Of Love and Loss

Hardy Yeats Larkin

Tom McAlindon

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781000578652
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literatura
• Subtopic: Crítica literaria en la poesía

A study of the poetry of Hardy, Yeats, and Larkin in relation to their shared preoccupation with time, change, and loss, the most ancient and fertile theme in lyric and reflective verse, known to earlier English poets as mutability. Though the importance of the socio-political and ideological context is in every case acknowledged, the literary-history context is viewed as primary: hence the introductory survey of foundational Renaissance and Romantic poets with whose work Hardy, Yeats, and Larkin were thoroughly familiar. Although a preoccupation with the subject of time and change in the work of these three poets is a critical commonplace, no one has ever isolated it for special attention, or used it to link them either together or with their historical predecessors. This is an entirely new approach to their work. The critical methodology employed is evidential and analytical rather than theoretical, focussed throughout on the meaning and the mood of each poem and the distinctive individuality of each poet.

1 Time and Change

The Mutability Tradition from Spenser to Keats

DOI: 10.4324/9781003266860-1

W.B. Yeats began his career as a Spenserian poet, Philip Larkin as an infatuated Yeatsian. Larkin soon discerned, however, that the Yeatsian style did not fit his temperament: the example of modest Thomas Hardy was more suitable. But it would be wrong to assume that there is no genuine affinity as poets between Yeats on the one hand and Larkin and Hardy on the other. Despite their striking individualities, all three are the rich inheritors of what I have called the mutability tradition in English poetry: that of complaint and lament inspired by the destructiveness of time and the inevitability of change; in particular, by the fleetingness of beauty, love, and life amid ‘Desarts of vast Eternity’.¹

In this study I shall refer briefly when appropriate to the biographical, socio-political, philosophical, or ideological context of each poet’s work. However, the context of major concern here is literary-historical: the mutability tradition itself. That tradition cannot be called a genre, although it contains formal elegies; rather, it is a mode and a mood, above all else elegiac. It is the most enduring of all literary traditions, and for the obvious reason that it enshrines sentiments and thoughts that afflict humankind at the deepest level. We can trace its characteristic preoccupations, themes, and symbols back from Larkin through Victorian, Romantic, and Renaissance verse to medieval poems on such themes as Contemptus mundi (‘Contempt of the world’), The Fall of Princes, and Ubi sunt? (‘Where are they now?’); back from these to Horace’s odes and Ovid’s Metamorphoses; and finally to the Judaic prophets Baruch (‘Where are the princes of the heathen, and such as ruled the beasts of the earth?’ [3:16–19]) and Isaiah (‘All flesh is grass and all the goodliness thereof is as the flower of the field’ [40:6]). Reference to the concept of intertextuality − the text as an intertext or amalgam of numberless other texts − would seem appropriate to some in a study such as this. I prefer, however, to note the autonomous poet’s conscious and often explicit allusion to his forbears and to demonstrate his creative originality in transforming what he has inherited. It is to those forbears and what exactly they passed on to Hardy, Yeats, and Larkin that I shall devote the remainder of this chapter. Hardy’s Victorian progenitors, Edward Fitzgerald and A.C. Swinburne, are briefly considered at the beginning of Chapter 2.

1 Andrew Marvell, ‘To His Coy Mistress’, in The Oxford Book of Sevententh Century Verse, ed. H.J.C. Grierson and G. Bullough (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1958), p.744.

The sheer extent, variety, and quality of Renaissance, Romantic, and Victorian poets’ reflections on the subject of mutability is astonishing; it seems like a great river of inspiration (we might call it Heraclitean) running through the whole history of post-medieval English poetry. Remarkable too is the fact that the major Romantics − Wordsworth, Shelley, and Keats − were keenly appreciative of what Spenser and Shakespeare had made of the ancient subject. They followed Spenser too in giving to the subject of time, change, and chance (or Fortune) the name of mutability. Yeats uses the term mutability only once (but illuminatingly²), Hardy and Larkin never at all. But all three are as much a part of the tradition as their Romantic predecessors. Hardy and Larkin would have agreed that in writing about time and change, love and loss, Yeats’s axiom holds true: ‘Works of art are always begotten by previous works of art’.³

Thornton Wilder once said that literature is the orchestration of platitudes. The axiom has been much quoted and is of course an exaggeration, as Wilder would have known; but it is singularly apt in relation to poems in the mutability tradition. It is worth mentioning here, too, because, as will be shown in Chapter 7, Wilder’s beautiful and now almost forgotten novel, the Pulitzer Prize-winning The Bridge of San Luis Rey, was itself a perfect example of the mutability tradition and was deeply involved in ‘An Arundel Tomb’, one of Larkin’s best loved poems.

