Jean Earle, the Wordsworths and Honesty

Dove Cottage

If metaphor works by transference of an ideal quality to a material object, metonymy works by transference between two material objects. There will always be some porosity between them but I think this is a good enough working definition of the difference between these two categories of figurative language. I want now to look at metonymy as an intermediate case between simile and metaphor.

In her poem ‘Honesty’, Jean Earle records her feelings about having been given a seed of the honesty flower collected from the garden of Dove Cottage, where Dorothy and William Wordsworth lived and which is now a museum. Jean Earle’s poetry characteristically displays a sophisticated use of the ‘naïve’ style. In her poem about the painting ‘Chasse au Tigre” by the ‘naïve’ painter Jean-Baptist Giraud (a detail from which appears on the cover of her Selected Poems) she says that, in viewing such paintings, “we look for truth”. Her ‘truth-seeking’ in the poem ‘Honesty’ clearly includes the ironic sub-text that the seed was dishonestly obtained. But it is the deeper ‘honesty’ of the main text that I want to discuss. Here is the poem:

Honesty

Always a ‘snapper-up of trifles’ –
Jars from a skip,
those rubber bands
Postmen let fly –
Some sad kitten –
After her trip, she brought me such a thing,
A seed of honesty
From Wordsworth’s garden.

Had she any idea
How it pleased me? Only a tourist
At Dove Cottage had she ever heard
Of William and Dorothy

Who may well have trodden the soil
This seed sprang from ….

Sowing the scarlet beans; or when Dorothy
Set herbs by moonlight. When she worked alone,
Grieving for William – who had taken joy
Of their life together into his stern hold
And gone for Mary.

Intense and ardent hearts! The seed sent up
A thin stalk, has managed a few flowers
Of a sharp magenta. She who stole me this
Finds it not worth the snatch,
Having no clue
How eloquent to me – yes, as a friend’s dress
Seen against time and light,
Its colour is.

The first thing to note here is that the specific reference back is not to the poems of William but to his sister Dorothy’s Grasmere Journal. The entry for 1 May 1802 begins: Rose not till ½ past 8 – a heavenly morning – as soon as breakfast was over we went into the garden & sowed the scarlet beans about the house”. This was less than six months before William’s marriage to Mary Hutchinson to which the poem also alludes. Dorothy makes several references to the progress of the beans throughout the summer, including “The scarlet beans want sticking. The garden is overrun with weeds”, which immediately follows the recording of letters sent to Annette Vallon and Mary Hutchinson. Arrangements for the wedding and the settling of William’s affairs with Annette dominate the Journal from this point on, as do images of domestic dislocation.

Already, then, it is apparent that there are rich layers of meaning in Jean Earle’s poem. Its apparently artless narrative form, shifting suddenly from the original subject to the Wordsworths and then abruptly to “sowing the scarlet beans” begins a process of metonymic transfer that grows in quiet intensity as the poem develops. There are a number of specific tensions between the brother and sister who shared Dove Cottage which become apparent at this time which I have discussed elsewhere (*) But Dorothy was re-assured by William’s poem ‘Farewell’ which she describes as his “going for Mary” poem. Seen in that light Jean Earle’s “gone for Mary” loses some of its potential force. The life they shared in what is now known as Dove Cottage is not jettisoned by his “Farewell thou little nook of mountain ground” but is left in suspension until both brother and sister will return with “one to whom ye will be dear”. Dorothy records writing out the poem for William on 29 May and then writing to Mary. Her entry concludes: “A sweet day. We nailed up the honeysuckle and hoed the scarlet beans.”

Jean Earle’s poem, then, is rooted in Dorothy’s Journal and the “dreams of flowers” evoked by William in the seclusion of Grasmere are imaginatively linked with the flower she has grown from a seed of honesty. The words of the brother and sister in 1802 resonate in the words of the modern poem which moves subtly backwards and forwards through time. The final change of direction occurs with the phrase “Intense and ardent hearts”, a reference back to the trio of William, Mary and Dorothy and the life they spent together. Jean Earle's own ‘honest’ response to the stolen seed and the “sharp magenta” flowers it produced brings the poem to a close. It is “eloquent” in expressing to her the colour of “a friend’s dress” and therefore familiar and suggestive of intimacy. The fact that it is “seen against time and light” must also affect our response here, particularly if we read it in the context of other poems by Jean Earle for whom light often suggests vision. Time adds depth to illumination. The seed provides a metonymic connection in the colour of its flower with the dress worn by Dorothy envisaged by Jean Earle as her friend.

