Favourite Poems: "Ode to Melancholy" by John Keats

"On First Looking Into Chapman's Homer" has been a candidate for my favourite poem of all time since I first encountered it in my teens, and "Ode to a Grecian Urn" and "Ode to a Nightingale" fully deserve all their plaudits.

This poem isn't quite as sublime as those, but it's still magnificent and rather overlooked. My favourite lines are "feed deep, deep upon her peerless eyes" and "in the very temple of delight veiled melancholy has her sovereign shrine"-- not only beautiful poetry, but a profound observation.

(I also like the assumption that every reader has a beautiful mistress with peerless eyes and soft hands, who is routinely angry.)

I've always thought the poem's last lines aren't quite worthy of it, and rather anticlimactic-- certainly compared to the closing lines of the three masterpieces named above. But who's to say I'm right? I might be talking out of my hat!

Ode to Melancholy by John Keats

No, no, go not to Lethe, neither twist
Wolf's-bane, tight-rooted, for its poisonous wine;
Nor suffer thy pale forehead to be kiss'd
By nightshade, ruby grape of Proserpine;
Make not your rosary of yew-berries,
Nor let the beetle, nor the death-moth be
Your mournful Psyche, nor the downy owl
A partner in your sorrow's mysteries;
For shade to shade will come too drowsily,
And drown the wakeful anguish of the soul.

But when the melancholy fit shall fall
Sudden from heaven like a weeping cloud,
That fosters the droop-headed flowers all,
And hides the green hill in an April shroud;

Then glut thy sorrow on a morning rose,
Or on the rainbow of the salt sand-wave,
Or on the wealth of globed peonies;
Or if thy mistress some rich anger shows,
Emprison her soft hand, and let her rave,
And feed deep, deep upon her peerless eyes.

She dwells with Beauty—Beauty that must die;
And Joy, whose hand is ever at his lips
Bidding adieu; and aching Pleasure nigh,
Turning to poison while the bee-mouth sips:
Ay, in the very temple of Delight
Veil'd Melancholy has her sovran shrine,
Though seen of none save him whose strenuous tongue
Can burst Joy's grape against his palate fine;
His soul shalt taste the sadness of her might,
And be among her cloudy trophies hung.

Blue Jeans and Western Decadence

 

Beyond the Wall by Katja Hoyer is one of the best books I've read in recent years. I read it last September, but I found myself thinking of it just now for a particular reason. It's a history of communist East Germany, with an emphasis on culture and social history.

One section of the book describes the mania for blue jeans that swept over East Germany in the 1960s. Blue jeans were a symbol of youth, freedom, pop culture, etc. etc.

The communist authorities frowned on blue jeans and rock music, and condemned them as decadent.

Here's the thing...although communism was (and is) evil all the way through, and the fall of the Soviet Union was a great victory for humanity, I can't help thinking the communist authorities were right in this instance.

Blue jeans did indeed symbolize everything rubbishy and decadent about the West, and still do. (I can never join in the celebration of "Western values"-- they're a very mixed bag, if you ask me. It was the West that spawned political correctness.)

It's a wonderful thing that the Soviet Union fall, but rather embarrassing that blue jeans, rock and roll, and Dallas had quite a lot to do with its fall.

But then again, Western governments also tried to severely restrict the radio airtime given to pop and rock music. In retrospect, this seems an entirely reasonable sort of paternalism. Pirate radio stations weren't doing anything noble.

It's notable that Alexander Solzhenitsyn, surely one of Soviet communism's most determined enemies, also lambasted the West for its "intolerable music" (among other things).

To my boundless shame, I have had a lifelong addiction to this intolerable music-- pop, rock, and all the rest. I've spent endless hours listening to it. Now and again, I've been overcome with remorse for this, and I can even remember throwing out all my rock music CDs on more than one occasion. However, I always drifted back to listening to it.

