1 00:00:02,190 --> 00:00:10,350 Hello, everyone. And that very warm welcome to this term's professor search lecture in Sleep King. 2 00:00:11,610 --> 00:00:13,450 My name is Professor Marion Turner. 3 00:00:13,470 --> 00:00:20,340 For those of you who don't know me, I'm chair of the faculty both here and professor of English literature at Jesus. 4 00:00:21,120 --> 00:00:28,550 It's an enormous pleasure to welcome you all and the fact that we can now do this lecture in two formats. 5 00:00:28,570 --> 00:00:34,440 So we've got our live audience here, but also a big a number of people can join us on the livestream as well. 6 00:00:34,440 --> 00:00:40,499 So being able to do it in hybrid form I think is really wonderful and it's a real pleasure to that. 7 00:00:40,500 --> 00:00:46,800 Finally, we can have Alice back among us in person after the months of everything being online. 8 00:00:47,670 --> 00:00:52,710 So I know that Alice Oswald really doesn't need much introduction from me. 9 00:00:52,740 --> 00:01:02,969 She is our professor of poetry and one of the most eminent of all contemporary poets, having won very many prizes for her. 10 00:01:02,970 --> 00:01:09,390 Many books of poetry, including the Forward Poetry Prize, the T.S. Eliot Poetry Prize, the Griffin Perch Prize. 11 00:01:10,350 --> 00:01:13,740 Her title today is about sleep and sleep occurring. 12 00:01:14,460 --> 00:01:22,670 And that immediately made me and I'm sure many of you who were here last year remember the moon poetry events, which I looked at, 13 00:01:22,680 --> 00:01:33,350 and it was almost exactly a year ago when 500 people were sent a poem and we all went out and read a poem to the full moon, 14 00:01:33,360 --> 00:01:39,689 I think it was on the 30th of November last year while we were all in one of our interminable lockdowns. 15 00:01:39,690 --> 00:01:45,780 And I remember that moment very clearly going out into that, to the clear nights and reading to the moon. 16 00:01:46,530 --> 00:01:48,569 I think that the time of sleep, 17 00:01:48,570 --> 00:01:57,150 the transition between different modes of consciousness is something that we see in many of Alice's poems and collections. 18 00:01:58,290 --> 00:02:04,830 I think in particularly of a Sleepwalk on the Seven of Falling Awake and the poem Tyson us in that collection, 19 00:02:05,730 --> 00:02:10,650 a poem about the movement between the nights and the dawn. 20 00:02:11,820 --> 00:02:20,910 I personally teach and research a lot about dream vision and I think a great deal about those liminal moments of creativity. 21 00:02:21,390 --> 00:02:31,620 And for me, one of the great joys of coming to Professor of Poetry Lectures is that I feel they often help many of us to pause, to stand and stare. 22 00:02:31,890 --> 00:02:35,250 Just to think about how literature comes into being. 23 00:02:36,000 --> 00:02:39,720 So without further ado, can we welcome Alice until. 24 00:02:51,530 --> 00:02:56,510 Thank you very much. It's so nice to be here is to be half here. 25 00:02:57,470 --> 00:03:04,910 I know I'm somewhere else as well, which is quite a strange sensation, but perhaps appropriate for this lecture to be half online, half here. 26 00:03:05,960 --> 00:03:19,190 So welcome. And my lecture today is called In Sleep a King and it is a sleep talk on the subject of waking up to the accompaniment of Sonnet 87. 27 00:03:21,140 --> 00:03:25,130 So you'll notice that I intend to conduct the lecture in my sleep. 28 00:03:25,550 --> 00:03:31,340 And this is the course. When I begin to write a lecture, I don't really know what I'm going to write about. 29 00:03:31,340 --> 00:03:37,399 I sort of drift around and flail around desperately, and I start by writing about absolutely everything, 30 00:03:37,400 --> 00:03:39,620 and then I just kind of chuck things that are going on. 31 00:03:40,070 --> 00:03:47,150 And to my horror in writing this lecture, I discovered quite late on that I was actually writing a lecture about Shakespeare, 32 00:03:47,240 --> 00:03:53,060 which is, you know, something, of course, I should not only do unless one has studied him for years and years and is an expert. 33 00:03:53,810 --> 00:03:58,940 So I decided that really the only way to approach Shakespeare was in sleep. 34 00:03:59,660 --> 00:04:07,490 So I'm going to dream my way through the lecture and I am very happy for you all to do the same, to listen with your eyes shut. 35 00:04:08,420 --> 00:04:13,820 In fact, I would much rather that you listen in a state of dreaming than a state of thinking. 36 00:04:16,280 --> 00:04:30,019 So I hope again by reading a sonnet that has always just obsessed me and I will read it first while you can see the writing on the whiteboard, 37 00:04:30,020 --> 00:04:35,149 and then I'll switch that off and you can hear it is that's something I'm always very interested in, 38 00:04:35,150 --> 00:04:39,500 is the difference between a poem when you see it written down and a poem and you hear it. 39 00:04:42,410 --> 00:04:48,140 It is by Shakespeare. Not too much farewell. 40 00:04:48,830 --> 00:04:55,810 Thought too dear for my possession. And like enough, I noticed that estimate. 41 00:04:57,910 --> 00:05:10,240 The chatter if they were kids releasing my bonds in the are all determinant for how could I hold it but but I guarantee. 42 00:05:11,530 --> 00:05:19,600 And for that riches. Where is my deserving? The cause of that therapist in me is wanting. 43 00:05:21,040 --> 00:05:24,270 And so my patient back again is sweating. 44 00:05:26,510 --> 00:05:34,360 They sell the greatest thine own words and not knowing or me to whom they gazed it else. 45 00:05:34,790 --> 00:05:44,210 Mistake. So the great gift upon this present growing comes home again on better judgement making. 46 00:05:46,400 --> 00:05:54,710 Thus have I happy as a dream doth Blatter in sleep a king but wake him. 47 00:05:55,640 --> 00:06:06,760 No such luck. Farewell. 