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2021-02-02T02:45:44+09:00
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Books by Taine, Hippolyte (sorted by popularity) - Project Gutenberg
http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/author/969
Tacite : Table des matières
http://remacle.org/bloodwolf/historiens/tacite/table.htm
Biographie et actualités de Guillaume Gallienne France Inter - page 11
https://www.franceinter.fr/personnes/guillaume-gallienne?p=11
100 Best Hip-Hop Albums
http://rap.about.com/od/toppicks/tp/100-Best-Hip-Hop-Albums.htm
Top 100 French hip hop albums (according to RYM French hip hop heads)
http://rateyourmusic.com/list/Snarkk/top_100_french_hip_hop_albums__according_to_rym_french_hip_hop_heads_/1/
Top 100 des meilleurs albums de rap français
http://www.senscritique.com/top/resultats/Les_meilleurs_albums_de_rap_francais/224928
Les 100 Classiques du Rap Français | Abcdr du Son
http://www.abcdrduson.com/special/100-classiques-rap-francais/01.php
Le rap français en 30 albums majeurs | Hush Hush Yo !
https://hushushyo.wordpress.com/le-rap-francais-en-30-albums/
Quels sont les meilleurs albums du Rap français? | Kesskiya?
https://kesskiya.wordpress.com/2013/04/21/quels-sont-les-meilleurs-albums-du-rap-francais/
HipHopListe - Liste des Albums Rap Français | hiphopliste.musicblog.fr
http://hiphopliste.musicblog.fr/708835/Liste-des-Albums-Rap-Francais/
TFC Hip Hop Radio: Les Meilleurs Albums, Maxis de Rap Français...
http://tfcradiohiphop.blogspot.jp/2015/01/les-meilleurs-albums-maxis-de-rap.html
The 100 greatest non-fiction books | Books | The Guardian
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2011/jun/14/100-greatest-non-fiction-books
A mini intro Guide to Hip-Hop in Spanish : hiphopheads
https://www.reddit.com/r/hiphopheads/comments/2jm64n/a_mini_intro_guide_to_hiphop_in_spanish/
2021-02-02T02:45:44+09:00
1612201544
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RPH
https://w.atwiki.jp/dooronron/pages/19.html
The New York Review of Books
February 9, 2012
"The Book From Which Our Literature Springs"
by Robert Pogue Harrison
BOOKS CONSULTED FOR THIS ARTICLE
Pen of Iron: American Prose and the King James Bible by Robert Alter, Princeton University Press, 198 pp., $19.95
The Wisdom Books: Job, Proverbs, and Ecclesiastes translated from the Hebrew and with commentary by Robert Alter, Norton, 394 pp., $17.95 (paper)
The Rise and Fall of the Bible: The Unexpected History of an Accidental Book
by Timothy Beal, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 244 pp., $25.00
The Shadow of a Great Rock: A Literary Appreciation of the King James Bible by Harold Bloom, Yale University Press, 311 pp., $28.00
Bible: The Story of the King James Version, 1611–2011 by Gordon Campbell, Oxford University Press, 354 pp., $24.95
The Apocryphal Gospels: Texts and Translations edited by Bart D. Ehrman and Zlatko Pleše, Oxford University Press, 611 pp., $35.00
On Eagles’ Wings: The King James Bible Turns 400, edited by Liana Lupas, MOBIA, 168 pp., $29.95
Manifold Greatness: The Making of the King James Bible, edited by Helen Moore and Julian Reid Bodleian Library, 208 pp., $35.00 (paper)
Majestie: The King Behind the King James Bible by David Teems. Thomas Nelson, 301 pp., $14.99 (paper)
Although it left in its wake a number of excellent books, the fourth centennial of the publication of the King James Bible, or KJB, came and went without any of the high-profile public readings and fanfare that marked the three-hundredth anniversary in 1911. A substantial majority of Americans may still “believe in God,” yet the book that found its way to America in the seventeenth century and helped engender on this continent what Lincoln called a “new nation” is rapidly becoming /terra incognita/. Whether in the King James Version or in newer versions, the Bible is neither read, nor read aloud, nor memorized to anywhere near the extent it was when Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson extolled the KJB as America’s “national book” a century ago. It is anyone’s guess whether a century from now the fifth centennial of the King James Bible—a masterpiece of English prose and the most important book in the history of the English language—will be celebrated at all.
What does Western culture lose when it loses its biblical literacy? At the very least it loses a great deal of access to its literature. This is true not only of medieval and Renaissance literature but of a large part of the modern canon as well. How much of Nietzsche is comprehensible without a basic knowledge of scripture? Hardly a chapter in /Thus Spoke Zarathustra/ does not contain overt allusions to or echoes of the Bible. The spiritual depths of writers like Emerson, Thoreau, and Dickinson are largely closed off to those who cannot hear in their inner ear the /basso continuo/ of these New Englanders’ ongoing dialogue with the Bible. The same can be said of any number of modernists—Yeats, Joyce, Stevens, Eliot, and the bleak Samuel Beckett, who constantly engaged, if only to subvert, biblical motifs and paradigms.
In /Pen of Iron/, the eminent Bible scholar and translator Robert Alter recounts a small yet telling part of the story of American literature’s attunement to the King James Bible. Exploring the way the KJB has impacted both the prose and worldviews of select American authors—mainly Lincoln, Melville, Faulkner, Hemingway, Bellow, and Cormac McCarthy—Alter shows that, even when they parody it or contend with its legacies (as Melville and Faulkner did), the King James Bible remains an enduring point of reference, if not a moral center of gravity, in their work.
One of the principal claims of /Pen of Iron/ is that style is more than a set of rhetorical and aesthetic qualities; it is “the vehicle of a particular vision of reality.” Thus the style of America’s onetime national book—its diction, tone, cadences, and above all its unique combination of archaic formality and straightforward simplicity, or what Edmund Wilson called “that old tongue, with its clang and its flavor…in its concise solid stamp”—this distinctive style of the King James Bible, which resonates so deeply in Martin Luther King’s most memorable speeches, conveys in its linguistic texture values and sensibilities that have permeated America’s sense of its moral and spiritual identity.
Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address became part of America’s sacred scripture because the sonority of its words, the dignity of its diction, and the cadences of its sentences reprised and incorporated the rhythms and tones of the King James Bible. Lincoln’s deliberately archaic opening phrase—”Four score and seven years ago”—in its echo of the King James Bible’s “three score and ten,” gives a rhetorical weight to the span of time that had elapsed between the Republic’s founding and its Civil War, in a way that “Eighty-seven years ago” could not have conveyed. Likewise his closing phrase, “shall not perish from the earth,” with its echoes of Job, Jeremiah, and Micah, confers on the sacrifice of the soldiers who died at Gettysburg a moral elevation that their cause, in the American psyche of the time, could not have derived from any other source.
The day may indeed come when the King James Bible itself will perish, if not from the earth then from America’s cultural memory, yet meanwhile Alter finds that it continues to resound—albeit in its darkest tones—in a twenty-first-century novel like Cormac McCarthy’s /The Road/. That novel imagines a devastated future earth reminiscent of the Flood or the catastrophes visited upon Job projected onto a collective scale. “Sentence by parallel sentence, word by hard-edged word,” writes Alter, “it draws on the structures and something of the diction of the King James Bible to forge without pathos a reality whose harshness beggars the imagination.” Yet it also draws on those same sources to envision restoration and renewal:
This contemporary imagining of an appalling end-time and what hope might be sustained after the apocalypse is anchored in the language and ideas of the memorable text that was put into resounding English in 1611 and first framed in Hebrew in the Iron Age.
If the Bible remains a gateway to centuries of literary history in the West, the King James Version of 1611 represents something of a literary miracle in its own right. Alter declares that all the subsequent, more “accessible” English translations “happen to be stylistically inferior in virtually all respects.” Coming from someone who has published highly acclaimed new translations of many books of the Hebrew scriptures, most recently /The Wisdom Books: Job, Proverbs, and Ecclesiastes/ (2010), that statement says quite a lot. Its lofty endorsement is shared by Harold Bloom, who, in his most recent book, /The Shadow of a Great Rock/, offers what its subtitle calls “a literary appreciation of the King James Bible.” Quoting profusely from a great many passages in the 1611 translation, Bloom shows in granular detail why, in his words, “the sublime summit of literature in English still is shared by Shakespeare and the King James Bible.”
If Bloom is right that “a test for great poetry and prose is an aura of /inevitability/ in the phrasing,” then the King James Bible passes that test brilliantly, thanks in part to the way it ends most of its verses with emphatic metrical stresses or resounding words, be they nouns, verbs, pronouns, or other parts of speech. Here are a few samples that I choose more or less at random from Yahweh’s series of rhetorical questions to Job in chapters 38 and 39 of the Book of Job:
Who shut up the sea with doors, when it brake forth, as if it had
issued out of the womb? (38:8)
Hast thou commanded the morning since thy days; and caused the
dayspring to know his place? (38:12)
Who provideth for the raven his food? when his young ones cry unto
God, they wander for lack of meat. (38:41)
Knowest thou the time when the wild goats of the rock bring forth?
or canst thou mark when the hinds do calve? (39:1)
Canst thou number the months that they fulfill? or knowest thou the
time when they bring forth? (39:2)
Compared to the strong lineaments of verses such as these, most of the poetry written in English today shows precious little “inevitability” in its phrasing. Some of the factors that have contributed to the drastic decline of the art of bringing phrases to closure are clear enough. They include the wholesale de-formalization of poetry in our time and the consequent premium placed on enjambment; our dogmatic insistence on open-endedness and the bland tones of everyday language; our predilection for understatement and uneasiness about rhetorical display; our aversion to affirmation and our cult of the whisper. In England the art of poetry was at its zenith in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and it left its mark throughout the King James Bible.
The KJB‘s “cognitive music,” as Bloom calls it, has a lot to do with the English translators’ efforts to provide a “literal” rendition of the Hebrew scriptures. As Gerald Hammond put it in his masterful 1982 study, /The Making of the English Bible/, the translators struggled to “reshape English so that it could adopt itself to Hebraic idiom.” Robert Alter reaffirms as much when he remarks on “the peculiar and productive decision [of the English translators] to follow the contours of the Hebrew in idiom and often in syntax.” Likewise Bloom speaks of the “gorgeous exfoliation of the Hebrew original,” even if he insists, rather predictably, that the English translators were engaged in an “aesthetic agon” with it.
Bloom sees the agon between the English translators and the authors of the Hebrew Tanakh as a struggle among literary heavyweights. He finds no such contest when it comes to the authors of the New Testament, whom he deems woefully lacking in literary merit. “The Greek New Testament,” Bloom writes, “is mostly composed by people thinking in Aramaic or Hebrew but writing in demotic Greek.” As literary counterparts, these “people” were not in the same league with the highly learned English translators who grappled so mightily—and successfully—with the sublime Tanakh. “For the most part,” writes Bloom about the King James Version of the New Testament, “the translation is an immense improvement” over the original.
Even if that is true, Bloom’s claim remains extremely questionable when it comes to texts like the Epistles of Paul, if only because Paul aggressively sought to overturn the hierarchical standards that exalt the sublime over the simple, the wise over the foolish, and the noble over the humble. The following passage from 1 Corinthians makes clear what is at stake for Paul in his attempt to bring about what Nietzsche would later call a Christian “transvaluation of values”:
For Christ sent me not to baptize, but to preach the gospel: not with wisdom of words, lest the cross of Christ should be made of none effect. For the preaching of the cross is to them that perish foolishness;
but unto us which are saved it is the power of God.
For it is written, I will destroy the wisdom of the wise, and will
bring to nothing the understanding of the prudent.
Where is the wise? where is the scribe? where is the disputer of
this world? hath not God made foolish the wisdom of this world?
For after that in the wisdom of God the world by wisdom knew not
God, it pleased God by the foolishness of preaching to save them
that believe. (1:17–21)
Paul may be more eloquent in the words of his English Renaissance translators than he is in his own “demotic Greek,” yet this apology for holy foolishness is no foolish piece of rhetoric. It is a highly crafted use of figurative language that turns the cross into an agent of contradiction. In Paul’s proclamation, “this world” is a topsy-turvy one that the Christ event has turned upside down (from his Christian perspective, that means right side up). Such is the “effect” of the cross—it converts the entire order of things, so that high now becomes low, wisdom becomes foolish, and foolishness becomes wise.
I draw attention to this passage in 1 Corinthians because it articulates a Christian inversion of values that had much to do with the translation of the Bible into English during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. To see why this is so, we must revisit the story that many of the books under review here retell from a variety of perspectives—namely, the genesis of the King James Bible.
If there was a genius behind the King James Bible, it was the English priest William Tyndale. Shortly after he was ordained in 1521, he resolved to translate the Bible, despite opposition from both the English clergy and monarchy, which at the time did not support English translations of the Bible. In a verbal dispute with a clergyman who had objected to him, “We had better be without God’s laws than the Pope’s,” Tyndale reportedly answered: “I defy the Pope and all his laws; and if God spare my life ere many years, I will cause a boy that driveth the plough, shall know more of the Scripture than thou dost.” In the minds of English reformers like Tyndale, the drive to make the Bible accessible to the plough boy and thereby dispossess the clergy of its traditional authority over scripture was consistent with Paul’s exaltation of foolishness over the presumption of the “scribes” and the wisdom of “disputers.” It was the reformist doctrine of “the priesthood of all believers” that mandated vernacular translations of the Bible.
Before Tyndale was burned at the stake as a heretic in 1536, he managed to translate the entire New Testament and roughly half of the Christian Bible’s Hebrew scriptures into English. There had been earlier English versions of the Christian Bible, yet Tyndale—an extraordinary linguist with a remarkable literary ear—was the first to base his translations on the Greek and Hebrew texts. His translation of the Greek New Testament, which had been made available by Erasmus in 1516, became the first edition of its kind in English. Printed in Worms in 1526, it was condemned that same year by Bishop Cuthbert Tunstall and banned by royal proclamation in 1530. Nevertheless, it had considerable diffusion and popularity in England. (Those interested in the fascinating convergence of translation from the original Greek and Hebrew texts, the rapidly advancing biblical scholarship of the time, and the expansion of print technology will profit greatly from reading the two exhibition catalogs under review, /Manifold Greatness/ and /Under Eagle’s Wings/, as well as the excellent books by Timothy Beal and Gordon Campbell.)
Tyndale, who fled from England to the Continent to pursue his translation project, provoked the ire of important figures like Bishop Tunstall, Cardinal Wolsey, and Sir Thomas More, the latter writing a
two-thousand-page “confutation” of Tyndale’s response to More’s /Dialogue Concerning Heresies/. More objected to, among other things, Tyndale’s translation of the Greek /ecclesia/ with the word “congregation” rather than “church,” as well as to his use of the word “senior” instead of “priest” and “love” instead of “charity.” More’s venom notwithstanding (he accused Tyndale of “discharging a filthy foam of blasphemies out of his brutish beastly mouth”), Tyndale’s translations proved so remarkable in their plain English idiom, so resolute in their phrasing, and so sonorous when read aloud that it was impossible to ignore what he had accomplished. Indeed, the Tyndale Bible was incorporated, with various revisions and emendations, into all subsequent English versions up through, and including, the King James Version. “It has been estimated,” writes Gordon Campbell in /Bible/ about the KJV New Testament, “that 83 per cent of the KJV published in 1611 derives from Tyndale, either directly or indirectly through other Bibles.”
Some of those other Bibles played important parts in the lead-up to the 1611 King James Version. After Tyndale was executed, his project was continued by Miles Coverdale, who produced translations of the portions of the Hebrew texts that Tyndale did not live to complete. Coverdale, unlike Tyndale, based himself mostly on new Latin and German translations rather than on the Hebrew original. He changed some of Tyndale’s controversial renderings, yet much of the Coverdale Bible, published in 1535, simply adopted Tyndale’s translations word for word.
A revised edition of the Coverdale Bible appeared in 1537 under another name—the so-called Matthew Bible—and two years later a modified version of the Matthew Bible was published with the authorization of King Henry VIII. Due to its large size (roughly fifteen inches by nine inches), it came to be known as the Great Bible. The Great Bible in its turn was revised and republished in 1568. Because the revision committee was made up largely of bishops, it was called the Bishop’s Bible. The Bishop’s Bible remained the official English translation until the King James Version appeared in 1611.
The most important and beloved English Bible to appear in this period was the unauthorized Geneva Bible, so named because Geneva, in Switzerland—a republic at the time and a stronghold of Calvinism—became the place of refuge for many English Protestants when the Catholic Queen Mary I ascended the throne in 1553. There the biblical scholar William Whittingham, in collaboration with Miles Coverdale and other scholars, oversaw the translation and production of the resolutely Protestant Geneva Bible. Published half a century before the King James Version, this was the version that the early Puritans brought with them to America and the one used by Shakespeare, Milton, Donne, and other literary luminaries. Mass-produced in affordable editions, and much more robust in style than the Bishop’s Bible, it came with notes, introductions to the different books, and scriptural aids of various sorts, making it essentially the first “study bible” in history. Yet even here Tyndale continued to exert his claims. Roughly 80 percent of his translations were carried over into the Geneva Bible, confirming once again that Tyndale was indeed “the father of the English Bible,” as he is still known today.
Shortly after ascending the throne in 1603, King James I—an eccentric yet relatively erudite monarch (see David Teems’s lively biography /Majestie/)—received a petition signed by over one thousand Puritans. Known as the Millenary Petition, it expressed concerns over a number of issues such as vestments, “popish” ceremonies, and the Puritans’ wish that the clergy should be properly educated and that church doctrine should be grounded in scripture. Fond of theological debate, James convened the Hampton Court Conference in 1604 to discuss the petition. He rejected virtually all of the Puritans’ proposals except for one. He agreed to the publication of a new English Bible, motivated in part by his aversion to the popular Geneva Bible, some of whose notes he considered antimonarchical.
The conference resulted in the following resolution:
That a translation be made of the whole Bible, as consonant as can be to the original Hebrew and Greek; and this to be set out and printed, without any marginal notes, and only to be used in all churches of England in time of divine service.
Fifty-four men—among them the best biblical scholars and linguists in England—were put in charge of the project. At least forty-seven of them took active part in the work, which began in 1604 and concluded in 1611.
The great virtue of that translation committee was its determination /not/ to undertake an entirely new translation but rather “to make a good one better, or out of many good ones, one principal good one.” With all the previous English versions at their disposal, they did not disdain to consult, adopt, or adapt whatever they deemed worthy from the previous translations. The result of their judicious work of appropriation and revision was a version that did indeed make “one principal good one” out of the many good Bibles that had come before.
I will offer just one example of how the King James Bible made many good translations even better. Here is Tyndale’s version (in our modern spelling) of the famous definition of faith that occurs in the first verse of chapter 11 of the pseudo-Pauline Letter to the Hebrews (“pseudo-Pauline” because Paul was not in fact its author):
Faith is the sure confidence of things, which are hoped for, & a certainty of things which are not seen.
The Geneva Bible version:
Now faith is the ground of things, which are hoped for, and the evidence of things which are not seen.
The 1611 King James Version:
Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.
The King James Version both retrieves and improves on its predecessors in two ways. By eliminating the words “which are”—which occur twice in the earlier versions—it gives a much cleaner and poetically compact rendition of the verse. Tyndale’s “sure confidence” is a very loose translation of the Greek /hypostasis/, which means literally “standing under” (/hypo/, under + /histasthai/, stand, middle voice of /histanai/, cause to stand). The Geneva version’s “ground” is a much closer approximation, yet the KJB‘s choice of “substance” is brilliant. Not only does “substance” mean literally “standing under,” it also comes with a host of religious associations and connotations—especially in the context of the Reformation’s vexed debates about the “transubstantiation” of the Eucharistic wafer by the priest during Mass.
Meanwhile the KJB retains the Geneva Bible’s “evidence,” an English word that stretches the meaning of the Greek /elenchus/, to be sure (/elenchus/ means, among other things, refutation of an argument by proving the contrary of its conclusion), yet the word “evidence” preserves, if only latently, the dynamic interplay between proof and refutation in the context of a definition of faith. Faith is the evidence of a truth that faith cannot show to be true, since it cannot be seen in the demonstrative mode. In that respect it is the evidence of what can neither be proved nor refuted by what Paul, in the passage cited from I Corinthians, calls “the wisdom of the wise” and the “understanding of the prudent.” Having mentioned that the Geneva Bible was used by Shakespeare, let me take this occasion to express my conviction that /Othello/ is an extended pun on this pseudo-Pauline definition of faith. The word “faith”—in a variety of semantic contexts—punctuates that play from beginning to end, ever more intensely as Othello’s doubts about Desdemona’s faithfulness turn into false certainty. Through Iago’s manipulation of the evidence, Othello sees something that is not there. Yet it is Othello’s own lack of faith in her that causes him to see in Desdemona’s purloined handkerchief the material evidence of things not seen, i.e., her betrayal of him, which never took place.
I believe that the verse in question from the Letter to the Hebrews also seeped into the latent recesses of the opening sentence of the second paragraph of the Declaration of Independence: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable Rights; that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness—That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.” We should recall here that Jefferson and his colleagues made a minor revision to that sentence before presenting their draft to Congress. The prerevised version read: “We hold these truths to be sacred and undeniable….” The difference between “self-evident” and “sacred” is considerable. From the point of view of enlightened reason, a self-evident truth is manifestly true. Its veracity does not need to appeal to external authority. A sacred truth, by contrast, has a transcendent source that lies beyond the bounds of confirmation by reason.
Yet what could be /less/ self-evident—when one looked at history, nature, or human society in the eighteenth century—than the equality of men or government by consent of the governed? Everywhere one turned one saw only inequality and oppression, nowhere inalienable rights and consent of the governed. To whom, then, are the Declaration’s truths self-evident? To those who are making the declaration—those who are declaring their faith in truths they deem self-evident. The Declaration of Independence is at bottom a declaration of faith in a certain type of government not yet seen on this earth.
The Italian writer Italo Calvino once defined a classic as “a book that has never finished saying what it has to say.” In /The Rise and Fall of the Bible/, Timothy Beal reminds us that the Bible is not really a book at all but “a collection of texts written by many different people, mostly anonymous, in many different translations, and in many different historical and social contexts.” The King James Bible is only one version of this great library, or /bibliotheca/, as Saint Jerome called scripture in the fifth century. Yet book or not, the King James Version surely fits Calvino’s definition of a classic. Whether it speaks in its own voice, or through the countless other voices that have kept its words alive, it still has not finished saying what it has to say.
2012-10-23T16:12:51+09:00
1350976371
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Jay-Z_Unplugged
https://w.atwiki.jp/dooronron/pages/18.html
Izzo
Ladies and gentlemen, put our hands together for the astonishing...
Welcome ladies and gentlemen to the 8th wonder of the world
The flow o' the century...oh it's timeless...HOVE!
Thanks for comin' out tonight
You coulda been anywhere in the world, but you're here with me
I appreciate that...uuunnnh...