I read The Closing of the American MInd by Allan Bloom in my twenties, and was greatly affected (and brought to shame) by its chapter on music, especially this much-quoted passage: "Picture a thirteen-year-old boy sitting in the living room of his family home doing his math assignment while wearing his Walkman headphones or watching MTV. He enjoys the liberties hard won over centuries by the alliance of philosophic genius and political heroism, consecrated by the blood of martyrs; he is provided with comfort and leisure by the most productive economy ever known to mankind; science has penetrated the secrets of nature in order to provide him with the marvelous, lifelike electronic sound and image reproduction he is enjoying. And in what does progress culminate? A pubescent child whose body throbs with orgasmic rhythms; whose feelings are made articulate in hymns to the joys of onanism or the killing of parents; whose ambition is to win fame and wealth in imitating the drag-queen who makes the music. In short, life is made into nonstop, commercially prepackaged masturbational fantasy." (The book was published in 1987.)

I felt shame, and yet...I came back to listening to rock and pop music, again and again and again. Mea maxima culpa, indeed!

Tolerance and Indifference

I've long harboured a rather contradictory attitude towards prejudice. Sometimes I find prejudice maddening, other times I find myself defending it-- indeed, sometimes I find myself thinking of it as a sign of health.

I think it comes down to this formula: it's good to avoid prejudice through tolerance (or broadmindedness), but it's bad to avoid it through indifferentism. It's especially bad to congratulate yourself on tolerance when you're simply indifferent.

And I'll go so far as to say that, sometimes, prejudice-- or even bigotry-- seems preferable to indifference. To me, anyway.

There was an epidemic of ersatz tolerance in the Ireland of my youth. Citizens of the Republic looked down on their Northern counterparts and wondered why they couldn't just "get over" or "get past" the Protestant-Catholic enmity.

Don't get me wrong. I absolutely believe that it's highly desirable for Christians to "get over" the Protestant-Catholic enmity. In fact, I've complained about Catholic triumphalism regularly on this blog. (I've never really encountered Protestant triumphalism.)

But secularists have absolutely no right to congratulate themselves on overcoming the Protestant-Catholic division. Why should they congratulate themselves on this? They think it's irrelevant anyway. The same applies to wishy-washy Christians.

Personally, I am all for ecumenism-- but all against an ecumenism of indifference. If you don't think doctrinal differences matter, you're not really ecumenical anyway. You're a non-denominational Christian, or a mere theist, or something of that sort.

Even by the time I was growing up, most people in the Republic had effectively become secularists, even if they retained a cultural or sentimental tinge of Christianity. So they really had no right to lecture (or even congratulate) their Northern cousins on tolerance. It was a non-issue for them.

For the most part, of course, the Northern Irish conflict wasn't really about religion. But there were people for whom it was fundamentally about religion, such as Dr. Ian Paisley. And for many others, religion entered into it to some real degree.

It was the declared policy of the United Irishmen, founded in 1791, to unite "Catholic, Protestant, and Dissenter", and this became a watchword of Irish republicanism ever since. Personally, I've always felt ambivalent about this motto, and about the "non-sectarian" nature of Irish republicanism. Insofar as it was inspired by the Voltairean ideas of the French Revolution, I consider it a bad thing. (I get the impression that most United Irishmen were not Voltairean, though.)

I apply the same principle to nationality. There's no virtue in rising "above" nationality if you don't care about nationality. Honestly, I would feel more affinity with any national chauvinist than I would with a cosmopolitan or internationalist.

The truth is that I've come to feel more affinity with the Northern Irish Orangemen than I do with almost all of their critics-- precisely because they do care about national loyalties, religious belief, and cultural traditions.

Similarly, I'm very dubious about most advocates for a united Ireland today. I suspect they want to get rid of the border because they want to get rid of all national borders. And personally I would rather have ten more borders on the island of Ireland than get rid of the current border in that spirit, or with such allies.

I've mentioned my lifelong anglophilia in many previous posts. Honestly, I probably love English culture more than I love Irish culture. Naturally enough, I have a bit of an allergy to anti-Englishness.

And yet I can't disagree with this point made by D.P. Moran in his book The Philosophy of Irish Ireland (1905): "The cry of the friendly Englishman fully responded to by the “reasonable” Irishman is, “Let us know more about Irishmen and let Irishmen know more about us; we will learn to like and understand one another.” As against this view it is absolutely clear to me, though the expression may appear to have some of the form of a “bull,” that when two nations understand one another there is from that moment only one nation in it. International misunderstanding is one of the marks of nationhood."