The likelihood that the seed is a modern descendant of a plant growing there when the Wordsworths inhabited the cottage is remote. Jean Earle only says that they “may well have trodden the soil / The seed sprang from”. So what sort of honesty is attempted here by the poet who finds the magenta flowers “eloquent”? This takes us deeper into the poem’s ‘truth’. We can say that the flower represents the “intense and ardent hearts” of the Wordsworths, enabling the poet to engage with personal feelings of affiliation that the flower triggers. But, as suggestive as the idea of ‘re-presenting’ is, it doesn’t quite capture the organic link that the poet makes between herself and Dorothy. The colour the flower carries in embryo from its Dove Cottage source is “like a friend’s dress” because it brings the light of Dorothy’s life through time to the present. This is more than simile but less than metaphor which would, I suggest, lack honesty in this context. Metonymy here functions in linking the person who grew the flower with the person who wore the dress in a deeply ‘honest’ way in spite of the fact that the “eloquence” with which it does so may, like the way the seed was obtained, and – some might want to argue – the way the experience is constructed – be seen as ironically invoking dishonest practices. But there is no doubting the honesty of the poet in wishing to honour her friend in a poem the integrity of which is beyond question.

(*) 'Rich Layers of Meaning' in New Welsh Review No.33 Summer 1996 from which parts of this blog are adapted.

Simile and Real Presences

Her shirt was o' the grass-green silk

I suggested last time, a poet writing about a remote God needs to use metaphor to make that God present, but that simile was a more appropriate device for the presentation of what is perceived of as naturally present. In the medieval Welsh tale of Culhwch and Olwen, Olwen is said to have hair yellower than the flowers of the broom and cheeks redder than the reddest foxgloves. The description continues with further superlatives based on comparisons to specific natural things; “Whiter were her palms and her fingers than the shoots of the marsh trefoil from amidst the fine gravel of a welling spring….”.

Notice that metaphor is not needed here. The urge is not to make present what is other, but to suggest intensity or an amplification of what is already present or immanent in nature. Consider too that, in the same tale, what are clearly mythological deposits are represented matter-of-factly as naturally occurring: each of the ‘oldest animals’ has a tale to tell of his or her great antiquity, they are superlatively old and part of the natural structure of things. So, too, Mabon, Son of Modron, the great boar Trwyth and the giant Ysbadadden whose eyelids have to be raised up by forks. If it might be objected that these are folktale elements and can’t be compared to the presentation of a religious quest, we can look farther back in literary history.

In the Aeneid, Virgil says of Aeneas: “I fared out upon the high seas, an exile with my comrades and my son, with the little Gods of our home and great Gods of our race.” Venus (his mother) appears at key moments to tell him what he needs to know like any other woman but with a special aura that distinguishes her. Arriving at the future site of Rome, the God Tiber speaks to him from beneath reedy hair, a natural emanation of the place. Figurative language is largely absent from the presentation of the gods whether in general terms or when describing personal confrontations with them. It is often difficult to know how literally we are expected to take the manifestation but the experience of the gods is never the result of the forcing of the imaginative process via metaphor.

In Homer the gods come and go from the battlefield at Troy just as the heroes who fight their battles there. Is Poseidon the sea or a representation of the sea? Homer does not seem interested in the question and we could take it either way. Odysseus experiences Athene in the guise of Mentor : “Then Athene, daughter of Zeus, drew near them in the likeness of Mentor, in fashion and in voice” in which guise she had previously appeared to Telemachus. She also appears as a swallow sitting on a roof beam or communicates in any number of ways but, as Roberto Calasso puts it in The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony, “[Odysseus] knows he need not be waiting for the dazzling splendour of epiphany. Athenê may be a beggar or an old friend. She is the protecting presence.”

These gods are present in nature rather than supernatural. Even the Otherworld is a place that can be visited and from which visitations can occur. Not only is the figurative language of metaphor not needed to realise them, neither is the device of allegory anywhere apparent. These beings stand for themselves rather than another plane of existence or representation. In a polytheistic world-view the gods are each manifest in their own right, not as aspects of one God or Goddess. They don’t depend on notions of allegorical transference or on metaphor as the only way of speaking adequately about them. Their superlative qualities may therefore be described by simile. They are like this but exceed even the best of that. The ‘worshipper’ does not look to enter another plane of being or a supernatural realm to catch a glimpse of them, though they might have their existence in parallel or time-shifted dimensions. Faery, though it exists alongside or at some oblique angle to our own life, is not a different dimension entirely to our own reality. Thomas of Ercildoune is carried off there by a lady on a white horse in the ‘Ballad of True Thomas’. Such stories are many. The ‘Spirit World’ is immanent in the material world and infuses its daily life.