H to the izz-O, V to the izz-A
Fo' shizzle my nizzle used to dribble down in VA
Was herbin' em in the home of the Terrapins
Got it dirt cheap for them
Plus if they was short wit' cheese I would work wit' them
Boy and we...got rid of that dirt for them
Wasn't born hustlers I was burpin' em
H to the izz-O, V to the izz-A
Fo' sheezy my neezy keep my arms so breezy
Can't leave rap alone the game needs me
Haters want me clapped and chromed it ain't easy
Cops wanna knock me, D.A. wanna box me in
But somehow, I beat them charges like Rocky
H to the izz-O, V to the izz-A
Not guilty, he who does not feel me is not real to me
Therefore he doesn't exist
So poof...vamoose son of a bitch
[CHORUS]
H to the izz-O, V to the izz-A
Fo' shizzle my nizzle used to dribble down in VA
H to the izz-O, V to the izz-A
That's the anthem get'cha damn hands up
H to the izz-O, V to the izz-A
Not guilty ya'll got-ta feel me
H to the izz-O, V to the izz-A
That's the anthem get'cha damn hands UP!
Holla at me...
I do this for my culture
To let 'em know what a nigga look like...when a nigga in a roaster
Show 'em how to move in a room full 'o vultures
Industry shady it need to be taken over
Label owners hate me I'm raisin' the status quo up
I'm overchargin' niggaz for what they did to the Cold Crush
Pay us like you owe us for all the years that you hold us
We can talk, but money talks so talk mo' bucks
Yeah...
Hove is back, life stories told through rap
Niggaz actin' like I sold you crack
Like I told you sell drugs...no...
Hove did that so hopefully you won't have to go through that
I was raised in the pro-jects, roaches and rats
Smokers out back, sellin' they mama's sofa
Lookouts on the corner, focused on the ave
Ladies in the window, focused on the kinfolk
Me under a lamp post, why I got my hand closed?
Cracks in my palm, watchin' the long arm o' the law
So you know I seen it all before
I seen hoop dreams deflate like a true fiend's weight
To try and to fail, the two things I hate
Succeed in this rap game, the two things is great
H to the izz-O, V to the izz-A
What else can I say about dude, I gets bizzay
Takeover
R.O.C., we runnin this rap shit
Memphis Bleek, we runnin this rap shit
B. Mac, we runnin this rap shit
Freeway, we run this rap shit
O & Sparks, we runnin this rap shit
Chris & Neef, we runnin this rap shit
The takeover, the break's over nigga
God MC, me, Jay-Hova
Hey lil' soldier you ain't ready for war
R.O.C. too strong for y'all
It's like bringin a knife to a gunfight, pen to a test
Your chest in the line of fire witcha thin-ass vest
You bringin them Boyz II Men, HOW them boys gon' win?
This is grown man B.I., get you rolled into triage
Beatch - your reach ain't long enough, dunny
Your peeps ain't strong enough, fucka
Roc-A-Fella is the army, better yet the navy
Niggaz'll kidnap your babies, spit at your lady
We bring - knife to fistfight, kill your drama
Uh, we kill you motherfuckin ants with a sledgehammer
Don't let me do it to you dunny cause I overdo it
So you won't confuse it with just rap music
R.O.C., we runnin this rap shit
M-Easy, we runnin this rap shit
The Broad Street Bully, we runnin this rap shit
Get zipped up in plastic when it happens that's it
Freeway, we runnin this rap shit
O & Sparks, we runnin this rap shit
Chris & Neef, we runnin this rap shit
{*"Watch out!! We run New York" -> KRS-One*}
I don't care if you Mobb Deep, I hold triggers to crews
You little FUCK, I've got money stacks bigger than you
When I was pushin weight, back in eighty-eight
you was a ballerina I got your pictures I seen ya
Then you dropped "Shook Ones," switch your demeanor
Well - we don't believe you, you need more people
Roc-A-Fella, students of the game, we passed the classes
Nobody can read you dudes like we do
Don't let 'em gas you like Jigga is ass and won't clap you
Trust me on this one - I'll detach you
Mind from spirit, body from soul
They'll have to hold a mass, put your body in a hole
No, you're not on my level get your brakes tweaked
I sold what ya whole album sold in my first week
You guys don't want it with Hov'
Ask Nas, he don't want it with Hov', nooooo!
R.O.C., we runnin this rap shit
B. Sigel, we runnin this rap shit
M-Easy, we runnin this rap shit
Get zipped up in plastic when it happens that's it
O & Sparks, we runnin this rap shit
Freeway, we run this rap shit
Chris & Neef, we runnin this rap shit
{*"Watch out!! We run New York" -> KRS-One*}
I know you missin all the - FAAAAAAAME!
But along with celebrity comes bout seventy shots to your frame
Nigga; you a - LAAAAAAAME!
Youse the fag model for Karl Kani/Esco ads
Went from, Nasty Nas to Esco's trash
Had a spark when you started but now you're just garbage
Fell from top ten to not mentioned at all
to your bodyguard's "Oochie Wally" verse better than yours
Matter fact you had the worst flow on the whole fuckin song
but I know - the sun don't shine, then son don't shine
That's why your - LAAAAAAAME! - career come to a end
There's only so long fake thugs can pretend
Nigga; you ain't live it you witnessed it from your folks pad
You scribbled in your notepad and created your life
I showed you your first tec on tour with Large Professor
(Me, that's who!) Then I heard your album bout your tec on the dresser
So yeah I sampled your voice, you was usin it wrong
You made it a hot line, I made it a hot song
And you ain't get a coin nigga you was gettin fucked and
I know who I paid God, Serchlite Publishing
Use your - BRAAAAAAAIN! You said you been in this ten
I've been in it five - smarten up Nas
Four albums in ten years nigga? I can divide
That's one every let's say two, two of them shits was due
One was - NAHHH, the other was "Illmatic"
That's a one hot album every ten year average
And that's so - LAAAAAAAME! Nigga switch up your flow
Your shit is garbage, but you try and kick knowledge?
(Get the fuck outta here) You niggaz gon' learn to respect the king
Don't be the next contestant on that Summer Jam screen
Because you know who (who) did you know what (what)
with you know who (yeah) but just keep that between me and you for now
R.O.C., we runnin this rap shit
M-Easy, we runnin this rap shit
The Broad Street Bully, we runnin this rap shit
Get zipped up in plastic when it happens that's it
Freeway, we run this rap shit
O & Sparks, we runnin this rap shit
Chris & Neef, we runnin this rap shit
{*"Watch out!! We run New York" -> KRS-One*}
A wise man told me don't argue with fools
Cause people from a distance can't tell who is who
So stop with that childish shit, nigga I'm grown
Please leave it alone - don't throw rocks at the throne
Do not bark up that tree, that tree will fall on you
I don't know why your advisors ain't forewarn you
Please, not Jay, he's, not for play
I don't slack a minute, all that thug rappin and gimmicks
I will end it, all that yappin be finished
You are not deep, you made your bed now sleep
Don't make me expose you to them folks that don't know you
Nigga I know you well, all the stolen jew-els
Twinkletoes you breakin my heart
You can't fuck with me - go play somewhere, I'm busy
And all you other cats throwin shots at Jigga
You only get half a bar - fuck y'all niggaz
Girls, Girls, Girls
(Jay-Z)
Girls I love you.. I love all y'all
Hehehe, hehehe, f'real
(Biz) I love girls, girls, girls, girls
Girls, I do adore
(Jay) You put your number on this paper cause I would love to date ya
Holla at ya when I come off tour, yeah
(Jay-Z)
I got this Spanish chica, she don't like me to roam
So she call me cabron plus maricon
Said she likes to cook rice so she likes me home
I'm like, "Un momento" - mami, slow up your tempo
I got this black chick, she don't know how to act
Always talkin out her neck, makin her fingers snap
She like, "Listen Jigga Man, I don't care if you rap
You better - R-E-S-P-E-C-T me"
I got this French chick that love to french kiss
She thinks she's Bo Derek, wear her hair in a twist
My, cherie amor, tu es belle
Merci, you fine as fuck but you givin me hell
I got this indian squaw the day that I met her
Asked her what tribe she with, red dot or feather
She said all you need to know is I'm not a ho
And to get with me you better be Chief Lots-a-Dough
Now that's Spanish chick, French chick, indian and black
That's fried chicken, curry chicken, damn I'm gettin fat
Arroz con pollo, french fries and crepe
An appetitite for destruction but I scrape the plate
I love
(Tip) Girls, girls, girls, girls (uh-huh)
Girls, I do adore
(Jay) You put your number on this paper cause I would love to date ya
Holla at ya when I come off tour
(Tip) I love girls, girls, girls, girls
Girls all over the globe
(Jay) I come scoop you in that Coupe, sittin on two-zeroes
Fix your hair in the mirror, let's roll - c'mon
(Jay-Z)
I got this young chick, she so immature
She like, "Why you don't buy me Reeboks no more?"
Like to show out in public, throw tantrums on the floor
Gotta toss a couple dollars, just to shut up her holla
Got a project chick, that plays her part
And if it goes down y'all that's my heart
Baby girl so thorough she been with me from the start
Hid my drugs from the NARCs, hid my guns by the parts
I got this model chick that don't cook or clean
But she dress her ass off and her walk is mean
Only thing wrong with ma she's always on the scene
God damn she's fine but she parties all the time
I get frequent flier mileage from my stewardess chick
She look right in that tight blue dress, she's thick
She gives me extra pillows and seat back love
So I had to introduce her to the Mile High Club
Now that's young chick, stewardess, project and model
That means I fly rough early, plus I know Tae-bo
That means I'm new school, pop pills and stay in beef
But I never have a problem with my first class seat
I love
(Rick) Girls, girls, girls, girls
Girls, I do adore
(Jay) You put your number on this paper cause I would love to date ya
Holla at ya when I come off tour
(Rick) I love girls, girls, girls, girls
Girls all over the globe
(Jay) I come scoop you in that Coupe, sittin on two-zeroes
Fix your hair in the mirror, let's roll
(Jay-Z)
I got this paranoid chick, she's scared to come to the house
A hypochondriac who says ouch before I whip it out
Got a chick from Peru, that sniff fufu
She got a cousin at customs that get shit through
Got this weedhead chick, she always catch me doin shit
Crazy girl wanna leave me but she always forgets
Got this Chinese chick, had to leave her quick'
Cause she kept bootleggin my shit - man
I got this African chick with Eddie Murphy on her skull
She like, "Jigga Man, why you treat me like animal?"
I'm like excuse me Ms. Fufu, but when I met your ass
you was dead broke and naked, and now you want half
I got this ho that after twelve million sold
Mami's a narcolyptic, always sleepin on Hov'
Gotta tie the back of her head like Deuce Bigalow
I got so many girls across the globe..
(Biz) I love girls, girls, girls, girls
Girls, I do adore
(Jay) Yo put your number on this paper cause I would love to date ya
Holla at ya when I come off tour
(Tip) I love girls, girls, girls, girls
Girls all over the globe
(Jay) I come scoop you in that Coupe, sittin on two-zeroes
Fix your hair in the mirror, let's roll
(Rick) I love girls, girls, girls, girls
Girls, I do adore
(Jay) You put your number on this paper cause I would love to date ya
Holla at ya when I come off tour
Jigga What, Jigga Who
[Jay-Z]
Uh-huh uh-huh, gi-gi gi-geyeah
Roc-a-Fella y'all, uh-huh uh-huh, Jigga
Timbaland shit, nine-eight BEYOTCH
Say what, say what? Uh-huh uh-huh, follow me beotch
Nigga what, nigga who?
Switcha flow, getcha dough
Can't fuck with this Roc-a-Fella shit doe
Switcha flow, getcha dough
Can't fuck with this Roc-a-Fella shit doe
[Jay-Z] -- first four lines overlap the section above
Can't fuck with me
They ain't ready yet
Uh-huh uh-huh
Yeah, yeah
Motherfuckers wanna act loco, hit em wit, numerous
shots with the fo'-fo'
Faggots runnin to the Po-Po's, smoke em like cocoa
Fuck rap, coke by the boatload
Fuck dat, on the run-by, gun high, one eye closed
Left holes through some guy clothes
Stop your bullshittin, glock with the full clip
Motherfuckers better duck when the fool spit
One shot could make a nigga do a full flip
See the nigga layin shocked when the bullet hit
And hey ma, how you, know niggaz wanna buy you
But see me I wanna Fuck for Free like Akinyele
Take this ride 'til you feel it inside ya belly
If it's tight get the K-Y Jelly
All night get you wide up inside the telly
Side to side, til you say Jay-Z you're too much for me
Chorus: Jay-Z (with Amil-lion)
(Nigga what?) Make you think you can fuck with me
(Nigga who?) Recognize girl, Jay to the Z
*repeat 3X*
(Nigga what?) Make you think you can fuck with me
(Nigga who?) Recognize bitch, Jay to the motherfuckin Z
[Jay-Z]
Got a condo with nuttin' but condoms in it
The same place where the rhymes is invented
So all I do is rap and sex, imagine how I stroke
See how I was flowin on my last cassette?
Rapid-fire like I'
Big Pimpin'
[Jay-Z]
Uhh, uh uh uh
It's big pimpin baby..
It's big pimpin, spendin cheese
Feel me.. uh-huh uhh, uh-huh..
Ge-ge-geyeah, geyeah
Ge-ge-geyeah, geyeah..
You know I - thug em, fuck em, love em, leave em
Cause I don't fuckin need em
Take em out the hood, keep em lookin good
But I don't fuckin feed em
First time they fuss I'm breezin
Talkin bout, "What's the reasons?"
I'm a pimp in every sense of the word, bitch
Better trust than believe em
In the cut where I keep em
til I need a nut, til I need to beat the guts
Then it's, beep beep and I'm pickin em up
Let em play with the dick in the truck
Many chicks wanna put Jigga fist in cuffs
Divorce him and split his bucks
Just because you got good head, I'ma break bread
so you can be livin it up? Shit I..
parts with nothin, y'all be frontin
Me give my heart to a woman?
Not for nothin, never happen
I'll be forever mackin
Heart cold as assassins, I got no passion
I got no patience
And I hate waitin..
Hoe get yo' ass in
And let's RI-I-I-I-I-IDE.. check em out now
RI-I-I-I-I-IDE, yeah
Chorus One: Jay-Z
We doin.. big pimpin, we spendin cheese
Check em out now
Big pimpin, on B.L.A.D.'s
We doin.. big pimpin up in N.Y.C.
It's just that Jigga Man, Pimp C, and B-U-N B
Yo yo yo.. big pimpin, spendin cheese
We doin - big pimpin, on B.L.A.D.'s
We doin.. big pimpin up in N.Y.C.
It's just that Jigga Man, Pimp C, and B-U-N B
[Bun B]
Nigga it's the - big Southern rap impresario
Comin straight up out the black bar-rio
Makes a mill' up off a sorry hoe
Then sit back and peep my sce-nawr-e-oh
Oops, my bad, that's my scenario
No I can't fuck a scary hoe
Now every time, every place, everywhere we go
Hoes start pointin - they say, "There he go!"
Now these motherfuckers know we carry mo' heat than a little bit
We don't pull it out over little shit
And if you catch a lick when I spit, then it won't be a little hit
Go read a book you illiterate son of a bitch and step up yo' vocab
Don't be surprised if yo' hoe stab out with me
and you see us comin down on yo' slab
Livin ghetto-fabulous, so mad, you just can't take it
But nigga if you hatin I
then you wait while I get yo' bitch butt-naked, just break it
You gotta pay like you weigh wet wit two pairs of clothes on
Now get yo' ass to the back as I'm flyin to the track
Timbaland let me spit my pro's on
Pump it up in the pro-zone
That's the track that we breakin these hoes on
Ain't the track that we flow's on
But when shit get hot, then the glock start poppin like ozone
We keep hoes crunk like Trigger-man
Fo' real it don't get no bigger man
Don't trip, let's flip, gettin throwed on the flip
Gettin blowed with the motherfuckin Jigga Man, fool
Chorus Two: Bun B
We be.. big pimpin, spendin cheese
We be.. big pimpin, on B.L.A.D.'s
We be.. big pimpin down in P.A.T.
It's just that Jigga Man, Pimp C, and B-U-N B
Cause we be.. big pimpin, spendin cheese
And we be.. big pimpin, on B.L.A.D.'s
Cause we be.. big pimpin in P.A.T.
It's just that Jigga Man, Pimp C, and B-U-N B.. nigga
[Pimp C]
Uhh.. smokin out, throwin up, keepin lean up in my cup
All my car got leather and wood, in my hood we call it buck
Everybody wanna ball, holla at broads at the mall
If he up, watch him fall, nigga I can't fuck witch'all
If I wasn't rappin baby, I would still be ridin Mercedes
Chromin shinin sippin daily, no rest until whitey pay me
Uhhh, now what y'all know bout them Texas boys
Comin down in candied toys, smokin weed and talkin noise
Heart Of The City (Ain't No Love)
[Jay-Z]
Uh, uhh, listen
First the Fat Boys break up, now every day I wake up
Somebody got a problem with Hov'
Whassup y'all niggaz all fed up cause I got a little cheddar
and my records movin out the sto'?
Young fucks spittin at me, young rappers gettin at me
My nigga Big predicted the shit exactly
"Mo' Money, Mo' Problems" - gotta move carefully
Cause faggots hate when you gettin money like athletes
Yung'uns ice-grillin me, ohh - you not feelin me?
Fine; it cost you nothin - pay me no mind
Look, I'm on my grind cousin, ain't got time for frontin
Sensitive thugs, y'all all need hugs
Damn though mans I'm just tryin do me
If the record's two mill' I'm just tryin move three
Get a couple of chicks, get 'em to try to do E
Hopefully they'll menage before I reach my garage
I don't want much, fuck I drove every car
Some nice cooked food, some nice clean drawers
Bird-ass niggaz I don't mean to ruffle y'all
I know you waitin in the wing but I'm doin my thing
Where's the love?
"Ain't no love, in the heart of the city.."
I said where's the love?
"Ain't no love, in the heart of town.."
Yeah..
And then the Fugees gon' break up, now everyday I wake up
Somebody got somethin to say
What's all the fuckin fussin for? Because I'm grubbin more
and I pack heat like I'm the oven door?
Niggaz pray and pray on my downfall
But everytime I hit the ground I bounce up like roundball
Now I don't wanna have to kill sound bar
Don't wanna have to cock back the four pound bar
Look scrapper I got nephews to look after
I'm not lookin at you dudes, I'm lookin past ya
I thought I told you characters I'm not a rapper
Can I live? I told you in ninety-six
that I came to take this shit and I did, handle my biz
I scramble like Randall with his
Cunning-ham but the only thing runnin is numbers fam
Jigga held you down six summers; damn, where's the love?
"Ain't no love, in the heart of the city.."
Niggaz, where's the love?
"Ain't no love, in the heart of town.."
Holla at me!!
"Ain't no love" (take 'em to church) "in the heart of the city.."
Uh, uh, uh - my nigga where's the love?
"Ain't no love, in the heart of town.."
Fuck
Then Richard Pryor go and burn up, and Ike and Tina Turner break up
Then I wake up to more bullshit
You knew me before records, you never disrespected me
Now that I'm successful you'll pull this shit
Nigga I'll step on your porch, step to your boss
Let's end the speculation, I'm talkin to alla y'all
Males shouldn't be jealous that's a female trait
Whatchu mad cause you push dimes and he sell weight?
Y'all don't know my expenses, I gotta buy a bigger place
Hehehe, and more baggies, why you all aggie?
Nigga respect the game, that should be it
What you eat don't make me shit - where's the love?
Where's the love?
"Ain't no love, in the heart of the city.."
"Ain't no love, in the heart of town.."
Can I Get A...
What? Well fuck you... bitch
Bounce wit me, wit me, wit me wit me
Can you bounce wit me, bounce wit me, wit me wit me
Can you bounce wit me, bounce wit me, ge-gi-gi-gi-gi-gi
Can you bounce wit me, bounce wit me, ye-ye-yeah
Uh-huh uh-huh bounce wit me, bounce wit me
Can ya can ya can ya bounce wit me, bounce wit me
Ya-yah-yah, ya-ya-yah-yeah bounce wit me, bounce wit me
Ge-gi, ge-gi-gi-gi-geyeah bounce wit me, bounce wit me
Get it!
Verse One: Jay-Z
Can I hit in the MORNING
without givin you half of my dough
And even worse if I was broke would you WANT ME?
If I couldn't get you finer things
like all of them diamond rings bitches KILL FOR
would you STILL ROLL?
If we couldn't see the sun risin off the shore of Thailand
would you RIDE THEN, if I wasn't DROPPIN?
If I wasn't ah, eight figure nigga by the name of Jigga
would you come around me or would you clown me?
If I couldn't flow futuristic would ya
put your two lips on my wood and kiss it - could ya
see yourself with a nigga workin harder than 9 to 5
contend with six, two jobs to survive, or
do you need a BALLA? So you can shop and tear the MALL UP?
Brag, tell your friends what I BOUGHT YA
If you couldn't see yourself with a nigga when his dough is low
Baby girl, if this is so, yo..
[Jay-Z] Can I get a FUCK YOU
to these bitches from all of my niggaz
who don't love hoes, they get no dough
[Amil] Can I get a WOOP WOOP
to these niggaz from all of my bitches
who don't got love for niggaz without dubs?
[Amil] Now can you bounce wit me, uhh
[Jay-Z] Bounce wit me, bounce wit me
Can ya can ya can ya bounce wit me, bounce wit me
[Amil] Uh uh.. Major Coins, Amil-lion
[Jay-Z] Bounce wit me, bounce wit me
[Amil] Uhh, yo bounce wit me
[Jay-Z] Can ya can ya can ya bounce wit me, bounce wit me
[Amil] Yeah, uh-uh uh uh
Verse Two: Amil
You ain't gotta be rich but FUCK THAT
How we gonna get around your BUS PASS
Fo' I put this pussy on your mustache
Can you AFFORD ME, my niggaz breadwinners, never corny
Ambition makes me so horny
Not the fussin' and the frontin'
If you got nuttin', baby boy, you betta
Get up, get out and get somethin, shit!
I like a, lot of P-rada, Alize and vodka
Late nights, candlelight, then I tear the cock up
Get it up I put it down erytime it pop up, huh
I got to snap em, let it loose, then I knock ya
Feel the juice, then I got ya, when you produce a rocka
I let you meet momma and introduce you to poppa
My coochie remains in a Gucci name
Never test my patience nigga, I'm high maintenance
HIGH CLASS, if you ain't rollin, bypass
If you ain't holdin, I dash yo
[Jay-Z] Now can you bounce for me, bounce for me
[Ja] Uhh
[Jay-Z] Can ya can ya can ya bounce wit me, bounce wit me
[Ja] Uhh!
[Jay-Z] Gi-gi-gi-geyeah-geyeah
[Jay-Z] Can ya bounce wit me, bounce wit me
[Ja] UHH!
