Tintern Abbey

Posted on July 10, 2012 by quicklytothepanopticon

I mentioned Wordsworth a fair bit in one of my recent entries. The major touchstone we kept coming back to in the 19th-century survey class I taught last semester was “Tintern Abbey.” More than any of his other poetic work, it seems to me (and my students thus far) to be continually resonant. The other works are important, but unsurprisingly “Tintern Abbey” is central: to Wordsworth’s personal ethos, to the Romantic movement as a whole, and to later writer’s engagements with the Romantics (for instance compare Wordsworth’s usage of the wilderness surrounding the Abbey to Matthew Arnold’s more melancholy picture at the end of “Stanzas From the Grande Chartreuse.”)

Anyway, this is all prelude to pointing out an excellent site hosted by the University of Michigan: Enchanting Ruin: Tintern Abbey and Romantic Tourism in Wales. It is an impressive resource that examines the larger context that the poem fits into, including the Romantic preoccupation with picturesque ruins, and the visual representation of landscape during the period. It has some great images and provides some interesting insight that illuminates the poem as well as the broader Romantic Era world. Really cool stuff.

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“Luminous as an autumn sunset”

Posted on July 3, 2012 by quicklytothepanopticon

I’ve been steadily making my way through my dissertation and I hope to have it in draft by the end of the summer. I’ve got over half of my chapters in approved final form (or as final as they can be before the defense) and am planning on at least having first or second drafts of the others before the fall term begins. That will keep me well on track for a fall defense date.

Anyway, a few weeks ago I was lucky enough to come across a four pack of this:

Thomas Hardy’s Ale is a near legendary English old ale that ceased production in 2008. The alcohol content is such that it will age like wine, so it is apt to be quite good when I finally open it up. Here is the bit from Hardy’s novel The Trumpet Major that is supposed to have inspired the brew:

In the liquor line Loveday laid in an ample barrel of Casterbridge ‘strong beer.’  This renowned drink—now almost as much a thing of the past as Falstaff’s favourite beverage—was not only well calculated to win the hearts of soldiers blown dry and dusty by residence in tents on a hill-top, but of any wayfarer whatever in that land.  It was of the most beautiful colour that the eye of an artist in beer could desire; full in body, yet brisk as a volcano; piquant, yet without a twang; luminous as an autumn sunset; free from streakiness of taste; but, finally, rather heady.  The masses worshipped it, the minor gentry loved it more than wine, and by the most illustrious county families it was not despised.  Anybody brought up for being drunk and disorderly in the streets of its natal borough, had only to prove that he was a stranger to the place and its liquor to be honourably dismissed by the magistrates, as one overtaken in a fault that no man could guard against who entered the town unawares.

I’ve got a batch from the last year it was produced, so it has already been aging for four years or so. Anyway, it is a beer that I’ll be saving for special occasions, though I have decided that I’ll open up a bottle to celebrate completing the rough draft of the dissertation.

Finally, here is a nice little bit on Thomas Hardy and beer.

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Never Turn Your Back on Mother Earth

Posted on July 2, 2012 by quicklytothepanopticon

I am an amateur gardener, and by amateur I mean novice. And by novice I mean newbie, and by newbie I mean, well, you get the point. I’ve recently begun working at the Temple Terrace Community Garden and it has been a great experience. I’ve always sought a connection with the natural world. As a kid I enjoyed camping, and hiking, fishing, all of those outdoorsy kinds of things. As a teenager I liked Thoreau and read and re-read Kerouac’s “Alone on a Mountaintop,” and while I long ago lost my enchantment with both writers my desire to be connected to the natural world continues. When I think back on it, I realize I first encountered the Kerouac piece in a composition class. I was sixteen and taking classes at the University of Southern Colorado (now CSU-Pueblo) and signed up for a comp 2 class centered around nature and humanity’s place within it. We used Constructing Nature: Readings from the American Experience edited by Richard Jenseth and Edward E. Lotto as our primary anthology. I still have that text, and think of it fondly, for amongst other things introducing me to the writing of Michael Pollan. It is still in print, and a quick Google search demonstrates it is still used by comp instructors fifteen years after I encountered it. That text, and the course which assigned it, introduced me to the idea that nature is something we human beings conceptually construct, dividing ourselves from nature and in a sense placing human-made things in the realm of the unnatural. These boundaries and our understandings of them are conceptual constructions, which is something Oscar Wilde understood at the end of the nineteenth-century. He playfully writes in “The Decay of Lying” :

