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‘Mankind's old dichotomy’: Gwen Harwood's romanticironistBonny Cassidy aa PhD candidate in the Department of English , University of SydneyPublished online: 18 May 2009.

To cite this article: Bonny Cassidy (2007) ‘Mankind's old dichotomy’: Gwen Harwood's romantic ironist, Journal of AustralianStudies, 31:90, 49-63, DOI: 10.1080/14443050709388109

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'Mankind's old dichotomy': Gwen Harwood'sromantic ironist

Bonny Cassidy

This article forms part of a larger project designed to rekindle interest in the placethat Romantic philosophy and aesthetics take in contemporary Australianliterature. Poet Gwen Harwood's 'Professor' sequences engage strongly withGerman Romantic philosophy, specifically the early, German Romanticism ofFriedrich Schlegel and Novalis. The sequences began to appear during the 1960sand continued to be published with decreasing frequency until 1991; many of theProfessor Kröte pieces first appeared under the pseudonym of Francis Geyerbetween 1943 and 1967. The debate waged between Dennis Douglas and A DHope in ALS during the 1960s and 1970s over the meaning of Harwood'ssequences introduces the topic of irony in these poems. By extension, this articletracks the concept of Romantic irony as central to both the formal and thematicadventure undertaken in these poems.

Since Robert F Brissenden's anthology of Harwood criticism in 1978,continuing scholarship has shied away from Romantic readings of the poet'swork.1 Alison Hoddinott's important study of Gwen Harwood's poetry, The Realand The Imagined World (1991), opens a critical investigation of the convergencebetween philosophy and poetry in the poet's work. Current scholarly work onHarwood promises to go further into this subject.2 However, despite Hoddinott'sacknowledgment of the general influence of 'German intellectual life' uponHarwood3, and of the poet's self-proclaimed stance as 'an uppercase Romantic',she does not investigate to any depth the rich links between German Romanticismand Harwood's poetry.4 Elizabeth Lawson has gone so far as to make a case forHarwood's 'anti-romanticism', opened up by Jennifer Strauss's earlierinvestigations of 'feminine sensibility' in the poetry of Harwood and femalepeers5; and a timely biographical essay by Gregory Kratzmann, focusing uponHarwood's numerous pseudonyms, reflects Andrew McCann's recent suggestionsof declining critical interest in Romantic influence upon Australian literature.6

Yet, contradicting her anti-romantic reading, Lawson describes Harwood'stechnique of 'admitting the antithetical voice outright' through 'counterpoint'.7

The technique of counterpoint is not only undeniable evidence of Harwood'sRomantic agenda, but is the formative element of Romantic irony in the Professornarratives. Romantic irony is again underlined when, in her 1996 obituary to thepoet, Strauss quotes Harwood's belief that 'human beings have only language andlaughter against the dark'.8 This claim echoes the philosophy of early, GermanRomanticism, and the roles of women, children and nature in the Professor poems.

Reacting to the idealism of Fichte and Schelling with a brilliant jumble ofontology and aesthetics, Schlegel comes to view the self as a site of reflection,comprised of'knowing and the knowing of knowing'—a meeting point of subjectand object.9 For Schlegel, the Romantic subject is defined not only by inhabiting

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the self-posited T (Ich), but also by eternally stepping-outside-of-itself intoobjectivity.

His philosophy claims knowledge of the realm not instituted by the existenceof the T , a realm that idealist philosophy avoids as the not-T (Nicht-Ich).Schlegel expresses annoyance at exclusive claims to self-knowledge promoted byFichte and Schelling:

That unhuman and absolute knowledge, as it pretends to embrace all at once, andby one step place us in full possession of the whole sum of human knowledge, so,ever fluctuating between being and non-being, it soon dissolves into thin air, andleaves behind but a baseless void of absolute non-knowing.10

When we first meet Professor Eisenbart, at the ceremony of 'Prize-Giving', he is'in full possession'—shimmering in his mind's mirror as the subject of aschoolgirl's crush. Harwood drew the character from a German folk song, ''Ich binder Doktor Eisenbart', in which the namesake 'can make the lame see, and theblind walk'. This figure represents the Promethean 'victory of the modemscientist': a Romantic triumph over God by controlling the giving and taking oflife.11 The name 'Eisenbart' itself translates as 'ironbeard', connoting 'a robot, ametallic man', a futuristic Tin Man unencumbered by a heart.12 Arguably,Harwood found fascinating inspiration for Eisenbart in atomic physicist J RobertOppenheimer, bringing an utterly fitting contemporary illustration to GermanRomanticism. Whilst we cannot place Eisenbart in a particular time period,Harwood feeds us some clues in the final poem of the sequence, 'The Death ofEisenbart':

He dreams of what Ouspensky sawin Poland before World War One:two heavy lorries with their loadof new unpainted wooden crutchesreaching up to the first floor windows

for legs which were not yet torn off.

