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Priscilla Gilman on William Cowper ("The Castaway")
1.9k Plays1 year ago
How does suffering separate the person going through it from their friends and loved ones? Priscilla Gilman joins the podcast to talk about a poem that takes on that question in literal terms—it tells the tragic story of a sailor who drowns as his shipmates are forced to sail away—and that sees it, at the same time, as a question we all have to face, William Cowper's "The Castaway."
Priscilla Gilman is the author of two books: The Anti-Romantic Child: A Memoir of Unexpected Joy (Harper, 2011) and The Critic's Daughter: A Memoir (Norton, 2023). She's a former English professor, first at Yale University and then at Vassar College, during which time she published an important article on Cowper's letters in ELH. You can follow Priscilla on Twitter.
Please follow, rate, and review the podcast if you like what you hear, and share an episode with a friend. You can also subscribe to my newsletter, where you'll get occasional updates on the podcast.
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Transcript
00:00:00
Speaker
Hello,
Introduction and Episode Overview
00:00:01
Speaker
everyone, and welcome to Close Readings. I'm your host, Kamran Javidizadeh, and it is a real pleasure to have Priscilla Gilman on the podcast today. Priscilla and I were chatting for like almost an hour, I think.
00:00:18
Speaker
before I press the start recording button because we have so much to talk about and some of that will come up in the episode. But it's just a real delight for me to have her on the podcast and I'm very happy to say that the
00:00:33
Speaker
The poet she's chosen to talk about is the English poet William Cooper, and the poem of his that Priscilla has chosen is, I think it's the last poem, the last original poem, or something like that I've seen it written, that he wrote, a poem called The Castaway.
00:00:51
Speaker
It's a very beautiful poem, strange poem, a sad poem, so prepare yourselves for that. But it's one that I'm really excited for us to talk about. So
Guest Introduction and Literary Contributions
00:01:01
Speaker
I'm sure many of you know already who Priscilla Gilman is, but in case you don't, let me tell you a little bit about her. She is the author of two books. Her first book was called The Anti-Romantic Child, A Memoir of Unexpected Joy, and that was published by Harper in 2011.
00:01:20
Speaker
And then much more recently, this year, Priscilla has published her second book, a book called The Critics' Daughter, which is also a memoir. It was published by Norton. And as I said earlier this year, it's a marvelous book, and I'll have more to say about it in a moment. Priscilla is a former professor of English, first at Yale University, which is where I met her.
00:01:45
Speaker
two decades ago, I think. Maybe even more than that. And then at Vassar College. And in that part of her life, she wrote a terrific, important article on today's poet, William Cooper, in the very prestigious academic journal ELH. And that article is in part about the role played by criticism
00:02:13
Speaker
in the poet William Cooper's imagining of his own self, of his life, of what it meant to be a poet. So Priscilla writes very interestingly about how Cooper on the one hand adopted a strategy of diffidence, a kind of posture of seeming not to care what the critics thought.
00:02:39
Speaker
But on the other hand, as we see in his letters, and actually I should say here, just as an aside, that William Cooper is one of the great letter writers in the history of English poetry, and that when I first met Priscilla Gilman, it was because I was a
00:02:57
Speaker
young graduate student at Yale, and she was a young faculty member at Yale, and I had proposed to do a kind of independent study on poets' letters. And my idea was that I would pick the different members of the Yale English Department, and as I read a poet's letters who fell in their field, I would have a meeting with them to talk about that poet's correspondence. So it was a great way to get to know
00:03:25
Speaker
a wide variety of faculty in the department. And I talked to Priscilla Gilman about William Cooper's letters. So it's this lovely kind of sense of rendezvous back again all these years later to talk about the same poet.
Cooper's Criticized Self and Personal Ties
00:03:41
Speaker
In those letters, Priscilla writes that we get a version of Cooper that critics haven't always fully acknowledged, that he was in ways that might seem surprising given the reputation he has.
00:03:53
Speaker
of being sort of this he has the side of him that's sort of career obsessed that cares very much what the critics will say that is highly anxious about what they what they will think of his books and who is constantly sort of toggling back and forth between that first attitude that attitude of diffidence and this other attitude in which he is
00:04:18
Speaker
internalizing criticisms that he imagines his poems receiving and revising in anticipation of them. Priscilla writes in that article, quote, that in the face of criticism's potentially freezing power, Cooper devises a theory of the criticized self that ensures its flexibility by maximizing its internal variations, if never quite freeing itself once and for all.
00:04:49
Speaker
So I read that sentence in preparation for today's, I read the article and I read the sentence which appears in that article, the sentence I've just read to you in anticipation of today's conversation. And
Personal Reflections and Literary Influence
00:05:02
Speaker
in the meantime, I've been reading Priscilla's most recent book, The Critic's Daughter, and it just, you know, dawned on me that
00:05:14
Speaker
just how personal that sentence and the article to which it belongs must have been for Priscilla who wrote it, you know, I don't know, 20 years ago, let's say. I think that's about right.
00:05:30
Speaker
So here's a quotation from now, not from that article, but from her new book, The Critic's Daughter, which is a memoir that touches on many aspects of Priscilla's life, but at the center of the book is the figure of her own father, who was a very important theater critic and literary critic. So this is Priscilla writing about her father. Quote, criticism for my father
00:06:00
Speaker
was a diagnosis of false seeing, a diagnosis of false being. She writes in this book about what it was like to grow up under the watchful eye of such a critic. And her account makes clear how literature, and when I say literature, I mean sort of all of it.
00:06:23
Speaker
which includes things like actual writers with their actual lives that are messy and unruly and fun and boring sometimes and unpredictable. And also things like the publishing industry, which Priscilla had a kind of unusual access to as a child, both through the figure of her father and the figure of her mother, who's a literary agent.
00:06:53
Speaker
But not just those things, also, of course, crucially poems. And one thing that I really love in reading this new book is how much poetry plays a role in Priscilla's account of her own life and of these crucial relationships in her life.
00:07:13
Speaker
and how poetry becomes a way for her of making sense of experiences that maybe did not make sense or did not sufficiently make sense at the time that she lived them. But as I'm reading the book and thinking about the Priscilla Gilman who wrote about William Cooper and his anticipation of criticism,
00:07:37
Speaker
and the strategies he devised to accommodate the anxieties that the anticipation of criticism produced in him, what has become clear to me is how vital poetry has been to her own capacity, I mean Priscilla's capacity to, quote, maximize internal variations in her own life. And so, you know,
00:08:04
Speaker
This is a writer and Priscilla Gilman is a writer who is near and dear to my heart in the sense that she's thinking about how literature and life are not two realms that we can easily separate. That in the right kind of hands and with the right kind of attention that poetry
00:08:31
Speaker
can help us make sense of our lives and our lives can help us make sense of poems. And so it's because of all of that, that I'm so thrilled to welcome her onto the podcast today. Priscilla, how are you doing? How are you feeling? What's going on?
00:08:47
Speaker
I'm doing a lot better after that glorious introduction, Kamran. Wow. I hope you have this written down and can send that to me. That's one of the most beautiful, luminously empathetic understandings of my work. And I love the way you put the two books in relationship to each other. And of course, the first book I just want to tell the listeners, since this is a poetry podcast, is filled with the poetry of William Wordsworth in particular. And I wrote my dissertation on Cooper
00:09:16
Speaker
Wordsworth and Jane Austen. Amazing. Yeah. No, that's that's amazing. I don't have it written down, but I can I can send you a link to the podcast episode. I'll listen to it whenever I'm in a low moment, whenever I'm feeling like a castaway camera and I'll listen to it. Right. Yes. Right. Right. OK. Yeah. So with that in mind,
00:09:42
Speaker
Interesting, just to think back for a moment to the dissertation you just described to us, which I'm sure was fantastic. The two other figures in that dissertation are perhaps William Wordsworth and Jane Austen, perhaps more well known to the non-specialist, non-PhD in English literature,
00:10:04
Speaker
than William Cooper is. And
Contextualizing William Cooper
00:10:08
Speaker
so I think some amount of contextualizing might be useful at the top of this conversation, Priscilla. So could I ask you to tell us what you think the kind of uninitiated might need to know about William Cooper? And maybe along the way, would you feel willing to tell us a little bit about how you came to be a reader?
