The Lord of the Rings

As the name suggests the Lord of the Rings is indeed a book of ring compositions. J R R Tolkien was amongst his many achievements an expert of Beowulf, another ring-rich text. It is recorded as a child and avid reader one of his favourite books was Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson. Both of these have we have seen are rich in rings.

So, are Tolkien’s other books rings also? Give me a chance!

If we look at The Fellowship of the Ring, the first volume of the trilogy we see enough rings to keep us going. It gets busier from then on!

The first volume is itself two books. The books carry multiple story-lines.  The first book begins in the Shire, and ends in a safe haven once again, in Rivendell. In between we have all manner of dark deeds.

The centre of the first book is once more seemingly safe indoors in Bree. Only, here, the themes work their magic: we have an attack by the Nazgul in the night, attempted murder.  We also have here the introduction of another major theme and character, Strider/Aragorn. The Bree episode is neatly framed by two events: the capture of the party on the Barrow-downs, and by the events on Weathertop.

How can these two possibly be parallels? The knights of the barrow-downs are not at rest because they failed in the battle against the witch-king of Angmar. And he is? The chief of the Nazgul. The barrow knights want more unresting dead to carry on the battle against the trapped dead of the Nazgul. For those not knowing the story, or unfamilar with this part, it is the chief of the Nazgul attacks Frodo on Weathertop.

Consider the Nazgual here: they enter the Shire, then break down the door of Crickhollow; they break open the gates of Bree; attack Frodo on Weathertop; attempt to break into Rivendell by the ford. In this last instance they are washed away by elf magic.

The story-line that holds this structure as a ring is the big story-line, of the ring, of big events outside the Shire that continually encroach and cast long shadows over lives of peace.

Behind this first book is the ring of Gandalf; it is hidden, only known by hints at the time, but revealed in the crucial Council of Elrond at Rivendell. Gandalf’s friendship to both Bilbo and Frodo was of the utmost importance to the whole tale of the one Ring. It is he who reveals its true nature to Frodo, and its legacy of danger. But then he disappears again; he was to meet them at Bree, the centre of the ring, or, as Strider/Aragorn asserts, at Weathertop at the very latest. It is not until they get to Rivendell, Frodo gravely injured, that he appears again. He had been a prisoner of Saruman; he had been inquiring into ring-lore and became caught in Saruman’s machinations. It was only the arrival of Gwaifir the eagle rescued him. The ring had taken him from the hobbits he trusted in the Shire, to Isenguard and a trusted advisor who turned out to be anything but, to Rivendell and safe colleagues.

The second book sees the making of the Fellowship, and ends in the break-up of the Fellowship. The centre of this book must be the dire events in the Mines of Moria, and the fall of Gandalf.

This is framed by the attempt to cross the mountain pass of Caradhras, and by the safe haven of Lothlorien: high mountain pass in snow, and low forest in leaf. An obvious parallel of opposites; what is particularly apposite here is that Gandalf could not save the company at Caradhras, that his power was found wanting. It is important that it was up to the men, particularly Boromir, to save the company. In LorienGandalf has gone and Boromir begins to be revealed as fractured and untrustworthy in his response to Galadriel. In both these two framing events the melding of the fellowship is a crucial factor: it is Boromir mostly, followed by Aragorn who forge pathways through the snow who rescues the party. In the latter it is the bonding of Legolas and Gimli, in the trust engendered by their mutual blindfold entry into Lorien, and the trust offered by Galadriel to Gimli bridging the traditional antipathy of Elves and Dwarves, that proves such a crucial factor in the coming battles.

It does get tricky when book One and Two are paralleled.

Is it plotted this way:

Shire: Frodo and Sam leave (Merry and Pippin join)  –  Rivendell: Fellowship leaves

Old Forest/Barrow downs –  Mountain pass

Bree: attack at night; introduction of leader, Strider/Aragorn   –  Mines of Moria and loss of leader, Gandalf

Weathertop  –  Lorien

Rivendell: meetings  –  Parth Galen: break up of Fellowship

?

Or this way:

Shire: Frodo and Sam leave —  Part Galen: Frodo and Sam leave

Old Forest: Tom Bombadill and Goldberry –  Lorien: Galadriel and Celeborn (reversal in roles)

Bree: attack at night; introduces leader Aragorn  –  Moria attack in dark: loss of leader Gandalf

Weathertop — Caradhras mountain (un)pass in snow

Rivendell: meetings — Rivendell: leavings

?

This latter ring, a reverse chiasmus, is the only example of such a form in the whole trilogy. I may yet be wrong on that assertion, or even that structure – although it does seem to fit very neatly. This second ring structure uses more superficial phenomena as its basis: similarity of pattern eg of Tom Bombadill and Goldberry with Celeborn and Galadriel. It has less to do with the history backstory, the emotive aspects, or the main story-line.

It is possible to see a bigger ring here for Gandalf: from the Shire, to the tower of Saruman, to Rivendell, then Caradhras in the mountains, and his fall in the Mines of Moria. A path full of parallel heights and low places; but how can we parallel hobbit holes with the mines of Moria, other than superficially? If we can, then what does this tell us about the nature of Gandalf, or his part in the story-lines?

The Lais of Marie de France

There does seem to be a cluster of Ring-Structured works over the three-hundred year period: eleventh to fourteenth centuries, in Western Europe.

So in this piece I am going back to see if a chronology can be traced.

Marie de France – so little is known of her as a person. Most is speculative: she ‘flourished’ (lovely word; how I would like to flourish!) in the twelfth century. Born in France, of a noble family, she may have been connected to the court of Eleanor of Aquitaine…. And so it goes. What is known is that she spent some years in England.

