The Little Nation
by Jessica Powers
Having no gift of strategy or arms,
no secret weapon and no walled defense,
I shall become a citizen of love,
that little nation with the blood-stained sod
where even the slain have power, the only country
that sends forth an ambassador to God.
Renouncing self and crying out to evil
to end its wars, I seek a land that lies
all unprotected like a sleeping child;
nor is my journey reckless and unwise.
Who doubts that love has an effective weapon
may meet with a surprise.
Thursday, May 21, 2020
Where Even the Slain Have Power
Wednesday, May 20, 2020
The Lukhimov Lord of the Rings
Among the best illustrations of The Lord of the Rings are those of the Russian artist Sergei Lukhimov for the Russian translation of the work. As it happens you can find a lot of them here. Every single one is worth stopping a moment and viewing; and it's impressive how easily identifiable the meaning of most of them are, just at a glance, to anyone who knows the story.
Tuesday, May 19, 2020
Some Poem Drafts
The second is based on a sentence in the Critique of Pure Reason. I think the second line of Martial's epigram is probably intended in the Latin to have a vulgar undertone; the word for pocket, sinus, sometimes is a sexual euphemism, and the vulgarization would convey the contempt for admiration. In any case, I thought that the last two lines could practically be the motto of much of social media, or indeed, many other kinds of media: Ecce rubet quidam, pallet, stupet, oscitat, odit. / Hoc uolo: nunc nobis carmina nostra placent.
Speech
In words we speak, but also hues
that tint the face with surging blush
or pallor when our wits outrush;
we speak as well with tones we choose,
with tremors in our hands and touch,
with twitch of lip and smiles and such,
our bodies thick with meaning's clues.
Noumenon
Kant reflects
on the mystery of rain:
The drops are but appearances,
and even the shape,
even the space
through which the rain falls
is but the order
of our many sensations,
and behind the rain
is but the unknown.
Optimism
We are not the rainbow;
it arcs through endless sky
above our heads, above the trees,
above the birds that fly,
a covenant of promise
that though our troubles build,
the sun through silver lining
has cloud with glory filled.
Martial, Epigrams 6.60
My Rome lauds, loves, sings our chapbooks;
Every pocket, every hand, holds me.
-- Ah, see! Someone blushes, pales, gawks, gapes, hates:
This I want: Now our songs please us.
The Liar
I spoke a word; the word was wise,
but water fell from flooding eyes.
My heart misgave, misshapen mass
with broken beats, before the lass.
The lady knows her trade; she lies,
designs and draws a fair disguise,
with highest pitch of twisting art
which hollows out the human heart.
Her language loose, I knew her word
was false and fatal ere I heard
a breath of air she breathed my way;
the truth she cannot tell or say.
She lies; a light and liquid tongue
my hope has harmed, my heart has wrung;
she lies with all deceits of hell;
but oh! I ache for her as well.
Speech
In words we speak, but also hues
that tint the face with surging blush
or pallor when our wits outrush;
we speak as well with tones we choose,
with tremors in our hands and touch,
with twitch of lip and smiles and such,
our bodies thick with meaning's clues.
Noumenon
Kant reflects
on the mystery of rain:
The drops are but appearances,
and even the shape,
even the space
through which the rain falls
is but the order
of our many sensations,
and behind the rain
is but the unknown.
Optimism
We are not the rainbow;
it arcs through endless sky
above our heads, above the trees,
above the birds that fly,
a covenant of promise
that though our troubles build,
the sun through silver lining
has cloud with glory filled.
Martial, Epigrams 6.60
My Rome lauds, loves, sings our chapbooks;
Every pocket, every hand, holds me.
-- Ah, see! Someone blushes, pales, gawks, gapes, hates:
This I want: Now our songs please us.
The Liar
I spoke a word; the word was wise,
but water fell from flooding eyes.
My heart misgave, misshapen mass
with broken beats, before the lass.
