Lady Caroline Lamb

            On Monday morning the city seemed to be doing spring-cleaning as both the big vacuum trucks and the little sidewalk suckers were making their noisy rounds while I was trying to figure out the chords to a song. I didn’t see those little suck trucks during the last few months when there was snow on the ground.

            I put some DW-40 on my bike chain before leaving for class because it had been looking rusty for a while from all my winter riding. I’ve been advised by volunteers at Bike Pirates not to use DW-40 on a chain because it gunks it up but it seemed to make it less grindy for now. I can always clean it up after my exam on April 17 when I go into Bike Pirates for a tune up.

            I told Professor Weisman that she’d gotten the family of the chamois wrong. She had said it was a deer but I told her it’s a kind of goat-antelope. They’re in a different family because deer are cloven hoofed while chamois are whole hoofed like cows and sheep. She said she usually says it’s a type of mountain goat but she slipped in the last lecture. I also told her that she’d gotten the pronunciation wrong but she said that the English, especially the Romantics, pronounce it “shamee”. She’s probably right about that.

           

We spent most of the class finishing our study of Lord Byron’s Manfred.

            Manfred cannot subjugate his will to the spirits that he commands and so he cannot wipe his mind.

            Being the same person throughout life is a thematic preoccupation of Romanticism. Wordsworth situated himself in the landscape of Tintern Abbey to establish a sense of continuity.

            Manfred has achieved the sublime and transcended much of human life and yet he still cannot achieve oblivion because he is haunted by guilt.

            The professor had me read Act 3, Scene 2 of Manfred.

            The lament is continuous with a common Romantic complaint. He is lamenting the loss of a primitive age. Romanticism brought a resurgence of interest in primitivism and times of simple wonder. Science and knowledge has replaced the integrity of imaginative apprehension with the insights of modern consciousness. The sun was once a god but now it has been unmasked by science. We have moved beyond the capacity to take pleasure in the simple wonders of an earlier age.

            There is ironic reversal here in the sense that the texts undermine the effort to celebrate solace.

            Keats’s Nightingale must return to the earth. Wordsworth’s inner landscape throws into relief how much pain there is in the world to escape.

            The power of mind to penetrate mysteries is what Manfred longs for. Manfred is preparing to die.

            We are experiencing the nostalgia of a creature that has transcended all limits. Some critics see this as a common Byronic theme. It’s one thing for your mind to transcend the limits of the powers of the world but it’s another to transcend them emotionally. We still want to believe in spirits and gods.

            Shelley says that names of god are fictions but still poets need to create them. His Jupiter is defeated when his Prometheus stops wanting revenge against him.

            Professor Weisman asked if we had read “Acquainted With The Night” by Robert Frost. No one raised their hands but she was particularly surprised that I hadn’t read it. We covered a lot of Robert Frost in “American Literature but not that poem:

I have been acquainted with the night

I have walked out in the rain – and back in the rain

I have outwalked the furthest city light

I have looked down the saddest city lane

I have passed by the watchman on his beat

And dropped my eyes, unwilling to explain

I have stood still and stopped the sound of feet

When far away an interrupted cry

Came over houses from another street

But not to call back or say goodbye

And further still at an unearthly height

One luminary clock against the sky

Proclaimed the time was neither wrong nor right

I have been acquainted with the night

            Manfred calls the Roman coliseum a noble wreck of ruinous perfection but it could also be applied to Manfred. There is disparity between the reality and the romance of the coliseum’s past. It is transformed into a beautiful ruin. He cannot evade history either. Finding a solitary loneliness opens up a contradiction of the reality of the coliseum. History doesn’t require only memory but also forgetfulness. There is a historical misreading that Rome will be favourably remembered. The text is setting up a reading of the past. Manfred longs for his own greatness to be remembered. Is Roman history to be remembered for its innovations or its cruelty and tyranny?

            It is ironic that a poem about the longing for forgetfulness is full of sentimental nostalgia. The more Manfred tries to transcend the more he becomes ensnared.

            As did Wordsworth in Tintern Abbey Manfred remembers but here there is no affirmation of the value of identity.

            Like other second-generation Romantic poets Byron rejects retributive justice and religion. There is no value in the world of punishment. This is the Satanic view from paradise Lose.

