Delights of "A Clear Midnight"

This is thy hour O Soul, thy free flight into the wordless,

Away from books, away from art, the day erased, the lesson done,

Thee fully forth emerging, silent, gazing, pondering the themes thou lovest best,

Night, sleep, death, and the stars.

Walt Whitman, “A Clear Midnight”

From its first phrase, “A Clear Midnight” builds an aura of wonder. Whitman carefully develops the mood to lift the soul in contemplation. But, how does this short poem so easily move one to quiet meditation? Elements are the key. Every letter is perfectly chosen to fit the mood of a line. After establishing the poem’s quiet, elevated mood in the first line, the next three move the reader from the excitement of activity to the peace of meditation. A true master, Whitman uses the elements of sound and rhetorical devices to delight and inspire the reader’s own soul.

In the first clause, Whitman creates a hushed setting. Entirely lacking mute consonants, “This is thy hour O Soul” (line 1) impresses the reader with a quiet and gentle ambiance. While the liquid letters establish a peaceful tone for the poem, the words inspire a meditative mood in the reader. Whitman begins contemplation of abstract truth with a direct address to the intangible soul. Combined with soft sounds of the consonants and long vowels, the elevated language of “O Soul” works from the quiet setting and lifts the reader into meditation.

The rise is punctuated and confirmed by the emphasis on “flight.” In the first line, only “flight” ends with a consonantal mute, while the other words are full of vowels, liquids and semivowels. Even the other two stops in “into” and “wordless” are softened by vowels and gentler consonants. According to Mary Oliver, “Within a line, use of a mute sound is like a tiny swoon, a mini-caesura” (Oliver 61). As the reader is forced to pause at the end of the word, he is given time to picture the implied metaphor. The alliteration in “free flight” ties the words together and brings up the traditional metaphor of the soul as a dove. By using slightly more powerful letters in the second phrase, Whitman and further lifts the reader’s thoughts builds up his exhilaration.

The second line builds off this energy to move the reader out of pressures and distractions. With a long vowel in “away,” Whitman places a distance between the soul and the business of the day. This is also emphasized his avoidance of mentioning the word “soul” in the line. Without even a pronoun reference, the soul is completely disconnected from both the line and the demanding work it represents. Whitman establishes the day’s agitation with heavy mutes in “books” and “art.” The oppressive consonants build the feeling that if the soul does not escape, books and art will trample it. Whitman demonstrates this detachment with the line’s ending. As the d’s enclose “day erased,” one can see the whole day closed and put away just like a book. At midnight, the soul leaves all distractions and finishes the day. Even so, another mute consonant in “done” emphasizes the break from stress while the liquid n closes both the line and the reader’s mouth. Whitman builds up the antagonistic energy with the power of mutes and uses the visual absence of the soul to argue that, as in the line, the soul must break with the day’s pressure and fly away to the quiet of midnight to meditate.

After establishing the flight from the cares of the day, Whitman transitions back to the soul and its meditation by returning to the softer voiced “Thee” and “thou.” With the opening vowels and consonant clusters he presents a fall from the forceful energy in the second line. Mary Oliver explains that liquids “suggest softness, fluency, motion” while a mute “is an enforcer of the self-containment, and so the certainty, of what has been said” (Oliver 61). Thus, the rest of the line returns to the initial sense of quiet elation by swelling the energy from the opening th’s to the gentler g’s within “emerging” to the hard t’s closing “lovest best.” In the description of the soul, one word stands out from the parallel –ing suffixes. “Silent” is not only set apart from the balance, but its t ending also helps to elevate it above the rest of the line. Like “wordless” from the first line, it hits on the poem’s main point. When the soul is engaged in meditation, it has no words to describe the beauty it contemplates.

As it rebuilds a meditative mood, the third line also returns to a more cheerful attitude. Whitman develops the thoughtfulness by using increasingly more forceful words. Yet, even with more stops, as in “gazing” and “pondering,” only the t’s particularly stand out. As the line ends, several technical devices focus the reader’s attention on the last two words. Once again, the reader lingers over the words because of the mutes’ natural pause. Furthermore, the slight rhyme ties together “lovest best” and multiplies the impact of the pleasant word and positive superlative. These devices effect a happy feeling as the soul fully embarks on its journey of wondering meditation.

