The Victorious, Threshold Existence: An Interpretation of the Liminal Space Between Life and Death in a Selection of Romantic Poets

            Within the collective Romantic conscience – as within the human conscience – there is a keen awareness of death; one finds this manifest in many poems of the era, among them Byron's “Prometheus,” Coleridge's “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” and Keats's “Ode to a Nightingale.” While these three poems touch on the theme in varying degrees of subtlety, one finds in all three alike the uniquely Romantic association of death with poetry. At the heart of each poem is a poet-figure who experiences or has experienced death and continues to desire it or cannot help but to be drawn to it. Within that symbolic attraction to death is the Romantic longing to transcend material life and its condition of suffering. As the three poems demonstrate, poetry functions as death in life, allowing the poet to escape his earthly existence. Necessarily, however, the transcendence akin to death, through poetry, is temporary, because the poet – being alive, though drawn toward death – exists on the threshold between the two. “Prometheus,” “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” and “Ode to a Nightingale” suggest, ultimately, that the poet's art depends on his or her existence upon the threshold between life and death, waking and sleeping, mortality and immortality; it is within that liminal space that poetry is generated.

            Each of these poems revolves around a central character who is representative of the

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poet-figure. This is clearest in “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” where the mariner of the title has the characteristic quality of a poet: “strange power of speech” (587). Like a bard, he wanders “from land to land” (586), sharing his story. Early in the poem, the wedding guest describes him as a “loon” (11), but the mariner's madness – the “agony.../[wherein the] heart within [him] burns” (583-585) –, as indicated by the fact that it always precedes an instance of storytelling, is, indeed, creative genius, “a poet's extacy” (Scott 90), as Sir Walter Scott elsewhere calls it. The mariner is, then, quite clearly a poet-figure. The poet-figure of Keats's poem is equally clear as being the speaker himself, not least because of the indicative, intimate first-person narrative. (Of course, one must be wary when claiming that the speaker of a poem is the poet him- or herself, but in works of the Romantic era – a period which saw the development and popularity of the personal, lyric genre – it is, arguably, safe for one to assume, excepting obvious reasons for doubt, that the persona and the poet are aligned.) Further proof that the speaker of “Ode to a Nightingale” is indeed a poet is the fact that the character successfully makes use of “the viewless wings of Poesy” (33).  The speaker, then, must be a poet, or at least capable of poetry. Prometheus, though more subtly, also represents a poet, particularly in his role as both an outsider and an insider to humankind. In Wordsworth's “Preface to Lyrical Ballads,” Wordsworth outlines this as characteristic of the poet: the poet “is a man speaking to men...who has a greater knowledge of human nature, and a more comprehensive soul, than are supposed to be common among mankind” (603). In other words, the poet, in the Romantic conception, is exceptional, his nature beyond what is typical in terms of human nature – thus he stands outside of humanity – and yet he is deeply aware of human nature; the poet is at once, then, within and without, part of and yet separate from the collective human body. Prometheus fits this conception of the poet. He is a markedly isolated being, placed at the “world's-end region.../[in the]...trackless wilderness” (1-2) as Strength says at the beginning of Aeschylus' Prometheus Bound, and chained, as Hephaestus further indicates in the play, to a “lone peak aloof, by no voice cheered” (21). Despite his extreme separation from others, however, Prometheus, like a poet, “the sufferings of mortality/[sees] in their sad reality” (Byron 2-3). Moreover, like a poet, who, as Wordsworth further details, must have the ultimate aim of leaving his audience “in some degree enlightened” (598), Prometheus seeks to “strengthen Man with his own mind” (Byron 38). Thus, at the core of each of the three poems in question, we are presented with an image of the poet-figure: the mariner in Coleridge’s piece, the speaker-poet (possibly Keats himself) in “Ode to a Nightingale”, and Prometheus in Byron's poem.

            Each of these poet-figures has experienced death. The mariner's journey, following his shooting of the albatross, can be interpreted, for instance, as a reiteration of the descent into hell mytheme. Things deaden – “Down dropt the breeze, the sails dropt down” (107) – and appear to decompose – “slimy things did crawl with legs/Upon the slimy sea” (125-126). Later, the mariner remarks “that God himself/Scarce seemed...to be” (599-600) with him during his experiences on the sea. Such lines suggest that the mariner has made a journey to and back from death; this interpretation is strengthened by the mariner's description of himself shortly after the albatross has fallen off his neck and he has managed to sleep: “I thought that I had died in sleep,/And was a blessed ghost” (307-308). The speaker-poet in Keats's piece also experiences death, at the very beginning of the poem, when he states that he feels “as though of hemlock [he] had drunk/...and Lethe-wards had sunk” (2-4) – hemlock, of course, being a poison, and Lethe being one of the rivers of Hades. If we accept that the speaker and the author are one in the same, furthermore, we may add that the poet has experienced death of a literal sort: as the editors' notes to the poem state, “Keats's brother Tom, wasted by tuberculosis, had died the preceding winter” (Stillinger and Lynch 903n7). Prometheus's experience with death (as he is immortal) is, again, subtle but evident: his fate is that of eternal punishment. Much like Sisyphus, doomed to roll a boulder up a hill each day only to have it roll back down by the next, Prometheus suffers his liver to be eaten and regenerated daily. Dr. Dominic Manganiello has noted, in discussions of literary modernism, that one of the defining characteristics of hell is hopelessness, often portrayed in modern literature through images of pointless repetition. Prometheus's fate, like Sisyphus's, is one of hopeless repetition, the only substantial difference between the two mythological characters being that Sisyphus's punishment takes place in Tartarus, while Prometheus is not placed in Hades. As far as hellishness goes, however, Prometheus's life is just as hellish as the lives of those in Tartarus; to this extent, one might say that he, too, has effectively experienced what it is to be dead, even though he is immortal.

            The poet-figures in these three poems have not only experienced death but continue to do so – indeed, they seem to want death. The mariner, for example, relives his descent into hell each time he retells his story, the image of his “glittering eye” (3) as he speaks connecting him to the dead men, whose “eyes/...in the Moon did glitter” (437). This reliving of his experience of death is a relief to the mariner, a confessional release of sorts, as is indicated by what happens to the mariner when he is able to tell his tale to the hermit:

                        Forthwith this frame of mine was wrenched

                        With a woeful agony,

                        Which forced me to begin my tale;

                        And then it left me free.

                        Since then, at an uncertain hour,

                        The agony returns:

                        And till my ghastly tale is told,

                        This heart within me burns. (578-585)

Keats, as well, recognizes “easeful death” (52) as an escape or release, and in this regard, yearns for it: “That I might...leave the world unseen,/...dissolve, and quite forget/...leaden-eyed despairs” (19-28). What can this desire for death mean? From where does it stem?

            To answer this, we must first understand the Romantic desire not to desire. In his essay “Heroic Victimhood: 'Prometheus' and 'The Prisoner of Chillon,'” Dr. Ian Dennis makes this observation of “Prometheus”: “genuine power...lies with those who can most persuasively demonstrate indifference,...[those] who can betray less desire” (97). In Dr. Dennis's analysis, Prometheus prevails over the tyrannous Zeus precisely through his passivity, his lack of desire, which in the face of Zeus's oppression and torture of him – a torture which “demonstrates...the victim's irresistible attraction for the torturer” (99) – manages to invert the structure of power, such that “the once omni-potent hand holding the lightning bolt 'trembles'” (98). Dr. Dennis gives a nod to the idea that “the ability to resist the attraction of the other...is connected to the transcendence of spirit or mind over materiality” (98).

