I grow old....

Recently Nabokov heard that John Crowe Ransom, whose poetry he greatly admires, was rewriting many of his old poems at the age of 80 and dismantling their classic beauty. Vladimir turned to Vera and said quietly, Never let me do that.

(From an interview with Martha Duffy in Time Magazine, May 23, 1969)

BROWN PENNY

I whispered, 'I am too young,' And then, 'I am old enough'; Wherefore I threw a penny To find out if I might love. 'Go and love, go and love, young man, If the lady be young and fair.' Ah, penny, brown penny, brown penny, I am looped in the loops of her hair. O love is the crooked thing, There is nobody wise enough To find out all that is in it, For he would be thinking of love Till the stars had run away And the shadows eaten the moon. Ah, penny, brown penny, brown penny, One cannot begin it too soon.

(W.B. Yeats from his Collected Poems,Definitive Edition,1956)

BROWN PENNY (2nd version)

... (1st stanza identical) ... And the penny sang up in my face, 'There is nobody wise enough To find out all that is in it, For he would be thinking of love That is looped in the loops of her hair, Till the loops of time had run.' Ah, penny, brown penny, brown penny, One cannot begin it too soon.

(The version—based upon Yeats's late (1937) modification—that is given in Richard Finneran, The Collected Works of W.B. Yeats, Vol I, The Poems (2nd Ed), 1997)

Brown Penny existed substantially in the first form since its original publication in The Green Helmet and Other Poems. So it was written in—or possibly considerably before—1910. Not to second-guess the Master, but it was a perfect little poem, and its images and diction are certainly tied to that period of Yeats's writing. So why did he, in 1937, feel compelled to put forward, as his last word on the subject, this wretched replacement for the second stanza?

Well, if nothing else, the occasion presented itself. In the middle to late thirties several publishers were preparing collected or selected editions of Yeats's writings, so Yeats had several opportunities—while he was doing proof corrections— to change poems. For the most part these changes were minimal—add a period, withdraw a comma, slightly recast a line—but in a few instances they were more substantial. In 1937 he submitted the second version of Brown Penny to be included in a contemplated edition by Scribner. The Scribner book was never published, but the version Yeats rather cavalierly supplied them is his last known. So, by the ethic of the editor, it is the official version. Thus Richard Finneran, the premier editor of Yeats, included this version in The Poems, rather than the haunting, nearly perfect original, in that definitive collection.

He was stuck: he had to use the second version. In an earlier scholarly work Finneran has a perfunctory commentary on the changes:

This revision continues the dialogue already established between the speaker and the penny, in the process eliminating the awkward image of the lunivorous shadows. Moreover, the "loops of time" suggest connections with the gyres of A Vision.from Editing Yeats's Poems: a Reconsideration (1990), p.38

The passage of course is complete piffle, but perhaps Finneran had a twinge of conscience here: yes, this version must prevail, so let's see if we can justify it as better. But neither this nor any other explanation accompanied the changeling when it finally saw print, but only a bare notation of its provenance, buried in the endnotes.

[The foregoing is not in any way to disparage the work of Finneran. He was a thorough and discerning scholar and—what is more important—a true lover of Yeats.]

It was 1997 or early 1998 when I first got The Poems in my hot little hands. I perused it happily, enjoying the thought that all the poems were here, right here. Fairly soon, within a year I suppose, I flipped over to Brown Penny, just for the pleasure of reading it from that volume. But what I saw there first puzzled, then gradually, after I had ensured there was no mistake, horrified.

In a way, it was like finding that your father had a child from a former marriage—not world-shattering, perhaps, but certainly world-transforming. I had always thought of a poem as something that didn't change, as a thing. Then I find it's more like your uncle Eddie who, after an exemplary career at the bank, got arrested for embezzlement.Or, as Nabokov so wittily puts it: We would prefer not to have known at all our neighbor, the retired hot-dog stand operator, if it turns out that he has just produced the greatest book of poetry his age has seen. (from the Vintage Lolita, p265)

When I was a tender high-school sophomore I was, as is customary, forced to read poetry. But my English teacher that year was magic: she made literature seem an enchanted journey, rather than the usual forced march. We read the standard stuff, I suppose, but what stayed with me was Keats's La Belle Dame Sans Merci:

Ah, what can ail thee, wretched wight, Alone and palely loitering! The sedge has withered from the lake, And no birds sing. Ah, what can ail thee, wretched wight, So haggard and so woe-begone? . . .

And so forth. I never had the poem by memory, except for the first two stanzas, which in idle moments I would find myself repeating. Every once in a while in after years, though, I would flip to La Belle in whatever anthology was at hand and read the whole thing out loud. After a while I noticed that the poem seemed to have changed:

O what can ail thee, knight-at-arms, Alone and palely loitering? The sedge has withered from the lake, And no birds sing. O what can ail thee, knight-at-arms, So haggard and so woe-begone? . . .

I thought I remembered it differently, but in effect I just shrugged. I would occasionally read the official version, which seemed to involve a knight, but would still murmur to myself the stanzas that I now thought of as mine, about a wight. Recently, though, I said to myself, this is ridiculous, am I imagining these words? So I did a bit of research.

Keats's originally wrote the knight version, and included it in a letter to his parents in 1819, but actually published the wight version later that year. The wight version was the only version for all of Keats's (admittedly short) life, but later the chronologically earlier knight version started gaining traction with critics [ah! critics!], who felt that the original in Keats's hand should prevail. They hoked up all sorts of reasons for this preference, most spurious of course. The net result is that I can no longer find my favored version in print, as the "knight" forces have prevailed.

So what is to be done? Are we to be at the pleasure of critics and editors for the words we wish to say? Certainly the Keats is long out of copyright, so we can use either version, or anything in-between.O what can ail thee, Erskine-Brown, Alone and palely loitering? The law-court now is closed and dark, And no judge sits. as Rumpole might have had it... But what of Brown Penny? Given the cancerous growth of copyright in the 20th century, I have no idea when we will be free to use the old good one. Oh, sure, we'll always be able to gather in secret conclaves and speak the forbidden words, but in public—I wonder. Must we give lip service to the critically-sanctioned words, and suppress those we love? Must there be an official version of a poem?Of course, I've been able to use the old version in this essay, which purports to be a critical study. Just as a priest of the Inquisition was allowed to read heretical writings (doubtless while holding his nose) so I, as a (self-described) guardian of literary virtue may comment on official non-versions of poems, without being corrupted by them. It's a matter of character...

Well, I've still got La Belle:

All Keats is out of copyright, so I can have my wretched wight.