48 00:06:07,180 --> 00:06:12,940 Thou art too dear for my possessing and liking a bout I estimate. 49 00:06:14,900 --> 00:06:21,920 The Charter of they worth gives the releasing my bonds in the are all determinate 50 00:06:23,660 --> 00:06:30,390 the how could I hold the I grow to and for that riches where is my deserving? 51 00:06:31,310 --> 00:06:34,590 The cause of that therapist in me is wanting. 52 00:06:35,450 --> 00:06:41,450 And so my patient back again is sweating. I said they'll get us. 53 00:06:41,780 --> 00:06:47,780 They know worse than not knowing or me to whom they guessed it else mistaken. 54 00:06:49,280 --> 00:06:56,230 So that great gift upon this Christian growing comes home again on Better Judgement Week. 55 00:06:58,680 --> 00:07:04,110 Thus have I happy as a dream that flatter in sleep. 56 00:07:04,290 --> 00:07:07,810 A king. But waking. No such. 57 00:07:13,600 --> 00:07:23,310 Here is a curious fact. When Basil Bunting was studying poetry under Ezra Pound, he was given the task of correcting Shakespeare's sonnets. 58 00:07:23,950 --> 00:07:28,090 Bring him up to date, he was told. Get rid of the superfluous language. 59 00:07:29,380 --> 00:07:35,860 So Bunting produced Sonnet 87 with everything crossed out except the first two lines. 60 00:07:37,460 --> 00:07:43,190 So I will start to defend my possessing and like enough though no estate estimate. 61 00:07:45,160 --> 00:07:53,590 Very good. What more do you need? A romance is over because one person has higher status than the other and probably knows it. 62 00:07:54,130 --> 00:07:57,550 One line of leave taking, one line of teasing. 63 00:07:57,940 --> 00:08:02,880 And there you have the whole poem in paraphrase. Farewell. 64 00:08:03,240 --> 00:08:07,520 Thou art to the for my possessing. And like enough thou nursed. 65 00:08:07,570 --> 00:08:15,790 I estimate. Two lines might convey the sonnets meaning, 66 00:08:16,420 --> 00:08:28,420 but they certainly do not convey its movement the way it's slow financial sleep talk suddenly wakes up and a king passes through the rhythm. 67 00:08:30,170 --> 00:08:36,230 That is what you might call the gesture or action or living of the poem. 68 00:08:37,160 --> 00:08:40,250 And for the past two years, in delivering these lectures, 69 00:08:40,520 --> 00:08:52,370 I've been trying to describe similar examples tracing the movements of poems first through light, then through water, birdsong, pebbles, platforms. 70 00:08:53,960 --> 00:08:55,310 They are very elusive. 71 00:08:56,360 --> 00:09:04,990 All one ever finds are their effects what Mandelstam called the rumpled sheets, which prove that poetry has spent the night them. 72 00:09:08,940 --> 00:09:19,350 Nevertheless, if I were such the Ezra Pound task, I would look for the poems movement, and I think I would be more radical than Basil Bunting. 73 00:09:21,380 --> 00:09:29,990 I would reduce Sonnet 87 to the pause between lines 12 and 13 just before the final couplet. 74 00:09:32,760 --> 00:09:39,390 Poems are full of pauses, but a true poem always includes one pause, 75 00:09:39,510 --> 00:09:47,100 which seems to pierce the page like an opening upon which the language pivots and transforms. 76 00:09:49,120 --> 00:09:58,780 And in Sonnet 87 that opening lines between the lines 12 and 13 and what follows is altogether altered by it. 77 00:10:00,780 --> 00:10:04,680 Thus have I had him as a dream death that. 78 00:10:08,350 --> 00:10:13,060 That is not iambic pentameter. I do not know exactly what it is. 79 00:10:13,690 --> 00:10:20,680 Ancient Greek. Anglo-Saxon nursery rhyme, night language, sleep talk, magic spell. 80 00:10:21,130 --> 00:10:25,690 Thus have I had the noli me tangerine, as I pronounce it. 81 00:10:25,870 --> 00:10:30,460 I find myself glancing around to see who disturbs the same pattern. 82 00:10:32,000 --> 00:10:37,550 And now that I have put my ear to the print space, an apparition floats up. 83 00:10:38,000 --> 00:10:41,090 The same shape as the original speaker's lungs. 84 00:10:43,280 --> 00:10:50,960 I am referring to the poem's voice, which is the body's voice amidst a breeze. 85 00:10:51,620 --> 00:10:57,280 A compression of the air. Yes. 86 00:10:57,290 --> 00:11:02,970 There seems to be something at work behind this poem which resembles a Jacobean wind machine, 87 00:11:03,320 --> 00:11:06,500 the sort that would have been used to make the storm in King Lear, 88 00:11:06,680 --> 00:11:12,860 with a man backstage turning a wheel on a length of cloth to produce a whistling, moaning sound. 89 00:11:13,940 --> 00:11:22,370 You can turn fast or slow to alter the pitch, and something like that is definitely being manipulated in this sonnet machine. 90 00:11:22,820 --> 00:11:30,380 The lungs pump, the throat pulse resonate, the tongue and teeth shape instant one syllable sound moves, 91 00:11:31,070 --> 00:11:35,780 and that is how a king floats miraculously out of the mouth. 92 00:11:36,350 --> 00:11:44,210 All the more miraculous, since he himself is a silent, is a photograph, and yet constructed out of sand. 93 00:11:45,790 --> 00:11:49,300 Mobile app. Active. Ephemeral. 94 00:11:50,260 --> 00:11:54,580 Gone bust. Had I had the as a dream? 95 00:11:55,000 --> 00:11:59,350 Yes, there is a difference between a poem's paraphrase and its voice. 96 00:11:59,860 --> 00:12:03,430 And I don't think Bunting's couplet is more than a paraphrase. 97 00:12:06,840 --> 00:12:15,780 You might tell me that a sonnet is primarily a written down thing and that Shakespeare's sonnets in particular make use of the silence of paper. 98 00:12:16,560 --> 00:12:19,860 They frequently mention ink and lasting notes. 99 00:12:20,070 --> 00:12:24,780 They proceed like arcs of thought, not acts of performance. 100 00:12:26,130 --> 00:12:35,070 But it is for that reason all the more startling when poems which begin as calculations evolve into declarations. 101 00:12:36,270 --> 00:12:39,360 That is what happens in Sonnet 87. 