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.

Although most of Wuthering Heights takes place indoors, readers sense that nature is a major element in the novel. Nature is present in figurative language, which accounts for the impression of realism, but why does Bronte choose an indirect mode of presentation over a direct one? The figurative uses of nature form a highly abstract symbolic system, distinct from “real” nature, while “real” nature is unrepresentable. Psychoanalytic theory may account for this discrepancy, if the text is treated as if it were a psyche. Nature, or the destructive reality it represents, is so threatening that it must be repressed, while the figurative use of nature is a sublimation, redirecting the dangerous force into a safe and constructive channel. Analysis of the heroine, Cathy, helps to confirm this reading. Similar forces are at work in her psyche, but unlike the author she cannot sublimate and succumbs to nature’s power.

Uneasy with the forms of literary expression and its costs, the speakers of Herbert’s poems frequently bear disturbed relationships to their own accounts. An interesting version of the disturbance between storyteller and story occurs in “The Collar,” where present-tense speech is fenced off from, and framed by, the eroding influence of a retrospective narrative voice. The poem provides an occasion to study the motives for and virtues of storytelling, to examine the ways in which accounts are not only generated but preserved, and to explore those problems that arise when a fixed story must be reread and its boundaries changed. Because the speaker of “The Collar” both protects and dismantles his account, the poem also raises questions about the values we attach to narratives, the costs we are willing to support in order to maintain them, and the difficulties we undergo when stories fail to represent us in traditional ways.

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.”

Clemens’ complex feelings about his piloting days provide insights into his imagination and his identity problems. Despite his nostalgia, Clemens feared the river and exorcised his fears by imaginatively identifying with Horace Bixby, his former steamboating master. Drawing upon his recollections for “Old Times on the Mississippi” in 1874, Clemens became a figurative master pilot, using the same order of memory that Bixby demands of the cub. Clemens’ 1882 river trip was motivated in part by an unconscious desire to recover his intuitive “Bixby memory”; he was searching for both his former master and his own imaginative self. The trip, however, was a sign that his intuitive memory had failed him and he was depending on direct observation. His “invocation” of the hateful pilot Brown (with his chaotic, literal memory) at the beginning of the 1882 writing of Life on the Mississippi foreshadows Clemens’ failure to achieve imaginative coherence in the second part of the book.

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.

Dickens progressively transforms the controlling conventions of Oliver Twist during the course of the novel to explore deeply rooted moral tensions involving innocence, evil, and the law. The opening satire degenerates into moralistic melodrama as Oliver changes from a typical parish boy to “the principle of Good.” But this sentimental Providentialism breaks down at the country funeral, and in the city the narrative form evolves to discover a more complex and humane morality. Although the plot remains occupied with the triumph of good, the symbolic pattern of the action suggests a hidden resemblance between Oliver and the thieves. The point of view moves toward closer identification with the harried, but increasingly humanized, criminals. The life of the novel resists repression even as the ending enforces the law. “The Parish Boy’s Progress” ends at the gallows, but Fagin takes Oliver’s place there.

A consideration of “Bright Star” and “Ode to a Nightingale” prepares for a reading of Hyperion as a poem of revisionary strife. Keats intends a progress poem that will put Milton, and secondarily Wordsworth, behind him. Entering the threatening ancestral space of Miltonic epic, Keats endeavors to make it his own by correcting Milton's errors in vision and thereby subduing the phantom he raises. Milton, however, will not maintain his place in the past; he returns, uncannily, to subvert Keats as powerfully as Keats subverts him. The impotence and anxiety of the Miltonic Titans are expressive of Keats's failure to write the poem he wishes. His surrogate, Apollo, is waiting to dawn but cannot. Engulfed by a knowledge that is equivalent to the Miltonic legacy, Apollo and Keats are halted at the threshold, in the dark passage that Keats explores in the great odes and in The Fall of Hyperion.