In night when colors all to black are cast,
Distinction lost, or gone down with the light;
The eye a watch to inward senses placed,
Not seeing, yet still having powers of sight,
Gives vain alarums to the inward sense,
Where fear stirred up with witty tyranny,
Confounds all powers, and thorough self-offense,
Doth forge and raise impossibility:
Such as in thick depriving darknesses,
Proper reflections of the error be,
And images of self-confusednesses,
Which hurt imaginations only see;
And from this nothing seen, tells news of devils,
Which but expressions be of inward evils.
Now read it a second time. The key word appears to be "inward." What governs the "inward sense"? Let's take it one step at a time. It is possible to have the power to see and be blind; that paradox we can figure out. But who has "placed" the eye there as "a watch?" Is there an appeal to a belief system the reader is presumed to understand and identify on the basis of the language and probable date of composition? The second stanza raises the possibility that "the inward sense" singular may be different from the "inward senses." And both are corrupt and susceptible to panic and fear. The eye can at least give a "proper reflection of the error." What's there is nothing, "the nothing that is," as Wallace Stevens would have it. And the news confirms the neuroses. The devil is a manmade expression of "inward evils" based on illusory images. And yet, saying all this, one feels one has left out something crucial to the poem: the darkness, the night, and the power of sight to see error or to see erroneously.
The late Edward Tayler, professor at Columbia, did his best to promote the English Renaissance poet Fulke Greville, Tayler believed that Greville's importance was on a par with that of Sir Thomas Wyatt, Ben Jonson, John Donne, George Herbert, and Andrew Marvell. For a final paper Tayler had us analyze this sonnet. A piece of cake it ain't.
Aldous Huxley chose the following lines by Fulke Greville as the epigraph for the 1928 novel Point Counter Point:
Oh, wearisome condition of humanity!
Borne under one Law, to another bound,
Vainely begot and yet forbidden vanity:
Created sick, commanded to be sound.
What meaneth Nature by these diverse laws –
Passion and reason, self-division’s cause?
-- DL
Thank you for bringing attention to Greville, a fine thoughtful fellow. Your comments on his substance are interesting. I would suggest that the key destination for his argument is "inward evils". He points out that the storms of the mind have very real sources. Perhaps one could look at it as the emergence of life from the muck of decay and its dependence on decay and death for nourishment. Life is an extension of decay in an organized form, aware of its source yet drawn to the light of the transcendent spirit. If this light is removed the dark truth of the grave seizes the imagination as it should, and after all, "dust to dust" as Donne repeatedly tells us.
Posted by: Kyril Calsoyas | July 02, 2022 at 12:16 PM
To Kyril Carlsoyas: I appreciate your thoughtful response to Greville's poem. Thank you.
Posted by: David Lehman | July 02, 2022 at 05:19 PM
Yes, a wonderful sonnet to ponder and poet to meet. Thank you! I think Emily Dickinson was expressing something similar, below. While both poems suggest intriguing resonances with possible spiritual realms, good and evil, even with the current tribalism in our nation that came first to my mind, I believe it's each poet's keen attention to how vision actually changes at night that allows their poems to gain a universality and plasticity that continues to speak to and invite a thoughtful reader to dwell in those further possibilities.
We grow accustomed to the Dark —
When Light is put away —
As when the Neighbor holds the Lamp
To witness her Good bye —
A Moment — We Uncertain step
For newness of the night —
Then — fit our Vision to the Dark —
And meet the Road — erect —
And so of larger — Darknesses —
Those Evenings of the Brain —
When not a Moon disclose a sign —
Or Star — come out — within —
The Bravest — grope a little —
And sometimes hit a Tree
Directly in the Forehead —
But as they learn to see —
Either the Darkness alters —
Or something in the sight
Adjusts itself to Midnight —
And Life steps almost straight.
Posted by: Sally Ashton | July 03, 2022 at 03:06 PM
Thanks for the excellent comment, Sally.I love Dickinson and and am grateful to you for posting this brave poem of hers confronting the dark. MNoreover. . .I owe you a letter.
Posted by: David Lehman | July 06, 2022 at 09:27 PM