1) The document discusses the challenges of objectively analyzing literature and determining the meaning and context of words within poems. 2) It examines Robert Browning's use of religiously-charged words in some of his poems and argues this suggests an underlying mystical or religious dimension, contrary to how the poems may seem at face value. 3) The document also discusses debates around whether the context for analyzing a work should be just the work itself or if external contexts like the author's overall body of work or historical time period should also be considered.

1. The opening stop in a proposed anthology of
essays on literary and historical subjects
By Julian Scutts
COPYRIGHT JULIAN SCUTTS JULY 14 2016

2. By Julian Scutts
The first chapter of this book
THE LAST
TRUMP

3. Quoth one: “It ’s as my great-grandsire,
Starting up at the trump of doom’s tone,
Had walked this way from his painted tombstone!”
Robert Browning, “The Pied Piper of Hamelin” 67-69
I once heard that back in the 1980s the name “Margaret Thatcher” found its way into word-
association tests designed by psychiatrists to gauge the mental condition of their patients and
they found that even in the case of the most distraught and confused patients the name penetrated
the deep strata of the mind. Only time will tell whether the word “Trump” will exert an equally
powerful influence.
The widest context of any word is the mind itself, the mind in its entirely, which comprises its
unconscious as well as its conscious component. When we speak of determining the sense of a
word by reference to its context, this “context” is narrow indeed, often requiring no more that
qualifying word or phrase. Thus we distinguish clearly between “a train to Liverpool” and “a
train of thought.”
The way we determine the sense of words encountered within a poem is initially at least little
different from the way we determine the sense of words encountered in a newspaper or factual
report - but for one essential difference. The reader of an article seeks only the one meaning that
conforms to the message of that article, while in poetry an assessment of a word’s immediately
recognizable meaning marks the beginning of an exploration of its deeper significance. Let us
consider the meaning of the word “trump” in Browning’s “the Pied Piper of Hamelin.” The
words “the trump of doom’s tone” conform to conventional usage and allude to verses in the

4. New Testament according to which the sound of the heavenly trumpet will herald the
resurrection of the dead. However, in the first place the word “trump” with its biblical allusions
merely serves to embellish a description of the Piper’s odd appearance and how this would strike
an observer in Hamelin. There are other explicit references to passages in the Bible but it is the
cumulative effect of words such as “cross,” “passion” and “promised” that imply some mystical
or religious dimension that underlies the plain narrative of the poem, even if these words
according to the logic of the narrative seem to be no more than synonyms of to traverse and a fit
of rage. One might pass off the all this as purely coincidental if one did not find similar
coincidence in other works by Browning. In “By the Fire-Side” the word root “cross” as a
declined verb or substantive recurs noticeably within the space of several lines and twice in the
line “We crossed the bridge that we crossed before” with the effect of contrasting two senses of
the word “cross,” one signify the act of traversing and the other the central symbol of
Christianity (“The cross is down, the altar bare”). Let us take another case. We are never told any
information as to the substance of “the Good News” in the title of Browning’s celebrated poem
“How they brought the good news from Aix to Ghent” but the religious import of these words
accords with allusive references within the body of the poem to blood, wine, the salvation of
Aix and the survival of the third horse. Why is it then that Browning’s most popular poems are
seen as aberrations from the high seriousness of Browning’s poetry in general, even as fun
tangents for the benefit of children? Should we compare poems in any case if each is a unique
enclosed “object” in which words play no more than an internal function and assert nothing
about anything in the world outside: history, biography or statements of belief? I raise the
question: what constitutes the final all-enclosing context of a literary work? The formal confines
of the work itself as adherents of “internal” or “objective” criticism maintain?
It is reasonable enough to accept that formal confines of work, in as far as they are clearly
delineated (and this is not always the case), constitute a context. We pay much closer attention to
the arrangement of words what form poem than we would normally do otherwise, though the
difference between a literary piece and a factual report is not radical in every respect. According
to the seminal works of Ferdinand de Saussure any coherent segment of spoken or written
language lies in the category of parole (as opposed to langue, language as a regulative system);
each word in a text is not identical with any other occurrence of a word, even one of like
appearance and meaning as definable in a dictionary, for its position in the sequence of words

