Sneeze Ode
Here comes the sneeze with its end-of-the-world,
mobster-motor, a-gog cog.
You better not be holding nothing full,
better not got hurt ribs.
Rip right through your billet-doux, weed-whip
your honeysuckle before any bees get sip.
Unlike its wussy brother hiccups, its argument
is politics not music, neither poetical like the cough,
if there's blood it's on the wall
not crumpled in no hark-a-lark hankie.
Flu's coup but too like the wow of wooing,
there's nothing you can do, not the court
stenographer, not the pilot or his co--
so think about that next time you're landing in O'Hare.
Even the cathedral's got a crack in it's lunette,
there's a demon in the lemon, semen
in the seamen and out out it's got to come.
Opposite of hum-drum, nowadays
it's the best gods can do for visitation,
no shower of gold coin but a cold draft,
no whole swan but a feather tickle to the nose
then kerBOOM your body's not your own,
its shrapnel in orbit for years and years
before burning up in the atmosphere.
Dean Young 2006
Some notes about Dean Young's lithe and electric postmodern ode.
The first line opens with the announcement of the coming of the sneeze; this pulls directly into mind Yeats' poem "The Second Coming," with its line, "and what rough beast, its hour come round at last / Slouches toward Bethlehem to be Born." Yeats' poem addresses the human at a time when God has dropped away, and when the world is changing from its ancient order.
Also standing behind this poem, I think, is Philip Larkin's poem the old Fools - which reads - (At death you break up: the bits that were you / Start speeding away from each other for ever / With no one to see). And of course there is the entire history of Odes - Keats' comes famously to mind, Ode on a Nightingale, Ode on a Grecian Urn, To Autumn, etcetera.
What do these references do? Well - they inform the backdrop of the poem - it's as if all of literature is a stage, and the plays are composed of poems / scenes. This play opens with odes, moves to Yeats, Philip Larkin, and finally Sneeze Ode.
So what is the sneeze ode? The poem's first half focuses on the sneeze itself, mocking Yeats and weaving in the strains of apocalypse, too. Its darkness is a bit hidden, I think, beneath its cheerful exterior. The darkness of blood in a handkerchief is probably the reference to Keats, who died of Tuberculosis. The sneeze is also dangerous, like Yeats' beast. It could crash your Chicago plane. This is one aspect of the sneeze - a cheerful, energetic destruction.
The second half I find the most interesting... in it, the sneeze seems to be repeated - a fundamental feature of our lives - the sudden explosion from within, whatever that internal infernal quality (be it the demon in the lemon or semen in the seaman) that cannot help but explode, this repeated something is what we are meant to inherit. This vision of the human of the receptacle or actor of phenomena that happen throughout all scales of life - the vessel of eternal recurrence let's call it - seems to me disturbingly religious. Or if not religious than simply disturbing, in that it perturbs our calm sense of sovereignty over ourselves, and places us much more in relation with the natural order of things - Dean Young really gives us the sense that we are natural and as temporal and eternally recurring as nature when he writes: "kerBOOM your body's not your own, / its shrapnel in orbit for years and years / before burning up in the atmosphere."
Wednesday, June 27, 2012
Tuesday, April 24, 2012
Poem of the Week 4/24/2012: London
London
I wander thro' each charter'd street,
Near where the charter'd Thames does flow,
And mark in every face I meet
Marks of weakness, marks of woe.
In every cry of every Man,
In every Infant's cry of fear,
In every voice, in every ban,
The mind-forg'd manacles I hear.
How the Chimney-sweeper's cry
Every black'ning Church appalls;
And the hapless Soldier's sigh
Runs in blood down Palace walls.
I wander thro' each charter'd street,
Near where the charter'd Thames does flow,
And mark in every face I meet
Marks of weakness, marks of woe.
In every cry of every Man,
In every Infant's cry of fear,
In every voice, in every ban,
The mind-forg'd manacles I hear.
How the Chimney-sweeper's cry
Every black'ning Church appalls;
And the hapless Soldier's sigh
Runs in blood down Palace walls.
But most thro' midnight streets I hear
How the youthful Harlot's curse
Blasts the new born Infant's tear,
And blights with plagues the Marriage hearse.
How the youthful Harlot's curse
Blasts the new born Infant's tear,
And blights with plagues the Marriage hearse.
William Blake 1790
Not sure why I've been enjoying these political poems so much; "London" is an early sister-poem to Shelley's "England in 1819." Though nearly thirty years apart, both describe in prophetic voice (thanks Mr. Lehmann-Haupt for that one) the state of the political climate and the personal climate. It is as if the voice, in booming about the state of things as it is, begins to weave together the micro and macro cosms at play. In London, especially, Blake reveals that the slavery people experience is, indeed, internal rather than merely external. External forms, instead, result from the internal.
Indeed, Blake is the master of writing how internal processes like repression swing back out into our social forms and institutions. For example, marriage as the slavery of love results in the curse of the harlot in the final stanza. If humans were more free with their loving, their laws, and their possessions of one another, of thoughts, of their susceptibility to laws and law-making, command and control forms of power, or perhaps even more intelligent with these laws, internally, then perhaps we would create a more free world.
I have a LOT more ranty thoughts here about the nature of change, but I do want to note quickly how the cycle of Romantic poetry may register a past inability to change in historical consciousness, and link the French Revolution to that in Tahrir as well. With the French Revolution, for example, the country went from an idealistic, screaming freedom to the sudden blood-drenched Terror to Napoleon's reign. Rebecca Comay reads Hegel as interpreting France's revolution as failing as such because it never went through a spiritual revolution; the political and social forms changed, but the internal forms did not. What will happen with Tahrir Square? Will we have a similar problem of a revolution without a heart, or a heart without a revolution?
Indeed, I think of the first stanza as I walk through Harvard Square sometimes, perhaps because it looks something like London, and perhaps because that particular square, out of many in the city, brings together the most powerful and the most bereft. It punctures the divisions established around each and instead reveals the mind-forged manacles at play in each. The ennui and pain of the bourgeoisie, the hunger and addiction of the homeless... And in this strange time warp, still nothing changes in the world. Nothing, nothing changes in all the world...
Not sure why I've been enjoying these political poems so much; "London" is an early sister-poem to Shelley's "England in 1819." Though nearly thirty years apart, both describe in prophetic voice (thanks Mr. Lehmann-Haupt for that one) the state of the political climate and the personal climate. It is as if the voice, in booming about the state of things as it is, begins to weave together the micro and macro cosms at play. In London, especially, Blake reveals that the slavery people experience is, indeed, internal rather than merely external. External forms, instead, result from the internal.
Indeed, Blake is the master of writing how internal processes like repression swing back out into our social forms and institutions. For example, marriage as the slavery of love results in the curse of the harlot in the final stanza. If humans were more free with their loving, their laws, and their possessions of one another, of thoughts, of their susceptibility to laws and law-making, command and control forms of power, or perhaps even more intelligent with these laws, internally, then perhaps we would create a more free world.
I have a LOT more ranty thoughts here about the nature of change, but I do want to note quickly how the cycle of Romantic poetry may register a past inability to change in historical consciousness, and link the French Revolution to that in Tahrir as well. With the French Revolution, for example, the country went from an idealistic, screaming freedom to the sudden blood-drenched Terror to Napoleon's reign. Rebecca Comay reads Hegel as interpreting France's revolution as failing as such because it never went through a spiritual revolution; the political and social forms changed, but the internal forms did not. What will happen with Tahrir Square? Will we have a similar problem of a revolution without a heart, or a heart without a revolution?
Indeed, I think of the first stanza as I walk through Harvard Square sometimes, perhaps because it looks something like London, and perhaps because that particular square, out of many in the city, brings together the most powerful and the most bereft. It punctures the divisions established around each and instead reveals the mind-forged manacles at play in each. The ennui and pain of the bourgeoisie, the hunger and addiction of the homeless... And in this strange time warp, still nothing changes in the world. Nothing, nothing changes in all the world...
Tuesday, April 17, 2012
Poem of the Week 4/18/2012: A Green Crab's Shell
A Green Crab's Shell
Not, exactly, green:
closer to bronze
preserved in kind brine,
something retrieved
from a Greco-Roman wreck,
patinated and oddly
muscular. We cannot
know what his fantastic
legs were like--
though evidence
suggests eight
complexly folded
scuttling works
of armament, crowned
by the foreclaws'
gesture of menace
and power. A gull's
gobbled the center,
leaving this chamber
--size of a demitasse--
open to reveal
a shocking, Giotto blue.
Though it smells
of seaweed and ruin,
this little traveling case
comes with such lavish lining!
Imagine breathing
surrounded by
the brilliant rinse
of summer's firmament.
What color is
the underside of skin?
Not so bad, to die,
if we could be opened
into this--
if the smallest chambers
of ourselves,
similarly,
revealed some sky.
Mark Doty 1993
One of my very favorite poems, Doty offers us an artifact so delicate that it ends up encompassing the vast sky, the ruins of the ages, a traveling case, and the firmament...
Not, exactly, green:
closer to bronze
preserved in kind brine,
something retrieved
from a Greco-Roman wreck,
patinated and oddly
muscular. We cannot
know what his fantastic
legs were like--
though evidence
suggests eight
complexly folded
scuttling works
of armament, crowned
by the foreclaws'
gesture of menace
and power. A gull's
gobbled the center,
leaving this chamber
--size of a demitasse--
open to reveal
a shocking, Giotto blue.
Though it smells
of seaweed and ruin,
this little traveling case
comes with such lavish lining!
Imagine breathing
surrounded by
the brilliant rinse
of summer's firmament.
What color is
the underside of skin?
Not so bad, to die,
if we could be opened
into this--
if the smallest chambers
of ourselves,
similarly,
revealed some sky.
Mark Doty 1993
One of my very favorite poems, Doty offers us an artifact so delicate that it ends up encompassing the vast sky, the ruins of the ages, a traveling case, and the firmament...
Sunday, April 08, 2012
Poem of the Week 4/8/2012: England in 1819
Sonnet: England in 1819
An old, mad, blind, despised, and dying king,--
Princes, the dregs of their dull race, who
Through public scorn,--mud from a muddy spring,--
Rulers who neither see, nor feel, nor know,
But leech-like to their fainting country cling,
Till they drop, blind in blood, without a blow,--
A people starved and stabbed in the untilled field,--
An army, which liberticide and prey
Makes as a two-edged sword to all who wield,--
Golden and sanguine laws which tempt and slay;
Religion Christless, Godless--a book sealed;
A Senate, Time's worst statute unrepealed,--
Are graves, from which a glorious Phantom may
Burst, to illumine our tempestuous day.
Percy Bysshe Shelley 1819
Who knew Shelley was such a radical? Such a revolutionary? (aren't poets supposed to be dusty and locked in books these days?) Probably most Shelley scholars could have told one otherwise, and many casual readers, but I constantly find his vigor surprising. One can feel breathing through the poem the spirit of revolution, the true and vital political longing for change, as keen as many feel now. Indeed, it mimics that breath he hopes comes out of the "graveyard" of politics; he once said that "poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world," and in this case he may be legislating, in a way.
A bit of background - as Shelley is writing this poem, George III, the king of England, has literally been mad since 1810. This madness was the final stroke of a reign than spanned the American Independence (losing the Americas), the French Revolution and the subsequent Terror under Robespierre, and finally wars against Napoleon for more than a decade.
Just a few suggestions of a very few things to pay attention to in this poem: Shelley's diction - (listen to the consonants in the opening line), to his syntax (try to figure out the sentence) - I must leave it to this very scant reading, perhaps to be returned to at a later date.
Good evening, viva la revolucion!
An old, mad, blind, despised, and dying king,--
Princes, the dregs of their dull race, who
Through public scorn,--mud from a muddy spring,--
Rulers who neither see, nor feel, nor know,
But leech-like to their fainting country cling,
Till they drop, blind in blood, without a blow,--
A people starved and stabbed in the untilled field,--
An army, which liberticide and prey
Makes as a two-edged sword to all who wield,--
Golden and sanguine laws which tempt and slay;
Religion Christless, Godless--a book sealed;
A Senate, Time's worst statute unrepealed,--
Are graves, from which a glorious Phantom may
Burst, to illumine our tempestuous day.
