I remember being vaguely amused by Doctor Faustus when I was in college, but the language was difficult for a 20 year old. Reading about the antics of Faust and Mephistopheles as I plowed through the verbiage was rather like trying earnestly to understand a joke.  I worked at understanding it and had it explained to me until I could finally smile weakly and say I got the punch line.  But I said that mostly to make it all go away.

 This time around, I found the play screamingly funny. Though I am writing about Christopher Marlowe, in my current reading of The Norton Anthology of English Literature Vol 1 I am in Paradise Lost, which appeals to me not at all.  I don’t have anything (much) against Milton; I wouldn’t have wanted to live with him, or even next door to him.  I want to say that I don’t care for his subject matter but Doctor Faustus has the same main dramatis persona.   The tone couldn’t be more different.

I was alienated from anything like Milton’s deadly serious treatment of the Life and Times of Satan somewhere around my fifth season in an evangelical, fundamentalist Sunday School.  Doctor Faustus would never have flown in the churches of my childhood.  Wait, no I take that back.  He could have made himself invisible, literally flown in the door and brought some actual life into the place.

Doctor Faustus is a scholar at the great medieval university of Wittenberg. He has exhausted his studies in every field he believes important and is struggling with the reality that everyone sins and then everyone dies.  Suddenly Doris Day makes an unexpected appearance and sings “Que Sera, Sera.”  You think I’m kidding. Here’s the text:

Aye, we must die an everlasting death.
What doctrine call you this, Che sera, sera;
What will be, shall be? Divinity, adieu!

Faustus decides to look into black magic.  He calls in the magicians and necromancers. He learns enough about the occult to cast a circle and call up the devil.  Mephistophilis appears, does a few shape-shifting tricks for Faustus and the two of them converse.  Mephistophilis tells Faustus that he conspired against God with Lucifer and now is forever damned with Lucifer, all of which would have been more interesting to me when I was kicking my heels against a chair in Sunday School at age ten, brainwashed into a world where Mary was a better person because she hung on Jesus’ every word than Martha who fixed the damn dinner so everyone could eat.

Faustus: Where are you damned?
Meph: In hell
Faustus: How comes it, then, that thou art out of hell?
Meph: Why, this is hell, nor am I out of it.

Seventy five years and 664 pages later, in Paradise Lost, Milton writes,

The mind is its own place, and in itself
Can make a Heaven of Hell, a Hell of Heaven.

Once at the Enumclaw County Fair, I took on the folks in a booth with a sign that read “Find Out if You’re Going to Hell.”  An evangelical bunch armed with their little pamphlets and scare tactics were, I think, proud of their provocative sign.  I listened to their spiel—briefly—and then told them I had been to hell already and had got out of it in spite of, not because of, Christian doctrine.  There wasn’t a counter response on their clipboards so they were forced to listen—briefly—to my spiel about depressions and psycho-analysis.

But I digress.

Faustus makes a pact with Mephistophilis.  These are his terms:

1) Faustus may be a spirit in form and substance i.e. shall have the ability to be invisible and/or to shape-shift.

2) Mephistophilis shall be his servant, bring to him and do for him whatever he asks

3) After 24 years of this adventure, Lucifer (Satan) can have Faustus.

The fun and games begin. Faustus and Mephistophilis interfere with the Pope who has just captured a German pretender to the papal throne, one Bruno.  Faustus and Mephistophilis put a couple of cardinals to sleep, take on their likenesses, and have a word with the Pope.  The upshot is that while the Pope thinks Bruno is being disposed of, in fact he is being spirited away to safety in Germany.

Faustus and Mephistophilis then become invisible so they can observe the results of their mischief at a dinner where the awakened Cardinals and the Pope try to sort out what happened to Bruno.  Faustus amuses himself by snatching away the Pope’s dinner and wine glass when he’s talking to the Cardinals.

After 24 fun-filled years, Faustus’ time is finally up.  His final request is to have sex with Helen who had:

the face that launched a thousand ships
And burnt the topless towers of Illium.

Did we all think that was Shakespeare?

As the clock strikes midnight on that final night, and amidst a thunder and lightning storm, the devils enter Faustus’ study and take him away. In the final scene fellow scholars visit Faustus to see how he’s doing after the storm.  Shrieks and screams had been heard coming from his house in the night.  They find his limbs and mangled body lying about the room.  They propose to bury what’s left of the body and to give Faustus a proper funeral. The Chorus steps in with a feeble moral, suggesting it is better to wonder about the occult than to practice it. 

I’m almost 60.  In twenty four years I suspect I am going to be ready to die anyway.  Twenty four years of mischief, especially if it means messing with the Catholic Church, or better yet, with evangelical fundamentalists doesn’t seem like a bad arrangement at all.  I don’t believe in hell other than in the mind itself.  And I’ve been there already.

