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Finding the Poet
An Introduction to Poetry
with Emphasis on
Critical Analysis and
Creative Writing
Rose Anna Higashi
Evergreen Valley College
2000
with Emphasis on
Critical Analysis and
Creative Writing
Rose Anna Higashi
Evergreen Valley College
2000
FINDING THE POET
CHAPTER 1 WHAT IS A POET?
Poetry is the most mysterious of all professions. It's also the most ordinary. I've known many poets during my lifetime, but the ones with whom I've felt the most intimate kinship have been dead for a very long time-- people like Geoffrey Chaucer, William Shakespeare, Matsuo Basho, Emily Dickinson, and Langston Hughes. All of these people, and the hundreds of other poets I have known, have changed my life in some way, just as a pebble tossed into a quiet pond changes the dynamics of the pond's world forever.
One of the great mysteries of poetry is this subtle way in which it communicates to a reader or a listener over time, across cultures, past genders, straight into what William Butler Yeats calls "...the deep heart's core."1 How rare it is in everyday life to communicate with anyone with such intimacy, yet our longing to share thoughts and feelings with others in this deeper way is part of what makes us human.
ISLAND
Wave of sorrow,
Do not drown me now:
I see the island
Still ahead somehow.
I see the island
And its sands are fair:
Wave of sorrow,
Take me there.
Have you ever felt this way? I know you have. I teach poetry among other things at Evergreen Valley College in San Jose, California. Recently I gave a midterm examination to one of my classes, and the test included several poems, including this brief one by Langston Hughes. I asked the students to choose one poem to analyze. Among the other poems were a sonnet by Shakespeare and a dramatic monologue by Robert Browning. (If you don't know what a sonnet or a dramatic monologue is, keep reading. You will learn a great deal about poetry in this book.) But almost all of the students chose to write about "Island." I've been teaching long enough to know that they probably chose this poem because it looked so easy.
This, too, is one of the mysteries of poetry. To be powerful, a poem does not have to be long, complex, or filled with difficult words. And a poem which looks simple and "easy" may in fact communicate to the reader with a depth and complexity that is truly startling. This is where my students got their surprise. As I read essay after essay on this "simple" little poem, each student's response had a unique richness. I believe that many of the students, when they arrived at the end of their essay, had traveled a universal journey with this poem that they had not intended to take.
Some wrote about metaphor, allegory, archetypes, and structure because we had learned all of these terms, and they knew that a student's job is to convince the professor that he or she has learned all of the material being covered on the test. Some of them even remembered that Langston Hughes was an African-American who lived from 1902 to 1967 and wrote about the struggle for dignity and equality before the Civil Rights Movement. One student point out that the wave of sorrow-- the personal grief expressed by the speaker in the poem-- was the very vehicle that would carry him or her to safely and healing, represented by the island. If the speaker had not been filled with grief, his wave would not have had the momentum to land him on the glorious island.
As I read all of these essays, I felt that many of the students had actually connected with the power of sorrow that Hughes was trying to express. So many times, I had to lay a paper aside as my own sorrow over my father's recent death and the illness of someone I love washed over me. And like the speaker in the poem, my heart called out, "Do not drown me now!"
Do you see what I mean when I tell you that poetry is the most mysterious, yet the most ordinary of human endeavors? I also want you to know that poetry is not something to be endured or suffered through. It is an ancient yet still living art intended for your healing. What kind of deep grief do you think Langston Hughes felt to write a poem like "Island"? And what gave him the courage to share this most vulnerable of emotions with millions of strangers, including you?
Poets have existed on our planet since pre-history along with painters, singers, dancers, priestesses, priests, healers, hunters, gatherers, craftspeople, farmers, and caretakers of animals. A poet is someone who uses words to communicate with others in a profoundly meaningful way. The poet's words go beyond the sharing of information or opinions and move straight into the listener's heart and soul. Could an ancient fisherman who had caught nothing for many days and whose children were beginning to starve have stood on the shore and called out to the turbulent sea, "Wave of sorrow, do not drown me now"? If he did, he was a poet.
Did you notice that this imaginary ancient poet did not write anything down on a piece of papyrus or chisel any marks into a stone? The words themselves are what make someone a poet. We call this oral poetry, and it certainly predated any form of writing. Memory was important to ancient pre-literate people, and the poet took on the mysterious and powerful role of speaker for the culture. Among other things, she or he memorized family genealogies, historic occurrences, and crucial moments in the life of the tribe. The poet then told of these events in a highly dramatic fashion at gatherings and celebrations, helping the clan to identify their values and honor their spiritual beliefs.
Often the poet's words were sung, perhaps accompanied by a drum or a harp, and among ancient people the link between poetry, song, dance, drama, and religious liturgy was very close. One must always remember that ancient people were far more spiritual than human beings in the last few centuries have been and that the original impulse toward poetic expression was religious. Also, in the ancient world the poet was deeply revered for his or her ability to use words to express the profoundly felt spiritual experiences of the whole tribe or clan.
The ancient world was also a more community oriented world than we live in today. Clans or tribes were really extended families who shared a language, a values system, and spiritual beliefs. Individualism was not helpful to the survival of the clan. I certainly cannot imagine an ancient poet singing a song at a tribal gathering with phrases like, "I gotta be me," or "I did it my way."
In addition to being more community oriented, ancient people lived in a much closer relationship to nature than we do today. Early poetry includes many references to natural phenomena such as sunrise and sunset and the changing seasons. Plants, animals, weather, and geographical elements also appear frequently in ancient poetry. One of the earliest pieces of written literature is The Rigveda, compiled in India in approximately the year 1,000 B.C. The Rigveda is a collection of sacred hymns which celebrate the spiritual lives and values of the ancient Vedic or Hindu people. The poem which follows is dedicated to Ratri, the goddess of night, and it expresses some of the anxiety that ancient people felt when darkness descended upon their world at the end of each day.
NIGHT
When night comes on, the goddess shines
In many places with her eyes:
All glorious she has decked herself.
Immortal goddess far and wide,
She fills the valleys and the heights:
Darkness she drives away with light.
The goddess now, as she comes on,
Is turning out her sister, Dawn:
Far off the darkness hastes away.
So, goddess, come to-day to us:
At thy approach we seek our homes,
As birds their nests upon the tree.
The villagers have gone to rest
And footed beasts and winged birds;
The hungry hawk himself is still.
Ward off from us she-wolf and wolf,
Ward off the robber, goddess Night:
So take us safe across the gloom.
The darkness, thickly painting black,
Has, palpable, come nigh to me:
Like debts, O Dawn, clear it away.
I have brought up a hymn, like kine,
For thee, as one who wins a fight:
This, Heaven's daughter, Night, accept.
Translated by A. A. Macdonnell
As you re-read this poem with your dictionary at hand, you will want to look up the word kine.
Also, notice the names of specific animals with which the Vedic people shared their environment. Are any of these animals part of your environment today? Among other things, the Vedic people experienced anxieties about dangerous animals, robbers, and debts, and they asked for divine help in dealing with these problems. Do you ever worry about things just before you fall asleep at night? Have you ever felt afraid of the dark? Do you share any of the Vedic people's anxieties?
The Chinese were also among the earliest people to use written language to create poetry. The Book of Songs is a magnificent anthology of ancient Chinese poetry which was compiled about 600 B.C. May of these poems were already very old when they were placed in this collection. Like the poems in The Rigveda, these ancient Chinese poems reflect a very close relationship between nature and human experience. They also reflect the ancient Chinese values system that has been associated with the Confucian ideal-- respect for ancestors and parents and fear of incompetent leadership and social chaos. The following poem expresses a theme which is also central to Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet, the conflict between passion between a young man and woman and family responsibility. The poet makes references to trees and gardens to describe this conflict.
I beg of you, Chung Tzu,
Do not climb into our homestead,
Do not break the willows we have planted.
Not that I mind about the willows,
But I am afraid of my father and mother.
Chung Tzu I dearly love;
But of what my father and mother say
Indeed I am afraid.
I beg of you, Chung Tzu,
Do not climb over our wall,
Do not break the mulberry trees we have planted.
Not that I mind about the mulberry trees,
But I am afraid of my brothers.
Chung Tzu I dearly love;
But of what my brothers say
Indeed I am afraid.
I beg of you, Chung Tzu,
Do not climb into our garden,
Do not break the hard-wood we have planted.
Not that I mind about the hard-wood,
But I am afraid of what people will say.
Chung Tzu I dearly love;
But of all that people will say
Indeed I am afraid.
Translated by Arthur Waley
Have you ever been afraid to tell your parents or family members the truth about something that was very important to you? What were you afraid would happen if the truth came out? How important is personal love to you? What would you do if you fell in love with someone your family didn't like? Have you ever denied something that you valued because you were afraid of what people would think? Ancient poems like the two above that have not disappeared with the passage of time often capture eternal human conflicts as they are acted out over and over again on the great stage of nature.
Another source of ancient written poetry which has been read by generations of people from a variety of cultures is The Book of Psalms. This collection of ancient religious songs appears in the Hebrew Old Testament, and about half of the psalms are attributed to David, the second King of Israel, who lived around 1,000 B.C. Some of the other psalms are thought to have been composed in the fifth and fourth centuries B.C. The psalms express a variety of moods and themes, including a strong sense of celebration for the relationship between nature, human experience, and God. This feeling of sacred celebration is especially well expressed in one of the most famous songs in this collection, "Psalm 23," which I will include in two different translations.
PSALM 23
The Lord is my shepherd; I shall
not want.
He maketh me to lie down in
green pastures: he leadeth me beside
the still waters.
He restoreth my soul: he leadeth
me in the paths of righteousness for
his name's sake.
Yea, though I walk through the
valley of the shadow of death, I will
fear no evil: for thou art with me;
thy rod and thy staff they comfort me.
Thou preparest a table before me
in the presence of mine enemies: thou
anointest my head with oil; my cup
runneth over.
Surely goodness and mercy shall
follow me all the days of my life: and
I will dwell in the house of the Lord
for ever.
The translation above was done by a committee of scholars appointed by King James I of England in 1611. The following translation was completed by a group of American Biblical scholars in 1970.
PSALM 23
The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not
want.
In verdant pastures he gives me
repose;
Beside restful waters he leads me;
he refreshes my soul.
He guides me in right paths
for his name's sake.
Even though I walk in the dark valley
I fear no evil; for you are at my side
With your rod and your staff
that give me courage.
You spread the table before me
in the sight of my foes;
You anoint my head with oil;
my cup overflows.
Only goodness and kindness follow me
all the days of my life;
And I shall dwell in the house of the
Lord
for years to come.
Translated by the Catholic Biblical
Association of America
Which of these translations do you prefer? As you can imagine, translation can be a difficult and complex process, especially when ancient texts are involved. The King James translation obviously contains language, especially verb and pronoun forms, that have now become archaic, but many readers prefer this older translation for its poetic qualities. However, in both translations the images of water, oil, food, and a kind and nurturing shepherd capture David's sense of gratitude for the peace and security he felt in his relationship with his creator. Think about a time when you felt truly safe and secure. What kinds of images come to your mind when you remember this feeling of complete serenity? Have you ever had to face a difficult situation that you thought you might not be able to handle, but somehow everything turned out better than you could ever have imagined?
As we can see in these examples of ancient poetry from India, China, and Israel, even thousands of years ago, poets were real people. They felt deep emotions such as fear, love, and profound longings for peace and security. They also experienced the same moments of joy that people treasure today. Another ancient poet who had a very strong and interesting personality was Sappho. She was born on the island of Lesbos in Greece and lived between the 7th and 6th centuries B.C. Like the ancient Asian and Middle Eastern cultures we have just observed, the ancient Greeks also produced a large volume of written poetry, and as you will discover later in this book, the Greeks influenced the development of poetry throughout Europe, including English language poetry, for more than two thousand years. And according to poet and translator Willis Barnstone, "Sappho was considered the most important lyric poet of Western antiquity."2 In Chapter 6 you will find a detailed discussion of the contributions that the Greeks have made to poetry, and I will define terms such as lyric, narrative, and didactic poetry. For now, it might be helpful to know that lyric poetry is any poem that expresses a speaker's feelings, thoughts, or mood. Applying this term rather loosely, all of the poems we have read so far in this chapter could be called lyric poems.
Sappho's lyric poems are especially powerful because of the astounding way she combines deeply felt emotion with striking imagery. In poetry, imagery is the use of words that appeal to any of the senses. We will study imagery, along with some of the other important elements of poetry in Chapter 7. In Psalm 23, as you will remember, the phrase, "... he leadeth me beside the still waters" appeals to our sense of sight as well as sound, smell, and taste. It is my opinion that imagery is the most important element of poetry because it makes the poem part of the reader's physical and emotional experience forever, even if the poem has been translated from another language, another culture, or another period in history. Like David, Sappho is a master of memorable imagery. Read the four short poems that follow and let yourself experience then with all of your senses as well as your emotions.
Like a mountain whirlwind
punishing the oak trees,
love shattered my heart.
I could not hope
to touch the sky
with my two arms.
The glow and beauty of the stars
are nothing near the splendid moon
when in her roundness she burns silver
about the world.
In gold sandals
dawn like a thief
fell upon me.
In the next poem, Sappho addresses Aphrodite, the Goddess of Love and Beauty, using a profusion of beautiful images:
Leave Krete and come to this holy temple
where the graceful grove of apple trees
circles an altar smoking with frank-
incense.
Here roses leave shadows on the ground
and cold springs bubble through apple branches
where shuddering leaves pour down pro-
found sleep.
In our meadow where horses graze
and wild flowers of spring blossom,
anise shoots fill the air with a-
roma.
And here, Aphrodite, pour
heavenly nectar into gold cups
and fill them gracefully with sud-
den joy.
All poems by Sappho translated by
Willis Barnstone
When Sappho refers to Aphrodite in this poem, she assumes that the reader is familiar with the entire Pantheon of Greek gods and goddesses, just as the author of "Night" assumes that his reader will recognize his reference to the Hindu goddess Ratri. In poetry, a reference to anything, including people, places, events, etc., is called an allusion. Ancient poets were almost always writing for readers of their own culture, and they could safely assume a vast area of shared knowledge about the history, religion, and even the geography of their nation. Thus, an allusion to a beautiful and charismatic goddess like Aphrodite could create a wealth of images in the minds of Greek readers and add a richness to the poem without requiring a lot of extra words.
I love allusions in poetry, and you will discover that poets throughout history, including contemporary poets, often use this interesting device. However, there is an obvious drawback when the reader is unfamiliar with the poem's historic or cultural context. In such cases, an allusion can become meaningless at best, and annoying at worst. Also, allusions can be overused, as students who have tried to read the seventeenth century British poet, John Milton, have discovered. Milton, one of the best educated men who ever lived, assumed that his reader was knowledgeable in every aspect of Greek and other European mythology and every character and episode in the Bible. In some cases, I will add footnotes to some of the poems you will be reading to explain allusions that might be obscure for contemporary readers. However, it is really the student's responsibility to approach every poem as a journey of discovery. You should always keep a dictionary at hand, and every library has wonderful reference books on history, mythology, the Bible, and other ancient scriptures. Poems are not intended for speedreading, and every poet deserves the respect you pay to him or her when you take the time to savor every word and every allusion the poet offers you.
As we have noticed, many of the allusions in ancient poetry are references to the gods and goddesses that inhabited their spiritual world and interacted with human beings. A modern term for this phenomenon is mythology. Unfortunately, the word myth has taken on a rather negative connotation today, suggesting that something is made up or untrue, as when someone says, "Oh, that's just a myth." This attitude has caused tremendous confusion in contemporary people's understanding of mythology. Think again about this definition of mythology as poetry, stories, and plays about gods and goddesses as they interact with human beings in various ways. These stories have a profound significance in defining the values of the culture from which they evolved and in explaining the relationship between human beings, divine beings, and nature. Whether or not these stories are true is irrelevant to the values and relationships they clarify.
As you proceed through this book, you will read many poems that make references to Hindu, Buddhist, Greek, and Roman mythology, stories in the Bible, fairy tales, quasi-historical incidents, etc. Poets like Sappho and others choose to include these allusions because they offer the reader some insight or point of reference to help them grasp the poet's message. The beauty of mythology in all its myriad forms is that it helps the poet and the reader to leap across centuries and over thousands of miles to share an insight about what it means to be human in our mysteriously spiritual world.
In discussing poets and some of the special ways they express themselves, I've tried to give you a feeling for how diverse a group poets really are. A poet can be either a man or a woman. A poet can write long, story-like poems or brief expressions of feeling. Poets have populated our world in every historic age, in every culture, and in every geographic area. You cannot tell by looking at someone if she or he is a poet. Some poets are introverts and others are extroverts. Some are rich; others are poor. Some were recognized and appreciated during their own lifetimes while others remained completely obscure. Every stereotype about poets has turned out to be untrue. I would like for you to start to think of yourself as a member of this group.
I have believed for many years not that every person is capable of writing poetry. In earlier centuries, all educated people learned how to write poetry as well as to analyze the great classics of world poetry. And in my studies of great poets from earlier time periods, I have observed that most of them were also careful students, tirelessly reading great poetry and mastering the elements of their craft. In recent decades, our system of education has separated the scholarly analysis of poetry and the writing of poetry into two distinct disciplines. In fact, in some universities, Literary Studies and Creative Writing programs are housed in separate buildings and their faculties seldom if ever even speak to each other. Our curriculum also reflects this division. If you are a student, you have probably signed up for either a Creative Writing class, in which you will be expected to write poems, or a Poetry class, in which you will be required to read and analyze poetry. Both groups lose in this tragic dichotomy.
I have met many student poets who say things like, "I just love to express my feelings." Yet when I read the students' work, it is obvious that they have never read excellent poetry and that they are not even familiar with the tools of their trade. Conversely, we have all met the pedantic scholar who can tell us all about onomatopoeia but is hopelessly out of touch with his or her inner creative voice. I recently gave a workshop with one of my colleagues, Sterling Warner, at a large convention of English Professors. Our topic was to present some techniques that could be used in the teaching of Creative Writing on the college level. Among the participants was a professor who was also the editor of an important literary journal. Sterling and I used some of the writings of the ancient Japanese woman writer, Sei Shonagon to illustrate how creative ideas can be generated for students. At the end of our workshop we said, "Okay, let's do some writing of our own using these techniques." The rest of the participants eagerly started to write, but the editor immediately stood up and walked out of the room. Can you see the irony in this situation? This person was willing to evaluate and judge the merit of other people's writing, but he was not willing to take even the slightest risk into the world of self-expression.
I believe that our educations can be greatly enhanced if we return to a more classical approach to the study of poetry. Like the great poetry masters from India, China, Israel, and Greece, we can be both scholars and writers. This is the thesis of my book, and I hope you will welcome this opportunity to find the poet within yourself along with the great poets of the world.
NOTES
CHAPTER 1
1. From "The Lake Isle of Innisfree."
2. Aliki Barnstone and Willis Barnstone, eds., A Book of Women Poets
(New York: Schocken Books, 1981), p. 30.
GUIDELINES FOR ACTIVITIES
Let me remind you once again that poets are real people, even those who are anonymous or dead. Keeping this truth in mind, it would be wise of you to show them the same courtesy that you would like to receive from a stranger who is reading your writing for the first time. At the beginning of your journey in the study of poetry, it is not necessary for you to focus on whether or not you like a particular poet or poem. If you dislike a poem on first reading it, you would be prudent to remain silent. A poem rarely reveals all it has to offer upon first reading, and someone else may recognize something of value in the poem which you failed to perceive. I give this advice to you to save you from embarrassment. Please remember that one must learn a vast amount about a subject before one becomes a critic.
Similarly, I ask you to show the same sensitivity to your Instructor and your classmates. When we are studying poetry, we are entering the deepest well of human emotion on our planet. If we are really to learn something about poetry, we must all become vulnerable. Therefore, an atmosphere of mutual support and trust is essential. If a student shares a poem which he or she has written, it is the responsibility of everyone in the class to listen with complete attention and respect. This should also be true even if a classmate is reading one of the poems from this text. Please remember above all that poetry is not a competitive art form, and that every poem that has ever been written has a value for some reader somewhere. However, as you learn more and more about poetry, a natural process of evaluation will emerge for you, and you will begin to recognize why some poems are more memorable and effective than others. Please do not initiate this evaluative process without your Instructor's guidance. Too much criticism at the beginning of the journey will interfere with your ability to learn about and appreciate the timeless glory of poetry.
QUESTIONS AND TOPICS FOR REVIEW
1. Define the word poet.
2. List some of the responsibilities of traditional poets.
3. Who or what provides these services today?
4. Are any of these services no longer needed? If not, why not?
5. Specifically, which cultures were among the earliest to produce
written poetry?
6. What are the names of some of the most important early collections
of poetry?
7. Define the following terms:
oral poetry
lyric poetry
imagery
allusion
mythology
8. Provide an example of each of the terms you have just defined.
TOPICS FOR DISCUSSION
1. Is it still appropriate to discuss religious poetry today?
Why or why not?