00:10:31
Speaker
of William Cooper and why it was you came to care about his writing.
00:10:36
Speaker
here so much. It's been such a joy to go back into his work this week in preparation for talking to you, Kamran. So I was always very passionate about poetry, but I went to a school called Brearley in New York City, where it was a fantastic English department, but the romantics and the 18th century poets were never taught. It was all about like metaphysical poetry, modern poetry,
00:11:01
Speaker
I went to Yale. I thought his name was pronounced Cowper. I'd read it in a couple of books. I didn't really know much. And I first encountered the castaway. I encountered him first through the castaway because I was taking a class on modern British fiction with Mark Wallager at Yale and Mr. Ramsey into the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf in the final section of that novel. Quotes, we perished each alone.
00:11:31
Speaker
when he's on the boat going to the lighthouse with his children. And then he says, but I beneath rougher seas and welded deeper gulfs than he. And this enrages his daughter, Cam, in the novel who says, why are you, you know, drawing attention to yourself, demanding sympathy, etc. So there was a little on a handout. This is from this William Cooper poem. And it was interesting to me, but I didn't really pursue it.
00:11:54
Speaker
And maybe we should just say that for people who don't know the novel that, sorry, bit of a plot spoiler here, but Mr. Ramsey's wife has died and the mother of those of those Ramsey children has died earlier in that book. And yes, and I suppose that's some context for his recitation of these lines by Cooper and absolutely. And that for Wolf, Mr. Ramsey was a kind of figure that was
00:12:21
Speaker
a kind of fictionalized version of her own father, maybe, Leslie Stephen.
00:12:25
Speaker
And Wolf's mother had died when she was a child. Okay. Absolutely. And as high Cooper's, Cooper's mother died when he was a child. And in the, it's interesting in the first section of To the Lighthouse, it's in three sections. When Mrs. Ramsey is still alive, Mr. Ramsey is walking around quoting Tennyson's Charge of the Light Brigade, much more kind of aggressively invoking this kind of martial imagery, this I'm powerful and I'm important.
00:12:55
Speaker
And some critics have seen the quoting of Cooper in the final section, even as it frustrates his daughter, who thinks he's kind of pleading for sympathy, as a sign of his growth as a character, that he's now admitting his vulnerability, his feeling of being bereft and having lost the most important person to him who was sort of the foundation of his sense of self, his wife, in the second section of the novel.
00:13:20
Speaker
So that's one of the most famous appearances of the Castaway in literature. The other one would be in Sense and Sensibility by Jane Austen. So I, in the spring of 1993, was taking Jill Campbell's 18th century novel lecture class at Yale and in her lecture on Sense and Sensibility, she had a big quote from the Castaway up on the board.
00:13:42
Speaker
Marion Dashwood in Sense and Sensibility is the sister who's associated most obviously with sensibility. She's very passionate. She loves nature and she adores Cooper and the rake that she falls in love with. Sorry, another spoiler everyone.
00:13:59
Speaker
Mr. Willoughby. She falls in love with him in part because he sufficiently appreciates Cooper and reads Cooper with the amount of ardor and investment that Miriam demands in a romantic partner. She dismisses Eleanor's partner, potential partner, for not reading Cooper with enough passion. And I actually pulled out this quote for you, Tom Rumm.
00:14:23
Speaker
She says to her mother that Edward just has no real taste.
00:14:28
Speaker
Oh, mama, she says, how spiritless, how tame was Edward's manner in reading to us last night. I felt for my sister most severely. Yet she bore it with so much composure, she seemed scarcely to notice it. I could hardly keep my seat to hear those beautiful lines which have frequently almost driven me wild, pronounced with such impenetrable calmness, such dreadful indifference. Interesting indifference, the word that I use in my piece about Cooper.
00:14:58
Speaker
And then the mother sort of rebukes her saying, he would certainly have done more justice to simple and elegant prose. I thought so at the time, but you would give him Cooper.
00:15:09
Speaker
nay mama if he is not to be animated by Cooper but we must allow for difference of taste and in the film they have in the Emma Thompson film of Sense and Sensibility Hugh Grant playing this character reads the cast away in the most un-Hugh Grant like way stumbling over the words and sounding like he doesn't understand at all what's going on so
00:15:33
Speaker
Well, that's funny. I think of Hugh Grant as a stumbler, as a charming stumbler. But you think that's on Hugh Grant. Anyway, that's not... I think he's a charming stumbler that's animated by passion. I see. Here he's sort of... Let's not say stumbler. Let's say he still did, comrade. Ah, right, right. That doesn't sound right. He reads it in this way where he breaks not long beneath the well, you know, it's just very unappealing, very unromantic. Sure, sure.
00:15:56
Speaker
So when I went into the Yale graduate program that fall, I decided I want to read these 18th century poets of sensibility that are never taught anymore. There were no classes on them. And I did a directed reading with Joel Campbell on Thomas Gray, Chatterton, Christopher Smart, William Cooper,
00:16:19
Speaker
So these are sort of the poets that that proceed in the kind of usual history of English poetry, the great romantic first generation romantic poets. Exactly. And that maybe follow the very different kind of 18th century poets like Pope and Dryden and so on. Yeah, absolutely. And in, in Sense and Sensibility, actually, that lineage is invoked when Eleanor
00:16:46
Speaker
She's speaking to Marianne and she says, of Mr. Willoughby, you know that he thinks of Cooper and Scott. You are certain of his estimating their beauties as he ought, and you have received every assurance of his admiring pope no more than is proper.
00:17:00
Speaker
So these are the, we call them variously, the pre-romantics, the poets of sensibility, the mad poets, because a lot of them struggled with insanity. And
Cooper's Biography and Poetic Themes
00:17:12
Speaker
one, a number of them died by suicide or attempted to die by suicide, including Cooper. So when I did this directed reading, I just absolutely fell in love with Cooper. So I'll give you a little bio of Cooper. So he was born in 1731.
00:17:27
Speaker
And into a fairly well-off family, his father is a reverend. His mother dies when he's six years old giving birth to his brother. And the brother, Cooper and the brother are the only surviving children. I think there were three or four others who died young. So he lives haunted by these vivid memories that he has of his mother. He writes a very beautiful poem on the receipt of my mother's picture. Someone sent him a painting of his mother.
00:17:57
Speaker
And he writes about that being a kind of primal wound in his consciousness, the first intimation that his life is not going to go well. His father sends him away to boarding school where he is mercilessly bullied and tormented. He is shy. He's physically rather fragile. And there's a famous moment where he says in a letter that
00:18:22
Speaker
All he remembers of the worst bully is the buckles on his shoes because he was so afraid of him that he couldn't look up to look at his face and he was looking down continually.
00:18:33
Speaker
The father wanted him to be a lawyer. I'm sure there are a number of people listening to this podcast who are already identifying. So his father very much wants him to become a proper lawyer. He studies for the bar but never ends up being a lawyer. He is offered a clerkship.
00:18:54
Speaker
at one point through some family connections. And in order to get this job, he has to do a public examination like an oral exam. And he's overcome by anxiety and he has the first of a series of mental breakdowns.
00:19:10
Speaker
When he's staying in this institution, he comes under the care of a beneficent kind evangelical doctor who converts him to a kind of liberal evangelicalism. And he finds faith in God, restores him to a sense of wellbeing to some extent, but throughout the rest of his life,
00:19:37
Speaker
He struggles with mental illness. He has a series of breakdowns. He wrote a poem in the mid-1770s called Hatred and Vengeance, My Eternal Portion. I mean, that will give you a sense sort of prefiguring the stark and terribly sad image of himself that he gives us in his last poem, The Castaway. But in the 1780s, the 1780s are his glory decade where he
00:20:03
Speaker
He has a lot of wonderful friends who support him and help him. Oh, he also, Conburn, I should say, was in love with his cousin when he was younger. Father forbade the marriage. That was another source of torment to him. They continue to kind of surreptitious romance and she supported him financially and took care of him when he was sick.