I’ve been reading The Norton Anthology of English Literature Volume 1 in stealth because I wasn’t sure I wanted to declare it A Project. But I have gotten passed the metaphysical poets and am rounding the 18th century so I think it’s a done, if not finished, deal. I was completely sucked in by Chaucer. After reading all the selections I listened to a CD of Trevor Eaton, known in England as “the Chaucer man” reading The Canterbury Tales in Middle English and got to where I could actually follow the story.

After Chaucer I enjoyed Piers Plowman and the scraps of extant Middle English lyrics in the Norton. I’ve tried to interest the OK Chorale in singing “Sumer is ycomen in, Loude sing cuckoo!” several times but it hasn’t taken. Maybe I should leave the y off of ycomen. Not everyone thinks that’s charming.

“The Corpus Christi Carol” is a very strange text put to haunting notes by Benjamin Britten in the last century.  I wanted to work on it once but when I sang it for my then voice teacher, her only comment was “Oh God, no. You don’t need this lully lullay falcon hath borne my make stuff.” Listen to Jeff Buckley sing it with suitable eeriness hear.

I wanted to re-kindle my old, long-time love for Sir Philip Sidney. Alas, the romantic figure of a poet dying at age 32 on the battlefield after offering his water to a comrade was more captivating to me as a 19 year old than it is now at 59. I re-read Apologia for Poetry and was amazed that my ardor for Sidney had once caused me to devour this treatise as though it were love poetry.

I still like Sidney’s sonnets. I had memorized several when I was at Whitman College, and can still recite them with only a few peeks at the text. Just as I have quoted John Donne at the sun all these years (“Busy old fool, unruly sun”), I have often spoken Sidney’s words to the moon:

“With how sad steps, O moon, thou climb’st the skies!
How silently, and with how wan a face!”

Another of Sidney’s sonnets begins like this:

“Come sleep! O sleep, the certain knot of peace,
The baiting place of wit, the balm of woe,
The poor man’s wealth, the prisoner’s release,
Th’ indifferent judge between the high and low.”

There in my college text is graffiti by the red-headed Kurt making the first line read like this:

“Come sleep with me, Elena. The certain knot of my stomach. . .”

Moving on: I still loathe Thomas More as much as I ever did. I have never been able to enter the world of Edmund Spenser, but I don’t have anything against him personally. I re-read with pleasure the sonnets of Shakespeare, Henry IV Part I and King Lear. I found more sonnets, ones by Michael Drayton, that I had memorized in college.

And finally in a section of anonymous lyrics are the texts of two songs I love. “The Silver Swan” set to music by Orlando Gibbons, I have sung as a solo and I once made the OK Chorale sing it as a choral piece. The objections were by turn that it was too morose and that it didn’t make sense.

The silver swan, who living had no note,
When death approached unlocked her silent throat;
Leaning her breast against the reedy shore,
Thus sung her first and last and sang no more:
“Farewell, all joys; Oh death come close my eyes;
More geese than swans now live, more fools than wise.”

“Weep You No More, Sad Fountains,” from John Dowland’s Third Book of Songs or Airs, is another beautiful solo piece. Nina (rhymes with Dinah) and I worked on it together and had many discussions about whether it was about sleep, loss, or death or all three. The music has varying time signatures which gives the sense of someone sobbing while she sings.

Weep you no more, sad fountains;
What need you flow so fast?
Look how the snowy mountains
Heaven’s sun doth gently waste.
But my sun’s heavenly eyes
View not your weeping,
That now lies sleeping
Softly, now softly lies
Sleeping

Which brings me to what I thought I would be writing about when I first started this post: Christopher Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus.

‘Til next time.

Meanwhile, I am curious what my fellow English majors everywhere liked and memorized from our days on campus.

I wanted to go for a walk to see the jack 0′ lanterns and to join the ghouls in the neighborhood last night but I was tired when I finished teaching. So I dumped the last of the Halloween candy on the last few children who rang my door bell, had a Scotch, and went to bed early. (It’s an age thing.) This morning I rose while it was yet night and got out my All Soul’s, All Saints, and All Days of the Dead stuff. I took down the ghosts, the black cats, and the 15 year old jack o’ lantern taffies that are part of the General Fall Display.

The General Fall Display goes up the first of September. It features a porcelain scarecrow guarding his few pumpkins, and a small bale of hay.  They pose on a carpet of flat dried leaves, which have been collected for years as far back as the 1960s when I was a child in Olympia. Framing the porcelain figures are some ears of Indian corn. Scattered about are acorns, walnuts, bits of lichen, and putka pods.

Come October, I add a black cat candle, a figurine of the guy at the organ with the crow on his shoulder, and the stale jack o’ lantern taffies. When I say the taffies are fifteen years old, my youngest students look at them with reverence.

On November first, today, the Halloween details are extracted and the truly dead people come out: Photos and mementos of my parents, my wonderful Aunt Frances, my first piano teacher, my Cornish cousin who welcomed me into my Cornish family; Meagan, my 14 year old student, and Dennis, the father of my two students, Anna and Julia. This morning I remembered each one in turn. I lit a new candle and sang Schubert’s “Litanei:”Alle Seelen ruhn in Frieden (all souls rest in peace).