2. Many ancient poems express the speaker's anxiety about his or her
relationship with God, nature, or other people. What are some
of the anxieties that are common in our culture today? Would
these make appropriate topics for poetry? Are some of these
anxieties the same as those expressed by the ancients?
3. List your favorite mythological figures. They can come from any
culture. What is it about these beings that makes them
interesting to you?
ACTIVITIES
1. This activity can be done either individually or in groups.
Select a poet from an earlier time period and spend a couple
of hours in the library gathering information about this
person. If you wish, choose a poet about whom you know
nothing. Jot down some notes about this person's life
such as:
country of birth
native language
childhood experiences
family background
education
marital status
sexual preference
occupation (many poets have other jobs besides writing)
religion
hobbies and interests, etc.
Some poets from earlier centuries whom you might find interesting are:
Sappho
David
Li Po
Tu Fu
Po Chu-i
Yakamochi Otomo
Ono no Komachi
Murasaki Shikibu
Dante Alighieri
Frances Petrarch (Francesco Petrarca)
Giovanni Boccaccio
Geoffrey Chaucer
Marie de France
Francois Villon
Louise Labe
William Shakespeare
Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz
John Milton
Alexander Pope
After completing your research, give a brief summary of your findings
to the rest of the class. These presentations should be oral,
very informal, and not graded. The purpose of this activity to
discover the diversity, as well as the similarities among the
great poets of the world.
After a few presentations have been given, the class may wish to discuss
the following ideas:
A. What are some of the differences between these poets?
B. How were their lives similar?
C. Which of these poets would you like to study further?
Why?
D. What were some of the stresses or anxieties experienced
by these poets?
2. Read through the collection at the end of this chapter entitled
ADDITIONAL POEMS FROM ANCIENT AND MEDIEVAL LITERATURE.
Volunteer to read one of these poems to the class. The group
will then discuss the poem focusing on some of the following
topics:
A. What emotions is the poet trying to express?
B. Is there a conflict being presented in the poem?
If so, what is it?
C. What kind of imagery does the poet use?
D. Does the poet's cultural or historic background seem
to influence his or her methods of expression?
How?
E. Does the poet use any allusions? If so, are you
able to understand their significance?
F. Is the poet writing within a mythological context?
If so, what does this context add to the poem?
ANALYTICAL WRITING ASSIGNMENTS
1. Select any poem from Chapter 1. Develop a thesis and analyze the
poem focusing on one or more of the following elements:
A. Emotional content
B. Social, cultural, or religious values being expressed
C. The attitude toward nature being expressed
D. The use of imagery
E. The use of allusions
F. Mythological content
2. Select any ancient or medieval poet and write a brief biography of
him or her. You will need to document the sources of your information
and include a WORKS CITED page at the end of your paper.
3. Write a paper in which you include both biographical and analytical
materials. Here are some possibilities:
A. The use of imagery and allusions to sheep herding
in the poetry of David.
B. The significance of Aphrodite in the life and
poetry of Sappho.
C. Buddhist influences in the poetry of Murasaki
Shikibu.
D. Satire in Geoffrey Chaucer's poetry.
4. Select any two poems from this chapter and write a comparison
and contrast between these poems. Include a clearly written
thesis statement in which you specify which elements (such as
imagery, mythological content, etc.) you will be using to analyze
the similarities and differences between these poems.
CREATIVE WRITING ASSIGNMENTS
1. Write a brief poem in which you use images from nature to
express a personal emotion. Do not concern yourself with
structure, line length, etc. Write your poem in any form
that seems comfortable.
2. Write a brief poem that celebrates one of your ancestors. Use
specific imagery to make this person come to life for the reader.
3. Tell a story about a crucial event in your family's history. Try to
structure this story into rhythmic lines rather than sentences
and paragraphs.
4. Write a poem describing an anxiety you experienced as a child.
5. Write a poem which includes one or more allusions to help explain
an emotional or spiritual experience. You may use allusions to
mythology, literature, popular culture, current events, etc.
After you have written your poem, ask yourself whether someone
one hundred years from now would be likely to understand your
allusions.
ADDITIONAL POEMS FROM ANCIENT AND MEDIEVAL LITERATURE
ANCIENT EGYPTIAN POETRY
From The Leiden Hymns 1238 B.C.
How splendid you ferry the skyways,
Horus* of Twin Horizons,**
The needs of each new day
firm in your timeless pattern,
Who fashion the years,
weave months into order--
Days, nights, and the very hours
move to the gait of your striding.
Refreshed by your diurnal shining, you quicken,
bright above yesterday,
Making the zone of night sparkle
although you belong to the light,
Sole one awake there
--sleep is for mortals,
Who go to rest grateful:
your eyes oversee.
And theirs by the millions you open
when your face new-rises, beautiful;
Not a bypath escapes your affection
during your season on earth.
Stepping swift over stars,
riding the lightning flash,
You circle the earth in an instant,
with a god's ease crossing heaven,
Treading the dark paths of the underworld,
yet, sun on each roadway,
You deign to walk daily with men.
The faces of all are upturned to you,
As mankind and gods
alike lift their morningsong:
"Lord of the daybreak,
Welcome!"
Translated by John L. Foster
* Horus is the hawk-headed sun god.
** Twin Horizons refers to dawn and dusk.
Love Songs 1300-1100 B.C.
I was simply off to see Nefrus my friend,
Just to sit and chat at her place
(about men),
When there, hot on his horses, comes Mehy
(oh god, I said to myself, it's Mehy!)
Right over the crest of the road
wheeling along with the boys
Oh Mother Hathor,* what shall I do?
Don't let him see me!
Where can I hide?
Make me a small creeping thing
to slip by his eye
(sharp as Horus')
unseen.
Oh, look at you, feet--
(this road is a river!)
you walk me right out of my depth!
Someone, silly heart, is exceedingly ignorant here--
aren't you a little too easy near Mehy?
If he sees that I see him, I know
he will know how my heart flutters (Oh, Mehy!)
I know I will blurt out,
"Please take me?"
(I mustn't!)
No, all he would do is brag out my name,
just one of the many...(I know)...
Mehy would make me just one of the girls
for all the boys in the palace.
(Oh Mehy)
Translated by John L. Foster
* Hathor is the Egyptian mother of the gods and Queen of Heaven.
I think I'll go home and lie very still,
feigning terminal illness.
Then the neighbors will all troop over to stare,
my love, perhaps, among them.
How she'll smile while the specialists
snarl in their teeth!--
she perfectly well knows what ails me.
Translated by John L. Foster
THE OLD TESTAMENT
Israel 1000-300 B.C.
Psalm 121
I lift up my eyes toward the moun-
tains;
whence shall help come to me?
My help is from the Lord,
who made heaven and earth.
May he not suffer your foot to slip;
may he slumber not who guards
you:
Indeed he neither slumbers nor sleeps,
the guardian of Israel.
The Lord is your guardian; the Lord
is your shade;
he is beside you at your right hand.
The sun shall not harm you by day,
nor the moon by night.
The Lord will guard you from all evil;
he will guard your life.
The Lord will guard your coming
and your going,
both now and forever.
Translation: The New American Bible
Psalm 137
By the rivers of Babylon,* there
we sat down, yea, we wept, when
we remembered Zion.
We hanged our harps upon the
willows in the midst thereof.
For there they that carried us
away captive required of us a song;
and they that wasted us required of us
mirth, saying, Sing us one of the songs
of Zion.
How shall we sing the Lord's
song in a strange land?
If I forget thee, O Jerusalem,
let my right hand forget
her cunning.
If I do not remember thee, let my
tongue cleave to the roof of my
mouth; if I prefer not Jerusalem
above my chief joy.
Remember, O Lord, the children
of Edom* in the day of Jerusalem;
who said, Rase it, rase it, even to the
foundation thereof.
O daughter of Babylon, who are
to be destroyed; happy shall he be,
that rewardeth thee as thou hast
served us.
Happy shall he be, that taketh and
dashes thy little ones against the
stones.
Translation: The King James Bible
* On the Euphrates River. The Hebrews were taken in captivity to
Babylon after the Babylonians captured and sacked Jerusalem in 586 B.C.
** The Edomites helped the Babylonians defeat Jerusalem.
Psalm 150
Praise the Lord in his sanctuary,
praise him in the firmament of his
strength.
Praise him for his mighty deeds,
praise him for his sovereign
majesty.
Praise him with the blast of the
trumpet.
praise him with lyre and harp,
Praise him with timbrel and dance,
praise him with strings and pipe.
Praise him with sounding cymbals,
praise him with clanging cymbals,
Let everything that has breath
praise the Lord! Alleluia
Translation: The New American Bible
CATULLUS
Rome 84?-54? B.C.
Love Lyrics
(Catullus wrote the following love poems to a woman he calls Lesbia.
She was probably Clodia, a married woman and the sister of a violent
and cynical Roman political gangster. Catullus' poems express the wide
range of emotions he experienced during this love affair.)
There are many who think of Quintia in terms of beauty,
but to me she is merely tall and golden white, erect,
and I admit each of these separate distinctions in her favor,
yet I object, deny,
that the word "beauty" describes her person;
for she has no charm, not even a grain of salt in her whole body
to give you appetite--
now Lesbia has beauty, she is everything
that's handsome, glorious,
and she has captured all that Venus* has to offer
in ways of love.
* Venus is the Roman Goddess of love.
When at last after long despair, our hopes ring true again
and long-starved desire eats, O then the mind leaps in the sunlight--
Lesbia
so it was with me when you returned. Here was a treasure
more valuable than gold; you, whom I love beyond hope, giving yourself
to me again. That hour, a year of holidays, radiant,
where is the man more fortunate than I,
where can he find anything in life more glorious
than the sight of all his wealth restored?
My life, my love, you say our love will last forever;
O gods remember
her pledge, convert the words of her avowal into a prophecy.
Now let her blood speak, let sincerity govern each syllable fallen
from her lips, so that the long years of our lives shall be
a contract of true love inviolate
against time itself, a symbol of eternity.
My woman says that she would rather wear the wedding-veil for me
than anyone; even if Jupiter* himself came storming after her;
that's what she says, but when a woman talks to a hungry,
ravenous lover, her words should be written upon the wind
and engraved in rapid water.
* Jupiter is the supreme god in Roman mythology. Sometimes called Jove,
he is the equivalent of the Greek god Zeus.
There was a time, O Lesbia, when you said Catullus was the only man
on earth who could understand you,
who could twine his arms round you, even Jove himself less welcome.
And when I thought of you, my dear, you were not the mere flesh and
the means by which a lover finds momentary rapture.
My love was half paternal, as a father greets his son or
smiles at his daughter's husband.
Although I know you well (too well), my love now turns to fire
and you are small and shallow.
Is this a miracle? Your wounds in love's own battle
have made me your companion, perhaps a greater lover,
but O, my dear, I'll never be
the modest boy who saw you as a lady, delicate and sweet,
a paragon of virtue.
You are the cause of this destruction, Lesbia,
that has fallen upon my mind;
this mind that has ruined itself
by fatal constancy.
And now it cannot rise from its own misery
to wish that you become
best of women, nor can it fail
to love you even though all is lost and you destroy
all hope.
If man can find rich consolation, remembering his good deeds and all he
has done,
if he remembers his loyalty to others, nor abuses his religion by heartless
betrayal
of friends to the anger of powerful gods,
then, my Catullus, the long years before you shall not sink in darkness
with all hope gone,
wandering, dismayed, through the ruins of love.
All the devotion that man gives to man, you have given, Catullus,
your heart and your brain flowed into a love that was desolate, wasted, nor
can it return.
But why, why do you crucify love and yourself through the years?
Take what the gods have to offer and standing serene, rise forth as a rock
against darkening skies;
and yet you do nothing but grieve, sunken deep in your sorrow,
Catullus,
for it is hard, hard to throw aside years lived in poisonous love that has
tainted your brain
and must end.
If this seems impossible now, you must rise
to salvation. O gods of pity and mercy, descend and witness my sorrow, if
ever
you have looked upon man in his hour of death, see me now in despair.
Tear this loathsome disease from my brain. Look, a subtle corruption has
entered my bones.
no longer shall happiness flow through my veins like a river.
No longer I pray
that she love me again, that her body be chaste, mine forever.
Cleanse my soul of this sickness of love, give me power to rise, resurrected,
to thrust love aside.
I have given my heart to the gods. O hear me, omnipotent heaven,
and ease me of love and its pain.
Translated by Horace Gregory
LI PO
China 701-762 A.D.
You ask me why I dwell in the green mountain;
I smile and make no reply for my heart is free of care.
As the peach-blossom flows down stream and is gone
into the unknown,
I have a world apart that is not among men.
Translated by Robert Kotewall and
Norman L. Smith
TU FU
China 712-770 A.D.
This night at Fu-chou in moonlight,
In her chamber she alone looks out;
Afar I pity my little children
That they know not yet to think of Ch'ang-an.
In the sweet mist her cloud-like tresses are damp;
In the clear moonlight her jade-like arms are cold.
When shall we two nestle against those unfilled curtains,
With the moon displaying the dried tear-stains of us both?
Translated by Robert Kotewall and
Norman L. Smith
PO CHU-I
China 772-846 A.D.
At the End of Spring
to Yuan Chen*
The flower of the pear-tree gathers and turns to fruit;
The swallows' eggs have hatched into young birds.
When the Seasons' changes thus confront the mind
What comfort can the Doctrine of Tao give?
It will teach me to watch the days and months fly
Without grieving that Youth slips away:
If the Fleeting World is but a long dream,
It does not matter whether one is young or old.
But ever since the day that my friend left my side
And has lived in exile in the City of Chiang-ling,
There is one wish I cannot quite destroy:
That from time to time we may chance to meet again.
Translated by Arthur Waley
* Yuan Chen was Po Chu-i's dear friend. Yuan Chen was banished in 805
for behaving inappropriately toward an official.
On Board Ship: Reading Yuan Chen's Poems
I take your poems in my hand and read them beside the candle:
The poems are finished: the candle is low: dawn not yet come.
With sore eyes by the guttering candle still I sit in the dark,
Listening to waves that, driven by the wind, strike the prow of the ship.
Translated by Arthur Waley
The Red Cockatoo
Sent as a present from Annam--
A red cockatoo.
Coloured like the peach-tree blossom,
Speaking with the speech of men.
And they did to it what is always done
To the learned and the eloquent.
They took a cage with stout bars
And shut it up inside.
Translated by Arthur Waley
Old Age*
We are growing old together, you and I,
Let us ask ourselves, what is age like?
The dull eye is closed ere night comes;
The idle head still uncombed at noon.
Propped on a staff, sometimes a walk abroad;
Or all day sitting with closed doors.
One dares not look in the mirror's polished face;
One cannot read small-letter books.
Deeper and deeper one's love of old friends;
Fewer and fewer one's dealings with young men.
One thing only, the pleasure of idle talk
Is great as even, when you and I meet.
Translated by Arthur Waley
* Written in 835, this poem was addressed to Liu Yu-hsi, who, like
Po Chu-i, was born in 772.
Dreaming of Yuan Chen*
At night you came and took my hand and we wandered
together in my dreams.
When I woke in the morning there was no one to stop the
tears that fell on my handkerchief.
On the banks of the Ch'ang my aged body three times has
passed through sickness;
At Hsien-yang to the grasses on your grave eight times has
autumn come.
You lie buried beneath the springs and your bones are
mingled with the clay.
I-- lodging in the world of men; my hair white as snow.
A-wei and Han-lang both followed in their turn;
Among the shadows of the Terrace of Night did you know
them or not?
Translated by Arthur Waley
* This poem was written eight years after Yuan Chen's death when
Po Chu-i was sixty-eight. Po Chu-i was in his twenties when he met
Yuan Chen.
KAKINOMOTO HITOMARO
Japan active c. 700 A.D.
On Parting from His Wife*
In the sea of Iwami,
By the cape of Kara,
There amid the stones under sea
Grows the deep-sea miru weed;
There along the rocky strand
Grows the sleek sea-tangle.
Like the swaying sea-tangle,
Unresisting would she lie beside me--
My wife whom I love with a love
Deep as the miru-growing ocean.
But few are the nights
We two have lain together.
Away I have come, parting from her
Even as the creeping vines do part.
My heart aches within me;
I turn back to gaze--
But because of the yellow leaves
Of Watari Hill,
Flying and fluttering in the air,
I cannot see her plainly
My wife waving her sleeve to me.
Now as the moon, sailing through the cloud rift
Above the mountain of Yakami,
Disappears, leaving me full of regret,
So vanishes my love out of sight;
Now sinks at last the sun,
Coursing down the western sky.
I thought myself a strong man,
But the sleeves of my garment
Are wetted through with tears.
Envoys**
My black steed
Galloping fast,
Away have I come,
Leaving under distant skies
The dwelling-place of my love.
Oh, yellow leaves
Falling on the autumn hill,
Cease a while
To fly and flutter in the air
That I may see my love's dwelling-place!
Translated by The Japanese Classics Translation
Committee, Seiichi Taki, Chairperson
* Like most Japanese poems from this time period, this poem is
untitled.
** An envoy (called hanka in Japanese) is a short stanza that concludes
a longer poem. The English poet Geoffrey Chaucer also concluded some of his
poems with envoys.
YAMANOE OKURA
Japan 660-733 A.D.
When I eat melon,
I remember my children;
When I eat chestnuts,
Even more do I recall them.
Whence did they come to me?
Before my eyes they will linger,
And I cannot sleep in peace.
Envoy
What use to me
Silver, gold and jewels?
No treasure can surpass children!
Translated by The Japanese Classics Translation
Committee, Seiichi Taki, Chairperson
A Dialogue on Poverty
On nights when, wind mixing in, the rain falls,
on nights when, rain mixing in, the snow falls,
I'm utterly lost, it's so cold
I take out a piece of black salt and nibble it,
I sip hot water with sake dregs.
Coughing, nose snuffing,
scratching my skimpy beard,
I boast to myself, "I'm the only one
who's worthy." But it's so cold
I pull the hempen quilt over myself,
put on all the cloth vests
I have. On such a cold night,
someone poorer than I am--
his father and mother must be starved, freezing,
his wife and children must be feebly weeping.
At a time like this, what are you doing
to live through it all?
Heaven and earth are wide, they say,
but for me they have grown narrow.
The sun and the moon are bright, they say,
but for me they do not shine.
Is this so for everyone, or for me alone?
I happened to be born a human
but am no worse than others.
Yet vests with no cotton,
mere rags tattered and dangling
like sea-fleece, are hung on my shoulders.
In this flattened hut, this leaning hut,
on straw spread on the bare ground
father and mother by my pillow,
wife and children by my feet
surround me, whimpering.
From the stove no steam spurts up,
in the steamer a spider weaves its web,
and rice-cooking forgotten,
we moan like thrushes--
when, as they say, "to cut the ends
of what's too short already"
with stick in hand the village chief shouts,
he comes to our sleeping-place and yells at us.
Is it as helpless as this,
the way of the world?
Envoy
I find this world sad and wearying, but cannot fly away
because I am not a bird.
Translated by Hiroaki Sato and
Burton Watson
ONO NO KOMACHI
Japan 9th Century
Doesn't he realize
that I am not
like the swaying kelp
in the surf,
where the seaweed gatherer
can come as often as he wants.
Translated by Kenneth Rexroth and
Ikuko Atsumi
In the daytime
I can cope with them,
but when I see those jealous eyes
even in dreams,
it is more than I can bear.
Translated by Kenneth Rexroth and
Ikuko Atsumi
He does not come.
Tonight in the dark of the moon
I wake wanting him.
My breasts heave and blaze.
My heart chars.
Translated by Kenneth Rexroth and
Ikuko Atsumi
The colors of the flowers fade
as the long rains fall,
as lost in thought,
I grow older.
Translated by Kenneth Rexroth and
Ikuko Atsumi
MURASAKI SHIKIBU
Japan 974-1031
I feel of others' affairs
as though they were
the water birds I watch
floating idly on the water.
My idleness comes
only from sorrow.
Translated by Kenneth Rexroth and
Ikuko Atsumi
Be close, you say;
But the first thing I met
On getting close
Were your feelings
Thin as summer clothes.
Translated by Richard Bowring
As they weaken,
Even insects in the hedge
Find it hard to stop;
Do they too feel sadness
In autumn partings?
Translated by Richard Bowring
Vaguely disturbing;
Did it, or did it not exist?
The morning glory
Dimly opening
In the pre-dawn sky.
Translated by Richard Bowring
Frozen stiff
By ice and frost
My writing brush
Cannot express
The inexpressible.
Translated by Richard Bowring
HILDEGARD OF BINGEN
Germany 1098-1179
Antiphon for Divine Wisdom
Sophia!*
you of the whirling wings,
circling encompassing
energy of God:
you quicken the world in your clasp.
One wing soars in heaven
one wing sweeps the earth
and the third flies all around us.
