Wallace Stevens (1879-1955) was an American modernist poet. Born in Reading, Pennsylvania, and educated at Harvard and the New York Law School, he worked as an executive for The Hartford Insurance Company in Connecticut. The photograph by Sylvia Salmi was taken in the 1940s, at which time he was vice-president of the company. In his free time Stevens wrote poems, publishing his first book Harmonium in 1923. Throughout his life he considered poetry as the “supreme fiction,” something that could replace religion in human life, and provide us with a more complete understanding than that provided by science or philosophy. In 1942 he published a set of poems entitled Notes toward a Supreme Fiction, to illustrate the nature and power of poetry.

The Romantic Revolution

In the late 18^th and early 19^th Century, artists and writers insisted that art should stress individual creativity rather than formal learning, and that the emotional response to the world was more important that the rational. Not everyone appreciated the new poetry. In 1820, the satirist Thomas Love Peacock described The Four Ages of Poetry: the iron age of wherein rude bards celebrated the exploits of their chieftains, the golden age of Homer, the silver age of civilized verse lasting from Virgil to Dryden, and the current brass age wherein poets described their feelings. His invective was venomous: he described the characteristics of romantic poetry as

harmony, which is language on the rack of Procrustes; sentiment, which is canting egotism in the mask of refined feeling; passion, which is the commotion of a weak and selfish mind; pathos, which is the whining of an unmanly spirit; and sublimity, which is the inflation of an empty head.  

Percy Bysshe Shelley wrote a response to Peacock in 1821, but he died in 1822, and A Defense of Poetry was not published until 1840. Shelley distinguished two kinds of mental action: reason (Greek logizein, logic, analysis) and imagination (Greek poiein, poetry, synthesis).

Reason is the enumeration of qualities already known; imagination is the perception of the value of those qualities, both separately and as a whole. Reason respects the differences, and imagination the similitudes of things. Reason is to imagination as the instrument to the agent, as the body to the spirit, as the shadow to the substance.

He proposed that it is through the imagination that we obtain new knowledge:

The functions of the poetical faculty are twofold: by one it creates new materials of knowledge, and power, and pleasure; by the other it engenders in the mind a desire to reproduce and arrange them according to a certain rhythm and order which may be called the beautiful and the good.

And at the end of his essay, he claimed

Poets are the hierophants of an unapprehended inspiration; the mirrors of the gigantic shadows which futurity casts upon the present; the words which express what they understand not; the trumpets which sing to battle, and feel not what they inspire; the influence which is moved not, but moves. Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.

The word hierophant, used initially in the context of the Eleusinian Mysteries, comes from the Greek hieros (sacred, holy) and phainein (show, reveal).

Shelley embodied these ideas in his 1819 Ode to the West Wind (full text available). This poem describes the west wind of autumn that blows the leaves from the trees and heralds the coming winter. It ends

Make me thy lyre, even as the forest is:
What if my leaves are falling like its own!
The tumult of thy mighty harmonies

Will take from both a deep, autumnal tone,
Sweet though in sadness. Be thou, Spirit fierce,
My spirit! Be thou me, impetuous one!

Drive my dead thoughts over the universe
Like wither’d leaves to quicken a new birth!
And, by the incantation of this verse,

Scatter, as from an unextinguish’d hearth
Ashes and sparks, my words among mankind!
Be through my lips to unawaken’d earth

The trumpet of a prophecy! O Wind,
If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind?

 

Shelley was not alone in considering poetry as a great system for creating knowledge and understanding. In his prophetic books, William Blake described Los as the personification of the creative imagination, in despair at the state of the world following the Industrial Revolution. In the 1820 book Jerusalem: The Emanation of the Giant Albion, Los is driven by his demonic Spectre to destroy the present state of England (personified by the Giant Albion), and reforge a new world. The following is Blake’s representation of Los from page 6 of Jerusalem:

Los proclaims

I must Create a System, or be enslav’d by another Man’s
I will not Reason & Compare: my business is to Create
(Blake, Jerusalem, 1820, p 10)

 

Modern Ideas of Poetry

Shelley and the Romantic poets were soon criticized for being too idealistic, too removed from the real world, and too emotional. The following quotation is from a critique of Shelley by George Santayana (1863-1952), a poet and philosopher who taught at Harvard when Wallace Stevens was an undergraduate there. Stevens and Santayana became friends, exchanged poems and stayed in contact long after Stevens graduated (Mariani, 2016, pp 21-23). Santayana claimed that Shelley

could never put together any just idea of the world: he merely collected images and emotions, and out of them made worlds of his own. His poetry accordingly does not well express history, nor human character, nor the constitution of nature. What he unrolls before us instead is, in a sense, fantastic; it is a series of landscapes, passions, and cataclysms such as never were on earth, and never will be. (Santayana, 1913, pp 181-2)

After Romanticism, the Realists had their day. And as the 20^th Century began, Modernism came to the fore. Modernists poets tended toward the everyday rather than the fantastic, irony rather than idealism, objectivity rather than passion, and innovation rather than derivation. In his 1942 poem Of Modern Poetry, Stevens remarked

It has to be living, to learn the speech of the place.
It has to face the men of the time and to meet
The women of the time. It has to think about war
And it has to find what will suffice. It has
To construct a new stage.

Despite being critical of Shelley’s poetry, Santayana nevertheless largely agreed with his idea that poetry creates our understanding of the world. He described the “great function of poetry:”

to repair to the material of experience, seizing hold of the reality of sensation and fancy beneath the surface of conventional ideas, and then out of that living but indefinite material to build new structures, richer, finer, fitter to the primary tendencies of our nature, truer to the ultimate possibilities of the soul. (Santayana, 1900, p 271).

Santayana realized that the creative imagination works in science as well as poetry:

Science and common sense are themselves in their way poets of no mean order, since they take the material of experience and make out of it a clear, symmetrical, and beautiful world (Santayana, 1900, p 271).

He also proposed that poetry and religion were closely related:

Poetry raised to its highest power is then identical with religion grasped in its inmost truth; at their point of union both reach their utmost purity and beneficence, for then poetry loses its frivolity and ceases to demoralize, while religion surrenders its illusions and ceases to deceive. (Santayana, 1900, p 290).

These last two quotations recall Shelley’s A Defense of Poetry:

Poetry is indeed something divine. It is at once the centre and circumference of knowledge; it is that which comprehends all science, and that to which all science must be referred

These ideas were not accepted by all modernist poets. W. H. Auden (1907-1973) had much more restrained views on the function of poetry:

For poetry makes nothing happen: it survives
In the valley of its making where executives
Would never want to tamper, flows on south
From ranches of isolation and the busy griefs,
Raw towns that we believe and die in; it survives,
A way of happening, a mouth.
(Auden, In Memory of W. B. Yeats, 1940)

Wallace Stevens, however, thought about poetry in much the same way as Shelley and Santayana (Italia, 1993). In his essay The Figure of the Youth as Virile Poet in his 1951 collection The Necessary Angel, Stevens quotes Shelley extensively:

He speaks of poetry as created by “that imperial faculty whose throne is curtained within the invisible nature of man.” He says that a poem is the very image of life expressed in its eternal truth. It is “indeed something divine. It is at once the centre and circumference of knowledge . . . the record of the best and happiest moments of the happiest and best minds . . . it arrests the vanishing apparitions which haunt the interlunations of life.” In spite of the absence of a definition and m spite of the impressions and approximations we are never at a loss to recognize poetry. As a consequence it is easy for us to propose a center of poetry, a vis or noeud vital, to which, in the absence of a definition, all the variations of definitions are peripheral. (Stevens, 1951, pp 44-45).

Stevens’ conception of the poet was very similar to Shelley’s:

what makes the poet the potent figure that he is, or was, or ought to be, is that he creates the world to which we turn incessantly and without knowing it and that he gives to life the supreme fictions without which we are unable to conceive of it. (Stevens, 1951, p 31)

Stevens used the term “fiction” to describe the creative process of poetry. “Fiction” comes from the Latin fictus the past participle of fingere meaning to shape, form, devise, feign; “poetry” comes from the Greek poeisis meaning a fabrication or creation, which is itself derived from poiein, to make or compose.

Stevens’ proposal of poetry as the process primarily responsible for our understanding of the world is similar in may ways to the Martin Heidegger’s ideas about Hölderlin’s poetry, though neither writer could have been aware of the other:

The poet names the gods and names all things with respect to what they are. This The poet names the gods and names all things with respect to what they are. This naming does not merely come about when something already previously known is furnished with a name; rather, by speaking the essential word, the poet’s naming first nominates the beings as what they are. Thus they become known as beings. Poetry is the founding of being in the word. (Heidegger, 1941, p 58)

What we can express in words we can hope to understand. Poetry is unlike other modes of expression used in religion, law, or science. Poetry is particularly and vividly close to experience, and because of its attention to sound and metaphor it makes that experience memorable. In his essay On the Contribution of Poetry to the Search for Truth, Hans-Georg Gadamer, a student of Heidegger, points out that poetry brings experience “near” to us:

A genuine poem …allows us to experience “nearness” in such a way that this nearness is held in and through the linguistic form of the poem. What is the nearness that is held there? Whenever we have to hold something, it is because it is transient and threatens to escape our grasp. In fact our fundamental experience as beings subject to time is that all things escape us, that all the events of our lives fade more and more, so that at best they glow with an almost unreal shimmer in the most distant recollection. But the poem does not fade, for the poetic word brings the transience of time to a standstill. (Gadamer, 1986, p 114)

Gadamer realizes, however, that poetry is but one of many linguistic modes used to gain  understanding of the world:

Language gives all of us our access to a world in which certain special forms of human experience arise: the religious tidings that proclaim salvation, the legal judgment that tells us what is right and what is wrong in our society, the poetic word that by being there bears witness to our own being. (Gadamer, 1986, p 115)

 

Supreme Fictions

Stevens first used the term “supreme fiction” in his 1923 poem A High-Toned Christian Woman (Brazeal, 2007). The main them of the poem (full text available) is that human creativity knows no hierarchy: poetry is as valuable as religion, jazz improvisations as important as choral hymns, and bawdy merriment as meaningful as moral laws. The poem begins

Poetry is the supreme fiction, madame.
Take the moral law and make a nave of it
And from the nave build haunted heaven. Thus,
The conscience is converted into palms,
Like windy citherns hankering for hymns.
We agree in principle. That’s clear. But take
The opposing law and make a peristyle,
And from the peristyle project a masque
Beyond the planets. Thus, our bawdiness,
Unpurged by epitaph, indulged at last,
Is equally converted into palms,
Squiggling like saxophones.

Stevens is indulging is word games: “nave” leads to “knave,” “palm” recalls “psalm,” and the “supreme fiction” brings to mind the “supreme being” who created everything, the creator free of any church, the godhead of Deists and Revolutionaries.

Stevens had given up his belief in the Christian God but still felt the need for something to believe in. That it might be possible to believe in a fiction was suggested in his 1942 poem Asides on an Oboe (full text available) which begins

The prologues are over. It is a question, now,
Of final belief. So, say that final belief
Must be in a fiction. It is time to choose.

Two ideas – the concept of a supreme fiction by which the poetic imagination could create and understand a world, and the need of human beings to believe in something – ran through all of Steven’s thought and poetry. In the Adagia (an unpublished collection of aphorisms), he claimed

The final belief is to believe in a fiction, which you know to be a fiction, there being nothing else. The exquisite truth is to know that it is a fiction and that you believe in it willingly (Stevens, 1997, p 903)

Unfortunately, although the word “fiction” means an imaginative creation, it also carries the connotation that it is untrue. In this regard, Stevens’ statements become contradictory since we cannot believe in something that we know to be untrue (Brazeal, 2007). Stevens is using William James’ idea of the will to believe. But, as Brazeal points out, it was not James’s view that we could just believe in anything. Rather we could believe in what we thought was true even though we had not yet fully proven it.

Stevens discussed the problems about believing in a fiction in a 1942 letter to Henry Church about Notes to a Supreme Fiction:

One evening, a week or so ago, a student at Trinity College came to the office and walked home with me. We talked about this book. I said that I thought that we had reached a point at which we could no longer really believe in anything unless we recognized that it was a fiction The student said that that was an impossibility. that there is as no such thing as believing in something that one knew was no true. It is obvious, however, that we are doing that all the time. There are things with respect to which we willingly suspend disbelief, if there is instinctive in us a will to believe, or if there is a will to believe, whether or not it is instinctive, it seems to me that we can suspend disbelief with reference to a fiction as easily as we can suspend it with reference to anything else. There are fictions that arc extensions of reality. There are plenty of people who believe in Heaven as definitely as your New England ancestors and my Dutch ancestors believed in it. But Heaven is an extension of reality (Stevens & Stevens, 1996, p 430)

Some resolution of these contradictions may be found in the way we consider fiction. Any worthwhile work of fiction must be “true to life.” If it has no relevance to real life, it is not worth reading. This is likely the meaning of Stevens’ fiction – something created by the human imagination that represents what could or does happen in real life as accurately and completely (as “truly”) as it can. Michael Frayn has discussed some of the complex relations between truth and fiction (2006).

 

Notes toward a Supreme Fiction

In 1942 Stevens published Notes toward a Supreme Fiction with Cummington Press, a fine press founded by Harry Duncan in 1939 in Cummington, Massachusetts. 273 copies of the 45-page book were hand-printed, 80 of which were signed by Stevens. A second edition of 330 copies was published in 1943. The book was dedicated to Henry Church, a patron of the arts, whose fortune derived from his father’s patent for baking soda (with the brand name Arm and Hammer). The design for the book’s title page was by Alessandro Giampietro. Stevens told Henry Church in a 1942 letter

that the straight lines in the designs of the book represent direction and that the circles mean comprehension. (Stevens & Stevens, 1996, p 418)

The poem (full text available) consists of a prologue of 8 lines, three sections containing ten poems, each composed of 7 unrhymed tercets (21 lines), and an epilogue in the same form as the preceding poems. The printing was set up so that the title, dedication (to Henry Church), prologue, section titles and the poems were each printed on a separate page.

The title informs us that this is not the definitive description of the supreme fiction. The poetry provides notes – either in the sense of early observations or in the sense of musical notes that can form an overarching harmony. Furthermore, it is “a” supreme fiction – the creation of Stevens rather than of the ultimate creation of everything.

The prologue is addressed to something not clearly identified, probably the creative imagination with which the poet interacts to bring forth understanding – the “vivid transparence” that leads to “peace.” Older poets would have called it their “muse.”

And for what, except for you, do I feel love?
Do I press the extremest book of the wisest man
Close to me, hidden in me day and night?
In the uncertain light of single, certain truth,
Equal in living changingness to the light
In which I meet you, in which we sit at rest,
For a moment in the central of our being,
The vivid transparence that you bring is peace.

The three sections of the book are entitled

It must be abstract
It must change
It must give pleasure

These titles denote the essential characteristics of any worthwhile fiction.

A detailed commentary is beyond the scope of this essay, which will limit itself to a few of the poems. Many scholars have provided more extensive analyses: Kermode (1960, pp 111-119), Sukenik (1967, pp 136-163), Vendler (1969, pp 168-205), Bloom (1977, pp 167-218), Cook (2007, pp 214-236), Bates (2007).  

The first poem in the first section (It must be abstract) is addressed to an “ephebe,” the name for a young man in training in Ancient Athens.  

Begin, ephebe, by perceiving the idea
Of this invention, this invented world,
The inconceivable idea of the sun.
 
You must become an ignorant man again
And see the sun again with an ignorant eye
And see it clearly in the idea of it.

The poet urges to ephebe not to accept what he has been taught – not to believe in the gods – but to make his own understanding of the world

The death of one god is the death of all.
Let purple Phoebus lie in umber harvest,
Let Phoebus slumber and die in autumn umber,
 
Phoebus is dead, ephebe. But Phoebus was
A name for something that never could be named.
There was a project for the sun and is.
 
There is a project for the sun. The sun
Must bear no name, gold flourisher, but be
In the difficulty of what it is to be.

Umber is an earth-brown pigment, but the word derives from the Latin ombra, shadow, and suggests the shades of the dead. The epithet “gold flourisher” describe the sun’s essential characteristics: the sun as an abstraction.

The final poem in the first section considers the idea of what man must become. The poet envisions a man in clothes too big for his body seeing the world clearly without regard to what religion requires or what humanity desires

Cloudless the morning. It is he. The man
In that old coat, those sagging pantaloons,
 
It is of him, ephebe, to make, to confect
The final elegance, not to console
Nor sanctify, but plainly to propound.

The 5^th poem of the second section (It must change) describes a deserted plantation on a tropical island – likely in the Florida Keys, which Stevens visited many times in 1920s and 1930s.

On a blue island in a sky-wide water
The wild orange trees continued to bloom and to bear,
Long after the planter’s death. A few limes remained,
 
Where his house had fallen, three scraggy trees weighted
With garbled green. These were the planter’s turquoise
And his orange blotches, these were his zero green,
 
A green baked greener in the greenest sun.
These were his beaches, his sea-myrtles in
White sand, his patter of the long sea-slushes.

Before the recurrent hurricanes had ruined the plantations, the Florida Keys were famous for the limes used to make Key lime pie. Stevens’ poem about the planter illustrates how our conception of the world must take into account its transience. And find this beautiful. The poem’s third verse is remarkable for its portrayal of the sound of the waves upon the beach.

This poem concludes with a eulogy to the planter. Because he is no more, the eulogy is expressed in negative terms:

An unaffected man in a negative light
Could not have borne his labor nor have died
Sighing that he should leave the banjo’s twang.

Vendler (1969, p 170) transcribes the verse without the negatives:

He lived in a positive light, a man deeply affected by his islands, and therefore he could bear his labor, and could die, in spite of exile and desire, sighing that he should have to leave even so simple and small a pleasure as his banjo’s twang.

The 6^th poem of the second section deals with birds:

Bethou me, said sparrow, to the crackled blade,
And you, and you, bethou me as you blow,
When in my coppice you behold me be.
 
Ah, ke! The bloody wren, the felon jay,
Ke-ke, the jug throated robin pouring out,
Bethou, bethou, bethou me in my glade.
 
There was such idiot minstrelsy in rain,
So many clappers going without bells,
That these bethous compose a heavenly gong.
 
One voice repeating, one tireless chorister,
The phrases of a single phrase, ke-ke,
A single text, granite monotony

Stevens was a connoisseur of birds and could whistle a multiplicity of birdsongs (Cook, 2007, p 224). The following are some typical songs of the birds mentioned in the first two verses

Sparrow:                                

Wren:

 Bluejay:

Robin:

As the poem provides its brilliant rendition of the different birds, it makes passing references to other birds that have found their way into poems. “Coppice” is a reference to Hardy’s The Darkling Thrush; “pouring forth” and “glade” are quoted from Keat’s Ode to a Nightingale.

                Now more than ever seems it rich to die,
         To cease upon the midnight with no pain,
                While thou art pouring forth thy soul abroad
                        In such an ecstasy!

Stevens cannot resist the wordplay between the “jug-jug” sound of the robin and “pouring out” from a jug.

However, Stevens notes that most birdsong is monotonous. Because it does not change it is not like the supreme fictions of a poet. Stevens criticizes the tendency of the Romantic poets to liken themselves to birds or to other natural phenomena. The “bethous” that he monotonously repeats are a reference to Shelley’s Ode to the West Wind.

                      Be thou, Spirit fierce,
My spirit! Be thou me, impetuous one!

Stevens’ poem concludes

These are of minstrels lacking minstrelsy,
Of an earth in which the first leaf is the tale
Of leaves, in which the sparrow is a bird

Of stone, that never changes. Bethou him, you
And you, bethou him and bethou. It is
A sound like any other. It will end.

The birdsongs are not supreme fictions because they never change.

In the 8^th poem of the second section (It must change) Stevens imagines how Shelley’s Ozymandias, who thought he could impose his order on the world, could have been seduced by the beautiful Nanzia Nuncio so that the constant order that the king of kings desired could give way to changing fictions:

I am the woman stripped more nakedly
Than nakedness, standing before an inflexible
Order, saying I am the contemplated spouse.
 
Speak to me that, which spoken, will array me
In its own only precious ornament.
Set on me the spirit’s diamond coronal.
 
Clothe me entire in the final filament,
So that I tremble with such love so known
And myself am precious for your perfecting.
 
Then Ozymandias said the spouse, the bride
Is never naked. A fictive covering
Weaves always glistening from the heart and mind.

In the 7^th poem of the third section (It must give pleasure), Stevens contrasts politics, the imposing or order on the world, to poetry, the discovery of order in the world. And finds pleasure in the changing order of the seasons (Lensing, 2007):

                    But to impose is not
To discover. To discover an order as of
A season, to discover summer and know it,

To discover winter and know it well, to find
Not to impose, not to have reasoned at all,
Out of nothing to have come on major weather,

It is possible, possible, possible.  

The final poem of the third section is a paean to the world we live on, affectionately referred to as the “fat girl,” the earth in all its plenitude and beauty, and “my green, my fluent mundo.” A world that we can only understand through feeling and through fiction:

That’s it: the more than rational distortion,
The fiction that results from feeling. Yes, that.
 
They will get it straight one day at the Sorbonne.
We shall return at twilight from the lecture
Pleased that the irrational is rational,
 
Until flicked by feeling, in a gildered street,
I call you by name, my green, my fluent mundo.
You will have stopped revolving except in crystal.

Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction concludes with an epilogue in which Stevens compares the poet to the soldier. Stevens may have thought this necessary in a poem written during war. However, the epilogue really does not work. Poets lay down their lines but not their lives for what they believe in. Stevens claims that poetry can give meaning to the soldier’s sacrifice. But as James Merrill pointed out in his 1985 poem Page from the Koran:

How gladly with proper words,” said Wallace Stevens
“The solider dies.” Or kills.

 

Death Comes for Philosopher and for poet

George Santayana resigned from Harvard University in 1911 and spent the rest of his life in Europe. He was financially supported by a small inheritance from his mother and by the royalties from his books, among which was the best-selling novel The Last Puritan (1935). His portrait by Samuel Johnson Woolf graced the cover of Tim magazine in 1936.

At the beginning of World War II, the philosopher was living in Rome. It soon became difficult to transfer money from his American publishers to Italy. In 1941, rather than undergo the stress of travelling during wartime, the 77-year-old obtained lodgings with the Sisters of the Little Company of Mary, who ran the small Calvary Hospital next door to the ancient Basilica Santo Stefano Rotondo. Since the sisters also managed a hospital in Chicago, Santayana’s publishers could pay the sisters in Chicago for his upkeep in Rome (McCormick, 1987, p 420). Santayana continued to live with the sisters after the war. Despite being a confirmed atheist, he enjoyed the liturgy, austerity and tranquility of his Catholic surroundings. Robert Lowell later commented that Santayana believed that “There is no God and Mary is His mother” (in the poem For George Santayana (1863-1952) in Life Studies, 1959). Nevertheless, Santayana maintained his scepticism to the end and insisted on being buried in non-consecrated ground.  

In the summer of 1952, Wallace Stevens wrote a poem about the old philosopher. Santayana died from stomach cancer before the poem was published later that year. As well as describing his situation in Rome, Stevens’ poem makes multiple allusions to Santayana’s 1923 Scepticism and Animal Faith (Griswold works through these references on his website). The poem (full text available) begins

On the threshold of heaven, the figures in the street
Become the figures of heaven, the majestic movement
Of men growing small in the distances of space,
Singing, with smaller and still smaller sound,
Unintelligible absolution and an end –

The threshold, Rome, and that more merciful Rome
Beyond, the two alike in the make of the mind.
It is as if in a human dignity
Two parallels become one, a perspective, of which
Men are part both in the inch and in the mile.

How easily the blown banners change to wings…
Things dark on the horizons of perception
Become accompaniments of fortune, but
Of the fortune of the spirit, beyond the eye,
Not of its sphere, and yet not far beyond,

The human end in the spirit’s greatest reach,
The extreme of the known in the presence of the extreme
Of the unknown. The newsboys’ muttering
Becomes another murmuring; the smell
Of medicine, a fragrantness not to be spoiled…

The bed, the books, the chair, the moving nuns,
The candle as it evades the sight, these are
The sources of happiness in the shape of Rome,
A shape within the ancient circles of shapes,
And these beneath the shadow of a shape

In a confusion on bed and books, a portent
On the chair, a moving transparence on the nuns,
A light on the candle tearing against the wick
To join a hovering excellence, to escape
From fire and be part only of that which

Fire is the symbol: the celestial possible.

The “more merciful Rome” of the second stanza is heaven and the parallel lines becoming one represent death as a transition to eternity. 

The poem ends:

It is a kind of total grandeur at the end,
With every visible thing enlarged and yet
No more than a bed, a chair and moving nuns,
The immensest theatre, and pillared porch,
The book and candle in your ambered room,

Total grandeur of a total edifice,
Chosen by an inquisitor of structures
For himself. He stops upon this threshold,
As if the design of all his words takes form
And frame from thinking and is realized.

The “inquisitor of structures” may refer to Santayana’s likening architecture to poetry:

Every human architect must do likewise with his edifice; he must mould his bricks or hew his stones into symmetrical solids and lay them over one another in regular strata, like a poet’s lines. (Santayana, 1900, p 261)

Griswold suggests that the final lines relate to Santayana’s

The ultimate reaches of doubt and renunciation open out for it, by an easy transition, into fields of endless variety and peace, as if through the gorges of death it had passed into a paradise where all things are crystallised into the image of themselves, and have lost their urgency and their venom. (Santayana, 1923, p 76

The following is Steven’s recitation of the poem

Wallace Stevens himself developed stomach cancer less than 3 years after Santayana (Mariani, 2016, pp 394-402). The cancer was inoperable and a gastroenterostomy was performed at St Francis Catholic Hospital in Hartford. During his recuperation Stevens met the hospital’s chaplain Father Arthur Hanley and talked to him about poetry and religion. Stevens was discharged but re-admitted a few months later. During this second and final hospitalization he agreed to be baptized by Father Hanley (Hanley 1977). Stevens had been brought up as a Lutheran as an adult he had questioned the need for any organized religion. Although Stevens was prone to irony, it appears that his final conversion was sincere. Perhaps he took to heart the words of his friend Santayana:

Scepticism is the chastity of the intellect, and it is shameful to surrender it too soon or to the first comer: there is nobility in preserving it coolly and proudly through a long youth, until at last, in the ripeness of instinct and discretion, it can be safely exchanged for fidelity and happiness. (Santayana, 1923, pp 69-70)

 

The Internal Paramour

One of Stevens’ last poems Final Soliloquy of the Internal Paramour was published in the Hudson Review in 1951:

Light the first light of evening, as in a room
In which we rest and, for small reason, think
The world imagined is the ultimate good.

