The TLS at the Chelsea Flower Show

Briefly to the Chelsea Flower Show: where I had learnt that there was a ‘literary garden’.

There was a picture of it in the office when I was picking illustrations for the TLS this week.

Every other newspaper seemed to have its own garden at Chelsea.

So why not the TLS? We could adopt a garden It would need only to be a small one.

Not, I think, however, this literary garden - despite its

Cornus Kousa tree called ‘China Girl’ and geraniums called ‘Jolly Bee’.

The lettering on wood and slate was magnificent; the literary was not.

But then I thought of the arguments that we would have to have at the TLS about what words would be most truly  worth the skills of master carver, Martin Cook.

 Donne vs Dryden. Shelley vs Shakespeare. Our own poets vs each other.

Enough, enough. No sponsored horticulture for us.

Time to move on — to the ‘show gardens’, larger constructions sponsored by DIY chains as well as newspapers, financial power-houses and northern cities where water was once the important source of power.

Crowds gathered five deep around a ‘gold medal winner’ based, it was said, on Roman ruins in a city of eastern Libya, one now judged to be in the good part of that benighted country. No one seemed to know why they were looking so keenly. The relationship to Ptolemais was not as evident as I had hoped. The beauty was said by some to be something to do with parsnips.

Inside the main tent there were flowers shown without the assistance of human invention. There were walls of daffodils, squares of grasses, bamboo groves, parade grounds of delphiniums and lupins,; and there was a bright giant lily called Nuance (surely an irony that would have graced a truly literary garden) whose bulbs were for sale at £5 for three (from www.hartsnursery.co.uk). Two packs have come home here tonight.

Maybe they will produce their pink-striped bigger-than-any-lily-I-have-ever-seen blooms in Primrose Hill as well as Chelsea. More likely they will not.

It is an axiom hard to deny that gardening is all about hopes and dreams. The greatest proof of visitors’ rejection of gardening reality was the sight today of all the lawn-mower sellers, keen men in brazen sun glasses, keen women in black pencil skirts, all of them ready to sell cutters of grass at unrepeatable cut prices, all of them reminders of gardening as it is, all of them avoided like blight.

 

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[Clayton Burns]

On the subject of the Chelsea Flower Show:

In "Emily's Lists," Jeannie Vanasco (New Yorker, New York Times), TLS May 13, devotes her first column to a summary of Helen Vendler's commentary on "I felt a Funeral, in my Brain." Vendler, unlike Harold Bloom in his recent "The Anatomy of Influence," makes close contact with Dickinson's texts. (I especially recommend Dickinson's poems 165, 238, 320, 340, 372, 407, 479, 591, 729, 764, 796, and 1096 from Vendler.) This TLS issue has just arrived in Vancouver.

Interestingly, Vendler focuses on "hysteria" in Dickinson's speakers. (A good Vendler course at Harvard would be "hysteria" in Eve, "Paradise Lost," Book IX, in Lady Macbeth, in Emily Dickinson's speakers, in James's Governess in "The Turn of the Screw," in Freud's Dora ("Shorn of a 'Freudian' reading"[?]--Vendler, 512), and in Blanche DuBois in "A Streetcar Named Desire." (Arthur Miller's introduction: "Two highly-touted productions which I saw shared a failure to embrace the language, striving for an off-the-shoulder kind of naturalism suited to television but not the stage and not this play with its foundation in joyfully enunciated speech. In one production the famous movie star playing Blanche DuBois could barely be heard at all...".)

Sensitivity to language in English lyric poetry is best taught through Dickinson, Shakespeare, and Keats. The microtext in Vendler's commentary on "I felt a Funeral" needs refining--even if Vanasco passed up questioning the fundamentals of her comments.

What is striking is that we still lack a descriptive vocabulary for the microtexts of lyric poetry. For example, vowel gradation or alternations as a principle of cohesion. Dickinson style. At the end of Vendler's commentary: "If Dickinson had not made the meter so insistently percussive, we would not 'feel' the Funeral she 'felt.'"

Unconsciously, Vendler thus alluded to the sharpening of coherence in the poem: just as in irregular verbs (bleed, bled; sleep, slept) and in word formation (discreet, discretion; redeem, redemption), there is pervasive vowel gradation in "I felt a Funeral:" "felt," "Kept," "treading," "treading," "seemed," "Sense," "when," "seated," "Kept," "beating," "beating," "creak," "Lead," "Heavens," "Bell," "Being," "Ear," "Wrecked," "here," "then," "Reason," "then."

Vowel alternations on "e" are especially powerful in Shakespeare's sonnets ((and in Frost's "After Apple-Picking"). If we were to hear echoes of "Cathedral Tunes" (as in "There's a certain Slant of light" (320) in "I felt a Funeral," we would have to account for the lyric music not only with the specifics of vowel patterning, but also chiasmus.

And then I heard them lift a Box
And creak across my Soul
With those same Boots of Lead, again,
Then Space--began to toll,

The paraphonic patterns of "l" and "b" in "I felt a Funeral, in my Brain," and in "Kept beating--beating--till I thought" (as in Keats's "some dull opiate" and "some melodious plot") foreshadow "lift a Box," reversed in "Boots of Lead" and in "began to toll." This is chiasmus in the Service of an idea: "My mind was going numb--."

As all the Heavens were a Bell,
And Being, but an Ear,

"Bell" synthesizes the above two paraphonic elements, and sets up the harrowing parallel: "Being...an Ear."

"The Fall of the House of Usher" contains some of the same suggestive "Gothic" sound patterning, although it is less decisive. Poems 238, 372, 407, and 1096 in Vendler are valuable for comparison. (Also "A Whiter Shade of Pale," and its "paraphrase:" "Beware the Ides of March").