00:20:22
Speaker
In the 1780s, he lands. But he didn't marry. Is that right? Never married. Right. Never married. Engaged. He was engaged to a woman named Mary Unwin, who when her husband died, he proposed to her, but they never married, but they lived together until she died. And she died a couple of years before the castaway was written. And that was that's one of the impetus behind the poem, that he feels like he is lost.
00:20:46
Speaker
this great prop, the great support, the person who understood him and supported him the best. So in the 1780s, he becomes a bestselling poet. He becomes extremely popular. He writes the John Gilpin, which is a very popular comic poem. He writes a mock epic poem called The Task, which Coleridge loved. Coleridge and Wordsworth adored Cooper. They found him.
00:21:13
Speaker
congenial in the sense that he celebrated nature, he celebrated domestic life, even though he never married or had children. There's a famous invocation to the sofa in the task.
00:21:27
Speaker
And another one about the cucumber, which is really wonderful. Every time I eat a cucumber roll, I think of Cooper in his celebration of the cucumber. He was also loved animals and was an early supporter of animal rights, was an abolitionist, was on the right side of all the issues, early feminist, wrote a number of just beautiful
00:21:51
Speaker
poems about various animals, epitaph on a hare, and they're mock epic, but they're also deeply moving. So connecting the sort of portrait you've just given to us of him as a poet and of where, you know, his sort of the shape of his poetic career and of his life to some extent.
00:22:09
Speaker
It's easier now to go back to the role he played in subsequent English novels and to think about what is it about Cooper that's letting him stand in in the Austen novel as a marker of a certain
00:22:26
Speaker
aspect of character that a certain kind of woman might find desirable in a mate? Or what is it in the wolf that allows him to play the role, if it does, of indicating a kind of softening or something like that in Mr. Ramsey? This is, in other words, a poet who is
00:22:46
Speaker
I don't know, how would you put it? Congenial, but feeling. Feeling, feeling. One other aspect of his career that's important to share with your listeners is that he famously wrote a number of hymns. He worked on hymns with John Newton, who wrote Amazing Grace. He did not write Amazing Grace, but he wrote God Moves in Mysterious Ways. He wrote a number of hymns that became quite celebrated.
00:23:13
Speaker
And he is associated for Marianne in particular in Sense and Sensibility with a capacity for strong feeling, not censoring strong feeling. Being open to sublimity, being open to the wonders of nature, not in a
00:23:35
Speaker
sort of cultivated way but wild untrammeled nature and the way that the romantic celebrated it. You think about, he wrote a beautiful poem called Yardley Oak about this tree that he loved from childhood. Some people see it as a precursor of Tintern Abbey, right, going back to a place and it ended up
00:23:56
Speaker
aspect of the landscape that is scored with memories for him. And he cherishes the oak. I remember Joel Campbell saying this in her lecture that Cooper cherishes the oak because it is marked with age, because it has history associated with it. And she connected that to the fascination with the Gothic in the 1790s. And again, preparing the way for the Gothic tinged poems of lyrical ballads by Wordsworth and Coleridge.
00:24:25
Speaker
and Jane Austen's Marianne. Now, another thing that we'll say, though, comrade is that feeling when taken too far can lead to madness. And Marianne has a breakdown in sense and sensibility. So in a sense, for adoration of Cooper, Jane Austen is sort of
00:24:42
Speaker
alluding the knowing reader, right? This may not end well for Marianne. Right. Right. Well, that's all fascinating. Yeah. So Cooper might be a love of Cooper might be an interesting and alluring thing to know about a boy that you like.
00:25:01
Speaker
But it might also be a red flag, I don't know. It might be a red flag. You know, I annotated an edition of Sense and Sensibility last year for an app called Threadable, which is, it's a great collab and it's meant for the common, sort of just every reader. And I wrote about that, that Willoughby and Marianne, it's almost like they're giving each other mix tapes. They're sort of comparing that, like, do you like the Before Sunrise movies? Oh, I do too. Okay, yeah. And it's both extremely appealing and alluring, but also
00:25:31
Speaker
absolute red flag territory. Yeah, and I guess it also is sort of premised on a theory that many or most of us operate by, I would think that if, you know, and I think this has something to do with how you conceive of criticism in a way, the theory being, well, if you tell me what you're into aesthetically and culturally,
00:26:01
Speaker
I know something about who you are, interpersonally. And I guess it's not...
00:26:08
Speaker
We shouldn't assume that that would be true or that, you know, in other words, you might find out that I'm really into like some kind of music that has no discernible bearing on my personality as you get to know me. But that's I mean, that's not the way I think about things. I suspect it's not the way you think about things. And it's it's not it's not I love this idea of like giving someone a mixtape because, you know, giving them a mixtape is a way of
00:26:35
Speaker
telling them what you think about them, but it's also a way of sort of showing them who you are. So interesting to think of Cooper functioning in something like that way for these fictional characters.
00:26:53
Speaker
from the two novels that you've cited. So let's talk about the castaway, Priscilla. As
Exploring 'The Castaway' and Its Themes
00:27:01
Speaker
I think you mentioned, or as we've established, it's the last poem he wrote.
00:27:12
Speaker
In a moment, I'm going to ask you to read it, but I'll leave it to you to decide. Do you think it would be useful to give a little bit of context about how it was that Cooper came to write it beforehand? Or do you want to read it first and then we can talk about the story that he wrote? I can give a little bit of context. He's not writing a lot of original poetry in the 1790s.
00:27:37
Speaker
quite celebrated as a translator of Homer. He's doing a lot of translations. And as I think I said earlier, he loses Mary Unwin. I believe she dies in 1796. And he's not in the best of health. He died of what they call dropsy, some kind of edema in 1800. This poem was written in 1799, published posthumously.
00:28:03
Speaker
We don't know whether he intended it for publication. And it's really one of the very few original works that we have from that last decade of his life. And I will say also that it's based on a story that was very well known in the 18th century. This Anson's Voyages Around the World, this famous sea captain who had written this prose account of
00:28:31
Speaker
um the perils of being on the open water and you know it was interesting i remember when i first i read a couple of articles about the background of this and this castaway this one guy who was left alone in the water and died
00:28:48
Speaker
It's just one of a number of people who suffer in this account. In other words, that account talks about, oh, and we had all these guys who died of this illness on the ship. And then we had another thing where someone had a heart attack, you know, and we were the ship was banged around and all these terrible things happened. And then there was this guy who went overboard and we couldn't rescue him. Cooper singles out.
00:29:10
Speaker
that one guy who went overboard and couldn't be rescued and makes him the subject of the poem. So in a sense, that's his revision of this legend. In other words, he's pulling out one story, one individual. You can see how he's anticipating romanticism with that, right? It's not about the group. It's about this one person.
00:29:29
Speaker
It feels like there's a sort of allegory there about lyric poetry in particular, the distilled solitary experience, just as you said. Absolutely. Absolutely. When I was rereading it, I was thinking about he would have been able to read the first edition of Lyrical Ballads, published in 1798.
00:29:50
Speaker
before he wrote this poem because there's a lot of ancient mariner stuff going on there so he would that it's possible he would not have been able to read the Lucy poems which were written around the same time he wrote this but I kept thinking about um she is in her grave and oh the difference to me right which many people say like modern poetry is born when Wordsworth says this but Cooper is doing a similar thing in this poem yeah um that's that's wonderful context
00:30:17
Speaker
And so now I think we really want to hear the poem. And I'll just remind listeners, as I say this, I don't know if it's audible at all, but there's thunder now happening outside my window, which is apt or something. I hope it doesn't mean that we wind up losing power. That would be a tragedy.
