"What's the import?": indefinitiveness of meaning in nineteenth-century parabolic poems - Critical Essay

Style, Spring, 2002 by Kerry McSweeney

For Poe, the "intrinsic and essential character" of Tennyson's "The Lady of Shalott" is "a suggestive indefinitiveness of meaning" and thus a "detinitiveness of [...] effect." This description may also be applied to other nineteenth-century parabolic or fabular poems: Coleridge's "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner," Keats's "La Belle Dame sans Merci" and "The Eve of St. Agnes," Browning's "Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came," and Christina Rossetti's "Goblin Market." These poems encourage interpretive activity in the reader but allow for a plurality of meanings. An aesthetic approach to these poems takes issue with the reader-response premises of Jack Stillinger's "Reading 'The Eve of St. Agnes': The Multiples of Complex Literary Transaction" (1999). A reading of "Childe Roland" emphasizes the poem's dreamlike features and that several leading interpretations are all instantiations of the poem's archetypal plot--a testing encounter with a greatly superior opponent. A consideration of "Goblin Market" subsumes both Christian and new historicist-feminist readings and illustrates the usefulness of an aesthetic approach in making qualitative discriminations and evaluative determinations.

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"Why," asked Edgar Allan Poe in 1844, "do some persons fatigue themselves in attempts to unravel such phantasy-pieces as the 'Lady of Shalott'?" The intrinsic and essential character" of such poems, Poe insists, is to convey "a suggestive indefinitiveness of meaning" and thus to bring about a "definitiveness of vague and therefore of spiritual effect." This effect is compared to that of "true musical expression"--that is, to music not imbued "with any very determinate tone" and thus not reducible to "a tangible and easy appreciable idea." It was to be regretted that "to the uncultivated talent, or to the unimaginative disposition, this deprivation of [the] most delicate grace [of such poems] will be, not infrequently, a recommendation" (1331). In essence, Poe's reflections adumbrate the familiar distinction between aesthetic and interpretive modes of critical discourse. The distinction is particularly relevant to the consideration of what Poe called phantasy-pieces but what might more usefully be termed fabul ar or parabolic narrative poems. (1) These include, in addition to Tennyson's "The Lady of Shalott," such well-known and often commented upon Romantic and Victorian poems as Coleridge's "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner," Keats's "La Belle Dame sans Merci" and "The Eve of St. Agnes," Browning's "Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came," and Christina Rossetti's "Goblin Market."

The plots of these narratives involve a passage from one state of being to another. All have a fantastic premise or supra-realistic appurtenances that combine with pronounced metrical and stylistic features to create a spell-like, magical atmosphere and to charge objects, actions, and binary oppositions with symbolic suggestiveness. The reader is teased, prompted, or propelled into interpretive considerations that are not the after-product of critical analysis but essential aspects of the experience of the poem. Sometimes the invitation is implicit: for example, the questions asked within "La Belle Dame sans Merci" and "The Lady of Shalott"--"O what can ail thee [...]?" at the beginning of the former; "Who is this? and what is here?" at the end of the latter--that at the extra-diegetic level stimulate the reader to ask "questions of conceptual intent" (Wasserman 65). In other poems, the invitation is explicit, and interpretive concerns are even thematized. In "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner," for example, bo th the marginal glosses and the likely fallibility of the pious and superstitious narrator foreground what Susan J. Wolfson calls "problems in interpretation" and "the ultimate uncertainty of interpretation" (23, 31).

But in parabolic poems, reflexive considerations are first and foremost not a theme but an affect contributing to indefinitiveness of meaning. When thematized, they become another of the conspicuous components of the poem impacting on the reading experience. Coleridge's poem, for example, is no more or less about problems in interpretation than it is about sin and expiation, guilt, "the psychology of physical and emotional extremity" (Perry 138) and the belief or feeling that (in Coleridge's words) "every Thing has a life of it's own, & that we are all one Life" (Letters 2:864). These and other concerns are not superseded or negated by the poem's reflexive elements, and none of them is any more qualified by these elements than it is by any other of the poem's thematic components.

While parabolic poems encourage interpretive activity, they do not invite the one-to-one assignment of conceptual meaning to signifiers. Indeed, their distinguishing feature is that they allow for a plurality of interpretive possibilities. Consider the difference between Matthew Arnold's "The Forsaken Merman" and "The Lady of Shalott." Arnold's poem has most of the characteristics of a parabolic narrative: a fantastic premise (its source is a Danish folktale); pronounced metrical and stylistic features; and the binary opposition of sea and land, more particularly the colorful undersea domicile of the merman versus the little gray church on the windy shore. But the key ingredient is lacking. The theme of "The Forsaken Merman" is univocal and overdetermined: the opposition of the unfettered, aesthetically attractive natural world and the somber, restrictive human world. It is true that commentators have disagreed over which world the poem ultimately valorizes, but this is not the same thing as saying that the p oem is polysemous. By the criterion that "what Arnold needed to produce a good poem was a passionate apprehension of a theme and an image or myth in which to embody that theme," "The Forsaken Merman" may be judged to be among the dozen or so of his "really fine poems" (Culler, "Introduction" ix). But as a parabolic narrative it is unimpressive precisely for the reason that it contains only a single theme. "The Riddle we can guess," as Emily Dickinson put it, "We speedily despise" (#1222). Arnold, it is hard not to feel, chose the wrong vehicle. The poem itself suggests the right vehicle. Disguised as a parabolic poem, "The Forsaken Merman" is in fact, like numerous Arnoldian poems, an elegiac monologue.