Posts Tagged ‘Poems’
A Taste of Honey – Does the play represent more than a dramatisation of the cycle of deprivation?
Texts Used: A Taste of Honey by Shelagh Delaney.
If I had to give a title to my view of the play, it would be ‘Windows of Opportunity and Despair’. I say this because the five characters in the play express quite a narrow range of social, economic and personal responses to opportunity. The opportunities that do arise for any of the characters are usually taken into some form of despair. Nevertheless the play appears to be more than a dramatisation of deprivation. It could equally as well be seen as expressing the pitfalls of inadequate communication, or unacknowledged dependence. It dramatises the many dimensions of experience of the two main characters, and demonstrates how they constantly limit and undermine each other.
The aspects I will argue are therefore connected with how the characters limit themselves, communicate badly, and continue their deprivation.
In the opening line of the play, Helen says, “Well! This is the Place.” This, along with Jo’s reply, “And I don’t like it.”(1) spell out a present and past situation existing between them. It tells us there has been no communication about the place in which they are both going to live. Jo has obviously never seen it before, and has been given no choice. Helen goes on to clarify even further that her own choices are made without any mutual agreement between herself and her daughter. She says, “When I find somewhere for us to live I have to consider something far more important than your feelings … the rent. It’s all I can afford.”(2)
This short and sharp exchange also explains the resentment Jo feels toward her mother. Having been given no choice, having been left out of any ability to help find a decent place to live, she has no feelings of participation or wanting to make anything of the flat. But there is another factor too. Helen says the flat is all she can afford, yet soon afterwards, when she sees some of Jo’s drawings she suggests Jo should go to a “proper art school” and says, “I’ll pay. You’re not stupid. You’ll soon learn.”(3) So we must assume Helen has obscure or unstated reasons for wanting them both to live in such a decrepit flat.
Another aspect of the interchange is that it depicts Helen as a character who treats her daughter as someone she doesn’t really want in her life. There are exceptions to this, but it is a prevailing attitude. It is particularly illustrated when Helen goes on her honeymoon. Jo pointedly expresses her need to be cared for, or perhaps her desire to be wanted and included in her mother’s life when she says to Peter, “…. What are you going to do about me Peter? The snotty nosed daughter? Don’t you think I’m a bit young to be left like this on my own while you flit off with my old woman?”(4) Helen’s response is, “We can’t take her with us. We will be, if you’ll not take exception to the phrase, on our honeymoon.”(5)
This exclusive behaviour is then continued by not including Jo in her marriage ceremony. There is no attempt at communication about Jo’s welfare or needs at this time, and Helen leaves for her wedding with the words, “I’ll be seeing you. Hey! If he doesn’t show up I’ll be back.”(6) In fact Helen doesn’t come back for months, leaving Jo to her own devices to survive.
The interactions already quoted highlight something else that, although a quiet theme in the drama, nevertheless remains constantly in the background. The characters all have a tendency to treat each other as if they have no personal or social links. Our social existence arises from an obvious web of interconnections. Few of us have made our own shoes, woven the material for our clothes, worked at generating the power for the light and heat in our houses, or grown our own food. Many or most of the advantages in our life come to us out of our relationship either with other individuals, or from the collective effort of groups of people. Obviously many of the ills arise in the same way, but in the play there is a great one-sidedness toward alienation from other individuals or ‘society’ in such forms as work or education. Instead there is a constant reiteration of the attitude of not needing each other. This has already been show in the relationship between Jo and Helen, but is particularly dramatised in other parts of the play.
For instance, although pregnant, Jo actually manages to remain in the flat, but this is with the help of Geof. When Geof arrives, Jo has to almost beg him to stay with such phrases as, “Please stay Geoff, I’ll get those sheets and blankets.”(7) Despite being homeless, Geoff resists such offers, finding it very difficult to admit his own need, and is not explicit about what he has to offer.