This is, therefore, the intensest rendezvous.
It is in that thought that we collect ourselves,
Out of all the indifferences, into one thing:

Within a single thing, a single shawl
Wrapped tightly round us, since we are poor, a warmth,
A light, a power, the miraculous influence.

Here, now, we forget each other and ourselves.
We feel the obscurity of an order, a whole,
A knowledge, that which arranged the rendezvous.

Within its vital boundary, in the mind.
We say God and the imagination are one…
How high that highest candle lights the dark.

Out of this same light, out of the central mind,
We make a dwelling in the evening air,
In which being there together is enough.

The following is Stevens’ recitation of the poem

Stevens does not directly identify his internal mistress. She shares qualities with the idea of the self that, like a shawl, we wrap tightly about us. This formulation is related to Santayana’s description of the self:

If I exist, I am a living creature to whom ideas are incidents, like aeroplanes in the sky; they pass over, more or less followed by the eye, more or less listened to, recognised, or remembered; but the self slumbers and breathes below, a mysterious natural organism, full of dark yet definite potentialities; so that different events will awake it to quite disproportionate activities. The self is a fountain of joy, folly, and sorrow, a waxing and waning, stupid and dreaming creature, in the midst of a vast natural world, of which it catches but a few transient and odd perspectives. (Santayana, 1923, p 146).

However, the mistress is also the creative imagination that proposes our understanding of the world: “an order, a whole, a knowledge.” The creation of this supreme fiction may be like God speaking the words “Let there be light!” The crucial comment, “We say, God and the imagination are one …” refers to one of Stevens’ Adagia:

Proposita:
1. God and the imagination are one.
2. The thing imagined is the imaginer.
The second equals the thing imagined and the imaginer are one.
Hence, I suppose, the Imaginer is God. (Stevens, 1997, p 914)

 

The poem harks back to the prologue of Notes to a Supreme Fiction, which described the poetic process as a meeting between the poet and his creative self:

In the uncertain light of single, certain truth,
Equal in living changingness to the light
In which I meet you, in which we sit at rest,
For a moment in the central of our being

 

References

Bates, M. J. (2007). Stevens and the supreme fiction. In Serio, J. N. (Ed.). The Cambridge companion to Wallace Stevens. (pp 48-61). Cambridge University Press.

Blake, W. (1820, reprinted with commentary by Paley, M. D., 1991). Jerusalem: the emanation of the giant Albion. Princeton University Press

Bloom, H. (1977). Wallace Stevens: the poems of our climate. Cornell University Press.

Brazeal, G. (2007). The supreme fiction: fiction or fact? Journal of Modern Literature, 31, 80-100.

Carroll, J. (1987). Wallace Stevens’ supreme fiction: a new romanticism. Louisiana State University Press.

Cook, E. (2007). A reader’s guide to Wallace Stevens. Princeton University Press.

Frayn, M. (2006). Is it true about Lensky? The truth-functions of fiction and the fiction-functions of truth. In The human touch: Our part in the creation of a universe. (pp. 236-269). Faber & Faber.

Gadamer, H.-G. (translated by Walker, N. & edited by Bernasconi, R., 1986). The relevance of the beautiful and other essays. Cambridge University Press.

Hanley, A. (1977). Letter from Father Arthur Hanley to Professor Janet McCann, July 24, 1977

Heidegger, M. (1941, translated by Hoeller, K., 2000). Elucidations of Hölderlin’s poetry. Humanity Books.

Italia, P. G. (1993). Of minstrels lacking minstrelsy: Shelley and Wallace Stevens’ “Notes toward a Supreme Fiction.” Wallace Stevens Journal, 17(2), 168–179.

Kermode, J. F. (1960). Wallace Stevens. Oliver & Boyd.

Lensing, G.S. (2007). Stevens’ seasonal cycles. In Serio, J. N. (Ed.). The Cambridge companion to Wallace Stevens. (pp 118-132). Cambridge University Press.

McCormick, J. (1987). George Santayana: a biography. Alfred A. Knopf

Mariani, P. L. (2016). The whole harmonium: the life of Wallace Stevens. Simon & Schuster.

Peacock, T. L. (1820). The four ages of poetry.

Santayana, G. (1900). Interpretations of poetry and religion. Scribner.

Santayana, G. (1913). Winds of doctrine: studies in contemporary opinion. J.M. Dent & Sons.

Santayana, G. (1923). Scepticism and animal faith: introduction to a system of philosophy. Scribner.

Shelley, P. B. (1821). A defense of poetry.

Stevens, W. (1923). Harmonium. Alfred A. Knopf.

Stevens, W. (1942). Notes toward a supreme fiction. Cummington Press.

Stevens, W. (1951). The necessary angel: essays on reality and the imagination. Vintage Books.

Stevens, W. (1954). The collected poems of Wallace Stevens. Alfred A. Knopf.

Stevens, W. (1997). Collected poetry and prose. Library of America.

Stevens, W., & Stevens, H. (1996). Letters of Wallace Stevens. University of California Press.

Sukenick, R. (1967). Wallace Stevens: musing the obscure: readings, an interpretation and a guide to the collected poetry. New York University Press. Available at wallacestevens.org.

Tompsett, D. (2012). The “Supreme Fiction” as the transvaluation of religion with poetry. In Wallace Stevens and Pre-Socratic Philosophy: metaphysics and the play of violence. (pp. 131–152). Routledge.

Vendler, H. H. (1969). On extended wings: Wallace Stevens’ longer poems. Harvard University Press.

Sakura Hanami (桜 花見, cherry blossom viewing), an age-old tradition in Japan, derived from the Chinese practice of enjoying wine and poetry beneath plum blossoms. In Japan cherry trees were more common and by the Heian period (794–1185) Japanese emperors held sakura hanami parties for the court. The custom soon spread to the samurai, and later to the common people. In the early 18^th Century, the shogun Tokugawa Yoshimune planted cherry trees in Asukayama park in the northern reaches of Tokyo, and opened up the park to its citizens. Nowadays thousands of people visit this and other parks to enjoy the blossoms, drink sake and feast on dumplings and cakes. In many places, temporary paper lanterns are hung to allow yozakura (夜桜, night sakura).

Japanese Cherry

Japanese cherry trees are members of the genus Prunus (plums, peaches, almonds, cherries, apricots, etc.), subgenus Cerasus. The trees of this genus have been widely cultivated either for their fruit or for their spring flowers. Most Prunus trees blossom before the leaves emerge, a phenomenon that facilitates wind pollination.

The most common species of ornamental cherry in Japan are Prunus serrulata (Japanese cherry), Prunus jamazakura (mountain cherry), and Prunus speciosa (Oshima cherry). The trees bloom in early springtime with the blossoms lasting between 1 and 2 weeks. The blossoming begins in January in Okinawa and reaches Kyoto and Tokyo by late March or early April. The flowers, with five petals and multiple stamens, typically arise in umbels (clusters arising from a single point like the ribs of an umbrella). The petals are white with a variable shading of pink. The blossoms have a mild fragrance of vanilla, related to the coumarin that they contain. The Japanese word sakura (桜) can mean either the tree or the blossom.

The following illustrations show the blossoms in a woodblock print by Utagawa Hiroshige from the 1830s and a modern photograph. Blue – be it silk or sky – is the preferred background for sakura.

The Floating World

Sakura blossoms provide clear evidence of spring’s new life. However, their brevity tells of its transience and bring to mind mono no aware (物の哀れ, the pathos of things, equivalent to the Latin lacrimae rerum). Cherry blossoms became a frequent topic of haiku poems and a common subject for woodblock printing: ukiyo-e (浮世絵, pictures of the floating world, Harris, 2011; Newland & Uhlenbeck, 1990). The term for ukiyo (浮世, floating world) is homophonous with the Buddhist term ukiyo (憂き世world of sorrow and grief). However, the stylishness, eroticism and beauty of ukiyo-e run counter to this allusion. The following is a ukiyo-e print of Utagawa Hiroshige from about 1840 showing sakura hanami in the park at Asukayama:

The following illustration shows three more of Utagawa Hiroshige’s ukiyo-e prints depicting sakura hanami in different parts of Tokyo. The one on the left shows Asukayama (1860), the middle is from the embankment of the Sumida River in Tokyo (1858) and the right is from Suijin Temple, now known as Sumidagawa Shrine (1856).

The middle print shows elegantly dressed geisha out to view the blossoms. Not to be outdone by the trees, they are arrayed in their most beautiful kimonos. The triptych prints below are by Utagawa Kunisada. They depict beauties amid the blossoms at daytime (1840) and at night during yozakura (1848):

In modern times there are almost as many visitors to Asukayama in spring as there are blossoms on the trees. An 1819 haiku by Kobayashi Issa remarks on the conviviality of sakura hanami:

A second haiku by Issa reminds us that love and beauty go together:

 

Sakura Sakura

As well as food and sake, sakura hanami is often accompanied by music. A famous folksong from the early Edo period (1603-1868) describes blossoms as far as the eye can see.

The following is a performance of the song by Aiko Shimada accompanied by Elizabeth Falconer on koto;

Temple Bells

Buddhist monks planted cherry trees near their temples. The transience of the blossoms illustrated the impermanence of worldly things. Over the years an association has grown between the fleeting of the cherry blossoms and the tolling of the temple bells. Both resonate with our sense of beauty. The following is a haiku from 1688 by Matsuo Basho:

And a woodblock print of Chionin Temple Gate (Kyoto) from Eight Scenes of Cherry Blossoms (1935) by Hiroshi Yoshida. Yoshida was a leading artist of the shin hanga (new prints) movement, which combined the techniques of ukiyo-e with a sensitivity to light and color that derived from French Impressionism: 

Another haiku about the cherry trees on the temple grounds is by Yosa Buson (1769):

 

Mountain Cherry Trees

Mount Yoshino is located in Nara Prefecture about 70 km south of Kyoto. Buddhist monks planted cherry trees on the mountain in the early Heian period. Most of the trees are Prunus jamazakura (mountain cherry) In spring the mountain is covered with blossoms:

The following illustration shows a ukiyo-e print of the village of Yoshino by Katsushika Hokusai (1833). As in the song Sakura, Sakura, it is difficult to distinguish the blossoms from mist.

The following is a haiku from Santoka Taneda (1882-1940) about the mountain cherry. Santoka composed haiku that did not exactly follow the syllabic conventions of earlier poets.

Envoi

Nothing is more peaceful than to stare up into blue sky through a screen of cherry blossoms:  

This experience is best accompanied by a little sake, and some cello music by Julian Lloyd Webber with Jason Kouchak accompanying on piano:

And a haiku about blossoms passing by Onitsura Uejima (1661-1738), an early haiku poet who stressed the importance of makato (truth, sincerity) in his poetry (Crowley, 1995):

References

Blyth, R. H. (1949, republished 1981). Haiku. Volume I. Eastern Culture. Heian International.

Blyth, R. H. (1950, republished 1981). Haiku. Volume II. Spring. Heian International.

Blyth, R. H. (1963). A history of haiku. Volume I From the beginnings up to Issa. Hokuseido Press.

Blyth, R. H. (1964). A history of haiku. Volume II From Issa up to the present. Hokuseido Press.

Crowley, C. (1995). Putting makoto into practice. Onitsura’s Hitorigoto. Monumenta Nipponica, 50(1), 1–46.

Haldane, M. (2006). Haiku. (website)

Harris, F. (2011). Ukiyo-e: the art of the Japanese print. Tuttle.

Lanoue, D. G. (2019). A taste of Issa: Haiku. David Lanoue. (also website)

Miyashita, E. & Watsky, P. (with photographs by H. Inoue, 2006). Santoka: a translation with photographic images. PIE Books,

Newland, A., & Uhlenbeck, C. (1990). Ukiyo-e to Shin Hanga: the art of Japanese prints. Brompton Books.

Reichhold, J. (2013). Basho: the complete haiku. Kodansha USA.

Resig, J. (2025). Ukiyo-e Search (website)

Saito, T. & Nelson, W. R. (2006). 1020 Haiku in Translation: The Heart of Basho, Buson and Issa. BookSurge

Trotter, E. (2022). Haiku master Onitsura. Peach Blossom Press.

Shirane, H. (2015). The rise of haikai: Matsuo Bashō, Yosa Buson, and Kobayashi Issa. In H.Shirane, T. Suzuki & D. Lurie (Eds.) The Cambridge History of Japanese Literature. (pp. 403–414). Cambridge University Press.

White, J., & Sato, K. T. (2019a). 5-7-5: the haiku of Buson. The Buddhist Society Trust

White, J., & Sato, K. T. (2019b). 5-7-5: the haiku of Issa. The Buddhist Society Trust.

Robert Davidson, one of Canada’s greatest artists, is one of the Haida people, whose ancestral territories are in the Haida Gwaii archipelago off the coast of British Columbia and the southern half of Prince of Wales Island in Alaska. His Haida name is G̲uud San Glans, which means “Eagle of the Dawn.” Davidson is a talented carver of argillite, jewelry and totem poles, a creator of striking masks, and a master of silkscreen printing (serigraphy).    

Life

Robert Davidson was born in Hydaburg (“Haida city”) Alaska in 1946. His father, Claude Davidson, was a fisherman from the village of Dadens on Haida Gwaii, and an important carver in argillite, a black stone found in Slatechuck Mountain in the southern part of Moore Island. Robert’s maternal great-grandfather was Charles Edenshaw (1839-1920), a renowned carver from Masset (Wright & Augaitis, 2013). In 1947, the Davidson family moved back to Masset, where Robert spent his childhood and adolescence. In 1965 he attended high school in Vancouver. When he began carving argillite sculptures in 1966, he met Bill Reid (1920-1998; Shadbolt, 1986) and worked in his studio for 18 months.

Davison began experimenting with silk screen printing in 1968 at the Gitanmaax School of Northwest Coast Indian Art in Hazelton, in the interior of British Columbia. He produced several prints in unnumbered editions in 1969, among them, Sea Bear Box Back and Sea Bear Box Front. Later in 1969 he carved a new totem pole for the village of Masset, sending out invitations to the potlatch and pole-raising adorned with a silk screen print that combined Eagle and Raven figures (see above). Eagle and Raven are the two main moieties of the Haida lineage. Davidson continued to carve totem poles throughout his life. In the 21^st Century he produced some large aluminum sculptures of Haida design forms.

In 1970, Davidson moved back to Vancouver and published his first limited edition serigraph, Killer Whale. Since then, he has continued to produced serigraphs, usually at a rate of several per year. Wyatt (2022) documents over 150 prints between 1968 and 2022.

The designs of the early serigraphs were based on old Haida paintings and carvings. In the 21^st Century, Davidson began to use more abstract designs, though still using original Haida art forms. These formed the basis of his exhibition Abstract Impulse (Brotherton et al, 2013). At about this time, he also began to base his serigraph designs on original acrylic-on-canvas paintings rather than preparatory drawings.    

The following illustrations show the location of Haida Gwaii, and a photograph by Ulli Steltzer of Robert Davidson on Old Masset beach in 1978.

 

Bentwood Boxes

Haida artists painted on the walls of their houses, on their furniture, and on bentwood boxes. Their designs were often supplemented by carving. Many old bentwood boxes have survived. The following illustration shows the technique of making these boxes. Specially measured grooves – kerfs – are cut in a cedar plank; the plank is then steamed to make it pliable and bent into box form; the free edges are joined by glue, sewing or pegs:

The following is a famous 19^th-Century bentwood box attributed to Charles Edenshaw, now in the Canadian Museum of History:

The central section shows a high-relief carving of a beaver. The box is large (142 by 58 cm) and only carved one side. MacDonald (1996) suggests that it may have initially been constructed as a burial chest, to be displayed at the top of a mortuary totem pole.  

Another famous box – called the Great Box – was collected in 1884 and is now in the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford. In 2014, modern Haida carvers Jaalen and Gwaii Edenshaw constructed a replica of this box. The design represents a sea monster, a mythical being perhaps related to the Orca. The monster has double eyes; its upper limbs have fingers and its lower limbs are flippers. The sea monster was meant to protect the contents of the box. The following illustration shows the original and the replica:

A Vocabulary of Forms

From studying the designs on bentwood boxes and other carvings, scholars have identified a basic vocabulary of forms used by Haida artists for representation and decoration (Holm, 1965; Holm & Reid, 1975; Stewart, 1979a; Gilbert &Clark, 1999, 2002).

A basic feature of Northwest Coast art is the “formline.” This is used to construct the basic design and to outline the anatomy of the subject being represented. The formline is typically black, but occasionally red. The formline varies in thickness, often tapering at junctions between major parts of the overall form.

The spaces within the formline can be filled with various forms that represent details, such as eyes and mouths, or that simply fill in the outlined spaces. These forms can be black or red depending on the importance of the detail. Sometimes a third color (usually blue-green) or cross-hatching is used for forms of lesser importance. Some spaces may be outlined by thin lines.

Various forms are shown below. Probably the most important form is the ovoid. Various theories have been proposed for the original source of this form. My preferred idea is that it represents a salmon egg resting on a surface. The U-Form is likely derived from one half of the ovoid.  The trigone probably comes from extending the U-Form out into a third point. The bottom of the illustration shows examples of how and an eye and a feather can be composed from the simpler forms. The thin lines in the eye represent the eyelids.

One common complex form is called the “salmon trout head.” Its derivation and various examples are illustrated below. The print of the steelhead salmon (also known as a salmon trout) was made in 1900 by Sherman Denton. Although it can represent an actual salmon head, the form is also used for other structures such as the joints of limbs, the palms of hands and the fins of fishes.  

Three general rules are often (but not always) used in the overall design. The first rule is to fill the space, be it a rectangular box, or a circular drum. The second rule is to keep the forms symmetrical. The third is to include forms within forms in a recursive manner.   

Robert Davidson closely studied the forms and designs on some of the old bentwood boxes. Two of his early serigraphs from 1969 were Sea Bear Box Front and Sea Bear Box Back. These designs do not represent a specific bentwood box, but rather illustrate the general idea of such boxes. The following illustration below (right) shows Sea Bear Box Back. In the belly of the monster can be seen an upside-down Kugann Jaad, or mouse woman, with two large eyes and a smiling mouth. The previously described Great Box also shows this feature. Kugann Jaad, who is able to shape-shift between mouse and woman, acts as an intermediary between human beings and the supernatural, and makes sure things happen as they should (e.g. Harris & Tait, 1976). Features of Kugann Jaad are also shown at the top of the Davidson’s design between the two ears of the monster. The illustration compares the Davidson print (on the right) to an actual bentwood box in the Canadian Museum of History:

The Davidson print shows the monster with hands on its forelimbs and flippers (with salmon-head centers) on its hind limbs. Within each ear is a representation of a human face seen in profile: eyebrow, eye, nostril and mouth.

In 1975 Davidson published the following print in bentbox format: Raven with a Broken Beak. A famous Haida story tells how the great shape-shifter Raven, when playing in the form of a salmon, was captured on a fisherman’s hook, and broke his beak trying to escape (Reid & Bringhurst, 1984).

The break in the beak is shown by the circle in the center of the print. The Raven, like many supernatural being has double eyes. In the bottom corners of the print are the Raven’s wings with the joint between wing and body represented by a variant of the salmon trout head. In the Raven’s mouth are representations of human faces: the Raven is able to talk to human beings.  

For the opening of the Bent Box Gallery in Vancouver in 1978, Davidson produced a print entitled Bent Box Design. The central section of the serigraph is effectively a self-portrait. The outer persona is represented in black formlines. In the lower body the inner artist is outlined in red formlines.

 

Four Circles

In 1977, Davidson brought out a set of four small (20 by 20 cm) prints: Raven, Eagle, Whale, and Frog. Each print portrayed the essential features of the creature within the bounds of the circular form.

Raven is the great transformer, able to change between bird and human forms. In the print this is shown by the small human face at the top of its head. Another characteristic of Raven is the broken beak that it suffered when, in the form of a salmon, it was hooked by fishermen. In the print the broken beak lies between the two wings.

Eagle is seen in profile. In the print the characteristic down-curved beak is placed between the head and wing. The ovoid in the upper beak represents the bird’s nostril.

Whale is depicted with its large mouth between the head and the two pectoral fins. At the right, the large circle represents the blowhole. Unlike the other prints of this set, this is composed mainly in black.

The lower half of the frog print shows the face of Frog, with its large toothless mouth, big eyes and nostrils. The upper half shows the body in black and the limbs in red.

 

Raven Stealing the Light

One of the most famous stories of Raven is that he stole the sun and the moon from the Old Man, who kept them hidden in a box for his daughter to play with. The curious Raven transformed himself into the form of a young boy and became part of the Old Man’s household. The Ravenchild asked the Old Man if he could hold the lights, but for a long while the Old Man refused. When at last the Old Man relented, Raven stole the bright lights, flew through the smokehole of the Old Man’s house, and ultimately released the sun, moon and stars into a world that had before been completely dark. The Old Man was upset over the loss of his precious lights, but he looked around

and for the first time saw his daughter, who had been quietly sitting during all this time, completely bewildered by the rush of events. The old man saw that she was as beautiful as the fronds of a hemlock against a spring sky at sunrise, and he began to feel a little better. (Reid & Bringhurst, 1984, p 17).

In 1977 Davidson created a print that told the story: Raven Stealing the Moon (Stewart, 1979a, p 37). The print shows Raven releasing the moon; the sun is already in the sky at the upper right. It is difficult to be sure of what is represented by the human figure on the lower right. This may be the Old Man, a chief of the Haida people, who stand to benefit from Raven’s thievery, or a human watchman observing the supernatural happenings.

 

Reflections

In 1975, Davidson printed a small (10 by 22 cm) Christmas card entitled Negative and Positive (below left) The upper image of a human face in profile was inverted and repeated on a red background below. In 1977 he reworked the earlier image to make a larger (32 by 57 cm) print entitled Reflections (below right) The face was made more detailed: the eye has taken on eyelid forms, and there are more teeth. The most intriguing aspect of the new print is the split-U form that is overprinted in red on the black center of the print. The fold between object and representation, between reality and imagination. This subtle addition is almost impossible to see on reproductions:

 

Eagle

In 1979, the University of British Columbia Museum of Anthropology presented Cycles, an exhibition of Davidson’s graphic work. Davidson produced a special print Eagle for the exhibition. An outer black Eagle contains an inner red Frog. These two are interconnected: the red beak of the Eagle forms the hindlimbs of the Frog and the red tail of the Eagle forms the mouth of the Frog.

The following is Marjorie Halpin’s description of the print (Halpin, 1979, p10) with a quotation from Davidson in italics:

The eagle, shown in the outer black segment of the circle, is his outer person, his social self, that part of him that the world sees. In-side, the red middle circle. is the frog. The inner self, the heart, the gut reaction. Love. This is the first time I allowed the feeling to show, to help the outside. Without the inner frog, the eagle isn’t complete. If you take the frog away, the eagle has no mouth.

Although, at first look, the black outer eagle and the red inner frog seem sharply separated from each other, totally separate and distinct, there is continual interaction between them expressed by interpenetrating elements of each in the other. This is most obvious in the eagle’s mouth, which is totally red and in the frog circle, but it occurs at even more subtle levels as well. The narrow black formline that connects the frog’s eyes and completes the red circle, for example, is repeated in a white or negative formline in the black ovoid of the outer circle. These and other interpenetrations can be read as symbols of integration, of the combination of opposites, into a new unity or wholeness. We might call it a Haida yin/yang.

 

Forms within Forms

The interpenetration of forms is clearly evident in a set of large prints from 1983. In Ti-Silii-AA-Lis (Raven Finned Killer Whale), the details of Raven are placed in the form of the dorsal fin of a Killer Whale. At the bottom is a human hand (perhaps the human aspect of Raven) that could also be the pectoral fin of the whale.

Wolf Inside Its Own Foot uses a recursive design. The large wolf is located within the overall black form of its foot. And a smaller red wolf is located within the form of the large wolf’s foot:

Thunderbird

The Thunderbird is a supernatural being common to the myths of many North American indigenous people. This all-powerful deity created thunder by flapping its wings and lightning by flashing its eyes. The Thunderbird has a large crest (often coiled) on the top of its head, which gives it power. Early in his career, Davidson produced a beautiful traditional print of Thunderbird (1979). Within the body of the Thunderbird is represented a Woodpecker in red formlines (below left). In 2006, Davidson created a large acrylic painting of Hiilang (Thunderbird). The design is stripped to its essentials; the crest on the head, the eye, the wing, the body, leg and talons (below right). The representation has become almost abstract. When the canvas was stretched the lower edge which had been painted green became part of the image (Wyatt, 2022, p 19). The green stripe provided a gentle ground for the stark image, and was maintained for the serigraphic reproductions.   

 

Bird in the Air

Over the past twenty years, Davidson’s prints have become more and more abstract. The print Bird in the Air (2016) places an ovoid representation of an eagle within a large yellow trigone form that may represent the eagle’s beak, the ovoid being the nostril (below right). The illustration below shows the print together with two photographs of the eagle:

 

Davidson has been intrigued by the concept of “Bird in the Air” and how this seems to encapsulate the spirit of the Haida. The following illustration shows a recent small aluminum sculpture entitled Bird in the Air (2013, 28 cm high) by Davidson, and compares it to the 19^th Century silver bracelet carved by Davidson’s great-grandfather Charles Edenshaw (Wright & Augaitis, 2013, p 144).

