TTHA Poem of the Month

TTHA Poem of the Month » A Commonplace Day

A Commonplace Day

After a summer pause for July, the August Poem of the Month (by request) is ‘A Commonplace Day’, published among the ‘Miscellaneous Poems’ in Poems of the Past and the Present, and number 78 in Jim Gibson’s edition. Like many of the poems in this group, it seems to set out a ‘philosophy’, in an idiosyncratic pattern of alternating trimeters and heptameters rhymmed ababb. Hardy included it in both Selected Poems and Chosen Poems. The only significant variant reading is to line 15, where the manuscript before revision has ‘Flattest of flat-pitched Days’, with an awkward musical metaphor. Elsewhere the diction is unmistakably Hardy’s: impends, undiscerned, upstole, ardency, are all Hardyan, or perhaps Hardyesque.

The poem is usually cited in one of two contexts: as an example, especially in the reference to ‘The world’s amendment’ in line 30, of Hardy’s ‘evolutionary meliorism, though one might then also note that this is a poem which perhaps unusually for Hardy slights the commonplace, suggesting that it needs redeeeming rather than that there is much to celebrate in the ordinary or homely; and as the poem singled out by F. R. Leavis in the 1940 Southern Review Hardy issue, as a typical Hardy poem: ‘As the product of a genuinely individual sensibility it has a certain obvious impressiveness.’ But to Leavis a typical Hardy poem was not a very good one. He thought ‘scuttles’ insufficiently ghostly, and at odds with the slow-moving ‘extends’ in the following stanza, and the linguistic ‘violence’ and ‘grotesque’ of the poem inconsistent with the idea of the commonplace. The best he could say for it was that ‘the final two lines might have been the close of something better’.

Is this a representative Hardy poem? Is Leavis’s grouchy account of it justified? What is the mood of the poem, and how much hope do the closing stanzas offer?

  	A Commonplace Day

		The day is turning ghost,  
And scuttles from the kalendar in fits and furtively,  
		To join the anonymous host  
Of those that throng oblivion; ceding his place, maybe,  
		To one of like degree.      

		I part the fire-gnawed logs,  
Rake forth the embers, spoil the busy flames, and lay the ends
		Upon the shining dogs;  
Further and further from the nooks the twilight’s stride extends,
		And beamless black impends.      

		Nothing of tiniest worth  
Have I wrought, pondered, planned; no one thing asking blame or  praise,  
		Since the pale corpse-like birth  
Of this diurnal unit, bearing blanks in all its rays –  
		Dullest of dull-hued Days!      

		Wanly upon the panes  
The rain slides as have slid since morn my colourless thoughts; and  yet  
		Here, while Day’s presence wanes,  
And over him the sepulchre-lid is slowly lowered and set,  
		He wakens my regret.      

		Regret – though nothing dear  
That I wot of, was toward in the wide world at his prime,  
		Or bloomed elsewhere than here,  
To die with his decease, and leave a memory sweet, sublime,  
		Or mark him out in Time . . .
  
		– Yet, maybe, in some soul,  
In some spot undiscerned on sea or land, some impulse rose,  
		Or some intent upstole  
Of that enkindling ardency from whose maturer glows  
		The world’s amendment flows;      

		But which, benumbed at birth  
By momentary chance or wile, has missed its hope to be  
		Embodied on the earth;  
And undervoicings of this loss to man’s futurity  
		May wake regret in me.

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24 Comments

1. Carolyn McGrath replies at 7th August 2012, 7:45 pm :

The spelling choice of ‘kalendar’ is curious. Could it signal a persona other than the poet-persona?