Percy Bysshe Shelley 1819
Who knew Shelley was such a radical? Such a revolutionary? (aren't poets supposed to be dusty and locked in books these days?) Probably most Shelley scholars could have told one otherwise, and many casual readers, but I constantly find his vigor surprising. One can feel breathing through the poem the spirit of revolution, the true and vital political longing for change, as keen as many feel now. Indeed, it mimics that breath he hopes comes out of the "graveyard" of politics; he once said that "poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world," and in this case he may be legislating, in a way.
A bit of background - as Shelley is writing this poem, George III, the king of England, has literally been mad since 1810. This madness was the final stroke of a reign than spanned the American Independence (losing the Americas), the French Revolution and the subsequent Terror under Robespierre, and finally wars against Napoleon for more than a decade.
Just a few suggestions of a very few things to pay attention to in this poem: Shelley's diction - (listen to the consonants in the opening line), to his syntax (try to figure out the sentence) - I must leave it to this very scant reading, perhaps to be returned to at a later date.
Good evening, viva la revolucion!
Wednesday, March 21, 2012
Poem of the Week 3/21/2012: Having a Coke With You
Having a Coke with You
is even more fun than going to San Sebastian, Irún, Hendaye, Biarritz, Bayonne
or being sick to my stomach on the Travesera de Gracia in Barcelona
partly because in your orange shirt you look like a better happier St. Sebastian
partly because of my love for you, partly because of your love for yoghurt
partly because of the fluorescent orange tulips around the birches
partly because of the secrecy our smiles take on before people and statuary
it is hard to believe when I’m with you that there can be anything as still
as solemn as unpleasantly definitive as statuary when right in front of it
in the warm New York 4 o’clock light we are drifting back and forth
between each other like a tree breathing through its spectacles
and the portrait show seems to have no faces in it at all, just paint
you suddenly wonder why in the world anyone ever did them
I look
at you and I would rather look at you than all the portraits in the world
except possibly for the Polish Rider occasionally and anyway it’s in the Frick
which thank heavens you haven’t gone to yet so we can go together the first time
and the fact that you move so beautifully more or less takes care of Futurism
just as at home I never think of the Nude Descending a Staircase or
at a rehearsal a single drawing of Leonardo or Michelangelo that used to wow me
and what good does all the research of the Impressionists do them
when they never got the right person to stand near the tree when the sun sank
or for that matter Marino Marini when he didn’t pick the rider as carefully
as the horse
it seems they were all cheated of some marvelous experience
which is not going to go wasted on me which is why I am telling you about it
Frank O’Hara
This may be one of the sweetest love poems of all modern time; simple and direct and flowing, it offers a particular picture of delight that seems just right to share during the heat and sweat of an early warm spell in Cambridge MA. It showed up in some readings in a class about queer theory - it's optimism, Jose Munoz argues, is what ought to be offered by being "queer," which is, I read, anything beyond the box of the normal, the habitual, the quotidien dull round... What is explosive and fresh! What snaps us into full and vibrant attention, flowing to that delicious other, and the world and possibilities expand; this is, he argues, the leaning in of Utopia, the faintest glimmer and promise. One should just as much say that these glimmerings light up life, make meaning, may be the revolution themselves.
Of course, there are the references to the meaning of art and beauty, the question of a lived and felt experience over that of the work of art, the way the work of art is itself propagated (Elaine Scarry writes that beauty begets beauty, a clicking brook of associations from one act of beauty to another - "this is why I am telling you about it," writes O'Hara), and these are also worth noting. And the poem takes up the great modern project of voicing the everyman, incarnated essentially by Wordsworth back in the day... Offering, alongside, another system of values - to seize the everyday! To live by loving every delicious detail of what is there - tulips and trees and coca cola and lover... Happy hot spring boston and beyond!
is even more fun than going to San Sebastian, Irún, Hendaye, Biarritz, Bayonne
or being sick to my stomach on the Travesera de Gracia in Barcelona
partly because in your orange shirt you look like a better happier St. Sebastian
partly because of my love for you, partly because of your love for yoghurt
partly because of the fluorescent orange tulips around the birches
partly because of the secrecy our smiles take on before people and statuary
it is hard to believe when I’m with you that there can be anything as still
as solemn as unpleasantly definitive as statuary when right in front of it
in the warm New York 4 o’clock light we are drifting back and forth
between each other like a tree breathing through its spectacles
and the portrait show seems to have no faces in it at all, just paint
you suddenly wonder why in the world anyone ever did them
I look
at you and I would rather look at you than all the portraits in the world
except possibly for the Polish Rider occasionally and anyway it’s in the Frick
which thank heavens you haven’t gone to yet so we can go together the first time
and the fact that you move so beautifully more or less takes care of Futurism
just as at home I never think of the Nude Descending a Staircase or
at a rehearsal a single drawing of Leonardo or Michelangelo that used to wow me
and what good does all the research of the Impressionists do them
when they never got the right person to stand near the tree when the sun sank
or for that matter Marino Marini when he didn’t pick the rider as carefully
as the horse
it seems they were all cheated of some marvelous experience
which is not going to go wasted on me which is why I am telling you about it
Frank O’Hara
This may be one of the sweetest love poems of all modern time; simple and direct and flowing, it offers a particular picture of delight that seems just right to share during the heat and sweat of an early warm spell in Cambridge MA. It showed up in some readings in a class about queer theory - it's optimism, Jose Munoz argues, is what ought to be offered by being "queer," which is, I read, anything beyond the box of the normal, the habitual, the quotidien dull round... What is explosive and fresh! What snaps us into full and vibrant attention, flowing to that delicious other, and the world and possibilities expand; this is, he argues, the leaning in of Utopia, the faintest glimmer and promise. One should just as much say that these glimmerings light up life, make meaning, may be the revolution themselves.
Of course, there are the references to the meaning of art and beauty, the question of a lived and felt experience over that of the work of art, the way the work of art is itself propagated (Elaine Scarry writes that beauty begets beauty, a clicking brook of associations from one act of beauty to another - "this is why I am telling you about it," writes O'Hara), and these are also worth noting. And the poem takes up the great modern project of voicing the everyman, incarnated essentially by Wordsworth back in the day... Offering, alongside, another system of values - to seize the everyday! To live by loving every delicious detail of what is there - tulips and trees and coca cola and lover... Happy hot spring boston and beyond!
Thursday, March 15, 2012
Poem of the Week 3/15/2012: God's Grandeur
God's Grandeur
THE WORLD is charged with the grandeur of God.
It will flame out, like shining from shook foil; *
It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil **
Crushed. Why do men then now not reck his rod?***
Generations have trod, have trod, have trod;
And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil;
And wears man’s smudge and shares man’s smell: the soil
Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.
And for all this, nature is never spent;
There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;
And though the last lights off the black West went
Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs—
Because the Holy Ghost over the bent *
World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.
Gerard Manley Hopkins
* "All things therefore are charged with love, are charged with God and if we know how to touch them give off sparks and take fire, yield drops and flow, ring and tell of him." The Sermons and Devotional Writings of Gerard Manley Hopkins
** ll. 3, "oil." Crushed from olives. An early version read: 'like an oozing oil / pressed."
*** "Reck" means to pay heed to, to attend to.
* ll. 13-14. See Genesis 1:2 and Milton, Paradise Lost, i. 19-22. GMH also observed the manner in which the sea 'warped to the round of the world' in his journals.
Genesis 1:2, KJV - "And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters."
Paradise Lost, 1. 16-26:
And chiefly Thou O Spirit, that dost prefer
Before all Temples th' upright heart and pure,
Instruct me, for Thou know'st; Thou from the first
Wast present, and with mighty wings outspread [ 20 ]
Dove-like satst brooding on the vast Abyss
And mad'st it pregnant: What in me is dark
Illumin, what is low raise and support;
That to the highth of this great Argument
I may assert Eternal Providence, [ 25 ]
And justifie the wayes of God to men.
One thing I find absolutely remarkable about this poem is the manner in which Hopkins blends the humble lyric with the Biblical and epic traditions - he brings a vast theology into earth, neither sacrificing the symbol of the dove, the olive, the Holy Ghost, or the genesis of all things, nor the humble things of the world in his poem - shook foil, a feathery wing, an olive.
It's fairly clear that the poem proceeds in three parts - the first two in the first stanza, and the last in the last.
To open, Hopkins clearly likens God to an electric charge - god is in everything, like some kind of static if only we reach out, that charge could enter us, give us a Zap. I suppose this is, in a way, radical, at least to blunt conceptions of God as other from this earth, an absolute being unknowable and who, perhaps, lives in heaven. This God, instead, is a force, the electricity shining from a beast's fur (Rilke), the static in your sock (there's a poem about this... whose name escapes me), the heat lightning in the distance, a shock, a shock, any shock!
About this holy fire, Hopkins offers both a prediction, "it will flame out," and a condition for it, as the glory of God, "Gathers to greatness." We can feel the energy in these statements, in their directness, their prophetic voice, and in the complex construction of the first three lines. They are each two pieces, in a way; the first line contains an internal slant rhyme between "charged" and "God," offering the drum beat, as well, of the D and G sounds that mark these first three lines. Lines 2-4, then, start the poem's beat with consonant-heavy, pounding, rhyming couplet, each split into two.
Hopkins does not let us rest, however; he stops us abruptly with the enjambment from "ooze of oil / Crushed," and then the question composed of single syllable words, "Why do men then now not reck his rod?" (ll. 4). This line taps out a new subject for the poem and announcing its next section - what has gone wrong, and why people aren't constantly struck by this grandeur. Moreover, the ambiguity of the antecedent for "his," it could be God or man, raise the question of whose self or piece of self really allows access to the divine. Does man have the rod - and we are abandoning ourselves? Is it the lightning rod of the Almighty? Perhaps the ambiguity actually signals that it is both, and the slippage between the antecedents is truly the best way of encapsulating the paradox of the touch between man and God - it is neither one nor the other - when this rod is activated, perhaps typical conceptions and sensations of self dissolve, and the categories slip from human to divine, charged with grandeur and glory.
Perhaps the following lines, however, make the case that this rod ought more properly be divine, since the world, when smeared with man, and smelling of him, prevents the holy from shining through us, "like shook foil."Indeed, perhaps modernity - the shoe, economy, getting and spending (wordsworth) - now protects us from these shocks, so that we no longer feel that cosmic electricity, of an energy but half our own... Hopkins, as ever, supports his statements with charged language - the repeated sssss sounds hiss with disdain, and the rhymes replace the holy with the fallen - "soil" and "toil" replace the divine metaphor of "oil," and "shod" and "trod" replace, of course, "God."
And yet, Hopkins almost cheerfully adds (perhaps one hallmark of disdain is the freedom it suggests from the thing disdained - it is below one, and the narrator of the poem, then, is above the soil and toil of commerce and materialism...), "for all this, nature is never spent; / There lives the dearest freshness deep down things" (ll. 9). Despite smears, the world is ever fresh; he expands this idea in a complex metaphor to close the poem. The metaphor is one of the sun coming up over "the brown brink eastward," but this metaphor is far vaster than we might think. God is presented as the Sun, but also as the Holy Ghost leaning over the deep (as the notes say, connoting Genesis and also Milton, bringing the weight of epic poetic memory to the poem, stirring the pots of feeling in hearts using beloved and old works from which the glory of God shines forth). And this ghost is similarly a dove, a natural symbol, an angelic symbol, the dove rescuing Noah from his time asea... Hopkins' image brings rising behind it a chorus of associations from sacred and poetic texts from thousands of years, a chorus of angels rising behind it - his poem thus mirrors the glory of God shining forth as from shook foil, the charge that rests in all things - the freshness and innocence and deep, childlike love for the divine, and the lightningshock of delight one feels upon reading it.
