Dear Unknown Friends:

Here is part 4 in our serialization of Hamlet and Questions, an extraordinary and richly kind 1976 lecture by Eli Siegel. It is about questions as asked in poems, and questions in our lives. Present are everyday questions, and also big and subtle ones.

What is the difference between the way questions are in a poem and the way they’re in our lives? In a poem, Aesthetic Realism explains, things—including questions—are present in such a way that we feel in them the structure of reality itself. Poetry, Eli Siegel wrote, “is the oneness of the permanent opposites in reality as seen by an individual.” That is true whether the poem’s lines are asking or stating—or hinting, or exclaiming. The writer sees the subject with such fullness of justice that the lines are a oneness of strength and delicacy, of order and freedom, lingering and speed, tautness and grand flexibility. As we hear these opposites as one—this world structure—we are hearing the distinguishing thing in poetry: poetic music.

Aesthetic Realism explains that the way of seeing that’s in art is the way we want to have in our own lives. This includes how we want to meet and ask questions.

The Inner Fight about Questions

As I wrote in a recent issue of TRO: the fact that human beings are able to formulate and ask questions at all, and take into ourselves questions asked by others, is a great thing in evolution and ethics. It’s a tribute to the desire to know. And that desire, had with sincerity and largeness, is the propulsion behind all art and science.

Meanwhile, another way of seeing questions—a way that’s against the desire to know—is in people. That way is to be dull about questions one might meet or ask, and also frightened about them. It’s seeing questions as interferences with one’s comfort, complacency, and fake supremacy. And people have used asking questions of others to be tricky and mean: they’ve changed questions into weapons.

How we see questions is an aspect of the big fight going on in everyone. This fight, Aesthetic Realism shows, is between the desire to respect the world—see authentic meaning in it—and our desire to have contempt, make less of things and people as a means of elevating ourselves.

A Quiet Drama in a Frequent Question

We can see both respect and contempt around one of the most frequently asked questions of the English-speaking world. That question, lovely in its three monosyllabic words, is How are you? It can certainly be asked with thoughtful sincerity. But thousands of times each day, someone comes upon an acquaintance, on the street or elsewhere, and says swiftly How are you?—and just keeps walking. Asking that question without a desire to know is not a crime. It’s not the worst form of contempt. But it is a casual cheapening of what every person most longs for. We long for persons really to want to know how we feel to ourselves, how we see—how we are. And we judge ourselves on how much we really want to know the feelings of others—how they are.

There’s something humorous about asking one of the deepest, most necessary questions while not being interested in either the question or a possible answer. But there’s also an insincerity in that; and it makes the askers more unsure, deeply, of themselves.

A famous and beautiful sentence in English literature is related to the matter I’m commenting on. That sentence, about asking a question, is by Francis Bacon (1561-1626). It’s the first sentence in his essay “On Truth”:“What is truth? said jesting Pilate; and would not stay for an answer.”

Bacon saw that one can ask a big question while not being interested in it, while wanting to get away from it, and while being, really, angry at the question’s meaning. Something of that I think is present as the important question How are you? is used as a mere conventional utterance. And yet—did the question become popular, even while being cheapened, because it stands for something large in the human self? The question is used—and misused—probably every hour somewhere, because it stands for the depths of people, which people simultaneously want to honor and to put aside.

Asked Truly

Soon, in this TRO, you will read Eli Siegel’s powerful discussion of instances of poetry that contain questions. He himself wrote many poems containing questions. And I am very glad to join one here with the present section of his talk, and then say a little about it. He wrote this poem in 1956.

This musical, logical, surprising poem has in it a matter that troubles people very much, though they may not articulate it: what is new and what is old—and how should we see these? From the first line on, the poem is saying, You won’t really be talking about, or looking for, newness, novelty, freshness unless you see that everything has these. And as the poem gives that message, the lines themselves, each differently, have a music that is eager, sparkling, fresh, and simultaneously imbued with a sense of all time.

Take the fourth line—“There are instances of daisies which have never come our way.” A somewhat breathless rush in the first phrase, “There are instances—,” is followed by the perky yet more symmetrical rhythm of the rest of the line: “of daisies which have never come our way.” And throughout the whole line, there are both the warmth of what’s lasting and the wonder and immediacy of the just-born moment.

Every line of this poem should be looked at for its meaning and its music. But for now I’ll point to just one more, the sixth from the end: “A Roman bit of green in a warm morning?” That little growing thing of perhaps the first century comes to us—and is it new or old? We feel its young petiteness through those short is and ee sounds in the phrase “bit of green in.” And meanwhile, the ms and rs in “Roman…warm morning” are rich with both immediacy and the millennia’s slow warmth. The line is beautiful.

Eli Siegel saw the world, always, this way. He saw everything as having complete freshness—as never to be summed up. And he saw everything, everyone, as having to do with, commented on by, the past, with its details. That is how he always saw a person, happenings, history. It was kind, and it was great.

