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Professor B. Walter
E Lit 301E-02: Practical Criticism
November 7, 2001
A Room above the Arno
“I want so to see the Arno. The rooms the Signora promised us in her letter would have looked over the Arno. The Signora had no business to do it at all. Oh, it is a shame!” cries Lucy Honeychurch in E. M. Forster’s A Room with a View. After much nonsense and squabble with her aunt, she manages to switch to a room with a view, where one could “fling wide the windows, pinching the fingers in unfamiliar fastenings, to lean out into the sunshine with beautiful hills and trees and marble churches opposite, and close below, the Arno, gurgling against the embankment of the road.” E. M. Forster manages to capture the picturesque landscape of Florence as ladies and gentlemen handle the Italian panorama with Baedekers and silk gloves. May Swenson, though, escaping the Victorian world and its sensibility, paints a complex, layered picture of Florence and the Arno River in her poem “Above the Arno.” Her Florence is bright, colorful, busy, and filled with bustle and noise, too, but behind the jubilance is a darker, gloomier undertone. The word “turbid” Swenson uses in the second stanza captures her view of the mysterious, lurking Arno, its color, texture, and movement. The way Swenson uses the word “turbid” contributes to an impressionistic experience of Florence, its people, and its art.
For example, Swenson uses the word “turbid” in the second stanza to describe the color of the Arno and to evoke visual sensations. The primary definition of the word pertains to liquids. Something turbid is “thick or opaque with suspended matter; not clear; cloudy, muddy (Oxford English Dictionary). In the line, “[t]he lizard river might be green, or turbid gray,” Swenson uses turbid to modify the color “gray” (l. 9). This description of color gives the impression that mud and decay cloud the river. Although the river is dirty, its color is natural; from nowhere does the reader get the impression that industrial waste or pollution has made it turbid. Instead, forces in the natural world affect the color of the river. In the first stanza, the speaker looks out from her window and sees how the sky changes the color and lighting of the scene. The Arno’s color, along with the rest of the landscape, alters with the time of day or night. The river is very much a part of the natural landscape, changing as time passes, and it is also a part of the human landscape. The Florentine environment is in between a large city like New York and a rustic village. The speaker describes Florence as a city with both automobiles and donkey-driven carts. The river, too, represents this “in-between” era for Florence. Its water is gray and green, between sewer-black and clear, so it is no local, small-town swimming hole, yet it is clean enough in its natural dirt for small boys to jump in for a swim against the order of the “no swimming” sign.
The word “turbid” also describes air, smoke, clouds as “[t]hick, dense; dark,” and this definition of “turbid” lends itself to the movement of the Arno (OED). This gaseous definition of turbid stems from Francis Bacon’s first usage of the word “turbide” in his 1626 Sylva Sylvarum to describe substances in a philosophical, scientific context. Writers after him often used turbid to describe the sky, clouds, and the sun, and throughout time, they gave the word a connotation of disorder and death. A turbid stream of air moves slowly, like fog. The Arno, too, in Swenson’s poem moves heavily. It lurks through the city like a lizard or a snake. Although the river does not bring events as severe as death or destruction, it does add to the sense of laziness and complacent purposelessness in the city. Boys dangle their legs along the river. They smoke and “[laze] in the sun” (l. 21). They fish without ever catching anything. The turbid Arno is like a fume that permeates Florence; it is the spirit of the city. Tourists go to and fro in carriages, and the content indolence of the city affects the speaker herself as she has all the time in the world to look through her window at the city outside and sleep for an entire afternoon. Time, like the Arno, passes in a sweetly slow manner. The details in the poem, from the washstand in her room to the urchins by the river to the donkeys on the streets, create a slow, steady pace. The speaker compares her window to a book, and she spends time savoring every detail as she reads the city and everything in her view.
While the word “turbid” conveys the movement of the river and the city around it, its meaning also has a figurative role. Something that is turbid is “characterized by or producing confusion or obscurity of thought, feeling, etc.; mentally confused, perplexed, muddled; disturbed, troubled” (OED). Although the word’s Latin origin turbid-us means “full of confusion and disorder” and even “violent,” Swenson’s use of turbid in the poem tones down the sense of violence and trouble as turbid mainly pertains to the muddled color of the river (OED). The Arno as a pervasive force in the city, however, has been through trouble, confusion, and violence as it snakes its way through time. Florence, birthplace of the Italian Renaissance and home of Michelangelo, represents architectural grandeur with remnants of art strewed throughout its streets and piazzas. The speaker can see Giotto’s Tower, Brunelleschi’s Dome, and the Palazzo Vecchio through her window, now a like history book. These buildings represent the Roman Catholic Church and the government, and the Arno itself has lived through papal wars, civil unrest, and civil war. At night, the speaker looks into the darkness and sees four white sculptures. The statues of the man holding a drape and “looking cold” (l. 68), the man in a toga, the woman of charm and “broken flounces” (l. 76), and the “Headless One” (l. 76) all seem phantom-like, bone-white against the blackness of the night. Time has ravaged these statues, so to the speaker, the sculptures of the woman with a basket of fruit who has lost its head and the “round-polled,” fat, naked men look ridiculous (l. 67). Time in the city embodies violence, more visible at night when “doorways [are] dark as sockets” and the image of the statues rises like ghosts above the Arno (l. 61). The Arno has lived through human history and is still collecting the memories of the people who are bustling through its streets. Its muddle, then, is the various human experiences—peaceful, violent, and ridiculous—that it has flowed through.
At the end of the poem, Swenson returns to the theme of time and connects it with images of the city. At daybreak, the bell tower strikes four. “F O U R,” the speaker spells out to capture the slow tolling of the bell. Then the sky “began to fill with downy clouds—pink as the breasts of Botticelli’s Venus—foretinting dawn” (ll. 93-95). The imagery, as in the beginning of the poem, again focuses on color. The darkness of the night, “the greenish air” gives way to the bright, patterned rosiness of sunrise. The one sting to this lovely picture of Florence is the turbid, snake-like Arno. Everything echoes above it, and the clutter of human movement and the shapes of busy people are but brief in the life and expanse of the Arno. People, art, and time constantly move and change. The Arno, too, changes along with everything around it in its long lifespan, yet its movement and color are heavy. The Arno bears the burden of everything that its water reflects and absorbs all that it has flowed through, marking the continuing loss of innocence in the changing, modernizing city. The speaker, looking into her “book” of Florence, recognizes her position as an observer. Unlike Lucy, Miss Lavish, and the Emersons, who glorify nature in A Room with a View, she does not attempt to merge into the picture, parasols and all. Instead of staying in Florence for “educational purposes” or for a social show, she merely looks. And in a night and a morning, looking through her window, she catches the color, the quirks of the environment, as well as the darker undertones of the Arno River.