On Anothers Sorrow
Can I see anothers woe,
And not be in sorrow too.
Can I see anothers frief,
And not seek for kind relief.
Can I see a falling tear,
And not feel my sorrows share,
Can a father seehis child,
Weep, nor be with sorrow fill'd.
Can a mother sit and hear,
An infant groan an infant fear--
No no never can it be.
Never never can it be.
And can he who smiles on all
Hear the wren with sorrows small,
Hear the small birds grief & care
Hear the woes that infants bear--
And not sit beside the nest
Pouring pit in their breast,
And not sit the cradle near
Weeping tear on infants tear.
And not sit both night & day,
Wiping all our tears away.
O! no never can it be.
Never never can it be.
He doth give his joy to all.
He becomes an infant small.
He becomes a man of woe
He doth feel the sorrow too.
Think not, thou canst sigh a sigh,
And thy maker is not by.
Think not, thou canst weep a tear,
And thy maker is not near.
O! he gives to us his joy,
That our grief he may destroy
Till our grief is fled & gone
He doth sit by us and moan
William Blake 1790
What a complex end this poem has--we are given compassion for redemption, is this correct? In the beginning, Blake writes that it is impossible to see suffering without taking it on ourselves. The savior suffered and suffers with us every moment so that we can be relieved, so that we can partake in eternal joy.
This is fundamentally a poem of trust and brotherhood--the lord has made a pact with us, it seems, abiding by a high rule of human life in order to help us live. Furthermore, it asks to trust in our suffering, to not be afraid of suffering because it is always suffered in kinship with others. Through this co-suffering, it is implied, suffering will end. And this we ought to trust.
Tuesday, August 28, 2007
Poem of the Week 8/20/2007: The Angel
The Angel
I Dreamt a Dream! what can it mean?
And that I was a maiden Queen:
Guarded by an Angel mild:
Witless woe, was ne'er beguil'd!
And I wept both night and day
And he wip'd my tears away
And I wept both day and night
And hid from him my hearts delight
So he took his wings and fled:
Then the morn blush'd rosy red:
I dried my tears & armed my fears,
With ten thousand shields and spears.
Soon my Angel came again;
I was arm'd, he came in vain:
For the time of youth was fled
And grey hairs were on my head.
William Blake 1790
This poem speaks of the human drive to self-concealment. The queen does not want to be made vulnerable, and so she hides both the real reason for her suffering and later must guard that out of her fear. In doing, she loses what could have saved her--an angel.
Of course, Blake cannot be shortened and simplified so extremely. There is a question as to the angel's role in her self concealement; could his comfort have actually enabled her suffering? In other works, Blake has written, "Opposition is true friendship;" our friends ought not enable every vice we have, but challenge us to stay our course, to keep pushing ourselves. To the angel's credit, his presence does seem to symbolize some kind of innocent state--not only does he, like a parent, wipe away her tears, he is associated with youth. When he returns, she is old, implying that his earlier comradeship occurred in youth.
So, though perhaps enabled by the angel, the Queen's reaction was violent and dualistic. Rather than opposition, which holds two forces agaist one-another, she wishes to cut off any chance of vulnerability, of being challenged internally.
I believe that Blake puts us in an uncomfortable position within the poem, for self-concealment is obviously something to which all people are prey. If one has any grain of self-knowledge, one cannot judge this woman, but only ask what might have happened had she not hidden so much from a being that loved her.
I Dreamt a Dream! what can it mean?
And that I was a maiden Queen:
Guarded by an Angel mild:
Witless woe, was ne'er beguil'd!
And I wept both night and day
And he wip'd my tears away
And I wept both day and night
And hid from him my hearts delight
So he took his wings and fled:
Then the morn blush'd rosy red:
I dried my tears & armed my fears,
With ten thousand shields and spears.
Soon my Angel came again;
I was arm'd, he came in vain:
For the time of youth was fled
And grey hairs were on my head.
William Blake 1790
This poem speaks of the human drive to self-concealment. The queen does not want to be made vulnerable, and so she hides both the real reason for her suffering and later must guard that out of her fear. In doing, she loses what could have saved her--an angel.
Of course, Blake cannot be shortened and simplified so extremely. There is a question as to the angel's role in her self concealement; could his comfort have actually enabled her suffering? In other works, Blake has written, "Opposition is true friendship;" our friends ought not enable every vice we have, but challenge us to stay our course, to keep pushing ourselves. To the angel's credit, his presence does seem to symbolize some kind of innocent state--not only does he, like a parent, wipe away her tears, he is associated with youth. When he returns, she is old, implying that his earlier comradeship occurred in youth.
So, though perhaps enabled by the angel, the Queen's reaction was violent and dualistic. Rather than opposition, which holds two forces agaist one-another, she wishes to cut off any chance of vulnerability, of being challenged internally.
I believe that Blake puts us in an uncomfortable position within the poem, for self-concealment is obviously something to which all people are prey. If one has any grain of self-knowledge, one cannot judge this woman, but only ask what might have happened had she not hidden so much from a being that loved her.
Poem of the Week 8/14/2007: Ulysses
Ulysses
It little profits that an idle king,
By this still hearth, among these barren crags,
Match'd with an aged wife, I mete and dole
Unequal laws unto a savage race,
That hoard, and sleep, and feed, and know not me.
I cannot rest from travel: I will drink
Life to the lees: All times I have enjoy'd
Greatly, have suffer'd greatly, both with those
That loved me, and alone, on shore, and when
Thro' scudding drifts the rainy Hyades
Vext the dim sea: I am become a name;
For always roaming with a hungry heart
Much have I seen and known; cities of men
And manners, climates, councils, governments,
Myself not least, but honour'd of them all;
And drunk delight of battle with my peers,
Far on the ringing plains of windy Troy.
I am a part of all that I have met;
Yet all experience is an arch wherethro'
Gleams that untravell'd world whose margin fades
For ever and forever when I move.
How dull it is to pause, to make an end,
To rust unburnish'd, not to shine in use!
As tho' to breathe were life! Life piled on life
Were all too little, and of one to me
Little remains: but every hour is saved
From that eternal silence, something more,
A bringer of new things; and vile it were
For some three suns to store and hoard myself,
And this gray spirit yearning in desire
To follow knowledge like a sinking star,
Beyond the utmost bound of human thought.
This is my son, mine own Telemachus,
To whom I leave the sceptre and the isle,--
Well-loved of me, discerning to fulfil
This labour, by slow prudence to make mild
A rugged people, and thro' soft degrees
Subdue them to the useful and the good.
Most blameless is he, centred in the sphere
Of common duties, decent not to fail
In offices of tenderness, and pay
Meet adoration to my household gods,
When I am gone. He works his work, I mine.
There lies the port; the vessel puffs her sail:
There gloom the dark, broad seas. My mariners,
Souls that have toil'd, and wrought, and thought with me--
That ever with a frolic welcome took
The thunder and the sunshine, and opposed
Free hearts, free foreheads--you and I are old;
Old age hath yet his honour and his toil;
Death closes all: but something ere the end,
Some work of noble note, may yet be done,
Not unbecoming men that strove with Gods.
The lights begin to twinkle from the rocks:
The long day wanes: the slow moon climbs: the deep
Moans round with many voices. Come, my friends,
'T is not too late to seek a newer world.
Push off, and sitting well in order smite
The sounding furrows; for my purpose holds
To sail beyond the sunset, and the baths
Of all the western stars, until I die.
It may be that the gulfs will wash us down:
It may be we shall touch the Happy Isles,
And see the great Achilles, whom we knew.
Tho' much is taken, much abides; and tho'
We are not now that strength which in old days
Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are;
One equal temper of heroic hearts,
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.
Alfred Lord Tennyson
Like the ancients, as my professor mentioned recently, Tennyson's poem demands of us: What is a life lived well?.
Filled with adventure, every hour is used for exploration and life, inner and out. Ulysses' suffering has been great, as well as his enjoyment. We find, in the last stanza, that Ulysses is a true hero, for he is willing to die at any moment. Rilke discusses the idea of the hero, not because he does sacrifice himself, but because he is willing to. I wonder how often we are willing to risk anything any more. Even in Greek timees, it must have been rare, for those heroes were *heroes* because they would do so. To risk anything, to constantly seek... can we be heroes any more?
It little profits that an idle king,
By this still hearth, among these barren crags,
Match'd with an aged wife, I mete and dole
Unequal laws unto a savage race,
That hoard, and sleep, and feed, and know not me.
I cannot rest from travel: I will drink
Life to the lees: All times I have enjoy'd
Greatly, have suffer'd greatly, both with those
That loved me, and alone, on shore, and when
Thro' scudding drifts the rainy Hyades
Vext the dim sea: I am become a name;
For always roaming with a hungry heart
Much have I seen and known; cities of men
And manners, climates, councils, governments,
Myself not least, but honour'd of them all;
And drunk delight of battle with my peers,
Far on the ringing plains of windy Troy.
I am a part of all that I have met;
Yet all experience is an arch wherethro'
Gleams that untravell'd world whose margin fades
For ever and forever when I move.
How dull it is to pause, to make an end,
To rust unburnish'd, not to shine in use!
As tho' to breathe were life! Life piled on life
Were all too little, and of one to me
Little remains: but every hour is saved
From that eternal silence, something more,
A bringer of new things; and vile it were
For some three suns to store and hoard myself,
And this gray spirit yearning in desire
To follow knowledge like a sinking star,
Beyond the utmost bound of human thought.
This is my son, mine own Telemachus,
To whom I leave the sceptre and the isle,--
Well-loved of me, discerning to fulfil
This labour, by slow prudence to make mild
A rugged people, and thro' soft degrees
Subdue them to the useful and the good.
Most blameless is he, centred in the sphere
Of common duties, decent not to fail
In offices of tenderness, and pay
Meet adoration to my household gods,
When I am gone. He works his work, I mine.
There lies the port; the vessel puffs her sail:
There gloom the dark, broad seas. My mariners,
Souls that have toil'd, and wrought, and thought with me--
That ever with a frolic welcome took
The thunder and the sunshine, and opposed
Free hearts, free foreheads--you and I are old;
Old age hath yet his honour and his toil;
Death closes all: but something ere the end,
Some work of noble note, may yet be done,
Not unbecoming men that strove with Gods.
The lights begin to twinkle from the rocks:
The long day wanes: the slow moon climbs: the deep
Moans round with many voices. Come, my friends,
'T is not too late to seek a newer world.
Push off, and sitting well in order smite
The sounding furrows; for my purpose holds
To sail beyond the sunset, and the baths
Of all the western stars, until I die.
It may be that the gulfs will wash us down:
It may be we shall touch the Happy Isles,
And see the great Achilles, whom we knew.
Tho' much is taken, much abides; and tho'
We are not now that strength which in old days
Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are;
One equal temper of heroic hearts,
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.
Alfred Lord Tennyson
Like the ancients, as my professor mentioned recently, Tennyson's poem demands of us: What is a life lived well?.
Filled with adventure, every hour is used for exploration and life, inner and out. Ulysses' suffering has been great, as well as his enjoyment. We find, in the last stanza, that Ulysses is a true hero, for he is willing to die at any moment. Rilke discusses the idea of the hero, not because he does sacrifice himself, but because he is willing to. I wonder how often we are willing to risk anything any more. Even in Greek timees, it must have been rare, for those heroes were *heroes* because they would do so. To risk anything, to constantly seek... can we be heroes any more?
Tuesday, August 07, 2007
Poem of the Week 8/7/2007: from The Country of Marriage
rom The Country of Marriage
I.
I dream of you walking at night along the streams
of the country of my birth, warm blooms and the nightsongs
of birds opening around you as you walk.
You are holding in your body the dark seed of my sleep.
II.
This comes after silence. Was it something I said
that bound me to you, some mere promise
or, worse, the fear of loneliness and death?