102 00:12:39,570 --> 00:12:46,950 A voice grows out of the thought process. A tiny oral poem is summoned into a printed one. 103 00:12:47,640 --> 00:12:52,770 And it happens just before the last couplet does. 104 00:12:53,130 --> 00:12:57,120 Have I had these as a dream? Just flutter in sleep. 105 00:12:57,420 --> 00:13:00,690 I came. But waking. No such matter. 106 00:13:03,000 --> 00:13:12,300 When I inhale to voice that couplet, a king floats into view luminously the lion asleep, waking up in confusion. 107 00:13:12,900 --> 00:13:17,960 I think it was his stirrings that disturbed the sound pattern. 108 00:13:23,600 --> 00:13:27,530 This king is really the only visible shape in the whole poem. 109 00:13:29,330 --> 00:13:40,790 Lines 1 to 12 are all messed it up. I continually see charters and signatures through the Latinate words, and I can hear the whisper of leaf taking. 110 00:13:41,660 --> 00:13:46,250 But I cannot see anything of the person being addressed. 111 00:13:48,630 --> 00:13:53,280 Farewell. Thou art too dear for my possessing. And like enough. 112 00:13:53,580 --> 00:13:58,310 Thou knowest I estimate. The charter of they were kids. 113 00:13:58,320 --> 00:14:03,330 The releasing my bonds in the are all determinant. 114 00:14:05,920 --> 00:14:11,799 It is semi humorous that a love poem should proceed like that in the jargon of the law, 115 00:14:11,800 --> 00:14:17,710 courts and the marketplace transactional as if wanting to make turns with the world. 116 00:14:18,100 --> 00:14:21,640 And yet, if I were the beloved, I would be offended. 117 00:14:22,690 --> 00:14:31,960 It sounds as if the poet has his eyes shut the whole time, waves about like a sleeve, his hand trying to reach that final word. 118 00:14:32,900 --> 00:14:38,000 Matter. How to wake up. 119 00:14:39,140 --> 00:14:44,150 How to come to. And feel about. And make contact with. 120 00:14:44,150 --> 00:14:47,450 Matter. How to sign up to the social contract. 121 00:14:47,480 --> 00:14:53,810 Let's see. That problem presents itself over and over again in Shakespeare's plays. 122 00:14:54,060 --> 00:15:01,340 I'm reminded of the King's Hand in a winter's tale, reaching out to touch a statue and discovering that it is his wife, 123 00:15:02,300 --> 00:15:06,080 which is really what is trying to happen in Sonnet 87. 124 00:15:06,320 --> 00:15:12,590 But there is no such battle, no statue, no wife, no beloved, no waking up. 125 00:15:13,730 --> 00:15:24,719 Just this king. And there is some trickery in the last line which keeps the king in view, 126 00:15:24,720 --> 00:15:34,320 or at least in earshot in sleep of king, but waking as if the sound would not let go of the crown. 127 00:15:36,100 --> 00:15:40,120 Thus have I happy as a dream to flatten this. 128 00:15:41,710 --> 00:15:45,400 It is a very twilight, very ambiguous sentence. 129 00:15:46,780 --> 00:15:53,150 As a dream. The latter can refer backwards to the opening phrase, in which case it means as in a dream. 130 00:15:53,170 --> 00:16:02,650 I flattered myself that I possessed you, or it can operate forwards, altering the grammar as it goes along as a dream. 131 00:16:03,010 --> 00:16:08,480 Does the latter in sleep a king waking i. 132 00:16:08,760 --> 00:16:13,450 I have had you in the same way that a dream flat as a sleeping waking king. 133 00:16:15,040 --> 00:16:21,490 In the second version, the movement from dream to sleep to waking jolts the whole thought out of syntax. 134 00:16:21,850 --> 00:16:25,480 It is a sentence made of misapprehensions. 135 00:16:26,110 --> 00:16:39,500 It is a misprint. So in spite of the poem's results, I exit sonnet 87 in a misprint in a two sons. 136 00:16:40,280 --> 00:16:51,679 One of them is weaselly and bookish, fully convinced that the infatuation is over, and one of them, the one deeper in the entrenched vegetal aural. 137 00:16:51,680 --> 00:16:54,650 One still sullen, still with eyes shut. 138 00:16:56,140 --> 00:17:07,770 That one is still asleep, lying in the space between 912 and 13, waking not backwards but downwards into deeper sleep. 139 00:17:09,520 --> 00:17:24,600 Haunted. Let me lift the curtain of the sonnet and look at this figure lying in the dark hollow of its making. 140 00:17:24,780 --> 00:17:34,040 Where nothing is visible except for. It is pitch black in that it is light. 141 00:17:35,150 --> 00:17:44,540 It is nothing. No streetlights. The heir, according to a contemporary of Shakespeare's, is thick like tobacco. 142 00:17:44,540 --> 00:17:50,000 Smoke and sleep is fitful because of the watches going past calling out the owls. 143 00:17:51,800 --> 00:17:54,950 People have put on white linen smocks for sleeping. 144 00:17:55,190 --> 00:17:58,580 They are lying together all over the city, trying to keep warm. 145 00:17:59,360 --> 00:18:09,770 The queen lies next to a companion in a carved wooden bed, hung with Indian painted silk, or sometimes in a boat shaped bank with sea green curtains. 146 00:18:11,580 --> 00:18:13,590 Travellers lie next to strangers. 147 00:18:14,040 --> 00:18:22,260 Most people sleep on wooden benches or straw pallets with wooden pillows and sheets washed in urine, often with animals nearby. 148 00:18:24,070 --> 00:18:28,000 The night is divided into a first sleep and a second sleep, 149 00:18:28,660 --> 00:18:36,850 and between them there is an intoxicated time for praying, reading, conversing, making love, or making sonnets. 150 00:18:38,870 --> 00:18:42,350 The brain flickers, according to doctors. 151 00:18:42,470 --> 00:18:48,230 It is affected by vapours coming up from the stomach, which clog the senses and cause dreams. 152 00:18:49,070 --> 00:18:52,880 You must be careful to lie first on your right side, then on your left. 153 00:18:53,030 --> 00:18:56,510 And then on your stomach, but never on your back. 154 00:18:57,910 --> 00:19:04,960 Naveen Islam is a Dutch doctor who claimed that so many asleep after that sort lie with their mouths open, 155 00:19:05,080 --> 00:19:13,060 their eyes staring, their eyelids unclothed, speaking very quietly and without any refreshing ease. 156 00:19:13,570 --> 00:19:17,860 They be oftentimes troubled with a nightmare and falling since. 