Typical. Just recently after deciding to curtail my spending on comic books, I get sucked back into reading them again. V for Vendetta is done and dusted, and I’m currently working through Watchmen. Alan Moore is a genius. Both are fantastic stories with grand scope and a great mixing pot of references. It must me the geek in me but I’ve always been a stickler for metatextuality in fiction; there’s just something really satisfying about seeing a writer use a great quotation (as an old English teacher of mine used to tell us, repeatedly, calling them “quotes” is WRONG), particularly fantasy writers, for some reason. Neil Gaiman and Philip Pullman are two who I can think of that do it very well, and I can now add Alan Moore to my list. I feel that good references serve as a way of grounding a work of fiction, particularly fantasy, in our own world. Plus, it can also lead to some great discoveries of poets, books, singers etc. that the reader would otherwise never have come across.
The Shelfquest continues. I’ve been reading a fair bit of poetry recently as well, from a massive anthology of Romantic poetry that was one of the core texts for a module I did at uni. I’ve decided to be brave and try and read as much of it as I can, rather than just cherry-picking certain poets, and it’s lead to some pleasant discoveries so far. The revolutionary energy of the Romantics is one of the most appealing things about them, and it has been picked up on by the fantasy writers I mentioned: both Pullman and Moore refer to, among others, Shelley, Coleridge and Blake in their work.
I feel very cultured right now. Who knows, maybe some of that revolutionary energy will rub off on me. For now, I’ve been scavenging away, magpie-like, for pretty chains of words, and here are some I’d like to share. In some cases I’ve just included the names of poems, which I’ve indicated with a [*].
William Cowper:
*Crazy Kate
(A great little story with a killer ending: “Kate is crazed.”)
“There is no flesh in man’s obdurate heart -
It does not feel for man.”
- On Slavery
Thomas Paine:
“Society is produced by our wants, and governments by our wickedness; the former promotes our happiness positively by uniting our affections, the latter negatively by restraining our vices. The once encourages intercourse, the other creates distinctions. The first is a patron, the last a punisher.”
- Common Sense
Anna Laetitia Barbauld:
“‘Tis passed! – the sultry tyrant of the south
Has spent his short-lived rage.”
- A Summer Evening’s Meditation
(I love this description of sunset)
“Still the loud death drum, thundering from afar,
O’er the vexed nations pours the storm of war.”
- Eighteen Hundred and Eleven
“But who in their mingled feelings shall pursue
When London’s faded glories rise to view?
The mighty city, which by every road,
In floods of people poured itself abroad;
Ungirt by walls, irregularly great,
No jealous drawbridge, and no closing gate;
Whose merchants (such the state which commerce brings)
Sent forth their mandates to dependent kings;
Streets, where the turbaned Moslem, bearded Jew,
And woolly Afric, meet the brown Hindu;
Where through each vein spontaneous plenty flowed,
Where Wealth enjoyed, and Charity bestowed.”
- Eighteen Hundred and Eleven
(Wow, it all sounds so wonderful!)
“There walks a spirit o’er the peopled earth -
Secret is his progress unknown his birth.”
-Eighteen Hundred and Eleven
“But fairest flowers expand but to decay;
The worm is in thy core, thy glories pass away;
Arts, arms and wealth destroy the fruits they bring;
Commerce, like beauty, knows no second spring.
Crime walks thy streets, Fraud earns her unblessed bread,
O’er want and woe thy gorgeous robe is spread,
And angel charities in vain oppose:
With grandeur’s growth the mass of misery grows.”
- Eighteen Hundred and Eleven
(There we are, a bit more like the London you get on the front pages.)
Hannah More:
“O great design!
Ye sons of mercy! Oh complete your work;
Wrench from Oppression’s hand the iron rod,
And bid the cruel feel the pains they give.”
- Misquoting from Thomson’s Liberty
*The Story of Sinful Sally
(A bit like a nursery rhyme, this. It’s didactic and I’m not sure I’d agree with the moral, but it’s a great story nonetheless.)
Charlotte Smith:
“So round the flame the giddy insect flies,
And courts the fatal fire by which it dies.”
- Elegaic Sonnets
*Beachy Head
George Crabbe:
“‘Still there they stood, and forced me to behold
A place of horrors — they cannot be told:
Where the flood opened, there I heard the shriek
Of tortured guilt no earthly tongue can speak:
“All days alike! for ever!” did they say,
“And unremitted torments every day!”
Yes, so they said…’
But here he ceased and gazed
On all around, frightened and amazed;
And still he tried to speak, and looked in dread
Of frightened females gathering round his bed;
Then dropped exhausted and appeared at rest,
Till the strong foe the vital powers possessed;
Then with an inward, broken voice he cried,
‘Again they come!’ and muttered as he died.
- Peter Grimes
William Blake:
“The voice of one crying in the wilderness.”
- All Religions Are One
(Blake is here clearly talking about a monkey)
*The Sick Rose
*The Angel
*The Tyger
*London
*A Divine Image
“Children of the future Age,
Reading this indignant page,
Know that in a former time
Love! sweet Love! was thought a crime.”
- A Little Girl Lost
“Now is the dominion of Edom.”
- The Marriage of Heaven and Hell
(Means a time of revolution, ‘pparently.)
*The Proverbs of Hell
(A mate and I tried writing our own Proverbs of Hells whenever we were sitting next to each and got bored in lectures. We got down about five.)
“Spurning the clouds written with curses, stamps the stony law to dust, loosing the eternal horses from the dens of night, crying, ‘Empire is no more! And now the lion and wolf shall cease.”
- A Song of Liberty
“Ask the blind worm the secrets of the grave, and why her spires
Love to curl round the bones of death; and as the rav’nous snake
Where she gets poison; and the winged eagle why he loves the sun -
And then tell me the thoughts of man that have been hid of old.”
-Visions of the Daughters of Albion
“Does not the worm erect a pillar in the mouldering churchyard,
And a palace of eternity on the jaws of the hungry grave?
Over his porch these words are written: ‘Take thy bliss O Man!
And sweet shall be thy taste, and sweet thy infant joys renew!’”
-Visions of the Daughters of Albion
“The Daughters of Albion hear her woes, and echo back her sighs.”
-Visions of the Daughters of Albion
*The First Book of Urizen
*The Mental Traveller
*The Crystal Cabinet
*Jerusalem (referenced in V for Vendetta).
Mary Robinson:
“Who has not waked to list the busy sounds
Of summer morning in the sultry smoke
Of noisy London?”
- A London Summer Morning
“Full thirty years his task has been,
Day after day more weary;
For Heaven designed his guilty mind
Should feed on prospects dreary.
Bound by a strong and mystic chain,
He has no pow’r to stray,
But destined mis’ry to sustain,
He wastes, in solitude and pain,
A loathsome life away.”
- The Haunted Beach
Assorted references to other stuff:
(these are from footnotes to the main poems, but I liked them any way).
“For the Lord thy God is a consuming fire, even a jealous God.”
Deuteronomy 4:24
(another footnote, not Blake)
“Rage on, ye winds, burst clouds, and waters roar!
You bear a just resemblance of my fortune,
And suit the gloomy habit of my soul.”
- Edward Young, The Revenge
(Reminds me of King Lear: “Blow winds, and crack your cheeks!”)
Wow. That was longer than I thought. Next up in the anthology are a couple of the big guns: Wordsworth and Coleridge.
