under covers
Today I thought of a poem by Christina Rossetti, "Winter: My Secret". As the title suggests, the poem is about the speaker's secret. Throughout the poem, the speaker taunts the reader: What is her secret? Is there even a secret?
I have read this poem many times but it was only today that I wondered about the colon in the title. It seems to suggest that the speaker's secret is simply the season of winter. Winter appears in the poem as conditions that are anathema to disclosure, making "today" too cold for the speaker to tell her secret:
"Today's a nipping day, a biting day;/ In which one wants a shawl,/ A veil, a cloak, and other wraps:/ I cannot ope to very one who taps"
I like to think Christina Rossetti was having a prescient moment when she wrote this poem, foreseeing that some day in the future critics and scholars and students would pore tirelessly, tiresomely, over her poems, looking for traces of the life she lived. The poem rebuts such efforts, it refutes the transparency of writing - the way a text can bare all, can show the writer in all the nakedness of her emotion, her beliefs, everything that makes her a person. The poem seems to say: the writer can create, alongside the surfaces that reveal depths, other surfaces to conceal other depths. There can be space for secrecy, all need not be uncovered.
"Winter: My Secret" was published in a volume that came out in 1862. That year over in America Emily Dickinson wrote a poem that was kept hidden away together with a thousand and more and it has a similar thread. The poem is short enough to quote in full:
A Charm invests a face
Imperfectly beheld -
The Lady dare not lift her Veil
For fear it be dispelled -
But peers beyond her mesh -
And wishes - and denies -
Lest Interview - annul a want
That Image - satisfies -
This poem also makes me think of writing fiction, that there is a delicate balance that needs to be struck otherwise too much or too little is said. The face loses points of charm when it is entirely uncovered.
Is there something being said too about attention and interest that can be captured and sustained through appropriate veiling? The world of fiction is made up of made-up persons, things, situations, and all of it can be dissolved into nothing if there isn't any desire on the reader's part to behold and be engaged by the writer's imagination.
For the writer, there is the reminder of the care that needs to be taken in the work of veiling and unveiling.
I have read this poem many times but it was only today that I wondered about the colon in the title. It seems to suggest that the speaker's secret is simply the season of winter. Winter appears in the poem as conditions that are anathema to disclosure, making "today" too cold for the speaker to tell her secret:
"Today's a nipping day, a biting day;/ In which one wants a shawl,/ A veil, a cloak, and other wraps:/ I cannot ope to very one who taps"
I like to think Christina Rossetti was having a prescient moment when she wrote this poem, foreseeing that some day in the future critics and scholars and students would pore tirelessly, tiresomely, over her poems, looking for traces of the life she lived. The poem rebuts such efforts, it refutes the transparency of writing - the way a text can bare all, can show the writer in all the nakedness of her emotion, her beliefs, everything that makes her a person. The poem seems to say: the writer can create, alongside the surfaces that reveal depths, other surfaces to conceal other depths. There can be space for secrecy, all need not be uncovered.
"Winter: My Secret" was published in a volume that came out in 1862. That year over in America Emily Dickinson wrote a poem that was kept hidden away together with a thousand and more and it has a similar thread. The poem is short enough to quote in full:
A Charm invests a face
Imperfectly beheld -
The Lady dare not lift her Veil
For fear it be dispelled -
But peers beyond her mesh -
And wishes - and denies -
Lest Interview - annul a want
That Image - satisfies -
This poem also makes me think of writing fiction, that there is a delicate balance that needs to be struck otherwise too much or too little is said. The face loses points of charm when it is entirely uncovered.
Is there something being said too about attention and interest that can be captured and sustained through appropriate veiling? The world of fiction is made up of made-up persons, things, situations, and all of it can be dissolved into nothing if there isn't any desire on the reader's part to behold and be engaged by the writer's imagination.
For the writer, there is the reminder of the care that needs to be taken in the work of veiling and unveiling.
Labels: writing
posted by wheyface at 10:11 PM
4 Comments:
Some thoughts that came to my head while reading your entry:
Does one not bare one's soul when one writes? Would partial concealment make one's writing less sincere, less honest, and hence less real/true (although we're talking fiction)?
Would the reader notice this, and what would be his likely reaction? Would he merely want to go where the writer wants him to go and stop there or would he prefer to go all the way? Does the writer have sufficient trust in his readers?
Off-topic: My prescient moment came earlier today when I looked at a car's licence plate number and noticed that it was 9977. It's a habit of mine to mentally add up licence plate numbers of cars when I'm travelling on buses. Today, suddenly it dawned on me that instead of doing the 9x2=18 + 7x2=14 = 32 process, it would have been easier and much faster if I had done 10x2 + 5x2 = 30 + 2 = 32. Ha ha ha!
Yes, all writing is in a sense autobiographical. I wasn't thinking so much of self-concealment as crafting in the post. Baring gives the impression that there is an opening up of a self through writing and there is entering into that self by others through reading. There isn't much craft in baring. It's what I do when I pick up the phone and talk to you about what's been bothering me. :)
Enlightenment: See --- that's why you're a writer and I'm a reader. :-) Yes, baring doesn't require craft; it requires courage and trust.
Looking forward to many more of your works. :-)
You're much more than a reader. :) And I'm not courageous, just desperado.
Post a Comment
<< Home