Posted on by Vincent Hanley

The Poetry of Sylvia Plath

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The legend of Plath as a dark and driven and unstable young woman is a tremendous simplification of her work.  Her work will endure where poetry endures.

The trouble for us who come to study her work in depth at Leaving Cert or A Level is that we already know the ending – a bit like watching a film of The Titanic!  We know that Plath died by suicide in mid-sentence, so to speak,  at the age of thirty one.  Studying this arbitrary selection of her poems here should impress on us her vast and vital legacy.  She is, in my view, a very essential poet.

There is unfortunately a widespread tendency to interpret Plath’s work as autobiographical, to read her poems as if they tell her life story.  While it is quite obvious – and probably inevitable – that a writer’s life will influence what she writes, it is important to understand that poetry is art.  Writing about this issue, Ted Hughes pointed out that the reader must learn, ‘to distinguish between a subjective work that was trying to reach an artistic form using a real event as its basis, and a documentary of some event that did happen.’

Some critics read her later poems exclusively in the light of her suicide.  They argue that she signals her suicide (intentionally or otherwise) in a number of her last poems, through various references to despair, rage, loss, separation, or death.  This is by no means as obvious as these critics claim and after all hindsight has always been the great tormentor of those left bereaved and bereft after a suicide.   Many of these poems are the work of a woman who is coming into her own, recognising her own needs, using her own voice, finding her true self.  Look, for example, at ‘The Arrival of the Bee Box’.  This is about facing and releasing the fears that are hidden beneath the surface – not about a woman who is contemplating death.

So therefore, it is important to read the poems as they stand.  Looking for signs of what was to happen afterwards in her life is to predetermine how the poems should be read, not actually attending to the poems themselves.

Note:  To help you prepare for your Leaving Cert you need to become very familiar with at least six of Sylvia Plath’s poems.  I would recommend that you concentrate on her later poems (from 1960 to her death) because of their power and honesty.  The following selection will be dealt with in some depth here:

  • ‘Morning Song’ (19th February, 1961),
  • ‘Finisterre’ (29th September, 1961),
  • ‘Mirror’ (23rd October, 1961),
  • ‘Pheasant’ (7th April, 1962),
  • ‘Elm’ (19th April, 1962),
  • ‘The Arrival of the Bee Box’, (4th October, 1962),
  • ‘Child’ (28th January, 1963).

The points made here represent one interpretation of her work.  It is important that you develop your own response to each poem; where this differs from the suggestions given here, trust your own judgement!  Become familiar with the poems and with the major themes running through Plath’s poetry.

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BACKGROUND

Plath wrote incessantly during her short life: poetry, short stories, articles, essays, and one semi-autobiographical novel, The Bell Jar.  Her writings were first published in magazines on both sides of the Atlantic; later they appeared in book form.

She considered poems written before 1956 as ‘juvenilia’.  Her first published book, The Colossus, includes only poems written after this date.  Her remaining poems were published after her death in three collections: Ariel and Other Poems, Crossing the Water, and Winter Trees.

Her last poems are generally seen as Plath’s outstanding achievement and that is why we concentrate on them here in this review.  Here she truly found her voice, expressing herself in a distinctive, unique style.  She was aware of this herself: while writing them she informed her mother, ‘I am a writer…. I am a genius of a writer; I have it in me.  I am writing the best poems of my life; they will make my name…. (Letters Home, 16th October 1962).

Her husband, Ted Hughes, describes these poems equally glowingly:

‘Her real self showed itself in her writing … When a real self finds language and manages to speak, it is surely a dazzling event’   (The Journals of Sylvia Plath, 1982).

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MAJOR THEMES IN PLATH’S POETRY

Motherhood:  Plath wrote many poems dealing with all aspects of pregnancy, childbirth, and motherhood, at a time when writers, especially poets, rarely touched on such topics.  Her best-known work on the theme, ‘Poem for Three Voices’, evokes powerfully the variety of emotions experienced by women around pregnancy, miscarriage, motherhood, and adoption.  Her poems on this theme are remarkable for their lyricism (their song-like quality), depth of feeling, and tenderness.

                   What did my fingers do before they held him?

                   What did my heart do, with its love?

However, being a realist, she also reflected the other side of being a mother: the drudgery, the anxieties, and the level to which a mother is bound to her child:

                   I have never seen a thing so clear …

                   It is a terrible thing to be so open: it is as if my heart

                   Put on a face and walked into the world.

Both attitudes are seen in ‘Morning Song’.  The mother’s life is shadowed by the child’s arrival, but is enriched by the joy of love.  ‘Child’ also reflects the simple pleasure she derives from her child; his eye is the one absolutely beautiful thing that she longs to fill with the beauty of the world.  But there is also an underlying threat to the child’s safety, which distresses her.

Identity:  Plath frequently returned to the issue of double identity in her writing.  The subject of her undergraduate thesis in Smith College was: ‘The Magic Mirror: A Study of the Double in Dostoevsky Novels’.  Her interest in what appears on the surface and what is hidden is reflected in ‘Mirror’.  Here, the depths hide something frightening and sinister; something the woman would prefer to avoid but cannot escape.

‘Elm’ also deals with doubleness: the apparent calm of the elm in the opening stanzas, and the hidden terrors that surface as she talks.  A similar preoccupation is at the heart of ‘The Arrival of the Bee Box’.  The practical, square box is a simple container: apparently there are no mysteries here.  However, it conceals something sinister, but also fascinating.

Nature:  Plath’s abiding interest in the world around her, her interest in nature, is reflected in many poems.  Her descriptions are remarkable for their concrete, precise detail.

‘Finisterre’ paints a graphic picture of the scene before her eyes, conveying the harshness of the sea, the bleakness of the rocks, the delicacy of the flowers on the cliff, and the effect of the mist.

Her painterly style creates graphic images in ‘Pheasant’: the bird itself, the flowers, the hill and elm in the background, the earlier scene where the snow was marked with the ‘crosshatch’ footprints of various birds.  This poem also reflects her stance against the destruction of nature, a concern that features in many of her poems.

Psychic landscapes/Mindscapes:  While her descriptions of landscapes and seascapes are very striking, the scene is at times simply the backdrop to the mood of the speaker.  In ‘Finisterre’, the place is identified by the title.  The landscape is captured in a series of wonderful images.  Many of these are personified: cliffs are ‘admonitory’, rocks hide their grudges, the sea wages war, and mists are without hope.  The place assumes an atmosphere that is oddly human.

Plath with husband Ted Hughes
Plath with husband Ted Hughes

 PLATH’S TECHNIQUE

 Style:  Plath’s style changed considerably during her career – unlike, say, Hopkins.  However, there are certain features that mark all her work:

  • Her remarkable use of language
  • Unusual and striking imagery

Language:  Plath’s ‘crackling verbal energy’ is apparent in her poems’ biting precision of word and image.  Her writing has been variously praised for its tactile quality, power, incisiveness, control, taut originality, and luminosity.  Joyce Carol Oates observed that, ‘the final memorable poems (‘Elm’, and ‘The Arrival of the Bee Box’ among others) … read as if they’ve been chiselled with a fine surgical implement out of arctic ice.’  In her Journals, Plath constantly urges herself to develop ‘diamond-edged’, ‘gem-bright’ style.  This she certainly achieved.  Part of her technique was to reuse certain words in many poems, which thus took on an almost symbolic meaning: smiles, hooks, element, dissatisfaction, vowels, shriek, horse, sea.

‘Pheasant’ is a good example of her skilled control of descriptive language.  The form here is less dominant, and the poet’s feelings are reflected in the personal voice that speaks throughout.  The words are simple, the descriptions are vivid, and the poem is crystal clear – a good example of Plath’s descriptive powers at their best.

‘Elm’ shows her powerful response to loss, pain and terror.  The feeling of despair, for example, is conveyed through a number of highly charged nouns and verbs.

 Imagery:  Certain images recur in Plath’s poetry, taking on a symbolic meaning that gains added force through repeated use.

  • The moon symbolises barrenness, coldness, and the negation of life. in ‘Elm’ it is merciless, cruel, and barren, associated with pain and suffering.
  • The mirror often symbolises the hidden alter ego (the ‘other self’), as in ‘Mirror’.
  • The horse is a symbol of vitality. In ‘Elm’, love gallops off like a horse.
  • The sea is often associated with undefined menace or hidden threat, as is so graphically evident in ‘Finisterre’.

She uses many other images, however, that are not symbolic, images that add to the vividness and immediacy of what she is describing.  One of the most distinctive features of her work is her use of metaphors, many of which are visual.

Examples abound:

  • Mists are ‘souls’, which ‘bruise the rocks out of existence’ (‘Finisterre’).
  • The pheasant is ‘brown as a leaf’, a ‘little cornucopia’ (‘Pheasant’).
  • The bee box is ‘square as a chair’, a ‘midget’s coffin’ (‘The Arrival of the Bee Box’).
  • Bees are like ‘African hands, / Minute and shrunk for export’ (‘The Arrival of the Bee Box’).
  • The baby’s mouth opens ‘clean as a cat’s’ (‘Morning Song’).
  • Her crying is ‘a handful of notes’, which rise ‘like balloons’ (‘Morning Song’).

Plath attached great importance to colours, often identifying them with specific attributes.  The repeated use of colour to suggest certain qualities links her poems to one another, giving added force to her meaning.

  • Red signifies vitality, life force: the pheasant’s vitality is envisaged largely through its vivid colouring.
  • Green too signifies the positive, creativity, life force: the pheasant is red and green.
  • Black is associated with death, anger, depression, aggression, and destruction: the black headland that opens ‘Finisterre’ underlines the sinister mood.
  • Surprisingly, white too is sinister: the white faces of the dead, the white mists in ‘Finisterre’.

 

In Summary then…

Sylvia Plath was a lyric poet in the Romantic tradition.  She wrote poems that drew on her own experience of life and explored a range of emotions from love and joy to terror and despair.  Like the Romantics, she looked inwards rather than outwards; her experience is gauged by what she has lived through.

‘Elm’ is perhaps the most striking example of this.  It is one of a number of poems she wrote around the same time, expressing agonising emotions.  Some of these emotions were quite ‘acceptable’, provided they were not shown too openly: the grief and loneliness expressed in ‘Elm’, for example.  However, less acceptable was the intensity with which she voiced these; it was considered ‘over the top’, too revealing.

The writer and critic Joyce Carol Oates sees in these poems the seeds of Plath’s eventual suicide.

Her poems have that heart-breaking quality about them that has made Sylvia Plath our acknowledged Queen of Sorrows, the spokeswoman for our most private, most helpless nightmares, her poetry is as deathly as it is impeccable; it enchants us almost as powerfully as it must have enchanted her.

Not everyone agrees with this estimate, however.  Janice Markey sees Plath’s writings as life-affirming:

‘The enduring success and greatness of Plath’s work lies in its universal appeal and in an innovative, effective presentation.  Plath was the first writer in modern times to write about women with a new aggressive confidence and clarity, and the first to integrate this confidence and clarity in a sane, honest and compassionate vision’.

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SYLVIA PLATH – AN AMAZING POET

One of the problems when reading poetry is how much do we need to know about the poet’s life and background.  The poet Thom Gunn argues that the making of poems is not like turning out clay pots; poems are rooted in and tell directly or indirectly of a life.  People who have never read a Sylvia Plath poem know that she killed herself at thirty one and therefore, her death has come to overshadow and dominate the life.  In Plath’s case, probably more so than the other poets on our course, her life is so emotionally complicated and complex that a fuller understanding and appreciation of the poems are possible when they are read against the life.  That life was in Sylvia Plath’s own words, ‘magically run by two electric currents’ and these she named ‘joyous positive and despairing negative’; her poetry reflects those charged polar opposites.

The seven poems that we have chosen here were written in the space of two years – the last one, ‘Child’ two weeks before she died.  Her poems describe the natural world and the domestic world but, whether she is writing about a pheasant, an elm tree, bees, or her child, she is primarily writing about herself.

Her poetry is always very urgent and intense.  That poetry has sometimes been described as hysterical and self-dramatising but such descriptions ignore the clear-sighted understanding she has of a situation.  She very often courageously writes of troubled emotions, the darker side of life, her own experiences.  Ted Hughes once told Eavan Boland that Sylvia Plath’s face changed in absolutely every single moment of expression.  She did experience extremes and, if her work is more pessimistic than optimistic, more shaded than light, she herself defended it as follows:

Don’t talk to me about the world needing cheerful stuff!  What the person out of Belsen – physical or psychological – wants is nobody saying that the birdies still go tweet-tweet, but the full knowledge that somebody else has been there and knows the worst, just what it is like.  It is much more help for me, for example, to know that people are divorced and go through hell, than to hear about happy marriages  (Letter to her mother, 21st October, 1962).

‘Morning Song’, ‘Finisterre’, ‘Mirror’, ‘Pheasant’, ‘Elm’, and ‘The Arrival of the Bee Box’, in Seamus Heaney’s words, reveal, ‘the terrible stresses of her own psychological and domestic reality’.  If she writes about a dramatic landscape, as she does in ‘Finisterre’, we see that landscape as Plath sees it.  She brings to it, just as every viewer would, her own preconceptions and concerns.  Anne Stevenson, in her book Bitter Fame: A Life of Sylvia Plath, writes that Plath’s, ‘raw-edged response to personal sorrows and joys, her apprehensions of the world’s horrors and injustices, as well as its beauty, were excessive to an unusual degree.’

Asked once about the importance of poetry, Plath said:

‘I am not worried that poems reach relatively few people.  As it is, they go surprisingly far – among strangers, around the world, even.  Farther than the words of a classroom teacher or the prescriptions of a doctor; if they are very lucky, farther than a lifetime.’

She wanted her poetry to mirror the life lived, its ordinariness and its extraordinariness, so much so that Plath once famously said that she wanted to get a toothbrush into a poem and that she was interested in writing about, ‘The real world.  Real situations, behind which the great gods play the drama of blood, lust and death’.

Her mother, Aurelia Plath, said that Sylvia Plath, ‘made use of everything and often transmitted gold into lead …… These emotions in another person would dissipate with time, but with Sylvia they were written at the moment of intensity to become ineradicable as an epitaph engraved in a tombstone’.  But on the page the thoughts and feelings are shaped and crafted.  Eavan Boland speaks of Plath’s, ‘great elan, her handling of the line, her very unusual take on language and image – all of those things have become coded into the poetry that we now have.  Robert Lowell speaks of Plath’s, ‘perfect control, like the control of a skier who avoids every death-trap until reaching the final drop’ and Michael Schmidt says of her poetry that it ‘is hard to imagine a poetry more forcefully stamped with a personality and voice’.

Therefore, it is clear that the legend of Plath as a dark and driven and unstable young woman is a tremendous simplification of her work.  Her work will endure where poetry endures.

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SAMPLE ANSWER:  Nature imagery in the poetry of Sylvia Plath.

Sylvia Plath was a very ambitious writer.  In 1958, before the publication of her first volume of poetry, she wrote in her journal: ‘I think I have written lines which qualify me to be The Poetess of America ….. I am eager, chafing, sure of my gift.’  Plath dedicated much of her short life to writing and developed several features that became characteristic of her style.  One of the most interesting and accomplished features is her depiction of nature in her work.

Plath shows a very keen eye for detail in her fine and striking portrayals of nature.  It is easy to picture the ‘Black admonitory cliffs’ in ‘Finisterre’ and she can also recreate the beauty of nature’s creatures as we see in ‘Pheasant’ where she marvels at ‘the wonder of it, in that pallor / Through crosshatch of sparrows and starling’.  She manages to capture the beauty and richness and ‘rareness’ of the pheasant in one remarkably apt image: ‘It’s a little cornucopia’.  Imagery, of course, adds a new dimension to Plath’s descriptions of nature.  She uses imagery in a way that sends echoes of suggestion, of splendour, of menace through a poem and invites interpretations from the reader.