Later in the play, when Helen has left Peter because of his affair with another woman, she does not admit her feelings for her husband, but instead, when Jo says, “I think you’re still in love with him.” responds by saying, “In love? Me? … You must be mad.”(8)
Although Geof is an extreme characterisation of not being able to stand up for what he wants or needs – allowing himself to be thrown out of the flat for instance – Helen and Jo also exhibit the same tendency. Helen does this by not fighting for her marriage, which although difficult has a lot of advantages, and such advantages could have been shared with her daughter and the coming baby. Jo does it by not expressing herself unequivocally when her mother is obviously going to ‘leave her behind’ when she gets married. This ambiguity in relationship seems to be another sign of failing to recognise the social and personal web one is a part of. The failure leads to feelings of powerlessness and personal inadequacy. Geof has in fact developed a working and caring relationship with Jo, and she with him. He fails to see the place he fills in her life, so allows himself to be levered out of the house by Helen.
This alienation that is partly self-inflicted and partly inflicted by others, reaches its height in the scene in which Helen, talking about the food Geof has brought in to the house, says, “You can bloody well take it with you, we don’t want it.” The following actions then dramatise the situation more explicitly:-
[GOEFFREY empties food from his pack on to the table while HELEN thrusts it back. HELEN finally throws the whole thing, pack and all, on the floor.](9)
These self-limiting behaviours in the play can be seen to result in lack of, or loss of, ongoing steady relationships, a reasonable place to live, better economic state, and a system of mutual support between individuals. As an extreme opposite we have what has been called the ‘old boys network’ in which individuals take great pains to give and receive support. The lack of self-revealing or explicit dialogue about needs, about dependence and what each person can offer, between the characters is also part of the system of defeat they are all running. Perhaps such systems were put into place originally by feelings that one would not be heard even if needs were stated. In the situations dramatised however, the system of retreat, denial, lack of explicit communication, along with its failure to recognise the social web and ones part in it, all contribute to present misery. The impoverished situation is as much a result of such failures, as it is a cause. Helen and Jo could mutually support each other if they stopped in the middle of their person-to-person battle and wondered what they wanted from each other. Geof could have stood his ground. Perhaps as a character he might not have done this through forcefulness. He could have recognised his value to Jo however, and stood his ground for her sake. But I use thes remarks as examples – they did not happen.
If there is such a thing as a ‘cycle of deprivation’, I don’t think the play dramatises this in particular. It seems more, from what has been looked at, to deal with self-perpetuating systems of failure in personal and social relationships – including poor communication and blindness to the social web, leading to alienation.
Bibliography
Delaney, Shelagh. A Taste of Honey. Published by Methuen & Co. Ltd., 1992 (originally 1959.) ISBN: 0413316807
(1)
Notes
(1) Page 7.
(2) Page 7.
(3) Page 15.
(4) Page 34.
(5) Page 35.
(6) Page 45.
(7) Page 48.
(8) Page 80.
(9) Page 84.
The Use of Private and Public Personae in the Poetry of Keats and Shelley
In defining the public and private personae of the two poets Keats and Shelley, it is helpful to compare their poetry with that of more recent poets. As an example to start with, the lines from Keats’ La Belle Dame sans Merci will be used.
I met a lady in the meads,
Full beautiful – a faery’s child,
Her hair was long, her foot was light,
And her eyes were wild.(3)
Although Keats is using the first person in starting, the meads or meadows he is writing about are ones of imagination. This is obvious from the first line of the poem starting as it does with the words “O what can ail thee, knight at arms”. The scene is therefore one of medieval times, and the woman one of myth or fancy. The personae who is the ‘I’ in these lines is the knight at arms who is being questioned in the first line, a knight who falls in love with the lady in the meads. Comparing this with a more modern poet, Eva Dobell, we have these lines:
Crippled for life at seventeen,
His great eyes seem to question why:
With both legs smashed it might have been
Better in that grim trench to die
Than drag maimed years out helplessly.(4)
This is not a mythical or imaginative scene, but a description of something Dobell has witnessed during the First World War, with personal responses added. So in La Belle Dame sans Merci, Keats is expressing through a personae of poesy, of myth and imagination. If Keats is expressing any private feelings, if he is giving any clue of personal relations or pains, then we must look for these in the tale of La Belle Dame sans Merci itself. At the end of the poem the knight’s dream reveals that “La Belle Dame sans Merci / Thee hath in thrall!”(5) The suggestion might therefore be that Keats felt at the mercy of his desires for women.
