There's a faint Keatsian flavour to this week's poem, An Autumn Sunset, by the multi-talented American novelist Edith Wharton. "Some ancient land forlorn" echoes the Ode to a Nightingale's "faery lands forlorn", and the rich colouration and sturdy construction might seem Keatsian, too. But Wharton's vision, technique and range of vocabulary are clearly her own. Overall, the structure is more classically Ode-like than Keats's studies in the form, and the effect suggests a "back to basics" invigoration. It was first published in 1894, in Scribner's Magazine, and perhaps some spirit of the fin de siècle looms over it, too.
Wharton's variation of two-, three- and five-stress lines is melodically effective, and underlined by a fine ear for sonorities. The opening lines of her two stanzas chime alliteratively, while rhythmically setting up contrasted moods. "Leagured in fire," with a dactyl's heavy first stress, heralds the martial advance in the first stanza and "Lagooned in gold," gently iambic, introduces the more elegiac tone of the second. Adjectives cluster thickly, but there's no unplanned-for stasis. In the first stanza, the poet's camera pans over the sky, relishing the paradoxical movement of the storm-clouds "halting higher" (a distant but audible rhyme with "fire"), massing their forces only to be penned in. There's a telling pause when the long opening sentence itself "stands at bay" in line eight, and a further long sentence begins with a uniquely memorable personification, "Mid-zenith hangs the fascinated day " That word choice, "fascinated", illustrates the novelist's gift for highlighting, by a word or phrase, a character's innermost response. The day, later a "wan valkyrie", is the character in this instance, and, like the speaker, like the reader, she is intently watching the elemental battle. The use of Norse rather than Greek mythology heightens this elemental quality. It's the valkyrie who, like a primitive Statue of Liberty, shines her torch in the penultimate line. But this creature's grimmer purpose is to "search the faces of the dead". Wharton's polysyllabic words "fascinated", "wind-lustrated", "ensanguined" extend the reach of her valkyrie's-eye view: they're almost visual effects.
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