Prelude by Derek Walcott

‘Enter the Reluctant Leopard’
Poetry as an Alternative Construction of the Caribbean
in Derek Walcott’s ‘Prelude’

L.Gilbert – 26.8.2013

It is worth remembering that ‘Prelude’, from In a Green Night, is the poem of a very young man. Walcott was just “sixteen or seventeen” when he wrote it. Nevertheless, it is interesting in that it introduces (as its title suggests) a number of themes that become significant in the rest of Walcott’s oeuvre. As Rita Dove has suggested, Walcott’s concerns “haven’t changed much” over his many years as a writer. Rather, he is a poet of “circling and deepening”. In particular, this early poem serves to illustrate Walcott’s love of and debt to English poetry and his early engagement with the nature of Caribbean experience, particularly in terms of the effects of their economic reliance on tourism.

Walcott has noted how the poem was written at the same time as he was discovering the work of T.S.Eliot. Indeed, the extent of Eliot’s influence on this particular poem is an interesting and revealing line of inquiry. Eliot’s ‘Preludes’ – note the intersection of the titles – from the 1920 collection Prufrock and Other Observations seems a particularly apt starting point.

Just as Eliot’s collection is a series of observations, so too Walcott’s early poem begins with the assertion “I … watch”. Eliot focuses on a city-scape under a winter sky at the end of a “smoky day” as “a gusty shower” … beat[s] on broken blinds and chimney pots”. Similarly, Walcott watches:

The variegated fists of clouds that gather over

The uncouth features of this, my prone island.

Walcott’s observing gaze seems to perceive St. Lucia in much the same way that Eliot perceives his London street. Both seem – to their respective viewers – visually unappealing and vulnerable beneath a gathering shroud of violent weather.

In contrast, Walcott’s ‘Prelude’ goes on to describe ‘eyes / that have known cities’  - eyes much like Eliot’s – looking at St. Lucia through ‘ardent binoculars’ from distant ‘steamers’. It is of note that these city-dwellers – (British?) tourists – arriving in the Caribbean on their cruise ships seem blinded by a superficial ‘blue reflection’ and believe the inhabitants of the island must be ‘happy’ away from the sort of ‘grimy scraps of withered leaves’, ‘newspapers’, ‘stale smells of beer’, ‘dingy shades’ and ‘lonely cab-horses’ that populate Eliot’s London. In such a view of the Caribbean one hears the ghostly echo of Andrew Marvel’s poem ‘Bermudas’ that, in turn, gives Walcott’s collection its title:

He hangs in shades the orange bright

Like golden lamps in a green night

And does in the pom’ganates close

Jewels more rich than Ormus shows.

For Christopher O’Reilly, it is through literature such as this that “the myth of the New World as a place of untainted, rural innocence was being constructed in the European imagination”. What Walcott’s early ‘Prelude’ appears to reveal is that this constructed perception of the Caribbean in the European imagination has lingered long into the twentieth century and beyond.

Walcott’s project in this poem appears to be to highlight the difference between the perceptions of the Caribbean held by its distant visitors on their cruise ship and the way that he feels as an inhabitant of the region – at one with it – with his ‘legs crossed along the daylight’ itself. Perhaps unsurprisingly, his feelings seem to echo those of Eliot’s about London. Just as Eliot’s London is populated by ‘muddy feet that press / To early coffee stands’, so Walcott’s St. Lucia is populated by ‘living images / of flesh that saunter through the eye’. Just as a London morning begins with ‘masquerades / that time resumes’ or Prufrock admits the need to ‘prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet’, so too Walcott admits to going ‘through all the isolated acts’, explaining how he will ‘straighten [his] tie and fix important jaws’. Just as Eliot’s ‘worlds revolve like ancient women / gathering fuel in vacant lots’, so Walcott expresses a feeling that ‘time creeps over the patient’ and his ‘boyhood has gone over’.

Ultimately this poem can be seen as a first effort to counter the fact that Walcott’s beloved Caribbean home is (he feels) “found only / in tourist booklets” – an image which appears to bemoan the lack of any serious literature through which the Caribbean can write itself into significance and define itself into being. We might therefore describe ‘Prelude’ as a first attempt at self-definition, trying (perhaps a little unsuccessfully, tinged as the poem is by something akin to teenage angst and an over reliance on Eliot as a model) to provide an alternative vision of the Caribbean to the stereotypes that European literature and Caribbean marketing material have perpetuated.