THE WORLD is charged with the grandeur of God.
It will flame out, like shining from shook foil; *
It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil **
Crushed. Why do men then now not reck his rod?***
Generations have trod, have trod, have trod;
And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil;
And wears man’s smudge and shares man’s smell: the soil
Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.
And for all this, nature is never spent;
There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;
And though the last lights off the black West went
Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs—
Because the Holy Ghost over the bent *
World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.
Gerard Manley Hopkins
* "All things therefore are charged with love, are charged with God and if we know how to touch them give off sparks and take fire, yield drops and flow, ring and tell of him." The Sermons and Devotional Writings of Gerard Manley Hopkins
** ll. 3, "oil." Crushed from olives. An early version read: 'like an oozing oil / pressed."
*** "Reck" means to pay heed to, to attend to.
* ll. 13-14. See Genesis 1:2 and Milton, Paradise Lost, i. 19-22. GMH also observed the manner in which the sea 'warped to the round of the world' in his journals.
Genesis 1:2, KJV - "And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters."
Paradise Lost, 1. 16-26:
And chiefly Thou O Spirit, that dost prefer
Before all Temples th' upright heart and pure,
Instruct me, for Thou know'st; Thou from the first
Wast present, and with mighty wings outspread [ 20 ]
Dove-like satst brooding on the vast Abyss
And mad'st it pregnant: What in me is dark
Illumin, what is low raise and support;
That to the highth of this great Argument
I may assert Eternal Providence, [ 25 ]
And justifie the wayes of God to men.
One thing I find absolutely remarkable about this poem is the manner in which Hopkins blends the humble lyric with the Biblical and epic traditions - he brings a vast theology into earth, neither sacrificing the symbol of the dove, the olive, the Holy Ghost, or the genesis of all things, nor the humble things of the world in his poem - shook foil, a feathery wing, an olive.
It's fairly clear that the poem proceeds in three parts - the first two in the first stanza, and the last in the last.
To open, Hopkins clearly likens God to an electric charge - god is in everything, like some kind of static if only we reach out, that charge could enter us, give us a Zap. I suppose this is, in a way, radical, at least to blunt conceptions of God as other from this earth, an absolute being unknowable and who, perhaps, lives in heaven. This God, instead, is a force, the electricity shining from a beast's fur (Rilke), the static in your sock (there's a poem about this... whose name escapes me), the heat lightning in the distance, a shock, a shock, any shock!
About this holy fire, Hopkins offers both a prediction, "it will flame out," and a condition for it, as the glory of God, "Gathers to greatness." We can feel the energy in these statements, in their directness, their prophetic voice, and in the complex construction of the first three lines. They are each two pieces, in a way; the first line contains an internal slant rhyme between "charged" and "God," offering the drum beat, as well, of the D and G sounds that mark these first three lines. Lines 2-4, then, start the poem's beat with consonant-heavy, pounding, rhyming couplet, each split into two.
Hopkins does not let us rest, however; he stops us abruptly with the enjambment from "ooze of oil / Crushed," and then the question composed of single syllable words, "Why do men then now not reck his rod?" (ll. 4). This line taps out a new subject for the poem and announcing its next section - what has gone wrong, and why people aren't constantly struck by this grandeur. Moreover, the ambiguity of the antecedent for "his," it could be God or man, raise the question of whose self or piece of self really allows access to the divine. Does man have the rod - and we are abandoning ourselves? Is it the lightning rod of the Almighty? Perhaps the ambiguity actually signals that it is both, and the slippage between the antecedents is truly the best way of encapsulating the paradox of the touch between man and God - it is neither one nor the other - when this rod is activated, perhaps typical conceptions and sensations of self dissolve, and the categories slip from human to divine, charged with grandeur and glory.
Perhaps the following lines, however, make the case that this rod ought more properly be divine, since the world, when smeared with man, and smelling of him, prevents the holy from shining through us, "like shook foil."Indeed, perhaps modernity - the shoe, economy, getting and spending (wordsworth) - now protects us from these shocks, so that we no longer feel that cosmic electricity, of an energy but half our own... Hopkins, as ever, supports his statements with charged language - the repeated sssss sounds hiss with disdain, and the rhymes replace the holy with the fallen - "soil" and "toil" replace the divine metaphor of "oil," and "shod" and "trod" replace, of course, "God."
And yet, Hopkins almost cheerfully adds (perhaps one hallmark of disdain is the freedom it suggests from the thing disdained - it is below one, and the narrator of the poem, then, is above the soil and toil of commerce and materialism...), "for all this, nature is never spent; / There lives the dearest freshness deep down things" (ll. 9). Despite smears, the world is ever fresh; he expands this idea in a complex metaphor to close the poem. The metaphor is one of the sun coming up over "the brown brink eastward," but this metaphor is far vaster than we might think. God is presented as the Sun, but also as the Holy Ghost leaning over the deep (as the notes say, connoting Genesis and also Milton, bringing the weight of epic poetic memory to the poem, stirring the pots of feeling in hearts using beloved and old works from which the glory of God shines forth). And this ghost is similarly a dove, a natural symbol, an angelic symbol, the dove rescuing Noah from his time asea... Hopkins' image brings rising behind it a chorus of associations from sacred and poetic texts from thousands of years, a chorus of angels rising behind it - his poem thus mirrors the glory of God shining forth as from shook foil, the charge that rests in all things - the freshness and innocence and deep, childlike love for the divine, and the lightningshock of delight one feels upon reading it.
Tuesday, March 06, 2012
Poem of the Week 3/6/2012: from Romeo and Juliet
MERCUTIO:
O, then I see Queen Mab hath been with you.
She is the fairies' midwife, and she comes
In shape no bigger than an agate stone
On the forefinger of an alderman,
Drawn with a team of little atomies
Over men's noses as they lie asleep;
Her wagon spokes made of long spinners' legs,
The cover, of the wings of grasshoppers;
Her traces, of the smallest spider web;
Her collars, of the moonshine's wat'ry beams;
Her whip, of cricket's bone; the lash, of film;
Her wagoner, a small grey-coated gnat,
Not half so big as a round little worm
Pricked from the lazy finger of a maid;
Her chariot is an empty hazelnut,
Made by the joiner squirrel or old grub,
Time out o' mind the fairies' coachmakers.
And in this state she gallops night by night
Through lovers' brains, and then they dream of love;
O'er courtiers' knees, that dream on curtsies straight;
O'er lawyers' fingers, who straight dream on fees;
O'er ladies' lips, who straight on kisses dream,
Which oft the angry Mab with blisters plagues,
Because their breaths with sweetmeats tainted are.
Sometimes she gallops o'er a courtier's nose,
And then dreams he of smelling out a suit;
And sometimes comes she with a tithe-pig's tail
Tickling a parson's nose as 'a lies asleep,
Then dreams he of another benefice.
Sometimes she driveth o'er a soldier's neck,
And then dreams he of cutting foreign throats,
Of breaches, ambuscadoes, Spanish blades,
Of healths five fathom deep; and then anon
Drums in his ear, at which he starts and wakes,
And being thus frighted, swears a prayer or two
And sleeps again. This is that very Mab
That plats the manes of horses in the night
And bakes the elflocks in foul sluttish hairs,
Which once untangled much misfortune bodes.
This is the hag, when maids lie on their backs,
That presses them and learns them first to bear,
Making them women of good carriage.
This is she!
William Shakespeare from Romeo and Juliet
A few fundamental puzzles for this passage -
Who is Queen Mab and what does she represent? (She is a midwife for faeries, or at least so says Mercutio. She does not actually seem to give birth to anything in the poem... so is this her primary role?)
Is she just some mischievous character or fantastic being? Does she have a psychological function? What does she reveal about the people that she encounters? Is she good for them or bad for them?
And why this prolonged discussion of her chariot in the beginning - does it have a function, or is it mere decoration? Does it matter that she's small?
O, then I see Queen Mab hath been with you.
She is the fairies' midwife, and she comes
In shape no bigger than an agate stone
On the forefinger of an alderman,
Drawn with a team of little atomies
Over men's noses as they lie asleep;
Her wagon spokes made of long spinners' legs,
The cover, of the wings of grasshoppers;
Her traces, of the smallest spider web;
Her collars, of the moonshine's wat'ry beams;
Her whip, of cricket's bone; the lash, of film;
Her wagoner, a small grey-coated gnat,
Not half so big as a round little worm
Pricked from the lazy finger of a maid;
Her chariot is an empty hazelnut,
Made by the joiner squirrel or old grub,
Time out o' mind the fairies' coachmakers.
And in this state she gallops night by night
Through lovers' brains, and then they dream of love;
O'er courtiers' knees, that dream on curtsies straight;
O'er lawyers' fingers, who straight dream on fees;
O'er ladies' lips, who straight on kisses dream,
Which oft the angry Mab with blisters plagues,
Because their breaths with sweetmeats tainted are.
Sometimes she gallops o'er a courtier's nose,
And then dreams he of smelling out a suit;
And sometimes comes she with a tithe-pig's tail
Tickling a parson's nose as 'a lies asleep,
Then dreams he of another benefice.
Sometimes she driveth o'er a soldier's neck,
And then dreams he of cutting foreign throats,
Of breaches, ambuscadoes, Spanish blades,
Of healths five fathom deep; and then anon
Drums in his ear, at which he starts and wakes,
And being thus frighted, swears a prayer or two
And sleeps again. This is that very Mab
That plats the manes of horses in the night
And bakes the elflocks in foul sluttish hairs,
Which once untangled much misfortune bodes.
This is the hag, when maids lie on their backs,
That presses them and learns them first to bear,
Making them women of good carriage.
This is she!
William Shakespeare from Romeo and Juliet
A few fundamental puzzles for this passage -
Who is Queen Mab and what does she represent? (She is a midwife for faeries, or at least so says Mercutio. She does not actually seem to give birth to anything in the poem... so is this her primary role?)
Is she just some mischievous character or fantastic being? Does she have a psychological function? What does she reveal about the people that she encounters? Is she good for them or bad for them?
And why this prolonged discussion of her chariot in the beginning - does it have a function, or is it mere decoration? Does it matter that she's small?
Wednesday, February 01, 2012
Poem of the Week 1/28/2012: No Possum, No Sop, No Tears
No Possum, No Sop, No Taters
He is not here, the old sun,
As absent as if we were asleep.
The field is frozen. The leaves are dry.
Bad is final in this light.
In this bleak air the broken stalks
Have arms without hands. They have trunks
Without legs or, for that, without heads.
They have heads in which a captive cry
Is merely the moving of a tongue.
Snow sparkles like eyesight falling to earth,
Like seeing fallen brightly away.
The leaves hop, scraping on the ground.
It is deep January. The sky is hard.
The stalks are firmly rooted in ice.
It is in this solitude, a syllable,
Out of these gawky flitterings,
Intones its single emptiness,
The savagest hollow of winter-sound.
It is here, in this bad, that we reach
The last purity of the knowledge of good.
The crow looks rusty as he rises up.
Bright is the malice in his eye...
One joins him there for company,
But at a distance, in another tree.
As absent as if we were asleep.
The field is frozen. The leaves are dry.
Bad is final in this light.
In this bleak air the broken stalks
Have arms without hands. They have trunks
Without legs or, for that, without heads.
They have heads in which a captive cry
Is merely the moving of a tongue.
Snow sparkles like eyesight falling to earth,
Like seeing fallen brightly away.
The leaves hop, scraping on the ground.
It is deep January. The sky is hard.
The stalks are firmly rooted in ice.
It is in this solitude, a syllable,
Out of these gawky flitterings,
Intones its single emptiness,
The savagest hollow of winter-sound.
It is here, in this bad, that we reach
The last purity of the knowledge of good.
The crow looks rusty as he rises up.
Bright is the malice in his eye...
One joins him there for company,
But at a distance, in another tree.
Wallace Stevens
This one's about winter.
This one's about winter.