The lady knows her trade; she lies,
designs and draws a fair disguise,
with highest pitch of twisting art
which hollows out the human heart.
Her language loose, I knew her word
was false and fatal ere I heard
a breath of air she breathed my way;
the truth she cannot tell or say.
She lies; a light and liquid tongue
my hope has harmed, my heart has wrung;
she lies with all deceits of hell;
but oh! I ache for her as well.
Emma. (2020)
The Darwins had asked me about my thoughts on the recent Emma movie (or Emma., with a period, as its title often seems to be given). I hadn't had a chance to see it recently due to the end of term, but having reached the usual little lull between having finished all major grading and students contacting me a day before the final grade deadline to ask if there is anything they can do to make up for the fact that that they didn't do two major assignments, I took a break to see it. It's a very tricky movie to talk about, because it's very uneven, swinging from very nice touches to "What were you thinking?" to nice touches again.
In any Austen adaptation, you have to take into account of certain things right away. First, Austen adaptations don't make money by appealing to people who want to see an adaptation of Austen herself; they make money by appealing to women in general, especially women who like to consider themselves readers, and what such an audience usually wants if they go to an Austen adaptation is (1) period romance (2) with good-looking men and women dressed in gorgeous clothes (3) that is funny. Because these are the money-making things, these are the things that dominate everything else; the Austen adaptation that excels at them will prosper, the Austen adaptation that fails at them will die. (This is one reason why many of the better adaptations even qua adaptations are pretty radical Austen-in-a-different-situation adaptations -- Bollywood doing Austen stories in modern India, or the movie with which every other Emma adaptation must perpetually compete, Clueless. They have the advantage of not being held to the same standards.) One of the tricky things this movie had to navigate was that there already was an Emma that did very well at (1), (2), and (3), the 1996 Gwyneth Paltrow Emma, so this movie had to differentiate itself from that movie while still competing with it on these points at which it excelled. We have to allow for the fact that much of the movie will be centered on things that have little to do with Austen's novel itself.
One of the major difficulties in adapting Austen to the screen is humor. Austen is extraordinarily funny, but most of her humor is dry or indirect, and much of it arises from the perspective taken by the narrator. None of this translates easily onto the screen. There are two ways you can go: you can add a lot of subtle touches or you can add slapstick. Probably the best example of the latter is Stillman's Love & Friendship, based on Lady Susan; Stillman's material gave him more room to maneuver than Austen's novels usually do, but he also made the choice, which is probably necessary for doing this well, of giving most of the slapstick to the secondary characters, so that the primary characters are mostly the vehicle for the dry-and-indirect humor, which is easier for audiences to catch given that it is in a framework and against a background that is more obviously comedic. (Austen adaptations suffer perpetually from an air of being Serious Moviemaking Done Seriously, so breaking this expectation is the first step to making sure Austen's actual jokes don't fall flat on the screen.) The other route, much harder, is to add a lot of subtle humorous touches. One kind of touch from this movie that I rather liked were the obviously bored footmen who keep being told to do obviously silly things, which they then have to do with great ceremony. One of the strengths of this movie is that a lot of the acting manages to add such touches; I liked, for instance, Emma's brief and quickly hidden look of shocked offense when Mr. Elton tells her, "Everyone has their level", thus implying that he is Emma's level, an idea which from Emma's point of view could hardly be regarded as anything but preposterous. But ultimately the movie tries to take both routes simultaneously, which is one of the things that contributes to the unevenness of the movie.
There are always cases in which the choices were odd but don't necessarily harm the movie as a movie. Casting is a good example; Johnny Flynn is not particularly well cast as Mr. Knightley, or Bill Nighy as Mr. Woodhouse, but both handled their roles well enough.