It seems a homely poem – the ‘scuttles’ is mouse-like rather than ghost-like – the ghost of a mouse-like day. The putting out of the dying fire is a late night task, typically done by man or woman or either? It is an image that is associated with Hardy’s poet-persona anyway. Surely anyone reading this can identify with the speaker’s sense of depression at the passing of yet another nonentity of a day and the prospect of other such
‘commonplace’ days to come – or is it just me who needs time and motion assistance? In addition to the deathly and colorless language, there is a sterility which is quite painful: ‘bearing blanks’,
‘benumbed at birth’, ‘has missed its hope to be / Embodied on the earth’, and the
‘undervoicings of this loss’. There is a muted sense of failure to conceive or miscarriage and the ‘regret’ is a mourning for an absence, a non-event.

Ah, happy holiday reading

best wishes

Carolyn
2. Carolyn McGrath replies at 10th August 2012, 1:04 pm :

By considering the spelling choice of ‘kalendar’, which denotes the ecclesiastical calendar, I have been led to consider the absence of the holy in these commonplace days. This poem suggests that there may only be the latter and so it is the speaker’s agnosticism that is the focus of this poem. The spelling choice in the second line draws the reader’s attention from the personal setting and tone, from a personal meditation on fruitless days, impending death and the lament of lost time, to a reading that is more broadly philosophical in nature.

The overtly personal is combined with imagery and word selection that allows this poem to be read as a sort of Christmas poem in the same sense that ‘A drizzling Easter morning’ is a secular reflection on the Easter story. In ‘A Commonlave Day’, however, the day’s birth is ‘pale’ and ‘corpse-like’ and instead of ‘Christians awake, salute the happy morn!’, we have a lone figure raking over the embers of ‘the light of the world’,facing the encroaching ‘beamless black’and the langauge of sterility and miscarriage I noted in my last post.

There are so many words that stand in counterpoint to the religious: no holy ghost but the ‘ghost’ of a day; no heavenly, but an ‘anonymous host’ of days which ‘throng oblivion’. There is also the capitalisation of ‘Day’s presence wanes’ which, with this reading, becomes a play on ‘Deus’, casting an ironic light on the ‘absence’ I noted in the poem as a whole. Most explicit is the reference to incarnation in ‘embodied on the earth’. The ‘decease’ of this ‘dullest of dull-hued days’ is in stark contrast to the joyous celebrations of the morn of Christ’s birth.

The tone of this poem differs from ‘A drizzling Easter morning’, which is defiant in its anger at the false hope and distorted vision of life that ‘Resurrection’ brings. This poem is profoundly agnostic and so, therefore, despite its surface ‘pessimism’, has to allow the ‘- Yet, maybe,’. There is the hope that there may have been, in ‘some soul’, in ‘some spot’, ‘some impulse’ or ‘some intent’ that would grow to amend the world to some degree. The agnostic cannot be accused of not wishing an ‘enkindling ardency’ to be so. The persona concludes this poem with the ‘undervoicings’ that murmer of such a hope for the world’s amendment ‘to be/Embodied on the earth’.

I could not initially see why this poem was so highly valued by Hardy; now I do.

Thinking out loud, hopefully not to myself

Carolyn
3. Robert Bensen replies at 16th August 2012, 2:09 pm :

Carolyn’s posts on agnosticism of this poem, especially in contrast to Christian conventions, help my understanding of its intellect and tone a great deal.

I wonder, though, if what Hardy regrets, finally and dimly hinted, is the bordering of his awareness by sensation–the sensations of the nearly stillborn day he’s witnessing the sepulchral lid lowered over. That should be the end of it. RIP. But that lowering lid “wakens” a response in him, that launches the last 15 lines. I see this poem as a grotesque sonnet–lengthened of necessity, with an intricate, even tricky rhyme-scheme that enlivens (?) the long periods of the sentences. But still, it’s sonnet-like in its problem-solution structure. The lowering of the sepulchral lid and the awakening of regret come proportionally at the point in the sonnet’s 8+6 movement that presents the solution, or an inkling of it, to the problem of the barren (apparently barren) day. Here no sweet love remembered brings such wealth, but the dying of a moribund day brings regret over some missed chance to amend the world. He’s not mourning his own lack of having done anything even “of tiniest worth,” not reveling in self-pity, but projected his own lack onto everyone everywhere–and how can he assert such absurdity, since it’s preposterous that on this given day he could know of “some soul,/In sme spot undiscerned on sea or land,” except that his regret (he speculates) may have been awaked by the “undervoicings of this loss.”
4. Robert Bensen replies at 16th August 2012, 2:20 pm :

