The Substance of Shadow: A Darkening Trope in Poetic History 9780226354309

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The Substance of Shadow

The 1999 Clark Lectures Trinity College University of Cambridge

The Substance of Shadow A Darkening Trope in Poetic History

John H ol l ander Edited by Kenneth Gross

The University of Chicago Press Chicago and London

John Hollander (1929–2013) was the Sterling Professor of English at Yale University. Kenneth Gross is the Alan F. Hilfiker Distinguished Professor of English at the University of Rochester. The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637 The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London © 2016 by The University of Chicago All rights reserved. Published 2016. Printed in the United States of America 25 24 23 22 21 20 19 18 17 16   1 2 3 4 5 ISBN-­13: 978–0-­226–35427-9 (cloth) ISBN-­13: 978–0-­226–35430-9 (e-­book) DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226354309.001.0001 Library of Congress Cataloguing-­in-­Publication Data Names: Hollander, John, author. | Gross, Kenneth, editor. Title: The substance of shadow : a darkening trope in poetic history / John Hollander ; edited by Kenneth Gross. Description: Chicago ; London : University of Chicago Press, 2016. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2015047973 | ISBN 9780226354279 (cloth : alkaline paper) | ISBN 9780226354309 (e-book) Subjects: LCSH: Shades and shadows in literature. | English poetry— History and criticism. | American poetry—History and criticism. Classification: LCC PR508.S53 H65 2016 | DDC 821/.00935—dc23 LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2015047973 ∞ This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48–1992 (Permanence of Paper).

for Natalie Charkow Hollander

Contents }

Preface  ix 1.  A Lecture upon the Shadow  1 2.  Shadows and Shades  33 3.  Shadowes Light  69 4.  A Shadow Different from Either  101 5.  Fragments of Shadow: Manuscript Extracts  131 Acknowledgments  155 Bibliography  157 Index  167

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Under thy shadow by the piers I waited; Only in darkness is thy shadow clear.

— Hart Crane The poet and scholar John Hollander writes in this book of the lives and afterlives of shadow, of the vivid substance, power, and even radiance that shadows can assume in works of the imagination. Focusing on British and American poetry from the Renaissance to the end of the twentieth century—though reaching back to more ancient sources—he explores shadow’s place as metaphor, as enigma, as matter for fable and parable, as a form of knowledge and a mode of vision. He shows us what love of shadow amounts to. He tracks the kind of thinking that is done with shadow, and in shadow, how we put shadows to use. Within these pages we find shadow as companion, comforter, creator, questioner, stalker, playmate, spy, king, ghost, dancer, demon, and destroyer. Shadow measures loss and gain, presence and absence, the visible and the invisible. Shiftingly it falls upon ix

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and gives us the ground, or a landscape; it maps in its motions an environment, inner and outer, natural and supernatural. Shadow also becomes a shape of time, a witness of past, present, and future things, contracting and lengthening with the course of our days, binding us together. It names the myriad forms of our human fate. The book can suggest an anatomy of melancholy, a “darkening trope” or turn, but shadow here is also an occasion of continuous wonder and opening to the gifts of time. Different, often conflicting ideas and genealogies of shadow are at work in the poems studied here, and one of Hollander’s tasks is that of finely discriminating among them, in the process finding his way through changing words for shadow: tsal, skia, eidolôn, umbra, imago, shade. One legacy in Western thought of Plato’s myth of the cave—with its image of chained watchers taking for real the shadows of mere statues cast on a wall by flames burning behind them—is to make of shadows the archetypal metaphor for the illusory world of matter and bodily perception, of mere opinion, imperfect images set against the perfect, foundational realm of ideas, the sun outside. Part of what this book does is to trace a counterhistory to the Platonic tradition, one in which shadows acquire a mysterious truth, a personality, a creaturely life, what Hollander calls “causative rights.” He shows us the paradoxical means through which a thing by nature secondary and passing grabs at something like authority, even a kind of originality, and becomes itself a source of life, an inward principle rather than an outward accident, surviving its own fragility. Shadow indeed reveals itself here as a kind of light; it clarifies things as much as it darkens them, even as it becomes a name for doubt, for the unnamable, for the life of lost or ruined things, or the deathliness of the literal. Shadow offers a name for the substance of poetry itself.

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This volume originates in the four unpublished Clark Lectures that Hollander delivered in 1999 at Trinity College, Cambridge. These lectures were planned to provide the core of a long-­meditated book, though he never completed his revisions for this before he died in 2013. I will say more below about the surviving manuscript of the lectures and my editing of them, but for now a brief account of their overall shape may be useful. The first lecture looks closely at the play of literal and figurative shadows in English Renaissance poetry, beginning with a love lyric by John Donne and proceeding to a group of Shakespeare sonnets—with their eerie self-­ reflections and increasing darkness of desire—taking up as well poetry by Edmund Spenser, Thomas Campion, Ben Jonson, George Chapman, and John Dowland. Shadows in this poetry offer complex images or maps of our wishes, dreams, cares, and fears; they are our own and not our own, both illuminating and alienating, always undergoing metamorphosis. They are things we make, models for the substance of our thought, but also figures of its emptiness or passivity, its power to be infected by illusion and disguise. This is a poetry that often plays against Plato’s dualism by aligning earthly shadows more closely with their supposed opposite, the realm of things ideal. The second lecture starts by probing backwards into the earlier history of poetic shadow, its biblical and classical, especially Virgilian, roots. Here we find shadow as a figure of protection—the covering shadow of divine wings, Isaiah’s “the shadow of a great rock in a weary land,” or the restful shade of a pastoral tree—but also, in many forms, as a figure of death and loss, defining a realm that Psalm 23 calls “the valley of the shadow.” Shade and shadow here lend form to ghosts. They shape environments at once lovely and transient, places of exile, of torment, and of mental darkness, yet

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also of strange continuity, sustenance, and truth. The diverse ombre of Dante’s Divina Commedia become important here, but even more so those of Milton in Paradise Lost, including the “darkness visible” of Hell, the shadows of (shadowless) Heaven, and those corporeal and incorporeal shadows that populate Eden before and after the fall. Moving into the poetry of Romanticism, lecture three (“Shadowes Light”) examines the ways in which the shadow comes to be seen as an image or expression of an unseen self, material for ever more acute psychological maps. The shadow here evokes a hidden, unknown, or alien self hood, something that can be linked to memories of childhood (Wordsworth’s “shadowy recollections” which are “yet the fountain light of all our day”) as well as to more dangerous, even self-­destructive impulses, or to the internalized shadows of social repression. Hollander dwells here on the frighteningly personified shadows—brooding, mournful, jealous, usurping, wandering—that emerge in the mythic poems of William Blake, his stories of how we both make and reduce ourselves to shadows. He tracks the myriad forms of shadow in Percy Bysshe Shelley’s poetry, shadows of volatile and unseen powers, charming, transformative, and devouring things which the poet urgently wants to know and name. Poems by Herman Melville, Walt Whitman, and Emily Dickinson figure here as well. This lecture looks also at tales of a shadow that takes on a life of its own, becoming a double or treacherous doppelgänger—most prominently works by Adelbert von Chamisso and Hans Christian Andersen. These are texts in which the shadow shows us the lost as much as the hidden self, its damaged and even unlived life. Shadows, if they offer us company, also measure our solitude. Gathering up the threads of this complex history, the final lecture studies the peculiarly fraught, crisis-­laden, and

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densely allusive shadows of later romantic and modern poetry, focusing on texts by Edgar Allan Poe, Alfred Lord Tenny­son, and T. S. Eliot. Shadows in this poetry offer an acute witness of unknown realms of experience and existence. “Speaks true who speaks shadow,” wrote Paul Celan. By the last pages of the book it becomes clear that, as Hollander writes, “the substance of modern poetic shadow is in good part that of prior poetic shadow itself.” There emerges here a sense that the shadow substance of past poetry can be a fearful thing, that it may become a blocking or devouring shadow, a version of what Harold Bloom, an important interlocutor for Hollander, describes as the “Covering Cherub” of poetic influence. But Hollander also lets us see, as does Bloom, the complex nourishment that houses in these shadows of prior poetry. The study of shadows becomes a locus for thinking about poetic survival, that power to renew itself, to gain continuing life, which poetry discovers in the most volatile things, the urgent presences that poetry finds in its own apprehensions of absence and need. The book’s moving map of past poetic shadows has indeed the ambition of something like prophecy, marking the weight of the present moment as much as of the future, and of a future not at all certain, but filled with the shadow of what is unknown and merely possible. My summary can only hint at the richness and texture of this brief book. Hollander’s scope of attention in these pages is characteristically expansive. Along with those already mentioned, the poets who enter the argument include Homer, Pindar, Horace, Ovid, the Countess of Pembroke, George Herbert, Andrew Marvell, Alexander Pope, Edward Young, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, John Keats, Thomas Hood, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Algernon Charles Swinburne, Ernest Dowson, Charlotte Mew, Paul Valéry, Rainer Maria Rilke, Wallace

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Stevens, Guillaume Apollinaire, D. H. Lawrence, and Hart Crane. He can turn an acute eye on biblical typology, Leonardo da Vinci’s notebooks, the philosophy of Schopenhauer, and a 1930s radio show called The Shadow, whose opening tag line was: “Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men? The Shadow knows!” As a work of criticism, the book shows throughout Hollander’s uncanny skill at laying bare the complex workings of figural language, his attention to poetry’s way of tracking and transforming the literal, building metaphor upon metaphor, and the peculiar kind of knowledge this provides, even in its darkness. His writing elicits poetry’s relentless commitment to play, and how poetry reflects on its own work. This investigation of the life of shadows—their shifting outlines, their way of doubling and morphing the defining shape of the bodies that cast them—indeed resonates subtly with Hollander’s many critical studies of poetic form, of the shaping energies of meter, line, rhyme, and stanza, of the ways in which poets make parables of their own formal devices, turning dead “scheme” into living trope. Equally important here are Hollander’s mappings of poetic tradition, his account of how one poet’s shadows turn on or mirror another’s over time, a tradition that his subject invites him to redefine rather than take for granted. Shadows and echoes— visual doubles and acoustic doubles—indeed share an essential fascination for him as images of poetic work. So it happens that The Substance of Shadow: A Darkening Trope in Poetic History forms a diptych with The Figure of Echo: A Mode of Allusion in Milton and After, one of Hollander’s crucial books, a study of the intricate ways in which poems hear, remember, and transform earlier poems, how they excavate buried words and make new homes for them, even as they bear the burden of the prior poems’ “darkening,” their decaying into noise or silence.

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As well as drawing together his concerns as a literary scholar, the lectures explore the backgrounds and sustaining questions of Hollander’s own poetry, itself a vast archive of poetic shadows, of varying shapes of darkness. It is a poetry preoccupied with the substantial force of things that, like shadows, may seem unreal, contingent, scattered, fading, and broken. All the tricks of light and all the richly varied shadows of the sensible world are given honor here, taken in with delight—long lamplit shadows falling on a wet street at evening, flickering shadows in a sunlit wood, shadows cast onto a bedroom wall or clinging to the curve of a face, the moving shadow of a cat on a carpet. But shadows in Hollander’s poetry also collaborate with the work of mind and memory. They are seen as gifts, profane sacraments; they are complex metaphors of making and knowing, matter for fables of longing, sorrow, joy, and fear, eliciting more occult radiances as well. Shadows become things with lives of their own, “spectral emanations” of the self, variously taunting, enigmatic, violent, and whimsical entities. These shadows grow and multiply, “the dark / Opening into further / Dark,” they weave themselves together with other, often elusive forms of sight and sound. It’s an old and sometimes fearful darkness that the poems explore and invite us to explore. They “sound the dark” as Hollander says of the owl in “Owl.” Darkness, or near darkness, is the domain in which the secret agent codenamed Cupcake, Hollander’s alter ego in his book-­length poem Reflections on Espionage, sends his messages to a network of fellow poet-­spies, friends of shadow.* *Among Hollander’s contemporaries are numerous poets with books whose titles somehow figure shadow, including John Ashbery’s Shadow Train, W. S. Merwin’s The Shadow of Sirius, Anthony Hecht’s The Darkness and the Light and Millions of Strange Shadows, Charles Wright’s A Short History of the Shadow, Geoffrey Hill’s Tenebrae, and Mark Strand’s Darker. James

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A handful of further instances will have to suffice here. In “The Night Mirror” (1971), there is the child and future poet haunted by a “dark shape . . . that moved / And saw and knew and mistook its reflection / In the tall panel on the closet door / For itself.” In “The Mad Potter” (1988), shadow becomes both the stuff of our fallen lives and the living material of poems: What are we like? A barrelfull of this Oozy wet substance, shadow-­crammed, whose smudges Of darkness lurk within but rise to kiss The fingers that disturb the gentle edges Of their bland world of shapelessness and bliss.

I think here also of Hollander’s always surprising book of shaped poems, Types of Shape, originally published in 1969, in which the typed-­out lines of each poem gloss and animate, or read metaphorically, the shaped silhouettes that the lines themselves give form to—a tree, a bottle, a heart—the last of these poems being “Swan and Shadow,” a poem of uncanny thresholds in which darkness mingles with “Scattered bits of light.” Shape and shade are often near doubles (I think here of how, on a day of intense sun, a small boy insisted to his mother that he wanted to stay “in the shapes”), and this present book might indeed have been titled Types of Shade. The interconnection of shadow and substance shows itself in the late poem “Where It Comes From” (2003), in which our myths of Helicon and other poetic streams become parables about our relation to language, to “A substance—the Merrill’s The Black Swan and The Fire Screen are also resonant of shadow matters, as is, more obliquely, The Changing Light at Sandover. Ashbery, Merwin, Hecht, Strand, and Merrill all appear, I should add, as codenamed agents in Reflections on Espionage.

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means and product, / Work and play—of expression itself,” which is yet joined mysteriously to “something hidden in those porosities, some dim / Unseen shadow of meaning that preexisted / Matter, energy, even / Mind . . . .” As a final instance, there are the shadows evoked in Hollander’s 1974 sequence “The Head of the Bed”: Half his days he had passed in the shadow Of the earth: not the cold, grassy shade cast By a pale of cypresses, by pines spread More softly across stony hilltops; not Warm, gray veiling of sunlight that blotted Up his own moving shadow on the ground; But the dark cloak of substance beyond mass, Though heavy, flung with diurnal panache Over his heavier head, weighed it down. Way down at the bottom of a shaft sunk Through the grass of sleep to deep stone he lay, Draped in the shade cast inward by the place All outward shadows fall upon, and on His tongue an emerald glittered, unseen, A green stone colder in the mouth than glass.

That unseen, silent, glittering stone seated in a place thick with inward shadows, a “womb of the shadows” as Whitman might call it, is one of the poet’s starkest visions of the survival and promise of poetic voice. A sense of promise indeed hovers around these lectures on shadow. In their work of memory and reflection they

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gather up material not just for the author’s own use but for that of other readers; you could think of this as a grandly annotated anthology of poetic shadows put together by a great anthologist, a great rememberer of poems. It aims to shift your experience not only of poetry but of the world, the experience of your senses and thought, your sense of the weight of things. I should say something about the manuscript I have worked with here. Hollander’s lectures survive in a set of four digital files, one for each lecture. Within these files the text of four original lectures can be seen with real clarity. As far as one can tell, given the limited internal evidence, absence of dates, and so on, they preserve the form in which he delivered the lectures at Cambridge in 1999, or polished them shortly afterwards. It is this text that I have presented here, with relatively limited editorial intervention and annotation. My main work has been to correct typographical errors, fix a rare slip of grammar, supply a missing word, and fill out some references and abbreviations (changing, say, FQ to The Faerie Queene). I have adjusted the punctuation in places where this seemed necessary for clarity, always keeping close to Hollander’s own rhythms of exposition. In a very few instances, I have put in the briefest of transitional phrases or cut a repeated sentence. All quotations were checked against their originals (more about this below). Otherwise, I have left the poet’s words alone. The lectures unfold from beginning to end with a sustained exploratory energy, moving from example to example, now content with a brief glance at a text, now slowing down for a more detailed reflection. The sentences are often complexly periodic and parenthesis-­laden, and yet even in this, or in their moments of compression and abrupt transition,

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the lectures keep the feel of things written for oral presentation. The tone is often intimate, conversational, by turns playful and wittily allusive, always aware of the occasion and of the poet’s place at the podium—as when he half-­apologizes for starting his lectures on shadows with Donne’s “A Lecture upon the Shadow,” or when, toward the end of the series, pointing to the Lady of Shalott’s being “half-­sick of shadows,” he adds in parenthesis, “as I hope we are not quite yet.” There are lots of poems to be read aloud, both familiar and strange. Hollander is alert to the audience’s needs and interests, what they might want to look forward to or remember. He is conscious as well of the brevity of the lecture format itself, the sense of what can’t be said and the need to keep much in reserve. For all the clarity and relative finish of the original lectures, it is also evident on many pages of the manuscript that Hollander had started to think about turning them into a longer book, one that might refine his argument and incorporate other examples and threads of reflection. Here his consistent strategy was to keep the original lecture texts intact and to insert any later notes or thoughts within square brackets, often typing words in bold, in all caps, or in a different font in order to mark the boundary between old and new. (He clearly took advantage of working on his text in digital form, which gave him an endlessly expanding space in which to make his notes, and an ability to quickly change his font—there are many of what seem to be insertions within insertions. The main font he used, I should say, was Courier, a standard font of the typewriters Hollander would have worked on before he started using a computer.) Of course, not all the bracketed insertions necessarily reflect later thoughts. Some may have been left over from earlier stages of composition: thoughts never incorporated in the

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lectures that he yet couldn’t quite let go. Others might have served during the original lectures as prompts for improvised digressions. But to a large degree, especially in the case of longer passages, they seem part of the process of thinking about the work of revising the lectures after their being delivered, fresh responses to his words upon rereading them— though there’s no real way of our knowing over how much time this process stretched. Most of these inserted passages, short and long, take their departure from particular moments in a given lecture, cutting into the lecture texts, as it were. A few play with alternate versions of a phrase in the original; for instance, “Except in darkness, we are bound [chained? pasted,] to our shadows.” But the majority do not directly revise the words of the original lectures. Hollander seems to have held back from such revisions, as if he were still at an early stage of things and wanted to leave the existing sentences as they stood. Many insertions just spell out bibliographical details for something he’s cited. Others are shorthand notes to himself about scholarly sources he still needs to look at, or backgrounds he wants to trace further: “check OED,” “check Vulgate,” “More romance here—Jay Macpherson stuff, etc.,” or “No! Do better than Temple here!” ( Jay Macpherson, a poet Hollander much admired, is also the author of a book on nineteenth-­century prose romance, The Spirit of Solitude; the bilingual Temple Classics edition of the Divine Comedy [1900–1906], which gave many twentieth-­century British and American poets their first taste of Dante, includes a rather old-­fashioned translation that Hollander quotes from.) One placeholder for an unwritten analysis reads simply: “In Masaccio’s fresco, blahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhetc.” There are also more developed notes, ranging from a few sentences to substantial paragraphs, that strike off in an ex-

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ploratory fashion. Some dwell on the nuances of a particular word and its history, while others quote from and comment on instances from the great array of shadow texts that he hasn’t yet had time to discuss: poems by Fulke Greville and Isaac Rosenberg, for example, or songs by Gilbert and Sullivan or Frank Sinatra. Other notes pursue the thread of some more idiosyncratic memory or wrangle with the ideas of a particular critic. Hollander always sees further corridors down which to follow the shadows. Most of these later notes are set directly into the lecture texts—usually in just one place, but sometimes in two or three, as if he couldn’t quite decide where a given addition should go. They might have become portions of the finished book, or longer footnotes, or they might not have been kept at all. There are also a number of discrete, free-­floating fragments of prose, usually gathered at the end of each lecture file, without a clear occasion in the lectures themselves—for instance, an analysis of a rich description of shadows in Thoreau’s A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, or a brief history of the phrase “the shadow of a doubt.” The task of separating out these various notes and addenda in the digital files was relatively straightforward, if time-­consuming. The effort showed me just how well-­crafted, how unhesitating, the original lecture texts are. In editing their pages I could thus use a light touch and still produce a readable book. Yet even in freeing up the earlier, more finished layers of writing, I felt the loss entailed in cutting out the later insertions. For one thing, these passages show you sharply how Hollander’s mind worked. They let you overhear a conversation he is having with his own words; you see him thinking and remembering, questioning himself and others, also playing, always drawing a larger circle. You feel the shifting claims on his attention of different literary

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sources, and through these the larger question of poetic origins, a thing the lectures themselves are preoccupied with. I had indeed thought early on of including many of these bracketed addenda, unedited, within the printed text to convey something of the texture of the manuscript as it survives. But in the end this seemed a bad idea, leaving aside a feeling that it might have disturbed Hollander himself. Fascinating as they are, these insertions are often just too fragmentary or too compressed, full of shorthand references and queries, or running off at length in a direction oblique to the main argument, which is already sufficiently complex. I had no wish to put these passages into more conventional form, and to have included them in the lectures as they are would have been more distracting than evocative, leaving readers with a broken sense of the lectures as a whole. Hollander was a sublimely digressive thinker, but in any final revision he would have worked through his incomplete thoughts and woven them in with care, choosing just the right moment for a particular divagation or leap of reference. Still, many of these later passages are just too good to lose. So I have included a number of them here in a final section of this book, leaving them pretty much as they are in the manuscript, including their telegraphic logic and often irregular punctuation. Read together, these fragments compose a kind of surrealistic notebook, a witness to the “precious idiosyncrasy”—to borrow a phrase from Kenneth Burke—of the poet’s thought. In editing the manuscript, as I have said, I checked any quoted texts against their published versions. When Hollander gave no indication of what edition of a particular text he used—this happened often in the case of poems—I tried to find one close in its details to what is in his manuscript, where possible a modern scholarly edition (though one pub-

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lished before 1999). Hollander was scrupulous about his texts and also had a powerful memory, and what differences I found involved mainly minor errors of memory or transcription, most of which I have silently corrected. Hollander often switches between original-­spelling and modernized versions of Renaissance poems—even of the same poem, such as Paradise Lost—and here I have not tried to make things uniform. I’ve indicated places where he quotes or adapts existing translations; otherwise, translations from Greek, Latin, Italian, French, and German are Hollander’s own. (He tends to quote the Bible in the King James version, though he cites other translations as well.) These, too, I have checked against their originals. There are a small number of places where I found a real mistake, or at least a significant question, in one of Hollander’s quotations or translations, things that in turn have consequences for the surrounding commentary. In such cases, rather than venture a silent correction or revision, I’ve left these passages as they are in manuscript, adding a brief footnote to indicate what’s at issue. A last piece of this book’s history: In addition to enlarging the four original lectures, Hollander had planned to write a final chapter on the subject of shadows in the visual arts, especially painting. As he says at the start of his first lecture, “Attached shadows are of the very stuff of painting.” Early sketches for this chapter also survive in the digital files. The chapter would have discussed the symbolic as well as the mimetic force of shadows in media where both light and shadow depend on the material substance of paint, ink, charcoal, or graphite (not to mention the underlying surfaces of paper or canvas). It would have examined the stories that painted and drawn shadows tell about themselves, their implicit poetry. This is a kind of question that Hollander could

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write about with force and passion, as in his book The Gazer’s Spirit: Poems Looking at Silent Works of Art. It brought him close to the center of his vision of art’s way of making and remaking the visible world. I think here of Hollander’s essay “Hopper and the Figure of Room,” where he explores how, in Edward Hopper’s paintings, “bed chambers and sitting rooms begin to share their human occupancy with light and shadow,” the poet describing one canvas in which a narrow “lightfall,” an “interrupted parallelogram” of painted sunlight, becomes “a formidable presence, an image of the meditative gazer’s mind as the cast shadow on the bed is of her body.” The painting, he writes, enshrines a moment when “angels of morning bring messages of thought, of the sense of something beyond.” The lecture manuscript also preserves this fragmentary note: “Hopper Light-­Spills as negative (and thus, positive) shadows??” From what appears in the files, however, it is hard to gauge what the shape of the final chapter would have been. In a group of drafts headed “From V, Shadows of Shadows,” there are various lists of painters to take up (Monet, De Chirico, Hopper, Sheeler, Morandi), a sketch for an introduction that summarizes earlier chapters, and some longer passages, varying in length from a paragraph to a few pages. Hollander describes a fresco by Masaccio, early master of painted shadow, which depicts Saint Peter curing the sick with his shadow, and looks at the shadows on the face of the Mona Lisa. He discusses one of Georges de la Tour’s candlelit pictures of the penitent Magdalen, in which she contemplates not a skull but an enigmatic shadow on the wall. He sets side by side two fables about the origins of painting: Pliny’s tale of a woman marking the outline of her departing lover’s profile shadow on a wall, and Leon Battista Alberti’s story of Narcissus tracing his own reflection on the surface of the water.

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There’s also an account of a seventeenth-­century Dutch engraving of Plato’s cave. You can imagine how these various discussions might be drawn together within a single chapter, one that would extend the book’s poetics of shadow in striking ways. And yet most of the pieces remain at the stage of general description, things awaiting further detailed reflection. I have, however, included a few passages from the drafts for chapter V among the extracts gathered at the end of this volume, to show a little of the workings of Hollander’s mind in taking up these matters. The Clark Lectures are traditionally addressed to “aspects of English literature,” and since the inception of the series in 1888 with Sir Leslie Stephen, lecturers have included the poets T. S. Eliot, Robert Graves, Stephen Spender, Adrienne Rich, Geoffrey Hill, and Seamus Heaney; the fiction writers E. M. Forster, V. S. Pritchett, Alison Lurie, and Toni Morrison; and such literary scholars and critics as G. Wilson Knight, I. A. Richards, William Empson, Frank Kermode, Geoffrey Hartman, Stephen Orgel, Christopher Ricks, and Elaine Scarry. The Clark Lectures have also given a podium to the philosophers Richard Rorty and Bernard Williams; the historians Peter Brown, Carlo Ginzburg, and Roy Foster; the biographer Harold Nicolson; the theologian and church leader Rowan Williams; the museum curator David Piper; the psychoanalyst Adam Phillips; the playwrights Harley Granville-­Barker and Tom Stoppard; and the theater directors Jonathan Miller and Peter Hall. That is a fittingly polymathic company for Hollander to be a part of. Hollander took pains in his work of revising his lectures. And yet he set the project aside at some point, and never returned to it. It’s not clear whether this was because he was dissatisfied with the book’s progress or didn’t have time to

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do what he wanted to do, or because other projects, as well as health problems, intervened. Nevertheless, he was ready to share the manuscript of the book with friends and colleagues, and eager to hear people’s responses. My hope is that in taking in this text, readers will see just how much of a whole is the thing he left for us. Kenneth Gross

Note: The appearance of a dagger (†) in chapters 1 through 4 marks the place within Hollander’s lecture manuscript of one of his notes or addenda for revision. The texts of these insertions, as well as of other unmoored addenda, are included here within chapter 5, “Fragments of Shadow.”

[ 1 ] A Lecture upon the Shadow

Except in darkness, we are bound to our shadows, and our thoughts continue to be involved with them. These shadows grow and contract, and seem variously to partake of the surface on which they are cast, yet each is as personal to us as our names, and although we may change our names, we cannot take another shadow. We tend to feel that it is ourselves and not a specific source of light which is responsible for the presence of our shadows, even though moving that light source will animate a cast shadow as much as moving a body would. Shadows are literal, optical phenomena, but we must always remember the complex role they have played in the history of visual representation, particularly in the depiction of objects and of the bodies of persons considered as more general bodies occupying three-­dimensional space. These attached shadows are of the very stuff of painting. Leonardo da Vinci calls this sort “adhering shadow” (ombra congionta), which he distinguishes from “separate shadow” (ombra separata), the former being the shaded side of a body and the latter its cast shadow. Night is, after all, the attached 1

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shadow of the earth, the implications of which Sir Thomas Browne so pointedly celebrated in observing how “Light that makes things seen, makes some things invisible, were it not for darknesse and the shadow of the earth, the noblest part of the Creation had remained unseen, and the Stars in heaven as invisible as on the fourth day, when they were created above the Horizon.” (Yet it must be remembered that “attached” here does not refer to what might be called the “attachment” of a cast shadow to the foot or bottom of its object—­actually to a notional line on the ground.) It is only by interesting metaphoric extensions that the shadow of an object becomes as complex and problematic a matter as the shadow of a person. Objects, or groups of objects considerably larger than persons, cast ordinary shadows, but often of the more extensive kind generally called shade in English (in its OED sense III), whereas in Romance languages, shadow and shade are both covered by the derivatives of umbra, of which more later on. Optically speaking, shadows are set into motion either by the activity of the objects casting them or by some movement of the source of light those objects partially and prominently occlude. Apparent solar motion is indiscernibly slow, and the cast shadow of a person, whether moving or motionless, is thought to grow and shrink and grow again during the course of a sunlit day, whereas the same sort of shadow cast by a sundial gnomon will be thought of as moving across a dial so shaped as to compensate for the contracting length of its pointer. Both moving and stationary cast shadows, then, can be longer and shorter, and it may be for a host of reasons that the postmeridian lengthening has been for so long the most significantly remarked upon. “When the sun sets, shadows, that showed at noon / But small appear most long and terrible,” says the Oedipus of Dryden and Lee (Oedipus,

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IV.i.80–81). Shadow has also provided the basis for parable: “Like our Shadows, / Our Wishes lengthen, as our Sun declines” (Edward Young, Night Thoughts, “Night the Fifth,” lines 661–62), and the latent (or even metaphoric) part of the simile invokes the insubstantiality of human desires as well as their vanity. In general, it is the occluding object which is spoken of as being the source or origin or matrix or cause (whether in some Scholastic sense or not) of a particular shadow—indeed, of its shadow. As the psychologist of perception Rudolf Arnheim puts it, “There are two things the eye must understand. First, the shadow does not belong to the object on which it is seen; and second, it does belong to another object, which it does not cover.” But this invokes a limited sense of possession, and for literary language speaking for the untutored eye, the shadow is the sun’s, or the lamp’s, or the open fire’s, as well. Paul Valéry invokes his palm tree as “Ce bel arbitre mobile / Entre l’ombre et le soleil” (this lovely moving arbiter [with a upon play on arbre = “tree”] between shadow and sun [“Palme,” lines 32–33]), thus elegantly transcending the issue of property, but a host of such figurations will emerge in the history of modern poetry. Shadows are related to our eternal condition—to our contours, rather than to our more substantial mass. And yet their very insubstantiality has allowed shadows to be seen both as residues or traces of something palpable and more profoundly animated and, more enigmatically, as emanations of something internal to us. These sorts of “shadow” are projections, as it were, of an inner form or entity, expressions of something within us rather than representations of our appearances.† In any event, anomalies and enigmas abound in discourse about shadows even more than in the phenomena themselves. These anomalies appear to have been distrib-

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uted throughout the course of poetry in modern English. I propose to explore some of them in these lectures, working toward a systematic delineation of the peculiar shadow cast upon the language of poetry by the checkered senses of the word shadow itself. I shall proceed largely chronologically—for reasons which should be clear later on—but I shall feel free to adduce at any point a text from a later moment in poetic history. In view of the transference and translation of trope in poetic history, I shall be obliged to look at the language of shadow in some other relevant literary languages as well. I shall stay with optical facts and figurations for a while, but it will be necessary to introduce some linguistic ones a bit further on. It is hard to resist—and particularly when there is no good reason to do so—starting out with a four-­hundred-­year-­old deliberation on something about personal projections. John Donne’s “A Lecture upon the Shadow” is a fine poem which hasn’t, it seems to me, received the attention it might have in the critical literature. It is a somber but not really gloomy moralizing love poem of the sort in which the male speaker and his female lover are, if not conspirators as in certain other of the Songs and Sonnets, at least totally complicit. The poem’s emblematic occasion is a three-­hour morning stroll. It is now noon, and the speaker—one of the two lovers on the walk—halts their progress at the point of noon to make a point of what has been happening. Their shadows, striding behind them, have contracted, during the course of their walk, to the degree at which they have disappeared beneath their feet. Even so—the emblematic lecturer continues— something analogous has happened during the course of our love: like the sun, it has grown, and we and our care, our concern not to be seen as lovers, have led to deceptions, disguises (of our actions? of ourselves?) and shadows of another sort.