I was responsible. Absurd.I was at school just starting Latinand fencing. Even then I thoughtof games which had not been inventedat which I'd shine.13

Eisenbart's occupations as a physics professor and inventor of a bomb(Hydrogen?) are closely tied to his psychological journey throughout thesequence. Indeed, his dying premonition, above, resembles Oppenheimer'saccused 'Shakespearean posturing' over his development of the atomic bomb: 'thephysicists have known sin; and this is a knowledge which they cannot lose.'14

With 'one hand placed / like Rodin's Thinker', Eisenbart's deluded sense ofself exudes an impressive charisma in 'Prize-Giving'. An attempt to withdrawfrom the not-T of surrounding society, to appear a cold monument to somethinghigher than the 'insect nervousness' of adolescent sexuality, lies in his pose ofmannered thought. Harwood's repetitive 'indifference'/'indifferently' emphasisesEisenbart's tone of self-glorification; and the narrative approach of the poem'sfirst half is biased toward Eisenbart's view of things: groupings of belittling

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adjectives divide not-T ('humble', 'humbler', 'flapped', 'tortured', 'half-hearted') from T ('distinction', 'pride', 'the best', 'advantage').15

For Schlegel, however, such division is fruitless. The combination of theknown and unknown is an ideal model for social life, the creative process and theRomantic work. Art is the presentation of thinking drawn from the model ofClassical dialogue, the 'amazement of the thinking spirit at itself, wherein 'theeddying stream of speech and counter-speech, or, rather, thought and counter-thought, moves livingly onwards':

And unquestionably this form of inner dialogue is, if not in every case, equallyapplicable and absolutely necessary, still it is all but essential, and at least highlynatural and very appropriate to every form of living thought and its vividenunciation.16

Literary and aesthetic 'enunciation' enacts this dialogic rhythm of Romantic ironyby achieving a state of infinitude 'at the midpoint between the portrayed and theportrayer, free of all real and ideal self-interest... still in the state of becoming'.17

Romantic irony of personality, as of the artwork, forces imagination to becontradicted by objectivity, and objectivity by imagination in 'absolute synthesisof absolute antitheses'.18 Whilst the ironic method is synthetic it is never completeor finite; in Novalis's description, 'self becomes nonself, the symbol becomessymbolized, and philosophy becomes poetry'.19

The dialectically structured poem has both an aesthetic and social/moralfunction. The significance of Harwood's 'language and laughter' lies in thisalliance. Romantic irony appears in the forms of analogy and joke, suggestsSchlegel, which gesture beyond the self and puncture its bubble.20 In The LiteraryAbsolute, which revisits German Romanticism in the postmodern context, PhilipeLacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy acknowledge that Romantic aestheticsremains (globally) relevant to us now because, still, 'we have not left the era ofthe Subject'.21 We can address this through literature, as Gary Handwerk argues:

The artwork's presence for analysis and its fixing of patterns long enough to permitthe dialectic of ironic self-recognition to occur do privilege it ... [and] poetrymakes the Absolute, as dialectic of presence and absence, tangible in an indirectway, through representation. It is a stage on the way to the objective.22

Past critiques of Romantic aesthetics have underscored its continuing relevance,but in doing so have often failed to reconcile with the notion of an 'objective'result. Kevin Newmark has criticised Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy for,suggestingthe capacity of the Romantic 'artwork' to signify in an unproblematic yetmultiplicative and finally self-contradictory way.23 As Michel Chaouli laments,'what kind of monstrosity is a movement that is interrupted at all times? How arewe to image a process of writing—and a society modelled on it—that has a breakat every point of its narrative?'24

But synthesis is of course not a point of rest outside the dialectic—it is thepermission of oscillation itself. A mind without language and laughter allows itselfto slip into what Christopher Brennan names the 'Romantic Fallacy'. Brennan, anAustralian poet equally as impressed by German cultural tradition as Harwood,gives a series of spirited philosophical readings in his essay 'German

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Romanticism: a progressive definition'.25 The notion of Romantic fallacy (takenup, as we shall see, so centrally in Harwood's Professor poems) is defined thus:

[Ijnstead of returning, in F. Schlegel's sense, to the duad and holding the balancebetween its two extremes, one declines upon one of them and 'identifies' it, in thewrong sense, with its 'better self ... The Romantic Fallacy is a besetting sin, notmerely of Romanticism, but of humanity in general: it seems to arise out of theduad (a) simple consciousness (Einheit), (b) reflexion (Vielheit); instead of aprogress towards universality (Allheit) there is a backward swing to the pre-reflexion period (we were always happier when we were younger).

Eisenbart may appear to triumph over the Romantic fallacy: after all, he does notfantasise about the past, nor does he glorify what Brennan names the 'pre-reflexion period'. Supported by Harwood's dramatic sympathy, Eisenbart's dapperconfidence has precisely the effect that he would wish.27 Holding his originalformula, he looks to the future:

Let copulation thrive amongthese tedious three-piece cultured miles.Suburbs, preserve your tribal styles.

