Katie Johnson

            On Monday morning I finished looking for the chords for “A la pêche des coeurs" (Fishing for Hearts) by Boris Vian. I only found one set and so next I have to see if they fit. 

            I uploaded “Rock n Rose” by Serge Gainsbourg to Christian’s Translations and started positioning the chords in line with the lyrics. 

            At around 10:30 I logged on for my Introduction to British Literature Lecture. Professor Teramura said that our essay is due next week. I looked it up and it’s due on December 4, unless there's another paper I don’t know about. 

            This lecture was on two poets that further expand poetry as a vehicle for thinking. Andrew Marvell and Margaret Cavendish came a generation after John Donne. The political context of their time created a different set of histories that both used as an opportunity to think about and explore the relationship between humans and non humans. 

            King James was the English monarch of Donne and Shakespeare. James was a scholar and an intellectual and unlike Elizabeth he was not shy about circulating his writing. He published meditations on the Bible, polemics against tobacco, and political writing. He advocated the political theory that kings are like gods. They reserve divine agreement with god, can create or destroy, judge but not be judged, have power of life and death and are only accountable to god. He expended an extreme amount on ornamentation for The Grand Banqueting House in Whitehall, designed in the latest architectural fashion. He staged masques, theatrical events featuring poetry and dance that celebrated the king.

            After James died Charles took over in the smoothest transition of power in English history. Charles was heir of James’s ideas and commissioned Rubens to do the ceiling of the banqueting house depicting the apotheosis of James's and all English kings' divine sacred right to govern. Charles didn’t like opposition from parliament and dissolved it for eleven years. People didn't like that and those years became known as “The Tyranny." People were alarmed with his actions on religion. Henrietta Maria his wife did not convert from Catholicism when they married. She had to watch his crowning from a distance. Some thought Catholicism was being snuck back into power. 

            Charles made Will Laud Archbishop of Canterbury and made changes so bishops could change the structure of church services and made worshippers kneel for the Eucharist. He also decreed that wealth taken from the church during the Reformation must be returned. He brought in a harder line of uniform formal religious authorities and people didn’t like it. He caused a crisis in Scotland where he thought the state church must become uniform with the Church of England rather than Presbyterian. This crisis was at the root of the English Civil War along with the bill that the next parliament pushed through to forbid the king from dissolving parliament. There was also a rebellion in Ireland by Catholics and it became violent. 

            Was the English army under control of king or parliament? Charles arrested parliamentarians for treason. Parliament had the navy and control over the midlands. It aligned with the Scots. England‘s armies were confused whether to serve the king or parliament. Oliver Cromwell came forward with a new army. Under Tom Fairfax they defeated the Royalists in Oxford. This was fought to protect the House of Commons but they overthrew the king and captured him. The King escaped to the Isle of Wight. Parliament was divided on how to handle this. Cromwell's army marched and took control of parliament. They tried Charles for treason and on January 30, 1649 Charles was beheaded. 

            The 1640s were confused and violent. Only 11% of people had been in the war and so some were sad. Royalists say Charles was a martyr. Some fled like Henrietta. 

            Literature tended to be on one side or the other. Royalists followed Roman models like Richard Lovelace, John Suckling, and William Davenant. Some writers were harder to pin down, like Andrew Marvell. 

            Andrew Marvell was from the north in Yorkshire. he travelled abroad and came back in 1647 after Charles fell. At first he was a royalist but after the execution he adjusted his affiliations. His best known poem was "An Horatian Ode” written after Cromwell invaded Ireland. The defeat of the Irish seemed like god’s blessing but Cromwell was widely hated for it and James Joyce mentions him in Ulysses. Marvell's ode on the surface celebrates Cromwell. 

            An ode is a long lyric poem elevated in style and elaborate in stanzaic structure often addressed to a natural force a person or an abstract quality. It often follows classical models from the Greek. Pindar wrote ecstatic choral odes sung in dances in praise of athletes. Horatian odes were more subdued, meditative and balanced so as to not be so praisy. 

