'One of the most unmeddlesome of women'

 Having recently read Richard Holmes's excellent account of Tennyson's early years, The Boundless Deep, I was amused to come across this picture, in J.G. Riewald's Beerbohm's Literary Caricatures (a great book for browsing in). It shows Thomas Woolner, the only sculptor in the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, sculpting his portrait bust of the still beardless Tennyson in 1857 – the bust that is now in Poets' Corner in Westminster Abbey. The caption reads: 

Mrs Tennyson: 'You know, Mr Woolner, I'm one of the most unmeddlesome of women; but – when (I'm only asking), when do you begin modelling his halo?'

'A single Hound'

 Consciousness. I know I have it, but have no idea what it is or where it comes from (nor does anyone else, whatever they may say). I am equally sure that I have a soul, but again have no idea what it is or where it comes from. Are consciousness and soul the same thing, or aspects of the same thing? Is soul perhaps a deeper form of consciousness, one that somehow connects with a reality beyond time and space? Both consciousness and soul seem identical with our ultimate selves. We inhabit consciousness, and infer everything else. 
  These are deep waters. Over to you, Emily Dickinson –

This Consciousness that is aware
Of Neighbors and the Sun
Will be the one aware of Death
And that itself alone

Is traversing the interval
Experience between
And most profound experiment
Appointed unto Men—

How adequate unto itself
Its properties shall be
Itself unto itself and none
Shall make discovery.

Adventure most unto itself
The Soul condemned to be—
Attended by a single Hound
Its own identity.

This poem was sent to me by my friend, the Emily Dickinson maven, who regards it as one of her most profound. I agree – it's a gem. 

Borges, Scott, Naipaul

This morning I took delivery of a new Panama hat, the old one having become an offence to the eye, and summer being in the offing. The new hat, I was delighted to note, was made by the firm of Borges & Scott – a nice literary double-act. Sadly, Jorge Luis had no connection with the hat-making dynasty, which is based in Ecuador, where they still make their hats by hand, weaving the narrow fibres of toquilla straw into cooling headgear. 
Then, this afternoon, I went with Mrs N to a hospital where she had an appointment with an eye specialist. He turned out to be called Mr Biswas. She didn't ask him if he'd got his own house yet.  

Changed

 Here, for no particular reason, is a poem by Charles Stuart Calverley which perfectly demonstrates what Pope called the art of sinking in poetry – also the perils of ending a stanza with a two-syllable line. 

Changed

    I know not why my soul is rack'd:
        Why I ne'er smile as was my wont:
    I only know that, as a fact,
            I don't.

    I used to roam o'er glen and glade
        Buoyant and blithe as other folk:
    And not unfrequently I made
            A joke.

    A minstrel's fire within me burn'd.
       I'd sing, as one whose heart must break,
   Lay upon lay: I nearly learn'd
           To shake.

   All day I sang; of love, of fame,
       Of fights our fathers fought of yore,
   Until the thing almost became
           A bore.

   I cannot sing the old songs now!
       It is not that I deem then low;
  'Tis that I can't remember how
           They go.

   I could not range the hills till high
       Above me stood the summer moon:
   And as to dancing, I could fly
           As soon.

   The sports, to which with boyish glee
       I sprang erewhile, attract no more;
   Although I am but sixty-three
           Or four.

   Nay, worse than that, I've seem'd of late
       To shrink from happy boyhood — boys
   Have grown so noisy, and I hate
           A noise.

   They fright me, when the beech is green,
       By swarming up its stem for eggs:
   They drive their horrid hoops between
           My legs: —

   It's idle to repine, I know;
       I'll tell you what I'll do instead:
   I'll drink my arrowroot, and go
           To bed.

Calverley was a noted university wit and a brilliant classicist who, uniquely, managed to win the Chancellor's Prize for Latin verse at Oxford (whence he was sent down for misbehaviour – he was an extremely high-spirited undergraduate) and Cambridge. He was a keen smoker, and wrote a heartfelt 'Ode to Tobacco'.

Caine

 It's not only the poets who are getting older (spoiler alert: we all are). Last night, for some reason, I was looking up Michael Caine, and discovered that he is all of 93. I've always liked Caine, who seems to be that rare thing among actors, a proper mensch, a regular guy. I wondered if he'd made an appearance on this blog – and sure enough he had, on this very day in 2009 (yes, the blog is that old, and older). Here's the post:

Quote of the Day

'We've got three and a half million layabouts laying about on benefits, and I'm 76, getting up at 6am to go to work to keep them.' Sir Michael Caine, telling it like it is.
The British 'welfare state' has turned into a national disaster, perpetuating poverty, idleness and dependence - at huge and ever-growing expense. It's a model that could only work in a nation with a strong, homogeneous identity and sense of common cause, and a strong work ethic. None of which apply to modern Britain.
See also De Tocqueville's Memoir on Pauperism, and Corelli Barnett's The Audit of War.