            Let me expand on this intriguing interpretation. In Romanticism is a belief in a transcendence which is, essentially, a blessed loss, denial or negation of the individual self. One sees this time and again in Romantic literature. To quote a famous example from “Lines Written a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey,” Wordsworth describes the transcendence attained through observation and remembrance of nature thus:

                        The breath of this corporeal frame,

                        And even the motion of our human blood [is]

                        Almost suspended, [and] we are laid asleep

                        In body, and become a living soul:

                        While with an eye made quiet by the power

                        Of harmony, and the deep power of joy,

                        We see into the life of things. (44-50)

Transcendence, then, is to lose one's self, to become unconscious (as if “laid asleep”), and in the becoming unconscious to become conscious and perfectly aligned with “the life of things,” some essence Coleridge in another poem, “The Eolian Harp,” calls “At once the Soul of each, and God of All” (48). There are, in this view of transcendence, in addition to classical elements, notable undercurrents of Eastern philosophical thought – of which, according to Norton Topics Online, there was an influx in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century – in line with the orientalism of the Romantic age. In particular, the Romantic view of transcendence is alike to the Buddhist concept of nirvana. Nirvana, from Sanskrit meaning “to blow out,” is the ultimate goal of Buddhism: the cessation of the cycle of reincarnation. Buddhists seek nirvana because, like Keats, they are keenly aware that earthly life is, inevitably, “weariness...fever...and the fret” (Keats 23). According to Richard Hayes in his article on Buddhism, in “Buddhist doctrine, the...cause of rebirth is simply the desire to continue existing” (620). Because of this, Buddhists seek detachment from people, places, and things – they view attachment to earthly entities as underlying the desire to continue existing; Siddhartha Gautama himself, as Buddhism recounts his life, had to step out of his luxurious existence as a prince – leaving behind his wife, his child, his palaces and riches – in order to become the enlightened Buddha. Buddhism then seeks to transcend suffering by denying desire, with a goal to finally deny life itself – just as, in “Prometheus,” the denial of desire – at its epitome, the ability “not to want life” (Dennis 99) – is what allows the titan to transcend his situation as a victim. In this sense, “Death [is] a Victory” (Byron 59): as the ultimate form of passivity, the complete cessation of the self's desires, death is the ultimate transcendence.

            Although, as I have argued, the Romantic notion of transcendence through death is aligned with Buddhist thought, it is also linked with Christian ideas of the Fall and expresses a desire to return to a prelapsarian state of unity and happiness. One very significant similarity between “Prometheus,” “Ode to a Nightingale,” and “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” is the depiction of suffering that each poem provides. In “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” for example, the mariner's killing of the albatross may be interpreted as the original sin which brings about the providential vengeance by his natural environment. The mariner, through his transgression, creates a state of suffering – a state of loneliness and alienation, unquenchable thirst, fear, uncertainty, and guilt – in a parallel to the story of the Fall, as outlined in the third chapter of the Genesis, in which the original sin evicts God's punishment: pain, suffering, and a life of toil outside of Eden (Authorized Version Bible, Genesis 3:16-23). Taking the role of humanity, the mariner must continually repent for this original sin. Death, then, comes to represent his ultimate absolution and freedom from the earthly life of suffering; as a symbol of God's forgiveness of transgression, death represents the return to the former ideal state, a state without suffering. Similarly, in “Ode to a Nightingale,” the poet's symbolic death depicts him as escaping human suffering and uniting with the world of the “immortal Bird” (61), a natural and purely happy world from which the speaker-poet is disconnected. Death, which is transcendence, in these and other Romantic poems, is seen, then, by the poet as a re-entrance into an Edenic existence from which he or she, along with all of humanity, has been evicted. If, as Wordsworth says in “Ode (there was a time),” “our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting” (58), death is likewise envisioned as the reversal of that process, a return to “God, who is our home” (“Ode” 65).

            But here is the problem for the central, poet-figures in “Prometheus,” “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” and “Ode to a Nightingale”: simply, they are not dead. In fact, they each exist between life and death. Prometheus is immortal, though he faces mortal suffering. The mariner, though his “body dropt not down” (230) when those of his shipmates did, is an image of death: unnaturally old – “ancient” – with a “skinny hand” like a skeleton, he himself admits he feels like a “ghost” (307), and his travelling “like night” (586) highlights this ghost-like quality. The speaker-poet in “Ode to a Nightingale” similarly has moments of “embalmed darkness” (43), in which he feels as though he is dead, but he is always called back to his “sole self” (72), reminded that he is of the living, knowledgeable of “what [the bird] among the leaves hast never known” (22). Thus, the poet figure is not an enlightened being: he has not completely transcended his mortal existence, but lives in a gray area between life and death, materiality and transcendence of material existence.

            Significantly, however, this is not an utter failure, for as each of these poems insists, there is value in the liminal existence of the poet: it is in that threshold existence that poetry is created. Consider, for example, the mariner: his bard-like vocation is a result of his fluctuating between life and death: whenever he is seized by the experience of death – whenever, that is, the story of his suffering, patterned into the symbolic descent into hell, rears itself in his mind – he enters a moment of ecstasy in which he appears a “'greybeard loon'” (11). Creative inspiration for the mariner is like death in that, in moments of creative genius, as in death, he transcends materiality, forgetting himself in a trancelike state that will not lift until his “ghastly tale is told” (584). Keats's speaker-poet's experience of creativity is much the same. It is no coincidence that the nightingale, the symbol of the speaker's inspiration, is said to sing in “full-throated ease” (10), when death is also described as “easeful” (52). As with the mariner, the speaker’s poetic inspiration is likened to death: the bird's song and the death-like feeling of “numbness” (1) it evokes can be recreated by the poet through “Poesy” (33). Let us consider, for a moment, what the case would be if the mariner and the speaker-poet were to fully transcend, through death. For the mariner, as argued above, this would signify absolution of his original sin, a return to a state in which there is no need for penance; however, without the guilt or memory of that sin to agonize him and cause him to continually repent, there would be no storytelling. Thus it is in the suffering state, being alive and yet aware of and informed by death, and, in some ways, himself dead, that the poet-figure of the mariner derives his creative genius. Likewise, if Keats were a transcended being - either in being dead, or in being a nightingale, which, as an “immortal Bird,” is the symbolic pinnacle in this poem of transcendence - there would simply be no “Ode to a Nightingale.” As the poet himself says, it is his being “half in love with easeful Death” (52) which creates his “mused rhyme” (53). The ode's poetic power and resonance is in the poet's fluctuation between the transcendent, deathlike state of imagination and true life “where but to think is to be full of sorrow” (27), between the “vision [and the]...waking dream” (79). These poems suggest, then, that it is necessary for poetry that the poet is not a completely transcendent being, for poetry depends on the fluctuation contained in a liminal existence – indeed, poetry depends on those desires which transcendence eradicates – namely, the desire for transcendence.

            I believe, as does Byron, that Prometheus is the very model of a poet in the Romantic conception. He is characterized by his eternal suffering – which is to say, by the liminal existence between immortality and mortality, life and death. Because of his connection to life, he is denied “the boon to die” (23) – denied the ability, that is, to become completely passive and thereby transcendent, a poet achieves moments of inspiration, Prometheus approaches complete passivity and a symbolic death in an eradication of desire. One must note, however, that he does not – cannot – achieve a complete erasure of his self and desires, which is transcendence and death. Indeed, it is in his “patient energy” (40), his passivized existence – as opposed to the absence of energy that is non-existence – that the titan is formidable.