Praise to Sophia!
Let all the earth praise her!
Translated by Barbara Newman
* Sophia is the spirit of divine wisdom. She is associated with
the dove, the sign of the Holy Spirit.
Antiphon for the Holy Spirit
The Spirit of God
is a life that bestows life,
root of world-tree
and wind in its boughs.
Scrubbing out sin,
she rubs oil into wounds.
She is glistening life
alluring all praise,
all-awakening,
all-resurrecting.
Translated by Barbara Newman
Song to the Creator
You, all-accomplishing
Word of the Father,
are the light of primordial
daybreak over the spheres.
You the foreknowing
mind of divinity,
foresaw all your works
as you willed them,
your prescience hidden
in the heart of your power,
your power like a wheel around the world,
whose circling never began
and never slides to an end.
Translated by Barbara Newman
JALALODDIN RUMI
Afghanistan 1207-1283
What I most want
is to spring out of this personality
then to sit apart from that leaping.
I've lived too long where I can be reached.
Translated by Coleman Barks
Don't come to us without bringing music.
We celebrate with drum and flute,
with wine not from grapes,
in a place you cannot imagine.
Translated by Coleman Barks
Sometimes visible, sometimes not, sometimes
devout Christians, sometimes staunchly Jewish.
Until our inner love fits into everyone,
all we can do is take daily these different shapes.
Translated by Coleman Barks
Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing
there is a field. I'll meet you there.
When the soul lies down in that grass,
the world is too full to talk about.
Ideas, language, even the phrase each other
doesn't make any sense.
Translated by Coleman Barks
Why Wine is Forbidden
When the Prophet's ray of Intelligence
struck the dimwitted man he was with,
the man got very happy and talkative.
Soon he began unmannerly raving.
This is the problem with a selflessness
that comes quickly,
as with wine.
If the wine-drinker
has a deep gentleness in him,
he will show that,
when drunk.
But if he has hidden anger and arrogance,
those appear,
and since most people do,
wine is forbidden to everyone.
Translated by Coleman Barks
GEOFFREY CHAUCER
England 1340-1400
From the General Prologue to The Canterbury Tales
Two Portraits
The Prioress
There was also a Nun, a Prioress,
Whose smile was gentle and full of guilelessness.
"By St. Loy" was the worst oath she would say.
She sang mass well, in a becoming way,
Intoning through her nose the words divine,
And she was known as Madame Eglantine.
She spoke good French, as taught at Stratford-Bow
For the Parisian French she did not know.
She was schooled to eat so primly and so well
That from her lips no morsel ever fell.
She wet her fingers lightly in the dish
Of sauce, for courtesy was her first wish.
With every bite she did her skillful best
To see that no drop fell upon her breast.
She always wiped her upper lip so clean
That in her cup was never to be seen
A hint of grease when she had drunk her share.
She reached out for her meat with comely air.
She was a great delight and always tried
To imitate court ways, and had her pride,
Both amiable and gracious in her dealings.
As for her charity and tender feelings,
She melted at whatever was piteous.
She would weep if she but came upon a mouse
Caught in a trap, or if it were dead or bleeding.
Some little dogs that she took pleasure feeding
On roasted meat or mild or good wheat bread
She had, but how she wept to find one dead
Or yelping from a blow that made it smart,
And all was sympathy and loving heart.
Neat was her wimple in its every plait,
Her nose well formed, her eyes as gray as slate.
Her mouth was very small and soft and red.
She had so wide a brow I think her head
Was nearly a span broad, for certainly
She was not undergrown, as all could see.
She wore her cloak with dignity and charm,
And had her rosary about her arm,
The small beads coral and the larger green,
And from them hung a brooch or golden sheen,
On it a large A and a crown above;
Beneath, "All things are subject unto love".
The Wife of Bath
A worthy woman there was from near the city
Of Bath, but somewhat deaf, and more's the pity.
For weaving she possessed so great a bent
She outdid the people of Ypres and of Ghent!
No other woman dreamed of such a thing
As to precede her at the offering,
Or if any did, she fell in such a wrath
She dried up all the charity in Bath.
She wore fine kerchiefs of old-fashioned air,
And on a Sunday morning, I could swear,
She had ten pounds of linen on her head.
Her stockings were of finest scarlet-red,
Laced tightly, and her shoes were soft and new.
Bold was her face, and fair, and red in hue.
She had been an excellent woman all her life
Five men in turn had taken her to wife,
Omitting other youthful company--
But let that pass for now! Over the sea
She had traveled freely; many a distant stream
She crossed, and visited Jerusalem
Three times. She had been at Rome and at Boulogne,
At the shrine of Compostella, and at Cologne.
She had wandered by the way through many a scene.
Her teeth were set with little gaps between.
Easily on her ambling horse she sat.
She was well wimpled, and she wore a hat
As wide in circuit as a shield or targe.
A skirt swathed up her hips, and they were large.
Upon her feet she wore sharp-rowled spurs.
She was a good fellow; a ready tongue was hers.
All remedies of love she knew by name,
For she had all the tricks of that old game.
Translated by Theodore Morrison
FRANCOIS VILLON
France 1431-?
Ballade
Brother humans who live on after us
Don't let your hearts harden against us
For if you have pity on wretches like us
More likely God will show mercy to you
You see us five, six, hanging here
As for the flesh we loved too well
A while ago it was eaten and has rotted away
And we the bones turn to ashes and dust
Let no one make us the butt of jokes
But pray God that he absolve us all.
Don't be insulted that we call you
Brothers, even if it was by Justice
We were put to death, for you understand
Not every person has the same good sense
Speak up for us, since we can't ourselves
Before the son of the virgin Mary
That his mercy toward us shall keep flowing
Which is what keeps us from hellfire
We are dead, may no one taunt us
But pray God that he absolve us all.
The rain has rinsed and washed us
The sun dried us and turned us black
Magpies and ravens have pecked out our eyes
And plucked our beards and eyebrows
Never ever can we stand still
Now here, now there, as the wind shifts
At its whim it keeps swinging us
Pocked by birds worse than a sewing thimble
Therefore don't join in our brotherhood
But pray God that he absolve us all.
Prince Jesus, master over all
Don't let us fall into hell's dominion
We've nothing to do or settle down there
Men, there's nothing here to laugh at
But pray God that he absolve us all.
Translated by Galway Kinnell
FINDING THE POET
CHAPTER 2 CREATIVITY
Just the word creativity makes some people nervous. Obviously, poets are creative, but somehow "ordinary" people think of creativity as some obscure gift (more of a curse, really), that has been bestowed only on a few of the most accomplished artists. These people use words like "talent" to differentiate the creatives from all the rest of us. There is also a widely held belief that creative people suffer from some sort of neurosis and that their lives are always filled with anguish. This stereotype also includes visions of poets and painters as emaciated, unwashed misfits who lack the social skills to interact with the rest of the culture in any normal way. Where did we get these stereotypes? And is it any wonder that the very idea of being creative seems threatening to some of us?
We can thank Sigmund Freud for some of this. The great modern psychologist Carl Jung, once a colleague of Freud's, ultimately came to disagree with some of Freud's perceptions about creativity. Jung refers to "... the idea held by the Freudian school that artists without exception are narcissistic--by which is meant that they are undeveloped persons with infantile and auto-erotic traits."1 Jung believed that Freud's psychoanalytic method of evaluating poetry as a form of neurosis was inappropriate. In a lecture entitled "On the Relation of Analytical Psychology to Poetry" which Jung delivered to the Society for German Language and Literature in Zurich in 1922, he made some comments about the nature of poetry and creativity that are still worth considering today. Sweeping aside Freud's approach to poetry, Jung declared, "In order to do justice to a work of art, analytical psychology must rid itself entirely of medical prejudice; for a work art is not a disease, and consequently requires a different approach from the medical one."2
Jung went on to point out that poets come from a variety of backgrounds and have very diverse personal and emotional lives. Your studies in Chapter 1 should certainly have corroborated this observation. Two of the poets you have already read provide a fascinating study in contrasts, yet as writers they share the honor of being among the greatest observers of human nature in all the world of poetry. These two poets, Geoffrey Chaucer and Murasaki Shikibu, literally lived in two different worlds. Murasaki, a low ranking aristocrat, lived in Kyoto between the Eighth and Ninth Centuries and served as a lady in waiting for a rather joyless princess. A widow, Murasaki found little pleasure in the shallow intrigues of court life and did not welcome the advances of the retired emperor who wanted her as his mistress. Introverted in nature, she found consolation in artistic expression and in studying the teachings of the Buddha. She seems to have spent much of her adult life writing her masterpiece, The Tale of Genji, the world's first novel, a brilliant study in human psychology which also contains several hundred poems. Chaucer, born in London about four hundred years after Murasaki, was the ultimate extravert. He held a variety of bureaucratic jobs, including tax collector, and served three different kings of England. Although he was born a commoner, he thrived on associating with aristocrats, but he also had a number of friends and acquaintances in other trades and occupations. His long narrative poem, The Canterbury Tales, fictionalizes the stories of a group of pilgrims who are traveling to Canterbury Cathedral to honor the popular Christian martyr Thomas Becket. Chaucer's pilgrims and their stories provide one of the finest series of character portraits in all of world literature. Chaucer and Murasaki are good examples of Carl Jung's theory of creativity.
You may have noticed that I referred to Murasaki as an introvert and to Chaucer as an extravert. These are concepts which Jung added to our vocabulary and to our understanding of human personalities. An introvert is a person whose mind or thoughts turn inward. An introvert directs his or her thoughts or efforts toward that which is internal or spiritual. Creatively, an introvert responds to material within his or her own mind and heart and shares these perceptions with others. An extravert, on the other hand, turns to the outside world for stimulation and inspiration.3 An extraverted artist responds to people and objects around him or her and processes these materials creatively to produce a work of art. In a description of herself in her diary, Murasaki's introverted tendencies are apparent:
So I seem to be misunderstood, and they think that I am shy.
There have been times when I have been forced to sit in
their company, and on such occasions I have tried to avoid
their petty criticisms, not because I am particularly shy but
because I consider it all so distasteful; as a result, I am now
known as somewhat of a dullard.
Translated by Richard Bowring
Have you ever felt this way? Have you ever felt dull and inadequate because you do not sparkle in social situations? Do you think of excuses to avoid gathering with other people so you can be alone with your own ideas and imaginings? You may be an introvert like Murasaki, and the poetry you create may reflect the richly decorated interior world which has always been part of your life.
The extraverted Geoffrey Chaucer needed more than his own thoughts and feelings for inspiration. He constantly gathered information from the people and places he visited and transformed these images into vivid, realistic poetry. You may be more like Chaucer. Maybe you love to travel, meet new people, attend concerts and social events, and you feel energized by the excitement that all of this stimulation creates. If so, your poetry will reflect the extravert's fascination with the always changing world around us. In the opening lines of the General Prologue to The Canterbury Tales, Chaucer sets the scene for the stories that will follow. As you read these famous lines, notice that Chaucer's attention is clearly focused on scenes and events outside of himself:
As soon as April pierces to the root
The drought of March, and bathes each bud and shoot
Through every vein of sap with gentle showers
From whose engendering liquor springs the flowers;
When zephyrs have breathed softly all about
Inspiring every wood and field to sprout,
And in the zodiac the youthful sun
His journey halfway through the Ram has run;
When little birds are busy with their song
Who sleep with open eyes the whole night long
Life stirs their hearts and tingles in them so,
Then off as pilgrims people long to go,
And palmers to set out for distant strands
And foreign shrines renowned in many lands.
And specially in England people ride
To Canterbury from every countryside
To visit there the blessed martyred saint
Who gave them strength when they were sick and faint.
Translated by Theodore Morrison
Let us return for a moment to Jung 's famous speech on the relationship between psychology and poetry. After asserting that a work of art is not a disease and that poets are not necessarily narcissistic neurotics, Jung elaborated on why he felt that psychoanalyzing poets as a way of trying to understand their creative work was not productive. "But when applied to a work of art... it strips the work of art of its shimmering robes and exposes the nakedness and drabness of Homo sapiens, to which species the poet and artist also belong."4 Jung's point is that magnificent works of art have been produced by very ordinary people through the mysterious power of creativity. Murasaki, a rather unhappy and bored lady in waiting, and Chaucer, a social climbing tax collector, put on the "shimmering robes" of art to create The Tale of Genji and The Canterbury Tales while personally remaining rather ordinary, perhaps even uninteresting people. Whether or not either was neurotic is of no interest to Carl Jung. He believed that the creative process uses human beings as its medium in much the same way that plants use soil as their medium. In referring to art, Jung said, "One might almost describe it as a living being that uses man only as a nutrient medium, employing his capacities according to its own laws and shaping itself to the fulfillment of its own creative purpose."5 Using the plant metaphor again, Jung pointed out that a plant is certainly more than a product of the soil in which it grew. Thus, he concludes that the work of art has a life beyond the individual poet who created it. Jung wrote, "What is essential in a work of art is that it should rise far above the realm of personal life and speak from the spirit and heart of the poet as man to the spirit and heart of mankind."6
I agree with Jung's theory that a work of art finally belongs to the human race and not to Murasaki Shikibu or Geoffrey Chaucer. Nevertheless, I have always been fascinated by the lives of poets, not so much to determine whether they were narcissistic but because I am amazed by the variety of methods that poets employ to cooperate with the creative force which chooses them as its media. Since I write poetry myself, I have always been comforted by the fact that there are so many ways to go about producing a poem. Or perhaps I should say there are so many ways that a poem uses us to create itself. This is a very important idea for a student of poetry to grasp.
In addition to the concepts of introversion and extraversion, Jung's theory of the Four Personality Functions can also be helpful in understanding creativity. Jung believed that every human personality operates on the basis of four psychological functions, Sensation, Thinking, Feeling, and Intuition. While every personality contains all four functions, in most people, one function is more fully developed and becomes dominant. Thus, a "feeling" person will respond to most situations emotionally, while a "thinking" person tends to be logical when responding to people and events. Jung thought of thinking and feeling as "rational" functions and sensation and intuition as "non-rational." He often depicted these four functions in circular form, like a compass, with the dominant function at the top of the compass and the individual's weakest function at the bottom. Each person's weakest function Jung associated with the Shadow, the aspect of the personality which may be denied or unconscious. If a personality function is particularly weak, its shadow aspect may be associated with the negative, unpleasant side of the personality.7
Poets have dominant or weak personality functions like everyone else, and when the creative force engages the poet, it often works through the poet's dominant personality function. You may have noticed the extreme depth of emotion, for example, in the poems in Chapter 1 by Catullus and Ono no Komachi. In their poems about the pain of passionate love, thinking is not their primary concern. On the other hand, Hildegard of Bingen and Jalaloddin Rumi are both highly intuitive poets who are expressing the subtleties of mystical spiritual experiences. In contrast, notice the emphasis on the world of the senses in this description of the place where the evil monsters, Grendel and his mother, live in the Anglo-Saxon epic poem, Beowulf:
They hold to the secret land, the wolf-slopes, the windy
headlands, the dangerous fen-paths, where the mountain stream
goes down under the darkness of the hills, the flood under the
earth. It is not far from here, measured in miles, that the mere
stands; over it hang frost-covered woods, trees fast of root
close over the water. There each night may be seen fire on the
flood, a fearful wonder. ...That is no pleasant place. From it
the surging waves rise up black to the heavens when the wind stirs
up awful storms, until the air becomes gloomy, the skies weep.
Translated by E.T. Donaldson
If you have not already done so, you may wish to consider whether you are primarily a thinker, and feeler, a person of the senses, or an intuitive. Your response to the poems you have read so far can give you a hint. Did you find this description from Beowulf fascinating and intriguing? Did you find yourself shivering with the cold and shaking in fear as you entered into this mysterious, damp and dark world? Or were you bored by this passage's lack of intellectual content? You may recall that I cautioned you in Chapter 1 to remain silent if you disliked one of the poems you were asked to read. Often students at first dislike a poem which appeals to their weaker or shadow personality function. Thus, a thinking person, on reading Catullus, might respond, "You idiot, why did you let that woman take advantage of you? You're a lousy poet!" This is a much easier response to make than the following: "Maybe I don't appreciate Catullus' poetry because I have not developed my own feelings fully and have never taken an emotional risk."
Fortunately, a vast amount of research has been done recently based on Jung's theories of introversion, extraversion, and the four personality functions. Much of this research can be helpful to you in understanding your own personality and how creativity works in your life. It can also help you respond to poetry and other forms of art in a deeper and more meaningful way. A popular presentation of Jung's ideas that I have found interesting is Please Understand Me, written by psychologists David Keirsey and Marilyn Bates. This book also incorporates the research of Isabel Myers and Katheryn Briggs. You may have heard of the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, a personality test, and if you are a student in a college or university, you can probably go to the counseling office or psychology department and arrange to take this personality test yourself. It is designed to identify sixteen different patterns of action and has been very useful, among other things, in helping guidance counselors in making decisions about appropriate career choices. It can help you determine whether you are an introvert or an extravert and may give you some insights into how you can best go about achieving your academic and creative goals.
This test, along with Jung's research and Please Understand Me, has created a renewed interest in the ancient belief in personality types, going all the way back to the Greek physician Hippocrates' description of the Sanguine, Choleric, Phlegmatic, and Melancholic temperaments. Updating these concepts just a bit, Keirsey and Bates discuss these four personality types as the Dionysian, the Epimethean, the Promethean, and the Apollonian temperaments.8 These names are taken, of course, from the Greek gods whose personalities typify these temperaments. Jung would refer to each of these figures as an archetype. According to Jung, "Archetypes are fundamental patterns of symbol formation which are observed to recur throughout mankind in the contents of the mythologies of all peoples."9 In other words, an archetype is a universal symbol. Circles, stones, and birds, for example, are archetypes which appear in the art and myths of every culture, usually representing wholeness, permanence, and freedom respectively. Do you remember Okura's "Dialogue on Poverty" from Chapter 1? The bird archetype appears in the envoy at the end of that poem when Okura says:
I find this world sad and wearying, but cannot fly away
because I am not a bird.
Some of these symbols take the form of human personalities. The Dionysian personality, for example, is a here and now, fun loving, exciting, light-hearted, charismatic, and perhaps somewhat self-destructive but generally lucky individual. A Dionysian does not worry about complex social problems and does not feel compelled to follow the rules.10 Every culture has myths and stories about charming rascals and tricksters, and in real life we all know people whose personalities reflect this archetype. These people are sensual, impulsive, easily bored, and not particularly focused on completion or accomplishments. Artistically, a Dionysian personality is more interested in creativity as play and enjoys the process of creating more than the end product.
The Dionysian archetype has spawned an entire genre, or category of poetry--the carpe diem school.
In poetry, the carpe diem theme, which means, "seize the day" in Latin, is a reflection of the Dionysian values system. Hundreds of poems have been written over the years expressing ideas such as "Eat, drink, and be merry," "Gather ye rosebuds while ye may," etc. The Seventeenth Century British poet, Andrew Marvell's brilliant poem "To His Coy Mistress" expresses the essence of the Dionysian attitude:
TO HIS COY MISTRESS
Had we but world enough, and time,
This coyness, lady, were no crime.
We would sit down, and think which way
To walk, and pass our long love's day.
Thou by the Indian Ganges' side
Shouldst rubies find; I by the tide
Of Humber would complain. I would
Love you ten years before the Flood,
And you should, if you please, refuse
Till the conversion of the Jews.
My vegetable love should grow
Vaster than empires, and more slow;
An hundred years should go to praise
Thine eyes, and on thy forehead gaze;
Two hundred to adore each breast,
But thirty thousand to the rest;
An age at least to every part,
And the last age should show your heart.
For, lady, you deserve this state,
Nor would I love at lower rate.
But at my back I always hear
Time's winged chariot hurrying near;
And yonder all before us lie
Deserts of vast eternity.
Thy beauty shall no more be found,
Nor, in thy marble vault shall sound
My echoing song; then worms shall try
That long preserved virginity,
And your quaint honor turn to dust,
And into ashes all my lust:
The grave's a fine and private place,
But none, I think, do there embrace.
Now therefore, while the youthful hue
Sits on thy skin like morning dew,
And while thy willing soul transpires
At every pore with instant fires,
Now let us sport us while we may,
And now, like amorous birds of prey,
Rather at once our time devour
Than languish in his slow-chapped power.
Let us roll all our strength and all
Our sweetness up into one ball,
And tear our pleasures with rough strife
Through the iron gates of life:
Thus, though we cannot make our sun
Stand still, yet we will make him run.