A man lost in the woods in the dark, I stood
still and said nothing. And then there rose in me,
like the earth's empowering brew rising
in root and branch, the words of a dream of you
I did not know I had dreamed. I was a wanderer
who feels the solace of his native land
under his feet again and moving in his blood.
I went on, blind and faithful. Where I stepped
my track was there to steady me. It was no abyss
that lay before me, but only the level ground.
VI.
What I am learning to give you is my death
to set you free of me, and me from myself
into the dark and the new light. Like the water
of a deep stream, love is always too much. We
did not make it. Though we drink till we burst
we cannot have it all, or want it all.
In its abundance it survives our thirst.
In the evening we come down to the shore
to drink our fill, and sleep, while it
flows through the regions of the dark.
It does not hold us, except we keep returning
to its rich waters thirsty. We enter,
willing to die, into the commonwealth of its joy.
VII.
I give you what is unbounded, passing from dark to dark,
containing darkness: a night of rain, an early morning.
I give you the life I have let live for the love of you:
a clump of orange-blooming weeds beside the road,
the young orchard waiting in the snow, our own life
that we have planted in the ground, as I
have planted mine in you. I give you my love for all
beautiful and honest women that you gather to yourself
again and again, and satisfy--and this poem,
no more mine than any man's who has loved a woman.
Wendell Berry
I.
I dream of you walking at night along the streams
of the country of my birth, warm blooms and the nightsongs
of birds opening around you as you walk.
You are holding in your body the dark seed of my sleep.
II.
This comes after silence. Was it something I said
that bound me to you, some mere promise
or, worse, the fear of loneliness and death?
A man lost in the woods in the dark, I stood
still and said nothing. And then there rose in me,
like the earth's empowering brew rising
in root and branch, the words of a dream of you
I did not know I had dreamed. I was a wanderer
who feels the solace of his native land
under his feet again and moving in his blood.
I went on, blind and faithful. Where I stepped
my track was there to steady me. It was no abyss
that lay before me, but only the level ground.
VI.
What I am learning to give you is my death
to set you free of me, and me from myself
into the dark and the new light. Like the water
of a deep stream, love is always too much. We
did not make it. Though we drink till we burst
we cannot have it all, or want it all.
In its abundance it survives our thirst.
In the evening we come down to the shore
to drink our fill, and sleep, while it
flows through the regions of the dark.
It does not hold us, except we keep returning
to its rich waters thirsty. We enter,
willing to die, into the commonwealth of its joy.
VII.
I give you what is unbounded, passing from dark to dark,
containing darkness: a night of rain, an early morning.
I give you the life I have let live for the love of you:
a clump of orange-blooming weeds beside the road,
the young orchard waiting in the snow, our own life
that we have planted in the ground, as I
have planted mine in you. I give you my love for all
beautiful and honest women that you gather to yourself
again and again, and satisfy--and this poem,
no more mine than any man's who has loved a woman.
Wendell Berry
Monday, July 23, 2007
Poem of the Week 7/23/2007: from A Kumquat for John Keats
from A Kumquat for John Keats
Today I found the right fruit for my prime,
not orange, not tangelo, and not lime,
nor moon-like gloes of grapefruit that now hang
outside our bedroom, nor tart lemon's tang
(though last year full of bile and self-defeat
I wanted to believe no life was sweet)
nor the tangible sunshine of the tangerine,
and no incongruous citrus ever seen
at greengrocers' in Newcastle or Leeds
mis-spelt by the spuds and mud-caked swedes,
a fruit an older poet might substitute
for the grape John Keats thought to be Joy's fruit,
when, two years before he died, he tried to write
how Melancholy dwelled inside Delight.* / /
and if John keats had only lived to be,
because of extra years, in need like me,
at 42 he'd help me celebrate
that Micancopy kumquat that I ate
whole, straight off the tree, sweet pulp and sour skin--
or was it sweet outside, and sour within?
For however many kumquats that I eat
I'm not sure if it's flesh or rind that's sweet,
and being a man of doubt at life's mid-way
I'd offer Keats some kumquats and I'd say:
You'll find that one part's sweet and one part's tart:
say where the sweetness or the sourness start.
I find I can't as if one couldn't say
exactly where the night became the day,
which makes for me the kumquat taken whole
best fruit, and metaphor, to fit the soul
of one in Florida at 42 with Keats
crunching kumquats, thinking, as he eats
the flesh, the juice, the pith, the pips, the peel,
that this is how a full life ought to feel,
its perishable relish prick the tongue,
when the man who savours life's no longer young,
the fruits that were his futures far behind.
Then its the kumquat fruit expresses best
how days have darkness behind them like a rind,
life has a skin of death that keeps its zest.
*Cf. John Keats, "Ode on Melancholy," lines 25-26
...
Tony Harrison 1981
I have cut a significant portion of this poem, because of limited space and because the poem spins into sentimental personal and social reflections. It is enough, for now, to get a taste of the kumquat Mr. Harrison would like us to mull over the course of this poem. Perhaps it will be helpful for the reader to know that Keats was a Romantic Era poet who died young; after the deaths of many family members from Tuberculosis, he had the premonition that he would die young, and many of his poems wrestle with issues of life and death, love and beauty. They are intensely compact works of art, almost effortlessly holding the reins of emotion, reflection and beauty, letting each lead as it sees fit. Metaphor is key to his work, from which Tony Harrison takes the cue for this poem.
Though not the densest or most profound poem ever written, I find it clever, fun to read, and a good reminder of the dualities we carry within life. One question it raises, I think, is: Do you know you are going to die? How often is this a reality? Does your life really carry with it the skin that keeps its zest? Interesting.
Today I found the right fruit for my prime,
not orange, not tangelo, and not lime,
nor moon-like gloes of grapefruit that now hang
outside our bedroom, nor tart lemon's tang
(though last year full of bile and self-defeat
I wanted to believe no life was sweet)
nor the tangible sunshine of the tangerine,
and no incongruous citrus ever seen
at greengrocers' in Newcastle or Leeds
mis-spelt by the spuds and mud-caked swedes,
a fruit an older poet might substitute
for the grape John Keats thought to be Joy's fruit,
when, two years before he died, he tried to write
how Melancholy dwelled inside Delight.* / /
and if John keats had only lived to be,
because of extra years, in need like me,
at 42 he'd help me celebrate
that Micancopy kumquat that I ate
whole, straight off the tree, sweet pulp and sour skin--
or was it sweet outside, and sour within?
For however many kumquats that I eat
I'm not sure if it's flesh or rind that's sweet,
and being a man of doubt at life's mid-way
I'd offer Keats some kumquats and I'd say:
You'll find that one part's sweet and one part's tart:
say where the sweetness or the sourness start.
I find I can't as if one couldn't say
exactly where the night became the day,
which makes for me the kumquat taken whole
best fruit, and metaphor, to fit the soul
of one in Florida at 42 with Keats
crunching kumquats, thinking, as he eats
the flesh, the juice, the pith, the pips, the peel,
that this is how a full life ought to feel,
its perishable relish prick the tongue,
when the man who savours life's no longer young,
the fruits that were his futures far behind.
Then its the kumquat fruit expresses best
how days have darkness behind them like a rind,
life has a skin of death that keeps its zest.
*Cf. John Keats, "Ode on Melancholy," lines 25-26
...
Tony Harrison 1981
I have cut a significant portion of this poem, because of limited space and because the poem spins into sentimental personal and social reflections. It is enough, for now, to get a taste of the kumquat Mr. Harrison would like us to mull over the course of this poem. Perhaps it will be helpful for the reader to know that Keats was a Romantic Era poet who died young; after the deaths of many family members from Tuberculosis, he had the premonition that he would die young, and many of his poems wrestle with issues of life and death, love and beauty. They are intensely compact works of art, almost effortlessly holding the reins of emotion, reflection and beauty, letting each lead as it sees fit. Metaphor is key to his work, from which Tony Harrison takes the cue for this poem.
Though not the densest or most profound poem ever written, I find it clever, fun to read, and a good reminder of the dualities we carry within life. One question it raises, I think, is: Do you know you are going to die? How often is this a reality? Does your life really carry with it the skin that keeps its zest? Interesting.
Wednesday, July 18, 2007
Poem of the Week 7/18/2007: from Don Juan, Canto 1
- from Don Juan, Canto 1
VI - Most epic poets plunge "in medias res"
- (Horace makes this the heroic turnpike road),
- And then your hero tells, whene'er you please,
- What went before -- by way of episode,
- While seated after dinner at his ease,
- Beside his mistress in some soft abode,
- Palace, or garden, paradise, or cavern,
- Which serves the happy couple for a tavern.
VII - That is the usual method, but not mine --
- My way is to begin with the beginning;
- The regularity of my design
- Forbids all wandering as the worst of sinning,
- And therefore I shall open with a line
- (Although it cost me half an hour in spinning)
- Narrating somewhat of Don Juan's father,
- And also of his mother, if you'd rather.
VIII - In Seville was he born, a pleasant city,
- Famous for oranges and women -- he
- Who has not seen it will be much to pity,
- So says the proverb -- and I quite agree;
- Of all the Spanish towns is none more pretty,
- Cadiz perhaps -- but that you soon may see;
- Don Juan's parents lived beside the river,
- A noble stream, and call'd the Guadalquivir.
IX - His father's name was Jóse -- Don, of course, --
- A true Hidalgo, free from every stain
- Of Moor or Hebrew blood, he traced his source
- Through the most Gothic gentlemen of Spain;
- A better cavalier ne'er mounted horse,
- Or, being mounted, e'er got down again,
- Than Jóse, who begot our hero, who
- Begot -- but that's to come -- Well, to renew:
X - His mother[4] was a learnéd lady, famed
- For every branch of every science known
- In every Christian language ever named,
- With virtues equall'd by her wit alone,
- She made the cleverest people quite ashamed,
- And even the good with inward envy groan,
- Finding themselves so very much exceeded
- In their own way by all the things that she did.
XI - Her memory was a mine: she knew by heart
- All Calderon and greater part of Lopé,
- So that if any actor miss'd his part
- She could have served him for the prompter's copy;
- For her Feinagle's[5] were an useless art,
- And he himself obliged to shut up shop -- he
- Could never make a memory so fine as
- That which adorn'd the brain of Donna Inez.
XII - Her favourite science was the mathematical,
- Her noblest virtue was her magnanimity,
- Her wit (she sometimes tried at wit) was Attic all,
- Her serious sayings darken'd to sublimity;
- In short, in all things she was fairly what I call
- A prodigy -- her morning dress was dimity,
- Her evening silk, or, in the summer, muslin,
- And other stuffs, with which I won't stay puzzling.
XIII - She knew the Latin -- that is, "the Lord's prayer,"
- And Greek -- the alphabet -- I'm nearly sure;
- She read some French romances here and there,
- Although her mode of speaking was not pure;
- For native Spanish she had no great care,
- At least her conversation was obscure;
- Her thoughts were theorems, her words a problem,
- As if she deem'd that mystery would ennoble 'em.
XIV - She liked the English and the Hebrew tongue,
- And said there was analogy between 'em;
- She proved it somehow out of sacred song,
- But I must leave the proofs to those who've seen 'em;
- But this I heard her say, and can't be wrong
- And all may think which way their judgments lean 'em,
- "'T is strange -- the Hebrew noun which means 'I am,'
- The English always used to govern d--n."
-
XV - Some women use their tongues -- she look'd a lecture,
- Each eye a sermon, and her brow a homily,
- An all-in-all sufficient self-director,
- Like the lamented late Sir Samuel Romilly,
- The Law's expounder, and the State's corrector,
- Whose suicide was almost an anomaly --
- One sad example more, that "All is vanity"
- (The jury brought their verdict in "Insanity").
XVI - In short, she was a walking calculation,
- Miss Edgeworth's novels stepping from their covers,
- Or Mrs. Trimmer's books on education,
- Or "Coelebs' Wife" set out in quest of lovers,
- Morality's prim personification,
- In which not Envy's self a flaw discovers;
- To others' share let "female errors fall,"
- For she had not even one -- the worst of all.