Even now, in 2013, one can easily find the sort of ‘tourist booklets’ that a young Walcott seems to be so at odds with in 1948:

Mix the stunning natural scenery of St Lucia with near-perfect weather, total relaxation and plenty of fun and you’ll have the perfect recipe for a very special holiday in the Caribbean. Shaped rather like a mango the island of St Lucia is just 14 miles wide and 27 miles long, has lots of sandy beaches, a scenic mountainous landscape and thick lush rainforests, sheltered white sand beaches and quaint fishing villages.

No variegated fists of clouds gathering over the uncouth features of this prone island. No inhabitants tempting by the idea of a ‘knife turning / in the bowels’ either. Only vacuous tranquillity and ripe fruit, oranges like ‘golden lamps’; ‘pom’ganates’ filled with ‘jewels’.

In this early poem from 1948 seem to be the first seeds of an idea expounded – circled and deepened, perhaps – in Walcott’s Nobel lecture of 1992. I will quote it at length:

   In our tourist brochures the Caribbean is a blue pool into which the republic dangles the extended foot of Florida as inflated rubber islands bob and drinks with umbrellas float towards her on a raft. This is how the islands from the shame of necessity sell themselves; this is the seasonal erosion of their identity, that high-pitched repetition of the same images of service that cannot distinguish one island from the other. …

   There is a territory wider than this - wider than the limits made by the map of an island - which is the illimitable sea and what it remembers.



   All of the Antilles, every island, is an effort of memory; every mind, every racial biography culminating in amnesia and fog. Pieces of sunlight through the fog and sudden rainbows, arcs-en-ciel. That is the effort, the labour of the Antillean imagination, rebuilding its gods from bamboo frames, phrase by phrase.

In many ways, the purpose of this section of ‘The Antilles: Fragments of Epic Memory’ seems strikingly similar to his purpose in ‘Prelude’: he bemoans the ‘erosion’ of the Caribbean identity into mere ‘images’ – ‘blue reflections’ in a Green night, as it were – and then seeks to supply an alternative vision. Only this time, the alternative is not filled with angst and borrowed ideas from Eliot – he asserts instead that the Caribbean identity can be found – or rather must be constructed out of – ‘what [the sea] remembers’, seemingly a reference to the Middle Passage; a reading of the amnesia of the mixed racial biographies that form the region as an opportunity rather than an agony; the beauty of their landscape, weather and dazzling combinations of creoles (I can say both rainbows and arcs-en-ciel, how fortunate I am, he seems to cry); and the traditions, myths, gods, literature that they choose to (re)construct for themselves, ‘phrase by phrase’ – poem by poem.

Or perhaps I’m being reductive to suggest that Walcott wasn’t already on his way to this resolution as a young poet. Let us turn, finally, to the last stanza of ‘Prelude’:

Until from all I turn to think how,

In the middle of the journey through my life

O how I came upon you, my

reluctant leopard of the slow eyes.

This seems to me a hugely obscure passage in which one senses a young poet straining to be difficult. What we can assert, however, is that it narrates a discovery of something new that Walcott feels the need to address directly with a prayer-like tone of reverence – ‘O … you’ – because it seems to provide him with an alternative to all the pain and emptiness that ‘Prelude’ has detailed thus far. A register of words like ‘Lost’, ‘Gone’, ‘Suffer’ and ‘Isolated’ have been the order of the day until this final stanza, then enter the reluctant leopard and all seems well.

Walcott has written of this poem that it was composed at a time when:

I was very excited about my discovery, through several older people, of the poetry of W.H. Auden, T.S. Eliot, and Dylan Thomas—physical books that I had, books whose print I liked (my emphasis).

Books whose print I liked, he explains, in what seems to be an attempt to clarify the final stanza of ‘Prelude’. Could it be that the young Walcott’s imagination saw in the metaphor of the reluctant leopard a symbol of poetry itself? A thing of great power and beauty that stalks forth reluctantly – revealing its distinctive print – from the landscape of the imagination only after much meditative gazing, observing, watching. If this is so, then it is poetry itself - both those poets he is reading with ‘slow eyes’ and those poems he is summoning forth himself after turning his ‘slow eyes’ to the landscape and situation of his St. Lucian home - that can provide a release from the loss, suffering and isolation that is the Caribbean predicament. Perhaps, then, a sixteen year old Walcott is already beginning to pierce the amnesia and fog (the variegated fists of clouds, the blank erosion of his home into an inflatable rubber island) with an early arcs-en-ciel of imagination: simply by the act of absorbing and reworking the poets of half his heritage, learning to ‘suffer in accurate iambics’, he begins building a tradition for the Caribbean from the imagination, from the landscape itself, from the bamboo frames of Eliot… phrase by phrase by phrase. 