At the moment of Manfred’s death a fiend comes to drag him down but he will not accept the subjugation of his own will. Manfred is too haunted to be tortured from outside.

We don’t know how Manfred dies.

We spent the rest of the class looking at Byron’s “Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage”.

Childe Harold is another fatal man.

Of this poem there is a famous line from Byron after publishing the first two cantos of Childe Harold: “I awoke one morning and found myself famous.”

He is an author who considers his own fiction making as efforts to establish a literature that can self-express but also self-identify.

Byron was driven out of England. The reasons may have been varied. He was licentious. There was his incestuous relationship with his half-sister but there were also his sexual relationships with men when homosexuality was illegal and multiple relationships with women, including Lady Caroline Lamb who famously wrote of him that he was "mad, bad and dangerous to know".

Byron inherited the title of “lord” but he grew up poor. He had a cleft foot and developed a swaggering walk to cover it up.

Byron’s fans would read both Manfred and Childe Harold to mine them for autobiographical revelations. Harold was an opportunity for Byron to address his own fictions.

“Childe” is an epithet for a titled knight. Harold is escaping both England and himself.

When Byron left England he also left behind his ex-wife and his baby daughter. He never saw Ada again and regretted it for the rest of his life. He begins the poem and ends it in his own voice (in propria persona) addressing Ada. This address is like Manfred’s address to nature. Harold is indifferent to England but his separation from Ada is from an aspect of his own being.

He calls England by its ancient name of “Albion”.

Harold is a wandering exile with no home.

“Once more upon the waters" speaks of a familiar place like Tintern Abbey but in this case there is no anchor and he cannot plant himself in a moving space. His natural home is in motion on water, which is the opposite of Wordsworth.

Byron returns to his own voice in stanza 115 to again address his daughter.

He is no longer a physical presence for Ada. All that she will have is his poems. He is no longer English but just a poet.

Why write poetry?

The professor asked us to paraphrase stanza 6 of canto 3 for next class. I doubt if I’ll have time when I’ll have my hands full with my essay.

Of the reference to history being romanticized in Manfred, I quoted for Professor Weisman the Leonard Cohen poem that appears in Beautiful Losers: "History is a needle / for putting men to sleep / shooting up the heroin / of all we want to keep”.  She liked it. I told her that what I’d quoted is a subtextual translation of the original poem, which uses drug slang of the 60s: “History is a scabby point / for putting cash to sleep / shooting up the peanut shit / of all we want to keep”. She said she liked the first one better.

Gabriel told me he was already done with his essay. I was jealous because I'd barely started.

I stopped at Loblaws and got a few bags of grapes. I also stopped at Freshco where I bought a watermelon, a bag of grapes, two half-pints of raspberries, a bunch of bananas, some tomatoes, some avocadoes, a jug of orange juice and two bottles of Garden Cocktail. I’d wanted to buy a jug of vinegar but my bags were too full so I would have to wait till Wednesday.

I typed most of my lecture notes.

That night I watched The Rifleman. This story begins as an old derelict named Joe is forced into a gunfight by a man named Haskins, who says Joe has something of his. Lucas takes Joe to the doctor but he can’t be saved. Before dying he asks Lucas to take care of his horse and his last words are, “I died with my boots on.”

Lucas lets Mark take Joe’s horse home. Haskins comes to ask of Lucas for what he already demanded of Joe. Lucas knows nothing about it. Joe's horse bites Haskins. Haskins pulls a gun on him but Lucas punches him and takes his bullets. Lucas goes back to the doctor’s office to look through Joe’s things and finds hidden in the heel of his boot a paper that shows that Haskins is a wanted man in another state. Lucas also learns that an anthrax epidemic is beginning in the area. He realizes that Joe’s horse has anthrax and rushes back to find that Haskins is already there. Haskins has him at gunpoint but Lucas tells him that when the horse bit him he got anthrax. Mark is listening from outside and looks at his hand to show a horse bite. Lucas takes Haskins to the stable to prove that he’s telling the truth. When Haskins sees the horse he angrily shoots it. That’s when Lucas disarms him. They fight and Haskins recovers his gun just as Mark comes and tosses his father’s rifle to him. Haskins is killed. Lucas learns that Mark has been bitten and takes Mark town to receive the vaccine. The goof here is that the veterinary vaccine had only just been invented by Pasteur and there wouldn’t be a human vaccine until 1954.