[Jay-Z] Gi-gi-gi-gi can ya bounce wit me, bounce wit me
[Ja] Uhh! Yeah
Verse Three: Ja (Rule)
It ain't even a question
how my dough flows, I'm good to these bad hoes
Like my bush wet and undry like damp clothes
What y'all niggaz don't know, it's eazy, to pimp a hoe
Bitches betta have my, money fo' sho'
Before they go, runnin they mouth, promotin' half
I be dickin' they, back out, go 'head, let it out
I fucks with my gat out, bounce and leave a hundred
Makin em feel, slutted even if they don't want it
It's been SO LONG
since I met a chick ain't on my tips but then I'm
DEAD WRONG, when I tell 'em BE GONE
So HOLD ON to the feelin of flossin and platinum
cause from NOW ON, you can witness Ja the I-CON
with hoodies and TIMBS ON, cause I thugs my bitches
VeVe, studs my bitches, then we rob bitch niggaz
I'm talkin bout straight figures if you here, you wit us
If not Boo, you know what, I still fucked you
[Jay-Z]
Now can you bounce wit me, bounce wit me
Ge-gi, ge-gi-gi-gi bounce wit me, bounce wit me
Wit me wit me wit me bounce wit me, bounce wit me
Bounce, bitch, bounce.. wit me wit me wit me wit me
Can ya bounce wit me wit me
Ge-gi, uh-huh uh-huh uh-huh uh-huh
Uh-huh uh-huh uh-huh uh-huh uh-huh uh-huh uh
Can ya bounce wit me bounce wit me
Geyeah
Hard Knock Life (Ghetto Anthem)
Take the bassline out, uh huh
Jigga uh huh uh huh uh huh
It's the Hard Knock Life for us
It's the Hard Knock Life for us
'Stead of treated, we get tricked
'Stead of kisses, we get kicked
It's the Hard Knock Life
From standin' on the corners, boppin'
To drivin' some of the hottest cars New York has ever seen
To droppin' some of the hottest verses rap has ever heard
From the dope spot, with the smoke glock, fleein' the murder scene, you know me well
From nightmares of a lonely cell, my only hell
But since when ya'll niggas know me to fail? Fuck naw
Where all my niggas with the rubber grips, bust shots
And if you with me, mama rub on ya tits, and what not
I'm from the school of the hard knocks, we must not
Let outsiders violate our blocks and my plot
Let's stick up the world and split it 50-50, uh huh
Let's take the dough and stay real jiggy, uh huh
Let's sip the Cris and get pissy pissy
Flow infinitely like the memory of my nigga Biggie, baby!
You know its hell when I come through
The life and times of Shawn Carter, nigga, Volume 2 - Ya'll niggas get ready
It's the Hard Knock Life for us
It's the Hard Knock Life for us
'Stead of treated, we get tricked
'Stead of kisses, we get kicked
It's the Hard Knock Life
I flow for those droed out
All my niggas locked down in the 10 by 4 controllin' the house
We live in hard knocks we don't take over we bomb blocks
Burn 'em down and you can have 'em back daddy, I'd rather that
I flow for chicks wishin' they ain't have to strip to pay tuition
I see you vision mama
I put my money on the long shots, all my ballers that's born to clock
Now I'ma be on top whether I perform or not
I went from lukewarm to hot, sleepin' on futons and cots,
To king size, green machines, to green 5's
I've seen pies let the thing between my eyes analyze life's ills
Then I put it down tight real
I'm tight grill with the phony rappers, you might feel we homeys
I'm like still you don't know me, shit
I'm tight real when my situation ain't improvin'
I'm tryin' to murder everythin' movin', Feel Me
It's the Hard Knock Life for us
It's the Hard Knock Life for us
'Stead of treated, we get tricked
'Stead of kisses, we get kicked
It's the Hard Knock Life for us
It's the Hard Knock Life for us
'Stead of treated, we get tricked
'Stead of kisses, we get kicked
It's the Hard Knock Life
I don't know how to sleep, I gotta eat, stay on my toes
Got a lot of beef so logically I prey on my foes
Hustlin' still inside of me and as far as progress
You be hard-pressed to find another rapper hot as me
I gave you prophecy on my first joint, and ya all lamed out
Didn't really appreciate it 'til the second one came out
So I stretched the game out, X'ed your name out
Put Jigga on top, and drop albums non-stop for ya nigga
It's the Hard Knock Life for us
It's the Hard Knock Life for us
'Stead of treated, we get tricked
'Stead of kisses, we get kicked
It's the Hard Knock Life for us
It's the Hard Knock Life for us
'Stead of treated, we get tricked
'Stead of kisses, we get kicked
It's the Hard Knock Life
It's the Hard Knock Life
It's the Hard Knock Life
Ain't No Nigga
I keep you fresher than the next bitch, no need
For you to ever sweat the next bitch, with speed
I make the best bitch see the exit, indeed
You gotta know ya thoroughly respected, by me
You get the keys to the Lexus, but no drivin'
Got ya own '96 somethin'... new ride and
Keep ya ass tied up in Versace, that's why
You gotta watch ya friends, you got to watch me, they connivin'
Shit, first chance to crack for bank, they'll try me
All they get is 50 cent franks, and papayas
From the village, to the telly
Time to kill it, on ya belly
No question, have more black chicks between my sheets than Essence
They say sex is a weapon, so when I shoot
Meet ya death in less than eight seconds
Still poundin' in my after life, laughin'
My shit is tight, who you askin', right
Ain't no nigga like the one I got
No one can fuck you better
Sleeps around but he gives me alot
Keeps you in diamonds and leathers
Friends'll tell me I should leave you alone (Haha..haha..haha..haha)
Tell them freaks to find a man of they own (Man of they own, man of they own)
Yeah, yeah
Fresh to def in Moschino
Coach bag lookin' half black and Filipino, fakin' no jacks
Got you a beeper to feel important
Surrounded ya feet in Joan & Davis and Charles Jourdan
I keep ya dove, but love
You know these hoes be, making me weak
Ya'll know how it goes, B, and so I creep
I been sinnin' since you been playin' with Barbie and Ken, and
You can't change a players game in the ninth inning
The chrome rims spinning keeps 'em grinning
So I run way the fuck up in 'em and wrinkle they face like linen
I play hard un-til they say "God, he's keepin' it real, Jigga stay hard"
Naw, don't even trip, I never slip
Nigga, get a grip, what you don't see is what you get
Weapons concealed, what the fuck ya'll feel
When ya niggas play sick we can all get ill
(What the deal?)
Right, right, yo
Ain't no stoppin' this no lie
Promise to stay monogamous, I try
But love you know these hoes be, makin' me weak
Ya'll know how it goes, B, so I stay deep
[Foxy Brown]
What up boo
Just keep me laced in the illest snakes
Bankrolls and shit, back rubs in the french tub
Mackin' this bitch, wifey nigga
So when you flip that coke 'member the days you was dead broke
But now you stylin', I raised you
Basically made you, into a don, flippin' weight, heroin and shit
You know the pussy is all that
That's why I get baguettes, five carats and all that
From Dolce Gabbana, to H. Bendel
I'm ringin' bells, so who the playa
I still keep you in the illest gators
Tailor-made, so we can lay up in the shade
Reminiscin' on how I fuck the best and shit
'Specially when I'm sippin' Baileys
Don't give a fuck 'bout how you move with them other mamis
I push the Z, eatin' shrimp scampi
With rocks larger than life
Fuck them Reebok broads, you made it known who ya wife was
I got you frontin' in Armani sweaters
Before this rap shit when you was in leathers and bullshit Berettas
And E classes with Mo' in the glasses
Shows in Cali with all the flavors suede Bally's
Now all your mens is up in ya Benzes
High post, I swear you be killing me
Playin' inside my pubic hairs
I never worry bout them other chicks
Cause you proved who was your wiz
When you was spinnin' that bitch
I tripped a little, when you was up north
Ya commissary stay pilin'
How you livin' large on a island
All them collects had me vexed, but when you come home
Knew I was comin' off with half of them checks
Now we on da rise, your diamond mami with the slanted eyes
Holdin' this grip, cocked the ?encleeque? and shit
Fucks no, I see half of the dough (whoa, whoa)
Made you into a star, pushin' hundred thousand dollar cars
Uh, what nigga,
Foxy Brown, (uh, uh, uh, Jay-Z ya'll) Jay-Z niggas
Cocked the ?encleeque? and shit (That's right, whoa, whoa)
(Jay-Z, what, Fox Brown, Roc-A-Fella ya'll)
(Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa)
Can't Knock The Hustle/Family Affair
I'm makin sure it turns gold, when the weather folds,
Just put away the leathers and put ice on the gold,
Chilly with enough bail money to free a big willy,
Hi-stakes, I got more at stake than philly,
Shopping sprees, coppin 3, deuce fever I.S'n,
Fully loaded, aahh yes,
Bouncin in the lex luger, tires smoke like budah,
50 g's to the crap shooter, niggas cant fade me,
Chrome stocks beamin, through my peripheral,
I see you schemin, stop dreamin, I'll leave ya body steamin,
Niggas is fiendin, whats the meanin?,
I'm leanin on any nigga intervenin with the sound of my money machine'n,
My cup's runneth, over with hundreds,
I'm one of the best niggas that done it,
6 digits and runnin, y'all niggas dont want it,
I got the godfather flow, the don juan demarco,
Swear to god dont get if fucked up
Takin out this time,
To give you a piece of my mind,
Cuz you cant knock the hustle,
Who do you think you are?,
Wel baby one day youll be a star
Last seen outta state, where I dropped my slang,
I'm deep in the south, kickin up top game,
Bouncin on the highways, switchin 4 lanes,
Screaming though the sunroof money aint a thing,
Your worst fear confirmed, me and my fam roll tight like the firm,
Gettin down for life, thats right, you better learn,
Why play when fire burns?,
We get together like a choir, to acquire what we desire,
We do dirt like worms, produce g's like sperm,
Till legs spread like germs,
I get extensive hoes, with expensive clothes,
And I sip fine wines, and spit vintage flows,
What y'all dont know?
Cuz ya cant knock the hustle
Runnin till the late day, I'm the one whos crazy,
Cuz thats the way youre makin me be, (the way you make me feel),
Cuz you cant knock the hustle
I'm just tryin to get mine, I dont have the time,
To knock the hustle for real
Y'all niggas lunchin, punchin the clock,
My function, is to make much and lay back munchin,
Sippin remy on the rocks, my crew, somethin to watch,
Nothin to stop, un-stoppable,
Scheme on the ice, I gotta hide ya crew,
I gotta, let you niggas know the time like movado,
My motto, stack rocks like colorado,
While I order champagne, kristals by the bottle,
Its a damn shame, what ya not though, me,
Slick like a gato (cat), fuckin jay-z,
My pops knew exactly what he did when he made me,
He tried to get a nut and he got a nut and what!,
Straight bananas, can a nigga, see me,
Got the U.S Open, advantage jigga,
Serve like Sampras, play fake rappers like a canvas,
Le tigre, son youre too eager,
You aint havin it?, good, me either,
Lets, get together and make this whole world believers huh,
At my arraignment, screamin,
All us blacks got is sports and entertainment,
Until we even, leavin, as long as I'm breathin,
Cant knock the way a nigga eatin, fuck you even, (fuck you)
Takin out this time,
To give you a piece of my mind,
Who do you think you are?,
Well baby one day youll be a star
Runnin till the late day, I'm the one whos crazy,
Cuz thats the way youre makin me be, (the way you make me feel),
I'm just tryin to get mine, I dont have the time,
To knock the hustle for real
Song Cry
Most incredible baby
Uhh - mmm, mmm, mmm, mmm
Yeah, yeah.. uhh
I can't see 'em comin down my eyes
So I gotta make the song cry
I can't see 'em comin down my eyes
So I gotta make the song cry
Good dudes - I know you love me like cooked food
Even though a nigga got move like a crook move
We was together on the block since free lunch
We shoulda been together havin 4 Seasons brunch
We used to use umbrellas to face the bad weather
So now we travel first class to change the forecast
Never in bunches, just me and you
I loved your point of view cause you held no punches
Still I left you for months on end
It's been months since I checked back in
Well somewhere in a small town, somewhere lockin a mall down
Woodgrain, four and change, Armor All'd down
I can understand why you want a divorce now
Though I can't let you know it, pride won't let me show it
Pretend to be heroic, that's just one to grow with
But deep inside a nigga so sick
On repeat, the CD of Big's "Me and My Bitch"
Watchin Bonnie and Clyde, pretendin to be that shit
Empty gun in your hand sayin, "Let me see that clip"
Shoppin sprees, pull out your Visa quick
A nigga had very bad credit, you helped me lease that whip
You helped me get the keys to that V dot 6
We was so happy poor but when we got rich
That's when our signals got crossed, and we got flipped
Rather mine, I don't know what made me leave that shit
Made me speed that quick, let me see - that's it
It was the cheese helped them bitches get amnesia quick
I used to cut up they buddies, now they sayin they love me
Used to tell they friends I was ugly and wouldn't touch me
Then I showed up in that dubbed out buggy
And then they got fuzzy and they don't remember that
And I don't remember you..
A face of stone, was shocked on the other end of the phone
Word back home is that you had a special friend
So what was oh so special then?
You have given away without gettin at me
That's your fault, how many times you forgiven me?
How was I to know that you was plain sick of me?
I know the way a nigga livin was whack
But you don't get a nigga back like that!
Shit I'm a man with pride, you don't do shit like that
You don't just pick up and leave and leave me sick like that
You don't throw away what we had, just like that
I was just f***in them girls, I was gon' get right back
They say you CAN turn a bad girl good
But once a good girl's goin bad, she's gone forever..
i mourn forever
Shit I gotta live with the fact I did you wrong forever
I Just Wanna Love U (Give It 2 Me)
Let's go
Hov!
Uh huh, Hov'
You, are, not, ready
Hov', unstoppable, Dynasty, young Hova
I'm a hustler baby [I'm a hustler]
I just want you to know [Wanna let you know]
It aint where I been [It aint where I been]
But where I'm bout to go [Top of the world!]
Now I just wanna love you [just wanna love you]
But be who I am [you know you love me]
And with all this cash [mo' money, mo' problems]
You'll forget your man
Now give it to me
Gimme that funk, that sweet, that nasty, that gushi stuff
But don't bullshit me
C'mon, gimme that funk, that sweet, that nasty, that gushi stuff
[Verse 1]
When the Remi's in the system, ain't no tellin
Will I fuck 'em will I diss 'em, that's what they be yellin
I'm a pimp by blood, not relation
Y'all be chasin, I replace them, huh?
Drunk off Crist', mami on E
Can't keep her little model hands off me
Both in the club, high, singing off key
"And I wish I never met her at all..."
It gets better, ordered another round
It's, about, to go, down
Got six model chicks, six bottles of Crist'
Four Belvederes, got weed everywhere
What do you say, me, you, and your Chloe glasses
Go somewhere private where we can discuss fashion
Like, Prada blouse, Gucci bra
Filth marked jeans, take that off
Give it to me
Gimme that funk, that sweet, that nasty, that gushi stuff
But don't bullshit me
C'mon, gimme that funk, that sweet, that nasty, that gushi stuff
I said give it to me
Gimme that funk, that sweet, that nasty, that gushi stuff
But don't bullshit me
Mama, gimme that funk, that sweet, that nasty, that gushi stuff
[Verse 2]
Yeah, save the narrative, you savin it for marriage
Let's keep it real ma, you savin it for karats
You wanna see how far I'ma go
How, much I'ma spend but you already know
Zip, zero, stingy with dinero
Might buy you Crist', but that about it
Might light your wrist, but that about it
Fuck it, I might wife you and buy you nice whips
Ma, but you really gotta ride nice dick
Know how to work your hips and your head's priceless
Profess you love the Hov', and I'll never let you down
Get you bling like the Neptune sound
Okay, hot Hov', too hot to hold
Ladies love me long time like 2Pac's soul
Only way to roll, Jigga and two ladies
I'm too cold, Motorola, two way page me, c'mon
Give it to me
Gimme that funk, that sweet, that nasty, that gushi stuff
But don't bullshit me
C'mon, gimme that funk, that sweet, that nasty, that gushi stuff
I said give it to me
Gimme that funk, that sweet, that nasty, that gushi stuff
But don't bullshit me
Mama, gimme that funk, that sweet, that nasty, that gushi stuff
I'm a hustler baby [uh, Hov']
I just want you to know [Hov']
It aint where I been
But where I'm bout to go [Hov', Hov']
Now I just wanna love you [young Hova]
But be who I am [know you love me]
And with all this cash [mo' money, mo' problems]
You'll forget your man
[Verse 3]
Yeah, yeah, yeah
Same song, I'm back, been around the world
Ro-mancing girls that dance with girls
From, Club Cheetah, to Club Amnesia
The Peanuts in L.A., Bubblin' in Dublin
Can't deny me, why would you want to
You need me, why don't you try me
Baby you want to, believe me, Hov'!
Give it to me
Gimme that funk, that sweet, that nasty, that gushi stuff
But don't bullshit me
C'mon, gimme that funk, that sweet, that nasty, that gushi stuff
I said give it to me
Gimme that funk, that sweet, that nasty, that gushi stuff
But don't bullshit me
Mama, gimme that funk, that sweet, that nasty, that gushi stuff
You gotta...
Give it to me
Uh, uh huh
Jigga That Nigga/People Talkin'
[Its like finding feathers on a housecat]
(Jay-Z)
Lemme take yall somewhere else right now
[Its like searching for a needle in a haystack]
Lemme get yall to zone out wit me, man
(Its aight, dont be scared)
Take yall niggaz left and center(zone out wit)
Bullshit
I hear the people talk(I hear yall)
Yes sir and when you walk(Yall hear me)
Your kind is hard to find
Darling, I'm glad youre mine
(Jay-Z talking during chorus)
Yall niggaz should twist up sumthin
Real real real tight right here
Zone out wit ya boy
If you dont smoke, grab you sumthin to drink
Mix it up right
If you dont smoke or drink
Man, just light up a inscense
Fuck it
Close ya eyes... vibe wit me
I want yall to really hear me
[Verse]
I speak through music, I reach you dudes
We can get deeper in the dirt than cleat shoes
I refuse to lose
I peep you creeps three months in advance
I SEE RIGHT THROUGH YA, JUDAS!
The man that I am and damn you dont know
The harder you go at me the harder I flow
Lets do this
I'm just a mirror reflectin your image
The minute you switch up your face I pick up the pace
There's nothin to it
Pull hammers from my waist
We can clap at this amateur pace
If that's what's crackin
Or we can play this on All Madden
Can you even fathom not havin a fear in the world
I'm cool in my afterlife
If I'm readin these chapters right
Please what have you, I breeze through Matthews
Bleed if I have you, you cowards die a thousand deaths
Fate fucks face-down on your house's steps
Are yall even gettin this message?
I aint bein aggressive
But if you testin my life then, shit I gotta answer
Gotta cut off the cancer, young'n, pull your pants up
You gettin too big for ya britches
You fuckin wit a dude that did it wit digits
Breathing's a privilege
Dont you know... when youre defeated?
Wont you throw? Throw in the towel
I'm better with vowels
I'm a man of principles; damn-near invincible
In my own mind now that my soul's aligned
I didnt know before now my role's defined:
Take hold and control what's mine
COME AND GIT MEEEEEEE
Come and take my life, you comin wit me
Come and try to take me for granted
I'll take you off this planet
Dammit, man this is the gift from God
This aint have to stand
'Til your arms are too short to box
Plus we knuckle up unorthodox
You can't take me off my grind GET OFF MY COCK
Whatchu thought? It's da ROC
(Jay-Z)
Back in the mix of the scuffle
Since '86 I was sick wit the hustle(Wooh!)
Git a couple of chicks to touch you(Wooh!)
Feather-weight fucker dont ever hate on the brothers
Heh-heh
Thought I was playin but you niggaz'll stop now
I aint gotta sell another record in my life
THE BLUEPRINT 2, BABY!!(Mm-hmm)
SEE YALL IN NOVEMBER (Oh shit)
I hear the people talk(C'MON!)
Yes sir and when you walk(C'mon)
Your kind is hard to find
Darling, I'm
2012-09-15T04:05:26+09:00
1347649526
-
Roots_undun
https://w.atwiki.jp/dooronron/pages/17.html
Sleep
[verse 1: aaron livingston]
like when autumn leaves fall
down from the trees
there goes my honey bee
i've lost a lot of sleep to dreams
and i do not miss them yet
i wouldn't wish them on than worst of enemies
let them burn, go from here
like when autumn leaves
[verse 2: black thought]
to catch a thief, who stole the soul i prayed to keep
insomniac, bad dreams got me losing sleep
i'm dead tired, my mind playing tricks, deceit
a face in the glass, unable to admit defeat
all that i am, all that i was is history
the past unraveled, adding insult to this injury
[ From: http://www.metrolyrics.com/sleep-lyrics-the-roots.html ]
i'm fighting the battle for the soul of the century
destiny is everything that i pretend to be
look, and what i did came back to me eventually
the music played on, and told me i was meant to be awake
it's unresolved like everything i had at stake
illegal activity controls my black symphony
orchestrated like it happened incidentally
oh, there i go, from a man to memory
damn, i wonder if my fam will remember me
[verse 3: aaron livingston]
i've lost a lot of sleep to dreams
and i do not miss them yet
i wouldn't wish them on the worst of enemies
let them burn, go from here
like when autumn leaves
Make My
[Verse 1: Big K.R.I.T]
I did it all for the money, Lord
That's what it seems..
Well, in the world of night terrors it's
Hard to dream, they hollerin' cash rules everything
Just call it cream, cause when it rises to the top
You get the finer things
Oceanfronts, rolling blunts with model chicks
And saying grace over lobster and steak
Like please forgive us for riding Benzes with camera plates
Too busy looking backwards for jackers to pump my brakes
For help signs to symbolize the lives that hunger takes
Addicted to the green, if I don't ball I'll get the shakes
I'd give it all for a peace of mind, for Heaven's sake
My heart's so heavy that the ropes that hold my casket breaks
Cause everything that wasn't for me I had to chase
[Hook]
They told me that the ends
Won't justify the means
They told me at the end
Don't justify the dreams
[ From: http://www.metrolyrics.com/make-my-lyrics-the-roots.html ]
That I've had since a child
Maybe I'll throw in the towel
Make my (make my)
Make my (make my)
Departure from the world
[Verse 2: Black Thought]
Tryin' to control the fits of panic
Unwritten and unraveled, it's the dead man's pedantic
Whatever, see it's really just a matter of semantics
When everybody's fresh out of collateral to damage
My splaying got me praying like a mantis
I begin to vanish
Feel the pull of the blank canvas
I'm contemplating that special dedication
To whoever it concern, my letter of resignation
Fading back to black, my dark coronation
The heat of the day, the long robe of muerte
That soul is in the atmosphere like airplay
If there's a Heaven I can't find a stairway
One Time
Yo, the spirit in the sky scream homicide
But it was time to ride
Then some niggas funny talking and too much money talking
We make em economize
Real rap – no tails spinning, such is the life of a
Kam-I-Ka-Ze pilot
We wylin out of control until we all make the funny papers like Comic-Con
Feared in all streets so, if you ever see me out in y’all streets
Find another one to occupy
I never hope for the best
I wish a nigga would
Turn around and walk away
I wish a nigga could
Listen to my instincts and say fuck the rest
But once you’ve had the best better ain’t as good
Weak-heartedness cannot be involved
Stick to the script nigga fuck your improv
Like the samurai
The street’s Hammurabi Code
Play your part shut the fuck up and do as I was told
I was always late for the bus
Just once can I be on time
Then I start to think what’s the rush
Who wants to be on time
Feeling unlucky and if I ever got lucky it was one time
In this crazy world
Not a thing I fear besides fear itself
This is clearly a lesson learned for someone else
Reach for the crown of thorns upon the shelf
Cross around my neck
I’ve been taught by stealth
Capture this moment in time… it’s a smash and grab
And where my party people y’all finna have a blast
You say goodbye… I say hello first and last
Hello-Hello… Now all of y’all elevate your glass
To an example of what time will do to you
When those nameless things just keep on eluding you
[ From: http://www.metrolyrics.com/one-time-lyrics-the-roots.html ]
When shit is new to you and lies is true to you
Words of suspects-usual… coming though to you
Man, I guess if I was ever lucky it was one time
Then I went missing looking for the sublime
A nigga stayed low left the ladder unclimbed
Time after time, verse blank, the line unrhymed
You ever wonder what’s the big fuss..
