13/1001 - Gilman, Brooke, and Wodehouse as poet

 Short Story: The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman

I'd not read this story before. 

Essay: Niagara Falls by Rupert Brooke, in a collection of essays called Modern Essays, selected by Christopher Morley. I'm excited to have found this collection. I've printed off another essay from this book to read tomorrow.

I've never been to Niagara Falls, but Brooke's description of it is vivid and clear. He comes in contact with the sublime and it seems like he can't admit it is in itself Sublime, like Coleridge's waterfall. He seems to edge right up to the border of Sublimity, but when he crosses over in spite of himself, he calls it "platitudinous." I don't agree that it's platitudinous to allow a marvel of the natural world to draw your mind to things above and beyond the waterfall itself. I think that is the natural and proper response to experiencing something like Niagara.

 "It is very restful to give up all effort at observing human nature and drawing social and political deductions from trifles, and to let oneself relapse into wide-mouthed worship of the wonders of nature."

I loved this. Yes.
Then he goes on to say:

"And this is very easy at Niagara. Niagara means nothing. It is not leading anywhere. It does not result from anything. It throws no light on the effects of Protection, nor on the Facility for Divorce in America, nor on Corruption in Public Life, nor on Canadian character, nor even on the Navy Bill. It is merely a great deal of water falling over some cliffs. But it is very remarkably that. The human race, apt as a child to destroy what it admires, has done its best to surround the Falls with every distraction, incongruity, and vulgarity. ...in the midst of all this, overwhelming it all, are the Falls. He who sees them instantly forgets humanity. They are not very high, but they are overpowering." 

"The Victorian lies very close below the surface in every man. There one can sit and let great cloudy thoughts of destiny and the passage of empires drift through the mind; for such dreams are at home by Niagara. I could not get out of my mind the thought of a friend, who said that the rainbows over the Falls were like the arts and beauty and goodness, with regard to the stream of life—caused by it, thrown upon its spray, but unable to stay or direct or affect it, and ceasing when it ceased. In all comparisons that rise in the heart, the river, with its multitudinous waves and its single current, likens itself to a life, whether of an individual or of a community. A man's life is of many flashing moments, and yet one stream; a nation's flows through all its citizens, and yet is more than they. In such places, one is aware, with an almost insupportable and yet comforting certitude, that both men and nations are hurried onwards to their ruin or ending as inevitably as this dark flood. Some go down to it unreluctant, and meet it, like the river, not without nobility. And as incessant, as inevitable, and as unavailing as the spray that hangs over the Falls, is the white cloud of human crying.... With some such thoughts does the platitudinous heart win from the confusion and thunder of a Niagara peace that the quietest plains or most stable hills can never give."

Poem: (It accidentally pairs well with the essay.)

Caliban at Sunset

by P.G. Wodehouse

I stood with a man

Watching the sun go down.

The air was full of murmurous summer scents

And a brave breeze sang like a bugle

From a sky that smouldered in the west,

A sky of crimson, amethyst, gold and sepia

And blue as blue were the eyes of Helen

When she sat

Gazing from some high tower in Ilium

Upon the Grecian tents darkling below.

And he,

This man who stood beside me,

Gaped like some dull, half-witted animal

And said,

"I say,

Doesn't that sunset remind you

Of a slice

Of underdone roast beef?