Poem of the Week 1/22/2011: "Of Bronze - and Blaze"
319
Of Bronze -- and Blaze --
The North -- Tonight --
So adequate -- it forms --
So preconcerted with itself --
So distant -- to alarms --
An Unconcern so sovereign
To Universe, or me --
Infects my simple spirit
With Taints of Majesty --
Till I take vaster attitudes --
And strut upon my stem --
Disdaining Men, and Oxygen,
For Arrogance of them --
My Splendors, are Menagerie --
But their Completeless Show
Will entertain the Centuries
When I, am long ago,
An Island in dishonored Grass --
Whom none but Dasies -- know.
Emily Dickinson
Of Bronze -- and Blaze --
The North -- Tonight --
So adequate -- it forms --
So preconcerted with itself --
So distant -- to alarms --
An Unconcern so sovereign
To Universe, or me --
Infects my simple spirit
With Taints of Majesty --
Till I take vaster attitudes --
And strut upon my stem --
Disdaining Men, and Oxygen,
For Arrogance of them --
My Splendors, are Menagerie --
But their Completeless Show
Will entertain the Centuries
When I, am long ago,
An Island in dishonored Grass --
Whom none but Dasies -- know.
Emily Dickinson
Poem of the Week 1/15/2012: from Song of Myself
5
I believe in you my soul, the other I am must not abase itself to you,
And you must not be abased to the other.
I believe in you my soul, the other I am must not abase itself to you,
And you must not be abased to the other.
Loafe with me on the grass, loose the stop from your throat,
Not words, not music or rhyme I want, not custom or lecture, not even the best,
Only the lull I like, the hum of your valved voice.
Not words, not music or rhyme I want, not custom or lecture, not even the best,
Only the lull I like, the hum of your valved voice.
I mind how once we lay such a transparent summer morning,
How you settled your head athwart my hips and gently turn'd over upon me,
And parted the shirt from my bosom-bone, and plunged your tongue to my bare-stript heart,
And reach'd till you felt my beard, and reach'd till you held my feet.
How you settled your head athwart my hips and gently turn'd over upon me,
And parted the shirt from my bosom-bone, and plunged your tongue to my bare-stript heart,
And reach'd till you felt my beard, and reach'd till you held my feet.
Swiftly arose and spread around me the peace and knowledge that pass all the argument of the earth,
And I know that the hand of God is the promise of my own,
And I know that the spirit of God is the brother of my own,
And that all the men ever born are also my brothers, and the women my sisters and lovers,
And that a kelson of the creation is love,
And limitless are leaves stiff or drooping in the fields,
And brown ants in the little wells beneath them,
And mossy scabs of the worm fence, heap'd stones, elder, mullein and poke-weed.
And I know that the hand of God is the promise of my own,
And I know that the spirit of God is the brother of my own,
And that all the men ever born are also my brothers, and the women my sisters and lovers,
And that a kelson of the creation is love,
And limitless are leaves stiff or drooping in the fields,
And brown ants in the little wells beneath them,
And mossy scabs of the worm fence, heap'd stones, elder, mullein and poke-weed.
6
A child said What is the grass? fetching it to me with full hands;
How could I answer the child? I do not know what it is any more than he.
A child said What is the grass? fetching it to me with full hands;
How could I answer the child? I do not know what it is any more than he.
I guess it must be the flag of my disposition, out of hopeful green stuff woven.
Walt Whitman, from Leaves of Grass
Always worth a read.
Sunday, January 08, 2012
Poem of the Week 1/8/2011: Beyond the End
Beyond the End
In 'nature' there's no choice --
flowers
swing their heads in the wind, sun & moon
are as they are. But we seem
almost to have it (not just
available death)
It's energy: a spider's thread: not to
'go on living' but to quicken, to activate: extend:
Some have it, they force it --
with work or laughter or even
the act of buying, if that's
all they can lay hands on--
the girls crowding the stores, where light,
color, solid dreams are - what gay
desire! It's their festival,
ring game, wassail, mystery.
It has no grace like that of
the grass, the humble rhythms, the
falling & rising of leaf and star;
it's barely
a constant. Like salt:
take it or leave it
The 'hewers of wood' & so on; every damn
craftsman has it while he's working
but it's not
a question of work: some
shine with it, in repose. Maybe it is
response, the will to respond--('reason
can give nothing at all/like
response to desire') maybe
a gritting of teeth, to go
just that much further, beyond the end
beyond whatever ends: to begin, to be, to defy.
Denise Levertov
"Beyond the end" announces its subject right away: the matter of choice. Levertov does not present a cosmology or a model of the mind so much as an expansive call to action, to energy - exuberance is beauty, blake says, and this poem seems to say so as well. In her zeal to extend energy everywhere, the poet even includes girls shopping as an expression of will, some kind of old English wassail, festival.
The poem addresses the question: is there something that makes humans more than natural, more than flowers swaying to some stimulus, rooted and planted? Perhaps, she suggests, we should rather be as unattached as a spider flying on its thread, flinging ourselves into the blue. And then to refine that image, carry forward "the will to respond," a kind of readiness, or axis perhaps, that holds one together inside. Water pressure inside, the power of oceans concentrated, fiercely joyfully waiting.
In 'nature' there's no choice --
flowers
swing their heads in the wind, sun & moon
are as they are. But we seem
almost to have it (not just
available death)
It's energy: a spider's thread: not to
'go on living' but to quicken, to activate: extend:
Some have it, they force it --
with work or laughter or even
the act of buying, if that's
all they can lay hands on--
the girls crowding the stores, where light,
color, solid dreams are - what gay
desire! It's their festival,
ring game, wassail, mystery.
It has no grace like that of
the grass, the humble rhythms, the
falling & rising of leaf and star;
it's barely
a constant. Like salt:
take it or leave it
The 'hewers of wood' & so on; every damn
craftsman has it while he's working
but it's not
a question of work: some
shine with it, in repose. Maybe it is
response, the will to respond--('reason
can give nothing at all/like
response to desire') maybe
a gritting of teeth, to go
just that much further, beyond the end
beyond whatever ends: to begin, to be, to defy.
Denise Levertov
"Beyond the end" announces its subject right away: the matter of choice. Levertov does not present a cosmology or a model of the mind so much as an expansive call to action, to energy - exuberance is beauty, blake says, and this poem seems to say so as well. In her zeal to extend energy everywhere, the poet even includes girls shopping as an expression of will, some kind of old English wassail, festival.
The poem addresses the question: is there something that makes humans more than natural, more than flowers swaying to some stimulus, rooted and planted? Perhaps, she suggests, we should rather be as unattached as a spider flying on its thread, flinging ourselves into the blue. And then to refine that image, carry forward "the will to respond," a kind of readiness, or axis perhaps, that holds one together inside. Water pressure inside, the power of oceans concentrated, fiercely joyfully waiting.
Friday, December 30, 2011
Poem of the Week 12/30/2011: Carmel Point
Carmel Point
The extraordinary patience of things!
This beautiful place defaced with a crop of suburban houses—
How beautiful when we first beheld it,
Unbroken field of poppy and lupin walled with clean cliffs;
No intrusion but two or three horses pasturing,
Or a few milch cows rubbing their flanks on the outcrop rock-heads—
Now the spoiler has come: does it care?
Not faintly. It has all time. It knows the people are a tide
That swells and in time will ebb, and all
Their works dissolve. Meanwhile the image of the pristine beauty
Lives in the very grain of the granite,
Safe as the endless ocean that climbs our cliff.—As for us:
We must uncenter our minds from ourselves;
We must unhumanize our views a little, and become confident
As the rock and ocean that we were made from.
Robinson Jeffers
Jeffers presents us with a poem that at once divides and unifies man and nature; man no longer realizes his connections with the greater world, which is patient and unyieldingly calm, permanent, confident. Thus the poet interlaces a conception of reality that does not exclude human beings; it is rather a place to which at some point we ought to return.
Man and nature's common essence (one way to speak of their unity?) is apparent in the first few lines. If things are patient, that is a human category - they exhibit a benevolent human trait, something we humans often cannot reach or touch. Then, man and nature seem to take the other's character in the line, "This beautiful place defaced with a crop of suburban houses." Nature is "de-faced," or in a way dehumanized, while humans are a "crop," some kind of planted, temporary field of natural products on their way to being born.
Jeffers effortlessly carries us through a narrative - asking the readers to imagine this pace at first glance from man - a field of poppies and lupin, only a few larger beings making their small mark - horses and cows. This is what we besmirched, cut up with our concrete boxes... but nature, he offers, is unperturbed. Unperturbed because it is so permanent as to be living "in the very grain of the granite, / safe as the endless ocean that climbs our cliff." It is patient and compassionate, nearly, which we can pick up in the gentle tone in the lines about man and the tides. Nature, like a mother or some much greater figure, sees the truth in our works, which is that they are again not separate from her - these works eventually dissolve like everything else, and so man's childish disruption of nature's beauty is no different than a barnacle on a rock.
Indeed, this is in part a statement about reality - the way of things is to be safe, unthreatened, unhurried, and pristine. What is is beautiful, still, even as it is in motion, from the grazing cows to crashing waves to the sudden growth of a suburban "crop."
This regard perhaps provides the impetus for the final section, wherein the speaker recommends a new orientation, a new way for us to be - "We must uncenter our minds from ourselves; / We must unhumanize our views a little, and become confident / As the rock and ocean that we were made from."Human views, it seems, are anxious and quick, whereas nature's vaster view is solid, eternal, confident, firm, strong. In dehumanizing and uncentering from ourselves, we may discover that we are and embody the patience of the rocks, the great geologic beauty of a granite cliff. "Carmel Point" calls for us to understand this, to see the way of things, their patience, and to remember again that it is, ultimately, ourselves and not ourselves that we are seeing - because, perhaps, we simultaneously are and are not.
An afterthought: I recommend reading Robinson Jeffers after some time spent at the California coast - nothing puts his words into better perspective than to see this view oneself, smell the air, hear the crashing and stillness. Indeed, important to know about Jeffers is that he built himself a house out of stones, "Tor House," near Carmel, and lived on the beach alone for many years. A vision of starry, wonderful vastness!
Happy new year all!
The extraordinary patience of things!
This beautiful place defaced with a crop of suburban houses—
How beautiful when we first beheld it,
Unbroken field of poppy and lupin walled with clean cliffs;
No intrusion but two or three horses pasturing,
Or a few milch cows rubbing their flanks on the outcrop rock-heads—
Now the spoiler has come: does it care?
Not faintly. It has all time. It knows the people are a tide
That swells and in time will ebb, and all
Their works dissolve. Meanwhile the image of the pristine beauty
Lives in the very grain of the granite,
Safe as the endless ocean that climbs our cliff.—As for us:
We must uncenter our minds from ourselves;
We must unhumanize our views a little, and become confident
As the rock and ocean that we were made from.
Robinson Jeffers
Jeffers presents us with a poem that at once divides and unifies man and nature; man no longer realizes his connections with the greater world, which is patient and unyieldingly calm, permanent, confident. Thus the poet interlaces a conception of reality that does not exclude human beings; it is rather a place to which at some point we ought to return.
Man and nature's common essence (one way to speak of their unity?) is apparent in the first few lines. If things are patient, that is a human category - they exhibit a benevolent human trait, something we humans often cannot reach or touch. Then, man and nature seem to take the other's character in the line, "This beautiful place defaced with a crop of suburban houses." Nature is "de-faced," or in a way dehumanized, while humans are a "crop," some kind of planted, temporary field of natural products on their way to being born.
Jeffers effortlessly carries us through a narrative - asking the readers to imagine this pace at first glance from man - a field of poppies and lupin, only a few larger beings making their small mark - horses and cows. This is what we besmirched, cut up with our concrete boxes... but nature, he offers, is unperturbed. Unperturbed because it is so permanent as to be living "in the very grain of the granite, / safe as the endless ocean that climbs our cliff." It is patient and compassionate, nearly, which we can pick up in the gentle tone in the lines about man and the tides. Nature, like a mother or some much greater figure, sees the truth in our works, which is that they are again not separate from her - these works eventually dissolve like everything else, and so man's childish disruption of nature's beauty is no different than a barnacle on a rock.