Read this poem several times and then look up all of the allusions such as the references to the Ganges and Humber rivers and to the story of the Flood in the Old Testament. Also, notice that the poem is written in three verse paragraphs, like a syllogism, a type of logical argument which begins with the word if and ends with a conclusion prefaced by the word therefore. But Marvell is really mocking the logical way of approaching life and trying to convince his woman friend that because life is so short (note his allusion to the sun god Apollo's chariot), she should give in to his sexual advances. Note too how cleverly Marvell stretches out the slow pace in the opening section of the poem when he says to the woman that if they had all the time in the world for their "vegetable love" to grow, he would be in no hurry. But the pace of the poem picks up rapidly in the conclusion, and the final verse paragraph is much shorter than the first. Marvell saves his most powerful images, the "amorous birds of prey" and the "iron gates of life" for his concluding argument. With a combination of comic logic and powerfully sensual images, achieving an effect which is both playful and disturbing, Marvell speaks in Dionysus' own voice about the intense attraction of living for the moment.
The Chinese and Japanese traditions also have a long history of poetry based on the Dionysian archetype and vision of creativity. Remember that although Dionysus was a Greek god, the archetype on which he is based is universal. The Sixth Century Chinese poet Li Po, whom you met in Chapter 1, is famous for his poems about drinking, living for the moment, and responding with intensity to his immediate environment. The following poem expresses Li Po's Dionysian spirit:
BRING IN THE WINE
Look there!
The waters of the Yellow River,
coming down from Heaven,
rush in their flow to the sea,
never turn back again
Look there!
Bright in the mirrors of mighty halls
a grieving for white hair,
this morning blue-black strands of silk,
now turned to snow with evening.
For satisfaction in this life
taste pleasure to the limit,
And never let a goblet of gold
face the bright moon empty.
Heaven bred in me talents,
and they must be put to use.
I toss away a thousand in gold,
it comes right back to me.
So boil a sheep
butcher an ox,
make merry for a while,
And when you sit yourself to drink, always
down three hundred cups.
Hey, Master Ts'en,
Ho, Tan-ch'iu,
Bring in the wine!
Keep the cups coming!
And I, I'll sing you a song,
You bend me your ears and listen--
The bells and the drums, the tastiest morsels,
it's not these that I love--
All I want is to stay dead drunk
and never sober up.
The sages and worthies of ancient days
now lie silent forever,
And only the greatest drinkers
have a fame that lingers on!
Once long ago
the prince of Ch'en
held a party at P'ing-lo Lodge.
A gallon of wine cost ten thousand cash,
all the joy and laughter they pleased.
So you, my host,
How can you tell me you're short on cash?
Go right out!
Buy us some wine!
And I'll do the pouring for you!
Then take my dappled horse,
Take my furs worth a fortune,
Just call the boy to get them,
and trade them for lovely wine,
And here together we'll melt the sorrows
of all eternity!
Translated by Stephen Owen
You may have noticed that the archetypes I mentioned from Please Understand Me, Dionysus, Epimetheus, Prometheus, and Apollo are all male, and I suggest that you do some research and find out what kinds of personalities and creative behavior patterns are represented by these four temperaments.
An interesting book that explores feminine archetypes from the Jungian perspective is Goddesses in Every Everywoman, by Jean Shinoda Bolen. Bolen, a Jungian psychiatrist, elaborates on the work done by Jung, Myers and Briggs, Keirsey and Bates, and many others. Her thesis also is that individuals connect with archetypal personalities, and that these archetypes guide the ways in which people work, play, interact with others, and engage in creative activities. Bolen focuses on the Greek goddesses Athena, Artemis, Hestia, Aphrodite, Hera, Demeter, and Persephone.
You may recall a poem from Chapter 1 by Sappho which ends with the stanza:
And here, Aphrodite, pour
heavenly nectar into gold cups
and fill them gracefully with sud-
den joy.
It is no accident that Sappho addressed this poem to the goddess of love and beauty. If you have done any additional research on Sappho, you know that she was a passionate, sensuous woman who had a highly developed aesthetic sense and lived for love. Jung might say that the Aphrodite archetype motivated Sappho's life and her poetry. Bolen refers to Aphrodite as the "Alchemical Goddess" because of her "...magic process or power of transformation."11 Women whose personalities reflect the Aphrodite archetype are highly creative and approach their work as though it were a love affair ultimately transforming itself into the birth of a child. Among the four personality functions, sensing is the most highly developed in an Aphrodite temperament, and an Aphrodite-style poet, like Sappho, uses beautiful and sensual imagery poems, as we have seen. Bolen describes the creative process of an Aphrodite temperament:
Creativity is also a "sensual" process for many people;
it is an in-the-moment sensory experience involving touch,
sound, imagery, movement, and sometimes even smell and taste.
An artist engrossed in a creative process, like a lover, often
finds that all her senses are heightened and that she receives
perceptual impressions through many channels.12
Another poet who epitomizes the Aphrodite temperament is the Twentieth Century Japanese poet Akiko Yosano. Akiko engages all of her physical senses in her passionate poems. Like other Aphrodite personalities, Akiko does not always write about love, but no matter what her subject, she uses her senses to express her theme. Notice the highly intensified imagery in these five short untitled poems:
I see drops of rain
On the floating leaves of white lotus;
In the small boat
Where my lover paints,
I hold open an umbrella.
Slipping
From these two feet of silk gauze
Along my kimono sleeve,
The firefly, swept away
On the blue wind of evening.
Do you know
Who bit her sleeve
At the Osaka inn
Reading your poem
That cold autumn day?
Hair all tangled this morning--
Shall I smooth it
With spring rain
Dripping from the jet-black
Wings of swallows?
He lured me in
Yet brushed away the hand
That sought to touch--
Still, still,
The smell of his clothes, the gentle darkness!
Translated by Sanford Goldstein and
Seishi Shinoda
Obviously, not all women express their creativity in the Aphrodite style of Sappho and Akiko, just as not all men write in the carpe diem style of Dionysus. Again, I urge you to do some research on your own into the temperaments of Athena, Demeter, and the other Greek goddesses to discover which archetype seems closest to your own personality. Understanding your own temperament can help you to work with your natural creative tendencies and express your own true voice as a poet. Remember Jung's assertion that creativity is simply a force that uses human beings as its medium. Knowing yourself can help you be a more welcoming medium when creativity comes to call.
Fortunately, there are some practical things you can do to become more sensitive to creativity at work. Think about your own interests, for example, and ask yourself what kinds of things inspire you. Do you like to listen to music while you're writing? Maybe you get inspired by looking at a fascinating painting or photograph, or perhaps you are the kind of person who likes to construct things like an architect. In my years of studying the lives of poets, it has become obvious to me that there is frequently a strong correlation between the arts. Many poets are active in other art forms besides writing, and they adapt the techniques from their secondary art form to the writing of poetry. The British poet William Blake, for example, was actually better known as an artistic engraver during his own lifetime than he was as a writer. And the poet Thomas Hardy, also from England, was trained as an architect. The Nineteenth Century American poet, Emily Dickinson, structured her poems in the forms of the hymns of her Puritan ancestors, and the Twentieth Century American poet Langston Hughes, whose poem we read at the beginning of Chapter 1, was influenced by the Blues.
At the end of this chapter, you will find a collection of poems that reflect the relationship between poetry and other art forms. Please read them carefully and notice whether you are more drawn to musical poems, painterly poems, or architectural poems. This will give you some insight into how you might want to go about putting your own poems on paper. Also, you can begin to nurture your other artistic interests. Do not limit yourself to the three I have just mentioned, however. Cooking, dancing, sewing, gardening, traveling, and participating in sports-- any number of activities can enhance your creativity. To prove my point, I would like to end this chapter with a little poem of my own that was inspired by my love of eating:
CHEESE
How luscious cheese can be--
Swiss, eaten almost warm
With the big bubbles
That the tongue likes to touch,
And the mellow taste
And chewy feel
That makes a foil
For sweet French bread
And apples crisp
From autumn's newest crop.
Brie can bring such a soft joy
To the mouth,
And the nose welcomes
His mystery scent.
But Stilton is the queen,
Jeweled in her necklaces of blue,
Old and elegant, with a history
Full of secrets
That are not ours to know.
She is friends with the golden pears
And almost no one else,
Yet she lets us coax her near
Where her fragrance alone
Can bring us to the edge
Of ecstasy.
NOTES
CHAPTER 2
1. Mark Schorer, Josephine Miles, and Gordon McKenzie, eds.,
Criticism: The Foundations of Modern Literary Judgment (New York:
Harcourt, Brace & World, Inc., 1958), p. 119.
2. Joseph Campbell, ed., The Portable Jung (New York: Penguin
Books, 1984), p. 308.
3. Ira Progoff, Jung's Psychology And Its Social Meaning (New York:
Anchor Books, 1973), p. 95.
4. Campbell, p. 306.
5. Campbell, p. 309.
6. Schorer, p. 119.
7. Progoff, p. 93.
8. David Keirsey and Marilyn Bates, Please Understand Me:
Character and Temperament Types (Del Mar, CA: Prometheus Nemesis
Book Company, 1984), p. 29.
9. Progoff, p. 58.
10. Keirsey, p. 39.
11. Jean Shinoda Bolen, Goddesses in Everywoman (New York:
Harper & Row, 1984), p. 224.
12. Bolen, p. 241.
QUESTIONS AND TOPICS FOR REVIEW
1. What was Freud's view of poets?
2. How did Jung's view of poets and poetry differ from Freud's?
3. Define the words introvert and extravert.
4. Provide examples of poets who write in the introverted and the
extraverted style.
5. According to Jung, what are the Four Personality Functions?
6. Define Jung's concept of the shadow.
7. What is the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator?
8. Explain the Dionysian Temperament.
9. Provide an example of a poem that expresses Dionysian values.
10. Define the term carpe diem.
11. What is an archetype?
12. List several examples of archetypes from the poems you have read.
13. Explain the characteristics of an Aphrodite-type personality.
14. Which poems have we read that reflect Aphrodite's values?
15. What are some of the other art forms that often have a close
relationship to poetry?
TOPICS FOR DISCUSSION
1. Do you think some people are naturally more creative that others?
Why? Or why not?
2. Discuss ways that people can enhance their creativity. Suggest
methods in addition to those presented in this chapter.
3. According to Jung, people are often attracted to their opposites.
For example, thinking people frequently fall in love with feeling
people. How can our lives be enriched by cultivating relationships
with:
thinking people
feeling people
sensing people
intuitive people?
4. Discuss ways in which everyone can develop all four personality functions
more fully.
5. Which personality function seems to be primary in each of these
poets? You will need to read the section at the end of this
chapter entitled POETRY IN RELATION TO MUSIC, ART, AND
ARCHITECTURE.
Li Po
Thomas Hardy
Akiko Yosano
Catullus
Federico Garcia Lorca
William Blake
Emily Dickinson
Yosa Buson
6. See if you can find the same archetype in several different
poems. Flowers and water, for example, appear in several
of the poems you have read. Discuss the various possible
symbolic meanings of each of the archetypes you have chosen
to analyze.
ACTIVITIES
1. For the next class session, bring a small object that has been
meaningful to you, perhaps for a long time. In small groups,
discuss why you treasure this object. Give everyone a chance
to talk about his or her special possession. Then see of you
can discern any patterns in the kinds of things that people have
brought. Were many of the objects gifts? Were they inherited?
Were they possessions from childhood? Were they made of materials
from nature? Are some of the objects also archetypes? Notice
that it is possible for an object to have both personal and archetypal
symbolic value.
2. Each member of the class should select a different archetypal
personality from mythology and research that person's
temperament and style of creativity. Any of the gods from
the Greek Pantheon would be good choices, such as Athena,
Aphrodite, Demeter, Hestia, Zeus, Aries, Hephaestus,etc.
Do not limit yourself to Greek mythology, however. Native
American mythology is filled with fascinating archetypal
figures, and so is Norse mythology. The Hindu gods such as
Indra, Varuna, and Agni are also interesting. Report your
findings informally to the class. You might want to focus
on some of the following ideas:
A. How does this figure express his or her creativity?
B. Does anyone in the class identify with this figure's
temperament?
C. Can you think of characters in literature, films,
history, or popular culture who have temperaments
similar to any of these archetypes?
D. What can students learn from any of these archetypal
figures that can help the student express himself
or herself creatively?
3. Go to a library and check out several art books. (Even better, go
to a museum.) Find an artist whose work you love and study his
or her technique. This activity can also be done in groups. What
can you learn as writers from this visual artist? You may wish
to focus on:
A. What kinds of images appear in the paintings?
B. Are any of these images also archetypes?
C. Do the paintings appeal primarily to the senses,
or do they also have emotional, intellectual,
. or intuitive appeal?
D. How are the images arranged in the space?
E. Do you think the painting has a message or a theme?
If so, what is it?
4. Take turns reading the poems included in POETRY IN RELATION TO
MUSIC, ART, AND ARCHITECTURE at the end of this chapter. Which
of the poems or poets seem most interesting to you? Can you
explain why?
5. Keep a record for several days of the times of day, places, and
situations when you feel most creative. Discuss these findings
with your classmates. You will notice some similarities and
some differences about your creativity patterns. What does this
tell you about yourselves?
6. Read "Suzanne Takes You Down" by Leonard Cohen and "Hey Jude" by
John Lennon and Paul McCartney. Discuss what you consider to be
the theme of each poem. Then obtain recordings of both poems
sung by their authors. Listen to these recordings as a group.
Do you believe that the music adds or detracts from the two
poems? Why do you feel as you do?
ANALYTICAL WRITING ASSIGNMENTS
1. Choose a poem by Emily Dickinson from POETRY IN RELATION TO
MUSIC, ART, AND ARCHITECTURE at the end of this chapter.
Write a paper analyzing the influence of music on the poem.
You might wish to include sound, rhythm, stanza form, and
phrasing in your discussion.
2. Go to the library and get a book that reproduces William Blake's
engravings of his own poems. Then select one or several of
Blake's poems and analyze the relationship between the poems
and the engravings.
3. Analyze the influence of American Blues on the poetry of Langston
Hughes.
4. Select one or more poems by Thomas Hardy. Then analyze the structure
of the poem as though you were explaining an architectural
design.
5. Research the Spanish (Andalucian) musical genre called Cante Jondo. Then write
a paper discussing the influence of Cante Jondo on Lorca's
poem "Guitar."
6. Find a Japanese art book that reproduces some of Yosa Buson's
paintings. Then write a paper explaining the techniques
from painting that Buson applied to the composition of
his poems.
7. Research the elements of Classical Greek aesthetics and design.
Then write a paper analyzing the influence of Greek artistic
values on H.D.'s poetry.
8. Choose any poem in this chapter and analyze the archetypes in
the poem.
9. Compare and contrast Marvell's "To His Coy Mistress" and Li Po's
"Bring on the Wine" focusing on the carpe diem theme.
10. Analyze the imagery (words which appeal to the senses) in the
opening lines of Chaucer's General Prologue to The Canterbury
Tales.
11. Analyze "The Altar" or "Easter Wings" by George Herbert as examples
of shaped verse. Discuss the relationship between the shape
and the theme of the poem.
12. Write a paper comparing and contrasting the visual effects in
selected poems by H.D. and Yosa Buson.
CREATIVE WRITING ASSIGNMENTS
1. This assignment is designed to help you use both sides of your
brain. If you are right handed, write a brief descriptive
poem with your left hand. If you are left handed, write a
brief descriptive poem with your right hand.
2. If you believe that you are an extravert, try to write a poem
based only on your inner thoughts and feelings. If you believe
that you are an introvert, write a poem based only on external
stimuli. The purpose of this assignment is to help you balance
the extravert and introvert aspects of your temperament.
3. Write a poem expressing the carpe diem theme.
4. Write a poem about your favorite food.
5. Listen to your favorite piece of music. Then write a few lines
in a free flowing style expressing whatever thoughts, feelings,
images, etc., the music brought our in you.
6. Imagine that you are one of the archetypal figures from mythology
discussed in this chapter. Then write a poem in the voice of
that mythological person.
7. Imagine that you are an archetypal object such as a stone, a river,
the wind, etc. Then write a poem in the voice of that archetypal
object.
8. Write a poem in the voice of your own shadow.
9. Think about the symbolic object that you shared with the class.
Then write a poem in which that object appears in some way.
10. Look at an interesting painting or photograph. Then write a poem
which responds to the painting in some way.
POETRY IN RELATION TO MUSIC, ART, AND ARCHITECTURE
POETRY AND MUSIC
EMILY DICKINSON
America 1830-1886
A narrow Fellow in the Grass*
Occasionally rides--
You may have met Him--did you not
His notice sudden is--
The Grass divides as with a Comb--
A spotted shaft is seen--
And then it closes at your feet
And opens further on--
He likes a Boggy Acre
A Floor too cool for Corn--
Yet when a Boy, and Barefoot--
I more than once at Noon
Have passed, I thought, a Whip lash
Unbraiding in the Sun
When stooping to secure it
It wrinkled, and was gone--
Several of Nature's People
I know, and they know me--
I feel for them a transport
Of cordiality--
But never met this Fellow
Attended, or alone
Without a tighter breathing
And Zero at the Bone--
* Emily Dickinson did not title her poems. She capitalized most
nouns and used dashes instead of other forms of punctuation.
I heard a Fly buzz--when I died--
The Stillness in the Room
Was like the Stillness in the Air--
Between the Heaves of Storm--
The Eyes around--had wrung them dry--
And Breaths were gathering firm
For that last Onset--when the King
Be witnessed--in the room--
I willed my Keepsakes--Signed away
What portion of me be
Assignable--and then it was
There interposed a Fly--
With Blue--uncertain stumbling Buzz--
Between the light--and me--
And then the Windows failed--and then
I could not see to see--
Because I could not stop for Death--
He kindly stopped for me--
The Carriage held but just Ourselves--
And Immortality.
We slowly drove--He knew not haste
And I had put away
My labor and my leisure too,
For His Civility--
We passed the School, where Children strove
At Recess--in the Ring--
We passed the Fields of Gazing Grain--
We passed the Setting Sun--
Or rather--He passed Us--
The Dews drew quivering and chill--
For only Gossamer, my Gown--
My Tippet--only Tulle--
We paused before a House that seemed
A swelling of the Ground--
The Roof was scarcely visible--
The Cornice--in the Ground--
Since then--'tis Centuries--and yet
Feels shorter than the Day
I first surmised the Horses' Heads
Were toward Eternity--
FEDERICO GARCIA LORCA
Spain 1899-1936
Guitar
Begins the crying
of the guitar.
From the earliest dawn
the strokes are breaking.
Begins the crying
of the guitar.
It is futile
to stop its sound.
It is impossible
to stop its sound.
It is crying a monotone
like the crying of water,
like the crying of wind
over fallen snow.
It is impossible
to stop its sound.
It is crying over things
far off.
Burning sound of the South
which covets white camellias.
It is crying the arrow without aim,
the evening without tomorrow,
and the first dead bird on the branch.
O guitar!
Heart heavily wounded
by five sharp swords.
Translated by Keith Waldrop
Llanto por Ignacio Sanchez Mejias Part I
The Dying Matador
A coffin on wheels is the bed
At five in the afternoon.
Bones and flutes sound in his ears
At five in the afternoon.
The bull was bellowing through his forehead
At five in the afternoon.
The room was rainbowed with agony
At five in the afternoon.
From far away the gangrene comes already
At five in the afternoon.
The trumpet of the lily through green groins
At five in the afternoon.
Like suns his wounds were burning
At five in the afternoon.
And the crowd was breaking the windows
At five in the afternoon.
At five in the afternoon.
Ay, what a terrible five in the afternoon!
It was five by all the clocks!
It was five in the shade of the afternoon.
Translated by Roy Campbell
LANGSTON HUGHES
America 1902-1967
The Weary Blues
Droning a drowsy syncopated tune,
Rocking back and forth to a mellow croon,
I heard a Negro play.
Down on Lenox Avenue the other night
By the pale dull pallor of an old gas light
He did a lazy sway....
He did a lazy sway....
To the tune o' those Weary Blues.
With his ebony hands on each ivory key
He made that poor piano moan with melody.
O Blues!
Swaying to and fro on his rickety stool
He played that sad raggy tune like a musical fool.
Sweet Blues!
Coming from a black man's soul.
O Blues!
In a deep song voice with a melancholy tone
I heard that Negro sing, that old piano moan--
"Ain't got nobody in all this world,
Ain't got nobody but ma self.
I's gwine to quit ma frownin'
And put ma troubles on the shelf."
Thump, thump, thump, went his foot on the floor.
He played a few chords than he sang some more--
"I got the Weary Blues
And I can't be satisfied.
Got the Weary Blues
And can't be satisfied--
I ain't happy no mo'
And I wish that I had died."
And far into the night he crooned that tune.
The stars went out and so did the moon.
The singer stopped singing and went to bed
While the Weary Blues echoed through his head
He slept like a rock or a man that's dead.
Trumpet Player
The Negro
With the trumpet at his lips
Has dark moons of weariness
Beneath his eyes
Where the smoldering memory
Of slave ships
Blazed to the crack of whips
About his thighs.
The Negro
With the trumpet at his lips
Has a head of vibrant hair
Tamed down,
Patent-leathered now
Until it gleams
Like jet--
Were jet a crown.