[next time I want to talk about metonymy]

R.S. Thomas : Metaphor and Simile

R S Thomas

When R.S. Thomas makes one of the voices in his radio poem ‘The Minister’ utter the words “Oh but God is in the throat of a bird”, is he speaking metaphorically (the bird as the figurative voice of God in nature), analogically (the poet hears the bird and compares his appreciation of this natural sound to his yearning for God) or literally (he actually hears God speaking through the bird)? A silly question? Perhaps. Figurative language often crosses the boundaries of such categories as metaphor and simile (not to mention their respective sub-classes) and the poet could well be said to mean something of all three. But the question is worth asking if only to tease out both the porosities in usage and the integrity of definition in these tropes.

Here is a complete poem by R. S. Thomas:

The Moor

It was like a church to me.
I entered it on soft foot,
Breath held like a cap in the hand.
It was quiet.
What God there was made himself felt,
Not listened to, in clean colours
That brought a moistening of the eye,
In a movement of the wind over grass.

There were no prayers said. But stillness
Of the heart’s passions – that was praise
Enough; and the mind’s cession
Of its kingdom. I walked on,
Simple and poor, while the air crumbled
And broke on me generously as bread.

The poem begins with a simile: “like a church” and continues with another: “like a cap in the hand”. The first is a straightforward comparison; the second seems to be stretching towards metaphor. But always the poem remains close to natural imagery. The moistening of the eye at first seems sentimental, but is then explained by the wind. In spite of the moor being like a church, the poem goes on to list various ways in which it is not like a church. By the final line the transition from simile to metaphor is complete. The elision of ‘as’ in “[as] generously as bread” seems to underline this.

This movement from simile to metaphor is often a movement from direct perception of nature to the transformation of this by the imagination. Before illustrating the point further it is worth noting several poems by Thomas (himself an Anglican priest) in which churches themselves feature. Typically, here, the poet confronts a God that does not make himself felt. The church is a far lonelier place than the moor. It is a “stone trap” for God than cannot contain him (‘The Empty Church’). In the poem ‘In Church’ he asks is it a place where “God hides from my searching?” The church walls are “the hard ribs / Of a body that our prayers have failed to animate”. Here the poet finds himself “nailing his questions / One by one to an untenanted cross”. An actual plain cross that he is looking at, or a metaphorically empty one? Well, both.

This is the dominant theme of many of the ‘empty church’ poems. Religion is a search for a presence which is defined by its absence:

…..for religion
Is like that. There are times
When a black frost is upon
One’s whole being, and the heart
In its bone belfry hangs and is dumb.

(The Belfry)

But the same poem hopes that prayers may be “… warm rain / That brings the sun and afterwards flowers”. The natural imagery is significant. In another poem, silent kneeling leads to a vision of

….. love in a dark crown
Of thorns blazing, and a winter tree
Golden with fruit of a man’s body.

(In a Country Church)

Here the startling image, combining natural and supernatural elements, seems to transcend the direct perception of nature (though he might be looking at a stained glass window or a gilded cross). This cross is tenanted, but its suffering body is metaphorically transformed by the natural image of fruit. Notice, too, that the balanced oppositions “dark … blazing”, “winter tree … fruit” are transformative, showing the process of the imaginative faculty.

These examples all come from fairly early in Thomas’s long career as a poet. Later his speculations about the nature and character of God became more metaphysical. But nature – or Nature – remained at the heart of his personal experience of divinity. In ‘A Thicket in Lleyn’ he stands “caged” while birds around him are free. He is “netted …in their shadows” as if, even beyond the bounds of the church, he also is caught in the trap for God that it sets. But then he proposes an escape:

Navigate by such stars as are not
leaves falling from life’s deciduous
tree, but spray from the fountain
of the imagination, endlessly
replenishing itself out of its own waters.

For Thomas, like Coleridge, it is the imagination that creates God from natural imagery. Life’s tree is “deciduous”; what is sought is eternal. This seems to me a particular consequence of apprehending a remote God through nature. Its dominant mode is metaphor. Simile, and some other intermediate tropes such as metonymy, seems better suited to the expression of presence which might be felt by one who perceives gods as immanent in nature. But that is a discussion for another time.