 

 

The Recent History of the Haida People

In the late 18^th Century, it is estimated that the Haida population was somewhere between 10,000 and 15,000 people. The first recorded encounter between the Haida and Europeans was in 1774 when the ship of the Spanish explorer Juan Perez anchored outside Haida Gwaii and was visited by Haida canoes. In 1787, the British captain George Dixon traded with the Haida for sea-otter furs. He named the islands after Queen Charlotte, the wife of Goerge III. Subsequently, the Haida interacted with European whalers and fur traders. In this way the Haida came into possession of European tools and weapons. Shortly after gold was discovered on Haida Gwaii in 1850, the Canadian government annexed the Queen Charlotte Islands.

In 1862, a passenger infected with smallpox arrived in Fort Victoria on Vancouver Island. This center for the fur trade later became city of Victoria, British Columbia. The disease spread rapidly through the indigenous people of the Northwest, many of whom had travelled to Vancouver Island to trade. Although the white colonizers protected themselves by vaccinations and quarantine procedures, the government did not make these measures available to the indigenous people. Instead, they burned indigenous settlements where the infection had broken out, and forced the Haida to retreat back to Haida Gwaii. By 1881, the Haida population had been reduced to below 1000 people (Macdonald, 1996, p 223, estimates that it may have been as low as 500 by 1900).  

In 1876, Christian missionaries arrived on Haida Gwaii. They thought the totem poles represented idols rather than family histories and urged the Haida to destroy them or risk not going to heaven. Together the church and the government outlawed the Potlatch ceremonies (Davidson& Davidson, 2013), and set up the Indian Residential School System. 

The first photographs of the Haida Gwaii settlements were taken by George Dawson in 1878.  Even at that early date many of the buildings were unoccupied, and many of the poles were mortuary poles rather than simple totems. By the time of Chicago World Fair in 1893, only a few buildings remained. One building and several totem poles from Skidegate were dismantled and taken to the fair, Several Haida artists were commissioned to make models of the other houses at Skidegate (Wright 2024). These models remain; the original buildings are no more. The following illustration show two of Dawson’s original photographs of Skidegate, and a modern photograph of one of the house models that was displayed at the fair:

Despite ravaging disease and cultural genocide, the Haida people have survived. In 2010 the islands reverted to their indigenous name Haida Gawai (Islands of the Haida). Today the Haida form a thriving cultural community. The population is now about 5000.

The survival of Haida culture is in part due to the tenacity and creativity of their artists. In 1969, Robert Davidson erected the first new pole in Masset in over 90 years: the 12-meter Bear Mother Pole. In 1978 Bill Reid erected the 16-meter Dogfish Pole in Skidegate. The following illustration shows on the left a totem in front of a derelict house in Kayung as photographed by Richard Maynard in 1884. The remaining people from Kayung on the east side of Masset Inlet had by then moved to the nearby village of Masset. The pole is presently in the British Museum. The middle totem is the Bear Mother Pole from 1969 and the right is the Dogfish Pole from 1978.

The serigraph technique initially used by Robert Davidson to present Haida designs, has become widespread among Haida artists. Their prints provide an easy way for the Haida to preserve the images of their culture, and to proclaim its beauty to the rest of the world.

Some sense of the Davidson’s determination can be found in an address that he gave on Haida Culture in 1991 (reprinted in Augaitis, 2006, pp 48-55). The following paragraphs are from the beginning and the end of that address:

We call ourselves Xaadaa 7Iaa Isiss, “The Good People.” The common derivative has become “Haida People.” We are the survivors of a once proud and prosperous nation who enjoyed the fruits, beauty, and magic of the place we call Haida Gwaii. Our philosophy has been to be generous and hospitable to the new people who we came to call the Yaats Xaadee, “Iron People.” The arrival of outsiders began a time of great change in our history, our values and our outlook on life. We have suffered great losses since the arrival of the Yaats Xaadee, of our population, cultural knowledge, and especially our self-esteem, our sense of identity; members of a whole generation were denied their own cultural values. There have been many changes, some of them good, and some from which we are still recovering. …

The next thing we need to reclaim is our language. Language holds insights and philosophies of our culture. It will add to the foundation we are rebuilding, as a nation, from the frustrations that came through my parents’ generation, from the experiences they lived through as children. It can come only from us as Haida People. The benefits we gain can only come from the efforts we put into reclaiming our ancestral values. Our forefathers had a position in the world, they had an understanding of their universe through generations of development. It is now time for us to regain our place in the world. It has been over two hundred years since the Yaats Xaadee first arrived on the shores of Haida Gwaii. This is a very short time in our development as a people. We have experienced many changes to date, we have suffered great losses, we have survived many obstacles, we have gained many new insights, but through it all our spirit is still alive. We cannot carry the burdens of confusion, self-abuse and lost identity anymore. It is our responsibility to pick up the pieces and mend them, to become whole again as a healthy, progressive, contributing and developing people.

 

A Man of Many Talents

This essay has focused on Robert Davidson’s serigraphs. He is also renowned for his carvings in argillite, silver jewelry, masks and carved poles (Stewart, 1979b; Thom, 1993; Steltzer, 1994; Rhyne, 1998; Davidson website). The following illustration shows an argillite carving with figures of bear, raven and eagle from top to bottom (height 18 cm), a silver bracelet with Beaver design, a Bear mask and the 1989 pole Breaking the Totem Barrier (height 6 meters).

 

Hope

We can conclude with a recent print entitled Hope (2024). This has become almost completely abstract although one can sense the feathers (below). It represents an idea rather than a creature. The print may refer to the poem by Emily Dickinson, written around 1861:

 

References

Augaitis, D. (2006). Raven travelling: two centuries of Haida art. Vancouver Art Gallery.

Bringhurst, R. (1999). A story as sharp as a knife: the classical Haida mythtellers and their world. Douglas & McIntyre.

Brotherton, B., Farr, S., Haworth, J. (2013). Robert Davidson: abstract impulse. Seattle Art Museum.

Davidson, S. F., & Davidson, R. (2018). Potlatch as pedagogy: learning through ceremony. Portage & Main Press.

Gilbert, J., & Clark, K. (volume 1, 1999; volume 2, 2002). Learning by designing: Pacific Northwest Coast Native Indian art. Raven.

Halpin, M. M. (1979). Cycles: the graphic art of Robet Davidson, Haida. Museum Note 7. UBC Museum of Anthropology.

Harris, C., & Tait, D. (1976). Mouse woman and the vanished princesses. McClelland & Stewart

Holm, B., (1965). Northwest coast Indian art: an analysis of form. University of Washington.

Holm, B., & Reid, B. (1975). Indian art of the Northwest coast: a dialogue on craftsmanship and aesthetics. University of Washington Press.

MacDonald, G. F. (1996). Haida art. Douglas & McIntyre.

Reid, B., & Bringhurst, R. (1984). The raven steals the light. Douglas & McIntyre.

Rhyne, C. (1998). Expanding the circle: the art of guud san glans, Robert Davidson. Douglas F. Cooley Memorial Art Gallery, Reed College.

Shadbolt, D. (1986). Bill Reid. Douglas & McIntyre.

Steltzer, U. (1994). Eagle transforming: the art of Robert Davidson. Douglas & McIntyre.

Stewart, H. (1979a). Looking at Indian art of the Northwest Coast. Douglas & McIntyre.

Stewart, H. (1979b). Robert Davidson: Haida printmaker. Douglas & McIntyre.

Thom, I. M. (1993). Robert Davidson: eagle of the dawn. Vancouver Art Gallery.

Wright, R. K. (2024). Skidegate house models: from Haida Gwaii to the Chicago World’s Fair and beyond (Hlg̲aagilda naa gii niijing.a k’ad.dala k̲wan: X̲aayda Gwaay.yaay sdaa uu Chicago Tllgaay K̲’aaysguux̲an gud ad is). University of Washington Press.

Wright, R. K & Augaitis, D. (2013). Charles Edenshaw. Blackdog Publishing.

Wyatt, G. (2022). Echoes of the supernatural: the graphic art of Robert Davidson. Figure.1.

In the latter half of the 19^th Century three actresses ruled supreme in the hearts of theatre-goers: the French Sarah Bernhardt (1844-1923), the Italian Eleonora Duse (1858-1924), and the English Ellen Terry (1847-1928). They played all parts: from the classics of Shakespeare and Racine, through the romantics such as Dumas and d’Annunzio, to the new naturalists such as Ibsen. They toured the world but acted only in their mother tongue. Their emotional intensity and stage presence communicated with their audiences even when their words were not understood. They were the first superstars: idolized by their public, celebrated by artists, and honored by poets.    

 

Beginnings

Both Ellen Terry and Eleonora Duse were born to parents who were travelling players, and both began acting in childhood. Eleonora Duse and her father continued acting after the death of Eleonora’s mother in 1875. In 1879, Eleonora received her first rave reviews for her performances as Ophelia in Hamlet and Elettra in Oreste at the Teatro dei Fiorentini in Naples. She married a fellow actor in 1881 and had a daughter Enrichetta before the two separated.

Although five of her siblings became professional actors, Ellen Terry was initially disillusioned with the theater. At the age of 16 years, she married the painter George Watts who was 30 years her senior. The marriage was unhappy, and Ellen left after a year to live with the architect Edward Godwin, with whom she had two children, Edith and Edward, who later used the fictitious surname, Craig, and who both became renowned theater-directors. Godwin encouraged Terry to act again and she was acclaimed as Portia in The Merchant of Venice in 1875, a role that she reprised many times over her career (Holyroyd, 2008, p 102).   

Sarah Bernhardt was the illegitimate daughter of a Jewish courtesan, and only came to the theater after finishing her education at a convent school. The Duc de Mornay, the half-brother of Napoleoon III and a patron of her mother, suggested that she audition for Le Conservatoire national de musique et de declamation. With his influence she was accepted, and studied there between 1860 and 1862. After leaving the conservatoire she acted at the Odéon theater but her initial roles were not successful. Though she continued to act, her main support over the next decade came from her life as a courtesan. She counted among her many lovers a Marshall of the French army, a Spanish banker, and a Turkish ambassador (Gottlieb, 2010, p 44). She likely had an affair with Victor Hugo when he directed his play Ruy Blas at the Comédie Française in 1872 (Gottleib, 2010, p 61). Though some 40 years her senior Hugo was still susceptible to female charms. Bernhardt had her first major triumph as Maria, Queen of Spain in Ruy Blas, and followed this by an acclaimed Phèdre in Racine’ tragedy in 1874.

 

The Acting Companies

Bernhardt’s subsequent successes at the Comédie Française allowed her to obtain backers for her own company in 1880. She put on La dame aux Camélias by Alexandre Dumas fils, and then took her company on tour to London and the United States. She had affairs with her leading actors and was briefly married to a Greek diplomat. She attracted the attention of Victorien Sardou who wrote several plays for her, notably Fédora (1882), Théodora (1884), La Tosca (1887) and Cléopâtre (1890). She arranged with Alphonse Mucha to produce magnificent art-deco posters for her shows:

Bernhardt became friends with artists and celebrities: Gustave Doré, the illustrator of Dante, the portraitist Georges Clairin, Edward VII of England when he was Prince of Wales, and Louise Abbéma, an impressionist painter and prominent lesbian. It is unclear how many of her friends were also lovers.   

In 1899, the theater built by Baron Haussmann on the Place du Châtelet in Paris was renovated and renamed the Théâtre Sarah-Bernhardt, a name it retained until the German occupation in 1941 when it was called the Théâtre de la Cité because of Bernhardt’s Jewish ancestry (Gottlieb, 2010, p 139).

Duse formed her own acting company in 1885. She had a prolonged affair with Arrigo Boito, who was later to serve as Verdi’s librettist for Otello and Falstaff.  Boito provided her with the play Cleopatre, a translation of Shakespeare’s Anthony and Cleopatra in 1887. The illustration below shows the competing Cleopatras of Duse and Bernhardt (Rader, 2018, pp 83-84):

In 1895 Duse had an affair with the poet and playwright Gabriele d’Annunzio. He wrote the play La Gioconda (1899) for her. However, later in 1899 when he sent his masterpiece La città morta, based on Ancient Greek tragedies, to her rival Sarah Bernhardt, Duse ended their affair. Nevertheless, she later performed in both this play and in d’Annunzio’s Francesca da Rimini (1901) about the tragic love affair between Francesca and her brother-in-law Paolo Malatesta, as told in Canto 5 of Dante’s Inferno.

When Duse toured Russia in 1891, she impressed the young Anton Chekhov. Duse was to become the model for Irina Arkadina in The Seagull (1895). During her tour of Russia, Duse presented Ibsen’s A Doll’s House. She was particularly fond of the role: Nora, the name of the heroine, is a diminutive of her own name (Rader, 2018, p 103). She later included other Ibsen plays in her repertoire, and visited the playwright in Oslo in 1904. After 1910, Duse had a long relationship with Lina Poletti, a poet, playwright and open Lesbian, but this was likely no more than friendship (Weaver, 1984, pp 286-290).

In 1878 Henry Irving and Ellen Terry formed a partnership to reopen the Lyceum Theatre in London. For the next 20 years, they acted together to great acclaim. Their repertoire centered on Shakespeare – Hamlet, The Merchant of Venice, Rome and Juliet, Macbeth, and Much Ado about Nothing – but they also presented other plays – Becket by Tennyson, Olivia by W. G. Wills derived from The Vicar of Wakefield, and King Charles I by William Havard. It is not known whether their relationship extended beyond the theater. Below are woodcuts of Irving and Terry by Terry’s son Edward Craig from about 1895.

Terry kept up a long epistolary relationship with Bernard Shaw, who found her an intelligent and witty correspondent. Despite the many letters, however, they only met occasionally. Terry played Lady Cicely Waynefleete in Shaw’s Captain Brassbound’s Conversion in 1906, one of her last important roles. In 1958 a set of eighteen unsigned love poems to Ellen Terry went on auction. Though attributed to Shaw (Werner, 1980), these poems were probably written by Christabel Marshall, who was Terry’s secretary for several years. Christabel ultimately changed her name to Christopher Marie St John, and became the romantic partner of Terry’s daughter Edy Craig (Holroyd, 2008, pp 321-330).    

 

Portraits

Bernhardt, Duse and Terry were the beauties of their day. They were the subject of glamorous portraits such as Michele Gordigiani’s 1896 portrait of Duse and Georges Clairin’s 1876 portrait of Bernhardt:

The following are portraits of Sarah Bernhardt as Cleopatra by Georges Rochegrosse (1890), of the young Ellen Terry by her husband George Watts (1864) and of Eleonora Duse by Giovanni Boldini (1895):

 

Ilya Repin made a striking charcoal sketch of Duse during her tour of Russia in 1891:

 

Photographs

Nicéphore Niéce took the first photograph in 1822. By the middle of the 19^th Century photography had become widespread. Felix Nadar, the first genius of photographic portraiture, produced several images of the young Sarah Bernhardt in the early 1860s.  

The following is Adam Begley’s description of the portraits:

Loosely wrapped in a white burnoose, or in a shiny black velvet cloak, both garments voluminous, their folds teasingly suggestive, she leans on a truncated fluted column—a vulgar prop Nadar would have laughed at a decade earlier. It doesn’t matter: the eyes are otherwise occupied, caressing her flawless skin, her calm pensive face, her untamed hair. It’s not just that she appears to be naked under her wrap—the portraits carry an erotic charge that’s complicated and enhanced by the withdrawn, private ex-pression and a whisper of melancholy. The air of mystery is especially strong when she’s wearing the black velvet and looking off to her right, almost in profile; the focus is slightly blurred, her bright eyes distant and enigmatic. Her sole ornament, a cameo earring, less a decoration than an echo in miniature, draws attention to her elfin ear, deliberately exposed and adding to the impression of nakedness. (Begley 2017, p 110)

Richard Howard’s poem Hommage to Nadar – Sarah Bernhardt (2004) celebrates both the photographer and his subject:

Often enough you were naked under the cloak
            in those days; gentlemen drank
and waited, murmuring deprecations

            till the cloak dropped and your arms
which would dishevel the world – those white serpents,
            Hugo called them – were exposed,

thin as your legs, thin and white, but rusted here,
            then here, the rest white and hard . . .
Not yet:  you have not yet had success on the stage,

            and if you were a mother two
years back, Maurice never knew his father –
            did you? A nun, you wanted

to be a nun, and became a sculptor, one
            craning female torso sent
each year to the Salon, ardent clay ladies

            in postures of possession.
Mortal will is already your mode, undressed,
            uncombed, probably unwashed –

you are the child he wrote in French for, Oscar
            who understood your crying
need and overheard, just thirty years too late,

            the voice of Salome, pure
gold bangles on a tin wire pulled to breaking,
            and of course the wire did break.

You seem to be regarding, on cue but still
            offstage, in the studio,
the resonant hells your talent sanctified

            for decades of unbelievers.
and taught your century its lesson, dying
            in La Gloire, your last relâche

attended by a house of fifty thousand:
            dazed Paris, unforgiving,
relented for your farewell tour of duty

            which was to doubt if either
the Heavenly City or that wan shade of it
            our dreams have perpetuated

can function, flourish or even form unless
            it include its opposite,
unless in heaven there is hell. Divine Sarah.

The poem mentions that Bernhardt was also a competent sculptor. Oscar Wilde wrote Salomé in French expressly for Bernhardt although she never played the role. La Gloire is likely a late performance in d’Annunzio’s La gloria which had been translated into French. The theatrical term en relâche is used to describe the days when a play is not performed so that the actors can rest. The English idiom is that the theater is “dark.” Bernhardt continued working until a few days before her death. “Fifty thousand” is the estimated number who attended her funeral in 1923.

Terry and Duse were also photographed extensively. The following illustration shows a portrait of Ellen Terry by Julia Margaret Cameron taken in 1864, and a portrait of Eleonora Duse by Edward Steichen taken in 1903. The latter was taken using a soft focus, a style popular at the beginning of the 20^th Century but eschewed by later photographers.

 

 

Costumes

Bernhardt, Terry and Duse all revelled in their costumes. Those of Ellen Terry were particularly striking. Edward Burne-Jones designed her outfits for Guinevere and Lawrence Alma-Tadema for Imogen. The most memorable of her costumes was the “beetle-dress” that she wore as Lady Macbeth. The gown, designed by Alice Laura Comyns-Carr and made by Ada Cort Nettleship, is embellished with green iridescent beetle wing-cases that shimmer under stage lighting. The dress has recently been restored. The illustration below shows the dress and a painting of Terry as Lady Macbeth by John Singer Sargeant (1888).

 

Lithographs

Lithography was invented in 1796 and come to prominence over the following century as a means for producing inexpensive color prints. William Nicholson published a set of Twelve Portraits in 1899: lithographic reproductions of hand-coloured woodcuts. Among those represented was Sarah Bernhardt. Eleonora Duse was included in a second set of portraits which came out in 1902.These portraits are shown below. In 1906 Nicholson produced for the Ellen Terry Jubilee Banquet a lithographic scroll showing all the major roles from her career. The middle section shows Ellen Terry as Lady Teazle from The School for Scandal (1877), Olivia from Olivia (1878), Ophelia from Hamlet (1878), Queen Henrietta Maria from King Charles I by William Havard (1879), and Portia from The Merchant of Venice:

 

 

Audio Recordings

In the early years of the 20^th Century, it became possible to record the sounds of voices. Both Ellen Terry and Sarah Bernhardt were recorded. Although the recordings are noisy and the studio recordings very different from an actual performance, the listener can get some sense of how they sounded on the stage.

The recording of Ellen Terry giving Portia’s speech about mercy was taken in 1911. The words of the speech follow together with a painting by George Baldry of Terry as Portia in an 1895 production. Terry’s presentation is restrained but convincing:

 

 

I could not find any audio recordings of Eleonora Duse. We must content herself with a description by Arthur Symons, the British critic and poet who lived for a while in Italy and who translated several of d’Annunzio’s works:

And then that voice of hers! It can be sweet or harsh, it can laugh or cry, can be menacing or caressing. And how every word tells! Every word comes to you clearly, carrying exactly its meaning: and, somehow along with the words, an emotion, which you may resolve to ignore, but which will seize on you, which will go through and through you. Trick or instinct, there it is, the power to make you feel intensely; and that is precisely the final test of a great dramatic artist. (Symons, 1926, p 99)

The following is an excerpt from a 1910 recording of Sarah Bernhardt in the role of Phèdre. Phèdre the wife of Theseus has fallen passionately in love with her stepson Hippolytus. She confesses her shame and asks him to punish her with death.

 

In the Words of the Poets.

The young Oscar Wilde was quite taken by Terry’s performance of Portia. The following is his sonnet to the actress. Since I could not find any image of the golden dress, I have paired the sonnet with a portrait of Terry by Forbes-Robertson from about the same time:

Wilde was perhaps even more impressed by Sarah Bernhardt in Phèdre. The accompanying photograph was taken by Felix Nadar’s son Paul:

The young playwright Edmond Rostand, author of the wildly successful Cyrano de Bergerac (1897) wrote several plays for Sarah Bernhardt, among them La Samaritaine (1897), about the Samaritan women who gave up a life of sin to follow Christ, and l’Aiglon (Eaglet, 1900) about the Napoleon’s son. At a celebratory dinner in 1896 he presented a sonnet in praise of Sarah:

The sonnet is mainly remembered for the line Reine de l’Attitude ed Princesse des Gestes. No one could strike a pose as well as Sarah. The following is the death of La Dame aux Camélias, probably from a production in the early 1900s:

In 1907, the American poet Sara Teasdale published four sonnets in honor of Eleonora Duse. The following sonnet about her performance in Francesca da Rimini was set to music by Robert Owen. Below is a performance by soprano Jamie Reimer and pianist Stacie Haneline:

 

Imaginings

It is difficult for us to understand the effect these actresses had on their audiences. We have some general idea:

Ellen Terry lives on as the eternal girl actress, the symbol of health, youth, and energy, in contrast with Duse, the suffering, mature woman. Between them stands Bernhardt, the creature of passion and power, larger than life and dangerously unpredictable. (Stokes et al, 1988, p 10).

And yet

Whatever audiences perceived in the work of Bernhardt, Terry and Duse, it was clearly something that took them beyond the immediate and into wider, deeper areas of themselves. This special quality is forever inaccessible to us now, since it died with them and with the time in which they lived. It is also something that challenges historical analysis, just as it challenged description by those contemporaries who struggled to express the inexpressible in the restricting language of their reviews and articles. (Stokes et al., 1988, p 11).

So to conclude, I would like to imagine them when they played roles that to me are special. I shall do this in the order of performance. First would be Ellen Terry as Beatrice in the early 1880s. It must have been marvelous to watch her spar with Henry Irving in Much Ado About Nothing.  

And then I would have found myself enthralled by the performance of Sarah Bernhardt as Hamlet in the 1890s. She thought of Hamlet much as I do: as a man who is determined to do the right thing, who hesitates not from a weakness of will, but because he needs to be certain before he acts. This is completely different from the idea that Hamlet was someone who just could not make up his mind.

 

And finally, I would have been transfixed by Eleonora Duse as Hedda Gabler in the first few years of the 20^th Century.

References

Begley, A. (2017). The great Nadar: the man behind the camera. Tim Duggan Books (Penguin).

Gottlieb, R. (2010). Sarah: the life of Sarah Bernhardt. Yale University

Holroyd, M. (2008). A strange eventful history: the dramatic lives of Ellen Terry, Henry Irving and their remarkable families. Chatto & Windus.

Howard, R. (2004). Inner voices: selected poems, 1963-2003. Farrar, Straus & Giroux.

Huret, J. (1899). Sarah Bernhardt. Chapman & Hall.

Izard, F. (1915). Heroines of the modern stage. Sturgis & Walton.

Rader, P. (2018). Playing to the gods: Sarah Bernhardt, Eleonora Duse, and the rivalry that changed acting forever. Simon & Schuster.

Stokes, J., Booth, M. R., & Bassnett, S. (1988). Bernhardt, Terry, Duse: the actress in her time. Cambridge University Press.

Symons, A. (1926). Eleonora Duse. Elkin Matthews.

Teasdale, S. (1907). Sonnets to Duse and other poems. Poet Lore Company.

Weaver, W. (1984). Duse, a biography. Thames & Hudson.

Werner, J. (1980). Lady, wilt thou love me? Eighteen love poems for Ellen Terry attributed to George Bernard Shaw. Stein and Day.

Johann Christian Friedrich Hölderlin (1770-1843) was one of Germany’s greatest lyric poets. He was exquisitely sensitive to the beauties of the natural world, and thoroughly enamoured to the glories of Ancient Greece. His verses are strikingly beautiful in their sound, and have been set to music by many composers. As a young man he was very productive, writing poems and the epistolary novel Hyperion (1799). He also made important new translations of Sophocles’ Oedipus and Antigone. However, in 1806 he lapsed into madness. From 1807 until his death, he lived alone in a room overlooking the Neckar River in Tübingen. He mumbled to himself in many languages, and occasionally wrote brief fragments of verse for visitors, signing them with various pseudonyms and fictitious dates.  This posting considers some of his poetry.The text of the poems can been enlarged by clicking on them to get a separate window.

 

Life

Friedrich Hölderlin was born in 1770 in Lauffen am Neckar a village just south of Heilbronn in the Duchy of Württemberg. (That year also marked the birth of Wordsworth, Beethoven, and Hegel). His father died in 1772 and his mother married Johann Gok and moved to Nürtingen. Hölderlin attended school at the monastery of Denkendorf, and then began studies for the clergy at the monastery of Maulbronn. Founded as a Cistercian monastery in 1147, Maulbronn had become a Lutheran institution after the Reformation. In 1788 Hölderlin began to study theology at the Tübinger Stift (seminary). Among his fellow-students in Tübingen were the philosophers Georg Hegel and Friedrich Schelling. Hölderlin and most of the Tübingen students were more fascinated by the ideals of the French Revolution (1789) than by the logic of theology. These were revolutionary times: what might be yet possible was replacing what always had been.