Much of her imagery is of a visual kind, in itself emphasising the importance of ‘seeing’ and ‘reflecting’ in her work.  One of her common images from nature, very like Heaney, is water.  In ‘Finisterre’, for example, Plath recreates the sights and sounds of land’s end in a dramatic evocation of the sea as it explodes, ‘Whitened by the faces of the drowned’.  The sea ‘cannons’ to the dead, suggesting that for Plath, it represents a destructive force that humans can only hope to oppose in their unheard prayers to ‘Our Lady of the Shipwrecked’.  The scene at the sea cliffs is a grim one.  Nature is unforgiving; it is a receptacle of death, ‘Leftover soldiers from old, messy wars’, and it holds potential for more evil where ‘rocks hide their grudges under the water’.  Certainly, it is not a benevolent force, not a nostalgic, romantic or sentimental place.  Plath’s vivid and perhaps unexpected images have created a disturbing ‘Bay of the Dead’.

However, a further development occurs in Plath’s imagery when she begins to use it, not merely to create a vivid picture of external reality, but as a device to suggest the inner reality of her own mind.  In this way, Plath uses imagery as an expression of landscape but also as a reflection of her own inner mindscape.  (Hopkins does this also in his Terrible Sonnets).  In other words, Plath succeeds in fusing external events with her own inner feelings.  In the poem ‘Elm’ the poet creates a dark, disturbing and surreal world where love is ‘a shadow’, sunset an ‘atrocity’, where winds are violent, the moon ‘merciless’, and the tree/woman is ‘terrified by this dark thing / That sleeps in me’.  The poem concludes with death that seems, rather than being final, to be ongoing.  The external landscape of the tree may indeed express the inner turmoil and disturbances of Plath’s mind, that has become ‘inhabited by a cry’ that ‘Nightly … flaps out / Looking with its hooks, for something to love’.  The poet is ‘terrified by this dark thing’ that ‘petrifies the will’.

Imagery, therefore, captures various states of emotional distress.  Often this unexpected power of her images originates in objects that at first appear commonplace, such as the elm tree or, in ‘The Arrival of the Bee Box’, the bees.  Nonetheless, the echoes that emanate from such commonplace objects are unexpected and startling.  The bees in the bee box, for example, are variously described ‘a Roman mob’, ‘maniacs’, who speak ‘unintelligible syllables’.  However, the poet has to ‘live with’ them overnight.  Such imagery certainly animates the bees in the poem, but it could also evoke the inner turmoil and chaos within the poet’s mind.  Her inner voices are like the bees: she can’t control them, can’t understand them, they remain ‘dark, dark’.  She also sees them as ‘Black on black, angrily clambering’ and their shriek ‘appals’ her.  In the poem she decides, hesitantly, to ‘set them free’ from her mind, which up to now has remained a ‘coffin’, a locked up box with ‘no exit’.  The poet, dressed in her ‘moon suit and funeral veil’ both wishes for and fears their release.  But the conclusion is more hopeful than that in ‘Elm’, for tomorrow she will ‘set them free’.

(As an interesting exercise, you might examine the poem ‘Mirror’ with some of these ideas in mind.  Stanza two of that poem should reward you with some thoughtful insights!  Another worthwhile study would be Plath’s use of colour and what it might symbolise in her poetry.)

It is clear, therefore, that Plath’s striking metaphors and startling similes are usually central to a poem’s development.  Her images can evoke vivid descriptions of the external world, the poet’s feelings for that world, and at times she has the ability to fuse these feelings to the emotional insecurities of her inner world.

A must read - if you can find the time!
A must read – if you can find the time!
Posted on by Vincent Hanley

Aere Perrenius … more lasting than bronze …

Hartnett bronze by artist Rory Breslin in The Square, Newcastle West.
Hartnett bronze by artist Rory Breslin in The Square, Newcastle West.

There is a very telling little poem by Michael Hartnett tucked away  in A Book of Strays called ‘Aere Perrenius’.   In it the poet recounts early encounters with Patrick Kavanagh after Hartnett had made his way to Dublin, ‘fresh from Newcastle West  / at twenty, with a sheaf of verse / tucked into my belt’.  It is really a very gentle admonition by the very prescient Hartnett who was already garnering academic interest.  He is saying to those who are required, as part of their academic studies, to rummage through the entrails of a poet’s work to be gentle in their excavations.

The Latin phrase aere perrenius comes to us from Horace.  In the final poem in his third book of Odes, Horace boasts that his poetry will outlive any man-made monument: “Exegi monumentum aere perennius.” (“I have made a monument more lasting than bronze.”). Hartnett would probably have been first  introduced to the  beauty and wisdom of Horace by Dave Hayes, erudite classics scholar and teacher of Latin at St. Ita’s Secondary School, Newcastle West where Hartnett studied for his Leaving Cert in 1950’s.

Hartnett’s poem ‘Aere Perrenius’, is therefore, really a poetic warning to young aspiring academics not to ‘tamper with the facts’ of his verse – or indeed Kavanagh’s verse either!  He mentions these, ‘dull strangers with degrees / who prune, to fit conceptions’.  These aspiring scholars build their theories on fragile ground, ‘give you ancestors and heirs’ and try to ‘bring you into line / with academic aims, / number all your bones / and make false claims.’

Would-be academics who undertake such necessary work should be aware, however, of the poet’s sensitivities.  Hartnett is adamant that he can live with being forgotten but not with being misunderstood or misinterpreted:

It is easy to forgive

a world that forgets

but not a world that changes

with subtle sentences

a life that was and is.

Both Hartnett and Kavanagh have had their fair share of being misunderstood – and for those who are familiar with the ‘history’ of their friendship, many will find Hartnett’s appeal on behalf of his ‘mentor’ very commendable!  He claims to understand Kavanagh, for all his rough edges, ‘the smokescreen of your talk / about fillies, about stallions’. His intimate knowledge of the man from Inniskeen is encapsulated in that uniquely Irish form of the ultimate trusting relationship: ‘I sometimes placed your bets.’

He declares that the bronze statue by the Grand Canal in Dublin’s  Baggott Street is best described by Kavanagh’s own word ‘banal’!  He, unsuccessfully as it happens, hopes that he will never suffer a similar fate.  He issues an appeal to all young, and not so young, aspiring academics to thread softly when they come to investigating and exploring the work  of any poet:

                                                            I’d rather be forgotten out of hand

than wronged in bronze:

let the sad facts stand.

Patrick Kavanagh's bronze commemorative seat near Baggott Street Bridge in Dublin
Patrick Kavanagh’s bronze commemorative seat near Baggott Street Bridge in Dublin
Posted on by Vincent Hanley

Themes and Issues in the Poetry of Elizabeth Bishop

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The main purpose of these notes is to assist you in forming an overview of Bishop’s work.  For this reason the material is structured as a series of ‘thinking points’, grouped under general headings.  These cover the poet’s main preoccupations and methods, but they are not exhaustive.  Neither are they ‘carved in stone’, to be memorised: ideally they should be altered, added to or deleted as you develop your own set of notes.  This priceless pearl of wisdom can be applied to the poetry of Elizabeth Bishop but it equally applies to all the other poets on your course as well!

The poems that we will analyse are: The Fish, Filling Station, The Prodigal.  (These are also on the Ordinary Level Course.) and also First Death in Nova Scotia,  In the Waiting Room, At the Fishhouses and Questions of Travel.

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Major Themes in Bishop’s Poetry

Childhood

  • Many of her poems have their roots in childhood memories, indeed are based on her own childhood (‘First Death in Nova Scotia’, ‘In the Waiting Room’).
  • The perspective is mostly that of adult reminiscence (‘In the Waiting Room’), but occasionally the child’s viewpoint is used (‘First Death in Nova Scotia’).
  • The lessons of childhood are chiefly about pain and loss (‘First Death in Nova Scotia’, ‘In the Waiting Room’).
  • There is a strong tension between the need to return to childhood and the need to escape from that childhood (‘In the Waiting Room’, ‘At the Fishhouses); she even returns in dreams in a poem called ‘The Moose’.
  • Perhaps this is based on the notion of childhood as the completion of the self, and the poems are a search for the self? (Don’t mind me I’m just showing off!)
  • We know she attended counselling to find the origins of her alcoholism and depression. Yet her reconstructions of childhood do not seem to function as Freudian therapy.  She doesn’t seem to alter her direction or attitudes as a result of drawing her past into the conscious, though she does seem to find a deal of comfort and a greater acceptance in the later poem, ‘The Moose’.  She is not trying to apportion blame, neither is she trying to be forgiving or sympathetic.  In general she seems neutral and detached (‘First Death in Nova Scotia’).
  • She also deals with the end of childhood and the awakening to adulthood (‘In the Waiting Room’).

Her life was her subject matter

Bishop was ‘a poet of deep subjectivity’, as Harold Bloom said.  She wrote out of her own experience, dealing with such topics as

  • Her incompleteness (‘In the Waiting Room’)
  • Alcoholism (‘The Prodigal’)
  • Achieving adulthood and the confusion of that (‘In the Waiting Room’)
  • Travel, her wanderlust (‘Questions of Travel’), her favourite places (‘At the Fishhouses’)
  • Even her hobbies, such as fishing (‘The Fish’).

The poet and travel

  • As her own wanderings show, she was a restless spirit, constantly on the move: Nova Scotia, Florida, Brazil, Europe, New York, San Francisco, Harvard.
  • Many of the places she visited (Nova Scotia, the Straits of Magellan, the Amazon Estuary, Key West, Florida) stand at the boundary between land and sea.   There is a tension between land and sea in the poetry of Elizabeth Bishop (‘At the Fishhouses’, ‘Questions of Travel’), with the sea viewed as a strange, indifferent, encircling power (‘At the Fishhouses’).  Perhaps this is a metaphor for the conflict between the artist and life?  Quite a few of her poems are set at this juncture between land and sea (‘At the Fishhouses’, ‘The Fish’).
  • She seemed to be fascinated by geographical extremities: straits, peninsulas, wharves; mountains, jungle, outback (‘Questions of Travel’). Perhaps she was attracted to the near-isolation of these places.  They are almost isolated in her poems.  One critic viewed these as the sensual organs of a living earth, ‘fingers of water or land that are the sensory receptors of a large mass.’  The poet is seen as making sensuous contact with the living earth.
  • Bishop has an eye for the exotic and the unusual (‘Questions of Travel’) but also for the ordinary (‘Filling Station’).
  • She dwells on the difficulty of ever really knowing another culture (‘Questions of Travel’), but this did not prevent her trying!
  • Travel and journeying can be seen as a metaphor for discovery of truth in some poems (‘Questions of Travel’).

Bishop and the natural world

  • Nature is central to her poetry, either as an active element central to the experience of the poem or by making an intrusion into the domestic scene (in a minority of poems such as ‘Filling Station’, ‘First Death in Nova Scotia’, and ‘In the Waiting Room’).
  • The experience of really looking at and encountering the natural is central to her poetic process (‘The Fish’, ‘Questions of Travel’).
  • Our ability to understand the natural is sometimes limited, yet there are great moments of awe and insight in our encounters with the otherworldly spirit of nature (‘The Fish’).
  • Bishop is always aware of the sheer beauty of nature (‘Questions of Travel’) and this is obviously tied in with her fascination with travel and her already mentioned interest in the exotic.
  • She tends to domesticate the strangeness of nature through language and description (see ‘The Prodigal’).
  • You should also consider again some of the points already made, such as how geographical extremes fascinated her, her beloved places, and the significance of journeys for her.

The domestic and the strange

  • The importance of the domestic is also a central ground in her poetry. Domesticity is one of the unifying principles of life.  It gives meaning to our existence (‘Filling Station’).
  • The comfort of people, of domestic affections, is important (‘Filling Station’).
  • Yet the heart of the domestic scene can sometimes be enigmatic. This strangeness, even at the centre of the domestic, is a powerful element in human life (‘First Death in Nova Scotia’, ‘In the Waiting Room’).  One can be ambushed by the strange at any time, even in the security of the domestic scene (‘In the Waiting Room’)

Bishop’s philosophy as revealed in the poems

  • Bishop’s is a secular (non-religious) world view: there is no sense of ultimate purpose, and in this she relates to modernist American poets like Frost and Stevens.
  • Hers is very much a here-and-now, existential philosophy: the experience is everything. There is some sense of tradition or linear movement in her life view, but tradition is just an accumulation of experience.  The transience of knowledge (‘At the Fishhouses’) and the limits to our knowing (‘Questions of Travel’) contribute to this outlook.
  • Her ecological outlook is at the basis of her philosophy, as we have seen: humans communing with nature, discovering, encountering, not domineering (‘The Fish’).
  • She demonstrates the importance of the domestic (‘Filling Station’).
  • Her view of the human being is as fractured and incomplete (‘Chemin de Fer’). This duality has been described by Anne Newman (in Elizabeth Bishop: Modern Critical Views, edited by Harold Bloom) as follows: ‘She sees the ideal and the real, permanence and decay, affirmation and denial in both man and nature’; a sort of ’fractured but balanced’ view of humanity’.  Examine ‘Filling Station’ and ‘In the Waiting Room’ for signs of this.
  • A person may not always be entirely free to choose her location (‘Questions of Travel’), yet she can make a choice about how her life is spent. Life is not totally determined (‘The Prodigal’).
  • The bleaker side of life is often stressed, the pain, loss and trauma (‘The Prodigal’, ‘First Death in Nova Scotia’, ‘In the Waiting Room’), yet she is not without humour (‘At the Fishhouses’, ‘Filling Station’).
  • She believes we need to experience our dreams (‘Questions of Travel’).
  • Is her overall view of humankind that of the eternal traveller, journeying? And is the journey all?
  • She expresses the unknowable strangeness of death (‘First Death in Nova Scotia’).
  • Yet there is a sort of heroism evident in her poems. Many of the poems feature a crisis or conflict of some sort, with which the narrator deals courageously, often learning in the process (‘The Fish’, ‘In the Waiting Room’).

Bishop and Women’s Writing

  • Are you conscious of the femininity of the speaker in Bishop’s poems? Some critics have argued that the importance of the domestic principle in her philosophy (‘Filling Station’) and the attitudes of care and sympathy in the poems (for the fish, the prodigal, the animals and birds) and even the occupational metaphors, for example of housekeeping (‘Filling Station’) and dressmaking and map colouring in other poems, all indicate a strong feminine point of view in her poetry.
  • Other critics have argued that her rhetoric is completely asexual, that the poet’s persona is neutral, the Bishop ‘I’ is the eye of the traveller or the child recapturing an innocence that avoids sex roles altogether, an asexual self that frees her from any sex-determined role.  Examine ‘Questions of Travel’ and ‘First Death in Nova Scotia’ in this regard.
  • We have already encountered something of her treatment of her own sexuality and her attitude as a child to female sexuality (‘In the Waiting Room’ and other poems).

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Style and Technique

Variety of verse forms

  • Though she was not often attracted to formal patterns, there are a variety of verse forms found in Bishop’s poetry: sonnet, sestina, villanelle, etc. (‘The Prodigal’, ‘Sestina’).
  • She used a variety of metres but often-favoured trimeter lines (resulting in those long thin poems!).
  • She was happiest using free verse (‘Questions of Travel’. ‘At the Fishhouses’).