—Dearest, what did you do today?'Slept late, as is my usual way.Did usual things at usual hours.Went shopping, read, arranged the flowers.'—Come, now.

'The moon forestalls you, dear.'—One day I'll crack that pestering sphere,that night-spy, womanish Peeping Tom.I'll rip her with some glorious bomb.I'll blow her to oblivionand howl with laughter when she's gone.There'll be no tides in women's blood.28

With Brennan's definition of the Romantic fallacy in mind, however, it is possibleto read Eisenbart's perception as a clear desire for absolute control. Romanticfallacy manifests itself, like Professor Kröte's musical torturing, as 'innumerablevariations of the one theme'. Brennan points out the ways by which 'better selfbetrays the fallacious mind, from Puritanism and racial superiority, to nostalgicrigidity of a status quo or Christian guilt of 'our birth as a sin'.29 The place of suchabsolutism in Romantic fallacy may be identified with the idealism of Fichte andSchelling opposed by Schlegel. Brennan's definition of the Romantic fallacyidentifies a shadowy temptation that lies within Wordsworth's famous descriptionof the Romantic self in the 1802 Preface to Lyrical Ballads:

A man speaking to men: a man, it is true, endowed with more lively sensibility,more enthusiasm and tenderness, than are supposed to be common ... delighting tocontemplate similar volitions and passions as manifested in the goings-on of theUniverse, and habitually impelled to create them where he does not find them ...30

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In 'Professor Eisenbart's Evening', quoted above, the Professor is 'habituallycompelled to create' to the point of megalomania. He envisages the T ascontaining a superhuman ability capable of destroying a world of human ties tothe very font of human life. Eisenbart's science has no universal purpose orappeal, for he does not accept his place amongst humanity's fallible desires.Withdrawing into the T , he creates an imaginary world of post-reflexion,involving nostalgia for a golden future exempt from human foibles and ruled byEisenbart himself. Even on his deathbed, at last well and truly grounded byphysicality, Eisenbart still attempts to conquer:

He calls the nurse

she's reminiscent of his mistresswhen he first took her, long ago.He tells her 'You belong to me.'Then says, 'Forgive me. I have thoughtsthat have no business in my head.'31

Whilst Eisenbart literally 'took' the mistress in the sequence's opening, 'Prize-Giving', it was a passive gesture. The tension between the Romantic irony andfallacy is readily apparent in the secondary characters of Harwood's sequences. Adialogic irony is played out through the tension of alternating voices, but in sucha way as to achieve hovering epiphanies or 'intervals' of systemic reflection in thecharacters and in the poems themselves.32

In the Eisenbart sequence it is almost always the mistress who tests theProfessor with an ironic perspective. Harwood wastes no time in establishing theplaying field of their dialogue, introducing the mistress's disturbing presence atthe characters' first meeting.33 The Professor's confidence, so carefully built in thefirst half of the poem, is rocked when, during the 'opening prayer', he glimpses agirl 'grinning at him, her hand bent / under her chin in mockery of his own'. Thefragility of his composure is exposed. The self-assurance of'indifference' and 'dryscholastic jokes' is but a fearful and imaginary elevation found in his 'backwardswing' to the self. The theatre of 'academic dress' and 'distaste' provide a coverfor the defensiveness and anxiety prompted by the appearance of this girl:

He tookher hand, and felt its voltage fling his holdfrom his calm age and power; suffered her strangeeyes, against reason dark, to take his starewith her to the piano, there to changeher casual schoolgirl's for a master's air.He forged his rose-hot dream as Mozart told

the fullness of all passion or despairsummoned by arrogant hands.

'Calm age and power' keep Eisenbart from the flux and drag of panicked ageingand time. The 'voltage' of youth and desire wrenches him from this security,reminding him of his real, physical existence. This is the beginning of a chain ofphysical convulsions, which represent the painful tension of the challenges to hisfallacy; electrocuted and 'suffering]', he shall be heartbroken, bayoneted ('EarlyLight'), and ripped apart ('Panther and Peacock'). Eisenbart is humiliated, but

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sexual desire is propelling him despite himself, ltak[ing] / his stare with her', untilthere he is—forging 'his rose-hot dream'—there, in the 'best seat' of 'a girls'school speech night'.

The Professor has been flung headlong into the very world he has decided hemust not enter: the not-T of 'passion or despair', a world of flux and animalexperiences. The father of a bomb should not be feeling this, but he is. Eisenbartseems stunned by the rude awakening to this odd place of transcendence, 'againstreason dark'. The Orphic trophy 'of silver chased with curious harps' with whichhe presents the girl pianist, in whose 'strange eyes' he finds an exit from hisexclusive genius, baffles him. He is left trapped in his own Romantic ambition,and is inverted:

The music ended.Eisenbart teased his gown while others clapped,and peered into a trophy which suspendedhis image upside down: a sage fool trappedby music in a copper net of hair.

