Textual Criticism and Comparative Mythology in light of Alfred Lord Tennyson's "Locksley Hall"

The other day, on a whim, I reread the poem "Locksley Hall" and have reached two conclusions: Either Alfred Lord Tennyson did not write the poem or, if he did, aerial combat does not exist.

In case you haven't read it lately, the poem consists of ninety-seven couplets of interior monologue by a young soldier who, jilted by his beloved and having failed to take revenge by finding glorious death in battle, tries to figure out what to do with the rest of his life. At one point, he pauses to ponder the wonders that the rising age of progress will bring about. The crucial passage comes about line 119 where the speaker does a little crystal ball-gazing:

For I dipt into the future, far as human eye could see,
Saw the Vision of the world, and all the wonder that would be;
Saw the heavens fill with commerce, argosies of magic sails,
Pilots of the purple twilight dropping down with costly bales;
Heard the heavens fill with shouting, and there rain'd a ghastly dew
From the nations' airy navies grappling in the central blue.  

This passage clearly describes the invention of the airplane ("argosies of magic sails"), commercial air travel ("dropping down with costly bales"), and the whole business of national air forces, dogfights, and bombers ("the nations' airy navies grappling in the central blue"). The problem here is that Tennyson purportedly wrote the poem in 1835, publishing it in 1842 in his volume, Poems. But the Wright Brothers did not launch from Kittyhawk until 1903. Jacob Earl Fickel first experimented with shooting a gun from an airplane in 1910 and the first actual application of such technology did not appear until the Italo-Turkish war of 1911. Tennyson died in 1892, far too early to have witnessed or even read about any of these events.

I dismiss any suggestion that, as a man of unusual intelligence and insight, the poet laureate somehow divined or deduced, by extending the technological developments of his day, these eventual outcomes. After all, in line 182 of this very poem the narrator cries "Not in vain the distance beckons. Forward, forward let us range,/Let the great world spin forever down the ringing grooves of change." The imagery here is of rail travel and scholars affirm that Tennyson, who took his first ride on a train in 1830, actually believed that the vehicle ran on grooves instead of rails. It defies credulity to think that a man of such technological ignorance could have prophesied so accurately a development so far superior to the locomotive.

However, one of two explanations suggest themselves. First, textual criticism allows the possibility that Tennyson did not write the poem, or at least this section of the poem, at all. Clearly some later author, doubtless a member of a fanatical band of Tennyson-disciples, wished to make the great writer appear as a prophet, and accordingly inserted the lines after the fact. It is true that no published version of the poem nor any manuscript copy exists without this section, but it is not difficult to believe that such documents were suppressed by the Academy. No doubt a careful linguistic analysis would reveal that either a) the language in these lines differs in vocabulary and syntax from the rest of the poem, clearly suggesting another author, or b) the language in these lines adheres almost exactly to the vocabulary and syntax in the rest of the poem, clearly suggesting an elaborate effort at verisimilitude.

On the other hand, a reading based on comparative mythology would draw the equally plausible conclusion that aviation as a whole simply does not exist but is, instead, the product of accretions based on Tennyson's original myth of air travel. A writer, a poet, no less, dreams up the wild fantasy of vehicles capable of breaking the bounds of gravity - which has been shown, by measurable and replicable experimentation, to be impossible - and later writers continue to embellish the idea until we ultimately arrive at human-made craft capable of flying not only from continent to continent but even out of our own solar system! It does seem a little difficult that all of this could happen so rapidly, within roughly a century and a half of the original legend, but it remains a more acceptable theory than the idea that Tennyson predicted the future with such accuracy.

As absurd as the foregoing sounds, this is exactly the kind of thing one often finds, written with a straight face (and often even a long face) about the documents of the Christian faith. For instance, Jesus' sermon predicting, in considerable detail, the siege and destruction of Jerusalem by the Roman army, is used to date the gospels of Matthew and Mark as later than AD 70 on the basis that the events must already have taken place. What such writers seem reluctant to consider (or incapable of conceiving) is that Jesus, whether or not he was God incarnate, was a highly intelligent individual who, through careful meditation on the political situation in Palestine in the early first century in light of the history of the region as recorded in the Jewish Scriptures, could predict which way things were likely to break and advise his followers on how to act. In fact, I sometimes wonder if such writers are more reluctant to credit Jesus with superior human intelligence than with prophetic foresight.

