IV Blithedale Romance (Chase & Tanner)

[alice wellintown]

The Tanner Oxford Introduction to Hawthorne's BR, available on-line,
is a great Introduction to IV. Just re-read it, thanks. An excellent
"response" to Chase's less than flattering view of Hawthorne's
Romance, and of Hawthorne and Romance generally. Although Chase claims
his study is descriptive, he begins with a contrast (American Romance
vs. the novel and the British novel) and provides all manner of
critical assessments, common a the time---Henry James is the Greatest
... Wuthering Heights is just Sport ...and so on.  But, Chase also
celebrates the Tradition that Pynchon writes in and, and this is very
important because so much of the groping in the night where spotted
cows and dappled dogs are shagging ...the autobiographical readings
and the mis-readings of the Romantic characterizations and such, can
do with a bit of grounding in the tradition here represented.

That said, as a dappled dude of freckled face
and orange Afro super saturated with rain
I salute all the brothas who dropped pebbles in the toilet bowl
and luv a blemish on a Brazilian lady, a little mole,
a beauty mark that marks the spot and makes her hot hot hot.

Turn the leaf now, Miles Coverdale.


GLORY be to God for dappled things—
  For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow;
    For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim;
Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches’ wings;
  Landscape plotted and pieced—fold, fallow, and plough;
    And áll trádes, their gear and tackle and trim.

All things counter, original, spare, strange;
  Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)
    With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim;
He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change:
                  Praise him.


Margaret, are you grieving
Over Goldengrove unleaving?
Leaves, like the things of man, you
With your fresh thoughts care for, can you?
Ah! as the heart grows older
It will come to such sights colder
By & by, nor spare a sigh
Though worlds of wanwood leafmeal lie;
And yet you wíll weep & know why.
Now no matter, child, the name:
Sorrow's springs are the same.
Nor mouth had, no nor mind, expressed
What héart héard of, ghóst guéssed:
It is the blight man was born for,
It is Margaret you mourn for.