157 00:19:22,910 --> 00:19:30,860 It's easy to come this far to enumerate all the details of Elizabethan sleep right up to the eyelids, 158 00:19:31,520 --> 00:19:37,220 and in so doing, to provide a list of the six things that were pressing against this summit. 159 00:19:39,520 --> 00:19:48,100 If I were a scholar, I would keep going. Researching the visible and audible worlds until I had made an exact vessel for the poems during. 160 00:19:50,620 --> 00:19:55,360 As a poet, I believe it's equally valid to attend to the unfixed things. 161 00:19:56,230 --> 00:20:00,220 There is, after all, something else in the room besides furniture. 162 00:20:01,750 --> 00:20:09,840 There is pretty. So they great guest upon miss prison growing. 163 00:20:13,180 --> 00:20:23,469 There is no description of one person overvaluing another misprint of a king concealed in a sleeper waking most prison 164 00:20:23,470 --> 00:20:33,530 of the is wealth growing inside the eyes prison of the moment resonating in the timeless Ms. prison of the word Ms. 165 00:20:33,550 --> 00:20:36,700 Prison wavering to and fro in its meanings. 166 00:20:38,860 --> 00:20:43,600 What a word it means both mistake and dislike. 167 00:20:44,200 --> 00:20:53,830 It denotes the space between apprehensions, which is the space where this sonnet comes alive, moving from daylight through doubt into darkness. 168 00:20:56,410 --> 00:21:04,900 There is tension in this prison. There is threshold and doubleness of the kind that manifests at dawn or at dusk. 169 00:21:05,320 --> 00:21:09,580 When damp comes up out of the earth and matter grows misted. 170 00:21:10,750 --> 00:21:21,040 There are mist prisons, moist prisons, things that are almost things that are missing, or these ambiguities are active in the sun. 171 00:21:21,040 --> 00:21:26,500 It's half light between nine, 12 and 13 before it plunges into dream. 172 00:21:30,100 --> 00:21:36,250 I'm told that Javanese puppeteers trained by running through forests at night at top speed. 173 00:21:36,820 --> 00:21:40,510 And I think that would be an excellent, excellent training for poets, 174 00:21:40,810 --> 00:21:47,890 since there is this draughty darkness flowing at the language which poems have to pass through in order to wake up. 175 00:21:49,030 --> 00:21:53,200 Some poems seal their pauses and never dip beneath meaning. 176 00:21:54,100 --> 00:21:58,420 For example, there's a sonnet, Infinite, Sydney's Astral and Stella, 177 00:21:58,600 --> 00:22:03,910 which is structured exactly like Shakespeare's, but without any transformative pause. 178 00:22:06,720 --> 00:22:12,520 Sonnet 39 a Sydney. Come sleep. 179 00:22:12,880 --> 00:22:17,950 Oh, sleep the set and not a peace. The beating place of wit. 180 00:22:18,520 --> 00:22:22,090 The balm of world. The poor man's wealth. 181 00:22:22,570 --> 00:22:27,520 The prisoners released the indifferent judge between the high and low. 182 00:22:29,050 --> 00:22:34,720 With Shield of Proof, shield me from the press of those fierce darts. 183 00:22:34,720 --> 00:22:40,810 Despair me duster. Making me those civil wars to cease. 184 00:22:42,100 --> 00:22:48,370 I will. Good tribute, Paul, if they would do so, take that with me. 185 00:22:48,850 --> 00:22:52,690 Smooth tellers. Sweetest bad. A chamber. 186 00:22:52,900 --> 00:22:58,360 Death to noise. And blind to light. A rosy garland. 187 00:22:58,810 --> 00:23:04,510 And a weary head. And if these things as being dying by right. 188 00:23:04,780 --> 00:23:10,840 Move not thy heavy grace. Thou shalt and me live better than elsewhere. 189 00:23:11,350 --> 00:23:19,280 Stella's image. She. Come and sleep. 190 00:23:19,640 --> 00:23:25,670 Oh, see? The certain not of peace. The baiting place of wit. 191 00:23:26,210 --> 00:23:29,690 The balm of world. The poor man's wealth. 192 00:23:30,200 --> 00:23:35,480 The prisoners release the indifferent judge between the high and low. 193 00:23:36,980 --> 00:23:42,600 With Shield of Proof. Shield me from the press of those fierce dogs. 194 00:23:42,870 --> 00:23:49,160 Despair me dust from. Oh, making me those civil wars to cease. 195 00:23:50,030 --> 00:23:55,870 I will good tribute pay if they would do so. Take that with me. 196 00:23:56,020 --> 00:23:59,510 Smooth pillows. Sweetest bed. A chamber. 197 00:23:59,590 --> 00:24:04,240 Death to noise. And blind to light. A rosy garland. 198 00:24:04,720 --> 00:24:10,000 And a weary head. And if these things as being time by right. 199 00:24:10,360 --> 00:24:14,500 Move not thy heavy grace. Thou shalt in me. 200 00:24:14,980 --> 00:24:18,250 Livelier than elsewhere. Stella's image. 201 00:24:18,550 --> 00:24:29,040 She. This sleep poem, which I do love, but I think it's constructed differently from Shakespeare. 202 00:24:29,220 --> 00:24:35,790 The Sleep poem written about a decade before Shakespeare's, has no dealt away in its metre. 203 00:24:36,600 --> 00:24:41,940 The dream at the end happens inside Sydney's head and inside the grace of the lion. 204 00:24:42,180 --> 00:24:47,070 Unlike Shakespeare's, which stops the whole poem and takes over the whole body. 205 00:24:48,090 --> 00:24:58,830 Shakespeare's Miss Britain might be close in date to sequence, but it is closer in kind to this infrared image of a fox. 206 00:25:05,700 --> 00:25:11,490 This shot was set up by Stephen GUILFOYLE and is one of a series called Night Procession, 207 00:25:12,210 --> 00:25:20,370 for which he positioned motion sensitive cameras in a forest, having first noticed the tracks and stopping places of night creatures. 208 00:25:22,140 --> 00:25:26,160 I wish I had such an instrument for detecting the movements of poles. 209 00:25:28,120 --> 00:25:35,800 His cameras could be triggered by insects moving over grass by rain or webs or slats or gusts, 210 00:25:36,490 --> 00:25:41,620 so that often the image is pure misimpression, out of reach of all meaning. 