Art is My Religion

Month: May 2015

  • Sunday Sonnet – 31 May 2015

    lovely Will

    The Spring morning breaks bright and beautiful here in Southern Wisconsin, and so it seems a perfect time to enjoy Shakespeare’s Sonnet 33, which features a complex metaphor about the shining sun–but that sun’s not always what it seems: 

    33

    Full many a glorious morning have I seen
    Flatter the mountain-tops with sovereign eye,
    Kissing with golden face the meadows green,
    Gilding pale streams with heavenly alchemy;
    Anon permit the basest clouds to ride
    With ugly rack on his celestial face,
    And from the forlorn world his visage hide,
    Stealing unseen to west with this disgrace:
    Even so my sun one early morn did shine
    With all triumphant splendor on my brow;
    But out, alack! he was but one hour mine;
    The region cloud hath mask’d him from me now.
    Yet him for this my love no whit disdaineth;
    Suns of the world may stain when heaven’s sun staineth.

    Despite the poem’s bright opening, this verse is mournful. Apparently the Young Man had rejected the Poet. This sonnet, and the ones following, seem to relate to a specific episode of genuine grief, casting an autobiographical aspect to the Sonnets. These episodes don’t hold the structural majesty of a Hamlet or an Othello, but seem to muddy through a betrayal, hurt feelings, and ambivalent (but beautifully poetic) metaphoric imagery. 

    Anyhow, what a splendid, lovely image: the rising sun beautifies the mountains and meadows, brightens the streams, only to be blotted out by a cloud, so that the sun must sneak away into sunset.   Likewise, the Young Man, a shining beauty, has let something blot his beauty–betraying himself and the Poet.   

    The image is of William Shakespeare, the recently rediscovered ‘Cobbe Family’ portrait. Scholars suppose this anonymous portrait of the Bard was commissioned later in his life–after Will had achieved fame–yet was painted as a representation of how Will might’ve looked in his younger years, when he was first storming the London stage.

  • Sunday Sonnet – 24 May 2015

    Elizabeth_I_(Armada_Portrait)

    Shakespeare’s 154 Sonnets are famous and enduring for many reasons: their beauty; their poetic genius of lyricism and form; their originality and refusal to bend to conventions, whether Elizabethan or modern; the fact that some of them express love for a man, and other express love for an arguably unlovable woman. But what also makes these great are their varied metaphors. One of the most unlikely set are Sonnets 123 and 124, which use the world of politics and state to make their case. 124 is full of politics. 

    124

    If my dear love were but the child of state,
    It might for Fortune’s bastard be unfather’d’
    As subject to Time’s love or to Time’s hate,
    Weeds among weeds, or flowers with flowers gather’d.
    No, it was builded far from accident;
    It suffers not in smiling pomp, nor falls
    Under the blow of thralled discontent,
    Whereto the inviting time our fashion calls:
    It fears not policy, that heretic,
    Which works on leases of short-number’d hours,
    But all alone stands hugely politic,
    That it nor grows with heat nor drowns with showers.
    To this I witness call the fools of time,
    Which die for goodness, who have lived for crime. 

    Few of us today are experts in Elizabethan history and politics. Reading this poem simply for its argument–that love is greater than all human-created conventions or ideals–is evident enough. But scholars and historians have, for centuries, tried to parse out all of the specific political references. In the hands of a lesser poet, such references might cripple the work, forever rendering it anachronistic. But with Shakespeare, these references also work in a general sense. Some examples: 

    ‘were but the child of state’: if you were something created only for profit or power (meaning, but you, dear love, are not)

    ‘for Fortune’s bastard be unfather’d’: the political world of Europe was littered with bastards of royal birth (meaning, but your love is true born)

    ‘it suffers not in smiling pomp’; the falseness of Courtly and political life (meaning, but your love shows true)

    ‘But all alone stands hugely politic’: politics dictate what’s important at the moment (meaning, but your love stands beyond the rage or worry of the moment) 

    This sonnet is full of many more examples. 

    So even today, any person woefully ignorant of Elizabethan goings-on can listen to or read Shakespeare’s great sonnets and come away with a sense of wonder, enlightenment and the sonnet’s central message: that love conquers time and anything man can build.

