*
Digby Mackworth Dolben is a poet I'd never heard of before page 240 of "The Oxford Book of Sonnets" edited by John Fuller, published in 2000, a book I've been reading now for 10 years—
not straight through, I don't think I've ever read an anthology straight through, but off and on I've pulled this one from the shelf, mostly to reread old favorites—
but just recently I read Dolben's sole entry here, untitled—an English sonnet, with the customary four rhyme-sections:
One night I dreamt that in a gleaming hall
You played, and overhead the air was sweet
With waving kerchiefs; then a sudden fall
Of flowers; and jewels clashed about your feet.
—Not last night, but one night, meaning the dream still haunts the "I" from the past . . . Note the subtle internal rhyme-echoes: dreamt/gleam, played/head, gleam/sweet, over/air/ker, play/waving, then/sudden, etc. . . . . The contrast of head=feet. The hard "K" sounds of kerchiefs/clashed (which will reappear in the final 3 end-rhymes, so their foreshadowing here is strategic). Overhead where? over the head of the you who is playing (playing what? a piano, a violin, what?) or overhead the speaker, the dreamer: what is the I's POV? are they in the audience gazing up at the you? The air was sweet with waving kerchiefs: who's waving those kerchiefs (taken from off their heads in homage?), and do they make the air "sweet" with scent (handkerchiefs daubed with perfume)? Is that "sudden fall / of flowers" being tossed up on the stage by bravo-ing fans of this virtuoso: and the jewels, where the hell are they appearing from?
Since it's a dream, there doesn't have to be any audience, really, and the kerchiefs/flowers/jewels can simply be oneiric manifestations, bursts of fealty. Waving/falling/clashing: what active verbs, and how vividly they contrast with the somnolence of the passively observing dreamer. The meter is all iambic, with one perhaps variant foot: Of flow/ers; and jew/els clashed / about / your feet. Perhaps not, since "flowers" traditionally pre-20th century was elided, prosodied as one syllable. Still, the extra (extravagant) "urs" sound is poignantly effective just there, especially with the semicolon adding to its caesura-like length. 4 lines, 3 of them split by caesurae, breaks in the flow— Indeed, there are only 3 unimpeded lines in the poem: lines 1, 6, and 10. Eleven lines are broken by punctuation. Unusual for a sonnet, I think (though I haven't surveyed a lot of sonnets to see if that is true): at the poem's climax breakage becomes its signature motif . . .
Around you glittering forms, a starry ring,
In echo sang of youth and golden ease:
You leant to me a moment, crying—'Sing,
If, as you say, you love me, sing with these.'—
Two variant feet: an anapest in line 5, and the trochaic substitution at the start of line 8. "Glittering forms"—the vagueness of this is shrewd: they're not men and women, individuals, they're less than that, nebulous diffuse they compose "a starry ring" around the player (pianist?), a backup chorus of secondary figures like the dancers framing Madonna/Lady Gaga in ancillary propitiatory posturings. In echo sang of youth and golden ease—this reminds me of two lines from Verlaine's Clair de lune: Tout en chantant sur le mode mineur / L'amour vainqueur et la vie oppurtune. The forms are misty apparitions befitting a dream-state, which is challenged and shattered line 7 by the sudden thrust of the active verbs: "You leant to me a moment, crying,—'Sing, [sing, damn you!] If, as you say, you love me, sing with these.'— Prove your love, dude, join my posse. Chime in, chump. All these golden glittering groupies gang and glee me, serenade me, while I play me my guitar, I'm the star here, hey you say you love me, well, who doesn't: get in queue, fool.
[the beginning of line 9 is indented two spaces:]
In vain my lips were opened, for my throat
Was choked somewhence, my tongue was sore and dry,
And in my soul alone the answering note;
Till, in a piercing concord, one shrill cry,
As of a hunted creature, from me broke.
You laughed, and in great bitterness I woke.
—Choked/concord/cry, creature, broke/woke: the profusion of cacophony, the harsh K-sounds, not quite as explosive as "kerchief" and "clashed" in the first quatrain. In vain my lips were opened: that were seems significant, as if to suggest the I's lips were open (in awe) throughout the dream/poem, even before they were commanded to be. The variant feet: line 11, the anapest at the end (stretching out the aching answer that fills the soul's inarticulate enclosure); then line 12: Till, in / a pier/cing con/cord, one / shrill cry, / the trochaic substitution of "Till" concording a rhyme-struck spondee with "shrill cry." And the con/one rhyme. (A concord normally heals, doesn't it? Love: the concord that spears you.) Hounded first by the heavenly vision and then the cruel taunting of the you, the I is pierced by their own outcry, stabbing upward from one's most inward self it splits the heart apart. But even its utter arrow of agony is less wounding, less shattering than the you's scornful dismissive laugh. And in great bitterness I woke.
*
One night I dreamt that in a gleaming hall
You played, and overhead the air was sweet
With waving kerchiefs; then a sudden fall
Of flowers; and jewels clashed about your feet.
Around you glittering forms, a starry ring,
In echo sang of youth and golden ease:
You leant to me a moment, crying—'Sing,
If, as you say, you love me, sing with these.'—
In vain my lips were opened, for my throat
Was choked somewhence, my tongue was sore and dry,
And in my soul alone the answering note;
Till, in a piercing concord, one shrill cry,
As of a hunted creature, from me broke.
You laughed, and in great bitterness I woke.
