The Pomegranate
The only legend I have ever loved is
the story of a daughter lost in hell.
And found and rescued there.
Love and blackmail are the gist of it.
Ceres and Persephone the names.
And the best thing about the legend is
I can enter it anywhere. And have.
As a child in exile in
a city of fogs and strange consonants,
I read it first and at first I was
an exiled child in the crackling dusk of
the underworld, the stars blighted. Later
I walked out in a summer twilight
searching for my daughter at bed-time.
When she came running I was ready
to make any bargain to keep her.
I carried her back past whitebeams
and wasps and honey-scented buddleias.
But I was Ceres then and I knew
winter was in store for every leaf
on every tree on that road.
Was inescapable for each one we passed.
And for me.
It is winter
and the stars are hidden.
I climb the stairs and stand where I can see
my child asleep beside her teen magazines,
her can of Coke, her plate of uncut fruit.
The pomegranate! How did I forget it?
She could have come home and been safe
and ended the story and all
our heart-broken searching but she reached
out a hand and plucked a pomegranate.
She put out her hand and pulled down
the French sound for apple and the noise of stone and the proof
that even in the place of death,
at the heart of legend, in the midst
of rocks full of unshed tears
ready to be diamonds by the time
the story was told, a child can be
hungry. I could warn her. There is still a chance.
The rain is cold. The road is flint-coloured.
The suburb has cars and cable television.
The veiled stars are above ground.
It is another world. But what else
can a mother give her daughter but such
beautiful rifts in time?
If I defer the grief I will diminish the gift.
The legend will be hers as well as mine. She will enter it. As I have.
She will wake up. She will hold
the papery flushed skin in her hand.
And to her lips. I will say nothing.
Eavan Boland 1994
Good evening Friends and Family! This is one of the first poems I read when I got my Norton Anthology of Poetry, and I loved it so much that I did a research project on Eavan Boland last semester. That means that I have some previous theories about Boland's work, and that this discussion will have some more biographical information than usual, but that does not in the least diminish this poem's power or beauty. I particularly love the last four lines, which are as full of tension and anguish as any lines I have ever read.
A bit of backstory on Boland will be helpful before I dive into this poem. Eavan Boland is a female Irish writer in the second half of the twentieth century. She grew up in England, where she felt as if she never had a country or nation as did the British. Boland deals with problems of representation and marginalization, both in being Irish and being an female Irish poet. Women Irish poets have been dreadfully under-represented in Irish literature for hundreds of years. With the help of such poets as Nuala ni Dhomhnaill (pronounced ni gau-na) and Boland, that trend is slowly changing, but the problem remains dire. An anthology called the Irish Literary Review appeared in 1992 that only incorporated two women poets in nearly one thousand pages of poetry. This fact incenses Boland, who contends that the Irish woman appears in Irish literature only as an emblem. She is either the sturdy washer-woman or the beloved, frail beauty. Boland sees that this (literal) subjugation of women cages real women. Boland is *very* aware of the problems of representation.
It may thus seem strange that she chooses the myth of Ceres and Persephone to illustrate a solution to this problem. After all, myth is perhaps the oldest form of written/aural representation that we have. She, however, states immeadately that this myth is useful because she "can enter it anywhere. And [has]". Boland is Persephone in her youth, learning that the world is not all springtime and flowers, experiencing winter in the form of a lonely English childhood. Throughout Boland's poetry, England appears as "a land of strange consonants," while Ireland is a land of vowels. Just in case you read more of her stuff. Ceres enters the picture when Boland inhabits her as a mother panicking over a lost daughter. Panicking, yes, but still aware that "winter was in store for every leaf... was inescapable for each one we passed/ And for me." In writing this, Boland demonstrates her acceptance that winter will come; despair and grief are inevitable. A character or person who can accept that something bad will happen actually creates room to live and to feel, something a female Irish emblem could never do.
The decision about whether to allow her daughter to eat the pomegranate, thus entering a world of pain and betrayal and fear, becomes the crux of the poem. All a parent wants is for her child to be happy and real, so it could be confusing that Boland chooses to say nothing. However, she would rightfully argue that a life lived in half-feeling, in total ignorance of the real world is worse than a life rife with sadness. Stagnancy is the worst feeling of all, so Boland keeps quiet. By speaking up, she would "defer the grief [and] diminish the gift." The gift is not only a life with a full emotional range, but the gift of being able to enter the myth. Boland keeps the myth itself alive by opening its doors to her daughter. Were she to warn "Persephone," she would have cut off the story's energy. It would simply become a dusty anecdote to be taken down and admired instead of a vivacious and relevant myth. Just as Boland does not want this for any person, so she does not want it for a story or form of representation.
I love many things about this poem, but what strikes me the most is how seamlessly Boland melds her story and that of the ancient myth. I distinctly remember being surprised when the pomegranate jumped out of the millennia-old story onto her daughter's plate. One minute everything was clear about who-was-who-when, and the next the tales got all mashed up. But I loved that - it brought both the poem and the Ceres/Persephone legend to life more powerfully than any storybook ever had or could. By living the story and then telling it honestly and painfully, Boland adds to our own emotional range. This is her goal, and it is one which I hope she will continue to puruse.
Sarah
Monday, July 18, 2005
Monday, July 11, 2005
Poem of the Week 7/11/2005: Punishment
Punishment*
I can feel the tug
of the halter at the nape
of her neck, the wind
on her naked front.
It blows her nipples
to amber beads,
it shakes the frail rigging
of her ribs.
I can see her drowned
body in the bog,
the weighing stone,
the floating rods and boughs.
Under which at first
she was a barked sapling
that is dug up
oak-bone, brain-firkin:* *small cask
her shaved head
like a stubble of black corn,
her blindfold a soiled bandage,
her noose a ring
to store
the memories of love.
Little adultress,
before they punished you
you were flaxen-haired,
undernourished, and your
tar-black face was beautiful.
My poor scapegoat,
I almost love you
but would have cast, I know,
the stones of silence.
I am the artful voyeur
of your brain's exposed
and darkened combs,
your muscles' webbing
and all your numbered bones:
I who have stood dumb
when your betraying sisters,
cauled in tar,**
wept by the railings,
who would connive
in civilized outrage
yet understand the exact
and tribal, intimate revenge.
Seamus Heaney 1975
* In 1951, the peat-stained body of a young girl who lived in the late first century was recovered from a bog in Windeby, Germany. As P.V. Glob describes her in "The Bog People" (a 1969 book), she "lat naked in the hole in the peat, a bandage over the eyes and a collar round the neck. The band across the eyes was drawn tight and had cut into the neck and the bast of the nose. We may feel sure that it had been used to close her eyees to this world. There was no mark of strangulation on the neck, so it had not been used for that purpose." Her hair "had been shaved off with a razor on the left side of the head.... When the brain was removed the convolutions and folds of the surface could be clearly seen [Glob reproduces a photograph of her brain].... This girl of only fourteen had had an inadequate winter diet.... To keep the young body under, some birch branches and a big stone were laid upon her." According to the Roman historian Tacitus (ca. 56-ca.120), the Germanic peoples punished adulterous women by shaving off their hair and then scourging them out of the village or killing them. IN more recent times, her "betraying sisters" (line 38) have sometimes been shaved, stripped, tarred, and handcuffed by the Irish Republican Army to the railings of Belfast in punishment for keeping company with British soldiers.
**Wrapped or enclosed. A caul is the inner fetal membrane that at birth, when it is unruptured, sometimes covers the infant's head.
Well, I gave everyone a nice, bright poem for the middle of summer....haaaaa... I hope that is alright. However, this is one of my all-time favorite poems by a Nobel Prize winner, Seamus Heaney. As the extremely long footnote indicates, this poem concerns one of the Bog People - thousand plus year old mummies excavated from (and often executed in) the bogs of Europe. My Longman Anthology of British Literature notes, of Heaney, that he found a metaphor for life and suffering in these people. Here are two websites about that - the second is admittedly more gruesome but a much clearer picture... I bet that whoever reads this will go to the site, unable to look away from the train wreck.
http://www.bogpeople.org
http://www.tornadohills.com/strange/bog_people.htm
That written, I have a confession to make. Heaney is a repeat author, and my first. Until now, I have tried to provide a different poet every week, so this is my first slip-up. I was close to breaking it with Margaret Atwood today, but you all, at least, have not read my Heaney poem as of yet. He was the third Poem of the Week ever, so did not fly out over the internet. "The Otter" was a printed poem, cut out and pasted on black construction paper, then taped to my dorm room door. I highly recommend it... I may send out those old PotW's sometime soon, because they are also some of my all-time favorite poems. So anyway. Expect repeats also by Margaret Atwood and ee cummings.
I picked Heaney (again) today because I wanted to do something great and comfortable for me. That is not to say that there aren't great poets I haven't covered yet (i.e. Keats, Milton, Poe, Browning, Tennyson, Petrarch, Coleridge, Pope, Blake, Pound, Eliot, St. Vincent Millay, Shakespeare!!!), but I love this poem. Ahhh seeing that list is making me rethink picking Heaney, but hey. I typed all of this already. So now I am finished filling your minds with prattle about my own personal battle.
What I love about this poem the most is its empathy, the presence of the narrator, the guilt, the tenderness, and the imagery. Thinking about it now, tenderness is probably one of the two most important components of this poem. This is indeed surprising, as the title itself is Punishment, and the body includes several gruesome ideas. A starving fourteen-year girl killed for adultery is not exactly tender. So the question is, why does it leave one with a deep feeling of tenderness?
The imagery and diction have a huge part to do with this. Heaney uses unusual images that basically allay the violence. He calls her ribs a "frail rigging" rather than a "bony cage" or something gorier. We get the idea that this is a tiny body, something delicate that requires a delicate image, lest it might break. This occurs even in the first line, when he writes, "I can feel the tug / of the halter at the nape / of her neck." Everything here is not as severe as it could be - the rope is a halter instead of a noose and it tugs, not pulls, on the very intimate, soft nape of her neck. We then learn that she is naked on her front, which is a very vulnerable state. He goes on to include the frail rigging line, which, with the other parts, directly establishes this girl's fragility. It's not just fragility, though, but the delicacy of a sleeping child. For me, the feeling is exactly what I feel when I think of my parents' childhoods or my (full) younger sister's. It's a complicated emotion - love, grief, joy and sadness kind of jumbled up together. If that makes any sense at all, which it very well may not.
The narrator certainly encourages this compassionate view, calling the girl "little," "poor," "barked sapling," "undernourished," and "beautiful." He again allays the violence by saying that he can see "the weighing stone"; this gives us merely the idea of pressure rather than direct violence. Heaney eventually employs apostrophe, addressing the girl directly. After calling her "my poor scapegoat," he seamlessly transitions to the second major piece of this poem: guilt.
The narrator (who I am mixing with Heaney: see my usual explanation for this) recognizes the connection between this two thousand year old tarred adultress and the women tarred and handcuffed to railings. And the sweet way he sees the bog girl allows him to find empathy for the modern women and feel guilty for his silence. He speaks as if he himself tortured these women, casting "stones of silence" and being an "artful voyeur." Then the question arises about whether part of his tender portrait of the girl is to assuage his guilt, or whether his almost-love for her comes from her fragility. Probably a little of both.
At any rate, I think that this poem is a step away from the artful voyeurism, because, in writing it, Heaney is literally no longer a voyeur. A voyeur simply watches, but this man *tells* the story. This point is important, as it reedems the narrator a bit. I recognise his courage in addressing the bog girl and in writing of his own silence. That is what I was talking about far above when I wrote that I like the presence of the narrator. This is a complex, flawed human being admitting something sad about himself and yet trying to reedem it. Perhaps another reason that he writes so sympathetically of this girl is that he feels a connection with her. That is, maybe he wants to treat her the way he wants to be treated. That statement could be a stretch, but maybe not as well. It's up to you.
Then of course there is the idea of revenge and how our society is simply repeating the primitve impulses to throw people into bogs (though we have apparently progressed to throwing bits of bog onto people). In other words, to punish. Perhaps writing the poem is a bit of a punishment for the narrator (or at least a penance) for staying silent about the girl's "betraying sisters." Anyway - we are rapidly approaching midnight in Boulder, CO, so I had better send this off! I hope that you enjoyed this poem as much as I did, and, of course, I welcome any responses. Have a wonderful night!
Sarah
I can feel the tug
of the halter at the nape
of her neck, the wind
on her naked front.
It blows her nipples
to amber beads,
it shakes the frail rigging
of her ribs.
I can see her drowned
body in the bog,
the weighing stone,
the floating rods and boughs.
Under which at first
she was a barked sapling
that is dug up
oak-bone, brain-firkin:* *small cask
her shaved head
like a stubble of black corn,
her blindfold a soiled bandage,
her noose a ring
to store
the memories of love.
Little adultress,
before they punished you
you were flaxen-haired,
undernourished, and your
tar-black face was beautiful.
My poor scapegoat,
I almost love you
but would have cast, I know,
the stones of silence.
I am the artful voyeur
of your brain's exposed
and darkened combs,
your muscles' webbing
and all your numbered bones:
I who have stood dumb
when your betraying sisters,
cauled in tar,**
wept by the railings,
who would connive
in civilized outrage
yet understand the exact
and tribal, intimate revenge.
Seamus Heaney 1975
* In 1951, the peat-stained body of a young girl who lived in the late first century was recovered from a bog in Windeby, Germany. As P.V. Glob describes her in "The Bog People" (a 1969 book), she "lat naked in the hole in the peat, a bandage over the eyes and a collar round the neck. The band across the eyes was drawn tight and had cut into the neck and the bast of the nose. We may feel sure that it had been used to close her eyees to this world. There was no mark of strangulation on the neck, so it had not been used for that purpose." Her hair "had been shaved off with a razor on the left side of the head.... When the brain was removed the convolutions and folds of the surface could be clearly seen [Glob reproduces a photograph of her brain].... This girl of only fourteen had had an inadequate winter diet.... To keep the young body under, some birch branches and a big stone were laid upon her." According to the Roman historian Tacitus (ca. 56-ca.120), the Germanic peoples punished adulterous women by shaving off their hair and then scourging them out of the village or killing them. IN more recent times, her "betraying sisters" (line 38) have sometimes been shaved, stripped, tarred, and handcuffed by the Irish Republican Army to the railings of Belfast in punishment for keeping company with British soldiers.
**Wrapped or enclosed. A caul is the inner fetal membrane that at birth, when it is unruptured, sometimes covers the infant's head.
Well, I gave everyone a nice, bright poem for the middle of summer....haaaaa... I hope that is alright. However, this is one of my all-time favorite poems by a Nobel Prize winner, Seamus Heaney. As the extremely long footnote indicates, this poem concerns one of the Bog People - thousand plus year old mummies excavated from (and often executed in) the bogs of Europe. My Longman Anthology of British Literature notes, of Heaney, that he found a metaphor for life and suffering in these people. Here are two websites about that - the second is admittedly more gruesome but a much clearer picture... I bet that whoever reads this will go to the site, unable to look away from the train wreck.
http://www.bogpeople.org
http://www.tornadohills.com/strange/bog_people.htm
That written, I have a confession to make. Heaney is a repeat author, and my first. Until now, I have tried to provide a different poet every week, so this is my first slip-up. I was close to breaking it with Margaret Atwood today, but you all, at least, have not read my Heaney poem as of yet. He was the third Poem of the Week ever, so did not fly out over the internet. "The Otter" was a printed poem, cut out and pasted on black construction paper, then taped to my dorm room door. I highly recommend it... I may send out those old PotW's sometime soon, because they are also some of my all-time favorite poems. So anyway. Expect repeats also by Margaret Atwood and ee cummings.
I picked Heaney (again) today because I wanted to do something great and comfortable for me. That is not to say that there aren't great poets I haven't covered yet (i.e. Keats, Milton, Poe, Browning, Tennyson, Petrarch, Coleridge, Pope, Blake, Pound, Eliot, St. Vincent Millay, Shakespeare!!!), but I love this poem. Ahhh seeing that list is making me rethink picking Heaney, but hey. I typed all of this already. So now I am finished filling your minds with prattle about my own personal battle.
What I love about this poem the most is its empathy, the presence of the narrator, the guilt, the tenderness, and the imagery. Thinking about it now, tenderness is probably one of the two most important components of this poem. This is indeed surprising, as the title itself is Punishment, and the body includes several gruesome ideas. A starving fourteen-year girl killed for adultery is not exactly tender. So the question is, why does it leave one with a deep feeling of tenderness?
The imagery and diction have a huge part to do with this. Heaney uses unusual images that basically allay the violence. He calls her ribs a "frail rigging" rather than a "bony cage" or something gorier. We get the idea that this is a tiny body, something delicate that requires a delicate image, lest it might break. This occurs even in the first line, when he writes, "I can feel the tug / of the halter at the nape / of her neck." Everything here is not as severe as it could be - the rope is a halter instead of a noose and it tugs, not pulls, on the very intimate, soft nape of her neck. We then learn that she is naked on her front, which is a very vulnerable state. He goes on to include the frail rigging line, which, with the other parts, directly establishes this girl's fragility. It's not just fragility, though, but the delicacy of a sleeping child. For me, the feeling is exactly what I feel when I think of my parents' childhoods or my (full) younger sister's. It's a complicated emotion - love, grief, joy and sadness kind of jumbled up together. If that makes any sense at all, which it very well may not.
The narrator certainly encourages this compassionate view, calling the girl "little," "poor," "barked sapling," "undernourished," and "beautiful." He again allays the violence by saying that he can see "the weighing stone"; this gives us merely the idea of pressure rather than direct violence. Heaney eventually employs apostrophe, addressing the girl directly. After calling her "my poor scapegoat," he seamlessly transitions to the second major piece of this poem: guilt.
The narrator (who I am mixing with Heaney: see my usual explanation for this) recognizes the connection between this two thousand year old tarred adultress and the women tarred and handcuffed to railings. And the sweet way he sees the bog girl allows him to find empathy for the modern women and feel guilty for his silence. He speaks as if he himself tortured these women, casting "stones of silence" and being an "artful voyeur." Then the question arises about whether part of his tender portrait of the girl is to assuage his guilt, or whether his almost-love for her comes from her fragility. Probably a little of both.
At any rate, I think that this poem is a step away from the artful voyeurism, because, in writing it, Heaney is literally no longer a voyeur. A voyeur simply watches, but this man *tells* the story. This point is important, as it reedems the narrator a bit. I recognise his courage in addressing the bog girl and in writing of his own silence. That is what I was talking about far above when I wrote that I like the presence of the narrator. This is a complex, flawed human being admitting something sad about himself and yet trying to reedem it. Perhaps another reason that he writes so sympathetically of this girl is that he feels a connection with her. That is, maybe he wants to treat her the way he wants to be treated. That statement could be a stretch, but maybe not as well. It's up to you.