The music
From the trumpet at his lips
Is honey
Mixed with liquid fire.
The rhythm
From the trumpet at his lips
Is ecstasy
Distilled from old desire--
Desire
That is longing for the moon
Where the moonlight's but a spotlight
In his eyes,
Desire
That is longing for the sea
Where the sea's a bar-glass
Sucker size.
The Negro
With the trumpet at his lips
Whose jacket
Has a fine one-button roll,
Does not know
Upon what riff the music slips
Its hypodermic needle
To his soul--
But softly
As the tune comes from his throat
Trouble
Mellows to a golden note.
LEONARD COHEN
Canada b. 1934
Suzanne Takes You Down
Suzanne takes you down
to her place near the river,
you can hear the boats go by
you can stay the night beside her.
And you know that she's half crazy
but that's why you want to be there
and she feeds you tea and oranges
that come all the way from China.
Just when you mean to tell her
that you have no gifts to give her
she gets you on her wave-length
and she lets the river answer
that you've always been her lover.
And you want to travel with her,
you want to travel blind
and you know that she can trust you
because you've touched her perfect body
with your mind.
Jesus was a sailor
when he walked upon the water
and he spent a long time watching
from a lonely wooden tower
and when he knew for certain
only drowning men could see him
he said All men will be sailors then
until the sea shall free them,
but he himself was broken
long before the sky would open,
forsaken, almost human,
he sank beneath your wisdom like a stone.
And you want to travel with him,
you want to travel blind
and you think maybe you'll trust him
because he touched your perfect body
with his mind.
Suzanne takes your hand
and she leads you to the river,
she is wearing rags and feathers
from Salvation Army counters.
The sun pours down like honey
on our lady of the harbor
as she shows you where to look
among the garbage and the flowers,
there are heroes in the seaweed
there are children in the morning,
they are leaning out for love
they will lean that way forever
while Suzanne holds the mirror.
And you want to travel with her
and you want to travel blind
and you're sure that she can find you
because she's touched your perfect body
with her mind.
JOHN LENNON AND PAUL MCCARTNEY
England
Hey Jude
Hey Jude, don't make it bad,
take a sad song and make it better,
remember to let her into your heart,
then you can start to make it better.
Hey Jude, don't be afraid,
you were made to go out and get her,
the minute you let her under your skin,
then you begin to make it better.
And anytime you feel the pain,
Hey Jude refrain,
don't carry the world upon your
shoulders.
For well you know that it's a fool,
who plays it cool,
by making his world a little colder.
Hey Jude don't let me down
you have found her now go and get her,
remember (Hey Jude) to let her into your
heart,
then you can start to make it better.
So let it out and let it in
Hey Jude begin,
you're waiting for someone to perform
with.
And don't you know that it's just you.
Hey Jude, you'll do,
the movement you need is on your
shoulder.
Hey Jude, don't make it bad,
take a sad song and make it better,
remember to let her under your skin,
then you'll begin to make it better.
POETRY AND VISUAL ART
WILLIAM BLAKE
England 1757-1827
Little Lamb, who made thee?
Dost thou know who made thee?
Gave thee life & bid thee feed,
By the stream & o'er the mead;
Gave thee clothing of delight,
Softest clothing wooly bright;
Gave thee such a tender voice,
Making all the vales rejoice!
Little Lamb who made thee?
Dost thou know who make thee?
Little Lamb I'll tell thee
Little Lamb I'll tell thee!
He is called by thy name,
For he calls himself a Lamb;
He is meek & he is mild,
He became a little child;
I a child & thou a lamb,
We are called by his name.
Little Lamb God bless thee.
Little Lamb God bless thee.
The Tiger
Tiger! Tiger! burning bright
In the forests of the night,
What immortal hand or eye
Could frame thy fearful symmetry?
In what distant deeps or skies
Burnt the fire of thine eyes?
On what wings dare he aspire?
What the hand dare seize the fire?
And what shoulder, & what art,
Could twist the sinews of thy heart?
And when thy heart began to beat,
What dread hand? & what dread feet?
What the hammer? what the chain?
In what furnace was thy brain?
What the anvil? what dread grasp
Dare its deadly terrors clasp?
When the stars threw down their spears
And water'd heaven with their tears,
Did he smile his work to see?
Did he who make the Lamb make thee?
Tiger! Tiger! burning bright
In the forests of the night,
What immortal hand or eye
Dare frame thy fearful symmetry?
The Sick Rose
O Rose, thou art sick.
The invisible worm
That flies in the night
In the howling storm
Has found out thy bed
Of crimson joy,
And his dark secret love
Does thy life destroy.
A Poison Tree
I was angry with my friend:
I told my wrath, my wrath did end.
I was angry with my foe:
I told it not, my wrath did grow.
And I waterd it in fears,
Night & morning with my tears;
And I sunned it with smiles,
And with soft deceitful wiles.
And it grew both day and night,
Till it bore an apple bright.
And my foe beheld it shine,
And he knew that it was mine,
And into my garden stole,
When the night had veild the pole;
In the morning glad I see
My foe outstretchd beneath the tree.
YOSA BUSON
Japan 1716-1783
Sudden shower:
Grasping the grass-blades
A shoal of sparrows.
Translated by Geoffrey Bownas and
Anthony Thwaite
Spring rain:
soaking on the roof
A child's rag ball.
Translated by Geoffrey Bownas and
Anthony Thwaite
On the temple bell
has settled, and is fast asleep,
a butterfly.
Translated by Harold Henderson
Blossoms on the pear--
and a woman in the moonlight
reads a letter there.*
Translated by Harold Henderson
* Japanese poetry does not use rhyme. The translator, Harold Henderson,
added rhyme to several of his translations of Japanese Haiku.
A mountain pheasant,
treading on its tail, the springtime's
setting sun.
Translated by Harold Henderson
Morning haze:
as in a painting of a dream,
men go their ways.
Translated by Harold Henderson
A mountain ant,
it is clearly seen
on a white peony.
Translated by Yuki Sawa
and Edith M. Shiffert
A village of a hundred houses
and not even a single gate
with chrysanthemums.
Translated by Yuki Sawa
and Edith M. Shiffert
POETRY AND ARCHITECTURE
GEORGE HERBERT
England 1593-1633
The Altar
A broken A L T A R, Lord, thy servant rears,
Made of a heart, and cemented with tears:
Whose parts are as thy hand did frame;
No workman's tool hath touched the same.
A HEART alone
Is such a stone,
As nothing but
Thy power doth cut.
Wherefore each part
Of my hard heart
Meets in this frame,
To praise thy Name:
That, if I chance to hold my peace,
These stones to praise thee may not cease.
Oh let thy blessed S A C R I F I C E be mine,
And sanctify this A L T A R to be thine.
Easter Wings
Lord, who createdst man in wealth and store,
Though foolishly he lost the same,
Decaying more and more
Till he became
Most poor:
With thee
O let me rise
As larks, harmoniously,
And sing this day thy victories:
Then shall the fall further the flight in me.
My tender age in sorrow did begin:
And still with sickness and shame
Thou didst so punish sin,
That I became
Most thin.
With thee
Let me combine,
And feel this day thy victory;
For, if I imp my wing on thine,
Affliction shall advance the flight in me.
THOMAS HARDY
England 1840-1928
Neutral Tones
We stood by a pond that winter day,
And the sun was white, as though chidden of God,
And a few leaves lay on the starving sod;
--They had fallen from an ash, and were gray.
Your eyes on me were as eyes that rove
Over tedious riddles of years ago;
And some words played between us to a fro
On which lost the more by our love.
The smile on your mouth was the deadest thing
Alive enough to have strength to die;
And a grin of bitterness swept thereby
Like an ominous bird a-wing...
Since then, keen lessons that love deceives,
And wrings with wrong, have shaped to me
Your face, and the God-curst sun, and a tree,
And a pond edged with grayish leaves.
The Darkling Thrush
I leant upon a coppice gate
When Frost was spectre-gray,
And Winter's dregs made desolate
The weakening eye of day.
The tangled bine-stems scored the sky
Like strings of broken lyres,
And all mankind that haunted nigh
Had sought their household fires.
The land's sharp features seemed to be
The Century's corpse outleant,*
His crypt the cloudy canopy,
The wind his death-lament.
The ancient pulse of germ and birth
Was shrunken hard and dry,
And every spirit upon earth
Seemed fervorless as I.
At once a voice arose among
The bleak twigs overhead
In a full-throated evensong
Of joy illimited;
An aged thrush, frail, gaunt, and small,
In blast-beruffled plume,
Had chosen thus to fling his soul
Upon the growing gloom.
So little cause for carolings
Of such ecstatic sound
Was written on terrestrial things
Afar or nigh around,
That I could think there trembled through
His happy good-night air
Some blessed Hope, whereof he knew
And I was unaware.
* This poem was written on December 31, 1900.
The Convergence of the Twain
(Lines on the Loss of the Titanic)*
1
In solitude of the sea
Deep from human vanity,
And the Pride of Life that planned her, stilly couches she.
2
Steel chambers late the pyres
Of her salamandrine fires,
Cold currents thrid, and turn to rhythmic tidal lyres.
3
Over the mirrors meant
To glass the opulent
The sea-worm crawls--grotesque, slimed, dumb, indifferent.
4
Jewels in joy designed
To ravish the sensuous mind
Lie lightless, all their sparkles bleared and black and blind.
5
Dim moon-eyed fishes near
Gaze at the gilded gear
And query: "What does this vaingloriousness down here?"...
6
Well: while was fashioning
This creature of cleaving wing,
The Immanent Will that stirs and urges everything
7
Prepared a sinister mate
For her--so gaily great--
A Shape of Ice, for the time far and dissociate.
8
And as the smart ship grew
In stature, grace, and hue,
In shadowy silent distance grew the iceberg too.
9
Alien they seemed to be:
No mortal eye could see
The intimate welding of their later history,
10
Or sign that they were bent
By paths coincident
On being anon twin halves of one august event,
11
Till the Spinner of the Years
Said "Now!" And each one hears,
And consummation comes, and jars two hemispheres.
* The Titanic, the largest and most luxurious ocean liner of its day, sank on its first voyage on April 15, 1912, because it collided with an iceberg.
H.D. (HILDA DOOLITTLE)
America 1886-1961
Sea Poppies
Amber husk
fluted with gold,
fruit on the sand
marked with a rich grain,
treasure
spilled near the shrub-pines
to bleach on the boulders:
your stalk has caught root
among the wet pebbles
and drift flung by the sea
and grated shells
and split conch-shells.
Beautiful, wide-spread
fire upon leaf,
what meadow yields
so fragrant a leaf
as your bright leaf?
Helen*
All Greece hates
the still eyes in the white face,
the lustre as of olives
where she stands,
and the white hands.
All Greece reviles
the wan face when she smiles,
hating it deeper still
when she grows wan and white,
remembering past enchantments
and past ills.
Greece sees unmoved,
God's daughter, born of love,
the beauty of cool feet
and slenderest knees,
could love indeed the maid,
only if she were laid,
white ash amid funereal cypresses.
* Helen, the beautiful wife of the Greek leader Menelaus, was abducted by Paris, a Trojan prince. She was blamed for the Trojan War in spite of having been kidnapped.
Pear Tree
Silver dust,
lifted from the earth,
higher than my arms reach,
you have mounted,
O silver,
higher than my arms reach,
you front us with great mass;
no flower ever opened
so staunch a white leaf,
no flower ever parted silver
from such rare silver;
O white pear,
your flower-tufts
thick on the branch
bring summer and ripe fruits
in their purple heart.
Evadne*
I first tasted under Apollo's lips,
love and love sweetness,
I, Evadne;
my hair is made of crisp violets
or hyacinth which the wind combs back
across some rock shelf;
I, Evadne,
was made of the god of light.
His hair was crisp to my mouth,
as the flower of the crocus,
across my cheek,
cool as the silver-cress
on Erotos bank;
between by chin and my throat,
his mouth slipped over and over.
Still between my arm and shoulder,
I feel the brush of his hair,
and my hands keep the gold they took,
as they wandered over and over,
that great arm-full of yellow flowers.
* Evadne, daughter of Poseidon and Pitane, bore Apollo a son, Iamus, who became a famous soothsayer.
FINDING THE POET
CHAPTER 3 READING POETRY
Reading a poem is one of the great experiences of life. Most of you know this, but there are still some of you who have horror stories to tell. I'm afraid there are still a few of those teachers around who believe that only their way of interpreting a poem is correct. And they feel that it is their duty to tell you that you are wrong if you don't agree with them. Those instructors may have poisoned your love of poetry and impaired your self-esteem as a scholar. Nevertheless, I suggest that you take King Lear's advice and "...forget and forgive..." You will not progress in your understanding of poetry if you hold on to these unpleasant memories.
Let's turn our thoughts instead to the adventure of reading a poem and slowly, one step at a time, unlocking all its secrets.
On First Looking into Chapman's Homer
Much have I travell'd in the realms of gold,
And many goodly states and kingdoms seen;
Round many western islands have I been
Which bards in fealty to Apollo hold.
Oft of one wide expanse had I been told
That deep-browed Homer ruled as his demesne;
Yet did I never breathe its pure serene
Till I heard Chapman speak out loud and bold:
Then felt I like some watcher of the skies
When a new planet swims into his ken;
Or like stout Cortez when with eagle eyes
He star'd at the Pacific--and all his men
Look'd at each other with a wild surmise--
Silent, upon a peak in Darien.
by John Keats, 1816
I love this poem because to me, it is about the joy of reading poetry. But you need to discover the poem's meaning for yourself. Reading a poem is not like reading the newspaper. You cannot expect to extract a poem's meaning on the first, second, or even the third reading. A poem is a highly condensed vehicle for communicating meaningful experience using words. Even with all of my years of experience, I almost never feel that I understand a poem on first reading it. I would like for you to read this poem by John Keats several times, and each time you will need to focus on a different aspect of the poem. I hope the following checklist will help you:
1. Read the poem aloud. Just enjoy the sound of the poem. Feel its pace, and listen for any rhythms, rhymes or other sounds the poem may contain. Have fun with the way the words roll off your tongue. Do not worry about what the poem means on this first reading. Your intuition will already be at work as you appreciate the way your voice recreates the poem. Read in your own natural voice. It is not necessary to read poetry in an artificially dramatic fashion. It would be silly, for example, to affect a British accent because the author of this poem was from England. When you read the poem out loud, it becomes your poem.
2. Read the poem again to understand its sentence patterns. A poem does not look like a group of sentences and paragraphs, but it often is. Try to read the poem as though it were a paragraph, stopping at the ends of sentences instead of at the ends of lines. This will help you understand the relationships from thought to thought in a poem. Also notice if the poem has a beginning, middle, and end and if it has any changes in focus or direction. You may notice that this poem by Keats contains only two sentences. The first sentence ends at the end of the fourth line, and the second sentence continues to the final word of the poem. However, there is a colon at the end of the eighth line, and the next line begins with the word "Then." This suggests that the part of the sentence that follows the colon is of some significance, and the word "Then" hints at some sort of cause and effect relationship between the first eight lines and the last six lines. Do not feel nervous if you still do not understand the meanings of the sentences in the poem; you still have a few more steps to go.
3. Use a dictionary. Once you have a feel for the overall flow of the sentences or phrases in the poem, get out your dictionary and look up all of the words you are even slightly unsure of. With experience, you will learn that poets often use words that have multiple definitions, adding complexity to the poem's possible interpretations. You don't want to miss any of these nuances. Also, the meanings of words change over time. The Oxford English Dictionary, often referred to as the O.E.D., is a wonderful source that provides the history of every word in the language along with all of the changes in meaning that each word has undergone. You may discover, for example, that the word "stout," which appears in line 11 of Keats' poem originally meant "proud, fierce, brave, and resolute." Later, however, it came to mean "having a thick or massive body." Which meaning do you think Keats intended in this poem?
You will also need to think about the connotations and denotations of the words in the poem. The denotation of a word is its meaning or definition as listed in the dictionary. A word's connotation, on the other hand, is its personality, or the feelings and associations that the word evokes in people. The word "stench," for example, has a negative connotation, whereas the word "aroma" has a positive one. Poets are highly sensitive to connotations, and they choose their words carefully to create just the effect they desire.
In Keats' poem you may notice several words such as "realms," "gold," "goodly," and "pure" which have positive connotations while there are no words that elicit a negative response from the reader.
As for denotations, Keats probably uses several words which are unfamiliar to you. Some of the words you may need to look up in the dictionary might be: "bards," "fealty," "demesne," "ken," and "surmise."
Notice that the word "surmise" is usually a verb, suggesting an action, but here Keats uses it as a noun. Also, the word "serene" is usually an adjective, as when we refer to someone as a very serene person. However, in this poem the word "serene" is a noun, and you may be surprised to learn its meaning. There are also several names in this poem which you may not recognize. This brings us to our next step.
4. Look up all of the allusions in the poem, including all of the names of people and places. You will have to be resourceful here. Reference books that you will find especially helpful include an encyclopedia of mythology, a Biblical encyclopedia, an atlas, and a biographical dictionary that lists the manes and accomplishments of famous people. You will certainly have to know who Chapman and Homer are if you ever hope to understand this poem by Keats. Other allusions include references to Apollo, Cortez, and Darien. You will be amused to discover that Keats apparently thought that Cortez discovered the Pacific Ocean, whereas in fact it was Balboa. You will notice that the second sentence of the poem gives two examples of exciting discoveries--an astronomer discovering a new planet ("...some watcher of the skies/When a new planet swims into his ken") and an explorer finding a previously unknown ocean ("...stout Cortez when with eagle eyes/He star'd at the Pacific.") He compares these two exciting discoveries with his own experience of discovery described in the phrase: " I heard Chapman speak out loud and bold." Keats makes the relationship between his excitement in reading the Greek poet Homer, author of The Iliad, in the excellent translation by George Chapman and the discoveries made by famous astronomers and explorers in the phrase "Then felt I like" at the beginning of the ninth line. Getting a firm grip on the vocabulary and allusions in a poem should help you begin to piece together its meaning. But you will still have more work to do.
5. Find out about the cultural and historic context in which the poem was written. Once again, libraries are full of information about literary history. You should have no difficulty discovering that Keats lived in England during the Romantic Period, a time when people hungered for new forms of knowledge and experience. Bored by the conservatism of the Neo-Classical age which had preceded their own, the Romantics looked to an even earlier time in English history for inspiration--the Elizabethan Period, also known as the English Renaissance. The Renaissance, like the Romantic Period, was a time of individualism, creativity, and fascination with discoveries of all kinds. Both time periods were inspired by a passion for the values and art of the Greek Classical Period. Homer, who probably lived in the Ninth Century B.C., is traditionally accepted to be the author of both The Iliad and The Odyssey, two epic poems which "...may be considered the beginnings of the continuing tradition from which modern Western literature has developed."1 George Chapman's translation of Homer was written in 1616, during the Elizabethan Period. Keats' poem is thus a tribute to both the Greek heroic tradition and the English Renaissance. Keats even chose a Renaissance poetic form, the sonnet, as the structure of his poem.
6. Find out something about the poet. Do you remember the statement I quoted from Carl Jung in Chapter 2 saying that art should rise above the personal life of the poet, communicating instead from the universal heart and spirit of the poet to the universal human spirit of the reader? In the same speech, Jung admitted that although art is ultimately a universal medium, it can still be helpful to know something about the poet. Said Jung, "It is undeniable that the poet's psychic disposition permeates his work root and branch. Nor is there anything new in the statement that personal factors largely influence the poet's choice and use of his materials."2 Keats' choice of the sonnet, a fourteen-line rhymed poetic form of Italian origin, is an example of a personal factor which influenced his selection of materials. Yosa Buson would not have chosen to write his poems as sonnets, just as Keats would never have chosen to write in the three-line, seventeen syllable haiku form.
Even though it may seem obvious that personal factors do influence many of the elements in a poem, there has still been a great deal of debate over the years about whether or not a poet's personal life has any relevance to the poem. When I went to college, T.S. Eliot's belief that the poem should stand on its own merit was very much in vogue. Eliot, a very influential Twentieth Century poet, was always careful to mask his own personality in his own poems, and he disliked "...the poetic exploitation of the author's own personality"3 in all poetry. This attitude led to a very impersonal and analytical approach to the study of poetry for several generations. Students were taught to think their way through poems and ignore any personal factors, including the poet's own feelings and intuitions. Consequently, many of my professors told us nothing about the poets, and even the textbooks we used contained very little biographical information. Although I can appreciate the value of letting a poem stand on its own as a message to "universal man," I always felt that I might be missing something by knowing nothing about the writer.
Conversely, both students and instructors make a serious mistake if they assume all poems are autobiographical and that if a poem has a speaker, that voice is always the poet sharing his or her own experiences. Nevertheless, I have found that some basic information about the poet can be very helpful. The fact that Buson was a painter, for example, may have helped you to appreciate the visual details, composition, and perspective in his poems.
