Robert, sorry for a few months of absence. I share your love for the sound of this poem, which as you say, seems to be so much of its content—its hinging and unhinging at once. Major Jackson had an essay last year where he implored poets, especially white poets in regard to race (but also more broadly), to engage subjects about themselves which are not kind or lofty. He suggested that through such endeavors we might find meaning in greater metaphors and sounds like those that abound in Greville's poem.

Jackson and Greville are both addressing shame, which is among the great undercurrents in poetry. More than almost any other, shame is an auditory emotion, inextricably linked to resonance. It is an emotion of tone, and the tie which inherently binds poetry and song. It is recursive, a dancer, which appears and reappears, sometimes confrontational and later as a ghost—refrain, chorus, and verse.

I am reminded of a comment once made by Hart Crane (truly among the 20th century's great poets of shame) that he often used words not based upon their dictionary definitions but by the meaning of their sounds. Greville's metaphors, not always clean—his jumps, not always clear, are explicated in this language, and should remind us all of the days when books were read aloud, even if one was alone, standing only with himself as his audience.

Thank you Laurence for this post with its idea, fresh to me, about the auditory and shame-- a feeling linked, in my conventional notion of it, with being seen. The chanting or muttering of words (as in Greville's hypnotic rhythms) I associate with the dispelling or avoiding of certain feelings, including grief and shame.

Yes, the figures and jumps in "All my senses" are sometimes not fully "clean": a clotted, smudged kind of emotional clarity that seems immensely strong to me.

The expression of shame that Greville voices in this poem stays in tense relation to idealizing impulses, the ways in which the imagination exalts the object of the poet's ardor. Love and shame are linked; rhapsody over the other turns to excoriation of the self, a kind of negative self-love. In the longer version of the poem--24 additional lines that fall between line 24 & 25 (Vulcan thinks to dwell alone. / I gave reins to this conceit)—the speaker envisions himself as Mars and Apollo, writing himself into myth as a kind of dynamic duo that is way over the top in its grandiosity. Although the additional lines make for a dramatic contrast with the act of "giving reins to conceit," I do like the shorter version (here) better, maybe because the obsession comes across with greater intensity and concentration without the further elaborated description of the bodies blushing and flaming. Robert, I know you have mentioned (In a "Poet's Choice" column in the Washington Post) Thom Gunn's edition of Fulke Greville's poems. It's worth noting that Gunn thinks the poem as good as Marvell, and in the same way: "It is the result of a confrontation between, on the one hand, an awareness of the grace and delicacy of courtly love at its best, and on the other, an equally full awareness of the way things are in life itself, where such idealism is imply irrelevant." Gunn's edition of the poems will be re-issued this spring by University of Chicago Press.

I connect this poem to Greville's "Caelica, I overnight was finely used," but in that poem, the regret turns fierce.

Josh, Good to know about the forthcoming red-issue of the Gunn edition. The best selection of Greville I have is in English Renaissance Poetry (ed. John Williams) -- about 18 pages.

Robert, I know you have mentioned (In a "Poet's Choice" column in the Washington Post) Thom Gunn's edition of Fulke Greville's poems. It's worth noting that Gunn thinks the poem as good as Marvell, and in the same way: "It is the result of a confrontation between, on the one hand, an awareness of the grace and delicacy of courtly love at its best, and on the other, an equally full awareness of the way things are in life itself, where such idealism is simply irrelevant."

Joshua, I agree that the conflict between Petrarchan idealism and reality is presented well in this poem, especially in its tone of “playfulness and self-mockery” (to quote Robert Pinsky) to cover up (or emphasize) the speaker’s shame.

But to include, as well, a moral reference to the divine realm while standing over Cynthia’s (now empty?) bed is, for me, an unsatisfying combination of tones. When someone who has done something shameful piously invokes the divine, I am distrustful of the speaker’s sincerity. (Or was that part of Greville’s purpose?)

Have to say I love this explication. I've not read this poem in years; reading it today brought me in mind of Donne's "The Flea". Both Greville and Donne manage to wind shame and an undercurrent of intense longing together in a dance that occurs within everyone yet is scarcely expressed with any accuracy. Greville's self deprecation is relatable with respect to the lofty heights his paramour's body reaches.

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Like Dealia, I hear (maybe I've already made this clear?) self-deprecation and shame in Greville's terse apothegms, those moral insights he uses as a sort of counter-motif to his story of a failed assignation and his dizzy flight of fancy.

So yes, MaryAnn, I do think the disjunction between piety and hanky-panky is part of the poem's energy: like Donne and Marvell, and in some ways more savagely than either, Greville forces the sacred and the profane, the moral and the immoral, senses and reason, into unexpected, in a way violent, conjunction.

(As I understand the old "faculty" psychology, about to be discarded by more empirical notions but still powerful for Greville, both memory and "fancy" (roughly, "imagination"-- though animals have it!) are senses. They are "inward" senses that examine and rearrange the particular evidence of the five outward senses. Theology or piety aside, the poem's closing lines are an attempt to govern all those sensory faculties with somewiser or superior element within oneself.)

That is my elaborate, tentative, thinking-back-to-school gloss on lines like "Fancy's scales are false of weight."

The wonderful Greville poem John Skoyles refers to is online at:
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Hi everyone -- I'm enjoying the discussion here. Following up on what Robert just said about the moral disjunction that is created here:

There is something thrillingly subversive about this poem, even though it allows social order to be restored at the end. The moral shift desire brings with its "sure to bring apoplexy to the pious" line in the night where smooth is fair is both provocative and slightly disturbing coming from the narrator who is, we must remember, off stalking the bedroom window of a married woman.