The Lais attest to this, she had a deep familiarity with texts only known in England at the time; she seemed familiar with certain places like Caerleon, Carlisle etc. Her knowledge, for instance, of current Arthurian texts does seem extensive. Traces of Wace and others are also to be found.

The influence of the Lais does also seem to have been extensive. We find adaptations in Chaucer  (The Franklin’s Tale); there was even an Old Norse version: the Strengleikar.

Hers was a time of disruption and change (ce’st la vie!), of endless wars, territorial disputes, of the terrible Crusades laying waste to stretches of eastern Europe and the Balkans.

It was also the height of the period of the southern France Troubadours, and their equally impressive counterparts in the north, the Trouveres.

1

So, lets us look at Equitan. This is one of the shortest of the Lais, at around 341 lines.

Lines 1 – 12

Marie de France addresses the reader: this is a Breton tale that she has saved from obscurity by being written down as a lay. That is, otherwise, as an oral tale it would gradually be corrupted, and lost.

13 – 28

Equitan was a courlty king of Nantes, with a fine reputation, and greatly loved by his subjects. He was a devout follower of chivalry and courtly love, of pleasure, hunting and dalliance.

As he was so taken up with his pursuits he left the ruling of his kingdom to his trusted knight to act as his seneschal.

29 – 53

The seneschal’s wife had a great reputation for beauty, breeding, and bearing. We are told that she will ‘bring great misfortune to the land.’

Her reputation of course reached the King, who ‘conceived a desire for her’. His ruse was to go hunting alone in the region where she lived. After the exertions of the hunt he retired to her castle. Her spoke to her often, and ‘displayed his great qualities.’

54 – 88

That night he could not sleep: Love ‘admitted him into her service… Unable to withstand its power he was forced to give Love his full attention.’

He lay all night reasoning out his desire, discussing with himself the rules of courtly love in her case: how such a beautiful woman was not in love or had no lover! A ‘true courtly lady, he argued, needs must have ‘true love’.

He devised a plan; he would go hunting next day, then feign illness and return to her castle.

89 – 100

Later that night, still sleepless, he questioned if she could take him as her lover – ‘Why am I so distressed and alarmed?’

101 – 36

As planned he went to hunt next day, then returned claiming illness. He asked the seneschal if his wife would tend him. She did, and he disclosed his feelings for her.

Her response was to request time to reflect. If she were to consent, and then he were to tire of her, she argued, she would end up with nothing. He would always be the king, in their relationship.

137 – 84

‘Love is not honourable unless based on equality.’ Love is not a commodity to be bought and sold, he replied. To prove this he said he was willing to surrender himself to her love, he  would be ‘her vassal and lover.’

He spoke long and argued passionately, begged, as was the custom.

She accepted ; they exchanged rings.

We are told: ‘It was to be the cause  of their deaths.’

185 – 211

Their love lasted many years; it was undetected. The excuse given was that the king needed to be bled, and in private. The seneschal’s wife was the only one to do this.

In this time the king took no other lovers, nor showed interest in anyone else.

His courtiers began to become concerned: he was not getting any younger, the need for marriage and especially an heir were becoming pressing.

The seneschal’s wife heard the grumblings; she wept. The king asked why.

212 – 36

She explained to him the reason: he needed to marry. She was lost: ‘Through you my death is inevitable.’ she said.

The king replied ‘with great tenderness’ he would never leave her.

So she came up with a plan to bring about her husband’s death… providing the king was willing to help her.

They could then marry openly and resolve the crisis.

287 – 62

He agreed.

The plan she came up with was that he would once again go hunting, and stay with them. He would request a bleeding. On the third day he would request a bath, and once again request the seneschal accompany him. She would have his water scalding hot. The king would then show both his and the seneschal’s men how the seneschal had died in the bath.

The king agreed.

263 – 82

Less than three months later he went out hunting.

They put the plan into action.

At the last minute the seneschal left the room of the bath for refreshments. The king and the man’s wife succumbed to their passion in his absence.

283 – 310

He came  back early and caught them. The king ‘to conceal his wickedness… jumped feet first into the tub, completely naked… and was scalded to death. The evil plan had rebounded on him….’

The seneschal seized his wife, and threw her after him; she was also scalded to death.

311 – 14

Marie wrote: ‘All this happened as I have described. The Bretons composed a lay on this subject, about how Equitan died and about the lady who loved him so dearly.’

2

If we compare lines 137 – 184 with 212 – 36 we see something interesting. Here are two relationships being explored; one is through the courtly seduction of a married woman, according to the rules of courtly love; the other the consequences of that: the reality behind the play, as it were.

What these two groups surround are lines 185 – 211. The relationship lasted many years, and was indeed honourable, according to the rules of courtly love. It was a stable and true relationship.

She was in fact cheating on her husband, and he was cheating on his people. When this latter is revealed the whole tone changes, and leads to the former being revealed. The standard rhetorical device of metonymy is in play here: we have the king, he is also an emblem of his realm, and his people. The people and the king are shown to be no longer in accord.

There are further patternings: there are two hunting episodes. In 29 -55 he sought her out at her castle on the ruse of hunting nearby. In lines 263 – 82 he once more sought out her castle on a hunting trip. There cannot be a greater contrast between these two episodes. In the first he hunts, probably the solitary antlered deer; in the latter he hunts the seneschal (complete with cuckold’s horns). The hunting metaphor as we now know it is here in prototype: it must be remembered this was written prior the Romance of the Rose where such symbolic images were more openly exploited.

There is a further patterning in lines 54 – 88 and lines 231 – 62. Here plans are being formulated in both cases, we are no longer in the realm of possibilities but very real causes and effects. He has to seduce, persuade and cajole her into a secret extra-marital affair; she has to engage him into killing her husband so that the affair can be openly consummated. We can see the same device being used, and that the one is a consequence of the other. This is sound paralleling.

