Poetry that creates a very specific sense of place through the all senses has always attracted me, especially if the poems also have a strong rhythmical and musical quality.  Two poems that are particularly evocative in this respect are Dylan Thomas’ prologue to Under Milk Wood and Inversnaid by Gerard Manly Hopkins.

Under Milk Wood opens in a sleepy Welsh town by Llareggub Hill (read it backwards) with a musical play on the sounds and meanings of words.  Rhymes and similar meanings are put alongside for rhythmical and imagistic effect, such as “down to the sloeblack, slow, black, crowblack, fishingboat-bobbing sea.”  The comma between “slow” and “black” slows down the whole rhythm of the sentence while the compound words (“sloeblack”, “crowblack”, “fishingboat”) speed it up, allowing Thomas to control exactly how the poem is read.  The use of compounds and punctuation in this poem is particularly important as Thomas meant for Under Milk Wood to be read out loud (it was commissioned as a radio play for the BBC) so line-breaks or formatting would have been ambiguous and confusing to the readers, whereas clear indications of how Thomas wanted the poem to be read through the way the words join is far more effective.  There are more fantastic compound words in this prologue, such as “jollyrogered sea” and “cobblestreets”, each of which bring together familiar ideas (jolly roger on the sea, yo ho ho and all that… and cobbled streets) in an unusual way, so that they conjure up an exact and fresh image rather than a mere idea dulled by cliché.  Also, not all linked ideas have been compounded as only some of the images could work.  For example, the hyphen in “bible-black” adds an emphasis and stress to the first syllables that ‘bibleblack’ wouldn’t.  Plus it also looks rather silly and tempts the reader to pronounce it as ‘bibbleblack’.  Essentially, the sound of each phrase has been carefully chosen for its metrical properties and how it should be read out loud, down the smallest detail.

Hopkins’ Inversnaid is similarly preoccupied with the sound of words when read aloud though it uses slightly different tactics.  Again there are some compound words, such as “pitchblack”, “beadbonny” and “rollrock” that take away the extra stress that a space would create, though Hopkins doesn’t seem as fond of them as Thomas.  The most noticeable thing about Hopkins’ poem is its use of accents on words that he wants stressed: “A windpuff bonnet of fáwn-fróth” and “Of a pool so pitchblack, féll frówning”.  Normally-soft vowels become harder giving the right rhythm to the end of each of these two lines.  The poem also uses a lot of alliteration and rhymes within lines to bring about and overall sense of musicality and strengthen the rhythm of the poem.  For instance, the repetition of the ‘r’ sound in “rollrock highroad roaring” and alliteration in “Degged with dew, dappled with dew” give the lines a particularly strong, heartbeat-like rhythm, literally rolling the poem along and pulling the reader down the highroad with the words.

The sense I keep getting of both poems, and perhaps what makes them stick in my mind the most, is the feeling of a tumble of words, like music, that gradually paints a picture.  In Inversnaid this comes immediately from its fixed AABB rhyming and regular four-line stanzas, giving a ballad-like and singsong quality to the poem.  It also introduces the image immediately, as if the reader were standing in front of “This darksome burn” and continues to list in simple images, “horseback brown”, “rollrock highroad roaring down” until the scene is painted.  Dylan Thomas sets the scene with similar lists of images in an even more tumble-down fashion, but his style is more like that of an epic narrator, starting with the playful yet somehow sombre “To begin at the beginning”.  Next it is like setting the scene in a play as the long list of images coagulate into an idea of the town – I particularly like “the anthracite statues of the horses sleep in the fields, and the cows in the byres and the dogs in the wet-nosed yards.”  Every simile is new and fresh, zooming in to a very specific moment: the snuffling wet nose of a dog or the stillness of a sleeping horse.