The pastel portrait (illustrated above) by Franz Carl Hiemer dates from 1792, when Hölderlin was in his final days as a student. It is the very picture of a young romantic poet: sensuously beautiful, clear-eyed and idealistic. Who could not fall in love with him?

 

Having decided against a career in the church, Hölderlin found employment as a tutor in the houses of the bourgeoisie. Though he was not a good teacher, these positions allowed him time to write poetry. When serving as tutor in the Gontard household in Frankfurt from 1796 to 1798, Hölderlin fell passionately in love with Susette Gontard (1769-1802), the wife of his employer. Susette returned Hölderlin’s affections. The illustration below shows a small alabaster bust of Susette by Landolin Ohmacht from around 1795.

Dismissed from his position, Hölderlin moved to Homberg, where he attempted to edit a new journal. He continued to write to Susette, and occasionally arranged secret meetings with her. She became immortalized as Diotima, the great love of the hero in Hölderlin’s novel Hyperion which was published in two parts in 1797 and 1799.

In January, 1802, Hölderlin accepted a position as tutor in the household of a German consul in Bordeaux, France. Penniless, he traveled to Bordeaux on foot, a distance of over 1000 km. The position did not work out, and he traveled back to Tübingen in May. We do not know what happened to him on the journey. He may have been robbed; he was clearly exhausted by his travel, and he was close to starvation. When he arrived in Stuttgart in June, a friend described him as “an emaciated man, pale as death, long-haired and bearded, wild-looking, habited like a beggar” (Zweig, 1939/2017, p 356). At this time, he was informed that Susette had died. She had contracted German measles from her children Though the children recovered easily, Susette who probably had some underlying lung disorder, perhaps tuberculosis, did not. Hölderlin was devastated.

Despite his despair, Hölderlin was able to complete his translations of Sophocles’ Oedipus and Antigone. However, when they were published in 1804, these translations were derided as monstrous, and considered the work of a lunatic. For example, in the opening scene of Antigone, the verb kalchainein (from kalche, the purple limpet), which means “to become dark red,” is metaphorically used to describe disturbed thoughts. Hölderlin, directly translated the Greek dēloīs gār ti kalchaínousa’ éposas as du scheinst ein rotes Wort zu färben (“you seem to dye your words red”) rather than decorously translating it as “you appear to be troubled.” His choice of words is strange and exciting (de Campos, 2007; Carson, 2008). Hölderlin’s radical translations have prevailed. Carl Orff used them for his operas Antigonae (1949) and Oedipus der Tyrann (1959), and Bertolt Brecht adapted them for his 1948 play Antigone.

Hölderlin’s grief after the death of Susette was overwhelming, and he began his descent into madness. Isaac von Sinclair, a close friend, arranged an undemanding position for him as court librarian in Homberg in 1804. However, in 1805, von Sinclair, who was a fervent supporter of the ideals of the French Revolution, was accused of treason against the Elector of Württemberg, arrested and brought to trial in Stuttgart. Hölderlin was initially considered a co-conspirator, but was soon deemed too mad to stand trial. Ultimately, von Sinclair was found not guilty. The mad Hölderlin left Homberg to return home. However, his mother could not take care of him and in 1806, the poet was admitted to the University Hospital in Tübingen where he was treated by Professor Johann von Autenreith.

In 1807 he was discharged as incurably insane into the care of a carpenter Ernst Zimmer, who took in student boarders. For the next 36 years (one half of his lifetime) Hölderlin lived in the first-floor room in a tower overlooking the Neckar River. His upkeep was supported by a small annuity from the state of Württemberg. The tower had at one time been part of the city’s medieval fortifications but was then merged into the houses on Bursagasse. The following illustration shows the tower as viewed from the Neckar River:

In the 1820s, Hölderlin was visited by a young poet, Wilhelm Waiblinger (1804-1830), who describes his experience visit in his 1830 memoir Friedrich Hölderlin’s Life, Poetry and Madness:

One ponders, wondering whether or not to knock, and feels a sense of uneasiness. After finally knocking, a loud and forceful “Come in!” can be heard. Opening the door, one finds a haggard figure standing in the middle of the room, who bows as deeply as possible and will not stop bestowing compliments, and whose mannerisms would be very graceful were there not something convulsive about them. One admires the profile, the high forehead heavy with thought, the friendly, lovable eyes, extinguished but not soulless; one sees the devastating traces of the mental illness in the cheeks, the mouth, the nose, above the eyes where an oppressive and painful wrinkle has been etched. With regret and sadness, one observes the convulsive movement which sometimes spreads throughout the entire face, forcing his shoulders to jerk and his fingers to twitch. He wears a simple jacket and likes to keep his hands in his pockets. One says a few introductory words which are then received with the most courteous obeisance and a deluge of nonsensical words which confuse the visiting stranger. Gracious as he was and, for the sake of appearance, still is, H. now feels obliged to say something friendly to the guest, to ask him a question. One comprehends a few words of his question, but most of these could not possibly be answered. Nor does Hölderlin in the least expect to be answered. On the contrary, he becomes extremely perplexed if the visitor attempts to follow up a train of thought.

Hölderlin was also visited by other students and tourists. When given paper, Hölderlin would write fragments of verses and give them to his visitors. He would sign these with various pseudonyms, one of the most popular being “Scardanelli.” Some of them would be dated with fictitious dates. On most days Hölderlin would go for walks in the city, but he would not recognize or interact with anyone. He had been given a piano, and would often improvise music for prolonged periods.  

We do not know the nature of Hölderlin’s madness William Dilthey (1910) attributed his symptoms to spiritual weariness: “that form of dispersion of spirit produced from enormous exhaustion.” He likened Hölderlin to Robert Schumann. For both, creativity came at too great a cost: they flew too close to the sun. Some writers have concluded that Hölderlin was schizophrenic (Blanchot, 1951; Jakobsen et al, 1980). Others have refrained from any definite diagnosis (Agamben, 2023; Robles, 2020). Horowski (2017) has proposed that his symptoms might have been due to mercury intoxication since von Autenreith treated him with very high does of calomel. However, Hölderlin’s symptoms clearly preceded his treatment in Tübingen. The illustration shows an etching of Hölderlin based on a sketch by J. G. Schreiner in 1826.

Alcaic Verses

Hölderlin’s German odes were composed using Alcaic verses, traditionally believed to have been invented by the Greek lyric poet Alcaeus around 600 BC (Warren, 1996). Stress in Ancient Greek is mainly related to the duration of the vowel sound, whereas stress in both German and English is more complex and can be affected by the duration, pitch and intensity of the syllable, as well as by semantics. Nevertheless, the Alcaic verse form works well in both German and English.

Alcaic verses consist of four lines. The first two lines contain 11 syllables, the third 9 syllables and the fourth 10 syllables. The stress pattern was complicated, and could be varied slightly. In the following diagram the stressed syllables are denoted by / and the unstressed by –. Syllables denoted by x could be either stressed or unstressed. 

To illustrate this form, we can look at the brief poem Ehmals und Jetzt, shown below with a translation by Michael Hamburger which uses the same alcaic form:

The following shows the stress pattern in the German verse :

The following is a musical setting of the ode by Josef Matthias Hauer (1883-1959), sung by tenor Holger Falk accompanied by Steffen Schleiermacher on piano.  

To the Fates

Greek mythology postulated that human life was controlled by three sisters known as the Fates (Moirai in Greek; Parcae in Latin): Clotho, the spinner, spun the thread from her distaff onto a spindle; Lachesis, the allotter, measured out the destined amount life; and Atropos, the inflexible, cut the thread and ended the life. The following shows an image of the Fates in a tapestry created in 1983 by Patricia Taylor from a 1948 drawing by Henry Moore:

This is Hölderlin’s ode To the Fates. The translation is by Elizabeth Henderson

As the years pass, it would be a blessing to remember that once one had lived as the gods even if only for a short time. One could not ask for more.

The following is a recitation of the poem by Matthias Wiemann and a musical setting by Paul Hindemith (1895-1963), sung by Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau with Aribert Reimann accompanying him on piano. 

 

                     

 

The Neckar

Hölderlin was born on the banks of the Neckar River. As shown in the map, this river arises in the Black Forest and flows down to join the Rhine River. Many stretches of the river are freely navigable.

The first half of Hölderlin’s poem describes how the river brought him joy and peace. The second half tells how the beauties of the river inspire him to consider what it might be like to visit the wonders of Ancient Greece: Pactolus, a river in Ionia described by Sophocles as a “golden stream;” Smyrna the great coastal city of Western Ionia, now known as Izmir; Ilion, the ancient  name for Troy; Sunium on the southernmost point of the Attic peninsula, with its temple of Poseidon; and Olympia, the site of the Olympic Games.

At the time that Hölderlin was writing his poem, it was impossible to visit Greece since it was part of the Ottoman Empire. He could only visit in his imagination. Greece attained independence in 1832, but by then Hölderlin was mad.

Below is the text of the poem with a German translation by James Mitchell, followed by a recitation by Burno Ganz The translation follows the meaning but not the alcaic form of the German poem.

Josef Matthias Hauer composed a set of brief piano pieces based upon lines from Hölderlin’s poems (Barwinek, 2023). The following are two of these pieces deriving from the poem Der Neckar, played by Anna Petrova-Foster:

Deine Wellen umspielten mich
Your waves played about me

 

                    wo die Meerluft
die heißen Ufer kühlt und den Lorbeerwald durchsäuselt
                    where the sea breeze
cools the hot shores and rustles through the laurel forest

 

Hyperion

Hölderlin published his novel Hyperion, oder der Eremit in Griechenland in two parts in 1797 and 1799. It consists of a series of letters between Hyperion, a young Greek, to his German friend Bellarmin, with some occasional letters between Hyperion and his beloved Diotima. Epistolary novels were very popular in the 18^th Century: Rousseau’s Julia, ou la nouvelle New Héloise (1761), Richardson’s Pamela (1740) and Goethe’s Die Leiden des jungen Werther (1774) all used the format. Those were the days when those who were literate wrote letters.

Hyperion is short on plot and long in thought. The novel presents a general theory of beauty as the guiding light for harmonious society and of union with nature as the goal of the individual person. Hyperion participates in an insurrection against the Ottoman rule with the rebel Alabanda (modeled on Isaac von Sinclair). Later he almost dies fighting with the Russians against the Turks in the great sea battle of Chesma in 1771. Although the Russians were victorious, the Greeks remained subjugated. Hyperion’s great love Diotima, modeled on Susette Gontard, dies soon afterwards. Hyperion finally retires to live as a hermit in unspoiled nature. His concluding comment is one of reconciliation (Unger, 1984, p 36):

Wie der Zwist der Liebenden, sind die Dissonanzen der Welt. Versohnung ist mitten im Streit und alles Getrennte findet sich wieder. Es scheiden und kehren im Herzen die Adern und einiges, ewiges, gliihendes Leben is Alles

[The dissonances of the world are like the quarrel of lovers. Reconciliation is in the midst of strife, and all things divided find each other again. The veins depart from and return to the heart, and a unified, eternal, glowing life is All.]

Hyperion’s Schicksalslied occurs after the battle of Chesma (Unger, 1984, p 36). It begins in awe of the gods and ends in despair.

Brahms’ Opus 54 (1871) provides a choral setting of this song. The following are two extracts as performed by the Runfunkchor Berlin conducted by Gijs Leenars with the Deutsche Symphonie Orchester: settings of the first and last verses:

  

                   

Brahms added a beautiful adagio at the end of the song. Though criticized for trying to attenuate Hyperion’s despair, this movement fits the novel, which ends with a sense of reconciliation.

Fragments from the Tower

Most of the slivers of poetry that have been preserved from Hölderlin’s time in the tower have little meaning. Occasionally there are flashes that recall the aphorism of the younger poet:

Und wenig Wissen, aber der Freude viel
Ist Sterblichen gegeben

And little knowledge, but joy enough
Is given to mortals.
Stuttgart Hölderlin Ausgabe 2.323
translated by Chernoff & Hoover

And some of the poetry from that time is genuinely beautiful. Much of it is in the form of simple rhymed verse, unlike the unrhymed hymns and odes of earlier days. One of his last poems, entitled Aussicht (Perspective), likens human life to the necessary passage of the seasons, a theme that recurs in much of Hölderlin’s poetry. Like much of his late work it is signed “Scardanelli” and dated to the preceding century:

Wenn in die Ferne geht der Menschen wohnend Leben,
Wo in die Ferne sich erglänzt die Zeit der Reben,
Ist auch dabei des Sommers leer Gefilde,
Der Wald erscheint mit seinem dunklen Bilde.

Daß die Natur ergänzt das Bild der Zeiten,
Daß die verweilt, sie schnell vorübergleiten,
Ist aus Vollkommenheit, des Himmels Höhe glänzet
Den Menschen dann, wie Bäume Blüt umkränzet.

24 Mai 1748                     Mit Untertänigkeit
                                          Scardanelli.

When the life that men live in passes faraway,
Into that future season when the vines gleam,
And the harvested fields lie empty,
Then emerges the dark shadow of the forest.

Nature completes her picture of the seasons,
And lingers while they quickly glide away,
Out of perfection, and the high heavens then shine
On men as if garlanding the trees with blossoms.

24 May 1748                     Your humble servant
                                          Scardanellli

The above translation is mine. There are few other translations available, but see Agamben (2023, p 289), and Aleksi Barrière for versions in both French and English.

The following is a recitation of the poem by Hanns Zischler:

And a photograph of the actual manuscript of the poem:  

Agamben (2023, pp 295-329) considers the various meanings of the phrase wohnend Leben (dwelling life) in the first line of the poem. He relates it to the idea of Christ’s incarnation from John 1:14:

And the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us …

We live in life for a brief time. Perhaps we come from elsewhere, and return there when we die. Agamben also considers the word “habit,” which comes from the word “inhabit,” which is close to “dwell” in its meaning. In German, the word gewohnt means “usual” or “habitual.”  In a life of habit, one is affected by the world but does not try to change it. Such was Hölderlin’s time in the tower.

 

Stefan Zweig on Hölderlin’s Poetry

Hölderlin created some of our most exalted descriptions of nature and of the gods. His poetry is beautiful to read and to listen to. However, it often lacks the specificity of normal human experience. Hölderlin preferred the eternal to the everyday. His poetry may help us to understand the infinite, but provides little insight into our own finite lives. Stefan Zweig (1939, p 342) noted

Of the “four elements” known to the Greeks – fire, water, air, and earth – Hölderlin’s poetry has but three. There is lacking to it earth, the dark and clinging element, connective and formative, the emblem of plasticity and hardness. His verse is made of fire, the symbol of the ascent heavenward; it is light as air, perpetually athrill like the rustling breeze; it is transparent as water. In it scintillate the colours of the rainbow; it is ever in motion, rising and falling, the unceasing respiration of the creative mind. His poems have no anchorage in experience; they have no ties with the fertile earth; they are homeless and restless, scurrying clouds, sometimes tinged with the red dawn of enthusiasm and sometimes darkened with the shadow of melancholy, sometimes gathering into dense masses from which flash the lightnings and thunders of prophecy. Always they climb towards the zenith, towards the ethereal regions far from solid ground, beyond the immediate range of the senses.

 

Heidegger and Hölderlin

Martin Heidegger (1889-1976) was a German philosopher who contributed significantly to the existentialist movement. In Being and Time (1927), he focused on what it means to “be.” This question cannot be solved analytically but requires creative intuition. Thus, Heidegger was led to the idea that poetry determines the world through the words we use to describe it. The word “poetry” derives from the Greek poiesis making. 

In his essay Hölderlin and the Essence of Poetry (1941), Heidegger discussed the meaning of the concluding lines to Hölderlin’s poem Andenken (Remembrance) which dealt with his visit to Bordeaux. The last sentence of the poem reads

          Es nehmet aber
Und giebt Gedächtniss die See,
Und die Lieb’ auch heftet fleissig die Augen,
Was bliebet aber, stiften die Dichter.

[           But it is the sea
That takes and gives remembrance
And love no less keeps eyes attentively fixed,
But what is lasting the poets provide.
translated by Hamburger, 1998]

Another translation of the last line is “But what remains is founded by the poets.” Heidegger’s interpretation follows:

This line throws light on our question of the essence of poetry. Poetry is a founding by the word and in the word. What is established in this way? What remains. But how can what remains be founded? Is it not that which has always already been present? No! Precisely what remains must be secured against being carried away; the simple must be wrested from the complex, measure must be opposed to excess. What supports and dominates beings as a whole must come into the open. Being must be disclosed, so that beings may appear. . . .

The poet names the gods and names all things with respect to what they are. This naming does not merely come about when something already previously known is furnished with a name; rather, by speaking the essential word, the poet’s naming first nominates the beings as what they are. Thus they become known as beings. Poetry is the founding of being in the word. What endures is never drawn from the transient. What is simple can never be directly derived from the complex. Measure does not lie in excess. We never find the ground in the abyss. Being is never a being. But because being and the essence of things can never be calculated and derived from what is present at hand, they must be freely created, posited, and bestowed. Such free bestowal is a founding.

But when the gods are originally named and the essence of things comes to expression so that the things first shine forth, when this occurs, man’s existence is brought into a firm relation and placed on a ground. The poet’s saying is not only foundation in the sense of a free bestowal, but also in the sense of the firm grounding of human existence on its ground. If we comprehend this essence of poetry, that it is the founding of being in the word, then we can divine something of the truth of that verse which Hölderlin spoke long after he had been taken away into the protection of the night of madness. Heidegger (1941, pp 58-59)

As the Nazis came to power in Germany, Heidegger became an enthusiastic supporter. A major problem in evaluating his philosophy is to determine whether it can be considered independently of his politics. Did his philosophy make him more susceptible to fascism? When one poetically creates an idea of a perfect society, one must be careful to consider the means used to bring it into being.       

Hölderlin and Nazi Propaganda

In Hölderlin’s time, the Holy Roman Empire no longer existed. Germany was a ragtag conglomeration of kingdoms, duchies, bishoprics and city-states. In many of his poems, Hölderlin yearned for a unified Germany, a country that could carry on the ideas of both ancient Greece and revolutionary France. His patriotism was both fervent and critical: he was upset by the petty bourgeois squabbling of his countrymen. The following is the beginning of his Gesang des Deutschens (Song to the Germans) with a translation form Sharon Krebs:

The following is the last verse from Hölderlin’s Der Tod fürs Vaterland (Death for the Fatherland). It embodies the poet’s dedication to his idealized country:  

The last three lines of this verse were engraved on the wall of the Langemarck-Halle, a memorial to the German soldiers who had died in World War I, included in the buildings for the 1936 Olympic Games.

During World War II, the Nazi government arranged for 100,000 copies of a special field edition of Hölderlin’s poetry to be printed and sent to soldiers at the front (Unger, 1988, pp 130-131; Savage, 2008; pp 6-7; Corngold & Waite, 2009). The poetry increased the morale of the soldiers and provided them with an excuse to die for their country.

How could Hölderlin’s poetry be dragooned into military service? As Savage (2008, p 6) asks

How then did the Nazis transform this scarcely militaristic poet, who never took up arms for his country, and spent the last four decades of his life in a state of spiritual benightedness, into a paragon of Prussian masculinity and patriotic self-sacrifice?

Hölderlin was not a proto-fascist. His poetry was popular not because it urged his readers toward the goals of the Nazis, but because it provided a respite from the suffering of the war:

He offered an inner sanctuary to which his readers could retreat to lick their wounds when confronted with the material deprivation, physical danger, and increasingly evident lack od freedom of everyday life under the Third Reich. (Savage, 2008, p 7).

Constantine (1988) remarked

There can be no doubt that Hölderlin was a patriot, but his patriotism was humane and not in the least militaristic. It included also—which is often overlooked—the wish first to achieve a homeland it would be a joy and a privilege to live in, one in which the ideals of liberty, equality, and fraternity would have been realized. (pp 221-222)

Hölderlin did not really care for politics. He could describe his poetic ideals but he was unable to state how they should be attained. Constantine (1988) remarks that the general tendency of German writers to be concerned with the spiritual rather than the political has been catastrophic:

The disparagement of politics by Germany’s artists and intellectuals left that sphere free for the men of blood and iron to run riot in. (p 222)

 

Paul Celan

Paul Celan (1920-1970) was born in Czernowitz, Romania, into a German-speaking Jewish family. His parents died in German concentration camps, and he was forced to work in a labor camp. After the war he made his way to Paris, where he lived until his suicide in 1970.

He wrote poetry in German, his mother tongue, despite the fact that the language had come to embody the evil and the suffering of Nazism. He fractured and distorted the language so that he could find the truth behind the words. Celan visited Tübingen in January (Jänner in dialect), 1961, and felt a great sympathy for Hölderlin, who also wrote in fragments and could not make himself understood. The result was the poem entitled Tübingen, Jänner, 1961

The poem is cryptic, and understanding may be helped by some notes from Joris (Celan, 2020, pp 469-471), and from Felstiner (1995, pp 172-174):

The first lines refer to the Hölderlin’s hymn Der Rhein, which states that the sons of God are the blindest of us all. Seeking to understand heaven may make one unaware of the real world. The poem then directly quotes (though in fractured form) that the source of purity is a mystery. Both Hölderlin and Celan relate the German word rein (pure) with the name of the river.

The next lines describe the tower in which Hölderlin spent the last half of his life: reflected in the Neckar River and circled by gulls.

Then we are introduced the carpenter Ernst Zimmer who was responsible for his basic care and who listened to his words.

The final verse likens Hölderlin to a patriarch or prophet with a beard that glowed. This may be a reference to the story that the face of Moses shone brightly when he came down from Sinai

And it came to pass, when Moses came down from mount Sinai with the two tables of testimony in Moses’ hand, when he came down from the mount, that Moses wist not that the skin of his face shone while he talked with him.
And when Aaron and all the children of Israel saw Moses, behold, the skin of his face shone; and they were afraid to come nigh him.
(Exodus 34:29-30)

Although Moses was able to communicate the will of God to his people, the people of the present world cannot understand the words of their prophets or poets. We only hear and incoherent babbling. Pallaksch is a nonsense word that Hölderlin used to mean “yes” or “no,” or simply uttered as an exclamation.

The following is Celan’s poem together with a translation by Pierre Joris and a reading by Bruno Ganz:

Farewell

And so we take our leave of Hölderlin, a poet who described the indescribable to a people who failed to understand him. He was one of the main exemplars of the romantic tradition (de Man, 2012), a movement that considered subjectivity as paramount. He combined the new ideas about nature that began with Rousseau with the ideals of beauty that came from Ancient Greece. The French Revolution led not to a society of Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité, but to the Terror of Robespierre and the wars of Napoleon. Hölderlin’s dream that melding the beauty of Greece to the revolution of France might bring forth a new and harmonious German society came to naught. Madness overtook his person; and a century later madness overtook Germany in the form of fascism. Yet the original dream was vivid and powerful, and it remains so.   

 

Hölderlin’s Poems and Translations

Hölderlin, F. (translated Henderson, E., 1962) Alcaic poems. Oswald Wolff.

Hölderlin, F., & Mörike, E. F. (translated by Middleton, C., 1972). Selected poems. University of Chicago Press.

Hölderlin, F. (translated by Sieburth, R., 1984). Hymns and Fragments. Princeton. 

Hölderlin, F. (edited by Santner, E. L., 1990). Hyperion and selected poems. Continuum.

Hölderlin, F. (translated Hamburger, M., 1998). Selected poems and fragments. Penguin Books.

Hölderlin, F. (translated by Chernoff, M., & Hoover, P., 2008). Selected poems of Friedrich Hölderlin. Omnidawn.

Hölderlin, F (translated by Mitchell, J., 2022). Poems of Friedrich Hölderlin.

Hölderlin, F. (accessed 2025) Friedrich Hölderlin: Gedichte.

Hölderlin, F. (accessed 2025) Stuttgarter Hölderlin Ausgabe. 

 

References

Agamben, G. (translated by A. L. Price, 2023). Hölderlin’s madness: chronicle of a dwelling life, 1806-1843. Seagull Books.

Barwinek, B. (2023). Expression in Josef Matthias Hauer’s piano music as exemplified by Klavierstücke mit Überschriften nach Worten von Friedrich Hölderlin Op. 25. Polski Rocznik Muzykologiczny, 21(1), 106–128.

Blanchot, M. (1951, reprinted 1995). Madness par excellence. In M. Holland (Ed.) The Blanchot Reader. (pp 110-128). Blackwells.

de Campos, H. (2007). Holderlin’s red word. In de Campos, H. (edited by A. S. Bessa & O. Cisneros). Novas: selected writings. (pp 327-333). Northwestern University Press.

Carson, A. (2008). Variations on the right to remain silent. A Public Space, Issue 7

Celan, P. (translated by Joris, P., 2020). Memory rose into threshold speech: the collected earlier poetry. Farrar, Straus, Giroux.

Constantine, D. J. (1988). Hölderlin. Clarendon.

Corngold, S., & Waite, G. (2009). A question of responsibility: Nietzsche with Hölderlin at war, 1914–1946. In Wistrich, R. S & Golomb, J. (Eds) Nietzsche, Godfather of Fascism? (pp. 196-214). Princeton University Press.

Dilthey, W. (1910, translated by A. Grugan, reprinted, 1993). Hölderlin and the causes of his madness. Philosophy Today, 37(4), 341–352.

Felstiner, J. (1990). Paul Celan: poet, survivor, Jew. Yale University Press,

Heidegger, M. (1927, trans. J. Macquarrie & E. Robinson,1962). Being and time. Blackwell.

