In Absentia

In all that we have read this semester, and throughout the four units we've covered, a figure has remained: one in absentia. Whether physical, emotional, or spiritual the distant character has been pervasive in so much of our readings. From the love drunk Petrarch to the dreamlike lines of Kelly speakers can be seen both within and without the bounds of reality. Those in absentia are present in the poems but disconnected: a lover who cannot have his beloved, a boy who can’t know where he came from, and a ruler whose memory is stranded in the sands. It is characterized by one who rests in between real and fictive worlds.

At times this absentia is founded on psychosis or breakdowns (as in Dickinson). In other authors the disconnect from the world is more subtle, as we saw in Kelly who features characters fluxing in and out of the real world. Funerals, gardens, and romantic associations with birds bring an unreality. They disconnect the reader, conscious or otherwise, into a different place and perhaps leave them there. A similar treatment is given to the following figures who exist in the poetic landscape yet are not fully accessible to the reader. They are in absentia.

In Shelley's Ozymandias the poem’s title character is not alive, and the entire account comes from a second hand source: “a traveler from an antique land” (1).  The long dead king exists in a state of absentia. He is spoken for and about after his death has past. After his likeness has been cut into stone and his “sneer of cold command” (5) has had time to stare down its intended victims he dwells in the sand. The very essence of authority is contingent on absentia, on how others are influenced without physical presence. A similar barrier is encountered when the reader encounters Ozymandias. He is only known by his authority, by his dictation. The subtler notes of his humanity are lost, his humanness is lost in the ruins.

Also, and more so, the absentia of Ozymandias is only a xerographic representation of the long dead king. We must be aware as readers when we look at the face of stone it is not his face. It is a likeness, a copy, designed to fool us into belief. Without Ozymandias’ presence, and thus viable authority, all that remains is a remnant of power. Yet Ozymandias has a presence in the poem. He exists as a character we are to interpret and weigh ourselves up against. At the root of it isn't this poem a mirror to hold our own ambitions up against? The absentia that encapsulates Ozymandias presence in the poem makes comparing ourselves to him the act of comparing against the sub-human or more so the inhuman. We discover in the poem’s desolate ending what happens after the ambition is realized, after the kingdom has risen, gone into revolt, flourished, and finally fallen again. Even after this the ruins that remain. Even the depiction of Ozymandias occurs through the filter of the “traveler from an antique land” (1). Our encounter with his character is through a traveler and more so through what time has left behind. We see only the remnants of a person. We see only a portion, the rest is lost in absentia.

Shelley's poem ignores overt form. Although it takes the shape of a sonnet, it follows none of the traditions that would hope to restrain it. The iambs are repeatedly broken in sequence, often by troches. “Nothing beside remains. Round the decay…” (12) While the poem follows a basic outline that is understood, in its execution it is unpredictable. This recalcitrant form might serve as a defiant “mirror” to a tyrant. Perhaps still it is Shelley bucking against the confines of structure that in the coming decades would also become a relic of the past. This “rebellious” structure is complemented by a poet making a poem commenting on a great failure from antiquity. Both the poem and its structure lean hard against a cynical view of order. Just as the poem bounds into chaotic form again and again so does the course of empire.

Just as we receive only a story of the (supposed) truth from Shelley’s traveler, “the boy” of Kelly’s Black Swan receives a dreamlike origin story. The boy is lost in absentia. He does not know his origins, at least not in any complete grounding of reality. He is merely told he was swept up into the speaker’s “belly”. It has been remarked that Kelly’s poems seem dream-like. They often move through reality and unreality imperceivably. The story of the boy and his birth, the earliest account of his life is obscured. The boy's very existence is a poetic balancing act between fact and fiction. His identity is a battle ground for competing narratives both mythic and staunchly real. The boy, like all of us, wishes to understand his identity. Like the form however, the poem elucidates that often identity is not a simple equation. Like a dream life must be interpreted. It must be sought after if one want to understand it and even then it may still seem foreign.

The form of Black Swan is complementary to its dream-like flow. It moves without any clear regard for metric feet or structure. Yet, like the bits of truth scattered in the lines, Kelly’s lines often break between nine and twelve syllables. There is a conscious attention to the page, to the line, to the balance of space between the printed words and the blankness that follows. The reader is not given any hard structure to hold onto and call their own, but they are never abandoned. One of Kelly’s longer lines reads as follows: “In another, statues of horsemen posting giant stone horses…” Other equally long lines feature similarly sensational content. Like a dream there is a sense of order, but not one that is contingent on what we already know. We are not abandoned, but stretched in what we are willing to experience as readers. Like the boy lost in absentia, the reader has a presence, but an exact location in uncertain. The form does not abandon us, but it does not give us coordinates tom the precise truth.

Spencer’s Sonnet 75 is likewise an exercise in absentia. The speaker writes his lovers name in the sand, only to have it washed away. The OED defines “strand” as “the land bordering a sea, lake or river”. It is an ancient word, even by Spencer’s reference point. By the time he used it it had already been in circulation for half a millennium. More so strand is a word often used by poets in more liberal definition to represent a separate country or land (see def. 1e). This separate space is the absentia of the poem. It is the line between expectation and reality. It is the shoreline of absentia the speaker dwells in.

The speaker writes his lovers name, but is greeted by “the tyde” that questions the action. The poem quickly becomes an exercise in futility bringing the speaker into absentia. There is not practical reason to write the name again and again. Just as a mother’s love is encountered in Kelly’s poem, romantic love is encountered in Spenser. The rationale of the poem is gone. It has no logical place that programs the next move. He is insistent, “our love shall live”(14). Yet that promise cannot be materialized exactly. It exists in an uncanny valley of possibility, and amount the futility of realizing it in a mortal world. Repetition throughout the poem can come to mean both death (Hoang) and copulation. In this simultaneity the speaker rests in the uncanny valley between aspiration and reality.

How can one guarantee love forever, or for the next moment? The poem seems to offer both the romantic possibility and fate itself to come crashing down at any moment. Analogous to the sea, the answer is reassuringly in favor of change. “The rushing in of emotions and the receding of the lover’s hope mirror what he sees happening in front of him” (Bradberry). The speaker of the poem exists in an absentia between love that is forever and love that cannot possibly be promised.

Works Cited:

Crosby, Stephanie Bradberry. Edmund Spenser's Sonnet 75: Ebb and Flow. HubPages, July 2011. Web. 14 May 2015

Hoang, Holly. "Sonnet 75 by Edmund Spenser Prezi." Prezi.com. 21 Mar. 2013. Web. 14 May 2015.  

"strand, v.1.e" OED Online. Oxford University Press, March 2015. Web. 13 May 2015.

Ferguson, Margaret W. The Norton Anthology of Poetry. Shorter 5th ed. New York: Norton, 2005. Print.  

Kelly, Brigit Pegeen. The Orchard: Poems. Rochester, NY: BOA Editions, 2004. Print.