For everyone be on time
What’s the big deal, why do they feel
The need to have as marching on line
Feeling unlucky and if I’d ever got lucky it was one time
In this crazy world
I wonder when you die do you hear harps and bagpipes
If you born on the other side of the crack pipe
Niggas learn math just to understand the crack price
Then drive in head first like the jack knife
Cause out here, yo you niggas can’t belly flop
If you wanna make the noise inside your belly stop
One time means being on the front line
Being on the front line means ducking one time
The pendulum swinging my way- couldn’t be more blind
Niggas talk to the cops? Not even one time
Cause we all going down just like the subprime
Or a cheap ass half gallon of Ballantine
But hopping over gates to escape is sublime
Then through the alley way and down to the sub line
Tales from the streets
A life of high crime
To make it to the bottom
Such a high climb
I was always late for the bus
Just once can I be on time
Then I start to think what’s the rush
Who wants to be on time
Feeling unlucky and if I ever got lucky it was one time
In this crazy world
Kool On
Hook : Come get your cool on, stars are made to shine
Greg Porn
Im in a double g three piece tux
screamin dressed to kill hope somebody call my bluff
its a full house sipping on a royal flush
two queens is on my cuffs
good times is on the dodge ?
livin on borrowed time im payin a extra charge
to feel like something small is worth a hundred large
swag is on retard
charm is on massage
wit is en guarde i challenge you to a duel
who needs a chain when every thoughts a jewel
god bless the widow and everyones a fool
fuck a genie and three wishes
i just want a bottle a place to write my novel
i am heroin to those who had rhyme
and ask how do you find this upper echelon this time
lets toast to better days
a beautiful mind and a flow that never age
Hook : Come get your cool on, stars are made to shine
Black Thought:
Yo Im never sleeping like im on methamphetamines
move like my enemy ten steps ahead of me
say my reputation preceed me like a pedigree
gentlemenly gangster steez beyond the seventies
holding fast money without running out of patience
move in silence without running up in places
cake by the layers rich but never famous
[ From: http://www.metrolyrics.com/kool-on-lyrics-the-roots.html ]
hustle anonymous still remain nameless
in hindsight, gold come in bars like a klondike
the minute before the storm hit is when im calm like
suited and booted for the shooting like its prom night
its suicide right
but you was tried like ????
to no avail and they heros what they died like
i got em waitin on the news like i was cronkite
not in the lime light or needed for crime right
no boast just body and chalk close to the the line type
Hook : Come get your cool on, stars are made to shine
Truck North
yeah outside where all the killers and the dealers swarm
and inside they dressed up like its a telethon
black tie affair but they holdin heavy arms
straight cash with the stash in the cumberbund
more bacardi and the bastards of the party home
riots erupt around us but still we party on
been a quantum leap from a king to a pawn
but it was destined the conclusion was forgone
serenade of the former slave promenade
cos them long days in the sun have now become shade
so we doing high speeds in a narrow lane
say cheese free falling from the aeroplane
another feather in the cap
for all the years that we spent in luxuries lap without looking back
cos memories can sting like a hornet
damn it felt good to see people up on it
Stomp
It's about flesh and blood
It's about a heart beat that beats strong
It's about a passion
That's unyielding, and
I want you men to know today
It is your dollar
It's your hour
It is your moment
Go take it
[Black Thought]
Yeah, speaking of pieces of a man
Staring at a future in the creases of my hand
It reads like a final letter I'm leaving for my fam but
It's written in language they will never understand
A late repentant
Never deviating from a plan
I drive by headed for the valley of the damned
The wheels spin, I'm looking for a sacrificial lamb
Then roll tactics like a soldier out in the Sudan
Listen...
Was this a matter of Flesh and Blood?
Yes it was
Does it matter who Win and Lose
Yes it does
It ain't about the most blessed love
When you return to the essence
What is it back to the essence of?
Greatness I wasn't in the presence of
Cause you was fake and never measured up
[ From: http://www.metrolyrics.com/stomp-lyrics-the-roots.html ]
You just a nigga on his regular
But how far am I ahead of ya
It just as easily coulda been me instead of ya
We gon' fight till we can't fight no more
And when we can't fight no more
We gon' lie down and bleed for a while
We gon' get up
And fight some more
I want you say it with me
Repeat it after me when I say it
We gon' fight
[Greg P0rn]
Fuck getting fucked
Immaculate conception
Now what's beef ain't even a question
Calico kisses, cold blood and crime tape
Flirt with death, every night is a blind date
One night stand, payback's a bitch
Shit have you skinny dipping in a pool of your piss
Blood, sweat, and tears, broken teeth and spit
Put the barrel in your mouth
Blow the devil a kiss
Put the knife in ya back cut down to the red meat
Daddy should've let me be a stain on the bed sheets
I'm one shot short of a Molotov cocktail
Kick in the door like welcome to my world
I'm an evil genius when it comes to this dumb shit
Half of the time I'mma keep it one hundred
Don't play chicken when I'm driving them crazy
Get hit in the wing, thigh, breast or drumstick
We like
Lighthouse
If you can‘t swizzim then ya bound to drizzown
Passing out life jackets bout to go didown
Get down with the captain or go down with the ship
Before the dark abyss I’m gon’ hit you wit dis...
And no one’s in the lighthouse
You’re face down in the ocean
And no one’s in the lighthouse
And it seems like you just screamed
It’s no one there to hear the sound
And it may feel like there’s no one there
That cares if you drown
Face down in the ocean
Smoking cheap weed sipping on cheap vodka
You pick your poison down Davey Jones’ locker
It’s rum we be wanting
By the tons my consumption
Take a look at my lungs and my liver
It’s disgusting
Take a look at the man in the mirror
We start fussing
Only one person gets hurt when throwing the punches
Me
And the man behind the glass just laughs
The waves come over my head and just crash
My hand start bleeding water starts receeding
A feeling comes into my heart I start believing that
I actually might survive through the evening
Survive on my own thoughts of suicide that’s competing
With thoughts of tryna stay alive which been weakened
By the feeling of putting on a smile while being beaten
The fear of drowning still diving in the deep end
The waters carried me so far you can’t reach ‘em
And it feels like there’s no one
And no one’s in the lighthouse
You’re face down in the ocean
And no one’s in the lighthouse
And it seems like you just screamed
[ From: http://www.metrolyrics.com/lighthouse-lyrics-the-roots.html ]
It’s no one there to hear the sound
And it may feel like there’s no one there
That cares if you drown
Face down in the ocean
After the love is lost
Friendship dissolves
And even blood is lost
Where did it begin
The way we did each other wrong
Troubled water neither one of us could swim across
I stopped holding my breath
Now I am better off
There without a trace
And you in my head
All the halted motion of a rebel without a pause
What it do is done till you dead and gone
The grim reaper telling me to swim deeper
Where the people go to lo and behold the soul keeper
I’m not even breaking out in a sweat
Or cold fever but
I’m never paying up on my debt or tolls either
I’ll leave the memories here I won’t need them
If I stop thinking and lie, now that’s freedom
Your body’s part of the Maritime museum
Face down in the past is where I’m being
And no one’s in the lighthouse
You’re face down in the ocean
And no one’s in the lighthouse
And it seems like you just screamed
It’s no one there to hear the sound
And it may feel like there’s no one there
That cares if you drown
Face down in the ocean
If you can‘t swizzim then ya bound to drizzown
Passing out life jackets bout to go didown
Get down with the captain or go down with the ship
Before the dark abyss I’m gon’ hit you wit dis...
I Remember
I drew a 2 of hearts from a deck of cards
A stock trick from my empty repertoire
Another hopeless story never read at all
I’m better off looking for the end
Where the credits are
It’s a pain living life against the grain
I’m looking back and y’all look the same
Troy, Mark, and little what’s his name
Memory is rerunning it all
It’s the flight of my fall and it’s right on the wall
I remember
Can you remember?
How it was
I do
Remember, do you?
I remember
Can you remember?
How it was
I do
Remember, do you?
I used to ride the train to the same two stops
And look at the graffiti on the rooftops
Like the same song playing on the jukebox
Joint called “Faded Polaroids In A Shoebox”
Regardless to what the cadence is
It can’t be forgotten like old acquaintances
I realize how depressing of a place it is
And when I notice my reflection whose face it is
I remember
[ From: http://www.metrolyrics.com/i-remember-lyrics-the-roots.html ]
Can you remember?
How it was
I do
Remember, do you?
I remember
Can you remember?
How it was
I do
Remember, do you?
I remember
Can you remember?
How it was
I do
Remember, do you?
I remember
Can you remember?
How it was
I do
Remember, do you?
It’s only human to express the way you really feel
But that same humanity is my Achilles’ heel
A leopard can’t change his spots and never will
So I’m forever ill
Now I can never chill
What’s keeping me from breaking out like Benadryl
When my baptism of fire resulted in a kill
Sometimes it’s as cut and dry as a business deal
You gotta cause the blood of a close friend to spill
But you remember still
Tip the Scale
[Hook: Dice Raw]
Homicide or suicide
Heads or Tails
Some think life is a living hell
Some live life just living well
I live life tryna tip the scale
My Way, my way
My Way, my way
[Verse 1: Black Thought]
Yo, I'm always early
I never take off cause I got a job
Rob Peter to pay Paul
Now I realize it's the winner that takes all
Do what I gotta do because I can't take loss
Picture me living life as if I'm some animal
That consumes its own dreams like I'm a cannibal
I won't accept failure unless it's mechanical
But still the alcohol mixed with the botanical
I guess I be referred to the owners manual full of loaners
Full of all the homeless throwaways and the stoners
Soldiers of the streets with 8th grade diplomas
And the world awaiting their shoulders as a bonus
Look, let he without sin live without sin
Until then, I'll be doing dirty jobs like swamp men
[ From: http://www.metrolyrics.com/tip-the-scale-lyrics-the-roots.html ]
Counting the faces of those that might have been
It's like living that life but I won't live that life again
[Repeat Hook]
[Verse 2: Dice Raw]
Lot of niggas go to prison
How many come out Malcolm X?
I know I'm not
Shit, can't even talk about the rest
Famous last words: "You under arrest"
Will I get popped tonight? It's anybody's guess
I guess a nigga need to stay cunning
I guess when the cops comin' need to start runnin
I won't make the same mistakes from my last run in
You either done doing crime now or you done in
I got a brother on the run and one in
Wrote me a letter, he said when you comin'
Shit man, I thought the goal's to stay out
Back against the wall, then shoot your way out
Gettin' money's a style that never plays out
'Til you end up boxin' your stash, money's paid out
The scales of justice ain't equally weighed out
Only two ways out, digging tunnels or digging graves out
2012-09-15T03:51:54+09:00
1347648714
-
Roots_Game Theory
https://w.atwiki.jp/dooronron/pages/16.html
"False Media"
[Chorus]
America's lost somewhere inside of Littleton
Eleven million children are on Ritalin
That's whay I don't rhyme for the sake of riddlin
False media, we don't need it, do we?
Pilgrims, Slaves, Indian, Mexican
It looks real fucked up for your next of kin
That's why I don't rhyme for the sake of riddlin
False media
[Black Thought]
If I can't work to make it, I'll rob and take it
Either that or me and my children are starving and naked
Rather be a criminal pro than to follow the Matrix
Hey it's me a monster y'all done created
I've been inaugurated
Keep the bright lights out of our faces
You can't shake it, it ain't no way to swallow the hatred
Aim, fire, holla about a dollar, nothin in sacred
We gone pimp, the shit out of nature
Send our troops to get my paper
Tell 'em stay away from them skyscrapers
Ain't long for you get y'all acres
I'ma show 'em who's the global gangster
Sentence me to four more years, thank you
I'ma make you feel a little bit safer
Because it ain't over
See that's how we get your fear to control you
But ain't nobody under more control than the soldier
And how could you expect a kid to keep his composure
When all sorts of thoughts fought for exposure again
[Chorus 3X]
America's lost somewhere inside of Littleton
Eleven million children are on Ritalin
That's whay I don't rhyme for the sake of riddlin
False media, we don't need it, do we?
Pilgrims, Slaves, Indian, Mexican
It looks real fucked up for your next of kin
That's why I don't rhyme for the sake of riddlin
False media, we don't need it, do we [repeat 4X]
"Game Theory"
(feat. Malik B)
[Chorus A 4X]
This is a game
I'm your specimen
You've got to let me know baby
So I can go, I'd have to fake it
I could not make it
You could not take it
[Black Thought]
Yeah, where I'ma start it at, look I'ma part of that
Downtown Philly where it's realer than a heart attack
It wasn't really that ill until the start of crack
Now it's a body caught every night on the Almanac
Rock bottom where them cops gotta problem at
Where them outsiders getting popped for they wallet at
I had nothin but I made somethin outta that
Now I'm the first out the limo like Charlie Mack
From 215 it's him the livest one
And he's representin Philly to the fullest
Blacks the realest
You can't touch him and not for nothin
If you bout hip hop then you gots to love it
If not then fuck it
I'm still handlin
Smokin more reefer than Redman and them damaging MC's
And my name's Rick Gees you endangered species
For what I do I'm about to up the fees
I'm paperchase motivated I ain't the one to play with
These cats get set ablaze
You can't have it y'all way but I'd rather parlay
Just smoke og and get cabbage all day
The way thought play causes your main thing to say
Your style so splendid you bout your business
You arousing my interests
You sharper than a Shogun
You know the way it go, huh, game know what I'm talkin bout
[Chorus B]
Hus, that's short for hustlers
We Black Inc Raw Life productions
Tryin to find our spota amongst the ruckus
And be sucker free, flea chumps and busters
Man yeah, Get 'em hus, get 'em hus, get 'em hus
[Black Thought]
Hey yo I'm tryin to get it at any cost so it's no remorse
When I'm blastin off like you been askin for it
When Black step in the door all hats is off
Your hands up in the air goin back and forth
I'm about ready for a classic massacre
I'll make it hotter than when Shaft in Africa
Jump outta a black Porshe huffin a fat cigar
Night ridin on 'em like my last name Hasselhoff
Voted unlikely to succeed cause my class was full
Of naysayers, cheaters and thieves
All it gave me was a good enough reason to leave
And put the writing on the wall for y'all to read it and weep
Cause I'm the force of the Lord, the rage of hell
You'd rather head for the hills and save yourselves
My Man rip drums like He ringin the bells
The King of the Realm you seen Him do His thing in a film
Come on
[Chorus B]
[Malik B]
Dreams when M16's with infrared beams
Blowin up presidents' cribs with cans of kerosene
Highjack the limousine with a strategic routine
Then blast my enemy, head for the Caribbean
Militant guerilla camp is ready for war
Lay your corner face down, place down your jewels cash and four four
When I score prepare for toture
Fuck around and make your town Warsaw
I'm from Illadel the land where the killas dwell
My technique is to ambush you guerilla style
My instinct is of a killer whale bang you up from head to toe
With lyrics I pack like a nine millimal
My types subliminal mentality switched to criminal
Importing heroin internash from Senegal
A soldier takes a stripes from a general
Used the mike of iron or lead
You choose your mineral
[Chorus A]
"Don't Feel Right"
[Chorus]
It don't feel right, it don't feel right
It don't feel, it don't feel, I can't feel it no more
It don't feel right, it don't feel right
It don't feel, it don't feel, I don't feel it no more
Things don't feel right over here
Lately I ain't been seein' clear
It don't feel right, it don't feel right
It don't feel, it don't feel, I can't feel it no more
It don't feel right, it don't feel right
It don't feel, it don't feel, I can't feel it no more
Seems to me nowadays things have changed
I don't know if I feel the same
[Verse 1 - Black Thought]
Yo, in the land of the unseen hand, and hold trouble
Theorize your game, it's difficult to roll a double
The struggle ain't right up in your face, it's more subtle
But it's still comin' across like the bridge and tunnel vision
I try to school these bucks, but they don't wanna listen
That's the reason the system makin' its paper from the prison
And that's the reason we livin' where they don't wanna visit
Where the dope slang and keep swayin' like Sonny Liston
The money missin' and there's mouths to feed
Yet the brain kickin', thinkin' of a thousand things
Remember back in the days, when the kitchen had eggs
And pancakes, thicken and greens and Kool Aid
When the 'fridgerator naked then the cupboard is bare
People got to strip naked, stick 'em up in the air
Wasn't lies when they told you wasn't nothin' to fear
Somethin' don't feel right out here, nahmsayin'? Check it out
[Chorus]
It don't feel right, it don't feel right
It don't feel, it don't feel, I can't feel it no more
It don't feel right, it don't feel right
It don't feel, it don't feel, I don't feel it no more
Things don't feel right over here
Lately I ain't been seein' clear
It don't feel right, it don't feel right
It don't feel, it don't feel, I can't feel it no more
It don't feel right, it don't feel right
It don't feel, it don't feel, I can't feel it no more
Seems to me nowadays things have changed
I don't know if I feel the same
[Verse 2 - Black Thought]
Look, my eyes open 'cause I'm really a rocksmith
And when inviting me thoughts, I'm really unboxin'
My main adversary in this silly concoction
Freeze your face like bosilium toxin
If you ain't tryin' to get popped, then give me a option
Helicopters choppin' from Philly to Compton
The Jones is the richest since the Smiths & the Johnson's
If you ain't sayin' nothin', you a system's accomplice
It should play with your conscience, do away with the nonsense
I'm overseeing anything within my circumference
This ain't a press junket, I ain't seekin' responses
I stand where the people got the heat in they pocket
You mesmerized by the calm nonchalant-ness
I spit a dart, rub on some John Hitchcock shit
If you ain't speakin' your life, your rhyme's adopted
If it don't feel right, then stop it, you nahmsayin'?
[Chorus]
It don't feel right, it don't feel right
It don't feel, it don't feel, I can't feel it no more
It don't feel right, it don't feel right
It don't feel, it don't feel, I don't feel it no more
Things don't feel right over here
Lately I ain't been seein' clear
It don't feel right, it don't feel right
It don't feel, it don't feel, I can't feel it no more
It don't feel right, it don't feel right
It don't feel, it don't feel, I can't feel it no more
Seems to me nowadays things have changed
I don't know if I feel the same
[Verse 3 - Black Thought]
Yo, field you work in, weapon producin'
Natural disaster got the planet in a panic
We all gots to make that livin'
Sex, drugs, murder, politics and religion
Forms of hustlin', watch who you put all your trust in
Worldwide, we coincide with who sufferin'
Who never had shit and ain't got nothin'
But most strugglin', and make you wanna run up in the ma' fuckin'
With hots on for a piece of the cake back
I can't work for it, I can certainly take that
I'm fired up, thinkin' about the payback, except
You fuck around and be a enemy of the state, black
Ill, but that'd be too real for TV
It's crazy when you too real to be free
If you ain't got no paper then steal this CD
Listen man, I'll let you know how it feel to be me, it don't feel
[Chorus]
It don't feel right, it don't feel right
It don't feel, it don't feel, I can't feel it no more
It don't feel right, it don't feel right
It don't feel, it don't feel, I don't feel it no more
Things don't feel right over here
Lately I ain't been seein' clear
It don't feel right, it don't feel right
It don't feel, it don't feel, I can't feel it no more
It don't feel right, it don't feel right
It don't feel, it don't feel, I can't feel it no more
Seems to me nowadays things have changed
I don't know if I feel the same
"In The Music"
(feat. Malik B, Porn)
[Black Thought]
Yeah, I'm from the illest part of the Western Hemisphere
So if you into sight seein don't visit there
It's somewhere between Jersey and Delaware
Philly never scared and them niggaz ain't timid there
Them young triggers lose lives by the minute there
It might start but the fight never finish there
They all fucked up tryin to get the gingerbread
A few stacks be the price for a nigga's head
Cops and robbers, cowboys and indians
Clips and revolvers and George's and Benjamin's
A celebration of the loss of your innocence
To you old self you've lost any resemblance
They say the city make a dark impression
The youth just lost and they want direction
But they don't get the police, they get the protection
And walk around with heat like Charlton Heston, man
[Chorus 2X]
It's in the music, turn it up let it knock
Let it bang on the block 'til the neighbors call the cops
The cops gone come but they ain't gone do shit
They don't want no problems, what are y'all stupid
It's all in the music [6X]
[Malik B]
It's kinda ill how we grip these bitches in the Bonneville
It's kind of a thrill, my mind it will spill, my nine it will kill
Of course bro like crossbow, I bring the force though
Hittin your guts splittin your torso
It's colder than the North Pole livin unlawful
I'm giving you a jawful Of somethin awful
Yo my theoretic is leaded, Will come and set it
The shit bang and leave you diabetic for paramedics
I spit flames and get dames to get change
With pitbull bark and lock the shock
Don't bother me Och, don't you dare lie to me Och
I don't know, who's this nigga that you try to be Och
Benefit of doubt had me think you in it for clout
Big shit, send it for route and finish him out
Joints stiff from rigor mortis
While we swimmin in waters, women with daughters
Will have us niggaz sinnin with orders
[Chorus 2X]
"Take It There"
Stand up, stretch for the stars
Get somebody else involved right next to ya
Y'all elected me to keep it so fresh for ya
Just cause I make it possible for the rest of ya
To just take it there come on and
Get your head ringin' from the sting of the snare
Spine tingle elevating every singular hair
All the way from South Philly on a wing and prayer
And still bringin' it yeah
[Chorus]
C'mon take it there
C'mon take it there
Let's take it there
C'mon take it there
I'm from the side of town
Where shots get sprayed around
Where the expectancy rate be twenty-eight around
Downtown battleground where cops parade around
Have your whole view of life beyond jaded
How everybody sick of breaking down, tryin' a make it out
Hand over fist the only way to get the paper down
People tired of gettin' pushed around, gettin' gangsta now
Discipline the only way to bring some kinda change around
Chain cirgarette smokin' with bad nerves
And brothas with bad lungs from smokin' mad herb
Whoever in the dark is unseen and heard
Let's submerge, I can feel something close we on the verge
Talkin' bout, to my street sweepers, hotel housekeepers
And my people spillin' this out through jail house speakers
Some people rather use than might than use heaters
Some people rather lose they life than lose freedom
For real
[Chorus]
[poem interlude]
Society's time bomb laying dormant
Our peopledisenfranchised for the free world
Oil for food but they still hungry
No democracy
They said one vote equals one voice
But he told you if he can't work to make it
He'll rob to take it
The villains
Abandoning the planet and the people
Another hot summer yo, they 'bout to flood the prisons
This ain't no do diddley, it's a do somethin'
Flash light, red light, proceed ahead right
Straight into them headlights, you get your head right
Head right get a third strike, hit the turnpike
Life quicker than spliff that wouldn't burn right
Make you wanna holla 'bout it
It ain't no doubt about it
Every now and then you gotta stand up and shout about it
And I'll be shoutin' it to, as if a shout'll count
Yo they got accountin' to do, reamount the ballot
The shit more puzzlin' than a jigsaw
Raw pitbulls hustlin' through the pitfalls
Some of y'all toys let the laughter rip roar
Heart felt truth in every lyric I spit forth
Raise up time to lift off
Written on a lega pad, poetry that sizzle the clip board
My og, my homey who taught me deal
Said in prayer that's the only time you should ever kneel
And that's real, I'm a take it there
"Baby"
[Black Thought]
Slow down when you're hitting them corners
Fuck around, spill this 'gnac on my two hundred dollar suit
(stop being a backseat driver man)
(turn him up)
Your ma don't like to jitterbug, said this unholy music
Hip hop just so ridiculous, everything sounds so confusing
Nowadays ain't nothing like it was, one thing that showed the blues
Is this system so mysterious, can't let that stop the movement
Can't get no satisfaction, they all laughing, glad it's happening
All wings hot for the main attraction
Acting a fool with a lust for action
Young girl caught in a crime of passion
Sitting there crying in designer fashion
Didn't blow, didn't have time for asking
Somebody call for the ambulance, girl
[Hook]
Baby, baby, baby
Baby let me live, please girl let me slide
Baby, baby, baby
Baby if you let me go, I swear I'll change, just change your mind
Your old man don't like to jitterbug, said this old dirty music
Hip hop just so ridiculous, them stories too confusing
Nowadays he ain't loving you like he was
And you ain't there just for using
Could have sworn that was him with another girl
And they wasn't out just for cruising
Can't get no satisfaction
He out late nights, probably smashing
Leaving a trail like Charlie tracks
Or the train on the ground, downtown Manhattan
Everybody seen him run around and you bound to catch him
The condoms, you found and asked him, was all this just for practice?
