My mate is also reading it. She scratched a pencil mark against this observation about the devout Dorothea:
Riding was an indulgence which she allowed herself in spite of conscientious qualms; she felt that she enjoyed it in a pagan sensuous way, and always looked forward to renouncing it.
With blackest moss the flower-plots
Were thickly crusted, one and all:
The rusted nails fell from the knots
That held the pear to the gable-wall.
The broken sheds look’d sad and strange:
Unlifted was the clinking latch;
Weeded and worn the ancient thatch
Upon the lonely moated grange.
She only said, “My life is dreary,
He cometh not,” she said;
She said, “I am aweary, aweary,
I would that I were dead!”
Her tears fell with the dews at even;
Her tears fell ere the dews were dried;
She could not look on the sweet heaven,
Either at morn or eventide.
After the flitting of the bats,
When thickest dark did trance the sky,
She drew her casement-curtain by,
And glanced athwart the glooming flats.
She only said, “The night is dreary,
He cometh not,” she said;
She said, “I am aweary, aweary,
I would that I were dead!”
Upon the middle of the night,
Waking she heard the night-fowl crow:
The cock sung out an hour ere light:
From the dark fen the oxen’s low
Came to her: without hope of change,
In sleep she seem’d to walk forlorn,
Till cold winds woke the gray-eyed morn
About the lonely moated grange.
She only said, “The day is dreary,
He cometh not,” she said;
She said, “I am aweary, aweary,
I would that I were dead!”
About a stone-cast from the wall
A sluice with blacken’d waters slept,
And o’er it many, round and small,
The cluster’d marish-mosses crept.
Hard by a poplar shook alway,
All silver-green with gnarled bark:
For leagues no other tree did mark
The level waste, the rounding gray.
She only said, “My life is dreary,
He cometh not,” she said;
She said “I am aweary, aweary
I would that I were dead!”
And ever when the moon was low,
And the shrill winds were up and away,
In the white curtain, to and fro,
She saw the gusty shadow sway.
But when the moon was very low
And wild winds bound within their cell,
The shadow of the poplar fell
Upon her bed, across her brow.
She only said, “The night is dreary,
He cometh not,” she said;
She said “I am aweary, aweary,
I would that I were dead!”
All day within the dreamy house,
The doors upon their hinges creak’d;
The blue fly sung in the pane; the mouse
Behind the mouldering wainscot shriek’d,
Or from the crevice peer’d about.
Old faces glimmer’d thro’ the doors
Old footsteps trod the upper floors,
Old voices called her from without.
She only said, “My life is dreary,
He cometh not,” she said;
She said, “I am aweary, aweary,
I would that I were dead!”
The sparrow’s chirrup on the roof,
The slow clock ticking, and the sound
Which to the wooing wind aloof
The poplar made, did all confound
Her sense; but most she loathed the hour
When the thick-moted sunbeam lay
Athwart the chambers, and the day
Was sloping toward his western bower.
Then said she, “I am very dreary,
He will not come,” she said;
She wept, “I am aweary, aweary,
Oh God, that I were dead!”
Alfred, Lord Tennyson
Mariana and her moated grange first appear in Measure for Measure. She waits, like Tennyson’s Mariana. But Shakespeare’s Mariana ends up with her man, Angelo – it’s that breed of Shakespearean relationship that features a strong adult woman and a more morally fickle boyish man, the one Germaine Greer thinks mimics Shakespeare’s relationship with Anne Hathaway. No one is quite sure what Tennyson is on about. I’m not. Love it but. The painting is by Millias.
Stephen Fry is 50. I’m a bit belated with it.
Stephen on poetry:
It slows you down, so you can just enjoy the bounce and heft and glory of one word following another.
Also, thought I might add these excerts from an interview with Stephen Fry in The Times, on the eve of the publication of his new book, The Ode Less Travelled, a beginners’ guide to poetry writing. The article is by Catherine Shoard. I previously posted this on my other, rarely-ever-tended-to blog.
Fry: “The strength and confidence that we associate with the Victorians we also associate with things like empire, poverty, social injustice, sexual hypocrisy. We can’t seem to separate them. So if you’re white and privately educated and you start talking about the virtuosity of Western enlightenment then it sounds as if you’re basically grinding a boot into the face of Muslims and the Third World.”
But political correctness shouldn’t take all the blame. Far from it – the chief cause of bad verse, says Fry, is laziness.
“You cannot work too hard at poetry,” he says, tapping his saucer for extra emphasis. “People are bad at it not because they have tin ears, but because they simply don’t have the faintest idea how much work goes into it. It’s not as if you’re ordering a pizza or doing something that requires direct communication in a very banal way. But it seems these days the only people who spend time over things are retired people and prisoners. We bolt things, untasted.”
He puffs contemplatively on a full-strength Marlboro, and pours more tea.
“It’s so easy to say, ‘That’ll do.’ Everyone’s in a hurry. People are intellectually lazy, morally lazy, ethically lazy …”
Morally lazy?
