Vesta, vests, and the fallibility of poets

Everyone’s favorite asteroid, Vesta, is taking its apparent retrograde path, across the hind leg of Leo the lion, as we pass nearest to it.

See the end note about enlarging illustrations.

You should be able to find Vesta with binoculars, north of the star Theta Leonis, and then perhaps see it without the binoculars.

Though it was the 4th asteroid discovered, Vesta’s light color and its combination of size and distance make it the only one that becomes visible to the naked eye (in good conditions).  This time it is at magnitude 5.9, which is almost its best.  It was considerably dimmer (6.3) at its last opposition, in November 2019; will be slightly brighter (5.7) next time, in August 2022, but 36° farther south.

Vesta’s opposition (in longitude) was on March 4.  I had hoped to write about it much earlier, but have had a baffling programming problem with the asteroids; suffice it to say that dealing with just one of them at a time is okay.  I know that sounds mysterious; well, it is!

Literary criticism department

Our correspondent Anthony Barreiro wrote to me last July that he had been reading, with his morning tea, one poem a day from Jane Hirshfield’s latest book, Ledger.  He said of Hirshfield’s poetry that “She crafts a beautiful synthesis of clear-eyed observation and deep feeling with a broad appreciation of history, politics, and science, and her use of language is nimble and precise,”, and he recommended a poem called “Vest.”

I followed Anthony’s link to the poem, and said that, as a myth about the pockets of memory, it outdoes Shakespeare’s “When to the sessions of sweet silent though / I summon up remembrance of things past.”  Anthony asked: “What do you have against Sonnet 30?”

This is the sonnet:

When to the sessions of sweet silent thought
I summon up remembrance of things past,
I sigh the lack of many a thing I sought,
And with old woes new wail my dear times’ waste:
Then can I drown an eye, unus’d to flow,
For precious friends hid in death’s dateless night.
And weep afresh love’s long-since cancell’d woe,
And moan the expense of many a vanish’d sight.
Then can I grieve at grievances foregone,
And heavily from woe to woe tell o’er
The sad account of fore-bemoaned moan,
Which I new pay as if not paid before.
But if the while I think on thee, dear friend,
All losses are restor’d, and sorrows end.

The first two lines are superb Shakespearean diction.  But then the poem does more to name than illuminate its emotion.  It uses “weep”, “wail”, “sad”, “loss”, “sorrow” once each, “sigh” and “grieve” twice, “moan” three times, and “woe” four times.  After which, the concluding couplet seems trite: all is gloom, but no, there’s you!

We have the right to find fault even with Shakespeare, and to suggest that the opening lines (sweet silent thought) would better have opened into a mood of the opposite kind: there may be glooms, but in memory there are glories.

The sonnet had been in my head because I had recently decided to memorize it.  I’ve got into a habit of reciting poems to myself (you can do that without moving the lips) while waiting to go to sleep.  That easily diverts the mind from problems of the kind that always seem worse when you’re lying down and can’t do anything about them.  So I had thought: What shall I memorize next?  Everyone knows those two lines, “When to the sessions…” but what follows them?

What follows them was not what I wanted to recite and re-recite.  So, next, I thought of Shelley’s “Ozymandias”.  It, too, is only of sonnet length, and it contains wonderful word-flashes.

I met a traveller from an antique land,
Who said – “Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed;
And on the pedestal, these words appear:
My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings;
Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.”

The discouragement to enjoying “Ozymandias” is one line:

The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed.

How does it fit in?  The “hand” and “heart” seem to be in apposition to some preceding plural noun, “those passions” or “these lifeless things”, but they can’t be.  Perhaps for you the answer instantly clicked?  But it was not obvious to me, nor, apparently, to all scholars.  I asked my friend Geoffrey Jackson, an authority on the Romantic poets, and he said: “A very good question. Why does hardly anyone seem to realise that line 8 is problematic?”

After more staring at the poem, I saw it.  “Survive” is not an intransitive verb but a transitive verb.  The passions are the pharaoh’s feelings of arrogance.  Because of having been stamped into the lifeless stone, they survive, that is, outlive, the sculptor’s hand and the pharaoh’s heart.

The weakness of the wording is that “survive” is liable to be taken the wrong way, because it is separated by the “stamped” phrase from its object, which is the whole of line eight.