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But by this point, the sun of our love at its zenith, this is no longer the case; and generally, love which is still overcareful (as we’ll see, Donne’s word is diligent here) about anyone else knowing about it has not reached, either as metaphorical sun or more abstractly as love, “its highest Degree.” The second stanza warns that unless the sun of our love remains at its noon, we’ll produce new shadows rising to meet us, disguises and deceptions which will now work on us, and which will continue to lengthen. These figurative shadows will blind our eyes, and falsely disguise from one another our behavior toward one another. Morning shadows or shows of complicit feigning shorten as love grows. Evening shadows of mutual and self-­deception—for which each of the lovers has become one of those others of the morning hours—lengthen as love’s sun sinks and love itself shortens. Once love has stopped growing, it had better remain at its height; the next step is into the night of its own death. The poem’s lesson unfolds gradually, but that lesson’s two central points will be seen to be driven home halfway through and at the end. “Stand still, and I will read to thee / A lecture, love, in love’s philosophy.” This is unlike the opening of another of Donne’s Songs and Sonnets that also starts out as if emblematically, “The Flea” (“Mark but this flea, and mark in this / How little that which thou deny’st me is”). In the case of the shadow poem, the very strophic structure seems to suggest an emblem book’s format, the eleven-­line stanza being in each case followed by a typographically separated couplet framing what could be an independent motto. The specific natural science he will address is that of love’s optics: Those three hours which we have spent In walking here, two shadows went

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Along with us, which we ourselves produc’d; But, now the Sun is just above our head, We do those shadows tread; And to brave clearness all things are reduc’d.

What will this mean, then? We “produced” (a complex word to which we shall return) the shadows, but so did the relative height of the sun; the two lovers could be seen merely as a passive style on the sundial of where they were at the moment. But for Donne they are agents in the “production” of the shadows. He even notes the mild irony that, when a person’s shadow is shortest at noon, he or she could be said to tread on it, rather than, more literally, merely on the ground upon which the shadow is cast. Well and good, and the particular agency with relation to the shadows will be of persons considered as lovers. But with the next line, the question of what these shadows are composed of becomes a bit more problematic. Their visual matter becomes as important as what they are “of ”—in that other sense of what were the objects that cast them—­with the phrase “reduced” to “brave clearness.” Here the three principal words need glossing for us today—brave in its older sense of “splendid” or “illuminated”; clearness again in its original sense of “radiant,” “bright” (contrary to modern usage, which makes it synonymous with “distinct,” so that Descartes’s celebrated characterization of ideas as “clear and distinct” seems redundant if “clear” is taken in any of the modern senses). And finally, reduced— the sense is not any of those of “dismemberment,” “breaking up,” “lowering” or “lessening,” but rather of leading or going back to a former state or condition (with perhaps an overtone of usage, common in the seventeenth century, of bringing back from error to truth). Donne isn’t only propounding

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the paradox that the material of the shadows has gradually been diminished to the immateriality—in the world of shadows—of light. It is also as if the heightening sun has led the shadows back into the condition of light—the splendid radiance—from which they emerged. With this in mind, we might consider what shadow production might mean here. The OED “produce”: 1 to bring forth or into view, to pre­sent to view, to exhibit—often of witnesses or evidence; 2 [geometric] to extend (a line in length) or continue in space; 2B stretch out, lengthen; 2C obscure (but OK until the 1640s), lengthen in time; 3 to bring into being; 3B of plants or animals, to generate; 3C yield, supply, furnish (as fields or rivers or mines, etc.); 3D manufacture, generate by human device (but this only in the eighteenth century, really). So that the walking couple have been exhibiting, presenting, manifesting their shadows all the while that the sun has been “producing” them, in another sense, by extending them. The poem does indeed expound natural philosophy to this degree: the conceit depends upon the fact that although we often tend to think of ourselves as producing (sense 3) our particular shadows, it is the sun which does so, in all of the senses Donne is probably using the word. In another more celebrated poem, Donne treats the cast shadow as “an ordinary nothing,” an unremarkable absence or privation, and there he privileges neither light source nor occluding object: “If I an ordinary nothing were, / As shadow, a light and body must be here” (“A Nocturnal upon St. Lucy’s Day,” lines 35–36). And in this case, the ordinary nothingness of shadow is plainly the product of a peculiar relation between two prominent somethings: a body, a physical substance, and a light source. I suppose that just as pointed a baroque quibble might have been made, in a very different poem, on

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the notion that shadow couldn’t be a nothing, ordinary or not, in that it derived from just those two somethings. Absent/present; nothing/something; a nothing-­like some‑ thing gradually contracting into pure or even original something—these oppositions and the verbal paradoxes they rap­ idly generate are immediately enlisted in an analogy, as the first stanza comes to an end: So, whilst our infant love did grow, Disguises did, and shadows, flow From us, and our care; but now ’tis not so.

But, and most importantly, we notice here that the “disguises” and “shadows” flowing from the lovers and their cares are figurative, cast by them in the growing light of their crescent love. (Care, or cares, casting a shadow is a bit more complex than a more literal likening in a simile of care and shadow, as in the lines by Queen Elizabeth I [ca. 1582] that Donne most likely knew: My care is like my shadow in the sun, Follows me flying, flies when I pursue it, Stands and lies by me, doth what I have done. His too familiar care doth make me rue it. [“On Monsieur’s Departure,” lines 7–10])†

In Donne’s lines, the shadows are at once tropes and the literal objects of vision. (That these are doubled in the rhetoric—visible shadows shadowed by speech, as Donne himself elsewhere might have put it—should be remarked now, because in that regard this poem is paradigmatic of many subsequent ones we shall be considering.) There is a sort of motto isolated in the couplet—rather like that in an emblem,

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but here with respect not to a pictured object or fable, but to the scene of the lovers and their shadows both optical and ­tropical: That love hath not attain’d the high’st degree, Which is still diligent lest others see.

“Diligent” equals wary. The lovers’ disguises and shadows, seen in retrospect, had compromised the brave clearness of their love itself. The second stanza sees another problem in prospect: Except our love at this noon stay, We shall new shadows make the other way. As the first were made to blind Others, these which come behind Will work upon ourselves, and blind our eyes. If once love faint, and westwardly decline, To me thou, falsely, thine, And I to thee mine actions shall disguise. The morning shadows wear away, But these grow longer all the day,— But oh, love’s day is short, if love decay. Love is a growing, or full constant light; And his first minute, after noon, is night.

And again, as with the changes in position and length of the optical shadows, so with the figurative ones, the disguises and misrepresentations—in the afternoon, they become dangerous to their love, instead of perhaps protecting it as during its morning of development. These which “come behind” (either spatially or temporally) are those of mutual decep-

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tion and perhaps self-­deception, and they can only grow and darken the love itself. As the late Rosalie Colie put it, “A Lecture upon the Shadow” is “a lecture upon the visibility, the sharpness, the depth, and the transiency of love itself: the shadow, an impalpable accidental record of human presence, is made the image of the nothingness of both love and the living, breathing lovers.” Literal shadows, then, are doubled by the metaphorical shadows of disguise and deception. But these deceptions are not delusions or phantasms generated by outer enchantments or some imbalance of inner faculties, but rather are inevitably produced in and by the course of love’s walk itself. Donne’s figurative shadows are attached to their human substances. But when shadows are unattached to present objects, they can become more general tropes for states of consciousness. For example, the American poet Philip Freneau (1752–1832) concludes his not too Gray-­like meditation on an Indian burial ground, calling up the spirits of the past by concluding that even “Reason’s self shall bow the knee / To shadows and delusions here”; but these shadows, unlike the “shadow . . . over my brain” (meaning madness) in Edgar Allan Poe’s “Eleonora,” are those of passing meditative clouds. Shadows are cast by objects occluding projected light from a source, and we would ordinarily not speak of them as being cast or produced by such a light source. Paul Valéry’s characterization of the sun as roi des ombres (in “Ébauche d’un serpent”) is resonantly ambiguous with respect to the causative or other natures of his particular ruling powers. And, poetically speaking, we will be confronting many textual shadows. But Leonardo da Vinci at one point explains shadow as being derived “from two dissimilar sources of which one is corporeal and the other spiritual; the body that is shadowed

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is corporeal and the light is spiritual. Light and body are the cause of shadow.”† In the case of a little poem of Thomas Campion (1601), a Petrarchan distant lady is figured as a sun and the suitor as a shadow, and yet it is as if this shadow were cast by no independent body, but had some kind of epistemological autonomy: Followe thy faire sunne, unhappy shadowe, Though thou be blacke as night, And she made all of light, Yet follow thy faire sunne, unhappie shadowe. Follow her whose light thy light depriveth, Though here thou liv’st disgrac’t, And she in heaven is plac’t, Yet follow her whose light the world reviveth. Follow those pure beames whose beautie burneth, That so have scorched thee, As thou still blacke must bee, Til her kind beames thy black to brightnes turneth. Follow her while yet her glorie shineth: There comes a luckles night, That will dim all her light; And this the black unhappie shade devineth. Follow still since so thy fates ordained; The Sunne must have his shade, Till both at once doe fade, The Sun still proud, the shadow still disdained.

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The shadow of a person would follow her only under a declining sun—and note how hard it is to note this literal fact without implicitly slipping into what could easily be a trope. And a constant and undetachable suitor might well “shadow” her. But here the Petrarchan lady is the sun herself, “producing”—in Donne’s term—the shadow image in an impossible optical situation. The sun is light source; where it is momentarily occluded by an object, that object pro­jects a shadow, a positive emanation created by a negative radiance, as it were. But in the case of the Campion poem, the implication cannot be that the sun can cast a shadow of itself which might then follow it, even as a person’s shadow follows him or her outdoors in sunlight, et cetera. There is quite a different analogy at work here, and the lover’s being called a shadow with respect to the lady as sun is not the first-­order optical trope we might expect. It has also been observed that the sun’s light first deprives the shadow of his, then scorches and burns him into blackness. (Campion neither knows nor cares—as Milton might have—that both black and bleach come by forked paths from the same Indo-­European base.) But the night of death will come, and even her sunlight will be darkened. In the last stanza, it is the literal sun (now with masculine gender) and “his shade,” figuratively “proud” and “disdained” respectively as the lady and the lover were literally, which will fade. But we are also left with an anticipation of what the speaker in Blake’s “Sun-­flower! weary of time, / Who countest the steps of the Sun” will feel at his perception of yet one more double bind. Campion’s lover as the sun’s shadow interestingly reverses a more conventional figure. I am thinking of the one represented by Ben Jonson’s little “Song. That Women Are But Men’s Shadows,” which, in the turns of its particular conceit, turning on purely optical phenomena, nicely avoids the more

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obvious parables of secondariness, contingency of presence and substance, epistemological weakness, and so forth that might so easily be applied to a shadowy female condition: Follow a shadow, it still flies you; Seem to fly it, it will pursue: So court a mistress, she denies you; Let her alone, she will court you. Say, are not women truly, then, Styled but the shadows of us men? At morn, and even, shades are longest; At noon, they are or short or none: So men at weakest, they are strongest, But grant us perfect, they’re not known. Say are not women truly, then, Styled but the shadows of us men?

In another little poem (“A Song”) of Jonson’s, a “Lover” sings: Come, let us here enjoy the shade, For love in shadow best is made. Though envy oft his shadow be, None brooks the sunlight worse than he.

And here the transition from protective cover to the covert, from the shadow of secrecy to shadow as follower or stalker, is accomplished in four short lines. It would be easy to mistake the notion of envy as love’s shadow in a post-­Miltonic, largely romantic sense of some sort of anti-­self, some shadow demon projected by love through some denial or thwarted acknowledgment. I shall be considering this matter in a later lecture. But returning to Campion’s conceit, we find it has an

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interesting power of its own. The body or substance has traditionally not only primacy, but more metaphysical authenticity than the shadow it casts. By substituting the source of heat and light for the occluding body more usually thought of as originating or, in Donne’s word, “producing” it, Campion works a turn on a figure going back to Petrarch, and even to Dante, of pursuing or desiring even the shadow—the ombra— of the beloved. Behind the phrase “even the shadow,” which I have just used, lies of course the whole Platonic agenda of reality and authenticity, and its trope of shadowing in the story of the cave: Just as mere shadows are unreal and deceiving insubstantial representations of substances, so are mere substances the unreal and deceiving substantial representations of ideas. Greek skia had its sense of imago before Plato, and a part of the legacy of Plato’s myth significant for later poetry is the use of shadow for all appearances, whether (a) those of purely visual phenomena representing particular palpable entities, or (b) purely visionary phenomena, that is, those occasioned by no palpable entity. Finally, The Republic’s trope is taken over by later revisionary turns modeled on Plato’s: various Christian views of the shadowy authenticity or reality of mortal life in the world, as opposed to eternal life beyond it, come to mind at once. A later instance of this familiar sort of simple reversal of substance and shadow occurs in these lines from Edward Young’s Night Thoughts, where he invokes this world as The Land of Apparitions, empty Shades! All, all on Earth is Shadow, all beyond Is Substance; the Reverse is Folly’s creed : How solid all, where Change shall be no more? (“Night the First,” lines 118–21)

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The metaphysical shadow/substance paradigm keeps reappearing, as in Schopenhauer’s parallel notion that the will “is accompanied by this world just as the body is by the shadow, since the world is merely the visibility of the true inner nature of the will.” And, in an outrageous turn, Emerson in “The American Scholar”: “The world,—this shadow of the soul, or other me, lies wide around.” Once Plato’s figure has rendered the mere actuality of substance into what is really shadow, neither notion will henceforth remain innocent for poetic thought. But something should be said here of the traditional pairing of the terms shadow and substance. They are ubiquitous in sixteenth- and seventeenth-­ century usage and—unlike other Elizabethan pairs like wit and will—survive through the nineteenth century. One feels the terms should comprise a venerable couple, but the ancient opposition is between shadow and body, Latin umbra and corpus. Ovid’s Narcissus “loves an insubstantial hope, and believes shadow to be body” (spem sine corpore amat, corpus putat esse, quod umbra est [Metamorphoses, III.417])—and where we would want to translate “substance” here, Golding (1567) has “For like a foolishe noddie, / He thinkes the shadow that he sees, to be a lively boddie,” and Sandys (1632) “And for a body he mistakes a shade.” Pliny, in discussing the painter Pausanias, observes that in one instance “this artist has made the whole ox of a black colour and has given substance to the shadow from the shadow itself ” (hic totum bovem atri coloris fecit umbraeque corpus ex ipsa dedit [Natural History, XXXV.xl.127, trans. Rackham]). While such a characterization might seem to come from a Jacobean or Caroline lyric, Pliny is being neither playful nor figurative, and is indeed invoking questions of painting to which we will return. And, in a biblical text which

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will also be of concern later on, Colossians 2:16–17 (in the King James Version): “Let no man therefore judge you in meat, or in drink, or in respect of an holy-­day, or of the new moon, or of the sabbath days: which are a shadow of things to come; but the body is of Christ.” The Vulgate’s umbra/corpus likewise preserves the Greek opposition (skia/sôma); it is the English Revised Version (1881), responding to almost three centuries of idiom, which gives the familiar “These are only a shadow of what is to come; but the substance belongs to Christ.” But by 1579 we have John Lyly in Euphues: “They be shadows without substance,” and this has the tone of a conventional pairing. When there is no logical or metaphysical agenda involved—or, at any rate, none that is not purely ad hoc to the occasion—there is room for considerable verbal and conceptual play. A lovely but dialectically modest instance is a lyric— I’d guess from the late 1570s—found in several manuscripts: I heard a noise and wishèd for a sight, I looked for life and did a shadow see Whose substance was the sum of my delight, Which came unseen, and so did go from me. Yet hath conceit persuaded my content There was a substance where the shadow went. I did not play Narcissus in conceit, I did not see my shadow in a spring; I know mine eyes were dimmed with no deceit, I saw the shadow of some worthy thing: For, as I saw the shadow glancing by, I had a glimpse of something in mine eye.

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But what it was, alas, I cannot tell, Because of it I had no perfect view; But as it was, by guess, I wish it well And will until I see the same anew. Shadow, or she, or both, or choose you wither: Blest be the thing that brought that shadow hither!

The psychology of perception here is itself somewhat visionary: it may be that the “glimpse” or the “something” is being located in the eye (rather than in the world?); and while it would be tempting to think of that something as a tiny arrow shot by Eros, I am inclined not to, but rather to ponder the notion of intraocular presence which is no shadow of deceit— like Donne’s—but which yet occludes part of a “perfect view,” and even a perfect comprehension, because of “it.” But is that “it” the shadow, the conceit that persuades the poet’s satisfaction to infer its substance, or the substance itself, whether that includes the “she” and/or “the thing that brought that shadow hither”? The grammar is probably intentionally, as well as conventionally, ambiguous. That “shadow, or she, or both” are cheerfully assimilated is a kind of post-­Petrarchan acknowledgment of the contingent status of various celebrated shes with respect to their figurations in sonnets. But something in this little song leads to another matter as well. Narcissus’s “shadow in a spring” is his reflection, and even readers not widely versed in sixteenth- and seventeenth-­century poetry will realize that, as mentioned earlier, the word is frequently used to designate a full reflection or mirror image, a painting or a drawing (and, most particularly, a portrait)—in short, any visual representation, whether of a material body or not (thus including various sorts of phantasms). It may be convenient to distinguish this sense

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of shadow as imago, or representation, and not merely in contrast to umbra—the Latin word contains that sense as well— but to the sense of covering, sheltering, beneficent shade. Shadows, understood literally as general portions of darkness, usually that of night, might be conveniently called by the Latin tenebrae. We will be observing some strange interrelations among these and others in poetry from early modern English to the present. “Shadow” as “picture”—and, as a verb, “to depict”—is sixteenth-­century in origin, and its use in poetry gives a new twist to conceits of shadow and substance, since a painted picture is considerably more substantial in the most trivial sense than a reflection, let alone a phantasm. John Lyly, Campaspe (1584), Apelles to Campaspe while painting her portrait for Alexander: If he cannot see her, he will “gaze continually on [her] picture.” Campaspe. That will not feed thy heart. Apelles. Yet shall it fill mine eye. Besides . . . thy protested faith, will cause me to embrace thy shadow continually in mine arms, of the which by strong imagination I will make a substance” (IV.v.10–15).

This is nice because he has already shadowed her substance in the painting, which shadow will feed or fill his eye; and at the same time his imagination will make metaphorical substance out of the different sort of “shadow” (a mental imago) of her he embraces. In The Merchant of Venice, III.ii.125–29, Bassanio orates an exuberant ecphrasis—enraptured and yet epistemologically sceptical—of a portrait, “fair Portia’s counterfeit.” He concludes it by acknowledging how conceited and contrived the rhetorical substance of his discourse may have been:

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Yet look, how far The substance of my praise doth wrong this shadow In underprizing it, so far this shadow Doth limp behind the substance.

There is a similar quibble in The Two Gentlemen of Verona (Proteus asks Silvia for a portrait of herself ): “For since the substance of your perfect self / Is else devoted, I am but a shadow; / And to your shadow will I make true love” (IV. ii.120–22). But Sir Frank Kermode has so elegantly discussed this passage in his Forms of Attention that it need not be considered here. “Here take my picture,” says Donne in his fifth Elegy, though I bid farewell; Thine, in my heart, where my soul dwells, shall dwell. ’Tis like me now, but I dead, ‘twill be more When we are shadows both, than ’twas before. (lines 1–4)

Here are substantive and insubstantial shadow—his picture (imago material), hers in his heart (imago immaterial); to these are added a new sense of shadow—or, sometimes in English, a concrete nominal “shade”—namely a ghost. This kind of shadow will be dealt with in a later lecture; for now, let us simply classify it under the term manes—­a Latin term for the disembodied spirit of a dead person, but clearly, from its etymon (Old Latin manus = good), a good spirit. When the poet is manes-­shadow, then he will be more like his shadow imago or shadow simulacrum. This usage (shadow versus substance) and the plays upon it continue throughout the earlier seventeenth century, and seem only to decline as painting in England gets more sophis‑

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ticated. Richard Lovelace, praising Peter Lely over other painters on one of several occasions, varies the usual move of wit as he maintains that “Within one shade of thine more substance is / Than all their varnish’d Idol-­ Mistresses” (“Peinture. A Panegyrick to the best Picture of Friendship Mr. Pet. Lilly”). Something similar happens in Lovelace’s mapping of the portrait/subject and soul/body oppositions onto the shadow/substance pair in another little poem on a picture of his Lucasta, claiming that in it, “Her soul’s fair ­picture,” her fair soul’s in all So truly copied from th’original That you will swear her body, by this law Is but its shadow, as this, its . . . (“Upon the Curtaine of Lucasta’s Picture, it was thus wrought”)

And even Wordsworth in The Excursion (II.772–73)—hardly a tour of cleverly conceited occasions—recapitulates the device with something close to quiet grim wit. With another sense of “shadow” as “frail, reduced version of a bodily presence,” he calls the homeless pensioner, doing chores for the housewife who took him in, “a shadow that performed / Substantial service.” In Shakespeare’s sonnet 37 the imago shadow of pictorial representation seems to be extended as well to verbal fiction: So then I am not lame, poore, nor dispis’d, Whilst that this shadow doth such substance give, That I in thy abundance am suffic’d, And by a part of all thy glory live . . .

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I think (pace Frank Kermode) that it is not the friend who is the shadow (as in the simile at the opening, a son to the poet’s father), but the poetic fiction of him appearing in these sonnets. Such a shadow reverses the usual epistemological order by “giving” substance (which here means “wealth,” with respect to the “poor,” as well) and the poet possesses the young man in part by shadowing him. It is this archaic use of the verb which we see Spenser using, by which to shadow = to depict = to trope poetically; thus, in the letter to Raleigh prefaced to The Faerie Queene, having declared that by Gloriana he means glory generally, and Elizabeth I in particular, he adds that “in some places els, I do otherwise shadow her.” And, in The Faerie Queene, book II, proem, this sense of shadow as trope becomes more complex. Again, addressing Elizabeth about a particular “otherwise”—the character Belphoebe, associated with Diana—Spenser uses the conventional figure of the mirror, an image in which might ordinarily in the 1590s be called a “shadow”: And thou, O fairest Princesse under sky, In this faire mirrhour maist behold thy face And thine owne realmes in lond of Faery, And in this antique Image thy great auncestry.

But then he compounds the matter of representation with another metaphorical remove: The which O pardon me thus to enfold In covert vele, and wrap in shadowes light, That feeble eyes your glory may behold, Which else could not endure those beames bright, But would be dazled with exceeding light.

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Typically Spenserian is the combined lexical and syntactic punning construction here: “shadowes light” can mean shadows that are light both in substantive weight and in radiance and—more enigmatically, as a possessive—the light that shadows radiate. (This doubling is underlined by the rime riche repetition of “light,” rhyming with itself.) The mirror image is again lightly troped by enigmatic shadows; the poem must not only see in a glass darkly but must mediate by even further figuration, for the glory is too bright to be seen face-­to-­ face. We must remember that both the Geneva and the later King James translations give “darkly” for the Greek en ainigmati (I Corinthians 13:12) and that Spenser uses “dark” in this same sense of enigmatic in characterizing the continued allegory of his poem as a “darke conceit.” As far as the matter of shadows having or giving light is concerned, to the degree that a visual imago of any sort—particularly a delusive one—could be radiant, could have the enargeia or vividness commended in painting, shadows could cast light rather than darkness. Thus Fulke Greville (Caelica XCVI), invoking Truth, “Which light of life doth all those shadows war / Of woe and lust, that dazzle and enthrall” (lines 41–42). Dark falsities contend with truth’s light, but with enough radiance to dazzle. It is the play of optical darkness against darkness problematic or enigmatic that we see in Shakespeare’s sonnet 43. The opening paradox is simple—when my eyes are closed, then I see more than when I see ordinarily and unobservantly: When most I wink, then do mine eyes best see, For all the day they view things unrespected . . .

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But this leads to a deployment of some literal and figurative uses of dark, shadow, shade, and form that we have already encountered. Given that Shakespeare’s English allows adverbial uses of adjectival forms (as with bright meaning brightly) the turns are twisted even more tightly into strict chiasm, as well as being knotted up in a variety of less familiar rhetorical patternings of repetition and antithesis: But when I sleep, in dreams they look on thee And, darkly bright, are bright in dark directed.

His eyes are brightly—alertly, radiantly, actively—directed in the darkness, but their brightness is enigmatic; they are “darkly bright” because they are seeing shadows of dreams and imperfect mental images of perfection, and because they are privately, thus obscurely and not famously, presented. They shine darkly as well in the older, anoptic sense of “dark,” even as “clear” is synonymous here with “bright.” The chiasms continue: Then thou, whose shadow shadows doth make bright, How would thy shadow’s form form happy show To the clear day with thy much clearer light When to unseeing eyes thy shade shines so!

The dreamed imago is generated partially by the tenebrous shadows of nocturnal darkness: How much more brightly would your body—the substance of all your different sorts of umbra and imago, far brighter than daylight—present an appropriate appearance in that light of day, given how vivid your imago—here, “shade”—was when it appeared as a mental image behind eyes closed in sleep. That shades and even shadows may shine touches on a matter which will be con-

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sidered later on. The sonnet continues with an almost inevitable day/night reversal, occasioned by all the interplay of dark and bright shadowing and shading that has preceded. How would, I say, mine eyes be blessèd made By looking on thee in the living day, When in dead night thy fair imperfect shade Through heavy sleep on sightless eyes doth stay! All days are nights to see till I see thee, And nights bright days when dreams do show thee me.

Also compare sonnet 53: What is your substance, whereof are you made, That millions of strange shadows on you tend? Since every one hath, every one, one shade, And you, but one, can every shadow lend. Describe Adonis, and the counterfeit Is poorly imitated after you. On Helen’s cheek all art of beauty set, And you in Grecian tires are painted new. Speak of the spring and foison of the year: The one doth shadow of your beauty show, The other as your bounty doth appear, And you in every blessèd shape we know. In all external grace you have some part, But you like none, none you, for constant heart.

Shade means shadow here, and does not partake of any of the developing shadow/shade distinctions which Shakespeare seems elsewhere to invoke; this may be more like Spenser in book V of The Faerie Queene, canto vii, stanza 2, where we are told that ancient lore, in personifying Justice

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and calling him Osiris, was “With fayned colours shading a true case”—where the shadowing—as of Elizabeth I by Belphoebe—and shading of color in painting and the “fayned colours”—in an older, rhetorical sense—of poetic language, and the sheltering protection of the shade of foliage are all intertwined in a dense figure of adumbration. An immediate answer to the opening question of this sonnet (“What is your substance, whereof are you made, / That millions of strange shadows on you tend?”) is probably: “You are made of the stuff of post- and anti-­Petrarchan poetry, so that, trope yourself, you are always being refigured in millions of possible ingenious conceits.” The strategy of the poem is a simple one: Everything in the world from which I have been drawing tropes for aspects of the “you” of this group of sonnets is indeed an imitation of those aspects of the real you, the—to adapt Whitman’s phrase—you yourself. The “millions of strange shadows” are strange both in that they are not the young man’s and in that they are—in their dogging of your footsteps as if they were your own— weird. And as many “shadows” they are (1) many pictures; (2) many actors (like Macbeth’s walking shadows, temporary presences, and like Theseus’s characterization of the play-­acting mechanicals in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, V.i. 210: “The best in this kind are but shadows”); (3) many followers; (4) many uninvited guests, in a use traditional at least since Plutarch; (5) other representations, emanations, flattering or otherwise falsifying. And are these your glory or your disgrace? You have been the model for millions of painted images, you have been the glass of fashion and the mold of form, out of which have been shaped millions of simulacra; you have spawned attendant personages, shadows of you and your authentic personhood rather than merely images of persons. You lend essential and perhaps substantial shadow-

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ing to all these millions of different forms and instances of shadow. In any event, you are substance to them as shadows, even as a Platonic ideal is substantial and its substantial instances shadows. You are, in fact, shadow itself, and thus more real than any of the millions. These tend toward you as well as attending upon you. In the context of these remarks it is almost as if we had been asking of the word shadow itself, “What is your substance, whereof are you made, that you emanate millions of strange tropes? Patches of night’s darkness scattered over the daylit, lamplit, or firelit world? Sheltering spaces? Radiant patches of illusion? Residues of persons after death?” One of two sonnets celebrating blackness by George Herbert’s brother, Lord Herbert of Cherbury, has it not that shadow is of one substance with blackness, but rather that it is black, the sum and absence of all color, which is somehow a sort of essence of the visible: Thou Black, wherein all colours are compos’d, And unto which they all at last returne, Thou colour of the Sun where it doth burn, And shadow, where it cools, in thee is clos’d Whatever nature can, or hath dispos’d In any other Hue . . .