Oooops, I didn’t finish. To continue:
The inventions in this poems culminate in the word “undervoicings,” which I don’t understand at all, though I take them (the “undervoicings”) the provide a chorus that accompanies the weal and woe of the world, to which Hardy is, in the poem’s vision, attuned and reactive.
The inventions of this poem render ironic its complaint of having rendered nothing of worth this day, since the poem’s dramatic & lyric recognition in the solution is a tongue in a serious cheek. The sonnet convention is to claim that the made poem will outlast time, be a monument to its mortal subject. Here, time is a dull constant, providing endless, virtually identical ghosts of this “diurnal unit” (feel the scorn!)
This poem is the very thing the poem claims is lacking in the world–and the poet is the only one who can’t see it. That’s an occupational hazard, I hear. The poem is perfection itself, articulating what cannot be said, through the force of inventive genius. The vision of the poem is at odds with its making (poesis). What it says is contradicted by how it’s said. This void, blank, wan, lifeless day (dull, stale, and unprofitable), is animated in perfect accord between the poet’s sensation and intuitive cognition. That’s not said right.
Try again: Seamus Heaney’s book title SEEING THINGS has the ambiguity I mean. We see things, of substance of form. But if someone is seeing things, that’s illusory. “The Commonplace Day” borrows the phrase from the writer’s “commonplace book,” in which the writer records everything of value in language. Such is this poem. The very process of finding form for this regret produces a thing of great worth that we might “blame or praise,” though I find nothing to blame and everything in it praiseworthy, to say the least.
5. Carolyn McGrath replies at 16th August 2012, 10:48 pm :

I don’t want to press the idea of the ‘commonplace day’ of the poem being a 1:1 match with a ‘Christmas Day’, but I do feel there is the underlying idea that this day, like all others, has no claim on being holy or sanctified. This morning I was reading an article by George Orwell and was struck by the following, which says more directly in prose what seems to me to be close to the philosophical stance of this month’s poem:

“I do not want the belief in life after death to return, and in any case it is not likely to return. What I do point out is that its disappearance has left a big hole, and that we ought to take notice of that fact. Reared for thousands of years on the notion that the individual survives, man has got to make a considerable psychological effort to get used to the notion that the individual perishes. He is not likely to salvage civilization unless he can evolve a system of good and evil which is independent of heaven and hell. … One cannot have any worth-while picture of the future unless one realizes how much we have lost by the decay of Christianity.”

‘As I Please’, Tribune, 3 March 1944

Still pondering
Carolyn
6. William Needham replies at 17th August 2012, 11:25 am :

Remains of the day.

I’ve gone back to Wordsworth (one of Hardy’s early models) to a purple passage that would no doubt have been copied into many a commonplace book:

“Though nothing can bring back the hour
Of splendour in the grass, of glory in the
flower;
We will grieve not, rather find
Strength in what remains behind;
In the primal sympathy
Which having been must ever be;
In the soothing thoughts that spring
Out of human suffering;
In the faith that looks through death,
In years that bring the philosophic mind.”

It seems to me that Hardy is saying that he cannot subscribe to any of this. He chooses to repudiate the words of his predecessor by–as Carolyn has aleady indicated-by the use of counterpoint, which is extensive. Wordsworth’s lines are short and uncomplicated; the vocabulary is simple and straightforward; likewise the rhythm and rhyme scheme; the thoughts naive and “soothing”.

Not so with Hardy. His poem does not make for easy reading; there are no cliches to act as crutches;
you have to pick your way; it’s true to life; it challenges: it tests our honesty.

