Art is My Religion

Month: September 2015

  • Sunday Sonnet – 27 September 2015

    clock

    In celebration of the first week of Autumn, I’d like to share one of my favorite darker sonnets. If you read or hear even a little bit of Shakespeare, it doesn’t take long to realize this Elizabethan poet and playwright was obsessed with time: time’s passage and its inevitable destruction of everything living, of everything we poor mortals love.

    64

    When I have seen by Time’s fell hand defaced
    The rich proud cost of outworn buried age;
    When sometime lofty towers I see down-razed
    And brass eternal slave to mortal rage;
    When I have seen the hungry ocean gain
    Advantage on the kingdom of the shore,
    And the firm soil win of the watery main,
    Increasing store with loss and loss with store;
    When I have seen such interchange of state,
    Or state itself confounded to decay;
    Ruin hath taught me thus to ruminate,
    That Time will come and take my love away.
    This thought is as a death, which cannot choose
    But weep to have that which it fears to lose.

    This verse is part of the long cycle of Young Man sonnets, and in some ways this sonnet is very similar to others in that it bemoans the destructive nature of time’s passage. But whereas other sonnets find a way to uplift–usually by attesting that the power of Poetry will defeat time–this one gives up in despair.  

    Such beauty in these dark rhymes: ‘Increasing store with loss and loss with store’, or ‘Ruin hath taught me thus to ruminate.’

    Ironically, these verses do have the power to endure, for they speak to the universal truth of our humanity: we live and inevitably love. But we’re mortal, and so eventually all of those things we love so dearly pass from the Earth. Or we pass. It’s a tough thing to accept, something we try–for a while at least–to hide from our children.

    Why hide it? For despite this sonnet’s despair, we do have Art, we do have Poetry. These simple etched lines shall outlive all of us, the closest any of us can ever come to defeating time.

    The image is of Great Saint Mary’s clock, an Elizabethan timepiece.  

  • Friday Poe Quote – 25 September 2015

    the-conquerer-worm-poster-cult-movie-mania

    Poe’s morbid gothic romanticism slithers from the page in his gloriously dark and depressing ‘Conqueror Worm.’ Published in 1843, it presages his ultimate gothic gem, ‘The Raven’ penned just a couple of years later.   ‘The Conqueror Worm’ uses theatrical and stage imagery to paint a grim picture of the universe; both of Poe’s parents acted, and both died young.

    Lo! ’t is a gala night

       Within the lonesome latter years!   

    An angel throng, bewinged, bedight

       In veils, and drowned in tears,   

    Sit in a theatre, to see

       A play of hopes and fears,

    While the orchestra breathes fitfully   

       The music of the spheres.

    Mimes, in the form of God on high,   

       Mutter and mumble low,

    And hither and thither fly—

       Mere puppets they, who come and go   

    At bidding of vast formless things

       That shift the scenery to and fro,

    Flapping from out their Condor wings

       Invisible Wo!

    That motley drama—oh, be sure   

       It shall not be forgot!

    With its Phantom chased for evermore   

       By a crowd that seize it not,

    Through a circle that ever returneth in   

       To the self-same spot,

    And much of Madness, and more of Sin,   

       And Horror the soul of the plot.

    But see, amid the mimic rout,

       A crawling shape intrude!

    A blood-red thing that writhes from out   

       The scenic solitude!

    It writhes!—it writhes!—with mortal pangs   

    The mimes become its food,

    And seraphs sob at vermin fangs

       In human gore imbued.

    Out—out are the lights—out all!   

       And, over each quivering form,

    The curtain, a funeral pall,

       Comes down with the rush of a storm,   

    While the angels, all pallid and wan,   

       Uprising, unveiling, affirm

    That the play is the tragedy, “Man,”   

       And its hero, the Conqueror Worm.

    So what do we have here? The world is a stage (perhaps borrowing from Shakespeare), where pathetic humans–the mimes–live out the folly of their useless lives, witnessed only by angels. Every mortal is eventually devoured by a blood-red thing with vermin fangs that writhes and writhes. Life is a tragedy, and the evil thing that devours us–the Conqueror Worm–is our hero. I love this poem.

    This verse, along with ‘The Raven’ and a select number of Poe’s most grotesque short stories, have done the most to cement Poe’s undying reputation as the Father of Modern Horror.   Go ahead, light some candles and read this aloud. And then go listen to some Goth Rock.