    The image is of the prevailing head of state for most of Shakespeare’s life, Queen Elizabeth. The artist is uncertain, but what is certain is that this painting was commissioned by the state as political propaganda after Elizabeth’s defeat of the Armanda.  

  • Friday’s Maniacal Poe Quote – 22 May 2015

    lionizing

    Though known for horror, mysteries, poetry and criticism, Poe also wrote a series of humorous or satirical short stories. They have not aged well; for the most part, they are awful. Here is an excerpt from one of them, ‘Lionizing’, considered to be less awful than most. The story is about a fantastic nose:  

    There was myself. I spoke of myself;—of myself, of myself, of myself;—of Nosology, of my pamphlet, and of myself. I turned up my nose, and I spoke of myself.

    “Marvellous clever man!” said the Prince.

    “Superb!” said his guests:—and next morning her Grace of Bless-my-Soul paid me a visit.

    “Will you go to Almack’s, pretty creature?” she said, tapping me under the chin.

    “Upon honor,” said I.

    “Nose and all?” she asked.

    “As I live,” I replied.

    “Here then is a card, my life. Shall I say you will be there?”

    “Dear Duchess, with all my heart.”

    “Pshaw, no!—but with all your nose?”

    –from ‘Lionizing’ (1835)

    This is one of the best passages from the story, mildly entertaining for its absurd banter. But the repetitive wordplay soon grows tiresome. 

    Part morality tale, part bad joke with a really long set-up, part satire, this tale and others like were popular in the day. In this particular tale Poe satirizes a couple of other writers of the day; today no one remembers them, and any clever conceits are lost on the modern reader.   And so while my posts about Poe usually encourage to go back and read his stuff, today I’m not. Today I’d just like everyone to know that Poe had many interests and many pursuits. Thank goodness his humorous writing wasn’t the only one, or he wouldn’t be remembered today.

    The image is from illustrator Harry Clarke, circa 1933. Clarke actually created an illustration for this story in a collection of Poe’s tales. Here you can see a gentleman examining the narrator’s nose.

  • Hump Day Shakespearean Quote – 20 May 2015

    merchant_of_venice13

    There’s a growing circle of folks in the world who are starting to regard the canon of Shakespeare’s works to be the greatest and most eloquent repository on how humans should live their lives. That is: what makes us human? And what precepts should guide our hearts and minds–and the way we treat others? One great example of this is Portia’s speech to Shylock on the merits of mercy:

    Portia

    The quality of mercy is not strain’d, 
    It droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven 
    Upon the place beneath: it is twice blest; 
    It blesseth him that gives and him that takes: 
    ‘Tis mightiest in the mightiest: it becomes 
    The throned monarch better than his crown; 
    His sceptre shows the force of temporal power, 
    The attribute to awe and majesty, 
    Wherein doth sit the dread and fear of kings;
    But mercy is above this sceptred sway; 
    It is enthroned in the hearts of kings, 
    It is an attribute to God himself; 
    And earthly power doth then show likest God’s
    When mercy seasons justice. Therefore, Jew, 
    Though justice be thy plea, consider this, 
    That, in the course of justice, none of us 
    Should see salvation: we do pray for mercy; 
    And that same prayer doth teach us all to render
    The deeds of mercy. I have spoke thus much 
    To mitigate the justice of thy plea; 
    Which if thou follow, this strict court of Venice 
    Must needs give sentence ‘gainst the merchant there. 

    –from The Merchant of Venice, Act IV, Scene i 

    Beyond its eloquence and poetic beauty, this speech is fascinating because Shakespeare puts this very learned and moral examination of the qualities of mercy on the lips of a woman.  

    As we know from many of my past posts, women were regarded as chattel in Elizabethan England. And while Shakespeare’s treatment of women in his plays was an evolving process–from bigoted to enlightened–The Merchant of Venice comes relatively early in Shakespeare’s career. Moreover, Portia’s great speech is delivered when she is disguised as a man. It’s as if no other character in the play would give truck to such revelatory words unless they were spoken from the mouth of…a man. 

