IN THE FORTY YEARS since Brooks and Warren published Understanding Poetry, explication de texte has become somewhat unfashionable, with “close reading” now being left, for the most part, to the undergraduates and to those who create multiple-choice questions for college entrance examinations. Still, as Marianne Moore observed in her poem on poetry (“I, too, dislike it”), “we do not admire what we cannot understand,” and I therefore find it refreshing to see that, among the articles accepted by the Editorial Board for this issue of PMLA, we have no fewer than three close readings of single poems—Neruda's “Galope muerto,” Keats's “To Autumn,” and a sonnet by Wordsworth. The poems are reprinted in their entirety in this issue, so readers will have no need to mix memory with desire.

Pablo Neruda’s first noteworthy lyric was written in 1925, at a time of unrest not only in himself but in Chilean society as well. “Galope muerto” strains the mimetic capacity of poetry. Similes without a referent and present participles without a limiting verb leave the reader reaching for some hidden source, some inner principle of experience. A new verse translation can instigate and inform the close reading of “Galope muerto,” showing what Neruda was after: an image of dynamic form, to catch things consumed yet brimming with energy, contained yet astir with life. He moves from the “dead gallop” of his title toward indigenous American calabashes resting on the earth and yet swelling with life. Twenty years later, in his major poem, Alturas de Macchu Picchu, Neruda reanimated the Andean site, drawing on the image of suspended energy that he first explored in writing “Galope muerto.”

Wordsworth is forcibly reminded in Wales of Alpine impressions dating back thirty-four years. The resulting sonnet is of interest because of its neartraumatic conflation of times and places, and because this kind of experience, associated with feelings of sublimity, is conveyed in a style alternating between the grand opening and such clichés as “in life’s mom.” Wordsworth questions the possibility of localizing the sublime by means of referential language (names or place names). “Devil’s Bridge” and “Viamala,” the conflated places, connect naming with speech-acts of blessing and cursing, while “How art thou named?” is ultimately addressed to a “luciferic” imagination that reveals “the sad incompetence of human speech.” Wordsworth’s later style is, correspondingly, sad and sublime, subdued yet charged.

“To Autumn” should not be read merely as a static poem expressive of perfection and sadness. All kinds of mutation can be recognized in it: temporal changes (within the season, within the day), changes in space and angle of view, in the kind of biology and sociology alluded to, in syntax and rhyme patterns. These can be recorded as a series of curves, each of which differs from the others in direction or shape. Critical interpretations of the poem result from the combination of several of these curves. However, most interpretations ignore the background of the curves, the solid and encompassing, if inarticulate, “nature in process” on which the curves are superposed. Although still more interpretations, such as a sociopolitical one, could be devised by combining individual curves, none of them will be fully significant unless it takes into account the deep, vast, indifferent voice of nature itself slowly passing, which Keats managed to summon to a background presence.

A letter to the hero in Daniel Deronda offers an interpretation of George Eliot’s novel, an account of its rhetorical principles: the Deronda plot discloses not the “effects of causes” but the “present causes of past effects.” This metaleptic plot structure contradicts the linking of origin, cause, and identity affirmed in the story of Deronda’s Jewish birth. The story must shift between constative and performative conceptions of language and must finally invoke the notion of an actual, nonlinguistic fact or act. The relevant referent is Deronda’s circumcision, which the novel must occlude; otherwise the story of discovering identity could not unfold. The scandal of this referent is its status as an exemplary signifier, alluding to the divine pact with Abraham, a story of the institution of signification. Circumcision is an emblem of the novel’s allusive or citational mode: the narrative makes its starting point, not a subject, but a rhetorical operation.

At the heart of much Victorian fiction is a moral ideology based on the assumption that human nature is essentially flexible, always at least potentially capable of change and renewal. Anthony Trollope devotes much of his own fiction to a systematic critique of such an assumption, arguing that individual character is at bottom irrevocably fixed. Three important novels in particular are built around progressive discoveries by major characters that they are, by their natures, incapable of change: Orley Farm, He Knew He Was Right, and The Duke’s Children. In books like these we discover a skeptical and somber vein in Trollope’s imagination that critics of his work have typically failed to recognize.

Despite the efforts of recent scholars who have argued for an ironic reading of Fragment x of the Canterbury Tales (the Parson’s Tale and Retraction), dramatic and symbolic propriety both dictate that at this penultimate moment in the pilgrimage “earnest” should emerge from “game.” Dramatically, the imminence of the approach to the Holy City urges—as with all pilgrimages—certain penitential expectations, the sacramental obligations of which require the ministrations of the Parson. Thus, his tale—a confessional manual appropriate to the penitential occasion in both length and oral device—serves the pilgrims with an examination of conscience indispensable to the aural rubric of the sacrament. Symbolically, the earnestness of the ending is prepared by the promise of the supper (with its manifold biblical implications), by the eschatological haste of Harry Bailly in urging completion of the tales, and by his unwitting use of Pauline imagery relating to doomsday drunkenness and nocturnal thieves in the Prologue to the Manciple’s Tale (Fragment ix).

The tone of Marlowe’s Tamburlaine, Parts I and II, has long troubled critics who have approached the plays as either tragedies or romances. This article argues, on the basis of our responses to Marlowe’s language, that each play attempts to define itself as a romance by asserting the mastery of the imagination over the material world and thus denying the effects of tragic realism. Marlowe creates a language that invites us to indulge in the glorification of worldly achievement in spite of the questionable morality of worldliness. In Part I, Marlowe demonstrates that the world of romance is a world of the imagination and, as such, free from the tragic concerns of a problematic humanity. In Part II, Marlowe moves closer to tragedy by exploring the possibilities of romance within a world where the imagination does not triumph and where the attitude toward the romantic hero is left ambiguous.

Tasso states his objections to Ariostan chivalric romance in terms of neo-Aristotelian epic theory in the Discorsi: romance, with its disunity, multiplicity, and irreality, violates the classical canons requiring epic to be unified, whole, and verisimilar. Analogous to and implicit in these objections are those stemming from Tasso’s Counter-Reformation Christianity, which holds romance confusion and disorder to be morally as well as esthetically repugnant. But it is Tasso’s aim in La Gerusalemme liberata to redeem romance by converting it to the service of both classical and Christian imperatives. The apparent conflict between romance and epic proves to be illusory when the dialectic of Tasso’s Christian humanism has run its course. The Liberata asks us to see romance diversity completed in epic unity, romance magic fulfilled in Christian mystery, and to see chivalric romance, therefore, as a vehicle for Christian epic.

Although critics have found La Deffence full of contradictions, they have not seen its conceptual and tonal shifts as defensive strategies reflecting Du Bellay’s ambivalence toward ancient literature. His filial piety conflicts with his desire to rival the ancients by achieving poetic greatness in the vernacular. His ambiguous theory of imitation shows the conflict between reverence and rivalry in its portrayal of imitation both as an organic process and as a violent power struggle in which the French poet devours or rapes ancient models. A similarly equivocal stance toward classical literary power appears in Du Bellay’s Roman sonnets, which illuminate La Deffence by defining a state of exile in which the Renaissance poet is torn between past and future, Rome and France. In La Deffence, the exile’s voice emerges as a dialogue that expresses the paradoxical desire to be both like and unlike the great classical originals.