In fact I drowned “an eye unused to flow for precious friends hid in death’s dateless night,” a line from one of the Shakespeare sonnets I memorized this summer:

When to the sessions of sweet silent thought
I summon up remembrance of things past,
I sigh the lack of many a thing I sought,
And with old woes new wail my dear time’s waste.
Then can I drown an eye unused to flow
For precious friends hid in death’s dateless night,
And weep afresh love’s long since cancelled woe,
And moan the expense of many a vanished sight
Then can I grieve at grievances foregone
And heavily from woe to woe tell o’er
The sad account of fore be-moaned moan,
Which I now pay as if not paid before.
But if the while I think on thee, dear friend,
All losses are restored and sorrows end.

It’s the beginning of winter in the pagan calendar and though it was warm this morning in Seattle, remembering the dead is a winter thing to do. Remembering the dead puts me into a session of sweet silence. I’m not wild about putting up on the Internet photos of people hid in death’s dateless night but here’s a long time feature of my All Soul’s altar:

Statue not in use.

As our Canterbury pilgrims move along the road the friar and the summoner get into a pissing match with each other by telling a story about the other’s profession. Since there seem to be friars and summoners all over the place, I’ll start with a few guidelines: The Pissing Friar and the Pissing Summoner are the pilgrims. The lower case friar and summoner are the ones in the stories. Also, in case you don’t already know: a friar goes out into the world as opposed to a monk who stays in the monastery. (I actually got that from an episode of Inspector Lewis.) A summoner is like a sheriff for the church. Summoners were known to threaten people with made-up offenses and squeeze them for money the church never saw, not that the church deserved it either.

The Pissing Friar tells this tale: a summoner is on his way to extort money from an old woman when he meets a cheerful young man who says he is a bailiff. The two get to chatting about the similarities of their jobs and swear an oath of brotherhood. The summoner becomes quite expansive about himself and his deceptive practices. The young man reveals that he is actually a demon, which the summoner does not apparently take seriously. The two come upon a carter whose cart is stuck in the mud and they hear him say,

“The devel have al, bothe hors and cart and hey.” (The devil have all, both horse and cart, and hay).

The summoner elbows his new friend and asks him why, since he’s a demon nudge nudge, he doesn’t take the carter to hell, but the demon replies,

“It is nat his entente.” (He didn’t mean it; it’s not a real oath.)

When they arrive at the old woman’s house, the summoner in his grandiosity not only fabricates a charge and demands a bribe; he demands her new frying pan to complete an old bribe against a previously fabricated charge of adultery. Here’s her response:

“The devel,” quod she, “so fecche hym er he deye,
And panne and al, but he wol hym repente.
(The devil fetch him, pan and all, unless he takes it back)

The summoner elbows the demon again. But the demon pronounces that the old woman meant exactly what she said. And he swoops the summoner to hell, frying pan and all.

That is The Pissing Friar’s Tale. The Pissing Summoner is incensed. He jumps right into retaliation. In his prologue, instead of introducing himself as many of the other pilgrims do, he enters into hostilities against The Pissing Friar. He tells a joke about a friar who visits hell and doesn’t notice any friars around the place. He asks his angel guide if this is because friars are under such grace that they don’t end up in hell. The angel says not at all, there are millions of friars in hell. He asks Satan to hold up his gigantic tale. Satan obliges.

Out of the develes ers ther gonne dryve
Twenty thousand frères in a route,
And thurghout helle swarmeden aboute.
(out of the devil’s ass twenty thousand friars swarmed about throughout hell.

Before The Pissing Friar has time to recover from his hissy fit over the joke, The Pissing Summoner launches right into his tale:

A friar who goes about the countryside preaching and extorting indulgences comes to the house of Thomas, one of his usual victims, and finds him ill and his wife grieving the loss of a two week old baby. The friar—like so many who can’t handle genuine emotion– immediately starts talking about himself. He knows all about the baby’s death because he saw it in a revelation as soon as it happened. Continuing on in this most relevant vein, the grandiose gasbag pontificates about friars being holy because they live in poverty. He drones into a boring sermon about God knows what because I skipped that part. Actually I believe it was about the sin of anger. Whatever it was, I’ve heard it before.

He tells Thomas he is sick because he hasn’t given enough money to the church. Thomas tells the friar that he will give him something if he promises to share it with all the other friars and monks at the “hooly covent.” The holy friar solemnly promises.

Now thane, put in thyn hand doun by my back. . .
and grope wel bihynde.
Benethe my buttok ther shaltow fynde
A thing that I hyd in pryvetee.
(Put your hand down my back and grope behind and beneath my buttocks and you’ll find something I have privately hidden)

Panting in anticipation, the friar cops a feel.

