A rare political comment

So we just had a spate of recent stories about Haiti and how bad things have gotten there. Good stuff that people should care I suppose. That's what we always tell ourselves isn't it? That it's really important to care?

But nowhere in the coverage did I see any admission of what should be an undeniable political fact now. That is that charity didn't work. A huge outpouring of western concern and huge pile of political donations didn't help at all.

Which wouldn't surprise anyone who knows the history of the place. Haiti was a disaster before the earthquake.

You can actually see the problem from space: look at satellite shots of Haiti and you can see that it is all brown while then neighbouring and relatively more prosperous Dominican Republic is green. The earthquake didn't cause Haiti's problems it just made the world aware of them. And no amount of aid is going to change things.

Charity used to mean a kind of love. Now it means caring and donating.

The short version ...

... of my last post would be this: one of our most sinful instincts is self dramatization.

It seems relatively harmless because each moment of self dramatization seems like relatively small beer when it happens. But each time we do, we entrench habits that sprawl out and effect others.

We get encouraged to do this sort of thing at every turn in our society.

Even Christians do it when we imagine ourselves to be fighting God's battles for him when all we are really doing is trying to lend some sense of importance to our lives.

Sprawling habits

Three incidents today got me thinking about civility.

The first was at mass. There were maybe a hundred and fifty people in attendance for the 8 AM service. At the Basilica, we receive at the rail and there were enough people present to make a line up waiting for places at the rail.

Ahead of me was a woman who obviously thinks of herself as devout. She was wearing a mantilla. After receiving, she remained at the rail on her knees, actively praying, she remained so long that the priest came back the other way and she had to break her routine to wave him off as he had no idea she had already received and was ready to present her with a second host.

And routine it was. She obviously has a whole series of prayers and devotions she goes through every time she goes to the rail to receive the Eucharist.

When she finished she stepped back and genuflected.

When it was time to leave the church afterward, she caused another line up because she insisted on stopping in front of the crucifix and prostrating herself on the floor.

As I say, she must think of herself as devout but she is, in fact, a selfish, inconsiderate and thoughtless person who doesn't have a clue about the Gospel.

And then I got on the bus and there was this guy who sat in a seat and sprawled so he blocked passage to the seats behind him. But it wasn't just his sitting style that involved sprawling. He spoke to his a guy across the aisle—this guy being sprawled so much that he managed to block the aisle and make it impossible for anyone else to sit in the seat beside him—and he spoke so loudly that everyone in the bus got to follow along.

The final incident took place walking to the bus stop on the way home. Three young men‚in their twenties—were standing in front of a storefront sharing a drink out of the same paper cup. At some point one guy didn't like something the other had said and he swung his hand violently and knocked the cup out of the other guy's hand.

This was right downtown and the sidewalk was packed with people. The contents hit at least a dozen people but I got the brunt of it. Whisky! In the face! Before breakfast!

These people all had something in common. They have a way of living, habits they have let develop over their lives, that sprawl all over the place and cause discomfort and suffering for others. And part of what was driving this in all three cases was a desperate need for recognition. They need other people to see them and notice them.

And then I got on the bus home. And I smell like a distillery. And I have this growing need to start a conversation. I want someone, anyone, to say something to me so I can tell my story and tell it loud enough so that everyone on the bus can hear and so they won't think I'm a drunken businessman who had whiskey for breakfast.

Suddenly, I had my own desperate need for recognition.

I didn't though. I sat there with my head down, my knees and shoulders hunched so there would be lots of room for the person beside me on the bus seat.

Book recommendation and Friday business

If you are at all interested in Saint Agnes and the role of her cult role in history and culture (and that role is considerable), I can highly recommend a book by Margaret Visser called The Geometry of Love. I don't give a link as this site is not monetized so I have no financial interest in directing you to any particular seller. It is still in print and available at the usual vendors. And check your local library as well.

It's a book about a church—Saint Agnes Without the Walls in Rome—but it includes a simply fascinating account of culture, history and theology behind Agnes. If you read it, I guarantee you will come away learning something that will enrich your life.

Today is also the day of my pastoral visit so not much blogging this morning anyway.

The person I visit is awaiting a test result that could mean the difference between life and death. There are. of course, many things to pray about in this world but if you have a prayer to spare, it would certainly not go amiss.

Three prayers

For no reason other than that I want to, I put the three prayers—meaning people who are praying rather than the prayers they said—below.