The poem’s upward flight reaches its crescendo in Whitman’s final line. Fittingly, each of the beginning three words has a natural punch from a consonantal mute. Since they are the substance of the soul’s contemplation, “night,” “sleep,” and “death” rightly stand out from the rest of the poem. The hard consonants, however, also set them apart from the rest of the line and emphasize their significance. But, the stops only symbolize the weight that each word carries in its own meaning and the silence inherent in each. Although the first few words of the line hit the reader with their quiet heaviness, Whitman does not leave the reader depressed and weighed down. Rather, he ends the poem on a pleasant note.

The very last word perfectly encapsulates Whitman’s excellent use of words and sounds. In the end, Whitman again lightens and elevates the mood by metaphorically lifting the reader’s gaze to “the stars.” The final word inspires the soul in its meditative hour to think of great things outside itself. Here is the full culmination of the poem as the reader saying the last a in “stars” physically drops his jaw like the soul in silent wondering meditation in “A Clear Midnight.” Thus, Whitman proves his masterful use of sounds and letters, which gives the poem its inspirational power and encourages the reader to join the soul’s contemplative wonder.

Works Cited

Oliver, Mary. Rules for the Dance: A Handbook for Writing and Reading Metrical Verse. Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1998.

Whitman, Walt. “A Clear Midnight.” From Leaves of Grass, 1900. Bartleby. 17 April 2006. http://www.bartleby.com/142/283.html

Planet Narnia

This particular post may go down in history as a case study in “why one should not attempt to write sensible things while sick.” But then again, it may not, so we shall see how it turns out.

Let it be known in advance that virtually nothing I am about to say is original to me. All thoughts were called from Matthew Ward’s article in Touchstone entitled, “Narnia’s Secret: The Seven Heavens of the Chronicles Revealed.” If you want to read more by him, I suggest his book, Planet Narnia.

In his article, Ward is attempting to explain a question that has been puzzling Lewis critics for years—what is the central theme that ties all the Chronicles together? Lewis was a powerful and organized writer, more he was a medievalist, all things tie together in a universal system. Yet, he drew from all sorts of classical traditions and myths: Father Christmas, a snow queen, E. Nesbit, classical mythology, even a few Norse symbols. Critics have argued for several binding themes: an analysis of the seven deadly sins, the seven Roman Catholic sacraments, and a miniaturized version of the Faerie Queen. None of them have been particularly convincing. Lewis himself said that the entire series was about Christ –an assertion that has led to more than a little confusion. Ward argues for a different interpretation—that the theme that binds all seven books together is nothing more than and extension of the gods of the seven heavens of medieval cosmology.

“Wait,” one might ask, “how does a set of pagan gods show Christ?” Well, that gets a little complicated. One of the major extension of Lewis’ writing is the essentialness of God—his overlookability. To Lewis, Christ is in all things; Christ is the obvious center of the entire world, the element that allows us to enjoy anything, to think about God, to see any beauty. Christ is, in fact, so utterly obvious that we are oblivious to his presence. Add to this, his theory of what made excellent literature was not its characters or stories, but how successfully it wove its atmosphere. An essential part of this atmosphere, to him, was a hidden element, a kappa stone that binds the entire work together. This hidden element may be nothing, but it is everything to the work. Finally, Lewis wrote a treatise on how to convey Christianity in literature, one of the methods he argued for was a pattern of transferred classicism, in which Christ is portrayed in the manner of a mere god of classical tradition. Christ is God, above all gods, but can also be portrayed within the pattern of the classical deities. Hopefully, that was not excessively tangential.

Ward presents quite a compelling picture for viewing each of the Chronicles as manifesting a specific planetary deity. The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe portrays Jupiter, or Jove. Prince Caspian personifies Mars, and The Voyage of the Dawn Treader is the Sun. The Silver Chair shows the Moon, while Horse and His Boy shows Mercury. Finally, the prequel and the sequel, The Magician’s Nephew and The Last Battle display Venus and Saturn respectively.