And whan this sike mana felte this frère
Aboute his tuwel grope hthere and here,
Amydde his hand he leet the frère a fart—
Ther nys no capul drawynge in a cart
That might have lete a fart of swich a soun.
(and when the sick man felt the friar groping around his anus, he let a fart into his hand. No cart horse could have let such a resounding fart.)

The friar commits the sin of anger all the way up to the Great House where he complains to the lord of the manor about the way he has been treated. What happens next is,to me, the funniest part of the story because this friar could have exploded into the living room of the house in which I grew up. The lady of the manor/my mother was outraged at Thomas’ treatment of the holy man. But the lord/my father sat reflecting for a long time.

Finally he mused, “How could one fart be divided amongst the other friars in the “hooly covent?” His squire/also my father came up with the solution: Get a cartwheel with twelve spokes. Have twelve friars kneel at the end of each spoke with their noses pulled up and touching the spoke-end. Then have Thomas, fart-ready, squat in the middle of the wheel and let ‘er rip.

That equally the soun of it wol wende,
And eke the stynk, unto the spokes ende. . .
(equally the sound and the stink will go down to the ends of the spokes.)

Chaucer doesn’t indicate who wins the pissing match. But no matter, we never see such interdepartmental squabbling in the church today. All the world loves a good fart, whether the world admits it or not. Especially during a church service.

As I snickered my way through some of The Canterbury Tales I got to wondering why on earth Chaucer isn’t favored reading in every high school English class and college fraternity in the entire world. Of course, I know it’s because one has to dig hard so hard to get through the language, but the Middle English is what makes it all the funnier. It’s like stumbling across salaciousness where you least expect it, say in the King James Bible in the middle of a church service. The Chaucer translators are hopeless. Their prudish word choices and euphemistic footnotes are a study in discomfiture.

Take The Miller’s Tale. Here’s the cast of characters:

John, an old carpenter, wealthy and gullible
Alisoun, his young sexy wife
Nicholas, a poor scholar who boards with John and Alisoun
Absolon, a parish clerk

John is possessive and jealous of his pretty young wife. Alisoun is fun-loving and lusty. Both Nicholas and Absolon are interested in Alisoun but only Nicholas is succeeding with her.

Nicholas hatches a scheme to keep John occupied so he and Alisoun can get into bed with each other. He fakes a trance and reports to John that he’s had a vision of God is sending flood twice as great as Noah’s. John packs three tubs with provisions and fastens them to the roof of the barn. The night before the predicted flood, he, Alisoun and Nicholas climb up into the tubs, the idea being that when the water gets high enough, John will cut them loose and they will float out, safe and dry. But as soon as John starts snoring, Alisoun and Nicholas climb down, run into the house and jump into the master bed. There was a line in Chaucer’s description of Alisoun and Nicholas having sex that made me smile:

“Ther was the revel and melodye.”

In early morning after the revel and the melodye, Absolon comes sauntering along the still dark street. He tries to flirt with Alisoun through the window of the house. To make him go away she says she will let him have one kiss. He puckers up. The translations say that Alisoun put her “backside” or, at best, “naked arse” out the window. But this is what Chaucer says:

And at the windowe out she putte hir hole,
And Absolon, him fil no bet ne wers,
But with his mouth he kiste her naked ers,
Fulk savourly, er he were war of this.
Abak he sterte, and thought it was amis,
For wel he wiste a womman hath no beerd.
He felte a thing al rough and longe yherd.

So Alisoun sticks her “hole” out the window and when Absolon kisses her, he starts back thinking, “a woman doesn’t have a beard.” Yet he had felt something rough and hairy. All the translations and commentaries dance around the obvious: Alisoun sticks her vulva out the window and Absolon kisses it. There now. Was that so hard?

More fun to come: Absolon goes into town and acquires a red-hot iron poker from the blacksmith. Back at the carpenter’s house, he begs for another kiss. Nicholas who had “risen for to pisse,” sticks his butt out the window and “let flee a fart as greet as it hadde been a thonder-dent.” The fart flames out and nearly blinds Absolon who thrusts the poker at Nicholas’ naked arse. Nicholas screams for water, which wakes the carpenter who assumes the flood has come. He cuts the ropes of the three tubs, comes crashing down from the barn and breaks his arm.

The Miller’s Tale ends thus:

Thus swived was the carpenter’s wif (to swive is to have sex with)
For al his keeping and his jalousie,
And Absolon hath kist hir nether yё, (kissed her lower “eye”)
And Nicholas is scalded in the toute:
This tale is doon, and God save al the route!

Don’t you just love it?

I’d heard about this woman: sexually voracious, loud mouth, obscene, headstrong, selfish, power-hungry, and immoral. I was eager to meet her. News flash: she is none of those things in my estimation. Here, word for word, is how we might expect to describe a man similar in nature to the wife of Bath: man of appetites, principled, sophomoric, determined, self-indulgent, autocratic, indiscreet. It sounds a lot more benign.