Dylan Thomas instructs his readers in what they should see, but subtly, uncovering each new sight like a miracle in the second person – “only your eyes are unclosed to see the black and folded town fast, and slow, asleep.// And you alone can hear the invisible starfall…”  Again the wordplay insertion of “and slow” breaks up the clichéd phrase ‘fast asleep’ and evokes in its unexpected rhythm a sense of breathing in deep sleep.  After showing, he addresses our sense of hearing, repeating the command “listen” so that gradually the image of the sleeping town also becomes stereophonic: “Listen.  It is night moving in the streets”; “Listen.  It is night in the chill, squat chapel, hymning in bonnet and brooch and bombazine black…” just what “night moving in the streets” sounds like, if we stop to think about it, isn’t actually clear, but the image somehow comes with the power of the sound of silence.  Thomas commands us to listen to the image, and we do.

Hopkins’ instructional moment comes at the end, at where I feel is relatively the weakest part of the poem, with an exclamation about what the world would be like “once bereft/ Of wet and wildness?  Let them be left…”  Perhaps it’s the moralistic tone I’m not so keen on, though the break from the musical imagery of burn and horses does nonetheless achieve its goal.  We are sorry to leave the wet and wild world of Hopkins’ Inversnaid and the final stanza’s sudden jolt out of it reminds us that these parts of the world could be destroyed or lost to us if we forget to value them.

With Under Milk Wood and Inversnaid I have presented two poems that are very much in love with the sound of words, the way they are arranged and the power of rhythm in creating an evocative image.  It shows just how sensitive a poem can be to an added hyphen here or alliteration there – how the slightest alteration can change the whole tone or rhythm of a poem.  It is also knowledge of this sensitivity, I think, that has influenced me most in my own poetry, exploring the various ways of presenting a clear and powerful image though not just the words themselves, but how, exactly, they’re arranged.

Sonya Hallett

November 2007

Bibliography

Hopkins, Gerard M. ‘Inversnaid’. By Heart: 101 Poems to Remember. Ed. Ted Hughes. London: Faber & Faber, 1997: 11.

Thomas, Dylan.  Under Milk Wood. London: Penguin, 2000.

[‘The Canterbury Tales consistently present natural energies escaping socially-constructed order.’  Substantiate, modify or refute this view.]

The common themes of love, lust, sex and jealousy in The Canterbury Tales certainly suggest a trend towards natural anarchy over social order, yet the idea of there being any true consistency within the tales is a hard one to grasp due to Chaucer’s tendency to subvert or undercut our expectations.  Nothing runs its conventional course: characters are flawed or go against stereotype, seemingly-moralistic tales shrink from morality and accepted norms of social conduct are not just broken, but broken with such casual abandon as to suggest that they weren’t really all that important to begin with.  Exploring this sense of anarchy, one begins to question whether it is nature, or in fact Chaucer’s own contrivances at work behind the tales’ almost exuberant demolition of order.

That most of the tales have marriage as a central theme makes it an obvious representation of socially-constructed order battered by the natural forces of lust and jealousy.  The knee-jerk response to this is that marriage almost always loses out – after all, Nicholas gets Alisoun, John and Allan sleep with the Miller’s wife and daughter while May and Damian make a cuckold out of old January even as he sits waiting below…  Not only do these acts of adultery generally go unpunished, the cuckolded husband, and the idea of marriage itself, is exposed to ridicule, esentially treated as the butt of each tale’s joke.  Yet to judge Chaucer’s treatment of marriage by his fabliaux only would be unfair.  The Miller, Reeve, Shipman and Merchant’s tales represent but a small proportion of those tales that deal with marriage, though their bawdy nature tends to make them more memorable to the casual reader.  As Howard points out, “the spectrum of morality in the tales is broad,” (53) and there are plenty that still uphold the sanctity of marriage over adultery and generally unbridled passion.  The most interesting (and somewhat unexpected) of these is the Wife of Bath’s prologue and tale.  Calculating, cynical and highly sexualised she may be, freely admitting to both enjoying sex and accepting money for it, but the Wife of Bath does still restrain her passions within the bounds of wedlock.  Moreover though her admissions make the motive behind her five marriages seem purely materialistic, the idealism of her tale suggests otherwise, particularly with her summation that what all women really want is “to have sovereigntee/ As well over hir husband and hir love,/ And for to been in maistry him above.” (182-4).  It is potent that the Wife of Bath, arguably Chaucer’s most strong-willed and modern character, does not so much escape the social-construct of marriage as repeatedly breaks back into it.

