Gerard Manley Hopkins - Against the Inner Darkness

I wake and feel the fell of dark, not day.
What hours, O what black hours we have spent
This night ! what sights you, heart, saw ; ways you went!
And more must, in yet longer light's delay.

With witness I speak this. But where I say
Hours I mean years, mean life. And my lament
Is cries countless, cries like dead letters sent
To dearest him that lives alas ! away.

I am gall, I am heartburn. God's most deep decree
Bitter would have me taste: my taste was me;
Bones built in me, flesh filled, blood brimmed the curse.

Selfyeast of spirit a dull dough sours. I see
The lost are like this, and their scourge to be
As I am mine, their sweating selves; but worse.



"No Worst"

No worst, there is none. Pitched past pitch of grief,
More pangs will, schooled at forepangs, wilder wring.
Comforter, where, where is your comforting?
.... Life death does end and each day dies with sleep.




"Carrion Comfort"

Not, I'll not, carrion comfort, Despair, not feast on thee;
Not untwist slack they may be these last strands of man
In me or, most weary, cry I can no more. I can.
Can something, hope, wish day come, not choose not to be.

But ah, but O thou terrible, why wouldst thou rude on me
Thy wring-world right foot rock ? lay a lionlimb against
me scan?
With darksome devouring eyes my bruised bones? and fan,
O in turns of tempest, me heaped there ; me frantic to
avoid thee and flee ?

Why? That my chaff might fly ; my grain lie, sheer and clear.
Nay in all that toil, that coil, since (seems)! kissed the rod,
Hand rather, my heart lo! lapped strength, stole joy,
would laugh, cheer.
Cheer whom though? the hero whose heaven-handling
flung me, foot trod
Me? or me that fought him ? which one ? is it each one?
That night, that year
Of now done darkness I wretch lay wrestling with (my
God) my God.

Hart Crane: Simply Making Something Beautiful

"... try to imagine working for the pure love of simply making something beautiful, - something that maybe can't be sold or used to help sell anything else, but that is simply a communication between man and man, a bond of understanding and human enlightenment - which is what real work is.... I only ask to leave behind me something that the future may find valuable... I shall make every sacrifice toward that end." Hart Crane in a letter to Clarence Arthur Crane (his father) January 12, 1924.
Hart Crane Complete Poems & Selected Letters. (Library of America Press, 2007)

Emily Dickinson - Profound Interiority

For many, all too many, there lingers a false perception of Emily Dickinson as a wall-flower poet - of quaintness and prettiness - of flowers and dainty things. Harold Bloom is far more accurate when he wrote in the introduction to the American Religious Poems (Library of America), "Her conceptual originality surpassed even theirs [John Milton and William Blake], and is dwarfed only by Shakespeare's, of all poets in the language." Despite the breadth for her work, she remains best known for poems like:

I'm Nobody! Who are you?
Are you - Nobody - Too?
Then there's a pair of us!
Don't tell! they'd advertise - you know!

How dreary - to be - Somebody!
How public - like a Frog -
To tell one's name - the livelong June -
To an admiring Bog!

This is an amazing poem, unfortunately we read it so often in our basic education and it is so often represented as the exemplar Dickinson poem we forget its profundity. If we delve deeper into her amazing body of work we find poems of the soul and intellect that express the full range of human experience. I have regularly referred her poems to a niece of mine who fancies herself to be 'edgy'. She has dismissively brushed off this suggestion with a condescending 'her, I don't think so." Poets as different as Hart Crane, Paul Celan and Eugenio Montale have looked to her as a great, profound poet (both Celan and Montale translated her work). How anyone could not perceive her stature as a major poet is a failure of the American Educational / Cultural system, but also of the American religious / contemplative arena which responds with ambivalence to her religious and intellectual independence.
Emily Dickinson is the American contemplative par excellence. I offer as proof of her depth the follow poem of darkness and understanding:

There is a pain - so utter -
It swallows substance up -
Then covers the Abyss with Trance -
So Memory can step
Around - across - upon it -
As one within a Swoon -
Goes safely - where an open eye -
Would drop Him - Bone by Bone.

If anyone can read this and think that she is anything other than the American poet of Contemplation, then they should stop reading poetry altogether. She should be read as many read St Teresa of Avila or St John of the Cross & as many read Auden, Eliot, Milton & Blake. Pick-up her work, stay with each poem, linger over it. I wish that each poem was printed only one per page to aid the lazy reader who might be tempted to fly through her work as if it were prose. She requires time, meditation and contemplation, and rewards the disciplined who find in her a poet of profound interiority.