Her descriptions

  • The surface of a Bishop poem is often deceptively simple.
  • A favourite technique is ‘making the familiar strange’ (‘Questions of Travel’).
  • Her detailed descriptions function as repossession or domestication of the object by the artist. This is how she gradually apprehends her subject, through the accumulation of detail (‘The Fish’).
  • Bishop often insisted on the truth of her descriptions, but the reality is more complex than that. Her descriptions are both recreation and creation, creating veracity but also using poetic licence (‘In the Waiting Room’).
  • Her similes and metaphors are often surprising, like conceits. They can be both exciting and exact.

Control and feeling

  • Many of her poems deal with emotive subjects (‘In the Waiting Room’).
  • There is an element of spontaneity and naturalness in the tone. Consider the opening of ‘In the Waiting Room’ and ‘Filling Station’.  ‘The sense of the mind actively encountering reality, giving off the impression of involved immediate discovery, is one of Bishop’s links to the Romantics,’ as the critic Penelope Laurans put it.
  • The matter-of-fact tone avoids sentimentality. The use of understatement controls feeling (‘In the Waiting Room’).

The absence of moralising

  • Her dislike of didacticism is well documented. She disliked ‘modern religiosity and moral superiority’, and so she avoids overt moralising in her poems.  The scenes offer up their wisdom gradually, ass the descriptions help us to understand the object or place (‘At the Fishhouses’, ‘Questions of Travel’).

Bishop as a dramatic poet

Consider:

  • Scenes of conflict or anger
  • Moments of dramatic encounter
  • Dramatic monologue structure in many of the poems.

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MAKING THE STRANGE FAMILIAR: FORGING A PERSONAL UNDERSTANDING OF BISHOP’S POETRY

Think about the following points, and make notes for yourself.

  • Which of her poems made the deepest impression on you?
  • Which passages would you wish to read and reread?
  • What are her principal issues or concerns?
  • Did you find that reading Bishop gave you any insights into human beings or the world? What did you discover?
  • Think about the landscapes and places that attracted her. What do they suggest about the poet and poetry?
  • What do you notice about the people featured in her poetry?
  • Do you find her poetry different in any way from other poetry you have read?
  • Why should we read Bishop?
  • What questions would you like to ask her about her poetry?

BISHOP’S LINKS TO THE ROMANTICS

The Romantic Movement held sway at the beginning of the nineteenth century.  It was at its height between 1800 – 1830 and the main architects of this movement were Wordsworth, Keats and Coleridge.

There follows a list of some of the main distinguishing features of Romanticism.  Consider Elizabeth Bishop’s poetry in the light of some or all of these statements.

  • Romanticism stressed the importance of the solitary individual voice, often in rebellion against tradition and social conventions.
  • In place of orthodox religious values the individual looks for value and guidance in intense private experience.
  • Nature often provides this intense experience, hence the notion of nature as the great teacher and moral guide as in Wordsworth’s ‘Tintern Abbey’ (or even ‘The Daffodils’!).
  • Romanticism can show a divided view of the individual. The individual is often pulled in opposite directions – for example solitariness versus sociability, lonely pursuit of an ideal versus community fellowship.
  • It is anti-rational. Feelings, instinctive responses, unconscious wisdom and passionate living are valued more than rational; thought.
  • Dreams and drug-enhanced experiences are especially valued. Children, primitive people, outcasts, even the odd eccentric figure are regarded as having special insight and wisdom.
  • ‘Bishop explored typical Romantic themes, such as problems of isolation, loss, and the desire for union beyond the self.’ Explore the poetry in the light of this statement.
  • It has been said that Bishop’s practice of poetry follows Wordsworth’s advice that poetry should embody controlled passion. For Wordsworth, (and for Bishop also), poetry was ‘the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings’ and many of his great poems embody the notion of ‘emotion recollected in tranquillity.’ Would you agree with this assessment of her poetry?
  • Finally, as a little test of your new-found expertise, examine ‘At the Fishhouses’ as an example of a great Romantic poem.

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ELIZABETH BISHOP – AN OVERVIEW

The poems by Elizabeth Bishop on our course reveal many of the most striking characteristics of her work: her eye for detail, her interest in travel and different places, her apparently conversational tone, her command of internal rhyme, her use of repetition, her interest in strict poetic forms (the sonnet and the sestina), childhood memories, identity, loss.

The world, which Bishop describes in her poetry, is vivid and particular.  She is so intent on accurate description that often the detail is qualified and clarified within the poem.  In Michael Schmidt’s words, ‘the voice affirms, hesitates, corrects itself; the image comes clear to us as it came clear to her, a process of adjusting perception until the thing is seen.  Or the feeling is released.’  For example, in ‘The Fish’ she tells us:

                       While his gills were breathing in

the terrible oxygen

– the frightening gills,

fresh and crisp with blood,

that can cut so badly –

Another example would be where she describes the eyes of the fish.  She says that they ‘shifted a little’ and then she clarifies this further with the more precise observation that, ‘it was more like the tipping / of an object towards the light’.

Bishop is a sympathetic observer and it has been said of her that she asks us ‘to focus not on her but with her’.  She looks at the fish, imagines its insides – ‘the coarse white flesh / packed in like feathers, / the big bones and the little bones … ; she sings hymns to the seal in ‘At the Fishhouses’; she finds love is present in the unlikely setting of a dirty filling station.  When Bishop uses ‘I’ in her poetry it is never alienating or distancing.  Somehow she makes the reader feel at ease.  The poems as we read them are working something out.

Her poetry is not always strictly autobiographical but Bishop, an outsider for much of her life, writes indirectly in ‘The Prodigal’ of the outsider and later, in the explicitly autobiographical ‘In the Waiting Room’, she names herself (‘you are an Elizabeth’) and charts the sense of her child’s mind realising her uniqueness and identity.  ‘Sestina’ is also autobiographical, in that it tells of a home without a mother and father.  She only wrote of her childhood experiences late in life: ‘Sestina’, ‘First Death in Nova Scotia’ and ‘In the Waiting Room’ all date from when she was in her fifties.  In these poems she captures the confusion and complexities of childhood, its terror, panic and alienation.  In ‘First Death in Nova Scotia’, she pieces together, as a child’s mind would, the details in order to understand them: ‘Arthur’s coffin was / a little frosted cake, / and the red-eyed loon eyed it / from his white, frozen lake.’

It has been said that Bishop preferred geography to history and it is significant that she remembers reading National Geographic in ‘In the Waiting Room’.  The title of her first book, North and South, contains the idea of opposites but opposites that co-exist.  Yet her descriptions of place are never just descriptions of place.  Morality, history and politics are also evident in Bishop’s landscapes.  In ‘Questions of Travel’, Brazil and its otherness prompt Bishop to ask if it’s right to watch strangers in another country.  She dwells on the country’s traditions (‘In another country the clogs would all be tested’), religious influences (‘a bamboo church of Jesuit baroque’), history (‘the weak calligraphy of songbirds’ cages’).

In her poetry there is self-discovery, a sense of difference, moments of heightened awareness (epiphanies), a strong sense of here and now, an absence of any religious belief but a belief in the mystery of knowledge ‘flowing and flown’.  In ‘At the Fishhouses’ what begins as accurate and gradual description of landscape gives way to a downward movement towards the dark cold centre of meaning, here imagined as deep beneath the ocean surface and something that we can never know or understand fully.

In Bishop the act of writing and the art of writing bring shape and order to experience.  In ‘Questions of Travel’ she describes the traveller taking a notebook and writing.  The use of ‘we’ in the poem and the way in which every traveller is contained in ‘the traveller’ allows everyone to enter into the experience.  This record of thought and feeling is what Bishop herself does in her poems.  She was interested in form: the sonnet and the sestina are very formal, but in other poems where the structure and rhythm may not be obvious at first there is often a very fine command and control.

***

In one of her finest poems, ‘Crusoe in England’, she imagines Robinson Crusoe lonely for his island and his friend Friday; and remembering his time there, she writes:

                   The sun set in the sea; the same odd sun

                   rose from the sea,

                   and there was one of it and one of me.

Here we have the voice of Robinson Crusoe, and the voice of Elizabeth Bishop, and the voice of all other lonely, observing, travellers.  It is significant that Bishop was attracted to the figure of Robinson Crusoe, an isolated figure, someone ill at ease having returned to society.  Her sexuality and her struggle with alcohol were part of her own sense of isolation.  In a letter written in 1948 to Robert Lowell she said, ‘When you write my epitaph, you must say I was the loneliest person who ever lived.’  Her later work suggests a happier Elizabeth Bishop, but her life was never uncomplicatedly happy.

Bishop’s The Complete Poems 1927 – 1972 contains just over 140 poems and some thirty of these are translations from French, Spanish, and Portuguese.  She wrote very slowly, very carefully, sometimes pinning bits of paper on her walls, leaving blank spaces (‘with gaps / and empties for the unimagined phrases’ is how Robert Lowell described it in a poem for her), waiting for the right word.  Some of her poems were several years in the making.  She worked on ‘The Moose’ for over twenty-five years, yet it seems effortless as all good poetry does.  She writes a poetry that echoes the rhythms of natural speech and her rhymes are not always easy to detect.  End rhymes and cross rhymes or slant rhymes create a special and effective music.  And what Yeats says of all true poetry is true of Bishop:

                             ‘A line will take us hours maybe;

                             Yet if it does not seem a moment’s thought,

                             Our stitching and unstitching has been naught.’

 

words-in-air-robert-lowell-and-elizabeth-bishop1 

Sample Answer:

‘Bishop’s poems are constructed around movement and reflection.  She is a meticulous writer who effectively combines precise observations with striking imagery’.

In the words of famous American poet, Robert Lowell, ‘I don’t think anyone alive has a better eye than she has’ – there is ample evidence in her poems on the course of the truth of this statement.

Each of her poems, from ‘The Fish’ to ‘First Death in Nova Scotia’, throbs with movement and reflection.  Bishop is a poet who seems preoccupied with the passion of movement, yet never strains in her ability to capture its beauty, strangeness or intricacies in imagery which can be dramatic, and at times almost outrageous, in its originality.  In ‘The Fish’, she describes how the fish hung ‘a grunting weight’ while his eyes ‘shifted a little’.  Through the poem, Bishop reflects on its suffering movements before she finally ‘let the fish go’.  Further activity is observed in ‘At the Fishhouses’ including the motion of wheelbarrows, the sea that considers ‘spilling over’, the standing seals and ‘forever flowing water’, all elements within a sea of change.

‘Filling Station’ has dirty monkey suits, wickerwork baskets and dogs, bringing to vivid life the ordinary, mundane scenes of a petrol station.  The observations here are precise, honest and real, ‘a dirty dog’, ‘a big dim doily’ … (‘Embroidered in daisy stitch / with marguerites, I think, / and heavy with grey crochet’.); the comic books which provide ‘the only note of colour’.  Much description, little movement it seems, until the observer moves outside where ‘high-strung automobiles’ fill up with gas as they impatiently prepare to depart the scene.

Movement is never described for its own sake or in isolation.  It expands on a theme, a tone, a mood that the poem is trying to reflect on.  The repentant wastrel in ‘The Prodigal’ mentions ‘pigs’ eyes’ following him, while the farmer comes at dark to inspect his labourer.  These images are used to emphasise to us the misery and remorse of the prodigal, a lonely emigrant worker in a foreign land at the soul-destroying job of pig-herding.

In her later poems, Bishop’s reflection on what she observes becomes a theme in itself.  In ‘Questions of Travel’, for example, there are ‘too many waterfalls … and the pressure of so many clouds on the mountaintops / makes them spill over the sides in soft slow-motion’.  Bishop feels a pang of guilt as the scene unfolds and asks, ‘Is it right to be watching strangers in a play / in this strangest of theatres?’  It is noteworthy too, that in describing the skies of Brazil she imports her imagery from Nova Scotia in saying, ‘the mountains look like the hulls of capsized ships, / slime-hung and barnacled’.  However, some things she observes will always be ‘inexplicable and impenetrable’ and can only be pondered on ‘blurr’dly and inconclusively’.

In all her poems, Bishop describes and defines movement, reflecting on landscape, animals and on people who work in and traverse that landscape.  No detail seems too trivial for her to note in her observations.  She paints striking pictures with imagery which is surprising, unusual and captivating – all the more so because many images depict ordinary, everyday scenes.  Bishop was a meticulous worker, whose attention to detail shows she had a reflective mind and was a keen observer.  Her craft, like her knowledge, is ‘flowing and flown’.

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Posted on by Vincent Hanley

Musings on The Green Road by Anne Enright

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I’ve just finished The Green Road (Jonathan Cape) by Anne Enright, the inaugural Laureate for Irish Fiction.  The blurb accompanying the book states that it is a darkly glinting novel set on Ireland’s Wild Atlantic Way – isn’t everything these days! – a story of fraction and family, of leaving home and coming home, a novel exploring selfishness and compassion, a book about the gaps in the human heart and how we learn to fill them.

The novel is a bit of a slow burner at first, that is until we are introduced to the great Irish matriarch, in this case, Rosaleen Madigan.  Her children, Dan, Emmet, Constance, Hanna, all leave the West of Ireland for lives they could never have imagined in Dublin, New York, Toronto and various third-world towns.  Then Rosaleen announces that she has decided to sell the ancestral home and divide the proceeds.  They all come home for a final Christmas together.

In truth I found the novel to be eerie and close to the bone.  How did Anne Enright obtain such deep insight and information about my own mother!  Her depiction of Rosaleen Madigan is worthy of a Booker on its own – ‘The world she grew up in was so different it was hard to believe she was ever in it.’  Like Michael Harnett’s grandmother, Bridget Halpin, in his poem,  ‘Death of an Irishwoman’, ‘she clenched her brittle hands / around a world / she could not understand.’ I feel the novelist would have benefitted from an editor of the calibre of Harper Lee’s – if so we would now be reading about, ‘Rosaleen Considine at six and Rosaleen Madigan at seventy six’ rather than Rosaleen and all her offspring.

There were also a number of inexcusable typographical errors in my paperback edition, the sign of rushed publication, but surely unforgivable in a Booker nominated novel.

However, despite all my nit-picking, this novel is a must-read for any among you living with – or away from – a strong willed ageing Irish mother!  Anne Enright has done a remarkable job of depicting this woman, a survivor of the Celtic  Tiger era, who decides to cash in her chips and divvy out the proceeds to those who have survived her reign.  Like Lear in his dotage we all are aware of the pitfalls of such a course of action!

My one major criticism of the novel is the ending.  It is as if Anne Enright loses interest in the project and it fades out like a damp squib.  The ending is disappointing and disjointed – skipping about tying up the loose ends.  The characterisation is uneven – with Rosaleen and Constance being strongly drawn while the others are insipid and aimless enough.  This novel won’t win this year’s Booker Prize, indeed it will be lucky to be shortlisted when you compare it to Tom McCarthy’s masterpiece, Satin Island, my current read.

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Posted on by Vincent Hanley

Cinema Paradiso Reviewed

 

 

 

Cinema Paradiso

CINEMA PARADISO

DIRECTOR: Guiseppe Tornatore

 

This beautiful film, with its haunting Ennio Morricone  soundtrack, is indeed a classic.  Cinema Paradiso was a critical and box-office success and is regarded by many with a great fondness. It is particularly renowned for the ‘kissing scenes’ montage at the film’s end. Winning the Oscar for Best Foreign Film in 1989, the film is often credited with reviving Italy’s film industry, which later produced Mediterraneo and Life Is Beautiful. Film critic Roger Ebert gave it three stars and a half out of four and four stars out of four for the extended version, declaring, “Still, I’m happy to have seen it–not as an alternate version, but as the ultimate exercise in viewing deleted scenes.”