XVII - Oh! she was perfect past all parallel --
- Of any modern female saint's comparison;
- So far above the cunning powers of hell,
- Her guardian angel had given up his garrison;
- Even her minutest motions went as well
- As those of the best time-piece made by Harrison:
- In virtues nothing earthly could surpass her,
- Save thine "incomparable oil," Macassar!
XVIII - Perfect she was, but as perfection is
- Insipid in this naughty world of ours,
- Where our first parents never learn'd to kiss
- Till they were exiled from their earlier bowers,
- Where all was peace, and innocence, and bliss
- (I wonder how they got through the twelve hours),
- Don Jóse, like a lineal son of Eve,
- Went plucking various fruit without her leave.
I will add the footnotes soon! For now, I hope that you can notice the narrator's contradictory tone. In this satire, Byron is poking fun at any number of things; in this excerpt, he laughs at the conventions of heroic verse, which can take itself Very Seriously. I also recommend that you read this out loud to yourself after reading it silently once, because the rhythm of this poem gallops along, a fact that becomes more impressive when one realizes that this is a fraction of one of sixteen cantos.
Wednesday, July 11, 2007
Poem of the Week 7/11/07: Man and Camel
Man and Camel
On the eve of my fortieth birthday
I sat on the porch having a smoke
when out of the blue a man and a camel
happened by. Neither uttered a sound
at first, but as they drifted up the street
and out of town the two of them began to sing.
Yet what they sang is still a mystery to me—
the words were indistinct and the tune
too ornamental to recall. Into the desert
they went and as they went their voices
rose as one above the sifting sound
of windblown sand. The wonder of their singing,
its elusive blend of man and camel, seemed
an ideal image for all uncommon couples.
Was this the night that I had waited for
so long? I wanted to believe it was,
but just as they were vanishing, the man
and camel ceased to sing, and galloped
back to town. They stood before my porch,
staring up at me with beady eyes, and said:
"You ruined it. You ruined it forever."
Mark Strand
Sorry no close read right now, for this one certainly needs some untangling.
On the eve of my fortieth birthday
I sat on the porch having a smoke
when out of the blue a man and a camel
happened by. Neither uttered a sound
at first, but as they drifted up the street
and out of town the two of them began to sing.
Yet what they sang is still a mystery to me—
the words were indistinct and the tune
too ornamental to recall. Into the desert
they went and as they went their voices
rose as one above the sifting sound
of windblown sand. The wonder of their singing,
its elusive blend of man and camel, seemed
an ideal image for all uncommon couples.
Was this the night that I had waited for
so long? I wanted to believe it was,
but just as they were vanishing, the man
and camel ceased to sing, and galloped
back to town. They stood before my porch,
staring up at me with beady eyes, and said:
"You ruined it. You ruined it forever."
Mark Strand
Sorry no close read right now, for this one certainly needs some untangling.
Monday, July 02, 2007
Poem of the Week 7/2/2007: Dante's Inferno, from Canto VI
from Canto VI, Dante's Inferno
We were passing over shades sprawled
under heavy rain, setting our feet
upon their emptiness, which seems real bodies.
All of them were lying on the ground,
except for one who sat bolt upright
when he saw us pass before him.
'O you who come escorted through this hell,'
he said, 'if you can, bring me back to mind.
You were made before I was undone.'
And I to him: 'The punishment you suffer
may be blotting you from memory:
it doesn't seem to me I've ever seen you.
'But tell me who you are to have been put
into this misery with such a penalty
that none, though harsher, is more loathsome.'
And he to me: 'Your city,* so full of envy
that now the sack spills over,
held me in its confines in the sunlit life.
'You and my townsmen called me Ciacco.
For the pernicious fault of gluttony,
as you can see, I'm prostrate in this rain.
'And in my misery I am not alone.
All those here share a single penalty
for the same fault.' He said no more.
I answered him: 'Ciacco, your distress so weighs
on me it bids me weep.
ll. 59-84: Dante and Ciacco discuss the future of Florence. Dante asks of the afterlife of five townsmen. Ciacco responds:
And he: 'They are among the blacker souls.
Different vices weigh them toward the bottom,
as you shall see if you descend that far.
'But when you have returned to the sweet world
I pray you bring me to men's memory.
I say no more nor answer you again.'
With that his clear eyes lost their focus.
He gazed at me until his head dropped down.
Then he fell back among his blind companions.
Dante Alighieri, translated by Robert and Jean Hollander
*Florence
I offer this filled out reading in hopes that you will all forgive my having neglected the PotW last week and the close-reads for some time now!
To read this selection of the Inferno, it will help, I think, to give background on the poem and its events for those who have not read it. Dante, the character, begins on a journey through hell after losing his way on the path of truth. Virgil, the poet, appears as a guide, and the two have so far moved through the circles of apathetic individuals, limbo (virtuous heathens and unbaptized babes), and lust. In that of lust, we witnessed Dante's encounter with Francesca, a woman who tells her story of giving into romantic love, which causes Dante to faint from pity. At the beginning of this excerpt, we are in the middle of the third circle of Hell: that of Gluttony.
As with every level of hell, we must ask ourselves, what are the conditions of the punishment? For gluttony, punishment seems to be absolute nothingness--no humanity, no pain, no change in the weather, and no physical form (one then wonders what Dante and Virgil see, and upon what they are walking). All memory of its inhabitants is effaced from "the sunlit world." In this case, those punished are denied their humanity even in the shadows of memory. Physically, we get the feeling that they are merged with their landscape, for Virgil and Dante step over them as if they were the ground. Little wonder Dante calls this penalty "the most loathsome," for they are less-than-human, capable of nothing. In his comment, we recieve a value judgment about the beauty of our own lives: that we are given so much. One question to ask yourself might be: why is nothingness an apt punishment for gluttony?
Which brings us to another question. If the state here is one of nothingness, then how is it possible that Ciacco recognized Dante? This moment is striking, for among so much barrenness, to be suddenly seen, to be picked out by a sinner, associates Dante with the sin. The suddenness of Ciacco's waking acts out what it would be to see sin for oneself. However, there is no way of logically explaining why Ciacco wakes up. Perhaps it is to teach Dante about the sin, and so has a positive outcome. The poem's Christian framework would suggest that the waking up is given by God to help Dante on his way. And so Ciacco's sin is perhaps somewhat redeemed?
The question of "what is good" in this encounter also arises after reading this section. After all, if Ciacco is allowed to enter consciousness for Dante, and this will help, it seems basically positive. Moreover, he is a sympathetic character--not only does he respect Dante's questions, answering them fully, my notes tell me that he is one of the best sinners in Hell. In history, he was engaged in improving Florence. Moreover, he is honest about his sins, not begging them to be excused or claiming his innocence to a human, which would betray a lack of remorse, egoism and blasphemy. Finally, his plea to be remembered is difficult to remain cold to, perhaps because it expresses the innate human impulse of loving one's life, one's place in the world. He wants simply to exist. Ciacco tries to, implores Dante...
And yet he is damned. Confusing, because it goes against our innate reaction. But, no matter what qualites we may admire, there is no doubt that they were not enough to excuse him from his sin, for God sent him there, and God's judgment would be infalliable.
Dante thus gives us a problem that reveals tension in ourselves. There are three levels here: sin (gluttony), sympathy (for Ciacco), and true morality (the implicit, objective judgment of God). By (most likely) aligning the reader's response in the middle of two visible sides, Dante helps us see what we are. Reading the Inferno is an experience, one that brings us back to ourselves, and this, perhaps, is one aspect of his writing that makes him so great.
We were passing over shades sprawled
under heavy rain, setting our feet
upon their emptiness, which seems real bodies.
All of them were lying on the ground,
except for one who sat bolt upright
when he saw us pass before him.
'O you who come escorted through this hell,'
he said, 'if you can, bring me back to mind.
You were made before I was undone.'
And I to him: 'The punishment you suffer
may be blotting you from memory:
it doesn't seem to me I've ever seen you.
'But tell me who you are to have been put
into this misery with such a penalty
that none, though harsher, is more loathsome.'
And he to me: 'Your city,* so full of envy
that now the sack spills over,
held me in its confines in the sunlit life.
'You and my townsmen called me Ciacco.
For the pernicious fault of gluttony,
as you can see, I'm prostrate in this rain.
'And in my misery I am not alone.
All those here share a single penalty
for the same fault.' He said no more.
I answered him: 'Ciacco, your distress so weighs
on me it bids me weep.
ll. 59-84: Dante and Ciacco discuss the future of Florence. Dante asks of the afterlife of five townsmen. Ciacco responds:
And he: 'They are among the blacker souls.
Different vices weigh them toward the bottom,
as you shall see if you descend that far.
'But when you have returned to the sweet world
I pray you bring me to men's memory.
I say no more nor answer you again.'
With that his clear eyes lost their focus.
He gazed at me until his head dropped down.
Then he fell back among his blind companions.
Dante Alighieri, translated by Robert and Jean Hollander
*Florence
I offer this filled out reading in hopes that you will all forgive my having neglected the PotW last week and the close-reads for some time now!
To read this selection of the Inferno, it will help, I think, to give background on the poem and its events for those who have not read it. Dante, the character, begins on a journey through hell after losing his way on the path of truth. Virgil, the poet, appears as a guide, and the two have so far moved through the circles of apathetic individuals, limbo (virtuous heathens and unbaptized babes), and lust. In that of lust, we witnessed Dante's encounter with Francesca, a woman who tells her story of giving into romantic love, which causes Dante to faint from pity. At the beginning of this excerpt, we are in the middle of the third circle of Hell: that of Gluttony.
As with every level of hell, we must ask ourselves, what are the conditions of the punishment? For gluttony, punishment seems to be absolute nothingness--no humanity, no pain, no change in the weather, and no physical form (one then wonders what Dante and Virgil see, and upon what they are walking). All memory of its inhabitants is effaced from "the sunlit world." In this case, those punished are denied their humanity even in the shadows of memory. Physically, we get the feeling that they are merged with their landscape, for Virgil and Dante step over them as if they were the ground. Little wonder Dante calls this penalty "the most loathsome," for they are less-than-human, capable of nothing. In his comment, we recieve a value judgment about the beauty of our own lives: that we are given so much. One question to ask yourself might be: why is nothingness an apt punishment for gluttony?
Which brings us to another question. If the state here is one of nothingness, then how is it possible that Ciacco recognized Dante? This moment is striking, for among so much barrenness, to be suddenly seen, to be picked out by a sinner, associates Dante with the sin. The suddenness of Ciacco's waking acts out what it would be to see sin for oneself. However, there is no way of logically explaining why Ciacco wakes up. Perhaps it is to teach Dante about the sin, and so has a positive outcome. The poem's Christian framework would suggest that the waking up is given by God to help Dante on his way. And so Ciacco's sin is perhaps somewhat redeemed?
The question of "what is good" in this encounter also arises after reading this section. After all, if Ciacco is allowed to enter consciousness for Dante, and this will help, it seems basically positive. Moreover, he is a sympathetic character--not only does he respect Dante's questions, answering them fully, my notes tell me that he is one of the best sinners in Hell. In history, he was engaged in improving Florence. Moreover, he is honest about his sins, not begging them to be excused or claiming his innocence to a human, which would betray a lack of remorse, egoism and blasphemy. Finally, his plea to be remembered is difficult to remain cold to, perhaps because it expresses the innate human impulse of loving one's life, one's place in the world. He wants simply to exist. Ciacco tries to, implores Dante...
And yet he is damned. Confusing, because it goes against our innate reaction. But, no matter what qualites we may admire, there is no doubt that they were not enough to excuse him from his sin, for God sent him there, and God's judgment would be infalliable.
Dante thus gives us a problem that reveals tension in ourselves. There are three levels here: sin (gluttony), sympathy (for Ciacco), and true morality (the implicit, objective judgment of God). By (most likely) aligning the reader's response in the middle of two visible sides, Dante helps us see what we are. Reading the Inferno is an experience, one that brings us back to ourselves, and this, perhaps, is one aspect of his writing that makes him so great.