Well, I think I have made my point.

Priggishness Revisited

I know I've been reposting a lot of old stuff on my blog recently. I guess I'm feeling retrospective. Perhaps the fact that I'm coming up to my twenty-fifth year working in UCD Library (on the fifteenth of October) has something to do with that. Coincidentally, that exact same date will be the fifteenth anniversary of this blog. 

Today I'm going to revisit the blog post that (most probably) means the most to me of everything I've posted. I posted it in June of 2016, so almost a decade ago. It describes my concept of "priggishness" which has great personal importance for me, and towards which I've had a lifelong yearning, but which I find it hard to put into words.

What other word or phrase could I use? It might be called aestheticism, but it's not quite that. It might be called the art of living, but it's not quite that. It might be called intentionality, but it's not quite that. It might be called romanticism, but it's not quite that. It's not quite any of those things, and yet it overlaps with all of them. It has much do with the concept of "enchantment". 

Even trying to define "priggishness" by its opposite is difficult. What is its opposite? Banality? But I love a lot of banality and it doesn't feel like the opposite of priggishness. Consumerism? I think a Halloween-themed window display in a shop is extremely "priggish". Mundanity? The little rituals of everyday life are the very things that cry out for "priggishness" the most.

Whatever it is, I think two influences were important in instilling it in me: first of all, Tolkien and the Lord of the Rings; secondly, having all my schooling through the Irish language, and more important under the auspices of the Irish language movement. The fundamental assumption of the Irish language movement was that everyday life in Ireland was to be transformed; primarily by becoming Gaelic-speaking but also through the propagation of Irish culture: dance, sport, mythology, etc. Although I reacted against the Irish language itself (at the time), I deeply absorbed the subliminal idea that ordinary, contemporary life was something to be utterly transfigured-- and more in a "backward-looking" way than the opposite. And this idea has never gone away.

If that hasn't scared you away already, here goes: 

A Short History of my Priggishness

Readers are warned that this post is going to be even more introspective and idiosyncratic than usual. Perhaps 'navel-gazing' is a better term. Nevertheless I feel the urge to write it. Nobody has to read it-- that is the great thing about blogging.

I wanted to write a few thoughts on my history as a prig.

I have always been a prig. I think I will always be a prig. I am trying to learn where priggishness is good and where it is bad.

Chambers English Dictionary, eleventh edition, describes a prig thus (and the definition is rather poetic): "A precisian, a puritan; a person of precise morals without a sense of proportion; a sanctimonious person, certain of his or her blamelessness and critical of others' failings; a coxcomb".

I think the only part of that definition that applies to me (in the sense I mean here) is 'a puritan'. I have always been a puritan, though my puritanism has been more aesthetic or cultural (or maybe behavioural) than moral. 

I have always had a craving for the purified, the consecrated and the intentional, over the mixed, the ambiguous and the matter-of-fact.

I have often written (to the point of tedium, I hear my reader think) about the Halloween party that fired my childish imagination. The thing that excited me was the sense of consecration-- this night was consecrated to all things spooky. It had a flavour and an atmosphere and a character all of its own.

A time to be spooky

I wanted, and have always wanted, everything to have a flavour and an atmosphere and a character all of its own. I wanted, from my earliest age, human beings to be avatars. I wanted each one to be a vessel of a particular ideal and way of looking at the world. I didn't really care what that way of looking at the world was, as long as it was there. Teenagers who were heavy metal fans I could understand. Adults who were proponents of some political viewpoint, I could also understand. But people who weren't really anything...who expressed no obvious view of the world, whether idealistic or hedonistic or otherwise....I couldn't 'deal' with them. They disgusted me, in the literal sense of that word.

Of course, I could never have expressed all this in words, as a child. But it was there.

I loathed what Yeats called 'the casual comedy' in his famous poem Easter 1916; the banal, business-like, humdrum attitude towards life that, the poem tells us, had been superseded in the Ireland of that time by the high tragedy of the Rising.