Heidegger, M. (1941, translated by Hoeller, K., 2000). Elucidations of Hölderlin’s poetry. Humanity Books.

Horowski, R. (2017). The “madness” of Friedrich Hölderlin: an iatrogenic intoxication. Journal of Neural Transmission, 124(6), 761–763. 

Jakobson, R., & Lübbe-Grothues, G. Ein Blick auf die Aussicht von Hölderlin. (1980/2010). In Jakobson, R. (ed. Rudy, S.) Selected Writings.  Volume III, Poetry of Grammar and Grammar of Poetry (pp. 388–448). De Gruyter. [Part of this essay translated in Jakobson, R., Lübbe-Grothues, G., & Kitron, S. (1980). The language of schizophrenia: Hölderlin’s speech and poetry. Poetics Today, 2(1a), 137–144.]

de Man, P. (2012). Hölderlin and the romantic tradition. Diacritics, 40(1), 100–129. [original lecture 1959]

Robles, N. (2020). Hölderlin’s madness. Hektoen International.

Savage, R. (Robert I. (2008). Hölderlin after the catastrophe: Heidegger, Adorno, Brecht. Camden House.

Unger, R. (1984). Friedrich Hölderlin. Twayne Publishers

Waiblinger, W. (1830, translated by S. J. Thompson) Friedrich Hölderlin’s Life, Poetry and Madness

Warren, R. (1996). Alcaics in exile: W.H. Auden’s “In memory of Sigmund Freud.” Philosophy and Literature, 20(1), 111–121.

Zweig, S. (1939, translated 2017). Hölderlin, Kleist, and Nietzsche: the struggle with the daemon. Routledge.

Bridget Riley (1931-  ) came to fame in the early 1960s with her striking black-and-white abstract paintings, which were paintings were included in an important exhibition organized by the Museum of Modern Art in New York, entitled The Responsive Eye (1965-66). After her first success, she moved on to colored abstract paintings and prints that infuse the viewer with a sense of movement.

 

Beginnings

Riley studied art at Goldsmith’s College and the Royal College of Art, but found no clear inspiration until she attended a summer school organized by Harry Thubron and Maurice de Sausmarez in 1959. She became intrigued by the pointillism of Georges Seurat, and made a careful copy of his 1887 painting Le Pont de Courbevoie in order to understand the relations between the colors (Spicer, 2015):

Maurice de Sausmarez

De Sausmarez, a charismatic teacher of art and design, was particularly intrigued by the way in which force and motion could be portrayed graphically. His teachings were presented in his 1964 book Basic Design: The Dynamics of Visual Form. In his introduction to the book (p 16) he summarizes the goal of his teaching:

to examine the rudimentary forces brought into being through graphic marks, dimensional relationships, juxtaposed colours, etc, leaving to the individual’s talent and temperament the terms in which he expresses himself. It is the counterpart to mastering the elementary signs of a language, formation and relationship to create coherences, but, by comparison, the primary forces operating in the act of looking provide us with prodigious subtlety and variety Furthermore visual coherence is more related to our neural and psycho-physiological being than to our processes of intellection. It is for this reason that we cannot describe or define this coherence, we can only acknowledge it when it is experienced through feeling. Optical forces are continuously operative, forces of attraction and repulsion, of expansion and contraction according to the situation of shapes and colours presented to our eyes. As we have already noted, sight is more than the mere optical stimulation of the retina by haphazard light rays, which the mind concurrently organizes into spatial units. It is virtually impossible to perceive units isolated from and unaffected by the context in which they appear. Relationship is inescapable and this makes the act of looking a dynamic experience.

In 1959 he and Riley began an affair, travelling together to Portugal and later to Italy. In Italy they attended an exhibition of Italian Futurism at the Venice Biennale. The following is a painting by Giacomo Balla: Abstract: Speed + Sound (1913):

In his biography of her early life, Moorhouse (2019, pp 200-201) describes how Riley came to her ideas about dynamism in black and white in Venice in 1960

Taking a respite from the day’s summer heat, the two stopped at a café and lingered at their table. Idling in this way, Bridget was greatly taken by the tessellated pattern of black-and-white floor tiles that lay around them. With its abutting squares the rigid geometry of the design caught her eye and she surveyed the arrangement with a half-conscious pleasure. Then, as sometimes happens, without warning the sky quickly became overcast and a torrential downpour ensued. With growing fascination, she watched as the exposed floor pattern was fractured by the beating rain. Consumed by spreading pools of water, the chequerboard design gradually dissolved, the lines and squares dancing in chaotic movement. Transfixed, she observed a firm structure as it became convulsed and then finally trans-formed into its opposite: a pliable, plastic surface that undulated and writhed. Within minutes the mirage had run its course. The sky cleared and, with the return of intense sunlight, the ground dried and the linear structure reappeared. Insignificant in itself, the spectacle had existed only briefly. Yet at some deeper level this optical event made a lasting impression.

 

Ruth Padel

The poet Ruth Padel described Riley’s experiences in Venice in 1960 in a long poem entitled Butterfly Landing on a Painting by Bridget Riley. The poem, published in Voodoo Shop (2002, pp 43-51), was triggered by a large swallowtail butterfly alighting near her: an “unfolded scrap of animate origami.” The butterfly evoked memories of her recently deceased father, who had been an amateur lepidopterist. Its black and white stipes also brought to mind the early paintings of Bridget Riley. She imagined Riley and de Sausmarez in Venice in 1960 in a section of the poem entitled Rain. The text of the poem is followed by its recitation by the poet.   

A sudden squall of rain in the piazza. It’s 1960. Venice.
        The dark girl, knocking back Camparis with her lover
(Old enough to be her dad; the centre of everything she is),
        Has won a prize. She’s twenty-nine, all go,
And flirting with Hard Edge
        Abstractionism. He thinks she’s difficult, and young.
They’re splitting up. She doesn’t know.

Together, they’ve explored the Futurists.
        They tried to visit Gino Severini,
Futurism’s founder, but he won’t be seen, he’s
        Ill. Now she’s drawing on the table, arguing.
‘Shapes that flow
        Through space destroy the world as you and I
Perceive it.’ But her voice is shrill.

He’s playing teacher, lecturing on
        The inner life of colour. She’s saying, too
Loud and wrong, somehow,
        That losing certainty of line could change
Things for a painter, rearrange him, set him free
        (She still says ‘he’), ‘or whisk
Him off to places he never dreamed he’d see.’

You can hear how young — you want to fold her in
        Your arms, make her slow down —
But you love the flinging out: the risk.
        More Camparis. He forgives
The arguing for now; until they’re home.
        What she’s really up to
Is watching how rain turns

All this Renaissance paving — midnight geometry
        Of star and parallelogram, black granite set
rnilkstone from the cold Carrara ridge —
        To a swirl of snake-skin
Runnels. Chaos physics.
        In herself, only half-aware, she’s marvelling
How a thing that seemed so certain

Can in a flash, a moment, fall to bits. She’s no idea
        This will change the way we see.
Rain stops — the flagstones dry — that pristine, seven-
        Point clarity comes back. But her eyes have taken in
How pattern, safe curtain
        Of the given world, can buckle, go
Molten on you, disappear.

Afterwards, she’ll see it everywhere, a witchy spell
        On pell-mell dying leaves
Or zebra crossings over Russell Square,
        And sloping glass of a Ford Popular’s rear window
Where it slippingly reflects
        The dark-pale-dark of bedrooms in Imperial Hotel.
It’ll stay with her, unnoticed, when he’s left.

 

The next section of Padel’s poem is entitled Kiss:

He’s gone. She can’t believe it, can’t go on.
She’s going to give up painting. So she paints
Her final canvas, total-turn-off
              Black. One long
              Obsidian goodbye.
A charcoal-burner’s Smirnoff,
The mirror of Loch Ness
Reflecting the monster back to its own eye.

But something’s wrong. Those mad
Black-body particles don’t sing
Her story of despair, the steel and
              Garnet spindle
              Of the storm.
This black has everything its own sweet way,
Where’s the I’d-like-to-kill-you
Conflict? Try once more, but this time add

A curve to all that straight. And opposition —
White. She paints black first. A grindstone belly
Hammering a smaller shape
              Beneath a snake
              Of in-betweening light.
‘I feel like this. I hope that you do, too,
Black crater. Screw you. Kiss.’

And sees a voodoo flicker, where two worlds nearly touch
And miss. That flash, where white
Lets black get close, that dagger of not-quite contact,
Catspaw panic, quiver on the wheat
              Field before thunder —
              There. That’s it.
That’s her own self, in paint,
Splitting what she was from what she is.
As if everything that separates, unites.

 

 

The painting Kiss (1961) shows two large black shapes, one straight, one curved, almost coming together. The point of their almost contact is scintillating.

Riley’s affair with de Sausmarez came to an end, but the two remained friends. De Sausmarez wrote the text for the first monograph on Bridget Riley’s work, published in 1970, just after his death. He remarked about the painting Kiss (de Sausmarez, 1970, p 16):

the ‘blink’ or ‘flash’ in the white area where the two massive, sensuous, black shapes nearly touch, and the fractional ‘together and apart’ movement of the straight and curved dividing lines.  

A second painting from 1961 awas entitled Movement in Squares:

 

Optical Art

Riley’s paintings are often considered as representative of Op or Optical Art. Op Art

relies for its effect on certain physiological processes in the eye and brain which we are not normally aware of either in ordinary vision or in looking at other works of art. (Barrett, 1971, p 9)

Typically composed of black-and-white or high contrast colors, the pictures can provide striking sensations of motion, depth, and color. Viktor Vasarely (1906-1997) was one of the early leaders of this field. Some have attributed Op Art effects to visual illusions, although a better term might be simply visual “phenomena” (Wade, 1978), since it is sometimes difficult to determine what is real and what is an illusion. De Sausmarez (1970, p 16) commented on Riley’s understanding:

For Bridget Riley there is no such thing as optical illusion since this would imply the censorship of visual experience by factual measurement. Cobalt blue on a white ground is not the same colour as cobalt blue on a black ground despite the fact that in both instances the pigment may have been squeezed from the same tube labelled ‘cobalt blue.’ For Riley what is visually experienced is the optical reality.  

Riley considers the term “perceptual abstraction” to be the best way of characterizing her art (Riley et al 2022).

 

Movement

Riley soon began to use curves to present contrasts and motion. The following is Arrest 2 (1965):

A more complex color experience is found in Drift 1 (1966):

De Sausmarez (1970, p 92) remarked

A cold tone remains constant over the whole area, while from left to right a warm sequence moving at two rates gives rise to warm/cold contrast, gradually changing to light/dark contrast in the central area and moving away again into warm/cold contrast. Diagonal movements at two different speeds power-fully influence the curving bands flowing from top to bottom. The climax of the tonal sequence and the climax of the curve movements are at variance.

 

Color and Movement

Over the years, Riley began to concentrate more on the relations between colors, in keeping with her initial interest in the paintings of Seurat. The following is New Day (1988):

Mor recently she has attempted to show movement through the shapes of colors, in keeping with the work of the Futurists. Below is Arcadia 3 (2011):

Conclusion

We can end with some photographs of Riley demonstrating the movement in her painting After Rajasthan, taken by Horst Kurschat in 2013 (MacRitchie et al., 2020, p 22-3)

 

References

Barrett, C. (1971). An introduction to optical art. Studio Vista.

de Sausmarez, M. (1964). Basic design: the dynamics of visual form. Reinhold.

de Sausmarez, M. (1970). Bridget Riley. Studio Vista.

MacRitchie, L., Hartley, C., Kudielka, R., Tommasini, A., Gubay, R. (2020). Bridget Riley: the complete prints 1962-2020. (Fifth revised and expanded edition. Thames and Hudson.

Moorhouse, P. (2019). Bridget Riley: a very, very person, the early years. Ridinghouse. 

Moorhouse, P. (2003). Bridget Riley. Tate Gallery

Padel, R. (2002). Voodoo shop. Chatto & Windus.

Riley, B. (2019). Bridget Riley: dialogues on art (3^rd edition.). Bridget Riley Art Foundation.

Riley, B. (edited by R. Kudielka, 2019). The eye’s mind: Bridget Riley, collected writings 1965-2019 (3rd edition.). Bridget Riley Art Foundation.

Riley, B., Stratton, R., & Ohadi-Hamadani, M. (2022). Bridget Riley: Perceptual Abstraction. Yale Center for British Art.

Schiff, R., & Kudielka, R. (2016). Bridget Riley: works 1981-2015. David Zwirner Books.

Spicer, E. (2015). Bridget Riley: Learning From Seurat. Studio International.

Wade, N. J. (1978) Op art and visual perception. Perception 7, 21-46.

Wade, N. J. (2003). Movements in art: From Rosso to Riley. Perception, 32(9), 1029–1036.

The paintings of Paul Klee (1879-1940) gave us a new way to look at the world, allowing us to go beyond our immediate perceptions and see the underlying forms. 

Kunst gibt nicht das Sichtbare wieder, sondern macht sichtbar.
Art does not reproduce the visible; rather, it makes visible.
(Klee, Creative Confession, 1920/2013, part I).

Color and music were the two great principles underlying his art. The tonal relations between colors and the rhythms of their spatial presentation combine to give us understanding. Many composers have sought to express Klee’s paintings in their music, to complement his colors with their notes. This essay presents some of these compositions. On the right is a portrait of Paul Klee by Hugo Erfurth in 1922

Early Life

Klee was born in Münchenbuchsee, a small town near Bern in Switzerland, and spent his childhood and adolescence in Bern. His father was a teacher of music and his mother a singer. Klee studied the violin and became good enough to play occasionally in the city orchestra. He revered Bach and Mozart, and cared little for the music of the 19^th-Century (Düchting 2012, 7-8).  

In 1898 he began to study art at the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich. He travelled to Italy, but found little inspiration in the works of the masters. His own graphic work – drawings, caricatures and etchings – was strange and uncertain.

Der Blaue Reiter

In 1911, several expressionist painters in Munich, among them, Wassily Kandinsky, Gabriele Münter, and Franz Marc, formed a new group, The Blue Rider (Gollek, 1982). They published an almanac, and in 1911 and 1912 held exhibitions of their work and modern paintings from other artists in Germany and France. Klee interacted with them, becoming aware of recent developments in art, such as the Cubism of Pablo Picasso and the Orphism of Robert Delaunay. Klee contributed several of his own works to the second exhibition.

 Klee’s Kleine Landschaft in Regenstimmung (Small Landscape in a Rainy Mood, 1913) shows the influence of Cubism. The picture shows hills in the distance and trees and rocks in the foreground. The violet and green palette is subdued, washed in the rain.   

In 1991 Walter Steffens composed a set of 4 pieces for recorder – Opus 63: Watercolors of Paul Klee. The following is the haunting third piece – Kleine Landschaft in Regenstimmung – played by Benedicta Bonitz on tenor recorder:

 

Paris

In 1912 Klee visited Paris. As well as visiting all the tourist spots, he spent time with Robert Delaunay, who had just written an essay on Light (Vriesen & Imdahl, 1969, pp 6-7). True painting depended on light and color. Color allowed different aspects of reality to be simultaneously and harmoniously represented. 

Art in Nature is rhythmic and abhors constraint. If art is attached to the Object, it becomes descriptive, divisive, literary. It lowers itself to imperfect means of expression, it condemns itself of its own accord, it is its own negation, it does not break free of imitative Art. …

For Art to reach the limits of sublimity, it must approach our harmonic Vision: clarity. Clarity will be color, proportions; these proportions are composed of various simultaneous measures within an action. This action must be representative harmony, the synchromatic movement (simultaneity) of light, which is the only reality. This synchromatic action will then be the Subject which is the representative harmony.

Klee agreed to translated the essay into German and his translation was published in Der Sturm in early 1913.

 One of Klee’s paintings from 1915 – Lachende Gotik (Laughing Gothic) – owes much to the ideas and the paintings of Delaunay. Suggesting the tall arches of a gothic church illuminated by the light of stained glass windows, Klee’s work owes much to Delaunay’s series of paintings of the Église Saint Séverin (1909-10).

 

In 2014, almost a century later, Martin Torp composed 6 Piano Pieces to Pictures by Paul Klee (“Klee-Blätter”). The following is Number 2 Lachende Gotik:

 

Tunis

In April 1914, Klee travelled to Tunis with August Macke, and Louis Moilliet. The brightness and clarity of the light and the variegated colors of the settlements they visited, Kairouan in particular, provided Klee with an epiphany:

Die Farbe hat mich. Ich brauche nicht nach ihr zu haschen. Sie hat mich für immer. Das ist der glücklichen Stunde Sinn: ich und die Farbe sind eins. Ich bin Maler.
Color possesses me. I don’t have to pursue it. It will possess me always, I know it. That is the meaning of this happy hour: Colour and I are one. I am a painter.
(Paul Klee diaries, April 24, 1914)

Although most of Klee’s paintings from Tunis were representational, one was completely abstract: Im Stil von Kairouan in Gemässigte übertragen (In Kairouan Style, Transposed to the Temperate, 1914):

I could find no pieces of music that directly related to Klee’s paintings from Tunis. The following is a highly rhythmic jazz piece by Marti Perramon, Joe Gallivan and the Ektal Ensemble entitled Kairouan a Klee. Their music suggests the suddenness and brightness of Klee’s Tunisian experience:

 

World War I

Klee’s friends, August Macke and Franz Marc joined up at the onset of the war. Macke died in September 1914, and Marc in March 1916 (in the Battle of Verdun). Klee, whose Swiss nationality gave him some respite, was finally called up in March 1916 since his father was German. As chance would have it, Klee was not assigned to the front lines: he spent the war doing clerical work in the payroll office. This gave him time to think through his philosophy of painting. He extended Delaunay’s ideas of simultaneity by joining it to the musical concept of “polyphony.” The following is from his diary in July 1916:

Thoughts at the open window of the payroll department. That everything is transitory is merely a simile. Everything we see is a proposal, a possibility, an expedient. The real truth, to begin with, remains invisible beneath the surface. …

Simple motion strikes us as banal. The time element must be eliminated. Yesterday and tomorrow as simultaneous. In music, polyphony helped to some extent to satisfy this need. …

Polyphonic painting is superior to music in that, here, the time element becomes a spatial element. The notion of simultaneity stands out even more richly. … Delaunay strove to shift the accent in art onto the time element, after the fashion of a fugue, by choosing formats that could not be encompassed in one glance.

The following illustration shows Klee’s Fuge in Rot (Fugue in Red, 1921).

The painting uses various shapes – leaf, vase circle, triangle and square – to depict the basic subjects of a fugue. Each of these shapes goes through an overlapping sequence from left to right becoming lighter as the sequence progresses. Sometimes the sequence might repeat and sometimes the subject might recur in inverted form. (see Liu, 2022, and Düchting, 2012, for further analysis).

In 2009, Jason Wright Wingate composed his Symphony Number 2 Kleetüden. The symphony consists of 27 parts, each keyed to one of Klee’s paintings. The following is the 14^th section: Fuge in Rot, moderato rossastro (at a moderate reddish pace) played by L’orchestre de l’Invisible:

 

Bauhaus

Walter Gropius, a successful architect, took over the Grand-Ducal Saxon Academy of Fine Art in Weimar in 1919, renaming it Das Bauhaus (building house). The first members of the faculty were Johannes Itten, a Swiss painter and color-theorist, and Lyonel Feininger, a German Expressionist painter. Klee joined the faculty in 1921, and Kandinsky followed in 1922. The Bauhaus moved to Dessau in 1925. Klee continued to work and teach at the Bauhaus until 1931, when he became a Professor at the Düsseldorf Academy of Fine Art. The Bauhaus was closed when the Nazis assumed control of the Dessau city council in 1932.

Gropius envisioned artists working together to create beautiful surroundings for people to live in:

The ultimate aim of all visual arts is the complete building! To embellish buildings was once the noblest function of the fine arts; they were the indispensable components of great architecture. Today the arts exist in isolation, from which they can be rescued only through the conscious, cooperative effort of all craftsmen. Architects, painters, and sculptors must recognize anew and learn to grasp the composite character of a building both as an entity and in its separate parts. Only then will their work be imbued with the architectonic spirit which it has lost as “salon art.” …

Let us then create a new guild of craftsmen without the class distinctions that raise an arrogant barrier between craftsman and artist! Together let us desire, conceive, and create the new structure of the future, which will embrace architecture and sculpture and painting in one unity and which will one day rise toward heaven from the hands of a million workers like the crystal symbol of a new faith. (Bauhaus Manifesto, 1919)

The Bauhaus combined craft with art to produce beautifully designed furniture, buildings and paintings. Form and function were joined together. Art was wedded to technology.

Klee’s appointment at the Bauhaus gave him the time and the freedom to create. One of Klees’ early works in Weimar is Kristall-Stufung (Crystal Gradation, 1921). One is tempted to related this to Gropius’ “crystal symbol of a new faith.” The different gradations in the picture are created by multiple overlays of transparent water-colors, a technique known as “glazing.”

In 2007 Paul Osterfield wrote some chamber music for guitar, flute and clarinet entitled Klee Abstractions. The following is the second movement based on Crystal Gradations:

Another early painting from his Bauhaus years is Der Bote des Herbste (Autumn Messenger, 1922). This is the description of Carola Giedion-Welcker (quoted in Klee, 1959, p 21)

A picture organized architectonically and musically, well-knit, gently toned, and sonorous. The parallel linework is articulated in long rectangles, stripes of gray and blue that darken into violet and become more compressed. There are delicate color gradations, which in the end are definitively brought together and tied into impressive rhythmic contrasts of light and shadow. Within the angular austerity of the whole, there swell the curves, solitary and impressive, of the organic oval—the sign of the tree, of the golden yellow messenger of autumn, which dominates the picture by virtue of its formal and color values. The white sickle on the lateral plane is like a fragmentary formal echo of the main theme.

The following is a musical interpretation of the painting by Takeshi Kako (1988) on piano:

Giedeon-Welcker also noted that the picture is reminiscent of Paul Verlaine’s poem Chanson d’Automne (Song of Autumn, 1866)

[The long sobbing of the autumn violins wounds my heart with a monotonous languor. Breathless and pale, when the hour sounds, I remember the old days and weep; soon I am going away in the ill wind that carries me here and there, like a dead leaf.]

Klee’s Vor dem Schnee (Before the Snow, 1929), a painting from the late autumn when the trees are on fire and the leaves are falling, brings to mind the transience of life:  

The following is Takashi Kato’s pianistic interpretation:

Klee and the poet Rainer Maria Rilke had been friends and neighbors in an apartment building in Munich in 1919. Rilke died in 1926. This painting recalls the poet’s acute sense of time, as seen in his poem Herbst (Autumn, from Das Buch der Bilder, The Book of Pictures, 1902). The poem describes the falling leaves and realizes that we are always falling through time. The following is the poem’s ending with Robert Bly’s translation (1981):

Wir alle fallen. Diese Händ da fällt.
Und sieh dir andre an: es ist in allen
Und doc hist Einer, Welcher dieses Fallen
unendlich sanft in seinen Händen hält

We’re all falling. This hand here is falling.
And look at the other one.  … It’s in them all
And yet there is Someone, whose hands
infinitely calm, hold up all this falling.

Klee’s painting Hauptweg und Nebenwege (Highway and Byways, 1929) seemed to portray the infinite artistic possibilities provided by the Bauhaus. The painting is an example of Klee’s polyphony, as it leads us into the future on parallel and contrapuntal paths:

The following is Takashi Kako’s pianistic journey (1988) through the colors of the painting:

Klee visited Ravenna, Italy, in 1926 and was entranced by the mosaics. Some of his later paintings were made in a pointillist style that brings to mind the mosaics. One of these, Ad Parnassum (1932), shows the mountain of the muses in the distance and the ruins of a temple in the foreground. The red triangle above the sun likely represents the morning from dawn to noon and the light-yellow triangle the afternoon from noon to sunset. The painting suggests a journey beginning at the temple and ascending toward the rocky peak:

The following is the 5^th movement from Peter Maxwell Davies’ Five Klee Pictures: Ad Parnassum. Maxwell Davies initially composed this piece for a high school orchestra in 1959, and then revised it in 1976 for the Philharmonia Orchestra:

 

The painting Eros (1923) is dominated by a rising arrow.

The painting is concerned with the erotic aspects of desire. The following is the 4^th section of Wingate’s Symphony Number 2: Eros (grave libidinoso):

For Klee, the arrow symbolized “desire” in both its sexual and intellectual forms. In his Pedagogic Sketchbooks (1925, p 54), he wrote about the intellectual aspects of desire:

The father of the arrow is the thought: how do I expand my reach? Over this river? This lake? That mountain?
The contrast between man’s ideological capacity to move at random through material and metaphysical spaces and his physical limitations is the origin of all human tragedy. It is this contrast between power and prostration that implies the duality of human existence. Half-winged – half-imprisoned, this is man.

 

Another painting that deals with desire is Katze und Vogel (Cat and Bird, 1928). The image of the bird is fixed in the brain of the cat as it quietly waits to pounce:

The following is the 24^th section of Wingate’s Symphony Number 2: Cat and Bird, andantino desideroso:

The National Socialists

All was not perfect as the decade of the 1920s progressed. Adolf Hitler and the Nazi party began their slow but inexorable rise to power. Klee’s paintings are open to many levels of interpretation. Some of these express foreboding about the times to come.

Klee’s Schwartzer Fürst (Black Prince, 1927) provides a frightening vision of power:

The following is the1st movement, Black Prince, of George Crumb’s Metamorphoses (2017), a series of pieces for piano based on paintings (Buja, 2022). The pianist, Marcantonio Barone, plays both through the piano keys and by manually activating the piano strings:

 

At one level we can see in Klee’s picture Ein Kreuzzugler (Crusader, 1929) an innocent medieval peasant off to liberate the holy land. The landscape is becoming visible through the crusader as he fades away. The green eyes burn. At another level we can see someone foolishly believing in something as vacuous as the Nazi ideas of racial superiority.