            The association between death and art is surprisingly insistent in Romantic literature. This may be because the Romantics were intensely focused on the image of the Fall of man; they saw human existence as a Fallen condition, and, as such, were preoccupied with the issue of transcendence: how to return to the prelapsarian ideal of life and thought. Death is symbolically envisioned as a return to nature, God, inner and outer peace; and poetry, furthermore, is associated with death because, like death, the poetic mind is a gateway to transcendence. But the Romantics recognize the interdependence of life and death, sleep and waking, joy and sorrow; Romantic poetry demonstrates an understanding that poetry, while it depends on the death-like moment of transcendent inspiration, equally depends upon its grounding in life. Thus, the Romantics, while depicting death as a symbolically transcendent state, demonstrate an implicit appreciation of the liminal space between death and life which poets and non-poets inhabit, in which creativity is derived. As Byron states, “Death [is] a victory” (59) – it is transcendence – but, as “Prometheus,” “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” and “Ode to a Nightingale” (among countless other Romantic poems) demonstrate, there is victory in the suffering as well.

SOURCES

Aeschylus. Prometheus Bound. Trans. Robert Whitelaw. Fifteen Greek Plays. New York: Oxford University Press, 1956. 2-32.

Authorized Version Bible. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Byron, George Gordon. “Prometheus.” The Selected Poetry of Lord Byron. Digireads.com             publishing: 2009.190-191. Google Books. Web. Mar 29 2012.

Coleridge, Samuel Taylor. “The Eolian Harp.” The Norton Anthology of English Literature. 8^th ed. Vol. D. Eds. Jack Stillinger and Deidre Shauna Lynch. New York: Norton, 2006. 426-427.

---. “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.” The Norton Anthology of English Literature. 8^th ed. Vol. D. Eds. Jack Stillinger and Deidre Shauna Lynch. New York: Norton, 2006. 430-446.

Dennis, Ian. “Heroic Victimhood: 'Prometheus' and 'The Prisoner of Chillon.'” Lord Byron and the History of Desire. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2009. 95-108.

Hayes, Richard. “Nirvana.” Encyclopedia of Philosophy. 2^nd ed. Vol. 6. Ed. Donald M. Borchert. Detroit: Macmillan Reference USA, 2006. 620-622. Gale Virtual Reference Library. Web. Apr 14 2012.

Keats, John. “Ode to a Nightingale.” The Norton Anthology of English Literature. 8^th ed. Vol. D.Eds. Jack Stillinger and Deidre Shauna Lynch. New York: Norton, 2006. 426-427. 903-905.

Manganiello, Dominic. Class Lecture. ENG3320: Modern British Literature. University of Ottawa, Ottawa, ON. Jan 23 2012.

“Romantic Orientalism: Overview.” Norton Topics Online. W.W. Norton and Company. Web. Apr 6 2012.

Scott, Walter. “The Lay of the Last Minstrels.” The Norton Anthology of English Literature. 8^thed. Vol. D. Eds. Jack Stillinger and Deidre Shauna Lynch. New York: Norton, 2006. 407-410.

Wordsworth, William. “Lines Written a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey.” William Wordsworth: The Major Works. NewYork: Oxford University Press, 2008. 131-135.

---. “Ode ('There was a time,').” William Wordsworth: The Major Works. NewYork: Oxford            University Press, 2008. 297-302.

---. “Preface to Lyrical Ballads.” William Wordsworth: The Major Works. NewYork: Oxford          University Press, 2008. 595-615.

The Problem With Language in Avison's "Butterfly Bones"

From the onset of “Butterfly Bones,” Margaret Avison likens the act of writing a sonnet to that of capturing a butterfly, and both of these she marks, further, as destructive processes: "The cyanide jar seals life, as sonnets move/towards final stiffness" (1-2). This association between sonnet-writing and death is carried through to the end. The poem is indeed a “sonnet against sonnets.”

                Avison's criticism of the sonnet stems, in part, because it is a fixed form. By comparing sonnet-writing to the capturing, killing, and mounting of butterflies for display in museums, she indicates that the art of sonnets is a science, requiring "skill,...patience,...learning,...[and] precision" (5-8). The writing of a sonnet, that is, depends necessarily on rationality, as opposed, perhaps, to the free-flow of emotions that has been lauded in art since at least the Romantic era, during which time Wordsworth wrote, "Poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings" (273). The primary concern of the sonneteer is form, order, and structure - a methodical concern which Avison criticizes.

                In this light, we come to the concluding couplet which contains the rhetorical question "Might sheened and rigid trophies strike men blind/like Adam's lexicon locked in the mind?" (13-14). One might read this as Avison further denouncing sonnets (those "rigid trophies") in favour of more natural forms of poetic expression ("Adam's lexicon" being the most primitive and untampered human language). The question may then be paraphrased thus: Can sonnets have as much of an effect on their readers as unaltered forms of poetry do? The answer, we are led to believe, is negative; just as "shivery wings" (10) are more real, more engaging, than "museum spectres" (9), so too would a poem not forcefully fixed into a preconceived form have more power than one which is – namely, a sonnet.

                However, Avison's diction in the final line can equally lead to an alternate interpretation. Specifically, that she writes "Adam's lexicon [is] locked in the mind" in a poem which criticizes things being sealed (line 1), "cased" (2), and fixed (line 7) brings to mind the question of whether even the most unsophisticated, unformulated poem is truly any more effective than a sonnet.

                I am reminded of the linguistic concept of the sign, developed by Ferdinand de Saussure. The model is as follows: the sign - or the word - is like a coin; on one side is the signifier - ie. the phonemes which make up the word - and on the other is the signified - ie. the idea that is evoked by the word (Barrie). For example, when one says the word "elephant," the pronunciation of it (as e-luh-fuhnt) is the signifier, and the idea one has in their mind (of a big, gray, four-legged animal) when they hear or speak the word is the signified. What the sign must inevitably exclude is called the referent: the actual object to which the word refers (Barrie). There may very likely be a million things regarding the elephant that a word for it either does not or can not convey. Thus, while language may capture an idea of a thing, it can never, ever convey the entirety of it.

                Avison compares writing a sonnet to capturing a butterfly. However, in capturing a butterfly, one kills it. Even as one looks at a butterfly pinned to a corkbord and thinks to oneself, this is a butterfly, there is that disjunction between what has been captured and what actually was - the creature that lived and existed freely. Similarly, what a sonnet captures is not the truth of that captured thing. In the concluding couplet, Avison seems to suggest that this is not an issue of sonnets in particular, but an issue of language itself.

                Language is one of few things that set homo sapiens apart; it is a biological function "locked in the mind" (14) and deeply interfused with other cognitive capacities which make us unique. We are rational creatures and we will always endeavour to understand and communicate what we see and know of the world - but inevitably, Avison suggests, we are doomed to fail because language cannot possibly convey the truth of that to which it refers, ie. reality. In attempting to capture and observe a butterfly - a thought, or an emotion - we are doomed to be left always with the "bones" - the exoskeleton, a mere shell - and never the essence. 

SOURCES

Avison, Margaret. “Butterfly Bones, or a Sonnet Against Sonnets.” An Anthology of Canadian Literature in          English. Eds. Donna Bennett and Russel Brown. Don Mills: Oxford University Press, 2010. 553. Print.

Barrie, Michael. Introduction Lecture. LIN1310 Introduction to Linguistics I: Words and Utterances. University of Ottawa. Ottawa, 6 January 2010.

Wordsworth, William. “Preface to Lyrical Ballads.” The Norton Anthology of English Literature. Eds. Jack Stillinger and Deidre Shauna Lynch. 8th ed. Vol. D. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2006. 263-274. Print. 