There is no Hesiodic fable of the origination of shadow, no tale of the genesis of Skia. We might indeed imagine one in which Shadow or Skia was begot upon Nux (night) by Phôs (light)—or else was a beautiful boy longed for by both Phôs and Skotos, or Darkness—also a masculine noun and hence not mythopoetically available in Indo-­European to be the boy’s mother. However fanciful, this would allow for a subsequent enigma which gets reformulated throughout the his-

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tory of poetry, namely whether a cast shadow is born of the light source or the occluding body, and whether shadows and shade are composed of what is purely their own darkness, or of that of night. One of the only mythographic treatments of the origin of shadow is by Campion, and it merits attention at this point. His neo-­Latin poem entitled “Umbra” is of the type of Ovidian epyllion (exemplified by Venus and Adonis, etc.), but quite energetically original. In its four hundred or so lines it tells of Apollo’s rape of the nymph Iole while she slept in her vale of flowers (a drug, his music, and a black cloud over the torch by her bed—hanc primum inficit atra / Nube [lines 61–62]—having put her under). Awakening, still unwitting of her defloration, she has nonetheless been impregnated by the god; and as the child grows within her, she despairs: “Where shall I flee? What shadows now, what clouds are across my brow? . . . How agreeable to me the shades! I shudder at the sunlight [or sun]” (Quo fugiam? quae nunc umbrae? quae nubila frontem . . . Quam bene cum tenebris mihi convenit! horreo Solem [lines 122–24]). Iole’s rhetoric is full of invocations of umbrae and tenebrae, and manes; and indeed, these areas of darkness provide an appropriate prenatal environment for the birth of her son, who was “totally black, except for the white shape of the Sun that adhered below his breast, the image of his father” (ille niger totus, ni candida solis / Haeserat effigies sub pectore, patris imago [lines 155–56]). The dark boy, named by the nymphs Melampus (or Blackfoot?) grows up handsomely: “If Amor were black, or if only he were white, you’d swear that the god was in both of them” (Si niger esset Amor, vel si modo candidus ille, / Iurares in utroque deum [lines 207–8]). While the poem’s first part has been of light, the remainder is of darkness. The boy of night is named Melampus. The god Morpheus, taking on varying appearances while travers-

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ing the shadowy regions—the Latin is opaca loca here—enters the flowery vale of the nymphs and sees the sleeping Melampus. He falls in unrequited love with him; the boy fails to respond to any of the thousand metamorphei—if we might call them that—that the protean god of dreams could become. Then, in purely Spenserian fashion, Morpheus enters a bronze-­walled secret garden of Persephone—a sort of alternative Elysian fields—which is a gallery of famous beauties from Antiope and Helen up through celebrated Tudor and Stuart ladies, such as Elizabeth I; Lucy, Countess of Bedford; and Queen Anne. He assembles all these into one image into which he changes himself, and in that form enjoys the young man at last. But the boy’s father, Apollo, bringing light to this darkness, dissolves this apparition, whatever it was, vel virgo vel umbra. Maddened with grief, Melampus seeks only darkness now—“light is unfriendly to sorrow, night and places empty of light divert it” (inimica dolori / Lux est, oblectat nox, et loca lumine cassa [lines 364–65]). He voices a long haranguing complaint, “but while with wakeful mind he sought the stolen shade, he became like a shade” (Mente sed ereptam vigili dum quaeritat umbram, / Umbrae fit similis [lines 392– 93]). Denied by his irate father a proper burial, “he fluttered off, gradually dispelled into dark shade; he fled the sight of the sun, and will flee for all time, condemned to exile from light” (Labitur, obscuram sensim resolutus in umbram; / Et fugit aspectum solis, fugietque per omne / Tempus perpetuo damnatus luminis exul [lines 402–4]). Of interest here are (a) that Melampus is indeed the son of the sun; (b) that the prior form of shadow attracts Morpheus, god of dreams, in whose name lurks the Greek morpheme meaning its anagram in Latin, “form”; (c) that there is an exploration of two realms of unconsciousness in relation to

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erotic desire in the two parts of the tale; and (d ) how generalized shadow is born of all this. Melampus, having been denied figural umbra and mourning its loss, dies, and his own manes or umbra then becomes general optical umbra as it flies out into the world, always shunning light. That there are so many uses of the word shadow throughout the poem before general shadow has indeed been created cannot be acknowledged, any more than in the case of an aetiological fable of language told, of course, in words. The question of mythopoetic shadow in the English Renaissance must include mention of one more seldom-­read text. The very title of George Chapman’s long, fussy book of 1594, Skia Nuktos: The Shadow of Night, Containing Two Poetical Hymns, is enigmatic, never being really glossed in either of those two hymns. It remains itself enwrapped in the shadow of ambiguity. The temptation to think only of the optical instead of the generally mimetic meaning—simple umbra instead of imago—is, given the matter of “night,” quite strong. If indeed “Night” is a pure personification here like, say, Michelangelo’s sleeping figure on the Medici tomb, then she or it can indeed cast an ordinary optical shadow. But only figuratively could the abstraction be said to produce a trope of itself. I do feel that Chapman means to play upon this confusion, and to imply something like an imago of an umbra, but without addressing merely the matter of successive metaphysical attenuations, of further Platonic removes. The one pure instance of night’s shadow in the poem is the limited case of dreams as the images that night produces, elicits, or whatever. They are neither cast by nor attached to her; they are her property and under her control; the genitive “of ” is not metonymic here. The “In Noctem” hymn was deemed “the worse” by C. S.

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Lewis. With perhaps deliberate confusion it muddies up the matter of night in a way analogous to some of those we have already seen at work in the poetic history of shadow. Lewis observed, “It uses ‘Night’ in three senses which do not enrich but collide with one another. It is (a) the original Chaos, conceived as a friend, because it is a pity that Cosmos ever dispossessed her; (b) the ‘stepdame’ Night of ignorance, the enemy, which enfolds everyone except Chapman and his circle; (c) the ordinary Night which occurs every twenty-­f our hours: apparently a friend.” We may see collisions of shadow parallel to those which Lewis mentions, in these lines: A stepdame Night of minde about us clings Who broodes beneath her hell obscuring wings, Worlds of confusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Beneath thy soft and peace-­full covert then, (Most sacred mother both of Gods and men) Treasures unknowne, and more unprisde did dwell; But in the blind borne shadow of this hell, This horrid stepdame, blindness of the minde, Nought worth the sight, no sight, but worse then blind, A Gorgon that with brasse, and snakie brows, (Most harlot-­like) her naked secrets shows . . . (lines 63–74)

But later on in the poem we have the beneficent shadows of dream associated with the good night, not the previous “blind-­born” darkness of what has been called mentally benighted:

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Her trustie shadowes, succour men dismayd, Whom Dayes deceiptfull malice hath betrayd: From the silke vapors of her Iveryport, Sweet Protean dreames she sends of every sort . . . (lines 338–41)

In the end, though, there is no great enigma, beyond the fact that realizing the imago of night requires considerable adumbration, and a few attendant strange shadows of its own. I shall conclude today’s discussion by citing one further bit of mythopoetic material, three lines from another air set by John Dowland (from his First Booke of Songes or Ayres, 1597 #20): the opening one, “Come heavy sleepe, the Image of true death,” and the first two of the second strophe: Come shadow of my end: and shape of rest, Alied to Death, child to this black fast night . . .

Hypnos is usually the brother, not the image or shadow, of Thanatos, although in this case it is heavy Sleep—heavy in being grave, profound, intense, oppressive, gloomy—who was born of Night. The pairing of shadow and shape implies a visual form for Sleep, but sleep as the shadow or somewhat metonymic trope of death is one thing, and the notion of a shadow of an end generally, a proleptic or prophetic shadow of what is to come, a foreshadow, is another matter entirely. What indeed shadows have to do with death, and the matter of present foreshadowings of later and last things generally, will be among the concerns of the next lecture.

[ 2 ] Shadows and Shades

In none but the last few lines discussed in the first of these lectures did the matter of death arise, other than in two simple respects. The first is that lengthening shadows postmeridian accompany the late aging of the day, and thereby metaphorically of a human life; the second, that shadows can be metonymically associated with night and with general darkness. The word “shadow” can mean a prefiguration, whether in a fixed system of Christian hermeneutic typology or more loosely in various modes of “foreshadowing.” But when an optical shadow falls across a person—and this is not to speak of that person’s own personal shadow cast on the ground or along a wall—one typology has become standard in recent centuries. Since every person will die, every shadow can be seen poetically either as a figure of that person’s own death or as an emanative instance of death itself (an appropriately insubstantial personification, death can’t be seen, but his shadow can appear). Symbolic questions aside, the purely inferential signification of shadows is very strong, even when drained of all allegory save what their status as 33

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recurrent phenomena might afford. However momentary a passing shadow—say, of a cloud, or of a substance more solid but in motion or in changing light—its presence is always capable of reminding us that before too many hours are up, the general darkness of night will occur, and in a way that makes us say that it “falls.”† Antemeridional waning shadows of the morning seldom lead to any reflections save those, like John Donne’s, on reciprocity and some of the paradoxes it might generate. A contracting morning shadow, a dissipation of the day’s afterbirth as it were, is rarely found to be proleptic of a lengthening one, and indeed, a late-­twentieth-­century view of their relation might have it that the sense of waxing daylight, energy, and enterprise accompanying waning shadows represses or otherwise denies the inevitability of lengthening ones and what they will bring. But how we view optical shadows at the beginning and end of a day may itself be represented in the relation of different senses of the word “shadow” over the course of a particular poem, and will be seen in a good many subsequent instances that may involve a systematic progression from one sense to another. The opening and closing of Virgil’s first eclogue might be considered for a moment in this regard, particularly in view of the poem’s vast influence in the Renaissance and after. The opening lines invoke the shepherd Tityrus, lentus in umbra, lolling about in the shade in what is for later poetry the primal scene of pastoral otium. Tityrus also has the last word in the poem, announcing closing time in what eventually became a canonical moment of poetic closure: “Even now the house-­tops over there are smoking, and longer shadows fall from the mountain heights” (et iam summa procul villarum culmina fumant / maioresque cadunt altis de monti-

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bus umbrae [lines 82–83; trans. Fairclough, adapted]). The umbrae of pleasant shade become the encroaching tenebrae of night, literally “falling” (cadunt) from the mountaintops onto the houses below. Moreover, the dark stuff of what is here cast shadow—rather than of the general shade of the opening lines—is almost doubled by the corresponding dark stuff of the chimney smoke sent up by the houses in reciprocal acknowledgment of oncoming night, of the end of the day and of the poem. Nothing seems to be made in these lines, as it might be in the case of later poetry with other moral or quasipolitical agendas, of the fact that the noble, high mountain remains illuminated by sunlight for some time after the poor, benighted valley has succumbed to the power of the higher and greater to darken the lower and the less; this is a notion that lurks in the use of the verb “overshadow” to mean “dominate in some way.” Umbra in this poem starts out as what we may in English distinguish as the “shade” of foliage, and ends with the lengthening shadows that will lead to what we might call the tenebrae of fallen night. That the final word of the first eclogue—umbrae—is indeed the final word of the Aeneid might be noted here (as I assume it has traditionally been), but the umbrae into which Turnus descends with a moan of indignation are of another stuff entirely. And this brings us to a crucial question, indeed, a mortal one. The deluding shadows in Plato’s cave lie at the origin of the matter of shadows as representations, some sixteenthand seventeenth-­century poetic engagements with which were touched on in the previous lecture. But a very different text gives rise to what will be discussed today. The word “shadow” in the Old Testament of the English Bible totally avoids the Greek agenda of shadow and substance, and for the most part it might well be best translated as “shade”—the

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general term, rather than the singular “a shade,” about which more later—with a sense of sheltering protection. Such is the case with the literally or figuratively invoked cast shadows of trees, rocks, clouds, or even a covering roof, which are benevolently protective. Even more resonant is the phrase recurring in the Psalms (e.g., 17:8, 36:7, 57:1, and 63:7) about finding shelter or refuge “in [or under] the shadow of thy wings.” This usage is unshaded by any negative valorization. In another set of cases the temporal transience of a shadow— dimensional insubstantiality—is inrather than its three-­ voked. Thus Job 8:9 (KJV): “Our days upon earth are a shadow” (ki tsel yamenu alei-­arets); but this does not mean a mere shadow of a more lasting substance, as it might easily be taken to be. Rather, it is the transitory presence, not the insubstantial nature, which is at issue here; and when these verses get paraphrased or adapted in English poetry, the totally un-­Hebraic question of representation residing in the Greek word skia can creep in. Thus, in a little song from a masque by Samuel Daniel (Tethys’ Festival, 1610), it is the transitoriness of human pleasures, rather than of life itself, which is at issue, in combination with the Platonic question of inauthenticity: Are they shadowes that we see? And can shadowes pleasure give? Pleasures onely shadowes bee Cast by bodies we conceive, And are made the things we deeme, In those figures which they seeme.

In an almost Paterian way, it is the brevity of their lives that makes pleasures what they are; thus the second stanza:

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But these pleasures vanish fast, Which by shadowes are exprest Pleasures are not, if they last, In their passing, is their best. Glory is most bright and gay In a flash, and so away.

In the third, the requisite carpe diem is enjoined: Feed apace then greedy eyes On the wonder you behold. Take it sodaine as it flies Though you take it not to hold: When your eyes have done their part, Thought must length it in the heart.

In returning now to the Hellenizing of the Hebrew Bible’s shadows, we may observe a somewhat amusing early instance. The prototypical artist of the Hebrew Bible is named Bezalel (Exodus, 31:1–6), which simply means in God’s shadow—that is, in his shelter (b’tsal-­el ). But Philo of Alexandria, in his Allegorical Interpretation, construes this in the Platonic sense of skia, and thereby infers from Bezalel’s name that as a visual artist he knew God by seeing the shadow of the divine in created things, in the works of God, but not as Moses did, directly. Moses, he says, “receives the clear vision of God directly from the First Cause Himself. The other discerns the Artificer as it were, from a shadow [ap’ autou tou aitiou, ton de hôsper apo skias], from created things by virtue of a process of reasoning. Hence you will find the Tabernacle and all its furniture made in the first instance by Moses but afterwards by Bezalel, for Moses is the artificer of the archetypes, and Bezalel of the copies of these” (III.102; trans. Col-

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son and Whitaker). This is quite alien to the sense of shadowing in the Hebrew, and far closer to the Pauline trope of the mirror of mediation in I Corinthians 13. One might say that Philo, who knew the Hebrew Bible from the Greek Septuagint, had unwittingly confounded the word tsel or shadow with the totally unrelated word tselem, image, whose senses are matched by the Greek eidolôn or the Latin imago, both of which we find gathered under skia and umbra. We might then consider a line, again coming more from Greek than Hebraic tradition, in which an additional poetic topos of the frailty of human life is adduced in the additional layers of removal from substantiality, Edward Young’s “Fond man! the vision of a moment made! / Dream of a dream! and shadow of a shade!” (A Paraphrase on Part of the Book of Job, lines 187–88). Pindar’s characterization (in Pythian 8) of man as skias onar, “the shadow of a dream,” is an early instance of this.* And we might observe that something rather different occurs in the fin-­de-­siècle poet Lionel Johnson’s “Man is a shadow’s dream! / Opulent Pindar saith,” where the shadow is the dreamer, rather than the image of what is itself an insubstantiality. Francis Bacon’s characterization of poetry revises Sir Philip Sidney’s insistence that the poet “nothing affirms, and therefore never lieth” in his observation that poetry is “but the shadow of a lie.” Reflexes of this figure of double-­ remove emerge in later poetry, as will be seen. On the other hand, Aeschylus’s eidolôn skias (Agamemnon, line 839), “the shadow of an image,” seems to inaugurate *Pindar’s wording, skias onar, is more accurately translated as “the dream of a shadow,” meaning either “a dream dreamt by a shadow” or a “dream about a shadow.” Hollander may have depended on Richmond Lattimore’s translation of Pindar’s odes, which in its first edition (1947) gives “the shadow of a dream,” though Lattimore himself corrects this in later editions to “the dream of a shadow.”

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another branch of this figure of redoubled shadowing that concerns not mortality, but inauthenticity. Thus Agamemnon scornfully refers to those who have pretended loyalty to him, and we note with some amusement the presence of the English convention as the Loeb edition’s translator, working in the 1920s, gives “shadow of a shade” here. A shadow of a shadow, either cast or attached, is optically impossible; indeed, what unites all the various entities that poetic language names “shadow” is that they cast no optical one.† Charles Churchill, in his The Rosciad, having satirized the actors Henry Woodward and Samuel Foote, then denounces Tate Wilkinson, who imitated Foote—calling him “a mere mere mimic’s mimic” (line 414)—and William Obrien, an actor with whom Garrick replaced Woodward: Shadows behind of Foote and Woodward came; Wilkinson this, Obrien was that name. Strange to relate, but wonderfully true, That even shadows have their shadows too! (lines 409–12)

Where “shadow” means “trace” or some other epistemological residue, the phrase works differently, as in Henry James, The Turn of the Screw, where “she [Mrs. Grose, the housekeeper] herself had seen nothing, not the shadow of a shadow.” Walter Scott’s Paulus Pleydell, in Guy Mannering, observes that he is “a member of the suffering and Episcopal Church of Scotland—the shadow of a shade now, and fortunately so.” Alfred North Whitehead composes a well-­constructed pentameter line, with contrastive paralleling of shade and shadow, in an observation about how, as William Pitt lay dying “at England’s worst moment” during the French Revolution, “he was heard to murmur ‘What

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shades we are, what shadows we pursue.’” That Pitt never said this, and that Whitehead seems to have been misremembering a different remark of Edmund Burke’s, only gives evidence to the doubled-­shadow topos. By the end of the nineteenth century, when poetic shadows have become another matter entirely, the phrase can return with added point, as in Ernest Dowson’s “Spleen,” where the speaker, “only tired / Of everything that ever I desired” as the day draws on, says of his lover, “Her lips, her eyes, all day became to me / The shadow of a shadow utterly” (lines 7–10). But perhaps the phrase “shadow of shadows” would engage another idiom, and produce an effect quite the opposite of the preceding attenuations, suggesting the significance we have been heading towards. For none of these uses has the dominating sense of the phrase “the shadow of death,” whose anomalous genesis is now well known but would not have been so to most readers of, and writers out of, the King James translation (and Geneva, earlier) in the seventeenth through the earlier twentieth centuries. The words occur most famously in the twenty-­third Psalm’s “Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death . . . ,” as well as in Job 3:5, “Let darkness and the shadow of death stain it . . .” and elsewhere (Psalms 44:19, 107:10; Jeremiah 13:16; Amos 5:8, etc.). The original Hebrew at all these points reads tsalmot, an early word meaning a deep darkness, and an appropriate translation might be “the darkest of valleys.” But a “scribal conceit,” as one scholar has put it, repointed the Hebrew to read tsalmavet, or, literally, “shadow of death.” The Septuagint accepts this in its rendering of the phrase as skia thanatou and the Vulgate as umbra mortis.* The English *Hollander’s phrase “scribal conceit” in the previous sentence misquotes his source, Mitchell Dahood (Anchor Bible Psalms), who writes that

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Bible, in particular, exhibits a strangely allegorizing propensity in its way of translating the Hebrew construct state as a prepositional phrase: What in Hebrew is “the YX” becomes in English the “X of Y,” and when Y is a more general or abstract term and X a concrete one—“the wine of astonishment” (Psalms 60:3), “the valley of decision” ( Joel 3:14)—the hearer tends often implicitly to capitalize the second term. In the case in question, the name of the resulting allegorical location, “valley of death,” is full of poetic possibilities: it could mean the valley constructed, owned, inhabited by, presided over by, composed of, serving as an emblem or other trope of, or otherwise identified with, Death. A use of the phrase in Isaiah 9:2, “they that dwell in the land of the shadow of death, upon them hath the light shined” (KJV), seems prima facie even more allegorical and general than in Psalm 23: here the shadowing seems more like an imaging skia than a sheltering tsel. But the Geneva Bible’s elegant gloss on Psalm 23 contrives to avoid the reified shadow completely by reminding us of the imagery at the opening of the poem: “Thogh he were in danger of death, as the shepe that wandreth in the darke valley without his shepherd.” A most remarkable turn on the phrase is to be found in Sir Thomas Browne’s great prose ode to shade (and shadow) in chapter IV of The Garden of Cyrus, where the interplay of shadow and representation is quite exuberant:

this repointing of the Hebrew “has been described as a rabbinic conceit,” though he offers no further background for this assertion. Hollander’s misquotation yet puts him on safer historical ground. The epithet “scribal,” by scholarly convention, would here imply the work of the Hebrew Bible’s earliest editors, whereas to say that a “rabbinic conceit” was accepted by the Septuagint translators could only be an anachronism, since their translation from the second century BCE precedes “rabbinic” Judaism by some three hundred years.

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The greatest mystery of Religion is expressed by adumbration, and in the noblest part of Jewish Types, we finde the Cherubims shadowing the Mercy-­seat: Life it self is but the shadow of death, and souls departed but the shadows of the living: All things fall under this name. The Sunne it self is but the dark simulachrum, and light but the shadow of God.

The rhetorical infection by the umbra mortis of the otherwise sheltering, or at most emblematically transitory, shadow remained to haunt many other poetic shadows and shades. In a rare later instance we might see a poet inquiring about an optical shadow—of the painted representation of a celebrated shadowed scene—whether the landscape were itself specifically allegorical. Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s sonnet addresses the inquiry to the central figure in that landscape— Leonardo’s Virgin of the Rocks in the London painting: Mother, is this the darkness of the end The Shadow of Death? and is that outer sea Infinite imminent Eternity?†

The shadow of death becomes more dense as it assimilates another kind of shadowing, associated with the living person. In a classical context, there is no need for a complex ratio of shadow:substance :: body:soul—a chiasm if mapped this way—that Christian doctrine deploys. Horace’s celebrated “pulvis et umbra sumus” (we are dust and shadow [IV.7.16]) refers to the condition of the dead, and may echo the similar “ashes and useless shadow” (anti philtatês / morphês spodon te kai skian anôphelê) of Sophocles’s Electra (lines 1158–59). But notice how the umbra takes on a more familiar sense in the neo-­Latin epigram of John Owen (1563–1622)

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that expands Horace’s text into the usual sort of paradox (I quote Fred J. Nichols’s prose version): Let no one born of dust despair of heaven. Let no one despair of heaven because we are shadow. Our flesh is dust, but of that same dust was made the body of the Lord; the mind is a shadow, but the shadow of God. [Desperet coelum natus de puluere nemo. Desperet coelum nemo quod umbra sumus. Nostra caro est puluis, sed eodem ex puluere corpus Fit Domini; Mens est umbra, sed Vmbra Dei.]

And yet the Horatian umbra, separated from its once completing but now decomposed body, is close to the manes, the shade or ghost of the dead. Horace himself elsewhere invokes these: “Soon there shall press upon you night and the fabled Shades and the dreary house of Pluto” (o beate Sesti . . . iam te premet nox fabulaeque Manes // et domus exilis Plutonia [I.4.14– 19]). And I observe that Horace echoes yet again at the end of Wallace Stevens’s grand “An Ordinary Evening in New Haven” (perhaps modulated by a memory of Yeats’s “Shade more than man, more image than a shade” from “Byzantium”), where another progression is worked through: It is not in the premise that reality Is a solid. It may be a shade that traverses A dust, a force that traverses a shade.

It is this word (manes) which provides the basis for the singular term “a shade” in English—as opposed to general sheltering “shade,” as was observed earlier. The “shades” that populate English translations and adaptations of Homer,

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Virgil, and Dante—and, indeed, neoclassical poetry generally—are produced by later rhetorical presences. There are no shadows associated with the dead in Homer; his word for the ghost of a dead person is, rather, psuchê—“soul”— as, for example, where “the souls of the dead are gathered out of Erebus” (ai d’ ageronto / psuchai hupex Erebeus nekuôn katatethnêôtôn [Odyssey, XI.36–37]). (In Plato, this can be a bit more complex, as in the Laws, where, as opposed to the soul which “makes each of us to be what he is,” the body is a “semblance which attends on each of us, it being well said that the bodily corpses are images of the dead” [eidôla einai ta tôn nekrôn sômata; XII, 959B; trans. Bury].) Like Homer, Virgil in book VI of the Aeneid uses anima, or imago—as in IV.654 Dido declares, “et nunc magna mei sub terras ibit imago” (and now in majesty my ghost will go beneath the ground)—although there are moments when umbrae, referring to the tenebrous darkness of the underworld, seem ambiguously to invoke animae as well. Often this is clearly not the case. Dryden’s version of the line about the anima of Marcellus—“But hovering mists around his brows are spread; / And night, with sable shades, involves his head” (sed nox atra caput tristi circumvolat umbra [VI.866])—is neutral about whether the black shadows are protective or not; but an imitation of this line (in his famous elegy for John Oldham), “But Fate and gloomy Night encompass thee around,” avoids the ambiguous shades completely. But perhaps there is a slightly different sense in the poem’s celebrated ultimate line concerning the death of Turnus, mentioned earlier: “vitaque cum gemitu fugit indignata sub umbras.” “And with a moan life passed indignant to the Shades below”—so reads H. Rushton Fairclough’s Loeb translation, 1916–18. Robert Fitzgerald gives, “And with a groan for that indignity / His spirit fled into the gloom below,” pointedly avoiding the ambiguity of

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English “shades.” Is it only the darkness of the underworld to which he descends, or to the company of all the other animae there as well? One may note that this perfectly repeats the line (XI.831) about the death of Camilla, and wonder whether this is a mere repetition or a loaded doubling. It is not only in translating the Aeneid that English requires some subtle shadow/shade distinction. This is a continuing question for English poetry. It is, for example, easy to confuse the shadows of manes and the tenebrae they might inhabit in the text of John Dowland’s “Flow my teares,” or “Lachrimae pavane,” first published in 1600. It addresses those “that in dispaire their last fortuns deplore,” and for whom “No nights are dark enough,” and it is they—not their venue of darkness—who are enjoined: Harke you shadowes that in darcknesse dwell, learne to contemne light, Happie, happie they that in hell feele not the worlds despite. (lines 17–20)

And here the manes or anima shadows inhabit the tenebrous shadows of Hell. That bodies cast shadows, and that anima- or manes-­ shadows do not, is crucial for Dante. His ombra can mean manes or cast shadow; the first, for example, in the famous moment (in Purgatorio, 2.79–81) when the pilgrim tries to embrace the figure of his beloved Casella and three times finds only impalpability: “O shades, empty save in outward appearance! Three times I clasped my hands behind him and as often brought them back to my breast” (Ohi ombre vane, fuor che ne l’aspetto! / tre volte dietro a lei le mani avvinsi, / e tante mi tornai con esse al petto; trans. Singleton, adapted). But

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in the next canto (3.19–30), when the pilgrim is startled by his observation that, unlike himself, his guide Virgil casts no shadow, the latter reminds him that “the body within which I made shadow” (lo corpo dentro al quale io facea ombra; trans. Singleton) has been buried elsewhere, implying but avoiding the point that as ombra ma non corpo he doesn’t cast an ombra.† Reciprocally, the excommunicates in Purgatorio 3.88– 96, shades themselves, are confused by Dante’s personal shadow. Perhaps the sharpest moment of contrast between the cast and the ghostly shadow is among the lustful in Purgatorio 26.7–9, when the flames from the bank beside them, made paler in the sunlight, resume their normal color by Dante’s shadow falling on them as he moves by, Dante being no shade himself: “With my shadow I made the flame appear ruddier, and even at so slight a sign I saw many shades, approaching, pay attention” (e io facea con l’ombra più rovente / parer la fiamma; e pur a tanto indizio / vidi molt’ ombre, andando, poner mente).† A most memorable shadow may be the final one at the end of the Paradiso (33.94–96), which is the first shadow of a previously unknown body. The pilgrim speaks of his intense final vision of the scattered pages of the entire universe bound by love into one volume, and of how his gaze on this seemed to feed itself: “A single moment makes a deeper lethargy [oblivion (Singleton)] for me than twenty-­five centuries have wrought upon the enterprise that first made Neptune wonder at the shadow of the Argo” (Un punto solo m’è maggior letargo / che venticinque secoli a la ’mpresa / che fé Nettuno ammirar l’ombra d’Argo)—“wonder” because the Argo was the first boat ever, and thus the first he could have seen. Ombra can be imago in the Paradiso as well, as in the prayer at the very opening that divine Virtue may “make manifest

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the shadow of the blessed realm imprinted in my mind” (che l’ombra del beato regno / segnata nel mio capo io manifesti [1.23–24; trans. Wicksteed, adapted]). But a moment at the end of the Paradiso (30.76–79) speaks of a number of flashing things—a river, topazes, grasses—as the “shadow-­bearing prefaces” (umbriferi prefazi) of their reality, and this brings us to another significant matter. Erich Auerbach reminds us, with regard to the Inferno, that unlike the ancient poets of the underworld, who represented earthly life as real and the life after death as shadow, “for [Dante] the other world is the true reality, while this world is only umbra futurorum.” The matter of the shadow of things to come has arisen only momentarily so far in these observations, and something may be said of it here. In considering the opposition of shadow and substance, the text of Colossians 2:16–17 was cited, speaking of meat, drink, various holy days, or the sabbath, “Which are a shadow of things to come; but the body is of Christ” (KJV; Geneva: “the bodie is in Christ”). While the shadow here is less than the body or substance—a skia and not a sôma—it nonetheless preexists it as an appearance, available for apprehension before the substance itself, and therefore possessing a different sort of value from a “mere” Platonic sort of shadow. It was of course the strategy of the Christian reading of the Hebrew Bible, in making it an “Old Testament,” to give it shadowy status with respect to the body of the new one. A crucial text here is Hebrews 10:1 (KJV), speaking of “the Law having a shadow of good things to come, and not the very image of the things” (Skian gar echôn o nomos tôn mellontôn agathôn, ouk autên tên eikona tôn pragmatôn). In this case, the shadow is opposed not to the substance but to the true image; the Geneva Bible’s gloss adduces that earlier sense of imago as picture, saying of the shadow here, “as it were

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the first draught and purtrait of the livelie paterne to come,” which gives “the livelie paterne” more general and generative power.† Jean Daniélou in From Shadows to Reality distinguishes two typological traditions: the first, sacramental, by which baptism would be typified by the crossing of the Red Sea and the baptism of fire in the last judgment, which it prefigures; the second, moral, deriving from Philo. We have no need to pursue any of the intricacies of biblical typology here, other than to be reminded of the familiar instances—the sacrifice of Isaac foreshadowing that of Christ (the OED suggesting that this word is first used in a sermon in 1577—“Our Saviour’s death . . . was by manifold Types foreshadowed”), the forty years of wandering in the desert prefiguring Christ’s forty days in the wilderness, and so on.* Sometimes a strange mixture of umbra futurorum and imago can occur. The very first of Jonathan Edwards’s Images or Shadows of Divine Things seems simultaneously to be presenting a trope and a typological prefiguration: Death temporal is a shadow of eternal death. The agonies, the pains, the groans and gasps of death, the pale, horrid, ghastly appearance of the corps . . . is an image of the misery of hell. And the body’s continuing in the grave, and never rising more in this world, is to shadow forth the eternity of the misery of hell.