Indeed, this is in part a statement about reality - the way of things is to be safe, unthreatened, unhurried, and pristine. What is is beautiful, still, even as it is in motion, from the grazing cows to crashing waves to the sudden growth of a suburban "crop."
This regard perhaps provides the impetus for the final section, wherein the speaker recommends a new orientation, a new way for us to be - "We must uncenter our minds from ourselves; / We must unhumanize our views a little, and become confident / As the rock and ocean that we were made from."Human views, it seems, are anxious and quick, whereas nature's vaster view is solid, eternal, confident, firm, strong. In dehumanizing and uncentering from ourselves, we may discover that we are and embody the patience of the rocks, the great geologic beauty of a granite cliff. "Carmel Point" calls for us to understand this, to see the way of things, their patience, and to remember again that it is, ultimately, ourselves and not ourselves that we are seeing - because, perhaps, we simultaneously are and are not.
An afterthought: I recommend reading Robinson Jeffers after some time spent at the California coast - nothing puts his words into better perspective than to see this view oneself, smell the air, hear the crashing and stillness. Indeed, important to know about Jeffers is that he built himself a house out of stones, "Tor House," near Carmel, and lived on the beach alone for many years. A vision of starry, wonderful vastness!
Happy new year all!
Thursday, December 22, 2011
Poem of the Week 12/22/2011: High Windows
High Windows
When I see a couple of kids
And guess he’s fucking her and she’s
Taking pills or wearing a diaphragm,
I know this is paradise
Everyone old has dreamed of all their lives—
Bonds and gestures pushed to one side
Like an outdated combine harvester,
And everyone young going down the long slide
To happiness, endlessly. I wonder if
Anyone looked at me, forty years back,
And thought, That’ll be the life;
No God any more, or sweating in the dark
About hell and that, or having to hide
What you think of the priest. He
And his lot will all go down the long slide
Like free bloody birds. And immediately
Rather than words comes the thought of high windows:
The sun-comprehending glass,
And beyond it, the deep blue air, that shows
Nothing, and is nowhere, and is endless.
Philip Larkin
Larkin always seems to leave a sort of ambiguity in his poetry, and in this one it has to do, perhaps, with the viewpoint. Whose thoughts are those at the end? Is it the speaker - the grumpy sort of a-religious, modern man? Or is it the person contemplating a Godless future, without any of the worries from Christianity who then remembers the subtlety and vastness of that experience? Indeed, Larkin presents two versions of paradise - the modern and materialist version, against, the quiet experience of vastness the final stanza suggests.
This stanza, after all, in a way suggests Adam and Eve in the garden, but instead of wearing fig leaves she wears a diaphragm, and sex is regarded not sinfully but practically - as something that can be done so long as nobody is pregnant. Also in counterpoint to Christianity seems to be the "long slide / to happiness;" it brings up images of Jacob's ladder to heaven, perhaps, or the great chain of being. Larkin offers us the endless slide of youthful... delight? debauchery?
And then this perspective gets amplified by the italics in the third and fourth stanzas - picking up on how this new world has dropped "bonds and gestures.../ like an outdated combine harvester." This perspective resents the priests, confession, the worrying about an afterlife about which one can do very little, captured in the lines that are nearly spit out, "free bloody birds."
Suddenly, however, the poem ends with something utterly a-cultural and perhaps truly holy. This is rather surprising considering the resentment about cultural bonds in the italics, but the blast of beauty, stillness, and openness offers a completely different theology, a paradise installed endlessly above the church windows. Indeed, even the height of this is probably symbolic, given that the rest of the poem has been earthy and grounded, from the images of the bed to the slide towards happiness to the "bloody birds" (priests) that are falling to the ground. The high windows show a level that is above all of these cultural concerns, debauchery, and worries - a God not tied to any of the cultural forms that show, tell, do, act, oppress, or "free." This God "shows / Nothing, and is nowhere, and is endless," an endlessness entirely different from the endless slide of pleasure posited in the early stanzas. A single moment and a few lines pierce the poem at its end!
When I see a couple of kids
And guess he’s fucking her and she’s
Taking pills or wearing a diaphragm,
I know this is paradise
Everyone old has dreamed of all their lives—
Bonds and gestures pushed to one side
Like an outdated combine harvester,
And everyone young going down the long slide
To happiness, endlessly. I wonder if
Anyone looked at me, forty years back,
And thought, That’ll be the life;
No God any more, or sweating in the dark
About hell and that, or having to hide
What you think of the priest. He
And his lot will all go down the long slide
Like free bloody birds. And immediately
Rather than words comes the thought of high windows:
The sun-comprehending glass,
And beyond it, the deep blue air, that shows
Nothing, and is nowhere, and is endless.
Philip Larkin
Larkin always seems to leave a sort of ambiguity in his poetry, and in this one it has to do, perhaps, with the viewpoint. Whose thoughts are those at the end? Is it the speaker - the grumpy sort of a-religious, modern man? Or is it the person contemplating a Godless future, without any of the worries from Christianity who then remembers the subtlety and vastness of that experience? Indeed, Larkin presents two versions of paradise - the modern and materialist version, against, the quiet experience of vastness the final stanza suggests.
This stanza, after all, in a way suggests Adam and Eve in the garden, but instead of wearing fig leaves she wears a diaphragm, and sex is regarded not sinfully but practically - as something that can be done so long as nobody is pregnant. Also in counterpoint to Christianity seems to be the "long slide / to happiness;" it brings up images of Jacob's ladder to heaven, perhaps, or the great chain of being. Larkin offers us the endless slide of youthful... delight? debauchery?
And then this perspective gets amplified by the italics in the third and fourth stanzas - picking up on how this new world has dropped "bonds and gestures.../ like an outdated combine harvester." This perspective resents the priests, confession, the worrying about an afterlife about which one can do very little, captured in the lines that are nearly spit out, "free bloody birds."
Suddenly, however, the poem ends with something utterly a-cultural and perhaps truly holy. This is rather surprising considering the resentment about cultural bonds in the italics, but the blast of beauty, stillness, and openness offers a completely different theology, a paradise installed endlessly above the church windows. Indeed, even the height of this is probably symbolic, given that the rest of the poem has been earthy and grounded, from the images of the bed to the slide towards happiness to the "bloody birds" (priests) that are falling to the ground. The high windows show a level that is above all of these cultural concerns, debauchery, and worries - a God not tied to any of the cultural forms that show, tell, do, act, oppress, or "free." This God "shows / Nothing, and is nowhere, and is endless," an endlessness entirely different from the endless slide of pleasure posited in the early stanzas. A single moment and a few lines pierce the poem at its end!
Wednesday, October 05, 2011
Poem of the Week 10/5/2011: Returning to My Cottage
Returning to My Cottage
A bell in the distance
the sound floats
down the valley
one by one
woodcutters and fisherman
stop work, start home
the mountains move off
into darkness
alone, I turn home
as great clouds beckon
from the horizon
the wind stirs delicate vines
and water chestnut shoots
catkin fluff sails past
in the marsh to the east
new growth
vibrates with color
it's sad
to walk in the house
and shut the door.
Wang Wei, trans. David Young
Written in the early T'ang Dynasty in China, Wang Wei's poem engages with and transcends the landscape genre in which it begins; ultimately, it leads its readers through its gorgeous metaphor for the difference between being related to the world and being self-enclosed.
Wei first manages to be incredibly specific, conjuring a distinct landscape using few and fewer words. It starts with a single bell's tone. This leads us into a valley where workers are heading home. Perhaps this specificity - the singluarity of the event - make it simpler to conjure distinct images, or a single world, in which these events are unfolding. Wang Wei establishes a sense of place, and love for that place.
We can notice the active subjects and verbs Wei offers. In this world, the sound floats, the mountains move, clouds beckon, wind stirs, growth vibrates... Wei's landscape is a living world, one where immense forces have a specific role, action, and effect. And since many of these forces (mountains, clouds, wind, growth) are somewhat universal in nature, they suggest a deeper set of forces moving through this world, or perhaps what Baudelaire might call correspondences. Our landscapes correspond with this one, they play as if in harmony.
So the meeting of particular and universal sets us up for the rich final stanza. Its events are simple. Our speaker is sad to leave this world for the indoors. Blur your eyes, and it looks like he's sad for leaving vast for the smaller - the larger world for a more closed one, a higher order for lower... And we can ponder what it means to be enclosed -- inside of a house with a shut door... To some extent this evokes a world of dead, still air; blur your eyes again and imagine enclosure within the self, where there are limits to what your breath can mingle with and you might encounter. Being in the house is solitary, closed off...
Rilke calls the more open world a world of possibility, and in Wei's expansive active landscape, it's the possibility and vastness of being related to something higher than oneself, or many things, a whole moving breathing landscape and world. What a sad one to leave when our minds are wrapped in thoughts.
I'm leaving it a bit vague at the end... hoping you'll read the poem several times and follow the trajectory and story Wei offers.
Until later, thanks for reading!
A bell in the distance
the sound floats
down the valley
one by one
woodcutters and fisherman
stop work, start home
the mountains move off
into darkness
alone, I turn home
as great clouds beckon
from the horizon
the wind stirs delicate vines
and water chestnut shoots
catkin fluff sails past
in the marsh to the east
new growth
vibrates with color
it's sad
to walk in the house
and shut the door.
Wang Wei, trans. David Young
Written in the early T'ang Dynasty in China, Wang Wei's poem engages with and transcends the landscape genre in which it begins; ultimately, it leads its readers through its gorgeous metaphor for the difference between being related to the world and being self-enclosed.
Wei first manages to be incredibly specific, conjuring a distinct landscape using few and fewer words. It starts with a single bell's tone. This leads us into a valley where workers are heading home. Perhaps this specificity - the singluarity of the event - make it simpler to conjure distinct images, or a single world, in which these events are unfolding. Wang Wei establishes a sense of place, and love for that place.
We can notice the active subjects and verbs Wei offers. In this world, the sound floats, the mountains move, clouds beckon, wind stirs, growth vibrates... Wei's landscape is a living world, one where immense forces have a specific role, action, and effect. And since many of these forces (mountains, clouds, wind, growth) are somewhat universal in nature, they suggest a deeper set of forces moving through this world, or perhaps what Baudelaire might call correspondences. Our landscapes correspond with this one, they play as if in harmony.
So the meeting of particular and universal sets us up for the rich final stanza. Its events are simple. Our speaker is sad to leave this world for the indoors. Blur your eyes, and it looks like he's sad for leaving vast for the smaller - the larger world for a more closed one, a higher order for lower... And we can ponder what it means to be enclosed -- inside of a house with a shut door... To some extent this evokes a world of dead, still air; blur your eyes again and imagine enclosure within the self, where there are limits to what your breath can mingle with and you might encounter. Being in the house is solitary, closed off...
Rilke calls the more open world a world of possibility, and in Wei's expansive active landscape, it's the possibility and vastness of being related to something higher than oneself, or many things, a whole moving breathing landscape and world. What a sad one to leave when our minds are wrapped in thoughts.
I'm leaving it a bit vague at the end... hoping you'll read the poem several times and follow the trajectory and story Wei offers.
Until later, thanks for reading!
Thursday, September 08, 2011
Poem of the Week 9/8/2011: Invitation to the Voyage
Invitation to the Voyage
My child, my sister,
Think of the rapture
Of living together there!
Of loving at will,
Of loving till death,
In the land that is like you!
The misty sunlight
Of those cloudy skies
Has for my spirit the charms,
So mysterious,
Of your treacherous eyes,
Shining brightly through their tears.
There all is order and beauty,
Luxury, peace, and pleasure.
Gleaming furniture,
Polished by the years,
Will ornament our bedroom;
The rarest flowers
Mingling their fragrance
With the faint scent of amber,
The ornate ceilings,
The limpid mirrors,
The oriental splendor,
All would whisper there
Secretly to the soul
In its soft, native language.