I think the difficulty that some have with the wife of Bath stems from their inability to see her as a human being. Women are constantly being characterized as something other than human. Men are standard-issue human. When women behave, think, and feel like human beings, a slice of the population is outraged.

Let me digress a minute: I expected to do a whole whine of a post about Chaucer’s middle English, eliciting all the admiration I could for even attempting to read the slightly translated excerpts from The Canterbury Tales in The Norton Antholgy of English Literature Vol 1.  But it turns out it’s not that bad. In fact it’s kind of fun. It takes a while to get used to the odd spellings and strange words but after a while, and when I imagine the spelling to be that of a second grader, it starts to flow.

The wife of Bath is one of a group of pilgrims journeying to the shrine of Thomas à Becket at Canterbury Cathedral. The pilgrims introduce themselves and then they each tell a story. The wife of Bath tells us she has had five husbands, three good and two bad, and she has learned how to make a place for herself within a marriage, or as she puts it: “Diverse scoles maken parfit clerkes” which I take to mean “diverse schools make perfect clergy,” i.e. a wide range of experience makes one knowledgeable and practical.

The wife of Bath enjoys sex and she expects to get it from whomever she’s married to. Within any couple, there’s usually one party who has the greater sexual appetite. When it’s the man, it’s considered normal. When it’s the woman, she’s a nymphomaniac. In the middle ages there was the “marriage debt,” in which the wife owed sex to the man who married her. The wife of Bath turns this around:

Why sholde men elles in hir books sette
That man shal yeeldle to his wife hir debt.
Now wherewith sholde he make his payement
If he ne used his sely instrument. . .

. . . in wifhood wol I use myn instrument
As freely as my Maker hath it sent.

Just to help you out here: hir means his, and sely means innocent, and instrument means penis. Then in the last two lines, the wife refers to using her instrument freely. I love that! News flash from the 13th century: Women are human beings. Women are sexual beings. Women have erections.

The wife continues:

Thou saist we wives wil oure vices hide
Til we be fast, and thane we wol hem shewe.
Wel may that be a proverb of a shrewe!

Shewe is footnoted as villain. The complaint here is that women behave one way (sweet) before marriage and differently (villainous) afterwards. Two things going on here: first of all the same could be said about men. Secondly, of course people behave differently when thrown into close proximity with another person. It’s why so many friendships go sour after friends travel together. The wife points out that while women and men may not be so very different, it is men who write the stories and advance the proverbs.

We love no man that taketh keep or charge
Wher that we goon: we wol been at oure large.

Translation: no one who is being controlled can love .

The wife of Bath’s Prologue is full of such observations, as well as a short history of her five housbandes, and a happy list of words for the female genitalia: quoniam, queint, cueint, chamber of Venus, and my favorite: belle chose.

Here, in brief, is the wife’s tale: a knight rapes a woman, and is sentenced to death. The Queen intervenes and gives him a year’s reprieve to find out what women most desire. If he comes back with the right answer, his life will be spared. He searches for a year and as he is about to return to the Queen without an answer, he meets an ugly, old, “foul” woman who will give him the correct answer if he will promise to marry her. He promises. Back they go to the Queen and the knight announces:

Wommen desire to have sovereinetee
As wel over hir housbande as hir love
And for to been is maistrye him above.

(Women desire to have sovereignty
Over her husband and in love,
And to be master over him.)

Ding! Ding! Ding! That answer was correct. The ugly old woman comes forward to be married but the knight balks. He wasn’t serious about his promise to her, he only wanted his life spared. But he is finally persuaded to marry her and of course, she immediately becomes young and beautiful. And then she turns around and gives back to the knight the “sovereinetee.”

There are many avenues of interpretation emerging from the wife of Bath’s tale. Here’s mine: When the women says she desires sovereignty over her husband and over love, she does not mean what a man might mean if he said the same thing. A predominantly feminine mind works somewhat differently than a predominantly male mind. The feminine paradigm is not about being on top, it’s about being side-by-side. When the wife has mastery over love, nobody is forcibly, stultifyingly on top all the time. People take turns yet come to rest side-by-side in a partnership of equals. This isn’t going to happen unless both parties are recognized as equals, which they are not in a hierarchical paradigm. It was this feminine paradigm that the young/old, beautiful/foul woman gave back to the knight.

I am not suggesting that this was exactly what Chaucer had in mind, or that women in the 14th century thought exactly in those terms. I am suggesting that what I call a feminine paradigm is not something that was dreamed up in the 1960s by Gloria Steinem or by Carl Jung in the early part of the last century. It’s an energy that has always been there, and that has always expressed itself in any way that it can.

And finally I read the “foul” woman turning “beautiful” as a perception within the knight himself. We are all both foul and beautiful. We are all both young and old. (I couldn’t know that for certain while I was merely young, but can, with pleasure, assert it now.) Who we love becomes beautiful to us, and within any relationship, there are only two perceptions that matter.