But typologies other than scriptural abound in literature, whether, as for some Renaissance mythographers, in the *Hollander’s quotation from the OED is in fact dated 1677 in the entry he refers to, though the dictionary does include a parallel example of this usage from 1577, taken from an English translation of a commentary by Martin Luther.

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“fayned colours” of pagan fable shading the “true case” of Christianity, or in the displacements and revisions of poetic tradition generally. One can possibly, though rarely, find the shadow of things to come associated with a literal optical shadow; a startling instance is Emily Dickinson’s remarkable little fragment (poem 764): Presentiment – is that long Shadow – on the Lawn – Indicative that Suns go down – The Notice to the startled Grass That Darkness – is about to pass –

(The manuscript shows that she had considered and then rejected a change from “The Notice” to “Monition.”) This is a typical Dickinson moment, although her shocking originality makes it always hard to say what she will do next. There is a novel use, in “Presentiment – is that long Shadow – on the Lawn –”, of that mode of reducing an abstraction to an ad hoc emblem of itself that would get to be first a convention of modernist poetry (e.g., “The Widow’s Lament in Springtime” of William Carlos Williams: “Sorrow is my own yard”), and, subsequently, a bathetic popular cliché. We may notice—along with Dickinson’s word “Notice” itself—that there is certainly some typological matter present here, some way in which optical shadow is foreshadowing and the grass is all flesh; but the fragmentary nature of the poem leaves it in abeyance whether darkness is about to pass over, by, or in upon it. Does this then deconstruct all prophecy, whatever its putative message, as divinations of death? I think so. In any event, this poem, like other oracles, is fragmentary. Walter de la Mare’s brief inquiry called “Shadow” (from Memory and Other Poems, 1938) seems like a set of questions, both lightly

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and darkly asked, to which Dickinson gives profound and enigmatic answer: Beware!—breathes the faint evening wind? Omen!—sighs dayspring’s innocent air? Stalks out from shadow, when drawn’s the blind, A warning Nothing, to shake the mind And touch the soul with care? — At midnight on thy stair?

But it may be remarked in passing that one is left with the sense of a secondary presentiment of the foreshadowing latent in all postmeridian shade. It may by now be apparent that these observations have all been in some way prolegomena to an inspection of a number of Miltonic shadowings. To the degree that Paradise Lost is an aetiological fable of Everything—life, death, nature, order, even the development and the temporal process which are part of its own very fabric—we might consider the ways in which shadow and shade are deployed throughout the poem, with particular regard to mortal matters, and to the question of prefiguration which has not yet been raised. The poem abounds in local aetiologies of all sorts. The matter of shadow and shade in Paradise Lost is there from the very outset, where the poem, starting at its lowest point, reveals Satan’s new world in which “No light, but rather darkness visible [for which the eighteenth-­century literalist Richard Bentley endeavored to substitute “transpicuous gloom”] / Served only to discover sights of woe, / Regions of sorrow, doleful shades” (I.63–65). Hell’s darkness is more than ancient, but the particularly problematic kind of illuminating darkness it takes to “discover” sights of any kind

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may come from Spenser’s description of the Cave of Mammon in book II, canto 7 of The Faerie Queene, which gives rise to so much else in Paradise Lost I and II: for vew of chearefull day Did never in that house it selfe display, But a faint shadow of uncertain light; Such as a lamp, whose life does fade away: Or as the Moone cloathed with clowdy night, Does shew to him, that walkes in feare and sad affright. (stanza 29)

The “faint shadow of uncertain light” is also of uncertain syntax, and whether it is a dimly radiant shadow or an imago lucis, a representation of light itself, remains in suspension. While the interplay of emanative and occlusive powers suggested by different sixteenth-­century kinds of “shadow” is peculiarly Spenserian, that uncertain light is brought to bear on some of whatever “darkness visible” is. Milton’s “doleful shades” derive from the umbrae with which the Aeneid closes, and there is no tincture of manes—of ghostly shades— in the meaning of the word here. But the implicitly proleptic is one of Milton’s characteristic modes in the poem, and even provides for ways in which unfallen shades can foreshadow fallen shadowings. Next, we may regard Satan’s legions, in book I, lines 302–4, lying as densely piled as the leaves at Vallombrosa, “where th’ Etrurian shades / High overarch’t imbowr,” and where in the text the name of the shady valley in Tuscany is given an analogue of the scribal repointing into the valley of the shadow of death. The “shades” here are still protective screens from the sun’s heat, but they have been co-­opted

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by a hidden mortal agenda. The basis of the elaborate simile comparing the fallen angelic army to the fallen leaves is that of the thickness of their piling up. What the simile brilliantly suppresses is that both are fallen, and dead. Reciprocally, the reader may come to see that she or he is suppressing the ghostly umbrae in the beneficent shade. When, later on in book II, lines 615–21, the fallen angels begin to explore their world, and “adventurous bands / With shuddering horror pale, and eyes aghast / Viewed first their lamentable lot,” there were revealed “O’er many a frozen, many a fiery alp, / Rocks, caves, lakes, fens, bogs, dens, and shades of death.” This line was widely imitated in the eighteenth century, and is celebrated today for the way in which internal rhyme and assonance sort out the stressed nominal monosyllables. It builds its catalogue of landscape elements toward a grim conclusion, more terrifying as it concludes with terms more abstract, moving from dens to shades to death, and confirming this with a little refrain of summation and redoubling in the next line’s “A universe of death. . . .” By the end of the line, all the darker parts of the natural scene have been co-­opted by the larger matter they seem to add up to—“Shades of death” is particularly resonant, first as a muted echo of the biblical “shadow of death,” then of Virgilian umbrae. (Aeneid II.368–69 might also be adduced here, with its “everywhere fearsome trembling, panic, and many an image of death” [crudelis ubique / luctus, ubique pavor et plurima mortis imago].) Milton’s shades do, I think, partake of mortis imagines, images of death general or even generally personified, although not the horrific local personification the reader will shortly encounter. One is reminded here that in sixteenth- and earlier seventeenth-­century art, the solidest of objects are presented as memento mori, as if they were really insubstantial shadows and their very palpability a delu-

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sion. But in the later history of poetry, many actual and occasional cast optical shadows will be seen to frame their own sort of natural memento mori as well. Milton’s shades here are not those of manes, nor are Satan and his crew Dantean umbrae in that they are “confounded, though immortal,” save that Satan’s explorers are already figuratively dead-­in-­life, as the earlier comparison to the fallen leaves suggests. They also seem to be umbrae futurorum to the degree that they look forward to the actual death which will soon be brought “into the world,” with “all our woe,” by the arch-­inhabitant of the region darkened by them. Milton may have been remembering La Pucelle’s curse in I Henry VI, V.iv.89–90—“But darkness and the gloomy shade of death / Environ you.” A Midsummer Night’s Dream’s “Fairies, black, grey, green and white, / You moon-­shine revellers, and shades of death” may also be in the background, pointing up the matters of insubstantiality, illusion, and the nonhuman.* These shades of death, apparently natural to the landscape of hell via Virgil, Dante, and Spenser, prefigure a far more upsetting shadow, forty-­odd lines later on in Paradise Lost, in Satan’s encounter with his daughter Sin and his incestuous son/grandson. Sin is clearly delineated as a composite monster from antiquity. But then, at line 666, no less—a fact which, since it is the number of the Beast in Revelation, I won’t refrain from noting—we are presented with The other shape, If shape it might be called that shape had none Distinguishable in member, joint, or limb,

*The lines quoted here as from A Midsummer Night’s Dream are in fact from The Merry Wives of Windsor, V.v.35–36, and the passage in the original ends with “shades of night” rather than “shades of death.”

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Or substance might be called that shadow seemed, For each seemed either . . .

Any of Milton’s readers could have encountered and recognized sin for what it is, and even a non-­Christian could acknowledge such a recognition—like, say, knowing that something is illegal in France, although not in one’s own country. But neither they nor we, having fully encountered death, would be in a position to report or describe it, and Death itself cannot have a shape, no matter how many images falsely represent it in one or another form. At most, it might be said that he is protean, but it is not that he is amorphous; his mode of being is problematic—apparently a shadow, he couldn’t be called substance because in his case the distinction seems to break down. As a personification, Death’s embodiment resides in his insubstantiality, and yet he is the shadow that triumphs over living bodies. Spenser refers at one point to Death as “Ne ought to see, but like a shade to weene, / Unbodied, unsoul’d, unheard, unseene” (Mutability cantos, vii, stanza 46), and the first two adjectives seem relevant. When “Sin and her shadow Death” are mentioned much later on (in IX.12), “shadow” as “constant attendant” (rather than as the more modern “stalking follower” derived from it) may be the point, but surely death is the shadow she gave birth to, and in some complex way her imago as well. And in book X, Sin urges Death to help build the broad highway into hell, “Whom thus the meagre shadow answered soon” (line 264); he is, of course, shadow—or he is of coarse shadow—or what might here be called “shadstance,” or something, and “meagre” applies to that. But he is also, at this point in the poem, the colloquial “a mere shadow of himself.” Once the poem has left the underworld, other sorts of shadow and shade appear. Book III, taking place in Heaven,

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is almost blindingly bright in an unrelieved way—“For sight no obstacle found here, nor shade” (line 615), even as the language of book III is unshadowed by trope. The gate of Paradise is “inimitable on earth / By model, or by shading pencil drawn” (lines 508–9). But in the blind poet’s famous invocation to Light at its opening, the writing of the poem itself suggests how “the wakeful bird / Sings darkling, and in shadiest covert hid / Tunes her nocturnal note” (lines 38–40). The nightingale is far from benighted, but rather a figure for the blind Homer and the blind Milton, singing out of the darkness. The shadiest covert is not remotely “shady” in the modern sense of “dubious,” but rather seems both literal and figurative at once—the bird sings out of dense foliage but at night, and the darkness is doubled but without any negative cast. (Such a pall does indeed fall over the same situation in the line from Comus [line 334] which speaks of “double night of darkness, and of shades” in a totally menacing context.) This propounds a strange turn on the protective shading in much of the Old Testament, and invokes different concerns from the pleasant kind of daylight shading beneath which human pleasures may occur. In Titus Andronicus (II.iii.14–15), “The green leaves quiver with the cooling wind, / And make a chequer’d shadow on the ground,” where the checkering is a pattern in motion, being occasioned by the moving leaves. In L’Allegro’s familiar “many a youth, and many a maid, / Dancing in the Chequer’d shade” (lines 95–96) it is the human figures, rather than the light falling on them, that are put into motion; the second line evokes an amenable variation of light and dark, no shading of dubiety in the purely visual “chequer’d.” This line remains resonant for later poets, from Pope in “Windsor-­Forest” (“Here waving groves a chequer’d scene display, / And part admit, and part exclude the day” [lines 17–18]) to Tennyson in “Recollections of the Arabian Nights”

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(“Thence through the garden I was drawn— / A realm of pleasance, many a mound, / And many a shadow-­chequer’d lawn” [lines 100–102]). Andrew Marvell’s version of this is the “light Mosaick” in “Upon Appleton House” (stanza 73), both pictorially vivid and punningly referential. In “The Garden,” the spot is too covert for the mere pleasance of checkered shade, but we get a more astonishing shadowing instead, with the Mind “Annihilating all that’s made / To a green thought in a green shade” (lines 47–48). In Marvell’s garden, a general “lovely green” has become the elemental color and has not only replaced but transcended the emblematic red and white of the carnal. The sublimation into idea can simultaneously be thought of as concluding with a living Neoplatonic form somehow contained in a newly formed imago, and as itself taking place in the green shade cast by foliage on grass. But with the doubled sensuous and shadowy senses of “shade,” the peculiar process of annihilation seems to be recapitulated in a movement from one sense of “shade” to another. The positive loveliness of shade is an issue here, rather than merely its more desperately needed shelter or protection. But not that there cannot be something lovely about that very protectiveness—here is Dr. Browne again, from the same passage in The Garden of Cyrus: “Nor are only dark and green colors, but shades and shadows contrived through the great Volume of nature, and trees ordained not only to protect and shadow others, but by their shades and shadowing parts, to preserve and cherish themselves.” Certainly it is this lovely variegated green that helps keep the beauty of Milton’s Paradise from being—for some of us who learn of it only through fallen hearsay—boring. The shade in the original garden is ubiquitous: “those loftie shades” that comprise Adam’s bower (III.734); “A sylvan

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scene, and as the ranks ascend / Shade above shade, a woody theatre / Of stateliest view (IV.140–42); Adam and Eve repose “Under a tuft of shade that on a green / Stood whispering soft” (IV.325–6). Within this blissful bower, we hear Eve’s account to Adam of her Narcissus-­like encounter with her reflection in a pool seen against a background which, she says, “to me seemed another sky” (IV.459). Her image pleases her more than does the sight of Adam. But the divine voice is quick to interpret her vision, and the lines addressing her are subtly intricate: What thou seest, What there thou seest fair Creature is thy self, With thee it came and goes: but follow me, And I will bring thee where no shadow staies Thy coming, and thy soft imbraces, hee Whose image thou art, him thou shalt enjoy Inseparablie thine, to him shalt bear Multitudes like thy self . . . (IV.467–74)

The doubling of “What thou seest, / What there thou seest” reminds us that a doubled appearance is being considered. “With thee it came and goes”—and the antecedent of “it” must be “what there thou seest,” for the reflection has not been named, and yet the coming-­and-­going description of a shadow is a conventional one. But so is that of following, and the “but follow me” has a touch of “Better be my shadow now, as you go back to acknowledging that you are more the image of Adam than your own.” Philostratus in his Eikones points out that Narcissus is doubly deceived because, in being astonished by his own image, he becomes identified with it through his motionlessness. “Staies” (in “where no

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shadow staies / Thy coming”) looks to be intransitive, meaning “remains, awaits.” But it is dragged by the enjambment into transitivity—this is a frequent device of the language of Paradise Lost throughout—and another sense, but here a complex one, in which “inhibits” and “supports” are curiously mingled. Thus Eve’s being rhetorically dragged away from her absorbing shadow, toward a more substantial and less shadowy mode of producing images of herself. And this is itself shadowed by the verb’s being shifted from motionless transitivity to agency. And that verb’s subject, “shadow,” becomes active and passive at once, and figuratively substantial in a new way. Satan in Eve’s dream (V.38–43) speaks to her of the pleasant time, The cool, the silent, save where silence yields To the night-­warbling bird, that now awake Tunes sweetest his love-­laboured song; now reigns Full-­orbed the moon, and with more pleasing light Shadowy sets off the face of things . . .

Here the nightingale has been re-­gendered and his song pointedly eroticized—a travesty of the darkling song of the bard-­bird of book III—and the “shadowy” moonlight is tinted by the colors of delusion and falsification. This is in good part because Satan keeps treating Paradise as if it were merely the condition of nature to which he will bring it. Remember that when he glimpses Adam and Eve making love, he is tormented by the sight of them, as he says, “Imparadised in one another’s arms” (IV.506)—but they are imparadised in Paradise, and have no need of the trope of that lost place which eros will eventually seem to afford. And so too with

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the moonlight: the face of things needs no cosmetic illumination to set it off. This is one of Satan’s characteristic modes of parodic inversion, both contrived and unwitting. There seems to be a kind of correction of Satan’s appropriation of the shadowy when we come to Adam awakening from his dream further on (VIII.309–11). He finds it “all real, as the dream / Had lively shadowd”; this lively or vivid shadowing is that of painting, and its enargeia includes both its clarity and its oneiric truth. Later on in book V, Raphael explains to Adam that the instruction in historical cosmology he’s going to be given will have to depend upon the mediation of something very like simile (just as Milton, explaining what happened before we hurled ourselves into a world of knowledge, has to depend upon his great art adequately to represent perfect artlessness). He shall, Raphael says, delineate so, By lik’ning spiritual to corporal forms, As may express them best, though what if Earth Be but the shaddow of Heav’n, and things therein Each t’ other like, more then on earth is thought? (V.572–76)

This is imago-­shadow, but redeemed from the pure contingency of actuality decreed by the Platonic convention: the apprehension of similitude is not merely a prosthetic implement of fallen consciousness but perhaps itself a partial glimpse, in an enigmatic mirror, of relations more profound. But when earth and heaven are mentioned, a touch of optical shadow suggests itself, as if the substantiality of our world were an emanation of the pure transubstantial light. This is itself a shadowy matter, doctrinally anomalous but perhaps

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reflecting some of the shadow/substance paradoxes briefly considered in the first lecture—here, as if substance were the shadow of something beyond it. At one of the darkest moments in Paradise Lost (IX.1051–55) Eve and Adam awaken after their first fallen sex—­screwing in Paradise prior to the Fall was presumably splendid but not excitingly dirty—with a sense of both shame and guilt. (It should be remembered that their sin lay in the disobedience and literal eating of what should have remained figurative fruit.) Having sex was one of the multitude of things they were not forbidden to do, and that they construe what they have done as shameful or in itself disobedient seems heartbreaking. One may feel that this may somehow reflect Satan getting his own back for what William Empson held was the reciprocally irrelevant sexual punishment of the fallen angels in book I. In any event, up they rose As from unrest, and each the other viewing, Soon found their eyes how opened, and their minds How darkened; innocence, that as a veil Had shadowed them from knowing ill, was gone . . .

The dialectical play of figurative darkness, of whether veils hide faces or the outside worlds around them, works on the predominantly Old Testament shadowing of protective shade here; but the veiling smacks of another sort as well. Twice in Spenser personages are veiled—a locally relevant figure of Venus in book IV, and the presiding judicial form of Nature in the Mutability cantos—with the precise effect, Spenser tells us, of preventing the beholder from knowing whether they are female or male. Innocence seems to be veiling at once the

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face of the world and the minds—rather than the eyes—of Adam and Eve: the figure is in fact rather complicated. Towards the end of the poem, the archangel Michael, in his account to Adam of law and providence, introduces a final umbra futurorum: So Law appears imperfet, and but giv’n With purpose to resign them in full time Up to a better Cov’nant, disciplin’d From shadowie Types to Truth, from Flesh to Spirit, From imposition of strict Laws, to free Acceptance of large Grace, from servil fear To filial, works of Law to works of Faith. (XII.300–306)

Erich Auerbach quotes Tertullian (Adversus Marcionem 5.19) about the Law and Christ as its fulfillment, that “it is transferred from the shadow to the substance, that is, from figures to the reality [or truth]” (de umbra transfertur ad corpus, id est, de figuris ad veritatem). The fundamental trope of shadow/substance for Old Testament / New Testament and even—with the usual mildly ironic Platonic reversal—for letter/spirit was considered last week. In a typological context, it still leaves the mere shadow under something of a cloud, but redeems it somehow with regard to prophetic presence. In this passage from book XII there are a number of affiliated transitions: flesh moves to spirit, imposing—or being imposed upon by—laws to acceptance of grace, a fear servile becomes a presumably higher form of fear filial, and Law— this time in another sense, as the Old Law, the realm of the Old Testament—moves to “works of Faith”—a phrase hinting at, among other things, a dialectical resolution of two

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concepts at occasional war in Reformation theology. But in each case, what one feels to be the more material, literal, palpable of the terms in the pair is itself figured in these lines as shadowy with respect to the substance of the higher one. This kind of question of the shadowy aspects of the substantial will contribute to the density of poetic discourse of shadows in later times. A pure instance of the same shadowiness of the more substantial occurs as late as Paul Valéry, albeit in a context which in the case is almost allusive. In his “Silhouette of a Serpent” (Ébauche d’un serpent) he can have his serpent address another tree, the originating central one in Eden, as “great tree of trees, shadow of the Heavens” (Arbre, grand Arbre, Ombre des Cieux, / Irrésistible Arbre des arbres [lines 271–72]).* Various senses of “shadow” deployed throughout the course of Paradise Lost both reflect and complicate their roles in previous poetry in English. Some of these were influential upon later poetry and some were not; but Milton’s way of shading one of these senses with another would be extended deeply into romantic and modern poetry. Such extensions and their conceptual milieu will be the concern of the subsequent lectures. But a brief glance at a familiar but strange little poem that progressively and almost schematically moves through four major kinds of shadow will serve both as conclusion and prelude. In 1849, Edgar Allan Poe composed a brief and elliptical ballad called “Eldorado,” alluding not so much to the name of the sixteenth-­century myth of a fabulous monarch covered with gold, supposedly inhabiting what is now Colombia and Ecuador. His realm was supposedly built of gold and jewels *The title of Valéry’s poem might more accurately be translated as “Sketch [or Rough Draft] of a Serpent.”

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as well, and the name became attached to it—thus Milton in Paradise Lost XI mentions “Guiana, whose great city Geryon’s sons [by which he means Spaniards] / Call El Dorado” (lines 410–11). By 1848 the term had become a journalistic cliché for the gold fields of California, as it had begun to be used earlier for the general American object of European immigrant desire. In an earlier poem (of 1844) he had rhymed the name with “shadow”—there are hardly any other rhymes for either. He writes of the “Dream-­Land” of the title that For the heart whose woes are legion ’Tis a peaceful, soothing region— For the spirit that walks in shadow ’Tis—oh ’tis an Eldorado! (lines 39–42)

Rather than engaging the seventeenth-­century conceit that in the darkness of night and sleep the imago-­shadows of dream are vivid, Poe’s easy-­sounding “spirit that walks in shadow” confuses insubstantial realms. A wandering spirit and a wandering shadow are frequently identified in later romantic tradition—although Tennyson’s Tithonus, who speaks of himself as “A white-­haired shadow roaming like a dream / The ever-­silent spaces of the East” (lines 8–9), is a “shadow” only in the sense that his is an ever-­withering body, decaying though immortal. But the shadow in which the spirit walks here is not the darkness of night, nor the brightness of dream that the Renaissance poems play with. But here is “Eldorado,” five years later: Gaily bedight, A gallant knight, In sunshine and in shadow, Had journeyed long,

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Singing a song, In search of Eldorado. But he grew old— This knight so bold— And o’er his heart a shadow Fell, as he found No spot of ground That looked like Eldorado. And, as his strength Failed him at length, He met a pilgrim shadow— “Shadow,” said he, “Where can it be— This land of Eldorado?” “Over the Mountains Of the Moon, Down the Valley of the Shadow, Ride, boldly ride,” The shade replied,— “If you seek for Eldorado!”

Some of the tropology recently considered unfolds across these four stanzas. “In sunshine and in shadow” feels both temporal and spatial—in fair weather or foul, through dark regions and light. But there is no radical figuration. “And o’er his heart a shadow / Fell . . . .” But here another sort of shadowing emerges, that which occurs when the shadow of something or someone falls over or across someone—or some significant part or aspect of someone else. Usually, in modern discourse, “overshadowing” a person or abstraction implies

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predomination of some kind. The one outstanding anomalous instance, most significant for some of the poetry subsequently to be discussed, is that of Luke 1:35, where Mary is told by the angel Gabriel that the power of the Most High will “overshadow” and thereby impregnate her (the verb used in the Greek is episkiazein; obumbrabit in Vulgate). The same verb is used in the moment in Acts 5:15 when the sick Jerusalemites are carried out into the streets so that the shadow of Peter, falling across them, would heal them. The young George Herbert, obviously delighted with the reciprocities brought to light in the anecdote by the play of baroque neo-­ Latin, observed in an epigram (Lucus, xiv, “In Umbram Petri”) that “Produxit Umbram corpus, Umbra corpori / Vitam reduxit: ecce gratitudinem” (Body produced a shadow, shadow then / [See with what grace!] gave body life again). The Countess of Pembroke, in a poem to Queen Elizabeth prefatory to her own and her brother’s translation of the Psalms into English verse, does a fine turn on the positive power of a strange type of episkiazein, when she explains: for in our worke what bring wee but thine own? What English is, by many names is thine. There humble Lawrells in thy shadow growne To garland others woold, themselves repine. (lines 41–44)

Elizabeth’s shadow in these lines is a kind of sunlight—with the queen being not only England and her language, but a sort of reine soleil—and flowers growing up in it would complain at having to praise anyone else. But an occasional shadow, rather than a continuing shade, is another matter. Certainly, a passing shadow falling across a ground, or across a person who thereby becomes

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part of that ground, can reduce the surface temperature and, like the drafts in nineteenth-­century houses whose invisible sudden effect gave rise to so many ghosts, darken the metaphoric light of feelings of elation, hope, pleasure, or comfort. What one is under is not a cooling shade, but a chilling shadow. Leigh Hunt (“Of Dreams”), in discussing Milton’s sonnet about his dead wife, speaks of “the sense of returning shadow on the mind,” and here he means something more complex than the day—of a blind man’s waking from a bright dream—bringing back his night, as Milton puts it. He means a more distantly metaphorical shadow of a returning sense of loss. The shadow falling across a mind or, as in Poe’s “Eleonora,” mentioned in the last lecture, a brain, is a metalepsis, a trope of a trope. A shadow falling across one or one’s face, for example, of present or future misfortune, though figurative, at least behaves in the way cast shadows do. But Poe’s meta-­metaphoric shadow penetrates, and is composed of, conceptual material; more will be said of shadows falling across someone in subsequent discussions.† Now to the last two shadows in the poem: “He met a pilgrim shadow— / ‘Shadow’ said he . . .”—here is some kind of umbra, manes, ghost, but perhaps also, given the agendas of romantic quest narrative, an uncomprehended double, and emanation of self. More will be said of this type of shadow later on. And finally, “Over the Mountains / Of the Moon, / Down the Valley of the Shadow . . . .” The unique nonrhyming line is prominent here. It also serves to pair the mountains and the valley, the two remythologized places, in a reciprocating rhythm (Over the Mountains of the Moon, Down the Valley of the Shadow). The mountains of the moon are a revision of the classical montes lunae or fabled sources of the Nile (the actual African site was first glimpsed by a missionary in the year of the poem’s composition, but Poe couldn’t

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have heard of that). But it is indeed likely that he knew of the “deep darkness / shadow of death” textual crux in the Hebrew Bible; and yet what looks like a correction back to an assumed original also seems to suppress specific allusion to death, making it absent and present at once. But there is something else here as well, for the shade’s recommended shadow-­journey leads through territory of a nature beyond that of the sunshine-­and-­shadow realm in which the encounter takes place, a realm lit by the light of the very name of moon, and darkened by the unnamed death. The knight’s shadowed Eldorado lying at the end of that quest can no more be found in the sunshine-­and-­shadow world than could the notionally substantive one be found in Colombia or California. As for any half-­expected admonition to the knight to pursue only “the Eldorado within thee, happier far,” it is not to be given here. But the next lecture will return to some of the figurations of which the “pilgrim shadow” and his kind are made.

[ 3 ] Shadowes Light

The first two of these lectures were primarily concerned with the presence in poetry of shadows considered in several ways—as occlusions of light, and as having some contingent relation to their substances. They were also treated primarily as representations. It would be easy to say that some of today’s observations will be more concerned with shadows as expressions; but I remain a little unhappy with this celebrated distinction, so usefully adduced forty-­five years ago by M. H. Abrams in his influential The Mirror and the Lamp. From a rhetorical perspective, the representations of a visible object, of a notional one, and of a purely fictive one differ mostly in whether or not they allow for evidentiary comparison with their objects. The notional and fictional objects share their condition with what are often thought of as expressions of inner states of various sorts: physical sensations, emotions, feelings, beliefs, et cetera. But there may be no grounds, save that of occasional discursive convenience, for maintaining that a gesture of despair, say, is an expression rather than a representation of it, any more than a nod 69

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of assent in English is linguistically defined with respect to the same nod in modern Greek, there used in negation. But it will indeed be convenient in the remaining discussion to speak of certain fictional shadows as behaving like expressions of something within, rather than representations of outer form and movement. Henry David Thoreau observed that “Every man casts a shadow; not his body only, but his imperfectly mingled spirit.” A shadow somehow projected from within one could appear to be as visually independent as it was deeply contingent, and more enigmatically so—more of an imago—than one’s cast umbra. An ordinary shadow may reveal information allowing for inferences about both the body and the light source (motion, position, intensity, and so on), but the notional extrojection—as it might be called— could yield far more, making visible what could not be otherwise. Rudolph Arnheim—a theorist of art, not language—moves from the question of such projections to another question: “Throughout the world the shadow is considered an outgrowth of the object that casts it. Here again we find that darkness does not appear as absence of light but as a positive substance in its own right.” Throughout these discussions of various sorts of metaphorical shadow—no matter how conventional, to the point of becoming an additional usage rather than nonce trope—the matter of emanation has held equal prominence with the matter of occlusion. The paradoxical matter lit up by Spenser’s “shadowes light” may be found in what may be only an etymological conceit, but at least a vivid one. (I should add here that I am as wary of the sensational romanticizing of the etymon—a sometimes dubious Heideggerian move that has come to be a cheap poststructuralist shot—as I am amused by the poetic false etymologies of Renaissance mythographers.)

