"Eros" by Robert Bridges

The missing word at 23:18 is "ironically"

Topics discussed in this episode include:

-My thanks to Heights Arts for the feature! 

-Hopkins and Bridges: name a more iconic duo.

-Sprung Rhythm vs. Syllabics

-Bridges' whacky work of logometry, Milton's Prosody

-18th century in the streets, 19th century in the sheets

-Iambic tetrameter couplets and the Hallmark effect

-No more unqualified ahistorical scansions! Mea culpa. 

-Robbie's vision of elision

-Congrats! It's triplets. 

-Polytheism is the deification of allegorical thinking

-Eros only wants one thing, and it's disgusting

-Not in my good Christian poem! 

-To be pagan is to be unconscious of fallenness

-A terrifying force of nature has never been sexier

-The raison d'etre of Anna and Emma

-Eros and Psyche

-It's all more and less than you think. 

Text of Poem:

Eros

Why hast thou nothing in thy face?

Thou idol of the human race,

Thou tyrant of the human heart,

The flower of lovely youth that art;

Yea, and that standest in thy youth

An image of eternal Truth,

With thy exuberant flesh so fair,

That only Pheidias might compare,

Ere from his chaste marmoreal form

Time had decayed the colours warm;

Like to his gods in thy proud dress,

Thy starry sheen of nakedness.

Surely thy body is thy mind,

For in thy face is nought to find,

Only thy soft unchristen’d smile,

That shadows neither love nor guile,

But shameless will and power immense,

In secret sensuous innocence.

O king of joy, what is thy thought?

I dream thou knowest it is nought,

And wouldst in darkness come, but thou

Makest the light where’er thou go.

Ah yet no victim of thy grace,

None who e’er long’d for thy embrace,

Hath cared to look upon thy face.

Transcript

Versecraft 3.2 “Eros” by Robert Bridges

Welcome to this week’s episode everyone! Versecraft has seen substantial growth in listeners lately, so if you’re new here, thank you so much for checking out the show, and I hope you enjoy what you find. I’m sure some of this new popularity is due to recent outspoken statements that I’ve made, and to those of you who are here because I’ve given voice to your exasperation with the mediocrity and confusion of the poetry world, to those who are agnostic but curious about my arguments, and to those who listen simply because you’re intellectual masochists, I hope you all get what you want out of this show. I’m here to serve, and my main goal is to inspire a new or continued love of poetry—the rest is important, but secondary. 

Another reason for the bump in listeners however may be due to the fact that I am the featured poet of the month for Heights Arts here in Cleveland—I’m very honored, and I’d like to thank the staff of Heights Arts for believing in my work and giving me the support of their platform. 

Speaking of support, if you, dear listener, decide that you love picking up what I’m putting down here on Versecraft, please consider supporting the show, either by becoming a member or giving a one-time donation—it really helps to make this show possible, and is one of the only ways that I can actually earn money from poetry in this philistine world we live in. You can do so at the link in the show notes or at www.buymeacoffee.com/versecraft. Thank you so much. 

Today’s poet is a fascinating figure whose long life spanned the Victorian, Edwardian, and Georgian eras, and whose work, while it never fully engaged with modernity, also did not mindlessly embraced the fashions of its day. Classical yet experimental, quiet yet polemical, nationally honored but never massively popular, Robert Bridges holds a rich but under-sung place in the history of English letters. Bridges, who lived from 1844 to 1930, figured out the trajectory of his life shortly after graduating from Oxford: he would study medicine and become a successful doctor, retire at forty, then spend the rest of his life writing poetry. As it turned out, this is almost exactly what he did, though he began writing verse while still a physician and retired slightly earlier than expected due to pneumonia. In his Oxford days, he formed a lifelong friendship with a strange fellow student named Gerard Manley Hopkins, and the two would influence one another’s poetry and ideas about poetry for their entire lives. Though Hopkins is of course the better-known poet today, during his lifetime he was totally obscure, and it was only with the advocacy of the more successful Bridges after his death that any of his work reached a general public. Though Hopkins, fairly or not, overshadows Bridges in the contemporary mind, we have the generosity and goodwill of Bridges to thank for knowing Hopkins at all. 

Both Hopkins and Bridges were interested in deconstructing the accentual-syllabic status quo of English verse, but ended up taking opposite approaches. While Hopkins, enamored of Anglo-Saxon and Welsh poetry, chose to focus on accent and alliteration, developing what he called “sprung rhythm,” which you can hear more about in my Hopkins episode, Bridges had much more of a Mediterranean bent. After some failed experiments attempting to adopt Greco-Roman quantitative meter into English, Bridges instead opted to develop a tradition of syllabic verse in English— no doubt inspired by French and Italian precedents, but also, interestingly, by his infamous and idiosyncratic interpretation of Milton, of all people. 