Monday, June 18, 2007
Poem of the Week 6/18/2007: The Hollow Men
The Hollow Men
Mistah Kurtz—he dead
A penny for the Old Guy
I
We are the hollow men
We are the stuffed men
Leaning together
Headpiece filled with straw. Alas!
Our dried voices, when
We whisper together
Are quiet and meaningless
As wind in dry grass
Or rats' feet over broken glass
In our dry cellar
Shape without form, shade without colour,
Paralysed force, gesture without motion;
Those who have crossed
With direct eyes, to death's other Kingdom
Remember us -- if at all -- not as lost
Violent souls, but only
As the hollow men
The stuffed men.
II
Eyes I dare not meet in dreams
In death's dream kingdom
These do not appear:
There, the eyes are
Sunlight on a broken column
There, is a tree swinging
And voices are
In the wind's singing
More distant and more solemn
Than a fading star.
Let me be no nearer
In death's dream kingdom
Let me also wear
Such deliberate disguises
Rat's coat, crowskin, crossed staves
In a field
Behaving as the wind behaves
No nearer --
Not that final meeting
In the twilight kingdom
III
This is the dead land
This is cactus land
Here the stone images
Are raised, here they receive
The supplication of a dead man's hand
Under the twinkle of a fading star.
Is it like this
In death's other kingdom
Waking alone
At the hour when we are
Trembling with tenderness
Lips that would kiss
Form prayers to broken stone.
IV
The eyes are not here
There are no eyes here
In this valley of dying stars
In this hollow valley
This broken jaw of our lost kingdoms
In this last of meeting places
We grope together
And avoid speech
Gathered on this beach of the tumid river
Sightless, unless
The eyes reappear
As the perpetual star
Multifoliate rose
Of death's twilight kingdom
The hope only
Of empty men.
V
Here we go round the prickly pear
Prickly pear prickly pear
Here we go round the prickly pear
At five o'clock in the morning.
Between the idea
And the reality
Between the motion
And the act
Falls the Shadow
For Thine is the Kingdom
Between the conception
And the creation
Between the emotion
And the response
Falls the Shadow
Life is very long
Between the desire
And the spasm
Between the potency
And the existence
Between the essence
And the descent
Falls the Shadow
For Thine is the Kingdom
For Thine is
Life is
For Thine is the
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.
I
We are the hollow men
We are the stuffed men
Leaning together
Headpiece filled with straw. Alas!
Our dried voices, when
We whisper together
Are quiet and meaningless
As wind in dry grass
Or rats' feet over broken glass
In our dry cellar
Shape without form, shade without colour,
Paralysed force, gesture without motion;
Those who have crossed
With direct eyes, to death's other Kingdom
Remember us -- if at all -- not as lost
Violent souls, but only
As the hollow men
The stuffed men.
II
Eyes I dare not meet in dreams
In death's dream kingdom
These do not appear:
There, the eyes are
Sunlight on a broken column
There, is a tree swinging
And voices are
In the wind's singing
More distant and more solemn
Than a fading star.
Let me be no nearer
In death's dream kingdom
Let me also wear
Such deliberate disguises
Rat's coat, crowskin, crossed staves
In a field
Behaving as the wind behaves
No nearer --
Not that final meeting
In the twilight kingdom
III
This is the dead land
This is cactus land
Here the stone images
Are raised, here they receive
The supplication of a dead man's hand
Under the twinkle of a fading star.
Is it like this
In death's other kingdom
Waking alone
At the hour when we are
Trembling with tenderness
Lips that would kiss
Form prayers to broken stone.
IV
The eyes are not here
There are no eyes here
In this valley of dying stars
In this hollow valley
This broken jaw of our lost kingdoms
In this last of meeting places
We grope together
And avoid speech
Gathered on this beach of the tumid river
Sightless, unless
The eyes reappear
As the perpetual star
Multifoliate rose
Of death's twilight kingdom
The hope only
Of empty men.
V
Here we go round the prickly pear
Prickly pear prickly pear
Here we go round the prickly pear
At five o'clock in the morning.
Between the idea
And the reality
Between the motion
And the act
Falls the Shadow
For Thine is the Kingdom
Between the conception
And the creation
Between the emotion
And the response
Falls the Shadow
Life is very long
Between the desire
And the spasm
Between the potency
And the existence
Between the essence
And the descent
Falls the Shadow
For Thine is the Kingdom
For Thine is
Life is
For Thine is the
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.
T.S. Eliot 1925
This poem brings up the questions: what could we do to fix this sort of problem? Are we like this? What would happen if I looked at the newspaper once a day, or perhaps the content of my conversations? It's kind of a memento mori poem, in that it reminds us that we are kind of dead right now. Not that death is coming, but that it is here, and that many things have internally ground to a halt.
Reading this one, I hope that you don't worry too much about the symbolism in particular. What is more helpful, I think, would be to move through the text a few times and let it affect you as it will.
Mistah Kurtz—he dead
A penny for the Old Guy
I
We are the hollow men
We are the stuffed men
Leaning together
Headpiece filled with straw. Alas!
Our dried voices, when
We whisper together
Are quiet and meaningless
As wind in dry grass
Or rats' feet over broken glass
In our dry cellar
Shape without form, shade without colour,
Paralysed force, gesture without motion;
Those who have crossed
With direct eyes, to death's other Kingdom
Remember us -- if at all -- not as lost
Violent souls, but only
As the hollow men
The stuffed men.
II
Eyes I dare not meet in dreams
In death's dream kingdom
These do not appear:
There, the eyes are
Sunlight on a broken column
There, is a tree swinging
And voices are
In the wind's singing
More distant and more solemn
Than a fading star.
Let me be no nearer
In death's dream kingdom
Let me also wear
Such deliberate disguises
Rat's coat, crowskin, crossed staves
In a field
Behaving as the wind behaves
No nearer --
Not that final meeting
In the twilight kingdom
III
This is the dead land
This is cactus land
Here the stone images
Are raised, here they receive
The supplication of a dead man's hand
Under the twinkle of a fading star.
Is it like this
In death's other kingdom
Waking alone
At the hour when we are
Trembling with tenderness
Lips that would kiss
Form prayers to broken stone.
IV
The eyes are not here
There are no eyes here
In this valley of dying stars
In this hollow valley
This broken jaw of our lost kingdoms
In this last of meeting places
We grope together
And avoid speech
Gathered on this beach of the tumid river
Sightless, unless
The eyes reappear
As the perpetual star
Multifoliate rose
Of death's twilight kingdom
The hope only
Of empty men.
V
Here we go round the prickly pear
Prickly pear prickly pear
Here we go round the prickly pear
At five o'clock in the morning.
Between the idea
And the reality
Between the motion
And the act
Falls the Shadow
For Thine is the Kingdom
Between the conception
And the creation
Between the emotion
And the response
Falls the Shadow
Life is very long
Between the desire
And the spasm
Between the potency
And the existence
Between the essence
And the descent
Falls the Shadow
For Thine is the Kingdom
For Thine is
Life is
For Thine is the
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.
I
We are the hollow men
We are the stuffed men
Leaning together
Headpiece filled with straw. Alas!
Our dried voices, when
We whisper together
Are quiet and meaningless
As wind in dry grass
Or rats' feet over broken glass
In our dry cellar
Shape without form, shade without colour,
Paralysed force, gesture without motion;
Those who have crossed
With direct eyes, to death's other Kingdom
Remember us -- if at all -- not as lost
Violent souls, but only
As the hollow men
The stuffed men.
II
Eyes I dare not meet in dreams
In death's dream kingdom
These do not appear:
There, the eyes are
Sunlight on a broken column
There, is a tree swinging
And voices are
In the wind's singing
More distant and more solemn
Than a fading star.
Let me be no nearer
In death's dream kingdom
Let me also wear
Such deliberate disguises
Rat's coat, crowskin, crossed staves
In a field
Behaving as the wind behaves
No nearer --
Not that final meeting
In the twilight kingdom
III
This is the dead land
This is cactus land
Here the stone images
Are raised, here they receive
The supplication of a dead man's hand
Under the twinkle of a fading star.
Is it like this
In death's other kingdom
Waking alone
At the hour when we are
Trembling with tenderness
Lips that would kiss
Form prayers to broken stone.
IV
The eyes are not here
There are no eyes here
In this valley of dying stars
In this hollow valley
This broken jaw of our lost kingdoms
In this last of meeting places
We grope together
And avoid speech
Gathered on this beach of the tumid river
Sightless, unless
The eyes reappear
As the perpetual star
Multifoliate rose
Of death's twilight kingdom
The hope only
Of empty men.
V
Here we go round the prickly pear
Prickly pear prickly pear
Here we go round the prickly pear
At five o'clock in the morning.
Between the idea
And the reality
Between the motion
And the act
Falls the Shadow
For Thine is the Kingdom
Between the conception
And the creation
Between the emotion
And the response
Falls the Shadow
Life is very long
Between the desire
And the spasm
Between the potency
And the existence
Between the essence
And the descent
Falls the Shadow
For Thine is the Kingdom
For Thine is
Life is
For Thine is the
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.
T.S. Eliot 1925
This poem brings up the questions: what could we do to fix this sort of problem? Are we like this? What would happen if I looked at the newspaper once a day, or perhaps the content of my conversations? It's kind of a memento mori poem, in that it reminds us that we are kind of dead right now. Not that death is coming, but that it is here, and that many things have internally ground to a halt.
Reading this one, I hope that you don't worry too much about the symbolism in particular. What is more helpful, I think, would be to move through the text a few times and let it affect you as it will.
Monday, June 11, 2007
Poem of the Week 6/11/2007: Archaic Torso of Apollo
Archaic Torso of Apollo
We cannot know his legendary head
with eyes like ripening fruit. And yet his torso
is still suffused with brilliance from inside,
like a lamp, in which his gaze, now turned to low,
gleams in all its power. Otherwise
the curved breast could not dazzle you so, nor could
a smile run through the placid hips and thighs
to that dark center where procreation flared.
Otherwise this stone would seem defaced
beneath the translucent cascade of the shoulders
and would not glisten like a wild beast’s fur:
would not, from all the borders of itself,
burst like a star: for here there is no place
that does not see you. You must change your life.
Rainer Maria Rilke
Commentary to come!
We cannot know his legendary head
with eyes like ripening fruit. And yet his torso
is still suffused with brilliance from inside,
like a lamp, in which his gaze, now turned to low,
gleams in all its power. Otherwise
the curved breast could not dazzle you so, nor could
a smile run through the placid hips and thighs
to that dark center where procreation flared.
Otherwise this stone would seem defaced
beneath the translucent cascade of the shoulders
and would not glisten like a wild beast’s fur:
would not, from all the borders of itself,
burst like a star: for here there is no place
that does not see you. You must change your life.
Rainer Maria Rilke
Commentary to come!
Monday, June 04, 2007
Poem of the Week 6/4/2007: Leda and the Swan
Leda and the Swan*
A sudden blow: the great wings beating still
Above the staggering girl, her thighs caressed
By the dark webs, her nape caught in his bill,
He holds her helpless breast upon his breast.
How can those terrified vague fingers push
The feathered glory from her loosening thighs?
And how can body, laid in that white rush,
But feel the strange heart beating where it lies?
A shudder in the loins engenders there
A broken wall, the burning roof and tower
And Agamemnon dead.
Being so caught up,
So mastered by the brute blood of the air,
Did she put on his knowledge with his power
Before the indifferent beak could let her drop?
William Butler Yeats 1924
*In Greek mythology, Leda, raped by Zeus, the supreme god, in teh guise of a swan, gave birth to Helen of Troy and the twins Castor and Pollux. Helen's abduction by Paris from her husband, Menelaus, caused the Trojan War. Leda was also the mother of Clytemnestra, who murdered her own husband, Agamemnon, on his return from the war. Yeats saw Leda as the recipient of an annunciation that would found Greek civilization, as the Annunciation to Mary would found Christianity.
