Herrick: To Daffodils

Welcome to a new close reading series. I shall be writing close readings or commentaries on a series of classic English poems. I have previously written or recorded commentaries or close readings of ‘The Whitsun Weddings’, ‘An Arundel Tomb’, ‘Fire and Ice’, ‘You’re’, Housman and Dickinson, and ‘Those Winter Sundays’. There is an audio version of this entire article which I recorded as well.

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Introduction to close reading

I recently published Arnold Bennett’s advice for reading poetry. It will not be to everyone’s taste, and wasn’t really to my own. I prefer a self-led approach for one thing. Find poems that you love and work out from there, preferably with an anthology. In this way, you build up a sense of styles, periods, modes, and so on. Note: a sense. At some point, a chronological understanding ought to be acquired. But to begin with what matters is that you read in ever widening circles based on your intuition.

However, taste is more than preference. Taste has to be developed. Immersion is part of that, but not all of it. You need some practice. That is what close reading provides. Once you find a poem you love, spend a little time working out what you love about it. As you are not a schoolchild (and ideally, even if you are a schoolchild) you are not obliged to talk vaguely about your feelings or to make the poem “relevant” to your life. You can focus on the language. Until you understand the language of a poem, you are largely using it as a feelings pump, and you may be pumping feelings that are not entirely to do with the poem.

T.S. Eliot’s quote that poems must be felt before they can be understood is quite true, but it has licensed a whole method of reading poetry that has very little to do with the art of language. He did not say that they must be felt instead of being understood. Indeed, poetry is the marriage of emotion and logic. Many people, of course, do largely see “culture” as a means of personal reflection or a kind of therapy. Whole books have been written about this. I would only urge those people to think about how useful poetry can be for that purpose if you have not taken pains to understand the language which they are using as a psychological mirror. All art is a means of understanding the self; it is the methods of understanding which are disputed.

This is all that close reading is: the understanding of how language is being used. Some people will begin talking about I.A. Richards, William Empson, the Cambridge method, and so on. Dip into those cold pools at your pleasure. My intention here, in this new series of close readings, is all to do with practice. Good literary criticism is a kind of higher common sense, underwritten by deep knowledge and an aptitude for the formal modes of literary analysis. I shall avoid talk of “texts” in the Stanley Fish sense, and there will be no nonsense about using the “text” as a means of interpolating our own ideas into the poems. We read the lines; we are not reading “between” the lines.

The risk of close reading is that it becomes dull. Commentaries on poems are fascinating, but they have a tendency to become scholastically convoluted. In his ‘Introduction’ to Poetry and Prose in the Sixteenth Century, C.S. Lewis discusses the modern idea that the Elizabethans “misunderstood” Machiavelli. They thought he was immoral, whereas we clever moderns can see that he is amoral. Nonsense, says Lewis. Machiavelli is professedly immoral, and the idea of amorality was as unknown to him as the steam engine. The Elizabethans understood Machiavelli much better than the “subtle” moderns. This tendency to the imaginary subtle, to finding and inserting meaning where there is none, is the vexing spirit of the whole enterprise of literary criticism. It dogs the young who find “the human condition” in everything, and it hounds their elders and betters who make everything into a commentary on society.

Guard against this impulse wherever you can. Just because you feel you have seen something in a poem doesn’t mean that it is there. These things are questions of historical fact as well as personal opinion. To say that literature is subjective is an ideological position as much as anything else. You must ask yourself: do I want to know the language of the poem or do I want to know how the ideas I already understand can fit on top of that language?

Finally, a note about close reading in practice. Although you can and should learn technical language, it is best not to start by thinking about that. You must first enter the dream of the poem. Read it dozens of times. Mutter it. Memorise it. This is what closeness means: knowing the poem as carefully as possible, noticing. Rather than going through and spotting caesuras and anacoluthons, you should make the poem so familiar that once you learn the technical language you will say to yourself, of course I have seen that several times before. What good is it to know enjambment if you don’t understand why the line has been enjambed?

This is not the only way you should proceed, but it is a better approach than the mechanical spotting of patterns than leave you without enough sense of the whole. Remember that the young Romans and Elizabethans who were instructed in rhetoric were living in a world of language that you do not inhabit. You can drill yourself, but only once you have a feel for the tones, rhythms, repeating patterns, and so on. The immersion method is insufficient on its own, but it is the necessary precursor for formal understanding. When you live in a culture where you are required to memorise Psalms as a child, then you can proceed straight to the manuals of tropes and meter.

In a great poem, every word justifies its place, and gives new meaning to the whole. An ideal poem cannot be explained: it is the full explanation itself, and must be come to terms with. For these works, close reading is merely a means by which you can come to see what the words really mean. Memorisation works by noticing that a poem is a succession of images or thoughts, expressed in rhythm. You are learning that sequence, those rhythms. Tap your fingers as you recite. Once you have spoken a poem one or two dozen times, more and more meaning will emerge. For a short poem like the one we are reading today, this is the work of a short amount of time.

Fair Daffodils, we weep to see
You haste away so soon;
As yet the early-rising sun
Has not attain'd his noon.
Stay, stay,
Until the hasting day
Has run
But to the even-song;
And, having pray'd together, we
Will go with you along.

We have short time to stay, as you,
We have as short a spring;
As quick a growth to meet decay,
As you, or anything.
We die
As your hours do, and dry
Away,
Like to the summer's rain;
Or as the pearls of morning's dew,
Ne'er to be found again.

Before you proceed to the commentary below, read this to yourself multiple times. You must say it aloud, even if it is very very quiet. Do this several times and you will see things you never saw the first time. Everyone now knows the story of Louis Agassiz, the ichthyologist at Harvard, who set his students to simply look at a fish. After a few days, they would report back that they had noticed that the fish had parallel organs. Good! said Agassiz. What now, the student asked. Why, the master replied, you look at your fish.

Look at your fish. When you have done so, proceed below to the close reading. If you want to, go ahead and memorise it. I did this on a twenty minute train journey this week, testing myself at intervals throughout the day. (Memorisation works through repetition and recall.) As you walk to the loo, you will be muttering to yourself “Like to the summer's rain” or when you receive an unwanted invitation you can mumble “We have short time to stay, as you,/ We have as short a spring.”