A third and final post (for the time being) on eclogues. This is an intertextual eclogue I wrote around May last year making use of an Emily Brontë poem. There's a conversation going on with the text and contexts of the original Brontë poem, but there's also a commentary on eco-collapse. It should be noted that by the time Emily died in 1848, the Industrial Revolution had so accelerated Anthropocene climate change that she was embedded in the damage in ways that might have induced a sublimated form of anxiety about 'human progress' if not a material resistance because of awareness.
Mind you, it was only eight years later that Eunice Newton Foote made observations about climate and carbon dioxide, and towards the end of the century (1896) when Svante Arrhenius noted the effect carbon dioxide could have on temperatures on earth. So even though there's an absurdity implicit in culture jamming across very different eras, it's maybe not so absurd when we consider the import of 'progress'. Juxtaposing Brontë's (anomalous in many ways) 'conservative' politics in conversation with an (Audenesque) 'age of anxiety' resistance voice is belied by the far-sightedness of her insights into the self with regard to 'nature', and the deep passion for the interconnectedness of life.
This is not a song competition à la Virgil's Third Eclogue (which drew on Theocritus, of course), but rather a 'song fusing': a discussion that becomes the figurative annealing of a problem that goes back to the mass destruction of forests, the rise of metals, and the entrenching of the military state in all its forms. There's no third speaker in this poem acting as judge, but maybe the reader is playing that role: as much over their own role in climate change and eco-destruction as over the validity of the two voices.
Over the years I have used intertext a great deal, but as I always note, there are problems attached to doing so. Brontë isn't given a choice, of course, but I think the need of the planet outweighs such proprieties. As one who opposes AI usage of writers' work but am also opposed to anyone owning words or even combination of words, it might seem straightforward that I believe such jamming is an automatic 'right'. Further, as I use what I call 'templating' to intertext with 'canonical' works in order to contest the control mechanisms that deliver them to us as 'authoritative' (in whatever way), it might seem that I am entrenched in this 'freedom'.
But it's more complex than this: there are many texts I'd never touch (especially if I felt it culturally appropriative), and when I do it can be either out of massive respect or massive disgust. It's not an easy picture. Suffice it to say in this instance that Emily Brontë's poetry accompanies me everywhere I go (I literally carry her collected poems with me everywhere). Oh, and competition has been a big part of the destruction of the biosphere. There is no competitiveness in this!
Eclogue With Emily Brontë’s ‘Shall earth no more inspire thee’
EB: Shall earth no more inspire thee,
Thou lonely dreamer now?
Since passion may not fire thee
Shall Nature cease to bow?
JK: I speak plainly: I’ve been keeping
records of failure, of diminishing rainfall
and defoliation, of contaminated rivers
and erosion. Anti-inspiration.
EB: Thy mind is ever moving
In regions dark to thee;
Recall its useless roving—
Come back and dwell with me.
JK: I’m working on it. Where
I come from and don’t belong,
I am trying to save a forest
from a ‘green metals’ miner.
EB: I know my mountain breezes
Enchant and soothe thee still—
I know my sunshine pleases
Despite thy wayward will.
JK: They do, maybe now
more than ever, but facts mess
with the imagery. There
are mountains being converted to ore.
EB: When day with evening blending
Sinks from the summer sky,
I’ve seen thy spirit bending
In fond idolatry.
JK: I idolise the earth,
not the idols of capital —
a ‘summer’s sky’
is a broken thesaurus.
EB: I’ve watched thee every hour;
I know my mighty sway,
I know my magic power
To drive thy griefs away.
JK: True, I rely on you.
But there’s less room for rhyme
outside of advertising:
gadgets, oil particulate, fate.
EB: Few hearts to mortals given
On earth so wildly pine;
Yet none would ask a heaven
More like this earth than thine.
JK: Yes, that’s it — ask no more
of heaven than we have around us,
or had... going going but not gone.
A tree lost it seems too easy to forget.
EB: Then let my winds caress thee;
Thy comrade let me be—
Since nought beside can bless thee,
Return and dwell with me.
JK: Seems like we’re arguing
when we’re not — the flight
of a pigeon is as glorious
as that of a goshawk. I love both.
John Kinsella with Emily Brontë
Anyone interested in my eclogue work might look at poetry collections such as The Hunt, Visitants, Peripheral Light, The New Arcadia, Supervivid Depastoralism and The Pastoraclasm (essentially a book of eco-eclogues).
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