There are three addresses to the reader in the tale: in lines 29 – 55 we are warned that the seneschal’s wife will ‘bring great misfortune to the land.’ This is before we have really been introduced to her or her predicament. In lines137 – 84 we are warned once again: ‘They kept faith well and loved each other dearly. This was later to be the cause of their death.’ And in the last lines Marie once more addresses us: “All this happened as I have described… how Equitan died and… the lady who loved him dearly.’

Does this not round of the tale well?

The tale seems to exhibit the classic structure of a ring: the first half, where the stages of the play of love, the courtly pursuit, are shown; and the second half where they are re-shown in reverse order – as well as the sudden insecurities: lines 89 – 100: will she be willing to take him as lover? And lines 212 – 36: ‘…you will take a wife, a king’s daughter, and leave me.’

The Introduction to the Penguin Classics edition (1986) comments: ‘… the lai concentrates almost uniquely on the crisis which is at the same time the crux and core of the narrative. The lai… generally starts from a position of lack and crisis and is resolved into a period of happiness; the happiness is then confronted with a test which leads either to a satisfactory or an unsatisfactory resolution. The events… are usually… the decisive moments in the lives of the protagonists….’ (page 27).

I hope I have shown there is more structure to this description than the writer seems aware of here.

Do we look solely to the text for our structure, or to the intent the tale is portraying? There are several instances in this text that bring this question up eg the depth of relationship between the lovers we have to take for granted before being reinforced by a later comment in the text by authorial intervention.

3

One of my first thoughts was: was this an example of the last vestiges of the exercise of seigniorial rights, that the king could lay claim to any body in his realm? It does not do to bring our contemporary formulations of historical ideas and ideals to such works.

One of the key writers on these topics, Johan Huizinga, in his excellent Men and Ideas (Meridian Books, 1959), commented: It is manifest that the political and military history of the last centuries of the Middle Ages as described by Froissart, Monstrelet, Chastellain… reveals very little chivalry and a great deal of covetousness, cruelty, cold calculation, well-understood self-interest, and diplomatic subtlety. The reality of history seems constantly to disavow the fanciful ideal of chivalry. (Chivalric Ideals in the Middle Ages).

The relationship of the seneschal and his wife perhaps fell under these last designations. That she is described in the text, by Equitan as a lady who needs love: the marriage, as most of the period was one of convenience and arrangement.

I have often wondered what the aims of chivalric writers were with their works in this respect. And I admit Marie de France amongst them. Were they trying to derive some thing of meaning, something worthwhile recalling, something to redeem their age? But then, this is indeed what we all do.

There was nothing noble about men hacking at each other with lengths of sharpened metal. Sword and spear go back centuries as the only weapons of war, and lasted for centuries after this: banal and brutal times indeed!. What damage they did was limited mostly to the savagery of hand-to-hand combat. The missle of the spear was limited; as a weapon its power was in the held thrust.

Perhaps the intention with these works was to provide a template for future rulers: See how nobly we conducted our affairs, how high-minded we were. So must you strive to be.

Perhaps their intention was with the life hereafter: Dear God, this we did. But we did it for You/in Your name: we tried to raise ourselves and actions into nobility. Be lenient with us.

Perhaps a blend of both.

PS

The English writer John Heath-Stubbs lived in Brittany as a child in the nineteen-twenties; he recalled hearing a great many folk-tales and stories whilst there. Maybe Marie had no reason to be afeared of the loss of the Breton tales.

That is just a quip, I know;  her real intent was to leave something of her own devising. One big question is, just how many of these tales are in fact hers? That not all the Lais can be construed as rings attests to either indiscriminate gathering of tales, or inclusions of other works and writers under the title The Lais of Marie de France. As always, it is perhaps a comination of both. Incidently, the tale Bisclavret mut be one of the earliest werewolf stories.

An Interruption of Geese

What follows is a brief discussion of use of interruptive image and of modes of address, in two seemingly disparate writers. There is much to be found in common between them.

Under the Apple Tree/Onder de appelboom                                     

I came home, it was about

eight and remarkably

close for the time of year,

the garden seat stood waiting

under the apple tree

 

I took my place and sat

watching how my neighbour

was still digging in his garden,

the night came out of the soil

a light growing bluer hung

in the apple tree

 

then slowly it once again became

too beautiful to be true, the day’s

alarms disappeared in the scent

of hay, toys again lay

in the grass and from far away in the house

came the laughter of children in the bath

to where I sat, to

under the apple tree

 

and later I heard the wings

of wild geese in the sky

heard how still and empty

it was becoming

 

luckily someone came and sat

beside me, to be precise it was

you who came to my side

under the apple tree,

remarkably close

for our time of life. 

Rutger Kopland, Under the Apple Tree/Onder de appleboom (Among Cattle/Onder het vee, 1966)

We scarcely notice the ballad-like repetitions of key phrases, or the manipulation of mood-buttons. He earns our trust, and the trust of the ordinary reader by foisting no great ideas of redemption on us, by insinuating no Political awkwardness. We get the ‘feel’: the surburbanism of life lived by the ordinary person, with a job, family… in fact, do we recognise in ourselves: nostalgia for the past? The past of a secure economy, of safe jobs, a stable society? This is a claim that plagued Kopland from these early books.

See how he builds the tension from stanza two: the juxtaposing of details of the neighbour (for which read, everyman/the identifier of self as ordinary: the classic Dutch sense of communalness), the change in light: the dark that identifies colours, blues…. Having keyed up the emotions at this point: the ‘…too beautiful to be true…’ (those last three qualifying words communicate so much, particularly in combination with preceding, ‘…once again…’), he immediately disengages and redirects. The emotional response is channelled via the toys in the grass, via sound, to the house, and identified as the laughter of children. The emotions are stirred but not settled, their direction may have been channelled but in consequence the mind is made open, the imagination engaged, by this ‘mental event’, so that when the geese fly they are identified immediately as ‘wild’, the sky is emptied by their presence, a sense of immanence is apparent.