I rather hope Sir Michael is not taking too keen an interest in the state of the nation these days, when there are around ten million people of working age (not all layabouts, of course) on benefits – a situation that is in large part a legacy of the insane policy of 'lockdown'.
Don't tell Caine – it might finish him off. 

A Birthday

 The poets are getting older: Kay Ryan is 80, Dana Gioia is 75, Dick Davis is 81, Billy Collins is 85 – and today Ted Kooser turns 87. He's a poet who tends to get dismissed as a Midwesterner dispensing homely wisdom, but I think this is unfair (and reminiscent of the way some have dismissed Willa Cather as a Midwestern chronicler of life on the Prairie, and nothing more). I've posted a few Kooser poems – here and here (and I hope he's having a happier birthday than that hinted at in the poem 'Birthday').
Like Wallace Stevens, Kooser was for many years an executive in an insurance company – and, also like Stevens, he wrote a poem called 'Sunday Morning', but it is no homage and bears little or no resemblance to Stevens's masterpiece. It is more in the nature of a suburban idyll, and very nicely done, I reckon...

Sunday Morning

Now it is June again, one of those
leafy Sundays drifting through galaxies
of maple seeds. Somewhere, a mourning dove
touches her keyboard twice, a lonely F,
and then falls silent. Here in the house
the Sunday papers lie in whitecaps
over the living-room floor. Among them floats
the bridal page, that window of many panes,
reflecting, black and white, patches of sky
and puffs of starlit cloud becoming
faces. On each bright brow the same light falls,
the nuptial moon held up just out of sight
to the left. The brides all lift their eyes
and smile to see the heavens stopped for them.
And love is everywhere. Cars that have all week
lurched and honked with sour commuters are now
like smooth canoes packed soft with families. 
A church bell strides through the green perfume
of locust trees and tolls its thankfulness.
The mourning dove, to her astonishment,
blunders upon a distant call in answer. 

Miss Bart and Mrs Lloyd

 I'm just back from yet another visit to Worthing (see Nigeness passim). This time my reading on the train was Edith Wharton's The House of Mirth, which I resolved to read after enjoying The Age of Innocence so much. I'm about halfway through, and finding it even more impressive than The Age of Innocence, and every bit as enjoyable, with the satirical humour closer to the surface, though the tragic undercurrents are unmissable. Miss Lily Bart – beautiful, witty, sophisticated, and in need of a seriously rich husband – is a wholly convincing and attractive creation, painted in the round, with full awareness of her weaknesses. 
   I have just read the crucial chapter that revolves around an evening of tableaux vivants  – a now defunct form of entertainment in which people posed as famous works of art, with suitable costume, lighting and props. This show is being lavishly staged by luminaries of New York society, under the direction of a fashionable artist, and is designed to impress. Lily Bart does indeed make an impression, eliciting a unanimous, spontaneous 'Oh!' from the spectators as soon as she appears, in the likeness of Joshua Reynolds's 'Mrs Lloyd'. Mrs Lloyd? This was not a painting I know, so I sought it out...

The portrait is of Mrs Richard Bennett Lloyd, wife of a British army captain who served in America, and it shows her as an ultra-elegant lady, carving her marital surname in the trunk of a tree. Lily Bart chose well when she decided to pose as Mrs Lloyd, and Wharton describes the effect: 'Her pale draperies, and the background of foliage against which she stood, served only to relieve the long dryad-like curves that swept upward from her poised foot to her lifted arm. The noble buoyancy of her attitude, its suggestion of soaring grace, revealed the touch of poetry in her beauty that Selden [who is in love with her, but not 'suitable'] always felt in her presence, yet lost the sense of when he was not with her. Its expression was now so vivid that for the first time he seemed to see before him the real Lily Bart, divested of the trivialities of her little world, and catching for a moment a note of the eternal harmony of which her beauty was a part.' Oh dear...
   The edition I'm reading (Virago Modern Classics) has as its cover image a portrait of Lady Colin Campbell by Giovanni Boldini, the 'Master of Swish' – a good choice.

As for Reynolds's Mrs Lloyd, that painting now hangs on the walls of Waddesdon Manor, the grand Rothschild mansion in Buckinghamshire.