            Pindaric or Horatian? Marvell might seem Pendaric. The lines seem to be about the boundlessness of Britain as long as Cromwell is around. It was a climacteric and critical new step towards a new age of republican liberty that was potentially global. But the delirious tone may not be straightforward. Charles was not made a villain and the tone presented him as a royal actor. He was not presented as mean but keen. He bowed as on a bed. These are ambivalent lines. In the metaphor Charles is an actor in a tragedy. His death is presented as lamentable. Although the audience condemned him Charles was above the multitude. His tragic potential is withheld. He is calm, sublime and stoic as if in being executed he is going to sleep. Does this suggest regret? It is hard to tell. There is nothing on Charles's son as saviour but a calm moment that lets the reader think. Keener eye, edge of axe, figure for Charles's eye and axe both keen in a double meaning. 

            The poem is equivocal and straddles two worlds. It withholds claims of parliamentary propaganda and presents the specific view of Cromwell as being non political. Cromwell leaves study for the pub arena. The poem doesn’t say he forsakes his muses for war. The restless Cromwell is urged by the stars. Cromwell is lightning exploding. It recalls gods origins like when Athena sprang from the head of Zeus. Cromwell gives birth to himself. The imagery has him as both mom and child. There is a pun on side of body but also political side. Cromwell is only ambitious. He is an amoral force of nature. This renders judgement obsolete because he has no control. He’s an innovator who melts down government to a new shape and just does it for change. The allegory is abstract and forces debating on how it all came to pass. A spokesperson for the old regime would be ancient. Justice is spokesperson for monarchy and Parliament represented by fate. Old laws get in the way of the new order. Fate is amoral and it doesn't matter if it is moral. Might is right. It is not about justice but rather will. Not just military but political cunning. 

            Cromwell allowed Charles to escape to be captured again. Marvell says Cromwell was a genius. He wove a net that Charles was caught in. Cromwell engineered Charles's escape. He allowed this to use it as an excuse to have Charles executed. Cromwell was the playwright of the king's doom. He is a spider. He’s the Iago of English history. Marvell is not necessarily condemning this. He endorses the new republic. In the history of Rome the ancient Romans found a bloody head while building a temple. It became the head of the world. There is a parallel for Marvell with Charles's head. 

            But under the surface Cromwell may be a threat to the new state like Caesar. The new leader will conquer Europe. He was a threat to Rome like Hannibal and Caesar. Could Cromwell be the same threat? In the shadow of the poem Cromwell, despite his command is a servant to the republic and no threat "yet". Cromwell is addressed at the end as representing only what was achieved by the military power of Cromwell but these arts must be used to maintain it, but perhaps we are too dependent on him. Cromwell is not necessarily a patriot and maybe a threat in the end. 

            Marvell's poetry was not usually political. He was in the service of Thom Fairfax. Fairfax grew apart from Cromwell and left the proceedings alienated from the republic. He resigned so as not to invade Scotland and went to Yorkshire and his Appleton estate. Marvell was hired to tutor his daughter Marie. 

            In "Upon Appleton House” we find a poetic mash up of the genre of country house poem invented by Emilia Lanyer with John Donne’s intellectual games and George Herbert’s way of turning poetry into physical space. In the first stanza Appleton is a modest building with no environmental damage in its construction caused by great amounts of marble and wood. The architect had no work. People are turned into buildings by admiring the sober frame. Of the beasts and birds, no creature likes empty space. We should build homes like the animals with simply contours. The bodies of places should be measured by the human body. Houses should be like bodies and like nature they should be orderly. Not just organic but orderly and in sober moderation. Exceedingly tall people had to stoop to enter. The architecture brings an ethical change and a way to think and act with humility. 

            "Immure" means to close up in walls. "Immure circle" refers to the ancient squaring of the circle to produce a square with the same area using a compass. Appleton is a miracle of mathematics and contains great things within. But the house sweats like a body. In the greatness of Fairfax as a force the building changes for him. The poem is about intermingling of categories. The genre changes and gets bigger to the spatial limits of Herbert’s temple. This poem is a walk through space. A nunnery, a virgin building, quarries, this country house poem becomes a history. 