—Ellen Reiss, Aesthetic Realism
Chair of Education

Questions and Three Poets

By Eli Siegel

In all literatures there are questions put in a way that is great. One place is in canto 3 of Byron’s Childe Harold, and it is a classical place in English poetry. Byron describes a dance going on in Brussels—and how the dance is interrupted by a certain sound. As people listen, they think it might be Napoleon’s troops in the neighborhood. We’ll find out that this is the beginning of the Battle of Waterloo, and British soldiers who have been dancing will soon be on the battlefield. —But what I’ll read has a question. (This is stanzas 21, 22, and 24 of the third canto of Childe Harold.)

Those lines are famous. Byron shows that the Spenserian stanza could tell of things, impetuous and making for questions.

Along with the question present in the lines themselves, the question every reader could ask is: What does this mean? Next, you could ask: How well does Byron show the meaning—or, What is the value of this? In fact, the value of these stanzas is still debated. Are they as good as Keats’ “Ode to a Nightingale”? They’re very different. So we’re now in the great question that criticism is about.

Meanwhile, there is a question in those stanzas: We’re now dancing—what’s that noise out there? It’s Napoleon in his last try. So you have the answer. It’s part of history.

Keats, Too, Is Asking Things

I mentioned Keats. And he has many questions. At the beginning of “La Belle Dame sans Merci,” he’s abrupt:

“What can ail thee?” The rest of the poem is given to answering that. And it’s a very lovely answer. Questions can be poetry, and answers can be poetry. And when you’re in suspense, that can be poetry too.

Keats asked a question directly in “La Belle Dame sans Merci,” but as famous a questioning as any in English poetry is in his “Ode on a Grecian Urn.” I’ll read one section of it. Keats has been looking at the Grecian urn, looking at the figures on it, and he asks about them:

So Keats looked. In looking at the urn he didn’t become an aesthetic critic: he didn’t ask how well the figures were on this vase. But he asks, Who are they? And one feels he’s interested in What have they been doing? and How do they feel?

“Who are these coming to the sacrifice?” The question has not been answered.

Then, as Keats asks about the sacrifice, there is a famous phrase, famous because of its music: “To what green altar, O mysterious priest.” The sound of altar and mysterious and priest has been accepted, felt as right, by many readers.

“To what green altar, O mysterious priest / Lead’st thou that heifer lowing at the skies…?” The sacrificial heifer gets to be part of what’s seen. “And all her silken flanks with garlands drest?” In any religion we have opposites in some relation. And that is here: this heifer is going to be sacrificed apparently, yet in the meantime she is dressed in garlands.

There is a question about “what little town” the people on this urn have come from. Then the town itself is addressed: “And, little town, thy streets forevermore / Will silent be; and not a soul to tell / Why thou art desolate, can e’er return.” Some towns in Greece have lost their being a town, and are not known. But the passage I have read has a question: What’s going on, on this part of the urn? And the asking of it has interested people, because of the music.

D.G. Rossetti—& Suggestion

Sometimes there are questions that are not given an interrogative form. Whenever there’s suggestion in a poem there’s a question. There are the facts, and the poet says, I think a meaning can be found. He or she doesn’t say it just so, but says it through the music.

This is a poem of suggestion, and you can ask, What does it mean? It’s a sonnet by Dante Gabriel Rossetti, called “Silent Noon”:

Rossetti is quietly implying that this hot day, this sluggish day in an English rural place, has something to do with how we see each other. The attempt to bring the two together, landscape and love, has been around a great deal. For a long time, many persons have felt Oh, harvest moon, you’re a part of our affection. Why, is a large question. But landscape has been used again and again to give more meaning to love.

A person and growing things can mingle: “Your hands lie open in the long fresh grass.” What can hands say about the grass? What can grass say about the hands? That’s in that line.

“The finger-points look through like rosy blooms.” There’s some red there. And there’s some transparency. “Your eyes smile peace.” The statement means: you seem to be pleased, and because you’re pleased one can feel peace is possible in this world.

“The pasture gleams and glooms.” That’s opposites: the pasture shines and then gets shadowy. That can happen of a summer day. The relation of dark and light, shadow and brightness, night and day still has questions. “’Neath billowing skies that scatter and amass.” And Rossetti feels, all of this is saying something of how we are to each other.

This is one of the clearer sonnets of Rossetti. As a writer of sonnets it can be said that he is with Wordsworth and Shakespeare. There is hardly anybody better.

“All round our nest, far as the eye can pass, / Are golden kingcup-fields with silver edge.” Again, there’s meditation and brightness: the “golden kingcup-fields with silver edge.” There are some sounds that stand out, like kingcup—very sharp. “Where the cow-parsley skirts the hawthorn-hedge.” Rossetti looked at flowers, at growing things, and he saw the relation that is between cow-parsley and hawthorn.

Then: “’Tis visible silence, still as the hour-glass.” He felt that the silence and all of the commotion have to do with love.

“So this wing’d hour is dropt to us from above.” And since there is this hour and the world seems to go along with how we feel, let us clasp it to our hearts and not put it aside. “Oh! clasp we to our hearts, for deathless dower, / This close-companioned inarticulate hour / When twofold silence was the song of love.” That last line is obviously about opposites.

The Question Here

The question here is: What has landscape got to do with the feelings of people? That’s implied in about every line.