00:30:33
Speaker
But let's listen to the poem. And before you start reading Priscilla, I just want to remind listeners that there's a link in the episode notes. So if you want to look at the text of the poem as Priscilla reads, you can find it there. But without further ado, here's Priscilla Gilman, Reading the Castaway by William Cooper.
00:30:55
Speaker
Obscurus night involved the sky, the Atlantic billows roared, when such a destined wretch as I washed headlong from on board, of friends, of hope, of all bereft, his floating home forever left. No braver chief could Albion boast than he with whom he went, nor ever ship left Albion's coast with warmer wishes sent.
00:31:25
Speaker
He loved them both, but both in vain, nor him beheld, nor her again. Not long beneath the whelming brine, expert to swim, he lay. Nor soon he felt his strength decline or courage die away. But waged with death a lasting strife, supported by despair of life.
00:31:53
Speaker
He shouted, nor his friends had failed to check the vessel's course. But so the furious blast prevailed that pitiless perforce, they left their outcast mate behind and scutted still before the wind. Some soccer yet they could afford, and such as storms allow, the cask, the coop, the floated cord, delayed not to bestow.
00:32:23
Speaker
But he they knew, nor ship, nor shore, what air they gave, should visit more. Nor, cruel as it seemed, could he their haste himself condemn, aware that flight in such a sea alone could rescue them. Yet bitter felt it still to die, deserted, and his friends so nigh.
00:32:51
Speaker
He long survives, who lives an hour in ocean, self-appelled. And so long he, with unspent power, his destiny repelled. And ever, as the minutes flew, entreated help or cried, adieu. At length his transient respite passed, his comrades, who before had heard his voice in every blast,
00:33:20
Speaker
could catch the sound no more. For then, by toil subdued, he drank the stifling wave, and then he sank. No poet wept him, but the page of narrative sincere that tells his name, his worth, his age, is wet with Anson's tear.
00:33:47
Speaker
and tears by bards or heroes shed alike immortalize the dead. I therefore purpose not or dream discounting on his fate to give the melancholy theme a more enduring date. But misery still delights to trace its semblance in another's case. No voice divine the storm allayed.
00:34:17
Speaker
No light propitious shone. When snatched from all effectual aid, We perished, each alone. But I, beneath a rougher sea, And whelmed in deeper gulfs than he.
00:34:37
Speaker
Priscilla, thanks so much, much, much better than your description of the Hugh Grant rendition. That was very nice. It occurs to me that maybe there are just a couple of like,
00:34:53
Speaker
proper nouns or something that we ought to gloss for people who aren't familiar. Albion is another name for Britain, a sort of traditional name for Britain. Okay. So no braver chief could Albion both. So as I think I heard you say that the story was famous and Cooper would have read, and this comes to the other proper name that's in the
00:35:18
Speaker
the poem Anson's Tier, when that's referred to about halfway through the poem. Anson is the writer of this nonfiction prose account of his sort of Disasters by Sea that he is. Disasters by Sea, yes. Right, okay. Okay, good. And so Cooper would have known that and would have expected his contemporaries to be very familiar with these tales as well.
00:35:46
Speaker
Absolutely. You know, some critics say that in this poem by invoking this famous story, it was published, I believe, in 1748, this account, Anson's Voyage Around the World, and it's an account of a voyage that went from 1740 to I think 1744, 1745.
00:36:08
Speaker
that in a sense it's a bid for immortality on Cooper's part, that he is invoking this famous story at the very same time that he's saying in the poem that he does not trying to immortalize the dead.
00:36:22
Speaker
he's choosing something that people would know. And when he says that no bard has written about this before, well, he's the first, he's doing it, so. Right, right, so sort of hitching his wagon to a bright star. Exactly, Cameron, and there's that paradox again that you noted that I discussed in my piece about his letters, right? There's that paradox where he's both diffident and ambitious. Right. Where he's both humble and sort of self-deprecating and at the same time,
00:36:53
Speaker
passionate about making an aim for himself. Right, right, right. I can see how that's playing out here. Now, sort of in terms of that, I suppose one thing we'll want to do soon enough is to kind of work our way through the poem a little bit. But before we dive in, as it were, again, Pat,
00:37:12
Speaker
Sorry, bad metaphor there. I find it useful sometimes just to sort of stand back slightly from the poem and be able to say some descriptive things about it. So one thing I'm noticing is that there's a first person pronoun in the poem, but it appears sort of at the beginning and at the end. It's a kind of framing, right?
00:37:37
Speaker
That's an interesting kind of rhetorical strategy. Do you have any preliminary thoughts about that? The pronouns in this poem are crazy. Yeah, go ahead. Crazy. You know, all of these hymns and hers and the I appears in the first, you know, I would say the first stanza when you read it.
00:37:58
Speaker
You think when he says, when such a destined wretch is I, that he is actually describing an experience that he had when he went into the water on a stormy day, right? And you think maybe, oh, it's like a persona. It's a dramatic monologue of some kind or something like that. Exactly. It's like an ancient Mariner story, right? That's what it feels like. I so agree with you. And the first jarring moment is when you get to that final line of the first stanza, his floating home.
00:38:27
Speaker
And that's the first indication that this isn't, that the as is a comparative. It's not, I was that person, right? There was a destined wretch. And the destined wretch phrase is so interesting too.
00:38:44
Speaker
You know, in the poem about his mother, I said that the loss of the mother was sort of a primal wound for him. Right. He describes his mother. I'm going to see if I can remember this. He says something about he asks her if she was conscious of the tears that he has cried for her since losing her. And he says, hovered thy spirit or thy sorrowing son, wretch even then life's journey just begun.
00:39:13
Speaker
And now we have another retch. And this idea of being a destined retch is also very strange. Is it useful to be, I know you mentioned earlier that he'd sort of turned to this kind of, I forget how you described it precisely, but somewhat liberal kind of evangelical form of Christianity. When I read the phrase destined retch, I'm thinking of perhaps
00:39:43
Speaker
more severe forms of Christianity or something. But do you think it's useful to think about Cooper's own religion in a moment like that? Absolutely. He believed that he was irrevocably damned by God. He believed that that is why. And friends would pull him out of this, but he would return to this sort of Calvinist idea of predestination.
00:40:07
Speaker
and that he was in the camp of the wretches and that nothing that he could do could get him out of that. And there's a letter in 1773, he wrote, my sin and judgment are like peculiar. I am a castaway, deserted and condemned.
00:40:26
Speaker
So that's 1773, you say, so 26, 25 years, something like that. Yeah, later. We're not math people, but that was close enough. Sure, sure. Close enough. And after and still late enough, though, for him to have known the ensign, maybe he was thinking about it even as he as he wrote that line. Maybe he was. I mean, shipwrecked narratives were there and think about Robinson Crusoe. I mean, they were very, very popular in the 18th century.
00:40:55
Speaker
Sure, okay. Yeah, okay. That's super interesting. And yes, I mean, I'll cop to just the confusion that you sort of hypothesized a first reader of the poem having. Like as I started reading this, I thought I had to reread that transition from the first stanza to the second a few times to understand the kind of move that was being made. I suppose one could almost have a kind of objection to it, like,
00:41:25
Speaker
Maybe it's a little bit like the objection that Kamri has to Mr. Ramsey into the lighthouse. Why are you putting yourself in this? Why are you sort of pitting yourself in this way? Absolutely, Cameron. And like the last lines, I mean,
00:41:44
Speaker
I don't know if you know that I'm also a meditation teacher and I'm a Buddhist meditation teacher. I did not know that. It's something that I tell my students. You never compare suffering. You never say, oh, my suffering is worse than your suffering. And that's exactly what he's doing in those last lines of the poem. We'll get there. But again, why are you inserting yourself into this story? I think another way of looking into that one, maybe a more
00:42:09
Speaker
compassionate way of looking at it is that he's both identifying with and using this castaway, this famous castaway as an emblem for not only his suffering, but for all. In other words, we're all castaways in a sense. We all perish each alone.