 Cinema Paradiso was shot mainly in director Guiseppe Tornatore’s hometown of Bagheria, Sicily.  The famous town square is Piazza Umberto I in the village of Palazzo Adriano, about 30 miles to the south of Palermo. The ‘Paradiso’ cinema was built here, at Via Nino Bixio, overlooking the octagonal Baroque fountain, which dates from 1608.  Told largely in flashback  the film tells the story of a successful film director Salvatore beginning with his early childhood love of cinema.  It also tells the story of his return many years later to his native Sicilian village for the funeral of his old friend Alfredo, the projectionist at the local “Cinema Paradiso”. Ultimately, Alfredo serves as a wise father figure to his young friend.  Alfredo only wishes to see him succeed, even if it means breaking his heart in the process.

Seen as an example of “nostalgic postmodernism”, the film intertwines sentimentality with comedy, and nostalgia with pragmaticism. It explores issues of youth, coming of age, and reflections (in adulthood) about the past. The imagery in the scenes can be said to reflect Salvatore’s idealised memories of his childhood.  Cinema Paradiso is also a celebration of films; as a projectionist, young Salvatore (a.k.a. Totò) develops a passion for films that shapes his life path in adulthood.

 THE HISTORICAL/LITERARY BACKGROUND:  The film begins in a Sicilian village in the late 1940’s after World War Two.  It was a time when cinema was just developing, and before the arrival of television.  Cinema made a huge impact on the people of Sicily, who were in many ways socially isolated from the cultural developments of mainland Italy.  The film spans a 30-year period, showing the changes in society and in the history of film itself, but more importantly, it documents the changes in the history of its viewers.  The simplicity of the lives of the Sicilian people alters significantly as the effects of a rapidly changing world impact increasingly on their way of life.

THE STORY:  Salvatore da Vita is the central protagonist or hero of the film.  The film begins with Salvatore as a successful middle-aged man in Rome, receiving a message from his mother in Sicily that someone called Alfredo is dead.  The shock of this news prompts a flashback to Salvatore’s youth and most of the film consists of Salvatore’s memories of his childhood in a small Sicilian village.

As a child, Salvatore (nicknamed Toto) had a fascination for the cinema in his village of Giancaldo, the Cinema Paradiso.  The projectionist was a local man, Alfredo, and Toto befriended him and observed him at his work.  Toto was a quick learner and soon knew how to run the cinema and he was especially interested in the work that went on in the projection room at the back of the cinema.  Alfredo became a father-figure for Toto as his own father had not returned from the Russian Front during the war and Toto had never really known him.  Alfredo taught Toto many things about the cinema, but he often discouraged him from considering it as a career as he could see that Toto was capable of better things.

However, one night, a fire broke out and Alfredo was trapped in the burning building and subsequently lost his sight.  A local man who had won the lottery rebuilt the cinema and Toto became the new projectionist.  Here the film jumps ahead about ten years and Toto is in his late teens and still working in the cinema.  He begins to experiment himself making amateur films and while filming people at random, he filmed a beautiful young girl, Elena, with whom he fell in love.  After persistently waiting under her window for weeks, like the soldier who waited for the princess, in a story told to him by Alfredo, he succeeded in winning her love in the comic ‘confession box scene’.

Alfredo still felt that Toto was wasting his time in Giancaldo and urged him to move away and do something with his life.  Toto and Elena made tentative plans to elope together but these plans come to nothing when through a misunderstanding they fail to meet.  Now Toto realised that there was no reason why he should stay.  He left Giancaldo with Alfredo’s advice not to look back and to forget about him.  We learn that while Toto did succeed materially, and later became a very successful film director in Rome, emotionally he has not found anyone to love.

 The film ends with Toto (now Salvatore) returning home to attend Alfredo’s funeral after 30 years’ absence and noting the changes in his village.  He visits the remains of the cinema and puts his old memories to rest.  Alfredo’s legacy to him contains a reel of film which turned out to be a collection of the censored clips of actors kissing.  He looks at this with a wry smile as he remembers all that this stood for.  They were the times when the local priest, Fr. Adelphio, would censor any hint of intimacy on film, no matter how slight, as far cry from the present, where we see the priest’s influence on Sicilian society is greatly diminished.  Alfredo may also have left the reel of film to remind Salvatore of the importance of love and to tell him to look for happiness in his personal life.

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THEMES AND ISSUES

The Power of the Imagination (Cinema)

The people of Giancaldo and its surrounds are intoxicated by the power of the cinema.  For them, the cinema not only transposes them from their mundane, limited circumstances into a world of excitement and drama, but it introduces them to modern living and all its promises.  They enter into the film as it unfolds and shriek with laughter or gasp with horror at the crisis points.

A clever touch in the film is the way in which we see the boy, who has seen the film many times, watching the audience’s reactions and behaviour.  They become his entertainment, as their responses are what make the projectionist’s job worthwhile.  Alfredo once told him that when the audience were happy, it made him happy too.

The local people were almost in a frenzy to get into the cinema to see the latest film.  The local priest, Fr. Adelphio, felt morally obliged to censor each film before it was shown to the public because he feared the influence of the film’s contents upon them.  Actors’ kissing on screen was completely unacceptable.

However, with the passing of time, the films have become less censored and the excitement of seeing bared flesh and especially scenes with sexual overtones are what attract the audiences now.  The priest has less control now over the content of the films because the cinema has now gone into private ownership.

Sadly, with the competing outdoor film companies (Drive in Movies) and the introduction of television, the cinema loses its customers and falls into disrepair.  When Salvatore returns thirty years later, what was once the centre-point of the village is now in a sorry state.  What was once the most powerful pulse of the locals’ entertainment, has now weakened and is fading away.

The Theme of Isolation

As a child, Toto was isolated from his mother.  He was an intelligent child, who needed to question and explore new things.  His mother was a woman who held the old values dear to her and looked at the changing times with suspicion, so Toto gradually became distant from her.  He lacked a father-figure due to the fact that his father had not returned from the Russian Front so he formed a bond with Alfredo.  This fact furthered his alienation from his mother.  Toto also had a younger sister who rarely features in the film and he seemed to have little in common with her.

Toto spent every spare moment with Alfredo in the projection room of the cinema, so in that respect, they isolated themselves from society.  Alfredo lived for the cinema and seemed distanced even from his wife.  This may be partly due to the fact that his job involved so many anti-social hours.  When he left Giancaldo, Toto seemed to have lived a rather lonely life, despite having no shortage of female companions.  He had never really formed a relationship with anyone since he left his home town.

The Theme of Love

In more than one way, this film could be seen as love story.  It deals with the relationship between Toto and Alfredo, which resembles a father-son relationship.  The fact that Toto’s mother disapproved of it may have drawn them closer together.  Alfredo loved Toto enough to send him away for his own good.  He felt that it was necessary to sever their bond so that Toto would be able to make more progress in the field of cinema than just merely showing films.  This proves to be the case as Toto became a respected film director.

Toto had only ever fallen in love once in his life, with a new girl to the locality who was the bank manager’s daughter.  It was, for him, the type of romantic love story he had seen in films many times – love at first sight.  Despite Alfredo’s reservations on the subject, Toto insisted on pursuing her.  When Elena is taken away by her father to live in an area where she can go to college, Toto’s heart is broken.  He never really recovers from this and cannot maintain a steady relationship with any other woman he meets later.  Every time his mother telephones, a different woman answers the phone.  As only a mother can tell, she says to Salvatore when he returns, that not one person who answers the phone is in love with you.  When Salvatore reruns the old film clip he had of Elena, his mother peeping in at the door understands.  As the film ends with Salvatore viewing the passionate kisses from the old films, he seems to be more at peace with himself and ready to let go of the past.

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CULTURAL CONTEXT

There is a strong emphasis on the changes in the Sicilian way of life from the end of the Second World War up to thirty or more years later.  At first the people are simple and ignorant of modern life and almost worship the power of the cinema with awe.  They take what they see literally and repeatedly view the same films over and over again.  As the cinema develops, so do they and they demand more variety.  The old and rather tame Romances are rejected and a more vibrant genre takes its place.  Now they are watching westerns, thrillers and passionate love stories.

These changes in Sicily, mainland Italy and, indeed, throughout Europe may not be welcomed by all but they are seen to be inevitable.  At the end, as Toto gazes at the old square which he knew as a boy, now filled with cars and noise and bright colours, we can sense his sadness.  The most shocking part occurs when the cinema is knocked down to make way for a car park.  That says it all.  It symbolises the transition from the old way of life to the new.  As the camera looks out from the hearse carrying Alfredo’s coffin to the graveyard it seems that there are two funerals taking place: Alfredo’s and the old way of life.  The cinema, which stood for the old cultural values, is gone.

LITERARY GENRE

Cinema Paradiso fits into the genre of social realism.  It deals with realistic relationships and gives a realistic view of Sicilian society.  It depicts the modernisation of Sicily in the post-war period, emphasising the rapid changes.  It can also be classified as a romance (especially the director’s cut version), but this is only a minor part of the plot.  The only real conflict is within the central character, when he struggles to make his decision to break from Alfredo and leave Sicily.  This film is also biographical, which makes it a narrative story in the form of a film.

STRUCTURE AND STYLE

PLOT:  It is quite a conventional plot at face value: a young boy is fascinated by the cinema in his youth and he leaves his small village to seek his fortune and he becomes a respected film director and then returns to his native village to attend the funeral of his mentor.  There is one main flashback which tells most of the story until the end, with a couple of additional minor flashbacks.  The history of the cinema is presented in sequence, and the progress of the society’s cultural development cleverly parallels this.

SETTING:  Most of the film is set in the cinema or in the square outside.  Toto is occasionally seen in the streets nearby.  Only a few scenes are set in the schoolroom, near Toto’s house, or at the river close by.  Salvatore’s house in Rome features at the beginning and at the end and the only other time the film goes any real distance from the village is when Toto goes away on military service.  There are some brief glimpses of the surrounding countryside and there is also one very significant scene where Toto takes the blind Alfredo to the sea after his return from military service.

VISUALS:  Sicilian architecture features significantly in the film, both outdoors and indoors.  Early on in the film some of the sequences are shot in the church and then they move to the cinema, which closely resembles the church.  The cinema is carefully designed to fit in closely with the buildings of the time and, by implication, its ethos.  Towards the end of the film, the structure of the new cinema deviates from this with its many garish qualities, neon signs, etc., mirroring the modernisation of society.

The stone carving of the lion is striking as it symbolises power and strength (maybe a reference here to the Metro Goldwyn Meyer lion?)  At dramatic points in the film, there is a quick cut to the lion, perhaps to remind us that film is a powerful medium of information and influence for the people.

Two very memorable visuals are the quick flashes of Elena and Salvatore in a bed of greenery, sharing food and love, followed by the lovers running through a cornfield, laughing and calling to each other.  The brevity of the shots may have been intended to emphasise the brevity of the relationship.

CAMERA SHOTS/ANGLES:  Cinema Paradiso has a varied selection of camera shots and angles.  On screen, we are shown the history of film and we can see the development and progression of film techniques in clips from a selection of films.  Within the cinema itself, the audience are viewed by the use of under shots, over shots and side shots often taken at unusual angles.

One feature that stands out is the one where Alfredo is advising Toto to leave Giancaldo and as his hands pass over Toto’s face, Toto becomes a young adult.  We quickly realise that Toto has been the projectionist in the cinema now for many years (since Alfredo’s unfortunate accident) and that nothing has changed.  There is something very unsettling in this, which illustrates how Toto is wasting his life in the confines of the Cinema Paradiso.

At the end of the film, the technique of superimposing one picture over another is used and with brilliant effect, giving the impression of a reflection in a car window as Salvatore looks out on the countryside.

We see a very clever variation on a camera angle at the funeral when the shot is taken from inside the hearse looking out at the mourners.  It resembles a television screen as the rear window of the hearse frames the picture.  (Not only is this Alfredo’s funeral but also a funeral for cinema and the old ways which are being replaced by the new fangled ideas such as television!?)  Towards the end of the film there is a greater variety of camera techniques displayed, showing the viewers that things have really changed and advanced since Salvatore left thirty years ago.  Now everything is presented differently.

(Read the excellent review on Cinema Paradiso by Barbara Poyner – it is very good in this area.)

LIGHTING:  The lighting in Cinema Paradiso is very cleverly manipulated to echo the content of the film.  Lighting constantly changes in this film.  We see it changing within the films themselves shown on screen, and also inside and outside the actual cinema.  Much of the film is set in the small room in the cinema where Alfredo and Toto are either cutting and splicing films or showing them.  The projection room is small and usually dark or shadowy.  One moment we can see Alfredo and Toto in the shadowy reel room and suddenly it changes to the square outside; we almost have to blink to adjust to the change in lighting.  When the cinema becomes modernised and Toto takes over, suddenly the room is bigger and awash with light.  The film begins with Salvatore in his bed, beginning to dream of home in the dark.  At the end we see him in his own private viewing room, in the dark, viewing his legacy from Alfredo – the reel of stolen kisses.

SOUND:  The sound effects in Cinema Paradiso are extremely appropriate.  The outstanding feature in this area is the music of Ennio Morricone which is as much a part of the film as anything else and which does so much to create the emotional responses sought by its director, Tornatore.  The soft music at emotional moments (often deliberately muffled to suggest poor and primitive sound systems) emphasises the strength of the relationship between Alfredo and Toto and between Toto and Elena.  One instance where the music is light-hearted is where Toto is racing from one village to another and back again, against the clock, to get the second part of the film.  The music is racing too, as speed is the important issue here and so the suspense is very well conveyed.

Often, there are silences when something significant happens.  When Salvatore’s mother tries to contact him, silence is used to highlight the tension.  A sound of thunder contrasts with this after Salvatore hears the news that Alfredo is dead.  Also at the funeral, silence is used effectively.

It is interesting to note that the flashback sequences in the film are announced by the sound of chimes or bells and this is a very clever use of sound.

So now, take a break – sit back and luxuriate in the haunting music of the soundtrack!

LANGUAGE:  The whole film is spoken in the Sicilian dialect, and subtitled for English speakers; therefore much of the richness of the language is lost on the non-Italian speaker.  However, the facial expressions of Toto as a child and the tender expressions of Alfredo are all the more meaningful.  A good example of this is the way in which Elena is first presented.  The absence of language makes her appearance more effective.

SYMBOLS:  There are many symbols in the film, some obvious and others partly hidden.  The church and religious images feature quite frequently.  In fact, at the beginning, the church and the cinemas are almost indistinguishable.  At the end, the cinema is transformed into something almost unrecognisable in comparison.  The statue of Mary is present on occasions to remind us of the strength of the Church in all areas of society, but she fades away and is notably absent at the end.  It is interesting to note that when Salvatore manages to speak to Elena in church, she uncannily resembles the statue of Mary.

The symbol of anchors is also very prevalent, especially when Salvatore returns from military service.  He goes with Alfredo to the sea and they speak.  Salvatore nervously tells jokes in an effort to show a brave face.  Alfredo tells him again that he should leave.  Sicily is an island and they are by the seashore surrounded by rusty anchors that seek to keep Salvatore anchored to the island.

The half-hidden symbols include the mother’s ball of wool, which we notice on his return.  She gets up to answer the door and let Salvatore back into their lives and as she does so the knitting begins to unravel signifying the unravelling of the years.

 

 

 

Posted on by Vincent Hanley

Just a thought …… about Harper Lee’s Maycomb, Alabama and other related settings….

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Middle Earth, Narnia, and Wessex are all examples of exotic, or parallel-world settings created by novelists to base their stories in.  Novelists have always created these imaginary worlds for their own purposes.  Middle Earth is the fictional universe created by Tolkien for his best loved works The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings.  C.S. Lewis goes to great rounds to create another fictional realm for his seven Narnia books which make up his  Chronicles of Narnia.  Thomas Hardy’s Wessex Novels are situated in a ‘partly real, partly dream country’.