The combination of these darker aspects of desire with the language of courtly love is interesting to me and much grimmer than Donne's "The Flea" which, despite its parasitic conceit, remains far more romantic than Greville here. Also darker than the loneliness of Wyatt's "They flee from me that sometime did me seek."

So I'm struck by how raw a glimpse into something dark and grim that Greville gives us, perhaps what Laurence was talking about when he mentioned Jackson pushing poets to explore something less kind about themselves. The call to morality at the end strikes me as simply the twinge of shame and remorse during the refractory period, it will be night again soon, and with that coming night the final couplet strikes me not as the musings of someone shamed, but rather a firm rejection of starry-eyed desire from afar.

Sound and shame: I like the double meaning of sound here, whether intended or not, especially sound as in fit. Though I am over my head here, let me simply dive in.

I gave reins to this conceit,
Hope went on the wheel of lust;
Fancy's scales are false of weight,
Thoughts take thought that go of trust.

As weight does not rhyme with conceit

Here reading strains and skips a beat

Leaving hollow banks behind
Who can neither forward move,
Nor, if rivers be unkind,
Turn away or leave to love.

Move is to love

As dove to groove

Love the postings on shame and sound. It’s an amusing, meta kind of shame in the poem, I think, one that not only refers to but also arises from sight/sound, rather than the more incurable (and perhaps less playful) sort that might have resulted from actual action. Since the love itself remains un-consummated/internal, the poet’s desire can stay at least a little bit “divine.” The lust of the poem is rooted muddily in the natural world: streams, hollow banks, rivers, arctic poles. But the mind, fiery though it may be, allows Greville to invest enough time in giving reign to his half-pious fantasy to let Cynthia and the danger of irrevocably humanizing himself - slip away. Only the conceit goes wild. Perhaps that’s partially why in the final lines –a kind of denouement w/o climax, the “inward senses” must get superior attention. And the sounds of shame are tempered by those absent eighth syllables - a lovely, funny marking of the difference between holding a temptation (safely if “not well”) with one’s starry eyes - and with one’s hands?

Rachel De Woskin's "denoument without climax" and Josh Kellar's "grim" and "refractory" represent two other ways of describing the discomfort or mistrust MaryAnn feels with the resolution of the poem.

Is it appropriate to find an anatomical joke (by the poet on himself) in "Arctic pole"?

(HAP-- I think "Thoughts take thought that go of trust" means that his love-thoughts were too trusting of the lady's resolve-- his mind functionally naive and too-trusting in its sexual excitement. And pronunciation in the 16th century was not only different from ours, but more various from person to person, region to region, family to family. Print and literacy make language more conservative, uniform, slow-to-change.)

The seven-syllable tetrameter line, with its emphasis on the first syllable, seems tricky to read--I think I hear Robert, in his reading, display extra-sensitivity at those places where the phrasing corresponds to the line neatly, and where he needs to vocalize the enjambment, which is difficult in a shortish line, that streams away like Cynthia on the run. It must help to have every fourth line end-stop, in effect making the poem a series of cross-rhymed quatrains leading to a final couplet. I can't help but wonder if "the line" Sol passeth o'er, is, in some meta-figurative way, also a line of poetry; certainly the "bed of play" is a verbal one--Cynthia escapes with time while the poet makes poetry instead of love; if he makes love through poetry, he ends up making it with the poem and not Cynthia. "Fire / desire; move / love"--these sound like cliched rhymes, even circa 1633. "Conceit /weight; lust / trust" wake me up, though, to the implications of new relationships in our experiences.

But the mind, fiery though it may be, allows Greville to invest enough time in giving reign to his half-pious fantasy to let Cynthia and the danger of irrevocably humanizing himself -- slip away

Rachel, are you suggesting that the speaker’s fantasy is that he allowed Cynthia to slip away? Also, I can’t help but wonder how pious the speaker would have been if Cynthia had not slipped away, but, instead, succumbed to his charms. For it appears that the speaker’s moral shift appears only after Cynthia has left the room (of her own volition, I think).

Is it appropriate to find an anatomical joke (by the poet on himself) in "Arctic pole"?

Whew! I’m glad I’m not the only one. (Must be something in the Inman Square water, Robert.)

He that lets his Cynthia lie

Naked on a bed of play,

To say prayers ere she die,

Teacheth time to run away.

Let no love-desiring heart

In the stars go seek his fate,

Love is only Nature's art.

Wonder hinders Love and Hate.

None can well behold with eyes

But what underneath him lies.

I wish someone could explain to me how the closing lines above are expressing shame, except perhaps for the lack of success in the seduction. (Quite different from attempting seduction at all.)Does the narrator want time to run away? So letting your Cynthia lie naked on a bed of play is apparently not the right thing to do. Is there any expression of repentence here?

I have thought of shame as primarily a visual emotion, relating to being seen by others. (See In Others' Eyes by Guenter Harry Seidler.)

Hi MaryAnn,

Nope - just that the poet takes so much time rhapsodizing that he allows Cynthia to escape, thus leaving fantasy in the realm of fantasy. And of course letting his conceit go on for so long that she leaves the scene is an intentional device, since he's keeper of the characters and plot. . . He could have taken the poem in a less prayerful direction - but it's her slipping away that determines the end/moves the lines toward moralizing once the potential for literal love is lost.

R