Then of course there is the idea of revenge and how our society is simply repeating the primitve impulses to throw people into bogs (though we have apparently progressed to throwing bits of bog onto people). In other words, to punish. Perhaps writing the poem is a bit of a punishment for the narrator (or at least a penance) for staying silent about the girl's "betraying sisters." Anyway - we are rapidly approaching midnight in Boulder, CO, so I had better send this off! I hope that you enjoyed this poem as much as I did, and, of course, I welcome any responses. Have a wonderful night!
Sarah
Monday, July 04, 2005
Poem of the Week 7/4/2005: Star-gazer
Star-gazer
Forty-two years ago (to me if to no one else
The number is of some interest) it was a brilliant starry night
And the westward train was empty and had no corridors
So darting from side to side I could catch the unwonted sight
Of those almost intolerably bright
Holes, punched in the sky, which excited me partly because
Of their Latin names and partly because I had read in the textbooks
How very far off they were, it seemed their light
Had left them (some at least) long years before I was.
And this remembering now I mark that what
Light was leaving some of them at least then,
Forty-two years ago, will never arrive
In time for me to catch it, which light when
It does get here may find that there is not
Anyone left alive
To run from side to side in a late night train
Admiring it and adding noughts in vain.
Louis MacNeice 1967
Happy Fourth of July friends and family! I could have chosen a grumpy political poem for this week, but I think that I am going to follow my MLK Jr. day track and add positive thoughts to a national holiday. It is important to know for this poem that MacNeice was born in 1907, so he was eighteen "forty two years ago". It's another celestial poem for me...surprise. There is a lot I could say about this poem, but I want to say how much this poem is resonating with me right now. It distills the excitement and openness of a fresh adulthood without losing sight of its ephemerality. I find it interesting how there are two consciousnesses at work here; that of the young eighteen year old and that of the sixty year old looking back. So I enjoyed seeing myself from that space. The night tonight was completely dark and beautiful, and I wanted to find a poem that felt the same way. Some things to notice: ephermality vs. infinity, unintrusive rhyme, the visual form, the somewhat unsual diction, parentheses, repetition, and the character of MacNeice (who is almost certainly the narrator.) I would keep writing if I was more awake. So I am going to go enjoy the night in a different way: by sleeping. Goodnight!
Love,
Sarah
Forty-two years ago (to me if to no one else
The number is of some interest) it was a brilliant starry night
And the westward train was empty and had no corridors
So darting from side to side I could catch the unwonted sight
Of those almost intolerably bright
Holes, punched in the sky, which excited me partly because
Of their Latin names and partly because I had read in the textbooks
How very far off they were, it seemed their light
Had left them (some at least) long years before I was.
And this remembering now I mark that what
Light was leaving some of them at least then,
Forty-two years ago, will never arrive
In time for me to catch it, which light when
It does get here may find that there is not
Anyone left alive
To run from side to side in a late night train
Admiring it and adding noughts in vain.
Louis MacNeice 1967
Happy Fourth of July friends and family! I could have chosen a grumpy political poem for this week, but I think that I am going to follow my MLK Jr. day track and add positive thoughts to a national holiday. It is important to know for this poem that MacNeice was born in 1907, so he was eighteen "forty two years ago". It's another celestial poem for me...surprise. There is a lot I could say about this poem, but I want to say how much this poem is resonating with me right now. It distills the excitement and openness of a fresh adulthood without losing sight of its ephemerality. I find it interesting how there are two consciousnesses at work here; that of the young eighteen year old and that of the sixty year old looking back. So I enjoyed seeing myself from that space. The night tonight was completely dark and beautiful, and I wanted to find a poem that felt the same way. Some things to notice: ephermality vs. infinity, unintrusive rhyme, the visual form, the somewhat unsual diction, parentheses, repetition, and the character of MacNeice (who is almost certainly the narrator.) I would keep writing if I was more awake. So I am going to go enjoy the night in a different way: by sleeping. Goodnight!
Love,
Sarah
Sunday, June 26, 2005
Poem of the Week 6/26/2005: Centaur
Centaur
The first typeface I loved
was Centaur, cut by Bruce Rogers
in 1914. It had animal bones,
and reminded me of skinny-dipping at night,
baptized in star water so cold
I suddenly became another
animal from the waist down.
In our family, we knew all about the Minotaur,
Cyclops, and centaurs.
My father read to me about the man-horses,
so I had an inkling
of their danger,
and thereafter leaned toward the horse part
and away from the man.
Chase Twichell 2005
Hallo darling friends and family! Another Monday is come and almost gone, so with it I give you this Poem of the Week. I read this poem sitting in Borders with one of my friends, and I went back to copy it out of the Kenyon Review because I loved it so much. What originally caught my eye was the line "star water," and I later realized that my favorite imagery synthesizes the everyday with the cosmic (does anybody remember Dufault's fountain of planets? Beautiful!). Not exactly relevant to the poem I guess, but isn't it exciting to discover something about yourself? I always find so; even the trivial things are invigorating. It's the same with learning things about other people. And I think that I like the small details almost more than the big ones, because people often ignore the small details. One can always overkill on this, of course, but that doesn't make the details irrelevant. Oh look at me chatting away when there is a poem to work on! Though this tangent does remind one of poetry's personal nature. The Poem of the Week (and all poetry I guess) is a very intimate part of me, so to cut that out of my close readings would starve the analysis.
Just a little justification.
Perhaps it is and perhaps it is not coincidental to note that the poem is also distinctly personal. The title, "Centaur," connotes something quite special for this speaker; I for one did not expect it to be a typeface. Also, Twichell (who is, by the way, a woman) writes later that her family knew about centaurs, but the poem is only about one. This centaur is probably the typeface or the speaker herself. But, then, we ask, what is a centaur? Or, more precisely, what does it mean to be a centaur for Twichell? It is clearly more than a typeface; this small, personalizing detail sserves more as a springboard into the true metaphor. I find it interesting that she chooses typeface, which is really a way of writing, as the opening image, for it's like a second layer of words. We have the visual words on the page, and then we have a means for constructing words within those lines. Just as a poem shakes itself into being when read, this poem's central metaphor clip clops out of that typeface when recollected.
She feels like a centaur because the water agitates her lower-body nerves just so. Twichell seems to say, then, that a strong, seizing physical sensation like skinny dipping can turn us into animals. Or perhaps it simply reminds us of our animal bodies, exposing the animal by peeling away the cerebral layers. Some of you may have noticed that she is animal from "waist down." This connotes sexuality, of course, though Twichell does not follow on this track. I think that the idea of being part animal means, both here and in life, that humans have an instinctual, powerful, noble side along with our delicate hands and quick brains. Simple, but easy to forget.
Twichell, having established the metaphor, leaves it for a moment, giving us more personal history. She provides the Minotaur and the Cyclops as other mythical beasts. I enjoyed imagining her family life as these two partial-humans. Instead of saying that "In our family, we knew / all about the Minotaur, / [and] Cyclops," she could have said, "my family was familiar with bull-headedness and short-
sightnedness." It could also mean that her family was well-read and connected with the past, but I like the more personal response.
Near the end of the poem, the speaker talks of centaurs' apparently inherent danger. Because she chooses to stick with the animal over the man, it seems that she believes this danger comes from man. This part of the poem invites us to think whatever we want about the dangers of man and the positive aspects of an animal. For me, the greatest peril of being a man (against which there is advantage in being animal) is our cerebrality; we forget to simply feel sometimes for one reason or another. Work is tiring, kids are draining, we don't laugh anymore... we fear feeling. That is something to which a horse would not be sensitive in my imagination. It is all about freedom from fear and societal constructs and binary opposites. Of course, there are any number of ways to look at the danger idea - man could be dangerous because his heart can break. Perhaps it is safer to be an animal and procreate without feeling. That interpretation calls back the sexuality in line 8. Man's danger could come from being so destructive. It struck me a little bit ago that animal could also be a metonym for nature, so the poem could be an ecological statement. The dangers of being a centaur could actually have to do with the tension between man and animal, too. Perhaps they are not reconciliable, so one has to choose? Maybe that is the tragedy.
I wrote at the beginning of this poem, "perhaps it is and perhaps it is not coincidental that this poem is very personal." I mean that it isn't a coincidence that I am going off on personal tangents for this particular poem. A personal poem evokes personal responses, and I hope that you think about what is human and animal and neither in yourself. I hope that you can respond personally to this poem by thinking about it - that is how to interact with literature and possibly learn something about yourself along the way. Sometimes articulating something is better than just knowing it; that is what poetry can do for me. It has a way of forcing me to pinpoint and spell out whatever I am feeling.
On a final note, I know that I mixed up the speaker and Chase Twichell time and again here, but it helps me to think of a poem's speaker as the author most of the time. There are of course countless poems wherein it is obvious that the speaker and author are separate, but I believe that this is not one of them. I don't know enough about the different schools of poetry yet to sort out the Confessional poets. With time, with time. For this time, I hope that you enjoyed this poem and good night!
Sarah
The first typeface I loved
was Centaur, cut by Bruce Rogers
in 1914. It had animal bones,
and reminded me of skinny-dipping at night,
baptized in star water so cold
I suddenly became another
animal from the waist down.
In our family, we knew all about the Minotaur,
Cyclops, and centaurs.
My father read to me about the man-horses,
so I had an inkling
of their danger,
and thereafter leaned toward the horse part
and away from the man.
Chase Twichell 2005
Hallo darling friends and family! Another Monday is come and almost gone, so with it I give you this Poem of the Week. I read this poem sitting in Borders with one of my friends, and I went back to copy it out of the Kenyon Review because I loved it so much. What originally caught my eye was the line "star water," and I later realized that my favorite imagery synthesizes the everyday with the cosmic (does anybody remember Dufault's fountain of planets? Beautiful!). Not exactly relevant to the poem I guess, but isn't it exciting to discover something about yourself? I always find so; even the trivial things are invigorating. It's the same with learning things about other people. And I think that I like the small details almost more than the big ones, because people often ignore the small details. One can always overkill on this, of course, but that doesn't make the details irrelevant. Oh look at me chatting away when there is a poem to work on! Though this tangent does remind one of poetry's personal nature. The Poem of the Week (and all poetry I guess) is a very intimate part of me, so to cut that out of my close readings would starve the analysis.
Just a little justification.
Perhaps it is and perhaps it is not coincidental to note that the poem is also distinctly personal. The title, "Centaur," connotes something quite special for this speaker; I for one did not expect it to be a typeface. Also, Twichell (who is, by the way, a woman) writes later that her family knew about centaurs, but the poem is only about one. This centaur is probably the typeface or the speaker herself. But, then, we ask, what is a centaur? Or, more precisely, what does it mean to be a centaur for Twichell? It is clearly more than a typeface; this small, personalizing detail sserves more as a springboard into the true metaphor. I find it interesting that she chooses typeface, which is really a way of writing, as the opening image, for it's like a second layer of words. We have the visual words on the page, and then we have a means for constructing words within those lines. Just as a poem shakes itself into being when read, this poem's central metaphor clip clops out of that typeface when recollected.
She feels like a centaur because the water agitates her lower-body nerves just so. Twichell seems to say, then, that a strong, seizing physical sensation like skinny dipping can turn us into animals. Or perhaps it simply reminds us of our animal bodies, exposing the animal by peeling away the cerebral layers. Some of you may have noticed that she is animal from "waist down." This connotes sexuality, of course, though Twichell does not follow on this track. I think that the idea of being part animal means, both here and in life, that humans have an instinctual, powerful, noble side along with our delicate hands and quick brains. Simple, but easy to forget.
Twichell, having established the metaphor, leaves it for a moment, giving us more personal history. She provides the Minotaur and the Cyclops as other mythical beasts. I enjoyed imagining her family life as these two partial-humans. Instead of saying that "In our family, we knew / all about the Minotaur, / [and] Cyclops," she could have said, "my family was familiar with bull-headedness and short-
sightnedness." It could also mean that her family was well-read and connected with the past, but I like the more personal response.
Near the end of the poem, the speaker talks of centaurs' apparently inherent danger. Because she chooses to stick with the animal over the man, it seems that she believes this danger comes from man. This part of the poem invites us to think whatever we want about the dangers of man and the positive aspects of an animal. For me, the greatest peril of being a man (against which there is advantage in being animal) is our cerebrality; we forget to simply feel sometimes for one reason or another. Work is tiring, kids are draining, we don't laugh anymore... we fear feeling. That is something to which a horse would not be sensitive in my imagination. It is all about freedom from fear and societal constructs and binary opposites. Of course, there are any number of ways to look at the danger idea - man could be dangerous because his heart can break. Perhaps it is safer to be an animal and procreate without feeling. That interpretation calls back the sexuality in line 8. Man's danger could come from being so destructive. It struck me a little bit ago that animal could also be a metonym for nature, so the poem could be an ecological statement. The dangers of being a centaur could actually have to do with the tension between man and animal, too. Perhaps they are not reconciliable, so one has to choose? Maybe that is the tragedy.
I wrote at the beginning of this poem, "perhaps it is and perhaps it is not coincidental that this poem is very personal." I mean that it isn't a coincidence that I am going off on personal tangents for this particular poem. A personal poem evokes personal responses, and I hope that you think about what is human and animal and neither in yourself. I hope that you can respond personally to this poem by thinking about it - that is how to interact with literature and possibly learn something about yourself along the way. Sometimes articulating something is better than just knowing it; that is what poetry can do for me. It has a way of forcing me to pinpoint and spell out whatever I am feeling.
On a final note, I know that I mixed up the speaker and Chase Twichell time and again here, but it helps me to think of a poem's speaker as the author most of the time. There are of course countless poems wherein it is obvious that the speaker and author are separate, but I believe that this is not one of them. I don't know enough about the different schools of poetry yet to sort out the Confessional poets. With time, with time. For this time, I hope that you enjoyed this poem and good night!
Sarah
Monday, June 20, 2005
Poem of the Week 6/20/2005: Night Feeding
Night Feeding
Deeper than sleep but not so deep as death
I lay there sleeping and my magic head
remembered and forgot. On first cry I
remembered and forgot and did believe.
I knew love and I knew evil:
woke to the burning song and the tree burning blind,
despair of our days and the calm milk-giver who
knows sleep, knows growth, the sex of fire and grass,
and the black snake with gold bones.
Black sleeps, gold burns; on second cry I woke
fully and gave to feed and fed on feeding.
Gold seed, green pain, my wizards in the earth
walked through the house, black in the morning dark.
Shadows grew in my veins, my bright belief,
my head of dreams deeper than night and sleep.
Voices of all black animals crying to drink, cries of all birth arise, simple as we,
found in the leaves, in clouds and dark, in dream,
deep as this hour, ready again to sleep.
Muriel Rukeyser 1951
Hello friends and family! I read this poem among the dying embers of a spectacular sunset, the latest in a series of great, sky-covering sunsets gracing Boulder's skies of late, so I simply paid attention to this poem's imagery and feel rather than its message. Otherwise, I might have chosen an easier one. Alas it will have to be incomplete. This, O best beloved, is quite a complicated poem (who caught the Rudyard Kipling nod?). I have read it at least five times and it is only now beginning to take its shape for me. As in some of the old school PotWs, I think that I am just going to point out some things I have noticed in this poem. As in James Joyce's Ulysses, the poem's tangible action is simple, even boring. A baby wakes a dreaming woman who feeds him and goes back to bed, "ready again to sleep." Rukeyser does not make things this easy for us, though. The difficult and perhaps most brilliant thing about "Night Feeding" is that it reads like a dream. The images cycle and recycle, never settling on a pattern or meaning. It is as if the broken ideas are what matters rather than the poem's universe, for the different ideas and images seem to dance around the real ones. What these real ones are, we have to imagine for ourselves. We do see that love, evil, gold, black, snake, sleep/deep, and (fantastically) dream itself shuffle about. Black sleeps, black is a snake, and animals are black within the poem. In the same way, gold burns, is bones and is a seed. Rukeyser plays with "black" and "snake" implicitly, as sleep, death and even deep often connote darkness or black. Then, too, the poem (and the speaker's consciousness) seem almost like a snake ingesting its tail. The end returns to the beginning, and we realize that the body exists as a digestion (or is it a regurgitation) of itself.
Within this jumble, though, there rests a grain or two of sense. The diction is decidedly Biblical, what with the snake, the burning tree (which, while nodding at the Old Testament burning bush, could also be a metaphor for the destruction of Eden), a woman who knows the "despair" of our days, a mother perhaps of "all birth," and the voices of all of the animals. I propose that the narrator's sleep at the beginning of the poem resembles Eve's innocence in Eden, which a child's cry begins to shatter. Eden, a dream, breaks down as one into a more frenzied and mixed up jumble of what was. The animals are despairing, the earth is despairing, and we live for our children, shown by the line "gave to feed and fed on feeding." This poem is dark and cynical, showing a version of motherhood that rerun's Eve's. This leads to deeper questions about our own originality. Are we just replaying things over and over? Milan Kundera in Immortality suggests that we do not perform gestures because no gesture is unique. With uncountable billions of human beings to have passed across the earth, nothing can be simply ours. So a gesture is more individual than an individual - they inhabit us when we perform them. So this poem asks whether we are just replaying the garden of Eden tragedy over and over. We are born into a state of innocence, it crumbles, and we eventually return to the garden/innocence/death. This is what meta-
narratives are all about anyway! Umbrella-stories attempting to explain our lives and struggles. The Bible is full of meta-narratives, beliefs aside. I could actually keep going for a long time, but I myself am tumbling into the deep of sleep, and bid you goodnight!
And to those of you to whom I owe emails, please accept my apology and my promise that they will arrive post-haste.
Sarah
Deeper than sleep but not so deep as death
I lay there sleeping and my magic head
remembered and forgot. On first cry I
remembered and forgot and did believe.
I knew love and I knew evil:
woke to the burning song and the tree burning blind,
despair of our days and the calm milk-giver who
knows sleep, knows growth, the sex of fire and grass,
and the black snake with gold bones.
Black sleeps, gold burns; on second cry I woke
fully and gave to feed and fed on feeding.
Gold seed, green pain, my wizards in the earth
walked through the house, black in the morning dark.
Shadows grew in my veins, my bright belief,
my head of dreams deeper than night and sleep.
Voices of all black animals crying to drink, cries of all birth arise, simple as we,
found in the leaves, in clouds and dark, in dream,
deep as this hour, ready again to sleep.
Muriel Rukeyser 1951
Hello friends and family! I read this poem among the dying embers of a spectacular sunset, the latest in a series of great, sky-covering sunsets gracing Boulder's skies of late, so I simply paid attention to this poem's imagery and feel rather than its message. Otherwise, I might have chosen an easier one. Alas it will have to be incomplete. This, O best beloved, is quite a complicated poem (who caught the Rudyard Kipling nod?). I have read it at least five times and it is only now beginning to take its shape for me. As in some of the old school PotWs, I think that I am just going to point out some things I have noticed in this poem. As in James Joyce's Ulysses, the poem's tangible action is simple, even boring. A baby wakes a dreaming woman who feeds him and goes back to bed, "ready again to sleep." Rukeyser does not make things this easy for us, though. The difficult and perhaps most brilliant thing about "Night Feeding" is that it reads like a dream. The images cycle and recycle, never settling on a pattern or meaning. It is as if the broken ideas are what matters rather than the poem's universe, for the different ideas and images seem to dance around the real ones. What these real ones are, we have to imagine for ourselves. We do see that love, evil, gold, black, snake, sleep/deep, and (fantastically) dream itself shuffle about. Black sleeps, black is a snake, and animals are black within the poem. In the same way, gold burns, is bones and is a seed. Rukeyser plays with "black" and "snake" implicitly, as sleep, death and even deep often connote darkness or black. Then, too, the poem (and the speaker's consciousness) seem almost like a snake ingesting its tail. The end returns to the beginning, and we realize that the body exists as a digestion (or is it a regurgitation) of itself.