00:42:32
Speaker
And I think also he's evading writing about himself. This is something that people would say he's pre-romantic rather than romantic, because he's not writing. He's not writing Tintern Abbey. He's not saying, well, then I was like this, and then I did this, and then I came back, and here's my sister. He's getting personal. That's a nice summary of Tintern Abbey. That's terrific.
00:42:56
Speaker
Oh my God. I wrote, I have a piece on foxnews.com. I never thought that would happen, but it's about Tindran Abbey. It's the greatest poem ever written. So, you know. Okay. We'll have to link to that. Okay. That's not the usual fare one gets on Fox News. No, I was happy to bring poetry to foxnews.com. Okay. This was 10 years ago before it went quite as toxic as it is now. Sure. Sure.
00:43:21
Speaker
So right, but we might expect in other words that if what he's really writing about is himself and he's sort of comparing himself to this famous shipwreck story that you could imagine a poem that would begin by invoking this famous story that you all know and then getting into the meat of like how my life is like that. But this doesn't do that. This sort of evades that by just going towards the story. Yeah.
00:43:46
Speaker
Is it worth saying anything at all, Priscilla, also about the kind of formal organization of the poem?
Poem's Structure and Emotional Tension
00:43:51
Speaker
So it's in these stanzas. The stanzas are
00:43:54
Speaker
six lines long, they're sort of, the first four lines are a kind of ballad meter or something like that, right? Yes, ballad meter, yeah. And then it ends with this kind of rhyming tetrameter couplet each time. I don't know, do you have any thought, I mean, maybe surely there might be moments where we can talk about specific instances where that produces an interesting effect or where you're curious about the rhyme or something like that.
00:44:20
Speaker
But just that sort of general formal organization of the poem, is it alerting you to anything or what do you think about when when you hear me describe it in those terms? Yeah, there are a number of people talk about it in terms of
00:44:36
Speaker
mimicking the motion of the waves, and I don't know, that seems a little easy, but I think it's interesting that a very, you know, some of his poems are not as intricate and structured as this, and it does seem to me that it's, in a way, a way of, right, after great pain, a formal feeling comes, right? It's very, he's containing the anguish and he's containing
00:45:06
Speaker
The feeling of being out of control which he writes about in his letters by choosing something that has a very regular meter Yeah, a lot of intricate rhyming. I love the couplets at the ends of ends of the stanzas and you know, we can look at specific examples where
00:45:25
Speaker
the lines aren't end-stopped, and there's enjambment in a way that makes the meaning uncertain in interesting ways. Yeah, for sure. And then also rhymes, off rhymes, where you're like, ooh, that's a little strange. And you don't get that feeling of conclusiveness. Like, for example, you know, vain again, behind in wind, where you're wanting to get that feeling of something rounding out at the end of the stanza, and you don't.
00:45:55
Speaker
and it leaves you with an interesting and unsettled feeling. Because it's a slight rhyme or a sight rhyme or both of those, right? Okay, but it's not producing that perfect kind of rhyming sound. Exactly.
00:46:06
Speaker
Yeah, and there is enjambment throughout the poem, but never between the stanzas, right? I like this idea that you gave us that the stanzaic form is some attempt to kind of enclose or manage, organize a kind of frightening or unruly, emotionally turbulent and physically turbulent.
00:46:34
Speaker
experience. I feel as though I should know the answer to this, but is there anything original about this kind of pairing of the ballad meter with the rhyming couplet, or is that a relatively standard form? I don't know, but it does seem like on the one hand the ballad meter
00:46:56
Speaker
is like what ballad meter wants to do is to tell a story. I mean, you've already talked about Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner, for instance, it's almost exactly contemporary with this poem, right? Which famously does that. Couplets, I suppose you could tell a story in couplets,
00:47:14
Speaker
But to use a term of our time, the energy of couplet feels to me to be sort of contra-narrative in a way, right? I so agree with you about that, actually. And let's look into that more, because I can't think of any other examples. And I think the fact that you're
00:47:34
Speaker
you know, you're noting that there's no enjambment between the stances is very important. So the lack of enjambment between the stances, plus the couplets, really closing them off as self contained units. And I think that that's both
00:47:50
Speaker
works effectively for him as a kind of... And we know this from his letters that one of the things that was most disturbing to him about his bouts with insanity was the feeling of being out of control and the feeling of chaos and
00:48:07
Speaker
vagueness and lacking boundaries between himself and objects around him or people around him. He did hear voices. So you can absolutely see that. But I also think that it adds to the weirdness of the poem and the eeriness of the shifts because
00:48:24
Speaker
You know, as you were saying, the shift from the first answer, which seems very personal and I agree with you, you would expect that it would go into and my life has been, you know, I lost this person when I was young and then this terrible thing happened. And and so I am analogous to this.
00:48:39
Speaker
legendary castaway. But instead, in the second stanza, it's so different. It goes into this kind of high language of Albion and this invocation of, you know, martial imagery and braver chief and the ship is leaving and he loved them and he never saw them again. It's very stately and couldn't really be more, less personal.
00:49:05
Speaker
Right. A kind of heroic register that makes it sound like epic or something, but you don't really care. Exactly. Yeah. Exactly.
00:49:14
Speaker
Right, yeah. That's super interesting. I love what you said about the kind of fear he had about the vague or the kind of discomfort he had with that. It makes me think of my friend and colleague, Megan Quigley, who has this great book on modernist vagueness. She writes about wolf, among other things, and about the waves.
00:49:38
Speaker
And I think it's true, I think I know this from Megan, that Wave and Vague are etymologically related. So it makes sense to, I feel like there's something in that, this sort of feeling of being at sea, right, that is like this experience of sort of imprecision or unknowability. I love that first line of the poem. I mean, we're into the second stanza, so that's fine, and we should move along. But Obscurus' night involved the sky.
00:50:08
Speaker
It's so strange, isn't it? Yeah, say something about its strangeness. Well, we've got hyperbole right from the start. We've got an extreme. It's not just obscure. It's not just dark. It's the obscurist. It couldn't be more dramatic, but involve the sky. Yeah, that verb is so interesting. So interesting. I was trying to think of another one where the meter would be preserved that would have a slightly different meaning.
00:50:37
Speaker
It's not a strong, like if Obscurus Knight is hyperbolically awful, involved is not awful, right? Involved is, it's involved with the sky. It's not, you know, covering the sky in a dramatic way. It's very, but you could also see it as involving the sky. In other words, that the sky has lost its agency. Yeah, yeah, right, yeah.
00:51:02
Speaker
And so it's in the mix of all that, the point that we've already touched on. When such a dust and wretch as I washed headlong from on board, a friend's of hope of all bereft, his floating home forever left. Okay, so we've gotten this, right, the ship. So we've gotten this brief kind of suggestion of I am like,
00:51:30
Speaker
you know, I am like the sailor whose story I'm now going to tell you. In the second stanza, what we get as you've so nicely described for us is this sort of incongruously kind of heroic description of his departure from land and also the kind of
00:51:50
Speaker
premonition of his fate. And then what follows in the third stanza and beyond, and now I want for you to walk us through what you find interesting about those moments, Priscilla, is like a
00:52:04
Speaker
a description of the kind of physical circumstances of his being in the water, right? So what are you noting in the third stanza or thereabouts that you want to bring our attention to? Yeah, you know, Comrade, I just want to say one more thing because you said something that was so great about the night.