In the case of the resurrection, writers like Joseph Campbell point to other resurrection stories as proof that the Easter account is just one more myth, concocted by early Christians to bolster their later claims concerning his divinity. As in the example above, this theory runs aground at least on the count of chronology: Stories of Jesus' resurrection abounded within months of the supposed events, which would be a tremendously compressed timeframe for the growth of a folk tale. (I say the theory "at least" founders on this count because it is open to critique from a number of other directions too numerous to deal with here.)

Perhaps it is easier (I didn't say easy; that option seldom exists where reality is concerned) to believe, as philosopher Dallas Willard suggests in his book The Divine Conspiracy, that Jesus is "the best-informed and most intelligent person of all, the smartest person who ever lived," and that he rose from the dead.

The Fourth Sunday of Advent: The Dog

The invading Romans greatly admired the war-dogs deployed by their British foes. These beasts, known as Pugnaces Britanniae, are widely thought to be the ancestors of the English mastiff and, perhaps, the bulldog. My own dog, a rescued bullmastiff, is, as the name implies, a cross of both breeds. The Romans prized these animals and adopted them into their own ranks. In heraldry, they symbolize peculiar fidelity.

talbot: a "dog of scent," probably some species of the mastiff

guardant: walking in profile with face turned toward the viewer

tenné: tawny

vert: green

Talbot guardant, tenné on vert field,

Elected silence of my solitude.

Your muscled shuffle, muzzled snuffle yield

In hedge and sedge rich scents in plenitude.

The antique Romans feared the vasty mass

Of blood and bone pugnacious Britons bred

That by my side pads deep now in damp moss

And nuzzles to my hand that massy head.

The widow had no power of jowl or jaw

Yet, brutal pugilist, bruited her suit

Before the bar of disregarding law

And struck the knockout blow like brawling brute.

We cry "Come!" as the bowling year rolls 'round:

God grant grace we in faith may then be found.

The Coldest Evening of the Year: Some Thoughts on Light, Dark, and the Winter Solstice

Today, December 21, 2013, is the winter solstice, the shortest day and consequently the longest night of the year. After this, it gets better.

The Roman Catholic Weekday Missal, noting this fact, assigns the reading of the fifth O Antiphon, as the Alleluia before the day's Gospel reading. In the original Latin it begins, "O Oriens," which the Missal translates as "Come, Radiant Dawn." The rest of that version goes:

splendor of eternal light, sun of justice:

shine on those lost in the darkness of death.

The daily meditation explains that, "We think today of the earth's need for more sunlight and warmth. Christ is the sun sending out rays of justice, holiness and grace. What the sun does for our planet, Christ as the Sun of grace does for the kingdom of God." It then tosses in a final thought: "And in our souls also there is still much darkness which cries out for the helping, healing rays of Christ."

This puts me in mind of another reference to the astronomy, if not the theology, this day involves. In "Stopping By Woods on a Snowy Evening," one of my favorite Robert Frost poems, the narrator speaks of halting his one-horse sleigh "Between the woods and frozen lake/The coldest evening of the year." This poem has moved me deeply since I first encountered it in high school. Not long ago I wrote a (too-) lengthy analysis of it in which I noted that it amounts to a proto-suicide note in which only a sense of duty to life's ongoing rhythms prevents fruition.

What I did not see at the time is the essential hope hidden in the now-more-than-ever-seems-it-rich-to-die tone of the piece. It is "the coldest evening of the year," the solstice, the nadir; if the speaker holds out through the night, things will get better.

The whole thing put me in mind of a line from Alexander Solzhenitsyn's "One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich." As the prison camp work crew stands stamping and shivering at morning roll call one man, a defrocked naval officer, speaks up. "'It's always coldest at dawn,' the Captain explained. 'Because that's the last stage of the loss of heat by radiation which takes place at night.'" The narrator adds that, "The Captain liked explaining things. . . .The Captain was clearly going downhill. His cheeks were caved in, but he kept his spirits up." It gets better - even if it doesn't.