It’s That Time Of Year. I loathe that expression. Every time I hear it I want to shriek, “Oh My God, think of something original!” Every day is That Time Of Year. It was probably a fresher phrase–then again, who knows?– when Shakespeare used it to begin this sonnet:

That time of year thou may’st in me behold
When yellow leaves, or few, or none do hang
Upon the boughs which shake against the cold,
Bare, ruined choirs where late the sweet birds sang:

In me thou see’st the twilight of such day
As after sunset fadeth in the west;
Which by and by black night doth take away,
Death’s second self that seals up all in rest.

In me thou see’st the glowing of such fire
That on the ashes of his youth doth lie,
As the death-bed whereon it must expire,
Consumed with that which it was nourished by.

This thou perceiv’st, which makes thy love more strong
To love that well which thou must leave ere long.

There. I wrote that from memory except for the commas. I set myself a little project last May to memorize four of Shakespeare’s sonnets and this is the last, coinciding with the actual time of year when yellow leaves, or few, or none do hang upon the boughs which shake against the cold; bare ruined choirs where late the sweet birds sang. The warm, dry summer that we in Seattle enjoyed this year made an about face right at the Equinox, almost at the moment that I emerged, naked, from my ritual baptism in the Pacific Ocean last week.

I don’t memorize easily any more—too old—but making myself labor at it has its rewards, one of which is that I’ve gotten better at it. As in singing, I don’t know a song until I can cut loose from the written page. That’s when I get inside the music and the text, and start to mine it for all its nuance and delight.

A Shakespeare sonnet looks like an impossible pile of words, many of them archaic, with syntax that would get you flunked from an English class. When I attempt to memorize, the hardest part is getting the correct linking words: as, that, and which. If I get one of those little words out of place, I lose the whole line. Memorizing makes me grasp for any structure, image, rhyme, or syllable count that guides me into the next line or quatrain. It gives me a reason to think about structure, image, rhyme, and syllable count in a way that would make an English teacher’s heart soar. Free of charge, I’ll tip you off to pronounce ruined as one syllable or the line doesn’t scan.

I already knew the first quatrain by heart from years ago when memorizing was easy. I actually think I learned it from the “News from Lake Woebegone” when Garrison Keillor says: “That time of year in Minnesota thou may’st behold when yellow leaves or few, or none, do hang upon the boughs that shake against the cold; bare ruined choirs where late the sweet birds sang.” I had it on an old cassette tape I listened to so many times I could quote whole hunks of the “news.”

Eventually I noticed that the next two quatrains of the sonnet began with the same opening: “In me thou see’st. . .” Then it was a matter of finding mental images. The first one was easy. I finished memorizing the poem while spending four days at the ocean where I sat on the deck at twilight and watched first the sun set, and then black night take away the day. The image I needed for the third quatrain organized itself around the word glowing: a glowing coal on a death-bed of ashes, soon to be consumed by what was its own blazing fire.

Clearly Shakespeare wrote the sonnet when he considered himself to be in the autumn of his life, which is where I place myself. I have said many times that I love being middle-aged. This is the richest and most alive time of my life. My life glows in me in a way it didn’t when presumably there was a bigger fire. I have a sense of possibility that isn’t less exciting because it’s tempered with experience. In fact it’s preferable to being inflated with the ignorance of my young adulthood.

Still I look at the world with a sweet sadness. I sometimes wonder how much longer I will be here. I am comfortable with not knowing if I will know anything on the other side of death. To me, that is the essence of faith: to surrender to not knowing. It’s what allows me to feel my glow now. And on this end of life, I am finding new ways to love well what I must leave ere long.

I’m back at The Sandpiper. When I was here with Nina in April, I wished I had brought my winter clothes. This week I could use a sundress and some shorts. There are ways around that when one is at a quiet resort mid-week on the off season. I’ll get to them later. For now I am thrilled to be here with my painting friend Susan, although I am doing precious little painting. I am in the upstairs bedroom of the A-frame at a wide open window looking toward the ocean which rolls toward me forever and ever, amen. I am working on a book about teaching and learning. A little later I’ll get out my paints and join Susan who is perfecting her wave technique. In the evening we’ll talk and knit.

Every few hours the waves pull me out for a walk. First time out I wore a pair of shoes, which I immediately took off so I could wade. Then I wore a pair of clogs which also came off as soon as I got past the dunes. Now I leave the cabin barefoot. I can’t walk with Susan. She’s a strider, out for exercise, whereas I want to kick at the water and let the waves overtake me. When I’m in the water, the roar fills my head and I lose track of time. I could be out there for five minutes or two hours and not know the difference.

It’s been years since I’ve seen actual sandpipers on this beach, but there are flocks of them now. Sandpipers with their round bodies and long, skinny legs running down the beach in high heels make me think of my Aunt Frances who had long skinny legs and as she got older, an increasingly round body. We saw flocks of pelicans, something I’ve never seen until now. Last night a black rabbit with huge eyes came onto our beach path and nibbled green things. He let me get within a few yards before he leaped into the brambles.