My Life had stood - a Loaded Gun

The first stanza of ‘My Life had stood – a Loaded Gun -’ presents the poem’s speaker as currently powerless yet potentially powerful. In a wildly inventive, dislocating metaphor Dickinson compares herself to a “Gun”. The capitalisation of this violent object seems to add to the sense of power that it connotes, and yet this gun spends its life “stood”, seemingly passively, in “corners”.

Dickinson – presuming that the speaker is synonymous with the poet herself – remains in this shadowy, passive state until she is “identified” by a male “Owner” and “carried … away”. The fact that she is static without her “Owner” makes her appear powerless, the frequent dashes in this stanza seemingly echoing her feeling of stagnation, and yet it must be acknowledged that the “Gun” which she compares herself to is “Loaded”: although she is powerless without her owner, she has huge potential for power in the future.

Whilst alone, then, she is weak – but when united with her “Owner”, as a “We” in the second stanza, she is free – roaming in “Sovereign Woods” – and sufficiently powerful to “hunt the Doe”. The gender of this animal seems significant. That the pair hunt a symbol of femininity appears to suggest that Dickinson’s movement from the passive sphere of a shadowy “corner” to the more active sphere of the “Woods” involves the destruction of some (of her?) feminine identity. In this poem, then, power is gendered. Superficially, it is a masculine trait, and yet this is complicated by the fact that the poem’s next six lines all celebrate the complex power of Dickinson’s female voice. Though she needs the power of a man to identify her, carry her away, liberate her and let her speak, he needs the power of the female voice to “speak for him”, and when it does, the results are phenomenal.

“Mountains” reply, the gun “smiles” – a metaphor for its explosive flash – and “cordial light” glows upon the whole valley. These seem hugely powerful images emphasising the pleasure and beauty of female speech, but also its simultaneous power and potential for violence. Furthermore, the fact that “mountains” reply not only communicates the loud echo of the gunshot, but also seems to suggest that powerful female speech is a wholly natural occurrence. For Dickinson, when a woman speaks it is as though a “Vesuvian” eruption takes place, and the destructive, powerful violence that this image connotes is described – almost sadistically – as a “pleasure”; and why shouldn’t it be when your “life” has been spent – powerlessly – in “corners” up to this point?

If the strength of the gun’s voice complicates the power relationship in this poem, it is certainly not simplified by Dickinson’s next image. The gun’s “Owner”, now described as a “Master”, sleeps whilst Dickinson takes on the role of his “guard”. Perhaps more importantly, she states that this role is “better” than sharing his “Deep Pillow”. Dickinson has abandoned the more passive, powerless, domesticated role of the female sexual object that shares the “Master’s” bed in favour of the seemingly more powerful role of his “guard”, boasting of her physical strength: to his enemies she can be “deadly” simply by looking at them.

None stir the second time
on whom I lay a Yellow eye

The gunshot is no longer a “smile”, it is now a bright but deadly glance, and interestingly, the gun itself has all of the agency. In stanza two the gun “speak[s]” for the “Owner”, but now the gun itself chooses to “lay a Yellow eye” or even an “emphatic thumb” on the owner’s foe whilst he himself sleeps. The woman has taken on power and independence, and yet it is all still in service of a male “Owner”.

Power, then, is something that the speaker of this poem has in abundance. Her voice and glance and touch can guard masters, kill foes, light valleys, shake mountains into speech; and yet all of this is only made possible by the liberating force of the masculine “Owner” she protects and defends, and ultimately she acknowledges the limits of her power in the poem’s riddling and complex final stanza.

The speaker lacks “the power to die”. In other words, she is – when all is told – an inanimate object. All of her strength and violence – after all, she has “the power to kill” – seem irrelevant given that the figure that empowers her, that makes this strength possible, is male, human and transient. He will not “live” forever, and thus Dickinson, whilst she will exist or “live” as a gun will return to the “corners” she started in, and thus not “live” in the active and powerful way that she came to enjoy in the hands of her transient Master.

Full Moon and Little Frieda - Analysis

Full Moon and Little Frieda

A cool small evening shrunk to a dog bark and the clank of a bucket -
And you listening.
A spider's web, tense for the dew's touch.
A pail lifted, still and brimming - mirror
To tempt a first star to a tremor.