Looking at another poem by Keats, it includes the lines:
As Hermes once took to his feathers light,
When lulled Argus, baffled, swooned and slept,
So in Delphic reed, my idle spright
So played, so charmed, so conquered, so bereft(6)
This is described as a dream Keats experienced after reading Dante’s Episode of Paolo and Francesca. Like La Belle Dame sans Merci it is also expressed in imagery and language of mythology and imagination. Keats is thus placing himself, his personae, in a position akin to the Greek gods. He is saying, “As Hermes” once took to his feathers” so did I. Instead of a heaven however, he visits the “second circle of sad hell”.(7) That the sad hell includes the description of “Pale were the lips I kissed, and fair the form”, once more brings us to pain, or hell, in connection with a woman.
Many of Keats’ poems mention the lips and hair of women he has met, and sometimes their feet (there is apparently nothing in-between). Kissing is a frequent theme. So Keats’ public persona is at times one of poesy and imagination, far from any direct connection with everyday life. His private personae, assumed from the little read, has some aspects of being pained in relationships with women.
Shelley too has a very marked tendency to express within symbolic or mythic language, though perhaps not so markedly as Keats. In The Mask of Anarchy, a description and condemnation of the massacre of Peterloo, we have examples of this.
I met murder on the way –
He had a mask like Castlereagh –
Very smooth he looked, yet grim;
Seven blood-hounds followed him:(8)
By giving murder a gender – ‘He’ – Shelley, despite giving names and details, such as Castlereagh,(9) makes a symbol of the act instead of giving a straight description. For instance, what is Shelley referring to in these lines?
I bind the Sun’s throne with a burning zone,
And the Moon’s with a girdle of pearl;
The volcanoes are dim, and the stars reel and swim,
When the whirlwind my banners unfurl.(10)
The title of the poem is The Cloud, but once more Shelley has given the cloud an anthropomorphic identity. He is also ascribing to the cloud – I bind the Sun’s throne – a power of will and effectiveness. In the lines given, and in the other lines of the poem, he does not appear to be using the cloud as a symbol, simile or metaphor. If one were to write descriptive lines such as –
My thoughts arise like doves each day,
On Mercurial purpose bent they fly away,
Touching each corner of the world,
Arrows from my bow of mind are hurled.(11)
they could be seen as an uneconomic way of saying that publishing ones ideas allows them to reach other people the world over. Therefore, although this is obviously a generalisation, Shelley and Keats appear to have a public personae which poses as an identity with great learning and wide ranging mind. The pose is dressed in massive reference to simile and metaphor, and the wrapping of ideas in long and complex chains of words. Instead of “poetry” lifting “the veil from the hidden beauty of the world” – instead of the poet being the “heirophant of an unapprehended inspiration” as Shelley has suggested, it seems this personae may often be an obscuring force to what is plainly seen by many, but perhaps not put into words by them.
As for their private personae, the many poems of Keats on red and ‘pulp’ lips suggest hidden feelings.
Tis young Leander toiling to his death.
Nigh swooning, he doth purse his weary lips
For Hero’s cheek, and smiles against her smile.
O horrid dream! See how his body dips
Dead heavy; arms and shoulders gleam awhile:
He’s gone: up bubbles all his amorous breath!(12)
Considering that Leander swam treacherous sea to make love with Hero, today we might simply say, I am dying to have sex with you. In fact this poem is a very powerful statement to be made publicly. If we take Leander and the Hellespont to be symbols of what Keats feels, and what Keats is addressing to Miss Reynolds who is the object of the poem, then Keats is struggling almost to the death with turbulent forces in order to arrive at love making with Miss Reynolds. The turbulence may be emotional, or it may be the social forces or attitudes against which Keats must swim in order to arrive at the delight of sex. In the end lines though he is suggesting he cannot make the journey to the island of her sex. He drowns, he dies under the massive currents and energy against which he pits himself, or against which his natural urgent desires press him.
Therefore, in ascertaining the personae of these two poets from today’s viewpoint, it appeared very necessary for them to publicly dress themselves in cloaks of learning and poesy. I mean by the latter word an expression in action and words of living in a mental emotional world more beautiful and tragic than ‘normal’ humans, a world of vision and unusual inspiration. I am not saying they did live in this world, only that they wanted to, and wanted to appear to do so.