            The nunnery gave birth to the house. Is it miracle or a joke about nuns not really being virgins? Fairfax back in 1518 met young Isabel Thwaite. She was confined in the nunnery before marrying Fairfax. The nun’s speech to the virgin is premeditated and woven like a net to catch Isabel and it is conceived as sexual. It is Spenserian, as the nun is like Archimago as she weaves the image of nun life. She presents the outside as bad and the inside as good. The nuns are virgin amazons and their space is turned inside out with liberty preserved inside. Outside is prison and the nuns are heroes in armour. The seductive speech begins like a poem within this poem. In the nunnery lies piety and power. The rules will change if one gains power within. Spenser’s Despair seduces Red Cross. The nun's speech ends with the promise of bed companions embracing pure innocent chastity with a smooth tongue. Isabel joins the nuns but Fairfax frees her in a military operation. 

            The nuns fight the invader but Fairfax is like a Spenserian knight. In the trope of the vanishing castle from romance tradition the nunnery disappears. It is dispossessed and the language of Spenser is a way to describe the dissolution of the nunnery by Henry VIII. Procreative lesbian nuns. Of Isabel’s tears, is she reluctant? Does she want to be a nun? Is this a non consensual rescue? Are nuns worse? With bodies as buildings moral authority blurs. Politically even just beyond is civil war. The gardens of the estate are designed as metaphor. The nuns’ gardens are a metaphysical conceit as military camp and fort. Bees are like military drums, petals are flags, their fragrance is gunpowder. He combines war with the pastoral.

            Marvell’s poetry is obsessed with seclusion, privacy, solitude and protection. He is keenly aware of the real world after the war and contrasts Appleton by addressing England. England is like the Garden of Eden but now after the fall people don’t know what they did, what the apple was. There used to be flowers and no war. The gardener was a soldier. The metaphor doubles back. War is imagined as evil plants and weeds. War deprived us of paradise and the speaker needs to meditate. 

            The speaker moves from garden to meadow and discovers himself. The speaker is in the meadow where the grass is so high it is an abyss. An abyss of subjectivity. An idiosyncratic view of the world. The tall grass makes men tiny but grasshoppers tall. Big is small, small is big, land is water. The space of the meadow confounds direction and this turns literal when the dams open so that fishes swim in architecture on the altered grounds. The laws of nature are defied. The mower and the rail bird. The mower accidentally kills the bird but this does not sever the connection with nature but joins human to grass and bird. His imaginative train makes the grass the Red Sea, the harvest dance a fairy circle, the haystacks are pyramids. 

            It is characteristic of Marvell to look for similes. “Cloths for Lily” refers to the Dutch painter who came under Charles as a court artist and imagines his canvas as a blank field. He compares to bull rings before the bulls arrive. Marvell is worldly and he goes to an evocative range. His mind like glass, like a prism or a distorting lens. Speaker goes into the wood and the forest is a Noah’s ark. A church of wood with a woodpecker as carpenter. The poet imagines he is almost a bird or tree. He was a tree all along in the shape of the human body as an upside down tree. The relationship between humanity and nature. Marvell describes Marie and one can compare her to Lanyer's countess in Cookham. He pushes the boundaries of the genre and dives into a self echo of praise as a better version of the real world. 

            Appleton is a microcosm of the world in perfect form. But now salmon fishers carry boats upside down like turtles under shells. They are amphibians. The poem moved from dawn to dusk, from door to forest, but now says go back in. The poem is a kaleidoscope in variety, more intellectual than Donne. But for genres and perspectives and reimagining the universe and intermingling categories. 

            It’s an artfully designed poem with 94 stanzas, 8 lines, 4 rhyming coups in iambic tetrameter. Its dimensions of width are the same as its height, four by four each. A quadrature, a square almost as if like Herbert’s temple it is an attempt to embody in verse the mathematical designs of architectural space. But the greater shape is the circle in quadrature or circle of quads opens with calculation to return but articulated in circular imagery ends as it began with a tortoise whose shell closes the ring. The poem describes itself as the short admirable lines of a house and perhaps resembles the tetrameter of the lines of the poem. Maybe the lines are admirable because they accomplish so much in the tight space of the stanza and Marvell makes this his own signature. “Admirable" means “marvel at”. The poem intertwines humanity and nature and blurs the lines. He is talking about the interrelatedness of all life. 