Where, if not from the Impressionists, do we get those wonderful brown fogs that come creeping down our streets, blurring the gas-lamps and changing the houses into monstrous shadows? To whom, if not to them and their master, do we owe the lovely silver mists that brood over our river, and turn to faint forms of fading grace curved bridge and swaying barge? The extraordinary change that has taken place in the climate of London during the last ten years is entirely due to a particular school of Art. You smile. Consider the matter from a scientific or a metaphysical point of view, and you will find that I am right. For what is Nature? Nature is no great mother who has borne us. She is our creation. It is in our brain that she quickens to life. Things are because we see them, and what we see, and how we see it, depends on the Arts that have influenced us.

While, this is on one level Wilde being his charming and witty self, on another level it is keenly focused on the way our conceptions shape our understanding of the world, in this case the natural world. We pay attention to the beauty of fogs, because Monet and others have taught us to pay attention to them. We view nature as a mother, because that is the metaphor we use to speak about it.

 Waterloo Bridge, the Fog Claude Monet, 1900

The major nineteenth-century touchstone for discussion of nature is of course Wordsworth, whose visions of the natural world echo throughout the century to today. Wordsworth was Poet Laureate well beyond the Romantic era from 1843 until his death in 1850, and he casts a shadow over the entirety of the period, Romantic and Victorian alike. I suppose I came to realize his impact more fully this past semester while teaching British Literature 1780-1900, when we kept returning to his work when similar subjects were addressed by other writers. Even writers who fail to find a sense of peace in the natural world, such as Matthew Arnold reference Wordsworth.

I’m not the greatest fan of Wordsworth, though as I’ve said, I can’t fail to acknowledge his importance. It always seems to me, as if Wordsworth has gotten one-half of the picture of the natural world right, with his visions of nature as a beautiful transcendent force. But there is little violence, danger, or even sublimity in Wordsworth’s vision of nature (despite his continual usage of the term sublime.) There is little of what Tennyson will call “Nature, red in tooth and claw.”

I’m reminded of a conversation I had with a friend of mine not too long ago about the environs we both currently live in: Florida. He specifically was talking about the Everglades which I had made a brief trip out to that day. He mentioned how inhospitable the swamps are, that they, unlike many other natural places we had mentioned were dangerous. That is something that many of us miss when we view nature through the rose tinted glasses forged (in part) by our separation from it.

A certain remedy to Wordsworth’s own rose tinted view is found in some of the work of his fellow Romantics. Percy Bysshe Shelley in “Mont Blanc” writes of the sublime immensity of the Alps and the slow but unyielding destructive force of the glacier:

Power dwells apart in its tranquillity,
Remote, serene, and inaccessible:
And this, the naked countenance of earth,
On which I gaze, even these primaeval mountains
Teach the adverting mind. The glaciers creep
Like snakes that watch their prey, from their far fountains,
Slow rolling on; there, many a precipice,
Frost and the Sun in scorn of mortal power
Have piled: dome, pyramid, and pinnacle,
A city of death, distinct with many a tower
And wall impregnable of beaming ice.
Yet not a city, but a flood of ruin
Is there, that from the boundaries of the sky
Rolls its perpetual stream; vast pines are strewing
Its destined path, or in the mangled soil
Branchless and shattered stand; the rocks ‘ drawn down
From yon remotest waste, have overthrown
The limits of the dead and living world,
Never to be reclaimed. The dwelling place
Of insects, beasts, and birds, becomes its spoil
Their food and their retreat for ever gone,
So much of life and joy is lost. The race
Of man flies far in dread; his work and dwelling
Vanish, like smoke before the tempest’s stream,
And their place is not known.

