Let’s start with A.E. Housman’s short lyric, ‘Into my heart’:
Into my heart an air that kills
From yon far country blows;
What are those blue remembered hills,
What spires, what farms are those?That is the land of lost content,
I see it shining plain,
The happy highways where I went
And cannot come again.
In the first line, we find one of the core principles of reading poetry—ambiguity. An air can be either the air Housman breathes or a song, music he has heard from a distance. The plain statement, that each breath we take is one breath closer to death, is made gentler by this double meaning. If the air is a song, then kills has a different meaning, as defined by the OED as “destroying vitality, neutralizing”; in this sense, Housman is killed the way an engine or a light get killed. The song has stalled him.
The second line explains his startlement: even when Housman was writing, in the 1890s, “yon” was falling out of use. It has a nostalgic tone. Housman, we begin to realise, is looking towards the past. Hence “blue remembered hills”, blue because light scatters and sends the blue spectrum furthest away, hence its use in landscape painting for the most distant hills. Blue denotes physical distance, and blue remembered becomes metaphorical of lost time in our minds.
This all becomes more overt in the second stanza, when he uses the allegorical, fairy-tale like “land of lost content”. This is not a real place: there is no village sign that says The Land of Lost Content: it represents lost youth. The paradox of seeing something “shining plain” expresses the state of nostalgia, where we see things in simple terms, even though that’s not how they really were. Is it so plain, this distant place whose spires he cannot make out? Things that shine in the distance have an elusive quality, too bright to be seen clearly.
The ending recalls Heraclitus—you can never step into the same river twice, or walk the same road again. The air is always blowing, time always moving on. We are time’s subjects, as Shakespeare wrote, and time bids be gone.
The duality of Housman’s poem—past and present, age and youth, reality and imagination—shows us another core principle of poetry: division or antithesis. Two modes or ideas (or more) often jostle together inside great writing. They are resolved with surprise, contradiction, synthesis, or ambiguity. In this way, poets don’t moralise or dictate, but evoke a mood or emotional state, to make you feel a particular mood. This is the aim of poetry: to posses you, temporarily, and to make you feel particular sensations.
In Sleep and Poetry, John Keats wrote that the great end of poetry is that
… it should be a friend
To soothe the cares and lift the thoughts…
Paraphrasing and responding to Keats, Harold Bloom wrote about this passage: “The nature of poetry is to be disinterested, but its function is consolatory and enlightening.” For Keats, poetry is not supposed to dogmatise, it has no ideology. Instead, “she governs with the mildest sway.” A poem grows out of consciousness, says Bloom, as naturally as leaves come to a tree.
Sometimes the sway is not so mild. Samuel Johnson wrote about Macbeth, “He that peruses Shakespeare looks around, and starts to find himself alone.” (Starts means jumps because startled.) Note that nothing had happened; quite the opposite. What startles Johnson while reading Shakespeare is not that someone else has interrupted him, but that he suddenly woke up from the dream of reading, not quite aware that everyone around him had faded away.
In Henry IV part II, Falstaff says of himself , “I am not only witty in myself, but the cause that wit is in other men.” Poetry is similar: it expresses certain thoughts and feelings, but in a way that holds us in a mild sway, and causes those feelings to be really felt in our minds, so that when we realise we have been lost in imagination, we startle to see we are back in reality. As George Eliot wrote about the poet Heinrich Heine, poets utter our feelings for us.
We’ve seen three core principles of poetry so far: division, allegory, ambiguity. And we’ve seen that poetry aims not to argue with us, but to hold us in a mild sway. Let us look at a more difficult poem by Emily Dickinson, not just to see division and ambiguity at work, and to see the mild sway of poetry, but to think about how to find our way into a difficult piece of writing.
Through what transports of Patience
I reached the stolid Bliss
To breathe my Blank without thee
Attest me this and this —
By that bleak exultation
I won as near as this
Thy privilege of dying
Abbreviate me this —
Dickinson’s poem is full of irony—she uses antithesis or division not to put opposites on display, like Housman, but to say one thing and mean another, and thus she creates deep ambiguities. Before we read this poem, we must understand what irony means.
Irony is a vast term. Modern culture rarely invokes earnest expression but relies on jokes, sarcasm, over and understatement and a whole range of not quite meaning what you say. That is irony. So too is Socrates’ endless statement that he is ignorant, when in fact he is asking a set of questions that lead his interlocutors to certain answers. Irony can be a lie or an encouragement. Imagine there are three of you in a conversation. Two of you are in on a secret and the third is not. So much of what gets said could be ironic, as the hidden or implied meaning will only be clear to two of you. When you watch a film or play and you know something one of the characters does not, that is irony. What the character thinks is happening isn’t really what’s happening. Irony is that gap between the stated and the implied.
Irony is a constant force in Dickinson. She constantly writes in paradox, antithesis, and juxtaposes our expectations with strange reality. Look at these examples from two of her popular poems
Success is counted sweetest
By those who ne’er succeed.Tell all the Truth—but tell it slant—
Success in Circuit lies—
We can see the way Dickinson’s irony makes paradoxical statements: success is valued by the unsuccessful, truth can only be revealed through concealment. But, it is very important that Dickinson doesn’t phrase her ideas in the way that I did. Dickinson is deeper and subtler than that. We cannot find a suitable bromide to summarise Dickinson; she is expressing the tragic irony that success means most to those who have tried and failed to be successful. It is an illusion that means most to those who are deceived by it.
So, let us return to the Dickinson poem, and trace her ironies.
Through what transports of Patience
I reached the stolid Bliss
To breathe my Blank without thee
Attest me this and this —
By that bleak exultation
I won as near as this
Thy privilege of dying
Abbreviate me this —
There are five paradoxes in this poem: “transports of Patience”, “stolid Bliss”, “breathe my Blank”, “bleak exultation”, “the privilege of dying”. Transports means something like the mild sway of John Keats, but more intense, more passionate. Samuel Johnson defined it as “Rapture; ecstasy.” It is perplexing to think of patience giving us raptures; to read this poem, we must hold that contradiction in our mind. Then, in the second line, we see that the raptures reached through patience lead Dickinson to “stolid bliss”, a dark irony of the heavenly bliss supposed to be attained through patient faith. The third line reveals that this is a grief poem—”without thee”. Someone has gone, presumably to death, leaving Dickinson with only a patience so painful it gives her agonising raptures. She is capable of “breathing her blank”, that is of surviving without hope, living without meaning, but the bliss of surviving is stolid. Attest me this, she says to her dead companion.
And this—she opens up the second stanza. The bleak exultation, the ironic triumph of her continued survival amid such grief, won her the privilege of dying, as near as this. Her life is the closest thing to death, the ultimately grim irony at the heart of this poem. Whereas Housman’s ironic air that kills transported him to the past, Dickinson’s blank breath becomes a recognition that to abbreviate her life, to reach the final transport, is a form of living, is a form, as Harold Bloom said, of “release from the despair of living on.” The poem is itself a transport of patience. Dickinson is under the mild sway of her own bleak exultation, turning despair into poetry. Like Housman, she is dead while living, dead in some stalled, stunned, neutered sense. Like him, too, she creates a poetic reality, something that cannot be abbreviated any further, that captures the fleeting moment, the shining plain, the clear ambiguity of ever running time.
Further reading
The Visionary Company and How to Read and Why by Harold Bloom
beautiful and insightful. thanks