W.B. Yeats

The philosphical depth of that poem amazes me more and more, as I grow older. Yeats managed to encapsulate (and anticipate) all the debates about the 1916 Rising in one poem, indeed, in one phrase-- "a terrible beauty". But it has a philosophical depth beyond its historical subject, too. In one passage from the poem, one which I did not even understand when I read it as a teen, Yeats expressed both the seduction and the peril of this urge towards purity, towards single-mindedness:
 

Hearts with one purpose alone   

Through summer and winter seem   

Enchanted to a stone

To trouble the living stream.

The horse that comes from the road,   

The rider, the birds that range   

From cloud to tumbling cloud,   

Minute by minute they change;   

A shadow of cloud on the stream   

Changes minute by minute;   

A horse-hoof slides on the brim,   

And a horse plashes within it;   

The long-legged moor-hens dive,   

And hens to moor-cocks call;   

Minute by minute they live:   

The stone's in the midst of all.

Too long a sacrifice

Can make a stone of the heart...

Jean-Paul Sartre believed that human beings, out of a desire to escape from the existential freedom which we find so unbearable, aspire to become a thing rather than a person.  I don't believe this exactly, but I think it shows considerable insight.

Yeats himself, who said that poetry is created out of the argument with ourselves, was also drawn to the idea of purity in his own way. "One day when I was twenty-three or twenty-four this sentence seemed to form in my head, without my willing it, much as sentences form when we are half-asleep: "Hammer your thoughts into unity." For days I could think of nothing else, and for years I tested all I did by that sentence." 

When I was a boy, I knew a couple called Holly and Harry. (I am changing the name and the details to protect the innocent.) When I visited their flat, i was delighted with their way of life. They had a piece of sculpture on their bookshelf, and a large and rather artistic painting on their wall. They gave me curry, which was unimaginably exotic, with chopsticks! They had poufs to sit on. I think there was incense involved, as well. It seemed to me they were living the refined way of life that I craved. 

Later on, I realized that they watched game shows and listened to rap music and followed sport like everybody else. And, to make matters worse, they quickly moved away from the aspirations of their early years. I felt unutterably betrayed and disillusioned.

In school, when I was about ten or eleven, we read a story taken from Little House in the Big Woods by Laura Ingalls Wilder. It was a tale-within-a-tale in which children are told how strict Sabbath observance was in their grandfather's day. Their grandfather (as a boy) goes out to play with a sled on a Sunday, when his own father is asleep, despite Sunday being utterly devoted to Bible reading and solemnity. My sympathies were not with the boys, but with the solemnity of the Sunday. I had never heard of such solemnity and consecration before and I craved it. 

Another time, I fell in calf-love with a girl who was several years older than me in school. I didn't know her name but she seemed to me like a vision of rather vampiric beauty. She had raven-black hair, slanted eyes and an alabaster complexion, and she moved and smiled with a demure grace. She looked very intellectual and as though she came from an upper-middle class family. I imagined her life as being one of art exhibitions, concerts, bike rides, intellectual debates around the dinner table, reading poetry in a meadow, etc. etc.

She should be reading poetry.

I remember how crushed I felt one day when the thought occurred to me: "She watches television. Of course she does. Like everybody else." I was about fifteen. I watched lots of television.

Lord of the Rings was a source of fascination for me; particularly Rivendell. I wanted everything in life, and everything in society, to be graceful and ceremonious and meaningful and stately like it was in Rivendell. Indeed, even the Shire seemed to me more gracious and ceremonial than the 'casual comedy' I saw around me.

I wanted this...

 

Not this...

...or this.

It is understandable that such a boy should be drawn towards cultural nationalism, as I was. When I learned about the Irish Revival, or the Gaelic Revival, of the late nineetenth to early twentieth century, it completely enchanted me. Indeed, that enchantment has never gone away, though I reacted against it for some years.

The Gaelic Revival was part of a wave of cultural and (important adjective) romantic nationalism that swept Europe in the nineteenth century and onwards. Romantic nationalism saw the art, folklore, dress, cuisine, literature etc. of a particular nation as being an expression of its national soul. Where those things had decayed, it sought to revive them.

(All my life, while despising revolutions of the destructive kind which seek to wipe the slate clean and start again, I have been fascinated by the idea of a revolution which transforms everything but which destroys nothing. The title of the much-mocked spoken word album by William Shatner, The Transformed Man, has always beguiled me.)