You see, in the late 1880’s, Bridges was asked to write a preface for a new edition of Paradise Lost. Rather than write a standard preface, he chose to write an entire book, entitled Milton’s Prosody, in which he thoroughly analyzed the meter of Milton’s epic. In writing this work, he came to a startling conclusion: Milton was writing syllabic, not accentual-syllabic verse— that is, he was counting syllables, but not accents. If this were true, it would mean that Milton, whom we typically think of as one of the greatest masters of iambic pentameter, was not thinking of his lines as iambic pentameter at all, but simply as arrangements of ten syllables each. Bridges supported his claim by demonstrating that, while Milton was willing to let his accents fall at any place in the line, and even occasionally used fewer than five accents in a line, if one scanned his lines using Milton’s intended elisions, that is, the blending of two syllables together in particular instances, every single line in Paradise Lost would be found to consist of ten syllables. We will have occasion to talk more about elisions later. Because, on this theory, the syllables were consistent, but the accents weren’t, Milton was writing syllabic verse, not accentual-syllabic verse. Inspired by this discovery, eager to find a fresh alternative to the rising tide of so-called free verse, and seeking, like Eliot, for a form which would accommodate multiple languages at once, Bridges turned in the second half of his career to composing poetry out of what he called “loose alexandrines,” lines of twelve syllables each with little regard for accent quantity or placement. This was the meter in which he wrote what is largely considered his masterwork, composed in his eighties, a long philosophical poem entitled The Testament of Beauty, for which he received the Order of Merit. It remains the longest syllabic poem in English. After Bridges, other writers were inspired to take up the frontier of syllabics in English, notable practitioners including Marianne Moore, Dylan Thomas, and Bridge’s own daughter, Elizabeth Daryush. 

Bridges was always a poet’s poet, never the toast of the masses but fiercely admired by a select few. It must have been due to admiration rather than popularity then that Bridges was elected the British Poet Laureate in 1913, following in the footsteps of luminaries like Tennyson, Wordsworth, and Dryden, a position he held for 17 years until his death. Today, he is known mostly for this role, his friendship with Hopkins, and his hymns, some of which remain popular. In addition to these distinctions, we would do well to remember him as a poetic innovator, an idiosyncratic prosodic theorist, and a writer of classically refined, thought-provoking verse. 

Today’s poem is from Bridges’ early period and is written in the accentual-syllabic meter we have come to know so well. At some point I will do an episode on syllabic verse, but I wanted to share this one with you today because I find it particularly haunting. It goes like this: 

Eros

Why hast thou nothing in thy face?

Thou idol of the human race,

Thou tyrant of the human heart,

The flower of lovely youth that art;

Yea, and that standest in thy youth

An image of eternal Truth,

With thy exuberant flesh so fair,

That only Pheidias might compare,

Ere from his chaste marmoreal form

Time had decayed the colours warm;

Like to his gods in thy proud dress,

Thy starry sheen of nakedness.

Surely thy body is thy mind,

For in thy face is nought to find,

Only thy soft unchristen’d smile,

That shadows neither love nor guile,

But shameless will and power immense,

In secret sensuous innocence.

O king of joy, what is thy thought?

I dream thou knowest it is nought,

And wouldst in darkness come, but thou

Makest the light where’er thou go.

Ah yet no victim of thy grace,

None who e’er long’d for thy embrace,

Hath cared to look upon thy face.

The strict iambic rhythm, the chiming rhyming couplets, and the throwaway classical allusions remind one of the Augustan poetry of the 18th century—on the other hand, the sensuous language and almost Nietzschean anxiety remind us of the time in which Bridges wrote this poem, the late 19th century. This contrast captures Bridges in a nutshell: a man devoted to classical restraint and purity, but who was nevertheless highly affected by the aestheticism, sentimentality, and angst which was his Romantic and Victorian inheritance. For a similar dynamic, check out my episode on John Keats. 

The poem is written in iambic tetrameter couplets, which is one of the most challenging forms to write in. I know you’re surprised, so let me clarify: the form is technically quite easy: what’s difficult is pulling it off so that it doesn’t sound silly, quaint, or cute. To the modern ear especially, iambic tetrameter couplets always threaten to sound like greeting card verse, and the poet must fight against this bias in order to succeed. 