Being a Harper Lee fan I’ve been awaiting Go Set  a Watchman with eager anticipation since the old PR machine kicked into gear earlier in the year.  For the purposes of this blog, however, I just want to focus for a little while on the setting of both novels, and novels in general, and it is clear to me that the real life Monroeville, Alabama of her youth becomes the fictional Maycomb, Alabama of her novels.  Lee sets her novels here for a reason: she deliberately selects her setting, and in effect the fictional Maycomb becomes another Narnia or Middle Earth – a microcosm of all that is good and bad in 1930’s America.  She tells us that one went to Maycomb, ‘to have his teeth pulled, his wagon fixed, his heart listened to, his money deposited, his soul saved, his mules vetted’.  She describes it as an isolated place, in effect it is an Everyplace – the town, ‘had remained the same for a hundred years, an island in a patchwork sea of cotton fields and timber land’.  It is, in effect, a remote backwater bypassed by progress, the perfect playground of her youth, and the perfect cauldron for change.

In Go Set a Watchman she says that Maycomb County is, ‘a wilderness dotted with tiny settlements’, it is, ‘so cut off from the rest of the nation that some of its citizens, unaware of the South’s political predilection over the past ninety years, still voted Republican.’  It is so remote, ‘no trains went there’.  In fact Maycomb Junction, ‘a courtesy title’, was located in Abbott County twenty miles away!  However, she tells us that the, ‘bus service was erratic and seemed to go nowhere, but the Federal Government  had forced a highway or two through the swamps, thus giving the citizens an opportunity for free egress.’  However, Lee tells us that few took advantage of this opportunity!  Then in one of those Harper Lee epiphany moments, one of those lightening bolts she releases now and then, she perceptively describes her hometown as a place where, ‘If you did not want much, there was plenty.’

In To Kill a Mockingbird she continues in the same rich vein.  Maycomb is, ‘a tired old town’. People moved slowly, ‘they ambled across the square, shuffled in and out of the stores around it, took their time about everything’.  She tells us that, ‘There was no hurry, for there was nowhere to go, nothing to buy and no money to buy it with, nothing to see outside the boundaries of Maycomb County’, a scenario somewhat reminiscent of modern day Greece!

The setting of George Eliot’s novel, Silas Marner,  has many echoes of Maycomb in Eliot’s fictional depiction of Raveloe.  Eliot tells us that it, ‘was a village where many of the old echoes lingered, undrowned by new voices.’  She further describes it as being, ‘Not …. one of those barren parishes lying on the outskirts of civilization — inhabited by meagre sheep and thinly-scattered shepherds: on the contrary, it lay in the rich central plain of what we are pleased to call Merry England’.  However, like Maycomb it was off the beaten track,  ‘it was nestled in a snug well-wooded hollow, quite an hour’s journey on horseback from any turnpike, where it was never reached by the vibrations of the coach-horn, or of public opinion’.   Much of this abundance is of course meant to contrast with Silas Marner’s previous place of residence in Lantern Yard.  Whereas Lantern Yard had been austere, white-walled, and filled with serious and devout Puritans, Raveloe is a place of lazy plenty, pints at the local tavern, and carefree religion on Sundays.  Chapter One declared it to be a place where bad farmers are rewarded for bad farming!

This description of Raveloe also holds great echoes with The Village as depicted in Jim Crace’s  latest (and last?) novel, Harvest.  The narrator, Walter Thirsk  tells us that, ‘these fields are far from anywhere, two days by post-horse, three days by chariot, before you find a market square.’  Harvest  dramatises one of the great under-told narratives of English history: the forced enclosure of open fields and common land from the late medieval era on, whereby subsistence agriculture was replaced by profitable wool production, and the peasant farmers dispossessed and displaced. “The sheaf is giving way to sheep”, as Crace puts it here, and an immemorial connection between people and their local environment is being broken – their world is crumbling around them.  Great changes are coming and, as everyone knows by now, the only people who welcome change are babies with wet nappies!

Brian Friel’s use of Ballybeg (small town) as the setting for many of his plays and short stories is also similar in vein to these others.  In Philadelphia Here I Come, Gar Public tells us that Ballybeg is, ‘a bloody quagmire, a backwater, a dead-end’.  Friel, like Lee, and Eliot and Crace is deceptive because he is dealing with familiar things and familiar characters – shopkeepers, housekeepers, and parish priests – a very familiar rural Ireland fixed in its own time.  Friel’s use of the alter ego – Public Gar and Private Gar – allows us the opportunity to see behind the superficiality of so much of this world of small-town life.

In many ways Friel’s major theme is the failure of people to communicate with each other on an intimate level.  In this play especially we are introduced to the typically Irish practice of verbal non-communication!  He, like Harper Lee, George Eliot, and Jim Crace, forces us to examine the nature of society.  In Ireland our society in the 40’s and 50’s was dominated by the church, the politician and the schoolmaster.  Ultimately the world that Gar is leaving has failed him and his generation.  But Friel is too subtle to allow us to imagine that the world Gar is about to enter in Philadelphia will be any better.

These meandering rambles are an attempt to place myself at the beginning of a work of fiction, to stand for a moment in the author’s shoes, so to speak, and see the world from their point of view.  From my limited reading it seems to me that many authors deliberately choose a world untrodden, less travelled as the setting for their novel.  I have mentioned some here in this piece but I’m sure this is just the tip of the iceberg and you will be able to reference many examples from your own reading.  Ideally the setting is always remote, secluded, off the map or often off the mainland, cut off from change and advancement.  This microcosm is then filled with characters and fictional dilemmas, action and inaction.  I have always been truly fascinated and overawed by each author’s unique ability and ingenuity in  creating and  imagining these hidden places and thus allowing us the privilege of entering the world of their texts.

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Posted on by Vincent Hanley

The Poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins

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Fr. Gerard Manley Hopkins S.J. can perhaps be best described using Winston Churchill’s barbed attack on Russia, made in a radio broadcast in October 1939. He famously depicted Russia as, ‘a riddle, wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma’.  Studying Hopkins’s poetry can leave us in much the same frame of mind as Churchill!  Hopefully what follows will provide you with a key to help unlock the enigma!

He was born in Stratford, Essex in 1844 and educated at Highgate School and at Oxford, where he became a friend of the poet, Robert Bridges.  He was very influenced by the Oxford Movement and he was drawn towards Newman and eventually, like Newman, he converted and became a Roman Catholic.  Hopkins didn’t do things by halves and he went on to join the priesthood, not just the ‘ordinary priesthood’ either but he joined the Jesuits and was ordained in 1877.

Shortly after joining the Jesuits he resolved not to write any poetry unless asked to do so by his Superiors.  This is in fact what eventually happened: his Rector suggested that he should write a poem to commemorate five Franciscan nuns who had been drowned in a boating accident on the Thames.  The result was his great poem, ‘The Wreck of the Deutschland’, which he completed in 1875.

He wrote steadily for the rest of his life, but made no effort to publish, being content with the opinions of Robert Bridges and a few intimate friends.  Following ordination he worked as a priest in the slums of London, Liverpool and Glasgow, eventually coming to Dublin Catholic University (now UCD) where he was professor of Greek.

He died of typhoid fever in 1889 and he is buried in Glasnevin Cemetery, Dublin.  His work was first collected and published by Robert Bridges in a selected edition in 1918 and he became an overnight success 29 years after his death!  His poetry was swiftly recognised for its great freshness and energy.  So, even though he lived and died in the nineteenth century, Hopkins has become one of the great poets of the twentieth century!

Hopkins was a very original poet.  He abandoned the traditional metres and substituted his own innovative ‘sprung rhythm’, where the stresses responded to the meaning rather than to any mechanical pattern.  He used words in new and startling combinations and frequently dispensed with definite articles, conjunctions and even verbs.  As with all great poets this language was not invented for its own sake, but to get across a deeply personal and passionate response to the world and its Creator.  Since 1918 his reputation has risen steadily, and he is now rightly regarded by many as the greatest of the Victorian poets.

He once said that we should read his poetry with our ears, which seems like an impossibility, but is not, since many of the sounds we hear create images in our mind.  He also said, ‘Perfection is dangerous because it deceives us – because there is no perfection on this earth’.

In Roddy Doyle’s novel The Van, Darren, studying Hopkins’s poetry for the Leaving Cert., reads one of the poems and wonders when Tippex had been invented and concludes, ‘Gerrah Manley Hopkins had definitely been sniffing something.’

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MAJOR THEMES IN HOPKINS’S POETRY

NATURE

  • The world of nature pulses with energy because it is charged with the grandeur of God.
  • Spring is a glimpse of what the Garden of Eden must have been like.
  • Everything in existence has its own unique identity and inscape. It is possible to recognise God’s design in every natural object.
  • Contrast (dappled things) and variety set off the beauty of things.
  • Unspoilt nature (the weeds and the wilderness) is a precious resource.
  • Humankind’s sinfulness and the Industrial Revolution have made us insensitive to the beauty and preciousness of the natural world.
  • Despite the destructive activities of humankind, the Holy Ghost protects and renews the natural world.

SUFFERING AND ALIENATION

  • Humankind’s sinfulness brings it suffering and toil.
  • Acceptance of God’s will brings comfort and relief from pain.
  • Spiritual desolation is a bottomless pit of suffering.
  • The worst form of suffering, outside of Hell, is the desolation caused by self-disgust.
  • Suffering is a mystery understood fully by God alone.

RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN PEOPLE AND GOD

  • God makes himself known to us through the world of nature and in the faces of people.
  • He is the ‘dearest freshness’ that permeates the natural world.
  • Only through the submission of our will to the will of God can we truly reveal our inner beauty.
  • God has made us the gift of natural beauty, with all its variety.
  • Humans are insignificant beings who have been rescued from death and oblivion by the sacrifice of Christ on the cross.
  • God’s will is a mystery to us.

MAIN FEATURES OF HOPKINS’S STYLE?

What about some of the following?  Energetic, intense, concentrated in meaning, obscure, tortuous, original, musical, dramatic, oratorical, erudite, demanding………

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SOME IDEAS ON THE CONCEPTS OF INSCAPE AND INSTRESS AND SPRUNG RHYTHM

 

(It is not essential to have an understanding of these concepts to appreciate the poetry of Hopkins.  If your reading of these notes enhances your understanding of the poet’s work, then they are worth reading; otherwise, they are a hindrance.)

 In our modern world we are familiar with the idea of each human being having a unique genetic code or DNA.  Hopkins’s theory was that everything in God’s creation had its own unique characteristics.  If you look closely at an object and if you have the sensitivity to recognise its unique character, the object will reveal its ‘inscape’ or, if you like, its inner landscape.  Finding the object’s form and shape, both external and internal, is the same as finding its inscape.  One of the reasons Hopkins abandoned the idea of being an artist was that he found that he could not ‘capture’ the inscape of things in his drawings.

‘Instress’, according to Hopkins, is the energy of God pulsating through all created things (‘The world is charged with the Grandeur of God’).  It is a coherent force, coherent because it comes from a single source.  He sees the inscape and feels the instress.  ‘All things are upheld by instress and are meaningless without it.’

Essentially, what Hopkins was attempting to do with the words ‘instress’ and ‘inscape’ was to provide a theory on the way in which objects, natural or human, create a reaction in the person who is looking at them.  He believed that what he saw was contained in the object rather than a result of his imaginative interpretation of that object.  He believed that the impact of that object on him was due to the object rather than to his subjective response to it.  ‘I thought how sadly beauty of inscape was unknown and buried away from simple people (like Leaving Cert. Students!) and yet how near at hand it was if they had eyes to see it.’

‘The Windhover’ provides an excellent example of these two concepts.  The effort to describe the bird goes beyond mere description of its physical form or appearance (‘wimpling wing’): there is almost a scientific attempt to ‘capture’ its movements (‘Of the rolling level underneath him steady air’).  This, however, is only part of the process.  The inner form of the bird, its virtues or strengths, are identified (‘Brute beauty and valour and act, oh, air, pride, plume’).  There is more.  The hidden ‘meaning’ or symbolic significance of the falcon is uncovered in a moment of mystical recognition that Joyce would call an ‘epiphany’.  T. S. Eliot called it ‘the intersection of the timeless with time.’  It is the moment when the observer recognises God’s plan for mankind in the action of a bird in flight.

SPRUNG RHYTHM

By the time Hopkins’s poetry was published in 1918, many poets had already begun to dispense with regularity and rules regarding rhythm; nevertheless Hopkins’s revolutionary experiments with rhythm inspired many modern poets to be more daring and unconventional in their approach to composition.  Of ‘The Wreck of the Deutschland’ Hopkins wrote: ‘I had long had haunting my ear the echo of a new rhythm which now I realised on paper.’  He called this new rhythm ‘sprung rhythm’, because it springs naturally.  It has the following characteristics:

  • There is a fixed number of feet (rhythmic units) per line.
  • Each foot has one stressed syllable.
  • The stressed syllable may stand on its own, or may be accompanied by any number of unstressed syllables. Hopkins summed this up very well when he wrote: ‘One stress makes one foot, no matter how many or how few the syllables.’

He developed sprung rhythm because he believed that ‘it is the nearest to the rhythm of prose, that is the native and natural rhythm of speech.’  He added that ‘my verse is less to be read than heard….It is oratorical, that is, the rhythm is so.’

One of the natural consequences of allowing any number of unstressed syllables in a line is that it generates energy.  Unstressed syllables must be uttered quickly.  The more there are in a line, the more energetic the line will be.  This has a clear value for a poet who sees the world of nature as charged with the energy of God.

Sprung rhythm is used most blatantly in ‘As Kingfishers Catch Fire’ and ‘The Windhover’, both of which vibrate with the energy of the natural world.  ‘Felix Randal’ also employs sprung rhythm extensively; other poems contain elements of it.

SUMMARY

To simplify matters, remember this: Hopkins believed in the idea of incarnation.  Christ was both man and God; so, too, the world is a combination of the material and the divine.  Seeing the divine in the world is the same as seeing its inscape.  Feeling the divine presence is the same as feeling its instress.  Sprung rhythm is a poetic device used to reveal the energy of God that pulses through the world.

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GERARD MANLEY HOPKINS – A GENERAL OVERVIEW

(As a member of the Jesuit order – the same order, it must be remembered, who were responsible for Joyce’s education at Clongowes and later at University – Hopkins was devoted to God and his poetry is a unique record of that devotion.  In the twentieth-century several critics praised his efforts to restore ‘freshness in words’ and others came to recognise in Hopkins one of the most powerful religious poets writing in the English language.)

Though he lived and died in the nineteenth century, Hopkins is frequently considered a twentieth-century poet, not because his poems were not published until 1918 but because of their startling and unique style.  It has been said that Hopkins was a Victorian in that he was serious, scrupulous, hard-working and set himself exacting ideals, but in his remarkable poetic innovations he was ahead of his time.  His poetry was misunderstood, unappreciated, unknown during his lifetime and, even though he had a strong sense of duty and believed in self-sacrifice, he also had an independence of spirit that is evident in his work.  He did not write for an audience nor did he follow the contemporary literary fashion.  Hopkins, says Robert Bernard Martin, ‘is constantly more concerned with putting across his perceptions than with fulfilling customary expectations of grammar … Most persistent readers of his poems learn to abandon their usual demands of convention in language, in order to enjoy a fuller poetic process than would otherwise be possible.’   Coventry Patmore, however, found that Hopkins’s poetry had the effect of ‘veins of pure gold imbedded in masses of unpredictable quartz’.  As mentioned earlier Roddy Doyle in his novel The Van, has Darren, studying Hopkins’s poetry for the Leaving Cert and when he reads one of the poems, wonders when Tippex had been invented and concludes, ‘Gerrah Manley Hopkins had definitely been sniffing something.’