Here nature is in full destructive force, attesting to its power as more than just the font of memory and impression that Wordsworth finds in it. The glaciers destroys the safe abodes of animals and threatens mankind. They are “poised like snakes” and will rain down destruction in perpetuity. Shelley finds a certain parallel in Lord Byron’s conclusion to Child Harold’s Pilgrimage where in the “Apostrophe to the Ocean” he writes:

Thou glorious mirror, where the Almighty’s form
Glasses itself in tempests; in all time,
Calm or convulsed–in breeze, or gale, or storm,
Icing the pole, or in the torrid clime
Dark-heaving;–boundless, endless, and sublime –
The image of Eternity–the throne
Of the Invisible; even from out thy slime
The monsters of the deep are made; each zone
Obeys thee:  thou goest forth, dread, fathomless, alone.

This vision of the ocean also has theological resonances. Nature, specifically the ocean, is a mirror to God, and thus God to again quote Tennyson who wrote these lines some thirty years after Byron completed Child Harold, God too must be “red in tooth and claw.”

And now, some bonus Neko Case, on this entry’s theme:

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The Audacity of Cities

Posted on June 29, 2012 by quicklytothepanopticon

The T rattled down Beacon Street, that electrical whirr driving into a higher pitch as it accelerated. With a clatter and a dinging of its bell it slowed and then stopped: the lurching progress of the train when it is above ground in Boston. The driver, an ideal Beantown specimen accent and all, rocked backwards and forwards with the motion of the train. The train slowed again, the bell ringing, pausing at a light and then, at slow speed began to inch forward.

I was seated facing front, close enough to see through the windscreen. I watched the train’s progress and then I saw a young guy, probably a BU student, pause and then step across the tracks. The train squealed to a halt and the driver simultaneously hit the bell and the horn, and strangely undeterred, I saw the guy pause and stare at the train. He stepped forward, finishing his crossing. The driver in that sharp accent, an accent that anyone outside of situ would call a caricature, leaned out and barked “what the fuck is wrong with you?! I got the right-a-way, I’m a fuckin’ locomotive!” With that the train sped on rapidly, bell and horn blazing through the mid-morning sun. For me, that moment is Boston

I both love and fear the audacity of cities.

I look back at that moment in Boston and it encapsulates that audacity. There is, of course, the audacity of that young man, staring down the train that came very close to breaking him to pieces like Carker in Charles Dickens’s Dombey and Son. But I also look at the audacity of the T: the audacity of sending those tons of metal rolling down those tracks. I bring up Dickens, because Dickens is a writer who understands both the glorious and hellish idea of cities as an ever evolving expression of humanity’s growth and change. Take for instance the squalor of the tenement called Tom-All-Alone’s in Bleak House, or the bureaucratic nightmare that is London in Little Dorritt. However, I’d like to dwell on the train for a moment as an emblem of that same audacity, that courage and defiance that prompts us build skyscrapers and monuments.

In chapter 6 of Dombey and Son Dickens describes Stagg’s Gardens a neighborhood in North London:

The first shock of a great earthquake had, just at that period, rent the whole neighbourhood to its centre. Traces of its course were visible on every side. Houses were knocked down; streets broken through and stopped; deep pits and trenches dug in the ground; enormous heaps of earth and clay thrown up; buildings that were undermined and shaking, propped by great beams of wood. Here, a chaos of carts, overthrown and jumbled together, lay topsy- turvy at the bottom of a steep unnatural hill; there, confused treasures of iron soaked and rusted in something that had accidentally become a pond. Everywhere were bridges that led nowhere; thoroughfares that were wholly impassable; Babel towers of chimneys, wanting half their height; temporary wooden houses and enclosures, in the most unlikely situations; carcases of ragged tenements, and fragments of unfinished walls and arches, and piles of scaffolding, and wildernesses of bricks, and giant forms of cranes, and tripods straddling above nothing. There were a hundred thousand shapes and substances of incompleteness, wildly mingled out of their places, upside down, burrowing in the earth, aspiring in the air, mouldering in the water, and unintelligible as any dream. Hot springs and fiery eruptions, the usual attendants upon earthquakes, lent their contributions of confusion to the scene. Boiling water hissed and heaved within dilapidated walls; whence, also, the glare and roar of flames came issuing forth; and mounds of ashes blocked up rights of way, and wholly changed the law and custom of the neighbourhood.