            In 1641 Richard Braithwait wrote a “Ladies Love Lecture" meditating on women's accomplishments. He said women don’t want fame and no applause. Humility is the goal implied and encircles no portraits. 

            But then came Margaret Cavendish. She was prolific in all kinds of writing and sought fame. She wants her “Poems and Fancies” to be the talk of the town. Her life exemplifies 17th politics. She was Maid of honour to Henrietta where she met Cavendish in Paris. He was in a philosophical circle with Hobbes and she became a member of a Platonist philosophical group. One of her central subjects was science and she wrote a lot of poems about atoms. But also poems on the elements, astronomy and geometry. Bacon in his new reasoning stripped the idols of mind. Everyone has a cave or den and refracts or discolours nature according to impressions from various sources like books or experience. The spirit of man is variable and governed by chance. Eccentricity of individual perception disrupts knowledge. 

            In the 1st Century Lucretious wrote on atomism in a poem translated in the 1650s. Poetry is honey for taking the medicine of science. She thought a world made by atoms would be a dance. Her strategy was to mobilize poetic simile to make the invisible visible, to fill the gaps. She uses poetry at the level of form of atoms as they dance. The words are rearranged for rhyme and they are also performing an atomic dance. Everyday sense might not inform so she looks at fallible perception. Maybe there are invisible people, small populations, whole countries out of sight. Maybe there are also people in the stars. Humanity is diminished as maybe others live far or near. 

            Other poems are more traditional but from a different perspective. “The Hunting of the Hare" is a poem about a hunt from the perspective of the hare. The language is precise and scientific as she describes the hares anatomy Nothing happens in the first twelve lines. What it is like to be a hare. The terror of the hunted animal. Subjectivity is central to the terror We are brought to the death bed. For Spenser two knights are lions. Humans are instrumentalized for the animal’s experience. The men are villains. After hare’s view men are honourless and sadistic. 

            A valuation of eating animals. She condemns it as hypocritical. Humans think animals are here to serve man but men are the most cruel. She challenges the idea that animals are here for humans. God creates humans in the Bible to have dominion. God gave man dominion but as custodian responsible for welfare not to exploit with tyranny. The relationship with nature must be ethical. The poem shows the ethical blind spots. Her “Earth’s Complaint" gives voice to nature. Voice of Nature she captures the scandal of human dominion. 

            In other poems she says animals might have knowledge that we don’t. Birds know the winds, fish know tides and why the sea is salty. “Poems and Fancies”. Fancy is imagination, the ability to form mental representations of things not present to senses. She uses poetry not just to assist learning but to decentralize the human belief that their experience is the only way. 

            This was a long lecture. It took me until 12:45 to listen and type it. 

            I had a chicken drumstick with yogourt and hot sauce for lunch. I took a siesta and then in the afternoon it took almost four hours to edit my shorthand lecture typing so it made sense. By then it was time to start cooking dinner and I was too tired to work on my essay.

            I had a potato, my last two chicken drumsticks and the last of my gravy while watching the first episode of The Quatermass Experiment. I realized that the version that I'd watched over the last two nights was not a film pieced together from this show but rather a movie remake with entirely different actors. It was in fact the very first Hammer Film. This episode had a much lower budget but a lot more characters. 

            The story begins with the ground crew tracking the first manned rocket to be shot into space. Professor Quatermass is in charge and one of the technicians is Judith, the wife of the astronaut Victor Carroon. The rocket has gone off course and left Earth’s orbit. They have lost contact but then they detect it returning to Earth. They achieve separation of nose cone where the men are and guide it by remote control but it crashes in Wimbledon, London. It destroys the home of a comical old lady named Miss Wilde but her and her cat Henry are fine. There are reporters, cops and street eccentrics around the rocket and interviews with Quatermass, Judith and the neighbours as they wait for the rocket to cool. Finally when is cool enough they open the door by remote control and Victor stumbles out and collapses. Inside the ship the other two astronauts are missing. 

            Miss Wilde was played by Katie Johnson, who started acting on stage at the age of 16 in 1894. She had a strong career in theatre but when she did movies the parts were small until she starred in The Lady Killers at the age of 77, for which she won a BAFTA award. At 79 she starred in “How to Murder a Rich Uncle" but that was the year she died.