The schoolgirl is repeatedly aligned with all that is antithetical to Eisenbart'sstance. Harwood's narrator suddenly withdraws to a more aloof position, asEisenbart's voice fades from the scene and a profusion of third-person pronounsemerges, with most of the descriptive focus falling on the girl. Harwood's reversalof gender roles shatters Eisenbart's control, with the girl assuming a blokeyswagger of 'master', 'hitched', 'winked' and 'stood before him', whilst Eisenbartis left high and dry, effeminately 'teas[ing]' his 'gown' and childishly'peerfing]'.34 His dream of literally monumental power has shifted to a dream ofhuman desire, a change signalled by the reader's abrupt alienation from him. In'Professor Eisenbart's Evening' the girl's mocking aggravates the lingeringdisturbance that her menstrual cycle has caused her lover:

'I'll go to sleep and you can lieand calculate the root of pi,work out what formulae you need,what cobalt, hydrogen, to speedthe great bomb's liberating shockand crack the cold-short lunar rockand free poor men from her dominion.It can't be done, in my opinion. ' j5

The mistress's interjections of 'laughter and language' prevent the poem fromremaining a conventional dramatic monologue. Structured as a dialogue, herspeech emphasises her legitimacy and importance as an independent character.Her tone is playful and, above all, ironic. The girl's spoken thoughts offerEisenbart the rude challenge of antithesis, in the way that her physical presencehas been allied with objectified narration and with language patterns of violentmotion and fluxing ambiguity. Her dialogue directly mocks Eisenbart's work andinterrupts his pathos, as if the 'formulae' were child's play and the 'poor men' toysoldiers.

Hoddinott's and Lawson's common interest in the feminist potential ofHarwood's work jars somewhat with the poet's own denial of having felt 'the

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problematical relationship of the woman poet to the Romantic tradition'.36 AsStrauss has found in her study of feminine poetics, Harwood embraces the label of'Romantic' with 'fervour notably in contrast to the edginess exhibited toclassification as a feminist'.37 This may be because Harwood inhabitsRomanticism in a way that allows it to amply embrace feminist poetics.Harwood's choice, to characterise antithesis as female in the Eisenbart sequence,does not limit her own spectrum of poetic expression when characterising themistress. In fact, the girl is something of a shape-shifter; toying with conventionalgender behaviour and moving from schoolgirl to lover across the sequence, she isa model of contradiction. Such contradiction is a key to Romantic irony, asBrennan points out in 'German Romanticism':

[Beauty] is isolated out of the world, it is an arrested moment of perfection. But justhere lies the second ground of Romantic Irony. Round and past that arrestedperfection the world keeps on along its stumbling way towards perfection ... newsyntheses are summoning us: the old beauty may no longer stand so near to us, itsdirect appeal is weaker, the labour required to revive it is greater.38

Harwood explores the protean figure of antithesis even further in the ProfessorKröte sequence. Eisenbart's wish for an iron society, a wish that is constantlydeflated by the reality of a world driven by lust, compassion, love, age and time,mirrors Kröte's yearning. Kröte's vanity is a less visible type than Eisenbart's:Kröte finds the 'labour' of self-scrutiny and contradiction set within the passinghost of characters, like so many mirrors. Novalis describes the fluxing pace ofKröte's lesson:

The first step will be an inward gaze—an isolating contemplation of ourselves.Whoever stops here has only come halfway. The second step must be an activeoutward gaze—autonomous, constant observation of the external world.39

'Nightfall' sets the Professor between his future ('poor drunks' sleeping beneathan autumnal shower of funereal blooms) and the past (lovers blindly beckoningand 'awaiting' time with their 'instinctive' and careless 'surrender' to age). Thelovers' animal unconsciousness and the drunks' 'uncaring' oblivion accept fate.Enjambment forces Harwood's metre to roll on past possible constraints, forminga rhythm of force and flux against the hero's mental stasis:

while the flaringcoat of the river glowed and flamedwith sunset, and declined to drabmonotony, and smokestacks framedin saffron light rose up to stabhis breast with memories: a yellow sky;cypress, jet-black; a boy plays 'Islamei'

with arrogant skill; his teacher clawsa fine gilt chair with nervous pride—and then the turbulent applause;rococo gods and cherubs ridehis winds of promise, and their gilded scrollsshine in that glittering hall; the Danube rolls

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past those high windows in its skinof sunset.