    Read the speech again now: its truths are as valid today as they were over 400 years ago. 

    The image comes from the 2004 film of The Merchant of Venice, with the great Lynn Collins as the clever–and morally astute–Portia.

  • Sunday Sonnet – 17 May 2015

    anne-hathaway2

    Today’s installment in the Dark Lady sequence of sonnets is rather an ugly one, and I mean that in more ways than one.

    137

    Thou blind fool, Love, what dost thou to mine eyes,
    That they behold, and see not what they see?
    They know what beauty is, see where it lies,
    Yet what the best is take the worst to be.
    If eyes corrupt by over-partial looks
    Be anchor’d in the bay where all men ride,
    Why of eyes’ falsehood hast thou forged hooks,
    Whereto the judgment of my heart is tied?
    Why should my heart think that a several plot
    Which my heart knows the wide world’s common place?
    Or mine eyes seeing this, say this is not,
    To put fair truth upon so foul a face?
    In things right true my heart and eyes have erred,
    And to this false plague are they now transferr’d.

    As Shakespeare did with so many of his sonnets–both to the Young Man and the Dark Lady–he turns the Petrarchan Ideal of Romantic Love on its head: he doesn’t flatter his love, rather he tells her (or him in the case of the Young Man), and the entire world, the truth.

    The truth in Sonnet 137 is that the Poet regards the Dark Lady as an unfaithful tramp; yet still he loves her.   Unfortunately, this misogynistic meme had continued to this very day, over four centuries later, in so much of our Blues and Rock ‘n’ Roll. I can forgive Shakespeare for this, since he a) was largely a product of his time and b) he was the first writer in Western Literature to create thoroughly realistic and empathic female characters–especially in his later plays. And so he grew into a kind of gender enlightenment.

    But back to Sonnet 137. The Poet uses some entertaining imagery to describe how Love has blinded him to his lady’s faults:

    • ‘Be anchored in the bay were all men ride’: a scathing condemnation of the Dark Lady’s promiscuity.
    • ‘Which my heart knows the wide world’s common place’: that which my heart loves is available to the whole world for the taking.
    • The vicious couplet: ‘In things true my heart and eyes have erred, / And to this false plague are they now transferred’: My eyes and heart have been fooled; for they love a lying and diseased woman.

    So the next time your lover betrays you (be they male, female, the same gender as you or different), instead of sending them a Sam Smith song, send them this sonnet.

    The image is reputed to be of Shakespeare’s wife, Anne Hathaway (though we can never really know), whom Shakespeare probably betrayed often. But back in those days, outside the realm of Petrarchan poetry, marriages were more of a practical contract than any kind of romantic or sexual hook-up.

  • Friday’s Maniacal Poe Quote – 15 May 2015

    The_Island_of_the_Fay

    Poe was known for more than horror, the grotesque or the invention of the modern detective: he also wrote a collection of fanciful musings, mournful stories about mysticism, lost islands, lost races, lovely and frail women who tragically die long before their time. ‘The Island of the Fay’ is one such yarn:

    She stood erect in a singularly fragile canoe, and urged it with the mere phantom of an oar. While within the influence of the lingering sunbeams, her attitude seemed indicative of joy—but sorrow deformed it as she passed within the shade. Slowly she glided along, and at length rounded the islet and re-entered the region of light. “The revolution which has just been made by the Fay,” continued I, musingly, “is the cycle of the brief year of her life. She has floated through her winter and through her summer. She is a year nearer unto Death; for I did not fail to see that, as she came into the shade, her shadow fell from her, and was swallowed up in the dark water, making its blackness more black.” 

    –from ‘The Island of the Fay’ (1841) 

    Make no mistake; though this Fay is a fairy, an otherworldly creature, she is a woman, and as such is part of one of Poe’s favorite memes: ‘The death of a beautiful woman is the most poetical thing in the world.’   

    The narrator of this story watches the island from a distance, and watches the Fay circle her boat round and round about the isle, becoming more and more faint and insubstantial, until she mournfully paddles herself toward oblivion and death. 