Best wishes from the gold medal county ..sorry…sorry! Bill
7. Carolyn McGrath replies at 17th August 2012, 11:22 pm :

Firstly, in case anyone is wondering, Bill Needham did not commit a typo when he wrote ‘county’ in his unseemly boast at the end of his last posting; he was referring to the success of ‘Team Yorkshire’ in the extended sport’s day that took place in my local park. If Yorkshire were an independent country, it would by all accounts have come 12th. There, happy now, Bill? Right, back to Wessex!
I have done some more digging regarding Christianity and think I was wrong to associate the poem with Christmas – it’s Pentecost. Christ passes the completion of his task to the Holy Ghost – ‘The day (deus) turns ghost’, and the poem, it seems to me now, is in counterpoint to the command of Pope Leo xiii in 1897 to all Christians world-wide to observe the Pentecost Novena for the Holy Spirit to ‘enkindle in them the fire of Your love’.
This poem refuses to countenance the reality of these ideas yet expresses,
I think, the possibility of experiencing ‘regret’ in being unable to do so as it holds out a means of melioration in which the persona does believe.

‘The Pentecost Novena is the first of all novenas, nine days of prayer. After Jesus’ Ascension into heaven, He commanded His disciples to come together in the upper room to devote themselves to constant prayer (Acts 1:14). They prayed for nine days before receiving the Holy Spirit on Pentecost.
On May 4, 1897, Pope Leo XIII proclaimed: “We decree and command that throughout the whole Catholic Church, this year and in every subsequent year, a novena shall take place before Whit-Sunday (Pentecost), in all parish churches.”
It has been reported that Pope Leo XIII was inspired to mandate the Pentecost novena because of a letter from a housewife in Italy.”
Day 1 – day after the Ascension
Pray: Come, Holy Spirit, fill the hearts of Your faithful, and enkindle in them the fire of Your love.
V. Send forth Your Spirit, and they shall be created,
R. And You shall renew the face of the earth.
Let us pray.
O God, Who by the light of the Holy Spirit, did instruct the hearts of Your faithful, grant that by that same Holy Spirit, we may be truly wise and ever rejoice in His consolation, through Christ our Lord. Amen.
Read: The daily eucharistic readings:
Acts 18:9-18
John 16:20-23
(for a teaching on the daily eucharistic readings see: One Bread, One Body)
Be silent
Pray: Father, as a mother carries her child in her womb nine months, so I choose to suffer for love of You during these nine days of the novena. Through my redemptive sufferings, may the Church receive the fullness of life in the Spirit. I pray in Jesus’ name. Amen.

http://www.presentationministries.com/brochures/PentNovena.asp
http://www.vatican.va/holy_father/leo_xiii/encyclicals/documents/hf_l-xiii_enc_09051897_divinum-illud-munus_en.html
http://www.arlingtonrenewal.org/history

This poem is beginning to make more sense to me now – hope I am communicating it alright
best wishes
Carolyn
8. roy buckle replies at 18th August 2012, 12:01 am :

I can’t believe I’m reading this (in the gold metal city where the saying once was “iron, cold iron is master of them all”.)
9. William Needham replies at 19th August 2012, 10:45 am :

Carolyn,

I read with interest your illuminating references to the Pentecost novena and am partly swayed by them–”partly” only because the poem is packed with allusions, mostly cynical or deliberately aimed at toying with the reader’s understanding—if it is not yet in line with the author’s.

For instance, on the face of it “ghost” in the first line is used, unusually, adjectivally; in which case its meaning is associated with being “diminished”, “deformed”, “emaciated”, hence a link to “Day’s presence wanes”.

I think it’s in the second stanza that Hardy alludes to the Church. Sacrificial burnings (are the “dogs” polished altar brassware?) prove to be futile in sustaining any hope.

Unrepentant Olympian.
10. William Needham replies at 19th August 2012, 7:00 pm :

Add: “At the same time the same content cannot fail to be mistaken for the endlessly repeated ravaging of time. Naturally the content may well prompt other compoundable allusions.”