'Who would know me now,a second-rate musician inan ignorant town? Or tell me howiscords of fading light find and restorethe colours of a day that comes no more?'40

Midway through the Kröte sequence, the poem 'Monday' steps up society'soffensive against Kröte. He is trying to reconcile the immigrant's frustrationenvisioned in 'Nightfall': 'Oh how shall I pluck from air some tune / to match thislife of mine?' Harwood makes her reader privy to his inner monologue, doingaway with the previous illusion of a voice in soliloquy and thus formally mergingthe subjective and objective. The Professor is lonely; with a companion he mightbe awoken to reality and grounded:

Kröte thinks: If I had a child ...and dreams himself a creature

with smoky hair, whose spirit's wildas wind, whose inmost nature

mirrors his love.41

As the narrative tone of the sequence shifts, the reader increasingly relies upondramatic irony. Harwood may not reveal Kröte's fallacy overtly here, as she doesin a poem such as 'At the Arts Club', but the context of the sequence reminds thereader that Kröte's vision is just another of his time-arresting fantasies. The childis a reflection of Kröte's 'wild musician's hair';42 he is a mere canvas upon whichKröte's glorification of the past might be projected, 'whose inmost nature mirrorshis love'. Kröte does not desire the challenge of the not-T, of friendship,tolerance of learning, but longs for a doppelgänger who avoids a departure fromthe self. He spots 'a dumpy likeness' of his dream, but this flesh-and-blood childthrows stones at gulls. In the Kröte poems, birds that are able to inhabit littoralplaces represent, somewhat traditionally, the freedom of the poetic spirit.Harwood's pun on 'gulling' represents the birds as tricksters. If Kröte is a 'sacredclown', they have the freedom of the Fool. When Kröte witnesses the child target'the crowding gulls', 'a wave of sickness / shakes him'. Again Kröte is physicallystatic, and the child, wandering over the beach, is an antithetical figure. The gullsrise from the child's stirring hand, as she perceives a similar victim in Kröte:

The child comes close, and hangsover him with a grin,

then with her metal spade she bangssharply on Kröte's shin.43

Both gulls and mortality return later in the sequence. In 'Wind' Kröte 'walksalone' as the lovers from 'Nightfall' reappear, 'transformed to radiant presences'by one another and yet 'indifferent' to the natural flux of'tossing' and 'swirl[ing]\Their dream of unity seems to protect them, whereas Kröte's fragmented dream oflost glory exposes him:

Professor Kröte walks alonepast their beatitude, and from

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his spirit cannot tear his ownbarbed instruments of martyrdom.

The gulls surround him, 'drop down' in 'nervous arcs of action' to resemble achorus, a gaggle heralding impending change, perhaps rallying around their land-locked brother, 'screamfing] / hunger through wintry shires of air'.44 Kröte'shunger is acute, but somehow he cannot ride the fickle currents with morsels ofinspiration as the gulls do—and as Wordsworth's poet does, a man who 'willfollow wheresoever he can find an atmosphere of sensation in which to move hiswings'.45 Harwood echoes Wordsworth through Kröte's confession in 'Soiree':'Oh, music's real as air, I breast / no other element, and I'm / faithful, if dull ofwing'.46 Harwood's end-stopped lines of iambic tetrameter and a/b/a/b schemebuild a satisfying momentum. Kröte tries to take off, 'leaning on the wind', butloses the power:

shaking his head as if he triedbeyond its senseless noise to findsome note whose echoes had just died.47

In these lines, Harwood echoes Henry Kendall's last poem, 'After Many Years':'And when the day is very near, / And birds are on the wing, / My spirit fancies itcan hear / The song I cannot sing.' Paul Kane identifies the resounding 'image ofnegativity' in Kendall's poem, and this is also relevant to the idealism of Kröte'sRomantic fallacy. However, the ironic moment—from the appearance of the girlchild, to the lovers, to the gulls—complicates those instances where narrative andform collude in dramatic sympathy with the Professors. It is as if the poem relieson the balancing scepticism of another presence at the points where Harwood andeven the reader cannot help but extend compassion to the Professor's fallacy. ThusHarwood does not sustain the 'negativity' of Kröte's situation, as Kendall'sspeaker does of his own; contradicting the Professor's absent ideal, there is alwayspresence.48 This interpretation of the poem through Romantic aesthetic discoursesupports Kane's suggestion of 'romanticism's continuing claims upon us', butdoes not necessarily agree with his argument that Harwood works in a tradition ofnegativity.49

If Hoddinott has pointed out that 'all the women in the [Eisenbart] seriesperform the same function', I would extend that reading to encompass all of thesecondary characters, in both sequences.50 To this extent, the working of GermanRomantic philosophy through the Professor sequences is pleasingly, binarysmooth. However, this would ignore the organic development of the charactersthat this article has tried to reflect. Harwood's admiration for the quality of bothformal and rhetorical 'possibilities in infinity' is fulfilled in the Professorsequences. The poems meet her measure of 'a memorable poem [as] one thatsprings back to life after merciless dissection'.51 It seems not to matter to Harwoodwhat form antithesis takes—wind, boys, girls, apes, love, music—only that it ispresent. Without the not-T, dialogue would cease; and in her desire to maintainthis fluid oscillation in poetry and, I think, in the world, Harwood makes sure thatrest is never an option for the Professors, the poems, or the reader. Following thelater epiphanies of both Professors to ironic being, any notion of either synthesis-as-conclusion or synthesis-as-negativity is up for play.