He didn't realize what he had
Now your heart got fractured girl
[Hook]
Baby, baby, baby
Baby, baby, baby
"Here I Come"
[Chorus 2X]
He said yeah
You better come out with your hands up
We got you surrounded
I'm in the back
Changin my outfit
He said blink
We gonna send the hounds in
I said wait
Cause here I come
Here I come
Here I come
You boys get ready
Cause here I come
Here I come
Here I come
[Verse]
I'm soul brother one hunted
How much charisma
Could another one stomach
If I be the prisoner then I wasn't more cunning
Or wise
If I come outside I'm not running
Stone lone wolf of the pack
The unwanted
I really got nothin to hide
I'm bout cuttin
Go out in a blaze
Wouldn't pop one button
I'm a murk half hurt leave the cop dogs huntin
The pretty black one in the group
The smooth villain under fire
Cause I'm pennin the words that move millions
Slide right in front of your eyes true brilliance
It's a new bad boy on the rise
Who feelin it
New true skill in it
Y'all the roots still in it
Ready plus willin it's all the true killer shit
You know we got them
Involved
We too diligent
They say the music is strong and too militant
[Chorus]
Yo
Black Inc raw life
In this whatumacallit
Weed smokin junkie alcoholic
One foot in the grave
One foot in the toilet
Still I'm onstage
In front of an audience
Disturbing the peace
And the local ordinance
My eta
I'll arrive by morning
Money long like the arms on Alonzo Mourning
Vampire chicks suck blood
Dusk to dawnin
Waitin to catch me sleep
But I'm not yawnin
They in the vip
At the garden
They gon jump me
When I stop performing
I got something for them
Behind the organ
I always roll deep
With my squadron
The sheriff out front
Gonna sic the dogs in
That nigger talkin bout he got warrants
[Chorus]
I'm in the darkness
Heartless
Fuck you regardless
Move with hardness
Y'all just pressin charges
It's often injury
Floss and force my entry
This peninitentiary
Knockin niggers for centuries
It's elementary
Like KRS and evidently
Incidents
They all stress
I'm lawless
That's my problem
Evolve
And never solve them
Chill in Harlem
Bang you
Bring you stardom
You full of boredom
Bastard you been aborted
Bring your neck out
Bring the tech out
Absorb it
See you check out
And then step out
The orbit
Blow your flesh out
Till I'm fressh out my torment
Street apostle
Pop shit
Preach the Gospel
Still I'm hostile
Sippin a duece When possible
Turn into a monster
Grouchy
Gimme the Oscar
Hit you like vodka
Then screech off in a Mazda
"Long Time"
[Chorus]
Oooh
It's been a long time
Since I been back around the way
It's been a long time
Let it spin let spin let it spin
Since I been back around your way
It's been a long time
Long time long time
[Verse]
[Black Thought]
Struck by the luck of the draw
Real life preservation
What I'm hustling for
My name black thought
The definition of raw
I was born in South Philly
On a cement floor
I had nothing at all
Had to knuckle and brawl
They swore I'd fall
Be another brick in the wall
Another life
Full of love
That lost
That's silly
This Philly
Y'all really ain't stoppin
The boy with the pen
Like Willie
On top of the hall
Pure soul is what the city
Most popular for
Hear the tones
That will ease you
Smooth
As Bunny Sigler's soundtrack
Keepin your head boppin and all
It's something in the water
Where I come from
They used to sing it on the corner
Where I come from
Making somethin outta nothing
Because everybody fifty cents
From a quarter
Where I come from
Yeah
The streets ain't timid
But I feel at home in it
Gotta see a couple people
I ain't got at
In a minute
Yeah
You can take a brother outta South Philly
Can't take it outta him really
I forever represent it
And it's
[Chorus]
[Peedi Peedi]
Live and dirvet
I don't need no mic check
Remember mommy told me
You ain't write that
It started in the bathroom taking a dump
Listening to Ultramagnetic
Ego tripping you won't
Pressure my word
I'm the urban vision
Of you chump
Stomped on a different ground
Sound second to none
Synthesizers tweet
To improvise your feet
I calculated every lyric to arrive on a beat
It's free
Come get high on me
Before a nine millimeter shell
Hit my pelle pelle
In the p
Yeah
It's somethin in the water
Where I come from
They used to sing it on the corner
Where I come from
Making somethin outta nothing
Because everybody
Fifty cents from a quarter
Yo
Where I come from
It's just a natural reaction
For crack to make it happen
Let the pen ink sink
Into the paper of the pad
Think back
When I was younger
Ghetto could have took me under
Young Peedi can't mess with North Philly
Never had
You don't know about me
You ain't stroll my streets
Look familiar
I feel ya
Longtime no see
[Chorus]
[Black Thought]
Uhh
Clap somethin
But whatever you clap
Clap to the record spinnin
While I'm takin you back
To the top paper era
Baby big on that
Picture the pool room
Where the money getters was at
And street people
With feather in the cap
Or their bossolino Pullin paper
As if it's a small casino
I was a young boy
Sweepin the floors
And runnin to stores
But all those old heads
Woudl talk to me About the way
To clutch the eagle
On a buck and truck
And if I'm down
How to get back up
Just survival kid
And it's a struggle worldwide
I'm positive
Shit the ghetto might as well
Be the Gaza Strip
You know where all the monsters is
Street walkers
You don't see no consciousness I'm coming back to where
The core of the problem is
We on the job again
Y'all know what time it is
"Livin' In A New World"
(feat. John-John)
[Intro / Chorus: John-John: repeat 2X]
Turn up the boombox, put on your hightops
Come on outside, today's gon' be the day we
Start livin in the new worrrld
[Black Thought]
Yo, they got high-powered lenses on the cameras outside
It ain't nowhere to run it ain't hardly nowhere to hide
They hear you when you whisperin so try to keep quiet
You don't even realize that youse a twinkle in the all, seein eye
From the time you in the bar gettin high
To havin conversations on your phone through the wire
You can drive but it's definitely footage of your ride
Livin in this day and time, it's a funny kind of vibe
From the corners of the ceiling feel its eyes in back of me
I couldn't tell you why I think they constantly after me
Maybe it's cause the news put it to me so graphically
How niggaz don't obey no laws, not even gravity boy
No benefit of doubt he had to be from
He from the corner where they known to get they casualty on
Another day another scene to perform, spotlight him on Friday
Come and lock him up Saturday morn, c'mon
"Clock With No Hands"
[Black Thought]
Yeah, sitting in the staircase, holding back tears
Looking over mad years worth of photographs
Pictures of some places I ain't never going back
Some people I used to love, why I ain't show them that?
The skies was overcast, when I was sober last
My head is spinning, couldn't tell you if it's slow or fast
It's starting to get too clear, I got to go and grass
To y'all it's a shame but life is what we know it as
Waiting, navigating the plot, without plans
In the car, it's hard to read as a clock with no hands
How your man's goin' get up and stop with no yams
All it take is one break, it could pop the program
Whether sinning or not, my back bending like I'm sentenced a lot
I feel some brothers is beginning to plot
It might have been a close friend I forgot
Who started up and ain't remember to stop
I bet these niggaz going remember the shop
[Hook]
People think that I'm crazy, just cause I wanna be alone
You can't depend on friends to help you in a squeeze
We all deal with shit on our own
And sometimes the beef can grow, get out of hand
Yeah, you know it gets full blown
I never said that you mean the world to me
Maybe it's best that you never know
Yo, I'm like Malcom out the window with the weapon out
Searching for somehow to find a minute or the second now
Precious time is money that I ain't got to mess about
Need it from the horse's mouth or from my eye with less account
Lessons with my back to the wall, scoping my session out
Stay a little edgy at times when I ain't stressing bout
Haters don't know shit about me, they the ones that talk shit
Those that love me send it out, so I ain't got to force quit
Cause I'm doing better now, don't mean I never lost shit
I was married to a state of mind and I divorced it, man
I'm from where brothers moving product from the porches
People locking their doors, clutching to their crosses
The block hot by the law, there ain't too many choices
So what I do is for y'all, there ain't too many voices left
I watch my back, and watch my step
And I might forgive, but I will not forget come on
[Hook]
Yo, living in turbulent times
The blind leading the blind
Some call it evolution, some say intelligent design
You say you want a revolution, you out of your mizind
Your sons' destitute, and their pops all in the prison
My man's back in the jam, he like the back of my hand
He just attracted to scam, he right back in the can
I never sleepwalking, you dig
You get your shuteye
I'm on the first thing in, I'm leaving on the red-eye
My brother back in rehab, just had another relapse
But fin himself, it's been like he's been fighting an energy
Half telling me nobody true when they pretend to be that
So closer than friends, that's where I keep my enemy at
To many parties concerned, it's time to live it and learn
Until we're able to grow, forever bridges we burn
My thoughts free as a bird, that's just about to emerge
And every action is heard, it speaks louder than words, yo
"Atonement"
(feat. Jack Davey)
[Intro / Chorus: Jack Davey - singing]
As I wait for atonement
Trapped in the heat of the moment
Feelin like I can't control it
As I wait for atonement
Trapped in the heat of the moment
[Black Thought]
Uh-huh, feelin the steam from the cauldron
With tension runnin deep as the ocean
Many are called, but so few are chosen
As I go through the motions, of medication uppin my dosage
Bangin Earth, Wind & Fire "Devotion" as I admire the focus
Takin the city with a grain of salt
Where they tastin foul, chase it down, with the latest malt - liquor
Roll and hit it, knife did it, hope you got some smarts wit'chu
Hope you got some heart it ain't no stoppin when it start - nigga
Feel somethin bigger got a hold on me
And I ain't trippin not a Bobby Brown, lippin with my nose runnin
Basically I had two, options I just chose one
And then got ghost, like my picture was on a most wanted
Coast to coast, from L.A. to Chicago
Now I'm faced, with the weight of survival, plus the taste
From the way I been lied to while the preacherman spittin his gospel
I can win if I try to
2012-09-08T13:22:19+09:00
1347078139
-
keats bloom
https://w.atwiki.jp/dooronron/pages/15.html
One of the central themes in W. J. Bate’s definitive John Keats is the “large,
often paralyzing embarrassment ... that the rich accumulation of past poetry,
as the eighteenth century had seen so realistically, can curse as well as bless.”
As Mr. Bate remarks, this embarrassment haunted Romantic and haunts
post-Romantic poetry, and was felt by Keats with a particular intensity.
Somewhere in the heart of each new poet there is hidden the dark wish that
the libraries be burned in some new Alexandrian conflagration, that the
imagination might be liberated from the greatness and oppressive power of
its own dead champions.
Something of this must be involved in the Romantics’ loving struggle
with their ghostly father, Milton. The role of wrestling Jacob is taken on by
Blake in his “brief epic” Milton, by Wordsworth in The Recluse fragment, and
in more concealed form by Shelley in Prometheus Unbound and Keats in the
first Hyperion. The strength of poetical life in Milton seems always to have
appalled as much as it delighted; in the fearful vigor of his unmatched
exuberance the English master of the sublime has threatened not only poets,
but the values once held to transcend poetry:
... the Argument
Held me a while misdoubting his Intent,
HAROLD BLOOM
Introduction
2 Harold Bloom
That he would ruin (for I saw him strong)
The sacred Truths to Fable and old Song
(So Sampson grop’d the Temple’s Posts in spite)
The World O’erwhelming to revenge his sight.
The older Romantics at least thought that the struggle with Milton had
bestowed a blessing without a crippling; to the younger ones a consciousness
of gain and loss came together. Blake’s audacity gave him a Milton altogether
fitted to his great need, a visionary prototype who could be dramatized as
rising up, “unhappy tho’ in heav’n,” taking off the robe of the promise, and
ungirding himself from the oath of God, and then descending into Blake’s
world to save the later poet and every man “from his Chain of Jealousy.”
Wordsworth’s equal audacity allowed him, after praising Milton’s invocatory
power, to call on a greater Muse than Urania, to assist him in exploring
regions more awful than Milton ever visited. The prophetic Spirit called
down in The Recluse is itself a child of Milton’s Spirit that preferred, before
all temples, the upright and pure heart of the Protestant poet. But the child
is greater than the father, and inspires, in a fine Shakespearean reminiscence:
The human Soul of universal earth,
Dreaming on things to come.
Out of that capable dreaming came the poetic aspirations of Shelley
and of Keats, who inherited the embarrassment of Wordsworth’s greatness to
add to the burden of Milton’s. Yielding to few in my admiration for Shelley’s
blank verse in Prometheus, I am still made uneasy by Milton’s ghost hovering
in it. At times Shelley’s power of irony rescues him from Milton’s presence
by the argument’s dissonance with the steady Miltonic music of the lyrical
drama, but the ironies pass and the Miltonic sublime remains, testifying to
the unyielding strength of an order Shelley hoped to overturn. In the lyrics
of Prometheus Shelley is free, and they rather than the speeches foretold his
own poetic future, the sequence of The Witch of Atlas, Epipsychidion and
Adonais. Perhaps the turn to Dante, hinted in Epipsychidion and emergent in
The Triumph of Life, was in part caused by the necessity of finding a sublime
antithesis to Milton.
With Keats, we need not surmise. The poet himself claimed to have
abandoned the first Hyperion because it was too Miltonic, and his critics have
agreed in not wanting him to have made a poem “that might have been
written by John Milton, but one that was unmistakably by no other than John
Keats.” In the Great Odes and The Fall of Hyperion Keats was to write poems
unmistakably his own, as Endymion in another way had been his own.
Introduction 3
Individuality of style, and still more of conception, no critic would now deny
to the odes, Keats’s supreme poems, or to The Fall of Hyperion, which was his
testament, and is the work future poets may use as Tennyson, Arnold and
Yeats used the odes in the past.
That Keats, in his handful of great poems, surpassed the Miltonhaunted
poets of the second half of the eighteenth century is obvious to a
critical age like our own, which tends to prefer Keats, in those poems, to even
the best work of Blake, Wordsworth and Shelley, and indeed to most if not
all poetry in the language since the mid-seventeenth century. Perhaps the
basis for that preference can be explored afresh through a consideration of
precisely how Keats’s freedom of the negative weight of poetic tradition is
manifested in some of his central poems. Keats lost and gained, as each of the
major Romantics did, in the struggle with the greatness of Milton. Keats was
perhaps too generous and perceptive a critic, too wonderfully balanced a
humanist, not to have lost some values of a cultural legacy that both
stimulated and inhibited the nurture of fresh values.
Mr. Bate finely says, commenting on Keats’s dedication sonnet to
Leigh Hunt, that “when the imagination looks to any past, of course,
including one’s own individual past, it blends memories and images into a
denser, more massive unit than ever existed in actuality.” Keats’s
confrontation with this idealized past is most direct from the Ode to Psyche on,
as Mr. Bate emphasizes. Without repeating him on that ode, or what I myself
have written elsewhere, I want to examine it again in the specific context of
Keats’s fight against the too-satisfying enrichments with which tradition
threatens the poet who seeks his own self-recognition and expressive
fulfillment.
Most readers recalling the Ode to Psyche think of the last stanza, which
is the poem’s glory, and indeed its sole but sufficient claim to stand near the
poet’s four principal odes. The stanza expresses a wary confidence that the
true poet’s imagination cannot be impoverished. More wonderfully, the poet
ends the stanza by opening the hard-won consciousness of his own creative
powers to a visitation of love. The paradise within is barely formed, but the
poet does not hesitate to make it vulnerable, though he may be condemned
in consequence to the fate of the famished knight of his own faery ballad.
There is triumph in the closing tone of To Psyche, but a consciousness also I
think of the danger that is being courted. The poet has given Psyche the
enclosed bower nature no longer affords her, but he does not pause to be
content in that poet’s paradise. It is not Byzantium which Keats has built in
the heretofore untrodden regions of his mind but rather a realm that is
precisely not far above all breathing human passion. He has not assumed the
responsibility of an expanded consciousness for the rewards of self4
Harold Bloom
communing and solitary musing, in the manner of the poet-hero of Alastor,
and of Prince Athanase in his lonely tower. He seeks “love” rather than
“wisdom,” distrusting a reality that must be approached apart from men. And
he has written his poem, in however light a spirit, as an act of self-dedication
and of freedom from the wealth of the past. He will be Psyche’s priest and
rhapsode in the proud conviction that she has had no others before him, or
none at least so naked of external pieties.
The wealth of tradition is great not only in its fused massiveness, but
in its own subtleties of internalization. One does poor service by sandbagging
this profoundly moving poem, yet even the heroic innovators but tread the
shadowy ground their ancestors found before them. Wordsworth had stood
on that ground, as Keats well knew, and perhaps had chosen a different
opening from it, neither toward love nor toward wisdom, but toward a plain
recognition of natural reality and a more sublime recognition-by-starts of a
final reality that seemed to contain nature. Wordsworth never quite named
that finality as imagination, though Blake had done so and the young
Coleridge felt (and resisted) the demonic temptation to do so. Behind all
these were the fine collapses of the Age of Sensibility, the raptures of Jubilate
Agno and the Ode on the Poetical Character, and the more forced but highly
impressive tumults of The Bard and The Progress of Poesy. Farther back was the
ancestor of all such moments of poetic incarnation, the Milton of the great
invocations, whose spirit I think haunts the Ode to Psyche and the Ode to a
Nightingale, and does not vanish until The Fall of Hyperion and To Autumn.
Hazlitt, with his usual penetration, praises Milton for his power to
absorb vast poetic traditions with no embarrassment whatsoever: “In reading
his works, we feel ourselves under the influence of a mighty intellect, that the
nearer it approaches to others, becomes more distinct from them.” This
observation, which comes in a lecture Keats heard, is soon joined by the
excellent remark that “Milton’s learning has the effect of intuition.” The
same lecture, in its treatment of Shakespeare, influenced Keats’s conception
of the Poetical Character, as Mr. Bate notes. Whether Keats speculated sadly
on the inimitable power of Milton’s positive capability for converting the
splendor of the past into a private expressiveness we do not know. But the
literary archetype of Psyche’s rosy sanctuary is the poet’s paradise, strikingly
developed by Spenser and Drayton, and brought to a perfection by Milton.
I am not suggesting Milton as a “source” for Keats’s Ode to Psyche. Poets
influence poets in ways more profound than verbal echoings. The paradise of
poets is a recurrent element in English mythopoeic poetry, and it is perhaps
part of the critic’s burden never to allow himself to yield to embarrassment
when the riches of poetic tradition come crowding in upon him. Poets need
to be selective; critics need the humility of a bad conscience when they
Introduction 5
exclude any part of the poetic past from “tradition,” though humility is never
much in critical fashion. Rimbaud put these matters right in one outburst:
“On n’a jamais bien jugé le romantisme. Qui l’aurait jugé? Les Critiques!!”
Milton, “escap’t the Stygian pool,” hails the light he cannot see, and
reaffirms his ceaseless wanderings “where the Muses haunt / clear Spring, or
shady Grove,” and his nightly visits to “Sion and the flow’ry Brooks beneath.”
Like Keats’s nightingale, he “sings darkling,” but invokes a light that can
“shine inward, and the mind through all her powers / Irradiate.” The light
shone inward, the mind’s powers were triumphant, and all the sanctities of
heaven yielded to Milton’s vision. For the sanctuary of Milton’s psyche is his
vast heterocosm, the worlds he makes and ruins. His shrine is built, not to
the human soul in love, but to the human soul glorious in its solitude,
sufficient, with God’s aid, to seek and find its own salvation. If Keats had
closed the casement, and turned inward, seeking the principle that could
sustain his own soul in the darkness, perhaps he could have gone on with the
first Hyperion, and become a very different kind of poet. He would then have
courted the fate of Collins, and pursued the guiding steps of Milton only to
discover the quest was:
In vain—such bliss to one alone
Of all the sons of soul was known,
And Heav’n and Fancy, kindred pow’rs,
Have now o’erturned th’inspiring bow’rs,
Or curtain’d close such scene from ev’ry future view.
Yeats, in the eloquent simplicities of Per Amica Silentia Lunae, saw
Keats as having “been born with that thirst for luxury common to many at
the outsetting of the Romantic Movement,” and thought therefore that the
poet of To Autumn “but gave us his dream of luxury.” Yeats’s poets were Blake
and Shelley; Keats and Wordsworth he refused to understand, for their way
was not his own. His art, from The Wanderings of Oisin through the Last Poems
and Plays, is founded on a rage against growing old, and a rejection of nature.
The poet, he thought, could find his art only by giving way to an anti-self,
which “comes but to those who are no longer deceived, whose passion is
reality.” Yeats was repelled by Milton, and found no place for him in A Vision,
and certainly no poet cared so little as Milton to express himself through an
anti-self. In Blake’s strife of spectre and emanation, in Shelley’s sense of being
shadowed by the alastor while seeking the epipsyche, Yeats found precedent
for his own quest towards Unity of Being, the poet as daimonic man taking
his mask from. a phase opposite to that of his own will. Like Blake and
Shelley, Yeats sought certainty, but being of Shelley’s phase rather than
6 Harold Bloom
Blake’s, he did not find it. The way of Negative Capability, as an answer to
Milton, Yeats did not take into account; he did not conceive of a poet “certain
of nothing but of the holiness of the Heart’s affections and the truth of
Imagination.” (There is, of course, no irritable reaching after mere fact and
reason in Yeats: he reached instead for everything the occult sub-imagination
had knocked together in place of fact and reason. But his motive was his
incapability “of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts,” and the results are
more mixed than most recent criticism will admit.)
Keats followed Wordsworth by internalizing the quest toward finding
a world that answered the poet’s desires, and he hoped to follow Shakespeare
by making that world more than a sublime projection of his own ego.
Shakespeare’s greatness was not an embarrassment to Keats, but the hard
victories of poetry had to be won against the more menacing values of poetic
tradition. The advance beyond the Ode to Psyche was taken in the Ode to a
Nightingale, where the high world within the bird’s song is an expansion of
the rosy sanctuary of Psyche. In this world our sense of actuality is
heightened simultaneously with the widening of what Mr. Bate terms “the
realm of possibility.” The fear of losing actuality does not encourage the dull
soil of mundane experience to quarrel with the proud forests it has fed, the
nightingale’s high requiem. But to be the breathing garden in which Fancy
breeds his flowers is a delightful fate; to become a sod is to suffer what Belial
dreaded in that moving speech Milton himself and the late C. S. Lewis have
taught too many to despise.