00:52:23
Speaker
um involving the sky in other words it's it's an absolute extreme where you you typically think of the sky the sky is sometimes light sometimes it's dark the sky is in control but here the night is involving the sky the sky goes under the umbrella of the night which is very unsettling and scary that's so interesting and then this idea of a destined wretch right
00:52:48
Speaker
He sounds kind of pathetic. He's washed headlong from on board. He doesn't have any control. He doesn't have any agency. This terrible ignominious fate has been determined for him in advance. Then we go to this very jarring. But he had everything on his side. He had the bravest chief that could ever be. And everyone on shore left, you know, sent them off with great love and beneficence. Right. And then we have this horrible image of
00:53:17
Speaker
vulnerability. But you know, one thing that I'll say about this poem in general, but particularly the stanza, these weird oxymorons, and these weird sort of negatives that turn into positives in a strange way, like not long beneath the whelming brine, expert to swim, he lay, nor soon he felt his strength decline or courage die away. So he's saying,
00:53:45
Speaker
What he's ostensibly saying is, it wasn't long for him to start really swimming vigorously and with a lot of skill and a lot of strength, but he says it in a way that underscores a potential vulnerability, strength defining, courage going away. And again, so you could say if the
00:54:12
Speaker
tight structure of the poem is in one sense an attempt at keeping vagueness and confusion and unknowability at bay
00:54:22
Speaker
The poem is scored with riddled by kind of vagueness and an inability to come down on one side or the other, right? Is he stronger? Is he not? Like, what are we supposed to feel? Are we supposed to feel? Because he does talk about the courage of this guy. He waged with death a lasting strife, but he was supported by despair of life. There's another oxymoron, right?
00:54:46
Speaker
Yeah. So he thought he was going to die, but so that gave him strength. We would typically think of despair of life as leading to you sinking. Right. Right. And in a way, it's like there's this display of heroic strength on his part, but it's in the context where both his shipmates and we as readers know that that's not going to matter. Exactly. You know, nobody
00:55:15
Speaker
can survive at sea forever, right? Exactly. Right. But I love the way you're calling attention to these negatives. And I was noticing, as you called attention to them in the third stanza, that they were there already, in a way, in the second stanza, right? No braver chief, no other ship, nor him beheld, nor her again. It's like this story told through its negations of what didn't happen or what wasn't the cause. Exactly.
00:55:44
Speaker
And in the fourth stanza, reward his friends. Right, so he shouted. So tell us now what gets established. Because part of what I think I heard you say earlier, Priscilla, is that it seems that Cooper's interest in plucking the story out of the book from which he's read it is that here is the story of the individual abstracted, as it were, from his companions. But we do get moments in the poem that describe, that almost like
00:56:15
Speaker
dramatize the kind of that abstraction happening, right? Like the binds between them sort of stretching, thinning, and breaking, you know? What are you seeing in that fourth stanza about his relation to his friends and so on?
00:56:29
Speaker
I love that, Cameron. So, you know, another interesting thing about the poem, it is about the individual's plight and the horror of being left behind and the horror of feeling that there's no recourse and you're going to inevitably die. But it's also a poem about what it's like to be the survivor. It's a poem about what it's like to witness that.
00:56:52
Speaker
uh and this stanza the next stanza and i believe it's the one right after yes yes yes um and again this negative nor his friends had failed to check the vessels course so in other words the friends didn't fail they did try uh they did try to help them
00:57:07
Speaker
But the furious blast prevailed and they had to be pitiless, pitiless per force. There was a real generosity and understanding there that it wasn't that they wanted to desert him, but they had no choice. And that alliteration as well. I mean, pitiless per force. What a great phrase!
00:57:23
Speaker
I got to use that in my real life someday. And they left their outcast mate. That's their perspective, right? Their outcast mate. He's their mate. They're close to him. And they scutted still before the wind. And then they tried to help some sucker yet they could afford. And such storms allow the cast, the coop, the floated cord.
00:57:45
Speaker
delayed not to bestow. I love that lingering with those commas over these three elements that could potentially save him. But he they knew nor ship nor shore, what air they gave should visit more. It's such a strange, and you know, and it was reminding me, you know, this is
00:58:03
Speaker
a strange irony of life, the relationship between literature and life, but that that Titan submersible that went down a couple of weeks ago. And I was watching the press conference with the head of the Coast Guard and they were saying, well, why are you searching? It's day four. They're going to be dead. And he said, because this is a search and rescue mission, we have to do this. That's exactly what's going on here. Right. In other words, they knew that he they knew in parentheses.
00:58:30
Speaker
Nothing they do is going to help, but yet they still have to go through those gestures of throwing out the cask. I'm not exactly sure what the coop is. We should look that up. I should know too, but I have a crazy theory about that line. Do you want to hear it? Oh, I do. What's your theory? Well, so it first came to me with the coop, which I also don't know what it is, and maybe that's what liberated my theory.
00:58:54
Speaker
Unknowability is a very good thing sometimes. It's generative. I'm not the seafaring sort, but it just made me think of his name, Cooper. And then when I thought that, then the cask made me think of the task.
00:59:11
Speaker
Oh, God. But wait for it. This is really dumb reading. But the part of the last part, which I think is interesting, and I don't know that we need to read it biographically necessarily, but the floated chord, you know, I think of like the umbilical chord or something like that as a, you know, a kind of attempt
00:59:34
Speaker
I don't know, it's a sort of biological way of keeping the vulnerable child nourished and so on while it's in utero and, you know, whatever. And then it's severed, you know, upon birth. And that marks a kind of first separation that
00:59:51
Speaker
You know what I mean, right? Okay. You're blowing my mind. You're blowing my mind. I'm so into this mother, the loss of the mother. That's right. That's right. You see it. Yeah. I'm so with you on this. I love it. I mean, we were both trained by Lanny Hammer who taught us to look for the word Frost and Frost poetry. Lanny, if you're listening, you're happy for teaching us to read that way.
01:00:12
Speaker
in the second stanza in that last line, nor him beheld, nor her again. It's very interesting because- Yeah, what's that feminine pronoun do? What is that feminine pronoun? Is it Albion? I thought Albion was male. Is it the ship because ships were female, or is it the mother because the wretch, remember I read that line from the poem about his mother, is when he calls himself, that's when I first became a wretch.
01:00:37
Speaker
Yeah, it's a way of sneaking in that feminine pronoun. That's interesting. Yes, that's great. But in any case, they throw out all the lifelines and whatever they can attempt, but they know it's all in vain. They're
Personal Parallels and Poetic Imagery
01:00:53
Speaker
going through the motions, as it were,
01:00:57
Speaker
Is that like Cooper's friends and family who tried everything they could to? You tell us, I don't know. I mean, I, you know, when I was reading it last night again, Comrade, I sort of thought about that. I thought about it being almost a really moving reflection on, or on one level, right? A moving reflection on how it feels to love someone that you can't save. Right.
01:01:22
Speaker
And you can try everything, but you know you have to try, but you know that it's all ultimately going to be in vain. So is it performative? Is it coming out of guilt? I mean, I absolutely think that he is working through. He's lost the person.
01:01:39
Speaker
a year or so before he wrote this poem that would throw him the cask, the coop, and the floating cord. But he had a lot of guilt about, and he writes about this in the letters, a lot of guilt about dragging his relatives and friends down into despair with him.
01:01:56
Speaker
And so I think that that is part of what's going on here when he's in the next stanza, when he says, nor cruel as it seemed, could he their haste himself condemn. In other words, they're being self protective, they're pitiless per force. I mean, come on, you've read The Critics Daughter, you see how it's registering for me with my dad. But you know, aware that flight in such a sea alone could rescue them. They have to save themselves, right? They've got to get away. But even as he's generously
01:02:26
Speaker
understanding that what his mates have done is necessary, and they really did not have a choice, he still lingers over that feeling in that next in the couplet, right? Yet bitter felt it still to die, deserted, and his friends so nigh, and that word deserted
01:02:48
Speaker
He hasn't been deserted, really. They had to go on. And that lingering, the die deserted, the alliteration, you go to the deserted, and there's a comma. And he feels that is the bedrock feeling of this poem, the bitterness of feeling deserted by his friends and by God.