---
As with many of Yeats' poems, there are a number of ways of approaching it; this does not bespeak the relativity of interpretation, but rather the layered meanings in each of his rich and complex poems. "Leda and the Swan" leaves open the question of the meaning of her suffering, which reflects the greater extent of human suffering.
1. the rape is described vividly, so that the body of the swan is pawing at ourselves
2. the consequences of that rape are given--not triumphant, but dark. Ests. causality and fate. Also narrative POV-some distance from the rape, though we are so close in with her, we sit in a position that knows beyond her but not within her. An uncomfortable place for the reader to be, becasue we feel the pain, we know the consequences, but we cannot find a bridge between the two, no way of unifying the experience.
3. the final stanza leaves the question completely open, for the possibilities are: knowledge is redeeming and power is transfered. the knowledge is dark, and power is acted over her. What do we do with her suffering? we are meant to be compromised and have no way of closing the wound, no way of settling ourselves, of reconciling cause and effect.
Sorry to leave this in outline format. I'll hopefully return to make it more elegant and more comprehensible. The above is the densest explanation of my thoughts about the poem as they currently stand.
A sudden blow: the great wings beating still
Above the staggering girl, her thighs caressed
By the dark webs, her nape caught in his bill,
He holds her helpless breast upon his breast.
How can those terrified vague fingers push
The feathered glory from her loosening thighs?
And how can body, laid in that white rush,
But feel the strange heart beating where it lies?
A shudder in the loins engenders there
A broken wall, the burning roof and tower
And Agamemnon dead.
Being so caught up,
So mastered by the brute blood of the air,
Did she put on his knowledge with his power
Before the indifferent beak could let her drop?
William Butler Yeats 1924
*In Greek mythology, Leda, raped by Zeus, the supreme god, in teh guise of a swan, gave birth to Helen of Troy and the twins Castor and Pollux. Helen's abduction by Paris from her husband, Menelaus, caused the Trojan War. Leda was also the mother of Clytemnestra, who murdered her own husband, Agamemnon, on his return from the war. Yeats saw Leda as the recipient of an annunciation that would found Greek civilization, as the Annunciation to Mary would found Christianity.
---
As with many of Yeats' poems, there are a number of ways of approaching it; this does not bespeak the relativity of interpretation, but rather the layered meanings in each of his rich and complex poems. "Leda and the Swan" leaves open the question of the meaning of her suffering, which reflects the greater extent of human suffering.
1. the rape is described vividly, so that the body of the swan is pawing at ourselves
2. the consequences of that rape are given--not triumphant, but dark. Ests. causality and fate. Also narrative POV-some distance from the rape, though we are so close in with her, we sit in a position that knows beyond her but not within her. An uncomfortable place for the reader to be, becasue we feel the pain, we know the consequences, but we cannot find a bridge between the two, no way of unifying the experience.
3. the final stanza leaves the question completely open, for the possibilities are: knowledge is redeeming and power is transfered. the knowledge is dark, and power is acted over her. What do we do with her suffering? we are meant to be compromised and have no way of closing the wound, no way of settling ourselves, of reconciling cause and effect.
Sorry to leave this in outline format. I'll hopefully return to make it more elegant and more comprehensible. The above is the densest explanation of my thoughts about the poem as they currently stand.
Wednesday, May 30, 2007
Poem of the Week 5/30/2007: O Taste and See
O Taste and See
The world is
not with us enough
O taste and see
the subway Bible poster said,
meaning The Lord, meaning
if anything all that lives
to the imagination’s tongue,
grief, mercy, language,
tangerine, weather, to
breathe them, bite,
savor, chew, swallow, transform
into our flesh our
deaths, crossing the street, plum, quince,
living in the orchard and being
hungry, and plucking
the fruit.
Denise Levertov
Ms. Levertov's poem flashes by like the world from a subway train, moving with as much energy. By calling us to live, though, she integrates growth with the speed of the modern world. Levertov is working with several elements here. First, she responds to a Wordsworth sonnet, which begins, "the world is too much with us." His lines express grief and anguish at the failure of the French Revolution, the weight that overcomes all humans. Since the French Revolution, times have changed. Now, we don't live enough, we don't respond enough. There is less joy and freedom than there used to be--merely lines of movement along subways, sidewalks, roads, and offices. So when we end up in the orchard, we ought to free ourselves!
She also responds to the Adam and Eve story, and to a Christian morality that no longer has a place in this world (though this interpretation of the A and E myth is only one level of its interpretation). Rather than denying outselves, with the paradoxical puritanism of work and capitalism, we ought to live more.
Perhaps, though, we might say that she is merely encouraging the small appeasement of desires, the endless deferment of experience by little pleasues of the modern world. So I will attempt to frame this in a way that will give her credit, with Foucault at my side. When I talk of the puritanism of capitalism, I mean the double-standard of repression and appeasement. A good example here is sexuality. We have a lot of rhetoric about sex being forbidden, a lot of paranoia about sexual harassment, a lot of messages of abstinence, safety, and responsibility. Sex is a transgression, nowadays. And yet, we are conversely called to do it all of the time. That is, any time somebody says "no" about it, they actually bring it up. They make you think about doing it, and so make you complicit in it. So the double standard of the media makes sex both transgressive, which makes it tempting and forbidding, but it brings it up. Hm. After writing all of this, I am not sure whether my argument holds. I am trying to say that there is a difference between responding to transgressive social norms and really following what ought to be.
The former implies still some kind of restriction, because society regulates our actions by pulling them into a discourse, by telling us what to think and when to think it. The latter has to do with enlarging ourselves by experience. By really living, by being grateful for everything that we have been giving, this beautiful world, which though sad and difficult, ought still be lived in. We need to engage, Levertov says, and we can in such a way as to grow.
Thanks for bearing with this thought-process of a PotW.
The world is
not with us enough
O taste and see
the subway Bible poster said,
meaning The Lord, meaning
if anything all that lives
to the imagination’s tongue,
grief, mercy, language,
tangerine, weather, to
breathe them, bite,
savor, chew, swallow, transform
into our flesh our
deaths, crossing the street, plum, quince,
living in the orchard and being
hungry, and plucking
the fruit.
Denise Levertov
Ms. Levertov's poem flashes by like the world from a subway train, moving with as much energy. By calling us to live, though, she integrates growth with the speed of the modern world. Levertov is working with several elements here. First, she responds to a Wordsworth sonnet, which begins, "the world is too much with us." His lines express grief and anguish at the failure of the French Revolution, the weight that overcomes all humans. Since the French Revolution, times have changed. Now, we don't live enough, we don't respond enough. There is less joy and freedom than there used to be--merely lines of movement along subways, sidewalks, roads, and offices. So when we end up in the orchard, we ought to free ourselves!
She also responds to the Adam and Eve story, and to a Christian morality that no longer has a place in this world (though this interpretation of the A and E myth is only one level of its interpretation). Rather than denying outselves, with the paradoxical puritanism of work and capitalism, we ought to live more.
Perhaps, though, we might say that she is merely encouraging the small appeasement of desires, the endless deferment of experience by little pleasues of the modern world. So I will attempt to frame this in a way that will give her credit, with Foucault at my side. When I talk of the puritanism of capitalism, I mean the double-standard of repression and appeasement. A good example here is sexuality. We have a lot of rhetoric about sex being forbidden, a lot of paranoia about sexual harassment, a lot of messages of abstinence, safety, and responsibility. Sex is a transgression, nowadays. And yet, we are conversely called to do it all of the time. That is, any time somebody says "no" about it, they actually bring it up. They make you think about doing it, and so make you complicit in it. So the double standard of the media makes sex both transgressive, which makes it tempting and forbidding, but it brings it up. Hm. After writing all of this, I am not sure whether my argument holds. I am trying to say that there is a difference between responding to transgressive social norms and really following what ought to be.
The former implies still some kind of restriction, because society regulates our actions by pulling them into a discourse, by telling us what to think and when to think it. The latter has to do with enlarging ourselves by experience. By really living, by being grateful for everything that we have been giving, this beautiful world, which though sad and difficult, ought still be lived in. We need to engage, Levertov says, and we can in such a way as to grow.
Thanks for bearing with this thought-process of a PotW.
Monday, May 21, 2007
Poem of the Week 5/21/2007: Death Poem of Koho Kennichi
Death Poem of Koho Kennichi
To depart while seated or standing is all one.
All I shall leave behind me
Is a heap of bones.
In empty space I twist and soar
And come down with the roar of thunder
To the sea.
Koho Kennichi 1316
Died on the twentieth day of the tenth month, 1316 at the age of seventy-six
In Japan, there is a tradition of death poems: poems written just before the moment of death. Koho Kennichi was a Zen Monk in Japan in the 14th Century. A few notes will be helpful in order to understand this poem. First, departed "while seated or standing" treats the position in which it is worthy to die if one is enlightened. Ultimately, this position is merely a form, for bones are the only thing that remain of the physical form.
The next three lines are somewhat more mysterious, and I have only a few thoughts as to their ultimate meaning. If Koho is enlightened, as the sitting or standing comment implies, the "empty space" *might* refer to the open, unified realm of the absolute. His moving toward the sea as death approaches is then the particular manifestation of the infinite (his Buddha-seed, as it were) rejoining the sea of ultimate reality. Death for the enlightened person is Pari-Nirvana, the final extinction of ties to samsara.
To depart while seated or standing is all one.
All I shall leave behind me
Is a heap of bones.
In empty space I twist and soar
And come down with the roar of thunder
To the sea.
Koho Kennichi 1316
Died on the twentieth day of the tenth month, 1316 at the age of seventy-six
In Japan, there is a tradition of death poems: poems written just before the moment of death. Koho Kennichi was a Zen Monk in Japan in the 14th Century. A few notes will be helpful in order to understand this poem. First, departed "while seated or standing" treats the position in which it is worthy to die if one is enlightened. Ultimately, this position is merely a form, for bones are the only thing that remain of the physical form.
The next three lines are somewhat more mysterious, and I have only a few thoughts as to their ultimate meaning. If Koho is enlightened, as the sitting or standing comment implies, the "empty space" *might* refer to the open, unified realm of the absolute. His moving toward the sea as death approaches is then the particular manifestation of the infinite (his Buddha-seed, as it were) rejoining the sea of ultimate reality. Death for the enlightened person is Pari-Nirvana, the final extinction of ties to samsara.
Thursday, May 10, 2007
Poem of the Week 5/10/2007: from Duino Elegies
The Ninth Elegy
Why, when this short span of being could be spent
like the laurel, a little darker than all
the other green, the edge of each leaf fluted
with small waves (like the wind's smile)--why,
then, do we have to be humanm, and, avoiding fate,
long for fate?
Oh, not because happiness,
that quick profit of impending loss, really exists.
Not out of curiosity, not just to exercise the heart
--that could be in the laurel, too...
But because being here means so much, and becaues all
that's here, vanishing so quickly, seems to need us
and strangely concerns us. Us, the first to vanish.
Once each, only once. Once and no more. And us too,
once. Never again. But to have been
once, even if only once,
to have been on earth just once--that's irrevocable.
And so we keep on going and try to realize it,
try to hold it in our simple hands, in
our overcrowded eyes, and in our speechless heart.
Try to become it. To give it to whom? We'd rather
keep all of it forever... Ah, but what can we take across
into that other realm? Not the power to see we've learned
so slowly here, and nothing that's happened here.
Nothing. And so, the pain; above all, the hard
work of living; the long experience of love--
those purely unspeakable things. But later,
under the stars, what then? That';s better left unsaid.
For the wanderer doesn't bring a handful of that
unutterable earth from the mountainside down to the valley,
but only some word he's earned, a pure word, the yellow
and blue gentian. Maybe we're here only to say: house,
bridge, well, gate, jug, olive tree, window--
at most, pillar, tower... but to say them, remember,
to say them in such a way that the things themselves
never dreamed of existing so intensely. When this silent
earth uyrges lovers on, isn't it her secret reason
to make everything shudder with ecstasy in them?