There all is order and beauty,
Luxury, peace, and pleasure.
See on the canals
Those vessels sleeping.
Their mood is adventurous;
It's to satisfy
Your slightest desire
That they come from the ends of the earth.
— The setting suns
Adorn the fields,
The canals, the whole city,
With hyacinth and gold;
The world falls asleep
In a warm glow of light.
There all is order and beauty,
Luxury, peace, and pleasure.
- Charles Baudelaire, trans. William Aggeler
Thanks many times to C for alerting me to this poem. It's a marvel of a work, something like a love poem but bursting with a greater love than just the erotic -- more like eros, from somebody who loves the world loving another. You see, the entire poem reads as seductive love poem, but the opening line, "My child, my sister," stages it so that we cannot simply read it as a romantic poem. Instead, it is a love like Whitman's, away from the grasping love of a person and towards a love that is meant to enliven the beloved, more objective, true, and vast!
What is this love? It is a love that is meant to bring the girl closer to what she is meant to be, as the first stanza announces. The speaker implores her to imagine the rapture that comes from living in a world that is like her, a land that matches her sensibility, is the right soil in which she can grow. It also draws out a world that exists for the living person -- expresses the sentiment that the world is here for human life, and that everything that is built reaches to us . This reflection is not egotistical, but hopefully grounded on earth, compassionately and exuberantly offering the things of this world to us, who see and live it.
Apparently it's based on some Claude Lorraine paintings of a ship-flecked, so there's an aesthetic joy in the poem as well; the poem is thus an eckphrastic poem, which is a poem based on a piece of art. Just goes to show an incredible ability to communicate and "read" that is outside the academy -- is translated by nothing but images, and then re-written (and re-translated into english) in a poem.
Thanks all for reading,
till later!
My child, my sister,
Think of the rapture
Of living together there!
Of loving at will,
Of loving till death,
In the land that is like you!
The misty sunlight
Of those cloudy skies
Has for my spirit the charms,
So mysterious,
Of your treacherous eyes,
Shining brightly through their tears.
There all is order and beauty,
Luxury, peace, and pleasure.
Gleaming furniture,
Polished by the years,
Will ornament our bedroom;
The rarest flowers
Mingling their fragrance
With the faint scent of amber,
The ornate ceilings,
The limpid mirrors,
The oriental splendor,
All would whisper there
Secretly to the soul
In its soft, native language.
There all is order and beauty,
Luxury, peace, and pleasure.
See on the canals
Those vessels sleeping.
Their mood is adventurous;
It's to satisfy
Your slightest desire
That they come from the ends of the earth.
— The setting suns
Adorn the fields,
The canals, the whole city,
With hyacinth and gold;
The world falls asleep
In a warm glow of light.
There all is order and beauty,
Luxury, peace, and pleasure.
- Charles Baudelaire, trans. William Aggeler
Thanks many times to C for alerting me to this poem. It's a marvel of a work, something like a love poem but bursting with a greater love than just the erotic -- more like eros, from somebody who loves the world loving another. You see, the entire poem reads as seductive love poem, but the opening line, "My child, my sister," stages it so that we cannot simply read it as a romantic poem. Instead, it is a love like Whitman's, away from the grasping love of a person and towards a love that is meant to enliven the beloved, more objective, true, and vast!
What is this love? It is a love that is meant to bring the girl closer to what she is meant to be, as the first stanza announces. The speaker implores her to imagine the rapture that comes from living in a world that is like her, a land that matches her sensibility, is the right soil in which she can grow. It also draws out a world that exists for the living person -- expresses the sentiment that the world is here for human life, and that everything that is built reaches to us . This reflection is not egotistical, but hopefully grounded on earth, compassionately and exuberantly offering the things of this world to us, who see and live it.
Apparently it's based on some Claude Lorraine paintings of a ship-flecked, so there's an aesthetic joy in the poem as well; the poem is thus an eckphrastic poem, which is a poem based on a piece of art. Just goes to show an incredible ability to communicate and "read" that is outside the academy -- is translated by nothing but images, and then re-written (and re-translated into english) in a poem.
Thanks all for reading,
till later!
Wednesday, August 31, 2011
Poem of the Week 8/31/2011: A Valediction Forbidding Mourning
A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning
As virtuous men pass mildly away,
And whisper to their souls to go,
Whilst some of their sad friends do say,
"The breath goes now," and some say, "No,"
So let us melt, and make no noise,
No tear-floods, nor sigh-tempests move;
'Twere profanation of our joys
To tell the laity our love.
Moving of the earth brings harms and fears,
Men reckon what it did and meant;
But trepidation of the spheres,
Though greater far, is innocent.
Dull sublunary lovers' love
(Whose soul is sense) cannot admit
Absence, because it doth remove
Those things which elemented it.
But we, by a love so much refined
That our selves know not what it is,
Inter-assured of the mind,
Care less, eyes, lips, and hands to miss.
Our two souls therefore, which are one,
Though I must go, endure not yet
A breach, but an expansion.
Like gold to airy thinness beat.
If they be two, they are two so
As stiff twin compasses are two:
Thy soul, the fixed foot, makes no show
To move, but doth, if the other do;
And though it in the center sit,
Yet when the other far doth roam,
It leans, and hearkens after it,
And grows erect, as that comes home.
Such wilt thou be to me, who must,
Like the other foot, obliquely run;
Thy firmness makes my circle just,
And makes me end where I begun.
John Donne
At last, a mourning poem that gathers together lovers, places, people, life and death; in its circled compass, one of Donne's primary metaphors, it inscribes the comings and goings of the things of our lives.
This tension continues in the next stanza --
But trepidation of the spheres,
And the genius of this image is that the circling compass itself evokes the image of the stars that came before it, the heavens circling above us, the trace of the planets in those heavens, and so brings to their separation a greater truth. The lovers live with the same truth that turns the heavens, the one that holds man steady in death -- that of a near universal perspective.
As virtuous men pass mildly away,
And whisper to their souls to go,
Whilst some of their sad friends do say,
"The breath goes now," and some say, "No,"
So let us melt, and make no noise,
No tear-floods, nor sigh-tempests move;
'Twere profanation of our joys
To tell the laity our love.
Moving of the earth brings harms and fears,
Men reckon what it did and meant;
But trepidation of the spheres,
Though greater far, is innocent.
Dull sublunary lovers' love
(Whose soul is sense) cannot admit
Absence, because it doth remove
Those things which elemented it.
But we, by a love so much refined
That our selves know not what it is,
Inter-assured of the mind,
Care less, eyes, lips, and hands to miss.
Our two souls therefore, which are one,
Though I must go, endure not yet
A breach, but an expansion.
Like gold to airy thinness beat.
If they be two, they are two so
As stiff twin compasses are two:
Thy soul, the fixed foot, makes no show
To move, but doth, if the other do;
And though it in the center sit,
Yet when the other far doth roam,
It leans, and hearkens after it,
And grows erect, as that comes home.
Such wilt thou be to me, who must,
Like the other foot, obliquely run;
Thy firmness makes my circle just,
And makes me end where I begun.
John Donne
At last, a mourning poem that gathers together lovers, places, people, life and death; in its circled compass, one of Donne's primary metaphors, it inscribes the comings and goings of the things of our lives.
To approach this poem, I'd suggest following the similies, images, and metaphors Donne uses, and try to decode the story they tell. It begins with a potent similie: with a dying man and his surrounding companions. Through this image Donne presents the poem's tension and argument. While the dying man lets his own soul go, some of those around him say "no." Translated - some will accept passing, and others try to deny it.
This tension continues in the next stanza --
Moving of the earth brings harms and fears,
Men reckon what it did and meant;
But trepidation of the spheres,
Though greater far, is innocent.
Cosmic events replace the dying man as the metaphors at hand. When earth quakes, men scramble to explain, tensely grasping knowledge out of fears. In stark contrast -- they ignore the rotation of the planets, though that movement and change is far more vast. So why tremble when the earth does if it's merely a change; like the stars, part of the everlasting movement of all things?
Now the poem transitions to its subject; lovers appear in the lines. "Dull sublunary lovers / whose soul is sense" cannot allow one-another to part. They only sense the animal aspect of the love, the physical and bodily, and so cannot let one-another go.
This is one half of the argument -- the dull hold on, the wise let go.
And so the speaker tells his (presuming it's a man) mistress -- he and the lady ought to be like the dying man, trusting that a parting is only temporary, and moreover that in the wisdom of parting, there is not parting at all! They are like "gold to airy thinness beat," and that of a compass whose two legs journey far apart yet are not, not once separate; in truth they dance around one-another.
And the genius of this image is that the circling compass itself evokes the image of the stars that came before it, the heavens circling above us, the trace of the planets in those heavens, and so brings to their separation a greater truth. The lovers live with the same truth that turns the heavens, the one that holds man steady in death -- that of a near universal perspective.
The poem's final word, "erect" of course has sexual connotations, but I think it's more potent understood as dignity. It connotes no stretching grasper of a person, but one with dignity who experiences instead of "a breach ... an expansion."
I hope very much you all enjoy.
Thursday, July 14, 2011
Poem of the Week 7/14/2011: To Failure
To Failure
You do not come dramatically, with dragons
You do not come dramatically, with dragons
That rear up with my life between their paws
And dash me butchered down beside the wagons,
The horses panicking; nor as a clause
Clearly set out to warn what can be lost,
What out-of-pocket charges must be borne,
Expenses met; nor as a draughty ghost
That’s seen, some mornings, running down a lawn.
It is these sunless afternoons, I find,
Instal you at my elbow like a bore.
The chestnut trees are caked with silence. I’m
Aware the days pass quicker than before,
Smell staler too. And once they fall behind
They look like ruin. You have been here some time.
Philip Larkin
For this week's PotW, a few brief notes will do. The title, "To Failure," sets up a poem that is somewhat of a letter to failure, discussing what the speaker expected it to be and then what it may actually be. This he does in an Italian sonnet that is tweaked just slightly (slant rhyme and rhyme patterns).
The first eight lines, the first half of the Italian sonnet, present a view of failure that is not, but that seems real. This failure is mythic (heroic even), evoking dragons, ghosts, and some kind objective ledger in the world. The first stanza, in its active, dreamy, engaged world, implies that in a life lived with too much intensity, one's failure has some kind of meaning, either with the bite of a dragon or the slow squeeze of losing all one's money. This failure is life lived fully, mistakes that attack, or that haunt a person, or demand something of them, include a contract and meaning.
The next stanza, which is failure itself, offers nothing other-worldly -- just chestnut trees "caked with silence," a stale smell, the quiet vision of a life in tatters. The contrast here lies at the heart of the poem, for me. Because failure is not adventure, torture, being haunted by the past. Failure, according to Larkin, is nothing. It's a slow decay of life, stillness, staleness, deadness. Blake writes, "expect poison from the standing water," and this seems to me ENTIRELY apt for Larkin's view of failure. Water that sits becomes poison, just as a life that sits, is too passive, is too stale, is a decayed failure.
Indeed! It raises the question of a life well lived! Because is a failure something done wrong, something that tortures a person or demands something of them, or is failure never experiencing that, never going under the nozzle of suffering, mistakes, problems, situations?
Thanks for reading these brief notes. The poem is simple, yes, but much in the way an arrow is simple, going straight to the point! Good night everybody.
Philip Larkin
For this week's PotW, a few brief notes will do. The title, "To Failure," sets up a poem that is somewhat of a letter to failure, discussing what the speaker expected it to be and then what it may actually be. This he does in an Italian sonnet that is tweaked just slightly (slant rhyme and rhyme patterns).
The first eight lines, the first half of the Italian sonnet, present a view of failure that is not, but that seems real. This failure is mythic (heroic even), evoking dragons, ghosts, and some kind objective ledger in the world. The first stanza, in its active, dreamy, engaged world, implies that in a life lived with too much intensity, one's failure has some kind of meaning, either with the bite of a dragon or the slow squeeze of losing all one's money. This failure is life lived fully, mistakes that attack, or that haunt a person, or demand something of them, include a contract and meaning.