01:03:09
Speaker
Right. There's a there's a beautiful moment in one there were a lot of biographies of Cooper in the 19th century, even in the 20th century, there are a lot of Christian biographies of him. There's a famous one is called the stricken deer because he compares himself to a stricken deer and the task another version of the castaway. Right. A deer that's been
01:03:29
Speaker
uh hunted and killed um or not i don't think he's killed i think he's limping along um anticipating the worthless white heart uh but he
01:03:41
Speaker
there's a moment in one of the biographies that says that some relative of his saw him when he was on his deathbed with a smile taking and so they interpreted that as he thought he was a castaway he thought he was a wretch he thought he was destined but he wasn't did he saw god now who knows if that's you know the religious the more conventional religious narrative kind of being overlaid on his his vision of himself as irrevocably damned but
01:04:09
Speaker
It sounds like it might also be survivors trying to assuage their own feelings of guilt. Yes, exactly. They threw themselves a cask. Yeah. Well, when you described how moving it is to sort of see someone suffering and not be able to help them, I'm thinking of versions of that as well. But it also, you know, I'm thinking of like what it's like to be suffering and to
01:04:38
Speaker
to know that friends and people who love you feel badly and would want to help you, but to know also that they can't and that you're separated from them. Your suffering separates you from them. They can't feel the thing with you, you know?
01:04:57
Speaker
Exactly, exactly. And how sad is it that in this next answer, which I would say is one of the most jarring moments in the poem where he suddenly goes... Yeah, remind us of it.
01:05:09
Speaker
He long survives who lives in our in ocean self-appelled and so long he It's like he pulls out and we get this axiom, right? He long survives like anyone who's who's alive for an hour in the ocean holding himself up That's that's really good. Let's give him a gold star for survival, right? And then he were
01:05:30
Speaker
turns to the individual. In so long he, with unspent power, his destiny repelled another oxymoron. You can't repel destiny. That's the point, right? And ever as the minutes flew, so we have this image of like, time is very interesting, this poem too, right? That this hour on the ocean is like a year, right, in normal life, because it's such a long survival. But then the minutes are flying by, and he's entreating help, but we already know that he
01:05:59
Speaker
they're not going to be able to help them. And so then he entreats help, but then, okay, it's not about help. It's about saying goodbye. Right. And it's in this kind of, I don't know how to properly read the kind of cultural connotations of the turn to French there or something at this moment, but it feels to me like a kind of dramatic and
01:06:22
Speaker
self-dramatizing kind of thing for an English speaker to do, a Jew, you know? Okay, I completely agree. It was so funny. I was reading this last night talking to my ex-husband, who you know, from grad school, and he's a poet. And Richard said, that word almost makes you want to laugh. There's something about it that feels very performative and very, maybe we could say it's another, you know, obviously he needs the rhyme, but
01:06:49
Speaker
Yeah, I don't know. There's another distancing mechanism. Maybe, and I don't know how much of that is just sort of the impossibility of taking off like the, you know, removing my memory of like, I'm thinking of the scene in Pee Wee's Big Adventure when
01:07:15
Speaker
For me, the rhyme that ends the next stanza really gets me.
01:07:25
Speaker
So at length his transient respite passed his comrades, who before had heard his voice in every blast, could catch the sound no more. For then, by toil subdued, he drank the stifling wave, and then he sank." Yeah. And in jams, you know, the drank to the stifling wave in jams. But when I was reading it out loud, I was sort of lingering over it. I didn't want to go to the next line, comrade, I was like.
01:07:54
Speaker
And I wonder, is that how you drown? I mean, it's such a weird way of describing. It's like the water gets into you. The water gets into you, exactly. And toil subdued is very interesting. You could do an interesting reading of this poem. I think we read this poem. I took a class on the Jorjek.
01:08:14
Speaker
in English poetry with Kevin Goodman, who teaches at Berkeley. She's a brilliant scholar of 18th century and early 19th century poetry. And we talked about honorable toil, and this castaway is absolutely toiling honorably, and perhaps the most honorable toil is the toil that one does with no hope of reward. Yeah, but he's subdued by his own toil, right? But he's subdued by his own toil, another oxymoron. Yeah.
01:08:43
Speaker
And then we got, well, on the topic of oxymoron, no poet wept him.
01:08:51
Speaker
Except that it's happening right now. Except that it's happening right now. Yeah, exactly. Another negative that becomes a positive or positive becomes a negative. Exactly. There's a distinction here between narrative and poetry, the narrative sincere. And so I guess I wonder, this is a question for you Priscilla, is there something like, is Cooper, is there some kind of meaningful distinction or distinction that's worth thinking about?
01:09:16
Speaker
as we sort of speculate about how Cooper would have understood this, between the way that a prose narrative account might memorialize someone like this poor castaway and the way that the poem that, you know, because it's poetry,
01:09:34
Speaker
the poem is doing it now. Is it a different kind of writerly commemoration?
Prose vs. Poetic Memorialization
01:09:41
Speaker
Yes, yes. And you know it's interesting because when I was at Yale, I taught a seminar on the poetry of sensibility. And when I got to Vassar, I taught a
01:09:54
Speaker
class on um sorry about the honking that's okay city everybody just some background texture it's like getting in i taught um the second half of the 18th century they had a survey class and it was called sense and sensibility and it was a prose and poetry
01:10:13
Speaker
So it was interesting to read like a cent, teach a sentimental journey and sense and sensibility and a Gothic novel alongside the sensibility poetry. Right. And I think that, you know, it's very interesting. No poet wept him and tears by bards or hero's shadow like immortalized the dead. Is he sort of saying, is this a classic
01:10:34
Speaker
kupyrian moment of self-effacement like i'm not really a poet or is he saying i'm not weeping for him i'm just writing about him right it could go either way um but the and narrative is sincere and um it records these details his name is age we don't have his age in the poem the poem is more abstract right it's worth
01:10:57
Speaker
is worth. Is that like his title on the ship or whatever it might be? And tears by bards or heroes shed a like immortalize the dead. So is he saying, I'm a bard, but because a hero has already done it, Anson, I don't need to immortalize him in this poem.
01:11:16
Speaker
I can do something else. And then going to the next stanza that weird false logic, I therefore, in other words, he's almost demoting himself. He's almost assuming the position of, you know, I'm just, I'm just writing about this guy. I'm not a bard. He's already been immortalized by
01:11:34
Speaker
Anson. I therefore purpose not or dream discounting on his fate, discounting ironic because that's such an archaic, high poetic word. So he's like, I feel like he is a bard right there. discounting on his fate to give the melancholy theme a more enduring date. He's sort of saying I'm not writing Alyssa to us.
01:11:56
Speaker
I'm not writing an elegy in a country churchyard, right? I'm not writing a great enduring, an elegy in a country churchyard being the most popular poem of the second half of the 18th century. He would have been thinking about that, right, by Thomas Gray. And then he just says, well, it's really about misery, still delights to trace it, some ones in another case, in other words, is it just kind of solipsism, right? And another oxymoron, misery is delighting.
01:12:26
Speaker
to trace its semblance in another's case. Misery likes company, right? Misery likes company. Yeah, I think you're onto something here. I mean, no surprise. But what I'm thinking is that he's saying, in a way, because Anson has already done this, it provides Cooper with a kind of license to sort of use the story in a way that's autobiographical.
01:12:55
Speaker
Yes. It's like the story is already written down. You can go look it up. I don't need to tell you his name and his worth and his age. Oh, that's great. But instead I can use it as a metaphor.
01:13:08
Speaker
And I can use it as a metaphor in two ways. I can make it autobiographical, and I can also make it emblematic of all human beings. Because we are all castaways, or we all feel that we are castaways at one point or another in our tumultuous existence on the sea. And though our shipmates may not help us, and they may need to sail on in our time of distress, we at least have the stories of other people who have suffered our wretched fate.
01:13:37
Speaker
You know, we're kept company by those or something. Well, I mean, isn't that, you know, one of the most fundamental reasons why we read, why we love sad, we make mixtapes with sad songs? Yeah, that's why, that's why, why there are the blues, right? I feel like we need a little musical soundtrack right now. I know, I could press one of these buttons on my screen, but I don't think it would give us what we wanted.