There are only five certifiably quick beings in this poem: in order of appearance they are the Beadsman, Madeline, Porphyro, Angela and "the wakeful bloodhound". Three of these kneel to pray.

First the Beadsman,

Numb were the Beadsman’s fingers, while he told
His rosary, and while his frosted breath,
Like pious incense from a censer old,
Seem’d taking flight for heaven, without a death,
Past the sweet Virgin’s picture, while his prayer he saith.
II.   His prayer he saith, this patient, holy man;
Then takes his lamp, and riseth from his knees,

Then Madeline,

As down she knelt for heaven’s grace and boon;
Rose-bloom fell on her hands, together prest,
And on her silver cross soft amethyst,
And on her hair a glory, like a saint:
She seem’d a splendid angel, newly drest,
Save wings, for heaven:—Porphyro grew faint:
She knelt, so pure a thing, so free from mortal taint.

And then Porphyro

Upon his knees he sank, pale as smooth-sculptured stone.
XXXIV.   Her eyes were open, but she still beheld,
Now wide awake, the vision of her sleep:
There was a painful change, that nigh expell’d
The blisses of her dream so pure and deep
At which fair Madeline began to weep,
And moan forth witless words with many a sigh;
While still her gaze on Porphyro would keep;
Who knelt, with joined hands and piteous eye,
Fearing to move or speak, she look’d so dreamingly.

What's my point? I don't have any. I just think it fascinating that these three kneel and clasp their hands. There is a progression of sorts from the Beadsman who before the sweet Virgin Upper case and definite article, to Porphyro who kneels before a sweet virgin, lowercase indefinite article. This move from caritas to eros is a fairly common move in Provençal troubadour lyrics so it is nothing new or radical for Keats to do likewise. It's just neat and that is the only reason I mention it.

It is Saint Agnes Eve now. And bitter cold it is where I am. It is minus 15 centigrade or five degrees Fahrenheit, clear and cold. We have no owl but we did have a Sharp-shinned hawk chase some poor sparrow into the cedar bushes beside our feeder today. The hawk flew out the other side so I couldn't tell if the he will be keeping warm on sparrow calories tonight or not.

Anyway, sweet dreams all.

Reading The Eve of Saint Agnes

Faeries!
The good professor over at CUNY suggests that perhaps Madeline is hoodwinked by Porphyro and her superstitions. And, for good measure, she tosses in a  suggestion that Keats may have chosen his characters names with intended irony. Madeline, of course, is a form of Magdalen who was historically believed to have been a reformed prostitute saved by Jesus. And of Porphyro, she says

His namesake, the historical Porphyro, was an active enemy of Christianity in the third century.

And thus this rationalist Porphyro might be a sort of Antichrist achieving an overthrow of religion by fooling Madeline into giving him her virginity and then fleeing with her to a marriage meant to be a parody of the marriage of Christ and his church.  Maybe.  Porphyry was an exponent of rationalism over superstition and he did indeed write a work called Against the Christians.

We should not forget, however, that Porphyro's name might just as easily derive from Porphyrion, who was one of the Giants who fought with the Olympian gods. Porphyrion is particularly interesting in that he tore Hera's clothing off and meant to rape her only Zeus and Hercules double-teamed him and saved her. It is just as easy to draw parallels between that character as it is with Porphyry.

But the bigger challenge is on the other side of the ledger. What are we to make of Madeline and does Keats mean to sneer at her?

And we should remember that Keats is recently engaged when he writes this poem. We can over-read autobiography but it would be odd for Keats to set about mocking Madeline given his own recent experience. And the concerns that Porphyro might be disqualified from marriage to Madeline because he is dying had echoes that were all to clear for poor Keats.

And while it may seem that Madeline's beliefs in superstition are meant to be laughed at, they could just as easily be a stand in for Keats own beliefs about imagination. Consider this from his letter to Benjamin Bailey of November 22, 1817:

I am certain of nothing but of the holiness of the Heart's affections and the truth of Imagination - What the imagination seizes as Beauty must be truth - whether it existed before or not - for I have the same idea of all our passions as of love: they are all, in their sublime, creative of essential beauty.

And this from a little later in the same letter:

The imagination may be compared to Adam's dream, - he awoke and found it truth. 