Within this jumble, though, there rests a grain or two of sense. The diction is decidedly Biblical, what with the snake, the burning tree (which, while nodding at the Old Testament burning bush, could also be a metaphor for the destruction of Eden), a woman who knows the "despair" of our days, a mother perhaps of "all birth," and the voices of all of the animals. I propose that the narrator's sleep at the beginning of the poem resembles Eve's innocence in Eden, which a child's cry begins to shatter. Eden, a dream, breaks down as one into a more frenzied and mixed up jumble of what was. The animals are despairing, the earth is despairing, and we live for our children, shown by the line "gave to feed and fed on feeding." This poem is dark and cynical, showing a version of motherhood that rerun's Eve's. This leads to deeper questions about our own originality. Are we just replaying things over and over? Milan Kundera in Immortality suggests that we do not perform gestures because no gesture is unique. With uncountable billions of human beings to have passed across the earth, nothing can be simply ours. So a gesture is more individual than an individual - they inhabit us when we perform them. So this poem asks whether we are just replaying the garden of Eden tragedy over and over. We are born into a state of innocence, it crumbles, and we eventually return to the garden/innocence/death. This is what meta-
narratives are all about anyway! Umbrella-stories attempting to explain our lives and struggles. The Bible is full of meta-narratives, beliefs aside. I could actually keep going for a long time, but I myself am tumbling into the deep of sleep, and bid you goodnight!
And to those of you to whom I owe emails, please accept my apology and my promise that they will arrive post-haste.
Sarah
Monday, June 13, 2005
Poem of the Week 6/13/2005: V.B. Nimble, V.B. Quick
V.B. Nimble, V.B. Quick
Science, Pure and Applied, by V.B. Wigglesworth, F.R.S., Quick
Professor of Biology in the University of Cambridge.
-a talk listed in the BBC's Radio Times
V.B. Wigglesworth wakes at noon,
Washes, shaves, and very soon
Is at the lab; he reads his mail,
Tweaks a tadpole by the tail,
Undoes his coat, removes his hat,
Dips a spider a vat
Of alkaline, phones the press,
Tells them he is F.R.S.,
Subdivides six protocells,
Kills a rat by ringing bells,
Writes a treatise, edits two
Symposia on "Will Man Do?,"
Gives a lecture, edits three,
Has the Sperm Club in for tea,
Pensions off an aging spore,
Cracks a test tube, takes some pure
Science and applies it, finds
His hat, adjusts it, pulls the blinds,
Instructs the jellyfish to spawn,
And, by one o'clock, is gone.
John Updike 1954
Good morning friends and family! This poem is somewhat lighter than most
PotWs, as this is a vacation Poem of the Week! Yes, I am on vacation, but I
refuse to abandon the Monday poetry post. So this analysis will be a bit
shorter as well (possibly with more typos, as this keyboard is difficult to
navigate). This poem is actually stuck in my head right now because it is so
rythmic and structured. I find it sticky, too, because it is nearly unbearably
clever. Updike managed to fit hilarious acts of science into one 20 line,
heavily structured poem. The imagery is hilarious, too, my favorite being
"kills a rat by ringing bells." This line is possibly a sinister
nod to Pavlov and his famous dog experiments.
What I like, also, about this poem (besides its hilarity), is its self
similarity across scale. Just as V.B. Wigglesworth manages to accomplish so
much in the short span of an hour, the poem also includes much in its tight
twenty lines. For that matter, actually, it accomplishes as much as any other
poem in its form and rhetorical complexity. Who says that a poem has to tackle
the Meaning of Life etc. etc. in order to utilize a rich form. Updike, a
writer for the New Yorker, incorporates every bit of detail from the quote
from which his inspiration came. He does what many other poets do, which is to
notice a detail about life and expound upon it. And he does it so that the
idea retains its humor rather than having the laughs explained out of it. Have
you all noticed that when somebody explains a joke, it maybe gets a groan but
loses everything that was funny? Well, this poem is Updike's way of explaining
this real-life funny moment. Anyway - that's vacation Poem of the Week!
Sarah
Science, Pure and Applied, by V.B. Wigglesworth, F.R.S., Quick
Professor of Biology in the University of Cambridge.
-a talk listed in the BBC's Radio Times
V.B. Wigglesworth wakes at noon,
Washes, shaves, and very soon
Is at the lab; he reads his mail,
Tweaks a tadpole by the tail,
Undoes his coat, removes his hat,
Dips a spider a vat
Of alkaline, phones the press,
Tells them he is F.R.S.,
Subdivides six protocells,
Kills a rat by ringing bells,
Writes a treatise, edits two
Symposia on "Will Man Do?,"
Gives a lecture, edits three,
Has the Sperm Club in for tea,
Pensions off an aging spore,
Cracks a test tube, takes some pure
Science and applies it, finds
His hat, adjusts it, pulls the blinds,
Instructs the jellyfish to spawn,
And, by one o'clock, is gone.
John Updike 1954
Good morning friends and family! This poem is somewhat lighter than most
PotWs, as this is a vacation Poem of the Week! Yes, I am on vacation, but I
refuse to abandon the Monday poetry post. So this analysis will be a bit
shorter as well (possibly with more typos, as this keyboard is difficult to
navigate). This poem is actually stuck in my head right now because it is so
rythmic and structured. I find it sticky, too, because it is nearly unbearably
clever. Updike managed to fit hilarious acts of science into one 20 line,
heavily structured poem. The imagery is hilarious, too, my favorite being
"kills a rat by ringing bells." This line is possibly a sinister
nod to Pavlov and his famous dog experiments.
What I like, also, about this poem (besides its hilarity), is its self
similarity across scale. Just as V.B. Wigglesworth manages to accomplish so
much in the short span of an hour, the poem also includes much in its tight
twenty lines. For that matter, actually, it accomplishes as much as any other
poem in its form and rhetorical complexity. Who says that a poem has to tackle
the Meaning of Life etc. etc. in order to utilize a rich form. Updike, a
writer for the New Yorker, incorporates every bit of detail from the quote
from which his inspiration came. He does what many other poets do, which is to
notice a detail about life and expound upon it. And he does it so that the
idea retains its humor rather than having the laughs explained out of it. Have
you all noticed that when somebody explains a joke, it maybe gets a groan but
loses everything that was funny? Well, this poem is Updike's way of explaining
this real-life funny moment. Anyway - that's vacation Poem of the Week!
Sarah
Monday, June 06, 2005
Poem of the Week 6/6/2005: Filling Station
Filling Station
Oh, but it is dirty!
-- this little filling station,
oil-soaked, oil-permeated
to a disturbing, over-all
black translucency.
Be careful with that match!
Father wears a dirty, oil-soaked monkey suit
that cuts him under the arms,
and several quick and saucy
and greasy sons assist him
(it's a family filling station),
all quite thoroughly dirty.
Do they live in the station?
It has a cement porch behind the pumps, and on it
a set of crushed and grease-
impregnated wickerwork;
on the wicker sofa a dirty dog, quite comfy.
Some comic books provide
the only note of color -- of certain color. They lie
upon a big dim doily
draping a taboret* *drum-shaped table
(part of the set), beside
a big hirsute begonia.
Why the extraneous plant?
Why the taboret?
Why, oh why, the doily?
(Embroidered in daisy stitch
with marguerites, I think, and heavy with gray crochet.)
Somebody embroidered the doily.
Somebody waters the plant,
or oils it maybe. Somebody
arranges the rows of cans
so that they softly say:
ESSO-SO-SO-SO
to high strung automobiles.
Somebody loves us all.
Elizabeth Bishop 1965
Oh Hello Everyone! A note about this poem: "Esso" is the name of the gas provider - the company turned into Exxon. I just didn't feel like putting more stars there for some reason, so you get that information here! Anyway. For this poem, I want to point out how there are several levels of emotion at play in this poem. To begin, there is the narrator's somewhat bemused attitude towards this station. Thanks to decidedly personal statements like "Be careful with that match" and "why, oh why, the doily?", we get the idea that the narrator is lamenting this gas station's awful taste and ubiquitous grime. Bishop repeats "oil" and "grease" very often, which underlines the station's filth. The hirsute (hairy) begonia is simply awful, as is the dingy-gray doily. Even choosing a doily is important, because the station's design touch is d-oily. Oil is everywhere.
Bishop heightens the idea of this po-dunk station by saying that "comic books provide / the only note of color -- / a certain color." First, the reading material is, shall we say, less than intellectual, while the final piece of that statement, "a certain color" could imply several things. The comics could just be faded in that certain way the sun has of taking all colors but blue. It could also point to the fact that the place has its own sort of flavor; the comic books provide visual color, though the place has its own color without them. Plus, the fact that she calls the visual arrangement a "set" demonstrates more of the speaker's amusement about this scene.
To this point, the filling station seems like a place nobody would actually want to visit - it's grimy and ugly and probably smelly. And yet, I don't hate this place. I actually kind of appreciate and love it, thanks to what Bishop discusses in the final stanza. She notices that these objects don't just exist as bastions of bad taste; somebody chose them. Somebody made that doily and somebody picked out that hairy begonia. She asks why they're there and then answers it in the last stanza. It's important to note that "somebody arranges the rows of cans" is in present tense, because this feeling is not simply one of fond nostalgia. These are lives.
That she doesn't find so much love and appreciation for life in, say, a meadow or a kiss maybe seems a bit curious. After all, shouldn't something that loves her spark the final insight that "Somebody loves us all?" I think not, actually. It makes perfect sense to me that this disgusting station inspires love in her (and in me). Perhaps it's that beauty clogs emotion or truth or something, stifling the genuine feeling with one of temporal surface beauty. For me, at least, ugly things often inspire more affection and compassion within me than beautiful ones. I can admire a graceful vase, but I don't know if I can love it the same way that I could love an awful vase at a thrift store. The coarse-ness allows space for empathy, for a thing's flaws make it real. It's a little sad to see the 80s chipped and cracked vase sitting there, but it, at least, has a history and a life. In "Filling Station," the father is more likeable, oil-
smeared as he may be, than the "high-strung" and presumably clean automobile at the end.
So anyway. One final point I want to add is the function this poem serves. Just as beauty can clog, disgust can, too. This poem gives us the imaginative distance from the actual grime so that we can appreciate that grease is an intrinsic part of this family. It may not be perfect or lovely, so this flawed space opens up room for love. This brings up the question of reader-participation. A poem gives us the opportunity to imagine or ignore as many aspects of a proposed image/scene as we like. So - one's interpretation can vary depending upon how much reality one gives the station. For me, I allowed myself enough room to appreciate and love the people.
Sarah
PS Hey - I was organizing my PotW database this weekend in a fit of boredom, and I am missing several of the earler PotWs. If any of you still have copies of 12/1, 12/7, 12/27, 1/3, the Change in the Poem of the Week (1/17), or 4/4, I would be much obliged if you forwarded me a copy. Thank you and have a wonderful day!
Oh, but it is dirty!
-- this little filling station,
oil-soaked, oil-permeated
to a disturbing, over-all
black translucency.
Be careful with that match!
Father wears a dirty, oil-soaked monkey suit
that cuts him under the arms,
and several quick and saucy
and greasy sons assist him
(it's a family filling station),
all quite thoroughly dirty.
Do they live in the station?
It has a cement porch behind the pumps, and on it
a set of crushed and grease-
impregnated wickerwork;
on the wicker sofa a dirty dog, quite comfy.
Some comic books provide
the only note of color -- of certain color. They lie
upon a big dim doily
draping a taboret* *drum-shaped table
(part of the set), beside
a big hirsute begonia.
Why the extraneous plant?
Why the taboret?
Why, oh why, the doily?
(Embroidered in daisy stitch
with marguerites, I think, and heavy with gray crochet.)
Somebody embroidered the doily.
Somebody waters the plant,
or oils it maybe. Somebody
arranges the rows of cans
so that they softly say:
ESSO-SO-SO-SO
to high strung automobiles.
Somebody loves us all.
Elizabeth Bishop 1965
Oh Hello Everyone! A note about this poem: "Esso" is the name of the gas provider - the company turned into Exxon. I just didn't feel like putting more stars there for some reason, so you get that information here! Anyway. For this poem, I want to point out how there are several levels of emotion at play in this poem. To begin, there is the narrator's somewhat bemused attitude towards this station. Thanks to decidedly personal statements like "Be careful with that match" and "why, oh why, the doily?", we get the idea that the narrator is lamenting this gas station's awful taste and ubiquitous grime. Bishop repeats "oil" and "grease" very often, which underlines the station's filth. The hirsute (hairy) begonia is simply awful, as is the dingy-gray doily. Even choosing a doily is important, because the station's design touch is d-oily. Oil is everywhere.
Bishop heightens the idea of this po-dunk station by saying that "comic books provide / the only note of color -- / a certain color." First, the reading material is, shall we say, less than intellectual, while the final piece of that statement, "a certain color" could imply several things. The comics could just be faded in that certain way the sun has of taking all colors but blue. It could also point to the fact that the place has its own sort of flavor; the comic books provide visual color, though the place has its own color without them. Plus, the fact that she calls the visual arrangement a "set" demonstrates more of the speaker's amusement about this scene.
To this point, the filling station seems like a place nobody would actually want to visit - it's grimy and ugly and probably smelly. And yet, I don't hate this place. I actually kind of appreciate and love it, thanks to what Bishop discusses in the final stanza. She notices that these objects don't just exist as bastions of bad taste; somebody chose them. Somebody made that doily and somebody picked out that hairy begonia. She asks why they're there and then answers it in the last stanza. It's important to note that "somebody arranges the rows of cans" is in present tense, because this feeling is not simply one of fond nostalgia. These are lives.
That she doesn't find so much love and appreciation for life in, say, a meadow or a kiss maybe seems a bit curious. After all, shouldn't something that loves her spark the final insight that "Somebody loves us all?" I think not, actually. It makes perfect sense to me that this disgusting station inspires love in her (and in me). Perhaps it's that beauty clogs emotion or truth or something, stifling the genuine feeling with one of temporal surface beauty. For me, at least, ugly things often inspire more affection and compassion within me than beautiful ones. I can admire a graceful vase, but I don't know if I can love it the same way that I could love an awful vase at a thrift store. The coarse-ness allows space for empathy, for a thing's flaws make it real. It's a little sad to see the 80s chipped and cracked vase sitting there, but it, at least, has a history and a life. In "Filling Station," the father is more likeable, oil-
smeared as he may be, than the "high-strung" and presumably clean automobile at the end.
So anyway. One final point I want to add is the function this poem serves. Just as beauty can clog, disgust can, too. This poem gives us the imaginative distance from the actual grime so that we can appreciate that grease is an intrinsic part of this family. It may not be perfect or lovely, so this flawed space opens up room for love. This brings up the question of reader-participation. A poem gives us the opportunity to imagine or ignore as many aspects of a proposed image/scene as we like. So - one's interpretation can vary depending upon how much reality one gives the station. For me, I allowed myself enough room to appreciate and love the people.
Sarah
PS Hey - I was organizing my PotW database this weekend in a fit of boredom, and I am missing several of the earler PotWs. If any of you still have copies of 12/1, 12/7, 12/27, 1/3, the Change in the Poem of the Week (1/17), or 4/4, I would be much obliged if you forwarded me a copy. Thank you and have a wonderful day!
Monday, May 30, 2005
Poem of the Week 5/30/2005: Homesickness
Homesickness
The lion stretched like a sandstone lion on a sandstone slab
of a bridge with one fixture, a gaslight,
looks up from his nicotine-worried forepaw
with the very same air my father, Patrick,
had when the results came back from the lab, that air of anguish-awe
that comes with the realization of just how slight
the chances are of anything doing the trick
as the sun goes down over Ballyknick and Ballymacnab
and a black-winged angel takes flight.
The black-winged angel leaning over the sandstone parapet
of the bridge wears a business suit, dark gray. His hair is slick with pomade.
He turns away as my mother, Brigid,
turned away from not only her sandstone pet
but any concession being made.
The black-winged angel sets her face to the unbending last ray
of evening and meets rigid with rigid
as the sun goes down over Lisnagat and Listamlet
and Clonmore and Clintyclay.
Feckless as he was feckless, as likely as her to be in a foofaraw,
I have it in me to absolutely rant and rail while, for fear of the backlash,
absolutely renounce
the idea of holding anything that might be construed as an opinion.
The lion still looks back to his raw
knuckle and sighs for the possibility that an ounce
of Walnut Plug might shape up from the ash
The angel still threatens to abandon us with a single flick of her pinion
as the sun goes down over Lislasly and Lissaraw
and Derrytrasna and Derrymacash.
Paul Muldoon 2002
Good Evening friends and family! Before I go into this Poem of the Week, I again have something extra to say. Three things, actually. The first is an appreciation; thanks to Steve Fisher for alerting me to see Paul Muldoon talk at the University of Denver, for taking me to see him, and for the book! The second is the story about seeing Muldoon. He was a funny, jolly sort of man: completely friendly (when some people walked in late, he just invited them up to the front and he offered one lady water when she coughed). Afterwards, he signed books for us and I got to ask him a question! I will go into the details when it is relevant in the poem. Finally, I have to say that I am tired and that this poem of the week may be less complete than those of late. I am just going to include things that I noticed and then I am crashing into my bed. So there you go. Happy Memorial Day!
This poem is, to me, quite confusing. The angel changes genders, there are many ambiguous geographical references (though they are probably all places around Muldoon's birthplace in Ireland), we have no idea what Muldoon's mother doesn't concede to, and the last stanza is a hodge podge of old images and lost antecedents. So, I thought that I would start with a little extra information. Adam Newey writes in the New Statesman that Muldoon's poems have no core. They stack images "like a heap of discarded road signs all pointing in different directions." Another difficulty, he notes, is that we are never sure where Muldoon sits within his work; there are overt autobiographical components that end up expanding into something wild or fantastic. This poem is a solid example of this. The parents are certainly Muldoon's parents, and yet their story deals with angels, lions, and ambiguous actions and beliefs. After all, the phrase "feckless as he was feckless" does not help in the least. It reminds me of T.S. Eliot's notes which tend to confuse the reader more rather than elucidating the text. But anyway - the point is that Muldoon tends to blend poet and speaker.