 

The following is the 1^st movement from Peter Maxwell Davies’ Five Klee Pictures: Crusader. The first movement is an unnerving march. Maxwell Davies conducts the Philharmonic Orchestra.

Klee’s painting of Kleiner Blautuefel (Little Blue Devil, 1933) is ambivalent. Is the subject an agent of mischief or of chaos?

This ambivalence is nicely captured in the 3^rd movement of Gunther Schuller’s 7 Studies on Themes of Paul Klee (1959) which combines jazz and classical music (Buja, 2021). The piece is performed by the Boston Symphony Orchestra under Erich Leinsdorf:

Although he abhorred the Nazis. Klee attempted to stay clear of overt politics. His painting Auftrieb und Weg – Segelflug (Up and Away – Gliding, 1932) captured his desire to get away from the coming evil:

Fabien Müller wrote a Concerto per Klee for cello and chamber orchestra in 2007. The following is the 1^st movement: Auftrieb und Weg (lento, poco rubato – presto). The cellist is Pi-Chin Chien and the orchestra is the Georgisches Kammerorchester Ingolstadt conducted by Ruben Gazarian.

In January 1933, Hitler became Reich Chancellor. In March, Klee’s home was searched and his papers were confiscated. In April, he was summarily dismissed from his position at the Düsseldorf Academy of Fine Art. In December Klee moved to Bern. Although he was born in Switzerland, he was considered an immigrant, and not granted Swiss citizenship. He stayed in exile in Switzerland until his death in 1940.   

In 1937 the Nazis organize an Exhibition of Degenerate Art (Entartete Kunst) in Munich (Barron, 1991). The exhibition claimed that much of what passed for art in the preceding years had been an insult to the purity and integrity of true German culture. Thirty-five works by Paul Klee were removed from German art galleries and included in the exhibition. Among them was Der goldene Fisch (Golden Fish, 1925) which had been acquired by the National Gallery in Berlin. The painting shows a magnificent golden fish shimmering in the dark blue waters as other smaller fishes make way for his passage:

The second of George Crumb’s Metamorphoses (2017) provides a sensitive interpretation of this ancient and magical being. We may not understand its life but we can marvel at its beauty. The music (played by Marcantonio Barone) shimmers:

Exile

Klee’s time in Bern was lonely and painful. In 1935, he was diagnosed with scleroderma, an auto-immune disease that causes the skin to tighten progressively, and also affects other organs. This caused him pain, and difficulties with swallowing and breathing. Ultimately, the disease led to his death in 1940 (Suter, 2010, 2014).

Nevertheless, he continued to be very productive. One of his Bern paintings, entitled Zeichen in Gelb (Signs in Yellow, 1937), was similar to his early work exploring the significance of colors and the colors of signs.

The painting was the inspiration for the 1^st movement of Hommage à Paul Klee, a concerto for 2 pianos and string orchestra by Sandor Veress (1951). The following is a performance by Andras Schiff and Denes Varjon on pianos, with Heinz Holliger conducting the Budapest Festival Orchestra.

 

The painting Paukenspieler (Kettledrummer, 1940) can bear multiple interpretations. On the one hand, it can simply represent a tympanist in the midst of a drum solo, caught with one drumstick raised and the other hitting the drum. On the other hand, the stark black and red colors and the angular shapes bring to mind the Nazi swastika and the drumbeat of war.

The following is the 16^th section of Wingate’s Symphony Number 2 Kleetüden: Paukenspieler (grave morboso). 

One of Klee’s last paintings was Tod und Feuer (Death and Fire, 1940). The white shape in the center brings to mind a skull, the features of which are portrayed by the letters T, O and D of the German word for “death.” Outside the skull the letters recur going up from the left and down on the right. The orange and yellow colors of the background suggest flames. Klee joined his own tragedy with that of the world at war.

The following is 7^th movement (Tod und Feuer) of Jim NcNeely’s Paul Klee Suite for Jazz Orchestra (2006), as played by the Swiss jazz Orchestra with the composer conducting.

Envoi

One of Klee’s most famous paintings, entitled Alter Klang (Old Sound/Ancient Harmony, 1925), encapsulates his desire to bring to painting the polyphony of music. The viewer can spend forever finding the patterns of the colors and their echoes across time.

Below are two musical interpretations: by Takashi Kako (1988) on solo piano, and by Sandor Veress (1951) in the 3^rd movement of his Hommage à Paul Klee, a concerto for 2 pianos and string orchestra, with Andras Schiff and Denes Varjon on pianos, and Heinz Holliger conducting the Budapest Festival Orchestra:

 

                      

We can conclude with a quotation from Klee’s Creative Confession (1920/2012, part V)

Formerly we used to represent things visible on earth, things we either liked to look at or would have liked to see. Today we reveal the reality that is behind visible things, thus expressing the belief that the visible world is merely an isolated case in relation to the universe and that there are many more other, latent realities. Things appear to assume a broader and more diversified meaning, often seemingly contradicting the rational experience of yesterday. There is a striving to emphasize the essential character of the accidental.

The essence of things had much in common with music. There is a rhythm at the heart of things. Multiple strands of meaning can interact like the themes in a fugue or the colors in a polyphonic painting.

 

 

Notes:

Klee produced many thousands of paintings over his lifetime. This essay only looks at twenty. A searchable listing of Paul Klee’s works is available. Many of his paintings have been interpreted musically (Wikipedia provides an extensive but incomplete listing). Recently, Jonathan Posthuma has composed some 50 chamber pieces related to Klee’s paintings: Paul Klee: Painted Songs.   

 

References

Paintings

Grohmann, W. (translated by N. Guterman, 1967). Paul Klee. H. N. Abrams.

Hopfengart, C., & Baumgartner, M. (2012). Paul Klee: life and work. Hatje Cantz.

Klee, P. (1959). The inward vision: water-colours, drawings, writings. H. N. Abrams.

Lanchner, C. (1987). Paul Klee. Museum of Modern Art.

Partsch, S. (2011). Paul Klee, 1879-1940: poet of colours, master of lines. Taschen.

Rewald, S. (1988). Paul Klee: the Berggruen Klee collection in the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Scholz, D., Thomson, C. (2008). The Klee universe. Hatje Cantz.

 Other References

Barron, S. (1991). Degenerate art: the fate of the avant-garde in Nazi Germany. Los Angeles County Museum of Art (H. N. Abrams).

Bly, R. (1981). Selected poems of Rainer Maria Rilke. Harper & Row.

Buja, M, (2021) Art and Music: Klee and Schuller. Interlude

Buja, M. (2022a). Art into Sound I: George Crumb’s Metamorphoses, Book I. (December 3) Book II. (December 10). Interlude.  

Buja, M. (2022b). Musicians and Artists: Peter Maxwell Davies and Paul Klee. Interlude.

Düchting, H. (1997). Paul Klee: painting music. Prestel.

Geelhaar, C. (1973). Paul Klee and the Bauhaus. New York Graphic Society.

Gollek, R (1982). Der Blaue Reiter im Lenbachhaus München: Katalog der Sammlung in der Städtischen Galerie. Prestel.

Klee, P. (1925, translated L. Moholy-Nagy, 1968). Pedagogical sketchbook. Faber and Faber.

Klee, P. (translated by P. B. Schneider, R.Y. Zachary & M. Knight, 1964) The diaries of Paul Klee, 1898-1918. University of California Press.

Klee, P. (2013). Creative Confession and other writings. Tate Publishing.

Liu, M. (2022). Paintings of music. Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 80(2), 151–163.

Suter, H. (2010). Paul Klee and his illness: bowed but not broken by suffering and adversity. Karger.

Suter, H. (2014). Case Report on the illness of Paul Klee (1879-1940). Case Reports in Dermatology, 6(1), 108–113.

Verlaine, P. (1866). Poèmes saturniens, Lemerre,

Vriesen, G., & Imdahl, M. (1969). Robert Delaunay: light and color. H.N. Abrams.

Weber, N. F. (2009). The Bauhaus group: six masters of modernism. Alfred A. Knopf.

Ely Cathedral was originally situated on a low island in the middle of the Fens, a region of marshland in eastern England lying inland of the Wash. Because of the flatness of the surrounding land the cathedral could be seen from great distances, appearing as the “Ship of the Fens.” The marshes were drained in the 17^th Century, but it is still easy to imagine the building floating above the waters: the embodiment of Auden’s image of the English cathedrals:

Luxury liners laden with souls,
Holding to the east their hulls of stone.
(Auden, 1936, p 43; also McDiarmid, 1978, p 292)

The Present Cathedral

The following illustration shows the cathedral as viewed from the southeast.

The present building was begun in 1083 by the Normans soon after their conquest of England. They bought with them a style of architecture known as “Romanesque” on the continent but considered “Norman” in England. The style was characterized by large weight-bearing columns surmounted by semi-circular arches. As the years passed, additions, collapses and renovations to the original building left it with a blend of styles that still somehow achieve harmony rather than incoherence.

The following is the view of the cathedral from the south from Bentham (1771, Plate 42, scale 100 ft):

The West end of the cathedral shows its mixture of styles. The following illustration shows a engraving from King (1881, plate XII) as well as two modern photographs showing the Gothic arches on the Galilee Porch and the Norman arches on the south west transepts

The following is a floor plan of the cathedral:

The dashed semicircular lines in the Presbytery show the eastern extent of the original Norman cathedral.

Saxon Beginnings

The region of England northeast of London – comprising the present counties of Norfolk, Suffolk, Cambridgeshire and Essex – was settled by Angles and Saxons in the 5^th and 6^th Centuries CE. Multiple kingdoms were set up on the island of Britain: East Anglia, Northumbria, Mercia, Essex, Sussex, Wessex, and Kent. Augustine of Canterbury arrived in England in 597 CE; and the various Saxon kingdoms in England soon converted to Christianity.

Anna, the king of East Anglia (reigned 636-654 CE), a devout Christian, probably reigned in Exning – just east of present-day Cambridge. A large ancient earthen wall, known today as the Devil’s Dyke, stretching from the southern end of the Fens to the River Stour, appears to have built as a defense against the Mercian kingdom to the west. The following map shows the kingdom of East Anglia at the time of Anna:

Anna’s daughter Æthelthryth (or Etheldreda) was born in 636 CE (Keynes, 2003). In 652, at the age of 16, she was married to Tondberct, a prince who ruled over part of the Fens. This was a political marriage, designed to extend Anna’s domain, and Æthelthryth insisted on maintaining her virginity. As a wedding gift she was given the Isle of Ely in the Fens. The name “Ely” probable comes from the Old English elge meaning “region of eels.” Tonberct died in 655, and Æthelthryth retired to live in Ely.

After Anna died fighting against the Mercians at the battle of Bulcamp in 654, Æthelthryth was married in 660 for a second time to Ecgfrith, a 16-year-old prince of Northumbria. Once again, she insisted on maintaining her virginity. In 670, she formally took the veil as a nun and lived in the double monastery (for both monks and nuns) at Coldingham, in what is now southeast Scotland. In 672, in need of an heir, Ecgfrith decided that he wished to consummate his marriage, and sent armed men to apprehend his wife. She and her attendants fled to Ely; Ecgfrith’s men were prevented from capturing her by the tidal waters of the Fens. Æthelthryth then founded a new monastery at Ely, where she presided as abbess until her death in 679. The following illustration shows two of the capitals on the octagon pillars in Ely cathedral (from Bentham, 1771, plates 9 and 10): Æthelthryth’s taking of the veil, and her miraculous salvation by the rising waters of the Fens. On the right is a 1960 statue of Æthelthryth by Phillip Turner.

Little is known of the abbey at Ely after its founding. In 869 the Vikings conquered the kingdom of East Anglia and much of Northumbria and Mercia. Alfred the Great (849-899) ultimately prevented the Vikings from further expansion, but allowed the continuation of Danelaw in the eastern parts of England from 886 to 1066. The original abbey of Æthelthryth may have been destroyed or may have simply fallen into disuse during the early Viking period. However, Ely Abbey was re-founded toward the end of the 10^th Century as a monastery for monks alone. As his boat approached Ely, King Cnut (reign 1016-1035) was impressed by the music of the monks and wrote a poem, a fragment (perhaps the refrain) of which survives (Parker, 2018):

Merie sungen ðe muneches binnen Ely
ða Cnut ching reu ðer by.
Roweþ cnites noer the lant
and here we þes muneches sæng.

[Sweetly sang the monks in Ely
When Cnut the king rowed by;
‘Row, men, nearer to the land
So we can hear the friars’ song.’]

 

The Norman Cathedral

Under the direction of Abbot Simeon, the Normans initiated the construction of a large abbey church in Ely in 1083. The remains of Saint Æthelthryth were moved from the old church to the new in 1106. Her marble tomb was placed in a shrine bedecked by gold and jewels behind the high altar. The building was granted cathedral status by Henry I 1109. The nave, central tower and transepts were completed by about 1140, and the western transepts and tower were finally finished by about 1190.

The nave is 72 meters long and 22 meters high. There are three levels: the arcade, gallery (or tribune) and clerestory, the last containing large windows for light (clerestory means “clear storey”). The proportions for these levels are 6:5:4 (Clifton-Taylor, 1986, p 36). The arcades of the gallery are divided into two and those of the clerestory into three. The columns alternate between piers with multiple shafts and piers with large cylindrical columns, providing a gentle visual rhythm. The aisles on either side of the main nave are each one half the width of the nave (Fernie, 2003). The roof was made of the same timbers that were used to provide the scaffolding when constructing the nave.

The following illustration shows on the left a diagram of the nave (Dehio & Bezold, 1887, plate 88), On the right is a modern photograph that shows its three levels, and at the bottom a photograph that illustrates the alternation of the main columns.

The monk’s door and the prior’s door from the cloisters into the nave were likely built and decorated in the 1130s. Both are intricately sculpted. The prior’s door (shown below in a plate from Bentham, 1771, and in a modern photograph) is surmounted by a tympanum containing Christ in Majesty surrounded by two angels. Though far less accomplished than the Romanesque sculptures in France, it has its own charm.

The Gothic Cathedral

The Galillee Porch was added to the west front of the cathedral in the first two decades of the 13^th Century. As we have already noted the style is early Gothic: the blind arcades decorating the façade have pointed arches, narrow columns, and trefoil openings.

A little later, the east end of the Cathedral was extended to form a Presbytery: a space for the monks to worship separate from the choir and the nave. This extension in a richly decorated Gothic style was completed in 1252 (Maddison, 2003). The large columns of the arcade are divided into multiple smaller columns and the pointed arches are geometrically ornamented. The tribune gallery has twin trefoiled openings beneath a large pointed arch. The clerestory has lancet windows with an inner row of cinquefoil arches. The stone vault is supported by tierceron ribs.

The following illustration shows a view of the choir and presbytery toward the east by John Eaton (2016) surrounded by two views of the north wall, the left by Arthur de Smet (1972) and the right from Broughton (2008):

In 1321, work began on a large separate Lady Chapel north of the choir and presbytery. Constructing the foundations for this new building led to the central section of the cathedral being undermined by water. The central bell tower of the cathedral collapsed in 1322, damaging parts of the north transept and the choir. Under the direction of Alan of Walsingham a new octagonal tower was built, with the stonework completed by 1328 (Maddison, 2003). The crowning glory of the tower was a magnificent “lantern” built of timber that allowed light to descend into the cathedral (completed in about 1340). The following illustration shows the octagon viewed from the western tower and a diagram of the carpentry underlying the lantern from Hewett (1974, plate 76):

The following illustration shows views of the lantern from the interior of the cathedral:

Because of the lantern, Ely cathedral provides a marvelous interplay of light and shadow. Frederick Evans took many photographs in 1897 and published these in Camera Work in 1903 (Lyden, 2020). Two of his images are below:

After the stonework of the octagon was completed Bishop Hotham and Akan of Walsingham then returned to complete the lady chapel – a wonder of Decorated English Gothic. The vault is supported by interconnecting ribs forming star shapes (lierne, from French lier, to tie, or stellar vaulting). This approach supports a wider vault than the simple tierceron ribbing. The large windows are supported by thin vertical columns that extend outward to provide a buttressing effect. The following illustration shows a photograph of the chapel and a diagram of the lierne vaulting.

The chapel was completed in the 1340s. The lower sections of the walls are decorated with vegetal patterns, giving the visitor a sense of being in a garden (Broughton, 2008). The present chapel is very different from the way it was in the 14^th and 15^th Centuries. At that time, numerous painted sculptures existed in the niches, and the windows were made of stained glass.

The Monastery

Ely Cathedral, like Canterbury, Durham, and Norwich, was a monastic cathedral. The monks at these cathedrals followed the Benedictine order. The bishop of a monastic cathedral was the titular abbot of the monastery, but the monks were essentially led by the prior. Although most of the old cathedrals in England were monastic, some cathedrals, such as Lincoln and Hereford were secular and had no associated monastery.

The monastery (or priory) at Ely was prosperous. Many of the medieval buildings of the monastery still stand. Some are used by King’s Ely School. The following plan shows the probable layout of the monastery (Dixon, 2003). The castle motte is the site of a fortress in Norman times.

The Reformation

As the years wore on the monastery at Ely became rich. The sale of indulgences brought in much money. Death acted like the church’s tax-collector, as those in need of heaven left their land and possessions to the church rather than to their children. Pilgrims to the shrine of Æthelthryth/Etheldreda were expected to make significant donations to the church. Æthelthryth was also called Saint Audrey. Ribbons bought at her shrine were called “St Audrey’s lace,” whence comes the word “tawdry” for overpriced finery. Some Bishops at Ely made special ornate chapels for themselves: Bishop Alcock (1486-1500) at the end of the north aisle and Bishop West (1515-33) at the end of the south aisle. It was easy to accuse the church of luxury and greed.

As the 16^th Century progressed, Henry VIII came to need both a new wife and a source of gold. In 1533 Henry appointed Thomas Cranmer as Archbishop of Canterbury. Cranmer allowed him to marry Anne Boleyn. In 1534, Thomas Cromwell, the king’s chancellor, arranged for Parliament to pass the Act of Supremacy declaring the king to be the head of the English Church. In 1537, Cromwell convened a synod of British bishops who produce a book The Institution of the Christian Man, espousing many of the principles proposed by Martin Luther. In 1839 Parliament passed a bill to allow the Dissolution of the Monasteries. All of the small monasteries were to be closed, their monks let go, and their assets expropriated by the king. The monasteries associated with the cathedrals were also to be closed, although some of their monks could remain as officers in the newly secularized cathedrals.

On 18 November, 1539, Prior Robert Seward and 23 other monks signed a deed of surrender of the monastery of Ely to Henry VIII (Duffy, 2020, pp 31-45). There was not much else they could do. The abbots of Gastonbury and Reading had been executed on November 13 for refusing to dissolve their houses. The monastery and cathedral were held at the pleasure of the monarch and its riches were duly plundered. In 1541 the cathedral was given a royal charter as a secular cathedral. The church which had been devoted to Saint Etheldreda and Saint Peter, was renamed “The Cathedral Church of the Holy and Undivided Trinity of Ely.”

The bishop during this time was Thomas Goodrich, a colleague of Thomas Cranmer. Trained in theology at Cambridge University, he was appointed Bishop of Ely in 1534 and remained bishop until his death in 1554. After the dissolution of the monastery, he ordered the destruction of the shrine of Ethelreda, the defacement of the statues in the Lady Chapel, and the removal of the statues in the chapels of Bishop’s Alcock and West. Every one of the 147 statues of Mary and the other saints in the Lady Chapel was beheaded. Goodrich continued as bishop after the death of Henry in 1547; during the reign of Edward VI (1547-53), he was also appointed Lord Chancellor (1552). He died in 1554, before Mary (reign 1553-8) had time to pursue her vengeance.

The following illustration shows two photographs from the 1890s by Frederick Evans showing the mutilation of the statues in the Lady Chapel and the empty plinths on the gateway to Bishop West’s chapel. Also shown is the memorial brass to Thomas Goodrich, located on the floor of the south presbytery. The bishop holds in his right hand both a bible and the seal of England, emblematic of his chancellorship.

After the Reformation the cathedrals of England fell into disrepair. The architecture was contemptuously referred to as “Gothic” or barbaric (see Clifton-Taylor, 1986, pp 9-12). In 1699, the north west transept of Ely Cathedral collapsed (Fernie, 2003, p 96). There was no money to rebuild:

To this day, Ely looks like the wounded veteran of some forgotten war. (Jenkins, 2016, pp 91-2)

Watercolors by J. M. W. Turner from the 1790s show the cathedral octagon and the dilapidated Galilee Porch.

Repair

The cathedral was extensively restored during the 19^th Century: The roof of the nave was retimbered and painted; the windows were provided with stained glass; the choir was provided with new stalls and a beautifully carved choir screen; the high altar received an intricate reredos (from French arere, behind, dos, back).

The following illustration shows some of the carvings above the choir stalls. These depict episodes in the life of Jesus: the supper at Emmaus, the appearance of the risen Jesus to Thomas, and the ascension:

Ely in the Present

Most people in England no longer attend church, and those who believe that there is a God are equaled by those who believe that there is not. What should be the place of the church in modern society?

Intriguing to me are the modern statues that now adorn the cathedral. Below are illustrations of four of these works. Clockwise from the upper left are the Virgin Mary in the Lady Chapel urging us to exultation by David Wynne (2000), Christ and Mary Magdalene wondering at the mystery of the resurrection by David Wynne (1967), Christ in Majesty above the pulpit by Peter Ball (2000), and half-life-size statues by Sean Henry on the empty plinths in Bishop West’s chapel, part of an installation entitled Am I My Brothers Keeper? in 2024.

An optimistic view of the future is from Nicholas Orme (2017, p 262):

The most astonishing feature of cathedral history, when one has journeyed through its seventeen hundred years, is its immense and varied creativity. If we take buildings, there is the evolving history of their plans and construction, the sourcing of the materials, the labours of craftsmen, the elaboration of the decoration, and the successive layers of repair and restoration. There is the worship, complex in its calendar, its liturgical texts, the ways in which it is done, and the application of the worship to God, saints, or popular, needs. There is the vast range of arts involved in producing worship and its setting: sculpture, painting, stained glass, metalwork, fabrics, singing, instrumental music, and chorography. There is the written and spoken word in prayer- and hymn-books, preaching, inscriptions, archives, libraries, guide-books, and service-sheets.

A more restrained understanding of what it is like to visit a church when faith has passed away can be found in a 1954 poem by Philip Larkin entitled Church Going, the last verse of which reads:

A serious house on serious earth it is,
In whose blent air all our compulsions meet,
Are recognised, and robed as destinies.
And that much never can be obsolete,
Since someone will forever be surprising
A hunger in himself to be more serious,
And gravitating with it to this ground,
Which, he once heard, was proper to grow wise in,
If only that so many dead lie round.

References

Atherton, I. (2003). The dean and chapter: reformation and restoration. In Meadows & Ramsay, op cit, pp 169-192.

Auden, W. H. (1936). Look, stranger!  Faber & Faber

Bentham, J. (1771). The history and antiquities of the conventual and cathedral church of Ely : from the foundation of the monastery, A.D. 673, to the year 1771 : illustrated with copper-plates. Cambridge University Press.

Broughton, L. (2008). Interpreting Ely cathedral. Ely Cathedral Publications.

Clifton-Taylor, A. (1967, revised 1986). The cathedrals of England. Thames and Hudson.

Dehio, G., & Bezold, G. v (1887). Die kirchliche Baukunst des Abendlandes. Atlas 1 (Tafel 1-116). Stuttgart.

Dixon, P. (2003). The monastic buildings at Ely. In Meadows & Ramsay, op cit, pp 144-155.

Duffy, E. (2020). A people’s tragedy: studies in reformation. Bloomsbury Continuum.

Eaton, J. (2016). English medieval cathedrals. Blurb.

Fernie, E. (2003). Architecture and sculpture of Ely Cathedral in the Norman period. In Meadows & Ramsay, op cit, pp 97-11.

Hewett, C. A. (1974). English cathedral carpentry. Wayland.

Jenkins, S. (2016). England’s cathedrals. Little, Brown.

Keynes, S. (2003). Ely Abbey 672-1109. In Meadows & Ramsay, op cit, pp 3-58.

King, R. J. (1881). Handbook to the cathedrals of England. Volume 3. Eastern Division: Oxford, Peterborough, Norwich, Ely, Lincoln. J. Murray. Available at archive.org.

Lyden, A. M. (2010). The photographs of Frederick H. Evans. J. Paul Getty Museum.

McDiarmid, L. S. (1978). W. H. Auden’s “In the Year of My Youth…” The Review of English Studies, 29(115), 267–312.

Maddison, J. (2003). The Gothic Cathedral: new building in a historic context. In Meadows & Ramsay, op cit, pp 113-141.

Meadows, P., & Ramsay, N. (2003). A history of Ely Cathedral. Boydell Press.

Orme, N. (2017). The history of England’s cathedrals. Impress Books.

Parker, E. (2018). ‘Merry sang the monks’: Cnut’s Poetry and the Liber Eliensis. Scandinavica, 57(1), 14-27.

Du Fu: Poet, Sage, Historian

Du Fu (712-770 CE) was a poet during a time of great political upheaval in China. He was born near Luoyang and spent much of his young adulthood in the Yanzhou region, finally settling down to a minor official position in Chang’an, the imperial capital. In 755 CE, An Lushan, a disgruntled general, led a rebellion against the Tang dynasty. The emperor was forced to flee Chang’an (modern Xian), and chaos reigned for the next eight years. For more than a year Du Fu was held captive in Chang’an by the rebels. After escaping, he made his way south, living for a time in a thatched cottage in Chengdu, and later at various places along the Yangtze River. His poetry is characterized by an intense love of nature, by elements of Chan Buddhism, and by a deep compassion for all those caught up in the turmoil of history. This is a longer post than usual. I have become fascinated by Du Fu.