Adam's dream would have taken place when God put him to sleep to create Eve! If anything, Madeline, is the character who most directly embodies Keats own beliefs in the poem: she awoke and found her dream to be truth. (Although we must acknowledge again that, despite Keats' supreme virtues as a poet, no one would call him a deep and profound thinker for stuff like the above.)

Mixed feelings about fairies
Keats was, of course, a huge fan of Spenser's The Faerie Queen in which events in a magical world are an allegory for the real world. When Spenser compares Elizabeth I to a Faerie Queen he means this as a compliment. And The Faerie Queen includes an interesting sequence in which Britomart, a female knight who embodies chastity, falls in love with Arthegall, a male knight embodying human justice, when she sees his image in a magic mirror. Arthegall is freed, by her, from a harsh Draconian justice so that he may be more humane (a familiar theme we see also in Portia in The Merchant of Venice).

At the same time, however, the image of the world of fairies had become by Keats' time a powerful metaphor for the Catholic church and was regularly used by rationalists to mock her. There are hundreds of examples I could cite here but I'm going to go for the gold here and quote one of the most beautiful bits of prose ever cranked out in the English language:

For, from the time that the Bishop of Rome had gotten to be acknowledged for bishop universal, by pretence of succession to St. Peter, their whole hierarchy, or kingdom of darkness, may be compared not unfitly to the kingdom of fairies; that is, to the old wives' fables in England concerning ghosts and spirits, and the feats they play in the night. And if a man consider the original of this great ecclesiastical dominion, he will easily perceive that the papacy is no other than the ghost of the deceased Roman Empire, sitting crowned upon the grave thereof: for so did the papacy start up on a sudden out of the ruins of that heathen power.

That is Thomas Hobbes*  from Leviathan.

And therein lies the whole problem of the English Romantic Catholic tradition. On the one hand, the enlightened English thinkers had attacked and, in their opinion, demolished the silly superstitions of Catholicism and the papacy and old wives' tales about fairies and elves. On the other hand, England was forever haunted by these things in places such as Tintern Abbey or in great works of art such as, to pick only one, A Midsummer Night's Dream.

The final thought on the subject is this: Keats seems rather enthralled by this superstition.  Here is a rather longish bit from John Aubrey's Miscellanies in which he reports on the superstition regarding Saint Agnes Eve and several other related superstitions:

The women have several magical secrets handed down to them by tradition, for this purpose, as, on St. Agnes' night, 21st day of Jannary, take a row of pins, and pull out every one, one after another, saying a Pater Noster, or (Our Father) sticking a pin in your sleeve, and you will dream of him, or her, you shall marry. Ben Jonson in one of his Masques make some mention of this.

      And on sweet Saint Agnes night
      Please you with the promis'd sight,
      Some of husbands, some of lovers,
      Which an empty dream discovers,

Another. To know whom one shall marry.

You must lie in another county, and knit the left garter about the right legged stocking (let the other garter and stocking alone) and as you rehearse these following verses, at every comma, knit a knot.

      This knot I knit,
      To know the thing, I know not yet,
      That I may see,
      The man (woman) that shall my husband (wife) be,
      How he goes, and what he wears,
      And what he does, all days, and years.

Accordingly in your dream you will see him: if a musician, with a lute or other instrument; if a scholar, with a book or papers.

Is this Keats' source? If so, he has taken liberties here by mixing in all sorts of stuff together to create a new superstition of his own. More tellingly, he has really sexed the thing up. Aubrey says nothing of getting into bed naked without looking back and laying there supine.

I think the right conclusion here is that the world of Catholicism had become, by Keats time, an enthralling thing. Keats does not seem to have been a religious man and we have no reason to believe him interested in promoting any side of religious controversy. But he was attracted, as would be many others, to the richness and beauty of the tradition. In a sense, the very things that made Catholicism seem dangerous to the English—intrigue, ritual, magic, smells and spells—has now become the thing that pulls in young Romantic rebels like Keats.




*If I remember correctly, Hobbes is playing with fire here because that second sentence is a deliberate parody of a sentence from the Bible. I don't have the time to look it up this morning however. I may come back to this later.

Reading The Eve of Saint Agnes

Where is this sex act?
A whole lot of how we understand this poem depends on how we read stanzas 35 and 36. In stanza 35 Madeline, who has been dreaming of Porphyro, sees him beside her bed and is jolted by how pale, chill and unhappy he looks. The entire stanza is her reported speech. She seems to be not fully aware that this is the real guy as opposed to her dream.