211 00:25:42,820 --> 00:25:48,730 Three legs, a deer, a mouse, ghost running on a branch foxgloves. 212 00:25:49,030 --> 00:26:01,240 Or is it nestlings mouths? Hieroglyphs by bark beetles and eggshell opening fungus spores function as leaves water not looking at itself. 213 00:26:05,220 --> 00:26:12,210 All poems are straining to see like that, moving as close as they can to what they can't see. 214 00:26:13,680 --> 00:26:20,850 I have heard of negative capability, which is the phrase Keats used to describe Shakespeare's withholding of himself from his work. 215 00:26:21,300 --> 00:26:25,770 But this infrared capability is a refinement we should learn from. 216 00:26:26,880 --> 00:26:36,720 A fox doubled in dark water by the low wave like his movement has triggered, dipping down to the edge of the on animal. 217 00:26:37,770 --> 00:26:46,950 The expression on this fox his face is just as I imagined the king's expression court seeking indiscretion. 218 00:26:50,570 --> 00:26:53,480 Mr. President, it was originally a legal word, 219 00:26:53,660 --> 00:27:01,910 meaning concealment of a crime and a proclamation made in 1582 suggests what kinds of concealment were in the air. 220 00:27:02,120 --> 00:27:13,370 When Shakespeare and Sidney did their dream of any person wittingly concealing any such Jesuit seminary man or priest or the practice aforesaid, 221 00:27:13,610 --> 00:27:17,780 shall be deemed and taken to be in case of miss presumed of treason. 222 00:27:19,610 --> 00:27:23,300 That was Sir Edward Coke responding to the pressures around the monarchy. 223 00:27:23,900 --> 00:27:31,070 No wonder it's unsettling to lift the curtain of a sonnet and find a king sleeping in its cavity. 224 00:27:41,830 --> 00:27:45,130 It's impossible to know when Sonnet 87 was written. 225 00:27:45,850 --> 00:27:52,600 There is speculation that Shakespeare started writing sonnets in the early 1590s alongside his first plays, 226 00:27:53,170 --> 00:28:01,900 but dates belong to the day that you can say when a poem was published and the sonnets were first published as a sequence in 1609. 227 00:28:02,530 --> 00:28:11,050 But publication is just the gravestone that commemorates a poem flat out for you cannot measure its gestation. 228 00:28:12,790 --> 00:28:20,380 Philip Larkin said he wrote poems in the evening after work and left them after 2 hours because after that you're going round in circles 229 00:28:20,530 --> 00:28:27,970 and it's much better to leave it for 24 hours by which time your subconscious or whatever has solved the block and you're ready to go on. 230 00:28:29,950 --> 00:28:36,760 Elizabeth Bishop wrote 17 drafts of her poem The Art of Losing and Who Knows How Many Others in her head. 231 00:28:38,020 --> 00:28:43,330 S.K. Williams said that his poem The Hearth, took 25 years to finish. 232 00:28:46,610 --> 00:28:49,730 Before publication poems are at their most active, 233 00:28:50,120 --> 00:28:56,930 suspended in the memory and movingly interacting with the poet's waking life, sometimes to devastating effect. 234 00:28:58,060 --> 00:29:03,760 Ted Hughes spoke frequently about the damage inflicted on him by the crones while he was writing. 235 00:29:06,110 --> 00:29:14,540 Like dreams. Poems modify our assumed knowledge of the world and are in turn modified by the world they modify. 236 00:29:15,650 --> 00:29:22,400 So we have to imagine at least two decades during which sonnets and plays were exchanging images. 237 00:29:23,300 --> 00:29:29,090 A whole line of things moving in and out of sonnet 87 as if it were changing the. 238 00:29:30,340 --> 00:29:34,659 We thought I heard a voice cry. Sleep no more. Macbeth doth murder. 239 00:29:34,660 --> 00:29:37,980 Sleep. Oh, stop there a little. 240 00:29:38,790 --> 00:29:43,290 This is the rarest dream that a dull sleep democ sat through years. 241 00:29:43,440 --> 00:29:47,580 All ha waking or sleeping. 242 00:29:48,150 --> 00:29:51,900 Sure it is not so. Who is it that can tell me who I am? 243 00:29:54,420 --> 00:30:01,379 The sonnet inhales all those voices and is animated by Imagine Shakespeare falling asleep after 244 00:30:01,380 --> 00:30:08,370 writing King Lear Dreaming He's a king waking not knowing whether he is himself waking or his dream. 245 00:30:08,370 --> 00:30:11,850 So half waking or sleeping? 246 00:30:12,300 --> 00:30:16,410 Sure it is not so. Who is it that can tell me who I am? 247 00:30:20,340 --> 00:30:30,390 Between 1594 and 1606, Lear was changing from the orderly king of the source play into the exhausted human of Shakespeare's play. 248 00:30:31,050 --> 00:30:34,890 Exactly the same transformation as happens in Sonnet 87. 249 00:30:35,340 --> 00:30:42,030 The language moving from executive command to wounded explanation lear of the source play 250 00:30:42,030 --> 00:30:46,500 is a strong magician who frightens his murderers by apparently controlling the thunder. 251 00:30:47,220 --> 00:30:51,210 Shakespeare's Lear complains that the Thunder would not peace at my bidding. 252 00:30:51,930 --> 00:30:59,249 I no doubt the point would have been well illustrated in performance at the Globe, where the storm was made material by cannonballs, 253 00:30:59,250 --> 00:31:08,790 rolling down copper sheets, drums and squids, disks of starch shaken in a wooden box and whistling fabrics brushed by a churning wheel. 254 00:31:11,000 --> 00:31:23,420 Those are the voices of matter which alter the meta in King Lear through the sharp Hawthorne blows the cold wind that is the food on the heath. 255 00:31:23,780 --> 00:31:27,560 Speaking in the same tune as Sonnet 87. 256 00:31:28,610 --> 00:31:31,670 Thus have I had the stone through the crucible. 257 00:31:32,240 --> 00:31:39,920 Thus have I had the blows, the cold wind. It is the same weathered sand, the same bareheaded king. 258 00:31:40,280 --> 00:31:52,180 See, talking in the same changing. Thus have I had the as I dreamed a flatter in sleep. 