The Duties of Adulthood - a Brief Analysis of Wordsworth's "Ode to Duty"

Upon first reading, “Ode to Duty” seems to conflict with the understood views of its author: it is difficult to attribute an appraisal of duty to a man who is well-known for lauding “the spontaneous overflow of emotion” (“Preface” 598) – spontaneity and duty seem at odds. However, upon closer consideration of the poem, one finds that Wordsworth does not necessarily suggest “duty” to be the adherence and conformity to an established religious or societal code, as one might understand the word today. Rather, “duty,” as Wordsworth describes, is a conscious devotion to the very things readers have overtime come to associate with him: childlike hope, joy, and an alignment with the natural world.

            The connection between Duty and nature is clear in the seventh stanza of the poem, where the speaker recognizes Duty's hand in all the natural world about him, from the flowers up to the stars. He connects Duty, furthermore, to divinity, naming her “the Godhead's most benignant grace” (50); the implication is, then, that the ordering of nature, maintained by Duty, is a reflection of God's will and benediction. This view is not unlike the view the child takes of nature, as Wordsworth describes in “Ode (‘There was a time’)”: “The earth.../To me did seem/Apparelled in celestial light” (2-4). In both cases, nature is recognized as infused with divinity. The difference between the child's view of nature, as remembered in “Ode,” and the adult's view, as expressed in “Ode to Duty,” is that, to the child, the world merely “did seem” heavenly. The adult speaker of “Ode to Duty,” on the other hand, recognizes that the natural world is heavenly because it is ordered on a set of natural laws which have their source in “the most Ancient Heavens” (“Duty” 56), which state, for example, that flowers shall bloom and “laugh” (“Duty” 53) or that stars shall be fixed in their positions. In other words, the child, in his interactions with nature, is filled with awe and thus implicitly aware of nature's divine source; the adult explicitly recognizes a government in nature, which he personifies as Duty, the “Daughter of the Voice of God” (“Duty” 1).

            In writing an “Ode to Duty,” then, Wordsworth is in part writing an ode to adulthood and “the philosophic [or, in other words, thoughtful] mind” (“Ode” 189) which consciously takes up what the child unconsciously carries out – that is, duty. In the poem in question, “Ode to Duty,” Wordsworth writes, “Youth/...without reproach or blot/...do thy work, and know it not” (12-14), indicating that Duty is not societal or religious conventionality or conformity – those are not things which children, purely in being children, adhere to. Thus, though he gives himself to Duty's “controul” (“Duty” 35), we may know that Wordsworth has not given up his childhood ideals; rather he has re-committed himself to them. As an adult, however, who can no longer “rely/Upon the genial sense of youth” (“Duty” 11-12), Wordsworth must consciously dedicate himself to Duty “in the quietness of thought” (“Duty” 36); that is, he must employ the “philosophic mind” (“Ode” 189) of his adulthood to dedicate himself, again, to the duties of his childhood years.

            Then, of course, the final question is that of his exact duties: what are they? What is a child's duty but to be carefree? As it turns out, this is precisely what Duty provides: freedom from “strife and from despair” (8). The poem suggests that children are free of “despair” because they are hopeful by nature:  they are the “blessed” (21) who “entertain” (22) a belief that “Serene will be our days and bright/And happy will our nature be” (17-18) – that is, a belief in a pleasant future. Because they have no doubts of “love” (23) or “joy” (24), children may “live in the spirit” (23) of faith. Adults, on the other hand, because they are aware that things “press/ Upon...present happiness” (29-30), must consciously “find that other strength” (24). That is, they must wilfully take up the duty to be faithful and thus free from “strife and despair” (8).

            As I have said, the duty to be hopeful and happy, which adults must undertake, is unconsciously performed by children. That is not to say, however, that the poet is unaware of duties particular to adulthood. In the middle of the poem, he at length discusses the concept of will in accepting one's duties; it is important to Wordsworth to clarify that he “still [acts] according to the voice/Of [his] own wish” (42-43). Thus the poem indicates that, as an adult consciously aware of him or herself, one has the duty to reconcile one's actions with one's desires and needs – that is, to be true to one's self. Again, children are, by nature, true to themselves; it is as they grow slowly into adults and take up, as Wordsworth writes in “Ode,” the “vocation/[of] endless imitation” (106-107), that it becomes a conscious duty to maintain individuality and free will. Thus, even in consciously exercising free will as an adult, one is merely continuing the work of the child.

            “Ode to Duty,” then, is not discordant with Wordsworth's ideals. Of course, as one might expect, duty is linked to adulthood; in the main, this poem is about the duty of being an adult, of taking responsibility through “the quietness of thought” (36). However, the responsibilities which Wordsworth outlines are essentially synonymous with the duties of a child; like the child, the adult has a duty to be free of “strife and from despair” (8), to live in hope, and to be true to one's self. However, while the child could carry out these duties and “know it not” (14), the adult is inevitably aware of himself and his actions. This does not much change things. Ultimately the adult's true duty is to consciously, thoughtfully, and wilfully do that which he had done unconsciously since birth and as a child. 

SOURCES

Wordsworth, William. “Ode (‘There was a time’).” The Major Works. Oxford: World’s Classics, 2000. 297-302. Print.

---. “Ode to Duty.” The Major Works. Oxford: World’s Classics, 2000. 295-297. Print.

---. “Preface to Lyrical Ballads.” The Major Works. Oxford: World’s Classics, 200. 595-615. Print. 

Vaguest Gleanings Merely - the dual-voiced persona and its quest for meaning in Reaney's "Starling with a Split Tongue"

As its title suggests, “Starling with a Split Tongue” concerns itself with speech (the figurative tongue) as well as the concept of a single, twofold object (the literal split tongue). Appropriately, then, the speaker that Reaney creates is a dual-voiced persona. One intuits, as one reads the poem, marked shifts in the voice: the first of these arrives shortly after the first stanza, and the second (which re-establishes the voice used in the first stanza) comes shortly before the last stanza. What these separate voices present in and of themselves, and what they symbolize in contrast to and in conjunction with the other, is the topic of this paper.

                The poem begins on a negative note, with a description of a cruel act: boys capturing and cutting the tongue of a bird, and then cooping him in a “cage” (5). The tone employed by the speaker  is matter-of-fact, as though the bird is resigned to his bleak fate and apparent lack of agency as represented in the fact that he merely repeats what “passersby taught” (8). By the end of the stanza, this negativity and resignation has intensified as the speaker settles on the thought of the utter emptiness of his speech: “Though I pray I do not pray/Though I curse I do not curse/Though I talk I do not talk” (10-12). The repetitive structure of these lines gives the voice, as it speaks of the meaninglessness of the things it says, the ring of conclusive certainty. Yet even as the persona within the poem resolves himself to the idea that his words are meaningless, the poet unexpectedly establishes a hope: that one can “talk [but]... not talk...[is] 'kinda nice'” (12-13).

                This hopeful transition leads into the second voice - a voice which, following the first voice's accedence to a belief in hollow utterances – speaks with a resulting abandon of language altogether. This second voice is hardly coherent: it speaks openly in a double voice, as suggested by the structuring of the poem upon the page; it verbalizes nouns (18), and nominalizes articles (15) and prepositions (24); it establishes unlikely comparisons such as “As still as infinitives were the Stones” (28). I am tempted to say that this voice says nothing meaningful at all – and yet I am (and I suspect this was Reaney's objective) engaged by this voice which at first glance defies logical language; that is, my creativity is engaged, and sometimes succeeds, in establishing meaning in the apparent meaninglessness. For example, as unusual as the metaphor of line 28 is, the reader can perceive meaning: infinitives are indeed “still”; the action of an infinitive (i.e. untensed) verb is not done; therefore, no motion takes place.