B.
11. William Needham replies at 19th August 2012, 7:05 pm :

Dammit!: “mistaken” should read “taken”.

B.
12. William Needham replies at 21st August 2012, 6:26 pm :

Replying to Robert Benson.

Robert, you’ve made me a happier man. Your observation that “(t)he vision of the poem is at odds with its making (poesis). What it says is contradicted by how it’s said” helps me shake off the guilt I felt when I realised that although Hardy’s lines and Wordsworth’s were, as I’d claimed (17th Aug), very different in terms of length, vocabulary, meaning, etc., they had more or less the same easy flow. It’s not easy reading poetry with your mind closed to meaning and punctuation but I tried it out and I’m satisfied I didn’t cheat. The two “tunes” sounded interchangeable lines on end. So I’m thinking now that it’s Hardy’s courteous tone to his old “tutor” which we are hearing throughout the poem. Using the word “regret” is surely an instance of this.

Cheers,
Bill N.
13. Carolyn McGrath replies at 23rd August 2012, 11:59 am :

I don’t know why Robert’s posts came in late, but they have slotted in on the dates you must have posted them so apologies for appearing to have ignored you, but I’ve only just received them.

Both Robert and Bill really make me think. I am a bit lost with the Wordsworth associations and just need to read more and listen to try to understand better the points Bill is making. I am very interested in his comment as to the two tunes being ‘interchangeable lines on end’ – made me think of those ‘ends/Upon the shining dogs – but maybe I’m off on an unnecessaryb tangent (again). Please feel free to expand, Bill, but I may be back with questions.
I have also been thinking about Robert’s comments and acknowledge the quasi-religious notes I hear do not need to be pinned too tightly to any one liturgical date. I am interested in your statement that, “This poem is the very thing the poem claims is lacking in the world–and the poet is the only one who can’t see it.” Would you consider changing the word ‘poet’ to ‘persona’ as I think the poet can see and hear the irony very well, even if the less perceptive persona may well be a version not too far from the poet himself. At any rate, the poem takes an ironic stance towards its own voice, even to the extent of appearing not to recognise that the ‘undervoicings’ may emanate from the persona – or from the persona’s perceptions of an external reality. The ‘sotto voce’ murmerings originate in the persona or maybe from the declining fire as, apart from the voice of the persona, there are no other sounds alluded to in the poem. However, I found one quote in Gittings (p128) that may help: ‘On 27 January (1897) he (TH) entered, ‘Today has length, breadth, thickness, colour, smell, voice. As soon as it becomes *yesterday* (TH’s italics) it is a thin layer among many layers, without substance, colour, or *articulate sound* (my italics).” — The ‘undervoicings’ then may be the sounds of the waning day, epitomised by the declining fire with the soft backdrop of sliding rainfall on the windows – the sounds themselves are ‘turning ghost’…
Any other points of view gratefully received, for as Bill has said, there are intentionally many ways of reading this poem.

best wishes
Carolyn
14. Robert Bensen replies at 23rd August 2012, 5:55 pm :

And I am a happier Bob for your post as well, Bill N., and for your ear.
And sure, ‘persona’ is more apt here than naming the poet–though the modesty of the poet & the claim of having made nothing in such a magnificent poem strikes me as almost funny. I’m no Hardy scholar at all–that’s my wife’s province–but her work has shown me the fluidity and flexibility of the Hardy persona in the fiction. That quote you found in Gittings is excellently helpful, and your dovetailing the final image of undervoicings with the initial day turning ghost, my word, the poem’s even more fantastic. The reductive in the poem counterpoints the hints and squibs and melodies the poem makes that more is always out there, and even if he (persona) can’t fully sense it, and he’s sensitive enough to suspect it so.
15. William Needham replies at 24th August 2012, 8:23 am :

Carolyn,

My “interchangeable tunes” is not a good description. Better to simply compare the movement of the words and phrases in Hardy’s poem with the movement of the blank verse in Wordsworth’s “Ode: Intimations of Immortality” and “Lines written a few miles above Tintern Abbey”. I find I can usually swap readily from them to Hardy’s poem without noticeably altering my voice.