    The story, first published in Graham’s in 1841, begins as an essay, but really is another short story. If you read this tale, stick with it; the first couple of pages are dry, incomprehensible mysticism crap. But the prose evolves into some of the most beautifully poetic language Poe ever put to pen. 

    The image comes from an uncertain origin. It appeared in Graham’s Magazine in 1841, and was intended to accompany Poe’s story.   The caption to the engraving read ‘Engraved for Graham’s Magazine from an Original by Martin’, but it seems the painting is actually dated to 1819. So perhaps Poe wrote the tale based on the painting….

  • Hump Day Shakespearean Quote – 13 May 2015

    Macbeth

    One of the remarkable things about Shakespeare was how sublimely eloquent he could make his villains. And some of his villains weren’t very lovable. Take Macbeth for instance: plotter, mass-murderer, arguably a coward, and certainly overshadowed by the powerful presence of his wife, Lady Macbeth. And yet, when his wife dies, he gives one the greatest soliloquys ever put to pen: 

    She should have died hereafter;
    There would have been a time for such a word.
    — To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow,
    Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,
    To the last syllable of recorded time;
    And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
    The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!
    Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player
    That struts and frets his hour upon the stage
    And then is heard no more. It is a tale
    Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury
    Signifying nothing. 

    —Macbeth, Act V, Scene v 

    Macbeth has just found out Lady Macbeth is dead. And so comes this famous and astonishing speech, so eloquent, that many of its parts have been borrowed, copied and repeated to this very day.   

    The speech is a striking contemplation about the futility of life. Lady Macbeth? She would’ve died anyway. Such tragedies have marched on for ever. Our time on the stage and our struggles are meaningless! Everything is brief. And all our struggles and passions? They signify nothing. 

    Breathtaking nihilism.   

    The images comes from Orson Welles’ 1948 crazed and twisted film version of the Scottish play. It’s worth a view.

  • Hump Day Shakespearean Quote – 06 May 2015

    DKingJohn-4035

    One of my favorite Shakespearean speeches isn’t very famous.

    CONSTANCE

    Thou art not holy to belie me so;
    I am not mad: this hair I tear is mine;
    My name is Constance; I was Geffrey’s wife;
    Young Arthur is my son, and he is lost:
    I am not mad: I would to heaven I were!
    For then, ’tis like I should forget myself:
    O, if I could, what grief should I forget!
    Preach some philosophy to make me mad,
    And thou shalt be canonized, cardinal;
    For being not mad but sensible of grief,
    My reasonable part produces reason
    How I may be deliver’d of these woes,
    And teaches me to kill or hang myself:
    If I were mad, I should forget my son,
    Or madly think a babe of clouts were he:
    I am not mad; too well, too well I feel
    The different plague of each calamity. 

    –from King John, Act III Scene iv 

    King John’s an early play, when the Bard had not fully perfected the soliloquy, and when his ideas and notions on women had not yet fully matured. Shakespeare was writing in a very patriarchal society where women couldn’t own property and certainly couldn’t perform on stage.

    Despite all that, Shakespeare breaths a realistic and searing grief into the character of Constance–the heartbreaking despair over the loss of her child.   

    How did Shakespeare understand all this? His own son, Hamnet, who did at the age of 11, we’re pretty sure was still alive when this play was written. Beyond Shakespeare’s genius with language and craft, he exhibited a deep empathy and emotive power on the page, showing he would imagine the hearts of beings–that is, females–who some Elizabethans believed did not even have souls.   

    The image comes from a Utah Shakespeare Festival’s production of King John, with Melinda Pfundstein as the beleaguered Constance.

