Riddle 23

Riddle 23 of the Exeter Book

Text

Agob is min noma     eft onhwyrfed;
ic eom wrætlic wiht     on gewin sceapen.
þonne ic onbuge,     ond me on bosme fareð
ætren onga,     ic beom eallgearo
þæt ic me þæt feorhbealo     feor aswape.
Siþþan me se waldend,     se me þæt wite gescop,
leoþo forlæteð,     ic beo lengre þonne ær,
oþþæt ic spæte     spilde geblonden
ealfelo attor     þæt ic ær gegeap.
Ne togongeð þæs     gumena hwylcum,
ænigum eaþe     þæt ic þær ymb sprice,
gif hine hrineð     þæt me of hrife fleogeð,
þæt þone mandrinc     mægne geceapaþ,
fullwer fæste     feore sine.
Nelle ic unbunden     ænigum hyran
nymþe searosæled.     Saga hwæt ic hatte.

Translation 

Wob is my name turned around;

I am a strange creature, in strife shaped.

When I bend, and the fatal arrow

travels through my breast, I am all-eager

to sweep far away from me that deadly danger.

After my ruler forsakes my limbs, who shaped

me in that torment, then I am longer

than before, until I spit destruction corrupting,

the all-vile venom that I before swallowed.

That which I thereabout speak in passing

does not easily pass away from any kind of men:

if it which flies from my womb touches him—

him that through his strength

far buys the deadly drink—

then he firmly buys the full atonement.

Nor to obey anyone will I unbind

unless I am skillfully bound.

Say what I am called.

—–

Commentary

Solution: Bow

Riddle 23 is one of the rare riddles of the Exeter Book that gives its answer. While the answers to Latin riddles were given by their titles (the Latin riddles being rhetorical word games rather than true enigmas), few of the Old English riddles provide solutions. When the solution is included in the riddle itself, it is often further hidden by an additional linguistic trick – in this case, the answer, “boga” (bow), is spelled backwards as the name of the strange creature (Agob). I translate the backwards “Agob” into “Wob” in order to retain this additional orthographic complication in the Modern English.

Agob is seen as “Agof” in the Exeter Book, which Mitchell and Robinson indicate is a corruption “by an inattentive scribe” (235). Sievers[1] suggests that in the eight century the spoken “b” might have been written as “f” according to custom, and so “Agob” in the urtext was “corrected” at some point between the eighth and tenth centuries as “Agof” to accommodate this philological adaptation.  In either case this corruption/substitution further confounds the riddle’s solution.

The reason for this additional veiling of the answer may be due to the paradoxical nature of the bow and its arrow: in order to fly forward, the arrow must be pulled backwards through the bow, and the bow must “swallow” the arrow that it then “spits” out as destruction. This structure of reversal is noticeable particularly in line 6, with the mirroring of “me se” to “se me” after the caesura. Line 6 also includes the verb “gescop” to indicate the shape of the bow’s tormented limbs. This reflects “sceapen” of line 2: “on gewin sceapen,” (in war/battle/strife created/shaped), which itself has a double meaning – bows are crafted as weapons in times of war, and they are “shaped” into their bent form during a battle.

The bow here is not connoted as an instrument of valor or victory (as many weapons are considered in Anglo-Saxon poetry), but rather a corrupting force. Its curving body is likened to a snake that spits venom. The arrows may indeed be poisoned, for even a touch will send a man to his death – an event that is further riddled by the word “fullwer,” a full covenant or atonement. The use of the noun “hrife” (belly/womb) as the source for the poison is of note. The closely-related adjective “rif” (sometimes spelled “hrif”) means violent, fierce, or noxious[2], relating either to the nature of the bow or of its poison. If the sense is that the bow is conceiving the poisoned arrow in its womb (rather than spitting it up from its stomach), then the imagery could, perhaps, be indirectly related to James 1:15: “Then, after desire has conceived, it gives birth to sin; and sin, when it is full-grown, gives birth to death.” The previous snake imagery of the bow gives credence to this, harkening back to Satan in Eden instigating the Fall (the poison to mankind’s souls), as well as the riddle’s notion that a man “buys the deadly drink through his own power” (þone mandrinc mægne geceapaþ), connected to a man’s “own evil desire” in James 1:14. Then the “full atonement” (fullwer) of death is made.

The riddler then ponders the paradoxical nature of the bow in lines 15 and 16. The bow will not “unbind” unless it is “bound” (more literally, it will not “loosen” unless it is cunningly “sealed”) – that is, the arrow will not shoot unless the bow is skillfully made and strung. Conceptually this is not a paradox, but it is made one through linguistic wordplay.

