|
A Brief History of Western Culture – Michael
Peverett |
|||||
A BRIEF HISTORY OF WESTERN CULTURE
by Michael Peverett
Athwart
(first
published in Intercapillary
Space)
One
of the things about reading poetry off the page instead of hearing it is that
the reading eye soon learns to be aware of words that swim into its early-warning
system, whose power of forecast extends two or three lines ahead of the one
that the reader is presently reading. This trick is on the whole an annoying
one and not conducive to the reader's happiness; you don't really want to know
anything about what's upcoming on line 166 while you are still silently
reciting line 164 - it means you never get any of your poetry really fresh, the
impact is always muffled because you've half-seen it coming - but nevertheless
you still catch yourself doing it. The reason for this spoiling habit is
obvious if you remember being forced to take part in sight-readings in class - you
were appointed to be some obscure personage in Marlowe or Shakespeare and because
you didn't know the play or what your character was doing in it, you were
afraid of saying the words in the wrong way... just so, when you read poetry to
yourself instead of listening to it you are still a performer of a sort (that
is, you put on a performance for yourself) and you scan anxiously ahead, you
use the early-warning system to make sure you're keeping roughly on track. But
since this is normally how poetry is now imbibed, many poets exploit the
early-warning system - so that, for example, in Peter Riley's Excavations when you turn over the page
and catch sight of some words in bold type, though they still lie far off from
you in the block of text, you read your way towards them with a jauntier gait,
refreshed by the promise of imminent song.
This
is all a laborious way of leading up to saying (what is nearly the only fact in
this essay) that when I'm reading some old poem I get dispirited when I see the
word "athwart" come over my horizon. It isn't just that the word is
obsolete in British (written) English, or even that it had a confusing variety
of senses, but something else too: when it became a poeticism in the nineteenth
century, the poets start to use it in a confusing way. As much as it means especially
little to me, the signs are there to show it meant something important to them;
something more important than precision.
Take
Coleridge in Kubla Khan:
But
oh! that deep romantic chasm which slanted
Down
the green hill athwart a cedarn cover!
I
can make myself see something clearly here. We have, say, the slope of a hill
in our vision. Imagine it blanketed in trees, perhaps of a coniferous sort -
"cedarn cover" might do as a way of referring to the forest canopy;
though not a particularly good way,since it has misled some readers into
thinking of coffin-lids. And then, as is not unusual on such hills, imagine the
deep cut of a beck slanting diagonally down the hill-slope, clearly visible as
a rift in the forest - I think I'm clear about this, it's like Burrington Combe
or Cheddar Gorge, and it's quite an erotic image. But now "athwart"
is annoying me, because apart from its ropey, fibrous sort of sound,
inapropriate to a rocky chasm, it seems to assert that the slanting line is
laid across, i.e. on top of, the cedarn cover, not embedded into it - as it
were, chalked rather than scored. I am obviously being too logical here, but it
seems like the word "athwart" is muffling my image, not clarifying
it. Of course, this only means that I'm missing something. Can I guess what it
is?
*
History of the word
"Athwart"
is made of solid old material (a+thwart), but the evidence for its distinct existence
in Middle English is rather hazy. It becomes prominent in written, or printed,
English in the 16th century, and you do half-wonder if there's an element of
pseudo-medievalism being enjoyed already. On the other hand, when it arrives
clearly before us it already possesses its distinct range of meanings, most of
which can be illustrated from the poets of the time.
Athwart his
(Spenser, Faerie Queene I, 7, xxix) - lying across
something, especially slantingly - a baldric = ornamental leather belt worn
over one shoulder, therefore diagonally across the breast.
With wanton yvie twyne entrayld athwart
(Spenser, Faerie Queene III, 6, xliv) - this also
means lying diagonally, in this case referring to the ivy winding up a branch.
This is from the description of the Garden of Adonis, specifically the sexy
forest on the mount of Venus which was the primary influence on those Coleridge
lines - but Spenser's use of the word is precise and graphic (though the
winding habit is more characteristic of woodbine or wild clematis), Coleridge's
by comparison implies some other motive.
hauing whiskt His taile athwart his backe
(a lion in Marlowe's Lucan) - moving
across something so as to impede its view.
