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Научни трудове на Съюза на учените в България-Пловдив, Серия A. Обществени науки, изкуство и култура том III, ISSN 1311-9400 (Print) ; ISSN 2534-9368 (On-line), 2017, Scientific works of the Union of Scientists in Bulgaria-Plovdiv, seriesA. Public sciences, art and culture, Vol. III, ISSN 1311-9400 (Print); ISSN 2534-9368 (On-line), 2017.
"FOR GOD PLACED ME LIKE A DIAL": TEMPORALITY AS SELFHOOD IN ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING'S POETRY Yana Rowland Plovdiv University
Abstract
On the example of three notable poems ("Hector in the Garden", "To Mary Russell Mitford in Her Garden", and "The Lost Bower") the present paper intends to explore the presence of time in Elizabeth Barrett Browning's poetry. My main concern is to establish the contextual parameters of the validity of naming, measuring and recording time as an anthropological variable in the lyrical speaker's perception of her own self. For me the need to interpret temporality in Elizabeth Barrett Browning's poetry has been dictated by the poetess' lifetime engagement with the role of memory - in nature, in human art, in the being of a text, and as an innermost component of man's conscience. I shall rely on the existential value of the poetics of self-expression, found in Browning's unconcealed interest in the relationship between the physical and the spiritual aspect of man's historicity. Some theoretical points of orientation include: M. Bakhtin, H. Plessner, and R. Wagner.
Key words: Elizabeth Barrett Browning, temporality, selfhood, ontology, anthropology, nature, text, historicity, memory, responsibility, conscience
Three poems of EBB's1 - "Hector in the Garden" (1843), "To Mary Russell Mitford in Her Garden" (1838), and "The Lost Bower" (1843) - indicate the poetess' need to time the emergence of her own literary genius through aesthetic history, to tune human conscience to nature's rites, and to explore the boundaries of the text as a compendium of events ex post facto. Easily spotted in these three works are: EBB's sincere fascination with Classical and Medieval literature, her favourable and meticulous contemplation of nature (remembered and invented), and most importantly her confession about the impossibility of disregarding the past - ontologically and textually. One of the most notable achievements of EBB's, found in both her poetic legacy and her correspondence is her confession about the necessity to measure time and to reminisce - hence the meditative didactic re-evaluation of human history as personal self-examination and self-expression.
From the historical figure of a gentle husband, father, and son, Hector metamorphosed - in EBB's work "Hector in the Garden" - into a statue, an object of artistic and literary-historical merit and private creative self-evaluation. Returning to the garden where Hector's statue is, the lyrical self returns to her childhood, in order to confess its formative role in her emergence as an individual with an identity of her own. For the poetess this confession has its aesthetic merit regarding her poetics of self-questioning via reminiscing and her tendency to anatomize her own consciousness. The first stanza suggests that nine is an especially lucky age for an impressionable girl to rediscover classical Greek lore (stanza I, ll. 1, 5-6). Stanza II ushers in
1 I have adopted a commonly used abbreviation for the poetess' full name: Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1806-
1861).