In translation, I have added an additional pun in line 10, not present in the original text, of the bow speaking of the arrow “in passing” – the twang of the bowstring as the arrow shoots, passing through the bow in an instant. This plays off the translation of “togongeð” (literally, “to-going”) as “pass away,” a euphemism for death. The line breaks in my version are constructed so as to end in the similar sounds of alliteration, assonance, and slant rhymes. The lines are also constructed in the curve of a bow. The spacing of lines 13 and 14 represents the arrow, and their cant down- and leftward is meant to reproduce a “notching” effect as the bow is drawn, readying itself to “unbind,” and send its target to his “full atonement.”

---

[1] Sievers, Eduard. “Zu Cynewulf.” Anglica xiii (1891): 15.

[2] Bosworth, Joseph and Northcote T. Toller. An Anglo-Saxon Dictionary. London, 1898.

The Falling Sickness

“Some men are born mediocre, some men achieve mediocrity, and some men have mediocrity thrust upon them.” Thus saith the latter-day sage and prophet Joseph Heller. One might say the same of books — that some are natally mediocre, having been written under a malalignment of aesthetic stars; that some achieve mediocrity, by the long, dark remainer-shelf of the soul; and that some have mediocrity thrust upon them — often under the influence of those that believe (rather misguidedly, I suppose) that they know this particular work the best. I will leave it to my reader to fill in examples of such mediocre books as he or she sees fit; examples of each classification abound on the heavy shelves of world literatures.

My intent is to discuss an unnerving trend in recent years, one that focuses primarily on the third classification: the forceful thrusting of humdrummery upon unsuspecting books. During a recent visit to the haven of the hiply literate (Barnes & Noble — and it must be noted here that I am not and never have been “hip” [which, I suppose, it what most hipsters think of themselves, although I adamantly deny being a hipster {which I grudgingly admit is characteristic of most hipsters — a pox upon their kind!}], and I consider myself “workably literate” [that is, I know the language and literature being discussed very rarely, but I compensate quite successfully through hogwash and bunkum] , so for me any sense of “hip literacy” is out of the question) I discovered an English translation (as it was advertised) of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter.  Having considered this for a moment or two (workably literate people generally second-guess their first impressions, having a vast archive of useless truths and trivial lies through which to sift), it occurred to me the possibility that an English translation of The Scarlet Letter was, perhaps, a bit extravagant. If I had any remaining doubts as to whether Nathaniel Hawthorne had already written The Scarlet Letter in English, they were soon dispelled by the adjacent copies of the work in its original language. The “translation,” apparently, was not one of English to English (although that perhaps would be more interesting, with all of its Borgesian Pierre-Menard-Author-of-the-Quixote implications [See? “Workably” literate]), but rather it was a translation of English to 21st-century American (although translating Hawthorne into “American” seems doubly ironic). Its overall quality was one of sheer — how to put it lightly? — simplicity, although much larger and much stronger words would suit it equally well (and I can already hear the cries and accusations of “Elitist!” in my ears — the curse of the low-functioning literate is to be considered elite by the ordinary and ordinary by the elite). But by changing mere words, by simplifying from Hawthorne’s original, the whole of each paragraph was transformed. Entire meanings and purposes were irrevocably lost. At long last, the aim of the alchemists had been accomplished — provided, of course, that the alchemists had grown tired of gold and wanted to transmute it back to lead.

Alas, I did not purchase the translation, even though it was certain to have a quite intriguing translator’s preface, so I do not have examples from its text at hand. But throughout literature there are many examples of such tawdrification that would suit my purposes equally well; why not produce a specimen from the best of them? Shakespeare’s work has gained the most notoriety and lost the most meaning from such “translations” (again I am putting it lightly — “Bowdlerizations” would be appropriate, but instead of editing out perceived vulgarities, entirely new ones are provided). Take, for example, an exchange from Julius Caeser, Act I, scene ii. Conspirators Brutus and Cassius inquire of Casca the events of Caesar’s military parade. Casca informs them that Caesar denied the offered crown three times, and then “he fell down in the market-place and foamed at the mouth and was speechless.” Brutus interjects,  “‘Tis very like: he hath the falling sickness,” what in this age we call epilepsy. Cassius then responds: “No, Caesar hath it not, but you, and I, and honest Casca, we have the falling sickness.” Cassius is not implying they all have epilepsy; instead, he refers to the fact that they have fallen under the spell of Caesar, and are powerless against him — in Elizabethan times, epileptics were considered to be under a spell, or possessed by a spirit. The other implication of the “falling sickness” is that its sufferer is powerless to resist, and cannot be held accountable for his or her actions. Thus, Cassius’ turn of phrase not only communicates his outrage at Caesar’s rule, but also includes a hint of moral justification for the future assassination — the conspirators cannot be held accountable for their actions, as they have a sort of falling sickness. How much is lost in the contemporary translation!

