POETS Day! William Empson’s “Aubade”
I went a little long on the poem this week, so I’m shirking the POETS Day intro. I suppose I could claim that I’m taking a POETS Day myself even though I’m writing on a Thursday so it would technically be a POETF Day. I’m not going to dwell on it.
Piss Off Early, Tomorrow’s Saturday. I trust you all to inspire yourselves, to find a reason to get out of works before the man says it’s time to go. Have a good time and enjoy an early weekend.
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“And, if I publish a volume of verse with notes longer than the text, as I want to do, will that be a prose work or a verse one? I ask out of curiosity, you understand…”
– William Empson in a letter to his publisher, c. 1930
William Empson was one of the most respected critics of poetry of the 20th Century. He was also a poet, though when reading commentary on his verse there’s often an unspoken, in some cases spoken but in very polite whispers, understanding that we read his poetry because of his criticism. It’s acknowledged that his poetry is technically brilliant but often spoken of as if he were writing to a formula or a unique talent for spotting errors or flourishes in others worked as a constraint when he composed; proper installation at odds with inspiration or something.
On a visit to Kew Gardens he read about a tree on “a white label attached to it by management.” Per the white label, the tree’s seeds lay dormant until awakened by a forest fire. From that, he wrote:
Note on Local Fauna
There is a tree native in Turkestan,
Or further east towards the Tree of Heaven,
Whose hard cold cones, not being wards to time,
Will leave their mother only for good cause;
Will ripen only in a forest fire;
Wait, to be fathered as was Bacchus once,
Through men’s long lives, that image of time’s end.
I knew the Phoenix was a vegetable.
So Semele desired her diety
As this in Kew thirsts for the Red Dawn.
I don’t think there’s anything staid about it. In fact, I think it’s exploding with energy and all the more impressive because of the technical perfection. It being Empson, few words are wasted. The Complete Poems of William Empson, assembled and edited by his biographer John Haffenden, contains sixty or so poems taking up one hundred and one pages. There are sixty-five pages of introduction, another ten of assorted acknowledgements, chronology, and bibliography, seven appendices totaling twenty-five pages, and then an astounding two-hundred and sixty-six pages of notes explaining the whys in exquisite detail. It’s perfect and Haffenden deserves every turn of fortune – found pennies, good weather on his wedding day, a knife when all he needs is a knife – the universe is willing to throw his way. If you are a fan of poetry dying for a rabbit hole, Haffenden’s your patron saint.
The ten lines of “Note on Local Fauna” are given five and a half pages of notes with quotes from correspondence, reviews, lectures, and notes covering the trip to Kew Gardens, the story of Semele and unleashed Zeus with Bacchus born in her immolation, thoughts about people shocked out of complacency being inert like vegetables until rebirth, Empson’s hope for a communist uprising, and minutia. So much minutia. If it’s unclear, I am a tremendous fan of The Complete Poems of William Empson.
Someone at enotes.com wrote in an analysis of Empson’s poem “Aubade” that “It has been said of Empson’s poetry that it provides the reader with the sensation of feeling sure that the poem is good, both aesthetically and intellectually, without the reader quite knowing what it means.” The analysis wasn’t very good, in fact wrong about some basic things, but that’s a well phrased description of the underlying polite whisper I mentioned.
In his article in the October, 2001 issue of The New Criterion, “The critic as poet: Empson’s contradictions,” Paul Dean writes about a reaction to “The Teasers.” About that poem Empson says in his notes, “I think it was nearly very good, above my level altogether, but I feel its final form is rather a cheat, with a solemn last verse giving a moral which the poem hasn’t earned.”
The Teasers
Not but they die, the teasers and the dreams,
Not but they die,
and tell the careful flood
To give them what they clamour for and why.You could not fancy where they rip to blood,
You could not fancy
nor that mud
I have heard speak that will not cake or dry.Our claims to act appear so small to these,
Our claims to act
colder lunacies
That cheat the love, the moment, the small fact.Make no escape because they flash and die,
Make no escape
build up your love,
Leave what you die for and be safe to die.
From Dean:
“It had an electrifying effect upon a group of A level students with whom I once discussed it. “It shows there can be poetry after Eliot,” one remarked. They were moved by its broken music, its poise and undulating swell (“a beautiful metrical invention,” Empson rightly claimed), even while expressing bafflement as to what it meant.”