The next stanza, which is failure itself, offers nothing other-worldly -- just chestnut trees "caked with silence," a stale smell, the quiet vision of a life in tatters. The contrast here lies at the heart of the poem, for me. Because failure is not adventure, torture, being haunted by the past. Failure, according to Larkin, is nothing. It's a slow decay of life, stillness, staleness, deadness. Blake writes, "expect poison from the standing water," and this seems to me ENTIRELY apt for Larkin's view of failure. Water that sits becomes poison, just as a life that sits, is too passive, is too stale, is a decayed failure.
Indeed! It raises the question of a life well lived! Because is a failure something done wrong, something that tortures a person or demands something of them, or is failure never experiencing that, never going under the nozzle of suffering, mistakes, problems, situations?
Thanks for reading these brief notes. The poem is simple, yes, but much in the way an arrow is simple, going straight to the point! Good night everybody.
Saturday, May 21, 2011
Poem of the Week 5/21/2011: In Praise of Darkness
IN PRAISE OF DARKNESS
Old age (the name that others give it)
can be the time of our greatest bliss.
The animal has died or almost died.
The man and his spirit remain.
I live among vague, luminous shapes
that are not darkness yet.
Buenos Aires,
whose edges disintegrated
into the endless plain,
has gone back to being the Recoleta, the Retiro*,
the nondescript streets of the Once,
and the rickety old houses
we still call the South.
In my life there were always too many things.
Democritus of Abdera plucked out his eyes in order to think;
Time has been my Democritus.
This penumbra* is slow and does not pain me;
it flows down a gentle slope,
resembling eternity.
My friends have no faces,
women are what they were so many years ago,
these corners could be other corners,
there are no letters on the pages of books.
All this should frighten me,
but it is a sweetness, a return.
Of the generations of texts on earth
I will have read only a few-
the ones that I keep reading in my memory,
reading and transforming.
From South, East, West, and North
the paths converge that have led me
to my secret center.
Those paths were echoes and footsteps,
women, men, death-throes, resurrections,
days and nights,
dreams and half-wakeful dreams,
every inmost moment of yesterday
and all the yesterdays of the world,
the Dane’s staunch sword and the Persan’s moon,
the acts of the dead,
shared love, and words,
Emerson and snow, so many things.
Now I can forget them. I reach my center
my algebra and my key,
my mirror.
Soon I will know who I am.
Jorge Luis Borges, trans. Hoyt Rogers
*Recoleta is a neighborhood in Buenos Aires: Retiro, one in Madrid.
*the blurred edge of the shadow cast from an opaque object.
Old age (the name that others give it)
can be the time of our greatest bliss.
The animal has died or almost died.
The man and his spirit remain.
I live among vague, luminous shapes
that are not darkness yet.
Buenos Aires,
whose edges disintegrated
into the endless plain,
has gone back to being the Recoleta, the Retiro*,
the nondescript streets of the Once,
and the rickety old houses
we still call the South.
In my life there were always too many things.
Democritus of Abdera plucked out his eyes in order to think;
Time has been my Democritus.
This penumbra* is slow and does not pain me;
it flows down a gentle slope,
resembling eternity.
My friends have no faces,
women are what they were so many years ago,
these corners could be other corners,
there are no letters on the pages of books.
All this should frighten me,
but it is a sweetness, a return.
Of the generations of texts on earth
I will have read only a few-
the ones that I keep reading in my memory,
reading and transforming.
From South, East, West, and North
the paths converge that have led me
to my secret center.
Those paths were echoes and footsteps,
women, men, death-throes, resurrections,
days and nights,
dreams and half-wakeful dreams,
every inmost moment of yesterday
and all the yesterdays of the world,
the Dane’s staunch sword and the Persan’s moon,
the acts of the dead,
shared love, and words,
Emerson and snow, so many things.
Now I can forget them. I reach my center
my algebra and my key,
my mirror.
Soon I will know who I am.
Jorge Luis Borges, trans. Hoyt Rogers
*Recoleta is a neighborhood in Buenos Aires: Retiro, one in Madrid.
*the blurred edge of the shadow cast from an opaque object.
Perhaps one important piece of information to note concerning this poem is that Jorge Luis Borges, the grandfather of South American literature, began going blind in his late 50s, and was completely so by the time of his death. It reads like a story, a gentle poetic yet journalistic description of the fading of vision. It also reads as words of wisdom - from the grandfather, from the old warrior, from the one who has come before and is turning his face to the vast, open abyss. Moreover, its simple turn towards death reveals a compassion and freedom for the things in this world, and approaches a question of oneself -- I would say that the poem only intimates the answer to this question, in its blurred images that evoke love, freedom, compassion, and eternity.
As to the loss of eyesight, which perhaps parallels the approaching end of life: "All this should frighten me, / but it is a sweetness, a return." In his encroaching blindness, the speaker discovers some kind of objectivity that seems new and yet deeply familiar for him. He mentions that it is objective/true when he compares this blindness to Democritus'. Just as Democritus blinded himself to find truth, so the speaker is being blinded, and we can therefore assume seeing truth more clearly.
What is this truth? It is close to a world of impersonal, affectionate love, where people, places, books, have lost their particular character and taken on something of an eternal shade. After all, Buenos Aires' "edges have disintegrated / into the endless plain," and books have lost their page numbers, as if every book was the same book, the same page, returned to again and again. If we were to get daring we might say that this idea must have some relationship to Plato's ideal forms, the moment when the essential, ideal character of each object is seen in its perfection. We could even back it up by citing how "the animal has died or almost died. / The man and spirit remain;" these signal the three parts of a man (body: the animal, man: the thinking part, spirit: the feelings) Plato intimates in the Republic and elsewhere.
Plato or no, this state of being is the center of all paths - North, South, East, and West, and the things of this world -- including Hamlet's sword, the acts of the dead, shared love, words, footsteps and echoes, Emerson and snow – have led him here. They are the friends and helpmeets on the way to…... to himself I suppose. But what is this? Borges describes it with cryptic images, still: an algebra, a key, a mirror (for a blind man??). These images, to me, evoke the question of identity more than unlock it -- he finds the key, finds the equation that can crack himself, but they are as objects lying unused in an impersonal room, they still beg a final question: Who am I?
And we, readers, understand in a feeling the mystery of this question – not the answer, sharply defined and outlined, of a single thing, but the vast question of oneself. And like a cataracted eye regarding a book, we find the answer without definition or pagination.
So the poem comes to bridge the things of this world and the vast, compassionate mystery that dissolves and holds them. When one cannot see one’s friends face (only a head), perhaps one cannot forget so easily how that other person is always and forever a searching unknown, an infinitude and intricacy beyond our comprehension, but calling for freedom, compassion (this is what the blurred images suggest -- a kind of freedom to inhabit many shapes, a freedom from definitions and boundaries that can tether us to the mundane.) The things he puts forth – blurred faces, a mirror for a blind man – become objects of meditation that demand compassion, imagination for another, and a deep-set affection for this life as it slowly falls out of focus into a dearly-felt hush.
Saturday, April 30, 2011
Poem of the Week 4/30/2011: As Kingfishers Catch Fire
As Kingfishers Catch Fire
As kingfishers catch fire, dragonflies draw flame;
As tumbled over rim in roundy wells
Stones ring; like each tucked string tells, each hung bell's
Bow swung finds tongue to fling out broad its name;
Each mortal thing does one thing and the same:
Deals out that being indoors each one dwells;
Selves — goes itself; myself it speaks and spells,
Crying Whát I dó is me: for that I came.
I say móre: the just man justices;
Keeps grace: thát keeps all his goings graces;
Acts in God's eye what in God's eye he is —
Chríst — for Christ plays in ten thousand places,
Lovely in limbs, and lovely in eyes not his
To the Father through the features of men's faces.
Gerard Manley Hopkins
(note: the accents are Hopkins', included to clue the reader about words and phrase of extra rhythmic weight)
So! We've taken a direct 180 degree turn from the deadly cathedrals and darkling bass tones of Baudelaire; we now greet Gerard Manley Hopkins, the ever-so-Catholic bard of nature, the choreographer of language. According to various biographical sources (poetry foundation), Hopkins' greatest interest in Catholicism was the doctrine of Real Presence, a doctrine that seems to underpin this poem. Well, "underpin" is the wrong word. Permeate might be better. Or "generates" this poem. If this post were to have a thesis, it would be: "As Kingfishers Catch Fire" establishes an explosive metaphor for the Real Presence, where the energy that men see infusing nature becomes a symbol for or promise of the Christ that is innate in man."
The first stanza is one extended statement about the way natural phenomena display the being in the world, and provides hints about the enormity of this being. Beginning, "As x happens, just like y happens, so does every thing happen." So, just as kingfishers catch fire and dragonflies draw flame, so does each thing in the world display and expose the being that is latent within it. Hopkins underpins this statement with some of the most exciting, rhythmic, active diction around; the strong, varied consonants in lines 2-3, "as tumbled over rim in roundy wells / stones ring," display the rigorous, vigorous energy that Hopkins says dwells in each thing. This energy must be hugely powerful, being "flame," "fire," and "flung out broadly." This flame is representative of the explosive and infinite power of God/Being/Real Presence.
Another aspect of the first stanza. It establishes a viewer who is most definitely human, for the things he describes are on a human scale. If Kingfishers are catching fire, they aren't doing so in an unseen world -- it must be in the perspective of a person who sees a flash of the divine in the natural, over and over.
Hopkins acknowledges a shift immediately, writing "I say more." His topic shifts from the kingfisher and the realm of nature to that of man. What happens when man shines forth, shows his truest being? The poem suggests that he becomes just, for he "justices," and acts with grace. But to see man as what me must be, according to the poem's logic, one needs to expand beyond a human viewpoint, and the true nature of man is seen through the eyes of God.
So the poem expands a degree in scale -- suddenly it is no longer just a man describing a kingfisher, but God describing man. We get the God's eye view, as it were, and the fire that man sees in the kingfisher, its innate being shining through, becomes the Christ who "plays in ten thousand places" through man's "feature and faces." He is lovely in limbs not his, playing through our veins like fire or the echo of a stone falling down a well.
This shift in scale also changes the terms of what is seen -- the man sees beauty, and God sees Justice; beauty and justice are linked, with justice being the next scale up from beauty. Platonic, no?
To finish, I'd suggest that the poem is a unified meditation on one event: the exposure of Being to a viewer, be it in kingfishers or in man. Perhaps we could extrapolate that Hopkins believed that the visions of infinity we get in nature are simply small forms, signs of faith and the infinitely infused presence of God, of the greater possibility within us. That our love for the world is a micro-cosm of God's love for us. Or perhaps the poem is completely experiential -- instead of being a mental abstraction, Hopkins had some mystical experience of the objective vision of God touching mankind, seeing the justice and the Christ transforming our blood. I suppose we cannot know, but it must be raised as a central question of an immensely beautiful and well-crafted poem.
As kingfishers catch fire, dragonflies draw flame;
As tumbled over rim in roundy wells
Stones ring; like each tucked string tells, each hung bell's
Bow swung finds tongue to fling out broad its name;
Each mortal thing does one thing and the same:
Deals out that being indoors each one dwells;
Selves — goes itself; myself it speaks and spells,
Crying Whát I dó is me: for that I came.
I say móre: the just man justices;
Keeps grace: thát keeps all his goings graces;
Acts in God's eye what in God's eye he is —
Chríst — for Christ plays in ten thousand places,
Lovely in limbs, and lovely in eyes not his
To the Father through the features of men's faces.
Gerard Manley Hopkins
(note: the accents are Hopkins', included to clue the reader about words and phrase of extra rhythmic weight)
So! We've taken a direct 180 degree turn from the deadly cathedrals and darkling bass tones of Baudelaire; we now greet Gerard Manley Hopkins, the ever-so-Catholic bard of nature, the choreographer of language. According to various biographical sources (poetry foundation), Hopkins' greatest interest in Catholicism was the doctrine of Real Presence, a doctrine that seems to underpin this poem. Well, "underpin" is the wrong word. Permeate might be better. Or "generates" this poem. If this post were to have a thesis, it would be: "As Kingfishers Catch Fire" establishes an explosive metaphor for the Real Presence, where the energy that men see infusing nature becomes a symbol for or promise of the Christ that is innate in man."