It’s just struck me: perhaps “undervoicings” is Hardy’s replacement for the word “intimations”.

Bill.
16. Carolyn McGrath replies at 24th August 2012, 10:34 am :

Thank you, Bill, for the direct, plain English guidance! Best not to confuse me with too much poetic diction. I shall go away and listen carefully. And yes, ‘intimations’ and ‘undervoicings’ sound very compatible.
Thanks again
Carolyn
17. Robert Bensen replies at 24th August 2012, 2:21 pm :

I’m intrigued by the Wordsworth-Hardy lineage as well as the liturgical patterns that Carolyn suggests are present (Miltonist that I am). Bill’s terms ‘tunes’ and ‘movements’ get at surprising melodic resemblences. I wonder if you’re in the neighborhood of what Robert Frost called the ‘sentence-sound’ in a 1914 letter. His definition of the sentence isn’t grammatical, but musical:

I give you a new definition of a sentence:
A sentence is a sound in itself on which other sounds called words may be strung.
You may string words together without a sentence-sound to string them on just as you may tie clothes together by the sleeves and stretch them without a clothes line between two trees, but—it is bad for the clothes.
The number of words you may string on one sentence-sound is not fixed but there is always danger of over loading.
The sentence-sounds are very definite entities….They are as definite as words.
–Robert Frost, letter to John T. Bartlett, 22 Feb. 1914.

I’ve never figured out what he meant, but surely he’s explaining something about his own way with the sentence that precedes words, and how he reads and plumbs the sentences of other writers. Are you, Bill, possibly comparing the sentence-sound of Hardy with that of Wordsworth in the passages you’ve studied? What’s the relation of Hardy’s (or any poet so distinctive)’voice’ to his ‘sentence sound?’ I think I admire most the poets whose unit of composition (if there is such a thing) is the sentence, built over the line. That’s a commonplace of prosody, of course. I wonder what ideas Hardy held about the origin of language–did speech begin with words, or with whole ‘tunes’ that became our sentences? Maybe the poem’s ‘sentence-sounds’ are themselves undervoicings of an elusive consciousness that both Hardy and Wordsworth, in their ways, write to give form to.

Willa Cather, more to the point: ‘Whatever is felt upon the page without being specifically named there—that, one might say, is created. It is the inexplicable presence of the thing not named, of the overtone divined by the ear but not heard by it, the verbal mood, the emotional aura of the fact or the thing or the deed, that gives high quality to the novel or drama, as well as to poetry itself’ (Not Under Forty). I wish I’d said that. I still feel there’s much unsaid in this poem, prompted in large part by the conditionality of the last line that feels coy: ‘…may wake regret in me.’ May? Not ‘may have wakened regret,’ not assertively ‘wakened regret.” But ‘may.’ He’s not sure. Why not?
18. Carolyn McGrath replies at 25th August 2012, 9:43 am :

By happy coincidence, I have been reading around Darwin’s theorising of the origins of language which he suggests lie in an ” emotionally-expressive musical proto-language”. I think Hardy very much shared this understanding of the connection between language and birdsong. You’re better off reading the following, if not the original, rather than me try to summarise: http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=1136

I loooked up ‘may’ when I first read the poem as it certainly stands out there in the last line, oddly tentative in conclusion to that impassioned, lengthy sentence – such a stream of sound and thought. I came to a tentative conclusion that it suggested not only ‘can’, in that it has the capacity to evoke regret, but, as you say, that this is not a foregone conclusion. Maybe there is also the suggestion that this is the only causes of regret: it is not the loss of the day, nor the impending
‘beamless black’ for the speaker as an individual or for us all, but the ‘this loss’ of the preceding line is the loss of the hope of an ‘enkindling ardency’ to ‘be embodied’. He knows not what to blame for this, ‘chance or wile’; this is the way things are. How is he to feel in the face of an indifferent universe?
Is ‘regret’ appropriate or justifiable? ‘He’s not sure. Why not?’ – well, that’s agnosticism for you! It’s all very
‘Darkling Thrush’.