01:14:02
Speaker
So, and I love that, but misery still delights to trace its semblance in another's case. And there maybe the sort of rhyme is doing something kind of self-descriptive, the sort of tracing, you know, kind of likeness, but aurally, you know, it's, it's as though, you know, it's another way of saying what I just tried to say clumsily is that like,
01:14:27
Speaker
Cooper in reading the story from Anson thinks, oh, my life rhymes with that one, you know, or my experience rhymes with that. It's a kind of tracing of one. Yes. And the vagueness around the word tracing, I think is also very interesting because it could be I'm just I'm putting my finger on it and I'm just tracing. In other words, I'm just feeling a sense of identification and commiseration and sympathy. Tracing can also mean writing, like being original.
01:14:54
Speaker
All right. Right. So is it copying or being original? I think that's interesting. Yeah. And then this last stanza, so glorious, I have to say, probably the most sort of high, sounds the most like Cooper's Only Hymns.
Final Stanza Analysis and Conclusion
01:15:13
Speaker
He wrote this beautiful hymn, God Moves in Mysterious Way, his wonders to perform. He plants his footsteps in the sea and rides upon the storm.
01:15:24
Speaker
I had no idea that was Cooper. I knew those lines, but I didn't know that was Cooper. That's great. He also invented varieties, the spice of life come from. Oh. That's a gloss on a line from the task. Cooper is everywhere. Everyone will soon see. He's everywhere. Talk about that last answer for us. Yeah, so this poem, God was in a mysterious way. There's
01:15:50
Speaker
One of the later stanzas in that poem, see if I can, his purposes will ripen fast.
01:15:57
Speaker
unfolding every hour. The bud may have a bitter taste, but sweet will be the flower. This is the inverse of that. Yeah, sorry. So that hymn is more optimistic. This is not, yeah. This is the opposite. But it's interesting that in that hymn, it starts with God on the sea, riding upon the storm, turning bitterness into sweetness. Here, no voice divine, the storm allayed. God is utterly absent.
01:16:25
Speaker
Remember we have the voice where they aren't able to hear his voice anymore. The mates are unable to hear the castaway's voice. Now the castaway is unvisited by a divine voice that would have the power to allay the storm. No light propitious shown when snatched from all effectual aid. Talk about a lack of agency, complete powerlessness and vulnerability. But then we perished each alone.
01:16:54
Speaker
but I beneath a rougher sea and whelmed in deeper gulfs than he. I have just given you in this poem.
01:17:04
Speaker
The drank and sink being one of the prime examples of it, as you so as do lead-o to the comm run. A brutal vision of what it's like to drown or what it's like to die seeing healthy, secure people and having them unable to help you and you die completely alone. And then he's like, and you know what? This seemed pretty darn awful.
01:17:29
Speaker
But my life is even worse. Yeah, bad as that was. Bad as that was. It doesn't even come close. Yeah. I love the attention you've put on the we in that third to last line. We perished each alone. And that's the line Mr. Ramsey, or one of the lines he quotes.
01:17:49
Speaker
Okay, because we're totally unprepared for it. We've been following this narrative about the third person, the sailor, so that we perished each alone. Is that coupling the poet and the subject of the poem? We're both perishing alone? It is. Or all of us perish alone, you know?
01:18:11
Speaker
I think it is coupling the two of them, but it is also, and when Mr. Ramsey says it, Cam interprets it as, oh, there goes my,
01:18:22
Speaker
You know, demanding father again, drawing all the attention to himself and saying, I lost my wife. Well, I lost my mother. You know, she's saying stop, you know, with your narcissistic wallowing in your own grief. But I think this line went snatched from all effectual aid. We parachute you alone. I remember Jill Campbell talking about it in terms of a paradox of communal isolation.
01:18:43
Speaker
That was the phrase that she used. And I do think that it resonates that way. All of us, when we die, but we all die. So are we united in that? We all struggle, we all suffer, we all feel like castaways at various points in our lives. So we're united in that.
01:19:02
Speaker
But it's also like a kind of asynchronous communion or something, right? We all meet this fate, but we all meet it at moments that are, if we're going to be precise, different. Yes.
01:19:16
Speaker
And right. So there's something interesting I guess now as I say that about the tense of that. We perished each alone in the past tense. Who's talking to us then? Well, exactly. And whelmed is past tense also. Although it could go both ways actually the more I think about it. Wellmed could be I am feeling overwhelmed. I'm feeling overwhelmed right now. I think whelmed is so interesting too. The feeling of being overwhelmed and we could
01:19:45
Speaker
you know, put that alongside the points that we've been making about the tight structure, the intricacy of the of the verse form, this sort of stay against chaos and the feeling of being overwhelmed and rougher see and heed a perfect rhyme. Yeah. And it is like that clincher you get at the end of the I mean, you really have a feeling of, oh, wow. Yeah. At the end. This is
01:20:12
Speaker
horrific. This is dark. I get it. It makes sense. It's terribly sad. It's awful. And it enacts what it's describing, right? Because we move from the we to the I. The we splits apart. It's I and he at the end.
01:20:33
Speaker
Right. Right. It's not trying to say something consoling about our shared faith. It's refusing consolation. It's the inverse of these hymns. Right. Yeah. But I beneath a rougher sea and whelmed in deeper gulfs than he. It's a shocker of a conclusion. It's a shocker. Yeah.
01:20:57
Speaker
Priscilla, this was such a wonderful conversation, and I want to keep talking to you, but we've got to bring it to a close, I think. I want to thank you for coming on the podcast and sharing this time with me and with our listeners. I bet people are going to really love hearing you think about this poem. But before we say goodbye, I wonder if I could ask you to read it one more time for us.
01:21:25
Speaker
Sure. This was such a wrenching joy. That's what people typically say about talking to me for an hour.
01:21:39
Speaker
Oh, you threw me a lot of coops. You threw me a lot of cords. It was beautiful. All right. Obscurus night involved the sky. The Atlantic billows roared when such a destined wretch as I washed headlong from on board of friends of hope of all bereft, his floating home forever left.
01:22:06
Speaker
No braver chief could Albion boast than he with whom he went, nor ever ship left Albion's coast with warmer wishes sent. He loved them both, but both in vain, nor him beheld, nor her again. Not long beneath the whelming brine, expert to swim he lay, nor soon he felt his strength decline or courage die away.
01:22:35
Speaker
but waged with death a lasting strife supported by despair of life. He shouted, nor his friends had failed to check the vessel's course, but so the furious blast prevailed that pitiless perforce, they left their outcast mate behind and scutted still before the wind.
01:23:01
Speaker
Some sucker yet they could afford, and such as storms allow, the cask, the coop, the floated cord, delayed not to bestow. But he they knew, nor ship, nor shore, what air they gave, should visit more. Nor, cruel as it seemed, could he their haste himself condemn.
01:23:27
Speaker
aware that flight in such a sea alone could rescue them. Yet bitter felt it still to die deserted and his friends so nigh. He long survives who lives an hour in ocean self upheld and so long he with unspent power his destiny repelled.
01:23:52
Speaker
and ever as the minutes flew, entreated help or cried adieu. At length, his transient respite passed, his comrades, who before had heard his voice in every blast, could catch the sound no more. For then, by toil subdued, he drank the stifling wave and then he sank.
01:24:21
Speaker
No poet wept him, but the page of narrative sincere that tells his name, his worth, his age, is wet with Anson's tear. And tears by bards or heroes shed, alike immortalize the dead. I therefore purpose not or dream discanting on his fate to give the melancholy theme a more enduring date.
01:24:51
Speaker
But misery still delights to trace its semblance in another's case. No voice divine the storm allayed, no light propitious shone. When, snatched from all effectual aid, we perished, each alone. But I, beneath a rougher sea, am whelmed in deeper gulfs than he.
01:25:22
Speaker
Priscilla Gilman, thank you so much for reading the poem with me. Thanks for reading it again. Thanks for talking with me. It's been an absolute delight. Thank you so much, Comrade. I read it very differently the second time after our conversation.
01:25:38
Speaker
Should we have a whole other conversation now to get into what was going on? Okay. That's the sequel. Stay tuned, everyone. Thank you listeners for following along with us and make sure you're following the podcast to get episodes that are in the works already and very exciting, I'm happy to say. In the meantime, though, be well, everyone, and take care. Bye.