Similarly, there is a vast amount of information available about John Keats. Some of this information, like the fact that Keats was barely over five feet tall, may be irrelevant to the poem. But other details, such as the fact that Keats was only twenty-one years old when he wrote this poem and that he had in fact traveled very little and was always short of money, may contribute to your appreciation of this poem. Certainly the poem has a sense of youthful exuberance and enthusiasm. And for a young man who had limited financial resources and was not a member of the aristocracy (his father, a hostler, had died in a fall from a horse when Keats was fourteen), reading a classic of world literature could be a source of adventure, "travel," and liberation.
When I was a student, I got into the habit of going to the library and checking out a few books about every author I was assigned to write a paper on in any of my literature classes. I probably did this out of insecurity at the beginning because I felt more confident in composing my papers if I knew something about the author and something about what the critics had to say about him or her. A secondary benefit I received was my continuing fascination with poets as creative people. As a result, I gained some insight into how poets work, and this has helped me in writing my own poetry.
Keats, for example, was an extraverted person who was strongly impressed by environmental factors and gained most of his inspiration from external stimuli. He wrote "To a Nightingale," for example, after actually hearing a nightingale singing in a friend's garden. And "On First Looking into Chapman's Homer" is not the only poem Keats wrote in response to something he had read. He has another sonnet entitled, "On Sitting Down to Read King Lear Once Again." In fact, Keats was so susceptible to outside influences that he passed up the opportunity to develop a friendship with the poet Percy Bysshe Shelly for fear that Shelley would influence his poetry too strongly. He was also a very sensuous person who loved colors, sights, smells, textures, etc. Unfortunately, Keats contracted terminal tuberculosis when he was about twenty-three, and he wrote all of his major poems by the age of twenty-four. At twenty-six, he was dead.
I have always felt a certain urgency in Keats' poetry, an appreciation of all the sensuous beauty that the world has to offer combined with an awareness that human life is very short. Unlike the carpe diem poets, Keats did not live just for his own pleasure. Although he deeply loved his fiancee, Fanny Brawne, he did not marry her and run the risk of infecting her with tuberculosis. Instead, he poured all his youthful sensual energy into creating beautiful poems. I have always found his epitaph, which he wrote himself, especially poignant: "Here lies one whose name is writ in water." Keats was never a famous or successful poet during his own lifetime, and he thought he would be forgotten. Today, he is viewed as one of the greatest poets of the Romantic Tradition.
These are the kinds of insights you can gain simply by doing a little reading about each author whose poems you are trying to understand. Of course, this takes a little extra time, but poetry is worth it. After you have learned a few things about the poet and the world in which he or she lived, you will need to scrutinize the poem itself a little more carefully.
7. Examine the poem's form, genre, and poetic devices. This process will be much easier for you when you have completed Chapters 5, 6, and 7, where these elements will be discussed in depth. For now, you can simply look at the poem to see if it seems to have any particular kind of structure, as you did with the "architectural" poems in Chapter 2. You can also ask yourself if the poem's subject matter seems to place it in any special category. I've already told you that "On First Looking into Chapman's Homer" is an Italian sonnet, so you might want to skip ahead to the discussion of Italian Sonnets in Chapter 5. These poems, which are fourteen lines in length, usually have a shift of focus or direction of some kind between the first eight lines and the last six lines. Notice that Keats describes his life before he read Chapman's translation of Homer in the first eight lines of this sonnet. In the last six lines, beginning with the word "Then," he describes his feelings after he read Homer. Keats also uses several effective poetic devices in these last six lines, especially comparisons, which are called similes and metaphors. These devices are discussed in more detail in Chapter 7; however, you may notice that Keats says that he felt "like some watcher of the skies" and "like stout Cortez." In these similes Keats compares his emotional excitement to the sense of wonder and discovery experienced by great astronomers and explorers. He also says that Cortez stared at the Pacific Ocean "with eagle eyes." This kind of comparison, in which the poet does not use the words "as" or "like," is called a metaphor. Keats is comparing Cortez's eyes to those of an eagle. In this compliment to Cortez, Keats describes a kind of expanded vision, since eagles are able to see tiny objects from a great height. But since Keats is really comparing himself to Cortez, he is saying that reading Homer has given himself an expanded vision that he did not have before. Analyzing the form and poetic devices used by the writer can really help you gain some understanding of the poem's meaning.
8. Write a paraphrase of the poem. When you feel that you are able to follow the poet's flow of thoughts, you understand his or her vocabulary, including the connotations of the words in the poem, you have looked up all the allusions, and you've found out something about the time and place in which the poem was written along with some basic information about the author, and you have a good grasp of the poem's structure and poetic elements, then you are ready to write the poem out in your own words. This can be a lot of fun. It feels just a little naughty to strip a beautiful poem of its "shimmering robes" and rephrase it into a pair of Levi's and a tee shirt, but believe me, you are doing the poet no harm, and you are helping yourself to clarify your reading of the poem. A paraphrase is simply a restatement in your own words. When you paraphrase, you do not need to use the same word order or sentence structure as the original. The idea is to come up with a comprehensible statement in your own language which is true to the spirit of the original poem. For example, in paraphrasing the fifth and sixth lines of "On First Looking into Chapman's Homer," you might write something like, "I had often been told about a large area that the wise Homer ruled as his realm;" Notice that this clause changes Keats' word order but clarifies his meaning for modern readers. I hope you don't think I'm going to paraphrase the rest of the poem for you. That's your job.
9. Read the poem again, focusing on the four personality functions. Which function seems dominant in this poem? What effect does the poem have on you? As you gain more experience in reading and writing poetry, you will discover that the best poems appeal to all four personality functions. The poem entitled "Cheese" that I shared with you at the end of Chapter 2 has very limited appeal because it is a sense only sort of poem. It may be interesting in the way it emphasizes the sensory aspects of cheese, and it may even be somewhat amusing and perhaps a little intuitive in comparing stilton, one of the world's smelliest cheeses, to an aging yet still elegant monarch, but ultimately the poem lacks emotional appeal and has next to no intellectual content.
If the poems you are writing seem shallow or limited, do not criticize yourself. Try to look at your poems objectively, appreciate them for the value that they have, and treat them with respect. I've taken the risk of sharing a poem with you that is not my best, but I still like it. We do not need to create unrealistic expectations for each poem we write.
Keats got very lucky when he wrote "On First Looking into Chapman's Homer." This poem has emotional, intellectual, sensual, and intuitive appeal. He expresses strong emotions about the joy of reading, yet he makes us think about the importance of intellectual and physical discovery. He engages our physical senses with his vivid descriptions, and his similes and metaphors require us to make intuitive leaps to compare people and things which might not logically seem to be alike. Other poets in the English language tradition who are masters at balancing the four personality functions are William Shakespeare, John Donne, Emily Dickinson, and Gerard Manley Hopkins. You will have an opportunity to apply this ten-step method to reading some of their poems later in this chapter. We have now come to the final step.
10. Write a statement of the poem's theme. In literature, a theme is a general statement about the overall meaning or purpose of the work. Therefore, an inappropriate statement of the theme of "On First Looking into Chapman's Homer" would be, "This poem is about how Keats feels that he had a great time reading this book." Theme is what the poem, not the poet, is trying to say to "universal man" (and woman.) A better statement of theme for this poem might be, "'On First Looking into Chapman's Homer' by John Keats affirms the fact that reading great literature can be a life-changing source of inspiration and discovery." However, this is only my statement of the poem's theme; you must come up with your own. After proceeding through all of these ten steps, you may have gained a deeper insight into this poem than I have.
It may surprise you to know that the theme is often the last thing the poet thinks of when composing the poem. Frequently the poet is simply inspired by some stimulus, as Hardy was when he heard an old bird chirping cheerfully on a gloomy day and was thus motivated to write "The Darkling Thrush." Similarly, Buson seems to have been inspired to write one of his very famous haiku poems when he was struck by the dazzling shades of white when he saw a woman in moonlight reading a letter on white paper under a pear tree covered in silvery white blossoms. What is this poem's theme? We must be careful not to confuse a poem's theme with its subject. The theme of Keats' poems is not really about Homer, and the theme of "The Darkling Thrush" is not about listening to a bird singing. Neither is the theme of Buson's haiku about a woman standing under a pear tree. Buson's theme might be something like "The spirit of the Buddha unites all things into a harmonious whole." But we would need to follow the ten steps that we just applied to Keats' poem before we would feel comfortable writing a statement of theme for Buson's haiku.
The theme of a poem sometimes comes to a poet intuitively after he or she has written down a response to an internal or external stimulus. This is when the relationship between the poet and the reader becomes especially crucial. It is not the poet's job to state the poem's theme. The reader must infer the theme from the images, the archetypes, allusions, connotations of words, and other elements provided by the poem.
Similarly, I advise you to put the poem's theme on the bottom of the list when you write your own poetry. Poems which are written consciously on a specific theme such as "war is evil" are often pretentious, preachy, and uninteresting. You will also run the risk of writing a "thinking" poem to the exclusion of sensing, feeling, and intuition if you write a poem only to address a theme. Your poems will reach out to your readers much more effectively of you begin with the stimulus that sparked your creativity and then let your thoughts, emotions, perceptions and intuitive responses work together.
I hope you have discovered that being able to read a poem effectively will also enhance your understanding of the craft of poetry and will ultimately stimulate your own creativity. I encourage you to read all kinds of poetry and to read with passion. I caution you once again to be humble and to respect every poem you read, including your own poetry and the work of your classmates. The brilliant mystic poetry of William Blake looks like childish drivel to people who are ignorant, and Buson's haiku poems seem pointless to those who have never studied the aesthetics of Zen Buddhist art. I hope you will also treasure your own understanding of the poems you have read regardless of how others may have interpreted these poems. Finally, I hope you will continue to read and to write in a spirit of trust--trusting yourself, your Instructor, and your classmates as you don together the "shining robes" of poetry.
NOTES
CHAPTER 3
1. Louis Kronenberger, ed., Atlantic Brief Lives (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1971), p. 375.
2. Schorer, p. 119.
3. M. H. Abrams, ed., The Norton Anthology of English Literature, Sixth Edition, Vol. 2 (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1993), p. 2139.
QUESTION AND TOPICS FOR REVIEW
1. Review the ten steps in reading and understanding a poem.
2. What is the Oxford English Dictionary, and why is it especially helpful to students of poetry?
3. Define the words connotation and denotation.
4. In poetry, what is a simile? What is a metaphor?
5. Define the word theme as it applies to literature.
6. In literature, what is a genre?
7. What is a paraphrase?
TOPICS FOR DISCUSSION
1. Who was Homer, and why is he so important in world literature?
2. Who was George Chapman, and why was he so important to John Keats?
3. What are some of the characteristics of the Italian sonnet?
4. Discuss some of the factors in the time and place in which Keats lived that may have influenced "On First Looking into Chapman's Homer."
5. Discuss some of the factors in Keats' own life that may have influenced the poem.
6. Share your paraphrases of "On First Looking into Chapman's Homer." What are the similarities and differences between them? Do some of the paraphrases help clarify the poem's meaning better than others?
7. Share your statements of the theme of "On First Looking into Chapman's Homer." Again, notice the similarities and differences between them. As a group, can you agree on two or three statements that seem to express the poem's theme most effectively?
8. Keats made an error in assuming that Cortez discovered the Pacific Ocean. In fact, Balboa made that discovery. How significant is Keats' error in the overall meaning of the poem?
ACTIVITIES
1. Form groups of three or four and select a poem from Chapters 1, 2, or 3 for each group to read. Work through the ten steps in reading a poem together, and report your findings back to the class. Be sure to include your paraphrase and your statement of theme in your report.
2. Select any poem from Chapters 1, 2, or 3, and read the poem in class. Then discuss the emotional, intellectual, sensual, and intuitive aspects of the poem. Is one function stronger in the poem than others?
3. Bring an Oxford English Dictionary to class. Then select any poem and look up the meanings of any of the words that are unfamiliar to you. Finally, discuss the connotations and denotations of the words in the poem. How does this information help you understand the poem's meaning?
4. Choose a poem from a different time period and or a different culture from your own. Do some research on the cultural and historical background of the poem. Do any of your findings help you understand the poem better? Share your discoveries with the class.
5. Choose any poet we have studied and do some research on the poet's life. (You did some preliminary research on the lives of poets in Activity 1 at the end of Chapter 1. You may wish to continue researching the same poet.) Then choose a poem by the author you have researched and see if your knowledge of the poet's life gives you a better understanding of the poem. Report your findings informally to the class.
ANALYTICAL WRITING ASSIGNMENTS
1. Select any poem from Chapters 1, 2, or 3 and write a paraphrase of the poem.
2. Prepare a brief written report on a poet, including an analysis of the meaning of one of his or her poems and a discussion of the poet's creative process in constructing the poem. Include any biographical information that seems pertinent.
3. Write an analysis of any poem starting with a statement of the poem's theme. Explain which elements in the poem led you to interpret the poem's theme as you did. You may wish to include connotations and denotations of words, allusions, structure, poetic devices, historical and biographical factors, etc.
4. Read Shakespeare's Sonnet 130 very carefully, following the ten step for reading a poem. Then analyze the poem as a satire on unrealistic love sonnets.
5. Read John Donne's "The Flea" very carefully. On one level, you may discover that the poem is a comic carpe diem poem about a man whose lover kills a flea who has bitten both of them. On another level, the poem is an oddly persuasive argument. Explain the events that take place in this poem and analyze the intellectual, sensual, emotional, and intuitive aspects of the poem.
6. John Donne's "A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning" is also an argument. Analyze the thesis of the speaker's argument in the poem and the evidence he provides to support this argument. Pay special attention to the simile of the compass near the end of the poem.
7. Select one of the poems by Emily Dickinson in Chapter 2. Analyze the ways in which Dickinson challenges her reader to respond intuitively to the poem.
8. What is being described in Dickinson's "A Narrow Fellow in the Grass"?
Write a paper explaining how Dickinson communicates to the reader the subject of the poem without ever naming it.
9. Analyze the use of archetypes in Sor Juana de la Cruz's "First Villancico."
10. Analyze the intellectual, sensual, emotional, and intuitive aspects of Gerard Manley Hopkins' "God's Grandeur."
11. State the theme of Hopkins' "Spring and Fall." Then analyze the elements in the poem that led you to your conclusions about the poem's theme.
12. Research the life and cultural background of William Shakespeare, John Donne, Emily Dickinson, or Gerard Manley Hopkins. Write a paper focusing on elements in the poet's personal life that may have influenced his or her style and choice of subjects and themes.
CREATIVE WRITING ASSIGNMENTS
In all of the creative writing assignments I have suggested so far, I have deliberately avoided telling you how to construct your poems. I have done this consciously to allow for the diversity of creative styles, and I want you to discover for yourself whether or not you want to write rhymed poems, structured stanzas, rhythmic poetry, or free verse, poetry which has no predetermined structure, rhyme, or rhythm. You may have felt a little insecure at first, but writing poetry is a process of discovery. You might want to write in a variety of structures and styles until you find something that feels comfortable for now.
1. Write a poem that responds in some way to something you have read.
2. Write a poem on any subject in fourteen lines. Try to create some kind of shift in direction or focus after the eighth line.
3. Write a three-line poem which uses at least two of the senses.
4. Sit in your back yard or in a park for at least half an hour. Then write a poem which responds to what you saw, heard, smelled, felt, etc.
5. Write a poem based on an external or internal stimulus. Try to let the poem evolve intuitively and allow the theme to emerge naturally. After you have written the poem, write a statement of the poem's theme on the back of the paper.
6. Trade poems with a classmate and go through the ten steps in reading each other's poems. Then share your paraphrases and statements of theme with each other. Compare your own statement of theme with the statement which your classmate has written about your poem. Were you surprised?
ADDITIONAL POEMS FOR READING AND ANALYSIS
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
England 1564-1616
Sonnet 18
Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?
Thou art more lovely and more temperate:
Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,
And summer's lease hath all too short a date:
Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines
And often is his gold complexion dimmed;
And every fair from fair sometimes declines,
By chance or nature's changing course untrimmed;
But thy eternal summer shall not fade ,
Nor lose possession of that fair thou ow'st,
Nor shall death brag thou wander'st in his shade,
When in eternal lines to time thou grow'st:
So long as men can breathe, or eyes can see,
So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.
Sonnet 116
Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments; love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove:
O, no, it is an ever-fixed mark,
That looks on tempests and is never shaken;
It is the star to every wand'ring bark,
Whose worth's unknown although his highth be taken.
Love's not Time's fool, though lips and cheeks
Within his bending sickle's compass come;
Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,
But bears it out even to the edge of doom.
If this be error and upon me proved,
I never writ, nor no man ever loved.
Sonnet 130
My mistress' eyes are nothing like the sun;
Coral is far more red than her lips' red;
If snow be white, why then her breasts are dun;
If hairs be wires, black wires grow on her head.
I have seen roses damasked red and white,
But no such roses see I in her cheeks;
And in some perfumes is there more delight
Than in the breath that from my mistress reeks.
I love to hear her speak, yet well I know
That music hath a far more pleasing sound;
I grant I never saw a goddess go;
My mistress, when she walks, treads on the ground.
And yet, by heaven, I think my love as rare
As any she belied with false compare.
JOHN DONNE
England 1572-1631
The Good-Morrow
I wonder, by my troth, what thou and I
Did, till we loved? Were we not weaned till then,
But sucked on country pleasures, childishly?
Or snorted we in the seven sleepers' den?
'Twas so; but this, all pleasures fancies be.
If ever any beauty I did see,
Which I desired and got, 'twas but a dream of thee.
And now good morrow to our waking souls,
Which watch not one another out of fear;
For love all love of other sights controls,
And makes one little room an everywhere.
Let sea-discoverers to new worlds have gone,
Let maps to others, worlds on worlds have shown:
Let us possess one world; each hath one, and is one.
My face in thine eye, thine in mine appears,
And true plain hearts do in the faces rest;
Where can we find two better hemispheres,
Without sharp North, without declining West?
Whatever lives was not mixed equally;
If our two loves be one, or thou and I
Love so alike that none do slacken, none can die.
The Flea
Mark but this flea, and mark in this,
How little that which thou deniest me is;
Me it sucked first, and now sucks thee,
And in this flea our two bloods mingled be;
Thou know'st that this cannot be said
A sin, a shame, or loss of maidenhead,
Yet this enjoys before it woo
And pampered swells with one blood made of two,
And this, alas, is more than we would do.
Oh, stay, three lives in one flea spare,
Where we almost, nay more than married are.
This flea is you and I, and this
Our marriage bed and marriage temple is;
Though parents grudge, and you, we are met,
And cloistered in these living walls of jet.
Though use make you apt to kill me,
Let not to that self-murder added be,
And sacrilege, thee sins in killing three.
Cruel and sudden, hast thou since
Purpled thy nail with blood of innocence?
Wherein could this flea guilty be,
Except in that drop which it sucked from thee?
Yet thou triumph'st, and say'st that thou
Find'st not thy self nor me the weaker now;
'Tis true; then learn how false fears be:
Just so much honor, when thou yield'st to me,
Will waste as this flea's death took life from thee.
A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning
As virtuous men pass mildly away,
And whisper to their souls to go,
Whilst some of their sad friends do say
The breath goes now, and some say, No;
So let us melt, and make no noise,
No tear-floods, nor sigh-tempests move;
'Twere profanation of our joys
To tell the laity our love.
Moving of th' earth brings harms and fears,
Men reckon what it did and meant;
But trepidation of the spheres,
Though greater far, is innocent.
Dull sublunary lovers' love
(Whose soul is sense) cannot admit
Absence, because it doth remove
Those things which elemented it.
But we, by a love so much refined
That our selves know not what it is,
Inter-assured of the mind,
Care less, eyes, lips, and hands to miss.
Our two souls therefore, which are one,
Though I must go, endure not yet
A breach, but an expansion,
Like gold to airy thinness beat.
If they be two, they are two so
As stiff twin compasses are two;
Thy soul, the fixed foot, makes no show
To move, but doth, if th' other do.
And though it at the center sit,
Yet when the other far doth roam,
It leans and harkens after it,
And grows erect, as that comes home.
Such wilt thou be to me, who must
Like th' other foot, obliquely run;
Thy firmness makes my circle just,
And makes me end where I begun.
Holy Sonnet 10
Death, be not proud, though some have called thee
Mighty and dreadful, for thou are not so;
For those whom thou think'st thou dost overthrow
Die not, poor Death, nor yet canst thou kill me.
From rest and sleep, which but thy pictures be,
Much pleasure; then from thee much more must flow,
And soonest our best men with thee do go,
Rest of their bones, and soul's delivery.
Thou are slave to fate, chance, kings, and desperate men,
And dost with poison, war, and sickness dwell,
And poppy or charms can make us sleep as well
And better than thy stroke; why swell'st thou then?
One short sleep past, we wake eternally
And death shall be no more; Death, thou shalt die.