                Meaning is, however, incontestably vague in the third, fifth, and sixth stanza - perhaps that is both the point and beside the point. The voice which speaks in these passages is not at all concerned with making sense since the speaker, in the first stanza, has already resolved himself to the idea that speech is meaningless. Thus the vagueness is the point of these stanzas: the poet has purposefully established it as resulting from the speaker's abandon of language. Having abandoned the conception of meaning in speech, however, the speaker has liberated himself. He is no longer trapped “in a phrenological cage/...[saying]/The cracklewords passersby taught” (5-7), but creating utterly new, unconventional expressions. He is playing with language and, fascinatingly, the readers are compelled to play with it as well – that is, to engage creatively in interpreting the text. The vagueness in meaning of these stanzas is thus beside the point: what is of more interest is the process of pure creativity within the mind of the speaker/writer as well as the interpreter.

                Now, that is a rather positive observance for a poem to make, but Reaney does not choose to end his piece there, but shifts back into the persona of the speaker's first voice, which has now turned to questioning higher powers about why tongues, and hands, and hearts are split. (We can be sure that this is, indeed, the first voice: the mention of jackknives recalls the poem's introduction; furthermore, the poem is physically structured such that it no longer suggests the double-voice embraced in the middle stanzas; the most obvious indicator, of course, is that the speaker is coherent again!).

                By thus reminding his readers of that first voice, Reaney suggests the split nature of his speaker: he is the creature trapped within the “cage” (5) of things he is taught, yearning for meaning but perceiving naught but lies in both “mask” and “face” (40-41), attempting to resign himself to a stoic belief in meaninglessness but ever “restless” (43) and questioning “Giant Jackknife in the sky” (39); at other times, he is a being at liberty, freed from the constraints of language because he expects nothing of it, and thus freed, able to create fresh meaning. These are, of course, contradictory personas: the one yearns for meaning in speech and does not find it; the other does not seek meaning but inadvertently creates it through language. At the same time, the two personas are deeply fused, for it is the starling's initial abandonment of language that allows him to spring into his free, creative alter-ego; that creative alter-ego would not exist without the ego which is ever giving up on finding meaning in language.

                “Starling with a Split Tongue” is a fascinating but obscure poem that stubbornly resists interpretation. It is, to summarize as briefly as possible, about the condition of being a split entity. Furthermore, it regards the question of how to make language meaningful. At the core of this poem (figuratively and literally), Reaney presents the notions of creation and interpretation of creation, both of which are playful and imaginative, fundamentally alike. By the end, when the starling asks “In the larger garage.../Do they not croak as I?” (46-47), there is, then, a hint that the “larger garage” refers to the world outside the poem, that “they” refers to us (the readers), and that we – starling/poet and the readers – are all a part of this croaking, this deep desire for meaning. But of course, by the last lines, we are, literally and figuratively, away from the heart of the poem where freshest meaning is created. Thus, meaning is elusive; as we attempt to grasp it, it evades us, and when it comes, it comes in vaguest gleanings merely – much like understanding of this poem.



SOURCE

Reaney, James. “Starling with a Split Tongue.” An Anthology of Canadian Literature in English. Eds. Donna Bennet and Russel Brown. Don Mills: Oxford University Press, 2010. 626-627. Print. 

Dennis Lee's Self-reflexive Examination of Language and the State of Existence in "Worldly"

The preposition “in” proposes two entities (one thing is in another); “only,” which can be broken up into the morphemes 'one' and '-ly' proposes one entity; the affix “un,” signifying negation, suggests no entities. As such, Dennis Lee's poem “Wordly” begins - “If inly, if only, if unly” (1-2) - as a countdown. That, and the fact that, towards its end, Lee brings up the concept of the reckoning (punning with “rekenning,” found in the ninth line of the poem), gives the poem an apocalyptic feel. Following this intuition, one may interpret the poem as Lee's examination of the ultimate state of the world; he envisions it as fragmentary and somewhat absurd, but among these qualities he highlights the possibility for creativity and happiness. His envisioning of the world as such is done through a self-reflexive examination of something intrinsic to the human world: language.

What any reader is likely to immediately notice about the poem is that it defies comprehension, mainly because the poet breaks language down, playing with the “emes” (4) – the sounds and bits of words – in an attempt to forcefully create new meaning. For example, Lee constructs the adjective “cripcryptic” (7). When first reading through the poem and coming upon this, one might exasperatedly think that the poem itself is cryptic. In fact, I think Lee is here speaking about the poem, or, more broadly, about language – alluding to the idea that words are signs which try to capture and convey some truth; that is, words are cryptic. However, the addition of “crip,” a word, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, derived from “cripple,” indicates, also, that the crypticness of language is crippling, confusing, so that to speak is merely to stutter - “cripcryp-.” This goes to explaining the sense of incomprehensibility in this poem and, I think, in many postmodernist works, generally: postmodernists believe that language is incapable of conveying truth. Language presents a deconstructed version of truth.

Despite the fragmentariness one finds in language, one also finds “ec-/statisyllabic largesse” (7-8). That is, within the “emes,” the syllables, one finds lavishness, an abundance of something. Perhaps this something is meaning; this is suggested in the word “heart-/iculates” (2-3). “Heart-/iculates” replaces the “art” in “articulate” with “heart” - denoting perhaps the insertion of the heart into language's articulations. At the same time, the only difference between “heart” and “art” is the addition of the phoneme /h/. It is a very minimal addition; phonologically, the sound /h/ is merely an unobstructed exhalation of air. This indicates the close association between art – language – and the heart. As such, Lee suggests that language is an intrinsic part of human nature.

That said, there is still the element of the absurd in language, as evidenced by the ending of Lee's poem: “rekenning, rekeening, re-/meaning our worldly demesne.” With “rekenning, rekeening, re-/meaning,” Lee encapsulates his notion of language. A kenning is a compound metaphor; as such, it represents putting things together – literally, putting words, or free morphemes, together. To keen is to wail, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, particularly over someone's death – and as such, the use of this word signifies things falling apart. “Remeaning,” again, entails putting things together, restructuring after things have fallen apart. Lee's repetition of the prefix “re-” indicates that this happens again and again; furthermore, that he uses the gerundive forms of these verbs indicates that this repetitive process is ongoing, neverending. Finally, the poem ends with Lee referring to our “worldly demesne,” suggesting that there is no possibility of transcendence. In fact, as the entire poem can be seen as a self-reflexive examination of the nature of language, Lee might possibly be suggesting that our “demesne,” our only true possession we have to work with, is language.

In Lee's vision, humanity is like a child with a single set of building blocks – a set of “emes.” The only thing he or she can do is structure and restructure those blocks into various forms, various words, various meanings. This is both a hopeless, resigned view of existence, yet also absurdly hopeful, for as a child plays, he or she derives happiness and employs limitless creativity, as, I believe, Lee did in writing this poem.

SOURCE

Lee, Dennis. “Worldly.” An Anthology of Canadian Literature in English. Eds. Donna Bennet and Russel Brown. Don Mills: Oxford University Press, 2010. 868-869.

