"I see the girls walk by dressed in their summer clothes...
...I have to turn my head until my darkness goes..." (People could rock in the 60s.)
Yup, it's that time again. It is damn hot outside, and I hate it. Last night I was having a good time walking around campus with an open coat flowing behind me in the cool breeze to the beat of The Mighty Boosh's "Love Games", which makes it impossible to be unhappy. So when I knew I had to run an errand in town today, I started out my journey with this in mind. It was working until I reached the shop windows down the main drag. Everyone's having a sale with all of these bright summer dresses in different pastel hues...and indeed people are dressing that way now. Then all I could think of was the above Stones lyric, which, while the tempo is a good pace, makes me agitated and broody. In a good way, I suppose, since I very much like it when other people can express what I feel better than I, but-
You know that seasonal disorder where people get low during winter? I must be the only person who gets depressed by summer.
So, like one does when one is depressed, I went into the local bookstore.
I ended up browsing the poetry section, because the fiction was full of romance [not in the harlequin sense, but he general sweeping dramatic sense] and the Fantasy section is so small, that the shelves were full of books I've either already read, or for which I have the first installment and am not ready to buy the next. Stores never seem to have the poetry I'm looking for...but I did end up finding this little book - a "bonzai book," as dubbed by the publisher - that has a collection of poems by both Robert and Elizabeth Barrett Browning, and on the front and back cover is a gorgeous painting of Florence. How could I say no to that? I've been meaning to read Mr. Browning for a long time, and of Mrs. Browning I've only Sonnets from the Portuguese in my collection. [I also ended up buying a bilingual edition of Beowulf. Because I have so much money.]
When I got back to campus I was still too off to get much homework done, so I cracked open the poetry. I read a few of the shorter poems, since I didn't have much time to hunker down and read the longer ones...then I skipped to the section in the back, where there's a selection of their very long and famous correspondence. Do these people have a way with words?! It's fascinating, really. Can't say I don't love the fact that they randomly add phrases in Latin and Italian, and quotes from Shakespeare and western myth (though the Greek I can neither read nor translate). They certainly were a part of the educated few. And all of this whilst dancing around other subjects...On the one hand I feel bad, because it is personal...on the other hand, well, I'm very pleased to read what they have to say. It makes them more real, somehow. It's important to know that those whom you admire were real, in the very earthly sense.
A excerpt from each poet, then:
Elizabeth:
"And what you say of society draws me on to many comparative thoughts of your life and mine. You seem to have drunken of the cup of life full, with the sun shining on it. I have lived only inwardly; or with sorrow, for a strong emotion. Before the seculsion of my illness, I was secluded still, and there are few of the youngest women in the world who have not seen more, heard more, known more, of society, than I, who am scarcely to be called young now. I grew up in the country - had no social opportunities, had my heart in books and poetry, and my experience in reveries. My sympathies drooped towards the ground like an untrained honeysuckle - and but for one, in my own house - but of this I cannot speak. It was a lonely life, growing green like the grass around it. Books and dreams were what I lived in - and domestic life only seemed to buzz gently around, like the bees about the grass. And so time passed, and passed - and afterwards, when my illness came and I seemed to stand at teh eddge of the world with all done, and no prospect (as appeared at one time) of ever passing the threshold of one room again; why then, I turned to thinking with some bitterness (after the greatest sorrow of my life had given me room and time to breathe) that I had stood blind in this temple I was about to leave - that I had seen no Human nature, that my brothers and sisters of the earth were names to me, that I had beheld no great mountain or river, nothing in fact. I was a man dying who had not read Shakespeare, and it was too late! do you understand? And do you also know what a disadvantage this ignorance is to my art? Why if I live on and yet do not escape from this seclusion, do you not perceive that I labour under signal disadvantages - that I am, in a manner, a blind poet? Certainly, there is a compensation to a degree. I have had much of the inner life, and from the habit of self-consciousness and self-analysis, I make great guess at Human nature in the main. But how willingly I would as a poet exchange some of this lumbering, ponderous, helpless knowledge of books, for some experience of life and man, for some...
"But all grumbling is a vile thing. We should all thank God for our measures of life, and think them enough for each of us. I write so, that you may not mistake what I wrote before in relation to society, although you do not see from my point of view; and that you may understand what I mean fully when I say, that I have lived all my chief joys, and indeed nearly all emotions that go warmly by that name and relate to myself personally, in poetry and in poetry alone. Like to write? Of course, of course I do. I seem to live while I write - it is life, for me. Why, what is to live? Not to eat and drink and breathe, - but to feel the life in you down all the fibres of being, passionately and joyfully. And thus, one lives in composition surely - not always - but when the wheel goes round and the procession is uninterrupted. Is it not so with you? oh - it must be so. For the rest, there will be necessarily a reaction; and, in my own particular case, whenever I see a poem of mine in print, or even smoothly transcribed, the reaction is most painful. The pleasure, the sense of power, without which I could not write a line, is gone in a moment; and nothing remains but disappointment and humiliation. I never wrote a poem which you could not persuade me to tear to pieces if you took me at the right moment! I have a seasonable humility, I do assure you."
Two quotes from Robert (as I chose such a long one for Elizabeth):
"...but in this addressing myself to you - your own self, and for the first time, my feeling rises altogether. I do, as I say, love these books with all my heart - and I love you too. Do you know I was once not very far from seeing - really seeing you? Mr. Kenyon said to me one morning 'Would you like to see Miss Barrett?' then he went to announce me, - then he returned...you were too unwell, and now it is years ago, and I feel as at some untoward passage in my travels, as if I had been close, so close, to some world's-wonder in chapel or crypt, only a screen to push and I might have entered but there was some slight, so it now seems, slight and just sufficient bar to admission, and the half-opened door shut, and I went home my thousands of miles, and the sight was never to be?" (from his very first letter to her)
"Don't you remember I told you, once on a time, that you 'knew nothing of me'? whereat you demurred - but I meant what I said, and knew it was so. To be grand in a simile, for every poor speck of a Vesuvius or a Stromboli in my microcosm there are huge layers of ice and pits of black cold water - and I make the most of my two of three fire-eyes, because I know by experience, alas, how these tend to extinction - and the ice grows and grows - still this last is true part of me, most characteristic part, best part perhaps, and I disown nothing..."
So, moral of the story? Hot weather sucks, I have a lot of work to do, but everything seems a little bit better when there's something good to be read. I need to find the Barretts on Wimpole Street somewhere, though apparently, only one movie version is available, and only on VHS at that. I could probably find the play fairly easily, though.
Now to go from lovely 1800s English to disgusting postmodern German lit, yech. When oh when will the stupid book end? There can be pretty modern German. I loved Der Vulkan. Pop lit, though? No. No no no no no.
Also, the wheels and cogs are beginning to turn for a film of the Odyssey. People are hoping that Sean Bean will reprise his role from Troy, though if that's so, there had better be a more well-written script.