Bowles 10. 'O Poverty! though from thy haggard eye'

O Poverty! though from thy haggard eye,
Thy cheerless mien, of every charm bereft,
Thy brow, that Hope's last traces long have left,
Vain Fortune's feeble sons with terror fly;
Thy loneliest haunts all desolate I seek—
For Pity, reckless of her own distress;
And Patience, in the pall of wretchedness,
That turns to the bleak storm her faded cheek;
And Piety, that never told her wrong;
And meek Content, whose griefs no more rebel;
And Genius, warbling sweet her saddest song;
And Sorrow, list'ning to a lost friend's knell,
Long banish'd from the world's insulting throng;—
With thee, and thy unfriended Virtues, dwell.

This may be Bowles's slackest sonnet yet -- a wilderness of non-specific Abstract Qualities that do nothing to bring the notion of 'poverty' alive to the reader. Line 5, 'Thy loneliest haunts all desolate I seek': does 'desolate' modify 'haunts' or 'I'? It makes a difference. If the point of the poem is to record that the poet visits charitably amongst the poor, it casts a rather offputtingly self-congratulatory light over the whole (the splendid 21st-century coinage 'humblebrag' comes to mind). Do I not like this.

Bowles 9: to The River Itchin, Near Winton

The River Itchen is a river in Hampshire, England. It flows from mid-Hampshire to join with Southampton Water below the Itchen Bridge in the city of Southampton. Here's a picture of it as it is today:

Pretty, no?

Itchin, when I behold thy banks again,
Thy crumbling margin, and thy silver breast,
On which the self-same tints still seem to rest,
Why feels my heart a shivering sense of pain?
Is it,---that many a summer's day has past
Since, in life's morn, I carol'd on thy side?
Is it,---that oft, since then, my heart has sigh'd,
As Youth, and Hope's delusive gleams, flew fast?
Is it,---that those, who circled on thy shore,
Companions of my youth, now meet no more?
Whate'er the cause, upon thy banks I bend,
Sorrowing; yet feel such solace at my heart,
As at the meeting of some long-lost friend,
From whom, in happier hours, we wept to part.

The rhetorical questions are, perhaps, a little lame; and the 'crumbling margin' strikes an odd note (wouldn't a river bank be muddy? Crumbling rather suggests dryness). But I like the way the 'shivering' of the river's surface works its way into the somatic response of the speaker; and 'circled on they shore' (the original version of the poem had the blander 'gathered') strikes a nicely ceremonial note. Are they dancing? Are they processing?

Not for the first time, reading these sonnets, I'm struck by Bowles's weird slippery, elusive emotional tone. The poem records his sadness; hope has proved itself delusive; his heart has sighed. Why. then, the rather abrupt turn in the last couplet to solace? Where is he getting that from?

On a more mundane level: I am just a little puzzled by the lines: 'thy silver breast,/On which the self-same tints still seem to rest'. Self-same? Same as what?

Googlefingers

And whilst I'm pausing: is there a word in the English language to describe the -- I think, rather charming -- occasional appearance of fingers in Google Books scans? If there isn't there ought to be.

Bowles title-page

A pause, and reminder. I'm not reading the original Fourteen Sonnets version of Bowles's collection, because that's not the edition Coleridge read. He read the expanded and revised second edition, also from 1789, also published in Bath. Here's the bottom-half of that edition's title page:

The Latin ('Cantantes, licet usque, minus via laedet eamus') is from Vergil [Aeneid 9:64]. It means: 'Let us sing as we travel along: the road will be less tedious.'

Bowles 8, On Leaving A Village in Scotland

Clydsdale, as thy romantick vales I leave,
And bid farewell to each retiring hill,
Where musing fancy seems to linger still,
Tracing the broad bright landscape; much I grieve
That, mingled with the toiling croud, no more
I may return your varied views to mark,
Of rocks amid the sunshine tow'ring dark,
Of rivers winding wild, and mountains hoar,
Or castle gleaming on the distant steep!—
Yet still your brightest images shall smile,
To charm the lingering stranger, and beguile
His way; whilst I the poor remembrance keep
Like those, that muse on some sweet vision flown,
To cheer me wand’ring on my way alone.

Clydesdale is not the name of the village confusingly (it's a Scottish district, not a village); though it's not clear to me if this is Bowles's confusion, or whether he means '[Village in] Clydesdale ...' Indeed, I'm not sure it matters; this is surely a general, rather than a particular, poem.

The sonnet rehearses what are, by now, familiar Bowlesian positions without, really, adding anything new: his fondness for remote (Lanarkshire is remote from the perspective of an Anglican living in Oxfordshire, after all), 'romantick', solitary landscapes; his preference for meditative or memorial solitude over the 'toiling croud'. Perhaps the most interesting thing here is in the last five lines, and it's much more Wordsworthian than it is Coleridgean. The idea that natural beauty will live in the imagination and provide a salutory resource for the poet (are the 'stranger' and the Bowlesian 'I' one and the same here, I wonder?) is a main plank of Wordsworth's own, later poetic project. Well, here it is, I guess. In proto-form. I guess.

Bowles 7: Evening! as slow thy placid shades descend

The seventh sonnet is not about a named place, but rather a time of day.