Failing the Examinations

Du Fu (Tu Fu in the Wades Gilles transliteration system, the family name likely deriving from the name of a pear tree) was born in 712 CE near Luoyang, the eastern capital of the Tang Dynasty (Hung, 1952; Owen, 1981). The following map (adapted from Young, 2008, and Collet and Cheng, 2014) shows places of importance in his life:

Du Fu’s father was a minor official. His mother appears to have died during his childhood, and Du Fu was raised by his stepmother and an aunt. Du Fu studied hard, but in 735 CE he failed the jenshi (advanced scholar) examinations. No one knows why: politics and spite may have played their part. He spent the next few years with his father who was then stationed in Yanzhou,

Du Fu met Li Bai (700-762 CE) in 744 CE. Despite the difference in their ages, the two poets became fast friends. However, they were only able to meet occasionally, their lives being separated by politics and war.

Du Fu attempted the jenshi examinations again in 746, and was again rejected. Nevertheless, he was able to obtain a minor position in the imperial civil service in Chang’an. This allowed him to marry and raise a small family.

Taishan

We can begin our examination of Du Fu’s poetry with one of the early poems written during his time in Yanzhou: Gazing on the Peak (737 CE). The peak is Taishan (exalted mountain), located in Northeastern China. Taishan is one of the Five Great Mountains (Wuyue) of ancient China. Today one can reach the summit by climbing up some 7000 steps (see illustration on the right), but in Du Fu’s time the climb would have been more difficult. The following is the poem in printed Chinese characters (Hànzì) and in Pinyin transliteration:   

The poem is in the lǜshī (regulated verse) form which requires eight lines (four couplets), with each line containing the same number of characters: 5- or 7-character lǜshī are the most common. Each line is separated into phrases, with a 5-character line composed of an initial 2-character phrase and a final 3-character phrase.  The last words of each couplet rhyme. Rhyme in Chinese is based on the vowel sound. Within the lines there were complex rules for the tonality of the sounds (Zong Qi Cai, 2008, Chapter 8; Wai-lim Yip, 1997, pp 171-221). These rules do not always carry over to the way the characters are pronounced in modern Chinese. The following is a reading of the poem in Mandarin (from Librivox).

Chinese poetry is directed at both the ear and the eye, and fine calligraphy enhances the appreciations of a poem. Ding Qian has written out Du Fu’s Wàng yuè in beautiful cursive script (going from top down and from left to right):

The following is a character-by-character translation (adapted from Hinton, 2019, p 2):

gaze/behold     mountain

Daizong (ancient name for Taishan)      then      like      what
Qi      Lu (regions near Taishan)     green/blue     never     end
create     change     concentrate     divine     beauty
Yin     Yang (Taoist concepts of dark and light)     cleave     dusk     dawn
heave     chest     birth     layer     cloud
burst     eye     enter      return      bird
soon     when     reach     extreme     summit
one     glance     all     mountain     small.

And this is the English translation of Stephen Owen (2008, poem 1.2):

Gazing on the Peak

And what then is Daizong like? —
over Qi and Lu, green unending.
Creation compacted spirit splendors here,
Dark and Light, riving dusk and dawn.
Exhilarating the breast, it produces layers of cloud;
splitting eye-pupils, it has homing birds entering.
Someday may I climb up to its highest summit,
with one sweeping view see how small all other mountains are

The interpretation of the poem requires some knowledge of its allusions. In the fourth line, Du Fu is referring to the taijitu symbol of Taoism (illustrated on the right) that contrasts the principles of yin (dark, female, moon) and yang (light, male, sun). Du Fu proposes that Taishan divides the world into two ways of looking. Some have suggested that the taijitu symbol originally represented the dark (north) side and the light (south) side of a mountain, and this idea fits easily with the poem.

All translators have had difficulty with the third couplet (reviewed by Hsieh, 1994). My feeling is that Du Fu is noticing layers of clouds at the mountain’s upper reaches – the chest if one considers the mountain like a human body – and birds swooping around the peaks – where the eye sockets of the body would be. However, it is also possible that Du Fu is breathing heavily from the climb and that his eyes are surprised by the birds. Perhaps both meanings are valid, with Du Fu and the mountain becoming one. Du Fu may have been experiencing the meditative state of Chan Buddhism, with a mind was “wide-open and interfused with this mountain landscape, no distinction between subjective and objective” (Hinton, 2019, p 6). One might also consider Du Fu’s mental state: at the time he wrote this poem he had just failed the jenshi exams. This might have caused some breast-beating and tears, as well as his final resolve to climb the mountain and see how small all his problems actually were.

The last couplet refers to Mencius’ description of the visit of Confucius to Taishan (Mengzi VIIA:24):

He ascended the Tai Mountain, and all beneath the heavens appeared to him small. So he who has contemplated the sea, finds it difficult to think anything of other waters, and he who has wandered in the gate of the sage, finds it difficult to think anything of the words of others.

Zhang’s Hermitage

During his time in Yanzhou Du Fu visited a hermit named Zhang near the Stonegate Mountain, one of the lesser peaks near Taishan. Zhang was likely a follower of the new Chan Buddhism, which promoted meditation as a means to empty the mind of suffering and allow the universal life force to permeate one’s being. Buddhism first came to China during the Han dynasty (206BCE – 220CE). Since many of the concepts of Buddhism were similar to those of Taoism, the new religion spread quickly (Hinton, 2020). A type of Buddhism that stressed the role of meditation began to develop in the 6^th Century CE, and called itself chan, a Chinese transcription of the Sanskrit dhyana (meditation). In later years this would lead to the Zen Buddhism of Japan. There are many allusions to Buddhism and especially to Chan ideas in Du Fu’s poetry (Rouzer, 2020; Zhang, 2018)

Du Fu reportedly wrote the following poem on one of the walls of Zhang’s hermitage. The poem is a seven-character lǜshī. The following is the poem in Chinese characters (Owen, 2008, poem 1.4) and in pinyin:

The following is a character-by-character translation (adapted from Hinton, 2019, p 22):

inscribe      Zhang     family      recluse      house     

spring      mountain     absence      friend      alone      you      search
chop      tree      crack     crack      mountain    again     mystery
creek     pathway     remnant       cold      pass       ice      snow
stone       gate      slant     sun      reach     forest     place
no       desire      night      know      gold      silver     breath/spirit
far     injure     morning     see      deer     deer       wander
ride     burgeon     dark     thus      confuse     leave      place
facing     you      suspect     this     drift      empty     boat.

And this is a translation by Kenneth Rexroth (1956):

Written on the Wall at Chang’s Hermitage

It is Spring in the mountains.
I come alone seeking you.
The sound of chopping wood echos
Between the silent peaks.
The streams are still icy.
There is snow on the trail.
At sunset I reach your grove
In the stony mountain pass.
You want nothing, although at night
You can see the aura of gold
And silver ore all around you.
You have learned to be gentle
As the mountain deer you have tamed.
The way back forgotten, hidden
Away, I become like you,
An empty boat, floating, adrift.

Notable in the poem is the idea of wú (third character) which can be translated as “absence, nothing, not” (Hinton, 2019, p 24) This is an essential concept of Chan Buddhism – the emptying of the mind so that it can become a receptacle for true awareness. The third and fourth characters of the first line might be simply translated as “alone (without a friend),” but one might also venture “with absence as a companion” or “with an empty mind.” This fits with the image of the empty boat at the end of the poem.

Zheng Qian, a drinking companion of Li Bai and Du Fu, suggested the idea of combining poetry, painting and calligraphy. The Emperor was impressed and called the combination sānjué (three perfections) (Sullivan, 1974). Li Bai and Du Fu likely tried their hand at painting and calligraphy but no versions of their sānjué efforts have survived. The Ming painter and calligrapher Wang Shimin (1592–1680 CE) illustrated the second couplet of Du Fu’s poem from Zhang’s hermitage in his album Du Fu’s Poetic Thoughts now at the Palace Museum in Beijing.

The An Lushan Rebellion

Toward the end 755 CE, An Lushan, a general on the northern frontier rebelled against the empire and captured the garrison town of Fanyang (or Jicheng) located in what is now part of Beijing. Within a month the rebels captured Luoyang. The emperor and much of his court fled Chang’an, travelling through the Qinling Mountains to find sanctuary in the province of Shu. The city of Chang’an fell to the rebels in the middle of 756 CE.

Below is shown a painting of Emperor Ming-Huang’s Flight to Shu. Though attributed to the Tang painter Li Zhaodao (675-758 CE), this was actually painted in his style several hundred years later during the Song Dynasty. Shu is the ancient name for what is now known as Sichuan province. This masterpiece of early Chinese painting is now in the National Palace Museum in Taipei. Two enlargements are included: the emperor with his red coat is shown at the lower right; at the lower left advance members of his entourage begin climbing the mountain paths.

The rebellion lasted for eight long years. The northern part of the country was devastated. Death from either war or famine was widespread. Censuses before and after the rebellion suggested a death toll of some 36 million people, making it one of the worst catastrophes in human history. However, most scholars now doubt these numbers and consider the death toll as closer to 13 million. Nevertheless, it was a murderous time.

Moonlit Night

At the beginning of the rebellion, Du Fu managed to get his family to safety in the northern town of Fuzhou, but he was himself held captive in Chang’an. Fortunately, he was not considered important enough to be executed, and he finally managed to escape in 757 CE. The following shows a poem from 756 CE in characters (Owen, 2008, poem 4.18), pinyin transcription, and character-by-character translation (Alexander, 2008):

The following is a reading of the poem from Librivox:

Vikam Seth (1997) translated the poem keeping the Chinese rhyme scheme: the last character rhymes for all four couplets:

Moonlit Night

In Fuzhou, far away, my wife is watching
The moon alone tonight, and my thoughts fill
With sadness for my children, who can’t think
Of me here in Changan; they’re too young still.
Her cloud-soft hair is moist with fragrant mist.
In the clear light her white arms sense the chill.
When will we feel the moonlight dry our tears,
Leaning together on our window-sill?

Alec Roth wrote a suite of songs based on Vikam Seth’s translations of Du Fu. The following is his setting for Moonlit Night with tenor Mark Padmore:

David Young (2008) provides a free-verse translation:

Tonight
in this same moonlight
my wife is alone at her window
in Fuzhou
I can hardly bear
to think of my children
too young to understand
why I can’t come to them
her hair
must be damp from the mist
her arms
cold jade in the moonlight
when will we stand together
by those slack curtains
while the moonlight dries
the tear-streaks on our faces?

The poem may have been written or at least conceived during the celebration of the full moon in the autumn. Families customarily viewed the moon together and Du Fu imagines his wife viewing the moon alone. The mention of the wife’s chamber in the second line may refer to either her actual bedroom or metonymically to herself as the inmost room in Du Fu’s heart (Hawkes, 1967). David Young (2008) remarks that this may be “the first Chinese poem to address romantic sentiments to a wife,” instead of a colleague or a courtesan.  

David Hawkes (1967) notes the parallelism of the third couplet:

‘fragrant mist’ parallels ‘clear light,’ ‘cloud hair’ parallels ‘jade arms,’ and ‘wet’ parallels ‘cold’

Spring View

Spring View (or Spring Landscape), the most famous poem written by Du Fu in Chang’an during the rebellion, tells how nature persists despite the ravages of effects of war and time. Subjective emotions and objective reality become one. The character wàng (view, landscape) can mean both the act of perceiving or what is actually perceived. In addition, it can sometimes mean the present scene or what is to be expected in the future (much like the English word “prospect”). The illustration below shows the text in Chinese characters (Owen, 2008, poem 4.25), in pinyin and in a character-by-character translation (adapted from Hawkes, 1967, Alexander, 2008, and Zong-Qi Cai, 2008):

The following is a reading of the poem from the website associated with How to Read Chinese Poetry (ZongQi-Cai, 2008, poem 8.1):

The next illustration shows the poem as written by three calligraphers. All versions read from top down and from right to left. On the left is standard script by Anita Wang; on the right the calligraphy by Lii Shiuh Lou is gently cursive. At the bottom the calligraphy by an anonymous calligrapher is unrestrained: it accentuates the root of the growing grass (8^th character) and the radicals that compose the character for regret/hate (16^th character) fly apart.

The following are two translations, the first by David Hinton, which uses an English line of a constant length to approximate the Chinese 5-character line (2020a):

The country in ruins, rivers and mountains
continue. The city grows lush with spring.

Blossoms scatter tears for us, and all these
separations in a bird’s cry startle the heart.

Beacon-fires three months ablaze: by now
a mere letter’s worth ten thousand in gold,

and worry’s thinned my hair to such white
confusion I can’t even keep this hairpin in.

A second translation, with preservation of the rhyme scheme and phrasal structure, is by Keith Holyoak (2015)

       The state is in ruin;
yet mountains and rivers endure.
       In city gardens
weeds run riot this spring.

       These dark times
move flowers to sprinkle tears;
       the separations
send startled birds on the wing.

       For three months now
the beacon fires have burned;
       a letter from home
would mean more than anything.

       I’ve pulled out
so many of my white hairs
       too few are left
to hold my hatpin in!

The second couplet has been interpreted in different ways. Most translations (including the two just quoted) consider it as representing nature’s lament for the evil times. For example, Hawkes (1967) suggests that “nature is grieving in sympathy with the beholder at the ills which beset him.” However, Michael Yang (2016) proposes that “In times of adversity, nature may simply be downright uncaring and unfriendly, thereby adding to the woes of mankind.” He translates the couplet

Mourning the times, I weep at the sight of flowers;
Hating separation, I find the sound of birds startling.

The last two lines of the poem refer the hair-style of the Tang Dynasty: men wore their hair in a topknot, and their hats were “anchored to their heads with a large hatpin which passed through the topknot of hair” (Hawkes, 1967). Most interpreters have been struck by the difference between the solemn anguish of the poem’s first six lines, and the self-mockery of the final couplet (Hawkes, 1967, p 46; Chou, 1995, p 115). This juxtaposition of the tragic and the pitiable accentuates the poet’s bewilderment.

The Thatched Cottage

Disillusioned by the war and by the politics of vengeance that followed, Du Fu and his family retired to a thatched cottage in Chengdu, where he lived from 759-765. A replica of this cottage has been built there in a park celebrating both Du Fu and Chinese Poetry:  

Many of the poems that Du Fu wrote in Chengdu celebrated the simple joys of nature. He often used isolated quatrains to find parallels between his emotions and the world around him. This brief form called juéjù (curtailed lines) was widely used by his colleagues Li Bai (701–762) and Wang Wei (699–759). The form consists of two couplets juxtaposed in meaning and rhyming across their last character (Wong, 1970; Zong-Qi Cai, 2008, Chapter 10). The following poem (Owen, 2008, poem 9.63) describing willow-catkins (illustrated on the right) and sleeping ducks gives a deep feeling of peace. These are the Chinese characters and pinyin transcription followed by the character-by-character translation (Alexander, 2008):  

grain    path    poplar/willow    blossom    pave    white    carpet
little    stream    lotus    leaves    pile    green    money
bamboo    shoot    root    sprout    no    person    see
sand    on    duckling    beside    mother    sleep

The following translation is by Burton Watson (2002):

Willow fluff along the path spreads a white carpet;
lotus leaves dot the stream, plating it with green coins.
By bamboo roots, tender shoots where no one sees them;
on the sand, baby ducks asleep beside their mother.

Shui Chien-Tung provided the following calligraphy for the poem (Cooper, 1973). He used aspects of the ancient scripts (circles, curves and dots) in some of the characters to give a sense of simplicity and timelessness. The illustration shows the calligraphy of the poem on the left and the evolution of the characters yáng (willow, poplar) and fú (duck) on the right. 

Another quatrain from Chengdu describes a night scene on the river. The following shows the poem in Chinese characters (Owen, 2008, poem 13.61), in pinyin, and in a character-by-character translation (mine):

This is the translation by J. P. Seaton (Seaton & Cryer, 1987):

The River moves, moon travels rock,
Streams unreal, clouds there among the flowers.
The bird perches, knows the ancient Tao
Sails go: They can’t know where.

As the river flows by, the moon’s reflection slowly travels across the rocks near the shore. The water reflects the clouds between the lilies. A bird on a branch understands the nature of the universe. A boat passes, going home we know not where.

The poem conveys a sense of the complexity of the world where reflections and reality intermingle, a desire to understand the meaning of our life, and a fear that time is passing and we do not know where it will take us. All this in twenty characters. Such concision is extremely difficult in English. An attempt:

River and rocks reflect the moon
and clouds amid the lilies
resting birds understand the way
sails pass seeking home somewhere.

The following shows a painting by Huang Yon-hou to illustrate the poem. This was used as the frontispiece (and cover) of the book Bright Moon, Perching Bird (Seaton & Cryer, 1987). On the right is calligraphy of the poem by Mo Ji-yu.

Above the Gorges

In 765 CE Du Fu and his family left Chengdu and travelled eastward on the Yangtze River. The region of Luoyang had been recently recovered by imperial forces and Du Fu was perhaps trying to return home (Hung, 1952). He stayed for a while in Kuizhou (present day Baidicheng) at the beginning of the Three Gorges (Qutang, Wu and Xiing).

While there Du Fu wrote a series of meditations called Autumn Thoughts (or more literally Stirred by Autumn). This is the second of these poems in Chinese characters and in pinyin:

A character-by-character translation (Alexander, 2008) is:

Kui  prefecture  lonely  wall  set  sun  slant
Every  rely  north  dipper  gaze  capital  city
Hear  ape  real  fall  three  sound  tear
Sent  mission  vain  follow  eight  month  raft
Picture  ministry  incense  stove  apart  hidden  pillow
Mountain  tower  white  battlements  hide  sad  reed-whistle
Ask  look  stone  on  [Chinese wisteria]  moon
Already reflect islet before rushes reeds flowers

The following is Stephen Owen’s translation (Owen, 2008 poem 17.27):

On Kuizhou’s lonely walls setting sunlight slants,
then always I trust the North Dipper to lead my gaze to the capital.
Listening to gibbons I really shed tears at their third cry,
accepting my mission I pointlessly follow the eighth-month raft.
The censer in the ministry with portraits eludes the pillow where I lie,
ill towers’ white-plastered battlements hide the sad reed pipes.
Just look there at the moon, in wisteria on the rock,
it has already cast its light by sandbars on flowers of the reeds.

The poem is striking in the difference between the first three couplets and the last. At the beginning of the poem Du Fu is feeling regret that he is not in Chang’an which is located due north of Kuizhou (in the direction of the Big Dipper which points to the North Star). Owen notes that “There was an old rhyme that a traveler in the gorges would shed tears when the gibbons cried out three times.” The eighth month raft may refer to another old story about a vessel that came every eight months and took a man up to the Milky Way. Owen commented on the third couplet that “The “muralled ministry” is where were located the commemorative portraits of officers, civil and military, who had done exceptional service to the dynasty.” Incense was burned when petitions were presented. The final couplet disregards all the preceding nostalgia and simply appreciates the beauty of the moment.

The Ming painter Wang Shimin illustrated this final couplet in one of the leaves from his album Du Fu’s Poetic Thoughts.

Later in Kuizhou, Du Fu entertained a librarian named Li who was returning north to take up an appointment in Chang’an. The following is the beginning of a poem (Owen, 2008, poem 19.34) describing Li’s departure in Chinese characters and in pinyin:

A character-by-character translation is:

blue/green    curtain    white    boat/raft    Yizhou    arrive
Wu    gorge    autumn    waves    heaven/sky    earth/ground    turn (around)
stone/rock    leave/exit    fall    listen    maple    leaf    down
scull/oar    swing    carry    point    chrysanthemum    flower     open/blume

The following is Stephen Owen’s translation:

When the white barge with green curtains came from Yizhou,
with autumn billows in the Wu Gorges, heaven and earth were turning.
Where rocks came out, from below you listened to the leaves of maples falling,
as the sweep moved back and forth you pointed behind to chrysanthemums in bloom.

The Ming painter Wang Shimin illustrated the second couplet in one of the leaves from his album Du Fu’s Poetic Thoughts. The painting shows the bright red leaves of the maples. In front of the riverside house one can see the multicolored chrysanthemums that Li is pointing to. Harmony exists between the wild and the cultivated.

On the River

After his sojourn in Kuizhou, Du Fu and his family continued their journey down the Yangtze River. However, the poet was ill and was unable to make it beyond Tanzhou (now Changsha) where he died in 770 CE. No one knows where he is buried. In the 1960’s radical students dug up a grave purported to be his to “eliminate the remaining poison of feudalism,” but found the grave empty.

One of Du Fu’s last poems was Night Thoughts While Travelling. The following is the poem in Chinese characters (Owen, 2008, poem 14.63) and in pinyin (Alexander, 2008):

The following is a reading of the poem from Librivox:

Holyoak (2015) provides a rhymed translation:

      The fine grass
by the riverbank stirs in the breeze;
      the tall mast
in the night is a lonely sliver.

      Stars hang
all across the vast plain;
      the moon bobs
in the flow of the great river.

      My poetry
has not made a name for me;
      now age and sickness
have cost me the post I was given.

      Drifting, drifting,
what do I resemble?
      A lone gull
lost between earth and heaven.

Kenneth Rexroth (1956) translates the poem in free verse:

Night Thoughts While Travelling

A light breeze rustles the reeds
Along the river banks. The
Mast of my lonely boat soars
Into the night. Stars blossom
Over the vast desert of
Waters. Moonlight flows on the
Surging river. My poems have
Made me famous but I grow
Old, ill and tired, blown hither
And yon; I am like a gull
Lost between heaven and earth.

The following shows the poem in calligraphy with three styles. On the left the poem is written in clerical script, in the center in regular script and on the right is unrestrained cursive script. All examples were taken from Chinese sites selling calligraphy.

Changing Times

During the Tang Dynasty (618–907 CE) the role of literature, and poetry in particular, in society changed dramatically (Owen, 2011):

In the 650s, literature was centered almost entirely in the imperial court; by the end of the era literature had become the possession of an educated elite, who might serve in government, but whose cultural life was primarily outside the court.

During Du Fu’s lifetime, poetry became no longer a part of the ancient traditions; rather it began to be concerned with the present and with the personal. Lucas Bender (2021) describes the traditional role of poetry in a society following the precepts of Confucianism:

Most people … would be incapable on their own of adequately conceptualizing the world or perfectly responding to its contingency, and therefore needed to rely on the models left by sages and worthies. Many of these models were embodied in texts, including literary texts, which could thus offer an arena for ethical activity. Poetry, for example, was understood to offer models of cognition, feeling, and commitment that would ineluctably shape readers’ understanding of and responses to their own circumstances. One way of being a good person, therefore, involved reading good poetry and writing more of it, thereby propagating the normative models of the tradition in one’s own time and transmitting them to the future. (p 317)

Du Fu found himself bewildered by the state of the world. He sought to convey this confusion rather than explain it:

Du Fu doubts the possibility of indefinitely applicable moral categories. The conceptual tools by which we make moral judgments, he suggests, are always inherited from a past that can – and, in a world as various and changeable as ours has proven to be, often will – diverge from the exigencies of the present. As a result, not only are our values unlikely to be either universal or timeless; more important, if we pay careful attention to the details of our experience, they are unlikely to work unproblematically even here and now. (Bender, 2021, p 319)

The complexity of Du Fu’s poetry – the difficulty in understanding some of his juxtapositions – becomes a challenge. The past provides no help in the interpretation. We must figure out for themselves what relates the mountain, the clouds and the poet’s breathing in the first poem we considered. And in the last poem we must try to locate for ourselves the place of the gull between heaven and earth.

 

References

Alexander, M. (2008). A little book of Du Fu. Mark Alexander. (Much of the material in the book is available on Chinese Poems website).

Bender, L. R. (2021). Du Fu transforms: tradition and ethics amid societal collapse. Harvard University Asia Center.

Chan, J. W. (2018). Du Fu: the poet as historian. In Zong-Qi Cai. (Ed.) How to read Chinese poetry in context: poetic culture from antiquity through the Tang. (pp 236-247). Columbia University Press.

Chou, E. S. (1995). Reconsidering Tu Fu: literary greatness and cultural context. Cambridge University Press.

Collet, H., & Cheng, W. (2014). Tu Fu: Dieux et diables pleurant, poèmes. Moundarren.

Cooper, A. R. V. (1973). Li Po and Tu Fu. Penguin Books.

Egan, R. (2020). Ming-Qing paintings inscribed with Du Fu’s poetic lines. In Xiaofei Tian (Ed.). Reading Du Fu: nine views. (pp 129-142). Hong Kong University Press

Hawkes, D. (1967 revised and reprinted, 2016). A little primer of Tu Fu. New York Review of Books.

Hinton, D. (1989, expanded and revised 2020a). The selected poems of Tu Fu. New Directions.

Hinton, D. (2019). Awakened cosmos: the mind of classical Chinese poetry. Shambhala.

Hinton, D. (2020b). China root: Taoism, Ch’an, and original Zen. Shambhala 

Holyoak, K. (2015). Facing the moon: poems of Li Bai and Du Fu. Oyster River Press.

Hsieh, D. (1994). Du Fu’s “Gazing at the Mountain.” Chinese Literature, Essays, Articles, Reviews, 16, 1–18.

Hung, W. (1952, reprinted 2014). Tu Fu: China’s Greatest Poet. Harvard University Press

Owen, S. (1981). Tu Fu. In S. Owen, The Great Age of Chinese Poetry: The High T’ang. (pp 183-224). Yale University.  

Owen, S. (2010). The cultural Tang (650–1020). In Chang, K. S., & Owen, S. (Eds). The Cambridge History of Chinese Literature (Vol. 1, pp. 286–380). Cambridge University Press.

Owen, S., (edited by P. W. Kroll & D. X. Warner, 2016). The poetry of Du Fu. (6 volumes). De Gruyter. (Available to download in pdf format.)

Rexroth, K. (1956). One hundred poems from the Chinese. New Directions.