a doubt as to whether we now have a young woman in front of us - "Nine green years had scarcely brought me / To my childhood's haunted spring" (ll. 7-8) - or whether the figure nine is a random way to measure the passage of time in the process of departing from childhood in the existential sense of the word. In any case, the elegiac recollection of the girl's happy days in her garden, beside Hector's statue, developed further in the poem, indicates an impossibility to escape the beginnings of one's existence. An impossibility that temporalizes the speaker's mind and the poetess' literary conscience as deepening duty to one's (literary) beginnings. Positioned "betwixt the country trees" and with the sun for her tutor, the speaker partakes of a greater, older, all-encompassing design whereby learning emerges chiefly as the intuitive grasp of the external world, for whose sake the poem has obviously been written. Trimming one's garden - a landmark of Victorian order and propriety (certainly also found previously and subsequently in English cultural history) - can hereby be analogously likened to trimming and exercising one's mind. Hector is a literary shape which signals the poetess' desire to preserve literary (i.e. human) memory through conservation of nature. Before knowing that Hector in this case is a rich floral construction mimicking the homonymous literary hero (stanza VII and onwards), we have been let see EBB's enviable skill of blending empirical observation of reality (a distinguishing trait of the collectivist organic Victorian mentality) with the less practically useful but eventually more rewarding imaginative self-expression and self-canonization through "artifacts" freely available and renewable in nature. While the speaker may be narrating her memory of a naïve, infantile belief in the reciprocity between the moods of a child and those of nature (stanzas III - V), the poem is indicative of a person's desire to relate to something externally seen, felt, available and reliable - a measure of reflecting on the passing of time through something which can be had beside one, something like a companion, a participant in some clandestine private venture which presupposes exchange of experience: "and the sun and I together / Went a-rushing out of doors" (ll. 25-26). The poetess' passion issues from the existence of the living world - relevant both for one's physical wellbeing and as an organic source of one's imagination. Hector the floral design is younger than Hector the historical figure. He is not an object of the surroundings but a regular participant in the becoming of the lyrical self as one who survives. Hector is, in the words of M. M. Bakhtin, "an item of one's Gnostic-ethic activeness in the open, still hazardous event of being, whose wholeness, sense and value have not been given but assigned" (Бахтин 2003: 173, my translation). Reminiscing precedes, ensures and conditions the ethic-Gnostic consciousness of the narrating man as a phenomenal response to time as natural history (Cf. Бахтин 2003: 173-174). Hector is the externalization of the poetess' soul and the guarantee for extra-locality as poetic being.
Victorian poets can be argued to have lived "secondary", "posthumous" lives - as heirs of the great Romantic, Renaissance and Classical poets (Cronin : 576-578, 584-585). The formation of a poet often relied on a sequential structure which involved telling an other's story as a source of self-discovery. Respectively, the most restless, shape-shift genre which involved the unfolding of a story as personal history was the Victorian dramatic monologue whose relational essence (Cf. Gray 2003: 469) can be illustrated by the three poems selected for discussion in this paper. In the processual emergence of Hector, the primacy of the past can be seen in the poetess' desire-duty to cast the present into a shape recognized by all - a well known classical image of tenderness and unjustified early loss, now embedded in that private garden as naturally promised eternity. Nature is not just a companionable appendix to creativity - it is the source and the objective of the poetess' self-conscious wish to comprehend herself through comprehending the past - Hector's past: "But a rhymer such as I am, / Scarce can sing his dignity" (ll. 47-48). The anatomizing delineation of Hector's body conveys the physicality of poetic memory and of self-expression: "Eyes of gentianellas azure [...] Nose of gillyflowers and box [...] Brazen helm of daffodillies [...] Purple violets for the mouth [...] And a sword of flashing lilies [...] And a breastplate made of daisies [...] Periwinkles interlaced / Drawn for belt around the waist [...]" (ll. 49, 51, 55, 57, 59-60, 61, 64). 114
The meticulousness and neatness of this natural Hector's outfit is an emblem of integrity sought, rather than achieved, as a personal feature of poetic being. There is a tendency to adhere to certain models historically valid and recognized in confirmation of one being identifiable. The boundaries of such identification of a literary-historical figure in nature, which may be seen as synonymous with the poetess' own desire for being historically identified, are rather broad and fuzzy as they eventually reach out for a source of poetic merit considerably distanced from modernity and actually requiring "translation" of experience on a linguistic level (from old Greek into English, most certainly), but also on an inter-semiotic level (human language into floral language into human language). Predictably, translation works on a personal experiential level for EBB: her own translation of an episode of Homer's eponymous original work (Hector's leave-taking from his family), accomplished in the same year as she first published "Hector in the Garden" (Cf. Stone and Taylor 2010: 39). The idea of semi-incidental-semi-deliberate self-revelation through semi-incidental-semi-deliberate revelation of artifacts based on natural organic abundance suggest the palimpsest value of the poetic effort and text - directly related to the palimpsest value of nature. This humble rhymer researches the conversational potency of external reality: she cares for Hector in a nearly physical way (suggestive of sexual closeness): "With my rake I smoothed his brow, / Both his cheeks I weeded through" (ll. 45-46).