The poet Malcolm Guite has also pondered the place of the fifth O Antiphon in his sonnet, O Oriens, available in his wonderful book "Sounding the Seasons." His own translation of the original begins, "O Dayspring." I have no Latin, but just feeling my way by the Braille of cognates I'm pretty sure "oriens" links to "orient," the idea of light dawning in the east. Guite invites the reader to ponder even the razor-wire gleams of this day's retreating dawn,

As though behind the sky itself they traced 

The shift and shimmer of another river

Flowing unbidden from its hidden source; 

The Day-Spring, the eternal Prima Vera.

In other words, "It gets better," not just because the sun won't sling us out of orbit so that our light and warmth appear to retreat into an irretrievable south, but because all light springs from what Gerard Manley Hopkins, in "The Habit of Perfection" calls "the uncreated light." 

Frost's narrator ascribes ownership of the winter wood to an absentee landlord whose "house is in the village," and who does not much care one way or another if a lone traveler chooses to lie down in the drifted snow and fall into his final sleep. Guite instead hears a voice which insists,

“Sleeper awake, the darkness was a dream 

For you will see the Dayspring at your waking,

Beyond your long last line the dawn is breaking”.

It will be darker and colder sooner and longer tonight than ever before, but rejoice: It will be darker and colder sooner and longer tonight than ever again. Advent's little Lent lasts only three days longer. The Sun of Righteousness rises with healing in his wings! The Dayspring will shine forth!

 

The Third Sunday of Advent: The Pelican

In medieval bestiaries, the pelican is a figure of Christ. This notion came from the belief that a pelican, in times of starvation, would peck holes in her own breast and allow her chicks to feed on her blood. Laertes invokes this idea when, in Hamlet IV/v, speaking of his murdered father he boasts that, "To his good friends thus wide I'll ope my arms;/And like the kind life-rendering pelican,/Repast them with my blood." The room in Jerusalem traditionally identified as the site of the Last Supper contains a crusader-era pillar topped by a capital which depicts a pelican performing this act.

Vert: green

Vulning: the term for a pelican feeding her young with her own blood

Gules: red

Endorsed: wings drawn back from the body

Embowed: bowed forward on the breast

Torteau: circular devices are known as "rondels." When red in color, they are "torteau."

Fess: a horizontal stripe across the middle of the shield, occupying about a third of the height

On vert, pelican vulning with beak gules,

With wings endorsed and crescent neck embowed.

Five torteaux fessed on breast like crimson jewels,

Above her brood gives vent to crimson flood.

When famine's fast unfastens hunger's cry,

With uncrossed wings her love becomes a cross,

Herself the satisfaction to the plea,

Her loss proof none that seek her shall be lost.

We crossless cross our arms and smiling sing,

And we are touched, ourselves untouchable,

Our careless carols sweetly warbling

With voices tuned and souls invulnerable.

Oh Nostro Pelicano, vulned Christ

Invade the void. Teach us to pay the price.

The Second Sunday of Advent: The Heron

In medieval bestiary lore, the heron, a solitary bird, represents the contemplative seeking God in solitude. The Italian Renaissance master Giovani Bellini, in his painting, "Saint Francis in Ecstasy," places a heron in the background at the moment when Il Poverello receives the stigmata, the five wounds of Christ which symbolize the saint's union with Our Lord.

Volant: flying

Perbend: divided diagonally from top left to bottom right

Azure: blue

Tenne: tawney

Cross potenty: known as the "crutch cross," a cross with bends at each end (here the beak, wing-tips, and feet of the bird)

Bend sinister: a diagonal band across the shield (top right/bottom left as viewed; this is opposite the normal direction, thus "sinister" from the Latin word for "left.")

Torteau: circular devices are known as "rondels." When red in color, they are "torteau."

The heron pterodactyls forth volant,

Perbends the field twixt azure and tenné.

A cross potenty stretched against the vault

Bends sinister aslant the morning haze.