Thefore, in an Ireland that had been losing its national culture and ways of life for generations, a massive campaign was launched, amongst cultural nationalists, to revive our national language, our national folklore, our national games, our national music, our national architecture etc. in a particularly Gaelic idiom. Traditions would be revived-- and where there were no traditions, new ones would be invented.

This was manna to me. The essence of the thing was that which was unthinking and incidental would become deliberate and intentional-- that which was almost arbitrary would become meaningful. Dressing and storytelling and painting and eating and making speeches and sending Christmas cards would become an expression of the Folk Spirit, as well as everything that they were already.

I have never aspired towards the kind of 'spontaneous' national identity that some cultural nationalists aspire towards. I remember, in one Irish language class, the teacher taking one of my class-mates to task for writing, in an essay, that a particular Irish language writer had "a great love for the Irish language". "Nobody ever says that English writers have a great love for the English language", she moaned. "It's just the language they naturally write in."

But that was exactly what I did not want-- for Ireland to regain her national traditions and way of life just to become blasé about them. This was long before I came across a quotation of Chesterton's which exactly expresses my dislike of this attitude: "This is the great fall, the fall by which the fish forgets the sea, the ox forgets the meadow, the clerk forgets the city, every man forgets his environment and, in the fullest and most literal sense, forgets himself". Chesterton somewhere else describes this as: "Losing a thing as soon as you find it."

Obligatory G.K. Chesterton picture

I will go further. I have never been able to really regret that Ireland lost her language and traditions and has had to regain them. I don't wish we spoke Irish today as the French speak French or the Spanish speak Spanish-- matter-of-factly. I think there is something heroic and life-giving in the project of revival. Chesterton said that the way to love something is to think that it might be lost. Ireland had lost so much, and yet-- would we have loved it so much if it had not been lost? Wasn't the 'turn' towards tradition in itself a noble thing, especially when it was an all-but-disappeared tradition?

Kathleen Ni Houlihan; Ireland's Uncle Sam

My cultural nationalism was a romantic, backward-looking, traditionalist, poetic form of nationalism, one that idealized the Irish countryside and traditional ways of life and that personified Ireland herself as Kathleen Ni Houlihan. I simply did not see the point of any nationalism that was not a 'thick' nationalism in this sense-- that did not want to "Irishify" everything in the national life.

When I realised that there were indeed nationalists who had contempt for this attitude, I was shocked to my core. Kathleen Ni Houlihan they considered sexist and outmoded and naive-- they wanted a bullish, anti-sentimental nationalism that wanted to make Ireland a progressive, modern, secular, multicultural nation. Aside from removing the British presence from Northern Ireland, and providing 'language equality' for Irish speakers-- because even seeking to revive the language was a bit too conservative for their liking-- they seemed willing to ditch the entire project of cultural revival. Wearing Aran sweaters and putting up paintings of Blasket Islanders in your living room were out. Bob Dylan songs and blue jeans and plays about tortured sexuality were in. This, in part, caused my strong reaction against nationalism for many years.

I could go on to describe the influence of my priggishness upon my religious faith, but this essay is already longer than I intended it to be.

I'll mention two things in conclusion.

The first is-- ladies and gentlemen, please do not consider me an out-and-out prig. Indeed, I harbour in my soul quite the opposite hankering, too, though it is not nearly as strong. There is a part of me that revels in 'the casual comedy', the infinite openness and indeterminacy of life, and of society. I do want to get outside, or at least to know there is an outside-- I do want fresh air. I have known the rather bracing sense of dizziness when it is borne upon one, through a snatch of overheard conversation perhaps, that other people have preoccupations and ways of looking at the world that are utterly different from one's own. I sometimes revel in the 'messiness' of modern liberal democracy. Louis Macneice's 'Snow' is one of my favourite poems. I even had these lines printed onto a t-shirt once:

World is crazier and more of it than we think,
Incorrigibly plural. I peel and portion
A tangerine and spit the pips and feel
The drunkenness of things being various.