The idea of incompletion as part of poetic existence, discoverable in the poetess' search for an appropriate natural-figurative trope of self-expression - Hector in the garden - is part of EBB's larger belief in temporality as an internal characteristic of the life of a human being. As the lyrical speaker in this poem migrates between various times in her own biography, it is suggested that a literary text codifies, but also delimits, temporally, the existence of a real person (Hector) and his artistic lastingness (Homer's Hector). Hector is reciprocally incomplete - his soul is "disembodied" (l. 68) and stands chances, ostensibly, of being renewed in a twofold way. He may only acquire sustainability, durability and a shape through the maintenance of patterns of memorization of natural and literary history intertwined: the flowers in/and the poem. The reciprocity between the bodily fulfillment of a literary image and the spiritual fulfillment of an actual person is retrospective. Without either being prioritized, both get temporalized and thus humanized-naturalized: "[...] the daisies [...] / with tender roots, renewing / His heroic heart to life? [...] Oh, my garden, rich with pansies! / Oh, my childhood's bright romances. / All revive, like Hector's body, / And I see them stir again" (ll. 76-78, 93-96). Mutually nutritive, artistic product and natural embodiment somehow de-center each other all the time, the text being both aid and curfew to the existence of an original: "I may wake up and be doing, / Life's heroic ends pursuing, / Though my past is dead as Hector, / And though Hector is twice dead" (ll. 103-108, emphasis added). With the singer's childhood dwindling into the past, Hector's second death occurs - the interruption of the intuitive communion between God and man seen as the consciousness' harmonious natural existence, a product of which is the figuration of Hector as living flowers. For the poetess, God's will as poetic talent is an obliging temporal definition itself, because it is a way of tracking down one's roots, one's own identity, of extending the bounds of one's own imagination as related to actual life: "As the birds sang in the branches, / Sing God's patience through my soul" (ll. 101-102)! The systolic-diastolic beat of EBB's poem comes from the perpetual alternation of perdition and restoration within the metaphysics of the functioning of human consciousness: the first loss is that of childhood, the second - that of Hector as part of childhood (a literary companion to the then infant poet). Both losses are at once figurative and real: both affirm the anthropological value of the interconnection between nature and memory. Indeed, the poetess' mind can be said to be a "garden, rich with pansies" which may revive her "childhood's bright romances [...] like Hector's body" (ll. 93-95). Childhood functions as a trope of physicality and (gender) self-evaluation a poetic existence claims. But rather than memory compromising poetic composition, female identity, and freedom - as Angela Leighton, re-iterating Barthes, insists in her seminal study of Victorian women poets (Cf. Leighton 1992: 116-17) - I see
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memory as by far the only mode of poetic being capable of animating the interconnection between natural representation and literary image in the textual-temporal being of a real person (Hector).
In EBB's poetry communing with the past is a motivational anthropological principle: the success and effectiveness of her lyrical speakers and lyrical personae is always based on participation - even if such participation be sometimes abstract or primarily internal. The applicability of cultural anthropology in studying EBB's work can be explained by her belief in the achievability of self-cognition and self-competence through communicating with, and minding, others (Cf. Wagner 1981: 7, 40). This forms the content basis of writing as transcribing shared time - literally and figuratively. Transcribing would mean transcribing oneself through transcribing-translating the past which can be transcribed because it needs to be transcribed - an essentialist survival need as social experience. Accounting for Hector as a floral design is needed for it leads back to the real Hector and to the lyrical speaker's childhood - a time of initial and fruitful contact with classical poetry for EBB. An earlier poem - "To Mary Russell Mitford in Her Garden" (1838) -provides