The moon is in its full phase. I gasped when I saw it last night, glowing over the tops of the trees, yellow-warm as though the sun had zipped under the earth and came up the other side just to mess with me. This morning at 6, it was shining where the sun had shone twelve hours earlier. I speak pidgin earth science so the behavior of the sun and moon are magical to me.

I have The Norton Anthology of English Literature Vol 1 with me. My friend, another Susan and the wittiest woman I know, suggested I give Donne’s love poems a look because I said I couldn’t bear his (so called) holy sonnets. In fact Donne’s (so called) holy sonnets were the biggest impediment to my cracking open the Norton Anthology of English Poetry Vol I. (Ugh, I’m not reading that book. It’s just Donne’s –so called– holy sonnets. And thus I dispensed with 1200 years of English literature.) Susan, being the wittiest woman I know, at age 18 was captivated with the conceits in Donne’s love poetry. At age 18 I was stopped in my tracks and stumped at why the complex images in his poems were called conceits. I’m afraid I didn’t get much farther than that but was still surprised when Dr. Tyson suggested to me that I just didn’t care for 17th century literature. (Why would he say that? Never mind, just tell me why they are called conceits.)

So I looked at Donne last night. OK, I do like “The Sun Rising.” In fact since 1974, whenever the sun becomes annoying, I have spoken to it: “Busy old fool, unruly sun.”

And I like “A Nocturnal upon Saint Lucy’s Day, Being the Shortest Day.” The St Lucy poem originally insinuated itself into my imagination by it being what Miss Temple was reading

. . . And I am re-begot
Of absence, darkness, death: things which are not.

when the bust of Shakespeare was dropped on her head in the Joan Hickson production of Agatha Christie’s Nemesis.

I started to read the poems Susan suggested but felt pulled back to earlier centuries which have always appealed me. I started in on Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. The Norton folk have tinkered with it to make it easier to read. It’s slow going but after a while I recognize certain words and spellings and it flows.

Now back to ways around the shortage of summer attire at a resort at mid-week and on the off season. There wasn’t a soul on the beach in the early afternoon. I put on my sleeping shirt which I have worn for so many years it’s threadbare, grabbed a towel and worked my way through the baking sand to the edge of the surf. I dropped my towel and my shirt and strode (I can stride when I have to) into the water until it was up to my chest. I exulted in the waves, naked and free and all alone (or so I believe) under the busy old fool, the unruly sun.

During my childhood, at regular intervals, somewhere in our house a book slammed shut and the call rang out, “Finished the book!” My father, my brother and I all participated in this ritual. My mother mostly read the Bible and of course, there’s never an end to that. This morning I quietly closed the 2533 pages of The Norton Anthology of English Literature Vol. 2 and informed the cat that I had finished the book and the summer was now over. My copy was a fourth edition that came out in 1979 after my years in college; but before the women’s movement and multi-culturalism had made a dent in the canon, and before the explosion of literary theories that has changed English departments everywhere. So it was, in a way, an Edwardian summer.

I don’t know exactly what possessed me to declare The Norton Anthology of English Literature Vol. 2 a summer reading project other than a curiosity about writers whose writings were a mystery to me. But I didn’t want to forego the pleasure of reading writers I remembered enjoying in college so I ended up finishing the whole book. What surprised me over and over was how much I had changed since college. The only writer who has made it through all those years with me is John Keats. All my other old favorites didn’t appeal to me as much this time: Wordsworth, Byron, Housman, Eliot, and Auden.

I met up with new friends: Burns, Coleridge, de Quincey, Mills, Tennyson, Browning, Huxley, Kipling, and Hopkins. I wrote about many of them in my previous 15 posts and I laid the infrastructure to read more of Browning and Hopkins. I also want to read more of who were, in 1979, considered new and upcoming poets: Molly Holden, Elaine Feinstein, and Seamus Heaney. Molly Holden died in 1981, Seamus Heaney died just last month (August, 2013) and Elaine Feinstein is still going strong.

A lot of writers and artists experience depression and it was the recognition of a shared experience that made reading Coleridge, de Quincey, and Hopkins poignant. Especially Hopkins who also had the religion thing going on: that struggle to make sense of what it means to be alive while thinking—or trying to not to– under the constraints of a Judeo-Christian paradigm. Kipling was comic relief to the intensity of the depressed poets. He had a calming Nanny Knows Bestness about him. Browning was wickedly funny. His pokes at religion made him a nice bookend to Hopkins and kept the two of them far enough apart that they couldn’t get into fist fights. Robert Burns spoke to me with the sweetness of a singer.

