Louise Gluck: "Task"

The profundity of our ignorance concerning the merit of what we do creates despair; it also fuels hope.  Meanwhile, contemporary opinion rushes to present itself as the intelligent alternative to ignorance: our task is to somehow insulate ourselves from opinion in its terminal forms, verdict and directive, while still retaining alert receptiveness to useful criticism.

--Louise Gluck

from "Education of the Poet,"
Proofs and Theories:
Essays on Poetry,
The Ecco Press,
1994

Homework

English 46A: Setting Up Paradise Lost 9 & 10 -----– Plus, Quick Quotations

Sorrow is knowledge; they who know the most
Must mourn the deepest o’er the fatal truth,
The Tree of Knowledge is not that of Life.”  
--Lord Byron, from Manfred (1816)

A.  Consider Books 9 & 10 of Milton’s Paradise Lost as a tragedy, as a blank verse drama, and what happens?  How can such a conceit aid us in understanding what Milton is doing, what Adam and Eve are doing, what Satan and God are doing?


B.  Who Wrote What?  What Else Ought We To Notice?

=1. Nought is there under heav’ns wide hollownesse,
   That moves more deare compassion of mind,
   Then beautie brought t’unworthy wretchednesse
   Through envies snares or fortunes freakes unkind:
   I whether lately through her brightnesse blind,
   Or through alleageance and fast fealtie,
   Which I do owe umnto all woman kind,
   Feele my heart perst with so great agonie,
When such I see, that all for pittie I could die.

-2. What would it pleasure me to have my throat cut
With diamonds?  Or to be smothered
With cassia?  Or to be shot to death with pearls?
I know death hath ten thousand several doors
For men to take their exits, and ‘tis found
They go on such strange geometrical hinges,
You may open them both ways.

-3. Tell fortune of her blindness;
Tell nature of decay;
Tell friendship of unkindness;
Tell justice of delay.
And if they will reply,
Then give them all the lie.

-4. When, in disgrace with Fortune and men’s eyes,
I all alone beweep my outcast state,
And trouble deaf heaven with my bootless cries,
And look upon myself and curse my fate,
Wishing me like to one more rich in hope,
Featured like him, like him with friends possessed,
Desiring this man’s art and that man’s scope,
With what I most enjoy contented least . . . .

-5. Why this is hell, nor am I out of it.
Think’st thou that I, who saw the face of God,
And tasted the eternal joys of heaven,
Am not tormented with ten thousand hells
In being deprived of everlasting bliss?
O Faustus, leave these frivolous demands,
Which strike terror to my fainting soul.

-6. Loving in truth, and fain in verse my love to show,
That the dear She might take some pleasure of my pain,
Pleasure might cause her read, reading might make her know,
Knowledge might pity win, and pity grace obtain,
I sought fit words to paint the blackest face of woe,
Studying inventions fine, her wits to entertain . . . .

-7. “O place of bliss, renewer of my woes,
Give me accompt, where is my noble fere,
Whom in thy walls thou didst each night enclose,
To other life, but unto me most dear.”

Each stone, alas, that doth my sorrow rue,
Returns thereto a hollow sound of plaint.
Thus I alone, where all my freedom grew,
In prison pine with bondage and restraint.

And with remembrance of the greater grief
To banish the less, I find my chief relief.

-8. Thanked be fortune it hath been otherwise
Twenty times better; but once in special,
In thin array, after a pleasant guise,
When her loose gown from her shoulders did fall,
And she me caught in her arms long and small,
Therewithal sweetly did me kiss
And softly said, “Dear heart, how like you this?”

-9. They looking back, all th’ eastern side beheld
Of Paradise, so late their happy seat,
Waved over by that flaming brand, the gate
With dreadful faces thronged and fiery arms:
Some natural tears they dropped, but wiped them soon;
The world was all before them, where to choose
Their place of rest, and Providence their guide:
They hand in hand with wand’ring steps and slow,
Through Eden took their solitary way.

Nicolson's "Sea Room" -- Gaelic and Norse

Adam Nicolson's Sea Room is a memoir concerning the Shiant Islands in the Hebrides.  Nicolson inherited the islands from his father, and he pays tribute to the islands, their life and history, his own life and history as intertwined with his father's gift.  Here is a longish passage in which Nicolson reflects on the Gaelic/Norse heritage, and though I don't always (or quite) agree with his interpretation of the intrinsic relationships or the causal links between borrowings, I will say Nicolson's delivery takes me into this mixed-lineage, mixed-linguistic world.

(Freyja is Nicolson's trusty boat.)