BRUTUS: He has epilepsy.
CASSIUS: No, Caesar doesn’t have it; but you, and I, and honest Casca, we have epilepsy.

There is no implication or subtlety. There is no moral ramification. When Casca doesn’t get Cassius’ meaning, there is no weight to it: we likewise don’t understand, for there is nothing to get. It is simply the wordy aside of a fool, full of sound and fury, etc. etc.

This type of “translation” (the type which does not seek to make things clear so much as make them trifling) is our own modern “falling sickness” — by no means an epilepsy, but certainly a captivating spell, a powerlessness. It is too mindful a task to approach an unfamiliar text (or an unfamiliar usage of language) on its own terms. It is easier to conform the text or language to what we already know. It is easier, true — but it is also much more mindless (“more mindless”? Like I said, “workably” literate).

We must recast the books as we see fit in order to approach them. It is our reflection we most admire. Those books that don’t reflect us must be reformed by our hands, like the distortions of a fun-house mirror. Our condescending political-correctness (such as removing the word “nigger” from Huckleberry Finn), our hip and truncated sarcasm (such as the recent anthology summarizing the world’s greatest novels as Twitter posts — I shudder to dwell upon this for any length of time that is more than necessary to compose this sentence), our insistence that the power of every myth be trimmed to irreverent and manageable stereotypes (such as the overwhelmingly unexceptional Twilight series and spin-offs, as well as the recent slew of 21st-century vampires and “monsters” artlessly plunged into Jane Austen, Jane Eyre, and the life of Abraham Lincoln) — those books that don’t reflect these aspects of ourselves must be made to do so.

There is a great danger in this falling sickness, but we are all under it to differing extents.  I am reminded of the gold doubloon nailed to the mast in Moby-Dick. Each crew member analyzes the doubloon, and interprets its imagery according to how it suits him. That’s well and good, and common to all of us and our pet perspectives. The falling sickness is most like Ahab, who sees only his own self in the images printed on the coin, and sees the coin itself as the world’s mirror of his image. The difference is that the falling sickness is neither as nasty nor as megalomaniac as Ahab — it hasn’t the guts for that kind of spectacle. It has flies in its eyes, but it can’t see them for the flies in its eyes. Instead, its fate is closer to Casca’s from Julius Caesar, who is incapable of appreciating Cassius’ humorless humor, or why Cassius says they have the falling sickness — “I know not what you mean by that, but I am sure Caesar fell down.” Honest Casca? Indeed, dishonestly so!

To a B+ Student Disputing Her Grade

An A is merely three thin lines
Arranged by a brief pen’s designs
Upon the unsuspecting page;

Its own aesthetic quality
is not as pleasing as a B
In this post-modernistic age.

And A can’t strike so rare a nerve
As C’s sleek, captivating curve
That always will the A upstage.

There are no tears of night that D
With its sun-rising symmetry
Has yet been helpless to assuage,

And F: three strokes of that same pen
That made the A have formed its friend,
A firm and fully steadfast sage.

(And to the blessed Illiterate
Any letter’s subtle wit
Is nothing but a foolish cage!)

One errs when one so elevates
An A above its other mates
Supported only by vague rage:

The Typist’s touch, the Artist’s eye,
Must also equally apply
As means by which to clearly gauge!

Envoi
The Teacher can’t alone retool
The value of each majuscule
Without an ample raise in wage.

The Heart Can Be Filled Anywhere on Earth

I brought the Minnesotan bones of Bill Holm to New England tonight. He is unheard of here, even in the most Midwestern of these eastern states, and I don’t believe he stuck. There is something in the sensibility that is profoundly different.

The best example I can think of is this: the only thing Minnesota is more proud of than its work is its weather. Having lived for years in Minnesota, and now having left its ten thousand lakes and ten thousand borders, I can say that Minnesotans carry both their work and their weather with them wherever they go.

Not that this isn’t the case with Mainers — I would hardly deign to say whether it is or not, being but a foolish infant here with hardly a sense of object permanence: Maine can play peekaboo with me like Minnesota tried so long and so hard to do, and Maine still can easily fool me and rack me up in fiendish fits of laughter — but rather, I only mean to say that while Minnesotans are proud of their weather, Mainers are likewise proud; but with a sense of pride that borders on mere vanity.

David Mamet writes (with an understanding of the core of the Midwestern worldview and sentimentality, the true profundity of which is most likely unknown to him): “At least once a day we reinterpret the weather — an essentially impersonal phenomenon — into an expression of our current view of the universe,” and all humanity nods its head and mutters, “It’s true,” while those in Minnesota nod their heads and smirk to themselves and mutter, “It’s true.” There is a pleasant masochism that is shared among Minnesotans, that our native weather tempers us, and sharply awakens our senses and our pains and pleasures, like the needles in the skin of the awakening foot, or the mirthful razor of our funny bone cracking a counter. It makes us stronger, callouses the skin, toughens our hide; and we are as proud of such consistent stings as a heap of clay must be of the incising blade of the master sculptor. Minnesotans put up with it and commiserate. Mainers for the most part believe they have grown accustomed to the cruelest cold and the bitterest wind, and can only with the strained gentility of etiquette accept a rival to their claims.