In a previous episode, I theorized that iambic tetrameter and heptameter in particular are liable to strike us as most appropriate for light verse, due to their almost cloyingly song-like call and response effects, effects which are only compounded by the use of rhyme. When reading this poem, it is all too easy to slip into a bouncing rhythm which belies the seriousness of what is being said. Nevertheless, through the concentration of his thought, the fineness of his diction, and the use of subtle rhythmic modulation, Bridges succeeds in convincing me that this is not a children’s song, but a graceful and intense lyric, the songlike qualities of which only add to its uncanniness and emphasize the uncanny innocence of Eros himself. 

As I said earlier, the iambic rhythm here is very strict—the only substitutions Bridges allows himself in this poem are first foot trochaic substitutions, a replacement so commonly used as to be virtually orthodox.  But wait, you might say—what about the anapest in line 4? Or line 7? Or line 8? Or line 9? Anapests are everywhere! To us, that may be true, but not to Bridges. This is where elision comes into play.

Recently, a listener criticized me for a couple of previous scansions I’ve made on this show which he identified, rightly, as ahistorical. That is, scansions in which I identified substitutions that on paper made sense, but didn’t actually correspond to the rhythm the author had in mind. You see, prior to the 20th century, poets tended to be very orthodox about their meter—metrical substitutions were not seen as something to spice up your rhythms, but as infelicities to be avoided. As such, when we see what look like creative substitutions in verse from the 19th century or earlier, we ought to be suspicious. In most cases, what look like anapests or other skipping rhythms are actually meant to be read as iambs by eliding the apparent extra syllable to another syllable next to it. I’m aware of this fact, and have actually discussed it on the show before in reference to reading Milton. Like I said in that segment, I don’t think that scanning poetry without reference to elision is a bad thing—often, I think that it can create more exciting rhythms than the author had in mind. What is a bad thing, and which I’ll try to avoid in the future, is scanning in this way without offering a disclaimer that the original intent was otherwise. Failure to offer such a disclaimer creates a distorted view of the past, one which I am certainly not trying to disseminate. In this poem, there are many examples of places in which Bridges would have elided, and I’d like to highlight those for you today in order to make up for a couple past oversights and also to give you a sense of what I’m talking about. This is particularly appropriate for Robert Bridges, who made elision one of the primary subjects of his poetic research. 

In line 4 for instance, we are probably tempted to read a second foot anapestic substitution, because we pronounce flower as two syllables: flo-wer. But here, in order to keep the rhythm iambic, Bridges wants us to pronounce it as one syllable: flowr. As such, the line does not actually go: “The flower of lovely youth,” but instead, “the flowr of lovely youth.” When reciting this poem, I think its fine to pronounce it either way, it’s just important to know that we are putting the anapest in there, not Bridges. 

Similarly, in line 7, we are meant to pronounce exub’rant, not exuberant; in line 8, “Phidyas,” not Phidias; in line 9, “marmoryal,” not marmoreal. In each of these cases, by gliding across a vowel, we are shortening the word by one syllable, allowing it to fit perfectly into the iambic scheme. It was by employing a similar method of vowel shortening that Bridges was able to argue that Milton, who would have intended elision in his work, never wavered from writing ten syllable lines. There are two more instances of elision in this poem, but I’ll leave them for you to find. 

The last thing I’d like to remark about the form of this piece is its stanzaic structure. The poem is 25 lines long, split into sections of 12, 6, and 7 lines. The first stanza, which comprises the first half of the poem, introduces the figure of contemplation, and elaborates on its significance. From here, we shift in the second stanza to the speaker’s impression of the figure. Finally, in the third stanza, meditation on the impression pivots into a moral insight. We may be curious why the last stanza seems to have an extra line: it would be more mathematically satisfying to have 12, 6, and 6, for a total of 24. The answer is that because Bridges has been using rhyming couplets this whole time, which are often used to end poems, he needs to move beyond the couplet effect in order to make the ending really pop, and he does so by ending on a triplet, which requires an extra line. Ending on a triplet after a poem full of couplets is a classic Neoclassical technique. 

Now let’s begin the poem again, starting with the first stanza:

Why hast thou nothing in thy face?

Thou idol of the human race,

Thou tyrant of the human heart,

The flower of lovely youth that art;

Yea, and that standest in thy youth

An image of eternal Truth,

With thy exuberant flesh so fair,

That only Pheidias might compare,

Ere from his chaste marmoreal form

Time had decayed the colours warm;

Like to his gods in thy proud dress,

Thy starry sheen of nakedness.