Empson was fascinated by multiple meanings, not because they obscure but because they enrich. I’ll bring up Ezra Pound’s hawk again, the idea that you can imbue a hawk with as many meanings as you like so long as it appears, to a reader unaware of its abstraction, as a regular old hawk. “The Teasers” isn’t alone. There are poems in his collected works that are pretty much impenetrable, but most of the entries are accessible to an interested reader and are impressive as presented. You don’t need two-hundred and sixty-six pages of extrapolation, but if you want it…
He was well aware of the dangers slipping towards Byzantine held and knew his penchant for puzzles. He stopped writing poetry after the second world war, putting it down to lack of inspiration but noted, from Dean’s article again, “He told Christopher Ricks in a famous interview, handily reprinted by Haffenden [and so handily reprinted by Dean], “It’s only because I stopped in time that you still think it’s poetry.”
I’ve been reading his most famous critical work, Seven Types of Ambiguity. I’ve set it aside for reasons I’ll explain in a moment, but it seems that to Empson, identifying ambiguity, or as Cleanth Brooks wrote in “William Empson, a tribute” (The New Criterion, September, 1984), “A better term might be multiple implication or even Philip Wheelwright’s jaw-breaking term, plurisignification,” is a step towards understanding. He wanted unknowns to be known unknowns, as Secretary Gates might put it.
Empson took his levels (I love the Britishisms) at Cambridge in mathematics, for which he showed promise, before deciding to study English. One of his new professors or tutors (I’m not up on all the Britishisms) was one of the legendary founders of New Criticism, I.A. Richards. Cleanth Brooks writes about a conversation he had with Richards in “William Empson, a tribute” (The New Criterion, September, 1984),
“On one occasion Richards filled out for me Empson’s account of how he came to write Seven Types of Ambiguity. Empson, having just read A Survey of Modernist Poetry by Laura Riding and Robert Graves, came up to Richards and said that what Riding and Graves had done with Shakespeare’s Sonnet Ninety-four he could do with any other poem. Since thus far Empson had shown himself as no more than a rather aimless and lackadaisical student, Richards replied rather testily: “Then why don’t you do that?” To his utter amazement, in a week or so Empson returned with a bulky manuscript, the fruits of his application of the method to a whole cluster of lyric poems. The manuscript was the core of what was to become Seven Types of Ambiguity.
From that moment, Empson was a made man in Richards’s eyes.”
Until recently I had read very little of Empson, but as I read I became more and more convinced that there’s no way to get a sense of the writer without considering both his criticism and his poetry, which is beyond the scope of this post. I started reading Seven Types of Ambiguity but came across the bit about how he owes inspiration for it to Graves and Rinding’s A Survey of Modernist Poetry – a copy of which has been sitting in the to-read stack since I did one of these on Riding a few weeks ago. Now Ambiguity’s on hold until I finish Survey, but what I did read of Empson’s book was extraordinary. I’ve maintained (unnecessarily as there’s evidence in output) that my approach to this weekly series about poetry is as a fan and in no way academic. I’m having fun reading Empson. Imagine a Beatles fan who can’t play a lick of music sitting down with a pre-murderous Phil Spector to break down why the wall of sound works and how it came about. It’s not really like that but kind of and when I’ve taken a deep enough dive into the criticism I’ll write an Empson POETS Day about his contributions to theory. Right now I’ll focus on one of his better known poems.
An aubade is a song sung at daybreak, usually about lovers going their separate ways before getting caught. Many poets have a poem titled “Aubade.” Philip Larkin’s might be the most famous. In fact I’m surprised that I haven’t come across a letter written by Larkin bragging about how his pops to mind at mention of the word before Shakespeare’s. He could have tried to pick up chicks with a line about that.
After becoming a made man in Richard’s eyes, Empson was kicked out of Cambridge when someone found condoms, or, Dean writes, “as the college gloriously called them, ‘sexual engines’” in his rooms (Britishism.) He bounced around from job to job in England until accepting an opportunity to teach in Japan. His “Aubade” centers around an affair he had with a woman named Haru.
It’s about a couple awakened by an earthquake. Empson could be very funny and his love of multiple meanings was never a secret, leaving Dean to note that it “begins from a shocking submerged parody of the question ‘Did the earth move for you too?’” The quake refers to the Manchurian Incident and he parallels the aftershock the couple anticipates to the possibility of war between Japan and the England among other things. In the notes there’s a quote from Empson: “If you were a young Englishman coming to teach in Japan in the early 1930s, the wise old Englishman, leader of the colony, would at once tell you, ‘Don’t marry a Japanese lady, because the two countries will be at war within ten years.’”
The structure is one five line stanza with an aabab rhyme paired with a three line one with cbc repeated four times, each iteration getting a new rhyme for the a but keeping b and c the same throughout and then followed by two five line stanzas of ggbgb and hhbhb, all in iambic pentameter with an odd syllable here and there. The poem rests on multiple meanings of the refrain “The heart of standing is you cannot fly.”