Modernist Anxiety as Depicted in Yeats' "The Second Coming" and Beckett's Endgame

The "catchphrase" of the twentieth century, derived from W. H. Auden's 1947 poem which bore the term as its title, is the "Age of Anxiety" (“anxiety” Def. 5). It is not just present-day scholars who have used the tag, but writers and thinkers within that era itself; for example, a 1953 publication of the Economist refers in one article to the “Age of anxiety;” it comes up again, also, in a 1958 edition of The Times (“anxiety” Def. 5). In light of this lasting label, then, used not only retrospectively by those studying an historical period but also by contemporaries of that period, we may be quite sure that the twentieth century was, indeed, a time in which anxiety was so pervasive and profound that it defined that time both from within and without. Having settled upon this, a host of questions arise, enclosed in this one: What is the nature of modernist anxiety?

Comparative analysis of “The Second Coming” by W. B. Yeats and Endgame by Samuel Beckett yields a comprehensive answer to this question, demonstrating a variety of elements that contribute to the characteristic super-anxiety of the modern era. These texts indicate that the modernist anxiety is at least threefold. Most basically, the anxiety arose from current affairs which were, as most would agree, worrisome. However, the modernists were also preoccupied with the past, the ideals and values from which, precisely because of current affairs, they felt alienated. This disconnection with past ideas and structures meant that the modernists experienced things in a void: suddenly without any faith in the support of a set of values against which to measure the world, the modernists could not value the world at all; to them, it became unknowable and insignificant. A comparison of “The Second Coming” and Endgame thus indicates that the anxiety which understandably arose from the present condition of the world expanded, ultimately, to an extreme anxiety over the futility of all past, present, and future existence – a threefold, all-encompassing, utterly hopeless anxiety.

In this interpretation, the modernist anxiety emerges most basically from current events of the early- to mid-1900s. One sees this clearly in the beginning lines of “The Second Coming,” wherein the poet depicts a dark, uneasy present world. Among the things he notes about the contemporary world is a trend of violence. The image of the falcon, for example, no longer under the control of a falconer as it flies ever higher, indicates (as the falcon is a bird of prey) a steady increase in brute violence. Elsewhere, the poet refers to “the blood-dimmed tide” (5), the mention of “blood” again suggesting violence that has “dimmed” the world. The editors of the anthology wherein this poem may be found note that it “was written...in the aftermath of World War I and the Russian Revolution and on the eve of the Anglo-Irish War” (Yeats fn.2). Undeniably, this was a turbulent time in which to live, a time of “passionate intensity” (8). The famous opening lines of “The Second Coming” demonstrate that the violence perceived during the era contributed to the troubled, anxious modernist outlook of the world.

Aside from the notion of violence, the major characteristic Yeats attributes to the modern world in “The Second Coming” is disorder. The violence itself is a result of this disorderliness: the poet envisions violence as something that has been restrained – that is, managed within an order - and, in the current times, “loosed” (5). The “falcon [who] cannot hear the falconer” (2) is another image of disorderliness: literally, the falcon no longer takes orders from its master. Yeats, then, sees the time in which he lives as one disintegrated into chaos. The images of “mere anarchy” (4) which Yeats uses to begin his poem establish the dire, discomfitting tone of the piece. Thus the poem suggests that comprised within modernist anxiety is a perception of a chaotic modern world.

One can find the motif of order and the chaotic ruin waiting beyond order also in Beckket's Endgame, in the characters of Hamm and Clov who form a pair, as physically manifest in their matching red faces. The two are engaged in a “vexed relationship...[of] master... [and] servant” (Stallworthy and Ramazani 2394). They are similar, then, to the falcon and the falconer of Yeats' poem. However, whereas Yeats mainly focuses on the chaos that erupts when hierarchical order “cannot hold” (3), Beckett examines the tension felt within an ordered situation of dominance and submission. Clearly, the hierarchical relationship between Hamm and Clov is not ideal for either party, as evidenced in the dialogue:

HAMM:...Why do you stay with me?

CLOV: Why do you keep me?

HAMM: There's no one else.

CLOV: There's nowhere else. (2396)

The situation is one of resentful “co-dependency” (Pearson 215). Clov and Hamm depend on one another because they are both, in some way, crippled, not fully competent: Hamm needs Clov to move him about and act as his eyes; Clov needs Hamm to give him food. Numerous times, Clov voices a desire to leave. However, as Hamm remarks, “Outside of here it's death” (2397). Thus, Beckket demonstrates that order is established to ward off the destructive, “outside” forces. In other words, order is set up to assuage the anxiety over threatening forces – death, in Beckett's work; chaotic violence in Yeats. However, as Beckett demonstrates, even within order, there is oppression, unhappiness, tension, and therefore anxiety resulting from a strained desire to escape order, as we find in Clov.

As aforementioned, the anxiety regarding disorder is rooted in current conflicts such as the First World War and the Russian Revolution which gave modernists a glimpse of the chaos and violence that erupted when various groups attempted to break out of an established order. However, the anxiety caused by the desire to escape an established order (even as disorder caused equal anxiety) is also rooted in contemporary affairs. For instance, as Nels Pearson contends in his essay subtitled “Codependency and the Ghosts of Decolonization,” the hierarchical relationship between Hamm and Clov can be interpreted as a parallel of the postcolonial relationship between colonizer and colony within the context of Irish history. As Pearson suggests, the strained, anxious relationship between the protagonists of Endgame derives from anxiety regarding the established order present in society (for example, the oppressive postcolonial relationship between Ireland and England).

To add to this point that modernist anxiety, as depicted in the two works in consideration, derived primarily from the present condition of the world is the observation made by some critics, such as Raymond Federman, that the setting of Endgame “reveals itself to be...a human skull...the two windows on the backdrop representing the eyes” (160). In this light, the tenants of the house or shelter – Hamm, Clov, Nell, and Nagg – are separate voices or thoughts within the skull; the mind depicted on stage is thus split-personalitied: it houses four people. Fascinatingly, modernists at the time “believed that Europe had a mind” (Brooker 12). Most notably in consideration of the split mind depicted by Beckett, T.S. Eliot maintained that the European mind is “schizophrenic” (Brooker 13). According to Eliot's The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism, Europe had undergone “'a splitting up of personality'” (Brooker 13). It can be argued, then, about Endgame that the play represents a single human mind conflicted within the structure of its own mind, but in the same vein, it can be argued that the setting represents the collective, “schizophrenic” (Brooker 13) mind of present-day Europe, with its tense conflicts. After all, according to Jewel Brooker, modern “philosophers and social scientists accepted the idea that the mind of the individual, the society, the culture, and the human race developed in parallel stages” (11). Thus, as suggested by the possible dual interpretation of the Endgame stage as both an individual and collective mind, the anxiety that modernists felt regarding order and disorder is a direct reflection of the anxiety and current tension in Europe at large. Paradoxical as it seems, then, the condition in Europe was both ordered and disordered, and, furthermore, both order and disorder caused tension on the continent and, in parallel fashion, in the minds of modernists. One must note, also, that, because the modernists felt uneasy with both order and disorder, they perceived themselves as trapped, like the characters in Beckett's play, with no where comfortable to stand.