Milton, invoking the light, made himself at one with the nightingale;
Keats is deliberate in knowing constantly his own separation from the bird.
What is fresh in this ode is not I think a sense of the poet’s dialogue with
himself; it is surprising how often the English lyric has provided such an
undersong, from Spenser’s Prothalamion to Wordsworth’s Resolution and
Independence. Keats wins freedom from tradition here by claiming so very
little for the imagination in its intoxicating but harsh encounter with the
reality of natural song. The poet does not accept what is as good, and he does
not exile desire for what is not. Yet, for him, what is possible replaces what is
not. There is no earthly paradise for poets, but there is a time of all-but-final
satisfaction, the fullness of lines 35 to 58 of this ode.
I do not think that there is, before Keats, so individual a setting-forth
of such a time, anywhere in poetic tradition since the Bible. The elevation of
Wordsworth in Tintern Abbey still trembles at the border of a theophany, and
so derives from a universe centered upon religious experience. The vatic gift
of Shelley’s self to the elements, from Alastor on, has its remote but genuine
ancestors in the sibylline frenzies of traditions as ancient as Orphism. Blake’s
moments of delight come as hard-won intervals of rest from an intellectual
Introduction 7
warfare that differs little if at all from the struggles towards a revelatory
awareness in Ezekiel or Isaiah, and there is no contentment in them. What
Keats so greatly gives to the Romantic tradition in the Nightingale ode is
what no poet before him had the capability of giving—the sense of the
human making choice of a human self, aware of its deathly nature, and yet
having the will to celebrate the imaginative richness of mortality. The Ode to
a Nightingale is the first poem to know and declare, wholeheartedly, that
death is the mother of beauty. The Ode to Psyche still glanced, with high good
humor, at the haunted rituals of the already-written poems of heaven; the
Ode to a Nightingale turns, almost casually, to the unwritten great poem of
earth. There is nothing casual about the poem’s tone, but there is a
wonderful lack of self-consciousness at the poem’s freedom from the past, in
the poem’s knowing that death, our death, is absolute and without memorial.
The same freedom from the massive beliefs and poetic stances of the
past is manifested in the Ode on a Grecian Urn, where the consolations of the
spirit are afforded merely by an artifice of eternity, and not by evidences of
an order of reality wholly other than our own. Part of this poem’s strength is
in the deliberate vulnerability of its speaker, who contemplates a world of
values he cannot appropriate for his own, although nothing in that world is
antithetical to his own nature as an aspiring poet. Mr. Bate states the poem’s
awareness of this vulnerability: “In attempting to approach the urn in its own
terms, the imagination has been led at the same time to separate itself—or
the situation of man generally—still further from the urn.” One is not certain
that the imagination is not also separating itself from the essential poverty of
man’s situation in the poem’s closing lines. Mr. Bate thinks we underestimate
Keats’s humor in the Great Odes, and he is probably right, but the humor
that apparently ends the Grecian Urn is a grim one. The truth of art may be
all of the truth our condition can apprehend, but it is not a saving truth. If
this is all we need to know, it may be that no knowledge can help us. Shelley
was very much a child of Miltonic tradition in affirming the moral
instrumentality of the imagination; Keats is grimly free of tradition in his
subtle implication of a truth that most of us learn. Poetry is not a means of
good; it is, as Wallace Stevens implied, like the honey of earth that comes and
goes at once, while we wait vainly for the honey of heaven.
Blake, Wordsworth, and Shelley knew in their different ways that
human splendors had no sources but in the human imagination, but each of
these great innovators had a religious temperament, however heterodox, and
Keats had not. Keats had a clarity in his knowledge of the uniqueness and
finality of human life and death that caused him a particular anguish on his
own death-bed, but gave him, before that, the imagination’s gift of an
absolute originality. The power of Keats’s imagination could never be
8 Harold Bloom
identified by him with an apocalyptic energy that might hope to transform
nature. It is not that he lacked the confidence of Blake and of Shelley, or of
the momentary Wordsworth of The Recluse. He felt the imagination’s desire
for a revelation that would redeem the inadequacies of our condition, but he
felt also a humorous skepticism toward such desire. He would have read the
prose testament of Wallace Stevens, Two Or Three Ideas, with the wry
approval so splendid a lecture deserves. The gods are dispelled in mid-air,
and leave “no texts either of the soil or of the soul.” The poet does not cry
out for their return, since it remains his work to resolve life in his own terms,
for in the poet is “the increasingly human self.”
Part of Keats’s achievement is due then to his being perhaps the only
genuine forerunner of the representative post-Romantic sensibility. Another
part is centered in the Ode on Melancholy and The Fall of Hyperion, for in these
poems consciousness becomes its own purgatory, and the poet learns the cost
of living in an excitement of which he affirms “that it is the only state for the
best sort of Poetry—that is all I care for, all I live for.” From this declaration
it is a direct way to the generally misunderstood rigor of Pater, when he
insists that “a counted number of pulses only is given to us of a variegated,
dramatic life,” and asks: “How may we see in them all that is to be seen in
them by the finest senses?” Moneta, Keats’s veiled Melancholy, counted
those pulses, while the poet waited, rapt in an apprehension attainable only
by the finest senses, nearly betrayed by those senses to an even more
premature doom than his destined one. What links together The Fall of
Hyperion and its modern descendants like Stevens’s Notes toward a Supreme
Fiction is the movement of impressions set forth by Pater, when analysis of
the self yields to the poet’s recognition of how dangerously fine the sells
existence has become. “It is with this movement, with the passage and
dissolution of impressions, images, sensations, that analysis leaves off—that
continual vanishing away, that strange, perpetual weaving and unweaving of
ourselves.”
Though there is a proud laughter implicit in the Ode on Melancholy, the
poem courts tragedy, and again makes death the mother of beauty. Modern
criticism has confounded Pater with his weaker disciples, and has failed to
realize how truly Yeats and Stevens are in his tradition. The Ode on
Melancholy is ancestor to what is strongest in Pater, and to what came after in
his tradition of aesthetic humanism. Pater’s “Conclusion” to The Renaissance
lives in the world of the Ode on Melancholy:
Great passions may give us this quickened sense of life, ecstasy
and sorrow of love, the various forms of enthusiastic activity,
disinterested or otherwise, which come naturally to many of us.
Introduction 9
Only be sure it is passion—that it does yield you this fruit of a
quickened, multiplied consciousness.
The wakeful anguish of the soul comes to the courter of grief in the
very shrine of pleasure, and the renovating powers of art yield the tragedy of
their might only to a strenuous and joyful seeker. Keats’s problem in The Fall
of Hyperion was to find again the confidence of Milton as to the oneness of
his self and them, but with nothing of the Miltonic conviction that God had
worked to fit that self and theme together. The shrines of pleasure and of
melancholy become one shrine in the second Hyperion, and in that ruin the
poet must meet the imaginative values of tradition without their attendant
credences, for Moneta guards the temple of all the dead faiths.
Moneta humanizes her sayings to our ears, but not until a poet’s
courteous dialectic has driven her to question her own categories for
mankind. When she softens, and parts the veils for Keats, she reveals his
freedom from the greatness of poetic tradition, for the vision granted has the
quality of a new universe, and a tragedy different in kind from the tragedy of
the past:
Then saw I a wan face,
Not pined by human sorrows, but bright-blanch’d
By an immortal sickness which kills not;
It works a constant change, which happy death
Can put no end to; deathwards progressing
To no death was that visage; it had pass’d
The lily and the snow; and beyond these
I must not think now, though I saw that face.
But for her eyes I should have fled away.
They held me back with a benignant light,
Soft mitigated by divinest lids
Half closed, and visionless entire they seem’d
Of all external things—
Frank Kermode finds this passage a prime instance of his “Romantic
Image,” and believes Moneta’s face to be “alive only in a chill and inhuman
way,” yet Keats is held back from such a judgment by the eyes of his Titaness,
for they give forth “a benignant light,” as close to the saving light Milton
invokes as Keats can ever get. Moneta has little to do with the Yeatsian
concept of the poetic vision, for she does not address herself to the alienation
of the poet. M. H. Abrams, criticizing Mr. Kermode, points to her emphasis
on the poet as humanist, made restless by the miseries of mankind. Shelley’s
10 Harold Bloom
Witch of Atlas, for all her playfulness, has more to do with Yeats’s
formulation of the coldness of the Muse.
Moneta is the Muse of mythopoeia, like Shelley’s Witch, but she
contains the poetic and religious past, as Shelley’s capricious Witch does not.
Taking her in a limited sense (since she incarnates so much more than this),
Moneta does represent the embarrassments of poetic tradition, a greatness it
is death to approach. Moneta’s perspective is close to that of the Rilkean
Angel, and for Keats to share that perspective he would have to cease to
depend on the visible. Moneta’s is a perfect consciousness; Keats is
committed still to the oxymoronic intensities of experience, and cannot
unperplex joy from pain. Moneta’s is a world beyond tragedy; Keats needs to
be a tragic poet. Rilke dedicated himself to the task of describing a world
regarded no longer from a human point of view, but as it is within the angel.
Moneta, like this angel, does not regard external things, and again like Rilke’s
angel she both comforts and terrifies. Keats, like Stevens, fears the angelic
imposition of any order upon reality, and hopes to discover a possible order
in the human and the natural, even if that order be only the cyclic rhythm of
tragedy. Stevens’s definitive discovery is in the final sections of Notes toward a
Supreme Fiction; Keats’s similar fulfillment is in his perfect poem, To Autumn.
The achievement of definitive vision in To Autumn is more remarkable
for the faint presence of the shadows of the poet’s hell that the poem tries to
exclude. Mr. Bate calls the Lines to Fanny (written, like To Autumn, in October
1819) “somewhat jumbled as well as tired and flat,” but its nightmare
projection of the imagination’s inferno has a singular intensity, and I think
considerable importance:
Where shall I learn to get my peace again?
To banish thoughts of that most hateful land,
Dungeoner of my friends, that wicked strand
Where they were wrecked and live a wrecked life;
That monstrous region, whose dull rivers pour,
Ever from their sordid urns unto the shore,
Unown’d of any weedy-haired gods;
Whose winds, all zephyrless, hold scourging rods,
Iced in the great lakes, to afflict mankind;
Whose rank-grown forests, frosted, black, and blind,
Would fright a Dryad; whose harsh herbag’d meads
Make lean and lank the starv’d ox while he feeds;
There flowers have no scent, birds no sweet song,
And great unerring Nature once seems wrong.
Introduction 11
This may have begun as a fanciful depiction of an unknown America,
where Keats’s brother and sister-in-law were suffering, yet it develops into a
vision akin to Blake’s of the world of experience, with its lakes of menace and
its forests of error. The moss-lain Dryads lulled to sleep in the forests of the
poet’s mind in his Ode to Psyche, can find no home in this natural world. This
is Keats’s version of the winter vision, the more powerful for being so
unexpected, and clearly a torment to its seer, who imputes error to Nature
even as he pays it his sincere and accustomed homage.
It is this waste land that the auroras of Keats’s To Autumn transform
into a landscape of perfection process. Does another lyric in the language
meditate more humanly “the full of fortune and the full of fate”? The
question is the attentive reader’s necessary and generous tribute; the critical
answer may be allowed to rest with Mr. Bate, who is moved to make the
finest of claims for the poem: “Here at last is something of a genuine
paradise.” The paradise of poets bequeathed to Keats by tradition is gone; a
tragic paradise of naturalistic completion and mortal acceptance has taken its
place.
There are other Romantic freedoms won from the embarrassments of
poetic tradition, usually through the creation of new myth, as in Blake and
Shelley, or in the thematic struggle not to create a myth, as in the earlier
work of Wordsworth and Coleridge. Keats found his dangerous freedom by
pursuing the naturalistic implications of the poet’s relation to his own poem,
and nothing is more refreshing in an art so haunted by aspirations to surpass
or negate nature. Shelley, still joined to Keats in the popular though not the
critical consciousness, remains the best poet to read in counterpoint to the
Great Odes and The Fall of Hyperion. There is no acceptance in Shelley, no
tolerance for the limits of reality, but only the outrageous desire never to
cease desiring, the unflagging intensity that goes on until it is stopped, and
never is stopped. Keats did what Milton might have done but was not
concerned to do; he perfected an image in which stasis and process are
reconciled, and made of autumn the most human of seasons in consequence.
Shelley’s ode to autumn is his paean to the West Wind, where a selfdestroying
swiftness is invoked for the sake of dissolving all stasis
permanently, and for hastening process past merely natural fulfillment into
apocalyptic renewal. Whether the great winter of the world can be relieved
by any ode Keats tended to doubt, and we are right to doubt with him, but
there is a hope wholly natural in us that no doubt dispels, and it is of this
hope that Shelley is the unique and indispensable poet.
13
The total shape of the Ode on Indolence is, as I have said, a dialectical one
of advance and refusal, advance and refusal, advance and refusal—the shape
of a stalemate. At the moment represented by the ode, both the reverie of
gestating vision and the regressive choice of preconscious insensibility are
being jealously protected from the claims of the heart, of fame, and even of
art itself. To think of constructing anything at all—a love affair, a place in the
world of ambition, a poem—threatens the slumbering embryonic self. Keats
finally remains obdurate, the dreamer of the dim dream, the viewer of the
faint vision. But the strain evident in the disparate and parallel languages of
Indolence, as well as in the inherent instability of the condition of spiritual
stalemate, predicts a tipping of the balance: as we know, it tips away from
immobility toward love and art.1
The odes that follow Indolence investigate creativity by taking up
various attitudes toward the senses, almost as though the odes were invented
as a series of controlled experiments in the suppression or permission of
sense-experience. Keats’s deliberate interest in sense-response has usually
been cited as proof of his love of luxury or his minute apprehension of
sensual fluctuation. It has not been generally realized that Keats’s search for
“intensity” led him as much to a deliberate limiting of sense-variety as to a
broadening of sensation, and led him as well to a search for an “intensity” of
HELEN VENDLER
Tuneless Numbers:
The Ode to Psyche
From The Odes of John Keats. © 1983 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College.
14 Helen Vendler
intellect that would rival the intensity of sense. In fact, the intensity to be
found in the mind attracted Keats at least as much as, if not more than, the
apparently easier intensity of sense; and the lapse of intensity following
sexual climax seems to have been only an instance, for Keats, of a curious
failure intrinsic to physical sensation itself. He described this eventual ennui
of the senses at length in Fancy, contrasting it there with the associative
powers of mental Fancy, which is able to assemble hybrid seasons and hybrid
mistresses that combine all beauties and can never fade. Imaginative
intellectual ecstasy seemed to Keats, at this point (Fancy was composed a few
months before the odes), a more promising source of sustained intensity than
physical sensation, and the second of the odes, the Ode to Psyche, is in this
respect the most “puritanical” of the group in its intent (if not in its effect).
It aims, whatever its sensual metaphors (and these will demand their own
recognition later), at a complete, exclusive, and lasting annihilation of the
senses in favor of the brain. The locus of reality in the ode passes from the
world of myth to the world of mind, and the firm four-part structure
emphasizes the wish to reproduce earlier sensual and cultic reality in a later
interiorized form. The implicit boast of Psyche is that the “working brain”
can produce a flawless virtual object, indistinguishable from the “real” object
in the mythological or historical world. “O for a life of Thoughts,” says this
ode, “instead of Sensations!”
In Psyche Keats emerges from the chrysalis of indolence, permits his
soul to become a winged spirit, and takes the smallest possible step toward
the construction of a work of art. He concedes that he will shape his reverie
toward some end (that reverie which had remained floating and inchoate in
Indolence), but decides that it will prescind from the bodily senses, and will
remain an internal making, as in Fancy, contained entirely within his own
mind. The shape of the Ode to Psyche is, in its essence, the shape of that initial
constructive act, and so is a very simple one. It is a reduplication-shape; we
might compare it to the shape made by a Rorschach blot. Everything that
appears on the left must reappear, in mirror image, on the right; or, in terms
of the aesthetic of the ode, whatever has existed in “life” must be, and can be,
restored in art.
The notion of art which underlies Keats’s continual use of the trope of
reduplication in the ode is a strictly mimetic one. The internal world of the
artist’s brain can attain by the agency of Fancy—so the trope implies—a
point-for-point correspondence with the external worlds of history,
mythology, and the senses. The task of the poet is defined in excessively
simple terms: he is, in this instance, first to sketch the full presence of Psyche
and her cult as they existed in the pagan past—that is, to show the locus of
loss—and then to create by his art a new ritual and a new environment for
Tuneless Numbers: The Ode to Pysche 15
the restored divinity.2 Of course Psyche is incomplete without her other half,
the god Cupid. Dissatisfied with the thinness of his allegorical and
emblematic urn-figures in Indolence, and economically reducing his figures
from three to two, Keats writes a hymn to the goddess traditionally
representing the soul, but the soul under one aspect—the soul in love.3 Each
of the subsequent odes worships a single divinity; each, like Psyche, is female;
after Psyche, all are unpartnered.
In the view of the Ode to Psyche, a pursuit of the most minute
verisimilitude becomes the task of art, since divinity will not grace art with
her presence if she lacks an exact interior re-creation of her former sensual
and cultic world. In the fiction of this ode, art does not objectify the natural
world in an external medium such as music or sculpture or even language. In
the ode, Keats’s art is the insubstantial one of Fancy, the inner activity of the
working brain, not even, as yet, the art of poetry embodied in words. The art
in Psyche is the pre-art of purposeful, constructive, and scenic or architectural
imaginings, not the art of writing; and the entire locus of this art is a mental
domain, within the artist’s brain, where Fancy, engaging in a perpetual rivalry
with nature, remains forever in a competitive (but apparently victorious)
relation to an external world.
In brief, in the Ode to Psyche Keats defines art as the purposeful
imaginative and conceptualizing activity of the artist—entirely internal,
fertile, competitive with nature, and successful insofar as it mimics nature,
myth, and history with a painstaking spiritual verisimilitude. It is art without
artifact. The artist is both worshiper of a divinity and its possessor: the
possession is envisaged here in mental, if erotic, terms, terms of invitation
and entreaty rather than of domination or mastery.
The shape of the poem pairs the opening tableau of the mythological
Cupid and Psyche embowered in the forest with the closing envisaged
tableau of the unpartnered Psyche awaiting Cupid in the bower of the artist’s
brain; and, in the center, it juxtaposes the absent historical cult of Psyche
with her imagined mental cult. I believe that the later odes demonstrate how
unsatisfactory, on further reflection, Keats found this reduplicative mirrorimage
conception of art—art as a wholly internalized, mimetic, imaginative
activity.
The ode declares, by its words and by its shape, that the creation of art
requires the complete replacement of all memory and sense-experience by an
entire duplication of the external world within the artist’s brain (a process we
have seen, in its undirected and simply pastoral sense, in Indolence, where the
soul, had itself become a lawn of flowers, complete with weather, light, and
shade). Psyche asserts that by the constructive activity of the mind we can
assert a victory, complete and permanent, over loss:4
16 Helen Vendler
And there shall be for thee all soft delight
That shadowy thought can win,
A bright torch, and a casement ope at night,
To let the warm Love in!
The reparatory plot of the poem—the restoration of the proper cult and
bower of Psyche—necessitates its mirror-shape, in which the second
imaginative half of the poem reduplicates the first nostalgic portion, the
replication in diction being most exact at the center of the poem. Psyche,
because a late-born goddess, has, says Keats, no
virgin choir to make delicious moan
Upon the midnight hours;
No voice, no lute, no pipe, no incense sweet
From chain-swung censer teeming;
No shrine, no grove, no oracle, no heat
Of pale-mouth’d prophet dreaming.
Keats will heal, one by one, with exact restitution, each of these lacks:
So let me be thy choir, and make a moan
Upon the midnight hours;
Thy voice, thy lute, thy pipe, thy incense sweet
From swinged censer teeming;
Thy shrine, thy grove, thy oracle, thy heat
Of pale-mouth’d prophet dreaming.
Yes, I will be thy priest.
This nearly exact repetition (within a relatively short poem) of identical
words, the earlier ones describing precise lacks, the later precise reparations,
is adapted from Wordsworth’s reparatory technique of repetition in his Ode:
Intimations of Immortality.5 This strategy, unobtrusive in Wordsworth, is here
verbally insisted on by Keats, so that the curative and restorative intent of
this structure cannot be overlooked. At “So let me be thy choir,” the Ode to
Psyche folds over upon itself and by repetition of diction intends to heal its
wounds of loss.
What is the wound that is being healed? It is, in Keats’s view, a wound
to poetry itself, inflicted by Christianity. Because Christianity banished the
pagan divinities, good and bad alike, the body of poetry inherited from the
ancient world was, by Christian poets, mutilated. It was in Milton’s Nativity
Tuneless Numbers: The Ode to Pysche 17
Ode that Keats found the amplest description of the banishing of the pagan
gods, and he borrows his vocabulary for Psyche from Milton’s equivocal and
beautiful account of the effect of the nativity of Jesus on pagan religions. I
quote Milton’s ode, italicizing Keats’s borrowings for Psyche:
The oracles are dumb,
No voice or hideous hum
Runs thro’ the arched roof in words deceiving.
Apollo from his shrine
Can no more divine,
With hollow shriek the steep of Delphos leaving.
No nightly trance, or breathed spell
Inspires the pale-eyed priest from the prophetic cell.
The lonely mountains o’er
And the resounding shore;
A voice of weeping heard and loud lament;
From haunted spring, and dale
Edg’d with poplar pale,
The parting genius is with sighing sent;
With flow’r-inwoven tresses torn
The Nymphs in twilight shade of tangled thickets mourn.
In consecrated earth,
And on the holy hearth,
The Lars, and lemures moan with midnight plaint;
In urns, and altars round,
A drear and dying sound
Affrights the Flamens at their service quaint ...
Peor and Baälim
Forsake their temples dim; ...
And mooned Ashtaroth,
Heav’n’s queen and mother both,
Now sits not girt with tapers’ holy shine.
All of Keats’s Miltonic words in Psyche are drawn from Milton’s banishing of
the gentler and more civilized pagan divinities; none is drawn from Milton’s
subsequent stanzas on the defeat of the more “brutish” gods.6 It is not to
Keats’s purpose here to suggest the darker side of the pagan pantheon. For
18 Helen Vendler
him, the classical world (even in its latest manifestation, Psyche) represented
a repository of truth-giving mythology, and not, as it did for Milton, “error”
or “fable.” Therefore Keats’s description of Psyche echoes the superlatives of
Spenser’s Hymn to Heavenly Beauty:
These thus in faire each other farre excelling,
As to the Highest they approach more near,
Yet is that Highest farre beyond all telling,
Fairer than all the rest which there appear.
Psyche, says Keats (recalling as well Shakespeare’s glow-worm), is the
latest born and loveliest vision far
Of all Olympus’ faded hierarchy!
Fairer than Phoebe’s sapphire-region’d star,
Or Vesper, amorous glow-worm of the sky;
Fairer than these.
Keats’s ode, then, is a hymn to pagan heavenly beauty which, in despite of
Milton’s ritual banishing, he will restore to sovereignty and will duly
worship, thereby replenishing an impoverished poetic world where,
imagination lacks proper deities to worship.7 The goddess who has captured
his veneration is Psyche, the soul in love, and the problem the poet sets
himself is to find a spell powerful enough to conjure Psyche back into
existence.
