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.
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.”
The close reading
Let’s look at the integrity of the images. Herrick has linked all of the imagery together, so that it runs in sequences. The first line “we weep” is echoed in the “pearls of morning’s dew” in the last line. These pearls are also miniature spheres, echoing the “early-rising sun”. Dew is not early-rising but early-falling, and this rising-falling pairing is repeated throughout: the daffodils are drooping while the sun is rising; noon is followed by even-song: this sequence takes us through the whole day, the “hours” that occur in the second stanza: morning, noon, night. Notice that the lines build and fall: early-rising, noon, hasting day, even song; and then again in the second stanza: spring, growth, decay, die. This happens within lines too: “As quick a growth to meet decay.” That line is split in the middle, rising then falling. Now see the words that recur or are similar: haste, hasting, run, go, short time, quick.
All of this imagery is carefully ordered to reflect the meaning: life is short, we will die soon. The night arrives not as an image of darkness, but in the word “go”.
And, having pray'd together, we
Will go with you along.
The even-song mentioned in the previous line means both even-song at church, but also the birds singing as the light fades. These final prayers are like the closing of all our days, the last prayer before the last light. “Go” is a common euphemism for death. He’s gone, we say. Or, as Henry Vaughan wrote at a similar time, “They are all gone into the world of light!” Life is short. It is later than you think. The daffodils “haste away so soon” just as, in Shakespeare’s phrase, “Summer’s lease hath all too short a date.” Herrick reinforces this with the rhymes: soon/noon; stay/day; song/along. Noon comes too soon, the day does not stay, the end of this song (the poem) will soon come along. Notice the repetition too of haste/hasting.
Now we can think about the meter. The poem is largely iambic, which means it works with an off-ON pattern of stress.
Fair Daff-o-dils, we weep to see
You haste a-way so soon;
As yet the ear-ly-ris-ing sun
Has not att-ain'd his noon.
Stay, stay,
Un-til the hast-ing day
Has run
But to the e-ven-song;
And, hav-ing pray'd to-ge-ther, we
Will go with you a-long.
See where he uses a spondee in “stay, stay” a perfect word to double in its own line. What a hopeless vocative! And the next short line contradicts it: “Has run”. These short lines have a strong effect, pulling you out of the expected rhythm and allowing for more rhymes. No-where else is there a couplet (where two lines rhyme in succession) so that the sudden double rhyme of “Stay, stay,/ Un-til the hast-ing day” stands out more strongly. Now, see the enjambment. There is no punctuation here. The line runs on, just like the hasting day it is describing… it sounds like what it says. So the sequence
Stay, stay,
Un-til the hast-ing day
Has run
But to the e-ven-song;
suddenly sounds a lot quicker, less controlled than the previous lines. Just at the days run fast away from the noon so does the poem. Then we return to the usual lilt of ballad meter (four stress then three stress), and the slowing down becomes plangent as it describes the end of life in that quiet euphemism “go”.
The other effect of the couplet is that after the double rhyme (stay/day) we then feel the poem opening up again. This repeats in the second stanza.
We die
As your hours do, and dry
Away,
Like to the summer's rain;
If the second two lines here rhymed as well it would become twee, as it is, not hearing another rhyme which we might expect also enacts the process of summer’s rain drying away. These lines remind me of Larkin.
Is it that they are born again
And we grow old? No, they die too.
Their yearly trick of looking new
Is written down in rings of grain.
The rhyme scheme is a,b,c,b,d,d,c,e,a,e.1 So you wait for the first line’s rhyme until the second-to-last line; this also reinforces the sense of first things and last things. (Seamus Heaney: my last things will be first things slipping from me.) The structure is a mirror, with the b/e swapping. Again, if Herrick used b rhymes again at the end it would become twee. He refuses any sense of reassurance. There are sequences of three unrelated rhymes (a/b/c; d/c/e) and sequences of one rhyme enclosing another (b/c/b; e/a/e). This makes the structure feel neat and formal as well as expansive. In this way we get the rhymes we expect but not always when we might expect them. So when the rhymes are closed it feels unsimple, final.
This poem is always showing you that life stops sooner than you think.
Fair Daffodils, we weep to see (a)
You haste away so soon; (b)
As yet the early-rising sun (c)
Has not attain'd his noon. (b)
Stay, stay, (d)
Until the hasting day (d)
Has run (c)
But to the even-song; (e)
And, having pray'd together, we (a)
Will go with you along. (e)