Edmund Spenser (1552–99)

Edmund Spenser must be credited, in Shakespeare’s phrase, with being ‘the onlie begetter’ of the English mutability tradition. He was greatly admired by the Romantic poets, who regarded him as one of themselves. Yeats (self-styled as one of ‘the last romantics’) kept remembering him in his mature poems; he also quoted him verbatim towards the end of his life in the greatest of his elegies, where he mused on the ‘permanent or impermanent images’ from his past displayed in a Dublin art gallery (‘The Municipal Gallery Revisited’). For Yeats, Spenser could never be dissociated from ideas of permanence and change, time and time passing.

2 In his early story Dhoya (1891): ‘And so Dhoya grew tranquil and gentle, and Change seemed still to have forgotten them, having so much on her hands. The stars rose and set watching them smiling together, and the tides ebbed and flowed, bringing mutability to all save them. But always everything changes save only the fear of Change (John Sherman and Dhoya, ed. Richard J. Finneran London: Palgrave Macmillan, p.89). Echoes the last line of Shelley’s sonnet ‘Mutability’, discussed below.

3 Early Essays, ed. Richard J. Finneran and George Bornstein (New York: Scribner, 2007), p.254.

The poet’s apprehension of time is very different from both the philosopher’s and the physicist’s abstract idea, an impersonal entity; least of all is it a tenseless Einsteinian continuum which contradicts our intensely felt conviction that the present will be irrevocably gone tomorrow. It is invariably personified, implicitly or explicitly, sometimes as the arbiter of natural order, but most often as a malign spirit: Horace’s and Ovid’s ‘devouring time’ (‘Tempus edax’), a revenant of the Greek god Chronos [Time], Roman mythology’s Saturn, who cannibalized his own children. Closely resembling Chronos in traditional iconography was the Grim Reaper (with his Scythe or Sickle), an invaluable image for the poet, being easily assimilated to images drawn from Nature (he is anonymously present as ‘an evening coming in / Across the fields’ in Larkin’s ‘Going’).

In The Faerie Queene, Spenser alludes several times to the Grim Reaper, but at the end of that unfinished romantic epic he produced his own classicized personification of time and change, Mutability. A female deity, she first appears in his Two Cantos of Mutabilitie, all that survives of the projected Book VII of The Faerie Queene, the Book of Constancy (constancy being the quality and virtue of which she is the natural opposite). Spenser inserts her into the Greek pantheon with an appropriate genealogy: she is the daughter of Titan, Saturn’s elder brother. True to her lineage, she is guilty of an audacious attempt to overthrow the ruling gods, laying claim to their dominion over both the translunary and the sublunary world. In arguing her case before Jove and the other gods, she points out that the four elements, of which everything on earth is constituted, are in constant state of mutual interaction and transformation: ‘So, in them all raignes Mutabilitie’ (FQ, VII.vii.26). Then she calls on the goddess Nature to demonstrate the workings of the elemental world, and when Nature’s magnificent pageant − the Seasons, the Months, the Hours, Day and Night, and Life and Death − comes forth, she claims that it too shows everything in this lower world ‘to be subject still to Mutabilitie’. Although her claim to rule in the heavens above the moon is rejected, her dominance in the sublunary world is acknowledged.

But that does not please the poet. In the next two stanzas, the gloomy mood prevailing in his The Ruines of Time and its companion poem, The Teares of the Muses, takes possession of him. More than ever, he feels himself to be the victim of a changing political order, dominated by Queen Elizabeth’s New Men, Lord Burghley in particular. The scion of minor gentry who had risen to be the Queen’s chief minister, Burghley did his best to frustrate Spenser’s hopes of full recognition by her as England’s ‘prince of poets’. In his essays, Yeats will empathize strongly with Spenser’s plight as poet and replicate it grandly in the tragedy of Seanchan, the Celtic poet-hero of his drama, The King’s Threshold. Seanchan takes his own life rather than accept his rejection from the king’s council, an option not open to the Christian poet of the Faerie Queene. But the fact that ‘In all things else [below the moon]’ Mutability ‘beares the greatest sway’ affects him similarly. Bitterly, world-wearily, with echoes of both Contemptus mundi and Ubi sunt?, he adds:

Which makes me loath this state of life so tickle [inconstant],

And loue of things so vaine to cast away;

Whose flowring pride, so fading and so fickle,

Short Time shall soon cut down with his consuming sickle.