His prehistoric croak protests the rough

Intrusion of one blundering out of time

And just in time, untimely, late enough,

Yet seeking to keep time in ordered rhyme.

Bellini set him by the saint alone

In solitude, adorned with five torteaux,

But we forsake the cell for home sweet home,

In shopping center loneliness flee wounds.

Uprooted, rootless, restless, may we fly

Back to the wilderness to hear hope's cry.

A Review of "The Cutting Edge," by Malcolm Guite

"The sciences long remained like a lion-cub whose gambols delighted its master in private; it had not yet tasted man's blood." - C. S. Lewis, De Descriptione Temporum

In "The Cutting Edge," from his new book The Singing Bowl, Cambridge poet Malcolm Guite describes what happens when the big cat tastes not only man's blood, but God's. Guite packs this poem until every line curls and sings with the pent-up power of a coiled spring. The kinetic uncoiling of the full piece leaves the careful reader stunned. Here is the poem in full:

At my back, like you, I always hear
The edge, the cutting edge is coming near.

Not the blind fury
With the abhorred shears,
But this is what I fear:
The stealthy scissors of a blinded time
Cutting through accretions of the past
Dully and daily deleting whatever is not next,
Sneering and sniping and snipping,
Excising every sign-post from the text,
Parsing all the parts that point away
To something other than our circled self.

I know the angels were the first to fall;
Cherub and seraph spiralled down
In circling curlicues of sacred text,
Flaring in ink and paper to the floor,
The shredded evidence of our affair,
Our old, embarrassing affair with God.
And God himself will follow soon enough;
A little word so easy to excise,
Another snippet from the cutting room,
A sweeping on the heap of history.

But still at night I tiptoe to the door
To rustle through these severed strips of love,
And strew my heart with scraps of poetry,
Forbidden hopes and shards of mystery.
They rustle through me in my waking dreams
And so I'll have a heart-, a head-, a handful when
The scissors come for me.

For at my back, like you, I always hear
The edge, the cutting edge is coming near.

The poem leads with irony as Guite invokes Andrew Marvell's famous, "To His Coy Mistress." In that poem, a young man seeks to wheedle his lover out of her virginity by invoking the relentless march of mortality. What Marvell's narrator hears at his back is "time's winged chariot hurrying near."

But that is merely death, and here the poet dismisses it almost casually: "Not the blind fury/With the abhorred shears." These two lines invoke the myth of the three fates, the oldest and scariest of which was Atropos who with her "abhorred shears" severed the thread of each person's life when the chosen moment arrived. The end of physical existence, the speaker assures us, poses a small threat in comparison to the loss of one's soul while still alive.

The linked imagery continues as the next stanza unfolds: Atropos in Greek means "un-turning." Now the lines abound exactly in imagery of revolving as words like "spiralled," "circling curlicues," and "flaring" seem to hold out hope of a relentless fate who finally relents. In fact, however, they depict the final falling of the severed thread. And this is not the thread of an individual existence as the previous stanza has made clear. It is "the text" that this force pares away. Those two words cover a lot of territory, but when written by a Christian priest, a safe bet says they at least include, and perhaps center on, the Holy Bible. Guite's language does the work of describing the attitude behind much of this sort of Jesus Seminar-style textual criticism. These are "stealthy scissors" that are "Sneering and sniping and snipping," a series of alliterations keen enough to give the reader's tongue a paper cut.

Then more allusion and yet more irony: "I know the angels were the first to fall," a phrase invoking the story of Lucifer's eviction from Heaven. But wait! These are the good angels, "Cherub and seraph," and human scholarship, not divine justice, lops them from glory. They spiral, circle, and flair: The words recall William Butler Yeat's "Sailing to Byzantium," where the speaker petitions the heavenly beings to "perne in a gyre," to whirl downward like the thread that whips through bobbin and spool until a movement so swift as to be imperceptible weaves individual filaments into one continuous cord. These heavenly hosts, by contrast, spin and twist, not into seamless unity, but away from oneness and into isolation. What Wordsworth said of modernity Guite says of modernity's engagement with divine revelation: "We murder to dissect."