Adaptations also have to adapt. There are always changes that lose fidelity to the original, but arguably work on their own. I think the scene at Box Hill is a good example. In this movie, the Box Hill incident was very nicely done -- some great acting done well. It is, I think, a very different incident from that in the novel. Here, Emma realizes that she's overstepped in her put-down of Miss Bates the moment she says it, and everyone else in the company is made uncomfortable and awkward by her failure. But I think it's important to the way the incident works in the novel that the novel goes exactly the opposite direction. Emma could have gotten away with it. It's a situation in which a person whom no one hates but whom everyone finds ridiculous and tiresome is wittily skewered by someone everyone likes on precisely the point that everyone finds ridiculous and tiresome. The movie presents it as perhaps the way we would all like such a situation to go. But the novel takes an infinitely more realistic approach. Almost everyone just accepts it without any commentary or pained pause; the party continues on merrily, with a lot of flattery of Emma. Miss Bates herself at no point ever blames Emma for it; she blames herself. When Knightley rebukes Emma over it, she's not (as in the movie) already down and self-reproachful about it; she's already forgotten it, and it's Knightley's rebuke that leads her to become depressed over it. And while Knightley does rebuke Emma, some things that Knightley says suggest that he too would not have done so if it weren't for the fact that Miss Bates was so bothered by the possibility that Emma's remark meant that she, Miss Bates, had acted inappropriately, that she worried about it to Knightley. It's the perfect encapsulation of Emma's moral danger, which is that she can get away with bad behavior. It also presents the two things that prevent her from being actually wicked: her bad behavior is not (yet) malicious and she has a good and healthy friendship with Mr. Knightley.
All of this is dropped by the movie. In absolute terms, the novel's handling is superior -- it is, indeed, a story in which the Emmas and Frank Churchills of the world not only can get away with most things, they are actively rewarded for almost anything they do. To those who have, everything is given, even when it shouldn't be. But the movie's changes on this point don't harm it, as far as I can see, as a movie; and the movie probably manages to capture the moral perspective better by them than it would if it tried to present the incident in the way the novel does (which would almost certainly give the impression that Mr. Knightley is being overly harsh about a joke that no one much minded, since part of the point of the novel is that at first no one other than Miss Bates much minded it, and that Knightley holds Emma to higher standards than other people).
There were quite a few really strange scenes that struck notes that never paid off in the movie. The bare-bottom scene, Mr. Woodhouse's bouncing entrance, some of the slapstick with Emma or with Mr. Knightley, all jarred because they were just thrown out there without any obvious reason why the movie needed them to be that way.
Most of these, while they detract, are just minor inconsistencies and weird bits. They are not serious mistakes with respect to the overall story or the movie as a whole, just minor ones. There is one very serious mistake, though, in the aftermath of Emma discovering that Harriet now has her sights set on Mr. Knightley; I'm not even going to talk about it, beyond saying that it made no sense and there was no reason for it. The only other mistake on the same level was the handling of Mr. Elton; the novel's Mr. Elton has many bad qualities, but smarmy is not the first to come to mind.
In terms of spectacle -- and movie is always primarily a matter of spectacle, whatever else we may get to ice the cake -- I thought the movie did very, very well at striking a balance between the pretty and the plausible in background and scenery and furnishings. Visually, this is a very nice film. The Pretty Young Things by and large bring a surprisingly high quality of acting to their primary role of being Pretty Young Things. The music was very odd. As music, it was all well done. As a soundtrack, it was one of the "What were they thinking?" parts of the movie. Almost every reviewer who has discussed the movie at any length has noted the music's strange combination of being technically well done while being intrusive and baffling in its choices, and they are all right.
The movie is watchable. As movies go, you could do much worse. I'm pretty sure the intent was to pitch it at a younger female audience than most Austen adaptations do, and I think for the most part it was very successful at that; it has a younger, more active feel than most Austen adaptations do. Among the odd choices, there were some brilliant ones as well. The only real failure, acting-wise (and a number of things suggest it was in great measure a directorial failure), was Josh O'Connor's Mr. Elton. Taylor-Joy was a great Emma; when Callum Turner's Frank Churchill showed up, I mostly thought he looked like a monkey, but he grew on me. Harriet Smith is a tricky character for the screen, because she has to come across as a very prettily presented and well-mannered girl who is nonethless very obviously Emma's inferior in both respects, and most adaptations give us a Harriet whose inferiority we can see but who (precisely because of that) could never really be friends with someone like Emma. This movie solves this problem very well, in part due to Mia Goth's charming portrayal. Miranda Hart's Miss Bates was a very good portrayal of the kind of person you can't help but like but also can barely stand. It's just so very uneven in so many other respects.