Cows are going home in the lane there, looping the hedges with their warm
wreaths of breath -
A dark river of blood, many boulders,
Balancing unspilled milk.
'Moon!' you cry suddenly, 'Moon! Moon!'

The moon has stepped back like an artist gazing amazed at a work
That points at him amazed.

Ted Hughes

------------------------

It is “evening” in a vague rural location: a “lane”, “hedges”, “a dog bark”, “a pail”, “the moon”. The evening is both “cool” and “small” – an interesting pair of adjectives. The simplicity of the vocabulary seems to echo the “little” of the title, and creates a childish, playful atmosphere. And yet despite the seeming insignificance of the evening it has “shrunk” further, focused in onto a specific moment – yet merely a “dog bark” and the “clank of a bucket”. Despite onomatopoeia and consonance working together here to make this description vivid, almost audible, they are hardly profound enough sounds to warrant the shrinking they acquire.

However, it is not the sounds themselves that imbue this moment with its importance, but rather their audience: Hughes describes “you listening” – presumably Frieda, his daughter. The hyphen and stanza break before this line combined with its sheer brevity in contrast to the first, merge to create both a sense of Hughes’ adoration of his daughter – developed further, perhaps, by the gentle second person pronoun ‘you’ – and an impression of the child’s quiet stillness and concentration. It is Frieda’s focus, almost fascination with the seemingly insignificant noises of the countryside that warrant this shrinking in to this moment in particular, on an evening which was previously ‘cool’, dispassionate, and ‘small’, unimportant.

What follows is a sequence of closely related images. Hughes notes a “spider’s web” and a “pail”. Superficially, these images work merely to develop setting and also appear contradictory: the natural fragility of the spider’s web opposing the heavy industrialism of the pail, however closer inspection reveals that they are closely linked: one is “tense”, the other “still”; both are associated in their turn with water – “dew” and the “brimming” fluid of the bucket; both wait for quiet – yet beautiful – miracles of nature: the “touch” or the first dew or the reflected “tremor” of a star in the “mirror” of the water’s surface.

Frequent personification, linked by subtly distant alliteration of ‘t’, work here to create a sense of a world that is coming alive, but currently waits in anticipation of that moment: the web is ‘tense’ for a ‘touch’, the water ‘tempt[s]’ a ‘tremor’. In this sense, these images not only develop setting and an atmosphere of expectation, but also character: they can be read as metaphors for Frieda herself.

Just as the web is fragile, Frieda is “little”. Just as the web waits for the dew’s touch, Frieda too waits for the appearance of the moon. Although at first a comparison between his daughter and a pail appears unromanticised, a comparison with Sylvia Plath’s oeuvre perhaps suggests otherwise. As Hughes’ wife reached the climax of the depression that would ultimately kill her, some of her only optimistic poetry concerned her children. In ‘Balloons’, she describes how one:

‘Sits

Back, fat jug

Contemplating a world clear as water’

And in ‘Child’ admits that:

‘Your clear eye is the one absolutely beautiful thing

I want to fill it with color and ducks …

Pool in which images

Should be grand and classical’

Plath saw her children as ‘jugs’, ‘pools’, vessels to be filled with knowledge of the ‘world’, ‘color’, ‘ducks’, ‘grand and classical’ images, all symbolised by the metaphor of water. Can we therefore read in Hughes’ comparison of his daughter to a ‘pail’ an allusion to his late wife’s poetry? Frieda is now the bucket Plath wished her to be, ‘brimming’ with the images and sounds of innocence and nature that Plath would have wished for her: ‘dog’, ‘spider’s web’, ‘star’, ‘cows’, ‘breath’, ‘hedges’, ‘moon’.

The shift from second to third stanza is a huge thematic shift too: from stillness to movement, innocence to experience, beauty to terror, life to death. The contrast between the relatively short lines of stanza two and the sudden length of

‘Cows are going home in the lane there, looping the hedges with their

warm wreaths of breath’

works to create this sense of an increase in pace and a resuming of time. The line breaks of the previous stanza promoted stillness, pauses, contemplation, expectation. Suddenly, we have a continual flow of language, symbolising the continual flow of cows which are imagined in a suddenly threatening image as a “dark river of blood”. Indeed, that their breath is imagined as “wreaths” only contributes to this funereal image. What this slightly gruesome death imagery adds to the poem is a thematic contrast between innocence and experience, father and daughter. This is Hughes meditating on the cows, not Frieda, who - as her sudden and enthusiastic interruption of ‘Moon!’ indicates – remains engrossed by the evening sky. As an adult, Hughes’ perception of the world is different; he is unable to look in awe at the innocent beauty of stars and dew (and enjoy the sound of their words as his daughter does, exclaiming moon a further three times) without also imagining the slaughter of cattle and eventual spilling of their currently ‘balanc[ed]’ milk.