259 00:31:52,390 --> 00:32:05,700 A king. But waking. No such matter. I often say those lines to myself to wake up, or at least to bring to mind what waking up demands. 260 00:32:06,600 --> 00:32:12,150 Absolute change of rhythm. Absolute change of status. 261 00:32:14,330 --> 00:32:21,650 I recently fell asleep while listening to someone speaking and found myself staring at the regular white spots on his suit. 262 00:32:21,920 --> 00:32:25,850 Each spot backlit as if his body was riddled with small holes. 263 00:32:26,150 --> 00:32:33,890 And I was looking straight through them to the daylight. But there were no spots on his suit for a moment. 264 00:32:33,920 --> 00:32:38,840 Two almost identical speakers passed through each other, each with the same voice. 265 00:32:40,790 --> 00:32:48,610 And each day begins in similar misimpressions, like an ancient vessel saying everything twice over. 266 00:32:49,880 --> 00:32:57,980 A woman shouts in the street and is instantly translated into dream narrative, where she becomes an owl on a fencepost. 267 00:32:58,670 --> 00:33:05,060 Some light passes over the islands. It becomes a red blindfold, becomes a knife pressed into the eyeball. 268 00:33:05,600 --> 00:33:11,510 The pressure increases until suddenly the symmetry is broken and the two worlds assert their difference. 269 00:33:12,230 --> 00:33:23,570 The sleep world is ancient, feudal, abusive, immersive, wishful, luminous, faceless, limitless upside down. 270 00:33:25,340 --> 00:33:28,430 The awake world is constrained by matter. 271 00:33:29,570 --> 00:33:36,410 It is very small. You have to get into it through the half inch opening of an eye. 272 00:33:40,830 --> 00:33:47,730 To practice that crossing. Salvador Dali recommended afternoon not in a high vat Spanish chair with a key 273 00:33:47,910 --> 00:33:52,860 clasped between finger and some of the left hand and a plate positioned underneath. 274 00:33:53,580 --> 00:34:00,630 The moment you nod off, the key falls and wakes you and dreams can be harvested as subject matter for paintings. 275 00:34:02,990 --> 00:34:11,060 There are plenty of similar examples among writers. Misha, the French 20th century poet, was a talented sleeper, helped by. 276 00:34:12,410 --> 00:34:20,420 He published a series of short prose dreams, including My King, which reads like a footnote to the sleeper in Sonnet 87. 277 00:34:22,940 --> 00:34:27,410 In my night, I besiege my king. I get up little by little. 278 00:34:27,710 --> 00:34:30,740 And I wring his neck. He regains his strength. 279 00:34:31,190 --> 00:34:36,020 I come back at him and wring his neck again. I shake him again and again like an old plum tree. 280 00:34:36,200 --> 00:34:40,310 And his crown wobbles on his head. And yet he is my king. 281 00:34:40,820 --> 00:34:45,140 I know it and he knows it. And of course, I'm at his service. 282 00:34:48,990 --> 00:34:53,490 Michelle. Sleep goes on and on, increasingly violent and hilarious. 283 00:34:53,940 --> 00:34:58,110 But it seems to me that his account is no more than a paraphrase of dream. 284 00:34:58,920 --> 00:35:02,790 It is the movement from one state to another. But his dreaming poem. 285 00:35:05,660 --> 00:35:10,790 What on earth do I mean by that? I mean that the deep structure of poetry is transitional. 286 00:35:11,600 --> 00:35:20,270 Unlike music or painting, poetry is a between form which demands that you occupy two planes of perception at once. 287 00:35:21,500 --> 00:35:25,670 It is theatre and it is art. It is fluid. 288 00:35:26,120 --> 00:35:32,660 And it is fixed. It is matter and inspiration, thought and sound. 289 00:35:33,140 --> 00:35:37,040 It is one rhyme laid next to another so that two words seek together. 290 00:35:37,610 --> 00:35:43,040 It is metres built up in layers so that each phrase remembers or predicts another. 291 00:35:44,120 --> 00:35:54,410 It is expression fused with impression, observation soaked with intention, imagination made actual by a tea falling on a plate. 292 00:35:55,790 --> 00:36:04,520 And at the centre of all this there is simile which demands the same insidious discipline as waking up. 293 00:36:06,060 --> 00:36:13,700 To think in simile is to dwell in two visions at once, as if you were still suffering from sleep. 294 00:36:16,800 --> 00:36:25,170 Thus have I had the as a dreamed of theatre in sneak a king but waiting no settlements. 295 00:36:27,910 --> 00:36:33,700 It is good. It is formally correct that Shakespeare negotiates his waking. 296 00:36:33,880 --> 00:36:44,200 By means of that twilight word as adverb conjunction preposition as always expresses a long sidedness. 297 00:36:45,460 --> 00:36:52,050 It cannot exist except in transition. And no representation can exist without a sense of. 298 00:36:53,480 --> 00:36:56,840 Impossible to catch sight of the substance of us. 299 00:36:57,590 --> 00:37:00,680 And yet each one of us passes through it every morning. 300 00:37:01,850 --> 00:37:06,170 If you know how to wake up, then you know how to punch. 301 00:37:12,820 --> 00:37:19,990 Elliot book ten a king has fallen asleep on a battlefield with his weapons laid out a side. 302 00:37:23,030 --> 00:37:30,620 It is night, ancient Homeric night, which is more like a substance than a time. 303 00:37:31,790 --> 00:37:41,390 A fragrant cloud like sickness. People creep along underneath night or push their way through it. 304 00:37:42,230 --> 00:37:46,650 Night is also a destructive, claustrophobic. 305 00:37:47,040 --> 00:37:51,630 It is powerful even over God's even use of night. 306 00:37:51,990 --> 00:37:57,810 It is death. A compass night darkens a man's eyes when he stops breathing. 307 00:37:58,230 --> 00:38:02,760 It is a measure of swiftness, they say. Apollo came swiftly down like the night. 308 00:38:03,750 --> 00:38:11,490 Night is the oldest of the gods, and it is ambrosia, which means not mortal. 