Transformative Subjectivity

Joshua Serrano

The Poet’s Transformative Subjectivity 

I love the obsessive nature of poets, the madness that forces them to dwell so intensely on an object, the effect of its existence in their lives, its potential to speak for something greater and, often, its fatality in relation to the poet’s. 

Rereading the post and comments of my peers, I’ve developed a label to satiate the desire I have to follow exactly what a poet feels about an object, as it recurs in the text’s chronology (i.e., line by line, stanza by stanza, etc.) 

I also believe that when people talk about subjectivity, they focus on the aspect which exhaust the notion that their limitless possibilities for people to respond to an object; however, the function of poetry that I am invested documents a specific person’s transformative subjectivity, their initial reaction and where the reader is left at the ultimate line. My essay is dedicated to presenting three examples from Milton’s description of Eden (as told by Satan) in Paradise Lost, Shelley’s descriptions of “Ozymandias”, and Brigit Pegeen Kelly’s shifting description of the dog in “The Orchard.” By demonstrating this in three poems from very different poets and centuries, I hope to illuminate transformative subjectivity as an inherent trait of poetry. 

Milton’s description of Eden is a tricky bit of poetry to follow because of how multilayered it is. It should be read as Milton’s view of how Satan is perceiving Eden, that is a close third-person. This is interesting to me because Satan’s opinions on Eden should not differ from Milton’s, in fact they should support and reinforce them. The first adjective given to Eden is “delicious.” The OED definition of the word, as used in 1667, reads: a. Highly pleasing or enjoyable to the bodily senses, esp. to the taste or smell; affording exquisite sensuous or bodily pleasure. Considering the “thicket overgrown, grotesque and wilde” (136) obstructs Satan’s view of Eden, the reader should assume Satan’s fancy for Eden enters his nostrils first. This is how Milton heightens Satan’s envy for Adam and anger towards God. Adam is described as “general Sire” (144) because God has given Adam dominion over creation, the “neather Empire neighboring round.” Satan, although at a vantage point to see the height of Eden’s majesty, is reminded from the outside that he is in Adam’s dominion and the beauty of Paradise is so great, that despite his immediate fiendishness, the “Vernal delight and joy” (155) entering Satan’s heart can drive away “All sadness but despair.” (156) This is the crucial moment in which we witness Satan’s great complexity. His sadness is absent, but his despair remains. To reference the OED again, the difference between sadness and despair are crucial because the feeling Satan is left with is the complete want of hope, an extremely powerful statement for Milton to make about the majesty of God’s creation and via its effect on Satan. 

Let’s shift to Shelley’s “Ozymandias.” A poem that pits art against emperors, but also a poem that employs a third-person narrative. This time the “I” only sets up the first line and the preceding thirteen are spoken by the traveler. David Mikics contributes an essay on the poem to Poetry Foundation which explains Ozymandias is likely Ramses II, but more interestingly finds a comparison in the description of the statue that mirrors that of “the monstrous George III of our other Shelley sonnet, “England in 1819.” (Surprisingly, surviving statues of Rameses II, aka Ozymandias, show him with a mild, slightly mischievous expression, not a glowering, imperious one.)” This comparison should make it clear that Shelley despises such “cold command” (5) including that of failed empires. Shelley’s subjectivity towards the object shift with his atypical rhyme scheme: ABABACDCEDEFEF. The first AB rhyme-wise cinquain of the poem presents an objective view of the tomb, laced with superficial negative qualifiers. We know from the traveler (and absolutely NOT Shelley) that emperor’s image in the tomb is merely a “half sunk… shattered visage” (4) that barely expresses Rameses II’s frown. Visualized in the pictures above, this is realized by Shelley as the impression made on the object by the sculptor. The empire and emperors are branded “lifeless things.” (7) The following lines contain the volta, which is why the Sonnet is a clear formal choice for transformative subjectivity. Poetry Foundation’s Glossary Terms describe the Volta as the “Italian word for ‘turn.’ In a sonnet, the volta is the turn of thought or an argument.” Shelley argues “on the pedestal, these words appear.” Which is significant because it contrasts the reign of Ramses II and boastful claim that he is “King of Kings; / Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!” (8-9) against the nothingness that remains where “The lone and level sands” exemplify the fate of rulers. Shelley’s argument is that the Word of man extends further than the scepter. Ramses II’s claim still exists, but among a “colossal Wreck,” the sandy remains of the climax of Egypt’s power. The reintroduction of the -ing rhyme on Kings visually mimics reminds the reader of how a ruler’s meets their fate of inevitable of absence. The last rhyme-wise quatrain demonstrate a true rhyme that allows the lines to flow as a forced construction, but sonically natural from the speaker. 

The last poem in which I hope to demonstrate a transformative subjectivity from the speaker is with Brigit Pegeen Kelly’s view of the dog in “The Orchard.” This is the most striking representation of the device at work. Shelley’s subject, the dog, takes several forms and functions in the poem, while sustaining a singular mechanical motivation.  The dog initially is imagined. From a dream, the “boney creature” is “feeding on apples.” The dog appears to Kelly as a horse and it’s repeatedly described as wolfing down apples. Horse, wolf and dog? Crazy, right, but the poet doesn’t stop there. The dog is released from the dream and surfaces in real life, feasting this time on a doe. In fact, the real dog transforms into: ghost, stray and hunter. The focus on the dog as hunter is the easiest for me to pin to portraying Kelly’s subjectivity towards the animal, in that doe is a commonly used as trope in courtly love poems. It often wanders into the subject’s view or is the object of a hunt, but Kelly’s doe is somewhere between the subject. She chronicles her interpretation of the dog’s feast based on the doe’s lack of a response. To me, I view the poem as a critique of the gruesome implications of describing love in terms of predator and prey. 

As I conclude, I realize I chose poems wherein the poet’s select subject that have their own object and the effect multiplies the transformative subjectivity. The poet has the opportunity to adopt the actions of a speaker or protagonist (satan, traveler, dog) to resolve their own feelings towards a complex, but worthy subject (God’s majesty of creation, rulers and empires, the dangerous of objectification.)