    The image comes from the 1968 Vincent Price movie, which has virtually nothing to do with the poem at all. But it sure makes a great movie title.

  • Sunday Sonnet – 20 September 2015

    sonnet 94

    One of my all time favorite couplets caps Shakespeare’s Sonnet 94. It’s the epitome of a great couplet: iambic pentameter and rhymed, closing the argument of the sonnet, but doing so with a stunning reversal. At the same time, this couplet is beautiful to read, contains a great metaphor speaking a great truth, reads aloud easily and deliciously, so much so that it contains the power of an ageless aphorism.

    94

    They that have power to hurt and will do none,
    That do not do the thing they most do show,
    Who, moving others, are themselves as stone,
    Unmoved, cold, and to temptation slow,
    They rightly do inherit heaven’s graces
    And husband nature’s riches from expense;
    They are the lords and owners of their faces,
    Others but stewards of their excellence.
    The summer’s flower is to the summer sweet,
    Though to itself it only live and die,
    But if that flower with base infection meet,
    The basest weed outbraves his dignity:
    For sweetest things turn sourest by their deeds;
    Lilies that fester smell far worse than weeds.

    This sonnet is a condemnation of the Young Man, whom the Poet loves. But the poem seems to be speaking about two disparate things–until its stunning conclusion.

    In the first 8 lines the Poet talks about how people who seem not do the stuff they most apparently are made to do: ‘That do not do the thing they most do show’. These people are so beautifully made that they can move the emotions (and lusts) of others, yet somehow manage to restrain themselves: ‘They are the lords and owners of their faces, Others but stewards of their excellence.’  

    Then, in the next four lines the subjects changes to summer flowers. Huh? The sweetest summer flower, if it succumbs to thickets of weeds, becomes worse than the weeds that infect it.   And there’s the connection. The final couplet warns the Young Man: regardless of how beautiful you are, your deeds will sour all of that:

    For sweetest things turn sourest by their deeds;
    Lilies that fester smell far worse than weeds.

    As is typical with most of Shakespeare’s sonnets, there’s much more going on here–and a knowledge of how aristocratic patronage worked in Elizabethan England might reveal a little bit more about what the Poet’s talking about.   But for now, just enjoy the lovely brilliance of that last couplet.

    The image comes from a painting of flowers by Ambrosius Bosschaert (the Elder), a Dutch painter who was a contemporary of Shakespeare’s.

  • Poe Quote – Saturday, 19 September 2015

    To Helen

    For the snobbish, Poe’s poetry seldom ever reached the caliber of the other Romantics. ‘The Raven’, of course, was unique and striking. But for my money, one of Poe’s most Romantic poems, where he managed to avoid his favorite trope of gothic gloom, is ‘To Helen’.

    To Helen (1845 version)

    Helen, thy beauty is to me

    Like those Nicean barks of yore

    That gently, o’er a perfumed sea,

    The weary, way-worn wanderer bore

    To his own native shore.

    On desperate seas long wont to roam,

    Thy hyacinth hair, thy classic face,

    Thy Naiad airs have brought me home

    To the glory that was Greece,

    And the grandeur that was Rome.

    Lo, in yon brilliant window-niche

    How statue-like I see thee stand,

    The agate lamp within thy hand,

    Ah! Psyche, from the regions which

    Are Holy Land!

    Poe lore has it that when he was only about 14, a Mrs. Jane Stith Stanard encouraged Poe to pursue his love of poetry. Though the final version of this poem wasn’t completed until decades later, it’s believed she inspired this paean to Helen.

    Despite its title, Poe doesn’t only compare Mrs. Stanard to Helen of Troy–a physical beauty–but at the final turn of the verse he compares her to Psyche, a more spiritual form of beauty. Finally, because she encouraged Poe at such a young age, this verse is also seems to be an homage to Poetry itself, in that it employs allusions to classical Art and mythology: Art is eternal, Art was Poe’s religion.

    The image comes from the 2004 movie The Ladykillers, where Tom Hanks, playing a whacked-out kind of faux Poe, recites ‘To Helen.’

