Writing an Essay

When you're set an essay, the natural and human reaction is to want to get it over with. But for high-stakes writing - for exams and such - this have-a-go approach is a bit risky. So it's hugely worthwhile to put some time aside to find a guide to the method of essay writing that clicks with you. Many websites offer help with this, and not a few offer to write them for you for a fee. After a brief trawl, the online resources below seemed to me particularly useful.

Here's a hub to various resources on all kinds of writings. I haven't looked at them all. The Creative Writing Resources looks very good. Open here.

For academic essays in particular, I recommend the Purdue University Online Writing Lab. Go to 'Common Writing Assignments' for detailed advice on argumentative essays etc. Breaks it down into stages.

Plenty of universities are posting their student guides online. Here's good one from Anglia Ruskin University.

Another good one is this, by David Gauntlett of the Institute of Communication Studies at Leeds. I like his examples of concision over waffle: Essay-Writing: The Essential Guide

Here's a very practical document by Tom Davis written for English undergraduates (but useful for other subjects), with some useful links of its own. Written in 2001 so the remarks on technology are a little archaic, but the advice on putting material into paragraphs is timeless. How to Write an Essay.

See also previous blog post, Guides to Good Writing.

T S Eliot, Poems 1920

Surely the first thing that strikes anyone on looking at the selection from Poems, 1920 is that they are extraordinarily difficult. In 'Gerontion' and the quatrain poems, Eliot uses dislocation: we seem to slide suddenly from one scene, or voice, or topic, or image to another, and the link is not at all clear. Then there is the obstacle course of quotations and allusions - in 'Burbank' a whole heap of them - which defy us to recognise and make sense of them. On top of this are difficulties in language, such as the tortuous syntax of 'Gerontion', and the abstruse vocabulary ('Polypohiloprogenitive' etc.). As if that were not enough, we have strange names to makes sense of (Princess Volupine, the 'characters' in 'Gerontion'), references to classical myth ('Sweeney among the Nightingales') and obscure theology ('Mr Eliot's Sunday Morning Service'), and a lack of clear subject matter. And the voice with which the poems are delivered seems frequently to change in tone - from ironic and sardonic to philosophical to, occasionally, lyrical (the description of the painting in 'Mr Eliot's Sunday Morning Service'). It is comforting to discover that the best-read critics and scholars have found these poems
extremely hard - even impossible - to fathom. Some have seen them as a bit of a dead end in Eliot's work (he never returned to this tight quatrain form for more than a few lines), an experimental phase between Prufrock and 'The Waste Land'.

Difficulty is itself an important aspect of Eliot's work, so we should pause and consider it. He himself took the view that modern poetry had to be complex if it was to present a truthful representation of modern experience. Here he is, in a lecture published in 1921:

It is not a permanent necessity that poets should be interested in philosophy, or in any other subject. We can only say that it appears likely that poets in our civilization, as it exists at present, must be difficult. Our civilization comprehends great variety and complexity, and this variety and complexity, playing upon a refined sensibility, must produce various and complex results. The poet must become more and more comprehensive, more allusive, more indirect, in order to force, to dislocate if necessary, language into his meaning. ('The Metaphysical Poets')

Why, we might ask following Eliot, should poetry be easy? Scientists don't expect the material world to deliver its secrets up easily; and if art is a comparable investigation into the human world of culture and civilization, then that, too is likely to be as dense and exacting as scientific research (Eliot compares the creative act to a scientific experiment in 'Tradition and the Individual Talent'). This is especially the case when that culture lies shattered into fragments after the cataclysm of World War One.

Here are some links to commentaries on the 1920 poems as a whole, and some of the individual poems.

Poems, 1920
Nigel Alderman, 'Where are the eagles and the trumpets?': the strange case of Eliot's missing quatrains - on the quatrain poems as a group. Accessible from JSTOR here.
Heather Bryant Jordan, Ara vos Prec: A Rescued Volume

Individual Poems
Critical interpretations of Gerontion
Thomas Day, analysis of 'Gerontion' in agenda poetry
Skylar Hamel, essay on The Hippopotamus
Cummings Guide, Sweeney Among the Nightingales
Gabriel Ellsworth, Analysis of 'Mr Eliot's Sunday Morning Service'
Keith Sagar, link on this page to Sagar's paper on 'Prufrock Supine and Sweeney Erect'

Moissac Tympanum



Image: Web Gallery of Art

The tympanum at Moissac, c.1115-1135, depicts Christ in majesty surrounded by the tetramorph, the symbols of the four evangelists. Beyond the tetramorph are accompanying angels. The other figures are the twenty-four elders beholding Christ, as described in St John's Revelations. The posts below show elongated figures of Peter (left) and Isaiah (right), while the central trumeau combines the figures of st Paul, Jeremiah and various fabulous beasts. Below are some links which should aid further exploration of this Romanesque masterpiece.

Superb images and brief text on paradoxplace

Andrew Tallon of Vassar College has produced some outstanding photographic resources, enabling the viewer to zoom in on details. See the bottom of his homepage.

A video of the Moissac portal led me to this wonderful blog on the Romanesque sculpture and architecture of the route to Santiago, The Joining of Heaven and Earth

Moissac is included in a useful chapter on Romanesque in the online World History of Art

Meyer Schapiro wrote a detailed study of the Moissac sculptures for his 1935 doctoral thesis. This work is available in two articles on JSTOR: 'The Romanesque sculpture of Moissac, Part I (1)' deals with the programme of capital sculptures in the cloister. The tympanum is described in detail in the second article, 'The Romanesque Sculpture of Moissac, Part 1 (II)'.  Both can be conveniently read in book form in Meyer Schapiro and David Finn (photos), The Romanesque Sculpture of Moissac (1985). Schapiro's Charles Eliot Norton lectures on various sites are published as Meyer Schapiro, Romanesque architectural sculpture (2006).

Learning Architecture Terminology

Learning about architecture involves absorbing a fair few technical terms. As with identifying trees - my present hobby - the best thing is to go round looking at real buildings with a handbook and try out the naming of parts. Here are some recommendations.

Matthew Rice, Rice's Architectural Primer. This is the one I'd start with. Really helpful watercolour drawings which clarify parts of buildings and the different styles. If you're interested in domestic architecture (which tends to get overlooked in academic courses) then his Village Buildings of Britain is another treat.

Glossaries
It's always handy to have a glossary and / or illustrated history to turn to. A handsome printed one is: Owens Hopkins, Reading Architecture. I also consult Lever and Harris, Illustrated Dictionary of Architecture 800-1914. Though the title doesn't say so, this covers English architecture exclusively. It's well worth tracking down a second-hand copy. For a richly illustrated tour through Western buildings, an excellent book is Doreen Yarwood, A Chronology of Western Architecture.

Here are two (of many) online glossaries. You could try drip-feeding yourself on a term a day from these:
Buffalo Illustrated Architecture Dictionary
Roberta Barresi, Architecture Glossary

Classical
Learning the classical language - columns, orders and so forth - is a logical first move in studying Western architectural history. A classic, and handily short, text is John Summerson, The Classical Language of Architecture. This helps you not just to name the elments of buildings, but to think about their effects. A useful accompaniment is this online Glossary of Classical Architecture. The Looking at Buildings site has plenty of clear explanation.

Churches
Studying architecture in the West involves looking at an awful lot of churches, so it's a good idea to have something that focusses on this: Mcnamara and Tilney, How to Read Churches is very well illustrated.  Matthew Rice has one coming out next year, which I'm sure will be excellent:  Rice's Church Primer

Rhetoric: Some Tropes

Accompanying another post on rhetorical schemes, here is one on tropes. Where schemes deal with sentences - clauses in parallel, etc. - tropes concern the artful deviation of words from their ordinary sense. In practice, the distinction between schemes and tropes can become artificial, as there is a natural symbiosis between word and syntax. Some figures (ie zeugma) have been classified variously as scheme and trope. There are also problems in talking about the 'ordinary' use of language. There are good arguments (see Owen Barfield's wonderful book Poetic Diction) that language in its normal state is metaphorically rich, and we have to make a special effort to reduce a word ro statement to carry single precise meanings: think of the work lawyers have to do to create documents that admit of only one interpretation - it suggests they might be working against the grain of the material of language.

