If this were Milton...

...there would be epic simile where that rock is:

She was an elfin pinnace; lustily
I dipped my oars into the silent lake,
And, as I rose upon the stroke, my boat
Went heaving through the water like a swan--
When, from behind that craggy steep till then
The horizon's bound, a huge peak, black and huge,
As if with voluntary power instinct
Upreared its head. I struck, and struck again,
And, growing still in stature, the huge cliff
Rose up between me and the stars, and still
With measured motion, like a living thing
Strode after me.
-Wordsworth, The Prelude (1805), I.401-412

In other words, that "when" in line 405 would function differently, so as to elaborate something about how swans are when they are doing so and so. And we'd have no dash (or semicolon, in the 1850 version), but instead that wonderful Miltonic enjambment that can introduce thirty lines or so (sometimes more with a sublimely equivocal "or") extending the comparison. What's important, though, is that Wordsworth--quite perversely, really, as with everything in the epic, lyric preface to a poem that is The Prelude--indeed gives us all we would need for that Miltonic simile. All the complex qualifications by heaping up imagery are there. It's like he's gutted the Miltonic form, partly by shooting it through with continual touches of actual or anti-metaphoric action ("I struck and struck again"), and partly (or mostly) because all these aspects apply to the rock. That's what's so striking about "like a living thing": the ghost of the simile insists on some level that we should still be talking about the boat being like a swan when ...it steals its way over water with measured motion, say, or when, from behind a craggy steep it glides, mounting the air, sailing smoothly aloft... And--in the final twist--Wordsworth is indeed doing this, since the measured motion is of course only the movement of his own rowing. But meanwhile the "living thing," has seemed both too obvious and too strange--or too strange precisely because, applied to the swan, it would have been too obvious. In other words, we shuttle between two metaphoric possibilities, one concrete and the other abstract: the first is due to the new tenor (the mountain), the other was called up not by the other tenor (boat) but by its huge and mighty form or gutted vehicle which should have been there (like an unbesotted, unspotted spot of time, like the impersonal form of time itself, like a "when"). And shuttling between them, moving through the concrete simile to the ghost of the other simile and its thwarted epic openness, is what causes the "living thing" to apply only strangely to the cliff. This is classic Wordsworth: what seems easy, even cheesy at first is actually doing a huge amount of work. More than that, it is allowing you to sink into the bits you naturally think are deeper: I doubt no one who reads this famous passage has any problem with "strode," however much they may balk at the commonplace "like a swan" and the almost banal (or at least horribly vague) "like a living thing." And I'm sure while reading it, they hit that inversion hard, and give themselves over to its wonderful lengthened "o"-sound, which lets them draw out the action of the cliff and give it that dark vitality. But these prosodic effects, which we might be quicker to accept as significant, are only substantial because of that subtle, almost hidden work those dismissed similes are doing. In fact, the passage is only read thoroughly and heard fully when, carried along by the rhythm and the first simile working together, we resist that temptation to pause and linger that the dash gives us at the beginning, and steal right over it, just as those who revel in the "strode" have to resist the temptation the spondee produces--for it turns out this was no mere inversion after all, but stress following stress--to move on after "me."

The mole

One of my favorite little bits of coiled, almost crushed verse (we speak of crushed ice, why not have two options for the poetry dispenser?) from Coleridge's lesser-read later writings: "The Mole." Coleridge extracted it from his cryptic little 1811 piece, "On the First Poem in Donne's Book" (which refers to "The Flea") to use in his Friend in 1818, to describe mechanical (that is,"crass and sensual") materialists, or, as he puts it, "the advocates of the Nihil nisi ab extra":

--They shrink in, as Moles
(Nature's mute monks, live mandrakes of the ground)
Creep back from Light--then listen for its sound;--
See but to dread, and dread they know not why--
The natural alien of their negative eye.

The compactness of this little fragment and the poems immediately written before and after it are often attributed precisely to Coleridge's unfashionable fascination and admiration for Donne (this is in the age of Johnson's "Life of Cowley"): in short the seem to people like a bit of metaphysical poetry in the Romantic age (and who better to write it than the Englishman most thoroughly steeped in metaphysics?). But I don't really think this bears much relationship to Donne, actually (and for the record, Shelley is much more "metaphysical" to me than Coleridge): the sort of compactness of this verse is not like Donne's at all, really, since that comes mostly--I'll hazard--from argument. In other words, in Donne, we have intensely compressed and suprising figures like this, but their effect is secured by what they do to the (also very compressed) argumentative structure of the poem--namely, punctuate it, interrupt it, twist it. They're like time bombs for the reader in the unfolding of the case being made. Coleridge's are--almost like Dickenson's, but less opaque and disturbing in a sort of immediate sense--internally intense: they take you away from the poem completely, into the metaphor or metonymy. They are time bombs for the reader, sticking in your head, incorporated but not digested (much like Wordsworth's poetry, but more intellectual). Thus what is like Donne, is Coleridge's play with the line, and the pitting of the line--and the parts of the line--against the poem as a whole. This however is put to a different end than Donne: it gives him the space needed for a fathomless metonymy or metaphor, not an argumentative turn or suprise. It also will restore some movement or speed to the poem, as one is forced on from line to line by the pounding beats that fit the polysyllables so well (too well--that is, they do it formally, not rhythmically). While this sometimes is indeed like Donne when these rhytmic units are smaller than the line and involve more rhetorical than metric effects, or when the two sharply reinforce each other ("mute monks" sounds very Donne-like), it is overall, if anything, an amazing Miltonic sort of effect (Milton's amazing ability to fill out the line with two or three words has this effect of Coleridge's shortening), and it chiefly produces that sort of forgetting necessary for the delayed intellectual effect that is so wonderful. Now, "The Moles" is a good example of this, but the most sublime (it is one of the most amazing things Coleridge ever wrote) is the first stanza in one of those poem composed almost immediately after (in 1811, that is: besides the following, they include "Limbo," and, "A Suicide's Argument"). I'll leave you with this, which was titled by Coleridge's son (Coleridge gave it no title) "Ne Plus Ultra":

Sole Positive of Night!

Antipathist of Light!
Fate's only essence! primal scorpion rod--
The one permitted opposite of God!--
Condensed blackness and abysmal storm
Compacted to one sceptre
Arms the Grasp enorm--
The Interceptor--

Social

A good article from a couple days ago that tries to reclaim the word social from Facebook. It reads, however, like someone asking us to go back to Web 2.0 (and thus the Google websearch is idealized as open, when it arguably isn't). While I myself miss Web 1.0 (that wonderful, stupid, experimental time where we had so many web pages like Homer Simpson's), this means we've probably actually really entered the age of Web 3.0, and are now realizing what it is: when all information on the web has effectively and perversely become socialized by corporations, so that it becomes something other than information--a product recommendation. Promising, though, is that we are now wondering whether the word social is being used any substantive sense by these corporations. It certianly jars with experience: if Facebook is the attempt to resolve the public/private paradox in the use of the increasingly corporatized web, it certainly doesn't seem intuitive, since its vision of what counts as interaction is so unbelievably narrow (narrower, it seems, even than networking).