“All the time. When people get angry with a traffic warden they don’t stop and think what it would be like to be a traffic warden or how annoying it would be if people could park wherever they liked. People talk lazily about how hypocritical politicians are. But everyone is. On the one hand we hate that petrol is expensive and on the other we go on about global warming. We abrogate the responsibility for thought and moral decisions onto others and then have the luxury of saying it’s not good enough.”
The solution? Poetry, thinks Fry. “At its best poetry engages with the realities of existence. That’s why it’s so grown up. It’s the absolute opposite of this Disney idea that if you dream hard enough you can get anything – that’s so manifestly not true. Good art has a skull showing. We just need to knuckle down and produce it.”‘
I’m only a quarter-way through, but I already have a surfeit of wisdoms from George Eliot’s Middlemarch.
… the great safeguard of society and of domestic life was, that opinions were not acted on. Sane people did what their neighbours did, so that if any lunatics were at large, one might know and avoid them.
Sir James paused. He did not usually find it easy to give reasons: it seemed to him strange that people should not know them without being told, since he only felt what was reasonable.
“He has got no red blood in his body,” said Sir James.
“No. Somebody put a drop under a magnifying glass, and it was all semi-colons and parenthesis,” said Mrs Cadwallader.
But anyone watching keenly the stealthy convergence of human lots, sees a slow preparation of effects from one life on another, which tells like a calculated irony on the indifference on the frozen stare with which we look at our unintroduced neighbour. Destiny stands by sarcastic with a dramatis personae folded in her hand.
And on Dorothea’s sister Celia:
The younger had always worn a yoke: but is there any yoked creature without its private opinions?
The first paragraph of Jonathan Yardley’s review in the Washington Post of Don DeLillo’s Falling Man. I think the best first paragraph of a bad review ever.
Nobody bothered to think about it at the time, but from the moment the first airplane hit the World Trade Center in September 2001, one thing was inevitable: Don DeLillo would write a novel about it. DeLillo, as has been noted before in this space, is the novelist as op-ed pundit, a ’60s recidivist who simply cannot resist the temptation to turn his novels into lectures or, upon occasion, harangues. So, of course, DeLillo simply had to write about Sept. 11, even though – as the results all too clearly demonstrate – he has nothing original or interesting to say about it.
From George Orwell’s essay Decline of the English Murder. One of his wives…
In most of the cases the crime only came to light slowly, as the result of careful investigations which started off with the suspicions of neighbours or relatives; and in nearly every case there was some dramatic coincidence, in which the finger of Providence could be clearly seen, or one of those episodes that no novelist would dare to make up, such as Crippen’s flight across the Atlantic with his mistress dressed as a boy, or Joseph Smith playing “Nearer, my God, to Thee” on the harmonium while one of his wives was drowning in the next room.
Jack Marx on Big Brother’s Emma. How I love “its various renovations and resulting tributaries”.
It’s astonishing that nobody has alerted Emma to the fact that the public has no general curiosity regarding the windmills of her mind, her ‘career’ as a match-flame celebrity, or her outlook regarding any issue but one: the fact that her father died while she was in the Big Brother house. This is the one thing about which Emma can speak and the world will listen. For the same reason that Neil Armstrong is not sought for his opinion on post-war Brazilian postage stamps, Emma Cornell is not required by the wider world if she does not wish to address that for which she is notable.
There are those who might argue that there is significant public interest in her body, its various renovations and resulting tributaries, but magazines like ZOO are the best arenas for such arguments, which are usually fought without words anyhow. When dealing with a newspaper, as a journalist or a subject of interview, it’s always worth remembering – if you can manage to wrap your head around such a bizarre idea – that there are readers besides yourself.
Then it was upstairs to the White Room for a podcast with Bob Geldof on Africa – Africa, a quarter-century compulsion of Bob’s and a solid 10-year enthusiasm of Tony’s. Then it was downstairs to the long table and a multinational convocation of bishops. Power has been described as a drug, an aphrodisiac, a “filthy venom” (in the words of Maxim Gorky); it is also, for much of the time, carcinogenically boring. Like all politicians, Tony has seven or eight kinds of smile. Smiles two and three would do for the bishops. When he is making the rounds of a crowded room, his smile, towards the end, is a rictus, and his eyes are as hard as jewels.
All the boredom is what the world doesn’t see – the hidden, humble toil of dosing and humouring, of giving face and jollying along. It is this that keeps politics halfway honest, and impedes the process that Bob Geldof alluded to, up in the White Room: “It’s a bit naff, isn’t it? What happened? The politicisation of celebrity or the celebritisation of politics?” And the question arose: what will Tony be when he quits? An ex-politician?
“No,” he said. “I’ll be a former celebrity.”
.
I’ve got obsessed with Dave Egger’s approach to writing the Sundanese lost boys story, What Is the What: The Autobiography of Valentino Achak Deng. The idea that it sometimes takes a novel to tell a story very truthfully. He describes the process beautifully here.
And here’s an extract, if yer innerested. Oh, and a review/article thing in the Washington Post.
