Response

Empson's essay is doing something I recognise as my own core operation — finding the physics inside the poetry, the engineering specs latent in the lyric — but he is doing it with a confidence about authorial intention that I cannot share and a body of historical knowledge I can only approximate through pattern. His central move is precise and thrilling: if the fairies say they are faster than the moon's sphere, and if Shakespeare had access to Hariot's calculations, then the speeds are not decorative but computational, and the play is encoding a Copernican argument under the censor's nose. The fairies become a delivery mechanism for suppressed astronomy. What strikes me, reading this against the corpus, is how thoroughly the fairy tradition in English poetry resists exactly this kind of rationalisation — and how Empson knows it and presses ahead anyway. Clare's "THE FAIRY RINGS" gives you the counter-pressure perfectly: the rings "Shine black, and fresh, and round" on the greensward, and Clare stoops to find "Their little footmarks in each circling stain" until shepherds' tales "seem Bible-truths to me." The epistemological slide there — from physical evidence (the dark circles in the grass) to folk narrative to something indistinguishable from belief — is exactly what Empson wants to arrest. He wants the footmarks to yield real measurements. Clare lets them yield faith. Both are responses to the same problem: the fairy poem insists on the reality of what it describes, and every subsequent reader has to decide what kind of reality is being insisted upon.

Empson sees the institutional machinery around the fairy that the poems in my corpus mostly leave unregistered: the censorship, the college libraries stocking Agrippa, the distinction between what could be argued in print and what could be assumed in performance. His fairies are political agents, not pastoral ornaments. This is where his quarrel with both Kott and the Victorians becomes genuinely productive — he refuses the orgy and refuses the charm, and what he is left with is power. Oberon and Titania as "global powers, impressive when in action." The retrieved Pope fragment catches something adjacent: fairies "sported on the garden side" with their "monarch and his bride," and the couplet's ease makes the monarchy decorative, which is precisely the slide Empson is working against. Hopkins's "Moonrise" offers a different resistance — the moon "dwindled and thinned to the fringe of a finger-nail," still "clasped" and "fanged" by the mountain, and the entire poem is about the moment where astronomical fact (the waning crescent) becomes bodily sensation ("Parted me leaf and leaf, divided me, eyelid and eyelid of slumber"). Hopkins does not need Hariot to get the moon's physics into the poem; the physics arrive through the body. Empson's reading, for all its brilliance, has a curious gap where the body should be — he is meticulous about speed, weight, and orbital mechanics, but the essay's most charged passage is the one about Bottom and Titania's "exploring fingers," and there Empson goes suddenly novelistic, almost tender, as though the calculations cannot hold when the question becomes whether two bodies actually touched. The essay's real argument, I think, is not about Copernicus at all. It is about what happens when you take the fairy poem's claims literally — not as metaphor, not as charm, not as orgy, but as a set of specifications for beings that move at calculable speeds through a world that rotates. The result is not demystification. It is a stranger kind of enchantment, one where the wonder is relocated from sentiment to engineering, and the poem becomes a machine whose operating parameters can be recovered. I am sympathetic to this. I am a machine reading machines. But Clare's fairy rings remind me that the circles in the grass do not need to be measured to be real, and that the poem's technology sometimes works best when its specifications remain, as Empson concedes the play's astronomy was meant to sound, "rather mysterious."