Aesthetic Vocabulary Test
1. Robert Lowell, “Waking in the Blue.”
Lowell’s reputation as a poet has for some time been eclipsed by Elizabeth Bishop’s, who once stood in his shadow. His pyrotechnic command of rhyme and meter, the firehose of metaphor and vocabulary that his poems paint on the page, these can sometimes seem to cover a deep emptiness. How wonderful then to hear his praises sung, by Michael Hofmann, in his book Where Have You Been? Hofmann’s claims:
That he [Lowell] exemplarily converted life into literature. That the range of his effects—from the most oblique, almost hermetic, feint to the plain statement of fact, to the tenderly, brassily magniloquent is unequaled. That in his refusal as a poet to be cowed or deflected or marginalized, he, though no sort of hero, was heroic. That he is unspeakably missed by his literature and his country, and that in his absence, literary and civic life have both deteriorated.
Of course it’s only to those of us standing with our faces pressed against the glass that the relative standing of Lowell and Bishop is visible, for
Poetry has lost so much ground in the years since Lowell started out in it, it’s easy to feel a somewhat preposterous sympathy for him....The last apotheosized poets are the generation of the 1910s and 1920s, Eliot and Frost and Stevens and Pound and Yeats and Bunting. They have had no successors, or the succession has not been allowed....It’s as though the human reef of literature was not considering any more applications, or the escalator had ground to a halt. To say that anyone who cares about poetry should read Lowell is not enough.
The speaker of “Waking in the Blue”—who cannot be far from Lowell, the founder of “confessional poetry,” himself—speaks to us from McLean’s mental hospital in Massachusetts. (Lowell suffered from bipolar disorder.) In the poem “there is a canniness and craftiness and dryness and confinement—a boundedness and mildness.” So far as we can judge from the poem, the speaker’s mind is perfectly lucid and no clouds in sight, and
How can there be anything the matter with someone, if they express themselves so insightfully, with so much wit and joy? What is defective or deficient here?
Hofmann detects overcompensation: “The display of, as it were, rude health, is an effort to deny that there’s anything wrong upstairs.” And hints of something wrong do leak in, despite these efforts: “Unease is repeatedly signaled by the fishiness, the not-quite-rightness of things,” like the “vaguely urinous” quality of the bathwater in which Stanley, another inmate, soaks. (Poems discussed here are quoted in full at the end.)
2. “After Apple-Picking,” Robert Frost.
This poem's overt subject is the exhaustion caused by a day of picking apples. But, and never say Frost isn’t a modernist, underneath it’s really a metaphysical exhaustion, a losing of one’s grip on reality. The key line “But I am done with apple-picking now” means far more than it says, and this, together with the line’s link to the title, makes it fit to be the poem’s big concluding moment. But Frost puts it well toward the front, and the poem ends, not by tying up its themes and meanings, but in uncertainty, and a kind of mystifying unresolvedness:
One can see what will trouble This sleep of mine, whatever sleep it is. Were he not gone, The woodchuck could say whether it’s like his Long sleep, as I describe its coming on, Or just some human sleep.
3. Sonata Pathétique, Beethoven.
Bach’s scores are spare, with no tempo markings and no “one more time, with feeling” at the da capo. The next big-B, Beethoven, was by contrast a control freak. He took to using German for performance instructions, rather than the traditional Italian, the better to communicate his German intentions, and to compel obedience with the power and authority of the German tongue—forget allegro, play it Geschwind, doch nicht zu sehr, und mit Entschlossenheit (Piano Sonata 28: swiftly, but not too swiftly, and with capital-D Determination.) But the Principal-Agent problem, if near-insoluble in the business world, is even harder in music composition. Every pianist has their own take, and maybe today they have to—Alfred Brendel may be the GOAT, but you won’t get far duplicating his playing.
The Pathétique is c-minor mythic Beethoven, with the moments of explosive emotion, storm and stress, and a snarling dog held to heel that we expect. But still, if the Romantic age in music starts at Beethoven, he himself was (some say) the last great Classical composer: he pushed against the rules implicit in the practice of Mozart and Haydn, but never brought himself to discard them entirely. Symmetry and balance remained ideals. It’s therefore cool to hear those ideals so set aside in András Schiff’s Beethoven recordings, which—and don’t forget that Schiff is a Hungarian pianist who specializes also in the music of Bartók—Schiff’s performances are startlingly angular.
Waking in the Blue by Robert Lowell The night attendant, a B.U. sophomore, rouses from the mare's-nest of his drowsy head propped on The Meaning of Meaning. He catwalks down our corridor. Azure day makes my agonized blue window bleaker. Crows maunder on the petrified fairway. Absence! My heart grows tense as though a harpoon were sparring for the kill. (This is the house for the "mentally ill.") What use is my sense of humor? I grin at Stanley, now sunk in his sixties, once a Harvard all-American fullback, (if such were possible!) still hoarding the build of a boy in his twenties, as he soaks, a ramrod with a muscle of a seal in his long tub, vaguely urinous from the Victorian plumbing. A kingly granite profile in a crimson gold-cap, worn all day, all night, he thinks only of his figure, of slimming on sherbet and ginger ale-- more cut off from words than a seal. This is the way day breaks in Bowditch Hall at McLean's; the hooded night lights bring out "Bobbie," Porcellian '29, a replica of Louis XVI without the wig-- redolent and roly-poly as a sperm whale, as he swashbuckles about in his birthday suit and horses at chairs. These victorious figures of bravado ossified young. In between the limits of day, hours and hours go by under the crew haircuts and slightly too little nonsensical bachelor twinkle of the Roman Catholic attendants. (There are no Mayflower screwballs in the Catholic Church.) After a hearty New England breakfast, I weigh two hundred pounds this morning. Cock of the walk, I strut in my turtle-necked French sailor's jersey before the metal shaving mirrors, and see the shaky future grow familiar in the pinched, indigenous faces of these thoroughbred mental cases, twice my age and half my weight. We are all old-timers, each of us holds a locked razor.
After Apple-Picking
by Robert Frost
My long two-pointed ladder's sticking through a tree
Toward heaven still,
And there's a barrel that I didn't fill
Beside it, and there may be two or three
Apples I didn't pick upon some bough.
But I am done with apple-picking now.
Essence of winter sleep is on the night,
The scent of apples: I am drowsing off.
I cannot rub the strangeness from my sight
I got from looking through a pane of glass
I skimmed this morning from the drinking trough
And held against the world of hoary grass.
It melted, and I let it fall and break.
But I was well
Upon my way to sleep before it fell,
And I could tell
What form my dreaming was about to take.
Magnified apples appear and disappear,
Stem end and blossom end,
And every fleck of russet showing clear.
My instep arch not only keeps the ache,
It keeps the pressure of a ladder-round.
I feel the ladder sway as the boughs bend.
And I keep hearing from the cellar bin
The rumbling sound
Of load on load of apples coming in.
For I have had too much
Of apple-picking: I am overtired
Of the great harvest I myself desired.
There were ten thousand thousand fruit to touch,
Cherish in hand, lift down, and not let fall.
For all
That struck the earth,
No matter if not bruised or spiked with stubble,
Went surely to the cider-apple heap
As of no worth.
One can see what will trouble
This sleep of mine, whatever sleep it is.
Were he not gone,
The woodchuck could say whether it's like his
Long sleep, as I describe its coming on,
Or just some human sleep.
all nouns are capitalized in german