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The Greek word skia, to which I have been referring, derives from an Indo-­European base, *ski = “gleam,” which similarly yields the German schein, the English shine and shimmer, and also the Latin scintilla. Here is no touch of darkness in the sense of the term and its descendants. On the other hand, the English shadow and the German Schatten are parallel with the Greek skotos, meaning “darkness,” likewise descending from an Indo-­European base, *skot, meaning dark. (The Latin umbra has been traced, unsurprisingly, to an Indo-­European base, *andho, meaning blind, dark.) The theoretical or poetical component of the sense of umbra and “shadow” come ultimately from the skia in Greek literature and thought, and the sense of shining, radiating, and emanating rather than of occluding and darkening remains latent until the complex language of early modern poetry begins to elicit it. (I might add that in German, erscheinen has the sense of “appear,” with all of its begged epistemological questions, so that some of Plato’s distrust of skiai carries through into the cognate but unshading verb.) The brightness, vividness, and prominent presence of shadows is ever at odds with the way we understand them as absences. John Locke, in discussing what he calls “positive ideas from privative causes,” speaks in terms far distant from the poetic accretions that give the word “shadow” such conceptual depth. But he provides an interesting analogue of what will happen to such matters as redoubled shadowing in romantic and later poetry: 5. I appeal to everyone’s own experience whether the shadow of a man, though it consists of nothing but the absence of light (and the more the absence of light is, the more discernible is the shadow) does not, when a man looks on it, cause as clear and positive idea in his mind as a man himself,

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though covered over with clear sunshine? And the picture of a shadow is a positive thing. Indeed, we have negative names, which stand not directly for positive ideas, but for their absence, such as insipid, silence, nihil, &c.; which words denote positive ideas, v.g. taste, sound, being, with a signification of their absence. 6. And thus one may truly be said to see darkness. (An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, book 2, VIII)

Locke’s “ideas” might have themselves been classed as “shadows” in writing a half century before him; and certainly ideas of shadows and ideas of the bodies that cast them are of the identical nonsubstance, even as a picture of a shadow and of what is casting it are made of the same substance—paint, ink, pencil-­carbon, or whatever. (But this is not as trivial as saying, with regard to the realm of poetry, that “shadow” and “substance” are both nouns.) Consideration of the radiance or emanative power of shadows leads us to central issues for romantic and later poetry. Locke does not in the least engage what was for him the still contemporary use of “shadow” in the material or substantial sense of a portrait or a painting generally. But one aspect of that material kind of shadow that accompanies its substantiality is its detachability from the body it represents—the detachment and subsequent independence of a personal cast shadow from the object to which it is quite literally subject. Ghostly shades (manes) have indeed some kind of agency, but the detachable shadow only acquires it in romantic and subsequent poetry. And there is yet another aspect of detachment which we ourselves constantly experience: the temporary or contingent independence of the visible cast shadow of an invisible person or object. Consider, for ex-

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ample, facing an open gateway in a wall two yards away and observing the growing shadow of someone as yet unseen approaching behind the wall. The shadow will be, momentarily at least, an uncontingent presence (until that brief independence is extinguished in the light of habitual inference). But it will also be a literal case of an umbra futurorum, an optical shadow which gives visual substance to the verbal trope—an optical shadow foreshadowing the imminent arrival of the substance of its corresponding body. These questions, along with the expressive matter of a shadow as being a projection of something inner, some mental or spiritual or psychic entity or state, will be part of our subsequent concerns. With the exception of the nonce instances of “overshadowing” (of the Virgin Mary by the Holy Ghost in Luke, and the healing shadow of Saint Peter mentioned in the last lecture), we have not yet encountered the effects on literary texts of the spooky and magical constructions of the human shadow found in folklore and in other religions. These are widespread and have been frequently remarked upon, and I cite only one exemplary instance of many, as given by James Frazer: “The Kiwai of British New Guinea identify the soul with the shadow, reflection, or picture. A man can steal the soul of somebody else by catching his shadow at night in a piece of bamboo open at one end, which he afterwards plugs.” The owner of the soul grows thin or dies if the bamboo container is burnt. When going out at night, the Kiwai carry their torches as high as possible to cast as short as possible a shadow. A more familiar case (Arthur Cook cites Pausanias, Polybius, and Plutarch) may be that of the cave of Zeus-­as-­Wolf atop Mount Lykaion in Arcadia, in the Peleponnesus: when you entered it you lost your shadow, with the effect that you

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would die soon thereafter. These and other such shadows of magical agency do not—and specifically do not—possess any notional substantiality. That is another matter. It is in romance and satirical fable that ordinary shadows are given detachability, palpability, and sometimes characteristics fully as intriguing as active agency in their own right. Coleridge on one occasion speaks of “two men who had the misfortune, the one of losing his shadow, and the other his reflection in a looking-­glass, and who were both perfectly persuaded, the one that what the rest of mankind called their shadows, and the other that what they took for their own image, were unconnected, independent, and self-­grounded verities.” It seems probable that he is referring in the case of the mirror image to E. T. A. Hoffmann’s Erasmus Spikher, and certain that the lost shadow is that of Adelbert von Chamisso’s celebrated Peter Schlemihl, the story of whose life (1814)—translated into English in 1823 by Sir John Bowring and illustrated by Cruikshank, and translated again in 1843 by William Howitt—became proverbial. This is the fabulous tale of a young man of no means, who, finding himself in wealthy company, succumbs to the offer of a muted and disguised Mephistophelean personage to buy his shadow for what turns out to be an endless supply of money. The purchaser is known throughout as “the man in gray.” The purchase is made—then, as the narrator Schlemihl puts it, “I beheld him, with an admirable dexterity, gently loosen my shadow from top to toe from the grass, lift it up, roll it together, fold it, and finally, pocket it.” The consequence of this exchange is that Schlemihl attains unlimited wealth but becomes the object of suspicion and aversion— not because of the wealth, but because he has no shadow. It is as if his identity, his authenticity, is exchanged for what from a moral point of view is an even grosser form of sub-

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stance than the baser and heavier lead. He remains unhappy in life and love. In one episode he is walking with Fanny, a young lady to whom he is attracted, when the moon comes out; she perceives that he casts no shadow and is terrified. In another, an artist, asked to paint a prosthetic shadow for him, points out that it would only detach again and advises him to keep out of sunlight. Despairing of his life, Schlemihl again encounters the man in gray, who offers to return the shadow in exchange for the young man’s soul when he dies. Schlemihl refuses the exchange (into which the gold does not enter) and flings the magic purse which his adversary produces into an abyss. After other adventures involving seven-­league boots that whisk him around the globe, he finally settles down to a happy reclusive life as a botanist, away from human society. The shadow can be taken, as Thomas Mann takes it in an essay on Chamisso, as embodying the social (“bürgerliche”) aspect of an artist’s existence, or simply as a projection of personality detachable from deeper character; its relation to the exchangable medium of gold has provided recent theoretical considerations, and even in the early nineteenth century, varied interpretations of the meaning and nature of the shadow flourished to a degree we can see reflected in the fourth stanza of Chamisso’s dedicatory verses to the third edition (1834), “An meinen alten Freund Peter Schlemihl.” In Bowring’s translation: And what—what is the Shadow? may I ask ye, Who am myself so wearyingly asked. Is it too high a problem, then, to task ye? And shall not the malignant world be tasked? The flights of nineteen thousand days unmask ye, They have brought wisdom—in whose trains I basked,

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And while I gave to shadows, being—saw Being, as shadows, from life’s scene withdraw.

Chamisso is said to have returned from a walk one day, complaining to his friend, Baron de La Motte Fouqué (author of, among other things, the famous romance Undine), that he had lost just about everything he’d had with him—hat, rucksack, gloves, handkerchief—to which La Motte Fouqué is said to have retorted, “Didn’t you lose your shadow as well?” Another variant anecdote about the genesis of the story, quoted by Mann, furnishes the vivid donnée of the exchange scene. In this, Chamisso took a walk with Fouqué on the latter’s estate; the sun cast such long shadows that Fouqué—who was very short—seemed in shadow almost as long as that of the tall Chamisso. Chamisso inquired, what if he just took his friend’s shadow and rolled it up so that he had to walk alongside Chamisso without one? Schlemihl’s shadow needs to be physically detached from his person; it is not that, for example, the man in gray magically causes it to disappear, as if he had mysteriously altered the nature of daylight or of Schlemihl’s physical properties. Like the joke that may have led to the story’s genesis, there is something ludicrous about rolling up a shadow and pocketing it like a painted canvas. But that same fictional being of metamorphic satire turns out to constitute some part of the owner’s self. Like the very notion of personality, of a prepared “face to meet the faces that you meet,” it seems to lie at the borderline of representation and expression. Another fable of this sort, briefer but much more self-­ consciously mythopoetic, is Hans Christian Andersen’s “The Shadow.” It is little known, but its interest for the poetics of shadow merits its recounting and consideration here. The

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tale concerns a young scholar who, attracted by the vision of a beautiful young woman in the window of a neighboring house, jokingly tells his shadow, which he sees falling across the lady’s balcony, to enter the house and investigate. The shadow vanishes into the house. The scholar awakens next day to find he has no shadow, but, unlike Peter Schlemihl, he gradually grows another one. Many years later, the scholar having become a philosopher, he receives a visit from an extremely thin but richly dressed personage who declares himself to be the shadow who had left him years ago. The shadow produces large amounts of gold and, upon asking if he owes the philosopher a debt, is told that he does not. Then, swearing the man to secrecy about his being nothing but a shadow, he tells him that the neighboring house he originally entered was that of Poetry. He describes it as an allegorical house with many chambers opening off each other, and says that, while never entering the innermost room, he could see from an antechamber what was inside. The philosopher begs to be told what the room was like, adducing three conventional scenes of romantic revelation: “the beech forest in spring? . . . the interior of a great cathedral? . . . the heavens when one stands on a mountaintop?” He also asks what was within the room: “Did Thor and Odin walk those halls? Did Achilles and Hector fight their battles again? Or did innocent children play there and tell of their dreams?”—again, implying a taxonomic array of modes and genres. The shadow can only say to him, “I saw everything that there was to see. You could not have stayed there and remained a human being, but it made a human being of me! I quickly came to understand my innermost nature, that part of me which from birth can claim kinship to Poetry.” Having become a human being in the house of Poetry through understanding his nature, the

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shadow went out into the world; ashamed of his nakedness, he explains, he “hid under the skirts of the woman who sold gingerbread men in the market.” From there he would go about at night, a wandering voyeur looking in through windows unobserved, witnessing all sorts of nastinesses and horrors and then, by blackmailing the perpetrators thereof, becoming wealthy and influential. The shadow departs, and reappears only years later, when the philosopher, wearied of writing of the true, the good, and the beautiful to no one’s interest, has become frail and then seriously ill. “‘You look like a shadow of your former self,’ people would say, and when he heard these words a shiver went down his spine.” But he is persuaded by his former shadow to accompany him to a celebrated health spa, all expenses paid; there the shadow meets a princess who is there because she “suffered from seeing too clearly, which is a very painful disease.” The shadow courts her, explaining that he is there not because he has no shadow—in fact he does have one, but his own shadow appears to be human, and he clothes him well; this personage he identifies to her as the philosopher. The princess falls in love with the shadow and is thereby cured of her overacute vision; they return to her kingdom for a wedding. The philosopher is told that he may continue to share the shadow’s good fortune, accompany him everywhere, and live grandly, but he must accept the role of shadow and always acknowledge that he is without human substance. The philosopher refuses; the shadow tells everyone that his shadow “has gone mad. He believes he is a man. And that I . . . that I am his shadow!” Just before the wedding, the shadow and the princess contrive to do away with the philosopher. This shadow’s independence and agency, originally con-

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tingent and willed by its person, acquires full independence, then eventually full bodily substance—save for not being able to cast a shadow himself—and finally the material substance of wealth. The scene of this transformation is the house of Poetry; the shadow gets no closer than the vestibule of her central chamber, but that allows him to become a sort of satirical novelist-­as-­blackmailer, and eventually to try to acquire—even by means of a convenient lie—his former object as his own, likewise substantial, shadow. Among other things, this is a sort of animated cartoon joke about Plato, in that the shadow of philosophy’s world—as certainly naive realism in philosophy would have it—is that of the material and the false in relations between persons. But shadows are metaphors too imaginatively substantive for abstract discourse, and they get out of hand. The longing of the romantic youth pro­jects the shadow of his desire into the lady’s house; that shadow materializes beyond even the expectation of fable and lives a life significantly antithetical to the one the philosopher assumes: each, in fact, grows into the rejected alternative of the other, but it is the shadow, like the ghostly presence in Henry James’s “The Jolly Corner,” who represents most significantly the life not lived. The long poems of William Blake are full of shadows, but there seems not to be too much consistency in the way they function. For example, in plate 5 of The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, we read that “[desire] being restraind it by degrees becomes passive till it is only the shadow of desire,” and this looks to be the conventional “shadow of ” as “frailer version of.” But in Blake’s poetry thereafter, the residues of restrained desires seem to detach themselves and become independent shadow entities, and thus Blakean shadows are often the visible return of the more abstract repressed. As such,

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they are expressions of, for example, desires whose suppression has created not simple tropes but powerful forms, personages interacting narratively and often contending with those figures previously containing them. Blake’s shadows cannot be identified solely with either of those two derivations of his heroic presences or “forms,” Spectre or Emanation. Both are often so named, sometimes with a significant modification. Thus, in Jerusalem, plate 6.4–6, the Spectre of Los “stood over Los / Howling in pain: a blackning Shadow, blackning dark & opake / Cursing the terrible Los . . . ,” the opacity specifically being the point here. Even more puzzling in this regard are moments like that in Jerusalem, plate 15.6–7: “I see the Four-­f old Man. The Humanity in deadly sleep / And its fallen Emanation. The Spectre & its cruel Shadow.” Here, Emanation and Shadow are parallel forms—representations—with Shadow more negatively valorized than Emanation, although one has to watch one’s tendency in reading Blake to identify some of his personages as the baddies. Elsewhere, we can get something much more like an Elizabethan shadow = reflected image or projection, sometimes, again in Elizabethan fashion, with a negative cast. Albion calls Jerusalem “The Shadow of delusions” ( Jerusalem, plate 18.11), with a shade of doubling in the figure here, because we have both shadow as delusion and shadow as trope, emanation, shadow, et cetera, cast by delusion. The personages in Blake’s long poems are defined in relation to one another and to their worlds, and whatever shadows— one cannot say spectres or emanations, because those are already there in the taxonomy of Blakean entities—they produce are equally unique. Suffice it to say that Blake’s diction is crammed with allusive usages that remain under conceptual control.

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A significant special case is that of Milton’s Shadow (Milton, plate 37.44–46). It sums up a whole list of visionary errors in Milton’s work, or as one critic (Harold Bloom) has put it, “everything in the fallen world that blocks imaginative redemption”: All these are seen in Miltons Shadow who is the Covering Cherub The Spectre of Albion in which the Spectre of Luvah inhabits In the Newtonian Voids between the Substances of Creation . . .

We may note that traditional shadow/substance language seems ironically deployed here. But earlier in the poem (plate 14.36–40), we have been presented with a remarkable moment of confrontation. This is not merely a self and a shadow self, but a shadow composed of the darkness of one’s mental misconstructions, come to haunt one not as a gothic ghost but as a presence to be dealt with more radically: Then on the verge of Beulah he [Milton] beheld his own Shadow; A mournful form double; hermaphroditic: male & female In one wonderful body. and he enterd into it In direful pain for the dread shadow, twenty-­seven-­f old Reachd to the depths of direst Hell . . .

And this is followed (plate 15.1–5) by the complex simile comparing Milton’s consciousness of entering his own Shadow to that of dreaming:

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As when a man dreams, he reflects not that his body sleeps, Else he would wake; so seem’d he entering his Shadow: but With him the Spirits of the Seven Angels of the Presence Entering; they gave him still perceptions of his Sleeping Body . . .

Entering a shadow implies that it has some substance, some capacity to absorb or contain—this is more than a matter of, even allegorically, someone else’s moving, or even moving one’s own hand, into the shadow of his or her body. In the narrative language of fable, this is of course not the same as encountering a fully formed other self, a double. In a well known passage from Prometheus Unbound, Earth makes it clear that she is citing a unique instance when she tells her son Prometheus of how Ere Babylon was dust, The Magus Zoroaster, my dead child, Met his own image walking in the garden. That apparition, sole of men, he saw. For know there are two worlds of life and death: One that which thou beholdest, but the other Is underneath the grave, where do inhabit The shadows of all forms that think and live Till death unite them, and they part no more . . . (I.191–99)

In the fictions of romance, doubles are not likely to be called or associated with shadows unless they become unavoidable constant companions, inseparable as shadows. Fighting with shadows—of other persons or objects—has

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almost always been a figure for delusion and folly. But the proverbial confrontation with one’s own shadow in antiquity seems to have been limited to fear of it. Thus Propertius (II.34, lines 19–20): “Ipse meas solus, quod nil est, aemulor umbras, / stultus, quod nullo saepe timore tremo” (I am jealous of my own shadow, which is nothing / Fool that I am to tremble with causeless fear [trans. Butler, adapted]). In a dialogue (in Chuang Tzu) between Confucius and an old fisherman, the following story is adduced: “Once there was a man who was afraid of his shadow and who hated his footprints, and so he tried to get away from them by running. But the more he lifted his feet and put them down again, the more footprints he made. And no matter how fast he ran, his shadow never left him, and so, thinking that he was still going too slowly, he ran faster and faster without a stop until his strength gave out and he fell down dead. He didn’t understand that by lolling in the shade he could have gotten rid of his shadow and by resting in quietude he could have put an end to his footprints.” To fear one’s shadow is thereby to endow it with a certain kind of projected substance. But the shadow acknowledges none of its unbearable debt, either to light source or to occluding object; what it would perhaps, but could never, conceal is its lack of any trace of three-­dimensionality whatsoever. “The echo always mocks the sound—to conceal that she is his debtor,” says Rabindranath Tagore in an epigram. One may, of course—like Alice telling everyone at the trial, “You’re nothing but a pack of cards!”—refuse to grant one’s shadow much substance. One Renaissance strategy is an easy Platonistic one. George Wither, in these lines from “The Author’s Meditation upon sight of his picture,” retails yet again the argument in Plato’s Republic:

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A PICTURE, though with most exactnesse made, Is nothing, but the Shadow of a SHADE. For, ev’n our living Bodies, (though they seeme To others more, or more or in our esteeme) Are but the shadowes of the Reall-­being . . . (lines 25–29)

As will be remembered, the doubled shadowing of “shadow of a shade” became a commonplace, largely satirical, in the eighteenth century. But there is no hint here of anything spooky and gothic—for example, something insubstantial itself casting the kind of shadow that only a body can. But this is neither the actual cast shadow nor some romantically constructed emanation. Nor is a rare seventeenth-­century instance of a poet’s confronting his personal cast shadow. There is an unusually extended poem, “On His Shadow,” ascribed to Bishop Henry King but not by him. It is addressed not—as a later eighteenth- or nineteenth-­century poem might be—to a particular occasional glimpse of his cast shadow, but rather to his shadow as a continuing companion, present whether latent or manifest, rather than a fickle and inconstant phenomenon. The poem moves through an ingenious sequence of conceits, and it may be considered for a moment or so at this point, even though that entails a look back past the postgothic shadowings that have been considered, and which will be returned to. The poet starts out with a fairly conventional move in the Cavalier mode, delicately reversing the expectation that a shadow’s transience and fragility might themselves figure in a misogynistic turn. The turn is there, but the other way:

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Come, my shadow, constant, true, Stay, and do not fly me: When I court thee or would sue, Thou wilt not deny me. Female loves I find unkind And devoid of pity; Therefore I have changed my mind And to thee frame this ditty.

Point taken. But then follows a touch of ad hoc mythography, by which his personal shadow descends equally from his substance and from the sun: Child of my body and that flame From whence our light we borrow, Thou continuest still the same In my joy or sorrow.

Calling the sun “that flame” dims the problematic gendering of his shadow’s parentage somewhat. Subsequent quatrains trace the shadow’s behavior under different conditions of light, sometimes with a mild turn of wit: And, when thou art forced away By the sun’s declining, Thy length is doubled, to repay Thy absence whilst he’s shining.

Two other issues which might be remarked upon emerge in the course of these seventy-­two lines. One is the praise, rather than the expected dispraise, of the shadow’s grossly literal mimesis:

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’Tis thy truth I most commend— That thou art not fleeting: For, as I embrace my friend, So thou giv’st him greeting. . . . . . . . . . . When our actions so consent— Expressions dumb, but local— Words are needless complement, Else I could wish thee vocal.

And finally, one can note the easy slide, through the more ambiguous word “shade,” from ombra separata to manes or ghost: Nay, when bedded in the dust, ’Mongst shades I have my biding, Tapers can see thy posthume trust Within my vault residing. Had heaven so pliant women made Or thou their souls couldst marry, I’d soon resolve to wed my shade; This love could ne’er miscarry.

And this is about as far as the poet can go. Certainly with regard to nineteenth-­century concerns with shadow and shade, this is almost light verse: there is nothing deeply personal about the shadow, and no implicit analysis of the nature of self hood. The subject-­object relation is simple: even in the way in which the poet-subject says the object-­shadow can mimic him, the shadow cannot shadow his noticing, thinking, or talking. An amusing parody of the romantic genre we will be sampling is from Tom Moore’s satirical verses called The Fudges

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in England (ca. 1818), letter III (“From Miss Fanny Fudge, to her Cousin, Miss Kitty _________: Stanzas [inclosed.] to my Shadow or, Why?—What?—How?”): Dark comrade of my path! while earth and sky Thus wed their charms, in bridal light arrayed, Why in this bright hour, walk’st thou ever nigh, Blackening my footsteps with thy length of shade— Dark comrade, Why? Thou mimic Shape that, mid these flowery scenes Glidest beside me o’er each sunny spot, Sadd’ning them as thou goest,—say, what means So dark an adjunct to so bright a lot,— Grim goblin, What? Still as to pluck sweet flowers I bend my brow, Thou bendest, too,—thou risest when I rise;— Say, mute mysterious Thing! how is’t that thou Thus com’st between me and those blessed skies,— Dim shadow, How?

One seems to hear a whisper of the “mute, inglorious Milton” of Gray’s Elegy. Miss Fudge goes on: Thus said I to that Shape, far less in grudge Than gloom of soul, while, as I eager cried, Oh why? what? how?—a Voice, that one might judge To be some Irish echo’s, faint replied All fudge, fudge, fudge!†

There is a tradition of poems on one’s own portrait, from Ben Jonson’s “My Picture Left in Scotland” through Words-

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worth, where the acknowledgment of the truth or falsity of the image is an occasion for moral meditation. Some of these concerns seem to enter later occasions of poetic confrontation with shadow-­as-­picture, as if wondering whether a shadow is painted by nature, by truth, or by oneself—is it a self-­portrait? As we shall see, Walt Whitman, for one, suspects so. In “That Shadow My Likeness,” he wonders whether the shadow cast not by his body only but by, in Thoreau’s words, “his imperfectly mingled spirit” is an image of a presented self, or what he calls in “Song of Myself ” the real me, the me myself. That shadow my likeness that goes to and fro seeking a livelihood, chattering, chaffering, How often I find myself standing and looking at it where it flits, How often I question and doubt whether that is really me; But among my lovers and caroling these songs, O I never doubt whether that is really me.

But he does not reveal whether, as poet or lover, he casts a different shadow, or that this other enclosed and unpresented self—withheld no matter what its constant hymning of its own connectedness—can read correctly in the shadow its relation to the social presence. It starts out seeming to be Peter Schlemihl’s “bürgerliche” personality, but becomes something else. With Whitman, in particular, one question may arise that may indeed have general relevance. We may sense that, as one astute critic, John Irwin, has put it, “the external relationship between the body and its shadow corresponds to another relationship between the body and something internal to the body.”

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In Herman Melville’s “Shelley’s Vision,” the speaker recapitulates an episode reported of Shelley’s last days, when he supposedly saw a shadowy vision of himself that asked him, “Are you satisfied?” Wandering late by morning seas When my heart with pain was low— Hate the censor pelted me— Deject I saw my shadow go. In elf-­caprice of bitter tone I too would pelt the pelted one: At my shadow I cast a stone. When lo, upon the sun-­lit ground I saw the quivering phantom take The likeness of Saint Stephen crowned: Then did self-­reverence awake.

This is a fine little poem about dejection and resolution—the shadow is stoned in bitterness and mockery (and of so many things, the ironies of the allusive nature of the encounter also being present). But then the speaker sees that his shadow has undergone a kind of martyrdom for the integrity and stability of his projecting body. Here a process that started with the purely figurative pelting of the poet by a locally personified hate (his own) concludes with (1) a mocking literalization of the act of stoning which had previously existed only in the near-­hyperbolic rhetoric of a self-­dramatizing moment, and (2) a refiguration at another level, as the shadow, now a “quivering phantom,” is realized as a later antitype of the first martyr.

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Emily Dickinson confronts an ambiguous shadow which may or may not be her own, falling—like many we have encountered—on the grass of a lawn which nonetheless must allow for consideration that it is biblical (Isaiah 40:6—“All flesh is grass” [KJV]) and that the shadow itself is additionally darkened by umbra mortis. But the poem (1871?) proceeds in startling ways: Oh Shadow on the Grass, Art thou a Step or not? Go make thee fair my Candidate My nominated Heart – Oh Shadow on the Grass While I delay to guess Some other thou wilt consecrate – Oh Unelected Face –

The first of several difficulties is with what is casting the shadow: herself? part of her body (possibly even her foot)? a Shelleyan passing cloud? The next is that of the step: the shadow may simply be that of her own walking; or, as has been suggested (by Harold Bloom in discussion), “step” may refer with an obscure allusiveness to one of the sun’s “steps” in William Blake’s little poem from Songs of Experience: Ah Sun-­flower! weary of time, Who countest the steps of the Sun: Seeking after that sweet golden clime Where the travellers journey is done.

But this would not help too much with the political conceit— “Candidate,” “nominated,” “Unelected”—and the faintly theological one—“consecrate,” “Unelected” (again, and piv-

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otal between the two). Nominating the speaker’s heart could simply mean denominating, naming it. And while she delays to guess (not to “dress,” as in a canceled second thought in the manuscript), the shadow moves over the grass to engage another face, another meditative consciousness, consecrating it with an apparent causal attachment that might make this other inquire whether it was some other X or Y or not. This Other would remain “Unelected” in either sense of the word, unchosen by the speaker or by some sort of Grace. Ultimately, it is the matter of not delaying in some act of acknowledgment of her relation to the shadow—the poem seems to be a sort of carpe diem of apprehending rather than, more conventionally, of sexual gratification. I can’t help but feel that the juxtaposition of two tropes in Psalm 102:11—“My days are as a shadow that declineth; and I am withered like grass” (KJV)—is being recalled here. And in any event, it speaks to the recurrent topos of a shadow—whether of cloud or of a human in motion—moving across the grass, mowing the sunlit blades into the stubble of shade.† The late nineteenth-­century American poet John Bannister Tabb abandons the romantic personal confrontation and returns to the mode of seventeenth-­century verse, and the matter of constancy worked up by Henry King, in the epigram “The Shadow”: O shadow, in thy fleeting form I see The friend of fortune that once clung to me. In flattering light, thy constancy is shown; In darkness, thou wilt leave me all alone.