The phrase structure of the poem is as deep as a Chinese box puzzle:

The whole poem is a sentence, consisting of a subject, “I”, and a predicate, all the rest.
The predicate consists of a verb, “met”, and its object, all the rest.
The object consists of a noun, “traveller”, qualified by two adjectives: the indefinite article “a” and a relative clause, all the rest.
The relative clause consists of a relative pronoun, “who”, and a verb phrase, all the rest.
The verb phrase consists of a verb, “said”, and its object, all the rest (the block of direct speech, enclosed by quotation marks).
This object consists of five sentences: “Two vast and trunkless legs…”, “Near them on the sand…”, “And on the pedestal…”, “Nothing beside remains”, and “Round the decay…”
The second of these sentences, six and a half lines long, consists of a subject phrase and a predicate.
The subject phrase consists of a noun, “visage”, qualified by “a”, “shattered”, and a relative clause.
The predicate consists of a verb, “lies”, modified by adverbial phrases “Near them”, “on the sand”, and “half sunk”.
The relative clause consists of a subject, “Whose frown, and wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command”, and a predicate, “tell that…”
The predicate consists of a verb, “tell”, and its object, a noun clause.
The noun clause consists of a relative conjunction, “that”, and a clause, the rest.
The clause consists of a subject, “its sculptor”, and a predicate.
The predicate consists of a verb phrase “read well”, and its object, the rest.
The object consists of a noun, “passions”, qualified by “those” and an adjectival clause, “which yet…”
That clause consists of a relative pronoun, “which”, a verb, “survive”, qualified by an adverbial phrase, “stamped on these lifeless things”, and the verb’s two objects: “the hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed [them]”.

How many levels deep is that, about fourteen? I made a hierarchical diagram, though it’s incomplete.

(I’m using S to stand for subject, P for predicate, Q for qualifies, M for modifies.)

A more thorough phrase structure diagram would be the nested-box kind of which I learned from Charles Hockett’s textbook of linguistics: a top box for the whole sentence, boxes underneath divided into subject and predicate, and so on.

An area of the sonnet is – let’s say – mumbled.  If a reader gets an unclear impression and sort of shakes the head and passes on, then rephrasing was needed!  “The heart that fed” was forced by the need to rhyme with “read”.

“Ozymandias” deserves it high reputation, but its memorableness is due to its scattered high points: the first line (a winningly simple way of beginning), and “the sneer of cold command”, and the pharaoh’s “Look on my words, ye mighty, and despair”, with its tremendous double meaning.

The pieces of verse (other than my own) that I can say to myself all the way through are short, such as Scott’s “Young Lochinvar” and all the comic New Zealand songs of Peter Cape – the longest I can recite is a ghazal by the Persian poet Hafiz (who got that title because he was one of those who can recite the whole Quran).  So I set about learning Coleridge’s “Ancient Mariner”, and so far know the first 159 lines of it.

And it, I think, brings out the possible fallibility of poets about each other.  Wordsworth said that his friend’s poem contained “many delicate touches” but had “great defects,” that the metre was “unfit for long poems,” and that the Mariner “does not act, but is continually acted upon.”  On the contrary, the mariner’s killing of the albatross generated everything that followed; the flashes of wording are far above delicate, they have the kind of simple brilliance that makes us laugh with pleasure; and I wouldn’t wish the hurrying metre, or the archaic words, changed: they are ideal for the ballad-world of the Mariner.  Even the oscillation between past and present tenses (“He holds him with his glittering eye; / The Wedding-Guest stood still / And listens like a three years child”) is just right, as is the giving of gender to the sun (“Out of the sea came he”) and not to the albatross (“Thorough the fog it came”).

For me, the only defect in “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” is that Coleridge, beyond calling the Wandering Albatross “sweet bird,” forgot to give it any further descriptive touch.  He drew details from navigators’ accounts of south-seas voyages, he must have known of the twelve-foot wingspan, the ability to sleep aloft while cruising effortlessly for thousands of miles on currents of wind over the polar oceans.

But I don’t enjoy the middle, with the phantom Life-in-Death, and may turn to Browning’s “Pied Piper of Hamelin.”  Maybe in time I’ll become a hafiz, though not of the Quran.

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ILLUSTRATIONS in these posts are made with precision but have to be inserted in another format.  You may be able to enlarge them on your monitor.  One way: right-click, and choose “View image”, then enlarge.  Or choose “Copy image”, then put it on your desktop, then open it.  On an iPad or phone, use the finger gesture that enlarges (spreading with two fingers, or tapping and dragging with three fingers).  Other methods have been suggested, such as dragging the image to the desktop and opening it in other ways.

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