5. places in an environment and field of associations shared by no other word. The text progresses.
This reality emerges clearly when we consider the cumulative effect that augments with each
occurrence word “honorable” in Mark Antony’s speech at the funeral of Julius Caesar in
Shakespearean drama.
One does not have to be an expert in literature – sometimes there is some advantage in not being
one - to appreciate the richness of poetry, especially when poems stir emotions that are familiar
to anyone, the sorrows of bereavement, the ecstasy and joy of love, sympathy for a blind sage,
but the same emotions can be equally well aroused in the course of daily life by a letter, a private
conversation or an article in a newspaper. Scholars, especially those adhering to the school of
objective literary criticism, will point to fundamental differences between the language of poetry
and that of daily communication. Poetry is an art form like painting, music or sculpture. To
delete, alter or add a word to poem would be an act of sacrilege no less than were the act of
erasing a feature of the Mona Lisa or chipping off a part of an ancient Greek statue. Even for the
poet Ezra Pound “images,” not words, constituted the essential ingredients of poetry. The notion
that poetry is only of value to the extent that it imitates the non-verbal arts finds extreme
expression in an article by Calvin Brown that analyses Walt Whitman’s poem “When Lilacs
Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d,” a work unreservedly accepted in literary circles as a personal
homage to President Abraham Lincoln, and finds that the poem is not about Abraham Lincoln at
all. References to the president serve only to establish the theme of “a great man,” which at
various junctures throughout the poem expands and develops a leitmotif that pervades the poem
as in an orchestral symphony.
According to Calvin Brown’s critical analysis Whitman was the first poet to fully recognize
the musical nature of poetry and rinse out from words any statement about facts, issues or
opinions that exist independently in the domain of external reality. If words in a poem play no
role but that of satisfying its aesthetic and structural needs, they are not only unrelated to the
world around them but also to all other works of literature, as each work is a unique object in
which all words are an inextricable part of an indivisible whole. Calvin Brown was not the only
one to hold that while all poem are unique objects, some poems are more unique than others.
Harold Bloom heaps inordinate praise on William Blake’s Jerusalem and Wordsworth’s “Lines
…Tintern Abbey” at the price of devaluing all poems composed before and after them. The

6. consummate perfection of these poems- so his argument runs, spelt the decline, nay, the death of
poetry thereafter. Bloom based this assertion on the argument that in writing their greatest works
Blake and Wordsworth reached the ultimate stage at which the libido achieved union with the
anima and thus effected the total “internalization” of poetry.
An interesting variation of standpoint within the broad spectrum of objective criticism is to be
found in the works of Northrop Frye. On one had he doggedly affirms a belief in the radical
separation of literature from all external factors in the domains of biography and history, etc. ; on
the other, he sees all works of literature as part of a vast unity within which the genres of
literature fall into categories that correspond to the four seasons of the annual cycle. Tragedy is a
mythos of spring, while satire of winter, for example At the centre of this system we discover
the ruling archetypes of classical symbolism and the high or low status of literary forms depends
on their distance from this centre. In such terms the novel is “a low mimetic displacement” of
classical archetypes. We see little acceptance of what other critics discern as the positive and
vital nature of novelistic fiction, its anti-hierarchal force and its power of innovation. Frye’s
refusal to accept the existence of vital connections between literature and human experience,
whether that of an individual or that of communities throughout history, leads him to adopt a
patronizing or nanny-like attitude to John Milton, a writer who held that literature had a lot to do
with human behavior and revealed truth. This lack of sympathy and empathy comes to light in
passages that include reference to acts of “wandering.” Indeed, Milton made ample use of the
verb to wander in Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained and invested this with a positive
meaning in line with biblical tradition for in this the negative aspect of wandering as sinning and
falling into error is overridden by the curative and redeeming consequences of wandering
through the wilderness of Sinai or even of the Fall, the felix culpa in Thomist theology. “With
wandering feet” Adam and Eve leave Paradise into the wilderness of history and experience,
where in due time Jesus will also wander and thwart the powers of evil. For Frye wandering is
understood only in negative .terms, as entrapment within “the labyrinth of the Law,” not even
conceding, as the apostle Paul did, that the law at least served as a schoolmaster in the
dispensation of divine providence. Incidentally, Byron was also highly sensitive to Milton’s uses
of the verb to wander, as a discussion of Don Juan will show.

7. Let us consider the problem that words in poetry present to the objective critic in the case of
Hirsch’s observation on the task facing the objective reader of poetry. As he points out, it avails
little if texts are objective but readers of these texts are not. Though the reader has no business
trying to probe the mind of the text’s author, considered extraneous to the text and unknowable,
Hirsch concedes it is legitimate to make a comparative study of words found anywhere within
the corpus of all works written by the same author, thus exceeding the bounds of one poem, as
long as the sense of a particular word in a given text is found to be ambiguous or incapable of
resolution. Here the objective reader must tread warily lest he or she leaves the terra firma of
the work and wanders off into perilous byways. Perhaps the danger to objective reading is all the
greater for the fact that language has a diachronic as well as a synchronic axis, to apply terms of
central importance in Ferdinand de Saussure’s theory of language. The state of a language on the
synchronic plane, in other words during a certain time frame, remains constant to all intents and
purposes, but on its diachronic axis, over long stretches of time, it does not. In the ordinary way
people are not greatly affected by concerns with semantic changes, but poets are, as tradition
unites them with poets who belonged to past ages. and the resonance of their words does not fall
silent. If indeed the uses of word within a long tradition influence contemporary poets in their
choice of words, objective critics have reason to shudder, for such influences could puncture the
watertight compartments that supposedly seal off poetic objects.
To be continued