Rouzer, P. (2020). Refuges and refugees: how Du Fu writes Buddhism. In Xiaofei Tian (Ed.). Reading Du Fu: nine views. (pp. 75-92). Hong Kong University Press.

Seaton, J. P., & Cryer, J. (with calligraphy by Mo Ji-yu, and painting by Huang Yon-hou, 1987). Bright moon, perching bird: poems of Li Po and Tu Fu. Wesleyan University Press.

Seth, V. (1997). Three Chinese poets: translations of poems by Wang Wei, Li Bai and Du Fu. Phoenis.

Sullivan, M. (1974). The three perfections: Chinese painting, poetry, and calligraphy. Thames and Hudson.

Xiaofei Tian (Ed.). (2020). Reading Du Fu: nine views. Hong Kong University Press.

Zhang, Y. (2018). On 10 Chan-Buddhism images in the poetry of Du Fu. Studies in Chinese Religions, 4(3), 318–340.

Wai-lim Yip. (1997). Chinese Poetry, Duke University Press.

Watson, B. (2002). The selected poems of Du Fu. Columbia University Press.

Wong, S. S. (1970) The quatrains (Chüeh-Chü 絕句) of Tu Fu. Monumenta Serica, 29, 142-162

Yang, M. V. (2016). Man and nature: a study of Du Fu’s poetry. Monumenta Serica, 50, 315-336.

Young, D. (2008). Du Fu: a life in poetry. Alfred A. Knopf.

Zong-Qi Cai (2008). How to read Chinese poetry: a guided anthology. Columbia University Press. (audio files are available at website).

 

 

This post describes some of the events that occurred in Ronda, a town in southern Spain, during the summer of 1936. After the Spanish Civil War broke out, Anarchists quickly took control of the town, and murdered many supporters of the Nationalist cause. Two months later, advancing Nationalist forces captured Ronda, and drove most of its people from their homes. Those that refused to leave suffered bloody reprisals. These events quickly became mythic rather than historic. In one story, the Anarchists had murdered the town’s Falangists by having them beaten to death in the town’s plaza and then thrown into the canyon that cuts through the center of the town. Ernest Hemingway recounted this version in his 1940 novel For Whom the Bell Tolls. However, most historians now agree that this never happened.  

Ronda

Ronda is one of the most beautiful of the pueblos blancos (“white towns”) perched on the inland hills of Andalusia. The name comes from the buildings that were white-washed to protect them from the heat of the sun. Through the center of Ronda runs the Guadalevin River, which has carved through the limestone cliffs a steep-walled canyon, el tajo, reaching depths of more than 100 meters. The most striking bridge over the river is the Puente Nuevo constructed in 1793 at the point where the canyon opens into the huge valley know as la caldera (cauldron) The following illustration shows the bridge viewed from the West (left) and from the Southeast (right).

The large building just to the north of the bridge used to be Ronda’s casa consistorial (town hall) where the ayuntamiento or local council met. In the 1990s this was converted into a parador (state-owned luxury hotel). The following illustration shows the old city hall with its arcades facing the large town square. On the far left can be seen a low wall looking over the canyon.

Ronda has many other luxury hotels. The Hotel Reina Victoria, a summer resort for the English stationed in Gibraltar, was built on the cliff overlooking la caldera in 1906. The German poet Rainer Maria Rilke stayed there for several months in the winter of 1912-1913. The gardens beside the hotel have a commemorative statue of Rilke gazing out over valley (shown below in a photograph by Bryan Appleyard).

In Ronda, Rilke continued working on a set of poems that would not be complete until ten more years had passed – the Duino Elegies. He was also able to compose several poems about Spain. In the third part of a poem called The Spanish Trilogy he praised the peasants he could see in the valley, hoping that he might become as attuned to the universe as a simple shepherd:

Langsamen Schrittes, nicht leicht, nachdenklichen Körpers,
aber im Stehn ist er herrlich. Noch immer dürfte ein Gott
heimlich in diese Gestalt und würde nicht minder.
Abwechselnd weilt er und zieht, wie selber der Tag,
und Schatten der Wolken
durchgehn ihn, als dächte der Raum
langsam Gedanken für ihn.

slow stepping, not light-footed, his body lost in thought,
but splendid when he stands still. A God might
secretly take his form and not be any the lesser.
By turns he tarries and continues on like the day itself
and the shadows of the clouds
pass through him, as if the vast space
were thinking slow thoughts for him.
(translation Paul Archer)

The poetry is beautiful. However, one cannot help but wonder about how shepherd felt looking up toward the hotel on the cliff. And whether this young shepherd would participate in the revolution some twenty years later.

As well as the canyon and its bridge, Ronda is famous for its plaza de toros (bullring) which was built in 1785. The bullring is seen in the upper left of the aerial view of Ronda in the following illustration:

Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961) first visited Ronda in 1923 and became enamored of its site and of the bullfights (Buckley, 1997). In his 1932 book on the traditions of bullfighting, Death in the Afternoon, he remarked

There is one town that would be better than Aranjuez to see your first bullfight in if you are only going to see one and that is Ronda.

Hemingway visited Spain during the Civil War, although at that time he could not visit Ronda, which was controlled by the Nationalists. He returned to Ronda many times in the 1950s. For the bullfights, and for the memories.

 

The Spanish Civil War

In 1931, the Spanish king was deposed and a new government was proclaimed: the Second Spanish Republic, the first having lasted for less than two years (1873-1874) before being aborted by a military coup. The governing coalition of the Second Republic was composed of many separate and feuding parties, among them Anarchists, Communists, Republicans and Catalonian Separatists. The right-wing opposition contained parties favoring the Monarchy or the Catholic Church. The Falangist party, a fascist organization was founded in 1933 in response to the new republic.

The government had to deal with multiple problems

• much of the land was owned by the aristocrats, who managed large tracts of land (latifundia), and who treated the peasants as slaves
• the military was far larger and more powerful than necessary for a country that had long ago lost its empire
• the church sided with the generals and the aristocrats, for they were the source of their power and wealth
• the new industries, run by a small number of capitalists, exploited the workers who made the factories run, and who were organizing into unions
• the police force – the Guardia Civil – mainly existed to support the landed aristocrats and the capitalists.

The course of the Second Republic was extremely turbulent. The government reduced funds for the military, and closed down the military academy in Zaragoza, run by General Franciso Franco. Strikes occurred and these were put down with excessive force. Attempts to take land away from the latifundista were unsuccessful. The government tried to restrict the role of the church in the educational system. Many of the poor, urged on by anarchists and communists, attacked the church. In 1933, Pope Pius XI published an encyclical Dilectissima Nobis (“Dear to us”) specifically deploring the anti-clerical violence in Spain.

In the election of January,1936, the left-wing parties in the Popular Front won a majority against a coalition of the right-wing parties named the National Front. Many have suggested that the election was rigged to some extent, and the voting was followed by much violence. Manuel Azana Diaz (1880-1940), who had served in various positions in the preceding government, became the president of the newly elected Republican government.

In July 1936, General Emilio Mola, supported by General Franciso Franco, called for a coup to end the republic and to return the nation to its previous form. The leftist parties reacted by calling for a Revolution of the workers. The country descended into anarchy. The Nationalists (or Rebels) were able to take control the north of the country, but the Republicans (or Loyalists) held off the coup in the south and in the major cities. The Civil War had begun (Thomas, 1961; Graham, 2005: Payne, 2012).

The governments of Germany and Italy immediately provided assistance to the Nationalists, and Russia came in on the side of the Republicans. England and France decided that they should not intervene in the internal politics of Spain. However, volunteers from these and many other countries (even Germany and Italy) began to organize the International Brigades to fight with the Republicans: among them were the Abraham Lincoln Brigade from the United States and the Mackenzie-Papineau Brigade from Canada.

Soon after the coup was declared, Franco borrowed planes from Italy and Germany and transported troops from North Africa to shore up the Nationalists in Seville, a Catholic stronghold. The regions of the country controlled by the Nationalists (blue) and the Republicans (white) in July, 1936) are shown in the following map (derived from Preston, 2012, p 658): 

From Seville, General Franco sent troops northward to join up with the Nationalists besieging Madrid. Another key point in the fighting was near Teruel, where Nationalist soldiers were attempting to advance to the sea to cut off Barcelona from Madrid. Franco also sent troops eastward to relieve the city of Granada.

Mola died in a plane crash in June of 1937, and General Franciso Franco Bahamonde (1892-1975) became the supreme leader (el caudillo) of the Nationalist forces. The following illustration shows the leaders of the two sides. On the left is a modernist stone statue of Manuel Azena by José Noja and Pablo Serrano that was not erected until 1979. On the right is a bronze equestrian statue of Francisco Franco by José Capuz Mamano initially cast in 1964. Various versions of this statue were erected in several of the major cities of Spain.

The following figure shows propaganda posters from both sides of the civil war. On the left is a poster stating “No Pasareis” (You shall not pass). This slogan and its variant “No Pasaran” (They shall not pass) was used by the Republicans throughout the war. The Communist politician Dolores Ibarruri Gomez (also known as La Pasionara – the passionate one) used the latter version in a famous speech urging on the defenders of Madrid in November 1936. The Republican poster comes from the two parties that were the mainstay of the Popular Front: the CNT (Confederacion Nacional de Trabajo) and the FAI (Federacion Anarquista Iberica). The right poster is from the Falangists. In the background are the four red arrows held together by a yoke, the Spanish version of the fasces (bundle of rods) of the Italian Fascists. Superimposed is a hand on a rifle. The call is “To arms – Homeland, Bread and Justice.”

Events in Ronda during 1936ca)

Soon after the military coup was declared in July, 1936, members of the CNT took control in Ronda and many of the small towns in Andalusia. Members of the Guardia Civil and many local Nationalist leaders were executed. Similar outbreaks of violence occurred in many regions of Spain. This “red terror” was not condoned by the Republican Government, which had difficulty controlling its many factions.

Once the Nationalists had shored up control of Seville, Franco placed the bloodthirsty General Queipo de Llano in command of retaking Southern Spain. After Granada was relieved, the Nationalists returned to the other cities of Andalusia. Reaching Ronda in September, 1936 they quickly subdued the town, and took bloody revenge. Those killed by the Nationalists far outnumbered those who had been murdered in the summer (Preston, 2012).

Exactly what had happened in Ronda during these early months of the war was not clear. The Nationalists declared that the anarchists had murdered several hundred people and thrown them over the cliff. This claim was used to justify their reprisals.

Many of the townspeople left Ronda and fled to Malaga, but this city soon fell to the Nationalists in February 1937. Republicans in Malaga were rounded up and shot. The Nationalists boasted that they executed more Republicans in seven days than the Republicans had killed in the seven months they were in control of the city (Preston, 2012, p 177).

Most of the citizens of Malaga, together with a few surviving Republican soldiers, then tried to reach Almeria along the coastal road – walking, riding donkeys and hanging onto rickety vehicles for a distance of about 200 km. These refugees were strafed and bombed by planes, and shelled by Nationalists warships. The number of people killed in what became known as the Malaga-Almeria Massacre was over 3000. The Canadian physician Norman Bethune used the few vehicles available to him to help the refugees travel to Almeria (Stewart, R., & Majada Neila, 2014), but this had little effect. The following photograph shows the refugees:

For Whom the Bell Tolls

Ernest Hemingway came to Spain toward the end of 1937 to produce a documentary film on the Civil War – The Spanish Earth – to help raise money for the Republicans. The photograph below shows him in the Republican trenches at Teruel (low center) together with the filmmaker Joris Ivens (high center).

After the Spanish Civil War ended in1939, Hemingway wrote For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940), a novel based on what he had heard about the violence perpetrated by both sides during the conflict. The following illustration shows some of the covers used by various editions of the book, the original on the left:

The epigraph to the novel is from John Donne’s Meditations upon Emergent Occasions (1624) The quotation ends with:

any mans death diminishes me, because I am involved in Mankinde; And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; It tolls for thee.

The novel’s central character is Robert Jordan, an American Professor of Spanish, and an explosives expert, now a volunteer serving with the Republicans. In the spring of 1937, he is ordered to blow up a mountain-bridge to prevent Nationalist forces from Segovia from reaching Madrid. For this task he recruits the help of a band of Republican guerillas, led by Pablo and his woman Pilar. Jordan falls in love with Maria, a beautiful young woman serving as the band’s cook. Maria’s father, the Republican mayor of Valladolid, and her mother had been executed by the Nationalists early in the war. She herself had her head shaved, and was raped and imprisoned, before finally escaping to the mountains.

One evening, Pilar tells Jordan and Maria what had happened in Ronda at the beginning of the war. Pablo, the leader of the local anarchists in the town, had captured the barracks of the Guardia Civil and executed all the guards. He had also rounded up the main supporters of the Nationalists and imprisoned them in the city council. Pilar describes the center of the town (see preceding illustrations):  

The town is built on the high bank above the river and there is a square there with a fountain and there are benches and there are big trees that give a shade for the benches. The balconies of the houses look out on the plaza. Six streets enter on the plaza and there is an arcade from the houses that goes around the plaza so that one can walk in the shade of the arcade when the sun is hot. On three sides of the plaza is the arcade and on the fourth side is the walk shaded by the trees beside the edge of the cliff with, far below, the river. It is three hundred feet down to the river.

Pilar then describes how the town square was set up for the execution of the fascists:

Pablo organized it all as he did the attack on the barracks. First he had the entrances to the streets blocked off with carts though to organize the plaza for a capea. For an amateur bull fight. The fascists were all held in the Ayuntamiento, the city hall, which was the largest building on one side of the plaza. It was there the clock was set in the wall and it was in the buildings under the arcade that the club of the fascists was.

Pablo organized the peasants and workers who had gathered in the square:

He placed them in two lines as you would place men for a rope pulling contest, or as they stand in a city to watch the ending of a bicycle road race with just room for the cyclists to pass between, or as men stood to allow the passage of a holy image in a procession. Two meters was left between the lines and they ex-tended from the door of the Avuntamiento clear across the plaza to the edge of the cliff. So that, from the doorway of the Ayuntamiento, looking across the plaza, one coming out would see two solid lines of people waiting.
They were armed with flails such as are used to beat out the grain and they were a good flail’s length apart. All did not have flails, as enough flails could not be obtained. But most had flails obtained from the store of Don Guillermo Martin, who was a fascist and sold all sorts of agricultural implements. And those who did not have flails had heavy herdsman’s clubs, or ox-goads, and some had wooden pitchforks; those with wooden tines that are used to fork the chaff and straw into the air after the flailing. Some had sickles and reaping hooks but these Pablo placed at the far end where the lines reached the edge of the cliff.

The assembled crowd was told that they must kill the fascists by beating them to death. One of the peasants asked Pilar why, and she reported the following exchange:

“To save bullets” I said. “And that each man should have his share in the responsibility”
“That it should start then. That it should start.” And I looked at him and saw that he was crying. “Why are you crying, Joaquin?” I asked him. “This is not to cry about.”
“I cannot help it, Pilar,” he said. “I have never killed any one.”

One by one, the fascists were led out of the city hall and made their way through the crowd of peasants. One by one, they were beaten and clubbed to death. And one by one, their bodies were cast over the edge of the cliff into el tajo.

This fictional representation of the Anarchist terror in Ronda is extremely powerful. In the novel Hemingway also describes Nationalist atrocities in Valladolid – the summary execution of Maria’s parents and her abuse and rape by the Falangists. This vivid portrayal of the brutality of the war should make us rethink our hatreds. We are all in this life together; we are diminished by the death of any man; the bell tolls for us.  

Later in the novel, Jordan and the guerilla band succeed in blowing up the bridge. but Jordan is severely wounded and unable to move. He convinces that the rest of the band to retreat while he stays to delay the advancing Nationalists. He insists that Maria leave with the guerillas. The novel ends with Jordan trying to stay conscious as the soldiers come closer. Talking to himself, he claims

And if you wait and hold them up even a little while or just get the officer that may make all the difference. One thing well done can make ⸺  

Hemingway leaves the thought unfinished. The novel ends with an officer of the Nationalist forces riding slowly up toward where Jordan awaits him. 

The book sold well, and in 1943 it was made into a film starring Gary Cooper as Jordan, Ingrid Bergman as Maria, Akim Tamiroff as Pablo and Katina Paxinou as Pilar. The film was an international success, although it was not distributed in France or Germany until after World War II (see posters below). The film received multiple nominations for the Academy Awards, with Katina Paxinou winning for best supporting actress.

The film follows the novel quite closely. When Pilar recounts her tale of what happened in Ronda at the beginning of the Civil War, the movie shows in flashback some of the brutal executions in the plaza:

The bridge that Jordan dynamites just before the end of the movie is as high as the Puente Nuevo in Ronda:

Historical Accounts of the Events in Ronda

The history of The Spanish Civil War (1961) by Hugh Thomas was the first major examination of what happened in Spain during the war. The book became a best seller soon after it was published and it has since gone through two revisions and multiple printings:

Thomas discussed the events in Ronda:

In country districts. revolution itself often consisted primarily of the murder of the upper classes or the bourgeoisie. Thus the description, in Ernest Hemingway’s novel For Whom the Bell Tolls, of how the inhabitants of a small pueblo first beat the male members of the middle class and then flung them over a cliff, is near to the reality of what happened in the famous Andalusian town of Ronda (though the work was the responsibility of a gang from Malaga). There, 512 were murdered in the first month of war. (p 263 in 1989 printing)

Other historians have proposed that the Ronda executions described by Hemingway, although based on accounts he had heard, was completely fictional. Buckley (1997) described what happened in Ronda in the Summer of 1936, according to the records maintained in the town hall:

On 19 July 1936 the commander of the small army garrison in Ronda, upon reports of a military uprising in Morocco, went to the Town Hall with a small platoon and demanded that the mayor submit to his authority and publicly announce that the city was under martial law and the army was taking control. The mayor belonged to the left-wing coalition known as the Popular Front. He refused to follow the commander’s orders and swiftly disarmed him and his small band of soldiers, heavily outnumbered by the peasant groups beginning to assemble on the plaza outside the town hall. Thus, Ronda remained loyal to the Republican government of Madrid, and did not fall to the fascists until 18 September 1936.
However, it would be would be wrong to assume that during these two months the Republican government in Madrid had any control over the town or its inhabitants. As soon as the reports of a military rising in Africa began to spread, the peasants from neighboring villages poured into Ronda and in effect took control. Although the mayor was nominally in charge, the real power belonged to a “Comite” formed by the peasants themselves, most of whom belonged to CNT (Confederacion Nacional del Trabajo), the Anarchist Labor Union.
The task of this committee was three-fold: first, to arrest all persons suspected of having fascist sympathies; second, to insure that food was evenly distributed to all inhabitants (money was outlawed and vouchers with the CNT rubber-stamp were issued); third, to prepare to defend Ronda from a probable attack by fascist troops stationed in Seville.
The word “revolution” immediately comes to mind when we attempt to describe the situation in Ronda in summer 1936. The Secretary’s “Record of Proceedings” for 28 July 1936, preserved in Ronda’s Town Hall, displays revolutionary rhetoric: “[W]e are living through a moment of historic transcendence … the fascist coup has spurred the populace to rise to the last man and to demand social justice . . . a new society is being born, based upon liberty, justice and equality … justice has now become `revolutionary justice’ designed to cleanse the state of all fascist elements as well as to establish the basis for a new social order etc.”

Many priests and supporters of the Nationalist cause were executed. However, these victims were not killed in the plaza, but were driven away from the center of the town and shot. It is difficult to determine the number of those killed, but it was likely much less than the 512 claimed by the Nationalists. None of the bodies were thrown into el tajo. This story seems to have been invented by General Queipo to inflame his troops as they went about their reprisals.

Corbin (1995) considers the story about the executions in the plaza and the casting of the bodies into el tajo as an example of myth-making. Myths have their basis in historical events but the stories become altered in the telling, often to justify the actions of those in power:

Any story of the past has a double construction and a double truth. The truth of the tale told is its historical truth; the truth of its telling is its mythical truth.

The story of the executions by el tajo served the purpose of the Nationalists: it portrayed the class hatred of the anarchists and communists and the violence that they promulgated in the early weeks of the Civil War. This then justified their violent repression. Society must be protected from any recurrence of such revolutionary terror.   

In The Spanish Holocaust (2012) which describes the repression of the Spanish Republicans during and after the Civil War, Paul Preston summarizes the events in Ronda:

Famous for its Roman and Arab bridges and its exquisite eighteenth-century bullring, Ronda had suffered a pitiless repression at the hands of anarchists led by a character known as ‘El Gitano.’ Initially, the CNT committee had maintained a degree of order although churches were sacked and images destroyed, but soon there were murders being carried out by anarchists from Malaga and also by locals. However, there is no substance to the claim, first made by Queipo in a broadcast on 18 August and popularized by Ernest Hemingway’s novel For Whom the Bell Tolls, that large numbers of prisoners were killed by being thrown into the tajo. The many rightist victims were shot in the cemetery. Francoist sources claim that victims of the red terror from Ronda and the nearby pueblos of Gaucin and Arriate numbered over six hundred. On 16 September, when Varela took the town, the defenders fled and his forces suffered only three casualties in the assault. His men stopped and interrogated anyone found in streets and shot many of them. Over half of the population fled towards Malaga. Under the new authorities, those of the town’s defenders who had not fled were subjected to a bloody repression and the theft of their property. (p 171)

In the White City

The American poet, Philip Levine, spent time in Spain trying to learn more about the Spanish Civil War and the poets that wrote about it (Levine, 2016). He also wrote about Ronda in a prose-poem entitled In the White City (2009).

From up there—& he points to the bridge high above us—they tossed down the fat barber, the Falangist, to his death. “It is all in the book by the American communist.” “The communist?” I say. Yes, the friend of Fidel Castro, Comrade Hemingway “The tourists come because of your Mr. Hemingway, that is why you are here.” Who can argue with this young, balding lieutenant of the Guardia Civil who has dared to leave his barracks lacking his tricorne & with only a small sidearm? In felt house slippers he stands at ease on the west streets of his town, Ronda, to show me the world. “On those rocks,” he continues, pointing to a ledge half way down the gorge, “he first hits & his belly explodes. Then they rape his beautiful daughter, the film star that is Swedish, & when they have finish they shave her head. That is why we execute them all.” Does he mean that is why in the novel the Nationalists executed them. (I am careful not to say “the fascists”; it is 1965.) “No, no, executed them here, in life or death”—he smiles at his little joke—“up there on the bridge”— & he points again,— “by military firing squad one at a time, properly. That is why the whole town must witness & learn. It is educational.” But, I insist, the death of the Falangist was merely in a novel that made no effort to be true to events, una novela, a fiction, a best seller. The lieutenant enjoys this repartee, he’s amused by my innocence, he shakes his head, he is discreet & patient with this visitor to his ancient city that boasts the first Plaza de Toros in all the world. “You Americans,” and he suppresses his laughter, “you think because he was a famous red he could not tell the truth. They do not give Noble Prizes to liars.”

The poem illustrates how history becomes mixed up with fiction, with movies, and with photographs to form the myths that we remember about the past. Hemingway was not a communist and, though he spent time in Cuba, he was not a friend of Castro (Michaud, 2012). This idea stems from photographs of the two of them together at a fishing competition, the only time they ever met. The character Maria in Hemingway’s novel, played by the Swedish film-star in the movie, was the daughter of a mayor who was executed in the Civil War, but this was in a different town, and the mayor there was a Republican executed by the Nationalists. The poem ends with the idea that fiction written by a winner of the Noble (sic) Prize has to be true.

The following is an etching of the Puente Nuevo in Ronda done by Gary Young for a broadside edition of Levine’s poem.

Epilogue

By the spring of 1938, the Nationalists ultimately made their way to the sea, isolating Barcelona from Madrid. After Franco’s troops marched into Barcelona in January 1939, Manuel Azana was among the thousands of refugees who fled from Barcelona to France. In March, Madrid was taken and Franco declared victory on April 1, 1939, and became the Prime Minister of Spain, continuing in this office until 1973. During and after the war, many thousands of Republicans were executed by the Nationalists in a repression known as the “white terror” or the “Spanish Holocaust” (Preston, 2012). Hemingway’s novel was translated into Spanish as Por quién doblan las campanas, but was not allowed into Spain until 1969. The movie was not shown there until 1978. Hugh Thomas’s history of the war was forbidden in Spain until after the death of Franco in 1975. Today Spain continues to unearth the bodies of those executed during and after the war, and to seek some understanding of the violence and brutality of those days (Anderson, 2017). The myths need to be converted back into history.

References

Anderson, P. (2017). Knowing and acknowledging Spain’s dark Civil War past. Journal of Contemporary History, 52(1), 129–139.

Buckley, R. (1997): Revolution in Ronda: the facts in Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls. Hemingway Review, 17(1), 49-57.

Corbin, J. (1995). Truth and myth in history: an example from the Spanish Civil War. Journal of Interdisciplinary History, 25(4), 609-625

Graham, H. (2005). The Spanish Civil War: a very short introduction. Oxford University Press.

Hemingway, E. (1932). Death in the afternoon. Scribner.

Hemingway, E. (1940). For whom the bell tolls. Scribner.

Levine, P. (2009). News of the world: poems. Alfred A. Knopf.

Levine, P. (2016). The Spanish Civil War in Poetry. In Levine, P. (edited by Hirsch E., 2016). My lost poets: a life in poetry. (pp 139-163). Alfred A. Knopf.

Michaud, J. (2012). Hemingway, Castro, and Cuba. New Yorker (May 24, 2012).

Payne, S. G. (2012). The Spanish Civil War. Cambridge University Press.

Preston, P. (2012). The Spanish holocaust: inquisition and extermination in Twentieth-Century Spain. HarperPress.

Stewart, R., & Majada Neila, J. (2014). Bethune in Spain. McGill-Queen’s University Press.

Thomas, H. (1961, revised and enlarged, 1989). The Spanish Civil War. Harper & Row.