Louise Macneice, renowned tangerine eater

And yet I think the cleavage is not as simple as that, either. Just as Chesterton said that, if you leave a white fence to itself, it will not remain a white fence but become a muddy grey, so I think that the diversity of the world actually requires a solicitude for singleness and purification. Perhaps tangerines only exist through the unnatural selection of fruit-eating human beings over the generations, as certain dogs have been bred for their distinctiveness. Even if this is not the case with tangerines, you know what I mean. Volumes could be written on this tension, this paradox, this dialectic, or whatever you may call it, between essentialism and pluralism.

Finally, I want to leave you with an image. I have been practicing mindfulness for several months now-- something I dismissed as a fad, but I have been compelled to accept as having genuine scientifically-established merit, and something that is of particular usefulness to me. There are many forms of mindfulness, but I have hit upon my own favourite-- staring into the flame of a candle for twenty minutes, focusing entirely upon that flame.

Staring into the flame makes me realise how important fire imagery has been to me all my life. In the Bible, some of my favourite stories involve fire-- the Burning Bush and Pentecost in particular. And one of my epigraphs you will find at the bottom of this blog is from our Blessed Lord: "I have come to bring fire to the Earth."

And then there is one of my favourite lines in all English poetry, the last line of this verse from the poem The Burning of the Leaves by Laurence Binyon:
 
The last hollyhock's fallen tower is dust;
All the spices of June are a bitter reek,
All the extravagant riches spent and mean.
All burns! The reddest rose is a ghost;
Sparks whirl up, to expire in the mist: the wild
Fingers of fire are making corruption clean.

The wild fingers of fire are making corruption clean. That is what I have craved, intermittently, all my life. That is what makes me a hopeless prig. And, although there is much to be said against priggishness, I think there is something to be said for it, as well.

The Introduction to the Gideon Bible

I'm trying to make Scripture more a part of my everyday life. I decided recently I should acquire a little pocket Gideon New Testament, so I could browse it at odd moments. I've had several of these down the years but couldn't find any. Thankfully, the Christian Union in UCD gave me one.

I find the introduction to the book extremely moving and poetic, whether or not the theology is entirely correct (and I personally don't see anything amiss with it). I can never get on the Protestant-bashing train that is sadly so popular among many conservative Catholics, liberal Catholics, and snooty secularists. If you don't find the following passages beautiful, there's something wrong:

"The Bible contains the mind of God, the state of man, the way of salvation, the doom of sinners, and the happiness of believers. Its doctrines are holy, its precepts are binding, its histories are true, and its decisions immutable. Read it to be wise, believe it to be safe, and practice it to be holy. It contains light to direct you, food to support you, and comfort to cheer you. It is the traveler's map, the pilgrim's staff, the pilot's compass, the soldier's sword, and the Christian's charter. Here paradise is restored, Heaven opened, and the gates of hell disclosed.

"Christ is its grand subject, our good the design, and the glory of God its end. It should fill the memory, rule the heart, and guide the feet. Read it slowly, frequently, and prayerfully. It is a mine of wealth, a paradise of glory, and a river of pleasure. It is given you in life, will be opened at the judgment, and be remembered forever. It involves the highest responsibility, will reward the greatest labor, and will condemn all who trifle with its sacred contents."

Favourite Poems: Golden Stockings by Oliver St. John Gogarty

This poem is fairly well-known in Ireland but, I'm guessing, almost completely unknown outside it. I have mixed feelings about introducing such poems to an international readership: I like the idea of a "national literature" and literary provincialism. But my little corner of the internet is hardly going to make much of a difference.

Do I have to say anything about this poem? Words like "dainty", "delicate", and "delightful" suggest themselves. It has enough pathos to avoid being twee. The last line is perfect.

Golden Stocking by Oliver St. John Gogarty

Golden stockings you had on
In the meadow where you ran;
And your little knees together
Bobbed like pippins in the weather,
When the breezes rush and fight
For those dimples of delight,
And they dance from the pursuit,
And the leaf looks like the fruit.

I have many a sight in mind
That would last if I were blind;
Many verses I could write
That would bring me many a sight.
Now I only see but one,
See you running in the sun,
And the gold-dust coming up
From the trampled buttercup.

And While I'm Posting Videos...

...here's a video of my talk in Belfast in 2019. The only time I've been in that city, and almost the only time. I've made one day-trip to Newry since then.

It's managed to chalk up a colossal 329 views! And one comment!!