Nor is any of this the product of "pure reason," passionless science that follows only where the evidence leads. Guite does all the work of unmasking the lie of disinterested scholarship with the single line about, "Our old, embarrassing affair with God." Yes, Christianity, religion of all sorts, arises from a deep emotional yearning; our theology is an "affair." At the same time, rationalism debunks this yearning not because the desire is inherently untrue (How can a desire be "untrue" in that sense?), but because it "embarrasses" (another emotion!) rationalist assumptions.
"And God himself will follow soon enough." Untwist the text that contains sacred revelation and ultimately the Revealed One disappears.

And then the furtive, subversive final stanza: "At night," "tiptoe," "forbidden" - the words conjure the image of a prisoner who sneaks into the open air. "Rustle" appears twice in four lines, and Guite is too good a poet to have done this because no other verb offered itself to his vocabulary. This word, and no other word, here creates the sound and feel rolling and wallowing in slivers of the written words of our ancient faith. "So I'll have a heart-, a head-, a handful" - the narrator stashes scraps of truth like a survivalist who stocks his doomsday bunker with MREs.

And "bunker" is the right word. Because it is a question of "when," not if, "the scissors come for me."  The lion has tasted man's blood. Shears wet with the life of Divinity cannot be stopped from turning on the human hands that wield them. And so the opening lines repeat at the end to sew up the poem. But while grim, the ending is not despairing. Though understated and apologetic, the enduring picture of this poem is the refrigerator raid on the leftovers of revelation and the daring child in his pajamas who pads down dark hallways to feast his fill. If the grownups have starved us with science, perhaps we must indeed come as little children.

The Party's Over: Second Sunday of Advent, Year A, December 8, 2013, Matthew 3.1-12

            In "The Custom House," the introductory chapter to his classic novel The Scarlet Letter, Nathaniel Hawthorne satirizes the career bureaucrats whom he supervised as surveyor of that establishment:

Mighty was their fuss about little matters, and marvellous, sometimes, the obtuseness that allowed greater ones to slip between their fingers! Whenever such a mischance occurred,—when a wagon-load of valuable merchandise had been smuggled ashore, at noonday, perhaps, and directly beneath their unsuspicious noses,—nothing could exceed the vigilance and alacrity with which they proceeded to lock, and double-lock, and secure with tape and sealing-wax, all the avenues of the delinquent vessel. Instead of a reprimand for their previous negligence, the case seemed rather to require an eulogium on their praiseworthy caution, after the mischief had happened; a grateful recognition of the promptitude of their zeal, the moment that there was no longer any remedy!

            Well, he had been fired from his post there and had vowed to take revenge, so perhaps his account is a trifle unkind. Still, who hasn't encountered the kind of bumptious officialdom that only acts when it's too late?

            John the Baptist seems to have taken a Custom House approach to the religious coalition of red- and blue-staters who dropped in to hear him preach. The Pharisees crowded to the Fox News and Tea Party right in both politics and theology. The Sadducees doubtless drove up to John's camp meeting in Volvos (if not Priuses!) that sported NPR bumper stickers. Curiously, John has the identical message for both: He orders the to slither off somewhere else and sell their snake oil. Then, mixing his metaphors to take the congregation on a bullet train to Eden, he tells them to stop eating forbidden fruit and bear the blossoms of real repentance.

            Then comes the Custom House clincher: It's too late to tend the tree after someone chops it down. The flood's coming so best learn now how to live under water. Wildfire's on the way: time to torch your selfish, sinful system so it serves as a firebreak instead of more fuel.

            In Advent, we await the coming of Christ. In retrospect, we relive the birth at Bethlehem and the Baptizer's first proclamation of the Kingdom. But we also harbor the prospect of Our Lord's final return. In either case, there's no more room for sinecured appointees who only heed prophecy after it comes to pass. We can seal the doors once the Spirit has flown or fly to the Spirit when He falls. We can file a police report once the thief has fled or seek Him when he comes in the dead of night.

            Hawthorne lost his government gig largely because the spoils system shut him out when a new party rose to power. The Kingdom of Heaven, however, recognizes only registered Repentants. And once the polls close, there's no point casting one's vote.

Customarily,

Doug