Freyja does at least belong to that world.  I hold her tiller and she is my link to a chain that stretches over five hundred miles and a thousand years to the coast of Norway.  Because there is no timber on the Outer Hebrides, the commercial connection with the Baltic has remained alive.  Until no more than a generation ago, Baltic traders brought Finnish tar, timber and pitch directly to Stornoway and Tarbert in Harris.  Although Freyja's own timber comes from the mainland of Scotland, her waterproofing below the water-line is known as 'Stockholm tar': a wood tar, distilled from pine and imported from the Baltic at least since the Middle Ages.  Until well into the nineteenth century, kit boats in marked parts came imported fro Norway to the Hebrides, travelling in the hold of merchant ships, and assembled by boat builders in any notch or loch along the Harris or Lewis coast.  In 1828, Lord Teignmouth, the ex-Governor-General of India, friend of Wilberforce, came out to the Shiants in the company of Alexander Stewart, the farmer at Valamus on Pairc, who had tenancy of the islands.  They launched forth in this gentleman's boat, a small skiff or yawl built in Norway, long, narrow, peaked at both ends, extremely light, floating like a feather upon the water, and when properly managed, with the buoyancy and almost the security of a sea-bird on its native wave.

The British Imperialist, the liberal evangelical, member of the Clapham Sect, travels in a Viking boat on a Viking sea.  I nearly called Freyja 'Fulmar' because of that phrase of Teignmouth's.  No bird is more different on the wing than on the nest and in flight the fulmar is the most effortless of all sea birds.  It was that untroubled buoyancy in wind and water that I was after.  But Freyja's  fatness was what settled it.

Almost everything in her and the world now around her, if described in modern Gaelic, would be understood by a Viking.  The words used here for boats and sea all come from Old Norse and the same descriptions have been on people's lips for a millennium.  If I say, in Gaelic, 'windward of the sunken rock', 'the seaweed in the narrow creek', 'fasten the buoy', 'steer with the helm towards the shingle beach', 'prop the boat on an even keel', 'put the cod, the ling, the saithe and the coaley in the wicker basket', 'use the oar as a roller to launch the boat', 'put a wedge in the joint between the planking in the stern', 'set the sea chest on the frames amidships', 'the tide is running around the skerry', 'the cormorant and the gannet are above the surf', 'haul in the sheet', 'tighten the back stay', 'use the oar as a steerboard', or say of a man, 'that man is a hero, a stout man, the man who belongs at the stem of a boat', every single one of those terms has been transmitted directly from the language which the Norse spoke into modern Gaelic.  It is a kind of linguistic DNA, persistent across thirty or forty generations.

Sometimes the words have survived unchanged.  Oatmeal mixed with cold water, ocean food, is stappa in NOrse, stapag in Gaelic, although stapag is now made with sugar and cream.  With many, there has been a little rubbing down of the forms in the millennium that they have been used.  A tear in a sail is riab in Gaelic, rifa in Old Norse.  The smock worn by fisherman is sguird in Gaelic, skirta in Old Norse.  Sgaireag is the Gaelic for 'seaman', skari the Norse word.  And occasionally, there is a strange and suggestive transformation.  The Gaelic for a hen roost is the Norse word for hammock.  Norse for 'strong' becomes Gaelic for 'fat'.  The Norse word for rough ground becomes peat moss in Gaelic.  A hook or a barb turns into an antler.  To creep -- that mobile, subtle movement -- translates into Gaelic as 'to crouch': more still, more rooted to the place.  A water meadow in Norway, fit, becomes fidean: grass covered at high tide.  'To drip' becomes 'to melt'.  A Norse framework, whether of a house, a boat or a basket, becomes a Gaelic creel.

But it is the human qualities for which Gaelic borrowed the Viking words that are most intriguingly and intimately suggestive of the life lived around these seas a thousand years ago.  There is a cluster of borrowings around the ideas of oddity and suspicion.  Gaelic itself, if it had not taken from the invaders, would have no word for a quirk (for which it borrowed the Old Norse word meaning 'a trap'), nor for 'strife', nor 'a faint resemblance' -- the word it took was svip, the Norse for 'glimpse'.  The  Gaelic from 'lullaby' is taladh, from the Norse tal, meaning 'allurement', 'seduction'.

The vocabulary for contempt and wariness suddenly vivifies that ancient moment.  Gaelic borrowed Norse revulsion wholesale.  Noisy boasting, to blether, a coward, cowardice, surliness, an insult, mockery, a servant, disgust, anything shrivelled or shrunken (sgrogag from the Old Norse skrukka, an old shrimp,) a bald head, a slouch, a good-for-nothing, a dandy, a fop, a short, fat, stumpy woman (staga from stakka, the stump of a tree), a sneak (stig/stygg), a wanderer -- all this was something new, and had arrived with the longships.  Fear and ridicule, the uncomfortable presence of the distrusted other, the ugly cross-currents of two worlds, the broken and disturbing sea where those tides met: all this could only be expressed in the odd new language the strangers brought with them.

--Adam Nicolson

Adam Nicolson,
Sea Room: An Island Life in the Hebrides,
North Point Press: New York,
2001

I've quoted from pages 30-33.