‘Could a rule be given from without, poetry would cease to be poetry, and sink into a mechanical art. It would be μóρφωσις, not ποίησις. The rules of the IMAGINATION are themselves the very powers of growth and production. The words to which they are reducible, present only the outlines and external appearance of the fruit. A deceptive counterfeit of the superficial form and colours may be elaborated; but the marble peach feels cold and heavy, and children only put it to their mouths.’ [Coleridge, Biographia ch. 18]

‘ποίησις’ (poiēsis) means ‘a making, a creation, a production’ and is used of poetry in Aristotle and Plato. ‘μóρφωσις’ (morphōsis) in essence means the same thing: ‘a shaping, a bringing into shape.’ But Coleridge has in mind the New Testament use of the word as ‘semblance’ or ‘outward appearance’, which the KJV translates as ‘form’: ‘An instructor of the foolish, a teacher of babes, which hast the form [μóρφωσις] of knowledge and of the truth in the law’ [Romans 2:20]; ‘Having a form [μóρφωσις] of godliness, but denying the power thereof: from such turn away’ [2 Timothy 3:5]. I trust that's clear.

There is much more on Coleridge at my other, Coleridgean blog.

Tuesday 11 June 2013

Bowles 4. 'Written at Bamborough Castle'




Ye holy tow'rs that shade the wave-worn steep,
Long may ye rear your aged brows sublime,
Though, hurrying silent by, relentless Time
Assail you, and the winter Whirlwind's sweep!
For far from blazing Grandeur's crouded halls,
Here Charity hath fix'd her chosen seat,
Oft listening tearful when the wild winds beat,
With hollow bodings round your ancient walls;
And Pity, at the dark and stormy hour
Of Midnight, when the Moon is hid on high,
Keeps her lone watch upon the topmost tow'r,
And turns her ear to each expiring cry;
Blest if her aid some fainting wretch might save,
And snatch, him cold and speechless from the wave

* Many readers may be ignorant that this very ancient castle, with its extensive domains, heretofore the property of the family of Forsters, whose heiress married Lord Crewe, Bishop of Durham, is appropriated by the will of that pious Prelate to many benevolent purposes; particularly that of ministring instant relief to such shipwrecked mariners as may happen to be cast on this dangerous coast, for whose preservation, and that of their vessels, every possible assistance is contrived, and is at all times ready. The whole estate is vested in the hands of Trustees, one of whom, Dr. Sharp, Archdeacon of Northumberland, with an active zeal, well suited to the nature of the humane institution, makes this castle his chief residence, attending with unwearied diligence to the proper application of the charity.
Here's what Bamborough Castle looks like, in case you're not sure.



