Patmore, Lewis, and The Angel In the House

Sunday Night Journal — July 10, 2011

This is something I’ve been planning to mention for some months. It’s been quite a while now—I’m not sure I want to remind myself of just how long—since Dale Nelson sent me a copy of his excellent article on Victorian poet Coventry Patmore’s long poem The Angel In the House which appeared in the March-April 2002 issue of the bulletin of the New York C.S. Lewis Society. The article focuses, naturally, on the connections between Patmore’s ideas and Lewis’s. I delayed in writing about it because I wanted to take some time to read something of Patmore first; I vaguely remembered that he had appeared briefly in the anthology which served as the text for a course in Victorian literature I’d taken as an undergrad, but that was all.

I still have that anthology, and another, larger one, which I thought had a good selection from Angel. As it turned out, the two together provided me with not much more than a hundred of the several thousand lines that comprise the poem, but those are excellent. (The entire work can be found online at VictorianWeb, but I don’t care to read at that length on the computer).

The Angel in the House, published in parts between 1854 and 1862, ultimately became “perhaps more generally loved than any other poem of the age,” in the words of one of my anthologies. Considering that “the age” included Tennyson and Browning, that’s saying quite a lot. As is often the case, the best-loved poem of its time did not remain so when its time had passed, but neither did it become a mere relic or antique; there seems to be a good deal in it which still speaks to us.

If I had pursued an academic career, I would most likely have specialized in the Victorian era. Part of the reason is that the Victorians were already dealing with the crisis of faith, and the deep anxiety it produced, long before the 20^th century would come to be known as the age of anxiety, but were coping with it in a very different way, a way still owing much to Christianity and characterized by common sense and a high sense of personal duty and honor. And where they were or became serious Christians, as Patmore was, they had already begun to hold a kind of faith that has come to be familiar to us, a faith that has to be, for any moderately educated person (apart perhaps from natural saints), self-conscious and self-examining in a way that was not required in the Middle Ages.

And so with Patmore’s long hymn to married love: perhaps I’m showing my ignorance here, but I’m not aware of any earlier literature which approaches the subject in quite this way. Obviously there had been all manner of love poetry, and the idea that romantic love could lead one toward God was hardly novel, but the raptures of that kind of poetry did not feature or even necessarily involve marriage as such, much less domesticity. And what Patmore seems to have attempted, among other things, is to paint married life as a continuing revel in the sacramental beauty and significance of love between the sexes, domesticated but still rich and powerful.

These ideas have been further explored in modern times, by C.S. Lewis among others, and Dale Nelson’s piece reveals that the connections between Patmore and Lewis were conscious connections: Lewis had read and admired Patmore. Unfortunately the article is not online, but it is among the back issues of the bulletin which are available for mail order at the Society’s web site . Here is one of the key points:

A chief conviction of Patmore’s is the centrality of gender for the whole creation (“nuptial contrasts are the poles / On which the heavenly spheres revolve” [Book I, Canto II]). Compare Lewis in Perelandra, Chapter 16: “Gender is a reality, and a more fundamental reality than sex. Sex is, in fact, merely the adaption to organic life of a fundamental polarity which divides all created beings....”

Patmore’s wife, Emily, who was the subject of The Angel In the House, died after fifteen years of marriage. Not long afterward, Patmore became a Catholic, and Nelson tells us that he burned all the copies of The Angel that he could get his hands on because he believed it to be heterodox. Perhaps it is in parts; perhaps it goes a bit too far in its exaltation of love between the sexes. That may be—or it may be that it only seemed so from the somewhat puritanical viewpoint that has, it can’t be denied, sometimes characterized the Catholic view of love and marriage. In any case the few poems I’ve read from it did not strike me as problematic in that line.

As Nelson points out, there is (based only on what he quotes and what I’ve read) quite a bit in Patmore that strikes us as Victorian in a bad way: I expect the title alone would be enough to put not only feminists but most contemporary women on guard. It appears that there is a good deal of condescension, to say the least—a good deal of woman as childlike, charming, and saintly, but not the mental equal of her husband. Nevertheless, there can’t be much doubt that he was writing about, and from, real love, and a real grasp of the connection between romantic love and spiritual aspiration. No culture gets everything right, and I’d say a flawed testament of real love and real faith is far preferable to a sick popular culture which speaks of women only as “hot” or not, and has given us the term “hookup.”

In one of the last poems of The Angel In the House, the poet asks himself why, though he is now married to the woman he has been pursuing, he still desires to woo her, and closes with this lovely picture of the something-unattainable that is always there in the woman one loves; I suppose the female point of view has a counterpart, but I suspect it would be expressed differently:

Because her gay and lofty brows,
When all is won which hope can ask,
Reflect a light of hopeless snows
That bright in virgin ether bask;

Because, though free of the outer court
I am, this Temple keeps its shrine
Sacred to Heaven; because, in short,
She’s not and never can be mine.

