Keats and the Squirrel

My students, writing on “La Belle Dame Sans Merci,” have all started with the withered sedge and the dearth of birds as symbols of desolation, which of course they are. But the landscape is not described entirely in terms of desolation. It’s desolate for the knight, but not for the squirrel. And someone is enjoying that harvest. It’s the opposite of “Grecian Urn,” where the townspeople are frozen in time on the pilgrimage to the sacrifice, and the little town is empty. Here the knight is frozen in place, forever unable to partake of the harvest.



This also suggests that the narrator is just passing through. He’s seen signs of the harvest before he gets to the barren place where the knight loiters. Real life and real nourishment aren’t that far away, but it doesn’t seem as though the knight is ever going to get to them…and it seems as though that’s his choice. He’s loitering. Did the word have the same connotations in Keats’ time? Apparently, yes. the OED quotes Sir Walter Scott in 1814: “Officers…loitered in the hall, as if waiting for orders.” The knight doesn’t seem to be waiting for orders; he’s already gotten them from the pale kings and princes. Don’t bother to try to go anywhere.



The knight is in thrall to his world between illusion and reality. The sedge is withered, not because he’s in a place of perpetual barrenness, but because the harvest is done and winter’s approaching. The traveler knows this. He is presumably going to keep going, on to a farmhouse where he can get some good bread or other fruits of the harvest. And he seems to know that there’s nothing much he can do for the knight.

Delving Into the Penetralium

Jeff Newberry posts on the NewPo list, the following definition of poetry (NewPo is big on "what poetry is?", which is actually one of the things I like about it), and Anny Ballardini has collected a wealth of definitions on her Fieralingue website:

" . . . one of poetry's chief aims is to illumine the walls of mystery, the inscrutable, the unsayable. I think poetry ought to be taught not as an engine of meaning but as an opportunity to learn to live in doubt and uncertainty, as a means of claiming indeterminacy. Our species is deeply defined by its great surges of reason, but I think it high time we return to elemental awe and wonder."

--Major Jackson, "Does Poetry Have a Social Function," Poetry, January 2007

I'm not sure I think poetry should be taught any one way. I kinda like it as an engine of meaning, but of course, it's also an engine of ambiguity, so none of the meanings fired up by its internal combustion are going to be definitive, and one can continue sputtering along in doubt and uncertainty.

I was going to continue this blog entry on Keats' thoughts about doubt and uncertainty, but that last metaphor reminds me of this wonderful poem by my great mentor, Donald Finkel, so I think I'll close with it and save Keats and the penetralium for next time:

Concerning the Transmission

You might say the same of poetry:
you've sunk too much in it
to quit now, driving
good hours after bad
too much of you wound
round the wires and the hoses.

You might stop addressing
this absence beside you,
cursing through the intricate
cities, singing in high passes,
tooling down freeways,
minding the numbers,
ears pricked for oracular
tappings, limping past fields
of sullen junkers, eyeholes crawling
with nettle and goldenrod.

If you let go now, the bearings
will scream from their orbits,
the rocker arms clang in their cylinders
and the needles return to their various zeroes,
as if your hands had never clenched
this sweaty wheel.