I don’t believe that Minnesota has harsher winters than Maine. From what I can either sense or guess, they are equals. But I have many times in Maine been asked if I am prepared for the winter, and when I respond most certainly, yes (which is, I suppose, also a type of vanity), I am asked with dubious arch of eyebrows if I’m quite sure I know what I’m talking about.

But thinking it over, a Mainer could as easily receive a similar mistrust in Minnesota, and an equally vain mistrust at that. So what, then, is the difference?

Perhaps it is always unpleasant in varying degrees to be the outsider. As Auden writes, “Isn’t it true that however far we’ve wandered into our provinces of persecution, where our regrets accuse, we keep returning back to the common faith from which we’ve all dissented, back to the hands, the feet, the faces? … Those in love cannot make up their minds to go or stay. Artist  and doctor return most often. Only the mad will never, never come back. For doctors keep worrying while away, in case their skill is suffering or deserted … And the artist prays ever so gently, let me find pure all that can happen.”

And it is here that I return to my first point: I feel as if I have brought Bill Holm the artist to the worrying doctors of academia, and the doctors have done what doctors frequently do — glance with mild and required curiousity, nod and sniff or hum a moody note, and then forget, and then move on to more important and more worrisome matters. “The story would be the same in Ohio or Montana, in Kansas or Kentucky or Illinois, and not very differently would it be told Up York State, or in the Carolina hills,” to purloin a sentiment from the ghost of old “Red” Lewis, who ends his most remembered work (and yet a work so conveniently avoided or simplified) with a bomb to blow up smugness — which is in turn ignored, in favor of concern about the weather, the storm windows, and a probably-stolen screwdriver.

And so the bones of Bill Holm will rest primarily in my mind, where neither he nor I are perpetual outsiders, as we so frequently have found ourselves amidst this de facto world of inorganic geographies, with borders of dry dust and chalky institutions. Sinclair Lewis is there too, an arm around us both, a scotch and cigarette in each hand, bellowing with a taut and tattered grin, “Well, let me tell you something. I’m the best goddamn writer in this here goddamn country!” And we all nod together and sip his whiskey. And then what do we three talk about? My God! We talk for sweet and holy hours about the Minnesotan weather.

Poems (Written Upon the Collapse of Facebook on the 23rd of September, 2010; Being in the Style of the Ancient Masters)

Poem (Facebook has collapsed!)

Facebook has collapsed!

It was not raining here but

they said it was raining back

in Minnesota and raining pretty

hard at that and flooding too

they told me and I was thinking

all about this when I realized

FACEBOOK HAS COLLAPSED!

there is no weather in the internet

there is no rain in the internet

I am registered on many social networks

and now I must use all of them at

my disposal to complain

Oh Facebook we hate you come back

After “Poem (Lana Turner has collapsed!)” by Frank O’Hara

The Second Coming

Refreshing and refreshing in the widening gyre

The user cannot hear the falconer;

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

The screen-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere

The ceremony of confluence is drowned;

The best lack all connection, while the worst

Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some devastation is at hand;

Surely the Second Coming is at hand.

The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out

When a vast article out of Wikipedia is sought

For explanation of what the “Second Coming” means;

A shape before the screen with hunched body,

A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,

Is blinking its slow eyes, while all about it

Stream shadows of the indignant Twitterers.

The network drops again but now I know

That six years of stony sleep

Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking browser,

And what bored beast, its hour come round at last,

Slouches toward the Blogsphere to be born?

After “The Second Coming” by William Butler Yeats

The Bare Tree

A comparative appreciation of Samuel Menashe and Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Note

There are many editions of Coleridge’s “Frost at Midnight” available, as the poem was published and revised frequently over many years. This essay employs the edition found here: http://www.poetryfoundation.org/archive/poem.html?id=173242

The edition of Menashe’s “The Bare Tree” is taken from his 2005 New and Selected Poems published by the Library of America

As the reader may not be able to find it on the internet, the poem is reproduced here for purely educational and academic purposes. But you really should buy it here: http://www.amazon.com/Samuel-Menashe-Selected-American-Project/dp/1931082855/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1284509558&sr=8-1

The Bare Tree
Samuel Menashe

My mother once said to me, “When one sees the tree in leaf, one thinks the beauty of the tree is in the leaves, and then one sees the bare tree.”