Beyond the relationship between these two natural objects and Frieda, is a wider relationship that Hughes establishes between earth and space. Although Hughes writes that the water in the pail can “tempt the first star to a tremor”, we know it is only the star’s reflection shaking, not the star itself. Similarly, as Frieda ‘points at [the moon] amazed’ that moon too appears to be ‘gazing amazed’ back at Frieda herself. The verb ‘gazing’ implies Frieda’s innocence and beauty - the moon personified in a simple simile as an ‘artist’ unable to take his eyes of his fabulous ‘work’.

In this sense the moon is also a projection of the poet himself, the fact that it is ‘full’ implying his fully grown adult ‘gaze’, now returned from the threatening ‘boulders’ of the ominous cows to the youthful innocence of ‘little Frieda’.

Going to him! Happy letter!

GOING to him! Happy letter! Tell him—
Tell him the page I did n’t write;
Tell him I only said the syntax,
And left the verb and the pronoun out.
Tell him just how the fingers hurried,	5
Then how they waded, slow, slow, slow;
And then you wished you had eyes in your pages,
So you could see what moved them so.
“Tell him it was n’t a practised writer,
You guessed, from the way the sentence toiled;	10
You could hear the bodice tug, behind you,
As if it held but the might of a child;
You almost pitied it, you, it worked so.
Tell him—No, you may quibble there,
For it would split his heart to know it,	15
And then you and I were silenter.
“Tell him night finished before we finished,
And the old clock kept neighing ‘day!’
And you got sleepy and begged to be ended—
What could it hinder so, to say?	20
Tell him just how she sealed you, cautious,
But if he ask where you are hid
Until to-morrow,—happy letter!
Gesture, coquette, and shake your head!

In ‘Going to Him!’ Dickinson speaks directly to a ‘letter’ that she has written, presumably to a lover that she cannot be with. Whilst the letter is ‘going to him’ she, seemingly, cannot. That the letter is personified as ‘happy’ signifies Dickinson’s love for this man: the implication is surely that seeing this unnamed man brings happiness – even to an inanimate object – whilst she is forlorn because she cannot be with him. That Dickinson chooses such a childlike adjective to open her poem and – rather than her characteristic dash – uses two exclamation marks, combines to give it an immediately playful and joyful tone.

Sudden extreme anaphoric repetition is used in the following three lines, combined with the return of the dash, as Dickinson stutters three times over the phrase ‘tell him’. These devices blend to introduce hesitancy to the lyric. The speaker is experiencing a struggle to communicate her true feelings, something that is borne out by the fact that there is a whole ‘page [she] didn’t write –’. Indeed, the dash after this phrase almost becomes symbolic of this communicative lacuna, representing as it does an absence of adequate language. Sadly, what this lyric categorically does not do is compensate for the ‘page’ missed out from the letter. Rather than filling this gap in the poem, Dickinson remains obscure, telling her letter that she only said the ‘syntax’ and left the ‘verb’ and ‘pronoun’ out.

It would surely be reductive to assign concrete values to these ambiguous terms. The verb could be ‘love’, the pronoun perhaps ‘I’, ‘you’, or indeed both, however we are only guessing. That Dickinson only ‘said the Syntax’ implies that her letter was somehow restricted, governed by rules: for whatever reason, she felt (and indeed still feels) unable to break free from this restriction. As she phrases it in ‘It was not Death’, her life – or in this case her letter – is ‘shaven’ and ‘fitted to a frame’. Indeed, the sibilant quality of ‘said the Syntax’ seems to simultaneous create a regretful tone – as though she wished she could have said more than decorum demanded, and a whispering quality –implying her feeling that she and her letter need to be secretive together. Perhaps what she truly wishes to say mustn’t be uttered aloud.