Doorsill: how much ir means to a pair of lovers
to wear down the sill of their own
dorr a little more, them too, after so many
before them, and before all those to come... gently.
This is the time for what can be said. Here
is its country. Speak and testify. The things
we can live with are falling away more
than ever, replaced by an act without symbol.
An act under crusts that will easily rip
as soon as the energy inside outgrows
them and seeks new limits.
Our heart survives between
hammers, just as the tongue between
the teeth is still able to praise.
Praise the world, to the angel, not what can't be talked about.
You can't impress him with your grand emotions. In the cosmos
where he so intensely feels, you're just a novice. So show
him some simple thing shaped for generation after generation
until it lives in our hands and in our eyes, and it's ours;
Tell him about things. he;ll stand amazed, just as you did
beside the ropemaker in Rome or the potter on the Nile.
Show him how happy a thing can be, how innocent and ours;
how even grief's lament purely determines its own shape,
serves as a thing, or dies in a thing--and escapes
in ecstasy beyond the violin. And these thingsm, whose lives
are lived in leaving--they understand when you praise them.
Perishing, they turn to us, the most perishable, for help.
They want us to change them completely in our invisible hearts,
oh--forever--into us! Whoever we finally may be.
Earth, isn't this what you want: to resurrect
in us invisible? Isn't it your dream
to be invisible one day? Earth! Invisible!
What's your urgent charge, if not transformation?
Earth, my love, I will. Oh, believe me, you don't
need your Springs to win me anymore--one,
oh, one's already too much for my blood.
I'm silently determined to be yours, from now on.
You were always right, and your most scared
idea is death, that intimate friend.
Look, I'm alive. On what? Neither childhood nor
the future grows less... More being than I'll ever
need springs up in my heart.
Ranier Maria Rilke
I do Rilke a lot--these are probably my favorite poems of all.
Why, when this short span of being could be spent
like the laurel, a little darker than all
the other green, the edge of each leaf fluted
with small waves (like the wind's smile)--why,
then, do we have to be humanm, and, avoiding fate,
long for fate?
Oh, not because happiness,
that quick profit of impending loss, really exists.
Not out of curiosity, not just to exercise the heart
--that could be in the laurel, too...
But because being here means so much, and becaues all
that's here, vanishing so quickly, seems to need us
and strangely concerns us. Us, the first to vanish.
Once each, only once. Once and no more. And us too,
once. Never again. But to have been
once, even if only once,
to have been on earth just once--that's irrevocable.
And so we keep on going and try to realize it,
try to hold it in our simple hands, in
our overcrowded eyes, and in our speechless heart.
Try to become it. To give it to whom? We'd rather
keep all of it forever... Ah, but what can we take across
into that other realm? Not the power to see we've learned
so slowly here, and nothing that's happened here.
Nothing. And so, the pain; above all, the hard
work of living; the long experience of love--
those purely unspeakable things. But later,
under the stars, what then? That';s better left unsaid.
For the wanderer doesn't bring a handful of that
unutterable earth from the mountainside down to the valley,
but only some word he's earned, a pure word, the yellow
and blue gentian. Maybe we're here only to say: house,
bridge, well, gate, jug, olive tree, window--
at most, pillar, tower... but to say them, remember,
to say them in such a way that the things themselves
never dreamed of existing so intensely. When this silent
earth uyrges lovers on, isn't it her secret reason
to make everything shudder with ecstasy in them?
Doorsill: how much ir means to a pair of lovers
to wear down the sill of their own
dorr a little more, them too, after so many
before them, and before all those to come... gently.
This is the time for what can be said. Here
is its country. Speak and testify. The things
we can live with are falling away more
than ever, replaced by an act without symbol.
An act under crusts that will easily rip
as soon as the energy inside outgrows
them and seeks new limits.
Our heart survives between
hammers, just as the tongue between
the teeth is still able to praise.
Praise the world, to the angel, not what can't be talked about.
You can't impress him with your grand emotions. In the cosmos
where he so intensely feels, you're just a novice. So show
him some simple thing shaped for generation after generation
until it lives in our hands and in our eyes, and it's ours;
Tell him about things. he;ll stand amazed, just as you did
beside the ropemaker in Rome or the potter on the Nile.
Show him how happy a thing can be, how innocent and ours;
how even grief's lament purely determines its own shape,
serves as a thing, or dies in a thing--and escapes
in ecstasy beyond the violin. And these thingsm, whose lives
are lived in leaving--they understand when you praise them.
Perishing, they turn to us, the most perishable, for help.
They want us to change them completely in our invisible hearts,
oh--forever--into us! Whoever we finally may be.
Earth, isn't this what you want: to resurrect
in us invisible? Isn't it your dream
to be invisible one day? Earth! Invisible!
What's your urgent charge, if not transformation?
Earth, my love, I will. Oh, believe me, you don't
need your Springs to win me anymore--one,
oh, one's already too much for my blood.
I'm silently determined to be yours, from now on.
You were always right, and your most scared
idea is death, that intimate friend.
Look, I'm alive. On what? Neither childhood nor
the future grows less... More being than I'll ever
need springs up in my heart.
Ranier Maria Rilke
I do Rilke a lot--these are probably my favorite poems of all.
Monday, April 30, 2007
Poem of the Week 4/30/2007: In a Dark Time
In a Dark Time
In a dark time, the eye begins to see,
I meet my shadow in the deepening shade;
I hear my echo in the echoing wood--
A lord of nature weeping to a tree.
I live between the heron and the wren,*
Beasts of the hill and serpents of the den.
What's madness but nobility of the soul
At odds with circumstance? The day's on fire!
I know the purity of pure despair,
My shadow pinned against a sweating wall.
That place among the wrocks--is it a cave,
Or a winding path? The edge is what I have.
A steady storm of correspondences!
A night flowing with birds, a ragged moon,
And in broad day the midnight come again!
A man goes far to find out what he is--
Death of the self in a long, tearless night,
All natural shapes blazing unnatural light.
Dark, dark my light, and darker my desire.
My soul, like some heat-maddened summer fly,
Keeps buzzing at the sill. Which I is I?
A fallen man, I climb out of my fear.
The mind enters itself, and God the mind,
And one is One, free in the tearing wind.
Theodore Roethke 1965
* The heron is a large, solitary wading bird, the wren a small, sociable songbird.
Mr. Roethke's poetry fuses psychological insight, tense verse, and natural imagery to form vibrating, heavy poems like this one. It treats his version of madness--the multiplicity of selves that come up. Not merely multiple personality disorder, Roethke treats the insanity of human consciousness when "the eye begins to see" what is: namely, multiplicity. Day to day, minute to minute, we change. Things come, things go; the narrator is sometimes solitary, sometimes sociable, and never stable. Madness, then, is instead an extreme mode of being, whether that means ideals of experience ("nobility of the soul") rubbing up against the reality of "circumstance" or living on the edge.
Also at work in this poem is the parallel between man and nature; the narrator's psychological state mirrors the chaotic, wheeling forest presented in the poem. Both nature and his mind include a "steady storm of correspondences," which we may read as a storm of thoughts. These thoughts, then, are "ragged," and flowing with many birds (presumably a reference to the heron-wren cycle above?).
Swelling in the third stanza to break in the fourth, the climax of the poem involves him coming out of that madness. The soul keeps buzzing incessantly, another version of the storm of thoughts, and the narrator questions "which I is I?" In other words, among this cyclic multiplicity, is there a self to be rescued? Is there unity, peace, calm among this torrent of thoughts and being?
The poem answers it with insight--when one sees what one is, there is at least unity within multiciplicity, unity in the storm, the "tearing wind."
In a dark time, the eye begins to see,
I meet my shadow in the deepening shade;
I hear my echo in the echoing wood--
A lord of nature weeping to a tree.
I live between the heron and the wren,*
Beasts of the hill and serpents of the den.
What's madness but nobility of the soul
At odds with circumstance? The day's on fire!
I know the purity of pure despair,
My shadow pinned against a sweating wall.
That place among the wrocks--is it a cave,
Or a winding path? The edge is what I have.
A steady storm of correspondences!
A night flowing with birds, a ragged moon,
And in broad day the midnight come again!
A man goes far to find out what he is--
Death of the self in a long, tearless night,
All natural shapes blazing unnatural light.
Dark, dark my light, and darker my desire.
My soul, like some heat-maddened summer fly,
Keeps buzzing at the sill. Which I is I?
A fallen man, I climb out of my fear.
The mind enters itself, and God the mind,
And one is One, free in the tearing wind.
Theodore Roethke 1965
* The heron is a large, solitary wading bird, the wren a small, sociable songbird.
Mr. Roethke's poetry fuses psychological insight, tense verse, and natural imagery to form vibrating, heavy poems like this one. It treats his version of madness--the multiplicity of selves that come up. Not merely multiple personality disorder, Roethke treats the insanity of human consciousness when "the eye begins to see" what is: namely, multiplicity. Day to day, minute to minute, we change. Things come, things go; the narrator is sometimes solitary, sometimes sociable, and never stable. Madness, then, is instead an extreme mode of being, whether that means ideals of experience ("nobility of the soul") rubbing up against the reality of "circumstance" or living on the edge.
Also at work in this poem is the parallel between man and nature; the narrator's psychological state mirrors the chaotic, wheeling forest presented in the poem. Both nature and his mind include a "steady storm of correspondences," which we may read as a storm of thoughts. These thoughts, then, are "ragged," and flowing with many birds (presumably a reference to the heron-wren cycle above?).
Swelling in the third stanza to break in the fourth, the climax of the poem involves him coming out of that madness. The soul keeps buzzing incessantly, another version of the storm of thoughts, and the narrator questions "which I is I?" In other words, among this cyclic multiplicity, is there a self to be rescued? Is there unity, peace, calm among this torrent of thoughts and being?
The poem answers it with insight--when one sees what one is, there is at least unity within multiciplicity, unity in the storm, the "tearing wind."
Monday, April 23, 2007
Poem of the Week 4/23/2007: from The Labyrinth
from The Labyrinth
Since I emerged that day from the labyrinth,
Dazed with the tall and echoing passages,
The swift recoils, so many I almost feared
I’d meet myself returning at some smooth corner,
Myself or my ghost, for all there was unreal
After the straw ceased rustling and the bull
Lay dead upon the straw and I remained…
I could not live if this were not illusion.
It is a world, perhaps; but there’s another.
For once in a dream or trance I saw the gods
Each sitting on the top of his mountain-isle,
While down below the little ships sailed by…
That was the real world; I have touched it once,
And now shall know it always. But the lie,
The maze, the wild-wood waste of falsehood, roads
That run and run and never reach an end,
Embowered in error – I’d be prisoned there
But that my soul has birdwings to fly free.
Oh these deceits are strong almost as life.
Last night I dreamt I was in the labyrinth,
And woke far on. I did not know the place.
Edwin Muir 1949
One of my favorite poets, Edwin Muir wrote in Scotland, largely after World War II. His poems brim with allusion, drawing off of Greek myth and Biblical allegory in response to the horrors he lived through. Like "the Labyrinth," much of his poetry comments on the dark and tangled world that holds little trace to God any more.
Since I emerged that day from the labyrinth,
Dazed with the tall and echoing passages,
The swift recoils, so many I almost feared
I’d meet myself returning at some smooth corner,
Myself or my ghost, for all there was unreal
After the straw ceased rustling and the bull
Lay dead upon the straw and I remained…
I could not live if this were not illusion.
It is a world, perhaps; but there’s another.
For once in a dream or trance I saw the gods
Each sitting on the top of his mountain-isle,
While down below the little ships sailed by…
That was the real world; I have touched it once,
And now shall know it always. But the lie,
The maze, the wild-wood waste of falsehood, roads
That run and run and never reach an end,
Embowered in error – I’d be prisoned there
But that my soul has birdwings to fly free.
