That cry in the night
can be a train whistle,
an owl,
or curlew
flying inland in the evening –
the meaning is always the same;
a door swings open
and lets the cold wind in.
 | |||
| Samuel Palmer: The Lonely Tower, Etching, 1878-79. |
You’ll see that, like Samuel Palmer, I’ve stolen a snippet of John Milton for my own ends . . . indeed, when isolated, it’s a powerful oxymoron. Since my schooldays, aged fourteen, the bullion dross of Paradise Lost has never ceased to exemplify a crisp declamatory end-stopped line, hammered into the mind like a coffin nail.
Palmer’s image of spiritual loneliness – fear of abandonment by a deity – was inspired by Milton’s lines in Il Penseroso :
Or let my lamp at midnight hour,
Be seen in some high lonely tow’r,
Palmer’s comments on the dark night of the soul summoned up by The Lonely Tower may be read in this fragment, tentatively identifying the source of his etching :
Here poetic loneliness has been attempted; not the loneliness of a desert, but a secluded spot in a genial, pastoral country, enriched also by antique relics, such as those so-called ‘Druidic stones’. The constellation of the ‘Bear’ may help to explain that the building is the tower of Il Penseroso. Two shepherds, watching their flocks, speak together of the mysterious light above them.
However, we can never be certain that Palmer was not also conversant with Matthew Arnold’s own long dark night of the soul, Dover Beach (1867), when published a decade earlier. (Dover Beach, of course, was published less than a decade after Origin of Species, 1859.)
Challenged in their lifetime by post-Darwinism’s retreating ‘Sea of Faith’, both Palmer-the-mystic and Arnold-the-doubter in these figurations attempted through their art each an allegorical exegesis of their Victorian generation’s conflicts of doubt as Science warred with Church for supremacy in the race to have the last word on defining the human condition . . . predestined versus evolved by natural selection.
Both worshippers at the altar of Milton (author of Eikonoklastes), they saw the contradictions thrown up by the Spirit of the Age resolved, I believe, by Milton’s own astonishing iconoclasm in characterising the sardonic Arch Fiend as altogether more appealing than the Great Architect.
After all, to the true artist, the irresolution of a paradox is the power of its mystery. One never solves a mystery or it would no longer remain a mystery. One enters a mystery.
For Milton to challenge his faith by daring to banish Jove’s ‘Architect’ from Paradise – the fallen angel who had ‘built in Heaven high Towers’ – then send him ‘headlong’ to the mines of the Underworld to the dig out ‘ribs of gold’ and, with ‘his industrious crew’, to cast in foundries the ‘massy Ore’, scum the ‘bullion dross’, and thence to ‘build in Hell’ a palace of ‘fretted Gold’, as a tribute to the Great Adversary to outrival the Kingdom of the Creator, was beyond audacious.
For those of us whose creed is no more and no less than belief in the unbearable reality of being, which existentialists call enargeia, the contrarian impulse to ‘make a Heaven of Hell, a Hell of Heaven’ is a casuistic paradox that, sophistry notwithstanding, endorses that more modest thing, the audacity of Art.
See alsoMiss Emily Dickinson Communes with the Great Dictator Mr John Milton . . . https://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.com/2019/10/miss-emily-dickinson-communes-with.html
That space the Evil One abstracted . . .
https://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.com/2018/05/that-space-evil-one-abstracted-and.html
and
Ignoble Retreat at the Edge where Earth and Firmament meet . . . https://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.com/2020/02/ignoble-retreat-at-edge-where-earth-and.html
Capital murder? Yes. In two senses.
I refer to the notorious forgery of an Emily Dickinson poem fabricated by the homicidal fraudster and Mormon iconoclast, Mark Hofmann, whose inspired fakery – conceived to dupe academia – first surfaced in a catalogue of Fine Books and Manuscripts mailed to collectors by a major international auction house in 1997. Reportedly, the manuscript was sold for $21,000.
 |
Left: Emily’s true pencilled script. (Circa her final decade.) Right: Mark Hofmann’s forgery with line-breaks defined by width of Emily Dickinson’s folded, lined, fascicle-style paper. (Facing page, a graphologist belatedly denounces Forgery.) |
Surely – everyone agrees – a defining characteristic of Dickinson’s verse is the metonymic capitalisation of her motifs . . . they are the signature feature of her rhetorical devices.
So . . . hang on!