Metaphor and Simile

Metaphor
Twisting a word from its usual sense to create another idea. Used to form striking comparisons between two unlike things to show something they still have in common. A metaphor can occur in various parts of speech, and it does not have to take the form a=b. There's a beautiful discussion of metaphor in the film Il Postino.
This book is a monument.
The sun blessed the bright sky. The sun shouted in the laughing sky.
That news just burns me up.
I stood in the lonely field [so-called transferred epithet, where the adjective describing me - lonely - is transferred to the field. Also an instance of Ruskin's pathetic fallacy, the fallacy being to suppose that inanimate things like fields have feeling (pathos) like loneliness.]

Simile
Also a comparison between two unlike things, made explicit by a word such as 'as' or 'like'
My love is like a red, red rose.
The silence settled like snow.
He entered the room as subtly as a steam train.

Part and whole

Synecdoche
Part stands for whole; genus or adjunct suggest main idea.
A village of three hundred souls. ['soul' is a part, standing for the whole person]
Keep your vehicle roadworthy [Vehicle stands - probably - for car, a specific kind of vehicle
: genus for species]
Give us this day our daily bread [Bread for food: species for genus]
Many hands make light work.
You did this for the oldest of motives - silver [the material 'silver' stands for what is made from it]

Metonymy
Virtually the same as synecdoche. An attribute or suggestive word is used to imply what is really meant.
Let's go and buy a bottle or two for dinner.
The top brass are meeting now.
He lives by his pen.
I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears and sweat.

Puns
Other ages took puns more seriously than we do. Shakespeare's plays and other Renaissance dramas has a level of wordplay that can seem puzzling to a modern audience. One way of looking at a line like Hamlet's punning 'A little more than kin and less than kind' is that it contains metaphor at its most compressed - several meanings in just one word (kind implies a comparison with 'kinned' (family-related) and 'kind' meaning species).

Antanaclasis
Word repeated in two different senses.
I want to scotch the idea that all the Scotch like Scotch.
Let's hang around while they hang Danny.
We make the traveller's lot a lot easier.

Paronomasia
Use words that sound the same but have different meanings. this is the groan groan type of pun.
I wish my parents would leave me a loan.
If you try the high stile you might look silly.
Let's have the fool for pudding.

Syllepsis
One word (usually a verb) governs two or mroe other words, though it is understood differently in each case. See zeugma, from which it is practically indistinguishable.
I take my hat and my leave.
Or stain her honour, or her new brocade.
... Dost sometimes counsel take - and sometimes tea.
His speech raised a laugh or two but also some hackles.

Figures of Substitution

Anthimeria
Substitute one part of speech for another. Several examples in late Shakespeare.
The thunder would not peace at my bidding. (noun for verb)
Lord Angelo dukes it well.
Knee thy way into his mercy.
I am going in search of the great perhaps (adverb for noun)
He wants to do the impossible (adjective for noun)
The fair, the chaste, the unexpressive she.

Periphrasis
Substitute a descriptive word or phrase for a name (eg a nickname); substitute a proper name for a quality associated with it.
Meet the mad jackal, captain of our village cricket team.
I am taught biology by the great fungus.
I like drawing, but I'm no Leonardo.
You'd need a Hercules to shift this lot.

Personification
Give abstract concepts or inanimate objects human qualities.
The ground is thirsty.
Smoke caressed the garden fence.
Fortune is cruel and arbitrary.

Apostrophe
Address to an absent person or personified abstraction: Death be not proud, Oh cruel fortune! etc.

Hyperbole
Substitute an over-the-top phrase for the real idea, to achieve emphasis.
There were millions of people at the party.
When he's angry, he makes the walls shake.
He's the King of the village hall ping-pong table.

Litotes
Opposite of hyperbole. Deliberate understatement, emphasising the point by opposite means. It's most common form is witht he negative.
That's no mean task.
I'm slightly puzzled as to why you burned the house down.
It would be rather helpful if you could throw me a rope to stop me from drowning.
I admit it's somewhat unusual to see a tree growing in someone's living room.
einstein was not unintelligent.

Rhetorical question (erotema)
Asking a question in order to make a point rather than to elicit an answer.
How many times do I have to tell you?
Isn't it odd that the murders only started after the new vicar was installed?

Irony
Using a word to signify the opposite of what it usually means. In its strong form it becomes sarcasm.
So you completely ignored the question - that was clever.
It's a privilege to be able to teach Wykehamists.
I can't wait to get the next gas bill.

Onomatopoeia
The sound of a word seems to underline its sense. Often combined with alliteration and assonance.
First march the heavy Mules, securely slow,
O'er hills, o'er Dales, o'er crags, o'er rocks they go
Jumping high o'er the shrubs of the rough ground,
Rattle the clatt'ring Cars, and the shockt Axles bound. (Pope, Iliad, 23:138-41)

Oxymoron
Joining together two words with different senses, to create a kind of self-contradiction.
Dry ice, conspicuously absent, deafening silence, cruel kindness, laborious leisure, the living dead
O miserable abundance, O beggarly riches.

Recommended Reading
Arthur Quinn and Barney R Quinn, Figures of Speech: 60 Ways to Turn a Phrase
Richard A Lanham, A Handlist of Rhetorical Terms

Online
Two handy lists:
Robert A Harris, A Handbook of Rhetorical Devices
University of Kentucky, Glossary of Rhetorical Terms

More comprehensive treatment:
Gideon Young, Silva Rhetoricae

Rhetoric: Examples of Schemes

Rhetoric: the art of persuasive speech. Or perhaps we might say, the art of expressive speech, in which language is shaped, 'figured', into configurations that compel our attention. Of the hundreds of figures of speech listed in reference works, only a few (metaphor, simile, alliteration) are in regular use in literary study. Here is a list of a few others: getting acquainted with them can certainly sharpen our sense of form in writing, and that perception of form can in turn - on a good day - help us to get a precise idea of the nature of the thought being expressed, and how its formal contours give it a rhythm and emotional current.

Rhetorical figures can be divided into schemes and tropes. Put simply, schemes deal with the shape of a sentence, tropes with the use of individual words. Schemes themselves can be subdivided, as follows:

Schemes of Balance

Parallelism   Words, phrases or clauses with a similar structure:

Government of the people, by the people, for the people 
I watched television and my wife read a book [Two clauses around and: the structure of each clause is Pronoun + transitive verb + object]

Players who abuse the opposition or maim the referee will not be selected in future. [Sentence includes two parallel phrases: abuse the opposition, maim the referee, both transitive verb + object]

Parallelism can convey the effect of being composed, in mind and speech, poised, in charge of one's material. Notice the various parallel phrases and clauses in the opening of Burke's Thoughts on the Cause of the Present Discontents:

It is an undertaking of some degree of delicacy to examine into the cause of public disorders. If a man happens not to succeed in such an enquiry, he will be thought weak and visionary; if he touches the true grievance, there is a danger that he may come near to persons of weight and consequence, who will rather be exasperated at the discovery of their errors, than thankful for the occasion of correcting them. If he should be obliged to blame the favourites of the people, he will be considered as the tool of power; if he censures those in power, he will be looked on as an instrument of faction.