Camden Town is decimated it seems. Some great cataclysm has struck and now the very fires from the bowls of the earth (or hell itself) seem to crackle upwards through the rents in the ground. It is a scene from a war movie or a disaster film. And only after this description of violence and upheavel does Dickens, quite concisely, tell us the cause: “In short, the yet unfinished and unopened Railroad was in progress; and, from the very core of all this dire disorder, trailed smoothly away, upon its mighty course of civilisation and improvement.”

I turn to the railroad here not just because subways run through many of our great cities, and are in many ways a great achievement in urban living, but because the train in general whether it is the New York City Subway, the London Underground, the MBTA or the Amtrak, shares the same audacity of the city, the audacity that seeks to impose “civilization and improvement” upon all it touches.

The audacity of the city is ultimately part of the long line of shifts that human beings have made in relation to the natural world. Often we think back to the state of nature with a kind of wistful glee (when not contemplating Hobbes argument that life in such a state was “nasty, brutish, and short.”) But it remains to be seen how long we were actually involved been in some kind of pure state of nature, or precisely what that means. We have been changing our relationship to nature at least since we started cooking our food. Cities and subways, long-distance rail travel, and 747s are products of the continual evolutions and reactions fueled by the kind of necessity, desire, and hubris that led us to redefine our relationship to the natural world (by which I mean the world that is not us) by making and using tools.

As I have said, I love and fear the audacity of cities. Boston’s John Hancock Tower is an astonishing thing. The MBTA for all of the complaints I have had about it (and there have been many) is indispensable for millions of Bostonians. The way in which giant communities, the likes of which our ancestors would never have dreamed of, can weave themselves together and sometimes live in relative peace is mind-boggling. And yet sometimes I think back to that T driver yelling at the foolish, but weirdly brave young man, and I wonder precisely why the hell does that train have the right of way.

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Elementary, my dear Watson

Posted on June 23, 2012 by quicklytothepanopticon

I recently started watching the first the season of the BBC’s Sherlock, a contemporary adaptation of Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories. It is an interesting, well-directed, and well-acted series. Benedict Cumberbatch goes directly to the quick (near manic) core of Holmes, while Martin Freeman imbues Dr. Watson with a smart stoicism that the character truly has in the stories.

I’ve read a fair few of the Sherlock Holmes stories and novels. They are, as a rule, not great, and often not even good books. Much like the series featuring Holmes’s modern day descendent Dr. Gregory House, what is generally entertaining about them is watching the primary character interact in eccentric ways. Did anyone who tuned in to House really care about the formulaic medical mysteries? I was never a regular viewer but when I caught an episode I was far more interested in Hugh Laurie’s acerbic character than anything going on in the patient’s case. Holmes is pretty much the same. As plots go, both A Study in Scarlet and The Sign of Four aren’t very compelling. The Hound of the Baskervilles is better, and is certainly more atmospheric. But Holmes and his relationship with Watson are often worth the price of admission.

Despite, these issues there are several reasons not to dismiss Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s legacy out of hand. First, as I’ve mentioned there are Holmes and Watson, two characters who are incredible interesting. Holmes, the manic cocaine-injecting genius, and Watson the skeptical medical man of no little intellect. Their relationship is characteristic of the literary period and genre, as inhabiting that continuum that Eve Kosofsky Sedwick defines between homosocial and homoerotic. Holmes, in particular is attached to Waston lamenting his friends relationship with Mary Morsten at the end of The Sign of the Four, and the “bias” marriage provides. It shouldn’t be surprisingly that Doyle ends up dispatching of Mrs. Morsten off-stage in-between texts in order to get his two detectives back together again in liberated bachelorhood.

Another reason, perhaps the primary reason, that the Sherlock Holmes books are interesting is their status as cultural objects that exist within a network of cultural influences. The books say a great deal about Doyle and his readers’ understandings of Britain, Empire, its neighbors in America, and numerous other subjects germane to anyone involved in the study of European culture. A Study in Scarlet, for instance, provides a window into contemporary views of Mormonism, while The Sign of the Four offers some highly charged visions of the Indian Rebellion and Empire in general.