Once again this keying-up of emotions is channelled to the ‘…precisely you…’: an anchoring, grounding in the here and now.

Now I want to look at Flashing Green Man by Kathleen Jamie

Flashing Green Man

I regret the little time I make to consider

these adult days, as you take a photo

to the window, tilt it to the winter light.

now I’m one of the city. Under the multi’s

walking tall and bejewelled

across our dark land, I wait with the others:

thinking about supper and the grocer’s wife,

whom he said, as he weighed out potatoes,

had been mugged. But these days I don’t much consider.

 

The green man flashed – he too refuged in cities –

and the traffic stilled for the shouting

news-vendor in his cap and scarf, for us

blethering people; and a sound

in the orange glow: a high kronk-honk

that made me picture those ancient contraptions

abandoned on farms. But I stopped

on the rush hour pavement to watch

the skein’s arrow

cross the traffic-choked Marketgait,

and head for the glittering multi’s

tenth or twelth floor, where they banked

in the wind of these pivotal buildings

to pull themselves North to the Sidlaws:

and brash light from windows

where clerks tugged on their street clothes,

coated their wings in silver and gold;

and people flowed around me

intent on home; from the roundabout’s hub

traffic wheeled off to the suburbs.

 

If not them, perhaps someone high in the multi’s –

say a pale-faced woman peeling potatoes

as her husband climbed the long stairs,

listened, smiled, and wiping the window

cupped her hands around her eyes

to acknowledge a sign

truer than the flashing green man

or directional arrows seen at a junction

where I watched the geese tilt

to make their turn, their beating wings

more precious than angels’ in the city lights.

Kathleen Jamie, The Queen of Sheba, Bloodaxe, 1994

Both poems employ long sentences that take up almost a whole long stanza; both do not employ much by way of commas, colons, semi-colons. The Jamie much more than the Kopland. Why is this? What does the long sentence express in the poem? Because it is used for a reason. What, the lack of punctuation?

Kopland only uses the comma; this allows a sense of flow, of ongoing thought, of feeling uninterrupted by analysis, discursive thought, consideration.

The long sentence can be seen as a rhythmic device, except that my term ‘device’ devalues the way the writer orders his work in this instance. Both writers contribute to the effect of on-going life in the poems, of on-going life in tandem with reflection; that is, although the poem instances a brief period of time, the minutes of the event, it encapsulates a life period. The point being that life and reflection are portrayed as part and parcel of the same event, the event that that the poem enacts, and that is the poem. It is all thrown against a much bigger, wider screen where times passes and is enacted.

Try to imagine what each poem would be without the interruption of geese.

For Kopland the geese can be seen as a device for expressing (or discovering?) an emotional state beyond that posited by the poem to that point. Admittedly, tiredness combined with a sense of fulfilment/achievement, had brought Kopland to a delicate state where he found his cognisance of the evening as too beautiful to be true. I use the term ‘cognisance’ here because I think it is necessary to know something of the man to know the range of the poem.

The late Rudi H van den Hoofdakker was a neuroscientist, who specialized in sleep disorders, and the aging process in the elderly. He was, it has been said, ‘the least metaphysical of men’; he was also a pioneer of the use of ‘ordinary language’ in poetry. By this I mean he did not use terms, express concepts that were not available to common language use. And yet he strove continually to express deeper and deeper insights into the human condition using this limited palate. To read his (translated) poetry aloud is to never stumble over an overwrought, or extravagant image, never to sense any awkwardness due to incursion by uncharacteristic content. I have cited negative attributes; for the positive I would state the poems recommend themselves to us as owning an integrity, honesty even.

In Jamie the geese are an interruption into the closed state the city represents, of the wilderness, the ‘natural’ world, from the world that covers major parts of the earth’s surface. Jamie has travelled these places, remote, difficult, almost inaccessible. Her books bear this out.

In this poem we are prepared for this special interpretation of the geese, by the Green Man image, a rural image of the essence of wildness in this case translated into the city as an icon for Walk, that is, movement, vitality, if you will.

Without the geese the poem would still have been a very potent expression of the urban life. For some writers this would have been enough. For Jamie, though, she has at least a dual vision. Like her fellow Scot, Norman MacCaig with his ‘binocular vision’ who identifies the smell of herring on an Edinburgh high street, or the incursion of Highland (Lochinver/Assynt) experience, memories, into city experience, Jamie is aware of the importance to her of those outside places.

She identifies herself as a city dweller in the poem, and this, it could be argued, precipitates the crisis that the incursion of geese engenders. The geese in this case become for her agents of a wider life-experience. Yet it seems to be a gendered life-experience: the clerks tugging on their street clothes are set against the pale-faced woman peeling potatoes: the clerks are oblivious to the geese, although just as trammelled and trapped, whilst the woman, and there is no hint of an unhappy relationship, smiles and recognises something of an extra adjunct to life in the incursion and activity of the geese.

For Kopland the geese are the vehicle for acknowledging a greater intensity of feeling. In the poem he writes how the sound of the geese precipitated a sense of how still and empty/ it was becoming.

If we compare this stillness and emptiness with the immediately preceding sense of fullness we get a quick switch from full to emptiness, itself symptomatic of emotion without outlet, looping in itself, until anchored by the presence of the other person.

If we compare this sense of emptiness with the following by Jamie we maybe can get a handle on the emotion.