  • Sunday Sonnet – 03 May 2015

    sonnet 142

    Our Romantic ideal of what love might’ve been like in Elizabethan times is pretty much hogwash. Certainly the kind of romantic love displayed in the move Shakespeare in Love is complete fantasy. Love and sex back then was little different than it is nowadays: it covers the spectrum from chaste and sweet to tawdry and cheap. Shakespeare’s Dark Lady sonnets are remarkable for many reasons, but one of them is their unflinching honesty in portraying bad relationships. Case in point: 

    142

    Love is my sin, and thy dear virtue hate,
    Hate of my sin, grounded on sinful loving:
    O! but with mine compare thou thine own state,
    And thou shalt find it merits not reproving;
    Or, if it do, not from those lips of thine,
    That have profaned their scarlet ornaments
    And sealed false bonds of love as oft as mine,
    Robbed others’ beds’ revenues of their rents.
    Be it lawful I love thee, as thou lov’st those
    Whom thine eyes woo as mine importune thee:
    Root pity in thy heart, that, when it grows,
    Thy pity may deserve to pitied be.
       If thou dost seek to have what thou dost hide,
       By self-example mayst thou be denied!

    This is a tough sonnet to parse out, for its psychological arguments are varied, tangled and complex. Let’s see if I can summarize it:

    The Poet’s love for such an awful woman is his sin, and the Dark Lady’s only virtue is condemning him for the sin of loving her. But it doesn’t stop there! For she really has no right to condemn him for his bad choice in lovers (namely, her), since her sins are worse than any of his. Furthermore, it’s galling that these condemnations come from lips so tainted, considering where her lips have been. More than that, not only has she kissed almost every man that’s come her way, she lies with those very same lips. So the Poet begs her to be allowed to love her anyhow (he’s pathetic), so that she’ll pity him. He then will pity her! For the deal is, if she refuses to pity the Poet, he just might refuse to sleep with her. As if. 

    There’s an entire soap opera wrapped up in these fourteen lines. My favorite line is: ‘And robb’d others’ beds’ revenues of their rents.’ Delicious stuff. 

    The image comes from Shakespeare In Love, showing one of its many ridiculous scenes of post-coital bliss. Ms. Paltrow’s character never existed, and even if she had, she was nothing like the powerful, angry, sensuous and vengeful Dark Lady described in Shakespeare’s Dark Lady Sonnets.

  • Friday’s Maniacal Poe Quote – 01 May 2015

    imp of perverse

    Have any of you ever resisted an sudden urge to veer your car into the opposing lane? Or veer it over the concrete abutment to sail from a high bridge to certain death at the bottom of a gorge? Edgar A. Poe felt these urges, and wrote about them in his essay: 

    We stand upon the brink of a precipice. We peer into the abyss—we grow sick and dizzy. Our first impulse is to shrink from the danger. Unaccountably we remain. By slow degrees our sickness and dizziness and horror become merged in a cloud of unnamable feeling. By gradations, still more imperceptible, this cloud assumes shape, as did the vapor from the bottle out of which arose the genius in the Arabian Nights. But out of this our cloud upon the precipice’s edge, there grows into palpability, a shape, far more terrible than any genius or any demon of a tale, and yet it is but a thought, although a fearful one, and one which chills the very marrow of our bones with the fierceness of the delight of its horror. It is merely the idea of what would be our sensations during the sweeping precipitancy of a fall from such a height. And this fall—this rushing annihilation—for the very reason that it involves that one most ghastly and loathsome of all the most ghastly and loathsome images of death and suffering which have ever presented themselves to our imagination—for this very cause do we now the most vividly desire it. And because our reason violently deters us from the brink, therefore do we the most impetuously approach it. There is no passion in nature so demoniacally impatient, as that of him who, shuddering upon the edge of a precipice, thus meditates a Plunge. 

    –from ‘The Imp of the Perverse’ (1845) 

    However, it’s not an essay. As Poe did in several other faked factual accounts–‘The Premature Burial’ the most famous example–his essay about the impulse to act against one’s own best self interest turns into a short story. In this one, the narrator’s a murderer driven, years after his crime, into sudden confession.   

    The murderers in ‘The Tell-Tale Heart’ and ‘The Black Cat’ succumb to the same urge. And perhaps Poe himself did this throughout his tragic life, a life full of grave mistakes, sudden turnabouts and personal acts of stupidity committed at the worst possible times. Despite this flawed behavior, Poe’s exploration of this urge forecasts the Freudian psychology of the subconscious and repression. Indeed, a mad genius. 

    The image comes from the cover of an old LP of Vincent Price reading Poe stories, including ‘Imp of the Perverse.’