One way of making clear the parts of text working in parallel is to place them in a column, to see how the elements of speech map onto each other:

If a man happens not to succeed
If he touches                                 [If + subject + verb / verbal phrase

weak and visionary
weight and consequence  [Two terms bound as a couplet, a pair of adjectives and a pair of nouns. Notice that in both pairs, a short Anglo-Saxon word is followed by a longer Latinate one]

exasperated at the discovery
thankful for the occasion  [adj + preposition + noun]

And the last sentence (or period, as Burke might have considered it) consists of two balanced sentences (If clause, main clause), themselves pivoted on a semi-colon and containing parallel constructions (the tool of power / an instrument of faction)

Isocolon
When the parallelism is exact:
The louder he talked of his honour, the faster we counted our spoons.
To our right is the hard road to virtue, on our left lies the pretty path to perdition.

Antithesis
Contrasting ideas, whose relation is pointed by their position in parallel structures:
The fool thinks he is clever; the wise man knows he is ignorant.
That's one small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind.

Schemes of Unusual Word Order (Hyperbaton)

Anastrophe
Inversion of usual word order:
Slowly flows the stream
Those I fight I do not hate, those I defend I do not love.

Parenthesis
Start a sentence, then interrupt its natural flow with something else, even a complete sentence:
This crime - and I use this word deliberately - must be punished.
When he is angry - something which I am sorry to say occurs quite often - he loses all sense of proportion.

Apposition
Two things side by side, one explaining or modifying the other. (In Latin, of course, they can be some way from each other)
Ted, the village postman, has just been arrested. ['the village postman' is in apposition to 'Ted' - it saves using the relative clause ' who is the village postman']

Schemes of Omission

Ellipsis
Missing out a word or words which the reader has to 'fill in' from context.
I must to England [Obviously, 'I must go' is intended]
If you want a harder essay title, fine.
Idleness is the main vice of the young, wasted effort of the middle-aged, and despair of the old.

Asyndeton
Missing conjunctions between successive clauses.
I came, I saw, I conquered.
You were warned. You ignored this warning. You must be punished.
The teams went onto the field, the referee blew his whistle. The game had begun.

Polysyndeton
Opposite of asyndeton: lots of conjunctions.
And God said, Let there be light. And there was light. And God saw the light, that it was good.
It was cold and dark and silent and suddenly we felt very scared.
I entered the room although it was dark and atood very still but heard nothing.

Schemes of Repetition

Alliteration
Repeated initial or medial consonants. A useful sound effect:
Bruised and bloody, but not beaten.
A lovely, long, lazy summer afternoon.

Assonance
Repeated vowel sounds in stressed words, surrounded by different consonants.
An old, mad, blind, despised and dying king. [It's the 'i' sound in blind that gets repeated here]
Sing with a voice of joy.
The hard, dark path.

Anaphora
Starting successive clauses with the same word or words.
We shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills.

Epistrophe
Ending successive clauses with the same word or words.
I don't like cricket. I don't play cricket. I don't want to hear another word about cricket.

Epanalepsis
Same word at beginning and end.
Blood will have blood.
Year chases year, decay pursues decay.

Anadiplosis
End a clause with a word, and begin the next clause with the same word.
Cars have parts, parts need repairs, and repairs are expensive.

Climax
Words, phrases or clauses arranged in order of increasing importance.
I serve my employer, my family, my country and my God.

Antimetabole
An ABBA structure where words are repeated in inverse order.
Ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country.

Chiasmus
ABBA structure where grammatical structures or parts of speech are repeated inversely.
We proceeded at night, and by day we slept.
It's easy to make friends; to lose them is difficult.

Another post will give a list of tropes and reading recommendations.

St Catherine's Hill, Winchester, 5 September 2012

A brief slideshow comprising of pictorial notes on an instructive walk around St Catherine's Hill, under the auspices of the Hampshire Wildlife Trust. It was interesting to learn about plans for managing this area: various clumps of even-aged trees and bushes (especially ash and hawthorn) have grown to form canopies, which hampers biodiversity. It is hoped that a scheme of felling and thinning out these clumps will encourage more downland grasses and flowers to grow, and provide the mixed scrub which makes a better environment for birds, butterflies and other wildlife.

The HWT page on this wonderful nature reserve can be found here.

Romanesque Altar of Sant Serni de Tavèrnoles

Altar Frontal from St Serni de Tavèrnoles. Second half of 12th century. Tempera on wood. Image: Wikimedia.

This altar frontal, from a monastery, is different in several ways to other examples of the genre: instead of a hierarchical series, in which a central figure is flanked by lesser beings, we have a more democratic way of representing things. The figures are all the same size and occupy the same space. I like to see it as a procession - as if they are all walking in suitably stately fashion towards us, but flattened out, so we see two lines at either side of Saint Serni in the centre.

 

Sant Serni is better known by his French name of St Sernin or Saturnin. He was a martyred bishop of Toulouse, where he is honoured by the largest Romanesque church in Europe. The choice of image here is another unusual feature. Other representations show revolting pictures of the saint's martyrdom in the year 250: he refused to sacrifice to pagan deities, and was sentenced to be dragged by a maddened bull throught he city streets. But here he is surrounded by other bishops (note the mitres and croziers), and apparently presides over an episcopal assembly. To warm the hearts of bureaucrats everywhere, we have here a reverent image of the saint chairing a committee (the scrolls are the agenda, perhaps, or dreaded AOB). Anyway, everyone looks very calm and happy as the Saint blesses them, so the procession / meeting is probably nearing its close. The deep mellow colours add to this serene air.

 

It's a big piece, and it has been suggested that it might have served as a sarcophagus or reredos. But then the church it comes from is big too, and needed something on this scale to be the centre of processions.

 

It's interesting to compare the Barcelona Frontal with the much busier one dedicated to the same saint (under the name St Sadurní) in the Episcopal Museum of Vic, made in the twilight years of Romanesque:

 



Altar frontal from Sant Sadurní in Rotgers

First quarter of the 13th century
Tempera on poplar wood



 

 

Briefly, this shows Christ Pantocrator in the middle, surrounded by the Tetramorph. Top left: Saint Saturninus refuses to bow down to a pagan idol, in the form of a bull. Bottom left: he is dragged by a bull through the Capitol of Toulouse. Top right: the saint has just saved a bunch of people from drowning, and blesses them. The style is very different: Byzantine influence has led to smoother modelling of faces and bodies. This new Greek style was to become predominant in the thirteenth century. The source of all of this is the museum website entry, which you can read here.

 

Wikipedia entry

 

Wikipedia entry on St Saturnin

 

Links to many images of St Saturnin from JISCMail



 

Romanesque Altar Frontal: Frontal d'Ix

This is the 'Frontal d'Ix', a painted (tempera) wooden (pine) altar frontal (fancy word for this: antependium) from the small Romanesque Church (single nave, round apse) dedicated to St Martin, in the village of La Guingeta d'Ix. It was made sometime around the middle of the twelfth century, and presently adorns the first room of the Romanesque galleries in MNAC. It's in fact one of the oldest pieces in that collection, having been given by a private collector in 1889 (the first exploratory trip to the Pyrennean churches was undertaken in 1907).

St Martí, La Guingeta d'Ix. Wikimedia.

These wooden frontals are apparently unique to the Catalan territories, and were made between the tenth and twelfth centuries - the Romanesque period in short. They seem to have been made in three workshops - the Seu d'Urgell, Ripoll and Vic. Those made for the larger and richer churches and monasteries often have precious materials (gold, silver, ivory, jewels, enamels) inlaid into them. A smaller church like St Martin made do with painted wood (though remains of metal strips have been found in this one). Planks of wood were joined together with nails, then covered with a layer of plaster. The drawing was then made, often incised, and finally the whole area was painted. This one is typical in having the widest board in the centre - the logical place for the Saviour, or the Virgin, or the patron saint of the Church. Look at the corners of the frontal and you can see clearly the iron clasps - presumably used to link this to the side panels of the altar, which have disappeared.