“Ah, Porphyro!” said she, “but even now
“Thy voice was at sweet tremble in mine ear,
“Made tuneable with every sweetest vow;
“And those sad eyes were spiritual and clear:
“How chang’d thou art! how pallid, chill, and drear!
“Give me that voice again, my Porphyro,
“Those looks immortal, those complainings dear!
“Oh leave me not in this eternal woe,
“For if thou diest, my Love, I know not where to go.”

Jolted by the bloodless appearance of the man who is the real Porphyro as opposed to the more lively dreamed version, she imagines he might be dying. Not surprisingly, Porphyro's move in Stanza 36 is to show her he really is alive. But what exactly does he do here?

Beyond a mortal man impassion’d far
At these voluptuous accents, he arose,
Ethereal, flush’d, and like a throbbing star
Seen mid the sapphire heaven’s deep repose;
Into her dream he melted, as the rose
Blendeth its odour with the violet,—
Solution sweet: meantime the frost-wind blows
Like Love’s alarum pattering the sharp sleet
Against the window-panes; St. Agnes’ moon hath set.

Just about every interpreter I have ever read sees sex happening here; sees the image of the rose blending its odour with the violet as signifying the penetration of Madeline. Solution sweet! And the last sentence, "St. Agnes' moon hath set", seems to seal the deal. But what is being solved?

Let's forget about poetry for a while and consider this purely in terms of what we know about human beings. This is not a realistic poem so it doesn't have to follow the rules but let's ask, separate from that, "Is this plausible?" In the very next stanza, Porphyro tells Madeline that this is no dream. If he has penetrated her, can we credibly imagine that she doesn't realize what has happened? Has Porphyro fed her the date rape drug?

Okay, but I have already admitted that the poem is a romantic fantasy so it doesn't need to follow the rules. But if we read it that way, meaning we read him as deflowering her while she is still unconscious and unable to consent, I think it loses it's power.

Voyeurism
To return to the poem, I think one of the most important things about it is that it's a very voyeuristic bit of writing. I find it odd that more people aren't troubled by Porphyro watching Madeline get naked before getting into bed and by old Angela helping him. For even if Angela really believes that Porphyro has not intention of taking advantage of Madeline in any other way, she has to know that the girl will get undressed on her way to bed and that Porphyro will see this.

It's also voyeuristic in another sense in that it makes us a party of the voyeurism. In some ways it gives us lots of detail. the carvings, the food, the dress, the colours the stained glass casts on her skin (remind me to tell you something funny about that later) are all described so we can imagine them. They are described so well that the Pre-Raphaelites were inspired to paint them. At the same time, however, the poem is voyeuristic in that it helpfully gets rid of any distracting details. The house is full of other people but "These let us wish away". After that we only get the possible menace of their breaking in as described by Angela or by the sound of the music that might wake Madeline.

The whole thing moves the way a suspenseful movie uses voyeurism. We are with Porphyro always. When Angela leaves him to set things up, we stay with him and cheer for him in the same way we cheer for a jewel thief breaking into the suite where the rich and beautiful woman sleeps with her jewels at a hotel on the Riviera. We get sucked into the lead character's perspective and don't question the legitimacy of his motives.

Momentous acts
We know for certain that sex does happen at some point, by the way, because of the publication history of the poem. Keats had originally been more explicit but was dissuaded from this by his publishers who thought, certainly correctly, that it would destroy his career were he to do so. To my mind, however, that is all the more reason to conclude that stanza 36 does not depict sex. It is complete of itself and there is no sense of anything removed or changed.

To read sex into this stanza we'd have to read the long em dash in the last half of the stanza as taking the place of the sex act and the description of the sleet on the window in the same way that the camera used to pan away to a waterfall in old movies as the couple really got down to business.

Into her dream he melted, as the rose

Blendeth its odour with the violet,—

Solution sweet: meantime the frost-wind blows

Like Love’s alarum pattering the sharp sleet

Against the window-panes; St. Agnes’ moon hath set.

But, to return to plain psychological terms, we then have to believe that Keats, a medical doctor by training, would seriously believe that Madeline, her hymen now torn, needs to be told she is not dreaming afterward.

It also doesn't fit with the style of Keats' narrative. Every momentous act has been accorded its full due up until now. Think of how Keats lingers on Madeline's undressing and how much significance is accorded the moment when Porphyro, peering through her bed curtains, presses his arm into her pillow back in stanza 32.