Skeins o geese

Skeins o geese write a word

across the sky. A word

struck lik a gong

afore I wis born.

The sky moves like cattle, lowin.

 

I’m as empty as stane, as fields

ploo’d but not sown, naked

an blin as a stane. Blin

tae the word, blin

tae a’ soon but geese ca’ing.

 

Wire twists lik archaic script

roon a gate. The barbs

sign tae the wind as though

it was deef. The word whustles

ower high for ma senses. Awa.

 

No lik the past which lies

strewn aroun. Nor sudden death.

No lik a lover we’ll ken

an connect wi forever.

The hem of its goin drags across the sky.

 

Whit dae birds write in the dark?

A word niver spoken or read.

the skeins turn hame,

on the wind’s dumb moan, a soun,

maybe human, bereft.

Kathleen Jamie, as above

Line 15 – that Awa’., should it be read as The word whustles/ ower high for ma senses and awa? Or is it a direct address: Awa with all that! In the latter case it could be said to serve a similar purpose to the retreat from the intensity of emotion in the Kopland poem. And as in the Kopland poem the emotive power of the piece is re-directed, first by disentangling from the past and then by calling upon the standard image for the going beyond language, custom, culture, into a common heritage of human experience, that of the human predicament of being faced with the ultimate full stop, our inevitable deaths.

Both writers have particular takes on use of language. I have mentioned Kopland’s ‘common language’; Jamie intersperses standard English with lowland Scots, a lived language rather than a dictionary-enhanced language such as lallans. Jamie’s lived Scots, particularly evident in Skeins o Geese, is also and emphatically a ‘common language’. Elsewhere in the book this poem is from, The Queen of Sheba, we have poems of recognition between people, of a (re-)discovered fellowship. This is at times wholly a gendered recognition, at others a recognition of common humanity. The identifying of herself as a city dweller, as in Flashing Green Man, is a part of this. The book also broadens out into the ‘other’ lands Jamie constantly references. There we find recognition and fellowship amongst, and with, nomads and widely different cultural groups.

And where do the poems end, in relation to these interruptions of geese?

In Kopland the becoming is in the arrival of the partner, remarkably close, that is, it is a treasured relationship. With Kopland we never move beyond the self. This is what has contributed to his being called essentially a sane writer: he recognises that all our knowledge is the self’s knowledge, that we are always just people on the earth, amongst its variousness. In a later poem Self-portrait as a Horse the writer does not become the horse but is always aware that he is human, and can never enter the being of another, whether person, or creature. We can only know the world from the position of our self. In this we are all alike.

In Jamie we become aware of the close proximity of the Sidlaw Hills to the city. This is a key feature of much Scottish writing, that city and ‘mountain’ are cheek by jowl. One is never without a glimpse, sighting, of  ‘wilderness’ in one form or another. This dual vision, cited above, becomes a means for investigating the common bond in the variousness of human lives, in whatever terrain.

Kopland investigates a similar connection, but by emphasising the common humanity inherent in all, but from within.

Both poems chart a journey; in Jamie this has the added resonance through her experience of nomadic peoples, and the apparently nomadic migrating geese in the city. The journey in Kopland is an entirely self-referential journey; maybe here we see the impact and legacy of the Calvinist tradition, the sole reliance on the self naked before God, without intercession from priest or saint. This is very much what we now take to be Martin Luther’s great vision. Historically it took many generations, twist and turns, interpretations etc to get to this, but the vision is strong enough for us in our unreligious time to glimpse: it is the existential moment. But in Kopland’s case brought back from the brink by the bonds of common humanity, of love for family, of duty, of responsibility to one’s community. And all accepted with varying degrees of willingness.

Ring Structures in Literature – 1

The social anthropologist the late Mary Douglas, promoted a new investigation of these old structures. Her book Thinking in Circles, (Yale University Press, 2007) has examined the phenomenon in some detail.

So what are Ring Structures? They are a way of structuring a text so that it forms a complete whole; there are many models, and they all seem to have definite similarities of structure. They are also found over a wide cultural area. Parallelism in literature, oral and written, occurs throughout the middle and far east. They are one of the earliest ways of structuring tales, poems, stories, even at one point a history.

A Ring Structure is based around a paralleling of events, themes etc, within the text; the main event appears in the middle of the story, poem etc, or to the modern reader, half way through. The events, thematic points, leading up to this main event are reiterated in reverse order in the latter part. The ending ties-in very closely with the beginning of the piece. The beginning and ending are also echoed clearly in the central event. This central event is the crux of the piece; it is a crux in that it is also a turning point in the piece, a crossing over in the story.

In some classic examples ring structured works also contain rings within the main ring.

Each paralleled point etc is usually clearly indicated in the text. This can take the form of reiterated phrases, verbal clusters. The result is what seems to be a series of separate episodes, and a petering-out of storyline. Ring literature can appear inconclusive, and full of repetitions, to the linear reader. Douglas writes it is this confusion in the scholarly approach: a widely praised work that to them reads jumbled, confused, repetitive, that made her pay close attention. The question is not Why is this work so valued? but What is it about this work makes it valued?

The general structure would seem to indicate that the text concentrates on the examination of cause and effect equally, as equal space is given both to the build up and the implications of actions.

For examples of these we mostly have to look to ancient texts. Mary Douglas’ book gives a very detailed account of The Book of Numbers, in the Old Testament of the Bible as having been conceived as a ring structured text. Another example is that of the Zoroastrian myths. As I said, ancient texts.

More modern examples can be found in the Chinese classics of the stories of the eleventh century The Water Margin.