The love of geometrical pattern and decoration is immediately apparent. It's interesting that the four sides around the iconographic images use different motifs. At the top there's a band of strikingly 3D-effect cubes, or interlocking zigzag straps, however you want to see them, picking up on the reds and blues in the middle. Going clockwise, we see vegetal motifs on the right, and at the bottom the so-called 'rinceaux' or foliage pattern. Up the left side, medallions, alternating vegetal and animal images. Behind them is a world of kells, mosaics, miniatures - the whole medieval vision of endless symmetrical patterns, stretching from Ireland to Byzantium.

Now to the subject matter, starting in the centre with the Maiestas Domini - the Majesty of the Lord, the motif of the Saviour enthroned. The figure is very similar to the one in the Seu d'Urgell frontal (see below): elongated face, long thin nose and wide-open eyes, beard and treatment of hair, and taches or red spots on cheeks and forehead all match up. The Christ of Ix does look rather less grim and more cheerful, though. He is seated at the intersection of two coloured circles, which make up the globe mandorla, a motif we can trace back to Carolingian times. He is wearing a red tunic, with a fringed blue mantle. Heavy linear folds following the logic of pattern rather than anatomy. Again, the nimbus bears a crucifer, which goes slightly over the edges and above the mandorla. Left hand rests on the Book, right hand raised in blessing. Unlike Urgell, this right hand is also carrying a small round object. Very likely it symbolises the world (some manuscripts helpfully name it, 'mundus'), but it could also be the Host (suitable to have the symbol of the Eucharist on an altar) - and I don't see why the interpreting viewer couldn't flip between these two significations. The Alpha and Omega letters remind us of the Saviour's rule over the beginning and end of the world. No tetramorph (as in Vézelay etc.) but a deep red background decorated with floral motifs - another similarity to the Seu d'Urgell frontal.

Now we can look at the sides, starting with the right. The equivalent space in the Seu d'Urgell frontal is a single plane, but here it is divided into four frames, each containing two figures. We can spot St Peter at once with his gigantic key (I like the way this breaks out of his space into the frame, forming a parallel with the two blessing hands and the codex if we read across to the left). Next frame along in the top row is St Martin, in his iconic act of dividing his robe with a beggar. This scene has the scholars vexed, though: St Martin (of Tours) is usually shown on horseback when he does this, not standing; the 'beggar' doesn't exactly look in need of more wardrobe here; and the staff linked to a chain over his right shoulder suggests he is a captive, which points to stories in other saints' lives but not St Martin. A conflation of some kind? The precise coherence of the elements seems to have become obscured by time. Also obscure, if they were ever known, are the identities of any of the other figures. They are obviously apostles, but who is who seems to be anyone's guess. As with the Urgell frontal, they all look towards Christ (though not with the same pronounced tilt); again, they're differentiated by being bearded and beardless, and have the same rather block-like faces. Notice too the pearl-like decoration around the edges.

The left side has the same four images. Second from the right on the top is St Martin again. No mysteries here - he is clearly depicted as a bishop with a crozier. I take it that what looks like a sore spot on his crown is the tonsure - the same detail distinguishes St Peter in the Urgell piece. And he gets his name in red letters, to the left of his halo. All the other figures are anonymous apostles. One detail I find oddly delightful is that St Martin is the only one in the whole work wearing shoes! The separate scenes are unified by the geometrical format, underlined by the simple alternation of red and yellow backgrounds. across the middle is an inscription - partial erasure, intricate letter decoration and shorthand abbreviations make it a challenge, but it has been deciophered as 'Sol et Lux Sanctorum Maneo in Praeclara Honorum' which I think means something like 'I dwell in the bright sun and the light of the beautiful saints' but gentle correction welcomed.

There's a strong feeling among experts that this Frontal and the one from Seu d'Urgell came from the same workshop. Parallels to many of the motifs have been found in manuscripts, and there are close similarities to sculptures in the monastery of Ripoll. These details are explored in humbling detail by Walter Cook in his 1923 article. Cook didn't have absolutely all the details to hand when he wrote, as the provenance of the piece only came to light in 1944  - but the article is a model of detailed description and iconographic research.



Seu d'Urgell Frontal

Sources.
Mostly plundered from the Catalan Viquipedia entry

The Earliest Painted Panels of Catalonia (II)

Walter W. S. Cook, 'The Earliest Painted Panels of Catalonia (II)', The Art Bulletin , Vol. 6, No. 2 (Dec., 1923), pp. 31-60 (especially 32-38). 

Blog entry on Seu d'Urgell Frontal

                  

Romanesque Altar Frontal from Seu d'Urgell

Another wonderful Romanesque altar frontal in MNAC, showing Christ surrounded by the apostles. Dated about 1150, tempera on wood. From a church in the old dicese of Urgell.  Heavy linearity and symmetry (look at the feet!) tending - physical details like garments and bodies all become the occasion for abstract patterning, as if the pattern is the reality, and the physical object just a brief configuration as the play of line and colour goes on for ever. This play, or pull, between concrete and abstract gives much of Romanesque art itrs animating tension. I like the tilted heads - impossible not to follow the gaze from side to centre.

Video introduction produced by MNAC:


Short entry on Spain is Culture

Wikipedia entry (note: 'lack of funds' in the description is a mistranslation and should read 'lack of background')

Article: Walter W. S. Cook, 'The Earliest Painted Panels of Catalonia (II)', The Art Bulletin, Vol. 6, No. 2  (Dec, 1923), pp. 31-60 on JSTOR. Article begins with a detailed account of this frontal, pages 30-32. It's a great example of detailed visual description - how pausing, looking and putting into words what we see leads to a much sharper awareness of what is happening. The eye wants to skim - particularly in a musem where there is so much to see - so sketching or describing like this is an essential discipline for slowing down and focussing.

Some lovely illustrations, and a good section on Geometrical Forms, in MNAC's excellent Guia Visual Art Romanic.

Gregorian Chant: Four Antiphons of the Virgin Mary

The last four melodies in Rutter's Eleven Gregorian Chants are Four Antiphons of the Virgin Mary, compositions from between the eleventh and thirteenth centuries which closed the office of Compline (the last Office of the day). An Antiphon is the root of 'Anthem' (Old English antefne), meaning a song of praise or devotion. The Marian antiphons are anthems sung to the Virgin Mary, using independent texts without psalms. Here are some links to Gregorian notation and performances. These Marian hymns can also be found gathered here.
Alma Redemptoris Mater

Written by Hermannus Contractus (Herman the Cripple, 1013-54). Like the others below, this is given int he longer version known as 'Solemn Tone'. Opening with a long melisma, this is sung at the Advent to Candlemas. There are some comments by musicologists and other information here.



Ave Regina caelorum (Candlemas to Holy Week). The Marian hymns were used as the basis for many arrangements in the Renaissance and later. There is a useful gathering here of some of these polyphonic versions.



Regina caeli laetare (Easter Even to Pentecost). See this site for different versions and performances.



Salve Regina




Sources and Further Reading
History and background to Marian Antiphons
Entry by Richard Taruskin from Oxford History of Western Music

Romanesque Art: Apse of St Pere d'Urgell

Apse of St Pere, Seu d'Urgell. MNAC, Barcelona. Image: Wikimedia Commons.

This is the first monumental fresco to confront the visitor to the Romanesque Collection in MNAC. It is the decoration of the apse of the church of St Pere, which forms part of the Cathedral complex of the Seu d'Urgell (the church is now St Miquel). The painting dates from the first half of the twelfth century.