The final reason, one which is still prevalent in adaptation and additions to the Holmes cannon today, is the way in which the characters seem to transcend their status as literary figure. Thomas Leitch, in his excellent book Film Adaptation and Its Discontents writes

There have been so many different ways for the film industry to adjust its literary sources to the requirements of different audiences, institutions, and conventions in hopes of increasing its profits that adjustment might seem not only the dominant but the sole model for adaptation. One model that sounds similar but is quite different is based on Elliott’s “de(re)composing concept,” in which “film and novel decompose, merge, and form a new composition at ‘underground’ levels of reading. The adaptation is a composite of textual and filmic signs merging an audience consciousness together with other cultural narratives and often leads to confusion as to which is novel and which is film.” The leading example in English-language cinema is the Sherlock Holmes franchise, whose every new addition adds and deforms material in the hope that it will become an indistinguishable part of the canonical franchise.

This, I think, is the most interesting part of the Holmes series, the way in which it has expanded far beyond the bounds of Doyle’s work. The recent films by Guy Ritche as well as the BBC’s Sherlock television series are all participants in this process. While both the BBC series and Ritchie’s films are based on the characters, they are not straight adaptations of particular storylines in most cases. While a few of the Sherlock episodes rework storylines from the novels or stories they are heavily transfigured; the Guy Ritche films are even further afield from the originary works, though they seek to maintain a certain canonicity in representation of character and in gestures towards particular narrative elements.

The two adaptations are notable for at least one more thin:, they rescue one particular element from the originary works that has been heavily altered (Leitch might say deformed) by previous filmic interventions into the material. These new adaptations have turned Watson from the bumbling sidekick of former adaptations, to a stronger, smarter, and more interesting character. For now at least this newer Watson (one which reflects the source material much more closely) has emerged as a thread in the ever-expanding franchise.

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Summer (Solstice) Reading

Posted on June 20, 2012 by quicklytothepanopticon

Today is the Summer Solstice (in the Northern Hemisphere) the longest day of the year. For some it’s the mid-point of summer, for others it’s the first day of summer. To celebrate this milestone in the year and to honor the late Ray Bradbury, I’ve been listening to the audiobook of Dandelion Wine. There have been several really excellent tributes to Bradbury in the weeks since his death, one the best being the series of short takes by Gary Wolfe, John Clute, Brian Attebery, and Rob Latham in the Los Angeles Review of Books. Wolfe notes “Bradbury seems to provoke a kind of visceral nostalgia that makes any effort to assess his place in science fiction or in literature almost irrelevant; he was at least as much a part of our personal histories as of literary and cultural history.” Wolfe then of course, goes on to quite succinctly summarize Bradbury’s importance to SF and literature in general. I think Wolfe’s piece is generally right on, and his acknowledgment that there is something personal in our responses is particularly on point.

I’ve never read Dandelion Wine before, but just a little ways in and I’m (not surprisingly) impressed and caught up in the novel. I’ve always thought that Bradbury was at his best when giving himself a long lyrical-leash, as he does in much of his work in October Country as well as Something Wicked This Way Comes and the strangely beautiful From the Dust Returned.

Dandelion Wine (thus far) captures perfectly the feeling of endless freedom, glorious expectation, and eternal youth that summer portends as a child. And yet, the book does not lapse into nostalgia for it is too honest for that. It is nice to listen to Bradbury wax lyrical about those endless days, the possibilities that the world seems to allow. And the danger and darkness too, the sure acknowledgment that summer is can be filled with the same uneasy things which haunt the October Country. As one of the novel’s young protagonists states to his brother “the ravine at night don’t belong in Mr. Auffman’s Happiness Machine, if he ever builds it.”

Of other summer literary interest, The Poetry Foundation has a nice selection of Summer Poems posted here. An apt poem considering the date and the kind of childhood remembrances that Bradbury brings up is Robert Fitzgerald’s “Midsummer.” It’s a lovely piece. As for me, I’m going to spend part of this evening at the Temple Terrace Community Garden, getting my hands appropriately dirty.

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Learning to Listen to the Monster

Posted on June 12, 2012 by quicklytothepanopticon

Last week I went to see a rebroadcast of National Theatre Live’s production of Frankenstein. The play was adapted by from the novel by Nick Dear, and directed by Danny Boyle. It stars Johnny Lee Miller and Benedict Cumberbatch on alternate nights as the monster and Victor Frankenstein. There are many interesting things to comment on in the production—the very cool steam-punk set design, the script and direction’s choice to explicitly frame the two primary characters as doubles of one another, the considerable amount of reference to the novel’s conversation with Paradise Lost—but the thing that I am most interested in exploring here is the way in which, while following very closely to portions of the novel, the adaptation foregrounds the experience of the monster.  The play makes what in the novel is a (substantial) narrative interlude, the monster’s story as told to Victor, the heart of the story.