Of course, taking any of Chaucer’s tales too literally would leave oneself open to accusations of not getting his irony.  The Wife of Bath’s serial monogamy can be seen just as much as a subversive indictment of the ‘sacred’ bond of marriage as it could be an endorsement, while even the most idealistic tales are undermined, often by the sincerity or naïveté  of the teller.  Take the Knight’s tale for instance: courtly love, classical setting, winning a fair maiden’s hand through honour… the ingredients for a classical romance are all there.  Unfortunately, the Knight that Chaucer chooses to depict is a pretentious preener, full of confused classical references and collapsed nobility.  The self-important tone and length of the tale, particularly followed by the Miller and Reeve’s bawdy efforts, turn the Knight’s tale into a petty quarrel between two unrealistic and rather pathetic rivals (I can’t help thinking that had any of the other pilgrims told the story, Palamon and/or Arcite would have jumped into bed with Emily long ago) while the Knight himself is reduced to a right royal laughing-stock.  Other more idealistic tales about marriage such as those by the Franklin and Clerk fall down due to their sense of misguided morality.  Poor Griselda’s marriage may be described as “of sovereyneteem noght of servyse” (114) but the brutish trials set on her by her husband makes that it a hard assertion to swallow.  Meanwhile, Griselda’s infuriatingly passive constancy leads even the Clerk himself to admit that, “This storie is seyd, nat for that wyves sholde/ Folwen grisilde as in humylitee,/ For it were onportable, though they wolde.” (1142-4).  The Franklin’s tale seems like the closest we get to an earnest endorsement of a faithful marriage, yet its anticlimactic ending (husband forgives wife, lover lets off wife, magician forgives lover…) as well as the oddly incidental-seeming magical narrative leave the tale feeling oddly limp and unconvincing.  There is no real conflict, even if “women of kind desiren libertee” (60), since Dorigen is not even tempted by Aurelius.  The shaky moral may be something like ‘true love conquers all’ but it doesn’t seem very important as not very much had to be conquered anyway and besides, the audience have probably fallen asleep.  So though Chaucer may subvert the convention of marriage and pit it against natural and carnal desires, the tales are inconsistent in their message and rarely break out of the mould completely and the overall sense is more cynicism towards marriage going well than outright rebellion against getting married at all.

After lust and jealousy, violence could perhaps be the most uncontrolled ‘natural’ force also dealt with by the tales, though again it is uncertain whether it so much as breaks out of the social order of things as subvert or run alongside it.  Indeed, the fight between Palamon and Arcite, rather than run its natural course, is halted and transformed into the honour of a formal duel (well, battle) by king Theseus, just as the fight seems to have been taken out of his ‘tame’ court of Amazon women.  Meanwhile, though passion and wounded pride drives Absalon to violence, the act seems inconsequential save for metering out “in passing” (Craik 6) some sort of dubious poetic justice against Nicholas.  Overall the act serves more as a lewd punch-line rather than any indication of moral judgement or escaped natural forces.  Chaucer seems, in fact, to shy away from any real violence in his tales beyond the slapstick to the extent that even the battle in the Knight’s tale is almost absurdly regulated by health and safety-style precautions.  Social convention doesn’t seem so much the issue here, as a vague ‘make love not war’ mentality, not so much reflecting the social constraints of honour and decorum (Medieval society was by no means a peaceful one, after all) as a general preference for comedy and wit over mindless violence, a stylistic preference that he shouldn’t be blamed for.