Thus whispering, his warm, unnerved arm
Sank in her pillow. Shaded was her dream
By the dusk curtains:—’twas a midnight charm
Impossible to melt as iced stream:

The act of actually getting into Madeline's bed is of immense significance and I'm certain that is all that happens in Stanza 36.

Roses and violets and Greek and Gothic
If this were Shakespeare, we would worry a whole lot about the significance of the particular flowers. For Keats? I don't know. You can decide yourself.

The first question is which is which. Violets are violet or white and "Porphyro" means purple so we might think that he is that. But Porphyro has been rendered colourless here and Madeline has been given colour and warmth so who knows?

We could also approach the problem in terms of the symbolic meanings of the two flowers.

The rose has two meanings depending on whether we choose to be pagan or Christian about it. The Ancients associated the rose with Venus, which is to say sexual love. They also associated it with secrecy; to meet "under the rose" or sub rosa, was to agree that everything that happens there was to be kept secret. Roses are also associated with death and rebirth and with victory.

Christians, as they always did, gave the best flowers to Mary and so the rose comes to be associated with her. Unlike what we might guess, the rose doesn't necessarily associate with virginity however. In Medieval literature it is often associated with love and always with licit love and not with illicit trysts. It is a flower of chastity not virginity.

Colour also matters to Christians. White roses connect to purity and red roses connect to martyrdom.

What matters to the Greeks about violets is that they grow close to the ground and we might read Porphyro falling to his knees here as a connection to the violet. The Greeks also associated violets with death and lovers remember their lost partners with violets. Again, that matches with Madeline thinking Porphyro to be dying when she awakens and sees him pale and cold.

For Christians, violets symbolized humility and modesty.

If Keats is following the rules of parallel structure, then Porphyro is definitely the rose.

Into her dream he melted, as the rose
Blendeth its odour with the violet,

In that construction, Porphyro is the rose and Madeline's dream is the violet. Oops. It has to be her dream doesn't it? Could Porphyro be both flowers? The dreamed Porphyro the violet and the live one the rose?

What can we conclude? 
Well, your call really. I think Porphyro gets into Madeline's bed and tells her it isn't a dream. I think she is not entirely taken by surprise at this but that the significance of his crawling in with her, she is completely naked after all, is what moves her to see herself as ruined and not any sex act just yet. Her fear is that he will now just take her as he easily could. And if this were a matter of purely Greek morals, that is what would happen.

In Gothic manners, however, the love has to be pure and justified between the lovers no matter how much it might be abhorred and prohibited by the society around them. Porphyro is not a date rapist. Instead he pleads his troth as a true medieval courtier in Stanza 38:

“My Madeline! sweet dreamer! lovely bride!
“Say, may I be for aye thy vassal blest?
“Thy beauty’s shield, heart-shap’d and vermeil dyed?
“Ah, silver shrine, here will I take my rest
“After so many hours of toil and quest,
“A famish’d pilgrim,—saved by miracle.
“Though I have found, I will not rob thy nest
“Saving of thy sweet self; if thou think’st well
“To trust, fair Madeline, to no rude infidel.”

And only then, upon her acceptance, do they have sex. Yes, there is room for all sorts of ambiguity here but I believe Porpyhro finds but does not rob her nest. The missing sex scene, I think, would have come after this between Stanzas 38 and 39 like a missing floor number thirteen in a modern apartment building. And then we move to Stanza 39 where they must wake up, as in an Aubade, but escape together.


The funny thing about that stained glass
The stained glass has a funny sequel. Several of the Pre-Raphaelites were moved to paint scenes from the poem. Millais was a stickler for accuracy and when he painted it he had a model stand in front of stained glass window with a full moon shining through in order that he could render the colours as they would have truly appeared. Alas, moonlight is too cold, it does not contain a full spectrum of colours, so it didn't work. There were no warm colours on his Madeline's breast.

By the way, I can't help but notice the significance of number in closing. Even though she is still fully dressed, it's very important that Keats get the number of the object noun correct here:

Full on this casement shone the wintry moon,
And threw warm gules on Madeline’s fair breast,

For the whole thing reads very differently if we pluralize:

Full on this casement shone the wintry moon,

And threw warm gules on Madeline’s fair breasts,

And right there, we might say, is a key detail in the difference between Gothic manners and Greek morality.