All athwart there
came / A post from
(Shakespeare, Henry IV Pt 1) .
To cross a path, impede someone's progress, stop someone in their tracks, often
with connotation of thwarting, perplexing and unhap.
The baby beats the nurse, and quite athwart / Goes all decorum
(Shakespeare, Measure for
Measure) - figurative; morally off-track, awry,
perversely.
I
have by the way no unpleasant frisson when I read "athwart" in these
older writers, I understand what they want to say and the word seems to say it.
It is in later poetry that I'm out of my depth.
But
let's finish with the history first. What isn't represented here is two other
things.
First,
the very oldest uses of "athwart" are Scottish (though still not much
earlier than 1500) - and in Scots
"athwart" carries an extra meaning (possibly still current in some
local speech, but Google is useless as testimony to spoken English) - the extra
meaning is hither and thither, in all directions, all over the place. So far as
I know this local meaning has no influence on literary usage, and perhaps it
will live on tenaciously when all our canonical English literature is steaming
in the dustbin of history, and actually this idea makes me feel happy, for some
reason.
Secondly,
at some point around 1700 "athwart" emerges as an active ingredient
in nautical jargon - perhaps originally because boats are always moving athwart
each other's course and courses themselves move athwart the tides, and then
"athwart" begins to be used to imply an imaginary line from bow to
bow of a boat (as opposed to an imaginary line from fore to aft), and gets into
aggregate combinations like
"athwartships" and "athwart-hawse". Possibly some of
these uses too are still current.
Finally,
I claimed that "athwart" is obsolete in British written English, but
(and here Google is a help) it isn't
obsolete in US written English; evidently there is a group of educated Americans who still use
the word, on occasion:
Marlowe meaningfully cuts athwart the expected pattern (Charles
R. Forker, 1995)
He has placed his
pontificate firmly athwart this conflict (of Pope John Paul II, re
Indeed, the Sadrist
insurrection which has followed Maliki's assault now controls many towns
athwart the main route of supply for US forces, up from
Its
most-quoted use in recent-ish times was by William J.
Buckley, Jr., when announcing his new conservative weekly in Nov 19, 1955:
if NATIONAL REVIEW is superfluous, it
is so for very different reasons: It stands athwart history, yelling Stop, at a
time when no one is inclined to do so, or to have much patience with those who
so urge it.
Buckley chiefly meant "standing in the path of, impeding
the progress of" - as per the Sadrist towns - but he also cunningly drew
on the heritage of Romantic ambiguity; he cloaked the idea of the conservative
as a mere reactionary blocker by managing to imply, rather, that the
conservative stood at an oblique angle to history, not so much stopping it in
its tracks - which readers of the National
Review patently had no hope of doing though they probably would have liked
to - as responsibly controlling it,
standing a little to one side like a sober guardian or like a gardener correcting
the injudicious vigour of modern tendencies with a pruning-knife.
*
Two other things about those sixteenth-century usages and
why I feel comfortable with them; first, I talked about a ropey, fibrous
connotation and I was probably taking a flyer when I said this but it so happens
that lion's tails and ivy stems satisfactorily confirm my connotation. The
other thing is that "athwart" in these usages is held down to a human
scale. The possibility, however, of a gigantic extension was always there. If
one of the things that "athwart" talks about is lying or moving
across a backcloth then some of nature's backcloths are very large, and
principally in this part of the world I'm talking about the sky and the sea.
Bacon in his Essays takes
"athwart" into this larger dimension:
To break his bridge athwart the
(We'll
see more of this narrow strip of sea between Europe and
As
for the sky, well that leads me to these two quotations, in which the new
poetic use of "athwart" that begins at the end of the eighteenth
century is, I like to think, neatly encapsulated.