Bridges starts out strongly and directly by giving us the question which inspires and guides the entire poem: why is the face of Eros that he is looking at so expressionless? Eros is not only the Greek god of romantic love and lust, but the embodied avatar of these forces. As such, how he is depicted, as is the case with depictions of all polytheistic gods, will necessarily be a commentary on the forces he represents. Polytheism is the theology of allegorical thinking, and this is what Bridges is interested in: how a depiction of Eros as expressionless is a commentary on the nature of love itself. 

As in an Aristotelian piece of rhetoric, Bridges spends the rest of this first section outlining the ethos of Eros—his qualifications and significance in relation to humankind. He is an ambivalent figure: admired and worshipped, but also an enslaver of hearts. Depicted as a beautiful youth, he not only symbolizes the fact that love is often the defining highlight, the “flower” of youth, and that youths are the loveliest of beings because they are in their prime, their “flowering” of life, but his undying youth also testifies to the eternal nature of cosmic truth itself, which humanity accesses most powerfully through the experience of love. It is disturbing that this powerful force, this force of utmost profundity and significance to humankind, should be depicted as expressionless. 

The last six lines of this stanza are interesting because they are superfluous—they serve no function other than pleasant extended description, and the poem would be stronger without them. This superfluity is interesting because it is a great example of the taste of the time, the Victorian preference for style over substance. Just as Victorian buildings were absolutely stuffed with non-functional decoration for its own sake, so too were many Victorian poems, and just as architectural modernism begins with the Arts and Crafts movement’s rejection of the Victorian separation between form and function, so too literary modernism was largely a reaction against Victorian verbal excesses. Though Bridges is a fine craftsman of a classical bent, he is also a Victorian at heart, and sometimes falls prey to such excesses. 

One interesting thing these last six lines do reveal is Bridges’ Greco-Roman learning. He compares the visage of Eros to the sculptures of Phidias, the greatest sculptor of Classical Greece. More than this though, he references how these sculptures were originally painted in vivid colors, and have only become colorless with time, a fact which is only nowadays in the 21st century becoming common knowledge. That he treats this at the time controversial and obscure fact as a matter of course demonstrates the ease and depth with which he carried his classical education. The fact that he is comparing the Eros that he sees with colored sculptures also indicates to us that the Eros he is looking at is also in color—given the time period, we can confidently infer that Bridges is looking at a painting. 

Now let’s read the poem again, this time continuing on through the second stanza:

Why hast thou nothing in thy face?

Thou idol of the human race,

Thou tyrant of the human heart,

The flower of lovely youth that art;

Yea, and that standest in thy youth

An image of eternal Truth,

With thy exuberant flesh so fair,

That only Pheidias might compare,

Ere from his chaste marmoreal form

Time had decayed the colours warm;

Like to his gods in thy proud dress,

Thy starry sheen of nakedness.

Surely thy body is thy mind,

For in thy face is nought to find,

Only thy soft unchristen’d smile,

That shadows neither love nor guile,

But shameless will and power immense,

In secret sensuous innocence.

            As we enter the second half of the poem in line 13, Bridges shifts from his little introductory ode to Eros to revisit his troubling question from line 1: “Why hast thou nothing in thy face?” Bridges begins this second section by concluding that because “in thy face is nought to find,” “Surely thy body is thy mind.” That is, the vacancy and inexpressiveness of the god’s face reveals that the concept of Eros is not about personality, hardly even about emotion, but about the brute desires of the flesh: the face, the window to the soul, is negligible— to Eros, to one possessed by Eros, the body is more eloquent, and the seat of thought. Bridges goes on to say that the slight smile of the god’s face suggests neither love nor guile—Eros is honest and innocent, but crucially, he is also not actually a god concerned with love, as many might suppose. Rather, he is a god of lust and infatuation, which many people mistake for love. 

Bridge’s description of Eros’s smile as “unchristened” functions on a couple of levels. Most obviously, Eros is a pagan god, and therefore exists in a domain apart from Christianity and Christian morality. More than this however, Bridges wishes to highlight how specifically un-Christlike the erotic urge represented by Eros is: Eros is pure physical attraction, worship of the flesh, with no regard for personal humanity, true love, or responsibility. Moreover, the fact that Eros is shameless and honest about his sensuousness, and feels innocent of any wrongdoing, indicates that he has no awareness or comprehension of sin and depravity. To be a Christian, Bridges implies, requires the prerequisite of recognizing that mankind is in a fallen state. To be pagan, on the other hand, is to be unconscious of fallenness. 