It is possible to make an argument for magic and the supernatural (as opposed to the unnatural) as a force that breaks out of and subverts the norms of convention though the examples are somewhat limited.  The Franklin’s tale presents magic as a possible source of chaos resolved only by the reasonable consciences of the characters.  This is similarly true of the squabbling gods in the Knight’s tale, though they don’t so much represent escape from social order as suggest there’s no such thing to begin with, since all fate and morality is arbitrary and human life is controlled by the whim of the deities’ wilful quarrels.  To add to the confusion, magic in the Wife of Bath’s tale is used to enforce the notions of marriage and social responsibility between husband and wife, while the Squire begins a tale of such fantastical magical whimsy that Chaucer has left it unfinished. What a mess… again, no real trend can be found between the tales, perhaps except for their inconsistency.

“Sownen into sin” is Chaucer’s own summation of The Canterbury Tales (Chaucer’s Retraction; Howard 55), suggestive of the heady sense of subversive rule-breaking that dominates the tales.  Yet what the investigations so far suggest is not so much an invocation of wild, natural forces escaping the confines of society as a far more calculating trend towards one-upmanship and the power of wit for personal gain.  Trickery runs amok throughout the tales from the scheming Nicholas to the various trials concocted by Griselda’s impossible husband; Palamon’s disguise to the cheating Miller and John and Allen’s revenge; the Wife of Bath’s caprices and May’s deception of January…  Chaucer doesn’t seem so much to be depicting a society going back to nature as a society where social order is eroded and almost entirely undermined by pride, greed and avarice.  Schemes win out over conventional morality while clever interpretations of the Bible such as by the Wife of Bath) justify blasphemy.  Indeed, Chaucer paints an image of “a world in decline” (Howard, 110) on several occasions both in the tales themselves, such as the Clerk’s, “This world is nat so strong it is no nay,/ As it hath been in olde times of yore…” (1139-1140) and also in a short poem he wrote around the same time as The Canterbury Tales that invokes the simple innocence of a Golden Age: “A blissful life, a paisible and sweete,/ Ledden the peoples in the former age.” (Howard, 126)  Though the bitterness of Chaucer’s satire feels somewhat diminished by the cheerful tone of his comedy, there is a definite sense of the power of human wit taking control in less-than-ideal times rather than any wayward caprices of wild nature.

Ultimately it would seem that the most anarchic and uncontrolled elements of The Canterbury Tales are in fact the pilgrims themselves.  Far from the pious contemplation expected of a holy pilgrimage, these travellers are loud and bawdy, turning the journey into a riotous storytelling contest.  The knight is exposed to ridicule by his pride, the miller gets drunk, the reeve vengeful, the wife of Bath unintentionally self-effacing in her justifications… In each case, Chaucer cleverly subverts the stereotypical expectations of his characters by showing up their inconsistencies and inadequacies so that each, in turn, gives in to their natural inclinations rather than the roles society expects and dictates of them.  Similarly, language in The Canterbury Tales breaks free of the social bounds that expect literature to be elevated and hold a superior moral viewpoint though the differing voices of the narrators.  What keeps cropping up is a re-assertion of the colloquial over the literary and contrived, as if everyday natural speech is bursting out of the confines of literary verse – the pilgrims digress, butt-in, forget or repeat themselves, make mistakes and asides…  It is realism through the convention of language that seems consistent in The Canterbury Tales beyond any sense of overarching morality or social judgement.  The pilgrims reflect real people of Chaucer’s time whose tales, in turn, make varying comments on his society.  This is perhaps a facet of The Canterbury Tales that offers the greatest sense of consistency and also goes some way to explaining the lack of regularity in the individual tales themselves:  that each tale represents a different viewpoint and personality therefore none of them can entirely agree.

So perhaps a better statement would not be that the tales present natural energies escaping socially-constructed order as the narrators themselves, and then only because of their realism and Chaucer’s reflection on the fragmentation of the order in his time.  Bearing this in mind, a search for consistency in the minutiae of The Canterbury Tales immediately becomes somewhat redundant as Chaucer’s point was to reflect a broad range of viewpoints and voices.  Realistically then, not everyone wants to break free of society, though everyone wants to live it in his or her own way, especially in times as uncertain as the Middle Ages, and this is ultimately what the tales bring across to its readers.

