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Au Bade

About Edith (from Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry, 447-9)

• 1887-1964, grew up in great house, Renishaw, father was a Sir George; mom was daughter of an earl
  • Used her strange features and tall height to her advantage: headdress and jewelry and costume, like Morrell
  • Widely painted, photographed 449
  • First published poem 1915
  • 1916: editor of literary review, Wheels (lasted till 1921) (she publishes herself and her family, Wilfred Owen)
  • Chilly relationships w/other critics
• Significance and reputation “erratic,” “small,” “eccentric”
  • “offbeat” and “cloistered” 450 but still “relations of sound, image, and sense were explored by her further than by almost anyone else”
  • suggests that her personality was a big part of it….ugh
• Admired Eliot and symbolists, Stravinsky and Diaghilev (Russian Ballet), disliked Georgians (“dim bucolics” with “dead and expected” rhythms, diction)
• Says that old poetry had the force of mass, of unity of poems, but that new poetry is “explosive” and about “separation”
• Her poetry
  • Early stuff
    • Novelty, new, experimentation
    • She says were “Abstract poems—that is, they are patterns in sound…virtuoso exercises in technique”
    • Focused on material world, to find things out about immaterial world
    • Favorite topic, growth of consciousness: what’s sleeping underneath the appearance of the world? how can we show the struggle of newly awakened consciousness trying to make sense of it all?
      • See it in “Aubade” or “Dark Song”
    • Style: reiterating of certain sounds a la Mallarme
  • Late stuff
    • Back to “age old rhythms of nature and womanhood” 447
    • Focuses on immaterial for content
    • She says, “hymns of praise to the glory of life” 449
    • Infl. by Blake, Yeats, Dylan Thomas
    • She says she wants “a greater expressiveness, a greater formality, and a return to rhetoric”
    • Thinks that trying to tone down your poetry to the quiet and neutral is “lowered vitality” 449
• First collection, Facade 1922, performed w/music in Aeolian Hall, London
  • Recited behind painted curtain
  • Not exactly well received
• 1929 Gold Coast Customs
  • Describes that state of things: what led up to WWII
  • “in this poem the bottom of the world has fallen out”
  • to see the “primal mud” in their civ

Aubade: Content

• She says: it’s the stupidity of the servant girl compared to the “true witness” who is perceptive and sensitive
• Jane, Jane is a country servant, ignored (disheveled hair), coming down to light fire, who can’t understand that light does anything, ie she won’t see (understand anything) or be able to see literally as the speaker can (seeing metaphors, by seeing correctly)
  • She thus thematizes metaphor, comparison, and shows that it’s less about some kind of sentimental or emotional relationship than a VISUAL relationship
  • It’s not about seeing something AS something else as in a comparison, bringing two unlike things together, but instead seeing that X actually isn’t just itself but in itself contains all other things
  • It’s defamiliarization, one like cubism b/c it shows you that you don’t see what you see: that the mode of representative realism doesn’t actually map out what you see, but instead maps out a pattern of TYPES that are stylized (cf Nietzsche’s leaves)
  • It’s a strange flattening of comparison: it’s not that X is like Y because they share quality Z, but instead because correct sight shows you that VISUALLY they are the same: you don’t have to route meaning through emotion or content; you only have to map the surface movements, vision itself
    • Saying your lover is like a diamond b/c she is beautiful but cold and hard is different from saying that your lover is like a diamond b/c she glitters in the light
• For Sitwell, there IS meaning possible. She clearly berates the servant for not seeing some meaning which is actually there. What’s neat is the kind of meaning Sitwell refers to.
  • What’s the meaning? It seems to be that the different types of weather conditions (light, rain) make the world seem very different (even light affects rain and vice versa), thus a relativism that demands constant attention to the material world.
• Seems to suggest that the “lonely world unknown” doesn’t have to be imported from above, doesn’t have to come down from on high, but is already in the material world if you’d only change your perspective
• Now “aubade” is a poem of lovers parting the morning after, suggesting that her “lover” is sleep, ie unconsciousness

Aubade: Form

• Amazing re-evaluation of what things truly look like, reminding me of H. D.
  • “Each dull blunt wooden stalactite / Of rain creaks, hardened by the light”
• Ten two-line rhyming stanzas of irregular iambic tetrameter. Bookended by a three line stanza of geometrical growth: 2 syllables, then 4, then 8. *