Blooper 1: Where’s the capitalised ‘H’ for His deeds? ‘Reverential capitalisation’ is a scriptural convention no devout 19th Century versifier would be without.
Blooper 2: As to the familiar capitalised Dickinsonian metonyms, where is the consistency that would balance the figuration of Life and Death as Sun and Snow?
I suspect that Emily lived through a period of reappraisal as to personified nouns. I have always considered it curious that the four seasons in our language remain uncapitalised. Surely spring, when personified, takes a capital? And is feminine? (Emily sees Grass as Nature deserving of a feminine possessive determiner and pronoun . . . the Wind is a capitalised male, a metonym for God: The Wind does not require the Grass / To answer—Wherefore when He pass / She cannot keep Her place.)
Yes, the forger’s writing-paper was manufactured in Boston most probably in 1871, when Emily was in her forties.
Yes, Emily often wrote in pencil (and, fortunately for forgers, pencil lead cannot be forensically dated).
Yes, the forger’s script replicated the hand of a poetess no longer cursive in her febrile latter years whose decline saw each character printed separately like that of a child. Nevertheless, there is a crudity in the hesitant execution that betrays the faker’s ineptitude. (As an apparent holograph – especially the stumbled signing of her given name – the whole thing seems insincere.)
Here is an extract from the fictional Theresa Ollivante’s fictional novel, An Auroral Stain. . .
An Auroral Stain was conceived as a postbellum detective story and built on the fictitious premise of a private investigation by a housebound Emily Dickinson intent to solve the mystery of a serving-woman’s suspicious death, ably assisted by Maggie, her faithful Irish maid; my central conceit has the young colleen and her phobic mistress sleuthing as a sort of composite Massachusite Nancy Drew.
In those early months, I wrote most of the core passages of An Auroral Stain.
Was it the muffled chiming of the bells from those Irishtown churches on each street corner or the sheer drudgery of my austere day-to-day routines that I found conducive to the mapping of the febrile psyche of the Belle of Amherst and the quaint notions of her resourceful Irish maid?
Sometimes I would hear the faint strains of a fiddle diddlydeeing and it was as if the once-hidden roots of a deep-set tree were exposed raw above ground.
Anyhow, the brogue of those Irishtown denizens must have still been ringing in my ears when I wrote:
“A sneeze as long as Nebuchadnezzar!” Maggie scolded as she took her mistress’s wet cape and hat. The maid had been kneeling on the homestead veranda, whitewashing a garden bench in a curious atavistic ritual, as if to welcome a long-lost relation to a hooley. She took Emily by the elbow and led her, half-fainting, to her room. That night she attended her mistress in her delirium, hearing her call out strange imprecations: “Refuse the mediciners, damn you! Why are our people backslidden!” So wild and convulsed was her expression she was raving a jeremiad. “There is no medicine against death!” she gasped. “Take heed, girl, of the promise of a man, for it will run like a crab!” “By the cross,” Maggie exclaimed, “there is fey blood i’ ye’re head! The poor darlin’s brain’s on fire and full of proclamations!”
In my notes to my novel I encoded “Emily” as “Em Dash,” both on account of her mercurial nature and of her all-pervasive typographical separatrices that signal the places where you should catch your breath before resuming her spare end-stopped verses.
•
 |
| David’s Lyre Music for Jonathan The greatest beauty is unenjoyed. On fruit ungarnered from the stem falls dew from dawns as unalloyed as lips unkissed whose savage charm is stainlessly uncharactered by the corruptibility of self regard. Notes: Visual/tactile evidence. Printed letterhead (Cobalt Blue): Cadogan Hotel, Sloane Street. (Twice folded from size 22cm width x 17.6cm height.) Holograph letter superscribed above left margin with: Saturday April 6/ For Charles Matthews/Ah! Lest I speak it’s [sic] name! [Presumed date: April 1895.] Verse: David’s Lyre Music for Jonathan. Signature: Truly yours/Oscar Wilde. [Note: Charles Mathews, with one ‘t’, was the third member of Wilde’s defence counsel.] The two minor errors are plausible failings of a cavalier orthographer. The type of urgent, flying cursive handwriting of Wilde’s letters at the time of his trials, beseeching loans from friends, is absent in the Cadogan Hotel Letter, suggesting that at the time of his arrest (April 6 1895), Wilde had composed himself in contemplation of his fate. |
. . .