1

Now dry stone holds
Your hopeful head
Your wise brown eyes
And precise nose

Your mouth is dead

2

The silence is vast
I am still and wander
Keeping you in mind
There is never enough
Time to know another

3

Root of my soul
Split the stone
That holds you–
Be overthrown
Tomb I own

4

Darkness stored
Becomes a star
At whose core
You, dead, are

5

I will make you a landscape
Spread forth as waves run

After your death I live
Becoming a flying fish

Samuel Menashe’s “The Bare Tree” and Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s “Frost at Midnight” are both poems of silence. Coleridge’s silence is that of reflection on a winter night, with his son sleeping beside him. Menashe’s silence is that of death. It is not implicit in the poem itself that it is the death of the poet’s mother (as the deceased is only referred to as “you”), but the text of the epigraph may allow for this assumption.

The first silence in Menashe is that of shock, at the end of the first verse. Before this the poet lists a number of the mother’s features, describing each with increasingly static adjectives. The “hopeful head” leads to her “wise brown eyes,” finally resolving the strain with her “precise nose.” The head of hope looks forward, advances, anticipates (one may think of Cicero’s dum spiro spero, “while I breathe, I hope”); the eyes of wisdom deliberate, consider, ruminate (as wisdom does), moving from the motion of hope to the stillness of reflection; the nose is precise, which means it is something definite but also something fixed and unmoving. This progressive stasis of familiar features then breaks, leading to the isolated line, “Your mouth is dead.” The instrument of sound, the human mechanism of speech and song and breath, is dead.

All of these features are held by the “dry stone” of the first line, which holds them not only in the grave, but also holds them by setting the pattern for their sounds: the long “i” of “dry” being repeated in “wise,” “eyes,” and “precise,” and the “o” of “stone” and “holds” appearing in “hopeful,” “nose,” and (slightly changed) “brown.” The hopeful “head” does not fit this pattern of the “dry stone,” instead linked soundwise to “dead.” All of the features of the “hopeful head” (of what does it hope, being held in death?) are used to transition into the silence of the dead mouth.

This silence is first felt before the mouth is acknowledged as being dead, in the jarring line break. It then continues into the second verse, where it now is “vast.” It is this vastness of silence that the poet must fill, and so, “I am still and wander/Keeping you in mind.” The open form of silence provokes the thought toward that which had once filled the silence. Coleridge’s equivalent is the loud owlet’s cry, the silence of which leaves him in “that solitude, which suits/abstruser musings.” The object of Coleridge’s musings, which fills the silence – both with immediate thought and, later, with “gentle breathings” – is his young slumbering son, the creation, whereas Menashe’s object of musing is his mother, the creator.

In this silence Menashe enigmatically is both still and wanders. Perhaps he is indicating his survival of his mother: “I am still (here).” Or perhaps, more likely, he is in the paradox of thought, wherein his body remains still while his mind wanders in its thoughts (consider the word choice of “wander,” so close in spelling and sound to “wonder”), specifically seen in the shock of grief. There are a number of ways to read this verse, based on the phrasings that a reader may employ. One such reading (with punctuation added) follows:

I am still and wander,

Keeping you in mind.

There is never enough

Time to know another.

This reading indicates the wandering of thoughts by keeping the mother in mind. Another reading could be this:

I am still and wander.

Keeping you in mind,

There is never enough

Time to know another.

That is, while the poet keeps her in mind, while the poet grieves for her, there is not enough time to know or consider anyone else. There is no punctuation of phrases here to guide the reader, only line breaks. Like the process of grief itself, this verse considers meanings yet wanders guidelessly, almost as vacantly and vastly as the silence itself.

The process of thought (seen in Menashe as wandering) forms the structure of “Frost at Midnight.” From out of the “extreme stillness” of the night he thinks of

…Sea, hill and wood,

This populous village! Sea, and hill, and wood,

With all the numberless goings-on of life,

Inaudible as dreams!

And from this thought he considers the flame in his fireplace, and the “film” of coal fire on the gate, which “still flutters there, the sole unquiet thing.” In popular folklore, this film was known as a “stranger,” and foretold the arrival of a friend. That is, the word for something that is unknown (stranger) is here applied as a means of discovering what is known. There is a movement taking place. Coleridge lounging in his cabin is still, and yet wanders in thought. The stranger reminds him of his school days, when he would likewise gaze “upon the bars,/To watch that fluttering stranger!” But this he immediately associates with an earlier memory,

…my sweet birth-place, and the old church-tower,

Whose bells, the poor man’s only music, rang

From morn to evening, all the hot fair-day,

So sweetly, that they stirred and haunted me

With a wild pleasure, falling on mine ear

Most like the articulate sounds of things to come!