In any Austen adaptation, you have to take into account of certain things right away. First, Austen adaptations don't make money by appealing to people who want to see an adaptation of Austen herself; they make money by appealing to women in general, especially women who like to consider themselves readers, and what such an audience usually wants if they go to an Austen adaptation is (1) period romance (2) with good-looking men and women dressed in gorgeous clothes (3) that is funny. Because these are the money-making things, these are the things that dominate everything else; the Austen adaptation that excels at them will prosper, the Austen adaptation that fails at them will die. (This is one reason why many of the better adaptations even qua adaptations are pretty radical Austen-in-a-different-situation adaptations -- Bollywood doing Austen stories in modern India, or the movie with which every other Emma adaptation must perpetually compete, Clueless. They have the advantage of not being held to the same standards.) One of the tricky things this movie had to navigate was that there already was an Emma that did very well at (1), (2), and (3), the 1996 Gwyneth Paltrow Emma, so this movie had to differentiate itself from that movie while still competing with it on these points at which it excelled. We have to allow for the fact that much of the movie will be centered on things that have little to do with Austen's novel itself.
One of the major difficulties in adapting Austen to the screen is humor. Austen is extraordinarily funny, but most of her humor is dry or indirect, and much of it arises from the perspective taken by the narrator. None of this translates easily onto the screen. There are two ways you can go: you can add a lot of subtle touches or you can add slapstick. Probably the best example of the latter is Stillman's Love & Friendship, based on Lady Susan; Stillman's material gave him more room to maneuver than Austen's novels usually do, but he also made the choice, which is probably necessary for doing this well, of giving most of the slapstick to the secondary characters, so that the primary characters are mostly the vehicle for the dry-and-indirect humor, which is easier for audiences to catch given that it is in a framework and against a background that is more obviously comedic. (Austen adaptations suffer perpetually from an air of being Serious Moviemaking Done Seriously, so breaking this expectation is the first step to making sure Austen's actual jokes don't fall flat on the screen.) The other route, much harder, is to add a lot of subtle humorous touches. One kind of touch from this movie that I rather liked were the obviously bored footmen who keep being told to do obviously silly things, which they then have to do with great ceremony. One of the strengths of this movie is that a lot of the acting manages to add such touches; I liked, for instance, Emma's brief and quickly hidden look of shocked offense when Mr. Elton tells her, "Everyone has their level", thus implying that he is Emma's level, an idea which from Emma's point of view could hardly be regarded as anything but preposterous. But ultimately the movie tries to take both routes simultaneously, which is one of the things that contributes to the unevenness of the movie.
There are always cases in which the choices were odd but don't necessarily harm the movie as a movie. Casting is a good example; Johnny Flynn is not particularly well cast as Mr. Knightley, or Bill Nighy as Mr. Woodhouse, but both handled their roles well enough.