I certainly never meant to open The Norton Anthology of English Literature Vol 1, but I was trying to find a poem that I thought was by John Donne. When I couldn’t locate it –or even remember the title—I started scanning the table of contents: The Canterbury Tales. Hmm. I want to read those sometime. Ooh, ooh: The Duchess of Malfi. I remember liking that. “You always were a bloodthirsty little wretch,” my father used to say. The Graveyard Poets. I never gave them enough of a look. Now that I live with a gate opening into a cemetery, I should be more familiar with them. And it’s getting on toward Halloween.

I am so tempted, but I think I’ll wait a bit. Read some New Yorkers and a stack of Funny Times first. Watch a few Vicar of Dibley episodes.

It’s a good idea to know the definition of dapple (cloudy and rounded spots or patches of a color or shade different from their background) before you read Gerard Manley Hopkins because it’s a word he uses a lot and nobody else does. Not ever. I have a dappled relationship with him. Music, painting, and spirituality suffuse his sensibilities but he has religious spots that don’t appeal to me.

He was influenced by the Oxford movement which emphasized a dogmatic side of Christianity and by John Henry Newman whose writing I found unimaginative. He became a Jesuit priest at which point he burned all the poems he had thus far written. In his work as what the British call a God Botherer, his aesthetic interests and his poetic genius fought with his sense of religious duty. I could have written the next sentence in the Norton bio: he became depressed. He struggled with his faith, his art, and his depression all his life.

Completely unlike anything else written during the Victorian period, Hopkins’ poetry is unusual for any literary age. It didn’t catch on immediately even when it was first published twenty years after his death. I read all the poems in the Norton Anthology and because I felt pulled in, I went looking for more. Two things that I learned from my excursion: Hopkins’ writing is transcendent of the Christian language he uses, and the poems must be read aloud.

In this line from “Binsey Poplars” the words themselves recreate the activity the poem describes. I didn’t notice this until I heard the poem read aloud. Here are the trees being cut down:

My aspens dear, whose airy cages quelled,
Quelled or quenched in leaves the leaping sun,
All felled, felled, are all felled.

And here is the winding waterway where the trees grew:

Of a fresh and following folded rank
Not spared, not one
That dandled a sandalled
Shadow that swam or sank
On meadow and river and wind-wandering weed-winding bank

In these lines from “The Wreck of the Deutschland,”the “Ws” make the wind:

Sitting Eastnortheast, in cursed quarter, the wind;
Wiry and white-fiery and whirlwind-swivelled snow
Spins to the widow-making unchilding, unfathering deeps.

At the second line of “God’s Grandeur” and the words “flame out,” I want to throw my arms up and on the word “shook foil,” make jazz hands. By the time I have heard
“have trod, have trod, have trod” and “seared,” “bleared,” and “smeared,” I feel generations of humanity using and abusing the earth.

The world is charged with the grandeur of God.
It will flame out, like shining from shook foil;
It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil
Crushed. Why do men then now not reck his rod?
Generations have trod, have trod, have trod;
And all is seared with trade; Bleared, smeared with toil;
And wears man’s smudge and shares man’s smell: the soil
Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.
And for all this, nature is never spent;
There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;
And though the last lights off the black West went
Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs —
Because the Holy Ghost over the bent
World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.

“Flame out” and “shook foil” are examples of what Hopkins called “sprung rhythm:” words that operate like a hemiola in music. They temporarily take you out of the meter, and then throw you back in again. The sprung rhythms, the alliterations and the juxtaposition of vivid nouns and adjectives minus a lot of little words that usually link a sentence together make the poems a great read-aloud experience, even when meaning eludes someone like me who has just entered the Hopkins novitiate.

Hopkins’ religious spots bothered me less as I got used to the “inscape,” the “thisness” (Hopkins’ words) of his language and rhythms and melodies. The “inscape” opens to the transcendence. When Hopkins says the Holy Ghost broods over the world, he is using the language of his religion to refer to something ineffable, yet available to everyone, no matter what word they use. Near the end of a poem called “As Kingfishers Catch Fire” is the line,

Christ plays in ten thousand places,
Lovely in limbs, and lovely in eyes not his
To the Father through the features of men’s faces.

The idea that Christ plays in ten thousand places suggests that Christ is himself a symbol of something that can’t be contained in the language of any religion or in language at all. Like Teilhard de Chardin’s “Christ Consciousness.” Teilhard was a Jesuit priest as well. You gotta watch those Jesuits.

“The Wreck of the Deutschland” made me a little nauseated. Its subtitle is “To the happy memory of five Franciscan nuns, exiles by the Falk Laws, drowned between midnight and morning of Dec 7, 1875.” The beginning seems to be the expression of what went on in the mind of one of the nuns as she was drowning and I found it hard to read. But one early line kept coming back: “Over again I feel thy finger and find thee.”

If I may be so reductive and if I may mix up all the metaphors and horrify Hopkins scholars, here is the Thisness that resonates with me:

The Christ Mind plays in ten thousand places.

Over again I feel thy finger and find thee.

Love over the bent
World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.