  • Midweek Shakespearean Quote – 16 September 2015

    Bishops_Bible_Elizabeth_I_1569

    Revenge is a dish best served cold.   No–I’m not going to claim this delicious little aphorism comes from Shakespeare. Historians and linguists can’t agree. However, the idea behind such a kind of revenge does come from Shakespeare, namely in Hamlet’s great soliloquy from Act III of the play.

    Hamlet espies his murderous step father Claudius praying–Hamlet’s uncle King who murdered his father, stole his father’s crown and then bedded his sister-in-law, Hamlet’s mother. Hamlet is so, so tempted to murder the bastard right where he kneels and prays. But then Hamlet thinks better of it:

    Now might I do it pat, now he is praying;

    And now I’ll do’t. And so he goes to heaven;

    And so am I revenged. That would be scann’d:

    A villain kills my father; and for that,

    I, his sole son, do this same villain send

    To heaven.

    O, this is hire and salary, not revenge.

    He took my father grossly, full of bread;

    With all his crimes broad blown, as flush as May;

    And how his audit stands who knows save heaven?

    But in our circumstance and course of thought,

    ‘Tis heavy with him. And am I then revenged,

    To take him in the purging of his soul,

    When he is fit and season’d for his passage?

    No!

    Up, sword; and know thou a more horrid hent:

    When he is drunk asleep, or in his rage,

    Or in the incestuous pleasure of his bed;

    At game, a-swearing, or about some act

    That has no relish of salvation in’t;

    Then trip him, that his heels may kick at heaven,

    And that his soul may be as damn’d and black

    As hell, whereto it goes. My mother stays:

    This physic but prolongs thy sickly days.

    —Hamlet, Act III, Scene iii

    The logic that stays Hamlet’s sword here is unusual in the Shakespeare canon: it’s a direct reference to Christian ethics and beliefs, and typically any topics or reference of a religiously Christian nature Shakespeare wisely avoided. Queen Elizabeth’s Protestant reformation wasn’t that far removed from the days of Queen Bloody Mary, who executed thousands of Protestants. Which meant smart playwrights steered clear. But for this scene, Hamlet’s beliefs serve the plot so well Shakespeare used it.

    Hamlet realizes that if he kills Claudius while Claudius is praying, it will send the murderous King to heaven, since he’ll die while asking forgiveness of his sins. Hamlet reasons that if he’s going to send this bastard to hell, he needs to kill him while he’s committing sins: ‘When he is drunk asleep, or in his rage, Or in the incestuous pleasure of his bed, At game, a-swearing…”

    It’s a crazy kind of logic. But when it’s couched within the luscious and lyrical language of this soliloquy, and issues from Hamlet’s mad lips, the audience buys it. It appears the Bard was as good at selling Christian myths as the Elizabethan preachers of the day.

    The image comes from the cover of a Holy Bible printed in 1569, dedicated to Queen Elizabeth.  

  • Sunday Sonnet – 13 Sep 2015

    Sonnet 88 - 1

    The rationalizations humans indulge in when a relationship has begun to break up can be convoluted and confusing. This hasn’t changed since Elizabethan times. In Sonnet 88, even though the Rival Poet is gone, too much damage has been done, and the Poet appears to be reconciling himself with the imminent loss of his Young Man:

    88

    When thou shalt be disposed to set me light,
    And place my merit in the eye of scorn,
    Upon thy side against myself I’ll fight,
    And prove thee virtuous, though thou art forsworn.
    With mine own weakness being best acquainted,
    Upon thy part I can set down a story
    Of faults conceal’d, wherein I am attainted,
    That thou in losing me shalt win much glory:
    And I by this will be a gainer too;
    For bending all my loving thoughts on thee,
    The injuries that to myself I do,
    Doing thee vantage, double-vantage me.
    Such is my love, to thee I so belong,
    That for thy right myself will bear all wrong.

    The Poet seems to be trying to argue that even though he’ll continue to praise the Young Man and take the blame for everything, it will be a win-win, or what Shakespeare calls “double-vantage”:

    For bending all my loving thoughts on thee,
    The injuries that to myself I do,
    Doing thee vantage, double-vantage me.

    This sonnet, in all its confused logic, seems to be describing a kind of abusive relationship: You, Young Man, think little of me and trash me in public, but I’ll take your side and agree with you, because I love you so much that I consider your gain my gain, even if I take the wrongs upon myself.   Good grief.