Evening! as slow thy placid shades descend,
Veiling with gentlest hush the landscape still,
The lonely battlement, the farthest hill
And wood,—I think of those that have no friend:
Who now, perhaps, by melancholy led,
From the broad blaze of day, where pleasure flaunts,
Retiring, wander ‘mid thy lonely haunts
Unseen; and mark the tints that o’er thy bed
Hang lovely; oft to musing fancy’s eye
Presenting fairy vales, where the tir’d mind
Might rest, beyond the murmurs of mankind,
Nor hear the hourly moans of misery.
Ah! beauteous views, that hope’s fair gleams the while
Should smile like you, and perish as they smile!

I like this better than some of the earlier ones. I like the way the (visible) shadows of evening veil 'with gentlest hush', as if they were physical sheets or curtains; I like the way we can intuit that the speaker is alone, and far from home, by his description of 'the lonely battlement, the farthest hill'. I like the way his contemplation of the solitary individual moving away on some exilic journey ('retiring. wander[ing]') is somehow simultaneously moving across a landscape and moving through time, from the broad blaze of (mid)-day to the evening that is being, here, apostrophised. The fairy vales are a touch twee, I suppose; although the 'murmurs of mankind' redeems tyhe verse-sentence, with its rather lovely alliteration, and its intimations that the noisy crowds of humanity are already so distant, as we move away, that their tumult has become murmurous.

There is something clever here, I think, about the elision of temporal and physical space; the juxtaposition of brightness and darkness, as means of articulating a mood neither wholly positive nor negative, neither entirely sad nor blessed with unalloyed happiness. That's an interesting emotional state, and it's good to read a poem that tries to capture it: the pleasures of melancholy, the positive affect of thinking sad thoughts about the death of hope. The line in the middle:

From the broad blaze of day, where pleasure flaunts

is prosodically and sonically nice: something about the movement from 'f' to 'f', (from/flaunts) via modulating 'b's, 'd's and 'p's. It also, I think, nods towards the famous line from Samson Agonistes (line 80, if you must know)

O dark, dark, dark, amid the blaze of noon

hich also cleverly juxtaposes the night of Samson's blindness against the brightness of the daytime.

The final couplet was originally:

Alas for man! that Hope’s fair views the while
Should smile like you, and perish as they smile!

Bowles was right to revise this, I think. The movement to a generic 'man' is a little jarring, giving the personal, even intimate feel of the rest of the poem. Still 'while'/'smile' is a pretty lame rhyme, and Bowles-y wasn't able to improve upon it:

Ah! beauteous views, that hope’s fair gleams the while
Should smile like you, and perish as they smile!

Excising the rather clumsy and emotionally directive 'alas!' improves this couplet; and I prefer a non-capitalised 'hope' as less stiffly Allegorical. Hope is a beautiful prospect, Bowles is saying; and beautiful prospects are at their most lovely at sunset. But the thing with that is: sunset brings the dark, and dark snuffs out the prospect. O dark, dark, dark.

Bowles 6: To The River Tweed

O Tweed! a stranger, that with wand’ring feet
O'er hill and dale has journeyed many a mile,
(If so his weary thoughts he might beguile),
Delighted turns thy beauteous scenes to greet.
The waving branches that romantick bend
O'er thy tall banks, a soothing charm bestow;
The murmurs of thy wand’ring wave below
Seem to his ear the pity of a friend.
Delightful stream! tho’ now along thy shore,
When spring returns in all her wonted pride,
The shepherd’s distant pipe is heard no more,
Yet here with pensive peace could I abide,
Far from the stormy world's tumultuous roar,
To muse upon thy banks at eventide.

The 'romantick' waving branches is a nice touch; it refers primarily back to actual Romance, but looks forward as well to the Romanticism these poems (via Coleridge, and to a lesser extent Wordsworth) will provoke. And the poem's through-line is easy to follow: the speaker has a heavy heart, but finds solace in the remote natural landscape of the river. He heats its flow as a consoling friend. The (nameless) Something in the speaker's past is paralleled with the social wrong of the Enclosures, leaving deserted villages where once there had been pastoral activity and song. And yet, in a when-you-come-to-think-of-it puzzling final twist, the speaker seems to applaud the forced depopulation of the countryside, since it has had the agreeable side-effect of giving him the elbow-room to sit and muse. I'm not sure, if I think about it, whether the poem squares the circle of its (conventionalised) desire to deplore the Enclosures, and its (more individual) sense that an empty countryside is a beautiful countryside.

Something else that strikes me: to what extent is this poem stitched together out of scraps and phrases from elsewhere? 'Wandering feet' is Jeremiah 14:10; 'hill and dale' is Shakespeare (Midsummer Night's Dream; it's also Milton's 'Song on May Morning'); 'beauteous scenes' is a standard poeticism (Google returns pre-1789 hits for Prior and Reynolds); likewise 'soothing charm' ('And now where every other motive fails/The soothing charm of eloquence prevails', 'The Councillor', 1733); 'wonted pride' is Paradise Lost (1:527), 'pensive peace' is from Thomas Warton's 1761 'Cherwell' Ode ('Lo! pensive Peace shall tune your solemn strings,/To saddest airs along my lonely verge'; Warton was Poet Laureate from 1785!); and 'the shepherd’s distant pipe is heard no more' chimes with a hundred pastoral texts (for example: here's the libretto to Handel's Acis and Galatea (1718): 'Stay, shepherd, stay!/See, how thy flocks in yonder valley stray!/What means this melancholy Aria?/No more thy tuneful pipe we hear.')  I'm not sure what to make of this single-minded dedication to writing at second-hand. It's like a sort of Waste Land tissue of quotations, only without the larger 'cultural exhaustion' rationale.