In my last post I discussed Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s “Lady Lilith” and how the experience of reading the lines actually mirrors the poem’s content. Another excellent example of a poet using the form, in this case repetition and specific diction, to help create a feeling in the reader that mirrors the poem’s concerns is Augusta Webster’s “Circe.” A dramatic monologue (though even that is complicated) focused on the ancient Greek enchantress, the poem is stunning in its imagery. “Circe” was first published in 1870 in Webster’s Portraits, though the version I draw from is the slightly revised version from the 1893 third edition. I’ve had difficulty finding a copy of the 1893 text online, though it is available in print in Broadview’s Portraits and Other Poems,so I’ve created a page with the the 1893 poem as a whole here.  I’m focusing on the first few stanzas for this post.

Circe Invidiosa, John William Waterhouse, 1892

The poem begins with Circe gazing out over the expanse of sea from her island:

The sun drops luridly into the west ;
Darkness has raised her arms to draw him down
Before the time, not waiting as of wont
Till he has come to her behind the sea ;

This is an intriguing image, describing what initially seems to be a sunset, but then reveals itself to be a storm, as the mounting darkness reaches up and pulls the sun down before sunset has fully arrived. The gendering here is also significant, and it mirrors Circe’s standard role as seductress (though the poem complicates this dynamic in important ways that are outside of the scope of this blog post.) Webster then gives a tour de force of poetic imagery describing what will happen once the storm reaches her island:

Oh welcome, welcome, though it rend my bowers.
Scattering my blossomed roses like the dust.
Splitting the shrieking branches, tossing down
My riotous vines with their young half-tinged grapes
Like small round amethysts or beryls strung
Tumultuously in clusters ; though it sate
Its ravenous spite among my goodliest pines
Standing there round and still against the sky
That makes blue lakes between their sombre tufts,
Or harry from my silvery olive slopes                                                 20
Some hoary king whose gnarled fantastic limbs
Wear rugged armour of a thousand years ;
Though it will hurl high on my flowery shores
The hostile wave that rives at the poor sward
And drags it down the slants, that swirls its foam
Over my terraces, shakes their firm blocks
Of great bright marbles into tumbled heaps.
And makes my pleached and mossy labyrinths.
Where the small odorous blossoms grow like stars
Strewn in the milky way, a briny marsh.                                            30
What matter ? let it come and bring me change.
Breaking the sickly sweet monotony.

This stanza is a virtuoso performance that is delicious to read (if at times a little difficult.) It sounds wonderful aloud with its cascade of images and enjambment that just seems to keep going. The sexual imagery is there too, obvious (though not Goblin Market obvious) to an astute reader who will allow themselves to delve into the imagery (“pleached and mossy labyrinths” where “odorous blossoms grow” turned into a “briny marsh”).*

But then, immediately following this stunning language, there’s a stanza break and the poem shifts:

I am too weary of this long bright calm ;
Always the same blue sky, always the sea
The same blue perfect likeness of the sky.
One rose to match the other that has waned.
To-morrow’s dawn the twin of yesterday’s ;
And every night the ceaseless crickets chirp
The same long joy and the late strain of birds
Repeats their strain of all the even month ;                                        40
And changelessly the petty plashing surfs
Bubble their chiming burden round the stones ;
Dusk after dusk brings the same languid trance
Upon the shadowy hills, and in the fields
The waves of fireflies come and go the same.
Making the very flash of light and stir
Vex one like dronings of the shuttles at task.

When teaching this poem I usually read the previous stanza aloud, but this is the stanza I have the class read aloud. Often I’ll have all of us try and read it in unison and then I’ll ask students how they feel about reading it. Does it effect them in any way? Does it make them feel anything (in the immediate visceral sense)? What is it like to read those words aloud and hear them?

Normally students first remark on how delightful Circe’s island sounds (and it does, I’d vacation there in a second if it weren’t for all the sulky pigs running around.) It is interesting that Webster uses the idyllic “blue sea” and the “perfect” blue sky to express Circe’s discontent. But the other thing students notice is that this stanza, especially when compared to the previous stanza, is not pleasant to read. It is very boring and that boredom comes directly from Webster’s diction. Note the repetition: “Always the same, blue sky, always the sea / The same blue perfect likeness of the sky“. Just in these two lines we have “always” repeated twice. “same” repeated twice, “blue” repeated twice, and “sky” repeated twice. This pattern continues as the stanza goes on as the “late strain of birds / Repeats their strain.” In fact the word “same” occurs five times over the course of the stanza and it is certainly not the only repetition.

All of this repetition in close proximity mirrors Circe’s own experience of repetition and monotony. We as readers get a small taste of her daily life on the island. It is all finally tied together–the sounds we hear as we read aloud, the repetition hammering at us as the fifteen lines drag on, and the descriptions of how this monotony effects Circe–by the last several lines of the stanza. As the same experiences ceaselessly recur something as lovely as fireflies have become routine to the point that their “flash of light and stir / Vex one like dronings of the shuttles at task.” The language of shuttles reference weaving (which both connects directly to Circe in The Odyssey and also more largely to women (it is also utilized in Rossetti’s “Lady Lilith” as seen in the last post). This has important implications for the poem’s interest and critique of Victorian gender roles. It also though is focused on sound. The experiences of the island are analogous to the droning sound of the loom, just as on some level our repetitions as we read aloud are somehow analogous to Circe’s existence on her island. We for a brief moment are made to experience a small portion of the enchantress’s  ennui. Here again we have a skilled poet utilizing language to produce an experience in the reader that connects back to the content of the poem. These experiences are not just intellectual appreciations of the poem, or focused on what my students sometimes think are the “squishiness” of feelings, but rather they are reactions to speaking and hearing the poem and the power language has on a very basic level. Next up, as I unpack these kinds of experiences? Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s “Mariana.”

*One thing that I sometimes find in my classrooms as that students are hesitant to suggest sexualized readings of poems because they either are too shy to talk about it, or think they must be wrong (and that everyone will think they have dirty minds for even thinking such a thing. This even happens with pretty obvious sexual references like the fruit in Christina Rossetti’s Goblin Market or even the explicit sexual discussion in Donne’s “To His Mistress on Going to Bed.” But that is a subject for another post . . .