As the stanza continues we gain an insight into Dickinson’s emotional state as she was involved in the process of the letter’s composition. At times her ‘fingers hurried’, and at others they ‘waded – slow – slow –’. Dickinson shifts from the quick, clipped vowels of ‘fingers hurried’ to the elongated and repetitive vowels and ‘w’ sound of ‘waded – slow – slow –’ to control the movement of this section of her poem, increasing and decreasing the pace of reading as the speed of her letter writing hurried and slowed. Indeed, this is further emphasised by the sudden proliferation of dashes through the latter line. In this slower moment, so beautiful crafted for the reader, she imagines that her letter wished it had ‘eyes’ in its ‘pages’ so that it could see what ‘moved’ Dickinson to suddenly write at such a laborious pace. The effect of this is to undermine Dickinson’s assertion at the beginning of stanza two that the ‘sentence toiled’ simply because she is not a ‘Practised Writer’. Given Dickinson’s remarkable poetic output one cannot help but see this as a hollow excuse.

Rather, we might focus (once again) on what Dickinson doesn’t wish to say rather than what she does, if we are to guess at what it is she wishes to communicate and what ‘moves’ her:

Tell Him – no – you may quibble there –

For it would split His Heart to know it

Dickinson dramatises two different reactions to this unspoken piece of information, dismissed so emphatically by the isolated and (consequently) emphasised ‘no’: her letter would ‘quibble’ with the knowledge – a verb suggesting a minor or slight objection, whilst the letter’s male recipient would find ‘His Heart’ entirely ‘split’ by it: clearly a far more serious reaction to this unarticulated fact. Ostensibly ‘split’ seems an entirely negative verb: what Dickinson wishes to tell this man would seemingly break his heart in two, and yet comparison to Dickinson’s other work may suggest otherwise: “Split the Lark”, she writes, “and you’ll find the music / bulb after bulb in silver rolled”.

Perhaps it is too convenient – although it is tempting and useful – to suggest that the recipient of this letter may be Charles Wadsworth. Wadsworth was the only man Dickinson ever loved, and yet, as James Reeves notes, this was a ‘hopeless and consuming passion’: he was married; a vicar; and eventually moved thousands of miles away from Dickinson herself in order to pursue his career. Nevertheless, this would certainly explain some of the poem’s ambiguities: there is little doubt that Dickinson would need to send a letter to him rather than visit herself, and also that knowledge of her love for him may well ‘split’ his heart between loyalty to his wife and profession, and affection (she may hope) for Dickinson herself.

This biographical detail is also useful for explaining the poem’s final stanza, which deals with the eventual completion of the letter and the intensely private Dickinson’s final decision to ‘hid[e]’ rather than send it. That she laboured over – though at least partly enjoyed - the content of the letter is indicated by her statement that ‘night finished before we finished’, the repetition of ‘finished’ and anaphora of ‘and’ in lines two and three of this stanza creating that sense of a drawn out process, so much so that the letter – in a hyperbolic personification – ‘begged’ to be ‘ended’. That it is the letter that wishes to end and not Dickinson is significant in illustrating her own enjoyment in this process of communication. Even the ‘clock’ that reminds Dickinson of impending ‘day’ appears ‘old’ she has spent so long perfecting the letter’s content.

In a characteristically compressed line Dickinson then instructs the letter to ‘tell him how she sealed you, cautious!’: this is not, however, what Byron (2000) would call an ‘unrecoverable deletion’ – the reader can fairly simply reconstruct the idea that Dickinson sealed the letter ‘cautious[ly]’ or ‘[with] caution’. This is also supported by the fact that she decides to ‘hid[e]’ the letter, at least ‘until tomorrow’. There is clearly something in its content – presumably ‘the page she didn’t write’, the unnamed ‘verb’ and ‘pronoun’ that she doesn’t with ‘him’ to know – that Dickinson hopes to conceal, yet simultaneously hopes to communicate: note that it is merely ‘until tomorrow’ that the letter is hidden, not permanently. In many ways, this is a poem about implied meaning and the existence of subtext: even though Dickinson has left a ‘page’, ‘verb’ and ‘pronoun’ out of her letter she remains aware, wary even, that they may be deduced or inferred through the words that she did write in their stead.

Interestingly, Dickinson ends the poem imagining the letter gesturing ‘coquette’ and ‘shaking’ its ‘head’, refusing to communicate its content or subtext. This playful, flirtatious imagery contrasts with the apparent severity of the letter’s words which take considerable ‘work’ and time, consequently leaving the poem on the same fun loving note with which it started. It is as though Dickinson projects her own emotions onto the letter, just as she projects her own emotions onto the personified shadowy and breathless landscape in ‘A Certain Slant’. In the end, it appears that coquettish flirtation may be the preferable strategy to a heartfelt revelation of a ‘page’ or ‘verb’ or ‘pronoun’ so profound they are left entirely unnameable in both the letter itself and the lyric its composition and concealment appear to have inspired.