Sonya Hallett
November 2007

________________________________

Bibliography

Chaucer, Geoffrey. The Canterbury Tales. London: Penguin Popular Classics, 1996.

Chaucer, Geoffrey. The Canterbury Tales. Trans. Nevil Coghill. London: Penguin Classics, 1977.

Craik, T. W. The Comic Tales of Chaucer. Edinburgh: University Paperbacks, 1967.

Harrington, Norman T. ‘Chaucer’s Merchant’s Tale: Another Swing of the Pendulum’. PMLA 86.1 (Jan. 1971): 25-31.

Howard, Donald R. The Idea of the Canterbury Tales. Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1976.

Lawrence, William W. ‘The Marriage Group in the "Canterbury Tales"’.

Modern Philology 11.2 (Oct. 1913): 247-258.

Owen, Charles A. Jr. ‘Morality as a Comic Motif in the Canterbury Tales’. College English 16.4 (Jan. 1955): 226-232.

Cold-start morning in yellowleaf drowned
cycle through puddles crunched yellow and brown
ice-paled greengrass
sky breathing clouds
on hardblack road the wheels turn round

red-sprawled warning for ivyclimed walls
path-tree colonnades, waiting tall,
leaf broken sunlight
strikeout bark
stealaway sleeptight and dozebutton calls

handlebar fingers their feeling returned
steambreath windows, blackcoffee burns

waking through hallways

draftchilled, bright,

shatter through frostgrass now summer has turned.

Sonya Hallett

October 2007 

Now I watch your thoughts

flick light across the screen and

stretch my sleep

where once you lay beside me

for three hot nights.

Then summer and your flight

leaving; bareblank Departures

and I lost you in the crowd.

You were so Real

walking the Great Wall

all lean chest and private eyes.

Beihai Park and stone steps,

Stone Boat and alcohol –

Our most private moment

on the last warm night,

as you helped me repaint my city.

Now Home.

Continental Drift pulls us apart and

we fill an Autumn with falling type

to try to find the words

on endless sleepless nights,

make up time difference by pretending

we never need to sleep.

Words to wrap an arm around me

undress me

feel our presence in the Same Room

in open pretence.

I am net-lagged.

Leaned against the curve of a virtual globe

Googling the price of making you Real again

as the darklong nights fold over

my town and yours–

the ‘x’ in our diaries close enough

to speak of

when you’re here…

and
see you soon.

But

I have already reduced you to words

and I don’t know

if I can ever bring you back.

Sonya Hallett

heatdrunk cicadas and thunder

we left the damp window wide to

suck sleep and mosquitoes into the night

and blow in storm soaked air

You are barely awake

Warm breath through eyelashtips and morning bristle

Forgotten sheets at our feet

Sonya Hallett

September 2007

[Discuss the ways in which modernist writers developed new conceptions of subjectivity and language ]

Modernist writers were particularly preoccupied with conceptions of subjectivity; different ways of seeing the world and interpreting meaning.  Rhys and MacDiarmid may not strike a reader as similar enough for comparison, yet both play with language and ideas in a way that undermines the readers’ preconceptions of literature, language, modernity and belonging.  Both writers were very conscious of how their writing should come across – as was the case with many of their contemporaries.  To put it rather bluntly, their obscurity and inaccessibility was the point: we’re not supposed to understand, at least not immediately, and it is in the reader’s quest for understanding that the works’ comment on subjectivity is expressed.