Emily Dickinson, The Poems of Emily Dickinson: Reading Edition. Ed. R.W. Franklin (Belkap Press, 1999)
American Religious Poems: An Anthology. Ed. Harold Bloom (Library of American, 2006)
Alfred Habegger, My Wars Are Laid Away in Books: The Life of Emily Dickinson. (Random House, 2001). [Habegger has an excellent discussion of the discovered albumen photograph of the more mature Emily Dickinson.]

The Notebooks of Nathaniel Hawthorne

Reading Nathaniel Hawthorne's Notebooks is a very different experience than reading those of Henry James, Steinbeck, Thomas Mann (Diaries), Robert Musil or even those published by Reynolds Price. Their self-mannered awareness that the future will prize their "private" thoughts and ideas is completely absent from Hawthorne. These were truly private workbooks. Hawthorne writes in full voice as someone for whom communication is vital and difficult. Open this work anywhere and read what sounds like the inner voice of someone practiced at concealing his thoughts publicly. Expansive, suggestive, and illuminating for all those who would like to know more of the deep thought and artfulness that went into his major works.

Some of his working ideas for stories sound absolutely modern. One story idea develops the possibility of having two men talking and discussing their difficulties while waiting and waiting for someone who never comes. They don't know what to do, so they continue to wait and discussing the one who never comes. Sound familar? A little like "Waiting for Godot"? If you love great literature and if you love Hawthorne, then run to a library / order it from Amazon.com / but get a copy of this magnificent book and stay with it. It will stay with you.

Nathaniel Hawthorne, Centenary Ed. Works Nathaniel Hawthorne: Vol. VIII, The American Notebooks.

Hawthorne, Hester and the Blessed Virgin Mary

While re-reading Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter, a novel I first read as a 14 year old, I was struck by the many references to Hester as a 'saint', 'sister of mercy' type along the lines of the Virgin Mary. Hawthorne writes,

"Hester's nature showed itself warm and rich: a well-spring of human tenderness, unfailing to every real demand, and inexhaustible by the largest. Her breast, with its badge of shame, was but the softer pillow for the head that needed one. She was self-ordained a Sister of Mercy; or, we may rather say, the world's heavy hand had so ordained her, when neither the world nor she looked forward to this result. The letter was the symbol of her calling." (Scarlet Letter, p. 257)

and again, Rev. Dimmsdale call out to Hester,

"O Hester, thou art my better angel!" (Scarlet Letter, p. 292)

"... the scarlet letter had the effect of the cross on a nun's bosom. It imparted to the wearer a kind of sacredness." (Scarlet Letter, p. 258)

These among the many other references (particularly in the concluding paragraphs were Hester's thoughts of a Prophetess, an angel and apostle, of a "new relation between man and woman on a surer ground of mutual happiness" shows her self-consciousness sacred aspect) recount the saintly or divine aspect of Hester and invites the reader to speculate on how Salem would have received Mary whose pregnancy was conceived outside of wedlock and how Joseph would have responded had he been placed on the judgment block of Puritanical Society.

Mary, the mother of Jesus, might have been forced to wear a 'F' (fornicator) had she been transplanted to 17th Century Salem as has Hester/ Jesus' earliest memories could have been of the Salem's women urging for a more severe punishment (death) on both Mary and Joseph (an odd negative of the plan of Herod). Instead another time called her Theotokos, mother of God. Perhaps as Hawthorne is without challenge as the first American artist - novelist, Hester is our mother of virtue, our mother of charity - embodying a new virtue that we have yet to follow.

Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter. From Nathaniel Hawthorne: Collected Novels (Library of America)

"Mercy clothed in light" - Poetry of Jane Kenyon

"Notes from the Other Side"

I divested myself of despair
and fear when I came here.

Now there is no more catching
one's own eye in the mirror,

there are no bad books, no plastic,
no insurance premiums, and of course

no illness. Contrition
does not exist, nor gnashing

of teeth. No one howls as the first
clod of earth hits the casket.

The poor we no longer have with us.
Our calm hearts strike only the hour,

and God, as promised, proves
to be mercy clothed in light.

Jane Kenyon
Collected Poems (Graywolf Press: St Paul Minnesota, 2005)