Adaptations also have to adapt. There are always changes that lose fidelity to the original, but arguably work on their own. I think the scene at Box Hill is a good example. In this movie, the Box Hill incident was very nicely done -- some great acting done well. It is, I think, a very different incident from that in the novel. Here, Emma realizes that she's overstepped in her put-down of Miss Bates the moment she says it, and everyone else in the company is made uncomfortable and awkward by her failure. But I think it's important to the way the incident works in the novel that the novel goes exactly the opposite direction. Emma could have gotten away with it. It's a situation in which a person whom no one hates but whom everyone finds ridiculous and tiresome is wittily skewered by someone everyone likes on precisely the point that everyone finds ridiculous and tiresome. The movie presents it as perhaps the way we would all like such a situation to go. But the novel takes an infinitely more realistic approach. Almost everyone just accepts it without any commentary or pained pause; the party continues on merrily, with a lot of flattery of Emma. Miss Bates herself at no point ever blames Emma for it; she blames herself. When Knightley rebukes Emma over it, she's not (as in the movie) already down and self-reproachful about it; she's already forgotten it, and it's Knightley's rebuke that leads her to become depressed over it. And while Knightley does rebuke Emma, some things that Knightley says suggest that he too would not have done so if it weren't for the fact that Miss Bates was so bothered by the possibility that Emma's remark meant that she, Miss Bates, had acted inappropriately, that she worried about it to Knightley. It's the perfect encapsulation of Emma's moral danger, which is that she can get away with bad behavior. It also presents the two things that prevent her from being actually wicked: her bad behavior is not (yet) malicious and she has a good and healthy friendship with Mr. Knightley.
All of this is dropped by the movie. In absolute terms, the novel's handling is superior -- it is, indeed, a story in which the Emmas and Frank Churchills of the world not only can get away with most things, they are actively rewarded for almost anything they do. To those who have, everything is given, even when it shouldn't be. But the movie's changes on this point don't harm it, as far as I can see, as a movie; and the movie probably manages to capture the moral perspective better by them than it would if it tried to present the incident in the way the novel does (which would almost certainly give the impression that Mr. Knightley is being overly harsh about a joke that no one much minded, since part of the point of the novel is that at first no one other than Miss Bates much minded it, and that Knightley holds Emma to higher standards than other people).
There were quite a few really strange scenes that struck notes that never paid off in the movie. The bare-bottom scene, Mr. Woodhouse's bouncing entrance, some of the slapstick with Emma or with Mr. Knightley, all jarred because they were just thrown out there without any obvious reason why the movie needed them to be that way.
Most of these, while they detract, are just minor inconsistencies and weird bits. They are not serious mistakes with respect to the overall story or the movie as a whole, just minor ones. There is one very serious mistake, though, in the aftermath of Emma discovering that Harriet now has her sights set on Mr. Knightley; I'm not even going to talk about it, beyond saying that it made no sense and there was no reason for it. The only other mistake on the same level was the handling of Mr. Elton; the novel's Mr. Elton has many bad qualities, but smarmy is not the first to come to mind.
In terms of spectacle -- and movie is always primarily a matter of spectacle, whatever else we may get to ice the cake -- I thought the movie did very, very well at striking a balance between the pretty and the plausible in background and scenery and furnishings. Visually, this is a very nice film. The Pretty Young Things by and large bring a surprisingly high quality of acting to their primary role of being Pretty Young Things. The music was very odd. As music, it was all well done. As a soundtrack, it was one of the "What were they thinking?" parts of the movie. Almost every reviewer who has discussed the movie at any length has noted the music's strange combination of being technically well done while being intrusive and baffling in its choices, and they are all right.
The movie is watchable. As movies go, you could do much worse. I'm pretty sure the intent was to pitch it at a younger female audience than most Austen adaptations do, and I think for the most part it was very successful at that; it has a younger, more active feel than most Austen adaptations do. Among the odd choices, there were some brilliant ones as well. The only real failure, acting-wise (and a number of things suggest it was in great measure a directorial failure), was Josh O'Connor's Mr. Elton. Taylor-Joy was a great Emma; when Callum Turner's Frank Churchill showed up, I mostly thought he looked like a monkey, but he grew on me. Harriet Smith is a tricky character for the screen, because she has to come across as a very prettily presented and well-mannered girl who is nonethless very obviously Emma's inferior in both respects, and most adaptations give us a Harriet whose inferiority we can see but who (precisely because of that) could never really be friends with someone like Emma. This movie solves this problem very well, in part due to Mia Goth's charming portrayal. Miranda Hart's Miss Bates was a very good portrayal of the kind of person you can't help but like but also can barely stand. It's just so very uneven in so many other respects.