The bells themselves are presageful, a sort of stranger of experience. That experience he finds in the “wild pleasure” of listening to the bells, the experience of which leads his thoughts back to his school days, when, awed by his “stern preceptor’s face” and “fixed with mock study,” he would notice the door half open and be filled with hope of relief from tedium.

Save if the door half opened, and I snatched

A hasty glance, and still my heart leaped up,

For still I hoped to see the stranger’s face,

Townsman, or aunt, or sister more beloved,

My play-mate when we both were clothed alike!

The bells and the stranger produce the same inner reaction in Coleridge, the presageful experience, for they both are what appear in the silence. The bells are the only music. The stranger is the “sole unquiet thing.” A pathos forms from this mutual livingness amidst silence (perhaps Wordsworth’s “we see into the life of things,” or perhaps Coleridge’s own ideas of the projection of thought onto lifeless things), which leads the poet to see a reflection of life in the surrounding world.

Methinks, its motion in this hush of nature

Gives it dim sympathies with me who live,

Making it a companionable form…

Menashe moves as well. From the silence linking the first two verses, he moves in thought (“keeping you in mind”), leading to a movement of the soul.

Root of my soul

Split the stone

That holds you—

The poet commands the growing root of his soul to split the dry stone of the tomb from verse one, the stone that held what was recognizable in his mother’s form. Out of the silence comes the thought, out of the thought comes the movement. The movement in Coleridge is a process of daydream, memory, and dream, and leads to a form of recognition (the stranger and the companionable form). In Menashe it is the process of grief, memory, and strong emotion (the root of his soul) that leads to a more unusual result.

Be overthrown

Tomb I own

The poet himself owns the tomb. It is comparable to the bells of Coleridge, which “stirred and haunted” him. In the case of Coleridge it is a haunting of “wild pleasure,” but in the case of Menashe it is a haunting of darkness. The sounds of this verse all reflect back (as if haunted) upon the “o” of the stone—“soul,” “holds,” “overthrown,” “tomb,” “own,” “root,” and “you.”

Coleridge now is in a complicated place. He is at once in his cabin, remembering his school days. In the memory of his school days (when he is searching for the stranger in the fire grate) he is remembering his home town, and the memory of the effect of the bells, as a day dream, would lull him to sleep, and produce actual dreams. Upon waking (still in the memory of his school days) he is in a place akin to Menashe.

And so I brooded all the following morn,

Awed by the stern preceptor’s face, mine eye

Fixed with mock study on my swimming book…

Menashe (in verse four) broods in his own way, describing his previous process of thought (in verses two and three) as “darkness stored.” The influence of Milton is apparent in both cases. In Paradise Lost the Spirit

…with mighty wings outspread,

Dove-like, sat’st brooding on the vast abyss,

And madest it pregnant.

This “brooding” is seen in Coleridge upon awakening from dreams (a type of abyss) and lost in moments presageful—perhaps “pregnant” in their own way: as in the hopeful appearance of the stranger, or as in the case of a “pregnant pause.” Menashe is in effect brooding through his grief in multiple ways: “I am still and wander,” “Keeping you in mind,” “Root of my soul/Split the stone,” finally leading to

Darkness stored

Becomes a star

At whose core

You, dead, are

which could be construed as another Miltonic reference, that of the “darkness visible.” It is not only the mother’s features that are now dead, but the mother herself. This realization (or, in the language of the stages of grief, acceptance) is the core of the progression. The grief “becomes a star” by its very process, the darkness turns to light. Out of the silence of darkness (the “vast abyss” or the “darkness upon the face of the deep” or the calm “so calm, that it disturbs/And vexes meditation with its strange/And extreme stillness”), the brooding spirit itself produces light—the light of Menashe’s star, Coleridge’s “thin blue flame,” Milton’s “What in me is dark, illumine.” And the star is a light itself, but it is also a sun by which one sees all else. Out of the contemplation of the stranger Coleridge produces a realization for his child,

Whose gentle breathings, heard in this deep calm,

Fill up the interspersed vacancies

And momentary pauses of the thought!

My babe so beautiful! it thrills my heart

With tender gladness, thus to look at thee,

And think that thou shalt learn far other lore,

And in far other scenes!

which is a presagefulness in itself, a foretold arrival, a pregnancy, an imagination (in the terms of Wordsworth, “that which is ever more about to be”). Out of the star Menashe produces a landscape.

I will make you a landscape

Spread forth as waves run

The running waves on the shore are also a foretold and continuous arrival, an “ever more about to be,” like the breathings of Coleridge’s son. Out of the darkness of grief a star is born, out of the star a landscape of memory is born, and it is in this landscape that Menashe’s command (or is it a prophecy?) “Be overthrown/Tomb I own” is fulfilled. The mother’s head in verse one can be described as “hopeful” for this reason.