Bridges is fascinated, as we all are, by the discrepancy between the superficial, childlike naivete of Eros and his terrifying power: he exists in sensuous innocence, but is also a force of “shameless will and power immense.” The uncanniness of Eros lies in his presentation as a light, joyful, mischievous entity on the one hand, and his ability to cause immense suffering and the utter ruination people’s lives on the other. He charms us with his beautiful, playful youth, but he is as much a cosmic force as a tidal wave or an earthquake, and is equally capable of causing calamity. 

I think one reason why literature is so fascinated by adultery is that it brings home the power of Eros to us in the most extreme terms: adultery is a monstrously selfish act to commit, a profound betrayal, and puts the stability of entire lives and families at risk—and yet, it is exceedingly common, and otherwise good people, people who know it is wrong, do it all the time. How can this be? How could it possibly be worth it to anyone to risk their families, their marriages, their friendships, for a few nights of physical passion? Obviously, there are often more complex explanatory factors at play, but a lot of times it is just that; a little bit of lust, a hunger for new flesh, makes people willing to toss years of love and devotion out the window. On the flip side, what is sexual jealousy if not yet another way that desire causes us to alienate ourselves from our own happiness? Eros, as much or more than death itself, is a terrifying reminder of human fragility and irrationality. 

Let’s now begin the poem once more, this time reading all the way through: 

Why hast thou nothing in thy face?

Thou idol of the human race,

Thou tyrant of the human heart,

The flower of lovely youth that art;

Yea, and that standest in thy youth

An image of eternal Truth,

With thy exuberant flesh so fair,

That only Pheidias might compare,

Ere from his chaste marmoreal form

Time had decayed the colours warm;

Like to his gods in thy proud dress,

Thy starry sheen of nakedness.

Surely thy body is thy mind,

For in thy face is nought to find,

Only thy soft unchristen’d smile,

That shadows neither love nor guile,

But shameless will and power immense,

In secret sensuous innocence.

O king of joy, what is thy thought?

I dream thou knowest it is nought,

And wouldst in darkness come, but thou

Makest the light where’er thou go.

Ah yet no victim of thy grace,

None who e’er long’d for thy embrace,

Hath cared to look upon thy face.

Fascinated by his vacant and unrevealing expression, Bridges cannot help but speculate on what Eros is thinking, and fantasizes that he is self-aware of his own arbitrary mindlessness, and sorry for it. Bridges calls him the “king of joy,” perhaps ironically, but also once again to emphasize the ambivalence of this god—he enslaves and ruins lives, but he also, in many cases, makes life worth living by serving as a bridge to the experience of love and beauty—he illuminates the world, making light wherever he goes, despite the moral and intellectual darkness of his nature. Bridges’ reference to Eros coming in the darkness, and later to his embrace and the sight of his face, also refers to the Eros and Psyche myth, in which Eros visited his lover Psyche under the cover of night so that she would not see his face and discover his identity. 

The love story between Eros and Psyche, which could be literally translated as the love between Desire and the Mind, has always been ripe for allegorical interpretation, and Bridges was so fond of it that he wrote a 12-canto narrative poem on the subject. Here in this poem however, he concludes by offering an insightful twist on the myth: It is not that Eros wishes to conceal his identity, it is that those who are victims of Eros or who long for Eros to happen to them are not themselves willing to confront his true face: an arbitrary, amoral power, a superficial, vacant will that steamrolls all in its path. Much like those who insist that their powerful and profound feelings are not biologically determined chemical reactions, the lover or would-be lover cannot face the reality that desire is not the poetic magic they think it is, but a brutal, faceless, force, sublime in its ability to appear meaningful and beautiful while also being mindless and merciless, playing with sophisticated human minds like so many toys. In the end, desire is something less glorious, but perhaps more mysterious and wondrous, than we have dreamt of in our philosophies. 

With all that we’ve learned and explored, let’s encounter this poem one last time, as an old friend: 

Eros

Why hast thou nothing in thy face?

Thou idol of the human race,

Thou tyrant of the human heart,

The flower of lovely youth that art;

Yea, and that standest in thy youth

An image of eternal Truth,

With thy exuberant flesh so fair,

That only Pheidias might compare,

Ere from his chaste marmoreal form

Time had decayed the colours warm;

Like to his gods in thy proud dress,

Thy starry sheen of nakedness.

Surely thy body is thy mind,

For in thy face is nought to find,

Only thy soft unchristen’d smile,

That shadows neither love nor guile,

But shameless will and power immense,

In secret sensuous innocence.

O king of joy, what is thy thought?

I dream thou knowest it is nought,

And wouldst in darkness come, but thou

Makest the light where’er thou go.

Ah yet no victim of thy grace,

None who e’er long’d for thy embrace,

Hath cared to look upon thy face.