Monday, May 18, 2020
The Whole World's Heart Is Uplifted
In Guernsey
To Theodore Watts
by Algernon Charles Swinburne
I. The heavenly bay, ringed round with cliffs and moors,
Storm-stained ravines, and crags that lawns inlay,
Soothes as with love the rocks whose guard secures
The heavenly bay.
O friend, shall time take ever this away,
This blessing given of beauty that endures,
This glory shown us, not to pass but stay?
Though sight be changed for memory, love ensures
What memory, changed by love to sight, would say—
The word that seals for ever mine and yours
The heavenly bay.
II. My mother sea, my fostress, what new strand,
What new delight of waters, may this be,
The fairest found since time's first breezes fanned
My mother sea?
Once more I give me body and soul to thee,
Who hast my soul for ever: cliff and sand
Recede, and heart to heart once more are we.
My heart springs first and plunges, ere my hand
Strike out from shore: more close it brings to me,
More near and dear than seems my fatherland,
My mother sea.
III. Across and along, as the bay's breadth opens, and o'er us
Wild autumn exults in the wind, swift rapture and strong
Impels us, and broader the wide waves brighten before us
Across and along.
The whole world's heart is uplifted, and knows not wrong;
The whole world's life is a chant to the sea-tide's chorus;
Are we not as waves of the water, as notes of the song?
Like children unworn of the passions and toils that wore us,
We breast for a season the breadth of the seas that throng,
Rejoicing as they, to be borne as of old they bore us
Across and along.
IV. On Dante's track by some funereal spell
Drawn down through desperate ways that lead not back
We seem to move, bound forth past flood and fell
On Dante's track.
The grey path ends: the gaunt rocks gape: the black
Deep hollow tortuous night, a soundless shell,
Glares darkness: are the fires of old grown slack?
Nay, then, what flames are these that leap and swell
As 'twere to show, where earth's foundations crack,
The secrets of the sepulchres of hell
On Dante's track?
V. By mere men's hands the flame was lit, we know,
From heaps of dry waste whin and casual brands:
Yet, knowing, we scarce believe it kindled so
By mere men's hands.
Above, around, high-vaulted hell expands,
Steep, dense, a labyrinth walled and roofed with woe,
Whose mysteries even itself not understands.
The scorn in Farinata's eyes aglow
Seems visible in this flame: there Geryon stands:
No stage of earth's is here, set forth to show
By mere men's hands.
VI. Night, in utmost noon forlorn and strong, with heart athirst and fasting,
Hungers here, barred up for ever, whence as one whom dreams affright
Day recoils before the low-browed lintel threatening doom and casting
Night.
All the reefs and islands, all the lawns and highlands, clothed with light,
Laugh for love's sake in their sleep outside: but here the night speaks, blasting
Day with silent speech and scorn of all things known from depth to height.
Lower than dive the thoughts of spirit-stricken fear in souls forecasting
Hell, the deep void seems to yawn beyond fear's reach, and higher than sight
Rise the walls and roofs that compass it about with everlasting
Night.
VII. The house accurst, with cursing sealed and signed,
Heeds not what storms about it burn and burst:
No fear more fearful than its own may find
The house accurst.
Barren as crime, anhungered and athirst,
Blank miles of moor sweep inland, sere and blind,
Where summer's best rebukes not winter's worst.
The low bleak tower with nought save wastes behind
Stares down the abyss whereon chance reared and nursed
This type and likeness of the accurst man's mind,
The house accurst.
VIII. Beloved and blest, lit warm with love and fame,
The house that had the light of the earth for guest
Hears for his name's sake all men hail its name
Beloved and blest.
This eyrie was the homeless eagle's nest
When storm laid waste his eyrie: hence he came
Again, when storm smote sore his mother's breast.
Bow down men bade us, or be clothed with blame
And mocked for madness: worst, they sware, was best:
But grief shone here, while joy was one with shame,
Beloved and blest.