And his poetry, though written in the nineteenth century, had an extraordinarily important influence on twentieth-century poetry.  It was not so much that other poets imitated Hopkins; rather they were empowered to develop and explore their own individuality.  His style was fresh and free and dazzlingly different. (!)  Robert Bridges, Britain’s Poet Laureate, was Hopkins’s contemporary (both were born in 1844) and friend.  It was Bridges who first published Hopkins’s poetry in book form in 1918 and an early reviewer of the poetry said that, ‘You fight your way through the verses yet they draw you on’, that the language, at times, created ‘an effect almost of idiocy, of speech without sense and prolonged merely by echoes’.  But that same reviewer, in 1919, claimed that Hopkins’s poetry contained ‘authentic fragments that we trust even when they bewilder us’.

He always claimed that things are more beautiful in movement, as in the flight of the kingfisher, shooting weeds, the windhover, Felix Randal beating iron out, or the mountain stream ‘His rollrock highroad roaring down’.  And he loved the distinctness in all things; each must be the individual that it is, as in ‘As Kingfishers catch fire’.  He loved the uniqueness of things, the ‘individually distinctive.’   He called this quality INSCAPE.  Another principle, that of INSTRESS was used by him to convey his understanding of the energy which made possible this uniqueness (‘It is the virtue of design, design, pattern, or inscape to be distinctive’ wrote Hopkins in a letter to Bridges).  Michael Schmidt, in his Lives of the Poets, sums it up as follows: ‘Inscape is manifest, instress divine, the immanent presence of the divine in the object.’

Hopkins, says Seamus Heaney, is a poet who brings you to your senses.  The reader sees and hears the ‘hereness-and-nowness’ of the moment but the sounds also match the poem’s tone and mood.  Hopkins believed that ‘my verse is less to be read than heard….it is oratorical, that is the rhythm is so’.

When he looks at nature, his involvement with what he sees is total but it is never a celebration of nature for its own sake; Hopkins saw nature as an expression of God’s grandeur.  His poetry is inspired by his love of God and God’s creation.  He is a poet of extraordinary highs.  The imagination soars in a poem like ‘The Windhover’ but he is also a poet who is capable of writing the bleakest poetry about the depths of despair in The Terrible Sonnets.

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SAMPLE ANSWER

‘Hopkins’s imagery impresses us with its originality and its range.’  Discuss this view using a selection of poems by Hopkins on your course.

Hopkins is regarded as an innovator.  He innovated in many ways in his poetry and one primary instance of this innovation occurred in his use of language.  The world surrounded Hopkins with visions of God’s glory and the poet responded by capturing those moments in imagery that is ostensibly original and quite remarkable in its range.  Hopkins’s imagery serves one of two main purposes: to record and communicate the beauty of nature and its Creator or to reveal the anguish of a desolate soul that feels isolated from God.  In the early poetry, Hopkins employs imagery to expose God’s glory in nature’s elements while the later poetry gives us dramatic images of desolation and despair.

He opened an early poem of celebration, ‘God’s Grandeur’,  with the line: ’The world is charged with the grandeur of God’ and it seemed it was not too difficult for this sensitive poet to confirm this in the world around him.  In ‘Pied Beauty’ he also praises God for his creation when he says, ‘Glory be to God for dappled things’.  Hopkins, therefore, did not accept nature’s glories in any bland or pedestrian way.  Rather, he responded to them with imagination and freshness to create images that are strikingly original and at times quite inventive.

In ‘The Windhover’, Hopkins uses recurring images of royalty.  The high-flying solitary falcon is a monarch of the sky, surging with the poet’s spirit through the steady air.  The poet uses chivalric terms such as ‘dauphin’, and ‘minion’ to capture the elegant and dignified ‘striding’ falcon, the prince of the daylight.  God, too, is visualised as a ‘chevalier’.  These images carry connotations of medieval romance and chivalry, and perhaps the virtuous struggle of the falcon in the air is symbolic of the Christian knight, Christ the chevalier, overcoming the pervasive threat of evil.  This conflict in the poem is dramatised through imagery that suggests the supremacy of the falcon in flight, and his control and mastery that ‘rebuffed the big wind’.  Another feature of Hopkins’s images here is the way in which they are loaded with possibilities.  It is as if Hopkins intended to create multiple ideas in some of his images, each interesting and valid in its own way.  For example, the image of the falcon on a ‘rein’ may represent the motion of as horse at the end of a trainer’s long rein.  However, the term, being ambiguous, could also suggest the spiral climb of the bird.  Perhaps, Hopkins is encouraging us to ‘Buckle’ several ideas in our engagement with the poem.  What is not in doubt, at any rate, is the powerful and original representation, through the falcon, of Christ’s beauty and nobility.

Hopkins uses a very different image in describing the precision of the falcon’s flight, where he says, ‘As a skate’s heel sweeps smooth on a bow-bend’.  This image also conveys the speed of the bird’s flight.  Other original images include that of ‘blue-bleak embers’ representing self-sacrifice and the ‘plough down sillion’ that evokes the hardship and perhaps tedium of daily labour.  In ‘The Windhover’, therefore, Hopkins employs images of flight, of majesty, of sacrifice and of glory ranging from a ‘dauphin’ to a ‘skate’s heel’, from a ‘fire’ to ‘blue-bleak embers’.  Such remarkable and wide ranging imagery reflects the vivid and precise response of the poet’s imagination to the sight of the falcon at dawn.  More importantly, perhaps, the imagery reveals that the moment created a response of deep spiritual insight.  There is nothing particularly novel in taking a falcon as subject matter.  However, what is original is the way Hopkins engages with the falcon, observes it and concentrates on it in a deeper way and articulates what it revealed to him through an interesting range of original imagery.

However, particularly in his Terrible Sonnets, there is another, more disturbing effect created by Hopkins’s wide ranging use of imagery. We know that he wrestled with doubt, particularly during his final years which he spent teaching in Dublin.  God exists, he is always certain of that, but why does he appear to be so far away, apparently unresponsive and uncaring to a man whose letters are ‘dead’?  Hopkins’s increasingly sinister images explore the bounds of human suffering and despair.  In the sonnet ‘I wake and feel the fell of dark’, for example, the conspicuous absence of daylight reminds us how far the poet has come from the glorious sunshine and colour in ‘Spring’, ‘God’s Grandeur’ or ‘The Windhover’.  There is little evidence of ‘couple-colour’ in ‘the black hours’ Hopkins has spent with his torment, suffering ‘yet longer light’s delay’.  The delay of light represents of course the delay of hope – all is now ‘gall’ and ‘heartburn’.  Quite remarkably, taste is evoked as a description of the poet’s state.  He becomes bitterness itself, borne out of his despair.  Yet, perhaps this is God’s will that he suffer the ‘curse’ with which his ‘bones’ and ‘flesh’ must contend.  But the poet’s tormented spirit is souring dough, which needs to be infused with spiritual ecstasy.

In his sonnet ‘No worst, there is none’, Hopkins outlines the intensity of his pain in the opening quatrain and then proceeds to seek significant comfort, but in vain.  This sonnet is particularly interesting in that many of its images echo through earlier poems where the mood was less despondent.  The poet’s sense of despair is emphasised in quatrain two in an unusual but particularly poignant image of his cries heaving ‘herds-long’, gathering at the gate of heaven perhaps but not being admitted or even acknowledged.  Where is the comfort that Hopkins himself had administered to Felix Randal?  The poet then refers to an ‘age-old anvil’, a sounding board which winces and rings out his pain. This very original image of the anvil reminds us again of Felix and his work in the forge, except on this occasion the poet is the raw material that Christ is beating into shape.  In the sestet, the poet refers to a natural landscape, the mountains.  In earlier poems, ‘wilderness’ filled him with joy.  Here, however, the steep cliffs, a nightmarish metaphor, represent the spiritual torment and physical suffering that the poet has had to endure, day in, day out.  The only comfort is the relief of sleep.  But in ‘I wake and feel the fell of dark’ the poet awakens to the oppressive darkness of night and yearns for the respite of daylight.  The dark night is itself symbolic of dark periods in the poet’s life when hope of spiritual ecstasy may have seemed very distant.

In Hopkins’s poetry, therefore, the range of imagery is certainly quite extensive, his originality unquestioned.  Imagery ignites the poet’s celebration and it ignites his desolation.  In the darkness, there is no flash of colour, of light, no ’dapple-dawn-drawn’ inspiration to lift his thoughts, no sparks, no flashes, no gold.  In 1889, only weeks before his death, Hopkins wrote ‘Thou art indeed just, Lord’.  In the poem images of fertility in nature abound: building, breeding, waking, growing.  The poet, however, is depicted in the sterile image of a ‘eunuch’.  Nonetheless, the concluding appeal, expressed again through a vivid and most appropriate image, is that as Spring renews nature, so God may send his ‘roots rain’.  Where there is prayer, there is hope!

DEVELOP YOUR OWN PERSONAL RESPONSE TO FR. HOPKINS!

  1. What impression of Hopkins the man do you get from his poetry?
  2. Is it necessary to admire the author to admire his work?
  3. Does the poet’s profound faith make it easier or more difficult for you to relate to his work?
  4. If you had the opportunity to interview Hopkins, what questions would you ask him?
  5. What do you like or dislike about the way Hopkins writes poetry?
  6. Do you think that the themes of his poetry have relevance in the modern world?
  7. Put forward an argument why Hopkins’s poetry should be retained on, or removed from, the Leaving Certificate course?

GENERAL QUESTIONS!!!!

  1. WHAT ARE THE CENTRAL THEMES OF HOPKINS’S POETRY?
  2. HOPKINS HAS BEEN CALLED ‘THE POET OF ENERGY’. HOW DOES HE CREATE THIS ENERGY IN HIS POEMS?
  3. ‘NO DOUBT MY POETRY ERRS ON THE SIDE OF ODDNESS’. IS HOPKINS’S POETRY TOO ‘ODD’ TO BE ENJOYABLE?
  4. ‘HOPKINS’S POETRY PRESENTS US WITH A DEEPLY PERSONAL AND PASSIONATE RESPONSE TO THE WORLD AND ITS CREATOR.’
Posted on by Vincent Hanley

An Analysis of the characters of Christy Mahon, Pegeen Mike and the Widow Quin in The Playboy of the Western World by J.M. Synge

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CHRISTY MAHON

Christy:  At First Weak, Timid

When we first meet Christy it is by way of report.  He is presented as a tramp, “a kind of fellow above in the furzy ditch groaning wicked like a maddening dog”, or a “queer fellow above, going mad — “.   When we first see him he is, according to the stage direction, a ‘slight young man – very fired and frightened and dirty’.  The first impression we get is one of timidity and fear: in short he is a coward but not totally lacking in spirit.  His retort to Michael’s accusation that maybe he is wanted for “robbing and stealing” is given with a flash of family pride: ”And I the son of a strong farmer”.  He relaxes as the others convince him that he is in a house safe from the ‘polis’, and begins to respond to their interest in the curiosity about his origins.  Was he the victim of bailiffs, agents, landlords; did he indulge in alchemy, marry three wives, fight “wars for Kruger”?  Pegeen’s impatient “you did nothing at all” provokes the required confession: “I killed my poor father, Tuesday was a week”.

The “lie” Begins

He is now definitely to be feared and respected, simply by what he has said. The hero in Christy is about to emerge; he is ‘a lad with the sense of Solomon’: “the peelers is fearing him”, he ‘should be great terror when his temper’s roused’, brave enough to “face a foxy divil — on the flags of hell”, and to stand up to “the loosed khaki cut-throats, or the walkin dead”.

The “lie” Takes Effect

Christy can hardly believe his ears: “Well glory be to God!” is all he can exclaim at the character the others are building for him.  When he is left alone with Pegeen who describes him as a “fine, handsome young fellow with a noble brow” his amazed reply is: “Is it me?”.  She further likens him to Owen Roe O’Sullivan (Eoin Ruadh O’Suilleabhain) the greatest of the Kerry poets, ‘a fine fiery fellow with great rages’ and passions.

Synge’s Sympathy For The” Lie”

The local response to Christy’s appearance on the scene highlight for us the drabness of such rural living, where the imagination has been starved, and there is longing for some excitement. Behind the obvious comedy in this scene we see a certain pathos: Synge was most definitely not out of sympathy with such peasant people (After all he had forsaken his own kind for their company).   

Christy Given Romantic Image

Pegeen’s mention of Eoin Ruadh O’Suilleabhain reveals much about her character: he was a rather rakish fellow, a womaniser and an eloquent poet.  She wants excitement and is prepared to defy the ‘priesteen’ and the powers of Rome to get it.  Maybe Christy is a re-incarnation of the poet – that is what she wants to believe.  Self-deception it is but understandable in the circumstances.  She and the others want a hero and Christy wants to be that hero.

So Christy has now progressed from tramp and coward to poetic hero, which brings us to the end of Act 1.  By this stage it is obvious that Synge has created a mock-hero, a parody of the hero of Celtic epic literature.

Christy Settles in To His New Image

At the start of Act II Christy feels quite at home and would be prepared to remain here ‘his whole life talking out with swearing Christians – never a day’s work’.  The emphasis is on talking rather than working.  He is aware now that his talent is verbal with a licence to lie or, at best, to bend and decorate the truth.

Heroes Must Prove Themselves

His status as hero is confirmed at this point by the arrival of the local girls bearing gifts, and by the Widow Quin’s announcement that she has entered him ‘in the sports below for racing, leaping, pitching’.  All heroes must be put to the test: it is a feature of the epic poem that the hero must prove his prowess and strength in epic combat.  For Christy this is to be done in the more humble local sports.

Comedy In Parody

The girls get their reward for bringing presents when Christy once again tells the story of his homicide (‘da-slaying’).  His new found confidence is reflected in the telling.  Now we have mime to enhance the comic absurdity.  There is even comedy in the “weapons” used; a chicken bone and mug replace the mighty weapons of the traditional hero.

Temporary Set Back For Christy

This comic episode ends with the return of Pegeen who bristles at the sight of other women, especially Widow Quin, making free and easy with her man.  They are dismissed imperiously and Christy receives a verbal punishing for his vanity.  “You’ll be shut of no jeopardy no place if you go talking with a pack wild girls”.   This provokes a great outburst of self-pity from Christy which softens the heart of Pegeen, making her realise how lucky she is to have found a lad with “a mighty spirit in him and a gamy heart”.

Power Of The “Lie” Again

Once again she is under the spell of Christy’s poetry, its rhythms and imagery: “it’s a lonesome thing to be passing small towns with the lights shining sideways, when the night is down”, “ drawn to the cities where you’s hear a voice kissing and talking deep love in every shadow of the ditch”, “but I was lonesome all times, and born lonesome, I’m thinking as the moon of dawn”, “the way I’ll not be waking near you another dawn of the year till the two of us do arise to hope or judgement with the saints of God”.

Comedy Of Christy’s Victory’ Over Shawn

Christy is now given and opportunity to act the hero.  Shawn Keogh, that representative of ‘respectability and conformity’, has to be confronted and humiliated.  Our new hero enjoys inflicting this humiliation on Shawn Keogh: he himself had often suffered similarly at the hands of his own father.  At the height of his heroic success Christy is suddenly brought back to earth with a bump when he sees “the walking spirit of my murdered da”, “that ghost of hell”.