Thus far I have argued that modernist anxiety stems primarily from the order and lack of order that the modernists witnessed immediately about them. However, as well as deriving from the present world, the anxiety felt by the modernists was intensified by their consideration of the past. Of course, the modernists' situation in, and preoccupation with, the present greatly influenced their view of the past; after all, when one considers an established order, he or she is inevitably considering an order that has been created in the past based on the past's ideals. So, for example, when Yeats writes, about the present, that “things fall apart” (3), he is recognizing that the old values which shaped the world no longer have the power to keep “things” together, that “the centre cannot hold” (3). Beckett also realizes this: in depicting Nell and Nagg (the older, parental generation) as with colourless faces, by placing them in trash cans, and by portraying the death of one of the two on stage, the play strongly indicates that the old ways are fading. Marc Hewson, in speaking of modernism, has called it an “age of awkwardness,” stating that the awkwardness – the “lack of ease” (“awkwardness” Def.3) akin to anxiety's “uneasiness” (“anxiety” Def.1) - comes from the modernists' recognition that they had lost the ability to use their parents' and grandparents' “tools.“ Thus, modernist anxiety, as well as coming from the present state of the world, was intensified through consideration of the past.

This leads us to the question, 'What constitutes “the centre” (3) of which Yeats speaks?' The first representative image presented in “The Second Coming,” that of a falconer at the centre of the “widening gyre” (1) of a flying falcon, provides some suggestions as to the “centre [that] cannot hold” (3). Glancing into the history of falconry, one finds that

Falconry...was the sport of kings in the Middle Ages...Social position not only

allowed time for the sport, but also dictated what species of bird could be used.

The technique and vocabulary of falconry was ritualized. (Jackson 21)

As falconry was a sport of the nobility, one might interpret Yeats' reference to it as indicating that “the centre” is – or was (since it no longer has any power) - traditional social hierarchy. Considering that Yeats disliked “the moneygrubbing and prudery of the middle classes...[and] looked for his ideal characters...to the aristocracy...[which had its] own traditions and lived according to them” (Stallworthy and Ramazani 2021), it is plausible that in the initial image of “The Second Coming,” he is expressing some regret for the loss of an ordered past in which the aristocracy stood at the controlling centre of things.

If the falconer is taken as an image of nobility, perhaps understood to be a king, he may also be taken as a representation of Christianity. The ordering of medieval society was based upon a desire to mimic the perfect, divine order, with the spousal relationship being a reiteration of the relationship of the king to his subjects, which itself was a reflection of the relationship between God and all of humanity – this is the reasoning that underlies, for instance, medieval concepts of petty and high treason (Plucknett 443), crimes which were seen as blasphemous acts against “the world order willed by God” (Carozzi 1365). Thus, if it is a noble falconer at the centre of the gyre which no longer holds, the image suggests that not only aristocracy but Christianity, as well, once held the world together. This interpretation is validated in the reference to “the ceremony of innocence [now] drowned” (6), a phrase one might take as denoting baptism, the Christian ceremony undergone by children. This view, that Yeats is suggesting Christiantiy to be one of the old structures that ordered society but no longer can, has been taken by many critics, including Brooker who writes “The center of which Yeats writes is Christianity, which for two thousand years held things together” (239).

The destabilization of these two centers of control – religion, and the traditional social system – was a long and gradual process and is a topic considered extensively in other works. For the purpose of understanding the modernist anxiety, however, we should note that this destablization was considerably hastened during the early twentieth century with publications of anthropological studies, among them James Frazer's Golden Bough, which “decentered” Western religion by placing it “in a comparative context as one of numerous related mythologies,” and philosophical writings such as those of Nietszche “who declared the death of God” (Stallworthy and Ramazani 1829). Furthermore, the World Wars of the twentieth century were a considerable blow on the modernists' faith not only in traditional social and religious structures but also in the methods – or “tools” (Hewson) - that had once created and perpetuated those structures, namely “conviction” (Yeats 7) – that is, firm “opinion or belief” (“conviction” Def. 7) as established through reason - and “passionate intensity” (Yeats 8) – that is, emotion. During the First World War, modernists witnessed many of the innovations which had been heralded as marks of human progress (for example, manned flight, first accomplished in 1903) turned to atrocious purposes (Hewson). According to Dr. Hewson, the “awkwardness” (or anxiety) of modernism arose from having to face the apparent fact that humanity was not what it had imagined itself to be. Thus, modernist anxiety, rooted in current events, intensified in consideration of the past, with the recognition that the “falcon cannot hear the falconer” (Yeats 2) - that is, that modernity was disconnected from its origins, from the structures and ideas that had once provided order and stability (a place to perch, if we extend Yeats' falcon/falconer comparison).

Twentieth century anxiety thus arose from what the modernists knew immediately (ie. the order and disorder of contemporary life) and that which they knew retrospectively (ie. the inadequacy and failure of past structures and modes of thought). However, as “The Second Coming” and Endgame show, the modernist anxiety was further heightened by the perception of a looming presence which had yet to be experienced or fully known. In “The Second Coming,” this is the “shape with the lion body and the head of a man,/...[slouching] towards Bethlehem to be born” (14-22). The creature, though by its particular hybridity recognizable as a sphinx, is meant to be ambiguous. It is a “shape,” merely – Yeats does not specify its species; furthermore, it is located in the unspecific setting of “somewhere” (13). Yeats concludes the poem, finally, asking “what rough beast” (21). Thus the description of this creature yet to be born is deliberately vague. This vagueness contributes to the sinister aura which accompanies this creature; its “gaze blank” (15) – a gaze unreadable, unknowable – creates uneasiness in the poet, troubling his “sight” (13) as well as ours, indicating that there is anxiety in not knowing.

This, of course is very troubling for the modernists. Because they now seriously doubted and had renounced old systems of thought and methods of knowing, the only thing the modernists could use to establish knowledge was individual perception, which they recognized as subjective and therefore not capable of ascertaining objective, absolute truth. This dilemma is captured in the setting of Beckett's play, which, as aforementioned is a depiction of a skull. The mind within the skull (ie. the four characters) has only two windows, two eyes, with which to see the outer world – aside from those, the mind is self-enclosed. Thus, as Beckett demonstrates, modernists recognized that the subjective perception which was now their only mode of perception was, by nature, limited and inadequate in ascertaining truth. This, coupled with the fact that there is uneasiness in vague, incomplete knowledge, indicates that the anxiety the modernists felt over not knowing was inescapable.

It must be noted, however, in a comparison of Yeats and Beckett, that in Endgame while there is a depiction of modernist subjectivity, the anxiety over not knowing is not brought into as much focus as in “The Second Coming.” Instead, Endgame foregrounds the knowledge that the characters, self-enclosed within some protective shelter, have of the outer world – that is, it examines what the characters fear to experience. When Clov peers through his telescope on “the without,” he states that he sees “Zero...zero...and zero” (2404). Earlier, Hamm states that “Outside of here it's death” (cite). Thus what the characters fear is death or, more generally, non-existence, the “infinite emptiness [that] will be,” as Hamm says (2406). Beckett associates death with the desert by causing Nell's final word before dying to be “desert.” The image of the desert is a suggestive symbol: it suggests not merely physical lack of life but also spiritual aridity (as in “The Second Coming,” where the dawn of a new era takes its setting in “sands of the desert,” suggesting the spiritual aridity at the end of the preceding, Christian era). Overall, the desert is a symbol of general void. The irony of the situation in Endgame, however, is that, in trying to guard themselves against the void, the emptiness, and the spiritual and physical death which await them, the characters create a stifling, unhappy system and a life for themselves which, self-enclosed, is equally void and empty: a life spent desiring to escape, as Clov does, or like Hamm, recognizing “it's time it ended” but continuing to “hesitate” (2395). As with the anxiety over not knowing, the anxiety caused by a fear of the void of substance (physical, spiritual, etc.) is inescapable, not only because in attempting to protect one's self from the void, one creates another void but also because, specifically, the modernists could no longer rely on older systems to impart meaning upon the void and thus make it meaningful (for example, in the Christian vision, death is merely one step on a the greater journey towards God/heaven). Modernist thought perceives that, within and without social structures (friendship, family, master/servant coordinations, religion, etc.), there is no meaning; thus, even as modernists yearn for structures of meaning, they recognize the futility of such structures, thus creating an inescapable anxiety.