Subject  The subject matter is, characteristically, a theophany - that is, a vision in which divine majesty is revealed. Christ appears in a mandorla (mystical almond shape), manifesting the Maiestas Domini (the Majesty of the Lord). Around him are the creatures making up the Tetramorph, the symbols of the Four Evangelists: to the right of the mandorla we see the eagle (St John) and the ox (St Luke). It is notable that Christ is standing, not enthroned - imagery which goes back to Early Christian models. This fact, together with the pleats of the drapery and the vertical elongation of the figure, have led some to suggest that the subject is the Ascension. But other elements of the iconography point to the Second Coming, when Christ returns at the end of the world to judge the living and the dead. We notice that Christ holds the Book of Life in his left hand, and has his right hand raised in blessing. Beneath the horizontal band, the fragmentary inscription comes from a Latin liturgical hymn concerning the Last Judgement.

On the lower level, Mary and the Apostles stand in pairs. They are identified in Latin shorthand (S Petus: Sanctus Petrus, S Iohs: Sanctus Johannis etc.) and by their attributes. From the left: St Andrew carrying the cross (on which he was crucified); St Peter with the keys to heaven; St Mary, holding a crown in her covered left hand (identifying her as the Queen of Heaven; the covered hand reminds me of the covered left hand of Justinian and attendants in the S Vitale Ravenna mosaic); St John holding his gospel with a similarly covered hand; on the right, we can just identify Paul from his name.

Style  Romanesque art was formed from a diversity of stylistic influences, and we can see several of them here. The scene of Theophany itself derives from Early Christian art of late antiquity. Here, the modelling of the figures, and the loosely geometrical approach to the drapery, point to the art of Provence, which was strongly influenced by classical models. The white background of the upper part is characteristic of southern and central France, while a similar image has been identified in a manuscript from St Mary of Lagrasse, dated to the time of Abbot Robert (1086-1108). The lands of this community included Urgell in the eleventh and twelfth centuries.

Observations One of the striking features of this painting is the interlaced geometrical schemes, especially in the beautiful central band where the pattern gives an impression of depth: this takes us to another stylistic source, the geometrical art of the barbarians and the early Middle Ages (the Celtic patterns in the Book of Kells, for example). The love of pattern is shown in the mandorla, in the semicircular configuration where Christ's feet extend (he is either taking off or coming in to land), and around the window openings. The band around the central window, punctuating the white horizontal line of the inscription, helps to join the separate spaces (as the trumeau abuts the lintel at Moissac). Deep browns and reds give a unifying tone to the whole composition, while among the vivid colours we notice the blue of Mary's mantle, made from lapis lazuli. Faces are elongated and - by modern realist standards - inexpressive. Yet the large eyes, with their deep mirada fuerte, give them a compelling intensity; and the painter has clearly tried to differentiate them with different beards, hair colour etc. (We think of the row of elders on the lintel of the tympanum at Moissac - first apparently identical, but each given a distinctive posture). We notice the love of symmetry when we look across the pairs of figures beneath, and see the disposition of hands being mirrored. The bodies seem to face outward to the viewer, while feet and hands indicate they are turned slightly inwards towards each other: the pictorial plane is ambiguous. There is a blend of space and intricate detail, animation and stillness, creating the drama of theophany, the transcendence from the earthly to the spiritual realm.

Sources
Most of the above is derived from the Guia art romanic published by MNAC.

Wikipedia netry on St Miquel de la Seu d'Urgell

Further bibliography on Ars Picta

Gregorian Chant: Victimae Paschalis laudes

Eleventh-century chant. Sequence sung on Easter Sunday. Attributed by some to Notker the Stammerer. Rutter, Eleven Gregorian Chants, p.8

St Vicenç, Cardona

This church is in the ‘First Romanesque’ style. The First Romanesque is a style of building of roughly 950-1050, the first century of Romanesque. This was a period when builders were experimenting with developing new forms and new solutions to the problems of vaulting and lighting a church. The style is common to churches in the Mediterranean area from Lombardy to Catalonia, from which it subsequently spread upwards to the regions of France. As well as being an example of this particular style, St Vicenç in Cardona exemplifies some of the key elements of Romanesque architecture: clearly organised space, with the units marked out by architectural elements; stone vaulting; a Latin Cross groundplan; the development of the East end with chapels projecting from transepts; blind arches decorating the exterior; and a general sense of restraint and fitness for purpose. As Eric Fernie puts it, “nothing is superfluous, nothing confused” (entry on Romanesque architecture in Grove). Studying this church is thus a good introduction to ‘reading’ Romanesque church architecture in general.

Location
Cardona is in the county of Bages, roughly in the centre of this map.

History

A church is documented on the site from 980. Around 1019, it was redeveloped by the Viscount Bermon, who reformed a religious (Augustinian) community that was present there from the late tenth century. The present church was built beween c.1029 and 1040, when it was consecrated by Eriball, the Bishop of Urgell .The church and community were under the control of the lords of the castle of Cardona – a reminder of the close association of Romanesque architectuyre and the feudal system.  Typically of many Romanesque churches, especially in Catalonia, it is dramatically situated on a rocky hilltop.

Groundplan. Source: learn.columbia.edu

Architecture

Groundplan:

·        The church is compose of a wide nave and two narrower aisles.

·        Naves and aisle are crossed by a transept, which is slightly wider, but not very long: it barely projects beyond the basic rectangular plan. Nave crossed by transept gives the Latin Cross groundplan.

·         The East end is emphasised, with chapels projecting from the North  and South arms of the transept, giving three semicircular apses.

Interior Elevation

Interior elevation. Source: romanicocatalan.com

·       Barrel vaulting is used in the nave, with transverse arches clearly articulating three bays + crossing. Aisles have groin vaulting.

·       The Tribune at the West forms a special gallery, an elevated space for the noble family of the castle: this is a feature derived from Carolingian architecture.

·       Inside the Crossing Tower is a dome carried on pendentives – a feature from Eastern architecture. Above that is the octagonal drum (cimborio).

·       The vaults are notably high (more than 19 metres), a characteristic feature of Catalan Romanesque churches, and also of Eastern derivation.

Piers; shafts continue into transverse arches. Barrel vaults



Nave: shafts join the two storeys; raised Chancel

Transverse arches and groin vaults in aisles.

Dome inside Crossing Tower. On pendentives, with scallop shapes.

·         Inside the Crossing Tower is a dome carried on pendentives – a feature from Eastern architecture.

Exterior

·         The Crossing is marked by an octagonal  tower.

·        Blind arches create a regular rhythm and unify the parts of the building. The decoration is very restrained, consisting of repeated shapes largely defined by straight lines.

·       The three chapels are clearly legible in the outward appearance of the East end.

Crypt

·         A three-aisled crypt with columns carrying vaults from simple pyramidal capitals lies beneath the Chancel, which is raised above the level of the nave.

Features typical of Catalan Romanesque: Nave and two aisles; high vaults; Latin Cross plan.

Features typical of Romanesque: articulation – clear division of space (bays, aisles, transepts, apses all clearly defined by simple lines and arches); symmetry in plan; austere decoration.

Another example of the 'First Romanesque' is St Philibert, Tournus.

Sources

Text, photos, plan and video on romanicocatalan.com

Catalan Wikipedia entry

Excellent photos, with images of the original painted decorations (c.1200) now in MNAC, are on the Catalan Monastery site.

Fernie, Grove entry; Zarnecki, Romanesque; Focillon, Art of the West.

Gregorian Chant: Vexilla Regis, Pange Lingua, Adoro te devote

More Gregorian chants, following the selection in Rutter's Eleven Gregorian Chants.

Vexilla Regis

Text (and possible melody) by Venantius Fortunatus (c.530-c.600/609), who composed this hymn in 569 to celebrate a procession bringing a fragment of the True Cross to Poitiers.  Unsurprisingly, it is concerned with the Cross and Christ's Passion; in the Church calendar, it is sung at Vespers in Passiontide (Holy Week).  A selection of Venantius' poems can be found on the Latin Library, including the text below. More Venantius poems, with facing translation, are printed in Helen Waddell's Medieval Latin Lyrics (4th ed., 1933), 58-67.