Many modern scholars find it hard to recognise the structure; the majority of modern literature is based on far more linear models, and ring structures are not that easily recognised in this environment. Ring structures do not seem to have survived in any quantity beyond the last millennium BC. Metrical structures and later rhyming structures seem to have taken over; whether these forms displaced the older forms or not is not clear. Douglas seemed to think that the loss of ring practice was due to displacement by other emergent cultures. Many questions are thrown up by this, especially if, as we see, they are so wide spread throughout most cultures: where do these new cultures which do not use ring structures come from? It is probably the case that new ideas within cultures, amalgamations of extant and conquering cultures, took over, imposed different orders, new methods.

The Pearl Poem – from the Middle English

The Pearl Poem is be found in a mid fourteenth century manuscript, that contains Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Cleanness and Patience; all four poems written down in a Midlands dialect of Middle English.

All except Sir Gawain… are explicitly Christian in theme, But, Sir Gawain: a knight all in green, green skin, hair, and a challenge to die at midwinter – what, we think, could be more pagan!

Jane Draycott has currently published a version of the poem; it is a modern, contemporary rendering rather than a direct translation. That writers of this quality are now exploring the poem is very encouraging.

The Pearl Poem is unique in its technical expertise, rhyming ababababbcbc, and consisting of a hundred and one stanzas, divided into twenty sections. The tone is courtly, as opposed to everyday, the language discursive and, at times, impassioned; all is refined so that all the focus of the poem is on the subject matter. Latest academic assessments suggests the author of at least, this and Sir Gawain to have been a priest based in Stockport, near Manchester in the North West of England. This is based on use of local words, as well as, in Sir Gawain, possible local sites (the Green Chapel based on Lud’s Cave, on the edge of the White Peak part of the Peak District).

Addendum: 2/7/12

- Commentators on the authenticity of the writer’s background very convincingly point out that the writer, although using the dialect of the region, would most likely have been a member of the court, or some family attached to the court of the time. This makes sense: what ‘boggled’ me about the writer’s location was the quality of the work added to the isolated location. When a boggling like that occurs, I am now aware enough to see it as an indication of inconsistency. -

Back to the body: Middle English is an impossible read for many people, but the poem becomes more accessible if we acknowledge its Midlands dialect. The ‘jeweller’ narrating the poem has lost a pearl of great value, in the grass:

Sythen in that spote hit fro me sprange/ Ofte haf I wayted, wyschande that wele/

That wont watz whyle devoyde my wrange/ And heven my happe and al my hele. /

That dotz but thrych my hert thrange/….

Literally:

Since in that spot it from me sprang/ often have I waited, wishing (all was) well/

That want was to while dispel my wrong/ And heaven my hope and my

 well-being./ That does but hurt my heart sore….

That ‘thrych’ is pure Midlands, as is the interchangeability of a and o sounds. The passage quoted, especially that third line, would need a page of explication to unwrap all its meanings.

There is much use of rhetorical forms and figures: all grasses are spices (’spysez’), that is, aromatic, varied, and the description of the dream landscape is a jeweller’s paradise. The access of writer and readers of this period, before the opening up of the world in the age of discovery, to a knowledge of the range and types of jewels is intriguing. The description of the dream vision of the heavenly city, built up of tiers of precious jewels (jasper, sapphire, emerald, ruby etc) is all based on the descriptions in the St John Gospel.

We think of all this as extreme artificiality, rhetoric-gone-mad; but for the time this was the accepted structure of the world, from base to noble metals; from iron to gold; from earth to heaven and the transcendent qualities. It is the ideology and semiotics behind the magnificence of stained glass windows.

The child who died, the jeweller’s two year old daughter, is transformed into a pearl, perfect and ‘matchles’; that is, there is found no match for her on earth. This is achieved by the writer’s insight into the passionate loss of a father. Already there is a play of imagery: pearl and young girl; jeweller and father, that draws us in, entangles us in a developing gestalt. Our imaginations are engaged, and our empathetic responses directly addressed. The precision of the language is invigorating.

The father/ jeweller has lost his perfect young daughter/ pearl. In his utter grief he finds himself in a jewelled dreamscape, and spies her across a stream. She seems older and even more serenely beautiful. They discourse; she instructs him, in a reversal of a parent to a child, in God’s teaching. He has to accept, but cannot lose her again. In trying to cross over to her he violates God’s law and loses the vision. His lesson, though, is learned. And ours with it.

We read the poem now as a courtly piece, whose rhyme scheme constrains expression. And yet there is an argument that the very artificiality of the form was intended, was a part of the expressive intent. Not only does the form aid the poet’s ability to handle the grief of the loss, but the courtly and intricate, almost dance form, brings dignity, gravitas and, ultimately, joyous praise to the handling of the theological content.

It is very much a show, not tell: we learn with him through following the question and answer of the religious discourse, that we have to suffer, whether it is the loss of a loved one or whatever our burden is to be. We learn also, that grief can bring a vision of the order of things.

This is where Sir Gawain… fits in. It is through the reader witnessing Sir Gawain’s learning of self-sacrifice, humility, and self-constraint that mankind’s weakness is revealed to itself; and that it is through repentance and suffering that mankind is redeemable.

In our emphatically non-religious culture the religious experience may be coming to seem increasingly alien to our sense of the world. That may be so; but the bases of the poem remain: we all experience grief, loss; we all have concepts of goodness, right, honesty.

Our experiences are always going to challenge our ideals. It is the ways in which we make sense of this, our ways of coping, which are the main stories of all times.

There is a freshness about this poem: the father’s grief is authentic; its overpowering emotions force him into direct confrontation with his beliefs. The jewelled landscape can still charm and surprise us.

The stanzas of religious discourse can be trying but if we approach them as an example of technique, skill, in using form and content whilst juggling sense, mood, atmosphere, it is surprising how really consummate was the poet.

