Sunday, April 22, 2012

Agony and Ecstasy

Santa and Mrs. Claus have excellent if slightly morbid taste.  Or maybe they just know me really well.  This past Christmas they gifted me with a collection of poetry edited by Harvard psychiatrist Mark S. Bauer entitled A Mind Apart: Poems of Melancholy, Madness, and Addiction.  I’m not really one to keep my bedside reading light—that last quiet hour of the day is really the best time to look the hard stuff in the eye. 

The collection would of course be incomplete without John Keats’ Ode on Melancholy.  The rest of the collection samples poems from minstrels of melancholy both obvious (like Plath) and overlooked (like Ivor Gurney).  None of the poems are translations, meaning that bardic purveyor of misery par excellence, Giacomo Leopardi, is left out.  This weekend I’ve started a new project of working my way through all of Leopardi’s Canti and was particularly struck with one poem which pairs nicely with the Ode of Keats, La quiete dopo la tempesta.  Both offer a look at the relationship between pain and pleasure.  Both are extraordinarily good.

It’s impossible to overstate the sheer pleasure involved in reading Keats.  Even when discussing sadness his language is lavish to the point of decadence.  It just feels good to say it, to have the words roll around in your mouth and then trip off your tongue.  Only in the action of saying the words do the images begin to make sense.

For the sake of time we’ll forgo the first two stanzas, in which Keats begs the reader not to forget melancholy, and stick to the third and final stanza which is really the crux of the thing.  In an unfair turn Keats gives the eponymous melancholy a female pronoun and Joy a masculine one.  But this sexism achieves his desired effect of creating separate, opposed, but complementary physiognomies.

She dwells with Beauty—Beauty that must die;

And Joy, whose hand is ever at his lips

Bidding adieu; and aching Pleasure nigh,

Turning to poison while the bee-mouth sips;

The line about “Joy", whose hand…” is perfectly quotable.  I’ve pretentiously quoted it at least a half-dozen times since February.  But the fourth line is the real killer.  Here the sensuousness of the verse ironically cuts against the disturbing image—until Keats brings things back in line at the last.  Read the line aloud and you’ll know what I mean. 

The line opens with a nimble alliteration (“Turning to”) which makes you think the unvoiced bilabial (“p”) in “poison” is really not so bad.  It’s all air and teeth and no throat.  The voiced bilabial (“b”) in “bee-mouth” brings it down into your chest at just the moment you’re presented with the cute image of a fuzzy little bee nourishing himself by lapping up sweet nectar.  By the time you realize that he’s taking his last supper you’re on to the “th-si-ps” creepiness of the end of the line.  Here the ophidian hissing sounds link back perfectly to the “s” in “poison.”  The irony is over.  At last the sound of the thing conveys its meaning.  The nectar cannot be consumed to give life—it bites back like an asp to take it.

The rest of the stanza, in typical Keatsian fashion, tackles a few more metaphors to drive his point home.  At first the imagery is devotional (melancholy has its shrine it the “temple of delight”).  Then it’s gustatory. 

Though seen of none save him whose strenuous tongue

Can burst Joy’s grape against his palate fine;

His soul shall taste the sadness of her might,

And be among her cloudy trophies hung.

In other words, the moment you finally reach happiness all you can taste is the bitterness of melancholy.  It’s the very juice beneath the taught skin of the grape.  It’s a sobering thought.  But Keats’ language is completely intoxicating.  He really makes you want to work to be depressed.

Leopardi deals with the same topic, but conveys a completely different sentiment with a completely different set of poetic tools.  Keats says that sadness is always quick at the heals of joy.  For Leopardi, happiness comes as a quick reprieve in the wake of sadness.  Keats gets his point across with discombobulatingly seductive language and imagery.  Leopardi gets his across with comparatively clean and simple language and a sustained metaphor.  Keats’ silver tongue gets you to the heart of the matter.  Leopardi’s patrician restraint calms you, lulls you, convinces you, and then drops the hammer.  Keats makes you want to spend a week in a melancholic haze.  Leopardi convinces you that your are now and forever in the very thick of that melancholic haze.

Leopardi grew up in the country and La quiete, like many of his great poems, draws its metaphorical power from the well of the simple country life.  “Passata รจ la tempesta:” he begins, “the storm has passed,” and the birds are once again singing, the sun is once again shining, and the world emerges from its shelters.  “Ogni cor si rallegra,” “Every heart rejoices” and tradesmen go about their business and whistle their happy tune.  Housekeepers un-shutter the houses and folks are back in their carriages, off to their destinations. 

The scene could be something out of Whitman—the world is abuzz with activity and optimism.  Leopardi asks when one is happier then after a storm has made people “Fredde, tacite, smorte”: “cold, mute, pale.”  That use of what’s called asyndeton (a list without “and”) is typically Leopardian.  It interrupts a longer lyrical thought with a shot of sobriety.  He often contrasts a kind of classical rhetoric with some astringent modernism.  This poem is from 1829, but it reads like something from a century later.

His pessimism his strikingly modern as well.  Unlike his fellow Romantics in England, Leopardi saw no salve for the wounded post-Enlightenment psyche.  No walk in the woods could refresh the soul or calm the nerves.  When, in the last stanza, he incants “O natura cortese” (“Oh kind nature”) you know he’s being supremely ironic.  For Leopardi, the brief reprieve after the storm is a kind of “miracolo talvolta / Nasce d’affanno,” a “miracle sometimes / born of worry.”  He only allows that “sometimes” one can be happy, and even then it’s a kind of super-human event inspired by the realization that a terrifying storm has not robbed one of their life.

By now in the poem it’s clear that Leopardi’s opening gambit is both more and less than what it first seemed.  The “tempesta” is not just an inconvenience for the simple bumpkins of his idyllic town, but a potent metaphor for the random, uncontrollable, and fearsome events that life throws at us.  The happiness that followed is not a renewal—as one might traditionally understand the metaphor—but at best a sense of relief and at worst a blithe ignorance about what has and will again happen.

I’m not sure that Keats ever knew how to end a poem.  His last lines always linger in the ether—I suppose that’s the point.  Leopardi usually gets a bit more didactic.  La quiete is certainly no exception.  Having taken us from bucolic bliss to existential angst he finishes us off with one last sage bit of wisdom, which reads like the epitaph of a cynical Roman senator by way of a particularly heretical reading of the sermon on the mount.  “assai felice / Se respirar ti lice,” he intones, “D’alcun dolor: beata / Se te d’ogni dolor morte risana.”

“Happy enough / if you’re permitted rest / from any pain: blessed if all your pain is cured by death.”