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Where would old literature professors be without energetic postgraduates? A recent human acquisition, working on the literary sociology of pulp science fiction, has introduced me to the intellectual equivalent of catnip: Google Ngrams. Anyone reading this blog must be tech-savvy by definition; you probably contrive Ngrams over your muesli. But for a woefully challenged person like myself they are the easiest way to waste an entire morning since God invented snooker.

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My second Shakespeare poem of the day (16th overall) was an ottava rima. I won't tell you what mine is about, but I will tell you that I used the words "vouchsafed", "filial", and "adieu", and you may make of that what you please.

I was just doing a bit of checking on my formatting for my ottava rima, to see whether the ending couplet is typically indented (the answer is NO), and it occurred to me to share this bit of Don Juan (pronounced "Don Jew-en", as it turns out) by George Gordon, Lord Byron:

"Go, little book, from this my solitude!
I cast thee on the waters – go thy ways!
And if, as I believe, thy vein be good,
The world will find thee after many days."
When Southey 's read, and Wordsworth understood,
I can't help putting in my claim to praise –
The four first rhymes are Southey's every line:
For God's sake, reader! take them not for mine.

Form: Ottava rima is a rhymed form (hence the "rima") written in eight lines (or an "octave", hence the "ottava"). It is an Italian form, hence the Italian name, and it is rhymed ABABABCC. Eight lines, three rhymes, and you may stop with one stanza or write book-length epics (a la Byron) this way.

I love Byron's wit: He wrote half of this particular octave by quoting Southey; as a result he had to come up with one A line, one B line and a couplet in order to finish. And so funny!

Immediately following "Her Voice" in published collections comes "My Voice". I believe that Wilde intended for the poems to be a dialogue, most likely between either his wife or his former girlfriend, noted beauty Florence Balcombe Stoker (she dumped Wilde and married Bram Stoker) and himself. Whether the conversation is based on something that occurred in actuality or is merely played out in his mind, I think it apparent that "Her Voice" was intended by Wilde to be the words of the woman in a failing relationship, and "My Voice" to be his version of events. First the poems, then the analysis. As always, I hope you can read these aloud wherever you are - they are so much better that way, and the first poem in particular is magnificent.

Her Voice
by Oscar Wilde

The wild bee reels from bough to bough
  With his furry coat and his gauzy wing.
Now in a lily-cup, and now
  Setting a jacinth bell a-swing,
    In his wandering;
Sit closer love: it was here I trow
    I made that vow,

Swore that two lives should be like one
  As long as the sea-gull loved the sea,
As long as the sunflower sought the sun,—
  It shall be, I said, for eternity
    ’Twixt you and me!
Dear friend, those times are over and done,
    Love’s web is spun.

Look upward where the poplar trees
  Sway and sway in the summer air,
Here in the valley never a breeze
  Scatters the thistledown, but there
    Great winds blow fair
From the mighty murmuring mystical seas,
    And the wave-lashed leas.

Look upward where the white gull screams,
  What does it see that we do not see?
Is that a star? or the lamp that gleams
  On some outward voyaging argosy,—
    Ah! can it be
We have lived our lives in a land of dreams!
    How sad it seems.

Sweet, there is nothing left to say
  But this, that love is never lost,
Keen winter stabs the breasts of May
  Whose crimson roses burst his frost,
    Ships tempest-tossed
Will find a harbour in some bay,
    And so we may.

And there is nothing left to do
  But to kiss once again, and part,
Nay, there is nothing we should rue,
  I have my beauty,—you your Art,
    Nay, do not start,
One world was not enough for two
    Like me and you.


My Voice
by Oscar Wilde

Within this restless, hurried, modern world
  We took our hearts’ full pleasure—You and I,
And now the white sails of our ship are furled,
  And spent the lading of our argosy.

Wherefore my cheeks before their time are wan,
  For very weeping is my gladness fled,
Sorrow hath paled my lip’s vermilion,
  And Ruin draws the curtains of my bed.

But all this crowded life has been to thee
  No more than lyre, or lute, or subtle spell
Of viols, or the music of the sea
  That sleeps, a mimic echo, in the shell.

Both poems talk about the end of a relationship, but the voices are very different. Completely intentional, of course - that's why he's made clear that he's presenting things in different voices. He doesn't just mean that he's conveying the words of two different people; he's writing from completely different points of view. In "Her Voice", he's not saying, "look, this is what I heard her say," he's saying "as an author, I am stepping into her shoes, and this is how it is from her point of view."

It's not just the structure of the poems, but the word choices and the viewpoint as well. Both parties speak with regret, but it's clear that their points of regret differ. The woman that Wilde channels in "Her Voice" uses far more words and a more embellished way of making her point (as women are often wont to do); the man's version is shorter, and assumes far more of the weight of responsibility for the relationship's failure. The woman seems to indicate that she loves the man, but just can't stay in the relationship anymore; the man seems to feel crushing sorrow, and may be sickly; further, he notes that "Ruin draws the curtains of my bed". All of this comports with the facts of Wilde's life: Having been sent to jail for "gross indecency", he emerged a sickly, ruined man. His wife, who never divorced him, changed her and their sons' last name to Holland, and terminated Wilde's parental rights. Bram Stoker (husband to Florence) remained friendly with Wilde and visited him on the Continent after he left England.