SOR JUANA INES DE LA CRUZ
Mexico (1648?-1695)
From the Fifth Villancico*, in alternating voices,
written for the Feast of the Nativity in Puebla, 1689
Because my Lord was born to suffer,
let Him stay awake.
Because for me He is awake,
let him fall asleep.
Let Him stay awake--
there is no pain for one who loves
as painlessness would be.
Let Him sleep--
for one who sleeps, in dreaming,
prepares himself to die.
Silence, now He sleeps!
Careful, He's awake!
Do not disturb Him, no!
Yes, He must be waked!
Let him wake and wake!
Let Him have his sleep!
Translated by Alan S. Trueblood
* A villancico is a poetic form derived from the simple language and strong rhythms of peasant songs, written as part of the religious festivals in Mexico.
From the First Villancico, written for the
Nativity of Our Lord, Puebla, 1689
Since Love is shivering
in the ice and cold,
since hoarfrost and snow
have ringed him round,
who will come to his aid?
Water!
Earth!
Air!
No, Fire will!
Since the Child is assailed
by pains and ills
and has no breath left
to face his woes,
who will come to his aid?
Fire!
Earth!
Water!
No, but Air will!
Since the loving child
is burning hot,
that he breathes a volcanic
deluge of flame, who will come to his aid?
Air!
Fire!
Earth!
No, Water will!
Since today the Child
leaves heaven for earth
and finds nowhere to rest
his head in this world,
who will come to his aid?
Water!
Fire!
Air!
No, but Earth will!
Translated by Alan S. Trueblood
GERARD MANLEY HOPKINS
England 1844-1889
The world is charged with the grandeur of God.
It will flame out, like shining from shook foil;
It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil
Crushed. Why do men then now not reck his rod?
Generations have trod, have trod, have trod;
And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil;
And wears man's smudge and shares man's smell: the soil
Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.
And for all this, nature is never spent;
There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;
And though the last lights off the black West went
Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward springs--
Because the Holy Ghost over the bent
World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.
Pied Beauty
Glory be to God for dappled things--
For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow;
For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim;
Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls, finches' wings;
Landscape plotted and pieced--fold, fallow, and plough;
And all trades, their gear and tackle and trim.
All things counter, original, spare, strange;
Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)
With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim;
He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change:
Praise him.
Spring and Fall
to a young child
Margaret are you grieving
Over Goldengrove unleaving?
Leaves like the things of man, you
With your fresh thoughts care for, can you?
Ah! as the heart grows older
It will come to such sights colder
By and by, nor spare a sigh
Though worlds of wanwood leafmeal lie;
And yet you will weep and know why.
Now no matter, child, the name:
Sorrows springs are the same,
Nor mouth had, no nor mind, expressed
What heart heard of, ghost guessed:
It is the blight man was born for,
It is Margaret you mourn for.
T.S. ELIOT
America (Naturalized British Citizen) (1888-1965)
From Landscapes
Rannoch, by Glencoe
Here the crow starves, here the patient stag
Breeds for the rifle. Between the soft moor
And the soft sky, scarcely room
To leap or soar. Substance crumbles, in the thin air
Moon cold or moon hot. The road winds in
Listlessness of ancient war
Languor of broken steel,
Clamor of confused wrong, apt
In silence. Memory is strong
Beyond the bone. Pride snapped,
Shadow of pride is long, in the long pass
No concurrence of bone.
Cape Ann
O quick quick quick quick hear the song sparrow,
Swamp sparrow, fox sparrow, vesper sparrow
At dawn and dusk. Follow the dance
Of the goldfinch at noon. Leave to chance
The Blackburnian warbler, the shy one. Hail
With shrill whistle the note of the quail, the bobwhite
With shrill whistle the note of the quail, the bobwhite
Dodging by baybush. Follow the feet
Of the walker, the water thrush. Follow the flight
Of the dancing arrow, the purple martin. Greet
In silence the bullbat. All are delectable. Sweet sweet sweet
But resign this land at the end, resign it
To its true owner, the tough one, the sea gull.
The palaver is finished.
FINDING THE POET
CHAPTER 4 KEEPING A JOURNAL
The relationship between keeping a journal and writing poetry is a very intimate one. In fact, the journal is often the raw material from which a poem emerges. I encourage everyone who has an interest in poetry to keep a journal. Poetry does not always just jump out of our pen onto the paper or out of our brain into the word processor. Sometimes it takes a while for the original stimulus to work its way into words and to find a form. If we do not jot down a few notes and keep them in a safe place, we can forget all about that flash of inspiration, and the poem will never be written. It makes me sad to think about all the brilliant poems that have never come to light because someone just didn't take the time to record that moment of insight or perception that was destined to be a poem.
You know that many of your most inspired moments come at completely inopportune times. Nothing is more frustrating than coming up with a stunning idea while you're driving on the freeway. The images for an entire poem came to me once while I was standing in a casino watching my husband play Blackjack. What did I do? I excused myself and went into the women's rest room and wrote the poem down on a scrap of paper I happened to find in my purse. This experience taught me never to leave home without a notebook.
It doesn't matter what kind of notebook you use. I like to carry a tiny spiral notebook--the kind you can buy in the grocery store--in my purse for emergency flashes of insight. I don't get so many of those that I can let even a few slip away. This same kind of notebook would work for a shirt pocket or a hip pocket. When I travel, I take along a large three-hole notebook so I can record in sentences and paragraphs all the people, places, and events I experience. Some of these experiences might turn out to be poems later. If I'm having a very busy day, I just jot down on the back of one of the pages the date, place, and a few individual words such as "shopping with Kathleen and Marny, green depression glass," or "river boat, dinner, blackberry cobbler, country music, 'Take Me Back to Tulsa,' blue heron," to remind me of the high points of the day--people and images I really want to remember. Then when I'm ready to write my journal out, I can just check the backs of the pages to jog my memory, and everything will be in the right sequence. Recently I spent the entire eight hours or so it took me to fly home to California from a family reunion in Missouri writing out my travel journal from the notes on the backs of the pages in my notebook. It gave me a tremendous sense of satisfaction to arrive home knowing that none of the really important moments were lost. Who knows how many poems might some day be born out of that three ring notebook?
Other writers use other kinds of journals. I admire the high-tech types who keep notes on their computers or electronic notebooks. Other people I know purchase those beautiful bound books with blank pages and use those for journals. I like that idea because it gives respect and dignity to journal keeping. Poets and all writers should honor all of the tools of their trade, even their pens and paper. I also like the idea of keeping multiple notebooks--one in your car, one at work, and notebooks in various rooms at home. Of course, this brings up the issue of privacy.
I am well aware that most poets feel that their personal writings are very private, and they don't want anyone snooping into their notebooks. I feel the same way, and fortunately, my husband never looks at any of my private writings. Many writers are not so lucky, especially young people who are still living with their nuclear family.
In Japan, where journal keeping has been a part of every literate person's life for the past thousand years, secretly reading other people's journals has evolved into a fine art. In Japan, where direct confrontation is considered rude and tasteless, people sometimes send important messages to family members by leaving their diaries lying around. Japanese literature is filled with scenes in which people discover some significant aspect of a family member's personality by reading that person's journal. Tanizaki's The Key, Dazai's The Setting Sun, and Inoue's The Hunting Gun are all beautifully written novels in which pivotal moments occur because someone has read someone else's diary. This is a very subtle form of communication that requires some level of consent on the writer's part. My favorite journal of all time is The Pillow Book of Sei Shonagon, written by a court lady in Kyoto who lived at the same time as Murasaki Shikibu. Near the end of her lengthy journal, Sei Shonagon wrote:
I wrote these notes at home, when I had a good deal of time
to myself and thought no one would notice what I was doing.
Everything that I have seen and felt is included. Since much of
it might appear malicious and even harmful to other people, I
was careful to keep my book hidden. But now it has become
public, which is the last thing I expected.1
Obviously, Shonagon knew that her "private" journal had a reading audience. She even remarks in a rather self-congratulatory tone, "Readers have declared, however, that I can be proud of my work. This has surprised me greatly... ."2 Fascinating as the Japanese view of the relationship between the writers and readers of journals may be, I find that most North Americans do not want to share their journals with anyone. If you are among the many who really do want privacy, you will have to take steps to provide your own security. If you live in a household where there is good communication and a lot of trust, all you will have to do is tell the people you live with that your writings are private and it is very important to you that this privacy be respected. If you life in an environment where people do not respect boundaries, you will have to initiate your own security measures. Hiding a journal probably won't work if you live with snoopy people. It will only inspire their curiosity, and they will set out on a quest to poke around into your private writings--assuming of course that you are writing about them. I know people who have left decoy journals hidden in spots where they just might be found.
Samuel Pepys, whose diary you will meet in this chapter, wrote his diary in a secret code. These subversive measures seem awfully exhausting to me. Why not just get yourself a strong metal box and keep your private writings locked up? Alternatively, ask yourself what is so secret about your writings anyway. Would the world really come to an end if someone else read your journal?
Maybe we need to think more carefully about why we are keeping a journal in the first place. I make a distinction between a journal and a diary. I think of a journal as a miscellaneous collection of notes,
a sort of storehouse for future poems and writing projects. A journal does not require any particular structure, it does not need to be chronological, and it does not need to be kept up every day. On the other hand, I think of a diary as a daily chronology recording events and experiences in one's life. Sei Shonagon's Pillow Book is a journal; in Japanese it is called a zuihitsu, which means, "following the brush," to suggest the spontaneity of this form of writing. Sometimes this style of writing is called a miscellany in English. Conversely, The Diary of Samuel Pepys is in fact a diary. It focuses on the daily events in Pepys' life in chronological order. If you should choose to read this fascinating piece of literature, you will discover why Pepys wrote it in secret code. Among other things, Pepys, a respectable married man, chronicles his adventures with his various mistresses.
There are other kinds of journals also, such as poetic memoirs, which include personal observations in prose with poems interspersed. Travel diaries can also be very interesting, and some of them also contain poems. There is a genre in Japan called haibun, or haiku diary, in which the poet included haiku poems in a prose diary which may include descriptions of people, places, nature, or philosophical observations. Haibun can be a very effective form of literature because it puts the very brief haiku poems in context, often providing information about the time, place, and situation which inspired these poems. Matsuo Basho's Narrow Road to the Deep North is an example of haibun at its very best.
You may have noticed that I referred to both haibun and The Diary of Samuel Pepys as literature. In Japan, the journal writing capital of the world, diaries and journals have always been considered literature, even those that were written only for the author's private self-expression. In fact, The Pillow Book of Sei Shonagon and Narrow Road to the Deep North are considered second and third only to The Tale of Genji in quality and importance in the entire history of Japanese literature. The Western tradition has not held diaries on the same level of esteem. Dorothy Wordsworth's journals, for example, have not been valued as highly as her brother William's poetry. This is perhaps a prejudice that Western readers might want to reconsider. Journals have a wonderful spontaneous quality and often contain breathtakingly beautiful descriptions and insightful observations. We also might want to re-think our view of the line between public and private literature.
You might want to write a journal some time that is a work of literature in itself. But for now, you're probably keeping a journal as a repository for ideas that can be turned into poems. If you're new to journaling, you'll need to think about what kinds of things to write down. Your personal interests should guide you. If you're an extravert, you'll probably want to focus on people, places, and events. Don't let yourself be influenced by other people's opinions of "literary material." If you love baseball and ice hockey, write down some notes about the games you attend or the sports you actually participate in. Anything can evolve into a wonderful poem if the writer has enough passion for his or her subject. If you are more introverted, you might want to record some of your dreams or simply describe some of your moods. I like to take notes about what is going on in nature such as exactly when the acorns started to fall, when the moon was full, what the sunset looked like, etc. I find that nature can often provide a framework for the feelings I try to express in a poem.
A journal can also be very helpful in leading you to a better understanding of how your own creativity works. You will probably discover, for example, that you prefer writing at certain times of day and not at others. Some poets are morning people, inspired especially by the dawn; others are night owls who like to write all alone when everyone else is asleep. Still others write in little spurts whenever they can find the time. Over time, you will also probably observe that you will feel more like writing during certain seasons of the year. Don't be surprised if you have a huge burst of creativity in the spring only to be disappointed at the end of summer when you barely have the energy to lift a pencil. The important thing is to respect your own natural rhythms and to honor the subjects that really matter to you.
I would like to share with you some selections from the journals and diaries of famous people. Do not feel compelled to imitate any of these. I present them to you only so that you can see the wealth of possibility that journaling can offer to a poet. Studying this diversity of writing styles and subject matter will, I hope, expand your own vision of this mysterious process of creating poems from observations, thoughts, and feelings that first found expression in a private notebook. Notebooks are places where lists, details, events, moods, dreams, themes, and passions are freely expressed. These are also the stuff that poems are made of.
I will begin with my favorite, whom I have already introduced to you, Sei Shonagon. The title of her journal, The Pillow Book, may need some explanation. Horrible as this may sound, pillows in ancient Japan were more like pieces of furniture than soft cushions. They were really wooden neck rests with drawers that could be used for hiding private writings. Thus, it became customary for men and women to write informal books in their bedrooms and stash them in their pillows. This genre, which seems to be unique to Japan, became known as makura no soshi, or notes of the pillow, the precursor to the zuihitsu, or occasional writings. Apparently many people wrote these kinds of journals during the Heian period (800-1200 A.D.), the time during which Sei Shonagon and Murasaki Shikibu lived, but Shonagon's Makura no Soshi is the only one of its type to survive.3
The Pillow Book of Sei Shonagon is the most poetic work of prose writing that I have ever read. It is a long, complex collection that contains historically accurate descriptions of the everyday goings on in the lives of the royal family members and courtiers in Heian Japan. Shonagon never misses a name or a detail. She is an avid, extraverted people watcher and a sharp critic. No breach of decorum escapes her scrutiny, as in the following assessment of a courtier named Masahiro:
Masahiro really is a laughing-stock. I wonder what it is like for
his parents and friends. If people see him with a decent-looking
servant, they always call for the fellow and laughingly ask how
he can wait upon such a master and what he thinks of him. There
are skilled dyers and weavers in Masahiro's household, and when
to comes to dress, whether it be the colour of his under-robe or
the style of his cloak, he is more elegant than most men; yet the
only effect of his elegance is to make people say, 'What a shame
someone else isn't wearing these things!'
If she is harsh with people, Shonagon is infinitely sensitive toward nature, as these two little paragraphs will attest:
I remember a clear morning in the Ninth Month when it had
been raining all night. Despite the bright sun, dew was still
dripping from the chrysanthemums in the garden. On the
bamboo fences and criss-cross hedges I saw tatters of spider
webs; and where the threads were broken the raindrops hung on
them like strings of white pearls. I was greatly moved and
delighted.
As it became sunnier, the dew gradually vanished from the
clover and the other plants where it had lain so heavily; the
branches began to stir, then suddenly sprang up of their own
accord. Later I described to people how beautiful it all was.
What most impressed me was that they were not al all
impressed.
As much as I love her gossipy accounts of people and events and her exquisitely beautiful descriptions of nature, it is her lists that make Shonagon the poetic genius that she is. Her lists are very much like poems that combine images around a theme. These lists usually bring together elements from nature and from human experience to present her theme in a manner that is both shallow and profound. "Squalid Things" is a personal favorite of mine:
Squalid Things
The back of a piece of embroidery.
The inside of a cat's ear,
A swarm of mice, who still have no fur, when they come
wriggling out of their nest.
The seams of a fur robe that has not yet been lined.
Darkness in a place that does not give the impression of being
very clean.
A rather unattractive woman who looks after a large brood of
children.
A woman who falls ill and remains unwell for a long time. In
the mind of her lover, who is not particularly devoted to her, she
must appear rather squalid.
Notice that the images at the beginning of the list are vivid and interesting details that appeal to our senses. But the final item evokes our emotions. The word "squalid" seems an unusual one to describe the undevoted lover's perception of his woman, and the reader is really left contemplating the profound loneliness of the sick woman who suffers not only from her illness but from the pain of not being loved. Here the list takes us beyond the word "squalid" and beyond the pathetic lovers as we meditate on how much more terrible it is to be unloved than to look into our cat's ear.
Did you also notice that Shonagon is not afraid to let us see her shadow? Perhaps because The Pillow Book at least purports to be a private journal, Shonagon gives herself permission to share even her most ungenerous thoughts, like her comment about the unattractive woman. We all like to think of ourselves as nice people, but we can learn from Shonagon that our journey as poets will be short if we only write about "nice" things. A journal is a safe place for putting down some of our rude, judgmental, or even angry observations. In the following list, Shonagon really lets her nasty side out:
Things That are Unpleasant to See
Someone in a robe whose back seam is crooked.
People who wear their clothes with the collars pulled back.
A High Court Noble's carriage that has dirty blinds.
People who insist on bringing out all their children when they
receive a visit from someone who rarely comes to see them.
Boys who wear high clogs with their trouser-skirts. I
realize this is a modern fashion, but I still don't like it. ...
A lean, hairy man taking a nap in the daytime. Does it
occur to him what a spectacle he is making of himself? Ugly
men should sleep only at night, for they cannot be seen in the
dark and, besides, most people are in bed themselves. But they
should get up at the crack of dawn, so that no one has to see
them lying down.
A pretty woman looks even prettier when she gets up after
taking a nap on a summer day. But an unattractive woman
should avoid such things, for her face will be all puffy and shining,
and, if she is not lucky, her cheeks will have an ugly, lopsided
look. When two people, having taken a nap together in the
daytime, wake up and see each other's sleep-swollen faces, how
dreary life must seem to them!
Even in this list, which begins on a shallow note of fashion policing, Shonagon takes us on a journey of the human spirit. We have all had moments when we have felt the dreariness of life, and Shonagon makes us see that dreariness in the swollen faces of the two who have just awakened to see each other at their worst. Let's face it. Life gets a lot worse than this for those of us who don't live in the elitist world of the Heian court, but poets do sometimes show us humanity at its very worst. Gone are the days when European poets only wrote in "poetic" language and only chose "noble" subjects for their themes.
Today, there is almost no subject and no level of dreariness that a poet somewhere is unwilling to share with a reader. This fact brings up the centuries old and never resolved question of appropriateness in art. Are there some words that just should not be used in poetry? Are there some subjects that should remain forever taboo? Over time, changing tastes and attitudes toward political correctness create turmoil for artists, and debates rage among school boards, publishers, gallery owners, etc., when a work of art is deemed offensive by some segment of society. James Joyce and D.H.Lawrence, two British novelists who wrote in the first half of the Twentieth Century, were both accused of writing pornography. The Romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley was expelled from Oxford University for writing an essay advocating atheism. Thomas More, author of Utopia, was publicly executed when he refused to sign the act of Succession and Supremacy, the document that separated Henry Vlll and England from the Roman Catholic Church. More recently, Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn has come under attack because it contains a racially offensive word. What can we conclude from these examples? The written word is very powerful; people can be profoundly affected even by a single word.
The power of words, as we know, is one of the qualities that makes poetry the sublime and necessary art form that it is. Poetry can touch the human mind, heart, spirit, and senses in a way that no other form of communication can. But when anything becomes this powerful, there will be people who will be terribly threatened by it and will want to control or destroy it. They will start talking about literature as a "dangerous influence," and they will begin to agitate for various forms of censorship. Debates of this sort are going on somewhere in the world at this very moment.
I cannot resolve the issue of the censorship of poetry for you. Personally, I have always opposed censorship because mass hysteria can and has led to the persecution of authentic art. It is also my opinion that people who persecute artists are almost always uninformed about the nature of art and unable to evaluate a work of art in context. I must admit, for example, that I am personally offended by the following passage from John Milton's Paradise Lost in which Adam and Eve are described:
Two of far nobler shape, erect and tall,
Godlike erect, with native honor clad
In naked majesty, seemed lords of all,
And worthy seemed; for in their looks divine
The image of their glorious Maker shone,
Truth, wisdom, sanctitude severe and pure--
Severe, but in true filial freedom placed,
Whence true authority in men; though both
Not equal, as their sex not equal seemed;
For contemplation he and valor formed,
For softness she and sweet attractive grace;
He for God only, she for God in him.
Can you see why women today might take offense? Milton clearly sees women as decorative objects who are mentally and spiritually inferior to men. A little research into Milton's personal life will affirm that he viewed his three successive wives and his daughters as subordinate to himself. In addition to being a sexist, Milton was a religious bigot who wrote anti-Catholic propaganda, referring to the Pope as the "triple tyrant,"4 among other unpleasant epithets. Should we throw out the writings of this prejudiced poet who is viewed by many scholars as second only to Shakespeare in importance in the history of English literature? Although I dislike Milton, I would have to say no.