One final observation can be made regarding modernist anxiety over what remained to come: both Beckett and Yeats, in their respective works, depict an anxiety over the repetition of life. The motif of cyclical existence is key in “The Second Coming” wherein Yeats employs his vision of history as two spiraling gyres which alternatingly expand and contract. As one gyre reaches its most expansive point (as during the modernist era), tension mounts, “things fall apart” (3). Thus, Yeats suggests there is anxiety over the cyclical, repetitive nature of history which predicts recurring chaos. In Endgame, similarly, there is tension at the possibility of life repeating. This possibility comes up three times in the play: with the flea, the rat, and the boy. In each case, Hamm and Clov express a desire to destroy life; when confronted with the existence of the flea, for instance, Hamm exclaims “But humanity might start from there all over again! Catch him, for the love of God!” (2405), indicating his tension at the thought of life reproducing. This disagreement with the cycle of life is somewhat perplexing in the case of Hamm and Clov. Considering their fear of the emptiness that awaits them beyond the here-and-now, one wonders why Hamm and Clov aren't elated at the prospect of life flourishing, filling the void - why they do not see the flea, rat, and boy hopefully. Similarly, one might ask why the poet of “The Second Coming” does not see the dawn of a new era as heralded by a “second coming” (even if a “second coming” without religious implications) as a hopeful change, why the image “troubles [the] sight” (13) of the speaker when it suggests a change in the current state of “mere anarchy” which the speaker deplores in the first few lines of the poem.

Both Beckett and Yeats suggest that the problem with hope, when it appears to occur, is that it occurs within a futile, inescapable system of stasis. For instance, the toy dog in Endgame which lacks one leg may be seen as a bizarrely hopeful object: it is a dog that is being put together; supposedly it will be complete – there is potential in the object. However, even if it is completed, even if that hope is fulfilled, it remains still a toy dog, a plaything, a pawn in someone else's game, just as the characters in the play are pawns (as suggested by their red and white pairing). The play ultimately views modern life as a futile “endgame” in which, despite appearances of hope, the final outcome (death, non-existence, emptiness) is unavoidable; the anxiety that arises at the notion of the continuation of life thus is an extension of the anxiety felt at living a futile, empty existence of which there can be no meaningful outcome.

Similarly, while the “Second Coming” in Yeats' poem would certainly mark a change in the direction of the world, it would still be a change within the limits of all possible history, a movement between two alternatives but not a true escape. In Yeat's model of history, it hardly matters what is at the center of the gyre, whether it is the figure of Jesus Christ or the figure of the sphinx, because, whatever it is, history will continue “turning and turning in the widening gyre” (1), continually leading to a point where “things fall apart” (3). Yeats and Beckett both indicate, thus, that the modernist anxiety permitted no sentiment of hope, for life, as the modernists viewed it in view of current catastrophic events and in consideration of the past's structures and ways of thinking which had so utterly failed, was futile, forever fluctuating between various extremes but never truly progressing.

The prevalent sentiment of the modernist period, anxiety, was so deep and dire that the period was nicknamed after it as “The Age of Anxiety.” To understand modernity, then, one must attempt to understand modernist anxiety. As I have argued based on analysis of Yeats' “The Second Coming” and Beckett's Endgame, the anxiety felt by the modernists was multifaceted; it derived from a number of aspects, which as in the interpretation of this paper, may be divided into aspects of the past, the present, and the future. The modernists felt anxiety over the lack of meaningful order in their contemporary world. Springing from their view of the immediate world, the modernists were forced to reconsider the past and recognize that the social structures and systems of thinking they had relied on could no longer hold - an understanding of disconnection that increased the modernists' sense of anxiety. Their view of the present and past cast serious doubts on the modernists' outlook of the future and the unknown in general. Stripped of the ability to trust in ordered systems of meaning, the modernists were reduced to an entirely subjective perception of the universe which denied the acquisition of objective, absolute truth – a perception which, in fact, suggested there is no such thing as objective truth. Similarly, the disconnection with and distrust of the past's systems of meaning rendered the modernists incapable of perceiving meaning in their surroundings; they were forced to confront the void, the unknown, the future, without anything stable to provide support, to help them make sense of and find meaning in the emptiness they perceived. As such, the modernist anxiety was all-encompassing and inescapable, creating in the modernist thinker and writer an outlook of all existence as inescapable futility, history as repetitive and barren.

SOURCES

“Anxiety.” Oxford English Dictionary Online. 2012. Web.

“Awkwardness.” Oxford English Dictionary Online. 2012. Web.

Beckett, Samuel. Endgame. The Norton Anthology of English Literature: The Twentieth Century and After. Ed. M.H. Abrams and Stephen Greenblatt. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2006.

Brooker, Jewel Spears. “The Mind of Europe: Anxiety, Crisis, and Therapy.” Mastery and Escape: T. S. Eliot and the Dialectic of Modernism.University of Massachusetts Press, 1996. 9-16. Google Books.

Carozzi, Claude. “Social Order.” Encyclopedia of the Middle Ages. Ed. Andre Vauchez, et al. Vol: 2. Chicago: Fitzroy Dearborn Publishers, 2000. 1365-1366. Google Books.

“Conviction.” Oxford English Dictionary Online. 2012. Web. 

Federman, Raymond. “The Imaginary Museum of Samuel Beckett.” symploke 10.1 (2002): 153-172. Scholars Portal Journals.University of Ottawa Library. 7 Mar. 2012.

Hewson, Marc. “Class Lecture.” ENG2450: American Literature. University of Ottawa, Ottawa, CA. July 4, 2011.

Jackson, Jerome A. “Birds and Humans.” Grzimek's Animal Life Encyclopedia. Ed. Michael Hutchins, Arthur V. Evans, Jerome A. Jackson, Devra G. Kleiman, James B. Murphy, Dennis A. Thoney, et al. Vol. 8. 2^nd ed. Detroit: Gale, 2004. 19-28. Gale Virtual Reference Library. Ottawa Public Library. 7. Mar. 2012.

Pearson, Nels C. “'Outside of Here is Death': Codependency and the Ghosts of Decolonization in Beckett's Endgame.” English Literary History 68.1 (2001): 215-239. Scholars Portal Journals. University of Ottawa Library. 7 Mar. 2012.

Plucknett, Theodore. “Treason.” A Concise History of the Common Law. Boston: Little Brown and Company, 1956. 443-444.

Stallworthy, Jon and Jahan Ramanazi. “Samuel Beckett.” The Norton Anthology of English Literature: The Twentieth Century and After. Ed. M.H. Abrams and Stephen Greenblatt. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2006. 2393-2394.

---”W. B. Yeats.” The Norton Anthology of English Literature: The Twentieth Century and After. Ed. M.H. Abrams and Stephen Greenblatt. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2006. 2019-2022.

---”Introduction.” The Norton Anthology of English Literature: The Twentieth Century and After. Ed. M.H. Abrams and Stephen Greenblatt. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2006. 1827-1847.

---”'The Second Coming' and The Wasteland.” Mastery and Escape: T. S. Eliot and the Dialectic of Modernism. University of Massachusetts Press, 1996. 231-246. Google Books.

Yeats, W.B. "The Second Coming." The Norton Anthology of English Literature: The Twentieth Century and After. Ed. M.H. Abrams and Stephen Greenblatt. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2006.