This sampling will conclude with a fine poem of Guillaume Apollinaire called “Ombre,” published in his Calligrammes, which fills his own shadow with additional sub-

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stance. The memories of the poet’s comrades fallen in battle now condensed into one—Souvenirs qui n’en faites plus qu’un— become a composite shade or manes: “Impalpable, dark shape you have taken / The changing form of my shadow” (Apparence impalpable et sombre vous qui avez pris / La forme changeante de mon ombre [lines 7–8]). Instead of an umbra futurorum, this is un ombre des souvenirs. He addresses it then: Multiple shadow, may the sun watch over you You who loves me enough never to leave me And who dances in the sunlight without raising dust Shadow ink of the sun Writing of my light . . . (Ombre multiple que le soleil vous garde Vous qui m’aimez assez pour ne jamais me quitter Et qui dansez au soleil sans faire de poussière Ombre encre du soleil Écriture de ma lumière . . .) (lines 15–19)

Poets, says Shelley in A Defence of Poetry, are “the mirrors of the gigantic shadows which futurity casts upon the present.” This mirroring of shadowing—Elizabethan diction might have it as shadowing shadows—makes for a complex and enigmatic image involving an optical conceit. It involves a dynamic refiguration of umbrae futurorum as cast shadows— the implicit light source (eternity? truth?) being unspecified. A presumption is that the shadows are invisible until reflected in the mirror of poetry, and in any event there seems to be a characteristic intermingling here of verbal and visual representations. One scholar, Susan Hawk, has counted some four

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hundred occurrences of the words “shadow” and “shade” in Shelley’s work. Shadows in his poetry are as dense and complex as are his musical “auditions”—the aural counterpart of visions. In “Alastor,” the Poet in his youth pursues Nature’s “secret steps . . . like her shadow” (lines 81–82), primarily in the sense of a follower, but implying some element of representation. The female Being whom the Poet envisions and whom he pursues “Beyond the realms of dream” is a “fleeting shade” (line 206) and “the bright shadow of that lovely dream” (line 233)—although here the trope is itself shadowy, for it can be the shadow of the Being that was in the dream, or the obsessive souvenir of the dream itself (but that is the ambiguity of “of ” here, not “shadow”). Death itself is “exposed, / Faithless perhaps as sleep, a shadowy lure, / With doubtful smile mocking its own strange charms” (lines 293– 95). But the “shadowy” of ambiguity and indefiniteness itself prefigures an older sense of the word some few lines later on, when Death is sought “on the drear ocean’s waste; / For well he knew that mighty Shadow loves / The slimy caverns of the populous deep” (lines 305–7). Then again, consider “shadow of some golden dream,” “image of some bright Eternity,” “Splendour,” “tender / Reflection,” “Metaphor,” and “Vision”—these terms are all appositively associated in “Epipsychidion” (lines 115–21), but whether they are separate aspects of the “Emily” of that poem unrolled in a breathless sort of blazon, or meant sequentially to gloss each other, they all seem to define a category of representation. Fifteen lines later on, Shelley regrets that his immortal spirit had not always moved beside Emilia Viviani’s as “A shadow of that substance.” Still further on (lines 267–68), the speaker confesses that “In many mortal forms I rashly sought / The shadow of that idol of my thought,” where there

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would seem to be a triple sequence of representations, particularly if “idol” has the sense of eidolôn as well of an object of devotion. In the “Hymn to Intellectual Beauty,” “The awful shadow of some unseen Power / Floats though unseen amongst us”; it is that of the “Spirit of Beauty” which nonetheless can “shine upon . . . human thought or form” and indeed, though unseen itself, seems in the poem to cast secondary shadows of visible natural phenomena. But it passes away, leaving “our state” a “dim vast vale of tears,” behaving like a cloud of brightness that blows over, abandoning the human condition to rain clouds. The shadow here is the bright radiation of a visionary form rather than a dark occlusion of a general light, and only on its departure seems to leave dark shades of another sort behind. Stanza 4 pre­sents a complex relation between bright visionary and dark optical shadowing. It opens by asserting that “Love, Hope, and Self-­esteem” come and go like clouds; but the Spirit, described as making human thought more prominent “Like darkness to a dying flame,” is in the next line enjoined to “Depart not as thy shadow came.” Here the “shadow,” meaning the emanation the Spirit leaves behind it, is tinted with the matter of the preceding line’s “darkness.” Then, in stanza 5, the speaker has found that invoking “the name of God and ghosts and Heaven” yielded no response (“I called on poisonous names with which our youth is fed; / I was not heard—I saw them not”); at a moment of consecration he recounts that “Sudden, thy shadow fell on me; / I shrieked, and clasped my hand in extacy!” This is one of those romantic instances in which the shadow metaphor is sufficiently complex that a shadow can fall on someone like a ray of light. It would be easy to sink into the pool of Shelleyan shad-

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ows, and I will only mention a few briefly here. In “To a Sky-­ Lark,” lines 78–79: “Shadow of annoyance / Never came near thee.” In “The Witch of Atlas,” stanza 13, the Witch spins a compound thread made of “fleecy mist” and “Long lines of light such as the Dawn may kindle / The clouds and waves and mountains with” and “star-­beams.” “And with these threads a subtle veil she wove— / A shadow for the splendour of her love.” This is interesting because of the melange of variously “shadowy” optical phenomena in the very fabric of the veil which serves metaphorically as a shadow for her love’s illuminating splendor—but to hide it? shade it from other light? shade a gazer’s eyes from it? or serve as an imago or material trope of it? These meanings, of course, may all be cooperating here, given the marvelous creative beauty of the Witch herself. “Mont Blanc” pre­sents a strong contrast between the specifically optical, but deemed to be fleeting, “Fast cloud shadows and sunbeams” (line 15) and the very problematic occasion at lines 41–48. There, in “the still cave of the witch Poesy,” “One legion of wild thoughts” floats above the darkness of the ravine of Arve, entering the cave, and seeks “among the shadows that pass by / Ghosts of all things that are, some shade of thee, / Some phantom, some faint image.” The “shade” of the Universal Mind, which has been identified with the ravine, lurks in the visual darkness of the geological formation and the “shadows” that themselves pass by those ghosts. A dense taxonomy of representations—of natural phenomena and of mental images—is implied here. Among the shadows in “Adonais” is a vast one, optical and allegorical at once. The fortieth stanza opens with the declaration that “He [the young Adonais, now dead] has outsoared the shadow of our night,” that shadow being the conical one cast by the earth and extending away from the sun—

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the one in which, in fact, the moon can be eclipsed. But at the same time, Shelley is invoking the shadow cast by night, darkness and negativity upon human life, and the darkness of night that itself foreshadows that of death. It is the conceptually dense shadow of all these that has been “outsoared,” transcended. On the other hand, we might look at what happens over the course of “The Triumph of Life.” It is the classical fear-­ of-­one’s-­own-­self convention which becomes refigured at the beginning of the poem where the first glimpse of the souls in the procession shows “Some flying from the thing they feared and some / Seeking the object of another’s fear . . . ,” And others mournfully within the gloom Of their own shadow walked, and called it death . . . And some fled from it as it were a ghost, Half fainting in the affliction of vain breath. But more with motions which each other crost Pursued or shunned the shadows the clouds threw Or birds within the noonday ether lost, Upon that path where flowers never grew . . . (lines 54–65)

These personages are quasi-­Dantean ombre to begin with. But walking “within the gloom” of one’s own shadow is an interesting reciprocal of having a gloomy shadow fall over one: it is as if one were more at fault for the consequences in the first case. Consider, for example, the immersion in a shadow in the last stanza of Poe’s “The Raven”:

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And the Raven, never flitting, still is sitting, still is sitting On the pallid bust of Pallas just above my chamber door; And his eyes have all the seeming of a demon’s that is dreaming, And the lamp-­light o’er him streaming throws his shadow on the floor; And my soul from out that shadow that lies floating on the floor Shall be lifted—nevermore!

The raven has become here, in Poe’s own words, “emblematical of Mournful and Never-­ending Remembrance,” presumably remembrance of more than “the lost Lenore,” and if the speaker’s soul can never emerge from its shadow it is because he has, during the course of the poem, emphatically—and perhaps even tiresomely—invited himself in. Shelley’s personages, whether remaining immersed or fleeing their shadows, are indeed responsible in some way—as are those whose more obvious delusions cause them to demonize or fetishize neutral natural phenomena. Next in the poem’s visionary procession, a chariot appears bearing “a Shape . . . as one whom years deform // Beneath a dusky hood and double cape / Crouching within the shadow of a tomb . . .” (lines 87–90). The chariot is led by a four-­ faced Shadow (a Janus quadrifrons), all faces blindfolded; it is drawn by a team, again, of Shapes, lost “in thick lightnings” (line 96). A Shape, its head shaded, drawn by Shapes and guided by a Shadow, suggests an implicit hierarchy of entities negatively analogous to angelic orders. The groups following the chariot include a “ribald crowd” whose leaders, “fleet as shadows on the green, / Outspeed the chariot” (lines 139– 40); following them are the old men and women who cannot

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keep up with it but who try anyway, “though ghastly shadows,” which are presumably cast by something in or about themselves, “interpose / Round them and round each other” (lines 171–72). Various other modes of shadowing unroll along the procession. Among them are the traces of individual lives, figures as shadows thrown “on the bubble” of the world (line 249); there is a more literal shadow of “leaf or stone” (line 445) or that of the “great mountain” (line 452) that is the scene of the vision of Life’s procession as recounted by the ghost of Rousseau, a vision within a vision. But two last occurrences are particularly interesting. One is the trope of the papacy as “men divine // Who rose like shadows between Man and god” (lines 288–89), the image of an interposing shadow that will be returned to in the final lecture. The intensified shadowing near the end of the poem also occurs when, in Rousseau’s words, “—the grove “Grew dense with shadows to its inmost covers, The earth was grey with phantoms, and the air Was peopled with dim forms, as when there hovers “A flock of vampire-­bats before the glare Of the tropic sun, bringing ere evening Strange night upon some Indian isle,—thus were “Phantoms diffused around, and some did fling Shadows of shadows, yet unlike themselves, Behind them . . .” (lines 480–89)

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This is a more interesting “shadow of a shadow” doubling than has been encountered. This region of the poem is introduced with allusive density: “Behold a wonder worthy of the rhyme” (line 471) of Dante, it begins, Virgil’s repeated phrase “mirabile dictu” returning in Milton’s Englishing of it. The Danteable vision involves phantoms who fling behind them shadows of shadows; but whatever these are seen to be (poems? fictions? ideas? writings generally?), the doubling is more than merely the Platonic double-­remove or attenuation of reality, for the phantoms are shadowy and these are representations of—yet “unlike”—themselves. But Dante’s precursor phantoms—his ombre—can be seen to lie in the background, and one might want to add “shadows of shadows of shadows.” There is also a return of the notion of a shadow as the trace of a passing presence Shelley first conceived in the “Hymn to Intellectual Beauty.” But the final shadows, “numerous as the dead leaves blown // In Autumn evening from a poplar tree,” are “sent forth incessantly” by “each one / Of that great crowd” (lines 526–29); we are reminded of Milton’s simile of the numerousness of the leaves at Vallombrosa, and thereby of Homer’s, Virgil’s, and perhaps Shelley’s own (in “Ode to the West Wind”). Each one of these shadows is like its producer and like the other shadows (“Each, like himself and like each other were” [line 530]). But then, “distorted seemed to be // Obscure clouds moulded by the casual air” (lines 531–32), as the very fabric of Rousseau’s vision starts dissolving, and he falls “by the way side” among the others “from whose forms most shadows past” (lines 541–42) fell earlier than the rest. Shelley’s shadows—occasionally positively valorized, but more often beyond particular moral assessment—are more various than Blake’s, and more allegorically consistent within

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their various species. They leave a high-­water mark for the accumulating levels and sorts of figuration that poetic shadows had been acquiring since the later sixteenth century, and which these observations have been attempting to analyze. But subsequent poetry—of the later nineteenth and twentieth centuries—finds it hard to thin out even the optical shadows it deals with, and it is this matter to which my final lecture will turn.

[ 4 ] A Shadow Different from Either

In this final lecture I want to explore some enigmatic shadows in later romantic and modern poetry. Shadows in poetry have so far been considered as, among other things, illusive, elusive (although inescapable), delusive, and even allusive. An increasing density of this last element of allusiveness in nineteenth- and twentieth-­century poetry has marked the figuration of shadows; older tropes become almost self-­consciously revisionary, and the relations between reports and descriptions of literal shadowings and various metaphorical ones themselves seem to darken. In this regard I shall examine in some detail three problematic shadows falling across the surface of poems by Poe, Tennyson, and Eliot. But in preparation for these, I want to return to the biblical trope of the “shadow of death,” left in abeyance at the end of my second lecture, and a few interesting revisions it undergoes. For example, in a chorus from Swinburne’s Atalanta in Calydon we are told that “There came to the making of man . . . Night, the shadow of light, / And life, the shadow of 101

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death” (lines 315, 324–25). Even these easy-­sounding tropes are somewhat puzzling: night can be viewed as the attached shadow of the globe’s dark side, but not in this case—it is almost as if night were light’s dark side, as well as some kind of negative phantom projected by light, a counter-­self. That all of life is lived in the shadow of death is obvious; but, again, that life itself is some sort of representation or projection or other metaphor of death is another matter. Swinburne turns that very figure around again in the opening of his slightly later poem “Genesis”; he speaks of when, at the early stages of creation, “All nature of all things began to be”: Sunbeams and starbeams and all coloured things, All forms and all similtudes began; And death, the shadow cast by life’s wide wings, And God, the shade cast by the soul of man.

Swinburne’s next stanza catalogues some of “the divine contraries of life” as they were originated, and we may note the ordering in this somewhat Blakean poetic deduction of the categories: Then between shadow and substance, night and light, Then between birth and death, and deeds and days, The illimitable embrace and the amorous fight That of itself begets, bears, rears, and slays.

Another, related image is from Coleridge; it was not life but a quintessential blackness in his short, terrifying “Ne Plus Ultra” that produced the concluding shadowy presence, although whether by representation or emanation, metaphor or metonymy, would be hard to decide:

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Sole Positive of Night! Antipathist of Light! . . . . . . . Condenséd blackness and abysmal storm Compacted to one sceptre Arms the Grasp enorm— The Intercepter— The Substance that still casts the shadow Death!— (lines 1–9)

Sometimes such complexities can be programmatically arrayed, as in Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s “The Three Shadows” (1876). Here the shadow shifts elusively from the actual to the figurative in the first half of each stanza, save for the first, in which the shadow is all optical, and only glossed in simile by another empirical one: I looked and saw your eyes In the shadow of your hair, As a traveller sees the stream In the shadow of the wood . . .

But in the second, there is a shift: I looked and saw your heart In the shadow of your eyes, As a seeker sees the gold In the shadow of the stream . . .

The figure of the eyes is complex: at first glance they seem an extension of the shade of the wood, casting a shadow over (what? ) to make visible the lady’s hidden heart. The presum-

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ably helpful simile here is of the gold being visible when a shadow on the water cancels the reflective surface to restore its transparency. But there is a better sense of “the imago, the poetic image, that is your eyes” and the conventional trope of them that our descriptive language about facial expressions continually reinforces. But the figure shifts again in the last stanza, even as the matter of greater depth, and revalued worth, surfaces in the simile: I looked and saw your love In the shadow of your heart, As a diver sees the pearl In the shadow of the sea . . .

Similarly, Walt Whitman does a complex turn on the traditional figure of obscurity as lack of fame. When he imagines himself entering a world of enterprise and becoming a candidate for public acknowledgment receiving “puffs out of pulpit or print,” he speaks of “becoming already a creator! / Putting myself here and now to the ambushed womb of the shadows!” (“Song of Myself,” section 41, but here quoted from the 1855 Leaves of Grass). The womb is the very engagement with a public realm, and the double shadows are of nascent fame as well as of obscurity. It may be remembered that Poe on several occasions— and particularly, as we have seen, in “Eldorado”—suppresses the word “death” from his allusions to the biblical “valley of the shadow” which we have already considered. That altered phrase is picked up in the title and unrhyming refrain of a compelling poem of Edwin Arlington Robinson’s, from some time before 1920. It begins, “There were faces to remember in the Valley of the Shadow,” and proceeds to catalogue the inhabitants in nine stanzas, with the opening line returning

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as the varied penultimate line. For example, amid these, one stanza concludes, And among them, giving always what was not for their possession, There were maidens, very quiet, with no quiet in their eyes; There were daughters of the silence in the Valley of the Shadow, Each an isolated item in the family sacrifice. (lines 29–32)

Also listed are “blighted sons of wonder,” “thwarted clerks and fiddlers,” “drinkers of wrong waters,” “gentlemen of leisure,” “numerous fair women,” “seekers after darkness,” “builders of new mansions.” The valley is that of modern life, rather than the figured emanation of death of the biblical topos, and the signification of Poe’s phrase is radically inverted, for although the dwellers in the valley are profoundly benighted, they are by no means in hell. But let us return to Poe and his suppression of “of death.” He reiterates the phrase in his epigraph to his strange, brief prose poem, “Shadow—A Parable” (1835), where he deliberately contracts it to “Yes! though I walk through the valley of the Shadow.” But the fable itself pre­sents an elaborate scene of the return of the repressed. The setting is a hall “in a dim city called Ptolemais,” presumably the one in Egypt described by Pliny as one where for ninety days in the summer the noonday sun produced no shadows (Natural History, II.lxxv, 183; VI.xxxiii, 171). It is presumably at some time during or shortly after the reign of Justinian, for the plague has visited the region and at the moment of the tale the heavens wear “an aspect of ill”—Jupiter and Saturn are in conjunction in

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Aries, a sign of catastrophic change. “The peculiar spirit of the skies,” says the narrator, Oinos, “made itself manifest, not only in the physical orb of the earth, but in the souls, imaginations, and meditations of mankind.” A group of seven men sit about a highly polished ebony table mirroring, in the light of seven lamps, the pallor and downcast eyes of their faces. Their dark symposium involves singing of Anacreontic songs and drinking purple wine which “reminded us of blood.” Lying among them, dead of the plague, is the corpse of young Zoilus (his name being derived from zōē or “life”—that of Oinos, the narrator, could mean “one” as well as “wine”). “My songs,” recounts Oinos, “ceased, and their echoes, rolling afar off among the sable draperies of the chamber, became weak, and undistinguishable, and so faded away.” I continue to quote his narration: And lo! from among those sable draperies where the sounds of the song departed, there came forth a dark and undefined shadow—a shadow such as the moon, when low in heaven, might fashion from the figure of a man: but it was the shadow neither of man, nor of God. . . . neither God of Greece, nor God of Chaldaea, nor any Egyptian God.

The “dark and undefined” qualities of the shadow seem connected with both the “weak, and undistinguishable” echoes of the song disappearing into the black draperies—as if in visual echo to them—and the visually undefinable form of Death in book II of Paradise Lost. As the shadow moves farther into the room, those present lower their eyes and gaze “continually into the depths of the mirror of ebony.” Finally Oinos asks the shadow to identify itself, and I follow his account to the end of the tale:

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And the shadow answered, “I am SHADOW, and my dwelling is near to the Catacombs of Ptolemais, and hard by those dim plains of Helusion which border upon the foul Charonian canal.” And then did we, the seven, start from our seats in horror, and stand trembling, and shuddering, and aghast: for the tones in the voice of the shadow were not the tones of any one being, but of a multitude of beings, and, varying in their cadences from syllable to syllable, fell duskily upon our ears in the well remembered and familiar accents of many thousand departed friends.

The whole gathering, the wine and song without women, is an unwitting ritual for summoning up this shadow. Despite the absence of the word “death” in Poe’s quotation and elsewhere, the whole fable is indeed an ad hoc personification suggested by the biblical phrase. The dark presence, though indefinable in outline, had been likened to the shadow cast by a human in moonlight, and it is thereby likened to some sort of projected phantom of humanity itself when seen in the appropriate light. But the shadow is both general and very specific to the lives of the seven among whom it appears, like one of the infinite shades of the night of general death. It is the death the plague brings that may be associated with “the foul Charonian canal,” and it has swallowed up the lives of all the others they have known. Thickened by the individual deaths of multitudes, the shadow speaks with the combined voices of those particular departed, most recently the metonymy of life generally, Zoilus. As a species of fictional entity, this shadow is also given allusive substance by incorporating something of several others we have been considering: image, spirit, negative emanation, manes. It is a shade of all shades, ocular proof of something transcendent. And

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ultimately it is at once an umbra futurorum, a type and foreshadowing of the imminent death of Oinos and his friends, a truth of the foreshadowing shadow-­substance Death in Paradise Lost, and perhaps a return of the repressed word “death” in Poe’s epigraph. In this fable, the shadow arises from the doubled darkness of the sable draperies and the sounds of song decayed and weakened within them, so that its voice somehow also echoes the vanity of the drinking songs the seven have been singing. Without acquiring demonization like Poe’s, or unusual expressive origins or detachment or materiality, shadowing in romantic poetic tradition acquires new powers of representation. Various associations of shadows with sounds begin to emerge in nineteenth-­century poetry. An older Renaissance formulation characterizes echo as an image, but the shadow figure is Wordsworth’s near the opening of a poem called “On the Power of Sound”; there he invokes echoes as “Ye Voices, and ye Shadows / And Images of voice . . .” (lines 33–34). In Poe’s “Silence—A Fable” (1838), a pendant piece to his “Shadow,” we have a demon in a desert region where there stands a rock engraved with the word DESOLATION, and he curses the region with “the curse of silence” and there is no “shadow of sound throughout the vast illimitable desert.” Here one can sense something more than the clichéd construction (“shadow of X” = “slightest trace of X”): rocks in deserts have, for poetry, resonant shadows (e.g., Isaiah’s “shadow of a great rock in a weary land” [32:2], to which we will return), and the almost systematic derangement of the senses here is intentional. Shelley in “Adonais” (stanza 15) leads us to where “Lost Echo sits amid the voiceless mountains, / And feeds her grief with his [Adonais’s] remembered lay . . . . Since she can mimic not his lips, more dear / Than those for whose dis-

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dain she pined away / Into a shadow of all sounds,” and here she is both a diminution, a “mere shadow” of herself, and a shadowing representation of sounds she does not originate. What would be too easy to call synaesthesia is in fact a catachresis of different tropes. And it is clearly in a Shelleyan mode that the nineteenth-­century American poet John James Piatt has the narrator of his “Antaeus” (1868) observe, after its hero has spoken, that It was a voice and pass’d, as voices pass From dreams but leave a wake of sound—a form And vanish’d, leaving something for the sight Shadowy and vast, the shadow of a shade. (lines 39–42)

In this conceptually rather overagitated figure, the shade of the audition leaves a shadowy trace of something visual. But more directly, the fine fin-­de-­siècle American poet Trumbull Stickney (in “Art in Man”) writes of . . . the wave-­rolled spiral shell . . . Wherein a vaster voice rings rich and rife— A shadowy murmur of the parent sea. (lines 12–14)

Here, the romantic myth of the seashell sound is shadowy because faint, and insubstantial as fact. We recall that it is neither the sound of the sea nor—in the later, more symbolist-­ sounding fiction—that of the blood coursing through the capillaries of your own listening ear. And ultimately, even less substantial because the fiction would have it be echoic. This is reinforced by the echoic alliterations, picking the second line’s v and r out of the first one’s “wave-­rolled.”

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Paul Valéry, still somehow reworking Poe, pre­sents audible shadows of two sorts. The first, in “La Jeune Parque,” engages the notion of shadow as trace or hint: “La houle me murmure une ombre de reproche” (The surf murmurs to me a shadow of reproach [line 9; trans. Paul]); but the visual darkening, in the way we have been seeing, accompanies it. More uncompromising is the injunction to “Listen to the night . . .” All becomes wonder— Silence awakens A shadow of noise . . . A shadow of voice (Écoute la nuit . . . Tout devient merveille: Le silence éveille ne ombre de bruit . . . Une ombre de voix) (“Odelette Nocturne,” lines 1–5)

And if sound can shadow and be shadowed in such poetry, so can silence. Thus the speaker at the start of Thomas Hood’s “Autumn”: I saw old Autumn in the misty morn Stand shadowless like Silence, listening To silence, for no lonely bird would sing Into his hollow ear from woods forlorn.

These lines—like the subject and framing of the whole poem— are shadowed by Keats. It will be observed that the first (capi-

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talized) Silence is a personification, the second an abstract entity; “like Silence”—although indeed, trivially, like all abstractions—Autumn is seen as shadowless, although the latter personification is, as it were, almost shadowed by the lowercase concept to which Autumn (and, ambiguously, Silence itself?) stands listening—almost, had it not been shadowless, regarding its own shadow. This sort of figuration gets extended beyond the acoustic in Poe’s sonnet “Silence”; in it he addresses two kinds of silence. One, which he calls “corporate,” is more substantial, perceptible in that it is auditory—the sort of acoustic silence of not being able to hear anything, as opposed to the rhetorical silence of not saying anything. The other is figured as “his shadow (nameless elf, / That haunteth the lone regions where hath trod / No foot of man) . . .”; and where this other more than rhetorical silence is a shadow because it is an unshakeable, probably unwanted, companion, it does its haunting as a shade, a ghost, even as it seems something like a Gnostic sort of emanation. In some lines, again by Hood, from a poem called “The Two Swans,” the ambience of darkness, sleep, and motionlessness bring a sense of “silent” to bear on the primary one of “still” as “yet”: I saw a tower builded on a lake, Mock’d by its inverse shadow, dark and deep— That seem’d a still intenser night to make, Wherein the quiet waters sunk to sleep . . . (lines 10–13)

What may be of most interest here is, first, the accuracy of the observation of the effect of a shadow of something dark falling on the surface of water and cancelling paler reflections as well as seeming to deepen the body of water receiving it,

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and second, the extent to which “mock’d” is used here (in “Mock’d by its inverse shadow”) as it is in Shelley’s “Ozymandias,” implying both imitation and derision, as if there were in the word “inverse” something immoral, something perverse. But the lines are unusually beautiful for Hood. What has always been for me a most memorable association of shadow with silence is a less direct one, from the opening of Tennyson’s monologue “Oenone” (1829): For now the noonday quiet holds the hill: The grasshopper is silent in the grass: The lizard, with his shadow on the stone, Rests like a shadow, and the winds are dead. (lines 24–27)

These lines exhibit subtle uses of what Dr. Johnson called “representative versification.” Here, there seems to be a trope of shadowing—like chiasm used ad hoc as a trope of mirroring—in the verse: first, the grasshopper silent in the grass, as if he had hidden the “hopper” part of him in its green shade; then, moved to the referential and literal levels, the lizard, not merely as motionless as his shadow (which would be trivial if he is not moving), but seeming to lose his substance to the surface of the stone he rests upon. He and his shadow both seem to rest like a shadow. The silence and the airlessness all come together here. But I want to proceed to Tennyson’s most celebrated and problematic shadow. It is one of two famously enigmatic shadows in English poetry, and it is purely optical. (The other, of mysterious substance, I shall consider further on.) In the powerful early dramatic lyric “Mariana,” it may be remembered that the protagonist has no relation to the lady in Measure for Measure at all, save perhaps that she awaits a

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lover who will not arrive—the poem has been generated in an almost symboliste way by the quoted phrase “Mariana in the moated grange,” and it is Tennyson’s wholly original conception of a moated grange which is like both a body for the speaker’s self and a head for her mind—an external world still internal to a larger world outside it. Mariana is weary of waiting—as the Lady of Shalott is “half sick of shadows” (as I hope we are not quite yet), although these are primarily Elizabethan mirror images of the outside world and the shadows of representation of what she sees woven into the tapestry on which she works. The interior of the grange is full of darkly specific details—the fly buzzing in the windowpane, the mouse shrieking in the wainscot, the sparrow’s chirping on the roof—as the exterior is marked by evidences of decay and neglect. But then in the fourth stanza: About a stone-­cast from the wall A sluice with blackened waters slept, And o’er it many, round and small, The clustered marish-­mosses crept. Hard by a poplar shook alway, All silver-­green with gnarlèd bark: For leagues no other tree did mark The level waste, the rounding gray. She only said, “My life is dreary, He cometh not,” she said; She said, “I am aweary, aweary, I would that I were dead!”

The tree is radically external to Mariana and her grange, singular and prominent in her visual field. Unlike the stagnant water and the vegetation in and around it, the leaves of the tree—their green grayed-­down—are at least in some kind of

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motion, however aged or sickly—as Christopher Ricks observes—the tree may seem. The poem’s refrain, coming in at this point, seems almost to imply that Mariana’s “My life is dreary,” et cetera, is uttered in response to her seeing what had been described in the stanza’s preceding lines. (This is an effect which will vary—even as the refrain itself slightly varies throughout the poem.) It is as if she saw in the lone tree a lone self, or a projected image of her solitariness in an otherwise barren world. The poplar is a visionary combination of at least two and perhaps three different botanical trees and a number of possible allusive poetical ones.† One may be from Keats’s “Sleep and Poetry”: If I do hide myself, it sure shall be In the very fane, the light of Poesy: If I do fall, at least I will be laid Beneath the silence of a poplar shade . . . (lines 275–78)

The other is from some lines almost at the end of Shelley’s “The Triumph of Life,” quoted in the previous lecture, mentioning shadows “numerous as the dead leaves blown // In Autumn evening from a poplar tree—” (lines 528–29). That both of these poplars are associated in some way with death— Keats’s is there for its shade and thus a “shade of death” in some way—may be significant. But in the next stanza, the tree enters her consciousness in another way as well: And ever when the moon was low, And the shrill winds were up and away, In the white curtain, to and fro,

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She saw the gusty shadow sway. But when the moon was very low, And wild winds bound within their cell, The shadow of the poplar fell Upon her bed, across her brow. She only said, “The night is dreary, He cometh not,” she said; She said, “I am aweary, aweary, I would that I were dead!”

This shadow, empirical in the narrative and yet deeply significant, has led to a wide range of critical speculations. Before considering them, we should be sure of the empirical situation. The shadow swaying “in the white curtain” is somewhat indefinite, both as to its appearance and as to its substance. It isn’t immediately identified as being cast by the tree, and it operates as a darkening in and of the white curtain when— with most effective spondaic motion—“the shrill winds were up and away,” and the moon still high enough for the shadow of the crown of the tree to cast a broader and more amorphous shade. But with the moon even lower and the tree motionless, a different shadowed form reaches farther into her room. The poplar’s shadow has been proclaimed as a phallic intrusion, as a shadow of “a genuine hope that can be neither claimed nor forgotten” ( James Kincaid), and alternatively (by Harold Bloom, The Ringers in the Tower) as “an indication of the border realm between the two states in which Mariana lives” (to which we might add, it is a shadow either absorbing the world or rejecting it: certainly the tree only enters her realm in its shadow); it has been held to represent “the Sublime or repressed element in Mariana . . . and even an emblem of expression itself ” (Bloom, Poetry and Repression). There is certainly a progression suggesting the motion of ap-

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proach in “Upon her bed, across her brow,” and the romantic trope of a shadow falling across a brow and thereby across a mind can imply anything from effacement and diminution to radical derangement of consciousness. The tree is probably not her permanently absent lover, but its shadow is of some substance which itself will never literally enter her life; whether this condition is self-­generated or not remains open to debate. There is something gothic about the shadow moving back and forth across the curtain, as if seeking entrance into the room, and the subsequent unagitated intrusion. (It is “gusty” at first, and the Germanic word for blasts of wind perhaps mutters of its Latin homonym, of a gustiness of a sensual sort.) One might try to visualize this scene as if cinematically portrayed, where the shots of the fourth and fifth stanzas were either unaccompanied or, at most, by Mariana’s refrain (as a voice-­over, as a shot of her murmuring the words, as a caption); the images would require no further glossing, and we would read the scene as one from an Antonioni film.† The poplar’s shadow vanishes after this stanza. But at the end of the poem the poplar again returns.† The mingled sounds from outside, and from within “the dreaming house” that is somehow her own head and also the condition of being herself within which she is imprisoned, combine at the opening of the last stanza in a compelling recapitulation: The sparrow’s chirrup on the roof, The slow clock ticking, and the sound Which to the wooing wind aloof The poplar made, did all confound Her sense; but most she loathed the hour When the thick-­moted sunbeam lay Athwart the chambers, and the day Was sloping toward his western bower.