The island of Guernsey is one of the three jurisdictions of the Bailiwick of Guernsey in the Channel Islands, the other two being Sark and Alderney. Its Latin name was Sarnia, and its capital is St. Peter Port. As a Crown dependency with its own government -- in Guernsey the government is called the States of Guernsey -- it is not part of the United Kingdom but only associated with it, and operates with a mix of English and Norman law under Queen Elizabeth II as Duke of Normandy (although she governs as Queen and not as Duke). Historically, its most famous resident was Victor Hugo.
When Napoleon III seized power in 1851, Hugo, who was very active in politics at the time, denounced him as a traitor to France. This was obviously not a safe position. He fled to Brussels, then Jersey, but was expelled from Jersey due to his inability to avoid getting involved in the local politics; so he came to Guernsey, settling at what has since become known as Hauteville House (which is currently owned and held as a consulate by the City of Paris). He bought the house because in Guernsey, under Norman law, no one who held property could be deported. It was there that Les Misérables was written.
Swinburne corresponded with Hugo several times while Hugo was resident on the island; he also visited the island, but, I think, could not do so at a time when Hugo was there. The eighth canto of this rondel is, of course, about Hugo and Hauteville House. Swinburne liked swimming in Channel waters, which we see expressed in the poem above. Because Guernsey is a major island of the Channel Islands, it has very often been fortified, and there are old defensive fortifications, including towers, throughout the landscape.
Sunday, May 17, 2020
Abreast and Ahead
In Sark
by Algernon Charles Swinburne
Abreast and ahead of the sea is a crag's front cloven asunder
With strong sea-breach and with wasting of winds whence terror is shed
As a shadow of death from the wings of the darkness on waters that thunder
Abreast and ahead.
At its edge is a sepulchre hollowed and hewn for a lone man's bed,
Propped open with rock and agape on the sky and the sea thereunder,
But roofed and walled in well from the wrath of them slept its dead.
Here might not a man drink rapture of rest, or delight above wonder,
Beholding, a soul disembodied, the days and the nights that fled,
With splendour and sound of the tempest around and above him and under,
Abreast and ahead?
Sark is one of the Channel Islands, which are the last remnants of the Duchy of Normandy. To be exact, it is a royal fief in the Bailiwick of Guernsey, which is ruled by the Duke of Normandy, who is,of course, at present Queen Elizabeth II, often toasted as La Reine, notre Duc. The Channel Islands are not, however, constituents of the United Kingdom, but associated Crown dependencies that have their own independent laws and governments -- in the case of Sark, called the Chief Pleas. The basic form of their laws is still feudal Norman law, although over the decades the specifically feudal or manorial characteristics have in many cases become purely ceremonial and nominal.
Sark itself is a small island of about 500-600 people, very rocky, consisting of Greater Sark and Little Sark, connected by an isthmus; it is riddled through with hollow sea-caves. It mostly governs itself and the nearby island of Brecqhou, but is subordinate to Guernsey in matters like criminal law, and is currently most famous for its complete ban on cars and its status as a Dark Sky Island, with a minimum of nighttime light pollution. Swinburne's visit to Guernsey and Sark was due to his enthusiasm for Victor Hugo, who was in exile in the Bailiwick of Guernsey for about fifteen years, which I'll discuss briefly in a future post on a poem by Swinburne about Guernsey.
Word Burst on Word
I Turn'd the Pages
by Alexander Anderson
I turn'd the pages writ by mighty men--
Giants who in the past had toil'd and fought,
And won great trophies in the war of Thought,
And with them immortality. And when
Word burst on word with all the heaven fed glow
Which is of genius, I stood like one
Who hears a melody he cannot shun--
So sweet its music that perforce must grow
Upon him with its rapture. And I felt
Another soul possess me as I caught
The inspiration of their words; and fraught
With wonder at their mighty toil, I knelt,
And whisper'd with a sense of holy fear--
"They move still with us; lo! the Great are here."
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