Comments

[Francesca]

I have sent off for the back issue!

[Mac]

I could have mailed you a copy--didn't think to offer. Oh well, nice to support the Society, I guess, though I doubt Dale got paid anything in the first place.

[Janet]

Rats. We only have through 1999 in the seminary library.

AMDG

[Louise]

No culture gets everything right, and I’d say a flawed testament of real love and real faith is far preferable to a sick popular culture which speaks of women only as “hot” or not, and has given us the term “hookup.”

Well said.

[Louise]

Because, though free of the outer court
I am, this Temple keeps its shrine
Sacred to Heaven; because, in short,
She’s not and never can be mine.

Wow. A lot to ponder there.

[Mac]

Thanks for the "well said"--that sentence as first written was a longer list of these contemptuous terms, including the cruder ones, which I decided I didn't want to propagate.

[antiaphrodite]

From the title alone I wouldn't have guessed (and I didn't) that the poems are romantic. And when I did, I didn't think the title referred to a woman. --Not at once, anyway; at any rate, when I read that the author wrote these with his wife in mind, my reaction was one of wistful regret.

[Mac]

That's interesting. What sorts of things did the title suggest to you?

"wistful regret"--because people don't think like this anymore? Of course most didn't, really, back then, either. Still, it was an admirable ideal in a lot of ways, and the book's popularity would indicate it was at least aspired to.

[antiaphrodite]

What sorts of things did the title suggest to you?

...an angel in a house. *sigh* I'm dead and doomed, aren't I? :-) (Or is it doomed and dead?)

it was at least aspired to.

--And not by all, certainly; and, I suppose, most were a lot less serious about it than the author. Still, it was indeed aspired to, however imperfectly; and I deeply mourn and regret the loss. But you know the immediate answer to your question :-)

[Mac]

Heh! Well, to paraphrase Freud or whoever that was, sometimes an angel in a house is just an angel in a house.

[Faztfj]

Что Вы думаете о своей фамилии?
Вы никогда не думали, насколько секрет фамилии влияет на жизнь человека и влияет ли вообще?
Ученые долгое время пытались вычислить, почему иногда судьбы современных людей повторяют судьбы наших предков, в чем таится виновник похожих судеб в веках и как связанна фамилия с будущей судьбой человека. Ради того, чтобы понять причину и найти ответы на все эти вопросы, ученые проводили исследование многих архивов, которые сохранились в наше время.

Analiz-familii-milevskij

история фамилии талипов бесплатно

происхождение фамилии богомолов

истоки фамилии емченко

значение фамилия большакова

фамилии узнать бесплатно бумащук

происхождение фамилии рыжова

значение фамилия облаков

анализ фамилии тимченко

значение фамилии gsrby

значение фамилия вартанян
фамилии маерова

[Paul]

Весела Коледа и Честита Нова Година! С пожелания за много щастие през новата 2012!

[Paul]

Историкът Пол Арбластър, преподавател в Университета в Льовен, Белгия, се е заел с амбициозна и нелека задача - да проследи пътя през столетията на три малки държави, чието историческо значение далеч надхвърля скромната им площ. Огромен е приносът на Белгия, Нидерландия и Люксембург за политическото, икономическото и културното наследство на Европа. От епохата на римските завоевания, през Средните векове, до днешните конституционни монархии и европейската интеграция - авторът не пропуска нито един важен момент от събитията в региона на Бенилюкс. В същото време миналото и настоящето на държавите от Низините не биха могли да се разглеждат извън географския контекст - общото развитие на цяла Западна Европа, тъй като през годините те са били бойно поле и търговски кръстопът на континента, а сега са пример за модерна икономика, сърце на Европейския съюз и район със забележителен духовен и интелектуален заряд.

[Paul]

Oh, sorry - don't know what came over me. (Mine is a safe link, by the way, albeit self-promotional.)

[Paul]

Huh - hovering with my mouse cursor suggests that my safe link has been disabled, but their dodgy ones haven't! What gives?

[Paul]

Here, this should do it!

[Mac]

Heh. I didn't even know what language that was. I followed your link and Chrome offered to translate it. That was several minutes ago. Did it misidentify the language? It thinks it's Bulgarian.

The thing you were replying to may or may not still be there. I reflexively marked it as spam before I noticed that your comments were replies to it.

As far as I know TypePad doesn't do any disabling of links--the spam catcher either snags it or not. I think your link wasn't working because you had 'ref' instead of 'href', which I just corrected, so maybe it works now.

I'm impressed that you know Bulgarian. Chrome is still churning on that translation.

[Mac]

Ok, I see the un-marking-as-spam of the original comment worked. I removed the links from it first, though.

[Paul]

All I know of Bulgarian is that my book has been translated into it. The rest is copying and pasting.

[Mac]

Ah. That's better.:-)