---

 This may look like a rather more conventional sonnet than some of the others in the Picturesque Spots volume: for the first time it presents us, or appears to present us, with a standard octave-sestet formal division; it appears to praise a stately home precisely as emblematic of the landed gentry, the established social and political order Except that the ‘turn’ after the octave isn’t much of a turn (the tone and argument of the poem continues smoothly across it); and ‘this very ancient castle, with its extensive domains’ is positioned as far removed from the grandeur of actual power, dedicated to charitable endeavours inoculates the poem not at all against the sorts of charges. ‘Charity’ might strike us as merely a fig-leaf for the continuing operations of Power (it is often critiqued on precisely those terms), and a poem that in effect sucks-up to the local grandees on the grounds that ‘they do a lorra work for charidee’ would surely stick in our craw. This poem, though, doesn’t, I think. It’s partly because the actual people associated with the property are mentioned only in the footnote; shifted, textually speaking, literally, to the margins. The castle itself is occupied only by the two allegorical figures of Charity and Pity. The conceit of the poem, if we follow tyhis Bunyanesque Holy War configuration through, is that these two crucial humane qualities need fortifcations behind which to hide, if they are to survive in a world fundamentally hostile: Time and Whirlwind invest the castle. Fair enough. And, actually, Bunyan is the wrong name to bring-in here. More apropos (of course) is Shakespeare. Bowles’s
And Pity, at the dark and stormy hour
Of Midnight, when the Moon is hid on high,
Keeps her lone watch upon the topmost tow'r,
And turns her ear to each expiring cry;
Blest if her aid some fainting wretch might save,
And snatch, him cold and speechless from the wave
Is a midrash upon Macbeth’s
pity, like a naked new-born babe,
Striding the blast, or heaven's cherubins, horsed
Upon the sightless couriers of the air
Shakespeare’s Pity is more striking, both because it combines extreme youth (and therefore vulnerability) with extreme exposure to the elements. Bowles’s pity—there’s no specific warrant in the poem, but I suppose I assume she is a young woman—hides from the blast behind thick walls. Presumably the cries of the shipwrecked sailors are described as ‘expiring’ because they are on the verge of dying until saved by Pity; although it’s hard to shake the feeling that (as in Macbeth’s) Pity’s role here is to register the horror of mortality rather than to intervene in any practical way. Grandeur crowds together, turning a collective blind eye to human suffering. Pity is different, but she is wholly solitary (keeping ‘her lone watch upon the topmost tow'r’). What good can she really do on her own? A lot hinges on the ‘speechlessness’ of the figure hauled from the sea in the final line. ‘Cold’ makes sense, for a shipwrecked sailor; but cold in a ‘warm him in front of the fire for a while and he’ll be fine’ sense? Or in a ‘cold of the grave’ sense? Speechless?

We can make sense of this, I think, if we register the way the poem positions itself between silence on the one hand and tumult on the other, both figured as destructive. The castle is caught between ‘relentless Time’ ‘hurrying silent by’ on the one hand, and the sweeping ‘winter Whirlwind’ on the other.
Here Charity hath fix'd her chosen seat,
Oft listening tearful when the wild winds beat,
With hollow bodings round your ancient walls
There’s a nice transference here: the action of the winds upon the castle may generate hollow bodings, but the hollowness is the building’s, not the wind’s. Bowles is magnifying the sense of emptiness, or vacancy, as in itself boding ill (is there even a homophonic pun on the sonnet’s first adjective, those ‘holy tow’rs’ of this beacon of Charity? A world literally empty slides conceptually into a world metaphorically empty: a meaningless, hopeless (though not pitiless) apprehension of the whole rainy, stony earth. (That last phrase is from Ted Hughes' ‘Examination at the Womb Door’, a poem that lodged deep in my brain when I read it, decades ago; and of which – oddly perhaps – this Bowles’ sonnet rather reminds me)

If Bamborough Castle is hollow (as castles are, something brought forcefully home when the storm winds boom against them); and if Bamborough Castle is as-it-were ‘a head’, ‘rearing its aged brows sublime’, then this becomes, logically enough, a poem about the vacancy of the hollow skull. The moon is hidden. Charity weeps. Pity is blessed but only if (a forceful subjunctive in this context) she can save the fainting wretch being devoured by the drowning ocean. As panegyrics to Stately Homes go, there’s something unusually bleak about this one. --- Here’s the earlier version of this same sonnet, from Bowle’s Fourteen Sonnets (1789)
Ye holy tow'rs, that crown the azure deep,
Still may ye shade the wave-worn rock sublime,
Though, hurrying silent by, relentless Time
Assail you, and the winter Whirlwind's sweep!
For far from blazing Grandeur's crouded halls,
Here Charity hath fix'd her chosen seat,
Oft listening tearful when the wild winds beat,
With hollow bodings, round your ancient walls;
And Pity's self, at the dark stormy hour
Of Midnight, when the Moon is hid on high,
Keeps her lone watch upon the topmost tow'r,
And turns her ear to each expiring cry;
Blest if her aid some fainting wretch might save,
And snatch him speechless from the whelming wave.
A few minor alterations in the body of the poem; but the wretch in the final line is not cold—instead the waves is alliteratively described as being ‘whelming’. There’s a slight rebalancing, in other words, in the later version: away from the sea and towards the sailor.

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