Pondering Prufrock's Indecision

"Let us go", demands Prufrock at the start of his 'Love Song'. Ostensibly decisive words, however closer reading reveals otherwise: he repeats the demand a stuttering three times in the first stanza. Indeed, as the "yellow fog" of an "October night" curls about his house and falls asleep, one wonders whether Prufrock himself changes like the season he describes, falling asleep like the "smoke" rather than traversing "half-deserted streets" to a mysterious "room" where mysterious "women come and go".

By the poem's fourth stanza Prufrock acknowledges his own indecision rather than masking it in mock decisiveness. "There will be time", he states four times in six lines before echoing the word "time" on a further four occasions within the stanza. As the reader skips continually over these ticking repetitions he senses the "hundred indecisions", the "visions and revisions", to which Prufrock admits.

What is it that makes Prufrock so afraid to "go"? So afraid to ask the obscure but "overwhelming question" that he keeps burning within him? Eliot seems to hint that a sense of inferiority and corresponding fear of mockery are to blame. The women are "talking of Michelangelo" - an artistic genius - with whom Prufrock perhaps feels he cannot compare. This intellectual inferiority is echoed physically. Despite his sartorial garb of "morning coat" and "necktie" two sets of scathing parenthesis invade stanza five. Both begin "They will say..." and end with the adjective "thin!". Prufrock's hair is thin, his arms and legs are thin, and consequently his willingness to "go", to "dare", to "meet", wanes too.

Eventually he asks himself:

Do I dare

Disturb the universe?

The first line is emphasised simply by merit of being the shortest of the poem so far. Indeed the pause created by its striking enjambment seems to draw further attention to Prufrock's indecision, just as the plosive alliteration that penetrates this curt interrogative adds a self-mocking tone to his ironic words. It is not a universe that he will disturb with his "overwhelming question" but a small social circle with which he is seemingly bored: "I have known them all" he tells us.

This fear of disturbing his universe recalls the poem's epigraph. Eliot opens with lines 61-66 of Canto 27 from Dante's Inferno. In the depths of hell, Guido would refuse to speak:

"S'io credessi che mia risposta fosse

A persona che mai tornasse al mondo"

(If [he] thought that [he] was replying

to someone who would return to the world)

This is surely describing Prufrock's ideal listener. An interlocutor upon whom he can unburden himself without fear of his confessions becoming part of the murmured gossip concealed "beneath the music from a farther room".

Given the poem's cryptic quality it appears that we are not such a listener. For Riquelme, the poem is comprised of "scenes that can with difficulty be imagined based on the minimal details provided". It is not just the poem's visual scenes that are obscure: we do not even know the question Prufrock so desperately wishes to ask, or indeed to whom he wishes to ask it!

We see her - and perhaps other women - only in synechdochic fragments scattered across five stanzas: "eyes", "arms", "long fingers", "skirts". While the "eyes" formulate him, put him in his place in the social "universe", the arms and their "light brown hair" distract him. Williamson sees them as an "erotic symbol", and this is consequently the clearest hint at Prufrock's intentions.

Indeed, when reflecting on 'what might have been' later in the poem, he wonders whether it would've been worthwhile to have "squeezed the universe into a ball". There is a definite echo of Andrew Marvell's 'To His Coy Mistress' in this phrase: Prufrock clearly wishes to seduce a woman into an erotic encounter. He does not want to be one of the "lonely men in shirt-sleeves" that he has (imagined) passing on his way to this room of "tea and cake and ices".

Inevitably though, he will be just that. He will never have the "strength" to "force the moment to its crisis" and ask his "overwhelming question". Even in his stanza ten rehearsal of his 'seduction' speech he gets no further than three lines of verse before an ellipsis signifies his inability to act on his desires.

"I should have been a pair of ragged claws", he laments, "scuttling across the floors of silent seas." By the poem's conclusion this is where he seems to end up. He will "grow old" and "walk upon the beach", but even here an internal crisis of confidence ensures women will converse entirely without him, just as they do in the "room". Echoing John Donne, Eliot writes:

I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each.

I do not think that they will sing to me.