309 00:38:12,360 --> 00:38:17,190 It means you might look outside and catch a whiff of damp earth and honeysuckle. 310 00:38:17,340 --> 00:38:22,590 But the matter of light extends beyond that and is essentially unknowable. 311 00:38:26,590 --> 00:38:32,170 And this particular night is especially strange because the Trojans have lit fires 312 00:38:32,200 --> 00:38:37,440 on the battlefield and they are sitting around them playing flutes in the darkness. 313 00:38:38,890 --> 00:38:43,240 And because it has been a good day fighting, I imagine their music is pretty wild. 314 00:38:43,390 --> 00:38:49,810 I am actually long threads of chromatic scales and screens are tangled in the night substance. 315 00:38:53,240 --> 00:38:58,880 Rhesus the king of the three oceans has just turned up, hoping to help defend the city. 316 00:38:59,660 --> 00:39:06,650 He has been managing his horses on difficult tracks through the mountains and he is relieved to have arrived at last. 317 00:39:08,040 --> 00:39:12,390 He has no idea what a merciless place this is. 318 00:39:15,170 --> 00:39:19,730 He has fallen asleep among his companions at the far edge of things, 319 00:39:20,030 --> 00:39:29,480 with his horses standing close by eating the grass and his weapons laid down like cutlery and the sound of flutes tying up the air all around him. 320 00:39:33,220 --> 00:39:39,820 The entire threshing army is sleep. And sleep, by the way, is not just a state of rest. 321 00:39:40,390 --> 00:39:45,190 It is a creature, a character. It lives on an island. 322 00:39:45,220 --> 00:39:49,470 Sleep has enough weight that when it moves, you notice the treetops shaking. 323 00:39:49,510 --> 00:39:54,520 And sometimes sleep settles among the leaves in bird shape, watching its prey. 324 00:39:56,250 --> 00:40:01,440 It is that kind of world, that kind of night, that kind of seep. 325 00:40:06,320 --> 00:40:14,420 Then HarperCollins sat up out of sleep and saw the empty space where those horses have been standing and men gasping and bleeding. 326 00:40:14,900 --> 00:40:20,750 And he cried out, calling his friends name so that the Trojans panicked and shouted back and came rushing up 327 00:40:20,960 --> 00:40:25,910 to stare at the horrible deeds done by those two men before they went back to their ships. 328 00:40:28,350 --> 00:40:31,290 The two men in question, Diomedes and Odysseus, 329 00:40:31,500 --> 00:40:38,190 have been prowling through the night substance and have found and murdered 12 threshers, including their king. 330 00:40:40,420 --> 00:40:45,760 When Diomedes found that king, he snatched away his life as he lay there gasping. 331 00:40:46,210 --> 00:40:52,120 Thinking about treatment stood at his head. But in fact, it was the son of only. 332 00:40:55,930 --> 00:41:00,640 I recognise these punishments. I've seen them already in Sonnet 87. 333 00:41:01,870 --> 00:41:07,660 There is the king, the dream, the man waking up, the empty space, the devastation. 334 00:41:08,110 --> 00:41:13,660 But I am seeing everything now the other way round. I have caught the king just before he vanishes. 335 00:41:14,020 --> 00:41:17,260 Peering out through the night. Substance like a fox. 336 00:41:17,680 --> 00:41:25,330 Seeing something. Deonte He mistakes it for a dream because he doesn't yet know that he is the dream. 337 00:41:25,690 --> 00:41:29,500 He is already changing status from a sleeping to a dead king. 338 00:41:29,950 --> 00:41:33,100 And in the Iliad, dreams always appear like that. 339 00:41:33,400 --> 00:41:40,520 Standing above the sleeper in human form. Some dreams are true. 340 00:41:40,850 --> 00:41:45,260 Some dreams are false. But in Homer, no dream is subjective. 341 00:41:46,220 --> 00:41:54,110 They descend from elsewhere, search for a sleeper, stand next to his head, transmit some message, and then move away. 342 00:41:54,770 --> 00:42:05,240 They always appear like that, which is why recess fails to recognise diamonds and is annihilated by similarity like gods or ghosts. 343 00:42:05,630 --> 00:42:10,490 Dreams in India are not ideas but existences. 344 00:42:14,490 --> 00:42:23,490 Homer. Unlike Larkin or even C.K., Williams spent at least 500 years on his talents before publishing and that prolonged dream time during which the 345 00:42:23,490 --> 00:42:29,820 stories went on living me interacting with the world must have blurred the edge between waking and sleeping. 346 00:42:30,660 --> 00:42:34,979 You can see how one state blends into another when Diomedes moves into the space 347 00:42:34,980 --> 00:42:39,840 where a dream should stand and takes on the intoxicated lightness of dream. 348 00:42:40,710 --> 00:42:44,220 Nothing resisting as he murders seeking them. 349 00:42:47,170 --> 00:42:52,290 It's not certain whether the story of Jesus is part of a much older rhapsodic cycle about nitrates, 350 00:42:52,300 --> 00:42:57,160 or is part of the later and more literary odyssey which dropped off and fell into the Iliad. 351 00:42:57,760 --> 00:43:06,220 Such deliberations only make sense because the poems are so hybrid and hard to define, like a backwards reflection of Sonnet 87. 352 00:43:06,640 --> 00:43:13,750 The Iliad is an oral poem being passed through by a literary come at a certain moment. 353 00:43:13,960 --> 00:43:18,310 Probably in the eighth century B.C. scribes made written copies of the text, 354 00:43:18,640 --> 00:43:25,720 and although versions went on changing from one performance to another, there was an evolving sense that something ought to stay fixed. 355 00:43:26,860 --> 00:43:33,790 The Iliad is a poem that is waking up feeling about trying to make contact with the matter of papyrus. 356 00:43:35,560 --> 00:43:40,870 But it is also a poem that is swooning backwards into deeper sleep. 357 00:43:41,680 --> 00:43:48,940 The dream of recess has happened already in the Epic of Gilgamesh, where A.D. dreams of death standing next to his head. 358 00:43:49,720 --> 00:43:53,140 Here he is in a translation by Maureen Gallery Kovacs. 