Discussion of form:
In "Her Voice", the first four lines and the sixth line each have four stressed (or accented syllables), and the fifth and seventh line of each stanza has two stressed syllables. The short lines are mostly iambs (taDUM), but not always. Each of the six stanzas uses the following end-rhyme scheme within it: ABABBAA. The fluidity of the form (with the two shorter lines and the way the end-rhymes mix about) gives the poem a lightness, as well as a more emotional feel due to the ebb and flux of the lines.

In "My Voice", there are only three stanzas (half as many as in "Her Voice"), and they are written in quatrains (four-line stanzas) using a very traditional rhyme and metre: ABAB rhyme in iambic pentameter (five iambic feet per line, taDUM taDUM taDUM taDUM taDUM). "His" poem sounds more regimented and less emotional as a result of its rigid metre scheme.

In addition to discussing parting and loss, both poems make reference to dreams. In "Her Voice," the speaker talks about how she promised forever (and oh the swoony goodness of those declarations about sunflowers and seagulls!), but now feels that they were living inside a dream. The real world has turned up to burst the bubble: "Ah! can it be/We have lived our lives in a land of dreams! How sad it seems." Now that she's living in reality, she's come to take her leave. "Sweet, there is nothing left to say/But this, that love is never lost". She adds references to nature's cycles (May's roses and winter's frost) and to the idea of ships finding safe harbor, both of which are references to life going on. The final stanza, "And there is nothing left to do/But to kiss once again, and part,/Nay, there is nothing we should rue/I have my beauty,—you your Art" invokes for me echoes of Byron's "When We Two Parted", particularly when I read the two poems together and put together the ideas of ruin and paleness and the sense of wasting that is in "My Voice". (That's just my association, by the way - there's no evidence that Wilde went there himself.)

As a final point, I want to look at the final stanza of "My Voice", where the male speaker (who I will assume is actually Wilde) observes that while he is left wasted and in ruin, the woman is free to move on with her life. The problems that have brought them to the point of parting are a dream-like sort of noise, that she can set aside and move away from. One can, after all, hear the ocean inside a shell, but one can also put the shell down and walk away from it.

But all this crowded life has been to thee
  No more than lyre, or lute, or subtle spell
Of viols, or the music of the sea
  That sleeps, a mimic echo, in the shell.

First the poem, then the discussion. Or really, if you have time, first the poem. Then a a few moments to think/grieve, and then the discussion. You'll understand that better in a moment, unless this is one you already know by heart.

When We Two Parted
by George Gordon, Lord Byron

When we two parted
In silence and tears,
Half broken-hearted,
To sever for years,
Pale grew thy cheek and cold,
Colder thy kiss;
Truly that hour foretold
Sorrow to this.

The dew of the morning
Sank chill on my brow—
It felt like the warning
Of what I feel now.
Thy vows are all broken,
And light is thy fame:
I hear thy name spoken,
And share in its shame.

They name thee before me,
A knell to mine ear;
A shudder comes o’er me—
Why wert thou so dear?
They know not I knew thee,
Who knew thee too well:—
Long, long shall I rue thee
Too deeply to tell.

In secret we met—
In silence I grieve
That thy heart could forget,
Thy spirit deceive.
If I should meet thee
After long years,
How should I greet thee?—
With silence and tears.

Go on. Pause for a moment. I'll wait.

Let's get the technical stuff out of the way: four stanzas, eight lines each, with an ABABCDCD rhyme scheme (the third stanza can also be read as ABABACAC). There's no strict syllable count per line; instead there are two strongly-accented syllables per line (E.g., "WHEN we two PARTed" or "they KNOW not i KNEW thee").

The power of this poem comes from multiple sources. Part of it is the punch-iness of the lines with their two accented syllables each. They rock you along through the poem, and yet they sometimes pack a wallop as they go. Part of the poem's power is Byron's use of the first person. It lends credibility to the words of the poem, which is highly personal not just because of the use of first person, but also because of the grief, anger, despair and resentment in the words of the poem.

And a large part of this poem's power is that ends on a sadder note than it began. Contrary to common belief, time has not healed the speaker's wound. In the first stanza, he's been rejected by a lover; the lover went on to a life of infamy, and his knowledge that he was once associated with the lover is a constant source of shame; while the lover's name is bandied about (one infers with some derision), the speaker reassesses the level of his affection ("Why wert thou so dear?"), and it seems that he harbored feelings over the years; and then the final stanza, which is killer, as he reflects on their past trysts and his continued resentment over what he now views as a betrayal, and considers the possibility of meeting her again.

I should note that this poem is often read as meaning that a prior secret lover has made a public fool of him- or herself, and is now being gossiped about in society. Friends discuss it openly in front of the speaker, not knowing of his past relationship, and it reopens all the wounds of the original separation. I should also note that I read this poem slightly differently, based on all the verbal cues that have to do with death, as meaning that the ex-lover is now dead, and is nevertheless the object of society's ridicule as a result of a misspent life, and that the far-distant future meeting is in the afterlife. It's supportable on the face of the poem, but isn't, I believe, the traditional take on it. And that's the beauty of poems— they are subject to individual interpretation.

If you're interested in more about Byron's biography, you can get some of the dirt in a prior post of mine. He was actually quite a scandalous figure in his day, and in honesty, this poem could as easily have been written about him as by him.

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