The couple is lying in bed wondering what to do if there is another quake, what should become of their relationship, and what will happen if war comes. Probably more, but that’s my amateur reading (assisted by seven pages of notes.)
The themes echo throughout, but I’m fond of the second pair of five-three line stazas so I’ll focus on it here.
It seemed quite safe till she got up and dressed.
The guarded tourist makes the guide the test.
Then I said The Garden? Laughing she said No.
Taxi for her and for me healthy rest.
It seemed the best thing to be up and go.The language problem but you have to try.
Some solid ground for lying could she show?
The heart of standing is you cannot fly.
The couple are comfortable in indecision. The quake didn’t get them the first go around so maybe they shouldn’t get out of bed. They are comfortable in their clandestine encounters so maybe there’s no need to establish the terms of their relationship. Maybe if they ignore it, the war won’t come. But she rises.
There was a debate about what to do in case of an earthquake. A house might collapse, but apparently falling roof tiles were a more likely danger if you couldn’t get far enough away from a structure. Should they take their affair into the light of day, maybe get married? Do they stay in Japan where the fighting was likely to be, or flee to England?
Standing in an earthquake is insufficient, standing for marriage means they are bound to that decision, and standing for their country means they are separated from each other. In no case can they fly away.
I love the wordplay in “Some solid ground for lying.” Maybe they can make up something, find a basis for some story that gets them out of what’s coming.
Aubades are often about adultery and because of the lines “The thing was that being woken he would bawl / And finding her not in earshot he would know,” it is assumed that Empson’s poem is as well, but that’s not the case. Haru was a nursemaid and the line is about the child she’s charged with. They aren’t cheating on anybody, but their nights together would still cause scandal if discovered.
Haru and Empson broke up. There are a few notes about them meeting up in England and corresponding intermittently but they went on to marry others. Another five-three line stanza pair was included in the poem’s initial publication in Life and Letters Today but excluded from subsequent printings by request of the author. Its placement was last in sequence of paired stanzas and right before the line “Tell me more quickly what I lost by this.”
This is unjust to her without a prose book.
A lyric from a fact is bound to cook.
It was more grinding; it was much more slow.
But still the point’s not how much time it took.
It seemed the best thing to be up and go.I do not know what forces made it die.
With what black life it may yet work below.
The heart of standing is you cannot fly.
Haffenden suggests several reasons he withdrew the lines. “Perhaps,” he writes, “because the references to ‘grinding’ and ‘black life’ seemed to suggest that she had become bitter or even simply, self-humiliatingly clinging.” Maybe in light of their post breakup relationship Empson felt the lines were cruel to her.
The poem is below. If I haven’t made it apparent, this one knocked me out and I’m hoping for similar reactions.
One aside, three articles I read about Empson included the word “gnomic.” That’s odd. I’m assuming that there’s an Ur-article about the poet/critic that informed the others because it’s not an esoteric word but it’s not everyday either. I just wanted to be sure and include it in my post so I was in communion with the Empson commentariat. Gnomic.
Aubade
William Empson (1906-1984)Hours before dawn we were woken by the quake.
My house was on a cliff. The thing could take
Bookloads off shelves, break bottles in a row.
Then the long pause and then the bigger shake.
It seemed the best thing to be up and go.And far too large for my feet to step by.
I hoped that various buildings were brought low.
The heart of standing is you cannot fly.It seemed quite safe till she got up and dressed.
The guarded tourist makes the guide the test.
Then I said The Garden? Laughing she said No.
Taxi for her and for me healthy rest.
It seemed the best thing to be up and go.The language problem but you have to try.
Some solid ground for lying could she show?
The heart of standing is you cannot fly.None of these deaths were her point at all.
The thing was that being woken he would bawl
And finding her not in earshot he would know.
I tried saying half an hour to pay this call.
It seemed the best thing to be up and go.I slept, and blank as that I would yet lie.
Till you have seen what a threat holds below,
The heart of standing is you cannot fly.Tell me again about Europe and her pains,
Who’s tortured by the drought, who by the rains.
Glut me with floods where only the swine can row
Who cuts his throat and let him count his gains.
It seemed the best thing to be up and go.A bedshift flight to Far Eastern sky.
Only the same war on a stronger toe.
The heart of standing is you cannot fly.Tell me more quickly what I lost by this,
Or tell me with less drama what they miss
Who call no die a god for a good throw,
Who say after two aliens and one kiss
It seemed the best thing to be up and go.But as to risings, I can tell you why.
It is on contradiction that they grow.
It seemed the best thing to be up and go.
Up was the heartening and strong reply.
The heart of standing is we cannot fly.