Vexilla regis prodeunt

Vexilla regis prodeunt
Fulget crucis mysterium
Quo carne carnis conditor
Suspensus est patibulo.

Quo vulneratus insuper
Mucrone diro lanceae
Ut nos lavaret crimine
Manavit unda et sanguine.

Impleta sunt quae concinit
David fideli carmine
Dicens In nationibus
Regnavit a ligno Deus.

Arbor decora et fulgida
Ornata Regis purpura
Electa digno stipite
Tam sancta membra tangere.

Beata, cujus brachiis
Saecli pependit pretium
Statera facta corporis
Praedamque tulit tartari.

O Crux ave, spes unica
In hac triumphi gloria
Auge piis justitiam
Reisque dona veniam.

Te summa Deus Trinitas
Collaudet omnis spiritus:
Quos per crucis mysterium
Salvas, rege per saecula. Amen.

For text with Blount's 1717 translation, see here.
Text and literal translation here

Performance by Schola Gregoriana Mediolanensis

Text, video and Gregorian notation are given by the excellent Brasil-based gregoriano.org site

Two Hymns by Thomas Aquinas

Pange Lingua

Text written in 1263 by St Thomas Aquinas, to an earlier melody. Hymn sung at the Feast of Corpus Christi.



Adoro te Devote

Eucharistic Hymn.

Gregorian Chants: Hodie Christus Natus Est, Kyrie de Angelis, Veni Creator Spiritus

I have been enjoying geeting to know Eleven Gregorian Chants, edited (in modern notation) by John Rutter. Here are some notes and links to the first three chants in this publication, which may help in appreciating and, above all, singing them.

Hodie Christus Natus Est
Ad Magnificat, Antiphona, In II Vesperis In Nativitate Domini (Antiphonale Monasticum (1934)p.249; Liber Usualis (1961), p.413). Mode 1, Dorian (D to D on white notes, with the final, or home note D)


Hodie Christus natus est:      Today Christ is born:
hodie Salvator apparuit:        today the Saviour has appeared:
hodie in terra canunt angeli,  today on earth the angels sing,
laetantur archangeli:               the archangels rejoice:
hodie exsultant justi,              today the righteous exult,
dicentes:                                 saying:
Gloria in excelsis Deo,          Glory to God in the highest
alleluia.                                    alleluia.

Here is a beautiful rendition, with neumatic notation, by the Benedictine nuns of the Abbey of Notre Dame d'Argentan.

Kyrie VIII (de Angelis)

This is the opening of the Missa de Angelis, from the 15th / 16th century. Note the extended melismas (one syllable sung across many notes). Mode VIII (Hypomixolydian: 'Mixolydian', a so-called authentic mode has the scale dewscribed by G to G, with D as the dominant; Hypo- indicates a 'plagal' mode, ie an even-numbered mode lying 'beneath' the authentic. Hypo-mixolydian has the same final as Mixolydian (G) but runs from domiannt to dominant (D to D).



Solo voice:




Other performances:

Monks of Santo Domingo de Silos (organ accompaniment)

Veni Creator Spiritus

This is one of the great hymnns of the Western Church, attributed to Rabanus Maurus in the 9th century, and in general use by the 12th century. It is sung at the Feast of Pentecost, and at important ceremonies such as Ordination. (Mode VIII)


A splendid blog entry by Clerk of Oxenford gives links to various performances and an interesting account of various translations.

For Gregorian notation, Latin text with literal English translation, see Chants of the Church (pdf text, p.175)

Unaccompanied:



Accompanied:

Reading the Romanesque

In answer to a request, here are some suggestions for reading on Romanesque Art, conventionally dated to c.1000 to c.1200 with all sorts of blurring and overlapping at either end of course. Here are some one-stop-shop books which cover all the arts of the period. Specific books on architecture etc. can be left for other posts.

Anne Shaver-Crandell, Cambridge Introduction to Art: The Middle Ages is an excellent starting-point. Clear and helpful chapter on Romanesque.

Andreas Petzold, Romanesque Art is attractive, authoritative, readable. The emphasis here is on how the art worked within the society, so there are chapters on patronage, women, the Church, other cultures (Classical, Jewish, Islamic). Not much extended object-specific analysis, but an excellent primer on looking for the significance of works you do encounter.



George Zarnecki, Romanesque, has chapters on the different media: Architecture, Sculpture, Metalwork, Ivories, Stained Glass, Wall Painting, Book Illumination. The author takes us through the key features of each of these, and wears his enormous learning lightly. As with many older art books, this one challenges the reader by having illustrations on a different page from the text, so there is a good deal of flicking around which interrupts the reading. Well, we just have to get over it. The points Zarnecki makes in capsules about individual images (capital sculptures, for example) are outstanding.

Henri Focillon, The Art of the West 1: The Romanesque is a classic of art history. First published in 1938, it shows the author's appetite for dealing with whole cultures, whole centuries, looking for deep principles which help us to understand the individual object. Focillon writes wonderfully, in a style quite different to most approved art history. Of Romanesque imagery - bestiaries, strange distorted sculptures - he says: 'It seems, not the created world, but the dream of God on the eve of the Creation, a terrible first-draft of his plan'. Thoughts like that put a smile on your face and transform the act of seeing. Plenty to be learned here - as far as I can tell, it's not overly dated - and inspirational too.

Zarnecki and other scholars produced English Romanesque Art 1066-1200, the catalogue which accompanied a major exhibition of Romanesque art from England, at the Hayward way back in 1984. All the arts are covered, and detailed descriptions of the exhibits make it a good source for getting to know particular works. Lots of information, perhaps best for occasional detailed reading.

A quick mention for two books which cover a wider period than those above:  John Beckwith, Early Medieval Art and C R Dodwell, The Pictorial Art of the West, 800-1200. Best read in that order. That's a long enough list for now.

Pinter and Pragmatics

The dialogues of Harold Pinter are often cited by linguists working in the field of pragmatics. This is an area where linguistics and literary criticism (of drama) are close neighbours; so some entry-level pragmatics can certainly help us in a commentary on a Pinter passage. Here is the briefest of outlines of this rich field of enquiry, followed by a list of things to look out for in the plays.
Pragmatics is the study of meaning in context. To take a simple example, I might say:

It's cold in here.

The meaning of the words is clear enough (assuming I'm speaking literally rather than figuratively); but that is not the same thing as the meaning of the utterance. Analysis starts with the question 'What is the meaning of the utterance? To begin to answer this we need to consider the context.

Depending on the context, 'It's cold in here' could mean:

Please shut the door, or
You're not a very good builder, or
You're not looking after my elderly mother properly, or
You've left the window open again.

We could easily extend this list. The utterance in each case is functioning as a communicative act: I am ordering, pleading, threatening, complaining etc. So we can ask what the speaker is doing with / through the words employed (and in fact we analyse each other's statements int his way all the time).

The utterance 'It's cold in here' is addressed to someone (teh addressee), and thus the act is intended to have an effect on them - to frighten, reassure, persuade, mollify, confuse etc. We could take the meaning of the utterance as act + effect, which is dependent on context (though meaning may be further affected by non-verbal elements: tone of speech, gesture, facial expression etc.)

Conversations generally involve a set of conventions understood by the speakers. One obvious one is turn-taking - a dinner party conversation dominated by one or two loudmouths is spoiled by their disregard for this norm -  but there may be many others whihc are implicit (wait for your seniors to address you, always agree with the boss etc.). The linguist Paul Grice identified 'maxims' or rules of the game which can be observed in conversational exchanges. Two of these are the Maxim of Relevance (say what is relevant) and the Maxim of Quantity (say what you are in a position to say). When we depart from these rules, we are flouting the maxims, just as we are flouting the convention of turn-taking if we speak out of turn.