information about one of the most fruitful literary friendships in the 19th century. Mitford, whom EBB had met in 1836, became the poetess' devoted confidante and the correspondence between the two was abundant (Stone and Taylor 2010: 69). The perception of nature as a text -interpretable, lovingly portrayed because felt as inherited lore and aimed as dedication - nuance the speaker's feeling of insufficiency and self-doubt in this beautiful Petrarchan sonnet: "What time I lay these rhymes anear thy feet, / Benignant friend [...] / [...] I would not wrong thy roses sweet, / Blaspheming so their name. [...] / - Low-rooted verse may reach some heavenly heat, / Even like my blossoms, as if nature-true, / Though not as precious. [...] / Dear friend, in whose dear writings drops the dew / And blow the natural airs, - thou, who art next / To nature's self in cheering the world's view, - / To preach a sermon on so known a text" (ll. 1-2, 4-5, 9-14). While the epigraph to this poem takes us back in time (and to the writings of the Renaissance poet Stephen Hawes and his chivalric romance Passetyme of Pleasure, 1509 - Stone and Taylor 2010: 71), the content is clearly evocative of a sense of time as literary tradition. The architectonics of this poem is the hermeneutic alternation between approximation and distanciation in the existence of person and/as text. The poetess' admiration for her tutor can be read in the first couple of lines. Further there germinates the idea that laying verse to Mitford's feet is a gateway into nature: the speaker's "low-rooted verse" symbolizes descent, self-neglect, leave-taking yet aspiration to something greater, older, more lasting, and in this sense it is also an act of approaching a meaning and content long aimed at. Mitford's talent is blessed as the receptacle of "dew" and "natural airs". If Mitford is the "text" closest to nature, then EBB's text is one step further away, yet in terms of literary history it engulfs both Mitford, and nature, and Hawes. Any subsequent text distances us from earlier texts, from first drafts, yet lets us into the original text and into nature as an original to be read, interpreted and re-transcribed. Poor and unskilled though they may be, this younger, second poet's verses keep vigil over time by "preaching" the significance of the past. Thus, the present comes to be, and with it - poetic identity: a canonization of friendship as duty in the palimpsest essence of writing as remembering and preserving.
Writing as reacting in a sensory way (i.e. through bodily and emotional response and in describing such responses) to external reality indicates a poet's aesthesiological involvement with the world. This involvement is conscious, felt, experienced and organic to poetic identity as emerging in time and from nature.2 Laying flowers, or verse, at the feet of her tutor (Mary Russell Mitford, or another revered poetic ancestor), EBB reveals the physicality of literary apprenticeship and the necessity of considering time in a sensory way - in the rootedness of the self into something external, verifiable, other, better. Though the poem "To Mary Russell Mitford" was written some 17 years prior to Mary Russell Mitford's demise, and was therefore not meant to be an elegy, the confessional tone of voice and the veneration lurking in this dedication convey the
2 For insightful critical reflections regarding the interconnectedness of femininity, physical wellbeing and
Victorian mentality, placed within a diachronic discussion of aesthesiology, consult: Bourke 2008: 420. 116
meaning of an end, of a limit, of a duty temporally bound, also of self-consciousness in transition, and of identity externally defined. This experiential constituent of poetic self-defining is EBB's anthropological investment in the comprehension of time as a cultural factor of the humanization of man. The lyrical self's reverence for her tutor elevates the other, older, person to the point of a reality symbolizing all other realities3 - all those to whom the poetess owes her willingness to speak, doubt and commemorate. This reality is as fragile as is one's ability to voice it, for it exists because of one's desire to speak it out and to remember it. The fragility of one's representational skill as care for reality - the reality of the presence of the other person - implies temporality (and mortality) as unavoidable condition and consequence of the expressibility of the human being.