After your death I live

Become a flying fish

That is, he lives within the waves, but is not trapped there. In fact, the waves of the landscape are what allow him to fly. But yet he must always return to them.

In Coleridge’s use of water (the eponymous frost at midnight, as well as the “eave-drops” and the “silent icicles” of the final lines) one sees a reflection, both of memory and of mirroring.

…whether the eave-drops fall

Heard only in the trances of the blast,

Or if the secret ministry of frost

Shall hang them up in silent icicles,

Quietly shining to the quiet Moon.

The icicles reflect the moon’s own light back to it. The icicles, by the “secret ministry of frost,” are the eave-drops in a frozen state, much like a memory (or a reflection) frozen in the mind. But yet that memory is accessed by a connection to a living thing, a “companionable form” of the stranger; which is itself not “living,” but only a reflection of Coleridge’s own sentiments.

The silence produces a thought, and the thought produces a form of movement. After the movement is the silence. Coleridge’s icicles shine quietly to the quiet moon. Returning to Coleridge’s infant son,

…whose gentle breathings, heard in this deep calm,

Fill up the interspersed vacancies

And momentary pauses of the thought!

one sees a cycle, an open form of silence and sound, of death and rebirth. These gentle breathings recall Coleridge from memory back to the present moment in the cabin. Looking upon his son, he then is cast into a future thought, a presagefulness. The “lakes and sandy shores” and the “crags of ancient mountain” will reflect to the son

The lovely shapes and sounds intelligible

Of that eternal language, which thy God

Utters, who from eternity doth teach

Himself in all, and all things in himself.

Great universal teacher! He shall mould

Thy spirit, and by giving make it ask.

That is, because the “great universal teacher” gives knowledge of himself to the son’s spirit through the “eternal language” of nature, his spirit will desire such knowledge all the more, increasing with its own fulfillment, like the eave-drops form icicles, like the waves upon the shore, as something that is “ever more about to be,” which is that cycle of silence and sound, death and rebirth. In Menashe this cycle is apparent in “The friends of my father,” a companion poem to “The Bare Tree” in many ways, when he describes the scene around his father’s grave.

The friends of my father

Stand like gnarled trees

Yet in their eyes I see

Spring’s crinkled leaf

Coleridge embodies this cycle in the hopeful turning of the seasons.

Therefore all seasons shall be sweet to thee,

Whether the summer clothe the general earth

With greenness, or the redbreast sit and sing

Betwixt the tufts of snow on the bare branch

Of mossy apple-tree…

This picture of the apple tree provides a visual form of “sound” and “silence.” The branch is bare of fruit in winter (silence), but yet is dappled with moss, tufts of snow, and the redbreast (sound). The redbreast sits (much like an apple on the bare branch) and sings, breaking both the visual and the aural silence.

This is the eponymous bare tree of Menashe, found only in the poem’s epigraph: “My mother once said to me, ‘When one sees the tree in leaf, one thinks the beauty of the tree is in the leaves, and then one sees the bare tree.’” It is in the moment of silence that everything of importance occurs. The silence lets in the experience of the unintended, the beauty of what one does not expect. It is a thought, or a dream, or a memory, uninvited. It is Wordsworth’s “gentle shock of mild surprise” that ultimately serves the purpose of awakening.

Autumn at the University

Dedicated to the Tintern Abbots

At the sunsets of these days
The stovesmoke sends an odorous haze
Up from the chimney-tips,
And with each breath drawn raw and dry
There is the promise of a sigh
That lingers on our lips.

The leaves cling fast to branches thin
As horsehair bows the violin
And rattles its wood cast,
And sounds a symphony of air
That, while it lingers faint and fair,
Must soon rest in the past.

While Autumn waits within the wings
And Summer bows, the Maestro brings
A chill in every storm;
While every home from attic crooks
Pulls blankets down, we write our books
And poems to keep us warm.

While bland folk beat out woolen hats
With fingers caught on thermostats
We weave our weathered lines,
Because we cannot pay for heat
We wrap ourselves with rhyme and feet
And drown in brainy brines.

Our gift of rhyme is Nature’s curse,
For no one has a need for verse
With food and fire enough.
And matched against the sweet duet
Of both TV and internet
Our tunes are stupid stuff.

With Muses such as these, who’d dare
To give Mankind a greater ware
Than brief, laconic quips:
The note unneeded, though it’s true
Rings false and futile at its cue
And quavers on our lips.

Third Day of Teaching

James put a pen through the wash. A Pilot Precise V5 Rolling Ball (Extra Fine Tip). A pen this expensive you don’t want to put through the wash. A pen this expensive could feed one (if one is a child in a third world nation and willing to be sponsored to some guilty middle class family in the West, or if one is a graduate student subsisting only on noodles) for perhaps a week or two.