With this in mind, here are some things we can look out for when commenting on a Pinter passage. Very few refer to linguistic jargon (and Pinter was not writing for students of linguistics!). No quoted examples given (copyright) but it shouldn't be difficult to find any.

1. Concealed meaning. What is being said beneath the surface of the spoken words? There may be several possibilities.
2. What is the speaker doing through the words? (defending, intimidating, resisting etc.)
3. What is the effect of the speech (both the presumed intended effect and the actual one we see)?
4. Ambiguity, when the act and effect are unclear. It can be very disconcerting when we do not know why someone is saying what they are saying.
5. Conventions being followed (the ritual of reading the newspaper at the start of The Dumb Waiter).
6. Conventions being flouted (Gus speaking out of turn, asking questions he's not supposed to).
7. Turn-taking not happening (eg when A speaks, then there's a pause - implying B's turn - and A speaks again)
8. Discontinuity and disconnection between speakers (a sign might be consecutive questions)
9. Dead ends, where a thread of conversation leads to nothing.
10. Evasion, sudden shifts of subject (flouting maxim of relevance)
11. Unexpectedly long speeches (flouting maxim of quantity)
12. Conversations which are not conversations because the characters are not communicating, but isolated in individual worlds.
13. Dialogue may seem awkward because there are no observable codes or conventions, so the characters circle each other warily.
14. Anywhere where information might be being witheld, or there is a possibility that it is being invented (for example, descriptions of past events may be constructions)
15. Repetition: for insistence, reassurance etc.
16. Any words or phrases that create in our minds a notion of violence, invasion, death.
17. And, of course, what is happening in the pauses and silences?

Some links:

Q&A with Michael Billington has some useful comments on Pinter's use of language.

Linguistic approaches:
Chowdury Mohammed Ali, 'Grice's Maxims and a study of some dialogues in Pinter's The Caretaker'
Khorshid Mostofi, An Analysis of Characters' Inner Threats in The Caretaker and Grice's Concept of Implicature
University of Lancaster Linguistics Department, Conversational Implicature and The Dumb Waiter

T S Eliot: Prufrock and Other Observations

With a writer as densely allusive and suggestive as T S Eliot, we can sink happily into the details  of each particular poem, without ever feeling we have quite touched the seabed.  This is an intensely rewarding activity, of course, but it also calls out for a complementary panoramic view of the work, in which we view poems next to each other and get a sense of the poet's general preoccupations. I offer here some thoughts on the first section of the Selected Poems (Faber), Prufrock and Other Observations (1917). This is a remarkable first collection, in which the poet speaks with a fully achieved voice, in a formally innovative style, and assays the great themes that we will see worked on again across the oeuvre.

Prufrock and Other Observations (1917). Observations? It gives the poet a distant air: he is not the Romantic poet expressing his emotional life, but a detached, clinical observer of his times. This is Eliot's impersonal poet, reserved and elusive, using the masks of personae rather than speaking in his own voice: there are many such masks in the Selected Poems: Prufrock, Gerontion, the voices of 'The Waste Land', Simeon ... Eliot is writing dramatic monologues in the tradition of Browning, but with a modern twist. His speakers are ghostly, phantasmal, barely characters at all perhaps beyond the poem they are in. After the psychotic swagger of Browning's Duke in 'My Last Duchess' we get the traumatised voice of Prufrock, vehicle for the doubts and hesitations of modern man, consumed by early twentieth-century angst. For a curious thing about some of the great modernists - Eliot, Pound, Lawrence - is that they hated the modern world. They were really anti-modernists, seeking in the past the order and vitality and sense which they felt had been drained out of the Western world. The contemporary scene they regarded with horror: it was, literally, a waste land, a spiritual desert life is savaged, mechanised, brutalised, rendered meaningless by the loss of a shared cultural tradition. One of the preoccupations we meet in the first volume is this sense of disenchantment: other ages might have known the grace and loveliness of the mermaids, but they are silent now. The later religious poems can be read as a search for a way out of this disenchantment, back to grace, beauty and meaning.

The air of coldness of the title of Prufrock and Other Observations clashes with the warmth of the dedication, to Eliot's friend Jean Verdenal, who died in the First World War. It is characteristic that Eliot should express his warmth of feeling for Verdenal through a quotation from Dante, a poet Eliot revered and turned to throughout his life. It is the first of the many, many allusions and quotations we will meet in the book. And it stirs questions. Why express yourself through the words of another poet, from another time, in another language? For some, it is simple elitism: an epigraph in Latin or Italian is like a sign saying 'Don't bother with this unless you're part of the club of the hyper-educated', a way of ring-fencing culture off from the common man. Another suggestion has been that it is a deliberate strategy of invoking (literally, calling in) the great tradition in the contemporary: through allusion and quotation, Eliot's poems seek to be inclusive, to involve the formative texts of Western civilisation. Quotation is a kind of genuflection to the great lights of culture. Or, perhaps, it is a form of reticence. A rather shy way of uttering affection, we may feel. Eliot cannot salute his dead friend directly, in his own words, but does through in a sideways fashion, through the words of Dante. Cleverness deflects the grief. Deep feeling is in this way managed and ordered through the apparatus of erudition. Or a mixture of these motives. Or none of the above.

Even before the first poem, we are in Dante's underworld, where he is guided by Virgil among the souls in Inferno and Purgatory: 'trattando l'ombre come cosa scalda', treating the shadows [the dead] like the solid thing. Shadows and reality, the dead and the living - this is one of the great Eliot themes. He is fascinated by the meeting between the living and the dead: on a literary plane, this is the meeting of past and present writers, the relationship between modernity and tradition. In Eliot's scheme of things, Dante is a modern poet, a voice expressing the present. And Prufrock, Gerontion, the inhabitants of 'The Waste Land', the Hollow Men - they are all in some shadowland, the twilight kingdom, between life and death. The living can seem more dead than the dead, an idea still being worked through in the Ariel poems, where we find the Magi between the old (dead) dispensation and the new world, or Marina's father between life and death in the ephemeral smoke (an echo of the fog of Prufrock). And overshadowing the work is the the tragedy of the First World War. Against that Inferno, everything can collapse into unreality. In Eliot, we barely leave Dante's underworld, where the living poet descends, with the help of Virgil, to meet the spirits of the dead, and where the spirits, through poetry, give voice to their vexations.

The first persona we meet is Prufrock, speaker of the first poem. He is himself an 'observation'. A strong influence here is the French poet Jules Laforgue (1860-87), who cultivated an air of sceptical, cynical detachment from vulgar modern life. Prufrock - whose tidy respectable name deflates the romantic expectations of 'Love Song'  - is in the Inferno of modernity, and the 'you and I' suggests Dante and Virgil, touring this latest manifestation of spiritual death. (Another key influence is Baudelaire, whose speakers take refuge in the imagination from the sordid urban world: 'La rue assourdissante autour de moi hurlait', the deafening street howled around me, he wrote). Prufrock is captive in the lonely, fog-bound city, and his particular circle of hell is the world of society, the drawing rooms, cultured conversations and teatime rituals which form the timetable of his existence. It is a poem of existential crisis: Prufrock is existing but not living. He cannot live. He looks out at the world around him and vertically down into himself. His world has 'formulated' him, and he is acutely aware of its judgements and expectations. Confined by this self-consciousness, he cannot find in himself any will to act, to take on an independent life: even to speak about it would be a presumption, a disturbance of the settled world. Though he walks and talks, Prufrock is, spiritually speaking, dead - a soul in agony, in hell. His condition is that of paralysis, a morbid lassitude born of the sense of the pointlessness of life, which leads to an inability to do anything apart from retreat into guilt-ridden introspection. This ennui is a major theme in Baudelaire; and we find another treatment in James Joyce's Dubliners, whose characters are unable to move or act beyond the narrow circumscribed world defined for them by place, tradition, religion. In this condition, life itself - meaningful, fulfilled life - is deferred, indefinitely postponed. Yet another reference here is Matthew Arnold's 'The Buried Life', which describes the sense of our real lives and selves being hidden from us:

But often, in the world's most crowded streets,
But often, in the din of strife,
There rises an unspeakable desire
After the knowledge of our buried life.