Oh these deceits are strong almost as life.
Last night I dreamt I was in the labyrinth,
And woke far on. I did not know the place.
Edwin Muir 1949
One of my favorite poets, Edwin Muir wrote in Scotland, largely after World War II. His poems brim with allusion, drawing off of Greek myth and Biblical allegory in response to the horrors he lived through. Like "the Labyrinth," much of his poetry comments on the dark and tangled world that holds little trace to God any more.
Monday, April 16, 2007
Poem of the Week 4/16/2007: The Broken Tower
The Broken Tower
The bell-rope that gathers God at dawn*
Dispatches me as though I dropped down the knell
Of a spent day - to wander the cathedral lawn
From pit to crucifix, feet chill on steps from hell.
Have you not heard, have you not seen that corps
Of shadows in the tower, whose shoulders sway
Antiphonal carillons** launched before
The stars are caught and hived in the sun's ray?
The bells, I say, the bells break down their tower;
And swing I know not where. Their tongues engrave
Membrane through marrow, my long-scattered score
Of broken intervals… And I, their sexton slave!
Oval encyclicals*** in canyons heaping
The impasse high with choir. Banked voices slain!
Pagodas campaniles* with reveilles out leaping-
O terraced echoes prostrate on the plain!…
And so it was I entered the broken world
To trace the visionary company of love,** its voice
An instant in the wind (I know not whither hurled)
But not for long to hold each desperate choice.
My world I poured. But was it cognate, scored
Of that tribunal monarch of the air
Whose thighs embronzes earth, strikes crystal Word***
In wounds pledges once to hope - cleft to despair?
The steep encroachments of my blood left me
No answer (could blood hold such a lofty tower
As flings the question true?) -or is it she
Whose sweet mortality stirs latent power?-
And through whose pulse I hear, counting the strokes
My veins recall and add, revived and sure
The angelus of wars my chest evokes:
What I hold healed, original now, and pure…
And builds, within, a tower that is not stone
(Not stone can jacket heaven) - but slip
Of pebbles, - visible wings of silence sown
In azure circles, widening as they dip
The matrix of the heart, lift down the eyes
That shrines the quiet lake and swells a tower…
The commodious, tall decorum of that sky
Unseals her earth, and lifts love in its shower.
Hart Crane 1933
*The angelus bell commemorates the Incarnation of Christ
** Alternating and overlapping melodies played on the bells.
*** Papal documents; here, divinely inspired messages.
*Also campaniles; bell-towers attached to Italian cathedrals.
** In the bells' attempt to transfigure life and to incarnate God, Crane sees an analouge of his own poetic mission.
*** Divine revelation, with which the poet hopes his word is cognate.
I choose Hart Crane for today partially as a response to Eliot. As most did in the 1920s, Crane respected and admired Eliot's poetry, save for its pessimistic message. He thought that some ecstatic experience was still possible, that, "After this [modern] perfection of death--nothing is possible in motion but a resurrection of some kind." This poem, the final one he published, treats the death and rebirth of love, as manifested in Crane's poetry.
Opening with an image (a clanging?) of angelus bells, the first four stanzas treat Crane's resurrection. What was he resurrected from? Well, we get images of Hell, of a stone tower falling, so it seems that he comes from somewhere stony and hellish. And since Crane was dealing with the death caused by modernity (this was ostensibly what he liked and found too pessimistic about Eliot's ultimate conclusion that modernity is nearly inescapable), we may guess that these towers etc were those of the modern world. Therefore, the first four stanzas open with the bells of resurrection breaking bonds and bringing the poet back into a broken world.
As the poem moves forward, we see that these bells are a metaphor for poetry. Inscribed in his veins, the bells begin to move in his blood, their song akin to that of a poem. Indeed, just as the bells announce the coming of the Word of God, divine revelation, his poetry, he hopes, will bring the revelation of love. For Crane's poetic project is one of love, of the breaking of external towers of love and building inner ones.
Poetry builds within him "a tower that is not stone" (for stone can't hold heaven in its vastness), but "visible wings of silence." What are these wings? Perhaps the same feeling of vertigo discussed in the beginning, now greater, more profound, more quietly and privately felt. So perhaps the ripples of images in this poem are like the resonance of bells--they appear in the beginning, and are echoed in the end... is the real resurrection in the final line, with the sky unsealing the earth and letting love out into the open? Beyond the rebirth of the poet, is the reemergence of love the real point of the poem?
Whether Crane's optimism about the possibility of a glorious rebirth from the deathlike world of modernity has come to pass, whether it is coming, or whether he is wrong is, well, a question. What do we pay attention to, the Waste Land of today, or the fact that this kind of end should herald so much more? Perhaps there will be more coming.
The bell-rope that gathers God at dawn*
Dispatches me as though I dropped down the knell
Of a spent day - to wander the cathedral lawn
From pit to crucifix, feet chill on steps from hell.
Have you not heard, have you not seen that corps
Of shadows in the tower, whose shoulders sway
Antiphonal carillons** launched before
The stars are caught and hived in the sun's ray?
The bells, I say, the bells break down their tower;
And swing I know not where. Their tongues engrave
Membrane through marrow, my long-scattered score
Of broken intervals… And I, their sexton slave!
Oval encyclicals*** in canyons heaping
The impasse high with choir. Banked voices slain!
Pagodas campaniles* with reveilles out leaping-
O terraced echoes prostrate on the plain!…
And so it was I entered the broken world
To trace the visionary company of love,** its voice
An instant in the wind (I know not whither hurled)
But not for long to hold each desperate choice.
My world I poured. But was it cognate, scored
Of that tribunal monarch of the air
Whose thighs embronzes earth, strikes crystal Word***
In wounds pledges once to hope - cleft to despair?
The steep encroachments of my blood left me
No answer (could blood hold such a lofty tower
As flings the question true?) -or is it she
Whose sweet mortality stirs latent power?-
And through whose pulse I hear, counting the strokes
My veins recall and add, revived and sure
The angelus of wars my chest evokes:
What I hold healed, original now, and pure…
And builds, within, a tower that is not stone
(Not stone can jacket heaven) - but slip
Of pebbles, - visible wings of silence sown
In azure circles, widening as they dip
The matrix of the heart, lift down the eyes
That shrines the quiet lake and swells a tower…
The commodious, tall decorum of that sky
Unseals her earth, and lifts love in its shower.
Hart Crane 1933
*The angelus bell commemorates the Incarnation of Christ
** Alternating and overlapping melodies played on the bells.
*** Papal documents; here, divinely inspired messages.
*Also campaniles; bell-towers attached to Italian cathedrals.
** In the bells' attempt to transfigure life and to incarnate God, Crane sees an analouge of his own poetic mission.
*** Divine revelation, with which the poet hopes his word is cognate.
I choose Hart Crane for today partially as a response to Eliot. As most did in the 1920s, Crane respected and admired Eliot's poetry, save for its pessimistic message. He thought that some ecstatic experience was still possible, that, "After this [modern] perfection of death--nothing is possible in motion but a resurrection of some kind." This poem, the final one he published, treats the death and rebirth of love, as manifested in Crane's poetry.
Opening with an image (a clanging?) of angelus bells, the first four stanzas treat Crane's resurrection. What was he resurrected from? Well, we get images of Hell, of a stone tower falling, so it seems that he comes from somewhere stony and hellish. And since Crane was dealing with the death caused by modernity (this was ostensibly what he liked and found too pessimistic about Eliot's ultimate conclusion that modernity is nearly inescapable), we may guess that these towers etc were those of the modern world. Therefore, the first four stanzas open with the bells of resurrection breaking bonds and bringing the poet back into a broken world.
As the poem moves forward, we see that these bells are a metaphor for poetry. Inscribed in his veins, the bells begin to move in his blood, their song akin to that of a poem. Indeed, just as the bells announce the coming of the Word of God, divine revelation, his poetry, he hopes, will bring the revelation of love. For Crane's poetic project is one of love, of the breaking of external towers of love and building inner ones.
Poetry builds within him "a tower that is not stone" (for stone can't hold heaven in its vastness), but "visible wings of silence." What are these wings? Perhaps the same feeling of vertigo discussed in the beginning, now greater, more profound, more quietly and privately felt. So perhaps the ripples of images in this poem are like the resonance of bells--they appear in the beginning, and are echoed in the end... is the real resurrection in the final line, with the sky unsealing the earth and letting love out into the open? Beyond the rebirth of the poet, is the reemergence of love the real point of the poem?
Whether Crane's optimism about the possibility of a glorious rebirth from the deathlike world of modernity has come to pass, whether it is coming, or whether he is wrong is, well, a question. What do we pay attention to, the Waste Land of today, or the fact that this kind of end should herald so much more? Perhaps there will be more coming.
Tuesday, April 10, 2007
Poem of the Week 4/9/2007: from Ash Wednesday
from Ash Wednesday
VI
Although I do not hope to turn again
Although I do not hope
Although I do not hope to turn
Wavering between the profit and the loss
In this brief transit where the dreams cross
The dreamcrossed twilight between birth and dying
(Bless me father) though I do not wish to wish these things
From the wide window towards the granite shore
The white sails still fly seaward, seaward flying
Unbroken wings
And the lost heart stiffens and rejoices
In the lost lilac and the lost sea voices
And the weak spirit quickens to rebel
For the bent golden-rod and the lost sea smell
Quickens to recover
The cry of quail and the whirling plover
And the blind eye creates
The empty forms between the ivory gates
And smell renews the salt savor of the sandy earth
This is the time of tension between dying and birth
The place of solitude where three dreams cross
Between blue rocks
But when the voices shaken from the yew-tree drift away
Let the other yew be shaken and reply.
Blessed sister, holy mother, spirit of the fountain, spirit of the garden,
Suffer us not to mock ourselves with falsehood
Teach us to care and not to care
Teach us to sit still
Even among these rocks,
Our peace in His will
And even among these rocks
Sister, mother
And spirit of the river, spirit of the sea,
Suffer me not to be separated
And let my cry come unto Thee.
TS Eliot 1930
(please know that I am riffing ideas in much of this analysis, and that Eliot requires more research, work, and time than I have given him. Esp. as regards the symbolism. This is one of those close reads that frustrates me because I can't get you to see what's going on; I can only talk about it, which can be really unhelpful sometimes)
I have written in my notes for the second to last line, "a cry for wholeness," and indeed this seems to partake in much of Eliot’s vision of the human condition. In this last part of his poem Ash Wednesday, we see that this is one of constant cycling, circling suffering and change. Against the twisting run of thoughts and self, the poem expresses the longing for something still and stable and whole. We are hungry and sad for the truth underlying things; our thoughts waver between the profit and the loss--things we get (pleasure, iPods, attention) and losses (pain, whatever thing we were entitled to.) We are never whole and engaged in the world, just worried about the accumulation of things.
"The dreamcrossed twilight between brith and dying" addresses the fundamental unreality of our experience now--we daydream and plan our way through life. So little of it is here. We miss what is, we try to catch up, and only moments of life are given to us, only tiny scraps of existence to we care to engage in. I had never understood why people want to talk about dreams all of the time, because my life felt real enough, but when I started to pay attention, I found that most things I cared about and thought of pass, slow, fade, or die. Things leave (the center cannot hold)--we cannot hold ourselves to anything, at least not at this stage.
With the line “(Bless me father) though I do not wish to wish these things,” Eliot expresses his pure grief (brokenness?) at this turning. He does not hope to turn again, and yet here he is. Meekness. Humility. Small sad broken thing. Or rather, “unbroken” thing. This reference keeps things always gauged against a state of brokenness: "Wholeness," then, is just this side of broken, the state in between breaks.