Another Side To Christy By His Father

Ironically Christy in hiding has to suffer the humiliation of hearing his father sarcastically describe the real Christy:

“An ugly young streeler with a murderous gob”

“a dirty stuttering lout”

“a lier on walls, a talker of folly, a man you’d see stretched the half of the day in the brown ferns with his belly to the sun”.

“he’d be fooling over little birds – or making mugs at his own self in the bit of glass – – -“.

“if he seen a red petticoat coming swinging over the hill, he’d be off to hide in the sticks… “

“a poor fellow that would get drunk on the smell of a pint”

“the laughing joke of every female woman”

“the loony of Mahon’s”

This is not exactly the character reference that Christy would give and had given to himself! An interesting point to note, however, is that the father has a ‘power’ of words himself!

Christy Becomes ‘The Playboy’

Once again Synge deglamourises the peasant and his lifestyle, reality keeping a firm grip on fantasy.  The cult of the hero needs to be exposed for what it is; gratuitous violence masquerading as bravery.  (Synge was a pacifist and was appalled by the violence of his own day and the false image of Ireland and its people that was being manufactured to support political ideas).  The Widow Quin dubs Christy sarcastically ‘the walking Playboy of the Western World’.  Christy is now in the hands of the Widow Quin and she being the practical person she is cashes in on his fear of exposure.  Since she cannot have him for herself she will demand a fee for his silence: ’give me a right of way I want, and a mountainy ram, and a load of dung at Michaelmas’.  The Act ends with Christy half-reassured that he has bribed the Widow into silence, and off he goes to his greatest test as hero, indeed the traditional test of all heroes.

Christy: Proven Hero At Last without ‘Lies’

In Act III Christy successfully proves himself at the races winning all before him, so when he returns to the Shebeen in triumph he is master of all.  There is no limit to his courage and confidence now.

Pegeen Abandons Herself To His Power

He quite overpowers Pegeen – the first time she has ever softened, she ‘the fright of seven townlands for my biting tongue’.  He raises her to such a level of passion that she is prepared to abandon everything for this ‘raggle-taggle gipsy man’, who according to Father Reilly would ‘capsize the stars’.  Pegeen becomes a ‘heathen daughter’ and renounces her engagement to Shawn Keogh ‘that quaking blackguard’.  Christy obliges by chasing him off and Michael gives his approval and blessing to both Pegeen and Christy.

Fantasy is Finally Driven Out By Reality

At that point Christy’s final test begins.  His father, ‘a raving maniac’, bursts in and attacks Christy with a stick.  The spell, which had mesmerised them all, is suddenly broken.  The hero becomes the victim who is to be sacrificed for the people.  Pegeen dismisses Christy with ‘Quit off from this’.  After he has chased his father outside and apparently killed him, he returns to find that the Widow Quin is the only one who still wants him.  This he passionately rejects with the infamous line – ‘What’d I care if you brought me a drift of chosen females, standing in their shifts’ – (Cue: Riots!).  He mistakenly thinks that the ‘killing’ will restore him to Pegeen’s favour but he soon learns that there is a world of difference between a ‘gallows story and a dirty deed’.  Humiliation, as the women try to put petticoats on him, is followed by final rejection by Pegeen who places the rope on him.  Shawn is triumphant, ‘Come on to the peelers till they stretch you now’.  Respectability, self-interest – the usual social norms return.  Christy now realises that he is finished here, his future is elsewhere and when his father comes back from the dead again, the two are re-united in a new relationship which makes them independent of the society that had made Christy into a hero and a poet.  Like the bard of old he is destined for a higher, if lonelier, existence, one preferable to village respectability.  ‘The thousand blessings upon all that’s here, for you’ve turned me a likely gaffer in the end of all, the way I’ll go romancing through a romping lifetime ….’

The Cuchulainn Parallel

One commentator on Synge, Declan Kiberd, in a very interesting book Synge and the Irish Language, sees a parallel between Christy and his story and the legend of Cuchulainn.  He sees it as mock-heroic satire that the  ‘Godlike Cuchulainn should re-appear in a feckless peasant’.  For Pegeen Christy evokes the ancient world of the poet and its heroic virtues, ‘it’s the poets and your like, fine fiery fellows with great rages ‘;  ‘You with a kind of quality name, the like of what you’d find on the great powers and potentates of France and Spain’; ‘the like of a King of Norway or the Eastern World’.

In youth Cuchulainn was athletic, handsome, articulate, attractive to women, a leader of men.  Christy is the opposite, ‘cowering in a ditch’, ‘a lier on walls’, ‘a slight young man’, ‘a talker of folly’, ‘the laughing joke of every female woman’ – all of which is to change through the power of a lie.

Christy’s father tried to marry him off to the Widow Casey.  The men of Ulster wished to marry off Cuchulainn to protect their own women from him.  Cuchulainn is victorious using the sword of King Conchubair just as Christy is victorious in the borrowed clothes of Shawn Keogh.  Cuchulainn woos Emer against her father’s wishes.  Emer has another suitor just as Pegeen has Shawn Keogh.  Both these suitors retire afraid of their opponents’ strength.  Cuchulainn and Christy triumph at games and win their loved ones.  Christy’s ‘great rages’ echo Cuchulainn’s great battle-rages.  Cuchulainn meets the warrior druidess to advise and prepare him for his struggle; Christy meets the Widow Quin, who also advises for a ‘fee’.

Comedy And Satire In The Parody

But Synge’s purpose is to make a mock-hero of Christy, probably a response on his part to the determined efforts of his contemporaries to manufacture super-peasants for a political ideal.  The only relic of the real hero left is the ‘gift of the gab’ upon which Christy is solely dependent.  The ancient hero is reincarnated in a ‘feckless peasant’ struggling to escape the grinding poverty and dullness of life in the West of Ireland.  For Synge there is no glamour in such harsh reality but a little fantasy can bring humour and escape, if only temporarily, so that not only Christy but the people of Mayo can go ‘romancing’, he for ‘a romping lifetime’, they for a few days at least.

The Widow Quin, Christy and Pegeen Mike. The Widow Quin, Christy and Pegeen Mike.

 PEGEEN MIKE

At First, Realistic and Strong

Like all the other villagers Pegeen is trapped by rural convention which declares self-interest and respectability to be the social norms.  It is ironic that when we first meet her she is preparing for her marriage to Shawn Keogh who most typifies this self-interest and respectability.  She is going to make the best of the world she finds herself in.  From the start we can see that she is strong-willed and dominant.

Latent Romantic

She has no love for Shawn Keogh whom she addresses contemptuously as Shawneen.  Indeed she laments the lack of eligible and romantic young men in the district which can only boast of such as “Red Linahan, has a squint in his eye, the Patcheen has a limp in his heel, or the mad Mulrannies …”  Her idea of a man is one who has the courage to break the law and tell stories of Holy Ireland – a Daneen Sullivan or masrcus Qwuin.  The absence of any romance in her life and the absence of any fire or passion in Shawn Keogh are facts that she had had to live with and, God help her, will have to continue to live with fore the future.  She is hard-headed enough, however, to accept Shawn as a poor substitutue for a real husband but he is better than no man at all.

Character of a Heroine

So the first part of Act I establishes her strength of character and her spirit: she can handle all the men, from her father, Michael, to Shawn Keogh.   She has no fear of authority, ecclesiastical or civil: ‘Stop tormenting me with Father Reilly’ she sneers at Shawn, and ‘Daneen Sullivan knocked the eye from a peeler’ shows her admiration for one with courage enough to stand up to and get the better of authority.

First Meeting With Christy: Contempt Turns to Admiration

Into such a world ruled by self-interest and respectability stumbles Christy, young, tired and frightened.  Their interest is immediately aroused (a ‘strainseir’ is always an object of great curiosity in an Irish village.)  Pegeen’s contempt for men is still evident when she contemptuously challenges Christy: ‘You did nothing at all’, ‘Would you have me knock the head of you with the butt of the broom?’  Christy’s confession that he had killed his ‘poor father’ for striking him takes her aback.  Suddenly her attitude changes: here is a man at last, another Daneen Sullivan or Marcus Quin, who has had the courage to challenge and overcome authority by killing his father.

Pegeen Falls Under Spell of The ‘Lie’: Romance Stirs

Christy’s ‘lie’ begins to work its magic on them all except Shawn Keogh (he isn’t the type that needs some excitement in life so he remains outside the spell).  This gauche, (awkward), young man is beginning to appear as a potential knight-in-shining-armour or hero come to snatch her from the jaws of her fate.  So, unwittingly she becomes an agent in the build-up of Christy into something larger than life.  Fantasy is at work.  The strong-willed, sharp-tongued young woman begins to melt as romance at last enters her life.  All thoughts of self-interest and respectability are abandoned as she loses her head to the stranger.

Pegeen’s Jealousy Evident

It is ironic that Christy is affected differently at first: at the end of Act I and the start of Act II he relishes the new found respectability and comfort.  But this isn’t allowed top last for long.  Pegeen’s jealousy temporarily breaks the spell when she finds other women tampering with Christy, and she sadistically enjoys his terror at her mention of him ‘swaying and swiggling at the butt of a rope – in great anguish, getting your death’.

Romance Continues To Hold Her

The spell re-establishes its hold over her when Christy responds with his self-pitying yet unwittingly passionate poetry: ‘it’s a lonesome thing to be passing small towns’ – ‘the cities where you’d hear a voice kissing and talking deep love in every shadow of the ditch’.  She even further builds up his character, attributing to him ‘a mighty spirit and a gamy heart’, which he shortly afterwards displays before the Widow Quin and Shawn Keogh when the latter comes to bribe him to leave.  ‘For what is it you’re wanting to get shut of me?’ he arrogantly asks Shawn.  Pegeen is not present  to see Christy’s cringing reaction top the appearance of his ‘murdered da’.  This must give Christy the necessary, if subconscious, incentive to prove himself at the sports to consolidate his position with Pegeen.

 Pegeen Abandons Herself To New Christy

After his successes at the sports Christy returns to the Shebeen with Pegeen positively aglow with admiration and love.  In the love sequence that follows she abandons herself completely to Christy’s verbal hypnosis.  She can hardly believe her own ears when she speaks, ‘And to think its me talking sweetly …. Well, the heart’s a wonder – there won’t be our like in Mayo for gallant lovers….’  Even the dispensation ‘in gallous Latin’ can’t dissuade her now – she belongs to the ‘young gaffer who’d capsize the stars’ and who indeed had capsized her world.  To her father she is a ‘heathen daughter’.  In her ecstasy she really enjoys humiliating Shawn Keogh and when Christy chases him out she passionately announces to her father: ‘Bless us now, for I swear to God I’ll wed him, and I’ll not renege’.

Pegeen: The Woman Scorned

With the re-entry of Old Mahon and his claim that all Christy had given him was a ‘tap of a loy’, suddenly Pegeen snaps out of her trance and turns impetuously on Christy, ‘And it’s lies you told, letting on you had him slitted, and you nothing at all’.  Her pride has been hurt and she feels publicly humiliated and in her rage she abandons him to fate.  ‘Take him on from this or I’ll set the young lads to destroy him here’.

Fantasy At The End

Ironically she does not realise that she has just provided Christy with his greatest opportunity yet to prove himself a hero.  Old Mahon’s ‘dying’ yell finally dispels that last trace of fantasy.  Reality returns: the villagers are one again against the intruder that would bring the law and trouble to them.

Pegeen: Tragic Figure

Pegeen must lead in purging the community of this menace and to her eternal shame she realises too late what she had done: she has freed Christy from any last ties that would have impeded his progress ‘to the stars’.  He doesn’t need her now, whereas she does need him, but she has lost and he has won.  She is indeed almost the tragic heroine at this stage; the Dido deserted by her Aeneas.

Note: The character of Pegeen is said to have many of the qualities of Molly Allgood (Maire O’Neill), Synge’s fiancée, with whom he had a rather tempestuous relationship.  She played the part of Pegeen in the first production and, like her, was independent and wayward, temperamental and warm-hearted, restless and very ambitious, and in the end lost her Playboy to death.

The Widow Quin The Widow Quin

THE WIDOW QUIN

The Widow Quin (Is there a Newcastle West connection?!) is presented as a worldly, materialistic woman whose life is governed by shrewd opportunism rather than passion.  Though she does put her eye on Christy it is not passion but rather self-interest that motivates her.  She has ‘buried her children and destroyed her man’ and has few illusions left about life.  She is the least affected by the spell of Christy’s charisma, except for Shawn Keogh of course, who is deaf to the magic of Christy’s words.  For a short while she does fancy herself as a rival to Pegeen, and the only ‘fault’ in her character is that she underestimates the strength of Christy’s love for Pegeen, it is a love to which she could never aspire.

Fit Rival To Pegeen

When we meet her first she is obviously someone to be reckoned with: Pegeen bristles at her entry and feels threatened.  Whereas any of the men in the play would have been easily subdued with a few sharp words from Pegeen, the Widow is impervious to her scorn.  Though Pegeen does best her in their first encounter, the Widow doesn’t leave without a good parting shot that unsettles Pegeen, reminding her in Christy’s presence of her engagement to Shawn Keogh.

Widow As Comic Agent

When we meet her she has Christy to herself with the chorus of village girls.  With a few direct personal questions she has found out from him all about his background, his father, and the reason for the ‘gallous deed’.  Her comic sense encourages Christy to tell his story this time with mime, which puts them all into such good humour that Susan and Sara suggest that he would make a fine second husband for the Widow Quin.

Further Challenge to Pegeen

The comedy abruptly ends when a jealous and frosty-faced Pegeen enters.  Once again as she leaves the Widow Quin has another fine parting shot for Pegeen as she reminds Christy that she, the Widow Quin, and not Pegeen had thought of entering him for the sports.  She certainly has the ability to bring out the worst in Pegeen!

A Woman of Action: Understands Human Nature

She deals with the three principal male characters in one short period: she barters with Shawn Keogh for her services in rescuing Pegeen from Christy, she flatters Christy, and then she coaxes Old Mahon into leaving but not before getting information about Christy from him.  This episode shows what an important role she has in the play: her main function is to initiate action and to keep it going.

  • Her threat to take Christy spurs Pegeen into action thus declaring her interest in Christy.
  • She enters Christy for the sports thus giving him the opportunity to prove himself a hero.
  • She controls Old Mahon thus keeping the action going as she wants it.
  • She manipulates Shawn Keogh which results in Christy looking a fine fellow, and she better off with his bribes.
  • She again sends Old Mahon off as Christy hasn’t yet been fully established as hero.
  • When Christy is finally exposed it is she alone who tries to save him from the anger of the village men and Pegeen, and this is ironic considering her reputation for being self-centred and heartless.

Widow has her Good Points

When Christy describes the Widow Casey in such horrific terms with her ‘limping leg’ and ‘blinded eye’ and her ‘noted misbehaviour’; she is ‘a hag with a tongue on her has the crows and seabirds scattered’, the Widow Quin seems positively angelic by comparison.  Earlier Christy had remarked on the ‘two fine women fighting for the likes of me’.  So the Widow Quin is a very presentable-looking woman even though her character is assassinated by the jealous Pegeen who slanders her with rearing ‘a black ram at her breast’ and ‘shaving the foxy skipper from France for a threepenny bit’.  Never does the Widow’s language take on the venomous tone and brutal imagery of Pegeen’s, though she can hurt when she wants to: Pegeen she says is ‘a girl you’d see itching and scratching – with a stale stink of poteen on her’.  In a way she is proved right in the end – Pegeen is not fit company for the new Christy, and it is Pegeen, not the resourceful Widow, who will tragically weep at his departure.

christy mahon (1)

Posted on by Vincent Hanley

An Analysis of Stephen Dedalus in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

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A STUDY OF STEPHEN

The reader must not identify Stephen with Joyce in every respect.  For instance, Stephen is represented in his days at Clongowes Wood College as a timid boy, conscious of his smallness and weakness, who tries to avoid being involved in the rough and tumble of football.  It is true that the young Joyce disliked fights, but he was keen on hurdling (not hurling!) and cricket and won cups for his prowess.  This practice of taking a certain aspect of his own character and intensifying and exaggerating it when picturing his alter ego, or second self, is typical of Joyce’s method.  The exaggerations often move Stephen a distance from the real Joyce.  Who would guess from A Portrait that Joyce’s cheerful disposition earned him the nickname “Sunny Jim”?