Returning to childhood - part of the practice of addressing the need to recognize time as a humanizing element in a writer's existence - is also subject matter of "The Lost Bower" (1843). Entrapped within a rich garden of vegetation and literary images, the poetess chants of the need to remember as an ontological duty. This duty enhances self-comprehension via enclosure within familiar space and within well known themes and literary images and tropes - a trait which endorses the humanizing role of the past in EBB's poetry.4 As the poetess tries to establish an original source of inspiration, she comes to grasp the essence of time as loss - the loss of the bower of her childhood, of her intuitive contact with nature. She reconstructs those in a roundabout route of investing her knowledge of her literary past in approaching the external world as if it were a living body of literary presences. The influence of pastoral poetry - Ancient Classical, English Medieval, and Romantic - both debilitates and rehabilitates EBB's poetics which thus gets supplied with an idiosyncratic assortment of tools for measuring, and accounting for, space as time: the "green land" of "jocund childhood", the "sheep cropping" amidst the hills "in choral silence", the "Malvern hills [...] - "keepers of Piers Plowman's visions", the squirrels and their "cheerful madrigal" (ll. 6-7, 30-31, 35, 43-45). Self-expression is based on the observer's ability to define temporally a given space - the garden, the bower, the hills etc. - as collectivity, tradition, memory, and reverence for the past and for childhood. Selfhood emerges as temporalization in maintaining literary heritage (with references to William Langland's Piers Plowman, in this case). Acculturation through prolonged contact with familiar reality and external markers of natural presences is both an aid and a bar to the emergence of an individual's identity. A strategic factor for the promotion of self-knowledge is the lyrical speaker's ability to negotiate between a zest for learning from experience and a readiness to recognize and utilize inherited lore as textual literary tradition. The two form the lyrical speaker's metaphoric descent-entrance into otherness which, albeit physically greater and exterior, eventually settles down as the self's innermost necessity by way of boundary-establishment: "the wood drew me within it" (l. 55); "the brambles [...] entrapped me" (l. 80); "a linden tree [...] / Drew to earth the blessed sunshine from the sky where it was shrined" (l. 95); "a green elastic cushion [...] / Took me in a chair of silence very rare and absolute" (l. 130). Not unpredictably, the presence of birds and birdsong (the lark, the nightingale, the blackbird, and the thrush) - seen most immediately in the anaphoric repetition starting with "never" ("never lark the sun can waken" - l. 186; "never nightingale so singeth" - l. 191; "never blackbirds, never thrushes" - l. 196) - marks the uniqueness of a recollection as a temporal product (fragile and immaterial as a birdsong); the abyss between childhood and adulthood in the speaker's privacy of lived experience, on the one hand, and the distance between source of literary reference and the poetess' own song (seen as a reinstatement of familiar motifs), grows. Remembered, or imagined, (literary) presences delimit, yet define, the lyrical speaker: "a
3 See Helmuth Plessner's discussion of the humanizing role of "the other" as "all the others" in relation to "Everyman's death" (Plessner 1958: 257).
4 Editorial work reveals that this poem was originally placed by EBB between the poems "To Flush, My Dog" (1843) and "The Deserted Garden" (1838), both of which stress the importance of presences as engendering a feeling of duty in the poet as a survivor. The literary-historical canvas underlying this work of EBB's is that of Wordsworth and Chaucer - love, duty, family, and loss as Romantic and late Medieval conceptual poetic constructs (Cf. Stone and Taylor 2010: 167-168).
sense of music [...] // Softly, finely, [...] inwound me; / From the world it shut me in" (ll. 175177). She is bound to account for time, to describe it, grasp it, and interpret it. Silence and sound become interchangeable within a strange music of recollections whereby motion and stillness alternate as part of the hermeneutic circularity of man's zest for knowledge. The lost bower is a metonymic substitute for the loss of childhood - a loss followed by many more (some abstract and theoretical, rather than actually experienced - e.g. the bower reminiscent of Oedipus' grave - l. 280). Loss also whets the poetess' sense of duty - to act through writing: "But the first of all my losses was the losing of the bower. // I have lost the dream of Doing, / And the other dream of Done" (ll. 300 - 302; see also stanzas LVIX - LXV, ll. 291 - 330). Loss - in time and in space, as an account of being human - features as a physiological-psychological experience. By being alive, she is capable of, bound to, and responsible for, evaluation of time - through the longevity of her own existence, as well as through poetic composition which both preserves, and eclipses, an original image of natural harmony (the bower) in poetic memory: "For God placed me like a dial / In the open ground with power, / And my heart had for its trial, / All the sun and all the shower! / And I suffered many losses, - and my first was of the bower! [...] Is the bower lost then! Who sayeth / That the bower indeed is lost? Hark! My spirit in it prayeth / Through the sunshine and the frost, - / And the prayer preserves it greenly, to the last and uttermost" (ll. 326-330, 361-365; emphasis added). The microscopic eye of the Victorian empiricist, and the subjective idealist trust in the poet's capacity to produce and maintain a higher reality uniquely, alternate to the last in this poem, like the pendulum of a grandfather clock (perhaps more appropriately in this case a grandmother clock) which undulates, striking the hour and affirming, ambiguously, that "'All is lost ... and won!'" (l. 370; note 40 on p. 187 of volume II suggests a link to another of EBB's own major works, "A Drama of Exile,"1844). The lost bower is an extended metaphor for creativity in gestation; it is a place of seclusion, difference yet unanimity with nature and with human literary history (through recognizable common symbolics and imagery). It is a place durable, itself demonstrable of duration in building meaning. It is an experiential environment, and as such - perceived hermeneutically and following Plessner's view of time (as loss) as a human trait - it imparts sense and singles existence as outliving something other, something older: "our experience of duration is determined by the order and meaning of its content" (Plessner 1958: 261).