First,
here we have Pope in an influential passage from The Rape of the Lock:
Some
guide the course of wand'ring orbs on high,
Or
roll the planets thro' the boundless sky:
Some,
less refin'd, beneath the moon's pale light
Pursue
the stars that shoot athwart the night,
Or
suck the mists in grosser air below,
Or
dip their pinions in the painted bow,
And, in contrast, this is Wordsworth in his early poem
"Salisbury Plain"*:
'Twas dark and waste as ocean's
shipless flood
Roaring with storms beneath night's starless gloom.
[ ]
Where the wet gypsey in her straw-built home
Warmed her wet limbs by fire of fern and broom.
No transient meteor burst upon his sight
Nor taper glimmered dim from sick man's room.
Along the moor no line of mournful light
From lamp of lonely toll-gate streamed athwart the
night.
Pope's fantasy of the sylphs takes place under the large
hemispherical dome of the night sky. At first he is looking overhead at the
immensities of the ecliptic where the planets roll (they are really the same thing
as the wandering orbs), but then the gaze lowers to near the horizon ("beneath
the moon's pale light"); here the sky stands upright, and against it he
shows us the stubby traces of shooting stars, like lion's tails or chalk-marks
on a blackboard. What is described by the word "athwart" is a planar,
two-dimensional effect, like a baldric across the chest. Though the night sky
is immense, Pope makes the shooting stars seem small,
the proper preserve of the delicate, miniaturized sylphs.
Wordsworth's poem specifically remembers Pope's in denying
the presence of "transient meteors", his night, overcast and dense
with rain, obscures all distance; and the petty light-source of the toll-gate
(if only it were not also absent) is imagined as projecting an elongated beam
visible in the reflections of a thousand raindrops. We've lost the planar
effect still present in Pope's poem and "athwart" (combining the
earlier meanings of "impeding the view of something" and of
"diagonally slanting") now suggests the indefinably slanting angle of
a beam that is not directly parallel to either an imagined backcloth nor to the
viewer's line of sight; it suggests three-dimensionality and the experience of
perception in a three-dimensional world, which is full of angles that are not
precisely 90 degrees or 45 degrees but are seen at one kind of irregular slant
and instantly understood as being really at some other kind of angle, could we
but see them straight-on. (My friend who works in adaptive optics suggested I
use the word "non-meridional" round about here.)
This was about the first Wordsworth poem that Coleridge
encountered; happily for him, he got it read to him (by its author). It was
1795 - Wordsworth was 25, Coleridge a couple of years younger. Twenty years
later, Coleridge remembered a "union of deep feeling with
profound thought; [a] fine balance of truth in observing with the imaginative
faculty in modifying the objects observed; and above all [an] original gift of
spreading the tone, the atmosphere, and with it the depth and height of
the ideal world around forms, incidents, and situations, of which, for the
common view, custom had bedimmed all the lustre, had dried up the sparkle and
the dew drops."
I don't know how much of this description I understand, but it
was true that Wordsworth was using language to express the depth and height and
forms of the real world. "Athwart", like his much-admired use of
"along" (as seen in the previous line of the quotation), was one of
his tools for conveying the inflected spaces of landscape. And I think this is
brilliant. But language being so poor at (among many other things) expressing
three-dimensionality, the stretching of the word is done at the cost of
introducing a significant vagueness; the possibility existed (perhaps it is
already glimpsed in Coleridge's praise) of beginning not so much to choose the
word for a pregnant suggestibility as to purchase with it a general
suggestibility. Take this pot-pourri from Keats -
Lo! I must tell a tale of chivalry;For while I muse, the lance points slantingly
Athwart the morning air: (Specimen
of an Induction)
Where the dark-leav’d
laburnum’s drooping clusters
Reflect athwart the
stream their yellow lustres,
(To
George Felton Mathew)
some, clear in youthful bloom,
Go glad and smilingly athwart the gloom; (Chaucer)
Those
two on winged steeds, with all the stress
Of
vision search’d for him, as one would look
Athwart
the sallows of a river nook
To
catch a glance at silver throated eels,—
(Endymion
Bk IV)
Silent sails
This shadowy queen athwart, and faints away
In another gloomy arch. (Endymion Bk
IV))
I'm not going to trace "athwart" through its
crowded nineteenth-century history, if such a thing were possible. In one sentence:
from Keats it inevitably carries through to the early Tennyson -
She drew her casement-curtain by, And glanced athwart the glooming flats.