359 00:43:56,450 --> 00:44:03,350 And crew's innards were churning. Lying there so alone, he spoke everything he felt saying to his friend. 360 00:44:03,710 --> 00:44:07,220 Listen, my friend. To the dream that I had last night. 361 00:44:07,820 --> 00:44:12,020 The heavens cried out and the earth replied. And I was standing between them. 362 00:44:12,530 --> 00:44:20,060 And there appeared a man of dark visage, and turned me into a dove so that my arms were feathered like a bird. 363 00:44:21,020 --> 00:44:25,730 Teasingly, he led me down to the house of darkness. On entering the house of dust. 364 00:44:26,180 --> 00:44:30,470 Everywhere I looked, there were royal crowns gathered in heaps. 365 00:44:31,280 --> 00:44:38,809 Everywhere I listened. It was the bearers of crowns who in the past had ruled the land, but who now served. 366 00:44:38,810 --> 00:44:55,810 And. And. And. Dreams Always come in threes And I have dreamed my way now backwards through deepening sleep to a moment of waking up. 367 00:44:58,060 --> 00:45:07,300 I have called this lecture a sleep talk, and my purpose in doing so is not to confuse you, but to honour the manner of the summit, 368 00:45:07,960 --> 00:45:18,790 which in Shakespeare's hands is not a confessional but factual proceeding like sleep talk from one similarity to another in a never ending pattern. 369 00:45:21,500 --> 00:45:26,990 Between the similarities between the poem's rational beginning and irrational end. 370 00:45:27,560 --> 00:45:31,250 There is a passing place, a breathing space. 371 00:45:32,290 --> 00:45:38,110 A line and a change of sound. A dawn and dusk nightscape. 372 00:45:38,770 --> 00:45:42,580 A slow down sleep wave. A zone of half beans. 373 00:45:43,150 --> 00:45:47,080 A heap of crowns. A line of kings. Mist. 374 00:45:47,800 --> 00:45:50,920 Moisture, almost. And messiness. 375 00:45:52,120 --> 00:45:56,110 A theatrical wind machine. Copper balls on metal sheets. 376 00:45:56,710 --> 00:46:00,040 Squids. Voices to foxes. 377 00:46:00,670 --> 00:46:03,760 Gusts of darkness. And a forest. 378 00:46:07,780 --> 00:46:19,660 None of these things exists or materially causes any other, but they all past exist and affect each other by means of adjacency and resemblance. 379 00:46:21,010 --> 00:46:26,020 And that is as close as I can get to the theatre maker who made this sonnet. 380 00:46:27,950 --> 00:46:36,740 It is quite problematic. Every writer needs to make terms with Shakespeare, needs to get past him or underneath him, or even square up to him. 381 00:46:37,040 --> 00:46:43,880 But I can't help thinking there is some enchantment or theatrical trick which keeps him invisible. 382 00:46:45,500 --> 00:46:50,300 There are at least seven portraits of Shakespeare, and not one of them is a true likeness. 383 00:46:51,410 --> 00:46:58,640 My favourite full slate is this portrait of an unknown man clasping hands from a cloud. 384 00:47:01,650 --> 00:47:07,140 It was painted by Nicholas Hilliard during Shakespeare's lifetime, but apparently it depicts someone else, 385 00:47:07,770 --> 00:47:12,990 which is a pity, since it beautifully illustrates the atmosphere of Sonnet 87, 386 00:47:13,770 --> 00:47:20,280 the unknowable cloud like and superior other, the sky blue emptiness pressing up against the subject, 387 00:47:21,000 --> 00:47:25,260 the misprint of eyes facing forwards and hand seething upwards. 388 00:47:28,450 --> 00:47:32,230 But as far as I'm concerned, the truest likeness, 389 00:47:32,920 --> 00:47:40,660 perhaps the only likeness I can make terms with is the blank space, which is the subject of this lecture. 390 00:47:42,730 --> 00:47:46,570 Pure disappearance is Shakespeare's signature. 391 00:47:47,560 --> 00:47:50,680 He delights in making a world and then whisking it away. 392 00:47:51,160 --> 00:47:56,770 Leading his audience blindfolded to a cliff, which is not a cliff or a statue, which is not a statue. 393 00:47:57,820 --> 00:48:03,430 He keeps confessing disappearance even as he seems to be professing something else. 394 00:48:04,000 --> 00:48:08,500 Love or envy or pride or murder or kingship. 395 00:48:08,950 --> 00:48:14,169 England His characters speak emphatically of such things, 396 00:48:14,170 --> 00:48:22,690 but then suddenly stop speaking and are melted into a thin air such that his dreams are made of faceless fabric. 397 00:48:22,930 --> 00:48:37,320 Not a. No such matter. Nothing. That seems to me to be the real subject of Sonnet 87, which is why Ezra Pound I am reducing it to an empty space. 398 00:48:38,070 --> 00:48:41,820 I want the sonnet to confess to the disappearance of its maker. 399 00:48:42,120 --> 00:48:48,300 And if you ask me for a title, well, I shall double the disappearance by calling it Mr. Pretty. 400 00:49:00,050 --> 00:49:15,430 It's a huge thank you to Alice for that extraordinarily dense and broad lecture. 401 00:49:16,210 --> 00:49:19,240 I deliberately didn't write her any notes because I was trying to approach it in 402 00:49:19,240 --> 00:49:25,030 that dreaming rather than thinking space that you mentioned at the beginning. 403 00:49:25,390 --> 00:49:31,030 But lots of the things that you said, the phrases that you used are resonating in my in my mind. 404 00:49:31,930 --> 00:49:41,650 I think in particular, as so many of us spend so much of our time thinking about interpretation and interpretative crusades in poetry. 405 00:49:42,340 --> 00:49:51,220 I particularly want to hold on to what you said, which was something like, If you know how to wake up, then you know how to read poetry. 406 00:49:51,670 --> 00:49:55,870 And that's, I think, particularly what I want you to take away with me, 407 00:49:55,870 --> 00:50:05,470 that that parallel between that the transference in our psychic states and the movements of the earth. 408 00:50:06,460 --> 00:50:09,460 So thank you very much, Alice. Can we thank her one more time?