Monsieur Magus

There are moments of sentimental and mystical experience . . . that carry an enormous sense of inner authority and illumination with them when they come. But they come so seldom, and they do not come to everyone; and the rest of life makes either no connection with them, or tends to contradict them more than it confirms them.
--William James

In the South of France the peasants had the gall
To squint and snicker when they read my name,
Hold discourse with a hydrant or a wall,
Falling through manholes in their silly game.
What did their cries of "Waldo!" signify?
How could my faithful camel miss the turns
And bring me here, while in the evening sky
The star, albeit faintly, plainly burns?

Too many years of study by the dim
Glow of the midnight oil have left these eyes
Two cloudy windows on a clouded mind.
Now I wonder at the meaning of that hymn
That lifted up our thoughts to touch the skies.
Wonder and wander. The blind shall lead the blind.


Days later, I am still trying to figure this one out, but
then the James epigraph seems to give me permission
to fail. That mystery is in a sense the poem’s theme.
That is, there is an air of the faintly ridiculous tinged with true pathos and regret. The poet roughs up the meter skillfully with substitutions. Lost causes and lost opportunities for a “wise” man? Call Yeats.

If I am reading this correctly, the narrator is a conflation of a Wise Man of the Nativity story and Mr. Magoo, the chronically befuddled and nearly blind cartoon character. There also seems to be an allusion to "Where's Waldo?" in the children's books. Although it is hard to pin down the point of this combination, there does seem to be both humor and pathos in it, the scholar and seeker become a figure of fun, the quest far off course and doomed.

Susan

Susan:

You said it better than I could!

My own set of idiosyncratic connections is probably misleading me, but I hear Emerson. RWE was a friend of the James clan, a supper guest when WJ was a tot, and was known by his middle name, Waldo. And there are long passages of James that read like Emerson without those perilous gaps between sentences, the epigraph to this poem being one of them. The title suggests I am way off, however.
The specific identity of the speaker is less important than his state of mind and heart, and that comes through clearly, if a clouded perception can ever be said to come through clearly.
RPW


[This message has been edited by Richard Wakefield (edited June 30, 2005).]

I may be too thick to get this one entirely, but you French-speaking, Bible-knowing fancypantses might care to know that Waldo is Mr. Magoo's dopey nephew in the cartoons.

Many thanks to Simon for resolving the only impenetrable thing about this romp of a sonnet.

"Magus" may be an attempt to render "Magoo" in French, as well, though it's difficult to second-guess the pronunciation of a name.

S2 has a lovely subtle humor. It's courageous to bring in allusions to William James, Mr. Magoo, the birth of Christ, and "Where's Waldo?"--in one sonnet! I feel it could have done without "Wonder and wander."

There's surely, as Len says, "an air of the faintly ridiculous tinged with true pathos and regret" here, though I sense the former more than the latter two. In fact, adding such an epigraph must be meant to amuse when it seems the sonnet is written to expand upon its final phrase: "to contradict them more than it confirms them." Yes, indeed! And the response to that is either the creative, the suicidal, the psychotic, or possibly the spiritual and/or hermetic.

Now I have to know who wrote this Lulu! I do regret the capitalised lines which end-stop the lines although in a way they add to the joke.
Geertjans? Monsieur Cantor? Somebody a little delightfully off centre.
Janet

[This message has been edited by Janet Kenny (edited July 04, 2005).]

I like the humility and humor. As I read this, it's about a guy who wears thick-rimmed glasses, like Mr. Magoo's or Waldo's, and good-naturedly accepts a lot of teasing about it. This person's a wanderer (an English speaker in the South of France), a seeker, a would be Wise Man. He feels that "too many years" of study have made him nearsighted in more ways than one, that he's still no closer to enlightenment - it's not the kind of epiphany where suddenly things become clear, but where it becomes clear that nothing's really clear.

I agree with Rose's summary and add that there is a delightfully unpompous whimsy which is very human.
Janet