What most immediately strikes the reader about many modernist works is the way in which language and style differs from the more traditionalist works that preceded it.  Rhys, for example, uses the technique of thought-streaming throughout Good Morning, Midnight, creating a melodic, poetic and at times non-linear form of prose.  Words are repeated for assonance and emphasis and descriptions made to seem almost filmic in their impersonal immediacy.  For example, “The Cinéma Danton. Watching a good young man trying to rescue his employer from a mercenary mistress” (p.89) is typical of Rhys’ descriptions in which a clear (first person) subject is absent.  The result is a sense of ideas and images flowing directly from the writer to the reader, adding a level of (indirect) emotional intimacy, while at the same time making it clear that the ideas are firmly subjective.  Gone is the omnipotent narrator who holds court over the novel’s ‘objective meaning’.  In modernist literature, meaning is fluid and open to interpretation – a neat comparison would be the contrast between Stanislavski’s ‘suspension of disbelief and Brecht’s demolition of the fourth wall, jolting the audience into awareness.  MacDiarmid similarly jolts his readers into awareness through his subversion of traditional rigid poetic forms and tradition’s love-affair with elevated (English) language. A Drunk Man Looks At The Thistle employs a style of verse with looser metrics and generous use of flow-promoting tools such as enjambment, standing as a direct reaction against more traditional metric forms.  The poem also makes use of the colloquial, albeit MacDiarmid’s own brand of ‘synthetic Scots’, all of which contributes to the strong reaction against conservatism that pervades the poem.

It is interesting that MacDiarmid should choose to go beyond the ‘common vernacular’ by using his own obscure mixture of various Scottish dialects in his writing, making his poems tricky to understand even to his fellow Scots.  I would suggest that this inaccessibility was very much part of MacDiarmid’s intention.  Not only does the fusion of West-coast/East-coast, Highland/Lowland showcase the vast richness of the sometimes maligned and ridiculed Scottish vernacular, the mixture plays subversively on the at-times pretentious inaccessibility of ‘elevated language’, as he suggests in the poem, “I dinna haud the warld’s end in my heid/ As maist folk think they dae” (lines 133-4, my italics).  Another aspect of this diversity, of course, is to show both the division and unity in the Scottish language and, by inference, society.  Readers of differing backgrounds will understand different proportions and parts of the poem, yet all are united in its common theme that calls for literature and language to return to the (ironically) comprehensible and unformulaic – particularly hinted at in, “I ha’e nae doot some foreign philosopher/ Has wrocht a system oot to justify/ A’ this: but I’m a Scot wha blin’ly follows/ Auld Scottish instincts, and I winna try.” (lines 149-52)  To complicate and emphasise this further, MacDiarmid includes translations of poetry and texts from other languages in his poem, such as the excerpt from Russian poet Alexander Blok (lines 169-172), translated, of course, into Scots.  This indicates that despite the undeniably Scottish focus of the Caledonian Antisyzygy that MacDiarmid promotes, it would be unfair to say that the division is purely between Scottish and English.  All language barriers are equally relevant – or perhaps irrelevant – they just present us more realities; more ways of viewing the world.

The inter-lingual inter-textuality is taken a step further by Rhys in Good Morning, Midnight through the strands of French and occasional German and Russian that is woven seamlessly into the narrative.  On the one hand, this can be seen as a form of extreme realism.  After all, the languages have not been translated and thus are not ‘second hand’ or dominated over by the linguistic nuances of another.  Yet the very dream-like quality of Rhys’ work subverts this realism, creating a multi-linguistic, multi-dimensional dreamscape in which we are assaulted with the many differing realities and contradictions that make up the real world – and her work does indeed seem directly contradictory at times, with its non-linear timeframe, occasional near-surrealism, “’Quite like old times,’ the room says.  ‘Yes?  No?’”(p.9) and apparent self-contradiction, “say something. …No, don’t say anything.”(p.24).  But reality isn’t ordered or consistent – organisation is the mind’s job and it is only in contrasting realism with surrealism, internal dialogue and external imagery, different subjective experiences that we can understand this and learn to use our own minds, rather than rely on the author, to understand the text.  To use a simpler analogy, modernist writers played with textual perspective the way Picasso did with visual perspective.  Like his iconic painting of the weeping woman, they employed paradox, contrast and contradiction to simultaneously depict reality from many different angles showing us both what we would have seen and what we would normally have missed.

