Reconfiguring Romanticism (39): Jeffrey Robinson, Two Poems with Notes after Wordsworth & Keats

VERNAL SONG OF BLITHE MAY

after William Wordsworth



Delicate veil renewed delicate veil

sweet May renewed delicate leafy veil

renewed in the deep dale delicate leafy

veil renewed sweet May blithe

May sweet May blithe May blithe

Flora blithe May blithe Flora blithe

May blithe blithe blithe Flora from

His couch upstarts blithe Flora blithe

May season blithe May season of

renewed delicate leafy blithe May

season of Fancy and Hope Season of

Fancy and of hope blithe May Season

of Fancy and fine touch of hope fine

touch of self-restraining self-restraining

art and hope Season of self-restraining

Season of Fancy and of hope tempering

tempering the years of extremes years extremes

tempering extremes extremes tempering

self-restraining breathes a freshness

a freshness breathes quickening quickening

where love nestles patient patient streams

inmost heart where love nestles

breathes freshness luster and freshness

freshness luster freshness luster freshness

freshness o’er noonday luster o’er noonday

stream that April could not check

could not check quickening luster

scattering scattering scattering hope

scattering luster blithe patient modest May

freshening glee scattering hope and luster

scattering season of fancy entrust fancy

entrust unfinished song deathless song

deathless scattering song unfinished

breathes unfinished luster of inmost heart

of quickening balance of delight How delicate

where love nestles how leafy blithe May

scattering lustres o’er noonday of unfinished

blessed sweet May sweet lustres blithe

May of deathless unfinished song



*



A NOTE



Between 1826 and 1835 William Wordsworth wrote two poems to the month of May. One begins like this:



While from the purpling east departs

The Star that led the dawn,

Blithe Flora from her couch upstarts,

For May is on the lawn.

A quickening hope, a freshening glee,

Foreran the expected Power,

Whose first-drawn breath, from bush and tree,

Shakes off that pearly shower.



All Nature welcomes Her whose sway,

Tempers the year’s extremes;

Who scattereth lusters o’er noon-day,

Like morning’s dewy gleams;

While mellow warble, sprightly trill,

The tremulous heart excite;

And hums the balmy air to still

The balance of delight.



You can see from these stanzas why people dismiss the late Wordsworth’s poems—inert blocks of predictable Romantic idiom. The following poem, however, builds on a careful review of the manuscripts of the May poems which show that the poet in his late 50s and early 60s had an intensely active and playful revisionary imagination. Here (in the mss. and in the poem that I’ve written) is a world that Wordsworth never wrote but that may have happened instantaneously and then faded into something more stable — we might call what follows a dream of the poems of May. The drafts show how vitally Wordsworth’s images, lines, and stanzas floated and flew through different arrangements. Ought, for example, “blithe” go with “Flora” or with “May”? I have tried to catch the visionary possibilities of words like “hope,” “blithe,” “season,” by placing them in fast-moving stream or electric current.





— FLORIDIZE, ABSORB, SPIN

Cockney Keats on Fanny Brawne



In singing never mind the music

devoted to wreckage

Suck or drink in a penchant

for acting stylishly: floridize

Keep your time and play your tune:

Dodge him

Abounding in flowers, spin the irreparable



Her mouth is bad and good

Innocence of all becoming

We have been depleted

We shall floridize soon I hope

Her arms are good her hands baddish

“Figurate” elaborate run and bloom

to fish with a spinning bait

to twirl or whirl

to draw out elaborate evolve

twist (of the Fates) of wool

cast a spell and whirl and twirl

to fabricate from suitable materials

spend time in inactivity

her arms are good her hands baddish

to shoot, spring up (as in blood)

issue in a rapid stream



Grotesque to a curious pitch

Yet still making up a fine whole

Poem is “fulfilled love living in desire”

Frozen words: sign of the fantasy of total control

Among Camels, Turbans, Palm Trees and sands

Draw out and twist fibres of wool

Twisting and untwisting of thoughts

Taken up by chemical action

Some suitable materials blooming

With a penchant for acting stylishly



Pass or be spent quickly

The irreparable: Dodge him

Spend time in inactivity of

Flowers abounding flushed florid

She wants sentiment in every feature

Cast a spell figurate in grace

Monstrous in her behavior

Flying out in all directions

Yet still making up a fine whole

Passage of music running on

Calling people such names



Fish for depletion with a spinning bait

Love is true attention to something or someone

She wants sentiment in every feature

A penchant she has for acting stylishly

And no longer exist apart – play your tune



*



A NOTE



Keats mimicking Leigh Hunt: “What is this absorbs me quite? O we are spinning on a little, we shall floridize soon I hope” – letter to the George Keatses, Dec. 1818-Jan. 1819. “Shall I give you Miss Brawne?” – same letter (which also contributes to the language of the poem)



“Floridize” occurs neither in Webster’s Unabridged nor in the OED. But “florid” in the Renaissance meant “abounding in or covered with flowers,” and since then has always carried the sense of profusion, bloom, elaboration, decoration, and extravagance. While a florid, flushed, complexion often signalled health, it also could suggest the (sexual) embarrassment associated with Keats and his poetry. Musically it has come to mean “running in rapid figures, divisions, or passages.” Recall Scarlatti, Bach, Handel, Haydn, early opera. “Floridize” may be Cockney poet leader Leigh Hunt’s neologism, it may be the secret “flash” language of boxers and dandies on the edge of Hunt’s circle, or perhaps Keats, friend of Hunt and with an “up-market” yearning, made it up with Hunt in mind. Vincent Novello, an important early nineteenth-century publisher of European Classical Music, and John Byng Gattie with his good singing voice, brought running musical figures to the Cockneys (spinning, drawn out, spent, twisted, produced) in immortal evenings of Bacchic figuration, while Fanny Brawne (of whom as he is dying Keats, absorbed, will say, “the sense of darkness coming over me–I eternally see her figure eternally vanishing”) spins for the first time into view..



-- from Jeffrey Robinson, Untamed Wing (Station Hill Press, scheduled: 2010) -- a further installment of Robinson's "deformations" of a range of Romantic poets.