Somewhat luckily, this is nearly precisely the question I asked Muldoon. When talking about a poem in Moy Sand and Gravel, his latest book, he expounded upon the personal experience that helped shape one of the poems he was reading but used "the speaker" once or twice in discussing the text itself. Like "Homesickness," this poem uses his family members' names and has *very* specific biographical notes. So I asked him why he still called him "the speaker" when he seemed to be Muldoon. He answered that the poem is just a representation of a person; it is never quite the whole speaker. Actually, he said something very interesting about it simply being a pastiche of the person he was at that specific time, that moment, and (implicitly) since this has changed, he can no longer claim to be the speaker. So, for this poem, while Muldoon's life may have informed the poem, it by no means holds the key.
Alright: some informal, general thoughts I have about the poem (I do apologise for being so tired - I hope that you will all excuse me. I don't like leaving the poem tangled up. You see, part of what me simply leaving notes here means is that I haven't spent enough time with the poem yet and am too exhausted to do it. And Muldoon is not very accessible. So these are, as Louis Althusser might write, simply "notes towards an investigation.") Notice how Muldoon immediately throws us off in the first line, writing that "the lion sits like a sandstone lion." This is a real lion that is simply acting like a stone one. As for its purpose, I think that the lion is a reflection of the father. This is somewhat blatant, seen in their shared anguish-awe at realizing that nothing is going to really work. Work to do what? For the lion we know - he wants the ash to reform into the tobacco from whence it came. This may illuminate what the father wishes; just as the lion wants the ash to heal into tobacco, the father perhaps wants his body to heal.
The ambiguity that Muldoon leaves concerning Patrick is characteristic of the poem, however. To begin, there are a number of things that the black-winged angel could be. Death? Guardian-angel? Something completely and totally different? So, the fact that the angel changes gender from the second to the third (and possibly even within the second - who is the antecedent for "her"?) stanza is actually consistent with the confusion that runs amok throughout "Homesickness." Why is the title "Homesickness" at all? Is this the father's disease? Why Muldoon wrote it? Perhaps the title explains all of the Irish towns' references in the couplets. Hmm - because night keeps falling over Ireland, the poem's action happens as Muldoon's home memories are fading away. He is homesick, and feels the anguish-awe about the fact that nothing is quite going to heal that. This may be what he is showing in the poem. After all, there is certainly a measure of loss. His father is dying and his mother turned away, stubborn and rigid. The speaker (a version of Muldoon) shows that he opposes this blind insistence, saying that he will "rant and rail" without ever harboring and opinion. He is completely flexible.
But this thought about homesickness doesn't help with the last stanza; the lion's piece is clear, but why would the angel leave? How does the final stanza's first sentence make sense at all? Actually, does it seem at all cohesive? That sentence and the angel still lie knotted beneath the poem for me. Ah well. Just as a magician doesn't alwaysd telll his secrets, I can occasionally leave some statements as mere questions, I guess. If any of you have ideas, let me know! I would love to discuss it with you (in email, voice, or person), and this concludes my notes towards an investigation! Good night!
Sarah
The lion stretched like a sandstone lion on a sandstone slab
of a bridge with one fixture, a gaslight,
looks up from his nicotine-worried forepaw
with the very same air my father, Patrick,
had when the results came back from the lab, that air of anguish-awe
that comes with the realization of just how slight
the chances are of anything doing the trick
as the sun goes down over Ballyknick and Ballymacnab
and a black-winged angel takes flight.
The black-winged angel leaning over the sandstone parapet
of the bridge wears a business suit, dark gray. His hair is slick with pomade.
He turns away as my mother, Brigid,
turned away from not only her sandstone pet
but any concession being made.
The black-winged angel sets her face to the unbending last ray
of evening and meets rigid with rigid
as the sun goes down over Lisnagat and Listamlet
and Clonmore and Clintyclay.
Feckless as he was feckless, as likely as her to be in a foofaraw,
I have it in me to absolutely rant and rail while, for fear of the backlash,
absolutely renounce
the idea of holding anything that might be construed as an opinion.
The lion still looks back to his raw
knuckle and sighs for the possibility that an ounce
of Walnut Plug might shape up from the ash
The angel still threatens to abandon us with a single flick of her pinion
as the sun goes down over Lislasly and Lissaraw
and Derrytrasna and Derrymacash.
Paul Muldoon 2002
Good Evening friends and family! Before I go into this Poem of the Week, I again have something extra to say. Three things, actually. The first is an appreciation; thanks to Steve Fisher for alerting me to see Paul Muldoon talk at the University of Denver, for taking me to see him, and for the book! The second is the story about seeing Muldoon. He was a funny, jolly sort of man: completely friendly (when some people walked in late, he just invited them up to the front and he offered one lady water when she coughed). Afterwards, he signed books for us and I got to ask him a question! I will go into the details when it is relevant in the poem. Finally, I have to say that I am tired and that this poem of the week may be less complete than those of late. I am just going to include things that I noticed and then I am crashing into my bed. So there you go. Happy Memorial Day!
This poem is, to me, quite confusing. The angel changes genders, there are many ambiguous geographical references (though they are probably all places around Muldoon's birthplace in Ireland), we have no idea what Muldoon's mother doesn't concede to, and the last stanza is a hodge podge of old images and lost antecedents. So, I thought that I would start with a little extra information. Adam Newey writes in the New Statesman that Muldoon's poems have no core. They stack images "like a heap of discarded road signs all pointing in different directions." Another difficulty, he notes, is that we are never sure where Muldoon sits within his work; there are overt autobiographical components that end up expanding into something wild or fantastic. This poem is a solid example of this. The parents are certainly Muldoon's parents, and yet their story deals with angels, lions, and ambiguous actions and beliefs. After all, the phrase "feckless as he was feckless" does not help in the least. It reminds me of T.S. Eliot's notes which tend to confuse the reader more rather than elucidating the text. But anyway - the point is that Muldoon tends to blend poet and speaker.
Somewhat luckily, this is nearly precisely the question I asked Muldoon. When talking about a poem in Moy Sand and Gravel, his latest book, he expounded upon the personal experience that helped shape one of the poems he was reading but used "the speaker" once or twice in discussing the text itself. Like "Homesickness," this poem uses his family members' names and has *very* specific biographical notes. So I asked him why he still called him "the speaker" when he seemed to be Muldoon. He answered that the poem is just a representation of a person; it is never quite the whole speaker. Actually, he said something very interesting about it simply being a pastiche of the person he was at that specific time, that moment, and (implicitly) since this has changed, he can no longer claim to be the speaker. So, for this poem, while Muldoon's life may have informed the poem, it by no means holds the key.
Alright: some informal, general thoughts I have about the poem (I do apologise for being so tired - I hope that you will all excuse me. I don't like leaving the poem tangled up. You see, part of what me simply leaving notes here means is that I haven't spent enough time with the poem yet and am too exhausted to do it. And Muldoon is not very accessible. So these are, as Louis Althusser might write, simply "notes towards an investigation.") Notice how Muldoon immediately throws us off in the first line, writing that "the lion sits like a sandstone lion." This is a real lion that is simply acting like a stone one. As for its purpose, I think that the lion is a reflection of the father. This is somewhat blatant, seen in their shared anguish-awe at realizing that nothing is going to really work. Work to do what? For the lion we know - he wants the ash to reform into the tobacco from whence it came. This may illuminate what the father wishes; just as the lion wants the ash to heal into tobacco, the father perhaps wants his body to heal.
The ambiguity that Muldoon leaves concerning Patrick is characteristic of the poem, however. To begin, there are a number of things that the black-winged angel could be. Death? Guardian-angel? Something completely and totally different? So, the fact that the angel changes gender from the second to the third (and possibly even within the second - who is the antecedent for "her"?) stanza is actually consistent with the confusion that runs amok throughout "Homesickness." Why is the title "Homesickness" at all? Is this the father's disease? Why Muldoon wrote it? Perhaps the title explains all of the Irish towns' references in the couplets. Hmm - because night keeps falling over Ireland, the poem's action happens as Muldoon's home memories are fading away. He is homesick, and feels the anguish-awe about the fact that nothing is quite going to heal that. This may be what he is showing in the poem. After all, there is certainly a measure of loss. His father is dying and his mother turned away, stubborn and rigid. The speaker (a version of Muldoon) shows that he opposes this blind insistence, saying that he will "rant and rail" without ever harboring and opinion. He is completely flexible.
But this thought about homesickness doesn't help with the last stanza; the lion's piece is clear, but why would the angel leave? How does the final stanza's first sentence make sense at all? Actually, does it seem at all cohesive? That sentence and the angel still lie knotted beneath the poem for me. Ah well. Just as a magician doesn't alwaysd telll his secrets, I can occasionally leave some statements as mere questions, I guess. If any of you have ideas, let me know! I would love to discuss it with you (in email, voice, or person), and this concludes my notes towards an investigation! Good night!
Sarah
Monday, May 23, 2005
Poem of the Week 5/23/2005: Burden
Burden
I called you because I could not stand alone
looking north to that skyline-
tree globed with its yellow apples
balancing like a fountain of planets
in the bright light and the blue air.
And because on the way there
I looked at a smooth cirque
the brook had worn in a stone;
and nothing as soft as water
could, by taking care,
have so pestled and polished
that granite mortar; only
by a thousand years of indifference,
of aiming elsewhere.
I wish we might do -- or no,
look back and find we had done --
some un-advertized thing,
overwhelming and un-self-aware
as water streamlining a stone, or a tree's
kindling in an empty meadow
its casual Hesperides.
Peter Kane Dufault 1978
Good evening! Before I go into this poem, I wanted to tell you all something I found when I was doing a little extra research on Dufault. Brad Leithauser writes that he is "a "little-known poet"-even if nowadays that's something of a redundancy, like "commercial athletics" or "formulaic top 40." He's someone who doesn't appear in most anthologies, and whose name is likely to raise a fuzzy look of semirecognition when dropped among contemporary poets" (the New York Review of Books). I like this comment because it brings to light something we talked about in my Brit Lit class one day - that poetry has essentially dropped off of the cultural radar. My *professor* could barely tell us who the current US Poet Laureate was (to be fair, we had just switched laureates), so how many average citizens are going to know much about any kind of American poetry? Besides, oh, the Beats or Billy Collins or Dickinson or Yeats or Plath, how many poets could most people actually name? Poe would be in the list, and Shakespeare of course, but really. If there is a poem of the week that you particularly like, I would encourage you all to take another five or ten minutes and look up the author - I choose lesser-known poets fairly frequently because I generally like later 20th Century poetry the best. Granted, they are still anthologized, as I get most of the PotWs out of my beautiful Norton Anthology of Poetry, but they are by no means popular. So that's my little rant, and on to the poem!
I chose it for its imagery, first and foremost. The entire first stanza is literally breathtaking; the mythic and fantastic quality of the image of a "tree globed with its yellow apples ... like a fountain of planets / in the bright light and the blue air" gives an immediate sense of both deepness and nobility. This stanza is also refreshingly clear. Dufault uses direct, simple words like "north," "yellow," "bright," and "blue" rather than more esoteric words. The stanza would be less piercing were he to substitute yellow with ochre, blue with azure, or bright with effulgent. It might still be beautiful, but it would sit less like a Techinicolor fantasy and more like a crinkled, faded, sepia-postcard. That crispness lies directly in line with the poem's simple structure; Dufault arranges it around one action (I called you). And the speaker is straightforward enough to explain *why* he called, though that explanation is not so simple.
This anwer has something to do with man and nature, time and myth, and free will. The speaker finds truths in nature, both of which compel him to call the "you". (*note: I know there is no way of knowing what gender the speaker is, but in my mind the speaker, if left unknown, takes the same gender as the author. I do not presume to say it is always a man or always a woman. It is the poet's sex, for me. Feel free to think of it any other way, and I am sure that this in some way limits me. I don't think that it's important for this poem, though, or I would address it, at least in passing). Thinking about who the "you" is becomes interesting, though, because it could be a parent, lover, friend, child, or reader. If the you is actually you reading the poem (and this response) right now, then it brings up the question of poetry's function. Maybe the "I" is Dufault himself, and the natural metaphors explain why he writes poetry. As Harriet the spy writes, think about that.
At any rate, the first reason he calls is that he cannot bear to be alone. That is simple enough, but why? What about this tree means that he cannot be alone? The key here may lie in the title: this clear vision, this mythic garden is a burden. We can read this myth at least three ways. The tree of youth (that is the tree with golden apples in the garden Hesperides, a mythic Greek garden) is perhaps too heavy to bear alone. Societal ideals of everlasting youth and beauty would be the culprits here. Or maybe our past, represented by the Classical era, is too much to deal with. The myth possibly alludes to every person's inavoidable trials, too, pointing to the possibility that he wants someone else because we need another to go on, day after day.
But this may not be the real reason that he called. It is certainly part of it, yes, but the second reason inhabits 16 lines to the first explanation's 5. Dufault presents this reason beautifully as well; the diction has a nice bit of self-similarity across scale in that it is as soft as the water it describes. "Pestled," "polished," "thousand," and "elsewhere" purr their way onto the page, seducing us as readily as the first stanza did. (Perhaps Dufault wanted to make these separate images so striking and gorgeous to convey their power over him, or their significance. Or not - another thing worth thinking about). The speaker notices that the water inadvertently creates something whole and wonderfully circular (this process is actually called potholing, in case you were wondering). Stanza two's final lines reminded me of that awful cliche "life is what happens when you're making other plans." Unfortunately, that may be the simplest way of conveying what the speaker noticed.
His version is mercifully more complex than the cliche, though. It questions free will, acknowledging that our actions, no matter how thoughtfully directed, may actually work towards a larger, unseen result. This just reminded me of when somebody told me that, if a pool ball were earth-sized, it would have higher mountains and deeper trenches than either Everest or the Marianas Trench. If you are miniature and on that ball, you have no idea how smooth it feels in the palm of your hand when you are so much bigger than it. The minute obscures the ball's larger design. It is ultimately significant, then, that the speaker corrects himself in line 15, saying "I wish we might do -- or no, / look back and find we had done." He wants to make the mistakes and (to continue my metaphor, helpful or no) have interesting geography rather than knowing immeadately that the earth is round. Everyday life matters, our choices matter, but perhaps more important is the wisdom that accompanies the ability to step away from those things and see the greater shape. Our incidental truths are perhaps the most important and organic ones, an idea with Dufault captures in "Burden."
Ahh you can tell I am getting tired by that last line's stunning middle-school wrap it all up feeling, so I think it is time for me to turn in. Here are some more questions that I would have addressed were I feeling more lucid, just in case you are totally bored and not drained from heat because you don't live in Colorado. What function does myth play in the last stanza? I touched on how it can be a burden in the first stanza, but how does this idea of burden play itself out in the final stanza? Why does Dufault use "un-advertize" and "un-self-aware" rather than a simpler term such as self-ignorant? And why does any of this make him want to call this you??? Maybe he realized that his person is part of his "plan", his greater arc, or maybe that is completely off-base. It's up to you! Dear friends and family, I hope that this poem has given you something to think about, or at least that you can appreciate one of the images within. I just realized that this close reading was enormous, but if you made it this far, I appreciate you! And if you didn't (you won't be reading this, for one) I completely understand. Goodnight!
Sarah
I called you because I could not stand alone
looking north to that skyline-
tree globed with its yellow apples
balancing like a fountain of planets
in the bright light and the blue air.
And because on the way there
I looked at a smooth cirque
the brook had worn in a stone;
and nothing as soft as water
could, by taking care,
have so pestled and polished
that granite mortar; only
by a thousand years of indifference,
of aiming elsewhere.
I wish we might do -- or no,
look back and find we had done --
some un-advertized thing,
overwhelming and un-self-aware
as water streamlining a stone, or a tree's
kindling in an empty meadow
its casual Hesperides.
Peter Kane Dufault 1978
Good evening! Before I go into this poem, I wanted to tell you all something I found when I was doing a little extra research on Dufault. Brad Leithauser writes that he is "a "little-known poet"-even if nowadays that's something of a redundancy, like "commercial athletics" or "formulaic top 40." He's someone who doesn't appear in most anthologies, and whose name is likely to raise a fuzzy look of semirecognition when dropped among contemporary poets" (the New York Review of Books). I like this comment because it brings to light something we talked about in my Brit Lit class one day - that poetry has essentially dropped off of the cultural radar. My *professor* could barely tell us who the current US Poet Laureate was (to be fair, we had just switched laureates), so how many average citizens are going to know much about any kind of American poetry? Besides, oh, the Beats or Billy Collins or Dickinson or Yeats or Plath, how many poets could most people actually name? Poe would be in the list, and Shakespeare of course, but really. If there is a poem of the week that you particularly like, I would encourage you all to take another five or ten minutes and look up the author - I choose lesser-known poets fairly frequently because I generally like later 20th Century poetry the best. Granted, they are still anthologized, as I get most of the PotWs out of my beautiful Norton Anthology of Poetry, but they are by no means popular. So that's my little rant, and on to the poem!
I chose it for its imagery, first and foremost. The entire first stanza is literally breathtaking; the mythic and fantastic quality of the image of a "tree globed with its yellow apples ... like a fountain of planets / in the bright light and the blue air" gives an immediate sense of both deepness and nobility. This stanza is also refreshingly clear. Dufault uses direct, simple words like "north," "yellow," "bright," and "blue" rather than more esoteric words. The stanza would be less piercing were he to substitute yellow with ochre, blue with azure, or bright with effulgent. It might still be beautiful, but it would sit less like a Techinicolor fantasy and more like a crinkled, faded, sepia-postcard. That crispness lies directly in line with the poem's simple structure; Dufault arranges it around one action (I called you). And the speaker is straightforward enough to explain *why* he called, though that explanation is not so simple.
This anwer has something to do with man and nature, time and myth, and free will. The speaker finds truths in nature, both of which compel him to call the "you". (*note: I know there is no way of knowing what gender the speaker is, but in my mind the speaker, if left unknown, takes the same gender as the author. I do not presume to say it is always a man or always a woman. It is the poet's sex, for me. Feel free to think of it any other way, and I am sure that this in some way limits me. I don't think that it's important for this poem, though, or I would address it, at least in passing). Thinking about who the "you" is becomes interesting, though, because it could be a parent, lover, friend, child, or reader. If the you is actually you reading the poem (and this response) right now, then it brings up the question of poetry's function. Maybe the "I" is Dufault himself, and the natural metaphors explain why he writes poetry. As Harriet the spy writes, think about that.
At any rate, the first reason he calls is that he cannot bear to be alone. That is simple enough, but why? What about this tree means that he cannot be alone? The key here may lie in the title: this clear vision, this mythic garden is a burden. We can read this myth at least three ways. The tree of youth (that is the tree with golden apples in the garden Hesperides, a mythic Greek garden) is perhaps too heavy to bear alone. Societal ideals of everlasting youth and beauty would be the culprits here. Or maybe our past, represented by the Classical era, is too much to deal with. The myth possibly alludes to every person's inavoidable trials, too, pointing to the possibility that he wants someone else because we need another to go on, day after day.