Their private persona seems tied to this. What they did outwardly was an expression of their own personal ambitions and uncertainties. If their outer expression was less passionate and direct than their feelings, then we must assume they hid personal pain. The social attitudes in which they lived, and that were alive in them, were forces against which they both fought. Clues to the private world underlying their social personae, may only be arrived at by a close reading of a wider sample than I have managed. However, the few poems mentioned do throw some light on this.
Bibliography
John Keats – The Complete Poems. Edited by John Barnard. Published by Penguin Books, 1973, UK. ISBN: 0-14-042210-2.
Reilly, Catherine – editor. Scars Upon My Heart. Published by Virago. 1981. ISBN 0-86068-226-9.
Shelley – Poetical Works. Edited by Thomas Hutchinson. Published by Oxford University Press. 1970. UK. ISBN: 0-19-281069-3.
(1)
Notes
John Keats – The Complete Poems.
(2)
Shelley – Poetical Works.
(3)
John Keats – The Complete Poems. Page 335. Fourth verse.
(4)
Scars Upon My Heart. Eva Dobell. Pluck. Page 31.
(5)
John Keats – The Complete Poems. Page 334.
(6)
John Keats – The Complete Poems. A Dream, after reading Dante’s Episode of Paolo and Francesca. Page 334.
(7)
John Keats – The Complete Poems. A Dream, after reading Dante’s Episode of Paolo and Francesca. Page 334.
(8)
Shelley – Poetical Works. Mask of Anarchy. Page 338.
(9)
Robert Stewart Castlereagh was foreign secretary from 1812, when he devoted himself to the overthrow of Napoleon and subsequently to the Congress of Vienna and the congress system. Abroad his policy favoured the development of material liberalism, but at home he repressed the Reform movement, and popular opinion held him responsible for the Peterloo massacre of peaceful demonstrators 1819.
(10)
Shelley – Poetical Works. The Cloud. Page 601.
(11)
My own fancy free.
(12)
John Keats – The Complete Poems. On a Leander Gem which Miss Reynolds, my kind Friend, Gave Me. Page 101.
Comparing the symbolic treatment of Childhood in Blake and Wordsworth
Both Blake and Wordsworth particularly emphasise childhood in their poetry. Blake’s Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience for example especially appear to treat childhood as a symbol of the human condition as seen from Blake’s perspective. His poem The Voice of the Ancient Bard in Songs of Innocence, starts with the lines:
Youth of delight come hither
And see the opening morn,
Image of truth new-born.(3)
This sense of pleasure and newness is typical of the impression Blake gives throughout Songs of Innocence. In a mixture of words such as ‘Little boy / Full of joy’(4) – ‘When the green woods laugh with the voice of joy’(5) and frequent usage of rural imagery, lambs and sunshine, Blake uses childhood and joy as a symbol of an aspect of human experience. But it is only when the Songs of Innocence are read against the background of Songs of Experience and other writings such as All Religions are One, and The Marriage of Heaven and Hell that one can begin to grasp what childhood symbolises in Blake’s writings.
In ‘The Marriage of Heaven and Hell’ we read that “Those who restrain desire, do so because theirs is weak enough to be restrained”(6) and “Sooner murder an infant in its cradle than nurse unacted desires”(7). Blake is maintaining in such lines that as humans we have no lower nature – ‘everything that lives is holy’. For Blake Heaven was what he called Poetic or creative genius. Hell was man’s body and all the energies of movement, emotions and delight that it generated.
Comparing the positive imagery of ‘Innocence’ with the changed tone of ‘Experience’ we find such lines as:
In every cry of every man,
In every infant’s cry of fear,
In every voice, in every ban,
The mind forged manacles I hear:(8)
As Blake is also writing about childhood in ‘Experience’ we cannot simply assume the difference is between childhood and adulthood. The poem Infant Sorrow makes this plain:
My mother groaned, my father wept!
Into the dangerous world I leapt,
Helpless, naked, piping loud,
Like a fiend hid in a cloud.(9)
Who is the fiend and what the cloud though?
Perhaps this is clearer in the poem A Little Boy Lost.