In one sense, of course, Psyche exists eternally, forever entwined with
Cupid, in the realm of mythic forms.8 Keats must find a liturgical language
suitable for her eternal mythical being, and then a language seductive enough
to woo her into an allegorical being, within his mind. Everyone has noticed
the revelatory change in language which takes place in the poem: the first
two stanzas are written, as one critic put it, in “early Keats,” while the last
stanza exhibits in part the language of “late Keats.”9 In this ode, the early
language of erotic experience disputes the later language of aesthetic
experience, as Psyche is embowered first with her lover Cupid in the forest
of myth, but lastly with her poet-priest in his internalized shrine. Cupid and
Psyche, though drawn, as Keats said in his letter sending the poem to his
brother, from Apuleius, are described in terms Keats had gleaned from
Lemprière. Keats’s decision to take up this material at this time, material
which he had long known, is explained in part by his evolving notion of the
world as a vale of soul-making, unfolded in the same letter as the poem. But
Cupid and Psyche remind us too of Love and Poesy in the Ode on Indolence,
Tuneless Numbers: The Ode to Pysche 19
though they have exchanged sexes, with Love now a masculine Cupid, Poesy
a Muse called Psyche. Ambition (which vanishes entirely from the later odes)
is here still present in the vow, with something of a boast in it: “Yes, I will be
thy priest.” The motives of Love, Poesy, and Ambition are still intertwined,
but Keats has decided to modify allegory as, a way of exemplifying them, and
has turned to mythology instead—not entirely seriously, as he had in
Endymion, but in a more playful and self-conscious way: “I am more orthodox
than to let a hethen Goddess be so neglected” (Letters, II, 106).
Keats’s perplexity on the subject of mythology arose from his severe
notion of what it was to tell the truth. Though he had (as I stood tip-toe
reveals) adopted Wordsworth’s theory in The Excursion about the allegorical
source of mythology—that it originated from an attempt to adorn natural
sights with the charm of story (a narcissus drooping over a pool, the moon
alone in the sky)—Keats had expressed, as early as Sleep and Poetry, a
suspicion that the proper subject of poetry was not only “the realm ... / Of
Flora, and old Pan” (101–102; that is, the realm of allegorized natural beauty
like that of the narcissus or the moon), but also human life. In the realm of
Flora he could read allegorically “a lovely tale of human life” (110), but he
would have to bid those joys farewell, in leaving them for “a nobler life, /
Where I may find the agonies, the strife / Of human hearts” (123–125). It is
not clear to Keats whether he can write about those agonies in mythological
terms at all. One of his reproaches of the Augustan poets seems to be their
neglect of nature and mythology at once; and yet, when in Sleep and Poetry he
begins to enumerate his own possible subjects, he does not come to
mythology until he enters, in memory, the house of Leigh Hunt, and recalls
looking with him at a portfolio including a picture of Bacchus and Ariadne.
After that, there follows a confusion of subjects—nature, mythology, past
poets, ancient heroes, and modern revolutionaries, not excepting the
allegorical figure of “Sleep, quiet with his poppy coronet.” In turning in a
“modern” and “worldly” way to the tale of Cupid and Psyche, a topic already
the subject for sophisticated, even decadent, interpretation, both in literature
and in the fine arts, Keats hoped, we may surmise, to enjoy the benefits of
mythology without seeming to engage in a false archaism. His struggle with
mythological material was not, as we shall see in the subsequent odes, to be
so easily resolved, if only because he connected it so strongly with the
pictorial and sensuous representational arts, rather than with thought and
truth.
Keats’s first sophisticating of mythology is evident in his assumption
that it exists not so much in the pagan past as in an eternal region where, by
purifying himself of skeptical modernity of thought (the dull brain that
perplexes and retards), he may once again find himself. There is a formal
20 Helen Vendler
liturgical beginning to this ode (to which I shall return), but its beginning in
narrative time retells Keats’s penetration to that eternal region, as, by
wandering “thoughtlessly” in a pastoral realm, he comes as spectator upon
two winged creatures:
Their arms embraced, and their pinions too;
Their lips touch’d not, but had not bade adieu,
As if disjoined by soft-handed slumber,
And ready still past kisses to outnumber
At tender eye-dawn of aurorean love.
We recognize this couple—this “happy, happy dove” and her “winged
boy”—as sentimental adumbrations of the youth and maiden on the Grecian
urn, warm in their “more happy love! more happy, happy love!” shaded by
their happy, happy boughs which cannot “ever bid the spring adieu.”
However, by the time Keats writes the Urn, though he is still using the Psyche
language of double happiness and no need to bid adieu, he has recognized
that the blissful stasis can only precede consummation, not, as in the more
innocent Psyche, outlast it. (By “recognize” of course, I mean, “realize in
language and structure”—there was no time in which Keats did not
recognize these plain truths in life.)
To present erotic desire unlessened by recent consummation, as Keats
does here in the figures of Cupid and Psyche, is to imagine an eroticism
without any share in the human cycle of desire and satiation. (Mythology
thus becomes here the world of heart’s desire, which puts into question its
capacity as a literary vehicle for the agonies of human hearts.) The symbolic
landscape in which Cupid and Psyche lie avoids the passionate and
unequilibrated; the flowers are hushed, their roots are cool, they are even
cool-colored: “blue, silver-white, and budded syrian” (corrected from the
blushing eroticism of “freckle-pink”)—though no one knows what Keats
intended “syrian” to convey. (His publishers changed it to “Tyrian.”) The
lovers themselves lie calm-breathing. In short, the divine couple are the pure
idealization of an eternal erotic desire for unsated and recurrent sexual
experience with the same partner.10 In this fantasy, love and beauty are
served, but truth of human experience is not.
The poet-spectator, having had a vision of the eternal Psyche, decides,
against Milton’s proscription of pagan gods, to restore her cult, and to that
end addresses her liturgically with the words which formally open the ode.
He hails her in terms deliberately borrowed from Lycidas (as indeed the
flower-catalogue of Psyche’s forest bower is also partially so borrowed): just
as “bitter constraint, and sad occasion dear” compel the uncouth swain, so
Tuneless Numbers: The Ode to Pysche 21
Keats’s “tuneless numbers” are wrung by “sweet enforcement and
remembrance dear,” in piety and pity for the banished goddess. Keats’s
numbers must be “tuneless” (that is, silent, offering no audible tones)
because the audible lyre of the ancients has fallen into disuse, but also
because his own song will be only a silent inward one, an unheard melody.
Keats’s only audience, in the internal theater of his working brain, is Psyche
herself, the soul, bereft of all other devotees. Keats’s pious memory of her
existence, and his sense of obligation in re-creating, however late, her cult,
explain his “remembrance dear” and “sweet enforcement” to this piety. Yet
the echo of Lycidas also tells us that this poem is, like its Miltonic predecessor,
an elegy for a vanished presence.
The restoration of the forgotten Psyche is the real subject of the poet’s
endeavor, and two forms of re-creation are attempted in the ode. In the first,
which opens the ode, the beloved divinity is represented as existing eternally
in a world accessible by dream or vision when the conscious mind is
suppressed, a world exterior to the poetic self. Had she been only within, the
poet’s vision of her could with propriety only be called a dream; but if she
were without, he could genuinely affirm that he had seen her with awakened
eyes. (Once again, I interrupt to say that I do not mean that Keats, in life, is
uncertain whether or not he had had a dream or seen a vision. The diction
of dream and waking is for Keats a way of making truth-claims; when he
wishes to insist that poetry has something to offer us which is more than
fanciful entertainment, he turns, as in his description of Adam’s dream, to the
metaphor of awakening and finding it truth.) The early rhetorical question
in this ode—“Surely I dreamt to-day, or did I see / The winged Psyche with
awakened eyes?”—is clearly, as I will conclude later, meant to be answered,
“With awakened eyes.” This, then, is the first restoration, a pastoral,
“thoughtless” waking vision; the second is the restoration by consciously
inward architectural reduplication, where Psyche will lie not in the forest
grass but in the shrine of the working brain. The first restoration requires of
the poet a mythological doubling of the self as a visible Cupid; in the second,
the poet in his own person becomes the allegorical Love. In the drama of
these parallel experiments—the poet in the first so passive, a thoughtless,
wandering spectator, in the other so active, a creator with a working brain—
lies the interest of the ode, and the proof of its evolution out of Indolence. The
meaning of divinity changes in the two restorations: in the first, divinity is
conceived of as an idealized presence revealed in a past vision; in the second,
divinity is conceived of as a presence which the poet must actively invoke,
and create a repository for; and the intent of the poem in its latter part is
consequently couched in the future tense of hope and will. The earlier part
sees revelation as casual and easy:
22 Helen Vendler
So did he feel, who pull’d the boughs aside,
That we might look into a forest wide,
To catch a glimpse of Fauns and Dryades.
That had been Keats’s earlier description, in I stood tip-toe (151–153), of the
poet’s activity, in his writing motivated by “the fair paradise of Nature’s light”
(126). Such a poet, Keats continues, would have been the one who wrote the
tale of Cupid and Psyche, writing of them as if they were fauns and dryads,
inhabitants of an unallegorized natural paradise, their tale one of charming
adventure, happily ended (147–150):
The silver lamp,—the ravishment,—the wonder—
The darkness,—loneliness,—the fearful thunder;
Their woes gone by, and both to heaven upflown,
To bow for gratitude before Jove’s throne.
But this facile parting of forest boughs to show us a tale of love lost and won
is no longer Keats’s idea of art, nor of the use to which it can put mythology.
Poetry is no longer entertaining tale-telling, or even seeing; it is active doing,
the poet’s human work, here seen, however, as a private task rather than as a
service to society.
The Ode to Psyche intends a wresting away of Psyche from the past, and
a seduction of her into the present. Though Keats’s first tones to the goddess
are those of elegiac religious observance (“O Goddess! hear these tuneless
numbers”), he ends with wooing:
And there shall be for thee all soft delight
That shadowy thought can win,
A bright torch, and a casement ope at night,
To let the warm Love in!
Though Psyche is originally said to lack a cult and prayers, what she is
offered in the last stanza is a landscape and a chamber for love, all in the
theater of the mind (which will become eventually Moneta’s hollow skull).
The elements of erotic bower and sacred temple, which will fatefully
lose their unison in The Fall of Hyperion, are still peacefully conjoined in the
Ode to Psyche. The poet promises a “rosy sanctuary” (an erotic version of the
Urn’s “green altar”), dressed “with the wreathed trellis of a working brain, /
With buds, and bells, and stars without a name,” in a landscape where “the
moss-lain Dryads” sleep: there Psyche will find a fane that will be a bower
for her and Cupid. These materials—wreath, trellis, bells, and moss in an
Tuneless Numbers: The Ode to Pysche 23
architectural setting—are also found (as Bloom early noted, in The Visionary
Company, p. 394) in the beautiful “arbour” with its roof and doorway, placed
near the opening of The Fall of Hyperion (25–29)
I saw an arbour with a drooping roof
Of trellis vines, and bells, and larger blooms
Like floral-censers swinging light in air;
Before its wreathed doorway, on a mound
Of moss, was spread a feast of summer fruits.
But on closer view the feast is seen to be over, and the arbor is littered with
empty shells and half-bare grape stalks. When the poet consumes some of
the remaining feast and drinks a draught of “transparent juice, / Sipp’d by the
wander’d bee” (the nectar, we may suppose, of the gods), he sinks into a
swoon, mastered by “the domineering potion.” When he awakes, he finds the
landscape changed (60–62):
The mossy mound and arbour were no more;
I look’d around upon the carved sides
Of an old sanctuary with roof august.
In this fairy-tale substitution, the “drooping roof” of the trellised arbor has
become the “roof august” of a sanctuary no longer rosy, like that of Psyche,
but carved, as the later Keats fully accepts the separation of nature and art.
Keats’s symbols in the epic imply his grand theme: that while the first,
youthful, perception of the world is erotic, the second, adult, one is
sacrificial. As he wrote to Reynolds after completing, so far as we can judge,
all the odes but Autumn, “I have of late been moulting: not for fresh feathers
& wings: they are gone, and in their stead I hope to have a pair of patient
sublunary legs” (Letters, II, 128). In Indolence, Keats had ached, within his
chrysalis, for wings; in Psyche, both Cupid and Psyche are winged creatures
though not yet shown in flight; in Nightingale, Keats at last wills to fly, if not
on actual wings, then on the viewless wings of Poesy. The erotic dream died
only with difficulty; in Psyche Keats is still in the realm of wings and arbors,
not steps and sanctuaries.
But though in Psyche bower and sanctuary are still one, a strain is
evident in the fabric of writing. The ode attains its greatest writing not in its
description of the rosy sanctuary-bower at the close, but in the slightly
earlier description of the landscape surrounding that fane, the landscape of
the as yet untrodden region of the mind that lies beyond the Chamber of
Maiden Thought. Keats had been in what he called “the infant or
24 Helen Vendler
thoughtless Chamber” when the ode began, as he wandered in the forest
“thoughtlessly.” When the working brain enters, he is no longer thoughtless:
we are, he says, “at length imperceptibly impelled by the awakening of the
thinking principle—within us” into the second Chamber, that of Maiden
Thought, and it is there that the working brain operates, as it does through
most of Psyche, “intoxicated with the light and the atmosphere, seeing
nothing but pleasant wonders.” That realm is still pastoral, but beyond it lie
the “precipices” which show “untrodden green,” as Keats had said in his
sonnet to Homer (Bate mentions the analogy in John Keats, p. 493): those
steeps and cliffs are not barren, but green with a new, if more alpine, verdure.
As one breathes in the atmosphere of the Chamber of Maiden Thought,
Keats adds, in the famous letter I have been quoting (Letters, I, 280–281), that
“among the effects this breathing is father of is that tremendous one of
sharpening one’s vision into the heart and nature of Man—of convincing
ones nerves that the World is full of Misery and Heartbreak, Pain, Sickness
and oppression—whereby This Chamber of Maiden Thought becomes
gradually darken’d and at the same time on all sides of it many doors are set
open—but all dark—all leading to dark passages.” Keats had written this
passage a year before writing the Ode to Psyche, and we sense a positive effort,
at the close of the ode, to stave off the encroaching dark passages:
Yes, I will be thy priest, and build a fane
In some untrodden region of my mind,
Where branched thoughts, new grown with pleasant pain,
Instead of pines shall murmur in the wind:
Far, far around shall those dark-cluster’d trees
Fledge the wild-ridged mountains steep by steep.
So the passage begins, opening into untrodden heights, and acceding to both
the pain and the pleasure of thought as work which Indolence, refusing pain’s
sting and pleasure’s wreath alike, had forbidden. But, as we recall, the rosy
sanctuary finally seems to lie within a cultivated garden, “with buds, and
bells, and stars without a name, / With all the gardener Fancy e’er could
feign.” It is not, however, the “gardener” Fancy who created the wild-ridged
mountains and the dark-clustered trees: they are the creations rather of
unconfined imagination, and they represent the sublime, as the garden
represents the beautiful. Many parallels in sublimity have been cited for these
lines, parallels from Milton and Shakespeare especially, but their effect in the
poem—given their Miltonic origins in the setting of Paradise (Paradise Lost,
IV) and in the mountains and steep of the Nativity Ode—resembles the effect
in Wordsworth’s Immortality Ode of corresponding lines:
Tuneless Numbers: The Ode to Pysche 25
The cataracts blow their trumpets from the steep;
I hear the echoes from the mountains throng;
The winds come to me from the fields of sleep.
The winds, the mountains, and the steep form a characteristic
Wordsworthian configuration of the sublime. The new dark-clustered
thoughts this region will require will, Keats knows, give him pain, even
though a pain which, because it calls up new creations, is compounded with
pleasure. The new domain seems limitless: “Far, far around shall those darkclustered
trees / Fledge the wild-ridged mountains steep by steep.” The farreaching
and arduous sublimity of soul here envisaged is not maintained; the
poem returns to the delicate, the beautiful, and the sensuous. It is hardly
accidental that Keats should appropriate to himself, in a poem about two
winged creatures, new pinions of his own by using the word “fledge” of his
mountain-thoughts;11 but the pinions, and the hope of steeps and
mountains, show that Keats’s notion of the pursuit of sublimity here flies on
eagle wings. The patient sublunary legs are still to come.
The earthly paradise described in the last stanza of the ode is entirely
nonseasonal, nonagricultural, and nonbucolic (there are no crops, no flocks);
it is a paradise within the working brain. Keats uses the paradisal index—the
“there” or là-bas or dahin of that “other country”—but he has abandoned the
dream of a passively received revelatory vision with which he began. The
chance sight of Cupid and Psyche is not one simply recoverable by a glimpse
through forest boughs. Yet his new, allegorical, later paradise reduplicates the
earlier, mythological one. There are, in the interior world, sleeping Dryads
lain on moss, just as the sleeping Cupid and Psyche had been couched in
grass; there are dark-clustered trees where there had been a forest; there is a
murmur of pines where there had been a whispering roof of leaves, streams
where there had been a brooklet, stars to replace Phoebe’s sapphire-regioned
star, mental flowers where there had been mythological ones, soft delight
where there had been soft-handed slumber, wide quietness where there had
been calm breathing, a bright torch to substitute for the aurorean light, and
a “warm Love” in place of the winged boy. In all of these ways, the
internalized closing scene of the poem is a copy, in its imagery, of the
opening forest scene, just as the second of the two central Miltonic stanzas
of the ode is a copy, in its catalogue of reparation, of the first, with its
catalogue of loss. The imperative of reduplication is as clear in the matching
of bowers as in the matching of cultic pieties. However, what is missing in
the tableau of the last stanza is of course crucial: we miss the figural center
of the opening tableau, the “two fair creatures” embracing. “Let me prepare
toward thee,” Keats might be saying at the end of the poem, as he lavishes all
26 Helen Vendler
his profusion of imagery on the prospective interior world to be inhabited by
Psyche. But she is not yet visible there, nor is Cupid: the close of the poem
is an entreaty and a promise, as Keats writes the archetypal poem of an absent
center.
If the Ode to Psyche were simply a restitution of what Milton’s Nativity
Ode had extirpated from English poetry, it would end with its restitutive
fourth stanza of restored cultic practice. Milton’s ode is far grander, in poetic
success, than Keats’s; but even in this novice effort Keats sees that what is life
to Milton is death to him. It is not enough to restore Psyche’s cult with a twin
stanza written in Milton’s religious vocabulary; Keats must reinvent Psyche’s
cult in his own language, the vocabulary of the luxuriant eroticism of his
initial vision.12 Milton’s pagan deities, as they are seen in the Nativity Ode,
are in no way erotic: even those who might have been are not so presented—
Ashtaroth sits alone as heaven’s queen and mother, and Thammuz is dead.
Psyche’s restoration, for Keats, must be not only the restoration of her cultvoice,
lute, pipe, incense, shrine, grove, oracle, and prophet—but also the
restoration of her atmosphere and presence. Milton’s austere language
permits itself nostalgia but no more; Keats, as Psyche’s worshiper, requires
the radiance of present conjuration. The radiant eroticizing of the interior
landscape of the mind, as it is decked and adorned and decorated, is Keats’s
chief intent, as he makes himself a mind seductive to Psyche. When Psyche
will have been won, and Love will have entered, the initial tableau will have
been reproduced entire—but this last tableau will be a wholly mental one, in
which the mind has been furnished by Fancy for the amorous soul, and Love
is a welcome guest. Keats’s characteristic erotic adjectives—soft, bright,
warm, rosy—together with the activity of Fancy, his presiding genius loci,
engaged in perpetual breeding of flowers, transform the mind from a place
conventionally reserved for philosophical thought to a place where all
possible thoughts and fancies (conceived after the manner of the poem Fancy)
are eroticized by the goddess’s imagined arrival. Worship, work, and embrace
will be one in the mind-garden, in which the more literal Miltonic cult of
swinging censers and moaning choir gives way to a new cult of tuneless
numbers, in which Psyche’s priest becomes himself her lyricist, her bower,
and her Cupid.
Nonetheless, in spite of this amorous and sensual redefinition of
religion and of the functions of the creative mind, the deepest energies of the
Ode to Psyche lie in two nonamorous places—in the sublime, uncultivated
periphery, lying outside the bower, of new-grown thoughts, and in the bold
claim not for amorousness but for independent divining power, outstripping
the soft dimness of dreaming: “I see, and sing, by my own eyes inspired.”13
These high and solitary sublimities—almost sequestered in this poem of
Tuneless Numbers: The Ode to Pysche 27
amorous contact and decorative luxuriance—predict the more solitary Keats
of Urn, Autumn, and The Fall of Hyperion. And it must be remembered that
the cost of the bower in Psyche is the total yielding up of the temporally
bound senses for a wholly spiritual world, the consequent singing of numbers
that must be tuneless (since they are embodied in no outward melody), and
the absence of all audience for this song, except one’s own soul. These
sacrifices of sense for mind, of melody for tunelessness, and of audience for
a putative, though scarcely realized, solipsism, coexist uneasily with Keats’s
sensually opulent style in the ode, a nonascetic style developed for the
happier embraces, both spiritual and physical, of Endymion. The tension
between the amorous mythological style and the desolate sacrificial
implications of Psyche will not be solved conceptually until Keats writes the
Ode on Melancholy, and not solved stylistically until he writes the ode To
Autumn. But in the internalizing of divinity, Keats has already advanced,
conceptually, beyond Endymion’s awkward doubling of the Indian Maid and
Cynthia and beyond Indolence’s three self-projections. The wholly
internalized Psyche—one’s own soul as interior paramour, as Stevens would
call it—is one solution (but by no means a finally satisfactory one for Keats)
to the question of the proper representation of divinity in art; and the
internalized atemporal and nonagricultural bower is a solution (but again, for
Keats, not an eventually satisfying one) to the problem of the modern
representation of the locus amoenus, or beautiful place.
Keats wished (as he says in his famous journal-letter immediately
contemporary with the odes) to sketch this world as a “vale of Soul-making,”
“a system of Salvation which does not affront our reason and humanity”:
It is pretty generally suspected that the christian scheme has been
copied from the ancient Persian and greek Philosophers. Why
may they not have made this simple thing even more simple for
common apprehension by introducing Mediators and Personages
in the same manner as in the hethen mythology abstractions are
personified— (Letters, II, 103)
Abstractions, Mediators, and Personages are the means of making moral
truths “simple for common apprehension.” Keats’s own mythological and
allegorical personages, whether Psyche or Moneta or Autumn, represent his
groping after a method he thought common to all “systems of salvation,” and
therefore true in a way beyond fancifulness. If Psyche, a “happy, happy
dove,” seems to us understandably insufficient as a personage aiding in
salvation, she is nonetheless proof of the immense if circumscribed faith
Keats placed, at this time, in the active soul emerged from its chrysalis, in the
28 Helen Vendler
strength of love in the soul, and in the imaginative force of the mind in
finding constructive forms.
The Ode to Psyche was of course inspired at least in part by the presence
of Fanny Brawne next door in Wentworth Place, and Keats may not at first
have been aware, as his ode took on its final dimensions, of the social, moral,
and aesthetic restrictiveness of its wholly internalized, timeless, and tuneless
cult. Psyche, his only audience for his tuneless numbers, both is and is not a
mythological being, both is and is not an allegorical form. The ode does not
solve the equivocal nature of her being, just as it does not solve the relation
between beautiful Fancy and truthful Thought—the one concentrated in a
small garden-fane full of happy spontaneity of erotic invention, the other
mysteriously far-ranging, sublime, and connected with pain as with eagleaspiration.