However, the inevitable fall of the mighty (such as Burghley) at the hands of Time is slight consolation: his only comfort lies in the expectation of an ‘Eternity / That is contrayr to Mutabilitie’, the afterlife of Christian belief ‘when no more Change shall be’ and ‘all shall rest eternally / With Him that is the God of Sabaoth hight’ (VII.viii. 1–2).

Poems in the mutability tradition invariably turn on two sets of contraries, one philosophical, the other mythical. One harks back to the conflict between the pre-Socratic philosophers, Parmenides, who declared that reality is changeless, and Heraclitus, for whom all is flux (‘You cannot step into the same river twice’). The other is the contrast between some mythic region of enduring happiness (pastoral or supernatural) and the time-ridden and unsatisfactory world we all inhabit. In The Ruines of Time, a complex elegy in memory of Spenser’s former patron, the Earl of Leicester, and Leicester’s brother-in-law, the poet Sir Philip Sidney, time, change, and death are countered with the promise of a twin eternity, one offered by poetry, the other by religion: as William Blake will put it, ‘The Ruins of Time build mansions in Eternity’.⁴ But as its title indicates, the primary emphasis in The Ruines is overwhelmingly on change as decay. The spirit of the vanished British city of Verulamium appears to the poet to lament the fact that it has sunk with all its famous monuments into oblivion, and in particular to urge him to celebrate the memory of his patron, the dead earl, shamefully forgotten by those who once revered him and are now responding to the winds of political change.

A dominant feature of The Ruines, reverberating in mutability verse as far as Yeats and Larkin, is the antithetic symbolism of perishable and imperishable monuments. The former are the vanished cities, palaces, tombs, statues, and funeral effigies of the great; the latter are the poems without which the memory of great men would be for ever ‘dipt in Lethe lake’ (line 428). (Ruines itself is presented to the bereaved as ‘a moniment’ for the dead [line 682]). The economic dependence of the poet on patronage is an obvious motivating factor in this glorification of the poet’s art, but so too is Spenser’s concern with a larger issue, the status and role of the poet and the arts in society as a whole. Thus, he claims, because the Muses and cultured noblemen are despised in the new England, and ‘ugly Barbarisme / And brutish ignorance’ have eclipsed civility (Teares of the Muses, lines 188–89), the country under ‘the fox’, Lord Burghley, is like to an Arcadia, a paradise lost, where the nightingale is replaced by the ‘Shriche-owle’ and ‘christall Thamis ‘has given way to ‘moorissh fennes, and marshes’ (Ruines, lines 130–40).

4 Letter to William Hayley, 6 May 1800, in The Letters of William Blake, ed. Geoffrey Keynes (New York: Macmillan, 1956), p.43.

Important in The Ruines, however, and embedded in the mutability tradition, is the notion that poetic expression is an antidote to the pain of loss, and even that it changes pain and sorrow into beauty. Spenser’s allusion to a bower ‘where the Nightingale wont forth to power / Her restless plaints, to comfort wakefull Louers’ (lines 131–32) (a reference to the metamorphosis of ravished Philomela into the most tuneful of songbirds) anticipates the poet’s courteous allusion to the Countess of Pembroke, Sidney’s poetically gifted sister, in a passage that links with one of Spenser’s most ardent admirers, John Keats:

Then will I sing: but who can better sing,

Than thine owne sister, peerless Ladie bright,

Which to thee sings with deep harts sorrowing,

Sorrowing tempered with deare delight,

That her to heare I feele my feeble spright

Robbed of sense, and rauished with joy,

O sad ioy, made of mourning and anoy.

(316−22)

In the tra...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Prologue
• Acknowledgements
• Fm
• 1. Time and Change: The Mutability Tradition from Spenser to Keats
• 2. Hardy I: Joy.
• 3. Hardy II: Pessimism
• 4. Yeats I: Faerie and Byzantium
• 5. Yeats II: The World of Time and Change
• 6. Larkin I: the Idealist
• 7. Larkin II: a Sad Pessimist
• Epilogue
• Index