First, Jove. Jove is the king of all gods and from his name comes the English word “jovial.” He is a merry master of all. In The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, the line of Narnian kings is established once and for all. “Once a king or queen in Narnia, always a King or Queen of Narnia. Those that take the thrones reign eternally. Jupiter is also the god that punishes winter. Jove is the one that beats it back to its cage and brings the joy of spring. The way this motif manifests in the books should be fairly obvious.
There is also the concept of death and blood for redemption—namely Aslan’s death for Edmund. Jupiter is called “the bleeding planet” because winter and darkness are exiled through Jove’s giving of his own blood. Through his sacrifice, the world is redeemed. In the Arthurian cycle, Jove gave of his body to defend Pellets. It is in this spirit if Joviality that Lewis brings in Father Christmas, the sacrificial death of Aslan, and even Peter’s exclamation, “By Jove!” when he first enters Narnia.

Don’t worry, gentle reader, all seven won’t take quite that long. In Prince Caspian the story is about a rightful king taking his take back his kingdom by force—appropriately, Mars is the god of war. Also, Mars is Mars Silvanus the god of the woods, maybe even the woods that the children both appeared from and spent most of the book travelling through. Arboreal imagery appears throughout the novel. Silvans, a beast that appear in no other book, appear at the final battle, Miraz frets over his martial o policy, Reepicheep is the most martial of all creatures, and the object that proves that children are in Narnia? A knight.

Voyage of the Darn Treader is a quest towards the rising run: Aslan appears out of a sun to Lucy, Aslan as an albatross flies out of a sunbeam. God, the metal of the sun, appears throughout the story--a man turned into gold and Eustace trapped by a gold armband. Even the dying dragons are taken from Apollo, the sun god, and lizard slayer.

Fittingly, the book that shows the Moon follows on the heels of the book on the Sun. In The Silver Chair, Aslan only appears in his own country, on earth he can only be known by signs and dreams, automatically making the night mistress of the day for a time. The moon in Latin is luna root of our word “lunatic.” Prince Rilian is a lunatic who must be freed from silver chair—silver being the metal of the moon. Even the names of the horses, Coalblack and Snowflake, are drawn from the names of the horses that pull the Moon’s chariot in Spenser’s Faerie Queen. Even more complicated, the whole book portrays the medieval model of the great divide between the realm of certainty and the realm of confusion, a divide shown in their travels in the overland and the underworld.

The Horse and His Boy is Mercury, the messenger of the gods. It concerns a tale of two twins, “meeting selves, same but sundered.” Twins who is recognizable as Castor and Pollux, the Horseman and the Boxer of Homer’s Iliad and The Twins, a constellation in the house of Mercury. Lewis even takes the time to let us know that the helmet of one of the Narnian lord’s helmet is marked with the sign Mercury, a metal helmet with wings on either side.

As the only lady of the deific constellation, Venus is the goddess over the book of life, The Magician’s Nephew. The book speaks of laughter and joy in the creation of the world and the fun of “The First Joke.” Motherhood, as Digory fights to save his mother, and Helen is the first queen, and in some ways, the mother of Narnia. Even her name, Helen, harkens back to Helen of Troy, whose troubles began with Venus. Warmth and beauty are in the Wood Between the Worlds and the new-born Narnia. Also, the apples that give life hearken back to the Apple of Hesperides. More ominously, Jadis is the anti-Venus, she is in the model of Ishtar, a goddess who reigned by a powerful use of her sex and pride. Charn in described as “the great city” an allusion to Nineveh, the stronghold of Ishtar’s worship.

Finally, there is The Last Battle and if you are still reading, my hat is off to you. The Last Battle is ruled by Saturn, the god of ill-chance, treachery, and death. Aslan does not appear until all the main characters are dead. Here, God is portrayed as the God who is seen most clearly in abandonment and loss. In this story, Father Time, who was originally based on Saturn, is the great leveler. In this book, loyalty costs life, and betrayal brings madness. In this book, righteousness bears the ultimate price.

Whether it is a true analysis or not, I do not know, I am re-reading the series to find out. But in any case, it fits the medieval pattern that C.S. Lewis both knew, and was known to respect. It is in any case, very interesting and illuminating.