This is one of those occasions where Hardy gets away with expressing ideas that he couldn’t get away with in prose – is it because people hear the ‘birdsong’ and don’t worry about *what exactly* is being expressed? I feel a ‘yearning’, for what and why are partially grasped – the raking of embers maybe, the fire untouched? – and so the poem remains in its own moment, unresolved aand that *is* the state of agnosticism. Maybe it links with Keats’ idea of ‘negative capability’.
19. William Needham replies at 25th August 2012, 5:16 pm :

Robert,

re sentence-sound. Your “Bill’s terms ‘tunes’ and ‘movements’ get at surprising melodic resemblences” needs to lose ‘surprising’. I’m referring to a flow, not spurts. Say you got someone to sit in the next room, gave them a copy of the Hardy and Wordsworth poems and then placed yourself at a distance where you could hear only indistinctly sections of them being read willy-nilly and with meaning ignored, I could well imagine that you would find it hard to match author with sound.(For good measure I’d be tempted to include Coleridge’s conversational poem, “Frost at Midnight”. Yes, why not?)

The point I’m making is that anything relating to “sentence” to me implies sense. I find it difficult to conceive the notion of sentence being raised a power (to use a maths phrase.

Nevertheless Willa Cather’s words you quoted are intriguing and I shall bear them in mind. As it happens, I’m presently trying to identify the reasons for my exuberance on reading the prose of Gabriel Garcia Marquez for the very first time. It has a unique power. His sentences are exquisite. But there’s more to it than that. I could be getting close to experiencing what Willa Catha says: ‘Whatever is felt upon the page without being specifically named there—that, one might say, is created.’

“Felt upon the page”? Isn’t that Wordsworth, “Tintern Abbey”?

Bill
20. Carolyn McGrath replies at 26th August 2012, 5:17 pm :

Continuing this conversation – where I am, without doubt, trying to punch way above my weight – I shall trust in your lovingkindness and just throw in another idea: I have been pondering the juxtaposition of ‘commonplace’ with the ‘sublime’, which has taken me to browsing Longinus’ treatise ‘On the Sublime’. Surely this links up with Bill’s contemplation of Wordworth and ‘immortality’? Is the persona here disclaiming any right to being ‘a great soul’ yet ironically providing the ‘eloquence’ to suggest that he ‘may’ well be? Right, that’s it – there are many echoes, but I shall leave it to someone else on the list (who is lurking in the nooks) to stride forth and shed some light.
21. William Needham replies at 28th August 2012, 12:15 am :

Carolyn,

By now you probably think I’ve got Wordsworth on the brain, but hark to this: ‘Ode to Immortality’ from line 60:

“Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting:
The Soul that rises with us, our life’s Star,
Hath had elsewhere its setting,
And cometh from afar:
Not in entire forgetfulness,
And not in utter nakedness,
But trailing clouds of glory do we come
From God, who is our home:”

In ‘A Commonplace Day’ (penultimate stanza) the speaker, I take it, is prepared to entertain the notion of pre-existence, the soul preceding the body; so that from such blameless beginnings individuals may bring about the betterment of the world.

The final stanza, however, falls like a lump of lead. The speaker is plagued by the realisation that such a procedure is too hit and miss.

I don’t think H is jeering at Wordsworth. It’s just that H thinks W’s philosophy is wrong. As is his devotion to divine (your ‘sublime’?) Nature . (Quite a few years back I stopped the car at the approach to Grasmere from Ambleside. There was the most glorious smell of hay being mown. Going back a week later, it was raining stairrods, mud and cow muck everywhere. H’s speaker had no cause either to commune with the countryside!)

I’m not sure how to categorise the poem. Satire, pastiche, parody..? They smack of mockery. H simply sends his regrets that he can’t go all the way.