The first stanza is one extended statement about the way natural phenomena display the being in the world, and provides hints about the enormity of this being. Beginning, "As x happens, just like y happens, so does every thing happen." So, just as kingfishers catch fire and dragonflies draw flame, so does each thing in the world display and expose the being that is latent within it. Hopkins underpins this statement with some of the most exciting, rhythmic, active diction around; the strong, varied consonants in lines 2-3, "as tumbled over rim in roundy wells / stones ring," display the rigorous, vigorous energy that Hopkins says dwells in each thing. This energy must be hugely powerful, being "flame," "fire," and "flung out broadly." This flame is representative of the explosive and infinite power of God/Being/Real Presence.
Another aspect of the first stanza. It establishes a viewer who is most definitely human, for the things he describes are on a human scale. If Kingfishers are catching fire, they aren't doing so in an unseen world -- it must be in the perspective of a person who sees a flash of the divine in the natural, over and over.
Hopkins acknowledges a shift immediately, writing "I say more." His topic shifts from the kingfisher and the realm of nature to that of man. What happens when man shines forth, shows his truest being? The poem suggests that he becomes just, for he "justices," and acts with grace. But to see man as what me must be, according to the poem's logic, one needs to expand beyond a human viewpoint, and the true nature of man is seen through the eyes of God.
So the poem expands a degree in scale -- suddenly it is no longer just a man describing a kingfisher, but God describing man. We get the God's eye view, as it were, and the fire that man sees in the kingfisher, its innate being shining through, becomes the Christ who "plays in ten thousand places" through man's "feature and faces." He is lovely in limbs not his, playing through our veins like fire or the echo of a stone falling down a well.
This shift in scale also changes the terms of what is seen -- the man sees beauty, and God sees Justice; beauty and justice are linked, with justice being the next scale up from beauty. Platonic, no?
To finish, I'd suggest that the poem is a unified meditation on one event: the exposure of Being to a viewer, be it in kingfishers or in man. Perhaps we could extrapolate that Hopkins believed that the visions of infinity we get in nature are simply small forms, signs of faith and the infinitely infused presence of God, of the greater possibility within us. That our love for the world is a micro-cosm of God's love for us. Or perhaps the poem is completely experiential -- instead of being a mental abstraction, Hopkins had some mystical experience of the objective vision of God touching mankind, seeing the justice and the Christ transforming our blood. I suppose we cannot know, but it must be raised as a central question of an immensely beautiful and well-crafted poem.
Sunday, July 11, 2010
Poem of the Week 8/07/2010: Obsession
Obsession
Great woods, you frighten me like cathedrals;
you howl like organs; in our curs'd hearts lie
chapels of endless grief where old rales rattle,
echoing your De Profundis a reply.
Ocean, I hate your tossing and your tumults,
my spirit finds them all again in me,
I hear the monstrous laughter of the sea,
the bitter laugh of the vanquished, with sobs and insults.
O night, how you would please me without stars
whose light speaks only in the banal tongue!
I seek the black, the empty, and the bare!
But the shadows are themselves a canvas where
from my eyes a thousand ghosts are flung.
of vanished beings with familiar stares.
Charles Baudelaire, trans. C.F. MacIntyre
Well, this could have been a joyous return to the poem of the week, perhaps with the onrush of a love-torn sonnet, or a sweetly pastoral poem, or a comic epic of unabashed wit! Which will it be, door one, two or three? Happily for you, dear readers, you are greeted by one of Baudelaire's fleurs du mal, a poem which plays out a crushing relationship between relief and pain, forgiveness and torture, and creator and muse.
Opening with the lines "great woods / you frighten me like cathedrals" links nature, beauty, the speaker, and the sacred, setting them as some of the poem's major topics. Baudelaire's first two lines, "Great woods, you frighten me like cathedrals; / you howl like organs;" are so amazing! They link terror "frighten," with the sacred "cathedral," with song, "the howl of organs." This will be a poem about a dark song, perhaps, which is breathed with the speed of wind -- the only way the forest could produce a howl. The next several lines, "in our curs'd hearts lie / chapels of endless grief where old rales rattle, / echoing your De Profundis a reply," elaborate this tortured relationship with the sacred and with song. "De Profundis" is a direct reference to Psalm 130, a song (poem) in which David calls to the Lord for mercy for his dark, black sins (http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Psalm+130&version=NIV). In the Psalm, the tortured ask for and are granted relief. In this poem, the empty howl of the woods echoes a reply -- grief and sadness. This first stanza establishes the question and answer format of the poem, but a secret one which drives us to deeper and darker measures.**
In the second stanza, then, the ocean at once ignores and embodies the pleads for help found in the De Profundis of the first. Baudelaire draws a delicate balance between tyrant and oppressed, with the line "monstrous laughter of the sea, / the bitter laughter of the vanquished." Because of this impersonal laughter, and the connotation of ocean with vastness and therefore power, it seems like the ocean must represent something untouchably strong, and in this case cruel. Perhaps it is the vindictive Old Testament God, perhaps the standard of poetic creation to which the speaker cannot but must live up to. On the other hand, the monstrous laughter is also the voice of the tortured who have already been refused their forgiveness, their own monstrous, Hamlet-like laughter at their own heavily rent states.
The next stanza makes its plea for forgiveness, or implies one already, in a different way; the introduction (and subsequent slander) of stars, in themselves quiet and still, implies the welcoming and rejection of beauty, respite, and peace. Baudelaire's speaker has already rejected the stars as "banal," and wishes to erase them. Perhaps his obsession is erasing him, or causing him to hate the beautiful, yet banal, elements of beauty that are normally given us. What is he doing here -- is he simply erasing the stars because they have failed him? He says that he seeks "the black, the empty, the bare!," almost as if that would save him (from banality?) more readily than the howling woods and tossing ocean.
Once he achieves the poetic erasure, though, he finds on that same dark screen only the shadows and projections of his brain. Poetic metaphor, the imagined or felt relationships with woods and sea that were established in the beginning of the poem, become aggressive in the third stanza and overwhelm the speaker in the final one. His phantom relationships with people become ghosts that torture him, and he is powerless to the spasms of his mind. Is this about the writing process (the poet is erased in his obsessive search for the perfect poem)? About the fall of man (man cannot help but run deeper and deeper into darkness)?
As you can probably tell from the number of question marks in this writeup, I remain unsure, and the more I read the poem, the deeper the confusion runs. Over what is the obsession? For what does the poet wish? I want to say regeneration, or forgiveness, but the poem seems to have already asked for this and been rejected; then I say beauty or purity, but the poem constantly opens and rejects these questions as well. In this sense, then, the poem is itself a turning set of questions, always finding the same answer, beginning over in each stanza, posing the question starkly to the reader, and then pulling it again darker, underground. Perhaps this is a relationship with a muse, which is, I think, implied in the "De Profundis" reference, where the poet wishes for something, good song and greater inspiration, and then the poet finds nothing but howls and torture to answer his call. The beauty of the muse is like a streak of lightning in a Turner painting, covered and devoured by its cloud, bursting forward, then retreating again.
**this is most succinctly stated in the final paragraph of my writeup. I hope you all enjoy.
Great woods, you frighten me like cathedrals;
you howl like organs; in our curs'd hearts lie
chapels of endless grief where old rales rattle,
echoing your De Profundis a reply.
Ocean, I hate your tossing and your tumults,
my spirit finds them all again in me,
I hear the monstrous laughter of the sea,
the bitter laugh of the vanquished, with sobs and insults.
O night, how you would please me without stars
whose light speaks only in the banal tongue!
I seek the black, the empty, and the bare!
But the shadows are themselves a canvas where
from my eyes a thousand ghosts are flung.
of vanished beings with familiar stares.
Charles Baudelaire, trans. C.F. MacIntyre
Well, this could have been a joyous return to the poem of the week, perhaps with the onrush of a love-torn sonnet, or a sweetly pastoral poem, or a comic epic of unabashed wit! Which will it be, door one, two or three? Happily for you, dear readers, you are greeted by one of Baudelaire's fleurs du mal, a poem which plays out a crushing relationship between relief and pain, forgiveness and torture, and creator and muse.
Opening with the lines "great woods / you frighten me like cathedrals" links nature, beauty, the speaker, and the sacred, setting them as some of the poem's major topics. Baudelaire's first two lines, "Great woods, you frighten me like cathedrals; / you howl like organs;" are so amazing! They link terror "frighten," with the sacred "cathedral," with song, "the howl of organs." This will be a poem about a dark song, perhaps, which is breathed with the speed of wind -- the only way the forest could produce a howl. The next several lines, "in our curs'd hearts lie / chapels of endless grief where old rales rattle, / echoing your De Profundis a reply," elaborate this tortured relationship with the sacred and with song. "De Profundis" is a direct reference to Psalm 130, a song (poem) in which David calls to the Lord for mercy for his dark, black sins (http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Psalm+130&version=NIV). In the Psalm, the tortured ask for and are granted relief. In this poem, the empty howl of the woods echoes a reply -- grief and sadness. This first stanza establishes the question and answer format of the poem, but a secret one which drives us to deeper and darker measures.**
In the second stanza, then, the ocean at once ignores and embodies the pleads for help found in the De Profundis of the first. Baudelaire draws a delicate balance between tyrant and oppressed, with the line "monstrous laughter of the sea, / the bitter laughter of the vanquished." Because of this impersonal laughter, and the connotation of ocean with vastness and therefore power, it seems like the ocean must represent something untouchably strong, and in this case cruel. Perhaps it is the vindictive Old Testament God, perhaps the standard of poetic creation to which the speaker cannot but must live up to. On the other hand, the monstrous laughter is also the voice of the tortured who have already been refused their forgiveness, their own monstrous, Hamlet-like laughter at their own heavily rent states.
The next stanza makes its plea for forgiveness, or implies one already, in a different way; the introduction (and subsequent slander) of stars, in themselves quiet and still, implies the welcoming and rejection of beauty, respite, and peace. Baudelaire's speaker has already rejected the stars as "banal," and wishes to erase them. Perhaps his obsession is erasing him, or causing him to hate the beautiful, yet banal, elements of beauty that are normally given us. What is he doing here -- is he simply erasing the stars because they have failed him? He says that he seeks "the black, the empty, the bare!," almost as if that would save him (from banality?) more readily than the howling woods and tossing ocean.
Once he achieves the poetic erasure, though, he finds on that same dark screen only the shadows and projections of his brain. Poetic metaphor, the imagined or felt relationships with woods and sea that were established in the beginning of the poem, become aggressive in the third stanza and overwhelm the speaker in the final one. His phantom relationships with people become ghosts that torture him, and he is powerless to the spasms of his mind. Is this about the writing process (the poet is erased in his obsessive search for the perfect poem)? About the fall of man (man cannot help but run deeper and deeper into darkness)?
As you can probably tell from the number of question marks in this writeup, I remain unsure, and the more I read the poem, the deeper the confusion runs. Over what is the obsession? For what does the poet wish? I want to say regeneration, or forgiveness, but the poem seems to have already asked for this and been rejected; then I say beauty or purity, but the poem constantly opens and rejects these questions as well. In this sense, then, the poem is itself a turning set of questions, always finding the same answer, beginning over in each stanza, posing the question starkly to the reader, and then pulling it again darker, underground. Perhaps this is a relationship with a muse, which is, I think, implied in the "De Profundis" reference, where the poet wishes for something, good song and greater inspiration, and then the poet finds nothing but howls and torture to answer his call. The beauty of the muse is like a streak of lightning in a Turner painting, covered and devoured by its cloud, bursting forward, then retreating again.
**this is most succinctly stated in the final paragraph of my writeup. I hope you all enjoy.
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