The buried life, the life not fully lived is another great Eliot theme, or really the same theme as the meeting of living and dead, for it is about the life which never happens, which turns into a mental death. Prufrock cannot act; Gerontion ends up in a waste land at the end of an empty life; The Hollow Men take this spiritual inactivity to an extreme; and even Simeon, having been granted the revelation, resigns himself to an otherwise uneventful life.

After Prufrock's love song, which describes not being able to love, and not having a song, we meet the similarly tortured speaker of 'Portrait of a Lady'. The title alludes to a Henry James novel, and the poem is a Jamesian 'moment', consciousness investigated to breaking point. The lady believes her companion is an understanding friend (lines 19-23), but he knows he isn't: he stands back from the scene he is in, treats it as material for art, reflects on his incapacity for true friendship (the musical images form an analogue of this guilt pulsing through him), and takes refuge in social rituals - admiring the monuments and so forth. It is another version of Arnold's buried life, the unspoken world where conversation falters, the subterranean anxieties which lie beneath social ritual. (This acute awareness of hidden, vertiginous depths beneath the surface of events is a great modernist trope: it is the basic premise of Joyce's Ulysses and Woolf's Mrs Dalloway - both, incidentally, published in 1922, the same year as 'The Waste Land'.) Feeling unequal to the emotional demands made of him, the speaker of 'Portrait' takes refuge in the persona of the refined flaneur, the ironic observer of urban life. Music throughout is the unconscious force that jerks him into recognising his inadequacy. When she dies - she is nearing her journey's end, she says - how will he respond to that? Will she have the better of him by pointing out in her death his total inability to find the right feeling in himself? Intellect, culture, irony .. all here have led to a dead end, a failure of sympathy and communication. Eliot the tremendously educated (Harvard, Paris, Oxford) intellectual poet is contemplating the emotional atrophy which follows from over-cultivation of the intellect. As in Prufrock, the form expresses the emotional narrative of the piece, giving us an x-ray of the synaptic currents as the speaker feels his nerves grow, then calms himself, then starts again ... And we are getting an uneasy sense now of Eliot's representation of women - terrifying presences in Prufrock, and a source of neurotic anxiety here.

In 'Preludes', we return to the modern city, as explored by Baudelaire (Eliot seems here to be remembering his home town of St Louis, Missouri - in exile in London, the memory grows keener). We can see the waste land forming - the streets are shabby, life is made up of pointless 'masquerades', the poet watches and cultivates his observational powers. The Preludes look back to Baudelaire and more recently to Imagism, the school of poetry formed by Pound and others in opposition to the (as they saw it) vacuous rhetoric of Georgian poetry. Imagism is devoted to clear, sharp delineations in a language which is born of common speech but exact. From the image the reader 'gets' the emotional state behind it. Compare the images in these poems to Pound's famous 'In a Station of the Metro':

This apparation of these faces in the crowd;
Petals on a wet, black bough.

From these deft observations and metaphors an emotional world is built up in the reader's mind. Alongside the clarity and economy of the writing, we also note the detached poet stance uttering some rather unpleasant observations about the sordid contents of some unnamed, ordinary person's mind. Thanks! And how does he know, anyway? The ironic detachment here becomes an aggressive snobbery, as in the dead crowd on London Bridge in The Waste Land. We could read this as the speaker projecting his own disenchantment and self-loathing onto what he sees: Preludes and Rhapsody, after all, explore the process of perception, dramatise the way inner state colours observations of the external world. But nonetheless, elitist detachment from ordinary life is for many one of the less agreeable aspects of the Eliot poetic.

Then we come to 'Rhpasody on a Windy Night', a poem freighted with intimidating learning, if we consult Southam and other guides. One influence is the French writer Henri Bergson, and his theories of memory (like Eliot, Bergson was interested in the coexistence of past and present); perhaps we see a trace of F H Bradley, the Oxford philosopher on whom Eliot wrote his doctoral dissertation (the war prevented Eliot from attending his viva voce exam, and hence he never became Dr Eliot). Bradley's subject was the philosophy of mind: is there any reality beyond the reality of my consciousness? Are there minds other than mine? How could I know if there were? and so forth. (Perhaps the most clearly Bradleyan lines occur in 'The Waste Land': 'each in his prison / thinking of the key'). But 'Rhapsody' is not a philosophical poem. It does not argue a thesis, and source-hunting is likely to lead us away from its emotional depths onto the dry (very dry) land of abstract reflection, where some readers may prefer to be. For 'Rhapsody', like the other poems in the collection, is quite terrifying. It is about suffering, and depicts a mind in an extreme state. Again we find a speaker trapped in a circle of hell, which takes the form of an urban nocturne. Memory is troubling, leading us into madness (11-12). We meet another menacing female (16-22). A prostitute, at that time? Perhaps. Or a projection of the mind? Another paralysed spirit, certainly, unable to communicate.  Failure to communicate is perhaps the keynote. Even the children are oblivious, and the nearest the speaker gets to any kind of interaction with anything is playing tug-of-war with a crab. we never quite know if the images int his poem are nightmare phantoms, or things in the real streets around which, restlessly, he walks. Alongside these themes we notice another Eliot motif, which is eyes: the woman's eye is twisted, and the child's eye is a blank. We remember the piercing eyes in Prufrock. Turn from here to 'The Hollow Men' and you'll see eyes all over the place, eyes unable to see, unable to meet. If the eyes are the windows to the soul, as the saying has it, then we find ourselves here in a soulless place, the place where the soul dies. 'Rhapsody' follows the meandering route of the speaker as he walks through this desolate inferno - waste land - city - unconscious - memory liminal space where thoughts that should be dead and buried come to life. He finally reaches his sparse-sounding lodging, with the single toothbrush hanging pathetically on the wall. The lamp tells him to get ready for the business of living (which is what Prufrock spends his life doing). Life? what life? The irony is savage, hence the last line, locked in place by rhyme (rhyme endings in Eliot are rarely comforting chimes, more often beats of mounting nervous tension).

To sum up the themes announced in Prufrock: failure of communication, the buried life, the life not lived, the mingling of living and dead, past and present, women as a source of fear and self-doubt, elitism (perhaps), despair, suffering. A depressing list, so what stops the experience of reading from being purely depressing? First, the simple fact that is being said: the unspeakable is being articulated, the depths hauled to the surface (cf the image of memory throwing things up on a beach in Rhapsody). There is the creative energy which we find in the exact use of language and the formal techniques: quotation and allusion, the handling of 'free' verse so that the lines form an exact map of the mental journey they describe, the employment of personae, the sharp characterisation, imagery that has not been done to death, and still makes a surprising impact today. And we sense that this is the real thing, not someone writing what they think poetry ought to sound like, but using poetry as an instrument to transcribe experience, whatever dark places that may lead us into. The creative process of art, then, is a way of dealing with pain. The next set of poems, 'Ara vos Prec' (Poems, 1920) will ask, among other things, whether art and intellect are sufficient for dealing with the tribulations of modern (modernist) life.

For more overview material (online) see:

One-page summary from Books and Writers
Ronald Bush, T S Eliot's Life and Career
General Account on The Poetry Foundation

Also:
Earlier post on this blog on Prufrock
Keith Sagar, 'Prufrock Supine and Sweeney Erect'
Analysis of Rhapsody
Another account of Rhapsody on Wondering Minstrels blog