Bill
22. Carolyn McGrath replies at 30th August 2012, 11:50 pm :

Hi Bill

‘I’m not sure how to categorise the poem. Satire, pastiche, parody..?’

Your comment made me think of the same difficulty I have with TH’s ‘To Shelley’s Skylark’. That is an expicit attempt to convey his own thoughts on the theme of immortality whilst positioning himself poetically both in tribute and in counterpoint – that sort of ‘satire, pasiche, parody’ which honours and distances itself from the past masters. Maybe the irony is equally distributed between their ‘ardency’ and his own lack lustre present – his ‘Dullest of dull-hued Days’ – which would he choose, if choice there was? Maybe that’s why there is the ‘May’ in the final line – why regret the truth?

I hadn’t read that penultimate stanza as stating that the speaker is ‘prepared to entertain the notion of pre-existence’. I agree the lines you quote from Wordsworth do, but this speaker tries to explain regret. Not only has his own ‘diurnal unit’ has
achieved ‘no one thing asking blame or praise’, but he can see
‘nothing dear’ in the rest of ‘the wide world’ either. The only proviso he gives is that ‘elsewhere than here’ might also need to include some interior ‘wolrds’ as well as external: the next stanza looks not before existence but within – ‘in some soul,  
In some spot undiscerned on sea or land’ and considers not actions or cognition but something more instinctive – ‘some impulse … Or some intent’ which of its own volition rises. It is a ‘spark’ which needs to take hold, ‘enkindle’ and benefit the world in its more mature embodiment. But I agree, the final stanza rapidly pours cold water on all that. If there was a spark – and I think he is prepared to consider he may have had the potential for such a thing as much as anyone else – that spark was ‘benumbed at birth’. The speaker does not claim to know what is to be blamed for that, whether it be ‘momentary chance’ or something more malign in its being designed, ‘wile’. However, the penultimate line seems to stress that it is the loss to ‘mankind’s futurity’ that is to be regretted rather than any personal loss. The poet seems to assert hiw own indifference to his experience of life other than it might have contributed to the betterment of the world at large. This seems to be in accord with the second stanza which reveals the speaker as one who is calmly putting his dying fire in order, doing nothing to maintain or prolong the fire or to keep the ‘beamless black’ at bay. I’m not sure of this though – do you have a hearth? What’s the effect of putting the ends on the shining dogs? Will they burn more brightly?
23. William Needham replies at 31st August 2012, 9:47 am :

Carolyn,

Thanks for replying. (Actually I thought I’d been a bit too breezy at the end of my last reply. Won’t occur again!)

You ask:’What’s the effect of putting the ends on the shining dogs? Will they burn more brightly?’
In my experience you save the ends of the logs in order to use them next morning to help light the fire with all over again.

As I think you pointed out earlier, the dogs are a symbol of domesticity. The adjective ‘bright’ also suggests brass, which among other things symbolises endurance–it will last for ever.

In W’s ode we read, line 134:

‘O joy ! that in our embers
Is something that doth live,’

Not so , as I understand, in H’s thoughts in a literal sense even in his last years.

One image that has come to me recently is the dogs in the knacker’s yard, where in H’s day worn out old horses and unmarketable cattle, etc., would be sent. Originally the saying ‘gone to the dogs’apparently carried no connotation of a racing industry. It was used to describe people who, for instance, had given up on life and were letting themselves be destroyed.

All errors and omissions excepted!

Bill.
24. Carolyn McGrath replies at 4th September 2012, 5:10 am :

Thanks, Bill. The This fireside persona seems then to be putting his hearth in order in readiness for another, probably, ‘dull-hued day’, although he does allow with that ‘maybe’ in the first stanza, that there is the possibility of something different.

Hope you are still enjoying Olympian days – I am now back at work after an extended holiday due to early school closure to accommodate ‘the world coming to Stratford’!

Very enjoyable discussion this August
best wishes
Carolyn

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