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The uncomfortable confrontations between Eisenbart and the natural world, forexample, are until the sequence's climax in 'Panther and Peacock' at least partlyrespectful of the two parties' physical separation. Here, however, Eisenbart findshimself in a zoo, caught at the threshold of human and beast, between 'the laughterof a Sunday crowd' and 'an ape's gross mimicry of man'. At the sight of what hebelieves is a regressive society observing its 'trap' of animalism and 'circling' life,his bitterness is palpable. Harwood introduces the scene with a vocabularysympathetic to Eisenbart's patronising voice, continuing the pattern of 'Prize-Giving'. The Professor's *skirt[ing]' of the crowd, avoiding the group with amovement that inadvertently mirrors its very motion, suggests his 'backwardswing' to self-glory. Thus we receive an image of Eisenbart left 'outside the circle'yet pathetically following its edge:

Professor Eisenbart, with grim distaste,skirted the laughter of a Sunday crowdcircling an ape's gross mimicry of man.His mistress watched a peacock. He grimaced,making rude observations on the proudcreature's true centre ofthat radiant fan.

All the cold observation he might summon cannot exempt Eisenbart from life'scycle. A constant parade of association with this cyclic motif continues in thefollowing stanzas:

Raked by the aureoled bird's nerve-twisting criesthey strolled away, affecting noble ease.A clot of darkness moved in temperate shade:a jungle climate, favouring decay,flared through the keyholes of a panther's eyesto tarnish' the gold gauze of sun, and fade

blue from brilliant air.52

Dennis Douglas's scrutiny of imagery of being opened up and being swallowed(or possibly Being opened and Being swallowed) highlights the trap of Eisenbart'sinsularity.53 Responding to A D Hope's review of the sequence, Douglas believesthat 'Eisenbart's temptations loom larger in the opening of 'Panther and Peacock'than fear'.54 Douglas denies that the Professor's temptation to exclude the not-Tand control it as a separate body is a direct product of his fears of antithesis andits uncontrollable elements. Consider, however, how the words 'raked' and'affecting' follow close on the heels of Eisenbart's 'temptation' to swagger at theopening.

Inversion rules: conventionally masculine word patterns associated withEisenbart are now applied to nature. The illumination Eisenbart avoids closes in,as Venus lblaze[s]' in the sky; absence is felt as 'the sharp iconography of sense /declines to vague abstraction'. His head appears not 'Darwinian' in character, butin subject—a beast or natural landscape, no less:

Its intricate landscape of fine lines and scars,ridges and hollows, veins' meanderings,grew desolate in sleep. Above them spreada leaf-divided tissue of space and stars.

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Although his dreaming life indulges 'the incredible / formula that, spoken, wouldimpel prodigious ruin', he is truly vulnerable, truly animal in sleep. His mistress'swords invert and set the formula:

His mistress spoke his name.Feathers sprang from the sutures in his skull.His hands grew rattling quills. As darkness fell

it circumfused worse darkness, in which prowledfamiliar nightmare towards him, cowering, grippedas always fast in horror. A stale breathof carrion choked him. Fingerless, dewlap-jowled,bird-beaked, he screamed in silence, and was rippedawake still rooted in his dream of death.

The imperfect rhyme scheme of this poem, a drawn-out a/b/c/a/b/c, drives thesurreal nature of Eisenbart glimpsing his fallacy with utter despair and bafflement.Polysyllabic and oddly stressed feet interrupt iambic pentameter; this rhythmdelays and clutters a metre that, in the end, resembles a carcass left behind.The traumatic waking process depicted in a preceding poem, 'Early Light', isheightened in 'Panther and Peacock':

His mind deep in the vehemence of shadegroped worldwards. Though his body showed no harm,stone-still, with sorrow frozen on her facethe young girl bent above him. While they madethis strange pieta, feathers glistening warmwith his own heartstain fell through infinite space.55

AD Hope's interpretation is also problematic. He reads a simple symbolism in thisconclusion, noting that Eisenbart and his mistress 'are seen under the species ofeternity in their timeless roles of intellect and beauty, of tragedy and love'. In fact,the Professor has not been timelessly bound to intellect, but has been tempted andhas found love and tragedy dormant within him. Eisenbart's dance with Romanticambition has finally come to a climax, and this nightmare is his grand lesson. Anend to Harwood's narrative sympathy is signalled by past tense; Eisenbart is quiteliterally history. The ironic view of self has been achieved by dream's analogy, sothat his consciousness of imagined pain meets the reflection of witnessing hisdestruction by an outside force. Hope's addendum that, in this stanza, 'the tone ofthe poem has modulated from casual fun to one of deep seriousness', is tooflippant a reading of the entire poem's dramatic place in the sequence.56 In thecontext of a Romantic philosophical reading, the accumulated struggle betweenfallacy and irony within the sequence is evident. The dialogic exchange buildsfrom the poem's very opening, with a suspense and extremity of sentiment inEisenbart's words that exceed the preceding poems.