    Even this interpretation only scratches the surface of this poem: some readers see a tennis metaphor (yes, they had tennis in Shakespeare’s time): A ‘set’ was bet or a stake in a tennis game: the word ‘set’ is used twice. ‘Vantage’ is a tennis shorthand for a player’s ‘advantage’ in a set: ‘vantage’ is used twice. And ‘Double-vantage’ was most especially a tennis term. There are other references.   Why, even numerologists have gotten into the game, claiming there are sports-based significance in the number 88.

    As with so many of Shakespeare’s sonnets, there is always much more going than what appears on the surface, and this emotionally messed up one is no exception.

    The image is an Elizabethan wood carving of two tennis players.

  • Sunday Sonnet – 06 Sep 2015

    George_Chapman

    Shakespeare’s 154 Sonnets create a narrative with a number of characters: the Poet himself, the Young Man and the Dark Lady. Well, there’s another character, in a sequence of eight sonnets–the ‘Rival Poet’–another writer vying for the favor of the Young Man. This contest for the attentions of the Young Man (possibly the Earl of Southampton), begins with Sonnet 79:

    79

    Whilst I alone did call upon thy aid,
    My verse alone had all thy gentle grace,
    But now my gracious numbers are decay’d
    And my sick Muse doth give another place.
    I grant, sweet love, thy lovely argument
    Deserves the travail of a worthier pen,
    Yet what of thee thy poet doth invent
    He robs thee of and pays it thee again.
    He lends thee virtue and he stole that word
    From thy behavior; beauty doth he give
    And found it in thy cheek; he can afford
    No praise to thee but what in thee doth live.
    Then thank him not for that which he doth say,
    Since what he owes thee thou thyself dost pay.

    For this first ‘Rival Poet’ sonnet, the only thing Shakespeare’s really arguing are words, that is verse, and through the tangled layers of this sonnet Shakespeare claims that for a long time only his verse received the benefit of the Young Man’s ‘gentle grace.’ Yet Shakespeare admits that maybe his verse is not as good as it used to be: ‘my gracious numbers are decay’d / And my sick Muse…’ And so Shakespeare admits the Young Man deserves a better poet. That said, Shakespeare then goes on to claim that this new rival only steals from the Young Man; his verses might lend the Young Man virtue, but the rival only learned virtue from the Young Man himself: ‘No praise to thee but what in thee doth live.’ The same with beauty. In other words, don’t thank this rival poet for his flattery, because he’s stolen it all from you.

    I’ve said this in my blog before, and I’ll say it again: these characters, the layered progressions of the relationships, the risqué nature of the love affairs (risqué for Elizabethan times), that is, the homosexual love affair, the love triangles, the interracial couplings: all these fly in the face what Elizabethans considered Romantic Love should be in poetry. So this somewhat subversive set of verse all speaks to the possibility of autobiography. And finally, though Shakespeare himself published other major works of verse to great acclaim, he never published his Sonnets. Why not?

    Who was the Rival Poet? Possibly the poet George Chapman, or possibly even Christopher Marlowe.   Possibly others. We’ll never know, assuming these sonnets were even inspired by a real human beings.

    The image is of George Chapman, an Elizabethan dramatist, writer and poet. He, like Shakespeare, knew the Earl of Southampton. Chapman translated a lot of Ovid’s works; Ovid’s Metamorphoses was one of Shakespeare’s favorite sources for his plays. Chapman, unlike Shakespeare, never could find patrons or great success, and died in poverty.

  • Friday Poe Quote – 04 Sep 2015

    city in the sea - 1

    ‘The City in the Sea’ is another gloomy gothic verse from Poe, this one possibly inspired by another Romantic poet, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and his masterpiece, ‘Kubla Khan’.

    Lo! Death has reared himself a throne

    In a strange city lying alone

    Far down within the dim West,

    Where the good and the bad and the worst and the best

    Have gone to their eternal rest.

    There shrines and palaces and towers

    (Time-eaten towers that tremble not!)

    Resemble nothing that is ours.

    Around, by lifting winds forgot,

    Resignedly beneath the sky

    The melancholy waters lie.