But this may not be the real reason that he called. It is certainly part of it, yes, but the second reason inhabits 16 lines to the first explanation's 5. Dufault presents this reason beautifully as well; the diction has a nice bit of self-similarity across scale in that it is as soft as the water it describes. "Pestled," "polished," "thousand," and "elsewhere" purr their way onto the page, seducing us as readily as the first stanza did. (Perhaps Dufault wanted to make these separate images so striking and gorgeous to convey their power over him, or their significance. Or not - another thing worth thinking about). The speaker notices that the water inadvertently creates something whole and wonderfully circular (this process is actually called potholing, in case you were wondering). Stanza two's final lines reminded me of that awful cliche "life is what happens when you're making other plans." Unfortunately, that may be the simplest way of conveying what the speaker noticed.
His version is mercifully more complex than the cliche, though. It questions free will, acknowledging that our actions, no matter how thoughtfully directed, may actually work towards a larger, unseen result. This just reminded me of when somebody told me that, if a pool ball were earth-sized, it would have higher mountains and deeper trenches than either Everest or the Marianas Trench. If you are miniature and on that ball, you have no idea how smooth it feels in the palm of your hand when you are so much bigger than it. The minute obscures the ball's larger design. It is ultimately significant, then, that the speaker corrects himself in line 15, saying "I wish we might do -- or no, / look back and find we had done." He wants to make the mistakes and (to continue my metaphor, helpful or no) have interesting geography rather than knowing immeadately that the earth is round. Everyday life matters, our choices matter, but perhaps more important is the wisdom that accompanies the ability to step away from those things and see the greater shape. Our incidental truths are perhaps the most important and organic ones, an idea with Dufault captures in "Burden."
Ahh you can tell I am getting tired by that last line's stunning middle-school wrap it all up feeling, so I think it is time for me to turn in. Here are some more questions that I would have addressed were I feeling more lucid, just in case you are totally bored and not drained from heat because you don't live in Colorado. What function does myth play in the last stanza? I touched on how it can be a burden in the first stanza, but how does this idea of burden play itself out in the final stanza? Why does Dufault use "un-advertize" and "un-self-aware" rather than a simpler term such as self-ignorant? And why does any of this make him want to call this you??? Maybe he realized that his person is part of his "plan", his greater arc, or maybe that is completely off-base. It's up to you! Dear friends and family, I hope that this poem has given you something to think about, or at least that you can appreciate one of the images within. I just realized that this close reading was enormous, but if you made it this far, I appreciate you! And if you didn't (you won't be reading this, for one) I completely understand. Goodnight!
Sarah
Monday, May 16, 2005
Poem of the Week 5/16/2005: Lament for a Leg
Lament for a Leg
Near the tree under which the body of Dafydd ap Gwilym* is buried in Strata
Florida, Cardiganshire, there stands a stone with the following inscription:
"The left leg and part of the thigh of Henry Hughes, Cooper, was cut off and
interr'd here, June 18, 1756." Later the rest of Henry Hughes set off across
the Atlantic in search of better fortune.
A short service, to be sure,
With scarcely half a hymn they held,
Over my lost limb, suitable curtailment.
Out-of-tune notes a crow cawed
By the yew tree, amd me,
My stump still tourniqued,
Akward on my new crutch,
Being snatched towards the snack
Of a funeral feast they made.
With seldom a dry eye, for laughter,
They jostled me over the ale
I'd cut the casks for, and the mead.
"Catch me falling under a coach",
Every voice jested, save mine,
Henry Hughes, cooper. A tasteless caper!
Soon with my only, my best, foot forward
I fled, quiet, to far America.
Where, with my two tried hands, I plied
My trade and, true, in time made good
Through grieving for Pontrhydfendigaid.**
Sometimes, all at once, in my tall cups,
I'd cry in hiraeth*** for my remembered thigh
Left by the grand yew in Ystrad Fleur's
Bare ground, near the good bard.
Strangers, astonished at my high
Beer-flush, would stare, not guessing,
Above the bad-board, that I, of the starry eye,
Had one foot in the grave; thinking me,
No doubt, a drunken dolt in whom a whim
Warmed to madness, not knowing a tease
Of a Welsh worm was tickling my distant toes.
"So I bequeath my leg", I'd sat and sigh,
Baffling them, "my unexiled part, to Dafydd
The pure poet who, whole, lies near and far
from me, still pining for Morfudd's heart",
Giving him, generous to a fault
With what was no more mine to give,
Out of that curt plot, my quarter grave,
Good help, I hope. What will the great God say
At Dafydd's wild-kicking-climbing extra leg,
Jammed hard in heaven's white doorway
(I'll limp unnimble round the narrow back)
Come the quick trumpet of the Judgment Day?
John Ormond 1973
*Fourteenth-century Welsh poet
**Welsh place-name, as Ystrad-Fleur (line 23)
***Longing, nostalgia (Welsh). In my tall cups: very drunk
Good morning friends and family! I have to say that I usually put a shorter
poem in just for everybody's convenience (and my typing-laziness), but I read
this poem last night and that was that. It is somewhat surprising to find
funny literature; when I started reading in AP English, I was very serious
about it and thought that good books (and good poetry) couldn't be funny. Now
I know that some of the best ones are quite amusing. The trick is not to let
the funny bits clog up any of the weightier elements.
To begin, the epigraph itself is quite startling; I find it hilarious that
they erected a tombstone for somebody's leg. Ormond visualizes the funeral for
this lost limb as kind of a community joke. Nobody really laments (they are
all laughing too hard), the priest doesn't give more than "half a hymn," the
feast is simply a snack, and the music is a crow's cawing (some of you at UPS
might be familiar with this sort of thing haha). All in all, it is a rather
pathetic funeral, and we only realize that there is actually an element of
sadness because we hear about it from Henry Hughes's perspective. I have to
admit that I might be laughing at this funeral with the rest of them, so I am
glad that Ormond included Hughes' words to counterbalance that. He gets the
joke, noting that the truncated hymn is sort of morbidly appropriate, but,
when I see him at the funeral, I see him grinning to his friends and dropping
that facade when they turn away. They don't understand that underneath the
novelty of a funeral for a leg, somebody has lost something dear and precious.
He has literally lost a piece of himself, a limb he relied on and that carried
him many places.
As he goes to America, we understand more and more that Henry Hughes is a hard
worker and a loner. He quietly flees there (a sign that he was not happy in
Wales and that he did not care to attract a lot of attention to himself) and
makes good with what he has: two hands and the ability to grieve for his home.
This last asset seems like it would not be very helpful, but he here
acknowledges that he has to move on before he can wholly throw himself into
his new life. At least, that is what it appears. It seems as if Henry Hughes
is a man who is good at hiding himself. While he seems like the hard worker,
the kind of man who can live out the American Dream, shed his nationality and
go from rags-to-riches pulling himself up by his (one) bootstrap, he is
literally torn in two. In saying that he is a man with "one foot in the grave"
who is being tickled by a distant Welsh worm, he shows that something in him
has died, something is left on that shore so far away. The leg, then, becomes
a kind of allegory for lost nationhood and the pains of immigration. The
strangers don't understand that part of him is far, far away, lost, gone,
separate, dead.
The final stanza reinforces the poem's sadness and Henry's status as a loner.
He baffles the strangers around him because (a) they don't know him and (b)
they couldn't if the tried. As stated above, they don't understand what is
Welsh about him. They don't understand where he came from. This kind of
misunderstanding is perhaps the worst. When people don't know your home, it
has to stay inside. The new sites (for they would be new for Henry
Hughes)begin to push at the old ones, and one begins to believe that maybe
nobody will understand this ever. This is deeply tragic. Part of Henry is
literally still in this home place, home is still a piece of him and he of it,
and yet since nobody can see his inexorable Welshness, so he loses it. He
literally gives his Welshness to the poet Dafydd, perhaps hoping that it can
attain the kind of immortality that words can engender. When he says that the
leg "was no more mine to give", whose does it become? I think that it becomes
Wales' leg to give, and, since Wales seems no longer *his*, the leg is no
longer his. Maybe he bequeaths it to the Welsh poet as well because, if it is
part of Wales' heritage, perhaps he will someday be part of that heritage as
well.
Ormond writes that the leg might help Dafydd out and goes on to describe a
somewhat comical scene in which a puzzled God watches this random third leg
trying to kick its way into heaven. The poem ends, however, on a note of
sadness. Hughes doesn't know whether God will recognize him (being recognized
is sort of like being understood or being seen the way I think about it), and
I read this as poor Hughes is so used to being misunderstood and unseen that
he doesn't believe that he will ever find a home. His situation feels so odd
and unrelatable that God won't even know what to do when his leg comes
stomping into Heaven. That is the truly sad part of this poem; he felt
alienated from his "friends" at his funeral and so he left Wales, only to feel
further estranged from himself, literally and figuratively. This poem thus
underlines the absolute necessity of human understanding; one cannot go
through life alone, acting on the outside for others. Otherwise, as Henry does
when he is drunk, the true self will bubble out the edges.
That's all for this week - hope you are all doing well, and I will see some of
you very soon who I have not seen in a long time, and others of you it will
still be a while. Have a good rest of your day!
Sarah
PS - A number of you of late have requested to have the PotW sent to your
other friends or family. This is completely and totally fine - you all have my
permission to give this to whomever. If you want to send it off yourself, you
can do that, but I will be more than happy to simply add their names to my
email list. You have to send me the email addresses though!!!! Otherwise there
is nothing that I can do!!! So - send me the addresses if you want them added
or you will have to do it yourself. Thanks!
Near the tree under which the body of Dafydd ap Gwilym* is buried in Strata
Florida, Cardiganshire, there stands a stone with the following inscription:
"The left leg and part of the thigh of Henry Hughes, Cooper, was cut off and
interr'd here, June 18, 1756." Later the rest of Henry Hughes set off across
the Atlantic in search of better fortune.
A short service, to be sure,
With scarcely half a hymn they held,
Over my lost limb, suitable curtailment.
Out-of-tune notes a crow cawed
By the yew tree, amd me,
My stump still tourniqued,
Akward on my new crutch,
Being snatched towards the snack
Of a funeral feast they made.
With seldom a dry eye, for laughter,
They jostled me over the ale
I'd cut the casks for, and the mead.
"Catch me falling under a coach",
Every voice jested, save mine,
Henry Hughes, cooper. A tasteless caper!
Soon with my only, my best, foot forward
I fled, quiet, to far America.
Where, with my two tried hands, I plied
My trade and, true, in time made good
Through grieving for Pontrhydfendigaid.**
Sometimes, all at once, in my tall cups,
I'd cry in hiraeth*** for my remembered thigh
Left by the grand yew in Ystrad Fleur's
Bare ground, near the good bard.
Strangers, astonished at my high
Beer-flush, would stare, not guessing,
Above the bad-board, that I, of the starry eye,
Had one foot in the grave; thinking me,
No doubt, a drunken dolt in whom a whim
Warmed to madness, not knowing a tease
Of a Welsh worm was tickling my distant toes.
"So I bequeath my leg", I'd sat and sigh,
Baffling them, "my unexiled part, to Dafydd
The pure poet who, whole, lies near and far
from me, still pining for Morfudd's heart",
Giving him, generous to a fault
With what was no more mine to give,
Out of that curt plot, my quarter grave,
Good help, I hope. What will the great God say
At Dafydd's wild-kicking-climbing extra leg,
Jammed hard in heaven's white doorway
(I'll limp unnimble round the narrow back)
Come the quick trumpet of the Judgment Day?
John Ormond 1973
*Fourteenth-century Welsh poet
**Welsh place-name, as Ystrad-Fleur (line 23)
***Longing, nostalgia (Welsh). In my tall cups: very drunk
Good morning friends and family! I have to say that I usually put a shorter
poem in just for everybody's convenience (and my typing-laziness), but I read
this poem last night and that was that. It is somewhat surprising to find
funny literature; when I started reading in AP English, I was very serious
about it and thought that good books (and good poetry) couldn't be funny. Now
I know that some of the best ones are quite amusing. The trick is not to let
the funny bits clog up any of the weightier elements.
To begin, the epigraph itself is quite startling; I find it hilarious that
they erected a tombstone for somebody's leg. Ormond visualizes the funeral for
this lost limb as kind of a community joke. Nobody really laments (they are
all laughing too hard), the priest doesn't give more than "half a hymn," the
feast is simply a snack, and the music is a crow's cawing (some of you at UPS
might be familiar with this sort of thing haha). All in all, it is a rather
pathetic funeral, and we only realize that there is actually an element of
sadness because we hear about it from Henry Hughes's perspective. I have to
admit that I might be laughing at this funeral with the rest of them, so I am
glad that Ormond included Hughes' words to counterbalance that. He gets the
joke, noting that the truncated hymn is sort of morbidly appropriate, but,
when I see him at the funeral, I see him grinning to his friends and dropping
that facade when they turn away. They don't understand that underneath the
novelty of a funeral for a leg, somebody has lost something dear and precious.
He has literally lost a piece of himself, a limb he relied on and that carried
him many places.
As he goes to America, we understand more and more that Henry Hughes is a hard
worker and a loner. He quietly flees there (a sign that he was not happy in
Wales and that he did not care to attract a lot of attention to himself) and
makes good with what he has: two hands and the ability to grieve for his home.
This last asset seems like it would not be very helpful, but he here
acknowledges that he has to move on before he can wholly throw himself into
his new life. At least, that is what it appears. It seems as if Henry Hughes
is a man who is good at hiding himself. While he seems like the hard worker,
the kind of man who can live out the American Dream, shed his nationality and
go from rags-to-riches pulling himself up by his (one) bootstrap, he is
literally torn in two. In saying that he is a man with "one foot in the grave"
who is being tickled by a distant Welsh worm, he shows that something in him
has died, something is left on that shore so far away. The leg, then, becomes
a kind of allegory for lost nationhood and the pains of immigration. The
strangers don't understand that part of him is far, far away, lost, gone,
separate, dead.
The final stanza reinforces the poem's sadness and Henry's status as a loner.
He baffles the strangers around him because (a) they don't know him and (b)
they couldn't if the tried. As stated above, they don't understand what is
Welsh about him. They don't understand where he came from. This kind of
misunderstanding is perhaps the worst. When people don't know your home, it
has to stay inside. The new sites (for they would be new for Henry
Hughes)begin to push at the old ones, and one begins to believe that maybe
nobody will understand this ever. This is deeply tragic. Part of Henry is
literally still in this home place, home is still a piece of him and he of it,
and yet since nobody can see his inexorable Welshness, so he loses it. He
literally gives his Welshness to the poet Dafydd, perhaps hoping that it can
attain the kind of immortality that words can engender. When he says that the
leg "was no more mine to give", whose does it become? I think that it becomes
Wales' leg to give, and, since Wales seems no longer *his*, the leg is no
longer his. Maybe he bequeaths it to the Welsh poet as well because, if it is
part of Wales' heritage, perhaps he will someday be part of that heritage as
well.
Ormond writes that the leg might help Dafydd out and goes on to describe a
somewhat comical scene in which a puzzled God watches this random third leg
trying to kick its way into heaven. The poem ends, however, on a note of
sadness. Hughes doesn't know whether God will recognize him (being recognized
is sort of like being understood or being seen the way I think about it), and
I read this as poor Hughes is so used to being misunderstood and unseen that
he doesn't believe that he will ever find a home. His situation feels so odd
and unrelatable that God won't even know what to do when his leg comes
stomping into Heaven. That is the truly sad part of this poem; he felt
alienated from his "friends" at his funeral and so he left Wales, only to feel
further estranged from himself, literally and figuratively. This poem thus
underlines the absolute necessity of human understanding; one cannot go
through life alone, acting on the outside for others. Otherwise, as Henry does
when he is drunk, the true self will bubble out the edges.
That's all for this week - hope you are all doing well, and I will see some of
you very soon who I have not seen in a long time, and others of you it will
still be a while. Have a good rest of your day!
Sarah
PS - A number of you of late have requested to have the PotW sent to your
other friends or family. This is completely and totally fine - you all have my
permission to give this to whomever. If you want to send it off yourself, you
can do that, but I will be more than happy to simply add their names to my
email list. You have to send me the email addresses though!!!! Otherwise there
is nothing that I can do!!! So - send me the addresses if you want them added
or you will have to do it yourself. Thanks!
Monday, May 09, 2005
Poem of the Week 5/9/2005: Out of Hiding
Out of Hiding
Someone said my name in the graden,
while I grew smaller
in the spreading shadow of peonies,
grew larger by my absence to another,
grew older among the ants, ancient
under the opening heads of the flowers,
new to myself, and stranger.
When I heard my name again, it sounded far,
like the name of the child next door,
or a favorite cousin visiting for the summer,
while the quiet seemed my true name,
a near and inaudible singing
born of hidden ground.
Quiet to quiet, I called back.
And the birds declared my whereabouts all morning.
Li-Young Lee 2001
**I figured out which poem this is but don't have the response. Does anyone have it? Please? **
Someone said my name in the graden,
while I grew smaller
in the spreading shadow of peonies,
grew larger by my absence to another,
grew older among the ants, ancient
under the opening heads of the flowers,
new to myself, and stranger.
When I heard my name again, it sounded far,
like the name of the child next door,
or a favorite cousin visiting for the summer,
while the quiet seemed my true name,
a near and inaudible singing
born of hidden ground.
Quiet to quiet, I called back.
And the birds declared my whereabouts all morning.
Li-Young Lee 2001
**I figured out which poem this is but don't have the response. Does anyone have it? Please? **
Monday, May 02, 2005
Poem of the Week 5/2/2005: Flowers
Flowers
Some men never think of it.
You did. You'd come along
And say you'd nearly bought me flowers
But something had gone wrong.
The shop was closed. Or you had doubts -
The sort that minds like ours
Dream up incessantly. You thought
I might not want your flowers.
It made me smile and hug you then.
Now I can only smile.
But, look, the flowers you nearly brought
Have lasted all this while.
Wendy Cope 1992
Salutations, Greetings, and a Good Evening to all! I wanted to choose a bit of a lighter poem for this week, as finals are bearing down on me, as I am sure they are on many of you. There are two parts of this poem that I am particularly drawn to, of which the latter is probably more interesting to non lit dorks. But as I am a lit dork I get to go on about the first thing I like! I like that this poem is not only free verse, but that it makes no to-do about its rhetorical devices. The rhyme is simple and straightforward (along/wrong, ours/flowers, smile/while), and appears every other line rather than being a constricting form. It is a casual rhyme, almost incidental. The poem's general tone reflects this easy rhyme; the speaker is telling us an intimate, simple story, so the rhyme relaxes and decides not to be pretentious. Cope includes a decent amount of enjambment (i.e. end stops - when a sentence/
phrase ends where a line ends), but it too is more a nod to syntatic forms rather than a dictating force within the text. It aids the conversational tone by neither droning on nor stopping us suddenly with a flash of insight. Normal people talk with sentences of varying lengths, pauses, and connections, so the poem is consistent with this thought. Furthermore, it softens the poem's tone, somehow makes it gentler, more personal. This is a very private experience this speaker talks of (by the way, we can't presume Cope is the speaker, nor that the speaker is even a woman), so the rhetorical devices sort of tiptoe around within the poem. I didn't even notice the rhyme until at least a third or fourth reading.