Finishing the seven part poem, the final stanza is the last plea for wholeness, the final prayer to collect oneself, to overcome the smallness and dryness of the air now…By way of commenting on the final stanza, I give you a stanza from the first part of the poem:
Because these wings are no longer wings to fly
But merely vans to beat the air
The air which is now thoroughly small and dry
Teach us to care and not to care
Teach us to sit still.
VI
Although I do not hope to turn again
Although I do not hope
Although I do not hope to turn
Wavering between the profit and the loss
In this brief transit where the dreams cross
The dreamcrossed twilight between birth and dying
(Bless me father) though I do not wish to wish these things
From the wide window towards the granite shore
The white sails still fly seaward, seaward flying
Unbroken wings
And the lost heart stiffens and rejoices
In the lost lilac and the lost sea voices
And the weak spirit quickens to rebel
For the bent golden-rod and the lost sea smell
Quickens to recover
The cry of quail and the whirling plover
And the blind eye creates
The empty forms between the ivory gates
And smell renews the salt savor of the sandy earth
This is the time of tension between dying and birth
The place of solitude where three dreams cross
Between blue rocks
But when the voices shaken from the yew-tree drift away
Let the other yew be shaken and reply.
Blessed sister, holy mother, spirit of the fountain, spirit of the garden,
Suffer us not to mock ourselves with falsehood
Teach us to care and not to care
Teach us to sit still
Even among these rocks,
Our peace in His will
And even among these rocks
Sister, mother
And spirit of the river, spirit of the sea,
Suffer me not to be separated
And let my cry come unto Thee.
TS Eliot 1930
(please know that I am riffing ideas in much of this analysis, and that Eliot requires more research, work, and time than I have given him. Esp. as regards the symbolism. This is one of those close reads that frustrates me because I can't get you to see what's going on; I can only talk about it, which can be really unhelpful sometimes)
I have written in my notes for the second to last line, "a cry for wholeness," and indeed this seems to partake in much of Eliot’s vision of the human condition. In this last part of his poem Ash Wednesday, we see that this is one of constant cycling, circling suffering and change. Against the twisting run of thoughts and self, the poem expresses the longing for something still and stable and whole. We are hungry and sad for the truth underlying things; our thoughts waver between the profit and the loss--things we get (pleasure, iPods, attention) and losses (pain, whatever thing we were entitled to.) We are never whole and engaged in the world, just worried about the accumulation of things.
"The dreamcrossed twilight between brith and dying" addresses the fundamental unreality of our experience now--we daydream and plan our way through life. So little of it is here. We miss what is, we try to catch up, and only moments of life are given to us, only tiny scraps of existence to we care to engage in. I had never understood why people want to talk about dreams all of the time, because my life felt real enough, but when I started to pay attention, I found that most things I cared about and thought of pass, slow, fade, or die. Things leave (the center cannot hold)--we cannot hold ourselves to anything, at least not at this stage.
With the line “(Bless me father) though I do not wish to wish these things,” Eliot expresses his pure grief (brokenness?) at this turning. He does not hope to turn again, and yet here he is. Meekness. Humility. Small sad broken thing. Or rather, “unbroken” thing. This reference keeps things always gauged against a state of brokenness: "Wholeness," then, is just this side of broken, the state in between breaks.
Finishing the seven part poem, the final stanza is the last plea for wholeness, the final prayer to collect oneself, to overcome the smallness and dryness of the air now…By way of commenting on the final stanza, I give you a stanza from the first part of the poem:
Because these wings are no longer wings to fly
But merely vans to beat the air
The air which is now thoroughly small and dry
Teach us to care and not to care
Teach us to sit still.
Monday, April 02, 2007
Poem of the Week 4/2/2007: The Tables Turned
The Tables Turned
An Evening Scene on the Same Subject
Up! up! my Friend, and quit your books;
Or surely you'll grow double:
Up! up! my Friend, and clear your looks;
Why all this toil and trouble?
The sun, above the mountain's head,
A freshening lustre mellow
Through all the long green fields has spread,
HIs first sweet evening yellow.
Books! 'tis a dull and endless strife:
Come, hear the woodland linnet,
How sweet his music! on my life,
There's more of wisdom in it.
And hark! how blithe the trostle sings!
He, too, is no mean preacher:
Come forth into the light of things,
Let Nature be your Teacher.
She has a world of ready wealth,
Our minds and hearts to bless--
Spontaneous wisdom breathed by health,
Truth breathed by cheerfulbess,
One impulse from a vernal wood
May teach you more of man,
Of moral evil and of good,
Than all the sages can.
Sweet is the lore which Nature brings;
Our meddling intellect
Mis-shapes the beauteous forms of things:--
We murder to dissect.
Enough of Science and of Art;
Close up those barren leaves;
Come forth, and bring with you a heart
That watches and receives.
William Wordsworth 1798
There's probably little I need to tell you about this poem, because Wordsworth is clear in his message. Come outside! Turn to the world again, for all that thinking will do is twist you in a bind.
I guess that what I can provide here is some historical background, because otherwise some of his frustrations with intellect and books will perhaps be taken a little too strongly. Wordsworth is talking against a society that was first championing rationality--in some way, he is writing at the birth of systematic approaches to knowledge and even art (the academies at that time stressed reproduction of the masters, and systems of drawing). Machines, calculation, and, over and over, rationality were the approaches to knowledge. Furthermore, these were supposedly higher forms of knowing; science and examination and consensus became the champion over experience. Perhaps things aren't so different today, and so Wordsworth's call holds true. Stop reading (yes, even this blog), and go look at the sky tonight, or a flowered tree---- Wordsworth would want us to go outside now, to leave our calculating minds behind, and open us to experience. We might even learn something, who knows?
In the end, I choose this poem because it explicitly asks us to do something that poetry often does to me--it asks us to turn back to the world. Poetry is not an end in itself, but it can point us back toward something more real, and encourages states of openness, reception, unknowing. Keats famously called this "negative capability:" "when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts without any irritable reaching after fact or reason... with a great poet the sense of Beauty overcomes every other consideration, or rather obliterates all consideration."
Perhaps this is the state that both great poetry and nature can put us in--a kind of openness that allows reality to enter just a little bit, a crack in habitual perspective that can change a moment or an afternoon. Small things, maybe, but how many have we missed after all?
An Evening Scene on the Same Subject
Up! up! my Friend, and quit your books;
Or surely you'll grow double:
Up! up! my Friend, and clear your looks;
Why all this toil and trouble?
The sun, above the mountain's head,
A freshening lustre mellow
Through all the long green fields has spread,
HIs first sweet evening yellow.
Books! 'tis a dull and endless strife:
Come, hear the woodland linnet,
How sweet his music! on my life,
There's more of wisdom in it.
And hark! how blithe the trostle sings!
He, too, is no mean preacher:
Come forth into the light of things,
Let Nature be your Teacher.
She has a world of ready wealth,
Our minds and hearts to bless--
Spontaneous wisdom breathed by health,
Truth breathed by cheerfulbess,
One impulse from a vernal wood
May teach you more of man,
Of moral evil and of good,
Than all the sages can.
Sweet is the lore which Nature brings;
Our meddling intellect
Mis-shapes the beauteous forms of things:--
We murder to dissect.
Enough of Science and of Art;
Close up those barren leaves;
Come forth, and bring with you a heart
That watches and receives.
William Wordsworth 1798
There's probably little I need to tell you about this poem, because Wordsworth is clear in his message. Come outside! Turn to the world again, for all that thinking will do is twist you in a bind.
I guess that what I can provide here is some historical background, because otherwise some of his frustrations with intellect and books will perhaps be taken a little too strongly. Wordsworth is talking against a society that was first championing rationality--in some way, he is writing at the birth of systematic approaches to knowledge and even art (the academies at that time stressed reproduction of the masters, and systems of drawing). Machines, calculation, and, over and over, rationality were the approaches to knowledge. Furthermore, these were supposedly higher forms of knowing; science and examination and consensus became the champion over experience. Perhaps things aren't so different today, and so Wordsworth's call holds true. Stop reading (yes, even this blog), and go look at the sky tonight, or a flowered tree---- Wordsworth would want us to go outside now, to leave our calculating minds behind, and open us to experience. We might even learn something, who knows?
In the end, I choose this poem because it explicitly asks us to do something that poetry often does to me--it asks us to turn back to the world. Poetry is not an end in itself, but it can point us back toward something more real, and encourages states of openness, reception, unknowing. Keats famously called this "negative capability:" "when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts without any irritable reaching after fact or reason... with a great poet the sense of Beauty overcomes every other consideration, or rather obliterates all consideration."
Perhaps this is the state that both great poetry and nature can put us in--a kind of openness that allows reality to enter just a little bit, a crack in habitual perspective that can change a moment or an afternoon. Small things, maybe, but how many have we missed after all?
Monday, March 26, 2007
Poem of the Week 3/26/2007: What Excuses Have You to Offer
from Mystical Poems of Rumi
1.
What excuses have you to offer, my heart, for so many shortcomings? Such constancy on the part of the Beloved, such unfaithfulness on your own!
So much generousity on your side, on yours such niggling contrariness! So many graces from him, so many faults committed by you!
Such envy, such evil imaginings and dark thoughts in your heart, such drawing, such tasting, such magnificence in him!
Why all this tasting? That your bitter soul may become sweet. Why all this drawing? That you may join the company of saints.
You are repentant of your sins, you have the name of God on your lips; in that moment he draws you on, so that he may deliver you alive.
You are fearful at last of your wrongdoings, you seek desperately a way to salvation; in that instant why do you not see him by your side who is putting such fear into your heart?
If he has bound up your eyes, you are like a pebble in his hand; now he rolls you along like this, now he tosses you in the air.
Now he plants in your nature a passion for silver and gold and women; now he implants in your soul the light of the form of Mustafa.
On this side drawing towards the lovely ones, on that side drawing you to the unlovely; amid these whirlpools the ship can only pass through or founder.
Offer up so many prayers, weep so sorely in the night season, that the echo may reach your ears from the sphere of the seven heavens.
Rumi 13th Century AD
I will offer a better gloss on this poem later. For now, a few notes of clarification. Rumi is a mystic poet writing in the Sufi tradition in Islam. When he talks of the Beloved, he doesn't write of a boyfriend or girlfriend, as we might think of it now, but of Allah or God. I am interested in this poem because it looks at the inconstancy of man as causing suffering, but that suffering itself is redemptive.
Also, I will hopefully post the belated poem of the week this Thursday or Friday.
Yours,
Sarah
1.
What excuses have you to offer, my heart, for so many shortcomings? Such constancy on the part of the Beloved, such unfaithfulness on your own!
So much generousity on your side, on yours such niggling contrariness! So many graces from him, so many faults committed by you!
Such envy, such evil imaginings and dark thoughts in your heart, such drawing, such tasting, such magnificence in him!
Why all this tasting? That your bitter soul may become sweet. Why all this drawing? That you may join the company of saints.
You are repentant of your sins, you have the name of God on your lips; in that moment he draws you on, so that he may deliver you alive.
You are fearful at last of your wrongdoings, you seek desperately a way to salvation; in that instant why do you not see him by your side who is putting such fear into your heart?
If he has bound up your eyes, you are like a pebble in his hand; now he rolls you along like this, now he tosses you in the air.
Now he plants in your nature a passion for silver and gold and women; now he implants in your soul the light of the form of Mustafa.
On this side drawing towards the lovely ones, on that side drawing you to the unlovely; amid these whirlpools the ship can only pass through or founder.
Offer up so many prayers, weep so sorely in the night season, that the echo may reach your ears from the sphere of the seven heavens.
Rumi 13th Century AD
I will offer a better gloss on this poem later. For now, a few notes of clarification. Rumi is a mystic poet writing in the Sufi tradition in Islam. When he talks of the Beloved, he doesn't write of a boyfriend or girlfriend, as we might think of it now, but of Allah or God. I am interested in this poem because it looks at the inconstancy of man as causing suffering, but that suffering itself is redemptive.
Also, I will hopefully post the belated poem of the week this Thursday or Friday.
Yours,
Sarah
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