Yet Eisenbart closes his epiphany following 'Panther and Peacock'. Ultimately,he refuses the lesson he has suffered, retreating suddenly from a sexual encounterin favour of his bomb plans, in 'Ganymede'. 'Group from Tartarus' illustrates thathe will pay a price for his arrogance. As Friedrich Schlegel warns, 'To blurt outeverything ... is a fault of young geniuses or a legitimate prejudice of oldbunglers'.57 Eisenbart retains his Romantic fallacy: in Brennan's words, the

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Who Am I?

adventure of life has lost 'everything in passing to the stage of the finishedpicture'.58 In an echo of Baudelaire's 'A Voyage to Cythera', those sea birds thatare emblems of hope for Kröte are harbingers of despair for post-coital Eisenbart:

Still weary from his mistress' bedhe read at sight, from eye to eye,

their fugue of love and loss, and tracedthe stretto of their parting words.Lightly across the pavement slabsa seagull walked. The sea-clean bird'sreptilian head made lightning stabsguttenvards at some rotting waste.

Eisenbart felt, who prized his dryindifference to love and luck,uncharted cold that winter dayas a hard beak of anguish struckthe ripe waste of his heart's decay:Too old to love, too young to die.59

As Harwood prepares to taper off the sequence in 'Fever', Kröte's Romanticfallacy builds to a 'fall' and an awakening that closely mirror Eisenbart's.Similarly, Kröte's character follows a rocky path. Kröte returns to reality byexperiencing a glittering affirmation of 'all that flows', in 'Flying Goddess'. Henevertheless bears the usual resentment of his audience and the art appreciated byit. We access his attitude by the poem's closely sympathetic narration, as he 'playsin a salon full / of rubbish artfully arrayed. / Someone who cannot play at all /waits with assured impatience by / a chunk of plastic'.

But Kröte also bears a sober grace that contrasts with his former loss of self-respect. Once punctuated by 'puffs and pounds and shakes', his performance here'essays a waterfall of notes'. He is 'thirstily quickwitted' and casually humorousabout the event. Kröte is in synchronisation with the motif of flux and ephemerathat runs through the scene: a 'disintegrating' nude, a floating 'haze of adjectives','faint overtones of his last chord die'. Whereas his fall centres 'Fever', ascensionis the key image in 'Flying Goddess':

A batik picture on the wallsprings suddenly to life: a FlyingGoddess made luminous by dyingsunlight. In a last western glow

her gold-edged feet and fingers shine.In labyrinthine fantasiesher scarf weaves rapid arcs of lineblue round her skin of ebony.A gold and scarlet fluencyof dress enfolds her slender thighs.60

"Dying sunlight' reiterates the world of dream that appeared previously in thesequence. But the goddess, bathed in the 'last western glow' (of the dead EuropeKröte has left behind?) is an inversion of Kröte's fallacy. With her 'gold-edgedfeet and fingers', the image is reminiscent of the rococo glitter of 'Nightfall'. Yet

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here is a female figure in place of 'gods and cherubs'; here is 'ebony' swathed in'gold and scarlet fluency' instead of pallor in a 'field of painted white', a site aboutwhich the Professor dreams previously in the sequence.61 Unlike the self-image ofKröte's dream child in 'Monday', the goddess is the antithesis of Kröte, bearingno resemblance to himself and not fashioned from his T . She shares the seagulls'gift of flight; her 'rapid arcs of line', too, echo the gulls' 'nervous arcs of action'.She is weightless, hovering like imagination between self-creation and self-destruction. The goddess is patron of those buoyant, hovering spirits. Kröte ispropelled by the vision of antithesis to re-attempt the take-off he failed toaccomplish in 'Wind' :

'Goddess, dear lady,' Kröte says,'wait in the glow and dazzle ofyour high transparent distances!'He smiles, and drinks himself a newenvironment of airy blue.Weightless in space he soars abovethe solid foreigner whose facebetween one vision and the nextis Kröte 's, to his native placein gentle, all-sustaining air,far from his sober prison wherean unintelligible text

is thrust at him, beyond the sneersof those who talk, but can't perform.62

Kröte is offered a ground continually receding, an ideal unreachable by regressivememory,' by the 'high transparent distances'. His smile is an almost shockingrevelation to the reader, breaking the Professor's indelible 'scowling at thescowling / features of the illustrious dead'.63 Once embodying the concept of the'empty continent', he is now native to place as well as spirit. The weight of beingshackled to himself is dropped, and he is able to step outside the T ; in 'Fever' hesees a 'solid foreigner', too heavy to fly, with a visage caught between 'one visionand the next'.64

These poems ask to be read as a critique as well as an affirmation of Romanticphilosophy. Eisenbart, too, is characterised by his 'scowl' and 'grimace'; he doesnot scowl again after 'Panther and Peacock', yet nor does he smile. He is left witha gentle disappointment that rises and subsides. Kröte, meanwhile, wanders ashifting path. Synthetic epiphany remains out of reach: inevitable night, with itsthreat of unstoppable change, fading and flux, falls in 'Flying Goddess':

