Since everything else that was
quoted of what James Marcus wrote, even if he expressed himself in a joky, journalistic style, made
excellent sense, I thought I’d have a stab at trying to figure out what he was
getting at in singling out “false azure”, which hadn’t bothered me at all until reading his remark. Hence my
deliberate use of the word “suggestion”. Since this mild suggestion has caused a
minor flurry, here is a response. Duncan White’s cavil seems the most
reflective, so I’ll start with his. He wrote:
You write that "Azure
means blue. Only secondarily does it connote sky." But one of the meanings of
the noun azure is the type of blue that we see in an unclouded sky - it is not a
secondary meaning, the two are bound up together in Shade's usage. Here's the
OED:
Azure: The clear blue colour of the unclouded sky, or of the sea
reflecting it. (Originally, the deep intense blue of more southern
latitudes.)
The azure is "false" because it is not the real sky, but a
reflection of it in the window pane. I don't really think it can be cited as
Shade being sloppy in his use of language.
Of course someone could make a
case for Frost being superior to Shade, or vice versa, but the point is that
glibly singling out one line, out of context, is no way to construct any sort of
interesting argument. But then Marcus' piece is more hackwork than "fair
criticism" and probably does not deserve even this slight fuss.
The OED deserves ultimate respect,
and I should have consulted it. In fact, I thought I’d checked my handy Cassell,
but perhaps I only took a quick look at the internet. Several on-line
dictionaries give:
az·ure (ăzh'ər)
n.
Cassell, however, does give n. lapis-lazuli; the deep blue of the sky; the vault of
heaven; a bright blue pigment; (Her.)
the blue of coats of arms, etc. I may have been over-persuaded by my
familiarity with the heraldic usage.
The derivation from lapis-lazuli, a blue stone, seems slightly significant.
Victor Fet wrote:
At least in Russian
poetry "azure" ("lazur' ") used as a noun often means sky, being a standard poetic
cliché.
The Russian ("lazur' ") apparently retains a firmer memory of the
original sense (Persian lazhward).
Victor’s mention of standard poetic cliché may
also be part of Marcus’s point. Using azure to mean “sky” smacks faintly more of
the poetastic than the genuinely poetic, and perhaps therefore falls more aptly
to Shade. I agree with
George’s
and Carolyn’s points were interesting. The various dictionary definitions for
“blue” seem to hover uneasily between noun and adjective. Carolyn’s question:
Is the sky itself, then
"truly" blue? raises
the question of whether “blue” has any existence at all apart from what the
human eye perceives as blue. I would say that it doesn’t, which is why the
concept of “false blue” can’t be justified. “False sky”, however, is of course
perfectly conceivable.
Brian Boyd
wrote:
Addendum: James Marcus
declares that it takes a tin ear to rate the "Pale Fire" poem highly. Then he
speaks with a tin tongue: "VN just isn't in the same ballpark as top-drawer
Frost." How to undermine your critical clout in one easy
lesson!
This comment seems to me completely
irrelevant. The posture of the critic is, as I believe I’ve said earlier,
naturally hateful, and invites hostility. Sycophancy is far more rewarding, and
as Pinocchio’s little friend once put it: if you can’t say something nice, don’t
say anything at all. However, Marcus is making a journalistic point, not writing
poetry. Dr Johnson said, in defence of the critic, that it is perfectly
permissible for a man (though invidious) to criticise a carpenter who makes him
a bad chair, even if he can’t make a chair himself. Presumably Brian is having a
dig at Marcus’s rhetoric, but there is nothing metallic about his demotic
metaphors in this context. In such cases of joyful mixing I’m often reminded of
a sterling line from Churchill’s 1941 broadcast: “The Royal Air Force beat the
Hun raiders out of the daylight air raid” when what he was also implying was that
the RAF had beaten the daylights out of them.
As I’ve recently been dipping into
The Collected Poems of Robert Frost
(Halcyon 1939), I’m vividly aware that I’ve been keeping company with a
true-blue master of cerulean azure, whose works are so far superior to Shade’s
as to leave that neighbourly “poet” not a couple of oozy footsteps, but more
like seven leagues, behind him. This list doesn’t want to analyze the
spine-tingling subtleties of Frost, but I’m bound to agree with James Marcus
that, temporarily no doubt, Ron Rosenbaum must have gone completely off his
trolley. But let me not be unfair.
My warm thanks to Jansy for her
generous support.
Charles