Darkness Spoken: the Collected Poems of Ingeborg Bachmann

Darkness Spoken: the Collected Poems of Ingeborg Bachmann    Zephyr Press      2006

1

Born in 1926 in southern Austria, Bachmann died, after a rollercoaster ride of fame and withdrawal, in somewhat mysterious circumstances, in 1973 at her Rome apartment.

Mysterious? Well, it is still undecided if she died through an unattended cigarette, smoking in bed; or was it a suicide attempt?

Why should we still read her? Obvious answer is: because she was one of the best of her time. So, is she time-specific? You are the judge. But allow me to say that Charles Simic, American laureate, values and continues to value her poetry; enough to write a generous Foreword to this book: What is it that makes certain poems memorable? Obviously, it could be the sheer mastery of form and originality of the imagination… Tastes change, newness wears out… (however) I have here in mind that elusive property known as the poet’s voice… it is her voice that one always remembers.

I would go as far to suggest she inhabits that place between modern and contemporary; like Alban Berg in music she looks back to earlier sensibilities, and forward to new ones.

Her tragedy was the in-between bit, the War, and the horrors of the War.

Some commentators have found in her the War-amnesia of many German writers of the period. She herself writes:

The unspeakable passes, barely spoken, over the land:

 already it is noon.

Early Noon

And noon, of course, casts no shadows.

A necessary amnesia, maybe: no single person can possibly hope to find in oneself the capacity to take on, never mind overcome, all that. Consequently she is a haunted writer: restless, uneasy, unsettled.

Her rise could not have been more auspicious: introduced to the Gruppe 47 (Boll, Grass etc) meetings by no less than Paul Celan; her two poetry books of 1953 and 1956 helped her win the George Buchner Prize, The Berlin Critics Prize, the Bremen Award. And yet after these two books there were no more.

Already proficient in short stories, plays, libretti, radio drama, and ballet libretto, she later accepted the Frankfurt Poetry Chair. In 1953 she first made Rome her residential centre.

Her later published writing consisted entirely of prose and drama pieces. Her most famous book was Malina, part of the large ‘Todesarten’ cycle. In 1968 she was awarded the Austrian State Prize for literature.

She had a long and productive liaison with Henze Werner Henze, writing libretto for several of his pieces: Der Prinz von Homberg etc, some of which is included in this collection. Her later breakup with Swiss writer Max Frisch was long and painful.

2

But were there no more poems? Here collected are the two best selling books as well as poems written throughout the rest of her life, in five time-sections: 1945 to 56; 1957 to 61; 1962 to 63; 1963 to 64, and 1964 to 67. As you can see some of these sections are fuller than others. As you can also see the last five to six years of her life are not covered. The translator Peter Filkins points out, that although the quality of this unpublished work maybe does not hit the high mark of the earlier pieces; it can still own its right as poetry.

 

Starting out she had to find a language of expression within her native German, As Christa Wolf notes, Ingeborg Bachmann knows that “literature cannot be composed outside the historical situation.” (The Writer’s Dimension). The ‘historical situation’ here implies both contemporaneous, as well as past time.

One of her main influences was Wittgenstein, of the Tractatus period: that end comment: What we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence must have chimed deeply with her. Wolf also comments, The historical situation is such that all literature must have at its heart the question of man’s possible moral existence. (ibid).

Yet, how to express whilst under the enormous pressure of a past that was all around her? The pressures of history have the tendency to reduce the individual to a statistic, a number in a listing somewhere.

The images of her first book Borrowed Time are of movement away, onward, from:

Smoke rises from the land.

Remember the tiny fishing huts,

because the sun will sink

before you’ve set ten miles behind you.

 

The dark water, thousand-eyed,

opens its white-foamed lashes,

studying you, deep and long,

thirty days long

 

……………………….

from  Journeying Out

 

Harder days are coming.

The loan of borrowed time

will be due on the horizon

…………………………

from Borrowed Time

 

It would be so easy to read the smoke rising from the land as referencing a broken Europe; to go is to perhaps go towards: there are always horrors waiting for us, unpaid dues, worse things. These poems were published within the immediate post-War period of German restructuring and hope. Their great impact was due perhaps to their tapping into the doubt and darkness behind the confidence.

She can also hit a fuller tone:

 

Wherever we turn in the storm of roses,

the night is lit up by thorns, and the thunder

of leaves, once so quiet within the bushes,

rumbling at our heels.

 

In the Storm of Roses

Roses have as illustrious a symbolism as poppies, maybe more so. The lurid brightness of their colour here (can you feel Giorgione’s ‘Tempest’?) maybe borrowing, or reflecting forward to, Sylvia Plath’s ‘Tulips’ (as her later poetry forward-echoes some of the tone of the ‘confessional’ poetry of Ginsberg, Sexton etc). It is the unease of this piece, how not even the standard pastoral held any escape, that is memorable.

The theme of leaving, moving away from, a past she was inevitably embroiled in, that coloured, toned and muddied every thing around her: to leave, then; but can one possibly leave it behind? Compare the above piece with:

Under an alien sky

shadows roses

shadow

on an alien earth

between roses and shadows

in alien waters

my shadow

Shadows Roses Shadow, from Invocation of the Great Bear

 

The self jostles for place amongst the shadows, and almost succeeds. It is that ‘almost’ she is most adept at expressing.

She has a Symbolist tone at times in those earlier poems:

 

As sorrow warms him, the glassblower steps towards us

…………………………………………………………..

……………………………………………………………

              

…. He boils the lead in the kettle of tears,

making for you a glass – meaning a toast to what’s lost –

for me a shard of smoke…………………..

 

from: Twilight

: the brittle delicacy of emotional states on the nerves; and the dull lumpeness of grief.