Cupid and Psyche together make up the actual joint divinity of
the poem, and they stand for a unity of being through spiritualized eroticism,
for flesh and soul in one couple—at the beginning not quite fused but not
quite separate, at the end both invisible in darkness. It is a divinity Keats will
forsake: all his subsequent divinities in the odes, as I have said, are
unpartnered females—the light-winged Dryad-nightingale, the unravished
bride-Urn, veiled Melancholy, and the goddess Autumn.14 Psyche’s exact
reduplicative pairing of the outside world (whether of myth or of cult) with
the inside world (of mind or Fancy) enacts the erotic pairing of the sensual
Cupid with the spiritual Psyche celebrated in the matter of the ode. This is
Keats’s most hopeful ode, and yet his narrowest one. The willed pairing of
flesh and soul in a perpetual and immortal embrace, the studied equivalence
of the flowery bower of Nature and the architectural bower of Fancy, the
total reconstitution of past religion in the present—the perfect “fit” of these
competing realities is the dream embodied in the reduplicative shape of the
Ode to Psyche. In the collapse of Keats’s hopes for a spiritual art exactly
mimetic of the sensual vision there collapsed as well the erotic joint divinity,
the happy coexistence of Fancy with Thought, the notion of art as idyllic
verisimilitude, the concept of aesthetic activity as a purely interior working,
the valuing of decorative, atemporal Beauty over austere, evolving Truth, and
the pure idealization of the immortal soul rescued, by the agency of the poet,
from the attrition of time.
Psyche originally thought to find its distinctive language in the realm of
religion mediated through Milton—as though the clear religion of heaven,
as Keats wished to announce it, could borrow its diction from the religions
of the past, Christian and pagan alike. Keats’s wish, expressed in the letter I
have quoted, to find something to substitute for Christianity explains his first
notion of a deity’s appropriate “numbers” as vows, voiced in piety, and
culminating in a sanctuary. He will not cease to struggle for a religious
Tuneless Numbers: The Ode to Pysche 29
diction appropriate to his purposes, as The Fall of Hyperion testifies. But in
mute confrontation with the religious language in Psyche there stand two
other languages—that of pastoral eroticism and that of pastoral allegory, the
first in the opening description of the forest bower, the second in the closing
description of the cerebral fane. Each of these is contaminated, so to speak,
by traces of the diction of religion; the diction of religion is contaminated, in
its turn, by traces of them. The latter case is more quickly made: Psyche is a
vision, as a devotee might say, of a religious goddess, but she is addressed in
the diction of physical love. She is the “loveliest” of visions, “fairer,” in this
lover’s comparison, than Venus or Vesper, that “amorous glow-worm of the
sky”; her choir is a virgin one making delicious moan (a detail not borrowed
from Milton, but inserted by Keats), and her pale-mouthed prophet dreams
in a fever of heat. She is brightest or bloomiest, and possessed of “lucent”
fans (the adjective later repossessed for Fanny Brawne’s “warm, white, lucent,
million-pleasured breast”). The religious, Miltonic edge is softened,
warmed, coaxed into pastoral bloom. But that very bloom and heat is itself
chilled or chastened by the religious use to which it is to be assimilated, into
the formality of “O Goddess” and the austerity of “tuneless numbers.” With
the introduction of Psyche’s “soft-conched ear” the earliest lines begin their
modulation into sensuality, and yet a restraint put on sexual warmth causes
the introduction into the forest embrace of the clear note of the brooklet, the
cool note of the roots, and the denial of rosiness to the flowers. The
suspension of the lovers’ lips checks the double embrace of arms and pinions
(the latter the warmest, and most boyish, imagining in the poem—“Their
arms embraced, and their pinions too,” a dream of an embrace doubled beyond
merely human powers). The “trembled blossoms” and “tender eye-dawn”
bear out the fragile and near virginal nature of this aurorean love; Keats is
uneasy, given his purportedly religious aims, about the extent of the erotic
that he can allow into his devotions.
The governing question of the opening of the ode—“Who wast thou,
O happy, happy dove?”—is, strictly speaking, epistemological rather than
devotional, and springs, I think, from the opening of Indolence (already
conceived even if not yet written down): “How is it, shadows, that I knew ye
not?” Keats had asked that question in self-reproach, and then had
exclaimed, in self-release, after seeing the three figures full-face, “I knew the
three.” To know them is also, as Keats admits in wishing to banish them, to
know “how change the moons.” In Psyche, “the winged boy I knew,” says
Keats, but Psyche is at first strange, as the urn-figures in Indolence had been;
she, like them, is eventually recognized.15 Keats here raises the question of
what he knows when he knows these personages, and though he briefly
considers that his glimpse might have been a dream, he decides, as I have
30 Helen Vendler
said, that he saw them with awakened eyes: I “saw” two fair creatures, he
announces, and later adds, “I see, and sing, by my own eyes inspired”; Psyche
is the loveliest seen thing, the loveliest “vision.” There is no further mention
of dreaming, after Keats’s first wondering question; everything else in the
text supports those “awakened eyes” in their seeing. Seeing, and knowing
who it is that one sees, and seeing truly, not in dream, is the first condition
of Keats’s clear religion, the opened eyes precluding any surrender to the
drowsiness Keats strove to maintain in Indolence. For all the resemblance
between Indolence and Psyche in what we might call their use of the diction of
bedded grass, it is, we must recall, Keats who drowses, in Indolence, amid
stirring shades and baffled beams, his head cool-bedded in the flowery grass;
but in Psyche it is the sleeping lovers who lie calm-breathing on the bedded
grass, and Keats has become the clear-sighted observer with awakened eyes.
Therefore, “not seeled, but with open eyes” (Herbert), Keats sees his own
former bower; like Ribh at the tomb of Baile and Aillinn, he has eyes by
“solitary prayer / Made aquiline,” which see what they could not have seen
when he drowsed in indolence. Keats as yet scarcely realizes whither his
newly aquiline gaze will lead. Eventually, as we know, it will disclose to him,
behind a parted veil, Moneta’s face. But for the moment Keats yearningly
believes that he can, while lifting his own head from the grass, maintain a
heavenly couple there in his place. The diction appropriate to their eroticism
grows the chaster for his separated gaze, but it preserves enough warmth for
knowledge and passion alike to be entertained in the hospitality of the poem.
The curb Keats has put on erotic fever in this passage is clear when we
glance back to the passage on Cupid and Psyche in I stood tip-toe (143–46):
What Psyche felt, and Love, when their full lips
First touch’d; what amorous, and fondling nips
They gave each other’s cheeks; with all their sighs,
And how they kist each other’s tremulous eyes.
The balance of warm and cool is, in the ode, delicately kept in all the
“stationing” of the first long stanza—the couple, though side by side, are
nonetheless calm; embraced, they are disjoined; not bidding adieu, they are
nevertheless not touching; they lie ready for a dawn that has not yet broken.
The imagery of erotic pastoral is cooled not only by Keats’s detached seeing
and knowing but also by his deliberately “tuneless” singing.
Keats’s diction for the embracing couple here is far more secure than
his diction with respect to himself. Though he begins in high seriousness, the
Byronic irony fitfully evident in Indolence has its say here too, though
shrunken to the brief double condescending to the “fond believing lyre” and
Tuneless Numbers: The Ode to Pysche 31
to “these days so far retir’d / From happy pieties.” This tone, never a
successful one in Keats, marks an instability in his enterprise, and a doubt of
the very possibility of ode-writing. How believing is his own lyre in this
hymn; how remote can he be, in truth, from his own skeptical epoch? The
irony in his joking tone about the neglected goddess in the letter to George
does not survive very well its translation into verse. And of all the language
in the poem, the language of religious cult, borrowed from Milton, is most
derivative, and least Keatsian.
The last diction invented in the poem is the diction for Psyche’s fane.
It is at once the best and the feeblest in the poem, showing, as I have said
earlier, the strain under which Keats is working. The feebleness is seen in
two places: in the random enumerative arabesque of “zephyrs, streams, and
birds, and bees, / ... buds, and bells, and stars without a name,”16 and in the
unselective amassing of Keatsian erotic words—rosy, soft, delight, bright,
warm. But the diction of Psyche’s fane also possesses a strength; the fane is
Keats’s first portrait of himself as artificer, as he becomes for the first time
not the youth in love, the ambitious man, or even the votary of the demon
Poesy (as he was in Indolence) but a maker of an object, here the goddess’s
sanctuary. Emerged from his embryonic indolence, Keats is born into work;
but his indecision about a proper diction for creativity disturbs him here.
The diction of “the gardener Fancy” is still the diction of pastoral eroticism,
that of “breeding”; and it issues (as in Fancy) in buds and flowerlike “stars”
and “bells.” These Spenserian breedings take place in the realm of the
Dryads, amid moss and streams and birds and bees, where lulling sleep is (as
it was in Indolence) the governing mode of being. In conflict with this soft,
mythic pastoral is the Shakespearean and Miltonic strenuousness of the fane’s
mountain landscape; and yet the sublime landscape is itself vegetative,
“grown” from that pain and pleasure which, though two separate things
when refused in Indolence, grow to one paradoxical single thing, “pleasant
pain,” when admitted to the precincts of mind. The phrase is of course a
blemish on the poem; but like so many of Keats’s blemishes it stands for an
intellectual insight for which he has not yet found the proper style in poetic
language. Keats, at this moment, can only note, baldly, that pleasure and pain
have some intimate connection; the answerable style for painful pleasure and
pleasant pain is yet to be found.
The diction of the fane is, as I have said, allegorical, as the original
diction of Psyche’s bower is not (being mythological, and narrative). Keats
had thought of following the line “Who breeding flowers, will never breed
the same” with the line “So bower’d Goddess will I worship thee,” but he
deleted it, realizing that his goddess was no longer in a bower but in a fane,
that bower language is not fane language, that nature is not architectural
32 Helen Vendler
artifact. Catching himself up short, he put in the open casement, that
casement which in Indolence had so meltingly brought the man-made and the
natural into conjunction, as “the open casement press’d a new-leaved vine.”
Here, the open casement will serve, so the poem hopes, to admit warm Love,
the human form divine, instead of the natural bloom. But the landscape has
perceptibly, in the thought-burdened allegorical moment, darkened from the
erotic one presented mythologically; the new forest region, unlike the
original one, is unknown, as yet untrodden; there are branches rather than
buds or blossoms; they cluster darkly; mountains loom, wild-ridged; instead
of feathery pinions there is a sterner fledge of trees; zephyrs are replaced by
wind. The darkness persists into the indeterminacy of “shadowy thought” at
the end, as Keats undertakes at one and the same time the burden of
allegorical writing and the architectural objectification of self in artifact, an
artifact which remains as yet internalized in thought, but which has been
effectively freed of its creator and endowed with architectural presence and
topographical depth.
The Ode to a Nightingale, which we next approach, marks a fresh
approach to all the questions raised by the odes preceding it. In it Keats takes
a step beyond the creative reverie of Indolence, beyond even the first creative
interior constructions of mental Fancy in Psyche, and envisages the artist’s
necessary embrace of a medium—in this case music, the art of Apollo. He
thus takes up, in choosing music, the idea of an art which of its nature
precludes mimesis and verisimilitude, an abstract art appealing only to the
sensation of the ear, an art devoted, perforce, to a beauty to which truth is
irrelevant. He will, pursuing his symbol of the artist as musician, adopt a
more ironic view of aesthetic experience, one in which a remote composersinger,
indifferent to and unconscious of any audience, pours forth a song to
a listener who is physically so passive, being pure ear, as almost to approach
the condition of insentience. In Nightingale the immortal world of art, far
from being an exact reduplication of the world of life, as in Psyche, is in fact
in all ways its opposite. In Psyche, the embracing sculptural frieze-figures are
no longer allegories of the poet’s desire for ambition, love, and poesy, but
rather have taken on a separate, objectified existence of their own. This
existence lapses somewhat at the end, where the poet seems to prepare to
become Cupid, but Psyche retains her independence. As a pagan goddess,
she preexisted her poet, and does not depend on him for her essence, as the
Love, Ambition, and Poesy of Indolence do. Keats’s attraction toward a
presence less contingent than his own selfhood dictates several of his other
objects of worship—a bird, an urn, a season. In the later odes, after Psyche, he
goes beyond an interest only in the psychology of inner reparatory creation
into an interest in artifact, medium, audience, and the intrinsic will-toTuneless
Numbers: The Ode to Pysche 33
annihilation in art itself. But in one aspect, Nightingale represents a
regression from Psyche. Though the composer-singer-bird is not “indolent,”
neither does she have a “working” brain; her art is one of happy spontaneity,
coming as naturally as leaves to a tree. Keats still hopes that art need not be
“work” intellectually planned. But the working brain will not be absent
forever; art as work reappears with the Urn.
NOTES
1. [Stillinger’s notes.] Text (including heading) from 1820. Variants and other
readings from Keats’s draft (D), his letter to George and Georgiana Keats, 14 February–3
May 1819 (L), and transcripts by Brown (CB) and Woodhouse (W2). Heading Ode to] Ode
To (Ode added afterward) D 4 into] <to> into L 5 dreamt] dreamt altered to dream’d W2
6 awaken’d] awaked L 9 couched] <cl> couched L 10 roof] fan D, L, W2, and originally
CB; fan altered to roof by Keats in CB 13 ‘Mid] interlined above <In> D; Near W2 14 silverwhite]
freckle pink in the margin (but silver-white undeleted in the text) in D; freckle-pink L;
freckled, pink W2 14 Tyrian] syrian D, L, CB, W2 15 calm] soft CB 17 bade] bid D, L,
W2 20 eye] <dawning> eye D 22 O happy] O <p> happy L 23 true!] ~ ? L 24 latest]
lastest L 26 Phoebe’s] successively (a) Night’s <wide> full, (b) Night’s orb’d (c) Phoebe’s D
28 hast] hadst L 30 delicious] melodious D, CB, W2 32–34 No and no] No <r> and no
<r> in all eight places in D 36 brightest] Bloomiest D, L, CB, W2 42 among] interlined
above <above> D 43 by my] by (corrected by Keats to by my) CB 43 own] interlined above
<clear> D 44 So] O D, L, CB, W2 45/46 <Thy Altar heap’d with flowers,> (written
vertically in the margin with a mark for insertion after 45, the line and the mark then deleted) D
47 From] interlined above <Thy> D 57 lull’d] interlined above <charmd> L 57 to sleep]
asleep altered to to sleep CB 62 feign] interlined above <frame> L 63 breeding ... breed]
successively (a) plucks a thousand flower and never plucks (b) plucking flowers will never
pluck (c) breeding flowers will <never> breed pluck (never deleted by mistake instead of pluck
in the third version) D 63/64 < So bower’d Goddess will I worship thee> D 67 the ... Love]
warm Love glide altered to the warm Love D; Love W2.
2. Psyche is “restored,” not “resurrected”: she was forgotten, not dead; The opening
tableau shows she is ever immortal. She is not a “dying immortal” or “immortal but also
fading,” as Leon Waldoff would have it (“The Theme of Mutability in the ‘Ode to
Psyche,’” PMLA [1977], 412). Psyche is, as Keats said, “neglected.” On the other hand,
Waldoff ’s psychoanalytic reading of the ode as a “rescue fantasy” (p. 410), a “defense
against irrevocable loss” (p. 415), and, finally, an “adaptation” (p. 417) are intelligent
insights into the ode as a psychological document. His concluding emphasis on will and
resolution is far truer to the poem than readings which emphasize only irony or an empty
center. The long and sometimes fanciful discussion of the ode by Homer Brown (Diacritics
6 [1976], 49–56) considers, following Harold Bloom in the Map of Misreading (p. 153), that
“Milton’s Satan as the artist of deceit at Eve’s ear becomes the ‘gardener Fancy’ and the
speaker of Keats’s Ode” (p. 54). Brown urges too strongly that “the mortality of all the
gods, including art, including the Psyche of this Ode, the mortality of all cultures” is
Keats’s concern (p. 56). But the poem is a restoration poem (however qualified). It is a
poem about substitution, as Brown says, but not about endless substitution around and over
a Derridean absence: such is not its tone. Leslie Brisman argues (“Keats, Milton, and What
One May ‘Very Naturally Suppose’”) that Keats is engaging in the creation of a
34 Helen Vendler
“countermyth” against the decay of nature, a countermyth asserting that “inspiration [is]
renewed as faithfully as are plants and seasons” (p. 4). (See Milton and the Romantics 6
[1975], 4–7.)
3. I am not unaware by how much the poem falls short of its claim of restitution, nor
of the ironies (discussed most recently by Sperry and Fry) that it encounters on its way to
the final fane. But these difficulties in the path—culminating in the vacancy of the final
tableau—do not defeat the passionate tone of the poem. Bloom, not insensitive to the
ironies, yet speaks of the poem’s “rhapsodical climax,” and sees the open casement
emphasizing “the openness of the imagination toward the heart’s affections” (Visionary
Company, pp. 395, 397). It should not be forgotten that for Keats, especially in his
moments of prizing verisimilitude, it was important to speak the truth about his life; one
of the truths behind the Ode to Psyche was that he was not yet embowered with Fanny
Brawne. That he still hoped and longed for her is evident from the final entreaty, and it
goes counter to the current of the poem to prize its uncertainties over its hopes, still ardent
and as yet undefeated.
4. Commentators have expended a good deal of effort on making an allegorical
identification of Psyche. She is “the soul of human love” (G. Wilson Knight, The Starlit
Dome, p. 302); the mind rescued by Love (Bate, John Keats, p. 490); the visionary
imagination (Perkins, The Quest for Permanence, p. 222 ff.); the human-soul-in-love
(Bloom, The Visionary Company, p. 390); “the simple consciousness of Being” (Fry, The
Poet’s Calling in the English Ode, p. 226); “the goddess of the poetic soul, the Muse” (Sperry,
Keats the Poet, p. 254); the “moth-goddess, who symbolized melancholic love” (Garrod, Keats,
pp. 98–99); “the intelligent ‘Spark’ struggling to become a soul ... a love-goddess with an
understanding of troubled human experience ... a personification of human nature
subjected to an inevitable and cruel process of growing up and growing old” (Allott, “The
‘Ode to Psyche,’” in Muir, John Keats, pp. 84, 86); “Love itself, the poetic-butterfly-moth
idea” (Jones, John Keats’s Dream of Truth, p. 206); and so on. Probably some such
identification is necessary if one is to write about the poem at all; but surely the point to
be made is that Keats is engaged in one of his recurrent recoils against emblematic
allegory; such recoils always took him in the direction of mythology. Mythology was
suggestive, emblematic allegory bald. Mythology, capable of motion, hovered; emblematic
allegory was frozen in a single gesture. Mythology derived from narrative and came
bearing, even if lightly, the aura of its narrative around it; allegory, originating in
conceptualization, had no richness of story about it. The fluidity of concept associated
here with Psyche comes precisely from her mythological origins; the ode marks Keats’s
resistance to the “fair Maid, and Love her name” sort of writing, to which he had resorted
in Indolence.
5. I discuss this art of wounds and cures at length in “Lionel Trilling and the
Immortality Ode,” Salmagundi 41 (1978), 66–86.
6. Though critics mention the derivation of this passage from Milton, they have
failed to see that Keats draws only on the passage about the more acceptable pagan gods,
and they have not seen Keats’s anti-Miltonic aim—to put the gods back into English
poetry, when Milton had banished them as unfit and false subjects for the Christian poet.
7. Allott (p. 87) and Sperry after her (p. 254) mention that Keats recalls the banning
of pagan gods in Milton, but they do not see that Keats saw the ban as a loss to poetry, or
that he is defying Miltonic truth-categories. Douglas Bush’s assumption that Keats
adopted echoes from Milton “simply because they fitted his idea of providing [Psyche]
with proper rites” seems to take too lightly Keats’s indignation that anyone should think it
Tuneless Numbers: The Ode to Pysche 35
possible to do without “the beautiful mythology of Greece.” See “The Milton of Keats and
Arnold,” Milton Studies 11 (1978), 103.
8. She in fact is the only one of the “faded Olympians” not to have declined; she is
still properly addressed as “brightest.” It therefore seems no part of Keats’s intent to show
her as careworn and acquainted with grief, as Allott would have it (Muir, pp. 84, 86).
9. I owe this formulation to Professor Patrick Keane of Le Moyne College.
10. I cannot therefore share Fry’s conviction that the couple represent “the bisexual
and at least partly daylit scene of creation that chaster poets, notably Collins, had tried to
represent euphemistically” (The Poet’s Calling, p. 223). Nothing is being “created” by
Cupid and Psyche, whether in the myth or in Keats’s poem; they are figures for sexuality,
but not for procreation. (Keats’s departure from Comus, where Milton envisages twins born
from the union of Cupid and Psyche, is explicit.) Nor can the forest scene be legitimately
called a “primal scene” (Fry, p. 225) if those words are to carry the shock and dismay which
Freud predicated in the mind of the child witnessing such a scene. Keats does not stand to
his scene as a child witnessing a parental act; the scene is a projection of his own desire,
and he cannot therefore be said to be, as Fry says he is, following Bloom, “the poet as
voyeur” (p. 225). If Fry means that Cupid and Psyche are to be taken as figures drawn from
Adam and Eve, then there is no reason to call the scene “bisexual,” at least not in the usual
sense of that word.
11. He speaks of his “half-fledged brain” in a letter of July 1819 (Letters, II, 130).
12. The chiastic structural pattern of bower-cult-cult-bower (what I have called the
mirror-image shape of the ode) seems to me clear enough to bring into question Fry’s
notion that the shape of the ode is one of “rondure”—“The whole poem is the shrine,
couched and soft-couched. It is a shell, rounded as the mind” (The Poet’s Calling, p. 227).
13. Homer Brown notes the defiance of Milton (“blind and blindly superstitious”) in
these lines. But he thinks of Psyche as too exclusively one with Keats, contrasting Keats’s
ode to the traditional ode “of worship to an otherness.” Keats is not writing a hymn to
himself; Psyche is, not least, Fanny Brawne. See Brown, “Creations and Destroyings:
Keats’s Protestant Hymn, The ‘Ode to Psyche,’” Diacritics 6 (1976), 49–56.
14. Leon Waldoff, also making the point that Keats’s divinities are female (in a paper
delivered at the MLA, 1980, and entitled “Processes of Imagination and Growth in Keats’s
Odes”), argues psychoanalytically that all are attempts at the (impossible) restoring of a
maternal image.
15. Lawrence Kramer in “The Return of the Gods: Keats to Rilke,” Studies in
Romanticism 17 (Fall 1978), 483–500, places the ode into a tradition of the theophanic
poem, “the genre in which the return of the gods takes place” (p. 484), and writes very
interestingly on “the riddle ritual” (p. 494) of the naming of Psyche, and the subsequent
withholding of her name.
16. Sperry voices the same criticism (p. 259); but he is wrong in saying (p. 257) that
the “buds ... burst into thought ‘with pleasant pain.’” They do not—only thoughts, in the
form of trees on the steep, do. Fancy is not painful; thought is. Keats allows in his earthly
paradise in this poem only flowers, not fruits, thus restricting his gardener to the single
season of spring.
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