This is a serious pen. This is the pen of professionals. The pen of gods. One single slash from a pen this expensive can ruin and topple the fates of nations. Of cosmoses.

I do not hear the news from Hurricane Earl because, perhaps, there is none. Only a memory soon: Hurricane Earl, R.I.P. 2010, Lost at Sea. There is no calm before the storm. Strange voices in the house before the storm, yes. The dog barking through every corner-shadow in the house before the storm, yes. Loud engines grinding down the road and toward the interstate, ever more intent on getting where they’re going as they rattle with the mindless bass that throbs in through the window screens before the storm, yes.

Class called off fifteen minutes early due to stuffy air and stuffy discussion. These young people, we’ve put them through enough. They’ve learned our foreign academic discourse; adapted well enough our language, our terms, our methodologies; feigned our ways, masked and mimicked our arcane rituals.

James, I cannot help you. I can only offer my condolences, condolences which stem from similar loss. James, these pens are too expensive. James: these pens require emotional investment. If only I could have warned you. But now I can only tell you what you already know, what I have discovered over and over, what every writer discovers and always knows and yet discovers again and again. James: the pen is massacred.

James stop texting me while I’m writing my blog.

First Day of Teaching

It occurs to me that one looking up at the stars must feel in response either calmness, or a great unease, or a mystic wonder. There is no other ground. If one does not feel one of these three things, I would argue that one is not truly looking at the stars, merely glancing up at them or ignoring them. Calm and unease (opposites though they are) both stem from a sense of oneness: a tranquil mind stems from a completeness with the surrounding universe, and a troubled mind stems from the oneness of the self, alone, in the face of the entirety of the cosmos. Wonder I think is apart from oneness, does not take oneness into consideration. It is silent. It is the still, soft voice.

Eager young scholars of the future, I say unto you:
We will not be using laptops in my classroom.

Is it because I am old-fashioned? Perhaps. Is it because I wish to complicate already difficult lives? No. Well, perhaps a bit. Is it because I am the doubting scoffer in the back pew of the Church of the Technophiles? Yes.

But mostly it is my extreme terror — and terror here is the right word — that I am living in a society of young people that increasingly cannot live for fifty minutes without an electronic device as company.

(He typed into his ever-faithful laptop one warm August evening as the stars glittered shameless for attention outside his window)

[And yes, even after my last acknowledgment of hypocrisy, YES I still remain the doubting scoffer — granted, the doubting scoffer who nonetheless is still sitting in the back pew of the congregation, still in the Sacred House of Worship of the Deus In Machina]

But, alas, we will be using our minds instead of our laptops in this classroom.

Which is not enough. Our minds themselves are never enough, I admit that. They are prisoners to themselves, which is why mankind deemed it necessary to invent the Muses — holy inspiration. There ought to be a law against Henry.

And so, dear young scholars of the future, so eager to prove me wrong, so eager to hold onto the devices that (you are convinced) liberate your minds, I say unto you:

Cyberspace is not a place and never will be. Each of those stars — above you at all times, regardless if you can see them — is. The cosmic pool of silence is a place. The restless constant noise is not. What happens in your mind is not (exactly) a place, but it is much more of a place than what happens in the circuitry at your fingertips.

Cyberspace is not a place, I say, and the ghost of Bill Holm nods in appreciation over my shoulder, with the ghost of Wordsworth standing on his bridge behind him, and Cowper staring at his couch, and Marvell strolling in his garden, and Milton staring at nothing but his darkness visible.

There ought to be a law against Henry.

–Mr. Bones: there is.

Argument for the Self

*I am foremost a scoundrel.

*Being a scoundrel, and, in the fashion of scoundrels, desiring not to be generally known as such, I will betimes affix myself with equitable cloths of feigned beneficence.

*Therefore do not trust me or anything I say.

*However, a scoundrel, if he is eloquent, clever, or indefatigable enough, can sometimes be considered by the general public lovable, and perhaps even morally justified.

*Some examples: Charlie Chaplain, Groucho/Chico/Harpo Marx, Freddie the Freeloader, and (from a particularly peculiar or aberrant viewpoint) Richard Milhous Nixon.

*I can at times be eloquent. I can at times be clever. I am most certainly not indefatigable.

*Therefore, by my own account and according to the general assumptions of logic and probability, I most certainly will remain a scoundrel, unlovable and morally unjustified, save for some sudden contingency of random kismet.

*However, one may hope the old idiosyncratic postulate of simul justus et peccator (that is, “at the same time saint and sinner”) may still apply to human nature.

*Therefore, if a saint always equals a sinner, then by the proper invocation and application of the Associative Property, a sinner always equals a saint.

*Thus, by my own merit of being a scoundrel, I am also qualified to be considered saintly through no extra sacrifice or effort.

*Therefore I am foremost a saint.

*Trust me and everything I say.