--- but most she loathed the hour
When the thick-moted sunbeam lay
Athwart the chambers, and the day
Was sloping toward his western bower. (Mariana)
- and after that it's no surprise
that almost every pre-Modernist poet uses it as a general marker of elevated
language. It happens that while thinking about this I've been reading a volume
from 1929, A Selection of Modern Swedish
Poetry trans. C.D. Locock, so let's give Locock an outing:
Ended the long November night, and like
a sick man waking
From slumber the drear Dawn unclosed
her melancholy eyes,
And low athwart the piny brow again came breaking
In grey-blue silent
harmonies the music of the skies.
(F. Vetterlund)
Heaven's air is breathless: there is cast
A spell on us, who view the sight
amazing
Of the great windmill, ceasing its dull
sound,
A moveless cross
athwart the sunset splendour. (Anders
Österling)
*
So
why do I experience a feeling of depression, of effort, when I glimpse the word
"athwart"? Have I sufficiently accounted for it when I speak of a
mannerism, a lazy poeticism? - no, it isn't enough. Casting about, I developed
grand (yet somewhat obvious) theories about e.g. our loss of belief in
realistic description and non-anthropic points of view, an analogy with the
disappearance of photographic perspective from modern painting, the walled-in
experience of urban horizons, dislike of elevated diction, etc. But if I am
honest it comes down to something simpler than that; the word
"athwart" becomes like a grey blot on the page because, mimicking one
of its meanings, the word itself impedes the view - it bulks too large, it
behaves more like a noun than an adverb. Take that last quote from Locock's
Österling - I want in my mind's eye only the sunset and the black sails of the
windmill, and I have to push "athwart" over to one side to see it
clearly. For after all the sails are slim and bony, you wouldn't notice them
against the sunset if they were a kind of obscuring mass that allowed no idea
of what lay behind them.
It
isn't that British poetry's interest in the inflections of three-dimensionality
is over, far from it; J. H. Prynne, Peter Larkin, Frances Presley, Allen
Fisher, Richard Makin, to name only a few obvious names... Riley's Excavations is a massive investigation
of three-dimensional (and four-dimensional) space, but it dispenses entirely with
the direct description of landscape - with the directness of description but
also, as the word "athwart" epitomizes in miniature, the cluttered
obfuscation of description. Instead, it is a realization of landscape. Riley
seeds his vision with Victorian descriptions of grave remains where all the
dimensions spring from an unperceiving body: "head to East, upper torso lying on its back but crouched at a
right-angle and knees turned sharply to left, and the head also turned to face
South.." Reading this, our own
bodies feel the posture, we are sensitized to dimensionality. Around these
quotations, the bending and torquing of Riley's own sentences, full of anything
but grassy knolls, continuously assert the immanence of landform but without
even naming it. The landscape is there but there's no need to move anything out
of the way. At least, that's how it works for me.
*
I
couldn't pass through the nineteenth-century territory of this essay without bringing
in Browning. The opening of the second
book of Paracelsus goes like this:
Over the waters in the vaporous west
The sun goes down as in a sphere of gold,
Behind the outstretched city, which between,
With all that length of domes and minarets,
Athwart the splendour, black and crooked runs
Like a Turk verse along a scimetar.
If
you look at pictures of the famous view of
More
trivia: if you want to hear what the word "athwart" sounds like when
it's in a pop song, you need to get hold of This
is Charing Cross (Idyllic Records, 2006) by
There
is also a rather scary thrash-metal band called A T H W A R T (from
I
wish I had read: Rachel Blau Duplessis, Draft
27: Athwart.
NOTE
1. Salisbury Plain -
Begun 1791-92, completed 1793-94; Wordsworth made various versions and
extracts; it's most commonly seen (though quite substantially revised) in the
version published by Wordsworth in 1842 titled "Guilt and Sorrow";
most of the stanza I've quoted is re-rendered, except for the "transient
meteor" and the last two lines.
(2008)
|
A Brief History of Western Culture – Michael
Peverett |
|||||