Dear and Boyle’s play wisely forgoes the elaborate frame narrative of the novel (there is no Captain Walton sending letters to his sister here) and begins with monster’s awakening from a kind of womb-like orb, clearly the means of his reanimation. This sequence, and what follows for the next act or so if primarily from the point of the view of the monster, chronicling his experience. It follows with his flight from Ingolstadt, his rejection from the society of human beings, and his education by DeLancey. This material is drawn specifically from the monster’s own narrative in volume two of the novel. While in the novel the monster’s narrative is presented framed several times (by Victor who is retelling the story to Walton, and by Walton who is transcribing Victor’s retelling of the story in letters to his sister) on the stage it is unmediated. The audience witnesses the pain and fear as the monster begins to discover his limbs, the joy of the sun and the rain, the pain of the savage beatings. The play is not front-loaded with Victor’s obsessive needs, with his guilt, his justifications, his egotism. Rather we follow the monster as he discovers his voice, struggles to understand his terrible marginality, comes to realize that the world will always reject him.

All of these things are in the novel. Indeed, with a few minor exceptions I found Dear’s script to cleave incredibly closely to the portion of the book he chose to adapt. However, what really works in the play is the way in which it re-centers the story on the experience of the monster. Dear realizes that we don’t need another story about Victor.* This understanding allows him to create a work of art that does something really extraordinary, it allows us to see what is already there in a new and vibrant way.

 

*Besides, the quintessential film adaptation of the novel has already been made.

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Queen Victoria in the Digital Age

Posted on June 11, 2012 by quicklytothepanopticon

Recently, the Bodlein Library and the British Royal Archives published digital copies of Queen Victoria’s Journals in their entirety. Some 40,000 journal pages from several different transcribed sources are available to view as high-quality photos. They are in the process of transcribing each entry and making them completely searchable, though at present the bulk of Victoria’s reign is not searchable. The current transcription runs from 1832 to February 1840 when she married Albert. As more entries are transcribed it will become interesting to see what pops up on a search. What did she really think about Tennyson’s ages-long recitation of In Memorium to her? She read Oliver Twist, but did she read Bleak House.

Another amusing by-product of the journal project is that Queen Victoria now has a Twitter feed. Which reminds me of this particular work.

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Is the plural of Ozymandias “Ozymandiases” or “Ozymandiai”?

Posted on June 10, 2012 by quicklytothepanopticon


Statue of Ramses II photo by Mujtaba Chohan via Wikimedia commons.

Continuing the thread I began in my last entry about the British Museum, here is a photo of a statue of Ramses II from one of the Museum’s main galleries. This particular statue is taken to be the inspiration for Percy Bysshe Shelley’s famous poem “Ozymandias.” While a brief look at publication dates demonstrates conclusively that Shelley did not see the piece at the British Museum before writing the poem. “Ozymandius” made its debut in The Examiner in January of 1818 before the statue arrived in England. Still Shelley heard of the statue and its progress West, which was a tremendous undertaking at the time. BBC Radio 4’s series A History of the World in 100 Objects featured the statue as number 20 and contains a concise study of the monuments significance including discussion of Shelley, and the irony that this statue, which brought European attention to the impressive magnitude of Ancient Egypt, will forever be associated with the futility of human endeavor.

Many people know Shelley’s “Ozymandias.” A lesser known fact is that there is a second “Ozymandias,” this one written by Horace Smith. Smith was, along with Shelley, a member of Leigh Hunt’s literary circle. A poet, novelist, and skilled stockbroker, Smith managed Shelley’s finances. Both sonnets were written in friendly competition, the two poets agreeing on the mutual subject, the reports of the statue of Ramses II.