At any rate, the tone is really what draws me to this poem. It is neither sentimental nor cloying, neither sad nor angry. We get a clear view of one part of these people; they are worriers, they are scared, but not in the afraid kind of way. Explanation: I had a few hours to kill in an airport leaving for Spring Break, so I was perusing the book shop, just generally picking over the airport clutter, thinking maybe I would find something. I came across a book by one of my favorite authors, Toni Morrison. She'd written simple stories for series of pictures she found from the social movements of the 1960s. The one that struck me most was a story of a young african american man about to boycott his job (I think it was that; it was in any case some risk he was taking). I distinctly remember the picture: it was of this eighteen year old boy sitting on a train, looking out the window as the landscape flicked by. His face was thoughtful. The line here read, "I am scared but not afraid." I thought about this for a long time, both on the plane and since. I think what she means to say is that "scared" is an emotion, a feeling, something real, yes, but it is not the same kind of affliction as is "afraid." "Scared" implies a more vulnerable spot, one in which deep seeded fears come out and can be overcome. At the same time, though, scared has a note of courage in it, while afraid is simply a condition, a way of life. I feel scared a lot, and I think that a lot of people do, but the trick is not being afraid. That's where the poem won me over. These are real people, sensitive, with fears and complicated explanations and emotions for even a small action.
Then, too, the narrator is still balanced and insightful - the lover is gone, yes, but this is not necessarily a bad thing. It is not a terrible betrayal, a monumental loss. Cope includes his absence as a fact, but not a dramatic one. She gives us a little physical space to reflect as the line ends (line 10), and then smoothly changes the subject to her real point; emotional deeds last longer than physical gestures. What matters is not the paltry proclamations of love we are supposed to recieve in a relationship, but just that the descision matters enough to think about, to worry about, to express. It questions the relevance of the physical world; actually, "questions" may be too forceful a word for this poem. It wonders about the tangible perhaps, but does not assert itself in the face of greater questions. Sometimes I wonder if we forget that the things worth writing poems about aren't always deep philosphical, theological, sociological, politcal, global things. Sometimes an action is worth a thousand words, or even just a non-action.
So there you go! I walked into this PotW thinking it was going to be short and sweet, and look how that turned out. I feel good writing this, better than I have in a while, actually. The culmination of the last couple days. If the nature of this reading does verge (and indeed cross into) the personal, that is simply because poetry is necessarily a personal experience. I hope that you all are able to connect with at least one of the poems I have sent out, or that you will be able to connect with one I will send out, because that just makes everything better (at least that's what I think). And how wonderful is it that twelve little lines managed to create so much more? Oh man, that's one of the things that really gets me going about poetry. In case you didn't notice. At any rate, Tara just mentioned that she likes a word, and I want to include it here not because it's directly relevant to this close read, but because it is very nice, and this poem was very nice, and you all are very nice. Kumquat. Have a good night!
Sarah
Some men never think of it.
You did. You'd come along
And say you'd nearly bought me flowers
But something had gone wrong.
The shop was closed. Or you had doubts -
The sort that minds like ours
Dream up incessantly. You thought
I might not want your flowers.
It made me smile and hug you then.
Now I can only smile.
But, look, the flowers you nearly brought
Have lasted all this while.
Wendy Cope 1992
Salutations, Greetings, and a Good Evening to all! I wanted to choose a bit of a lighter poem for this week, as finals are bearing down on me, as I am sure they are on many of you. There are two parts of this poem that I am particularly drawn to, of which the latter is probably more interesting to non lit dorks. But as I am a lit dork I get to go on about the first thing I like! I like that this poem is not only free verse, but that it makes no to-do about its rhetorical devices. The rhyme is simple and straightforward (along/wrong, ours/flowers, smile/while), and appears every other line rather than being a constricting form. It is a casual rhyme, almost incidental. The poem's general tone reflects this easy rhyme; the speaker is telling us an intimate, simple story, so the rhyme relaxes and decides not to be pretentious. Cope includes a decent amount of enjambment (i.e. end stops - when a sentence/
phrase ends where a line ends), but it too is more a nod to syntatic forms rather than a dictating force within the text. It aids the conversational tone by neither droning on nor stopping us suddenly with a flash of insight. Normal people talk with sentences of varying lengths, pauses, and connections, so the poem is consistent with this thought. Furthermore, it softens the poem's tone, somehow makes it gentler, more personal. This is a very private experience this speaker talks of (by the way, we can't presume Cope is the speaker, nor that the speaker is even a woman), so the rhetorical devices sort of tiptoe around within the poem. I didn't even notice the rhyme until at least a third or fourth reading.
At any rate, the tone is really what draws me to this poem. It is neither sentimental nor cloying, neither sad nor angry. We get a clear view of one part of these people; they are worriers, they are scared, but not in the afraid kind of way. Explanation: I had a few hours to kill in an airport leaving for Spring Break, so I was perusing the book shop, just generally picking over the airport clutter, thinking maybe I would find something. I came across a book by one of my favorite authors, Toni Morrison. She'd written simple stories for series of pictures she found from the social movements of the 1960s. The one that struck me most was a story of a young african american man about to boycott his job (I think it was that; it was in any case some risk he was taking). I distinctly remember the picture: it was of this eighteen year old boy sitting on a train, looking out the window as the landscape flicked by. His face was thoughtful. The line here read, "I am scared but not afraid." I thought about this for a long time, both on the plane and since. I think what she means to say is that "scared" is an emotion, a feeling, something real, yes, but it is not the same kind of affliction as is "afraid." "Scared" implies a more vulnerable spot, one in which deep seeded fears come out and can be overcome. At the same time, though, scared has a note of courage in it, while afraid is simply a condition, a way of life. I feel scared a lot, and I think that a lot of people do, but the trick is not being afraid. That's where the poem won me over. These are real people, sensitive, with fears and complicated explanations and emotions for even a small action.
Then, too, the narrator is still balanced and insightful - the lover is gone, yes, but this is not necessarily a bad thing. It is not a terrible betrayal, a monumental loss. Cope includes his absence as a fact, but not a dramatic one. She gives us a little physical space to reflect as the line ends (line 10), and then smoothly changes the subject to her real point; emotional deeds last longer than physical gestures. What matters is not the paltry proclamations of love we are supposed to recieve in a relationship, but just that the descision matters enough to think about, to worry about, to express. It questions the relevance of the physical world; actually, "questions" may be too forceful a word for this poem. It wonders about the tangible perhaps, but does not assert itself in the face of greater questions. Sometimes I wonder if we forget that the things worth writing poems about aren't always deep philosphical, theological, sociological, politcal, global things. Sometimes an action is worth a thousand words, or even just a non-action.
So there you go! I walked into this PotW thinking it was going to be short and sweet, and look how that turned out. I feel good writing this, better than I have in a while, actually. The culmination of the last couple days. If the nature of this reading does verge (and indeed cross into) the personal, that is simply because poetry is necessarily a personal experience. I hope that you all are able to connect with at least one of the poems I have sent out, or that you will be able to connect with one I will send out, because that just makes everything better (at least that's what I think). And how wonderful is it that twelve little lines managed to create so much more? Oh man, that's one of the things that really gets me going about poetry. In case you didn't notice. At any rate, Tara just mentioned that she likes a word, and I want to include it here not because it's directly relevant to this close read, but because it is very nice, and this poem was very nice, and you all are very nice. Kumquat. Have a good night!
Sarah
Monday, April 25, 2005
Poem of the Week 4/25/2005: The Shout
The Shout
We went out
into the school yard together, me and the boy
whose name and face
I don't remember. We were testing the range
of the human voice:
he had to shout for all he was worth,
I had to raise an arm
from across the divide to signal back
that the sound had carried.
He called from over the park -- I lifted an arm.
Out of bounds,
he yelled from the end of the road,
from beyond the foot of he hill,
from beyond the look-out post of Fretwell's Farm --
I lifted an arm.
He left town, went on to be twenty years dead
with a gunshot hole
in the roof of his mouth, in Western Australia.
Boy with the name and face I don't remember,
you can stop shouting now, I can still hear you.
Simon Armitage 2002
Hello Friends and Family! Though perhaps not the most technically rich of poems (though of course tightly crafted and very beautiful), I chose this poem for the poem of the week because I like how relevant it is to "the human experience." I always hesitate to go on about human nature (Orwell might have something to say about the meaninglessness of those words - I would highly recommend "Politics and the English Language," for anybody and everybody), precisely because who can presume to say something about human nature? That is not to say that there aren't common experiences. That's what this poem touches, for me. I guess I will get to that at the end, though.
The poem begins with the speaker noting that he doesn't remember the boy's name and face, two elements of identity that most people hold on to strongly. The speaker does recall, however, what they did together. The two boys tested "the range / of the human voice." One gets the feeling of young children testing the limits of their importance, the range of their impact. The shout is a way of asking, "Where am I in you, oh world? What weight have I, with my singular self against the other six billion beings on this planet?" Armitage even goes so far as to say that the boy "had to shout for all he was worth." This shout is not only a question, but the shouter must attempt to do the best he can, to be the best he can be. To make an impact, the poem says, requires personal dedication and work.
It is also important to note that in order for this "game" to work, the other boy (presumably the poet, due to the personal, almost confessional tone of the poem), must acknowledge that he has heard the sound. This brings to light the concept that we need reciprocity and reactions to validate and enrich our existence, to alleiviate our fears. Lifting an arm also functions as a sort of salute to the boy's existence. It is an almost triumphant way of saying "I hear you! Look how much you mean!" Furthermore, this idea of the arm-lifting as a salute brings up another thought as to what the poem is. "The Shout" is a salute-
poem. Not quite an elegy or a eulogy, but it is a salute; I like that self-similarity across scale in that!
The first few times I read the poem, I thought that the boy had died in a war, which lends the poem a political/humanist slant, but I think that it can be more accurately read as a suicide. Thus, the boy's death is much more of a personal tragedy. Suicide is often the final act of desperation, the last way to feel noticed (though it is much more complicated than that, of course). Here, though, it fits in as a crying-out for recognition. What I really love about this poem is how tender the last couplet is. It doesn't matter how we look or what we do, part of identity rests in those that we loved, in those that we shared something with, no matter how small. Even though the boy moves farther and farther away every time spacial image in the poem (from the park to the road to the hill and on til death), in some ways he is still stationary in the poet. The self needs an other to reflect it back. Where would we be if our voices couldn't be heard, and if we couldn't hear those around us? This poem deals with reciprocity as much as it deals with individuality and loneliness. The end is just so empathetic - the author is willing to love this boy whether he knows his name and face or not. Have a wonderful night!
Sarah
We went out
into the school yard together, me and the boy
whose name and face
I don't remember. We were testing the range
of the human voice:
he had to shout for all he was worth,
I had to raise an arm
from across the divide to signal back
that the sound had carried.
He called from over the park -- I lifted an arm.
Out of bounds,
he yelled from the end of the road,
from beyond the foot of he hill,
from beyond the look-out post of Fretwell's Farm --
I lifted an arm.
He left town, went on to be twenty years dead
with a gunshot hole
in the roof of his mouth, in Western Australia.
Boy with the name and face I don't remember,
you can stop shouting now, I can still hear you.
Simon Armitage 2002
Hello Friends and Family! Though perhaps not the most technically rich of poems (though of course tightly crafted and very beautiful), I chose this poem for the poem of the week because I like how relevant it is to "the human experience." I always hesitate to go on about human nature (Orwell might have something to say about the meaninglessness of those words - I would highly recommend "Politics and the English Language," for anybody and everybody), precisely because who can presume to say something about human nature? That is not to say that there aren't common experiences. That's what this poem touches, for me. I guess I will get to that at the end, though.
The poem begins with the speaker noting that he doesn't remember the boy's name and face, two elements of identity that most people hold on to strongly. The speaker does recall, however, what they did together. The two boys tested "the range / of the human voice." One gets the feeling of young children testing the limits of their importance, the range of their impact. The shout is a way of asking, "Where am I in you, oh world? What weight have I, with my singular self against the other six billion beings on this planet?" Armitage even goes so far as to say that the boy "had to shout for all he was worth." This shout is not only a question, but the shouter must attempt to do the best he can, to be the best he can be. To make an impact, the poem says, requires personal dedication and work.
It is also important to note that in order for this "game" to work, the other boy (presumably the poet, due to the personal, almost confessional tone of the poem), must acknowledge that he has heard the sound. This brings to light the concept that we need reciprocity and reactions to validate and enrich our existence, to alleiviate our fears. Lifting an arm also functions as a sort of salute to the boy's existence. It is an almost triumphant way of saying "I hear you! Look how much you mean!" Furthermore, this idea of the arm-lifting as a salute brings up another thought as to what the poem is. "The Shout" is a salute-
poem. Not quite an elegy or a eulogy, but it is a salute; I like that self-similarity across scale in that!
The first few times I read the poem, I thought that the boy had died in a war, which lends the poem a political/humanist slant, but I think that it can be more accurately read as a suicide. Thus, the boy's death is much more of a personal tragedy. Suicide is often the final act of desperation, the last way to feel noticed (though it is much more complicated than that, of course). Here, though, it fits in as a crying-out for recognition. What I really love about this poem is how tender the last couplet is. It doesn't matter how we look or what we do, part of identity rests in those that we loved, in those that we shared something with, no matter how small. Even though the boy moves farther and farther away every time spacial image in the poem (from the park to the road to the hill and on til death), in some ways he is still stationary in the poet. The self needs an other to reflect it back. Where would we be if our voices couldn't be heard, and if we couldn't hear those around us? This poem deals with reciprocity as much as it deals with individuality and loneliness. The end is just so empathetic - the author is willing to love this boy whether he knows his name and face or not. Have a wonderful night!
Sarah
Monday, April 18, 2005
Poem of the Week 4/18/2005: Dusting
Dusting*
Every day a wilderness -- no shade in sight. Beulah
patient among the knicknacks,
the solarium a rage of light, a grainstorm
as her gray cloth brings
dark wood to life.
Under her hand scrolls
and crests gleam
darker still. What was his name, that
silly boy at the fair with
the rifle booth? And his kiss and
the clear bowl with one bright
fish, rippling wound!
Not Michael -- something finer. Each dust
stroke a deep breath and the canary in bloom.
Wavery memory: home
from a dance, the front door
blown open and the parlor
in snow, she rushed
the bowl to the stove, watched
as the locket of ice
dissolved and he
swam free.
That was years before Father gaver her up
with her name, years before
her name grew to mean
Promise, then
Desert-in-Peace,*
Long before the shadow and sun's accomplice, the tree.
Maurice.
- Rita Dove
*Part of a book length narrative, "Thomas and Beulah," about which Dove writes in introduction, "These poems tell two sides of a story and are meant to be read in sequence." The main characters are African Americans born at the beginning of the twentieth century.
**Beulah means "married, possessed" in Hebrew. In the Bible, it refers to the promised land.
Happy Monday all! To begin, I have to say that I particularly love this poem - it reminds me of something Toni Morrison might write, which is not quite surprising; they are dealing with similar subject matter in similar times. The first thing that leaps off the page in this poem is the imagery - "a rage of light," "the clear bowl with one bright/fish, rippling/wound!" "canary in bloom," "locket of ice...." Dove presents us with these powerful and stunning images, which lend the poem a sort of mystical quality. This contrasts with the simple, domestic act of "dusting" and the apparently plain patience of Beulah. Since this is in its full form book length, there is a lot more to the woman than we get here in the poem, but it still stands by itself, hinting at more richness. (What happened with her father? How did her name take on those different connotations, and how does its Biblical references tie in to her life?) It switches to stream of consciousness narrative (mixed with the poetic voice of the author), and we learn that this woman has had a wealth of experience. The one described here, or rather family of experiences, has to do with "a silly boy" and a fish that appears several times.
Now that I think about it, there is a definite sense of water throughout the poem, but it remains just that: a sense. Dusting, which is a dry, dirty activity is here a "grainstorm," obviously a pun on rainstorm. Furthermore, the rippling wound tangentially refers to water, as does the term "wavery memory." The recollection itself has references to water in different forms, namely snow and ice. Then, too, one of the meanings of Beulah is "desert-in-peace," which refers to an absence of water. The final word of the poem, Maurice, could possibly be a pun on "more ice" - they sound sort of similar, though that could easily be a strech. The sound of the name itself is enough to merit placement in the poem. Anyway. The water is prevalent throughout the poem in every form but as an actual liquid. What this might signify more largely is impossible to divine without reading the entire poem. However, it might be useful to think of water as being necessary for life, which also appears throughout the poem. Dusting gives life to the wood, so Beulah, we know, is a life giver. She vivifies the wood, saves the fish, and fleshes out her memories as she is dusting. There is some self similarity across scale, too, in the fact that as she dusts off this dark something, she dusts off her memories. She frees them just as she freed the fish (the fact that she freed it and saved it brings up the question of how freedom and being saved are linked), just as the dust flies off like "a canary in bloom." This concept of freedom may or may not have something to do with slavery - I don't want to go on liberal autopilot and say that this is a noble, complex, black woman and she is working, dusting, unable to escape the wilderness, longing for some shade, some respite from the harsh reality which is really a societal repeat of slavery only not so explicit. That is not to say that the answer isn't plausible, I simply don't want to escape the bounds of what we have here. To fully understand the significance of many of these motifs would probably require a full reading of the poem, which I do intend to do at one point; I like all of Dove's work that I have read so far. So - I hope that you all enjoyed the poem of the week this week. Of course, feel free to reply at any time with comments, disagreements, other poems that you found complementary...And I am glad that I can share this with all of you every week!
Sarah
Every day a wilderness -- no shade in sight. Beulah
patient among the knicknacks,
the solarium a rage of light, a grainstorm
as her gray cloth brings
dark wood to life.
Under her hand scrolls
and crests gleam
darker still. What was his name, that
silly boy at the fair with
the rifle booth? And his kiss and
the clear bowl with one bright
fish, rippling wound!
Not Michael -- something finer. Each dust
stroke a deep breath and the canary in bloom.
Wavery memory: home
from a dance, the front door
blown open and the parlor
in snow, she rushed
the bowl to the stove, watched
as the locket of ice
dissolved and he
swam free.
That was years before Father gaver her up
with her name, years before
her name grew to mean
Promise, then
Desert-in-Peace,*
Long before the shadow and sun's accomplice, the tree.
Maurice.
- Rita Dove
*Part of a book length narrative, "Thomas and Beulah," about which Dove writes in introduction, "These poems tell two sides of a story and are meant to be read in sequence." The main characters are African Americans born at the beginning of the twentieth century.
