My recent posts have focused on Eben Loomis’ “A Sunset Idyl,” a work he published in 1903 in a collection of poems he dedicated to his wife, Mary, for their fiftieth wedding anniversary. From the start, I sort of poked fun at Loomis’ use of the word “athwart,” which showed up promptly athwart the second line of his semicentennial work:
All day the drifting clouds had trailed along
Their gray, cool wreaths of mist athwart the hills
I checked on Dickinson’s use of the word "athwart" in her poetry, but she never used it. However, in exploring the word, I did find an example of its usage by Alfred Lord Tennyson in his work “A Lover’s Tale”:
the cloud of unforgotten things,
That sometimes on the horizon of the mind
Lies folded, often sweeps athwart in storm
Turns out that Tennyson also used the word twice in his poem “Mariana.” The first instance comes in the second stanza:
She drew her casement-curtain by,
And glanced athwart the glooming flats.
And the second use of the word? Well, I’ll get to that momentarily. First, let me share a bit of history about the poem.
Tennyson's "Mariana," written in 1830, was inspired by a single line from Shakespeare's play Measure for Measure: "There, at the moated grange, resides this dejected Mariana.” Tennyson took Shakespeare's brief mention of the abandoned character and expanded her into a psychological study of isolation, grief, and prolonged waiting.
Then, when I read through Tennyson’s work, I wondered if Tennyson’s poem had, in turn, inspired Edgar Allan Poe to pen his classic, “The Raven.” Take a look at these lines that conclude each of the seven stanzas of "Mariana":
All day the drifting clouds had trailed along
Their gray, cool wreaths of mist athwart the hills
I checked on Dickinson’s use of the word "athwart" in her poetry, but she never used it. However, in exploring the word, I did find an example of its usage by Alfred Lord Tennyson in his work “A Lover’s Tale”:
the cloud of unforgotten things,
That sometimes on the horizon of the mind
Lies folded, often sweeps athwart in storm
Turns out that Tennyson also used the word twice in his poem “Mariana.” The first instance comes in the second stanza:
She drew her casement-curtain by,
And glanced athwart the glooming flats.
And the second use of the word? Well, I’ll get to that momentarily. First, let me share a bit of history about the poem.
Tennyson's "Mariana," written in 1830, was inspired by a single line from Shakespeare's play Measure for Measure: "There, at the moated grange, resides this dejected Mariana.” Tennyson took Shakespeare's brief mention of the abandoned character and expanded her into a psychological study of isolation, grief, and prolonged waiting.
Then, when I read through Tennyson’s work, I wondered if Tennyson’s poem had, in turn, inspired Edgar Allan Poe to pen his classic, “The Raven.” Take a look at these lines that conclude each of the seven stanzas of "Mariana":
There are numerous other gloomy details as well: blackest moss, rusted nails, falling tears, thickest dark, glooming flats, cold winds, a gray-eyed morn, blacken’d waters, a low moon, shrill winds, and creaky hinges. Then, in the final stanza of the poem comes the second use of “athwart”:
but most she loathed the hour
When the thick-moted sunbeam lay
Athwart the chambers, and the day
Was sloping toward his western bower.
And buried within those lines – did you catch it? The thick-moted sunbeam lay athwart the “chambers.” The poem then concludes with the lines shown above -- and quoth the bard – nothing more.
Did Tennyson’s “Mariana,” in fact, inspire Poe? I ran a Google-search and found these articles:
* “Poe and Tennyson,” a comparison of Tennyson's early poetry and Poe's stories which suggest “the dream-shrouded entrapment of the poetic soul within the world's ‘deserted’ (Tennyson) or ‘haunted’ (Poe) houses,” HERE.
* A paper noting similarities between Poe's "The Raven" and Tennyson's "The Lady of Shallot,” HERE.
Oh – ad speaking of "The Raven," I also found something "Quaint and Curious – HERE.
but most she loathed the hour
When the thick-moted sunbeam lay
Athwart the chambers, and the day
Was sloping toward his western bower.
And buried within those lines – did you catch it? The thick-moted sunbeam lay athwart the “chambers.” The poem then concludes with the lines shown above -- and quoth the bard – nothing more.
Did Tennyson’s “Mariana,” in fact, inspire Poe? I ran a Google-search and found these articles:
* “Poe and Tennyson,” a comparison of Tennyson's early poetry and Poe's stories which suggest “the dream-shrouded entrapment of the poetic soul within the world's ‘deserted’ (Tennyson) or ‘haunted’ (Poe) houses,” HERE.
* A paper noting similarities between Poe's "The Raven" and Tennyson's "The Lady of Shallot,” HERE.
Oh – ad speaking of "The Raven," I also found something "Quaint and Curious – HERE.
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