Ozymandias
By Percy Bysshe Shelley

I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: “Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown
And wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed.
And on the pedestal these words appear:
`My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings:
Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!’
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,
The lone and level sands stretch far away”

Shelley’s poem has become iconic, certainly eclipsing Smith’s effort. Still, Smith’s work is worth a read:

Ozymandias (later re-titled “On A Stupendous Leg of Granite, Discovered Standing by Itself in the Deserts of Egypt, with the Inscription Inserted Below”)
By Horace Smith

In Egypt’s sandy silence, all alone,
Stands a gigantic Leg, which far off throws
The only shadow that the Desart knows:—
“I am great OZYMANDIAS,” saith the stone,
“The King of Kings; this mighty City shows
“The wonders of my hand.”— The City’s gone,—
Nought but the Leg remaining to disclose
The site of this forgotten Babylon.
We wonder,—and some Hunter may express
Wonder like ours, when thro’ the wilderness
Where London stood, holding the Wolf in chace,
He meets some fragment huge, and stops to guess
What powerful but unrecorded race
Once dwelt in that annihilated place.

Smith’s poem is interesting, even if it lacks the eloquence of Shelley’s more restrained work. This second poem brings the subject directly forward to Smith’s present, the capital of a burgeoning Empire, London. While Shelley’s poem implies the possibility of Western Civilization collapsing into the sands of time (the use of the phrase “King of Kings” does double duty referring to the rulers of the Ancient world and also implying Christ, the King of Kings most of their contemporaries would be acquainted with) Smith’s work is more explicit. It is a great image, one which finds a contemporary echo in unexpected places. In this version of the poem, civilization has been overtaken by the natural world, and an earlier mode of existence has taken hold as a hunter pursues a wolf through what was once London. This is a particular interesting invocation, as wolves have been extinct in Britain since somewhere around the 16th century (possibly 17th century in Scotland.) It also finds an echo in Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s meditation on a situation in the British Museum, “The Burden of Nineveh,” a poem I’ll be looking at in a later blog entry.

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It all comes back to the British Museum

Posted on June 9, 2012 by quicklytothepanopticon

When I was an undergraduate I spent a semester at the Florida State University London Study Centre. The Centre is housed in a series of interconnected Georgian style buildings dating back to the 17th century. It is the perfect location, particularly for a young student with a literary bent. The Centre is in the middle of Bloomsbury, in the theater mecca of the West End. It is a five minute walk to SoHo. The British Museum is a block away.

I spent a great deal of time that semester in the British Museum. I walked through the galleries, haunting the Greek and Egyptian galleries, the Anglo-Saxon Hall, and any other corridor that wasn’t barred. I wrote most of my papers on my laptop in the Reading Room, and felt awed that I was working in the same space once frequented by Oscar Wilde, Karl Marx, Bram Stoker, Virginia Wolfe, and numerous other luminaries.


The British Library Reading Room photo by Dillif via Wikimedia Commons.

In the decade since then I have graduated from college, gone to graduate school for an MA and then a PhD. I’ve focused my academic work and interests significantly on the nineteenth-century, far afield in many ways from those Greek and Roman galleries. Distant from the Sutton Hoo relics that invoke Beowulf and “The Dream of the Rood.” And yet, I’ve found that the museum has stayed with me. I’ve found it throughout the work I’ve studied, whether it has been in Keats’ ruminations on the Elgin Marbles or Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s invocation of the “Winged beast” being brought in through the museum’s doors. I teach some of these works in my survey of 19th century literature and I’ve been continuing to think about the resonances of the British Museum in the literature of the period.

I think an entire course could be organized around the topic, using the museum as a way of opening up the discussions about art and history as represented in literature. Such a class would ideally take place in the vicinity of the Museum and would use the exhibits both to open discussion, but also to provide a sense of continuity. Keats, Shelley, and Rossetti (amongst others) saw some of these same sights and found in them inspiration, sources for commentary, and aesthetic objects that would outlast the poets themselves. Such a course could begin with Beowulf and Sutton Hoo, and wend its way throughout British literature. And of course, this current discussion has not even touched the way in which such a course could address the museum in the colonial context, as both product of and promoter of Empire.

I plan on spending the next few blog entries examining a few of the pieces of work related to the British Museum, primarily from my own area of interest. There is something fascinating about finding places and objects where literature that lies centuries in the distance can be brought together with our own material experiences of the world.

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