Prufrock's assertion that he is "not Prince Hamlet" shows an astute self-knowledge. Despite the Danish Prince's initial hesitation he eventually learnt to act decisively. Prufrock never does. It is not only his refusal to engage with women that is indecisive. Even the most minor detail causes a frantic question: "Shall I part my hair behind?", he wonders, "Do I dare to eat a peach?".

As the poems final stanzas begin to break down in length, so Prufrock's life begins to break apart too. Indeed the final stanza acts almost as a mise-en-abyme for the entire poem. He admits he has "lingered in ... chambers" rather than acting as he perhaps should. He has been close to "sea-girls" yet remains separate from them, before eventually appearing to die or "drown".

Finding inspiration in Stevens' writing on Winter

In 'The Snow Man', standing amongst "pine-trees crusted with snow" and "junipers shagged with ice", Wallace Stevens describes a

listener, who listens in the snow,

And, nothing himself, beholds

Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.

In characteristic Stevens style this stanza is noticeably repetitive. The three mentions of "nothing" seem only to emphasise the emptiness that he experiences in this desolate winter landscape, this "bare place", where there is only "misery in the sound of the wind" for company. In light of this poem, it seems unsurprising that Stevens has another entitled 'Depression before Spring'.

The bleak sense of complete emptiness in a winter landscape is slightly reduced in 'Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird' in which Stevens opens with the assertion that

Among twenty snowy mountains,

The only moving thing

Was the eye of the blackbird.

Minor comfort, perhaps, but life nevertheless where previously there was none. It is not until Spring, however, that Stevens seems to truly perk up, noting in 'The Sun this March' how

The exceeding brightness of this early sun

Makes me conceive how dark I have become

Indeed this half-rhyming couplet in jaunty iambic pentameter seems to echo in its form the joy Stevens feels now that Winter has passed.

For me, Stevens' success is in managing to take a cliched motif such as the age-old winter-depression/spring-happiness metaphor and imbue it with a new found beauty and life. It strikes me that sometimes that might be all a poet can do to overcome the daunting emptiness of the blank page.

Even if the idea at the heart of a poem might be easily dreamt up by another writer, the language in which you express it will always be your own.

The Sky from a Window

Almost imperceptibly,

Slow rumbles of cloud

Blow over a curving mound

Of budding trees.

They're eaten by the peeling white

Of a verticle gable wall

And replaced by brighter sky

With a patch of blue.

Meanwhile other poets,

Perhaps just two doors down,

Pen the same thought

Differently, in canon.

By Liam Gilbert (April 2011)

"You should have kept the book longer to meditate over..." (Giorgio - Passion, by Stephen Sondheim)

On the tenth birthday of Wikipedia, commentators are remarking upon the way that, despite its flaws, it has democratized knowledge. I've sensed, in the media, a tangible air of celebration and an overriding acknowledgement that Wikipedia has been, and is, a jolly good thing.

Academics too are becoming increasingly interested in the wikipedia phenomenon. Kittur et al. comment that "although Wikipedia was driven by the influence of "elite" users early on, more recently there has been a dramatic shift in workload to the "common" user." If Francis Bacon's famous aphorism "knowledge is power" truly stands, then Wikipedia is surely a concrete site of the way that power is increasingly spreading and shifting away from an elite centre.

Perhaps of more interest is the way that wikipedia symbolises our obsession with being permanently 'plugged-in' to information. As Alain de Botton recently remarked on Radio 4's 'A Point of View', we have a tendency to favour 'consumption' over 'absorption' and 'reflection'. In a restaurant with my family on Saturday evening, I had a television - showing the news - over my left shoulder, and a table of two girls - both with permanently buzzing blackberries - over my right. Information is all around us and we seem to thirst for it. 

It seems I too am guilty of this info-lust. I hate the idea of discarding books, or passing them on to others. I like to keep them, and display them. Ostensibly, so that I can return to them and meditate on their many truths... Perhaps more truthfully, so that I have a sort of visual archive of my remarkable consumption on text-after-text.

In Sondheim's Passion it is the ugly, sickly, outcast 'Fosca' who sings:

 

I do not read to think. I do not read to learn.
I do not read to search for truth.

I read to fly, to skim -
I do not read to swim.

I do not dwell on dreams.

And yet, in this connected world of Wikipedia and smart phones, Fosca's admission does not contribute to the minority status that crystallizes from her physical appearance, to the contrary she describes an increasingly 'normal' condition, and in so-doing, shifts herself closer to the mainstream, not further from it.