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The refrain, here at the end of the poem, changes to “Then, said she, ‘I am very dreary, / He will not come,’ she said; / She wept, ‘I am aweary, aweary, / Oh God, that I were dead!’” and we are at the end of the day, her every returning day, as well, at the time of day when denial sinks into acknowledgment. But it will arise again with the next morning’s sun, and toward evening she will again most loathe this hour of awareness. The poplar answers “the wooing wind” in the drawn-­out tones of a love duet, accompanied by a violin pizzicato and a pianissimo percussion. The echoing pun on “moated” grange and “thick-­moted” sunbeam is followed by the powerful recapitulation of that thick-­sounding word “athwart” from its earlier appearance (“When thickest dark did trance the sky, / She drew her casement-­curtain by, / And glanced athwart the glooming flats”). In the last stanza, we are even made to consider the senses of “thwart” as a verb: the thick-­moted sunbeam enters her rooms like a blocking agent, rather than as a cheerful visitor. I have spent some time on this moment because it seems to me to pre­sent certain problems typical of mysterious shadows in romantic and modern poetry. I mentioned a second famous shadow of such a sort, which I should now like to consider. It’s one of the most enigmatic shadows in T. S. Eliot’s work, and will be of interest as we come to the close of these deliberations. This is the (capitalized) Shadow, or the various but related Shadows, in section V of “The Hollow Men.” Following, if you will remember, the metamorphosed childhood jingle (technically a carol) “Here we go gathering nuts and may”—United States: “go round the mulberry bush”—in the lines about the prickly pear, comes the anaphoric incantation, if not actually some negative litany:

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Between the idea And the reality Between the motion And the act Falls the Shadow For Thine is the Kingdom Between the conception And the creation Between the emotion And the response Falls the Shadow Life is very long Between the desire And the spasm Between the potency And the existence Between the essence And the descent Falls the Shadow For Thine is the Kingdom

While much has been written about the pairs of concepts between which the Shadow falls, we may observe that there is a general agenda of realization or fulfillment manifested by the movement from the first to the second of these terms in the cases of idea-­reality, conception-­creation, and potency-­ existence. This is both more limited and more intense in the specifically sexual realm of desire-­spasm; other matters seem to be present in the relations of motion (particularly when construed as “intention” or “impulse”) and act, or emotion

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and response (whose?—that of the emoter him/herself? and if so, a response mental or physical?). Essence and descent are a more problematic pair, implying a “descent” into the previously mentioned existence. “Potency” has both specifically sexual and general senses, and in the last stanza it is the second sense which leads from the more physical to the metaphysical pairing. In any case, it is a remarkable shadow that can reinforce and perhaps make unbridgeable so many conceptual categories. In any event, there has been great critical reluctance to deal with the Shadow that falls between these paired terms. Grover Smith, who provides what seems to me still the best gloss on the sequence of distinctions, nevertheless concludes: “With every effort to make the potential become actual a ‘Shadow’ interferes. This, whatever its private value, has in the poem no clear conceptual reference.” We might paraphrase this (in the light of subsequent academic discourse about literature?) by saying that the Shadow functions as a structuralist’s virgule or solidus (/), creating a distinction which has more of one kind of conceptual power than the mere entities thereby distinguished. (I know this would be the silly sort of structuralism.) And yet in the poem, the undefined, melodramatically capitalized “the Shadow” has just such a power. (I think here of the popular American radio program of the later Thirties in which the eponymous hero, a “wealthy young man about town named Lamont Cranston”— some sort of Bulldog Drummond spinoff—becomes invisible at will to do justice to criminals, speaking out of that invisibility with a hollow ironic laugh. Of interest here is that “the Shadow” lacks any visual presence whatsoever.) In the light of our investigations into shadows and their growing figurative density in poetry in English, it might be said that

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there is indeed considerable conceptual substance here. If we are concerned with the nature of the interposition here, we might consider that substance and its unusual behavior. We might start looking for it in some invocations of a deepened trope of shadowing in Eliot’s previous work. One might think immediately of the celebrated parenthetical observation in “Sweeney Erect”: (The lengthened shadow of a man Is history, said Emerson Who had not seen the silhouette Of Sweeney straddled in the sun.) (lines 25–28)

Emerson did not in fact say that, but rather “An institution [italics mine] is the lengthened shadow of one man,” citing among others Luther and the Reformation, Fox and Quakerism, Wesley and Methodism—a list of reformers not exactly designed to speak to Eliot’s orthodox views, however nascent at this stage. But our point here is that Eliot also takes lengthening of the shadow as a temporal matter. For Emerson, on the other hand, it represents a certain kind of consequential magnitude, but also coupled with an implicit attenuation (of the imaginative substance or corpus projecting the institution). There are several sorts of shadow in close proximity in some familiar lines from “The Burial of the Dead,” close to the beginning of The Waste Land. They speak of an unrelieved desert landscape: Only There is shadow under this red rock, (Come in under the shadow of this red rock),

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And I will show you something different from either Your shadow at morning striding behind you Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you; I will show you fear in a handful of dust. (lines 24–30)

“There is shadow” is strange diction, whereas “there is shade” would not be; likewise, in the following line, to come in under the red rock would be to rest atop its shadow cast on the ground. In both cases the word “shadow” replaces the expected “shade.” But the personal shadow of the addressee, cast on two reciprocal occasions, is then invoked, with an implication that these cast shadows are two different, somewhat hostile, or at least adversarial, entities. The person addressed has to be walking eastward in both instances, but the stalking shadow and the confronting one reverse expected associations (morning rising to meet; evening striding behind). These are all densely allusive shadows; they partake of emanations or contrary doubles, and their relation to the red rock’s realm of shadow, part protective, part projective of vision, recalls that juxtaposition, mentioned in a previous lecture, of Dante’s ombra, his cast shadow that darkens the flames, and the ombre, the shades of the lustful who gather about to observe this phenomenon (Purgatorio, 26.7–9). But Eliot had written a previous version of these lines in his “The Death of Saint Narcissus” (1911–15). I quote from the opening of an earlier draft of this poem: Come under the shadow of this grey rock Come (and sit) under the shadow of this grey rock And I will show you a shadow different from either Your shadow sprawling over the sand at daybreak, or Your shadow huddled by the fire against the redrock.

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cloth bloodless I will show you his bloody cloth/coat and green limbs grey And the blue shadow between his lips.

This grey shadow of death, “different from either” of the two forms of shadow cast by the addressee, is given another sort of substance in the poem’s final lines: “Now he is green dry and stained / With the shadow in his mouth.” But in the revision of these lines in The Waste Land, it is not yet a third form of shadow which sitting under the shadow of the (now red) rock will help manifest. It is rather a “something” which displaces that deathly shadow while yet, in its echo of Tennyson’s Maud (“Dead, long dead, / Long dead! / And my heart is a handful of dust . . .”), invoking it. It might also be remarked here that Eliot had from his early years been immersed in FitzGerald’s Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám. Quatrains 66–67 (1872 text) put Dante’s ombra through a complex revisionary machinery involving Milton, Shelley, perhaps Blake, and more likely Swinburne: I sent my Soul through the Invisible, Some letter of that After-­life to spell: And by and by my Soul return’d to me, And answer’d “I Myself am Heav’n and Hell:” Heav’n but the Vision of fulfill’d Desire, And Hell the Shadow of a Soul on fire, Cast on the Darkness into which Ourselves, So late emerg’d from, shall so soon expire.

The shadow is both an emanation and another figuration of an optical shadow, cast on another sort of darkness upon

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which nothing could be read in any case. More complex is the broadened shadow of a man becoming the whole realm of perdition in an engulfing sort of Plato’s cave. One may feel that The Waste Land’s paired shadows dogging one at dawn and perhaps menacingly greeting one at dusk are not merely cast by a personal substance but are some sort of frightening personal double, and a word or two should be said about that matter as well. Figurative shadows expressed or projected by a whole self or part of it are associated in poetic and prose romance with doubles of some sort. The matter of the double is a vast one, many aspects of which Karl Miller has written about so well, and it will only be touched upon lightly here. Kierkegaard in Repetition refers to the relation of “the hidden individual” to possible “shapes” or roles in which he might gain an impression of his actual self as a Schattenspiel, a shadow play. For example, in James Hogg’s The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner (1824), the protagonist Wringhim pursues his brother George, whom he eventually murders to secure the family estate, as a sort of demon, like “the shadow . . . cast from the substance, or the ray of light from the opposing denser medium.” But then, in a complicated redoubling, his own demonic companion, a double-­like personage he calls Gil-­Martin, invokes a romantically modified form of the older trope when Wringhim seeks to divest himself of this companionship: “Sooner shall you make the mother abandon the child of her bosom; nay, sooner cause the shadow to relinquish the substance, than separate me from your side.” The shadow as unwelcome follower takes on something of the character of an emanation of one’s own in such contexts as this, or in, say, Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, where Chillingworth says that Dimmesdale had believed himself to have been “given over to a fiend,” but

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that it was only “the constant shadow of my presence!—the closest propinquity of the man whom he had most vilely wronged! . . .” Even more interestingly, in The Marble Faun by Hawthorne there is the mysterious figure who follows the somewhat mysterious painter, Miriam (she is associated in several shadowy ways with Beatrice Cenci in the story). He has been her model, but he is known to her friends as her “shadow”—again, not only because he follows her about and lurks in hiding at intervals, but also, more ambiguously, invoking the dialectic of primary-­antithetical with respect to her. One has the feeling that he may be her father, and, with Cenci-­like nuances throughout the novel, that Miriam lives “in the shadow” of the unspecified scandal mentioned in the book’s epilogue. He is a daimon-­shadow in many romantic senses of the term. Strangely reciprocal doublings occur in Moby Dick, where the celebrated Ishmael/Queequeg pairing is paralleled by the one of Ahab and Fedallah, “Ahab in his scuttle, the Parsee by the mainmast; but still fixedly gazing upon each other; as if in the Parsee Ahab saw his forethrown shadow, in Ahab the Parsee his abandoned substance . . . .” Such shadowy doubles inhabit a sort of gothic domain and differ from one’s own simple cast shadow, or that cast by another—even if momentarily unseen—person. It may be a projection of something internal to oneself—and hence “one’s own” shadow in another sense, a visible but intangible form of something of mind, of soul, of some dysfunctional passion. And as we have seen, there is a confederation of tribes of shadow that we might loosely call Gnostic-­Blakean-­ Yeatsian-­Jungian. It comprises forms of some repressed element or version or aspect of personhood unacknowledged by the active and conscious self, partly projected in perhaps an inevitable but unwitting return of that repressed, or defied, or unrecognized agenda. These are perhaps like ghosts

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in European folklore who are like shadows of persons whose deaths have not been thoroughly acknowledged, even by Death itself. Such a shadow-­double has less epistemological substance than a true material double, whether natural (a twin, a statistical anomaly) or artificial (a simulacrum). But it is not merely an alternative self, but an anti-­self in some kind of antithetical or even adversarial relation to the entire agency that has rejected it—or, indeed, imprisoned it in some inner darkness, some of which it brings, as its own shadowed darkness, out into the realm of the visible. The superimposition in The Waste Land of a number of prior tropes of shadow characterizes generally the late romantic and modern poetic shadowings we have been considering. Specifically, they look forward to the unidentified Shadow in “The Hollow Men,” with which we are presently concerned. Like them, this umbra is interestingly presented in strange diction that helps establish a strange trope. As we have been observing, literal or allegorical shadows fall across, or along, or on, or even—in its stronger sense—“upon” a place, thing, or person, or person’s mind or soul. But a shadow falling “between” something and something else, pointing up their differentiation into something like an ad hoc opposition, is almost unidiomatic. In the language of ecphrasis, perhaps not. One can imagine saying that in a painting a shadow of an object thrown against a wall between two human figures sitting beside it “falls between them,” thereby implicitly making some formal, structural, epistemological, or otherwise moralizing point. But ecphrasis is not relevant here, and not just because the entity casting the shadow is unseen. But there are two immediate idiomatic matrices for the shadow that creates such aporia in “The Hollow Men.” One of these was later acknowledged by Eliot himself. In Ernest Dowson’s celebrated lyric with the almost proverbial refrain

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“I have been faithful to thee, Cynara! in my fashion” (the title, “Non sum qualis eram bonae sub regno Cynarae,” sarcastically from Horace IV.1.3–4), the speaker, who has “gone with the wind” and “flung roses, roses, riotously with the throng” in order to forget the “pale lost lilies,” begins Last night, ah, yesternight, betwixt her lips and mine There fell thy shadow, Cynara! thy breath was shed Upon my soul between the kisses and the wine . . .

Cynara’s figurative ghost, memory, or dogging—and thus also shadowing—presence, a loved-­and-­hated blocking agent, redirects desire and then interposes itself between the old lover and his momentary new object. In these opening lines, the figure of the intervening shadow (Smith speaks of the one in “The Hollow Men” as “interfering”) is paralleled by Cynara’s sensible breath being “shed . . . between the kisses and the wine” like a floral scent “upon” the speaker’s “soul.” The alternate refrain in Dowson’s four stanzas avows that “I was desolate and sick of an old passion”—sickened with and by it—and it is that passion from which the spectral shadow emanates. It is unclear whether Cynara’s shadow functions as an erotic block, or as the provider of an additional frisson. In any case, Dowson’s lines provide a paradigmatic interposition of shadow as opposed to the more usual coloring, or darkening, or shrouding one. And its milieu is erotic. This may very well matter for Eliot’s lines. The trope of a representational entity falling between the partners in a sexual act and widening all but the mere physical distance between them may very well underlie the disturbances of the Shadow in “The Hollow Men.” But another prior instance of a shadowy intervention, perhaps quite as significant, would not be of the sort that Eliot

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tended to acknowledge. It is a moment in Shelley’s The Triumph of Life—I passed over it in the previous lecture—where the papacy is seen as “men divine // Who rose like shadows between Man and god” (lines 288–89). Here, also, it is the shadows falling between two entities which are figuratively dense: here it is a matter of veiling, of interposing; but the popes are not walls nor even screens or masks, for their distorting mediation is all part of a mental process. Moreover, there is an implication that the denial of access works in both directions, although that is a more problematic question we should leave to Shelleyans. In the Eliot passage, the epistemological or even metaphysical divider falls between the concepts and disrupts the consequential relation between them, and as such that divider must be redefined in each case—the Shadows may be of different potent but immaterial agents of one sort of negation.† One critic (Smith) has suggested that “the first group chiefly connotes sex; the second, sex and creation; the last, sex, creation, and salvation”; and certainly the imperfection of an enjoyment seems to lie at the heart of the Shadow’s matter. It exhibits the same kind of allusive and revisionary density which marks the shadows in so many twentieth-­ century poems. There is no time now to consider in detail a host of such instances. But we might pause to remark on the density of the more than merely paradoxical shadow trope in these lines from Geoffrey Hill’s remarkable The Triumph of Love, about Jean Cocteau and France generally after the First World War: . . . his debellated, debellished land bore to inaugurate towers of remembrance, the massive verticals, to lean on fields of the dead;

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the fields of preservation, with ranging shadows cast by the black bulk of light, that are formal sorrow, mourning, in its conjurations of triumphs. (CXXVIII)

Or how, in the last section of D. H. Lawrence’s late “The Sea,” a wonderful passage recalls both the sixteenth-­century (verb) shadow meaning to trope or represent, and the doubled senses of “mock”—imitation and derision—at the end of Shelley’s “Ozymandias.” The sea is addressed as “you . . .” who shadow the sun’s great gestures and expressions So that he seems a stranger in his passing; Who voice the dumb night fittingly; Sea, you shadow of all things, now mock us to death with your shadowing.

Or, finally, what millions of strange shadows lie beneath the again apparently paradoxical figure toward the end of Hart Crane’s “To Brooklyn Bridge,” where the bridge at night, invoked in the previous quatrain— Again the traffic lights that skim thy swift Unfractioned idiom, immaculate sigh of stars, Beading thy path—­condense eternity: And we have seen night lifted in thine arms.

—is now fully acknowledged as the major symbol it will be in Crane’s great poem. “Under thy shadow by the piers I waited,” begins the next stanza; and then the mention of a derivative shadow propounds an enigmatic proposition:

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Only in darkness is thy shadow clear.

“Clear” is intensified with the original sense of “bright, radiant,” and the bridge’s other shadow, that vast trope of temporal and spatial connectedness, needs a darkness both more and less than the light of common day to be potent and apparent. The substance of modern poetic shadow is in good part that of prior poetic shadow itself. As the poetic image of “shadow” allusively thickened during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, it summed up and intermingled representations of things seen and unseen and even unseeable, expressions of inner states and outer conditions—shadows as representations accompanying their objects in a common visible world, or shadows cast by invisible objects, invisible either because they are abstractions (like death) or something within a person which in any case no anatomy could bring to light. We might say that it darkened, deepened the intensity of its darkness, or intensified its shining in acquiring more light of its own. But this is after all a question that only poetry itself might care to answer.

[ 5 ] Fragments of Shadow: Manuscript Extracts

Gathered below is a selection of the later notes and addenda that Hollander inserted into the manuscript of the Clark Lectures (on which see my preface). All of these passages stem from Hollander’s work towards revising these lectures for a book, though that work was never completed. I have corrected obvious typographical errors, and the often varied fonts of Hollander’s insertions are here all one, but otherwise I have left these notes very much as they appear in the manuscript, with their sometimes compressed arguments, imperfect syntax, telegraphic references, and idiosyncratic punctuation (e.g., opening brackets that often find no answering closed ones). The first group of extracts consists of notes that Hollander inserted directly into the lecture texts. Here I’ve indicated the page on which each insertion originally appears in the lecture manuscript as printed in this volume; in the lectures themselves the specific place of the insertion is marked by a dagger ( †). The second group of extracts consists of notes that appear in the manuscript files, but without any precise place for them in the lectures themselves being indicated.—KG 131

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Page 3: Old shadows within I perhaps trace my own fascination with the language of shadow to an impression from earliest childhood—being put to bed (longtemps, nous nous somme tous couchés de bonne heure)—my mother showed me shadows—etc.*

Page 8: Shadows before Donne Also here, Donne’s literal > figurative shadows perhaps foreshadowed in Fulke Greville’s Caelica XVI Fie foolish earth, think you the heaven wants glory, Because your shadows do yourself benight? All’s dark unto the blind, let them be sorry, The heavens in themselves are ever bright. Fie fond desire, think you that love wants glory, Because your shadows do yourself benight? The hopes and fears of lust, may make men sorry, But love still in herself finds her delight.

Here the pointed parallel is between more general literal and figurative shadowings (again, of love), but the latter are hopes and fears, rather than Donne’s much more complex doubts and changes of feeling and temperament.

*Hollander here riffs on rather than misquotes, I think, the opening of Marcel Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu, where the subject of the sentence is singular: “Longtemps, je me suis couché de bonne heure.”

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Page 11: Rilke’s defense of shadow A certain Neoplatonic overtone may perhaps be discerned in Leonardo’s habit of associating light with the spiritual and darkness with the corporeal. . . . The issue of as it were causative rights in a cast shadow comes up in another way in a little poem of Rilke’s from mid-­Feb. 1922: Mein scheuer Mondschatten spräche gern mit meinem Sonnenschatten von fern in der Sprache der Toren; mitten drin ich, ein beschienener Sphinx, Stille stiftend, nach rechts und links hab ich die beiden geboren. My shy moon-­shadow would like to talk with my sun-­shadow from afar in the language of fools; In between, I, an illuminated Sphinx, [pun on bound, splinted?] establishing silence, to right and left I’ve given birth to both of them.*

Page 34: Intimations of mortality A memorable figure of this is in D. H. Lawrence’s wonderful “Bat” poem, a sort of revisionary commentary on the gathering of swallows at the darkening conclusion of Keats’s “To Autumn.” Swallows on an evening in Florence, dipping under the Pontevecchio, are “sewing the shadows together”; *Hollander adapts Edward Snow’s rendering of these lines in Rilke, Uncollected Poems.

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the unnamed resulting fabric is, of course, night. And perhaps there is a larger fabric, stitched together from all the shades of all one’s nights: in Lawrence’s poem, it is bats that turn out to have been mistaken for swallows, and the fabric they stitch together seems to be that of death.

Page 39: Silhouettes and shadows The shadow of a silhouette would be the shadow of a cutout form, itself perhaps imitating a shadow, but a palpable mass, no matter how thin

Page 42: The Valley of the Shadow of Death Also somewhere hereabouts: in Bunyan, The Pilgrim’s Progress, the allegorical “location” (in my sense of the word) called the Valley of the Shadow of Death, through which Christian moves after his successful battle with Apollyon. It is described in detail; first by “two men” who report that the Valley “is as dark as pitch; we also saw here the Hobgoblins, Satyrs, and Dragons of the Pit: we heard also in the Valley a continual howling and yelling, as of a People under unutterable misery; who there sat bound in affliction and Irons: and over that Valley hangs the discouraging Clouds of confusion, death also doth always spread his wings over it: in a word, it is every whit dreadful, being utterly without Order.” [The difficult path through it passes between a ditch and a quag and passes near “the mouth of Hell”; at the far end of the valley lie “blood, bones, ashes, and mangled bodies of men” (a sort of Death Valley, actually) . . . .

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Page 46: Dante’s dead cast no shadows I suppose that this works best in Spanish, wherein only hombres vivos have ombras.

Page 46: The weather of hell The souls of the Gluttonous in Inferno VI, drenched in an eternal downpour of hail, cold heavy rain and snow, are unique in the precise nature of their quasi-­substantiality, a fitting condition for the sinners so engrossed in the pure materiality of food: as Dante and Virgil leave the third circle, they move “per sozza mistura / de l’ombre e de la pioggia” (100–101)—a nasty mixture of shadow and slush (almost as if compounded in some kitchen?)

Page 48: Composite shadows A strange combination of typological shadow and “shadow of death”—­almost a pun on two different tropes, as it were, occurs in D. G. Rossetti’s “The Passover in the Holy Family,” where “the slain lamb confronts the Lamb to slay. // The pyre is piled. What agony’s crown attained, / What shadow of Death the Boy’s fair brow subdues . . . ?”

Page 66: How shadows fall Consider for example the Freud, “fell upon”—like thieves upon a traveler? like Byron upon the chambermaid in Venice (“like a thunderbolt”)? Freud “Mourning and Melancholia”: [the free libido when an object is lost] “It did not find application there [in the ego] . . . but served simply to establish an identification of the ego with the abandoned object. Thus the

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shadow of the object fell upon the ego, so that the latter could henceforth be criticized by a special mental faculty like an object, like the forsaken object.”

Page 87: Ghosts at graveside In Thomas Hood’s “Ballad” [“She’s up and gone . . .”] “My shadow falls upon my grave, / So near the brink I stand,” since the speaker is only figuratively “standing” near the brink of his own grave, and not seeing or even imagining himself there, the shadow is [a] literal but [b] only so in the covering fiction.

Page 91: Emily Dickinson’s heliotropes I also note with interest that Mrs. Todd, in a transcript, attached the first stanza of the following 1864 poem, #920, as the first one of “Oh Shadow. . . .”* Probably quite unsupported, the editorial emendation nevertheless cleverly introduces the solar agenda, and makes the step one of following: We can but follow to the Sun – As oft as He go down He leaves Ourselves a Sphere behind – ’Tis mostly – following – We go no further with the Dust Than to the Earthen Door – *Here as elsewhere, Hollander quotes from Thomas H. Johnson’s 1955 edition of Dickinson’s complete poetry, rather than the R. W. Franklin text, now more commonly accepted, first published in 1998. The numbering of the poems is Johnson’s as well.

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And then the Panels are reversed – And we behold – no more.

This seems to bring up either heliotropic matters, or else the implicit trope of shadowing the sun—Todd then adduces our poem as gloss. Could she have known the Campion, “Follow thy fair sun”? [in Palgrave, etc.?] Most interesting. Bloom (Blake’s Apocalypse??? p.??) refers to the sunflower’s “heliotropic bondage”—this may possibly be relevant here. One of the only critics writing on this poem has claimed that “the speaker interprets the end of daylight in her own case as a permanent loss of opportunity”—Jane Donahue Eberwein, Dickinson: Strategies of Limitation.

John James Piatt “My Shadow’s Stature” Whene’er, in morning airs, I walk abroad, Breasting upon the hills the buoyant wind, Up from the vale my shadow climbs behind, An earth-­born giant climbing toward his god; Against the sun, on heights before untrod, I stand: faint glorified, but undefined, Far down the slope in misty meadows blind, I see my ghostly follower slowly plod. “O stature of my shade,” I muse and sigh, “How great art thou, how small am I the while!” Then the vague giant blandly answers, “True, But though thou art small thy head is in the sky, Crown’d with the sun and all the Heaven’s smile— My head is in the shade and valley too.”

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Page 114: Mariana’s poplar tree What kind of poplar? This visionary tree seems to combine aspects of three different trees: populus nigra italica, or Lombardy poplar, the tall thinly pyramidal kind of tree that gives rise to the “phallic” interpretations of it here; the populus tremula, or quaking one that might “shake always”; and the silvery one, called by the French peuplier argenté “all silver-­ green”—but these last two have a tall trunk and a rounded leafy top, and don’t make a neatly phalloid shape like the Lombardy poplar or a cypress. In re the height, these vary— the trembling one from 15–20m., the other two up to 40m. The longest “stone’s throw” would still allow for these last two, and the optics of the shadow formation are all right given an optimum placement of tree in relation to Mariana’s window.

Page 116: A shadowing refrain “We three, we’ll wait for you / Even till eternity, / My echo my shadow and me.”*

Page 116: More on Mariana’s poplar it’s quite plausible that if there are no other shadow casting objects visible, that of the tree would act like a vast moon-­ dial gnomon. Also the phallic is nonsense for a number of reasons, not the least being the species of poplar. Even if Lombardy, its shadow would be broad enough to engulf her. And if not, overly nice calculations would be needed to place *Hollander transcribes here the chorus of a 1940 Frank Sinatra hit, “We Three (My Echo, My Shadow, and Me).”

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the tree in such a position that only the shadow of its narrow trunk would go in because of the moonlight coming through her window. Even repressing what he was really doing, Tennyson could have described just that, purely as a pictorial effect.

Page 127: The Shadow of “The Hollow Men” This may itself be allusively darkened by Marlow’s evocation of Kurtz in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness: “He lived as much as he had ever lived—a shadow insatiable of splendid appearances, of frightful realities, a shadow darker than the shadow of the night, and draped nobly in the folds of a gorgeous eloquence.” The shadow “draped nobly” is an allegorical figure; yet earlier it gobbles up appearances and realities both (like a trope??). And what is the shadow of the night? a shade? darkness itself? surely not echoing Chapman which he wouldn’t have known—and later on Kurtz seen by Marlow as a “Shadow—this wandering and tormented thing.” B. C. Southam, A Guide to the Selected Poems of T. S. Eliot (New York, 1968) suggests a further infection from the “shadow” in 1 Chronicles 29:15—close by to 29:11 where the words of the Lord’s Prayer first appear. Also possibly relevant here is that the original epigraph to Prufrock and Other Observations was from Purgatorio, 21.131–36. Statius stoops to embrace the feet of Virgil [“my teacher”], who warns him: “Frate, / non far, ché tu se’ ombra e ombra vedi.” [“Brother, don’t do that: you’re a shade and a shade is what you’re seeing.” Statius then says, rising,

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“Or puoi la quantitate comprender de l’amor ch’a te mi scalda, quand’ io dismento nostra vanitate, trattando l’ombre come cosa salda.”

[“Now you can grasp the intensity of the love that warms me toward you when I forget our [vanitas? nothingness?] which treats shades as if solid.”] [Mandelbaum on above—very good: “Brother, there’s no need— / you are a shade, a shade is what you see.” . . . “Now you can understand / how much love burns in me for you, when I / forget our insubstantiality / treating the shades as one treats solid things.”

OTHER MANUSCRIPT EXTRACTS The world as shadow Emerson: “The American Scholar”: “The world,—this shadow of the soul, or other me, lies wide around” . . . and cf. Scho­ penhauer here!!!!! Nature, pt. VII, “Spirit”: “And all the uses of nature admit of being summed in one, which yields the activity of man an infinite scope. Through all its kingdoms, to the suburbs and outskirts of things, it is faithful to the cause whence it had its origin. It always speaks of Spirit. It suggests the absolute. It is a perpetual effect. It is a great shadow pointing always to the sun behind us.” [But doesn’t this presuppose an evening condition? Doesn’t the spooky cast shadow of melodrama, quasi independent of the person, but also attached in that it is a harbinger not only of his arrival but of the evil of his arrival, point toward the person casting it? Here, the shadow points toward the light source, partly because the trope is reticent about itself—What occlud-

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ing objects cast these shadows? Things? The shadow of the physical body or the perceiving mind?]

Lyric shadows in Dante and Petrarch Petrarch: #22 a sestina: note ombra/sole: “sí aspra fera, o di notte o di giorno / come costei ch’í piango a l’ombra e al sole . . .” #30: “I shall follow the shadow of that sweet laurel / in the most ardent sun or through the snow” [seguirò l’ombra di quel dolce lauro / per lo più ardente sole et per la neve] possibly following Dante. [Note also, Dante in stony sestina—ombra is always shade or shadow of landscape, save for one instance: “vestita a verde / sì fatta, ch’ella avrebbe messo in petra / l’amor ch’io porto pur a la sua ombra” [dressed in green, so fashioned that she would have inspired a stone with the love I bear her very shadow (trans. George R. Kay, Penguin Book of Italian Verse pp. 89–91 but check others) where Rossetti gives “dressed in green,— / So fair, she might have wakened in a stone / This love which I do feel even for her shade” where Rossetti may be subtly invoking a confusion of meanings, accumulated by his “shade” for ombra throughout and the strange use of “shade” for “cast shadow of the living individual person” (vs. ghost of a dead one) possibly there or not in Dante.

The shadow of a doubt Doubt appears only to have developed a shadow, appropriately enough, towards the beginning of the nineteenth century. It may be of the same species as shadows of madness and derangement. Depending upon one’s spiritual state and its economy of knowledge and belief, the same questions will be seen to arise in the bright light of scepticism or in

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a dark shadow of doubt. The phrase “shadow of a doubt,” where our word is used primarily in the sense of a tincture or gradation—the term seeming to derive from water-color drawing in the eighteenth century—I have seen no earlier than in two American[?] versifiers. “Beyond the shadow of a doubt” appears in both (Bishop, [who? check!!] The Poetical Works, 1796 and T G Fessenden, Democracy (Unveiled? Divided? check 1800) but undoubtedly there is additional rhetorical substance: doubt either casts a shadow or is itself a half-­personified spooky presence, or a shadowy one in that it may be elusive. But by the time [????] in The Gondoliers can assure all that “Of that there can be no possible doubt, no possible probable shadow of doubt, no possible doubt whatever,” one would think that the phrase had been worn down by overuse; if it had, then certainly Alfred Hitchcock’s film title reinfused the term with allusion to some of the materials of his own kind of poetic world.* Doubt certainly is a shadow in the opening lines of Mallarmé’s “Sonnet,” “Quand l’ombre menaça de la fatale loi / Tel vieux Rêve . . .” etc. and get rest of beginning?— Clarel from part II The Wilderness canto 22—one of the cantos on the Jews, the discussion ending in an atmosphere of doubt, raised a few lines earlier by a theological question being asked, “And none responded. ’Twas like the night / Descending from the seats of light, / Or seeming thence to fall . . .” then at the end of the canto *Samuel Bishop (1731–95) was in fact a British poet. Fessenden’s poem, published in 1806, was entitled Democracy Unveiled. Hollander slightly misquotes the refrain of Don Alhambra’s song from Gilbert and Sullivan’s 1899 operetta, The Gondoliers: “Of that there is no manner of doubt— / No probable, possible shadow of doubt— / No possible doubt whatever.”