**Beulah means "married, possessed" in Hebrew. In the Bible, it refers to the promised land.
Happy Monday all! To begin, I have to say that I particularly love this poem - it reminds me of something Toni Morrison might write, which is not quite surprising; they are dealing with similar subject matter in similar times. The first thing that leaps off the page in this poem is the imagery - "a rage of light," "the clear bowl with one bright/fish, rippling/wound!" "canary in bloom," "locket of ice...." Dove presents us with these powerful and stunning images, which lend the poem a sort of mystical quality. This contrasts with the simple, domestic act of "dusting" and the apparently plain patience of Beulah. Since this is in its full form book length, there is a lot more to the woman than we get here in the poem, but it still stands by itself, hinting at more richness. (What happened with her father? How did her name take on those different connotations, and how does its Biblical references tie in to her life?) It switches to stream of consciousness narrative (mixed with the poetic voice of the author), and we learn that this woman has had a wealth of experience. The one described here, or rather family of experiences, has to do with "a silly boy" and a fish that appears several times.
Now that I think about it, there is a definite sense of water throughout the poem, but it remains just that: a sense. Dusting, which is a dry, dirty activity is here a "grainstorm," obviously a pun on rainstorm. Furthermore, the rippling wound tangentially refers to water, as does the term "wavery memory." The recollection itself has references to water in different forms, namely snow and ice. Then, too, one of the meanings of Beulah is "desert-in-peace," which refers to an absence of water. The final word of the poem, Maurice, could possibly be a pun on "more ice" - they sound sort of similar, though that could easily be a strech. The sound of the name itself is enough to merit placement in the poem. Anyway. The water is prevalent throughout the poem in every form but as an actual liquid. What this might signify more largely is impossible to divine without reading the entire poem. However, it might be useful to think of water as being necessary for life, which also appears throughout the poem. Dusting gives life to the wood, so Beulah, we know, is a life giver. She vivifies the wood, saves the fish, and fleshes out her memories as she is dusting. There is some self similarity across scale, too, in the fact that as she dusts off this dark something, she dusts off her memories. She frees them just as she freed the fish (the fact that she freed it and saved it brings up the question of how freedom and being saved are linked), just as the dust flies off like "a canary in bloom." This concept of freedom may or may not have something to do with slavery - I don't want to go on liberal autopilot and say that this is a noble, complex, black woman and she is working, dusting, unable to escape the wilderness, longing for some shade, some respite from the harsh reality which is really a societal repeat of slavery only not so explicit. That is not to say that the answer isn't plausible, I simply don't want to escape the bounds of what we have here. To fully understand the significance of many of these motifs would probably require a full reading of the poem, which I do intend to do at one point; I like all of Dove's work that I have read so far. So - I hope that you all enjoyed the poem of the week this week. Of course, feel free to reply at any time with comments, disagreements, other poems that you found complementary...And I am glad that I can share this with all of you every week!
Sarah
Monday, April 11, 2005
Poem of the Week 4/11/2005: Sonnet 14
14
Batter my heart, three personed God; for You
As yet but knock, breathe, shine, and seek to mend;
That I may rise and stand, o'erthrow me,' and bend
Your force to break, blow, burn, and make me new.
I, like a usurped town, to'another due,
Labor to admit You, but O, to no end;
Reason, Your Viceroy in me, me should defend,
But is captived, and proves weak or untrue.
Yet dearly'I love you,'and would be loved fain,*
But am betrothed unto your enemy.
Divorce me,'untie or break that knot again;
Take me to you, imprison me, for I,
Except you'enthrall me,** never shall be free,
Nor ever chaste, except you ravish me.
John Donne 1663
*gladly
**unless you make a prisoner of
Hello! Sorry this is late - six hours of rehearsal will do that to a poem of the week... I hope you'll forgive me. This has been one of my favorite poems for a long time, even though I tend to gravitate towards twentieth century poetry. What draws me to it is the energy of the language, the imagery, and (surprise) the paradox. That energy comes from the lists and consonants within the poem (break, blow, burn; break that knot). Now, what the lists contain is interesting, too, because one of the first lists is a deceptively simple one of some of the functions of God: knock (to punish/to judge), breathe (He gave us life), shine (God is glorious, omnipotent, omnitient), and seek to mend (God is, above all, a healer, a love-er). I like that destruction is required to make the man new; he asks God to get rid of the old so the new can grow back. Then, in using "a usurped town" and "viceroy," Donne takes the body of a man as a town, as a whole community. I love that kind of metaphor for a human, because it manages to be encapsulate some of a human's complexity. But my favorite part of the poem is all of the paradox - rampant paradox, really. He asks for heresy (divorce) in order to escape a worse kind of heresy, he will not be free unless he is locked up in God, and he will never be chaste, except when God ravishes him. This, to me, though, does two things. First, it points towards the fact that being locked up and raped by God is better than being technically in line with church morals. It also then questions the importance of the insitution of church next to the institution of faith, the latter being preferred. Furthermore, and I believe that this is the true core of the poem, it hints at the paradoxical nature of God - He is everything, he is all around, and yet he is nowhere, he cannot be seen. I don't think that I can express this as beautifully as Donne does, and I definitely can't after ten million (and by ten million I mean six) hours of rehearsal, but I hope that you all see what I mean. And I also want to put a little disclaimer on this that this poem of the week is in no way intented to be a sermon or religious act. Not like it matters, but anyway. Just thought I would put that out there before I bid you all goodnight!
love sarah
Batter my heart, three personed God; for You
As yet but knock, breathe, shine, and seek to mend;
That I may rise and stand, o'erthrow me,' and bend
Your force to break, blow, burn, and make me new.
I, like a usurped town, to'another due,
Labor to admit You, but O, to no end;
Reason, Your Viceroy in me, me should defend,
But is captived, and proves weak or untrue.
Yet dearly'I love you,'and would be loved fain,*
But am betrothed unto your enemy.
Divorce me,'untie or break that knot again;
Take me to you, imprison me, for I,
Except you'enthrall me,** never shall be free,
Nor ever chaste, except you ravish me.
John Donne 1663
*gladly
**unless you make a prisoner of
Hello! Sorry this is late - six hours of rehearsal will do that to a poem of the week... I hope you'll forgive me. This has been one of my favorite poems for a long time, even though I tend to gravitate towards twentieth century poetry. What draws me to it is the energy of the language, the imagery, and (surprise) the paradox. That energy comes from the lists and consonants within the poem (break, blow, burn; break that knot). Now, what the lists contain is interesting, too, because one of the first lists is a deceptively simple one of some of the functions of God: knock (to punish/to judge), breathe (He gave us life), shine (God is glorious, omnipotent, omnitient), and seek to mend (God is, above all, a healer, a love-er). I like that destruction is required to make the man new; he asks God to get rid of the old so the new can grow back. Then, in using "a usurped town" and "viceroy," Donne takes the body of a man as a town, as a whole community. I love that kind of metaphor for a human, because it manages to be encapsulate some of a human's complexity. But my favorite part of the poem is all of the paradox - rampant paradox, really. He asks for heresy (divorce) in order to escape a worse kind of heresy, he will not be free unless he is locked up in God, and he will never be chaste, except when God ravishes him. This, to me, though, does two things. First, it points towards the fact that being locked up and raped by God is better than being technically in line with church morals. It also then questions the importance of the insitution of church next to the institution of faith, the latter being preferred. Furthermore, and I believe that this is the true core of the poem, it hints at the paradoxical nature of God - He is everything, he is all around, and yet he is nowhere, he cannot be seen. I don't think that I can express this as beautifully as Donne does, and I definitely can't after ten million (and by ten million I mean six) hours of rehearsal, but I hope that you all see what I mean. And I also want to put a little disclaimer on this that this poem of the week is in no way intented to be a sermon or religious act. Not like it matters, but anyway. Just thought I would put that out there before I bid you all goodnight!
love sarah
Monday, April 04, 2005
Poem of the Week 4/4/2005: Heroes
Heroes
In all those stories the hero
is beyond himself into the next
thing, be it those labors
of Hercules, or Aeneas going into death.
I thought the instant of the one humanness
in Virgil's plan of it
was that it was of course human enough to die,
yet to come back, as he said, hoc opus, hic labor est.*
That was the Cumaean Sibyl speaking.
This is Robert Creeley, and Virgil
is dead now two thousand years, yet Hercules
and the Aeneid, yet all that industrious wis-
dom lives in the way the mountains
and the desert are waiting
for the heroes, and death also
can still propose the old labors.
Robert Creeley
*Aeneid, 6.129. When Aeneas asks the Sibyl, a priestess and prophet, how he might visit his dead father in the underworld, she answers that the descent is easy, but to return -- "that is the task, that is the labor."
As some of you may or may not know, the poet Robert Creeley died this week (thanks to Steve Fisher for letting me know), so I decided to do one of his poems; happily, I had this poem marked to do soon anyway! A good place to start with a poem is something that you don't understand, so: What I had trouble with when I read this poem was the line "the one humanness." What is this one humanness? And what is the antecedent to the "it" that follows? I take the "it" to be heroes, or at least the heroic plan - that is the only thing that makes some sort of grammatical sense. Maybe the one humanness, then, means that there is only one powerfully human part of Virgil's story. Or perhaps there is one thing all humans have in common, and, the poem proposes, it has to do with death. Returning from death - "that is the task, that is the labor." This wisdom runs through the whole earth, and it remains true even though thousands of years have passed. Creeley points out that, even if it seems that we don't have heroes any more to journey through the underworld, or great storytellers of yore to carry on their story, we have people and the opportunity to work. In that way, there is something heroic in the way every single person walks around the earth. Or maybe our task is not to simply walk around; maybe that's not heroic. I think that it might only be heroic to strive, for death only "proposes" the old labors. It requires an answer, an action.
There are lots of perhaps-es and maybes in this PotW criticism, but that in itself points to one of the things that I love most about literature in general - all of these ideas may be true within the body of the poem even if they conflict. Poets, authors and literary critics often welcome paradox. So as I have said before, if anybody disagrees with my read of the poem (because they are never ever perfect, and who would want them to be) or has any extra comments or anything, you ought to email me back! I hope that everybody enjoyed this Poem of the Week, and I hope that your days are great!
Sarah
In all those stories the hero
is beyond himself into the next
thing, be it those labors
of Hercules, or Aeneas going into death.
I thought the instant of the one humanness
in Virgil's plan of it
was that it was of course human enough to die,
yet to come back, as he said, hoc opus, hic labor est.*
That was the Cumaean Sibyl speaking.
This is Robert Creeley, and Virgil
is dead now two thousand years, yet Hercules
and the Aeneid, yet all that industrious wis-
dom lives in the way the mountains
and the desert are waiting
for the heroes, and death also
can still propose the old labors.
Robert Creeley
*Aeneid, 6.129. When Aeneas asks the Sibyl, a priestess and prophet, how he might visit his dead father in the underworld, she answers that the descent is easy, but to return -- "that is the task, that is the labor."
As some of you may or may not know, the poet Robert Creeley died this week (thanks to Steve Fisher for letting me know), so I decided to do one of his poems; happily, I had this poem marked to do soon anyway! A good place to start with a poem is something that you don't understand, so: What I had trouble with when I read this poem was the line "the one humanness." What is this one humanness? And what is the antecedent to the "it" that follows? I take the "it" to be heroes, or at least the heroic plan - that is the only thing that makes some sort of grammatical sense. Maybe the one humanness, then, means that there is only one powerfully human part of Virgil's story. Or perhaps there is one thing all humans have in common, and, the poem proposes, it has to do with death. Returning from death - "that is the task, that is the labor." This wisdom runs through the whole earth, and it remains true even though thousands of years have passed. Creeley points out that, even if it seems that we don't have heroes any more to journey through the underworld, or great storytellers of yore to carry on their story, we have people and the opportunity to work. In that way, there is something heroic in the way every single person walks around the earth. Or maybe our task is not to simply walk around; maybe that's not heroic. I think that it might only be heroic to strive, for death only "proposes" the old labors. It requires an answer, an action.
There are lots of perhaps-es and maybes in this PotW criticism, but that in itself points to one of the things that I love most about literature in general - all of these ideas may be true within the body of the poem even if they conflict. Poets, authors and literary critics often welcome paradox. So as I have said before, if anybody disagrees with my read of the poem (because they are never ever perfect, and who would want them to be) or has any extra comments or anything, you ought to email me back! I hope that everybody enjoyed this Poem of the Week, and I hope that your days are great!
Sarah
Monday, March 28, 2005
Poem of the Week 3/28/2005: Song for the Last Act
Song for the Last Act
Now that I have your face by heart, I look
Less as its features than its darkening frame
Where quince and melon, yellow as young flame,
Lie with quilled dahlias and the shepherd's crook.
Beyond, a garden. There, in insolent ease
The lead and marble figures watch the show
Of yet another summer loath to go
Although the scythes hang in the apple trees.
Now that I have your face by heart, I look.
Now that I have your voice by heart, I read
In the black chords upon a dulling page
Music that is not meant for music's cage,
Whose emblems mix with words that shake and bleed.
The staves are shuttled over with a stark
Unprinted silence. In a double dream
I must spell out the storm, the running stream.
The beat's too swift. The notes shift in the dark.
Now that I have your voice by heart, I read.
Now that I have your heart by heart, I see
The wharves with their great ships and architraves;
The rigging and the cargo and the slaves
On a strange beach under a broken sky.
O not departure, but a voyage done!
The bales stand on the stone; the anchor weeps
Its red rust downward, and the long vine creeps
Beside the salt herb, in the lengthening sun.
Now that I have your heart by heart, I see.
Louise Bogan
Hello all! I usually choose the PotW based on either my mood or something that has happened within the week that makes me think of a certain poem, but this week was a little different. I wanted to find either an Easter poem or a beach poem (because it's easter, or at least it was yesterday, and I was at the beach this weekend), but none felt right. So, in my random reading looking for a poem that was "right," I instead found one that is dense and interesting. When I first went through the poem, I thought that the speaker was talking about a lover. Reading it like that, it makes almost no sense. Why, now that she knows her lover, would there be so many images of darkness, of falling apart, of geography? Well, I suppose that she could be likening him to all of those things, his face casting a pall over her views of the world, but if we take the poem to be either a nation or some kind of political (or even, perhaps, Southern aristocratic) construction, everything sort of falls into place. The wealth, shown in the gardens of the 1st stanza, is "insolent" and about to enter autumn, a representation of "the last act." It feels almost as if the money has fallen in to vice, or is soon to do so.
Then, too, Bogan deconstructs the archetypal vision we have of music as something light and laughing. This music is not even sung, it is read, expressed in "unprinted silence." That is, the silence does not come from the music, a sort of creation, being printed. Print is silent. The silence comes from it either not being sung (literal silence) or it having lost all meaning. Not being able to express an idea is akin to silence, no? The above rather akward phrase, though, brings up another aspect of the poem. Evident throughout are the things that Bogan is not doing. She is not portraying music or gardens typically. The images are nearly impressionstic at some points; Bogan consciously hops from object to object without much grace. In Hemingway, this kind of "economy of language" (a phrase we talked about in class) actually details the picture more, but here the images seem almost cracked. Archaic, esoteric, and akward language helps with this ("dulling," "staves," "darkening," "architraves" etc etc).
The diction also begins to become more and more unstable as the poem moves on. The notes "shake and bleed," "shift in the dark," while "the anchor weeps" under "a broken sky." The final stanza is what helped me to find that the you is probably a nation of some sort, and the reference to slavery and creeping vines maybe gestures to this being a Southern nation. Bogan uses the body metaphor for the nation, but it is, true to form, a little akward. How can anybody possibly memorize a nation's face? How can anyone hear its voice? In relation to those questions, it is interesting, then, to go back to the repeated statements (perhaps the poem's "darkening frame"). She plays with the term "by heart." It works not only conventionally here, but Bogan plays with the pronoun enough to help us think that this nation could actually be next to her. By her heart, near to her heart. It touches close. And the fact that "knowing" (of the brain) translates to the heart, which then enables sight, elicits interesting intra-body relationships.
I could go on and on about this poem, which is why I chose it. She plays with rhyme, the difference between looking, reading and seeing, and leads us to possibly question where the nation's body parts are. Does it have a head, heart etc? I don't know, but it might be fun to find out. Hey - good job if you made it to the end of this especially long PotW criticism! I truly appreciate everybody out there who manages to read this and all of the other PotWs. If you ever have any discussion about any poem, past, present, or suggestions to come (I don't quite want to repeat authors yet, that's just about the only constrain) I would love to hear them!! Have a wonderful day (because I hope that you are all in bed!)
Sarah
Now that I have your face by heart, I look
Less as its features than its darkening frame
Where quince and melon, yellow as young flame,
Lie with quilled dahlias and the shepherd's crook.
Beyond, a garden. There, in insolent ease
The lead and marble figures watch the show
Of yet another summer loath to go
Although the scythes hang in the apple trees.
Now that I have your face by heart, I look.
Now that I have your voice by heart, I read
In the black chords upon a dulling page
Music that is not meant for music's cage,
Whose emblems mix with words that shake and bleed.
The staves are shuttled over with a stark
Unprinted silence. In a double dream
I must spell out the storm, the running stream.
The beat's too swift. The notes shift in the dark.
Now that I have your voice by heart, I read.
Now that I have your heart by heart, I see
The wharves with their great ships and architraves;
The rigging and the cargo and the slaves
On a strange beach under a broken sky.
O not departure, but a voyage done!
The bales stand on the stone; the anchor weeps
Its red rust downward, and the long vine creeps
Beside the salt herb, in the lengthening sun.
Now that I have your heart by heart, I see.
Louise Bogan
Hello all! I usually choose the PotW based on either my mood or something that has happened within the week that makes me think of a certain poem, but this week was a little different. I wanted to find either an Easter poem or a beach poem (because it's easter, or at least it was yesterday, and I was at the beach this weekend), but none felt right. So, in my random reading looking for a poem that was "right," I instead found one that is dense and interesting. When I first went through the poem, I thought that the speaker was talking about a lover. Reading it like that, it makes almost no sense. Why, now that she knows her lover, would there be so many images of darkness, of falling apart, of geography? Well, I suppose that she could be likening him to all of those things, his face casting a pall over her views of the world, but if we take the poem to be either a nation or some kind of political (or even, perhaps, Southern aristocratic) construction, everything sort of falls into place. The wealth, shown in the gardens of the 1st stanza, is "insolent" and about to enter autumn, a representation of "the last act." It feels almost as if the money has fallen in to vice, or is soon to do so.
Then, too, Bogan deconstructs the archetypal vision we have of music as something light and laughing. This music is not even sung, it is read, expressed in "unprinted silence." That is, the silence does not come from the music, a sort of creation, being printed. Print is silent. The silence comes from it either not being sung (literal silence) or it having lost all meaning. Not being able to express an idea is akin to silence, no? The above rather akward phrase, though, brings up another aspect of the poem. Evident throughout are the things that Bogan is not doing. She is not portraying music or gardens typically. The images are nearly impressionstic at some points; Bogan consciously hops from object to object without much grace. In Hemingway, this kind of "economy of language" (a phrase we talked about in class) actually details the picture more, but here the images seem almost cracked. Archaic, esoteric, and akward language helps with this ("dulling," "staves," "darkening," "architraves" etc etc).