    No rays from the holy heaven come down

    On the long night-time of that town;

    But light from out the lurid sea

    Streams up the turrets silently —

    Gleams up the pinnacles far and free —

    Up domes — up spires — up kingly halls —

    Up fanes — up Babylon-like walls —

    Up shadowy long-forgotten bowers

    Of sculptured ivy and stone flowers —

    Up many and many a marvelous shrine

    Whose wreathéd friezes intertwine

    The viol, the violet, and the vine.

    So blend the turrets and shadows there

    That all seem pendulous in the air,

    While from a proud tower in the town

    Death looks gigantically down.

    There open fanes and gaping graves

    Yawn level with the luminous waves;

    But not the riches there that lie

    In each idol’s diamond eye —

    Not the gaily-jeweled dead

    Tempt the waters from their bed;

    For no ripples curl, alas!

    Along that wilderness of glass —

    No swellings tell that winds may be

    Upon some far-off happier sea —

    No heavings hint that winds have been

    On seas less hideously serene.

    But lo, a stir is in the air!

    The wave — there is a movement there!

    As if the towers had thrust aside,

    In slightly sinking, the dull tide —

    As if their tops had feebly given

    A void within the filmy Heaven.

    The waves have now a redder glow —

    The hours are breathing faint and low —

    And when, amid no earthly moans,

    Down, down that town shall settle hence,

    Hell, rising from a thousand thrones,

    Shall do it reverence.

    This atmospheric verse was published in 1845, though it did exist in earlier versions. There are no actual characters in this poem, except for Death itself, but this poem still follows some of the major tropes of Poe’s brand of Gothic fiction: the decay of the aristocracy, death and madness. It’s an easy read, and when read aloud it’s pleasing to the ear, which is interesting, since the poem contains no descriptions of any kind of sound: the city is silent, like the dead. I think the elevated language is intentional, giving the poem a feeling of antiquity.

    The image is a photograph I took of the sun setting into the western Pacific. Poe possibly set his mysterious city to the west, because the setting sun was often associated with the end of life–something Poe obsessed over.

  • Hump Day Shakespearean Quote – 02 Sep 2015

    othello

    This coming weekend I’ll be fortunate enough to visit one of the Midwest’s premiere Shakespeare venues, American Players Theatre, in the deep woods of Southern Wisconsin. They’ll be performing the classic tragedy, Othello.

    OTHELLO:

    Soft you; a word or two before you go.

    I have done the state some service, and they know’t.

    No more of that. I pray you, in your letters,

    When you shall these unlucky deeds relate,

    Speak of me as I am; nothing extenuate,

    Nor set down aught in malice: then must you speak

    Of one that loved not wisely but too well;

    Of one not easily jealous, but being wrought

    Perplex’d in the extreme; of one whose hand,

    Like the base Indian, threw a pearl away

    Richer than all his tribe; of one whose subdued eyes,

    Albeit unused to the melting mood,

    Drop tears as fast as the Arabian trees

    Their medicinal gum. Set you down this;

    And say besides, that in Aleppo once,

    Where a malignant and a turban’d Turk

    Beat a Venetian and traduced the state,

    I took by the throat the circumcised dog,

    And smote him, thus.

    [Stabs himself]

    —Othello, Act V, Scene ii

    Here Othello writes his own epitaph. At this point in the play, all has been revealed: Iago’s murderous plot of revenge, tricking Othello into murdering his innocent wife, Desdemona. In his last speech, Othello eloquently confesses that he loved well, but was unwise; was not prone to jealousy, but when driven to it, pursued it to its last degree; and that he held the most precious thing in the world only to foolishly cast it away.

    His final couplet, after stabbing himself, is to kiss the dead Desdemona with these words:

    I kissed thee ere I killed thee. No way but this,

    Killing myself, do die upon a kiss.

    Othello was written in about 1604, just a few years after the triumphant tragedy of Hamlet, and began Shakespeare’s run of shockingly brilliant tragedies, including King Lear, Macbeth and Antony and Cleopatra. Iago the villain of Othello, is considered to be the epitome of evil in western literature, and even in its day, Othello was powerfully provocative. Elizabethans were frightfully racist, and yet Shakespeare dared to make a ‘blackamoor’ the tragic protagonist of his play.

    The image comes from the currently running production of Othello at American Players Theatre, with Chike Johnson as Othello and James Ridge as Iago.