///
Digby Mackworth Dolben is a poet I'd never heard of before page 240 of "The Oxford Book of Sonnets" edited by John Fuller, published in 2000, a book I've been reading now for 10 years—
not straight through, I don't think I've ever read an anthology straight through, but off and on I've pulled this one from the shelf, mostly to reread old favorites—
but just recently I read Dolben's sole entry here, untitled—an English sonnet, with the customary four rhyme-sections:
One night I dreamt that in a gleaming hall
You played, and overhead the air was sweet
With waving kerchiefs; then a sudden fall
Of flowers; and jewels clashed about your feet.
—Not last night, but one night, meaning the dream still haunts the "I" from the past . . . Note the subtle internal rhyme-echoes: dreamt/gleam, played/head, gleam/sweet, over/air/ker, play/waving, then/sudden, etc. . . . . The contrast of head=feet. The hard "K" sounds of kerchiefs/clashed (which will reappear in the final 3 end-rhymes, so their foreshadowing here is strategic). Overhead where? over the head of the you who is playing (playing what? a piano, a violin, what?) or overhead the speaker, the dreamer: what is the I's POV? are they in the audience gazing up at the you? The air was sweet with waving kerchiefs: who's waving those kerchiefs (taken from off their heads in homage?), and do they make the air "sweet" with scent (handkerchiefs daubed with perfume)? Is that "sudden fall / of flowers" being tossed up on the stage by bravo-ing fans of this virtuoso: and the jewels, where the hell are they appearing from?
Since it's a dream, there doesn't have to be any audience, really, and the kerchiefs/flowers/jewels can simply be oneiric manifestations, bursts of fealty. Waving/falling/clashing: what active verbs, and how vividly they contrast with the somnolence of the passively observing dreamer. The meter is all iambic, with one perhaps variant foot: Of flow/ers; and jew/els clashed / about / your feet. Perhaps not, since "flowers" traditionally pre-20th century was elided, prosodied as one syllable. Still, the extra (extravagant) "urs" sound is poignantly effective just there, especially with the semicolon adding to its caesura-like length. 4 lines, 3 of them split by caesurae, breaks in the flow— Indeed, there are only 3 unimpeded lines in the poem: lines 1, 6, and 10. Eleven lines are broken by punctuation. Unusual for a sonnet, I think (though I haven't surveyed a lot of sonnets to see if that is true): at the poem's climax breakage becomes its signature motif . . .
Around you glittering forms, a starry ring,
In echo sang of youth and golden ease:
You leant to me a moment, crying—'Sing,
If, as you say, you love me, sing with these.'—
Two variant feet: an anapest in line 5, and the trochaic substitution at the start of line 8. "Glittering forms"—the vagueness of this is shrewd: they're not men and women, individuals, they're less than that, nebulous diffuse they compose "a starry ring" around the player (pianist?), a backup chorus of secondary figures like the dancers framing Madonna/Lady Gaga in ancillary propitiatory posturings. In echo sang of youth and golden ease—this reminds me of two lines from Verlaine's Clair de lune: Tout en chantant sur le mode mineur / L'amour vainqueur et la vie oppurtune. The forms are misty apparitions befitting a dream-state, which is challenged and shattered line 7 by the sudden thrust of the active verbs: "You leant to me a moment, crying,—'Sing, [sing, damn you!] If, as you say, you love me, sing with these.'— Prove your love, dude, join my posse. Chime in, chump. All these golden glittering groupies gang and glee me, serenade me, while I play me my guitar, I'm the star here, hey you say you love me, well, who doesn't: get in queue, fool.
[the beginning of line 9 is indented two spaces:]
In vain my lips were opened, for my throat
Was choked somewhence, my tongue was sore and dry,
And in my soul alone the answering note;
Till, in a piercing concord, one shrill cry,
As of a hunted creature, from me broke.
You laughed, and in great bitterness I woke.
—Choked/concord/cry, creature, broke/woke: the profusion of cacophony, the harsh K-sounds, not quite as explosive as "kerchief" and "clashed" in the first quatrain. In vain my lips were opened: that were seems significant, as if to suggest the I's lips were open (in awe) throughout the dream/poem, even before they were commanded to be. The variant feet: line 11, the anapest at the end (stretching out the aching answer that fills the soul's inarticulate enclosure); then line 12: Till, in / a pier/cing con/cord, one / shrill cry, / the trochaic substitution of "Till" concording a rhyme-struck spondee with "shrill cry." And the con/one rhyme. (A concord normally heals, doesn't it? Love: the concord that spears you.) Hounded first by the heavenly vision and then the cruel taunting of the you, the I is pierced by their own outcry, stabbing upward from one's most inward self it splits the heart apart. But even its utter arrow of agony is less wounding, less shattering than the you's scornful dismissive laugh. And in great bitterness I woke.
*
One night I dreamt that in a gleaming hall
You played, and overhead the air was sweet
With waving kerchiefs; then a sudden fall
Of flowers; and jewels clashed about your feet.
Around you glittering forms, a starry ring,
In echo sang of youth and golden ease:
You leant to me a moment, crying—'Sing,
If, as you say, you love me, sing with these.'—
In vain my lips were opened, for my throat
Was choked somewhence, my tongue was sore and dry,
And in my soul alone the answering note;
Till, in a piercing concord, one shrill cry,
As of a hunted creature, from me broke.
You laughed, and in great bitterness I woke.
///
No comments:
Post a Comment