Conservation and self-building through writing as memorializing is an implied message of EBB's entire poetic legacy. The presence of gardens and bowers in her work suggests a mechanism of accounting for time as both external givenness and product of the human being's necessity to conceptualize existence. It is within the bounds of this mechanism than we find the poetess' hope of gaining identity. EBB's interest in nature is ontologically and anthropologically vindicated: it demonstrates a desire to find oneself, to specify oneself in the discovery of some common milieu. Or, to apply Kate Soper's eco-critical reflection on the relationship between man (as artist) and nature: "'nature' is the concept through which humanity thinks its difference and specificity" -it is the "nature of immediate experience and aesthetic appreciation" (Soper 2000: 125). This common milieu is a circularly functioning unique environment - the poetess as anthropologist admits the impossibility of achieving ultimate objectivity: she cannot cut herself entirely from her background so as to find an absolute referential point of spatio-temporal stasis as neutrality or beginning. She achieves relative objectivity in comprehending reality as comprehension of other individuals and eventually of herself by way of inclusion (see also: Wagner 1981: 2). This inclusion (on the basis of the three poems discussed hereby), proves the inseparability of subject and object in humanitarian research where historical validation of content as interaction and interrelation constantly alters both investigator and investigated item within the methodology of approbating temporality as the innermost component of being and of selfhood.
Works Cited:
Barrett Browning, Elizabeth. The Works of Elizabeth Barrett Browning. vol. 2. Eds. Marjorie Stone and Beverley Taylor. London: Pickering & Chatto, 2010.
Bourke, Joanna. "Sexual Violence, Marital Guidance, and Victorian Bodies: An Aesthesiology". Victorian Studies 50. 3 (2008): 419-436.
Cronin, Richard. "Victorian Poetry: an Overview". In: Ed. Michael O'Neill. The Cambridge History of English Poetry. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010, 576-595.
Gray, Erik. "A Bounded Field: Situating Victorian Poetry in the Literary Landscape". In: Victorian Poetry 41. 4 (2003): 465-472.
Leighton, Angela. Victorian Women Poets. Writing Against the Heart. Hemel Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1992.
Plessner , Helmuth. "On the Relationship of Time to Death". Translated by Ralph Manheim. In: Man and Time. Papers from the Eranos Yearbooks. Hunab Ku. Proyekto Baktun. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1958: 233-263.
Stone, Marjorie and Beverley Taylor. Eds. The Works of Elizabeth Barrett Browning. Vol. 2. London: Pickering & Chatto, 2010.
Wagner, Roy. The Invention of Culture. Chicago - London: The University of Chicago Press, 1981.
Soper, Kate. "The Idea of Nature". Ed. Laurence Coupe. The Green Studies Reader. From Romanticism to Ecocriticism. London - New York: Routledge, 2000: 123-126.
Бахтин, М. М. Философская эстетика 1920-х годов. „Автор и герой в эстетической деятельности". Ред. С. Г. Бочаров и Н. И. Николаев. М. М. Бахтин. Собрание сочинений. Т. 1. Москва: Русские словари, 2003. 69-263.