The diction also begins to become more and more unstable as the poem moves on. The notes "shake and bleed," "shift in the dark," while "the anchor weeps" under "a broken sky." The final stanza is what helped me to find that the you is probably a nation of some sort, and the reference to slavery and creeping vines maybe gestures to this being a Southern nation. Bogan uses the body metaphor for the nation, but it is, true to form, a little akward. How can anybody possibly memorize a nation's face? How can anyone hear its voice? In relation to those questions, it is interesting, then, to go back to the repeated statements (perhaps the poem's "darkening frame"). She plays with the term "by heart." It works not only conventionally here, but Bogan plays with the pronoun enough to help us think that this nation could actually be next to her. By her heart, near to her heart. It touches close. And the fact that "knowing" (of the brain) translates to the heart, which then enables sight, elicits interesting intra-body relationships.
I could go on and on about this poem, which is why I chose it. She plays with rhyme, the difference between looking, reading and seeing, and leads us to possibly question where the nation's body parts are. Does it have a head, heart etc? I don't know, but it might be fun to find out. Hey - good job if you made it to the end of this especially long PotW criticism! I truly appreciate everybody out there who manages to read this and all of the other PotWs. If you ever have any discussion about any poem, past, present, or suggestions to come (I don't quite want to repeat authors yet, that's just about the only constrain) I would love to hear them!! Have a wonderful day (because I hope that you are all in bed!)
Sarah
Monday, March 21, 2005
Poem of the Week 3/21/2005: Permanently
Permanently
One day the Nouns were clustered in the street.
An Adjective walked by, with her dark beauty.
The Nouns were struck, moved, changed.
The next day a Verb drove up, and created the Sentence.
Each Sentence says one thing - for example. "Although it was a dark
rainy day when the Adjective walked by, I shall remember the
pure and sweet expression on her face until the day I perish from
the green, effective earth."
Or, "Will you please close the window, Andrew?"
Or, for example, "Thank you, the pink pot of flowers on the window
sill has changed color recently to a light yellow, due to the heat
from the boiler factory which exists nearby."
In the springtime the Sentences and the Nouns lay silently on the grass.
A lonely Conjunction here and there would call, "And! But!"
But the Adjective did not emerge.
As the adjective is lost in the sentence,
So I am lost in your eyes, ears, nose, and throat -
You have enchanted me with a single kiss
Which can never be undone Until the destruction of language.
Kenneth Koch
Hello friends and family! Now, it was definitely time for this Koch poem - I have loved it for a long time and it just felt right, what with springtime and wedding and best friends and mothers and all. Some things I like about it: of course, words as people or beings, with personalities and feelings of their own, the hilarious, formalized example-sentences, and the end of the poem. It's so interesting how he uses adjectives in the sentences - they would be more boring without the adjectives (in this poem the symbols of love/skeletons on which Koch drapes love). That's pretty awesome - adjectives (love) are both the color of our sentences and our lives. Koch ties that into the poem in the last stanza talking about the connections of language and life, and the permance of both. Language is immortal in the sense that it will (presumably) be around so long as humans are, so love (adjectives) will be around as long as humans are. All kinds of love - the Greeks called it philia, eros, agape (loosely family, erotic, divine love, implying love defined as an emotion, a desire, and a commitment). It is interesting to think of all of the different kinds of love that there are, and how much of it there is everywhere. I digress, as usual, but maybe that's what I would just like to leave you all with this week - love, language and good night!
Sarah
One day the Nouns were clustered in the street.
An Adjective walked by, with her dark beauty.
The Nouns were struck, moved, changed.
The next day a Verb drove up, and created the Sentence.
Each Sentence says one thing - for example. "Although it was a dark
rainy day when the Adjective walked by, I shall remember the
pure and sweet expression on her face until the day I perish from
the green, effective earth."
Or, "Will you please close the window, Andrew?"
Or, for example, "Thank you, the pink pot of flowers on the window
sill has changed color recently to a light yellow, due to the heat
from the boiler factory which exists nearby."
In the springtime the Sentences and the Nouns lay silently on the grass.
A lonely Conjunction here and there would call, "And! But!"
But the Adjective did not emerge.
As the adjective is lost in the sentence,
So I am lost in your eyes, ears, nose, and throat -
You have enchanted me with a single kiss
Which can never be undone Until the destruction of language.
Kenneth Koch
Hello friends and family! Now, it was definitely time for this Koch poem - I have loved it for a long time and it just felt right, what with springtime and wedding and best friends and mothers and all. Some things I like about it: of course, words as people or beings, with personalities and feelings of their own, the hilarious, formalized example-sentences, and the end of the poem. It's so interesting how he uses adjectives in the sentences - they would be more boring without the adjectives (in this poem the symbols of love/skeletons on which Koch drapes love). That's pretty awesome - adjectives (love) are both the color of our sentences and our lives. Koch ties that into the poem in the last stanza talking about the connections of language and life, and the permance of both. Language is immortal in the sense that it will (presumably) be around so long as humans are, so love (adjectives) will be around as long as humans are. All kinds of love - the Greeks called it philia, eros, agape (loosely family, erotic, divine love, implying love defined as an emotion, a desire, and a commitment). It is interesting to think of all of the different kinds of love that there are, and how much of it there is everywhere. I digress, as usual, but maybe that's what I would just like to leave you all with this week - love, language and good night!
Sarah
Monday, March 14, 2005
Poem of the Week 3/14/2005: The House Was Quiet and the World Was Calm
The House Was Quiet and the World Was Calm
The house was quiet and the world was calm.
The reader became the book; and summer night
Was like the conscious being of the book.
The house was quiet and the world was calm.
The words were spoken as if there was not book,
Except that the reader leaned above the page,
Wanted to lean, wanted much most to be
The scholar to whom his book is true, to whom
The summer night is like a perfection of thought.
The house was quiet because it had to be.
The quiet was part of the meaning, part of the mind:
The access of perfection to the page.
And the world was calm. The truth in a calm world,
In which there is no other meaning, itself
Is calm, itself is summer and night, itself
Is the reader leaning late and reading there.
Wallace Stevens
It's always exciting to discover a new poet who you love - so I was very excited to find Wallace Stevens. He is kind of post-modernist (though definitely not post-modern thank goodness) and talks a lot about stillness. Or his poems distill a moment and give us that quiet. I chose this poem because I think that it sums up a lot of what being alone and, not trying to be clich‚ though maybe doing it anyway, being alive is all about. Being at college has really underlined my own need for personal space and alone time. Just that time to let your thoughts sift out or spin or just run. Reading, listening to music, cleaning, organizing, making lists, painting one's toes, creative dressing, all of those things are so calm. And, as Wallace Stevens might contend, they are what helps us appreciate everything, these smaller elements of living.
This poem works on a deeper level than that, though; he doesn't just want us to enjoy our alone time. He would like to tell us that the meaning is all around. There is a nice little term that I picked up for this in Honors - self-similarity across scale. That is, there is a common thread through all things. The pattern is the same on the microscopic and the macroscopic. So this poem has ss - scale (how I abbreviate it) in its own apparent simplicity. The form itself is simple. There is no crazy rhyme scheme, and the "stanzas" are just couplets. Then the diction is simple, the night is simple, the elements in the poem (aka the situation) is simple, made up of very few elements, and the message is that simplicity is what makes us humans so wonderful. And yet this idea is very complex, because every piece in this poem works with every other piece to construct this simple meaning. The quiet and the calm are both part of the situation within the poem, the elements which are necessary for the poem's meaning, and they are the meaning itself. But they are the other things at the same time - this is what I was talking about last week with Wordsworth and paradox. One element is at once three (and probably more) things. I like how everything in the poem has a consciousness. The idea of a book having a consciousness is very beautifully and thoughtfully detailed in an essay called "Criticism and the Experience of Interiority" by Georges Poulet. I would recommend it to anybody interested in this idea of the existence of the book and the book's dual consciousness. I am rambling - the book has a consciousness, and the person responds to that consciousness, wanting it to be his always, wanting it to be honest or beholden to him (both connotations of the word "true"). And the house and summer night respect the consciousnesses of the man/book, and respectfully remain silent to encourage the meaning of the book. So all of these complex elements work together to construct a simple message. Like an infinite structure that builds up to a simple package. So anyway. That is all for the poem of the week this week, and I hope that you are all having a wonderful spring break, if it is your spring break!
- Sarah "contemporize your knight bitches" Smith
The house was quiet and the world was calm.
The reader became the book; and summer night
Was like the conscious being of the book.
The house was quiet and the world was calm.
The words were spoken as if there was not book,
Except that the reader leaned above the page,
Wanted to lean, wanted much most to be
The scholar to whom his book is true, to whom
The summer night is like a perfection of thought.
The house was quiet because it had to be.
The quiet was part of the meaning, part of the mind:
The access of perfection to the page.
And the world was calm. The truth in a calm world,
In which there is no other meaning, itself
Is calm, itself is summer and night, itself
Is the reader leaning late and reading there.
Wallace Stevens
It's always exciting to discover a new poet who you love - so I was very excited to find Wallace Stevens. He is kind of post-modernist (though definitely not post-modern thank goodness) and talks a lot about stillness. Or his poems distill a moment and give us that quiet. I chose this poem because I think that it sums up a lot of what being alone and, not trying to be clich‚ though maybe doing it anyway, being alive is all about. Being at college has really underlined my own need for personal space and alone time. Just that time to let your thoughts sift out or spin or just run. Reading, listening to music, cleaning, organizing, making lists, painting one's toes, creative dressing, all of those things are so calm. And, as Wallace Stevens might contend, they are what helps us appreciate everything, these smaller elements of living.
This poem works on a deeper level than that, though; he doesn't just want us to enjoy our alone time. He would like to tell us that the meaning is all around. There is a nice little term that I picked up for this in Honors - self-similarity across scale. That is, there is a common thread through all things. The pattern is the same on the microscopic and the macroscopic. So this poem has ss - scale (how I abbreviate it) in its own apparent simplicity. The form itself is simple. There is no crazy rhyme scheme, and the "stanzas" are just couplets. Then the diction is simple, the night is simple, the elements in the poem (aka the situation) is simple, made up of very few elements, and the message is that simplicity is what makes us humans so wonderful. And yet this idea is very complex, because every piece in this poem works with every other piece to construct this simple meaning. The quiet and the calm are both part of the situation within the poem, the elements which are necessary for the poem's meaning, and they are the meaning itself. But they are the other things at the same time - this is what I was talking about last week with Wordsworth and paradox. One element is at once three (and probably more) things. I like how everything in the poem has a consciousness. The idea of a book having a consciousness is very beautifully and thoughtfully detailed in an essay called "Criticism and the Experience of Interiority" by Georges Poulet. I would recommend it to anybody interested in this idea of the existence of the book and the book's dual consciousness. I am rambling - the book has a consciousness, and the person responds to that consciousness, wanting it to be his always, wanting it to be honest or beholden to him (both connotations of the word "true"). And the house and summer night respect the consciousnesses of the man/book, and respectfully remain silent to encourage the meaning of the book. So all of these complex elements work together to construct a simple message. Like an infinite structure that builds up to a simple package. So anyway. That is all for the poem of the week this week, and I hope that you are all having a wonderful spring break, if it is your spring break!
- Sarah "contemporize your knight bitches" Smith
Monday, March 07, 2005
Poem of the Week 3/7/2005: from The Prelude, Book Thirteenth
From The Prelude, Book Thirteenth
...
Thus might we wear perhaps an hour away,
Ascending at loose distance each from each,
And I, as chanced, the foremost of the band --
When at my feet the ground appeared to brighten,
And with a step or two seemed brighter still;
Nor had I time to ask the cause of this,
For instantly a light upon the turf
Fell like a flash, I lookedd about, and lo,
The moon stood naked in the heavens at height
Immense above my head, and on the shore
I found myself of a huge sea of mist,
Which meek and silent rested at my feet.
A hundred hills their dusky backs upheaved
All over this still ocean, and beyond,
Far, far beyond, the vapours shot themselves
In headlands, tongues, promontory shapes,
Into the sea, the real sea, that seemed
To dwindle and give up its majesty,
Usurped upon as far as sight could reach.
Meanwhile, the moon looked down upon this shew
In single glory, and we stood, the mist
Touching our very feet; and from the shore
At distance not the third part of a mile
Was a blue chasm, a fracture in the vapour,
A deep and gloomy breathing-place, through which
Mounted the roar of waters, torrents, streams
Innumerable, roaring with one voice.
The universal spectacle throughout
Was shaped for admiration and delight,
Grand in itself alone, but in that breach
Through which the homeless voice of waters rose,
That dark deep thoroughfare, had Nature lodged
The soul, the imagination of the whole.
A meditation rose in me that night
Upon the lonely mountain when the scene
Had passed away, and it appeared to me
The perfect image of a mighty mind,
Of one that feeds upon infinity,
That is exalted by an under-presence,
The sense of God, or whatsoe'er is dim
Or vast in its own being --
This is just a tiny excerpt from Wordsworth's wonderful poem The Prelude, but it is one of the most important "spots of time" in the book. For all of you honors kids, you have seen this before, but in-
class reading is never so good as looking at something of your own volition. Or having it forced on you in the form of the Poem of the Week. And anyway, my conversation with Tim the other night inspired me to send out Wordsworth. I have done a lot of extra work on the Prelude, so my reading of this poem will probably be longer than most of the Poem of the Week thoughts. Either skip them or bear with me - it doesn't matter either way. I just hope that you can feel the energy and the wonder of Wordsworth's words. I would sometimes have a hard time even reading his stuff because it is so beautifully and carefully constructed. But yeah.
This episode picks up as Wordsworth is ascending Mount Snowdon in his early twenties. Before he gets to the top, all is misty and blank and simply sort of quiet. Then he suddenly comes upon this vision as he emerges from the fog. Wordsworth presents this episode as evidence of his creative healing later in life - as if this experience in his 20s proves creative power much later. It is circular, but Wordsworth is all about paradox, and the Prelude is the journey of the poet to the creation of the poem. It is Ww's journey into realizing and trusting his own creative power. He sees nature as the creation of God. When we look at the immense infinity of nature, we take it in and it becomes part of us. So creation, and the potential to create, enters a human through nature, and poetry emerges. Nature is God's way of working through humans. Creative power is inspired by nature, which is actually inspired by God. External forces work internally. In this passage, the vastness of Mt. Snowdon parallels the vastness inside - "the perfect image of a mighty mind." And the final entanglement of God and interiority hints at the infinite nature of man which is technically finite (i.e. death). So what is infinite? Is it our relationship to God that makes us infinite? The lasting quality of anything you create? A thing created is, in actuality an Other, yes? But it comes from the self. But this self IS other-ly, through God/Nature. Very circular. My favorite phrase about this is that something like this self/other knot is both "containing and being contained." Is any of this making any sense? I don't know if I am being as clear as I would like to, or conveying my wonder at the complexity of this excerpt. It is very complicated and paradoxica. But the Romantic poets would argue that it is crucial to be able to hold paradox in your mind - two opposing ideas can and do exist at the same time: negative capability. Anyway. This is one of my favorite works of poetry, and I love the twisting of Romantic ideas. If you made it this far through my little (and by "little" I mean "big") discourse on self/other and paradox, thank you! And have a wonderful day!
Sarah
...
Thus might we wear perhaps an hour away,
Ascending at loose distance each from each,
And I, as chanced, the foremost of the band --
When at my feet the ground appeared to brighten,
And with a step or two seemed brighter still;
Nor had I time to ask the cause of this,
For instantly a light upon the turf
Fell like a flash, I lookedd about, and lo,
The moon stood naked in the heavens at height
Immense above my head, and on the shore
I found myself of a huge sea of mist,
Which meek and silent rested at my feet.
A hundred hills their dusky backs upheaved
All over this still ocean, and beyond,
Far, far beyond, the vapours shot themselves
In headlands, tongues, promontory shapes,
Into the sea, the real sea, that seemed
To dwindle and give up its majesty,
Usurped upon as far as sight could reach.
Meanwhile, the moon looked down upon this shew
In single glory, and we stood, the mist
Touching our very feet; and from the shore
At distance not the third part of a mile
Was a blue chasm, a fracture in the vapour,
A deep and gloomy breathing-place, through which
Mounted the roar of waters, torrents, streams
Innumerable, roaring with one voice.
The universal spectacle throughout
Was shaped for admiration and delight,
Grand in itself alone, but in that breach
Through which the homeless voice of waters rose,
That dark deep thoroughfare, had Nature lodged
The soul, the imagination of the whole.
A meditation rose in me that night
Upon the lonely mountain when the scene
Had passed away, and it appeared to me
The perfect image of a mighty mind,
Of one that feeds upon infinity,
That is exalted by an under-presence,
The sense of God, or whatsoe'er is dim
Or vast in its own being --
This is just a tiny excerpt from Wordsworth's wonderful poem The Prelude, but it is one of the most important "spots of time" in the book. For all of you honors kids, you have seen this before, but in-
class reading is never so good as looking at something of your own volition. Or having it forced on you in the form of the Poem of the Week. And anyway, my conversation with Tim the other night inspired me to send out Wordsworth. I have done a lot of extra work on the Prelude, so my reading of this poem will probably be longer than most of the Poem of the Week thoughts. Either skip them or bear with me - it doesn't matter either way. I just hope that you can feel the energy and the wonder of Wordsworth's words. I would sometimes have a hard time even reading his stuff because it is so beautifully and carefully constructed. But yeah.
This episode picks up as Wordsworth is ascending Mount Snowdon in his early twenties. Before he gets to the top, all is misty and blank and simply sort of quiet. Then he suddenly comes upon this vision as he emerges from the fog. Wordsworth presents this episode as evidence of his creative healing later in life - as if this experience in his 20s proves creative power much later. It is circular, but Wordsworth is all about paradox, and the Prelude is the journey of the poet to the creation of the poem. It is Ww's journey into realizing and trusting his own creative power. He sees nature as the creation of God. When we look at the immense infinity of nature, we take it in and it becomes part of us. So creation, and the potential to create, enters a human through nature, and poetry emerges. Nature is God's way of working through humans. Creative power is inspired by nature, which is actually inspired by God. External forces work internally. In this passage, the vastness of Mt. Snowdon parallels the vastness inside - "the perfect image of a mighty mind." And the final entanglement of God and interiority hints at the infinite nature of man which is technically finite (i.e. death). So what is infinite? Is it our relationship to God that makes us infinite? The lasting quality of anything you create? A thing created is, in actuality an Other, yes? But it comes from the self. But this self IS other-ly, through God/Nature. Very circular. My favorite phrase about this is that something like this self/other knot is both "containing and being contained." Is any of this making any sense? I don't know if I am being as clear as I would like to, or conveying my wonder at the complexity of this excerpt. It is very complicated and paradoxica. But the Romantic poets would argue that it is crucial to be able to hold paradox in your mind - two opposing ideas can and do exist at the same time: negative capability. Anyway. This is one of my favorite works of poetry, and I love the twisting of Romantic ideas. If you made it this far through my little (and by "little" I mean "big") discourse on self/other and paradox, thank you! And have a wonderful day!
Sarah
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