The weeping child could not be heard;
The weeping parents wept in vain.
They stripped him to his little shirt,
And bound him in an iron chain.(10)
Something has been hidden, something bound, something stripped of its possible apparel. Blake appears to be describing what he calls the natural ‘energy’ that is the opposite to nursed ‘unacted desires’. He is delineating how different the world appears when we are bound by religious or social views that lead to constraint. Blake was a self-taught youth, allowed to read and explore in his own manner, and he may well associate his own genius with this ability to follow natural inclination. Apart from this however, he makes it plain that aspects of religion and social restraints lead to social and personal sickness – ‘Prisons are built with stones of law, brothels with bricks of religion’.(11) Blake does not appear to mean a simplistic judgement by this. More likely it refers to the sort of social attitudes that not so long ago led many women to madness or suicide when they were pregnant with an illegitimate child. Today we would think such levels of stress very strange in an unmarried mother.
Michael Mason, in his Introduction to Blake’s poems, warns the reader that one must resist the temptation to simplify Blake’s intent. To quote Mason, “Blake, who is so readily simplified by his readers, was the great anti-simplifier, always probing for contradiction and tension.”(12) Blake may even be pointing out a way of doing this when he wrote, “I must create a system, or be enslaved by another man’s.”(13) “Everything possible to be believed is an image of truth.”(14) To have ones own response to life, full of its contradictions and conflicts, and attempt a marriage of these antipodes of human experience, is recommended by Blake.
Wordsworth writes in quite a different way about his physical surroundings and childhood, but nevertheless, still describes nature and youth as representing something more than simple trees, rivers or scarcity of years. In his poem Michael, we read:
Careless of books, yet having felt the power
Of nature, by the gentle agency
Of natural objects, led me on to feel
For passions that were not my own, and think
(At random and imperfectly indeed)
On man, the heart of man, and human life.(15)
Just as a story in a book may lead us on to form a picture, or even an understanding that is not explicit in the words, so Wordsworth is suggesting in the above lines that nature intimates or leads to certain thoughts or understandings about human life. He defines this further in Lines – Tintern Abbey:
Of the deep rivers, and the lonely streams …
To me was all in all. – I cannot paint
What then I was. The sounding cataract
Haunted me like a passion: the tall rock,
The mountain, and the deep and gloomy wood …”(16)
The words “what then I was” refer to childhood, and the state defined as “That time is past.”(17) This with the words ‘all in all’ suggest the experience of nature in childhood was complete in itself, experiences that have meaning, but perhaps meaning which is the very think known, rather than what may later be thought or interpreted, written about.
But Wordsworth at some point in his life had a vision of the wonder of birth, ““Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting: The Soul that rises with us, our life’s Star, Hath had elsewhere its setting, And cometh from afar: Not in entire forgetfulness, And not in utter nakedness, But trailing clouds of glory do we come From God, who is our home: Heaven lies about us in our infancy!”
It suggests that not only is birth a holy event, but we exist before our birth, and that we have enormous awareness already.
Bibliography
William Blake. Edited by Michael Mason. Published by Oxford University Press, 1994, UK. ISBN: 0-19-282305-1
Wordsworth. Complete Poetical Works. Published by Oxford University Press, 1936, UK. ISBN: 0-19-281052-9
(1)
Notes
William Blake. Edited by Michael Mason. Published by Oxford University Press, 1994. ISBN: 0-19-282305-1
(2)
Wordsworth. Poetical Works. Published by Oxford University Press, 1936, UK.
(3)
William Blake. Page 66.
(4)
William Blake. Spring. Page 64.
(5)
William Blake. Laughing Song. Page 65.
(6)
William Blake. Page 75.
(7)
William Blake. Page 78.
(8)
William Blake. London. Page 124.
(9)
William Blake. Page 125.
(10)
William Blake. Page 127.
(11)
William Blake. Proverbs of Hell. Page 76.
(12)
William Blake. Introduction. Page xi.
(13)
William Blake. Jerusalem.
(14)
William Blake. The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. Page 77.
(15)
Wordsworth. Michael. Page 104.
(16)
Wordsworth. Lines – Tintern Abbey. Page 164.
(17)
Wordsworth. Lines – Tintern Abbey. Page 164.