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. . . They saw In silence the heart’s shadow draw— Rich shadow, such as gardens keep In bower aside, where glow-­worms peep In evening over the virgin bed Where dark-­green periwinkles sleep— Their bud the Violet of the Dead.

[Nietzsche, The Gay Science tr. Walter Kaufmann (Random House 1974) #108: “New Struggles.—After Buddha was dead, his shadow was still shown for centuries in a cave—a tremendous, gruesome shadow. God is dead; but given the way of men, there may still be caves for thousands of years in which his shadow will be shown.—And we—we still have to vanquish his shadow, too.”

A desolating shadow George Macdonald, Phantastes. Anodos, the central figure, and wanderer in an alternative romance-­world, in chapters 8 & 9 becomes burdened with his shadow because of encountering a deluding forest-­nymph; this shadow is noxious: he lies down on grass and flowers that return to their former state afterwards, but not those on which his shadow had lain: “The very outline of it could be traced in the withered lifeless grass, and the scorched and shrivelled flowers which stood there, dead, and hopeless of any resurrection. . . . rays of gloom issued from the central shadow as from a black sun, lengthening and shortening with continual change. But wherever a ray struck, that part of earth, or sea, or sky, became void, and desert, and sad to my heart.” The rest of his quest is not for the Lady he had originally been seeking, but

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deliverance from the thrall of his Shadow (at the end, “I, who set out to find my Ideal, came back rejoicing that I had lost my Shadow”).

Shadows of madness Shadows of madness and derangement < or > shadows of one’s own fictive constructions of life, looser than Blake’s notion, “a shadow on my brain” = madness in Poe’s “Eleonora,” etc. . . . And how and where does this lead to Romantic shadow-­ self: Coleridge—“Constancy to an Ideal Object” (1826??) the speaker pursues the spectral presence of a “Thought! that liv’st but in the brain” . . . but it turns out to be merely a projection of himself—and here the simile is that of a well-­known “white shadow” phenomenon, a mirage-­like illusion that appears at the end of Poe’s Narrative of A. Gordon Pym, where it is a kind of negative shadow cast by the observer—he addresses the Thought: . . . Such thou art, as when The woodman winding westward up the glen At wintry dawn, where o’er the sheep-­track’s maze The viewless snow-­mist weaves a glist’ning haze, Sees full before him, gliding without tread, An image with a glory round its head; The enamoured rustic worships its fair hues, Nor know he makes the shadows, he pursues!

The substance of doubles The full double can partake of a shadow, being negatively valorized thereby, but with the substance-­person still bearing the responsibility for that negativity. Another matter: insub-

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stantial shadow can testify to the materiality of a present substance [see Purgatorio III, etc.] but when they give false testimony, they are spooky, ghosts, etc., and one question about that is whether a “shade” [= spirit in Hell or Purgatory or whatever] is to be identified with its manifestation, or merely emanates it, in which case the emanation would have quasi-­ substance as compared to the spirit [cf. Yeats’s “Shade more than man, more image than a shade”

Shadow-­doubles in history Yeats in a letter to Dorothy Wellesley May 4 1937: “I begin to see things double—doubled in history, world history, personal history. At this moment . . . thought is about to be unified as its own free act, and the shadow in Germany and elsewhere is an attempted unity by force. In my own life I have never felt so acutely the presence of a spiritual virtue and that is accompanied by intensified desire. Perhaps there is a theme for poetry in this “double swan and shadow.”

Shadows on a landscape ( from “Friday,” in Thoreau’s A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers) I find this long passage remarkable, composing a kind of romantic ode in prose, and its meditational process moves from optical actuality through various kinds of allegorizing. It starts with observation, moving at once to an unremarkable association of a not-­quite-­pathetically-­fallacious sort. But notice how the direct report of observation cannot return, in the second sentence, unshaded by that association: The shadows chased one another swiftly over wood and meadow, and their alternation harmonized with our mood.

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We could distinguish the clouds which cast each one, though never so high in the heavens . . .

It is as if the cloud-­shadows were cast across the writer’s inner state as well. A shadow falling across a person’s consciousness, or feelings, or any other entity of an inner state, is almost a romantic cliché—e.g., Gérard de Nerval’s lines about his vexing sadness being a dark cloud that prostrates him and spreads its shadow over his pleasure and sorrows (“Stances élégiaques”) Car il est un nuage sombre, Un souvenir mouillé de pleurs, Qui m’accable et répand son ombre Sur mes plaisirs et mes douleurs . . .

But here such a figurative shadow is adduced to open up other matters: When a shadow flits across the landscape of the soul, where is the substance? Probably, if we were wise enough, we would see to what virtue we are indebted for any happier moment we enjoy. No doubt we have earned it at some time; for the gifts of Heaven are never quite gratuitous.

—Yet this is followed by an extremely material figure: The constant abrasion and decay of our lives makes the soil of our future growth. The wood which we now mature, when it becomes virgin mould, determines the character of our second growth, whether that be oaks or pines.

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The trees function in the vegetative conceit here, but there may be a hint that they are, in fact, providers of the constant shadowing of shade. But then, with the sentence quoted earlier, the shadow of a person, rather than those figuratively cast over him, introduces the next parabolic move: Every man casts a shadow; not his body only, but his imperfectly mingled spirit. This is his grief. Let him turn which way he will, it falls opposite to the sun; short at noon, long at eve. Did you never see it?—But, referred to the sun, it is widest at its base, which is no greater than his own opacity. The divine light is diffused almost entirely around us, and by means of the refraction of light, or else by a certain self-­ luminousness, or, as some will have it, transparency, if we preserve ourselves untarnished, we are able to enlighten our shaded side. At any rate, our darkest grief has that bronze color of the moon eclipsed. There is no ill which may not be dissipated, like the dark, if you let in a stronger light upon it.

Those “some”—the party of transparency here—probably means Emerson, and the trope suddenly shifts from the cast to the attached shadow. The pivotal term “enlighten,” with its purely visual and moral senses in perfect balance, helps frame the psychological fable. But a more elusive parable continues to claim the rest of the observations. In the retailing of the optical details which follows this, there is an implicit moral conceit, rather than just an observation. Sir Thomas Browne, and moral emblems and the seventeenth century generally, do not seem far from this passage: Shadows, referred to the source of light, are pyramids whose bases are never greater than those of the substances which cast them, but light is a spherical congeries of pyramids,

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whose very apexes are the sun itself, and hence the system shines with uninterrupted light. But if the light we use is but a paltry and narrow taper, most objects will cast a shadow wider than themselves.

That final sentence reads both as statement of natural fact and apothegm, in this case involving a shadow of the delusive species, with the concern being breadth, rather than the more familiarly proverbial length.

A reader’s shadow A remarkable case of a shadow falling over a text—Rilke, “Der Leser” “The Reader” considers him as one who sank his face away from Existence to a second one [welcher sein Gesicht / wegsenkte aus dem Sein zu einem zweiten]: “Even his mother could not be sure [certain] / whether it is he over there reading / what is drenched in his own shadow” [Selbst seine Mutter wäre nicht gewiss, / ob er es ist, der da mit seinem Schatten / Getränktes liest]. The point of this poem is not to issue a hermeneutic warning, but it is hard not to take one.

A poem by Charlotte Mew “Absence” [first two stanzas] Sometimes I know the way You walk, up over the bay; It is a wind from that far sea That blows the fragrance of your hair to me. Or in this garden when the breeze Touches my trees

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To stir their dreaming shadows on the grass I see you pass.

[Here one might expect the trope to be that shadows are the dream of trees—playing with shade as shadow as personal shadow—but instead, the shadows dream: of emanation-­ what? of the waking world wherein they are trees (at night, say, when the silhouette-­images of the trees approach the condition of shadow?]

A poem by Isaac Rosenberg “A Worm Fed on the Heart of Corinth” (wr. 1916) A worm fed on the heart of Corinth, Babylon and Rome: Not Paris raped tall Helen, But this incestuous worm, Who lured her vivid beauty To his amorphous sleep. England! famous as Helen Is thy betrothal sung To him the shadowless, More amorous than Solomon.

amorphous > shadowless > amorous [vs shadstance amorphous PL Death]*

*For Hollander’s coinage “shadstance,” used to describe the substance of Death in book II of Paradise Lost, see page 54 above.

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Lawrence’s revisionary shadow Possibly D. H. Lawrence “The Shadow of Death”—one of the early Rhyming Poems but get date my edition 132–33—here? Quite remarkable as an attempt to remythologize the phrase. In this case, the shadow “startled by this dawn confronting / Me who am issued amazed from the darkness,” Feeling myself undawning, the day’s light playing upon me, I who am substance of shadow, I all compact Of the stuff of the night, finding myself all wrongly Among crowds of things in the sunshine jostled and racked.

He is “substance of shadow” in an intricate turn on the usual figure both because—being a mythological construction— his substance is shadow, and because he is the substance of all shadows. That seems to invoke, in this case, not the substance of the object casting or projecting the shadow, so much as the stuff of which shadows are ultimately formed. This is skia as skotos turannos, claiming all darkness as his own—as if we had moved from shadowy types of shadow to the truth of death. I with the night on my lips, I sigh with the silence of death; [Keats the sigh that silence heaves?] And what do I care though the very stones should cry me unreal, though the clouds Shine in conceit of substance upon me, who am less than the rain! Do I not know the darkness within them? What are they but shrouds?

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The clouds go down the sky with a wealthy ease, Casting a shadow of scorn upon me for my share in death; but I Hold my own in the midst of them, darkling defy The whole of the day to extinguish the shadow I lift on the breeze . . .

darkling here from Shakespeare Milton Keats Arnold Hardy [and see others and see Figure of Echo . . .]—the point being where this word which has never been used saved in a small number of poems is brandished in the poem, in the matter of scorn and of trotting out two additional species of shadow.

From Manuscript Notes for a Final Chapter, “Shadows of Shadows” Present absences What about—in re the positivizing of negativity—our consciousness of voids in painting: what are construed by some discursive agendas about drawing either as [a] not to be acknowledged or else, more modern[?] as heuristic devices for better rendering what surrounds and thereby creates them? And what is the relation of this if any to our post-­Corot consciousness (read back into Chardin?) of modeling shadow. Does it take a touch of frowning on the surface of a pot to give it depth?

Shadows by Cezanne and Braque Cubist or post-­Impressionist painting where a shadow seems to have more substance than what casts it? And here’s where

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one tries to get a still of a Tom and Jerry or other WB cartoon in which a shadow gets rolled up or whatever. . . .

Shadow on the wall: Georges de la Tour A most enigmatic and mysterious shadow—so enigmatic that it is unacknowledged in any of the iconography of the subject of the painting, is one of Georges de la Tour’s several images of the meditating repentant Magdalen. In one she quite canonically regards a skull; in another more interesting one, the twisting flame of her candle [check on all these]. But in this, one of the most interesting for me, she contemplates a rectangular area of shadow on the wall. [no poststructuralist concerns about the void there, parallel, say, to what has been written about what is and isn’t going on in and about the world in the blank wall behind Marat’s bathtub in David’s painting. But the shadow at which she stares in umbra and figura, both, a foreshadowing, a shadow of death, and more perhaps as well. The shadow is not an absence of light, but a tabula obscura crammed with meaning.

Shadow as visual rhyme In re object accompanied by its cast shadow [but without menace or darkening]: Emerson, “Poetry and Imagination” (Poirier volume, page 459): “Every one may see, as he rides the highway through an uninteresting landscape, how a little water instantly relieves the monotony: no matter what objects are near it,—a gray rock, a grass-­patch, an alder-­bush, or a stake,—they become beautiful by being reflected. It is rhyme to the eye, and explains the charm of rhyme to the ear. Shadows please us as still finer rhymes . . . .”

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An old smile One of the most vivid shadows in western painting is, strangely enough, not acknowledged as such. Vasari says that Leonardo’s portrait of Mona Lisa, “for Francesco del Giocondo” was “painted in a manner to cause the boldest artists to despair . . . Mona Lisa was very beautiful, and while Leonardo was drawing her portrait he engaged people to play and sing, and jesters to keep her merry, and remove that melancholy which painting usually gives to portraits. This figure of Leonardo’s has such a pleasant smile that it seemed rather divine than human. . . .” The story of that smile depended to some degree on the enigmatic character of the landscape with regard to the figure that eventually allowed Walter Pater to allegorize her as a sort of Ewig Weibliche, “Older than the rocks among which she sits.” All this casts the shadow of enigma on the smile itself (particularly after Browning’s implications about Fra Pandolf ’s unfortunate smiling sitter). But if we examine the smile closely, blocking off all of the right-­hand portion of the face up to the very start of the mouth, we see that the muscles are not contracted. What we have covered up is a tiny area of painted modeling shadow, in fact, and in several senses of the word as it has been used in English phrase and fable, “the shadow of a smile.”

Acknowl ed gmen ts }

John Hollander loved the time he spent at Cambridge and the chance the Clark Lectures gave him to shape his ideas about poetic shadow. In his own acknowledgments, he would have thanked most strongly the Master and Fellows of Trinity College, in particular Amartya Sen, Master at the time he delivered the Clark Lectures; Sir Michael Atiyah, Master at the time of his election as Clark Lecturer; members of the selection committee, including the late Anne Barton, Christopher Decker, Eric Griffiths, the late Jeremy Maule, and Adrian Poole; and Boyd Hilton, who oversaw the event in 1999. He would also have thanked Jennifer Lewin, who helped him with his original research for the lectures. For my own part, I owe a debt of thanks to Angus Fletcher and Langdon Hammer, who offered vital encouragement and advice at the start of my work of editing these lectures. I also want to thank those who offered help and counsel, in many different ways, as I grappled with the minute particulars of the book: Tom Bishop, David Bromwich, David Carbone, 155

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Acknowledgments

Peter Cole, James Kugel, Joseph Loewenstein, and Rosanna Warren. I am grateful to all those at the University of Chicago Press who have made this book possible, including my editor, Alan Thomas; Randolph Petilos; my manuscript editor, Renaldo Migaldi; and the book’s designer, Ryan Li. Liza Lorwin saw me through this project, helping me to weigh small and large questions as the work unfolded, and to know what counted most in this conversation with an old friend and teacher. Lastly, my profound thanks to Natalie Charkow Hollander, herself a sculptor of substantial shadows, for her trust in me to undertake this project and for her support throughout. The book’s dedication is my own, but it would have been John’s as well. Kenneth Gross

Bi bl i ogra p hy }

In cases where it was impossible to confirm the particular edition of a work that Hollander quotes from or cites in his lectures, I have listed below a text such as he might readily have consulted in 1999, most often a modern scholarly edition (two each, as it turned out, for Shakespeare’s sonnets and Paradise Lost, which Hollander quotes in both original-­ spelling and modernized versions). For further on Hollander’s sources, see my preface.—KG Abrams, M. H. The Mirror and the Lamp: Romantic Theory and the Critical Tradition. New York: Oxford University Press, 1953. Aeschylus. Aeschylus. Translated by Herbert Weir Smyth. Loeb Classical Library. 2 vols. London: Heinemann, 1922–26. Alighieri, Dante. The Paradiso of Dante Alighieri. Translated by Philip H. Wicksteed. Temple Classics Edition. London: Dent, 1899. ———. The Divine Comedy. Translated by Allen Mandelbaum. 3 vols. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980–84. ———. The Divine Comedy. Translated, with a commentary, by Charles S. Singleton. 6 vols. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1970– 75. Andersen, Hans Christian. The Complete Fairy Tales and Stories. Translated by Erik Christian Haugaard. New York: Anchor, 1983. Apollinaire, Guillaume. Oeuvres poétiques. Edited by Marcel Adéma and Michel Décaudin. Paris: Gallimard, 1959. 157

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Arnheim, Rudolph. Art and Visual Perception: A Psychology of the Creative Eye. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1954. Auerbach, Erich. Scenes from the Drama of European Literature: Six Essays. New York: Meridian Books, 1959. Bacon, Francis. The Essayes or Counsels, Civill and Morall. Edited by Michael Kiernan. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985. Biblia Hebraica Stuttgartensia. Edited by Karl Elliger and Wilhelm Rudolph. 2nd ed. Stuttgart: German Bible Society, 1984. Biblia Vulgata. Edited by Alberto Colunga and Laurentio Turrado. Madrid: Biblioteca di Autores Christianos, 1977. Blake, William. The Complete Poetry and Prose. Edited by David V. Erdman, commentary by Harold Bloom. Rev. ed. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982. Bloom, Harold. Poetry and Repression: Revisionism from Blake to Stevens. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1976. ———. The Ringers in the Tower: Studies in Romantic Tradition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1971. Browne, Thomas. The Prose of Sir Thomas Browne. Edited by Norman Endicott. New York: Norton, 1967. Bunyan, Thomas. The Pilgrim’s Progress From This World to That which is to come. London, 1678. Campion, Thomas. Campion’s Works. Edited by Percival Vivian. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1909. Chamisso, Adelbert von. Peter Schlemihl. Translated by John Bowring. 3rd ed. London, 1861. ———. The Wonderful History of Peter Schlemihl. Translated by William Howitt. London: Longman, 1843. Chapman, John. Poems of George Chapman. Edited by Phyllis Brooks Bartlett. New York: Russell and Russell, 1962. Chuang Tzu. The Complete Works. Translated by Burton Watson. New York: Columbia University Press, 1968. Churchill, Charles. The Poems of Charles Churchill. Edited by James Laver. 2 vols. London: Eyre and Spottiswoode, 1933. Coleridge, Samuel Taylor. Logic. Edited by James Robert De Jager Jackson. Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Vol. 13. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1981. ———. Poems. Edited by Ernest Hartley Coleridge. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1954. Colie, Rosalie L. Paradoxia Epidemica: The Renaissance Tradition of Paradox. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1966.

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Conrad, Joseph. The Heart of Darkness. Edited by Robert Kimbrough. 3rd ed. New York: Norton, 1988. Cook, Arthur Bernard. Zeus: A Study in Ancient Religion. 3 vols. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1914–40. Crane, Hart. The Poems of Hart Crane. Edited by Marc Simon. New York: Liveright, 1986. Da Vinci, Leonardo. Treatise on Painting. Translated and edited by A. Philip McMahon. 2 vols. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1956. Dahood, Mitchell, ed. and trans. Psalms. The Anchor Bible. 3 vols. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1966–70. Daniel, Samuel. Tethys Festival: or, The Queenes Wake. London, 1610. Daniélou, Jean. From Shadows to Reality: Studies in Biblical Typology of the Fathers. Translated by Wulstan Hibberd. London: Burns & Oates, 1960. De la Mare, Walter. The Complete Poems. New York: Knopf, 1970. Dickinson, Emily. Poems. Edited by Thomas H. Johnson. 3 vols. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1955. Donne, John. Complete English Poems. Edited by A. J. Smith. Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, 1971. ———. Songs and Sonets. Edited by Theodore Redpath. 2nd ed. London: Methuen & Co., 1983. Doughtie, Edward, ed. Liber Lilliati, Elizabethan Verse and Song ­(Bodleian MS Rawlinson Poetry 148). Newark, DE: University of Delaware Press, 1985. ———. Lyrics from English Airs, 1596–1622. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1970. Dowson, Ernest. Poems. London: John Lane, 1905. Dryden, John. Works of John Dryden. Edited by Edward Niles Hooker and H. T. Swedenberg, Jr. 20 vols. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1956–2000. Eberwein, Jane Donahue. Dickinson: Strategies of Limitation. Amherst, MA: University of Massachussetts Press, 1985. Edwards, Jonathan. Images or Shadows of Divine Things. Edited by Perry Miller. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1948. Eliot, T. S. Collected Poems, 1909–1962. New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1963. ———. “The Waste Land”: A Facsimile and Transcript of the Original Drafts Including the Annotations of Ezra Pound. Edited by Valerie Eliot. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1971.

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Whitehead, Alfred North. Symbolism: Its Meaning and Effect. New York: Macmillan, 1927. Whitman, Walt. Leaves of Grass: A Comprehensive Reader’s Edition. Edited by Harold W. Blodgett and Sculley Bradley. New York: Norton, 1968. Wither, George. A Collection of Emblemes (1635). Facsimile with introduction by Michael Bath. Aldershot, UK: Scolar Press, 1989. Wordsworth, William. The Poems. Edited by John O. Hayden. 2 vols. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1981. Yeats, William Butler. Letters on Poetry from W. B. Yeats to Dorothy Wellesley. London: Oxford University Press, 1940. ———. The Poems. Edited by Richard J. Finneran. New York: Macmillan, 1983. Young, Edward. The Complaint, or Night-­Thoughts on Life, Death, and Immortality, to which is added A Paraphrase on Part of the Book of Job. London, 1750.

I nd ex of Authors and Artists Cite d }

Abrams, M. H., 69 Aeschylus, 38–39 Alighieri, Dante, 14, 44, 45–47, 53, 96, 99, 121, 122, 135, 139–40, 141, 145 Andersen, Hans Christian, 76–79 Antonioni, Michelangelo, 116 Apollinaire, Guillaume, 92 Arnheim, Rudolph, 3, 70 Arnold, Matthew, 151 Auerbach, Erich, 47, 61 Bacon, Sir Francis, 38 Bentley, Richard, 50 Bible, 35–36, 40–41, 47–48, 55, 60, 61; Acts, 65; Amos, 40; Chronicles, 139; Colossians, 16, 47; I Corinthians, 22, 38; Exodus, 37; Hebrews, 47–48; Isaiah, 41, 90, 108; Jeremiah, 40; Job, 36, 40; Joel, 41; Luke, 65, 73; Psalms, 36, 40–41, 65, 67, 91; Revelation, 53 Bishop, Samuel, 142

Blake, William, 99, 102, 122, 124, 144; “Ah! Sun-flower,” 12, 90, 137; Jerusalem, 80; The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, 79; Milton, 81–82 Bloom, Harold, 81, 90, 115, 137 Bowring, Sir John, 74 Browne, Sir Thomas, 2, 41–42, 56, 147 Browning, Robert, 153 Bunyan, Thomas, 134 Buonarotti, Michelangelo, 29 Burke, Edmund, 40 Byron, George Gordon, Lord, 135 Campion, Thomas, 11–12, 13–14, 27–29, 137 Carroll, Lewis (Charles Lutwidge Dodgson), 83 Chamisso, Adelbert von, 74–76 Chapman, John, 29–31, 139 Chardin, Jean-Baptiste-Siméon, 151 Chuang Tzu, 83

167

168  Churchill, Charles, 39 Cocteau, Jean, 127 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 74, 102–3, 144 Colie, Rosalie L., 10 Confucius, 83 Conrad, Joseph, 139 Cook, Arthur Bernard, 73 Corot, Jean-Baptiste-Camille, 151 Crane, Hart, 128–29 Cruikshank, George, 74 Dahood, Mitchell, 40n Daniel, Samuel, 36–37 Daniélou, Jean, 48 Dante. See Alighieri, Dante David, Jacques-Louis, 152 Da Vinci, Leonardo, 1, 10–11, 42, 133, 153 De la Mare, Walter, 49–50 Descartes, René, 6 Dickinson, Emily, 49–50, 90–91, 136–37 Donne, John: Elegy V, 19; “The Flea,” 5; “A Lecture Upon the Shadow,” 4–10, 12, 14, 17, 34, 132; “A Nocturnal upon Saint Lucy’s Day,” 7 Dowland, John, 31, 45 Dowson, Ernest, 40, 125–26 Dryden, John, 2–3, 44 Eberwein, Jane Donahue, 137 Edwards, Jonathan, 48 Eliot, T. S., 101, 139; “The Death of Saint Narcissus,” 121–22; “The Hollow Men,” 117–27, 139; “Sweeney Erect,” 120; “The Waste Land,” 120–22, 123, 125 Elizabeth I (queen), 8, 21, 25, 28, 65 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 15, 120, 140, 147, 152 Empson, William, 60

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Index Fairclough, H. Rushton, 44 Fessenden, T. G., 142 FitzGerald, Edward, 122–23 Fitzgerald, Robert, 44–45 Fouqué, Friedrich de la Motte, 76 Fox, George, 120 Frazer, James, 73 Freneau, Philip, 10 Freud, Sigmund, 135–36 Gilbert, W. S. See Gilbert and Sullivan Gilbert and Sullivan, 142 Golding, Arthur, 15 Gray, Thomas, 10, 87 Greville, Fulke, 22, 132, Hardy, Thomas, 151 Hawk, Susan, 93 Hawthorne, Nathaniel, 123–24 Heidegger, Martin, 70 Herbert, George, 26, 65 Herbert, Mary Sidney, Countess of Pembroke, 65 Herbert of Cherbury, Edward Herbert, Baron, 26 Hesiod, 26 Hill, Geoffrey, 127–28 Hitchcock, Alfred, 142 Hoffmann, E. T. A., 74 Hogg, James, 123 Homer, 43–44, 55, 99 Hood, Thomas, 110–12, 136 Horace, 42–43, 126 Howitt, William, 74 Hunt, Leigh, 66 Irwin, John, 88–89 James, Henry, 39, 79 Johnson, Lionel, 38 Johnson, Samuel, 112 Jonson, Ben, 12–13, 88 Jung, C. G., 124

Index   Kay, George R., 141 Keats, John, 110, 114, 133, 150, 151 Kermode, Frank, 19, 21 Kierkegaard, Søren, 123 Kincaid, James, 115 King, Henry (bishop), 84–86, 91 La Tour, Georges de, 152 Lawrence, D. H., 128, 133–34, 150– 51 Lee, Nathaniel, 2–3 Lely, Peter, 20 Lewis, C. S., 30 Locke, John, 71–72 Lovelace, Richard, 20 Luther, Martin, 120 Lyly, John, 16, 18 MacDonald, George, 143–44 Mallarmé, Stéphane, 142 Mandelbaum, Allen, 140 Mann, Thomas, 75, 76 Marvell, Andrew, 56 Melville, Herman, 89–90, 124, 142– 43 Mew, Charlotte, 148–49 Miller, Karl, 123 Milton, John, 12, 13, 81, 87; “L’Alle­ gro,” 55; Comus, 55; “Methought I saw my late espouséd saint,” 66; Paradise Lost, 50–62, 63, 99, 106, 108, 122, 149, 151 Moore, Thomas, 87 Nerval, Gérard de, 146 Nichols, Fred J., 43 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 143 Ovid, 15, 27 Owen, John, 42–43 Palgrave, Francis Turner, 137 Pater, Walter, 36, 153 Pausanias, 73

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169

Pembroke, Mary Sidney Herbert, Countess of. See Herbert, Mary Sidney, Countess of Pembroke Petrarch, 11, 12, 14, 17, 25, 141 Philo of Alexandria, 37–38 Philostratus, 57 Piatt, John James, 109, 137 Pindar, 38 Pitt, William, 39–40 Plato, 14–15, 26, 29, 35, 36, 37, 44, 47, 56, 59, 61, 71, 79, 83, 99, 123, 133 Pliny the Elder, 15, 105 Plutarch, 25, 73 Poe, Edgar Allan, 101; “DreamLand,” 63; “Eldorado,” 62–67, 104; “Eleonora,” 10, 66, 144; The Narrative of A. Gordon Pym, 144; “The Raven,” 96–97; “Shadow—A Parable,” 105–8; “Silence” (poem), 11; “Silence— A Fable,” 108 Polybius, 73 Pope, Alexander, 55 Propertius, 83 Proust, Marcel, 132n Ricks, Christopher, 113–14 Rilke, Rainer Maria, 133, 148 Robinson, Edward Arlington, 104–5 Rosenberg, Isaac, 149 Rossetti, Dante Gabriel, 42, 103–4, 135, 141 Sandys, George, 15 Schopenhauer, Arthur, 15, 140 Scott, Sir Walter, 39 Shakespeare, William, 151; 1 Henry VI, 53; Macbeth, 25; Measure for Measure, 112–13; The Merchant of Venice, 18–19; The Merry Wives of Windsor, 53n; A Midsummer Night’s Dream, 25, 53; sonnets, 20–26; Titus Andronicus, 55;

170 

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Shakespeare, William (continued) Two Gentlemen of Verona, 19; Venus and Adonis, 27 Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 89, 109, 122; “Adonais,” 95–96, 108–9; “Alastor,” 93; “A Defence of Poetry,” 92–93; “Epipsychidion,” 93–94; “Hymn to Intellectual Beauty,” 94, 99; “Mont Blanc,” 95; “Ode to the West Wind,” 99; “Ozymandias,” 112, 128; Prometheus Unbound, 82; “To a Sky-lark,” 95; “The Triumph of Life,” 96– 100, 114, 127; “The Witch of Atlas,” 95 Sidney, Sir Philip, 38, 65 Sinatra, Frank, 138n Smith, Grover, Jr., 119, 126, 127 Snow, Edward, 133n Sophocles, 42 Southam, B. C., 139 Spenser, Edmund, 21–22, 24–25, 28, 51, 53, 54, 60, 70 Stevens, Wallace, 43 Stickney, Trumbull, 109 Sullivan, Sir Arthur. See Gilbert and Sullivan Swinburne, Algernon Charles, 101–2, 122

Index Tabb, John Bannister, 91–92 Tagore, Rabindranath, 83 Tennyson, Alfred Lord, 101; “The Lady of Shalott,” 113; “Mari­ ana,” 112–17, 138–39; “Maud,” 122; “Oenone,” 112; “Recollections of the Arabian Nights,” 55–56; “Tithonus,” 63 Tertullian, 61 Thoreau, Henry David, 70, 145–48 Todd, Mabel Loomis, 136 Valéry, Paul, 3, 10, 62, 109–10 Vasari, Giorgio, 153 Virgil: Aeneid, 35, 44–45, 51, 52, 53, 99; Eclogues, 34–35 Wellesley, Dorothy, 145 Wesley, John, 120 Whitehead, Alfred North, 39–40 Whitman, Walt, 25, 88, 104 Williams, William Carlos, 49 Wither, George, 83–84 Wordsworth, William, 20, 88, 108 Yeats, William Butler, 43, 124, 145 Young, Edward, 3, 14, 38