The gilding disappearsfrom his sublime, immortal friend.Day and his bottle reach their end.'Goddess,' he says, 'you have the charm

of all that flows, yet still you stayunmoving in your classic sky.Bless me!'65

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In 'A Music Lesson', Kröte asserts faith in indifference, a soaring comfort that, 'IfGod exists / then music is his love for me'.66 Kröte's consultation of an externalpower in both poems illustrates Schlegel's advocacy of recognising existenceoutside the self. Kröte's summation of the goddess's paradox identifies this lesson,with a version of Keats's 'Ode on A Grecian Urn' to which Harwood makesreference in the third stanza of 'Flying Goddess' ('Green leg, forever wilt thourun'). Kröte's blasphemy is, in fact, a request for salvation.

'A Scattering of Ashes' reiterates this acute change in Kröte's character. Whilstthe poem celebrates his self-awareness, it underlines the desperation within suchacuteness and awareness. He thinks of death, and conjures an imagined memoryof Beethoven's funeral:

TorchbearerSchubert held lilies bound in black;afterwards with Randhartingerand Lachner, heavy of heart, went backto the Mehlgriiber Inn, to toastthe one whom death would summon first.

Schubert himself.

The thought of mortality is not so much a reminder of Kröte's funerealengagement as it is a sting to shock him into the present. The scattering of ashesthat he attends involves him in another's loss:

An old lady leans close to say,'My beloved friend knew Massenet.'

Kröte's impressed. 'And Saint-Saëns too.She was in Fauré's singing class.Now I don't know what I shall do.I thought I'd be the first to passaway. We were friends for fifty years.'She weeps, and Kröte's close to tears.

Kröte, at last, weeps for someone else. His usually stormy mood is traded for areverence and urgent sense of duty to this mourner:

She taps his kneeand puts the casket, like a grandactress, in his unwilling hand.

—Pins? Needles? 'Whiskers! Our dead cats.We've made provisions in our willsfor those outliving us.' She patshis hand confidingly. He spillsthe box and contents on the floor.Mourners are filing through a door,

but Kröte's kneeling to retrievewhiskers. The cat is on the mat.Lord, help me find them. I'll believein the resurrection of the cat.

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Again, Kröte appeals to God, a promise of belief in an impossible miracle(signalled by the childish phrase, 'The cat is on the mat'), no matter how bizarre.Kröte feels a respect and tolerance for this woman who has unconditionally soughthis company. He comprehends the need to detach from the T , to feel alienated attimes,

—Whiskers to whiskers, dust to dust.'The Cat's Fugue!' she exclaims aloud.Kröte begins to hum the themeand feels her crazy joke redeem

the dismal day. He takes her arm.She smiles at him, and he can guesshow bright she was, how full of charm.—Such intervals! Let music blessall hopes, all loves, however odd.Music, my joy, my full-scale God.67

The pair experience a humming 'interval' of whimsy and grief played together.It is one of those 'arrested moments' that Brennan describes as the epitome of theRomantic work; a perfection of the present, fleeting but illuminating.

This moment characterises Harwood's struggle with Romantic philosophy inthe latter halves of the sequences. In a tradition including Hope, Douglas, Lawsonand Vincent O'Sullivan, Richard King argues that Eisenbart is, 'rather tooobviously, a foil for Harwood's own ideas, philosophical and otherwise'.Likewise, King believes that the satire of the Kröte poems 'wears thin' in theexcessive number and repetitive settings of the sequence.68 However, in latepoems such as 'Matinee', 'Flight of the Bumblebee', 'Ganymede' and 'The Deathof Eisenbart', the Professors, once awakened, depart from their realisations andlapse into earlier incarnations.

Playing out recent critical accounts of a terrible, human 'balancing act',Harwood's Professor sequences work through the struggle for perfection that isthe German Romantic ideal. The Professors' limping course through these poemsfeels quite unpredictable, returning the reader to that old pathos reserved for thoseone knows too well. If the satire of the poems wears thin, it is because theirdramatic credibility deepens; critical moments such as Eisenbart's pieta andKröte's funerary friendship are undeniably touching.

The Professors' uneven fates suggest Harwood's interest in a more realistapproach to philosophical problems and to Romantic synthesis, a desire tomaintain the magic of the characters' humanity by their wavering and disunity.The many faces of antithesis in the poems avoid a gendered interpretation ofRomantic irony. Harwood resists imbuing the poems' role-playing with anythingmore than the dialogic dynamic itself. In the same way, Professor Kröte's thirdappeal for blessing takes his awareness to its fullest, extending not only to himself,nor only to musicians, but to all. The enduring power of these poems is perhapsthe most persuasive evidence that ideals of Romanticism 'with a capital "R"', asHarwood puts it, have a continuing place in contemporary verse.69

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