Pulling momentarily out of the technicalities of language, the issue of subjectivity was also addressed assiduously as a main topic in many modernist works.  Good Morning, Midnight portrays a new perspective on the much-heralded image of the ‘modern city’ through its author’s descriptions of Paris as an at-times soulless machine.  The people wear masks and the preoccupation is more with one’s external image than one’s internal wellbeing or sanity.  “Tomorrow I shall dye my hair blonde”, says our heroine, as if this will solve all of tomorrow’s problems.  The preoccupation with image reaches absurdist heights as the protagonist wonders whether drowning herself in the Seine would be cliché and perhaps rather passé.  The relevance of subjectivity here is that the protagonist is viewing herself through those around her – the French ladies, the Russians, the artist… ‘How does Mrs so-and-so view me?  How do I come across to Mr such-and-such?’  As the exchange with the artist suggests (buying the painting), she is plagued by a fear that her personal reality is at odds with the reality of those around her, but can there really be a ‘right’ way of viewing the world?  Another interesting effect of the discussion into clichéd suicide methods is that the reader is again reminded of the presence of Rhys the Author – the dilemma could just as easily have come from a self-conscious author trying to decide the fate of her heroine as from the unfortunate heroine herself.

The subject matter of A Drunk Man is altogether more abstract, being a discussion on Scottishness, identity and more broadly metaphysical questions regarding truth, understanding and meaning.  In MacDiarmid’s work then, the notions of subjectivity is actively discussed rather than (as with Rhys) implied.  Much of the poem deals with the typically modernist doubt about man’s capacity to find objective truths about the world, describing the conscious mind (following Freud) as the tip of “a floatin’ iceberg/ That hides aneth the sea/ Its bulk,” (lines 1769-71) the depths of which are hard to fathom.  MacDiarmid also explores the incongruence between rationality and feeling with the dialogue between body and mind (lines 571-80), challenging received traditions into the bargain by linking religion with sex: “I’ve been startled whiles to find,/ When Jean has been in bed wi’ me,/ A kind o’ Christianity!”  This contrast is what essentially makes up MacDiarmid’s vision of humanity – a melding together of mind and body, in which the physical and mental, carnal and cerebral take on equal value.  He re-emphasises this idea throughout the poem with, “I wish I kent the physical basis/ O’ a’ life’s seemin’ airs and graces.” (lines 581-2) and “Man’s spreit is wi’ his ingangs twined/ In ways that he can ne’er unwind.’ (lines 585-6)  Echoes can easily be drawn between this and MacDiarmid’s probing into vernacular versus elevated – a person can only be taken as a complete individual when both his body and soul are taken into account, just as a language can only reach its full potential and be best understood through reuniting the perceived ‘elevated’ and ‘vernacular’ which the poet, neatly, demonstrates through the writing of his work.  Yet amongst all this obscurity and ideas and metaphysical debate, MacDiarmid gives the reader another point to consider: “I lauch to see my crazy little brain/ -and other folks’ – tak’n’itsel’ seriously.” (lines 137-9)  Echoing the father of Western philosophy, Aristotle, who said something like, ‘nothing amongst humans should be viewed with much importance’.  It is therefore rather ironic that both the poet and the philosopher’s works are held under such close academic scrutiny today.  I like to imagine that both would have been rather amused.

So subjectivity was brought to the fore by modernists through depicting at the world in each of its constituent parts and perspectives, with no part made to seem superior or ‘closer to the truth’ than any other.  Contradiction, oxymoron, the unconventional use of language aided in this deconstruction, building, or so the writers hoped, a more realistic depiction of truth – and more truthful depiction of reality.

Sonya Hallett
March 2007

_________________________

Bibliography

Colebrook, Claire: Jean Rhys online lecture notes, 2007.      <http://www.englit.ed.ac.uk/studying/undergrd/english_lit_2/Handouts>.

MacDiarmid, Hugh: A Drunk Man Looks At The Thistle, (tutorial handout, sources unknown), 2007.

Rhys, Jean: Good Morning, Midnight, Penguin Classics, London, 2000.

Thomson, Alex: A Drunk Man Looks At The Thistle lecture handout, February 14^th 2007.