Stephen, then, is not simply a direct self-portrait.  Indeed it is significant that Joyce called his book A Portrait of the Artist and not A Portrait of an Artist.  For Joyce was never content to record particular experiences for the sake of their interesting particularities.  He wanted to achieve universality.  Of his first book of short stories, Dubliners, he wrote: ‘If I can get to the heart of Dublin, I can get to the heart of every city in the world.  In the particular is contained the universal.’  So we may assume that in studying the growth and development of Stephen Dedalus he was not exclusively concerned with getting to the heart of the young James Joyce or an imaginary equivalent, but in getting to the heart of the young artist as such.

In calling his hero ‘Stephen Dedalus’ Joyce consciously combined the name of the first Christian martyr and that of Daedalus, the legendary Athenian craftsman.  Daedalus was credited with making statues that could move.  He constructed the famous labyrinth at Crete.  He made wings from feathers and wax so that he and his son Icarus could escape when Minos imprisoned them in the labyrinth.  Icarus flew too near the sun so that the wax melted and he fell into the sea and was drowned.  In giving his hero these names Joyce gave him symbolic status.  The martyr suffering for his faith and the skilful, inventive artificer are joined in one person.  Daedulus is significant both because he was a cunning craftsman giving life and complexity to his inventions and because he escaped imprisonment by the adventure of flight.

CHAPTER 1

In the presentation of Stephen’s infancy Joyce has compressed a series of references that hint at the larger issues in the child’s future life.  In fact infant memories are the acorn containing a promise in miniature of the future tree.  The bedtime story sets the young hero on the road of life encountering a cow which is a symbol of the Ireland with which he will have to come to terms.  The physical experience of finding relief and warmth in wetting the bed is followed by discomfort: this little miniature of delight seized that has to be paid for in pain, of ecstasy followed by sordidness or agony, sets the tone for many of the coming experiences.  In the memory of Dante’s brushes, representative of Davitt and Parnell, is foreshadowed the Irish political strife that is to ruin the Christmas party and provide a public background which Stephen, the university student, finds suffocating.  The demand that the child should apologise or have his eyes pulled out foreshadows the later full-scale demand for repentance to escape the torments of hell.

The story of Stephen’s development is the story of these contrasts and conflicts magnified.  The child growing to young manhood has to face the impact on his individuality of the forces at large in the world he has entered.  He is subject in turn to the pressures of family, of Church, and of his country, all trying to mould him in a particular way.  The disillusionment experienced after bed-wetting is symptomatic of his maturer experience in this respect.  The first separation from home at Clongowes is a move from the remembered warmth and cosiness of the family circle to a world of physical cold and discomfort and of emotional harassment by others, boys and masters.  A chill caused by bullying brings him to the school sickroom in a shivering delirium.  This is the first crisis of Chapter 1.  The Christmas party to which he has looked forward, and which opens with promise of warmth, good cheer, and family friendliness, turns sour and then erupts into a violent slanging match because the public controversies of Irish history have impinged on the private scene.  This is the second crisis of Chapter 1.  The shock for Stephen is that Parnell is a hero, that priests are good and wise men, that these adults are all for Ireland, and yet tears and rage break up their conviviality.  The third and last crisis of Chapter 1 is caused by the shock of Stephen’s first encounter with flagrant injustice – injustice perpetrated by a priest in authority.  Father Dolan punishes him cruelly when he is innocent.  The injustice stirs him to a brave and spirited bid for his rights.  If Stephen is the loser, by sickness and by family discord, in the first two crises, he is victor in the third.  The hero has protested in the face of the highest authority and has won his case.  His individuality has triumphed over the iniquities of the system.  This, in embryo, is the pattern of the artist’s destiny.

CHAPTER 2

In the period between Clongowes and Belvedere Stephen develops as a normal, healthy young boy who goes shopping with his uncle, and enjoys riding in the milkcart and playing on a farm.  This is accompanied by two stirrings of his inner life: one is the sickening realisation that the family have financial problems, which turns to bitterness when they are forced to move from the comfort of Blackrock to the cheerless house in the city: the other is the romantic dream-life he creates for himself through reading The Count of Monte Cristo and picturing himself the partner of the lovely Mercedes.  The first crisis of Chapter 2 is the shock of failure within himself.  It occurs at the tram-stop with Emma Clery.  Her eyes, her chatter, her way of coming to stand on the step beside him all seem to invite him to hold her and kiss her.  But he does nothing; and the failure fills him with gloom.  When he tries to write a poem to Emma, he empties the incident of reality and precision of detail and transforms it into a mistily conceived dream.  As soon as the poem is written he goes to stare at himself – not to look for Emma.

The second crisis of Chapter 2 also involves self-dramatisation, this time in an actual theatrical performance on stage at Belvedere.  A deep inner disturbance of desire, tenderness, and melancholy is focused on the belief that now, two years later, Emma is to watch him on stage with admiring eyes.  The belief stimulates him to an excited and confident performance, after which he rushes out in wild expectation to his family, only to discover that Emma is not with them.  The shock sends him running through the night streets of Dublin to a filthy corner where rankness and stench quench his inner agony.  Interwoven with this record of emotional development Joyce traces the growing artistic confidence of Stephen’s persistence in championing the rebel Byron against the respectable Tennyson.

The Cork visit serves to detach Stephen irrevocably from his father and his like.  Tagging on behind his father, he recognises the hollowness of his garrulous bonhomie, is ashamed of the way he can be duped by an obsequious college servant, is embarrassed by his cheap flirtatiousness with barmaids, and is disgusted by his excessive drinking.  Shame and humiliation open a chasm between his father’s cronies and himself.  The experience reinforces the humiliation already felt in his ambiguous status at Belvedere – a leading boy whose home background is one of squalor.  And there is no escape to heroic self-confidence because he has become the victim of a restless inner lust and private orgies that fill him with self-loathing.  There is an unbridgeable gap between the real world around him and what transpires in his own angry, impotent, dejected soul.

In the last section of Chapter 2 Stephen makes a desperate attempt to re-establish order in his world and to rebuild effective relationships with his own family.  The money prizes he has won for academic work are spent lavishly and recklessly on giving the family a taste of affluent living and turning himself into their banker and benefactor.  When the money is gone, the whole attempt to stem briefly the tide of squalor and to come to terms with his family seems to have been futile. Meanwhile sexual desire is so strong that he turns innocent girls seen by day into objects of imaginary lustful indulgence in his private dreams at night.  There are still momentary day-dreams of fulfilment in the company of the idealised Mercedes; but the predominant urge is an animal demand to force some girl into sin and to take pride in it.  In this mood he encounters the prostitute who takes him home.  Thus the final crisis of Chapter 2 (like the final crisis of Chapter 1) ends in a kind of triumph, in that Stephen feels release, delight, and a new self-assurance when the prostitute moves into his arms.

CHAPTER 3

As with each epiphany, after the elation there comes deflation!  The effect of sexual release upon Stephan is complex.  His senses are repelled by the vulgarity of the brothels; he is conscious of his sinfulness, and yet too proud to pray, and afflicted with spiritual indifference.  He is certainly not more open to others: on the contrary he finds himself scorning his school-fellows and simple worshippers.  The aesthetic delight in the office (litany) of the Virgin Mary still captivates him.  Stephen has not found a way to self-fulfilment nor to love of others.  The sexual act, which ought to be a means to both, has become one more experience for a would-be artist self-consciously inflating his own ego.  It is in this deeply unsatisfied condition that Stephen is subjected to the retreat sermons.

The first crisis of this (third) chapter occurs when the rector announces the retreat and speaks of the sanctity, self-sacrifice, and heroic achievements of St. Francis Xavier.  Stephen feels an ominous withering of his heart.  Father Arnall’s previous contact with Stephen at Clongowes revives childhood memories, and his sermons are to thrust him back into a state of childlike submission and obedience.  The introductory sermon and the sermons on death and judgement produce a second crisis, a sense of his shamelessness and foulness against which the thought of Emma stands in stark contrast.  The shock of conscious guilt is resolved temporarily by another mental act of self-dramatisation when he pictures himself, hand in hand with Emma, being forgiven and comforted by the Virgin Mary.  This romanticised day-dream is another absurdly extravagant product of the immature artistic mind.  On the third day of the retreat the sermons revolve around the horrors of hell with an emphasis upon the physical torment of the senses and the moral and spiritual torments that accompany it.  Designed to stir the conscience by stimulating fear, they constitute a burlesque of Catholic exhortations.  Joyce emphasises the parallel by making Lucifer’s slogan in rebellion against God (non serviam) Stephen’s own slogan of commitment to his artistic vocation.  Pride, the sin of Lucifer, is the sin which the egotistic young artist cannot recognise in himself.  The final crisis of this chapter brings Stephen to a condition of terrified remorse, which is removed only when he makes his confession and receives absolution.  Even in this act humility and sincerity are infected by self-dramatisation in the role of penitent.  Like the previous chapters, this chapter too ends on a note of ‘triumph’ – again a romanticised triumph, that of the self-consciously cleansed young man receiving the sacrament in the joy of forgiveness.

CHAPTER 4

In Stephen’s next phase he cultivates his soul with elaborate devotional exercises, models his religious raptures on the romantic gestures represented in sacred art, and mortifies his senses with ingenious disciplines. The persistent habit of self-dramatisation is evident in Stephen’s various reflections on the director’s suggestion that he might have a vocation to the priesthood.  The first crisis of Chapter 4 comes when he weighs the call but suddenly realises that his own individuality can never surrender to the claims of such a calling.  He has a ‘pride of spirit’ that makes him ‘a being apart’.  He must learn his own wisdom in his own way and face the world’s snares.  The decision to apply for a university place follows naturally.  But there is a second brief crisis when Stephen meets a band of Christian Brothers who in their work and attitude have all the genuineness of devotion, humility, and charity which he himself lacks, and he feels ashamed and angry with himself in their presence.  This mood is resolved by the sudden assertion of his poetic self and his delight in words.  The final crisis of the chapter, and the climax of the book, occurs when, dreaming of his urge to creative achievement as an artist, and feeling ready to shake off all that impedes him from following his calling, he sees a girl wading in the sea.  Her beauty and her stillness fill him with rapture.  Stephen exclaims, ‘Heavenly God!’ bringing his religious sense into a new context in response to the image of loveliness.  The call of youth, beauty, and creativity throws him into an emotional ecstasy.  The decisive choice of his life has been made.

CHAPTER 5

The final chapter has thus the air of an epilogue.  Yet the first section of it is the longest section in the book, and a good deal of experience is encompassed in Stephen’s thoughts.  The sordid scene at home is in stark contrast to the literary treasures stored in his mind.  Though he scorns the pedantry of the lecture room, he relishes the magic of language with acute sensitivity.  He has an off-hand attitude to the college time-table, and thinks but poorly of the dean of studies with whom he argues half-seriously, half-provocatively.  He sits through the physics lecture in detachment.  There is something of a show-down with fellow students in the entrance hall after the lecture, when he refuses to compromise with the sentimental aspirations of some of his companions and sign their petition.  His cleverness at the expense of other people’s earnest endeavours is bound to irritate and antagonise.  Stephen manages to make himself unlovable by parading unpopular views uncompromisingly and doing so with calculated scorn.   The charges of other students, that he lacks altruism and is a crank, win sympathy with the reader.  Too often he seems to be spoiling for a fight, even with his genuine friends, such as Davin.

Stephen’s long theoretical argument about the character of beauty is sandwiched between Davin’s teasing reference to Emma and Lynch’s whisper, ‘Your beloved is here’.  The contrast between the unrestrained verbalism of Stephen’s talk about beauty and the equivocal, halting reservations that mark his attitude to a living woman is symptomatic of Stephen’s failure to integrate thought and action.  His head is full of theory about emotion and beauty, while his living experience of emotional commitment is confined to the brothel.

The thought that he may have misjudged Emma turns her in his mind, in a flash, into an epitome of natural gaiety and simplicity.  When the poetic inspiration seizes him, his thought transfigures her into an object of devotion to be hymned exaltedly.  The cry of the heart is transmuted into a precious rhetoric, rich and liturgical, but detached from the reality of the true relationship with Emma.  Indeed Stephen’s memories of her, now recalled, suggest a girl interested in him, ready to be responsive, doing her best to communicate, but being rebuffed by cool, oblique replies and the pose of isolation.  Joyce’s irony is never more subtle than here.  Stephen’s jealous anger at Emma’s friendliness with Father Moran seems disproportionate.  It seems to draw nourishment from his hatred of the Church and from his determination to make a priesthood of the artist’s calling, a priesthood to which she ought to turn in frank confession.  Stephen hovers between exaggerated condemnation of her as treacherous and exaggerated idealisation of her.  Finally he conjures up her image as that of the voluptuous, yielding mistress at the point when the finished poem flows through his mind.

In the penultimate section of the book Stephen snaps the ties with home one after another.  When he watches the birds and hears their cries it is the image of his mother’s face and the sound of her weeping that they blot out.  In deciding to fly, he is also consciously forsaking the Ireland of the vulgar barracking of Yeat’s play.  In conversation with Cranly he sums up his rebellious rejection of the Church and of the claims of his suffering mother.  In relation both to his mother and to Emma, Stephen manifests grave deficiency in human sympathy.  The self-righteousness of his attitude is as priggish as the inflated language in which he presents his decision.  In his own eyes his decisions are earthshaking.  He assumes to himself the importance of a future Beethoven or Shakespeare!

The notes from Stephen’s diary suggest that within his divided being the conscious artist has taken over from the man of direct sympathy and unselfconscious action.  The jottings have an artificial literary flavour.  They show a young mind making art out of life.  They sum up people and events with aphoristic dismissiveness.  They employ archaisms, literary allusions, and clever analogies in verbally discarding people who after all have loved Stephen – Emma, Cranly, his mother, his countrymen (‘a race of clodhoppers’), and Davin.  All are summarily treated as material for epigrammatic play by a super-mind.  Meanwhile Stephen’s own role is glamorised, his isolation, his spiritedness, and his resolve wrapped about with overtones of grandeur and heroism.  The element of earnestness in his acceptance of the artistic vocation must not be ignored, but it is expressed here with a pretentiousness and flamboyance that cannot but raise a smile.

In the end Stephen emerges as a proud, rather anti-social person far too much wrapped up in himself.  Cranly’s question, ‘Have you never loved anyone?’ ought to touch a raw nerve.  His lack of common humanity is surely Stephen’s dominant weakness.

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Posted on by Vincent Hanley

Donal Ryan has hit the big time – at last!

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Donal Ryan has hit the big time with his inclusion in the Leaving Cert syllabus list of texts for the Leaving Cert in 2017.  This recognition is obviously well deserved and students will enjoy his quirky depiction of Celtic Tiger Ireland.  It is amazing, and a source of great pride, how modern and with-it the ‘new’ Leaving Cert Syllabus really is, unlike the ancient ‘dead poet’s society’ attitude of years gone by.  Today, any young aspiring Irish writer who gets  shortlisted (or even long-listed) for the Booker guarantees him/her inclusion in the new course in a very short space of time.

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