 

Her Great Landscape Near Vienna is, it has been suggested, in part influenced by Carol Reed’s iconic scenes of the shattered (Hapsburg) empire, and moral ambiguity, in his iconic film, The Third Man:

 

… two thousand years gone, and nothing of us will remain

……………………………………..

only in the square, in midday light, chained to

the column’s base………..

the nave is empty, the stone is blind,

no one is saved, many are stricken,

the oil will not burn, we have all

drunk from it………….

 

Her second book Invocation of the Great Bear has a more confident tone, allowing her to go more deeply into the unease, as well as her natural wish to rise, to allow the spirit’s movement. Where earlier she had suggested immanence, now she can weigh spirit and flesh, or earth: the Shadows Roses Shadow above, in its complete lack of punctuation, displays a greater confidence in form and tone. But also we have:

 

Now the journey is ending,

the wind is losing heart.

Into your hands it’s falling,

a rickety house of cards.

 

The cards are backed with pictures

displaying all the world.

You’ve stacked up all the images

and shuffled them with words.

 

…………………………..

From: Stay

 

The poem can be read as self-referential, as well as addressed to her peers. The image of the journey now turns its dis-ease inward onto the self, and language. What is the relationship between a word and its meaning? Do nouns claim a world for us; and with verbs do we manipulate that world, make it active? Wittgenstein’s idea of picture-language may read to us now as anachronistic, maybe a little clumsy, but we must remember in 1956 it still held its fascination and appeal. So how does this piece end, what has she to say?

 

And how profound the playing

that once again begins!

Stay, the card you’re drawing

is the only world you’ll win

(ibid)

 

The only way out – action linked to the real processes of society – seems barred by a hopelessness which feeds non-stop off the alienation she feels when she observes real events. (Christa Wolf, ibid).

This is very much an existential impasse.

It is also an impasse created by language; the concept of the ‘language game’ of the later Wittgenstein is echoed in the above extract. We need to ask, Where does the ‘I’ stand in relation to our language, to what we express?

What is the point of writing… for whom to express one’s thoughts, and what is there to say to people? (Christa Wolf, ibid). Another commentator has noted: The fuse that runs through these powerful poems is the powerlessness of language, its continual failure to measure up: “Between a word and a thing / you only encounter yourself, / lying between each as if next to someone ill, / never able to get to either.”

In her poetry… she reveals a person who… is willing and able to endure the conflicts of our own time.” Christa Wolf had noted earlier. That ‘able’ worries me; it should worry us all. It is like a gong, sounding out presumption, over-confidence.

And so, in order to continue at all, the language use must change; the need to express continues, but the form is felt to be no longer adequate:

 

The oar dips at the sound of a gong, the black waltz starts,

with thick dull stitches, shadows string guitars.

 

Beneath the threshold, in a mirror, my dark house floats,

the flaring points of light now softly radiate out.

 

…………………………………………………

always the surface shifts towards another destination.

                  

………………………………………………………..

The Black Waltz

The search for a language: she approaches Surrealism, its sudden clinching and clanging of images that reveal meaning, as it were, by accident:

 

……………………………………………………..

a flywheel starts spinning, the derricks pump

spring from the fields, erected forests macerate

the degraded torso of greenness, and an iris of oil

watches over the wells of the land………

…………………………………………….

The Ferris wheel drags the coat that covered our love.

from: Great Landscape near Vienna

 

The second book makes great use of Grimm’s stories: Snow White and Rose Red, The Three Billy Goat’s Gruff etc

……………………………………………….

the seven stones turned into seven loaves;

he plunged into the meadows; fragrant air

scattering crumbs for the lost in forest groves

……………………………………….

from: Of a Land, A River and Lakes

 

As such, these excerpts are all of techniques of narrative. That last named poem has ten sections of strict rhyming quatrains, on domestic rural scenes. The quotidian: all that we can be sure of. The piece is unflinching perhaps in its depictions of slaughter days, and how closely they run to War’s sanctioned excesses. Nevertheless these are landscapes closely guarded by form and metre.

She often uses the first person singular as a way of exploring, through identifying basic traits, a universal.

Each poem is the uncovering of a host of images that cluster around a central concern, often obliquely approached. In Advertisement she blends the bland hopes of advertisers with the syntax of lives full of very real broken hopes:

 

But where are we going

carefree be carefree

…………………..

…………………..

but what happens

best of all

when dead silence

 

sets in

 

This attention to syntax prepares us for the concern with pure language systems that we saw in Stay, the language-game, where truth is textural.

 

3

What happened next was the meeting of emotional break-up and existential impasse; what happened next was hospitalisation: depression; slow recovery.

The Gloriastrasse poems convey something of that time:

The blessing of morphine, but not the blessing of a letter

 and

In a bed

in which many have died

odourlessly, fitted out

in a white smock

…………………..

…………………….

Lost in a haze of morphine

 

Confessional in mood, shut-off and half-aware at times, these poems are painful reading. Perhaps the hospital poems of Elizabeth Jennings in English poetry come the closest.

 

With recovery, even if only partial, came the success of the novels; a success based in part on their innovative techniques.

For a writer there is only language: intent, expression, ability, vocabulary, wide reading, and accident. And the contexts, and the meta-narratives that language-use brings with it.

These translations are not always at their best, fighting to retain the metre and rhyme schemes of the original German in lines padded out with redundant terms, phrases, to make up the metre. Overall, however, the standard is high. This is a big book, a dual-language volume. If one compares these translations with others available on the net one sees how generally successful this book is.

It is always best to let the writer have the last word.

 

Nach dieser Sintflut

[After this deluge]

 

After this deluge

 I wish to see the dove

 saved,

 nothing but the dove.

 

 I would drown in this sea

 if it did not fly away,

 if it did not return with the leaf

 in the final hour.