Instead, we have to look at his poetry in its historic and cultural context. In fact, Milton's values were very much shared by most British men during the 1600s. English women historically were not sent to school, and only daughters of aristocratic families were taught by private tutors to read and write. British universities were open to men only until the latter part of the Nineteenth Century. English women were raised to stay at home and focus their attention on domestic activities and needlework. One hundred and twenty years after Milton's death, Percy Shelley's mother-in-law, Mary Wollstonecraft, wrote a long essay entitled A Vindication of the Rights of Woman. Her thesis is to advocate for the education of English girls. In support of her argument, she quotes the very passage by Milton that you have just read, and her comment is, "How grossly do they insult us who thus advise us to render ourselves gentle, domestic brutes!" Although Wollstonecraft lived during the relatively open-minded Romantic Period, she was hated and ridiculed by men of her own time and the Victorians who followed. A Twentieth Century scholar, Russell Noyes, made this observation in 1956:
When Mary Wollstonecraft spoke out, she used great plainness
of speech and her book aroused widespread opposition. After
its publication, she was called a 'hyena in petticoats' and
denounced as a social outcast. Actually, her teachings seem
conservative when compared to the present status of English
and American women.5
As this example illustrates, Milton's views on the status of women were not only shared by men during his own lifetime but for many generations after his death, and those who opposed this majority view were harshly rejected. When we read Milton, we must understand that whether we like it or not, his writings accurately reflect the Seventeenth Century British opinion that women were mentally inferior to men.
His religious views were also shared by many of his countrymen. Milton lived during a time of great religious upheaval. In fact, Milton, a Puritan, was a member of a political faction which started a civil war in England culminating in the execution of King Charles l and the control of the English government for eleven years by the Puritan dominated Parliament. Puritans detested both Catholics and members of the Church of England. After they subsequently lost control of English politics and the monarchy was restored, the Puritans found themselves the victims of religious persecution at the hands of the Church of England. This state of religious tension ultimately led to the immigration of English Puritans to America. What did these Pilgrims do in America? They persecuted the peaceful Quakers and burned several of their own women at the stake, falsely accusing them of witchcraft.
The Puritans continued the traditional British anti-Catholic values in America also, and back in England, Catholics were not allowed to hold public office or graduate from universities for generations. In fact, it was officially illegal to be Catholic in England until 1829. English Catholic poets who suffered varying degrees of persecution and ostracization include John Dryden, Alexander Pope, John Donne, and Gerard Manley Hopkins. Under pressure from King James l, Donne finally converted to the Church of England and became Dean of St. Paul's Cathedral. One of his motives for this conversion could have been his need to support his wife and their twelve children, seven of whom survived. I hope you see how important it is to look at a poet and his or her work in the framework of the time and place in which this poet lived. Far from censoring poets because their views don't conform to our own, we can learn valuable lessons from writers like John Milton that will help us understand how our own opinions about religion and sexual identity have evolved.
As a writer of poetry, I encourage you to focus on the subjects that you feel passionately called to write about and use the words that seem best to express what you have to say. Not everyone will like your words or your subject. In fact, even the most innocuous poem is bound to offend someone. And if you write on social issues, you run the risk of being deemed politically incorrect. As a poet, you will just have to take your chances and be true to your heart and soul. If you are ridiculed for your writing, you will be in good company.
Having said this, I must admit that I do not necessarily believe that all poets are entirely pure in their motives. Some writers deliberately use offensive language solely for the pleasure of shocking and annoying their readers and gaining attention for themselves. Then these would-be artists rationalize their motives as "pure art." Or they focus on profoundly disturbing topics claiming that they are merely "reflecting the values of the culture." This trend has been taken to extremes in the film industry where offensive language, gratuitous violence, abuse of women, and racist behavior are routinely included in films, apparently on the theory that shock sells. Particularly inexcusable is the argument that this kind of "art" reflects society. Although many might disagree with me, I believe that it is not the artist's job merely to "reflect the culture." It is also his or her responsibility to play a visionary role in leading the culture to a higher level of consciousness. In this context, perhaps we can take a poet like Milton to task for failing to recognize his own prejudices, even if they were widely shared by his contemporaries.
Jonathan Swift spoke out for the rights of women when it was not politically correct to do so, and the English Romantic poet Lord Byron advocated the emancipation of Catholics to an unsympathetic House of Lords. In America, Paul Laurence Dunbar expressed the feelings of African Americans before the Harlem Renaissance, a time of great creativity for African American artists that began in the early 1920s. Dunbar's poetry made it easier for Langston Hughes to find an audience, and ultimately, Hughes and other poets played a profound role in the American Civil Rights movement. Historic British poets whose work has had a visionary quality include William Blake, Percy Shelley, and William Butler Yeats.
My point is that because poetry is such a powerful medium, poets must be especially careful to discern their own motivations and to rise above immature, shallow, and selfish influences. They must also look at their own values with a critical eye, not relying solely on the opinions of their peers. There is another very sensitive issue that poets must be aware of. One of my professors referred to this issue as "literary cannibalism." Cannibalism in poetry is the temptation to write about the private misfortunes of others, particularly members of one's own family. Let me give you an example. I attended a public poetry reading several years ago in which a poet stood up and informed the audience that the poem she was about to read was about her daughter's abortion. I remember feeling outraged that this poet would violate her daughter's privacy in this way and furthermore that she would use this painful experience to advance her own career as a poet. Certainly there is nothing wrong with writing about abortion, a topic about which people have very deep feelings. The ethical issue for me had to do with sensationalizing the private pain of a family member. In another example of literary cannibalism, a very famous Twentieth Century American poet added to his own fame by writing about his wife's mental illness. Although many will argue that all topics must be open to the artist, I hope you will give some thought to the ramifications of literary cannibalism. The following poem by the brilliant American poet Sylvia Plath might give you something to think about.
Daddy
You do not do, you do not do
Any more, black shoe
In which I have lived like a foot
For thirty years, poor and white,
Barely daring to breathe or Achoo.
Daddy, I have had to kill you.
You died before I had time--
Marble-heavy, a bag full of God,
Ghastly statue with one gray toe
Big as a Frisco seal
And a head in the freakish Atlantic
Where it pours bean green over blue
In the waters off beautiful Nauset.
I used to pray to recover you.
Ach, du.
In the German tongue, in the Polish town
Scraped flat by the roller
Of wars, wars, wars.
But the name of the town is common.
My Polack friend
Says there are a dozen or two.
So I never could tell where you
Put your foot, your root,
I never could talk to you.
The tongue stuck in my jaw.
It stuck in a barb wire snare.
Ich, ich, ich, ich,
I could hardly speak.
I thought every German was you.
And the language obscene
An engine, an engine
Chuffing me off like a Jew.
A Jew to Dachau, Auschwitz, Belsen.
I began to talk like a Jew.
I think I may well be a Jew.
The snows of the Tyrol, the clear beer of Vienna
Are not very pure or true.
With my gipsy ancestress and my weird luck
And my Taroc pack and my Taroc pack
I may be a bit of a Jew.
I have always been scared of you,
With your Luftwaffe, your gobbledygoo.
And your neat mustache
And your Aryan eye, bright blue.
Panzer-man, panzer-man, O You--
Not God but a swastika
So black no sky could squeak through.
Every woman adores a Fascist,
The boot in the face, the brute
Brute heart of a brute like you.
You stand at the blackboard, daddy,
In the picture I have of you,
A cleft in your chin instead of your foot
But no less a devil for that, no not
Any less the black man who
Bit my pretty red heart in two.
I was ten when they buried you.
At twenty I tried to die
And get back, back, back to you.
I thought even the bones would do.
But they pulled me out of the sack,
And they stuck me together with glue.
And then I knew what to do.
I made a model of you,
A man in black with a Meinkampf look
And a love of the rack and the screw.
And I said, I do, I do.
So daddy, I'm finally through.
The black telephone's off the root,
The voices just can't worm through.
If I've killed one man, I've killed two--
The vampire who said he was you
And drank my blood for a year,
Seven years, if you want to know.
Daddy, you can lie back now.
There's a stake in your fat black heart
And the villagers never liked you.
They are dancing and stamping on you.
They always knew it was you.
Daddy, daddy, you bastard, I'm through.
Sylvia Plath's father, Otto Plath, was a German immigrant and a college professor. He died of a gangrenous leg when Sylvia was eight years old. She makes several specific references to her father's appearance, background, and profession in the poem. Many readers and critics, including Elizabeth Hardwick have been shocked by the viciousness of Plath's attack on her dead father. Hardwick has pointed out that Mr. Plath never killed anyone, and that it is Sylvia herself who has a "fat black heart" and an ungenerous spirit. In response to this kind of criticism, Plath's literary editors, Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar, have written, "The problem with such remarks, which are representative of a good many attacks which have been mounted against Plath, is that the literary figure of "Daddy" in the poem of that name... is not identical with, but rather generalized from, Plath's literal father."6 I find this explanation difficult to accept, especially in light of the fact that the poet so carefully included details about her literal father and autobiographical references to her own suicide attempt and recently failed marriage. It is not easy to see the father in this poem as a generalized or archetypal father figure. A daughter's relationship with her father is certainly a universal theme, and many readers have appreciated "Daddy" in that context. But, ethically speaking, is the real Mr. Plath, who is dead, able to respond to any of his daughters charges against him, including comparing him to Adolph Hitler and the devil?
This question might bring us back to Sei Shonagon, who blithely ridicules Masahiro as a laughingstock, while Masahiro, who might very well have been a charming and decent man, has no voice to tell us what his life was really all about. In her defense, Shonagon's journal, unlike Plath's poem, is at least ostensibly a private piece of writing. But how much of the shadow should we express, even in our journals, and how much cannibalism should we allow ourselves in our poetry? If we remember that the shadow is really the aspect of our personality that we have denied or not developed, we might use our journals more profitably to try to develop those aspects of our personality that threaten us. John Milton's personal writings reveal a deep attraction to and fear of the emotional power of women. If you feel threatened by the opposite sex, of if you feel the need to scapegoat, you might want to make some lists in your journal such as, "Why I Am Afraid of Women," or "Why I Am Homophobic," or "Why I Feel the Need to Humiliate Men," or "Why I Don't Have Any Asian Friends." Some startling poems could evolve out of these lists.
You can also learn to avoid literary cannibalism by fictionalizing your poems and creating a persona, a voice who speaks in the poem who is understood not to be the poet. This is the same technique as using first person point of view in a short story or novel. Readers all understand that Huckleberry Finn, the narrator in the novel by the same name, is not Mark Twain. The same thing can happen in poetry. The Romantic poet w
William Blake, whose poems you read in Chapter 2, used a variety of personas in his collections called Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience. A theme which runs through both sets of poems is the exploitation of children by greedy and hypocritical adults. In particular, Blake advocated child labor reform, and the use of children as chimney sweeps was especially disturbing to him. In Songs of Innocence, he includes a poem called "The Chimney Sweeper," written in the voice of a boy who has been sold as an indentured laborer by his own father. The use of the persona is especially effective in this poem because of the ironic contrast between the boy's innocence and faith and the cynical manipulation by adults that the reader is able to infer. When the boy first started working, he was so young that he could not pronounce the word "sweep" yet, so instead he said "weep." The connotations of this word create for the adult reader a picture of the sorrow that is ahead for this trusting boy. The last line of the poem is especially ironic because the boy is truly trying to do his "duty," but have the adults in his life been as conscientious in doing their ethical duty toward him?
The Chimney Sweeper
When my mother died I was very young,
And my father sold me while yet my tongue
Could scarcely cry''weep! 'weep! 'weep! 'weep!'
So your chimneys I sweep, & in soot I sleep.
There's little Tom Dacre, who cried when his head
That curl'd like a lamb's back, was shav'd: so I said
'Hush, Tom! never mind it, for when your head's
bare
You know that the soot cannot spoil your white
hair.'
And so he was quiet, & that very night,
As Tom was a-sleeping, he had such a sight!
That thousands of sweepers, Dick, Joe, Ned,
& Jack,
Were all of them lock'd up in coffins of black.
And by came an Angel who had a bright key,
And he open'd the coffins & set them all free;
Then down a green plain leaping, laughing, they
run,
And wash in a river, and shine in the Sun.
Then naked & white, all their bags left behind,
They rise upon clouds and sport in the wind;
And the Angel told Tom, if he'd be a good boy,
He'd have God for his father, & never want joy.
And so Tom awoke; and we rose in the dark,
And got with our bags and our brushes to work.
Tho' the morning was cold, Tom was happy &
warm;
So if all do their duty they need not fear harm.
Notice that the use of the persona in this poem separates Blake's personal life and relationship with his biological father from the issue of social child abuse. The use of the child narrator, who innocently describes his friend Tom's death dream, creates tremendous sympathy for the exploited children in the poem. By fictionalizing the events in the poem, Blake presents his theme without cannibalizing any actual people. Contrast this poem with Plath's "Daddy." Which poem has a more clearly presented theme? Which creates a higher level of sympathy for the abused child? Which poem do you think will continue to inspire readers in future generations?
I hope you have grasped the idea that with a little fictionalizing and the use of a persona, a very personal perception can be transformed into a poem of great power and passion without violating your privacy or anyone else's. Here is a final thought about literary cannibalism. When in doubt, always take the high road. Read the truly great poets like Shakespeare, Chaucer, and Murasaki. You will see that they ignore none of life's sorrow, yet the power of their poetry is never based on viciousness or the exploitation of other people's pain.
Although some of what she says is unkind, I encourage you to read The Pillow Book of Sei shonagon in its entirety. There is much that a journal writer and poet can gain from reading this great classic. Here is a list of some of the valuable lessons that I have leaned from Sei Shonagon:
1. Pay close attention to nature. Shonagon places all of her observations in the context of the seasons of the year. She is particularly skillful at observing how changes in nature influence human life.
2. Great writing encompasses the ordinary. It is not necessary to include larger than life scenes of travel and adventure to be a good writer. As a lady in waiting, Shonagon spent most of her life in virtual confinement, yet she found great fascination in the daily activities of those around her. In your own journal, you may discover that everyday events, placed in the context of the changing seasons, can connect with universal themes.
3. Negative thoughts are part of being human. In the world of art, there is no such thing as a "wrong" emotion. Shonagon expresses a variety of critical, angry, and judgmental attitudes. In your journal, you can safely express all of your feelings, even those that are not considered socially attractive. You will need to develop a mature level of discernment when you transfer these feelings into poetry.
4. Writing lists is an excellent source of inspiration. Shonagon's lists are filled with fascinating specific images. It is easy to turn the images from a list into poetry.
5. Anyone can focus on contrasts, but a great writer can see comparisons. Shonagon's real genius is her ability to see similarities between things that other people would think of as being different. Try to train yourself to see the comparison, for example, between the back of a piece of embroidery and a sick, unloved woman. One of the most important functions of a poet is to make connections which readers would not ordinarily make for themselves.
Let's look at another journal that in its own way is as beautifully written as Sei Shonagon's Pillow Book-- The Journals of Dorothy Wordsworth. Dorothy was the sister of William Wordsworth, one of the founders of the Romantic movement in English poetry and ultimately Poet Laureate of England. Dorothy was a devoted companion to her brother William and spent her entire adult life as a member of his household. She never married, and after William married, Dorothy remained in his home and helped to care for his five children. Earlier, she, William, and Samuel Taylor Coleridge had all benefited from a symbiotic relationship in which the three strongly influenced each other's writing. Between 1797 and 1802, the three lived near each other in England's beautiful lake district and met regularly to discuss poetry and share their perceptions of nature. Both William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge wrote some of their best poetry during this time of close association.
The Lyrical Ballads, a collection of poems by William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge published in 1798, was the first major work of Romantic poetry in England. The Preface, which William added in 1802, contains his now famous definition of poetry as "... the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings." He further refined this definition by saying that poetry was "... emotion recollected in tranquility."7 This definition gives us some insight into how William Wordsworth wrote his poetry and into the unique relationship he had with his sister Dorothy.
Apparently the Wordsworths, often accompanied by Coleridge, would take walks in the countryside observing nature in its various seasonal manifestations. The three were profoundly moved by the beauty of nature, and Dorothy would record their observations in her journals. (These journals are now known as The Alfoxden Journal and The Grasmere Journals, referring to the villages where Dorothy and William were living at the time.) Later, recollecting these strong emotional responses in the tranquility of their home, William wrote his poems, using Dorothy's journals to jog his memory.
In the following passage from The Alfoxden Journal, Dorothy describes the magnificent daffodils that she and William observed while walking together in April of 1802:
When we were in the woods beyond Gowbarrow park we saw a few
daffodils close to the water side. We fancied that the lake
had floated the seeds ashore and that the little colony had so
sprung up. But as we went along there were more and yet more and
at last under the boughs of the trees, we saw that there was a
long belt of them along the shore, about the breadth of a country
turnpike road. I never saw daffodils so beautiful they grew among
the mossy stones about and about them, some rested their heads upon
these stones as on a pillow for weariness, and the rest tossed and
reeled and danced and seemed as if they verily laughed with the wind
that blew upon them over the lake, they looked so gay ever glancing
ever changing. This wind blew directly over the lake to them. There
was here and there a little knot and a few stragglers a few yards
higher up but they were so few as not the disturb the simplicity
and unity and life of that one busy highway.
Two years later, relying heavily on this description in Dorothy's journal, William wrote this beautiful poem, which has helped to make him world famous:
I wandered lonely as a cloud
I wandered lonely as a cloud
That floats on high o'er vales and hills,
When all at once I saw a crowd,
A host, of golden daffodils;
Beside the lake, beneath the trees,
Fluttering and dancing in the breeze.
Continuous as the stars that shine
And twinkle on the milky way,
They stretched in never-ending line
Along the margin of a bay;
Ten thousand saw I at a glance,
Tossing their heads in sprightly dance.
The waves beside them danced; but they
Out-did the sparkling waves in glee:
A poet could not but be gay,
In such a jocund company:
I gazed--and gazed--but little thought
What wealth the show to me had brought:
For oft when on my couch I lie
I vacant or in pensive mood,
They flash upon that inward eye
Which is the bliss of solitude;
And then my heart with pleasure fills
And dances with the daffodils.
This lovely poem certainly illustrates William's definition of poetry as "emotion recollected in tranquility." In another outing in February of 1798, Dorothy describes how sheep rub up against fences, leaving behind tufts of wool and spots of red paint that was used to mark the sheep for identification:
Walked a great part of the way to Stowey with Coleridge. The
morning warm and sunny. The young lasses seen on the hill-tops,
in the villages and roads, in their summer holiday clothes--
pink petticoats and blue. Mothers with their children in arms,
and the little ones that could just walk, tottering by their side.
Midges or small flies spinning in the sunshine; the songs of the
lark and the redbreast; daisies upon the turf; the hazels in
blossom; honeysuckles budding. I saw one solitary strawberry
flower under a hedge. The furze gay with blossom. The moss
rubbed from the pailings by the sheep, that leave locks of wool,
and the red marks with which they are spotted, upon the wood.
This image found its way into a long poem called "The Ruined Cottage" which William wrote in 1798. The section quoted below seems to have been inspired by the passage from Dorothy's Alfoxden Journal:
And, looking round, I saw the corner-stones,
Till then unmark'd, on either side the door
Will dull red stains discoloured and stuck o'er
With tufts and hairs of wool, as if the sheep
That feed upon the commons thither came
Familiarly and found a couching-place
Even at her threshold.
Are you starting to wonder about the authorship of these poems? Students know very well that if they lift material from another source and place it into a research paper without giving credit to the original writer, they are guilty of plagiarism. Yet history has always given William full credit for all of his poems, and he himself always accepted that recognition. One might argue that Dorothy was simply playing the role of recording secretary, listing a few images for her brother, who was the real poetic genius, to transform into sublime poems. But if we read her journals carefully, it becomes apparent that she herself had a remarkable gift for observation, as this passage from The Grasmere Journals reveals:
We rested a long time under a wall. Sheep and lambs were in the
field--cottages smoking. As I lay down on the grass, I observed
the glittering silver line on the ridges of the Backs of the sheep,
owing to their situation respecting the Sun--which made them look
beautiful but with something of strangeness, like animals of another
kind--as if belonging to a more splendid world.
In a section of the "Preface to the Lyrical Ballads" called "What is a Poet?" William Wordsworth defined a poet as "...a man speaking to men."8 He apparently meant that definition literally, and he seems to have been only partially aware of his sister's profound contribution to his own success as a poet. The story of their relationship has a tragic ending. At the age of about fifty-four, Dorothy, who had previously been a sweet, loving, and giving person, lost her sanity completely and became hateful and at times violent. To his credit, William cared for her with great kindness and patience until his own death five years before hers. In one of my trips to England, I visited their graves in a small churchyard in the lovely little town of Grasmere. I was overwhelmed with a poignant sense of loss. I must try to avoid both literary cannibalism and inept psychoanalysis. But one cannot help but wonder how Dorothy's life might have been different if England had been the kind of country that welcomed and nurtured poets like Sappho and Sei Shonagon, and if poetry had been defined as "men and women speaking to women and men."
Although Dorothy Wordsworth's writings have not received the same level of literary recognition, there are several similarities between her journals and Sei Shonagon's Pillow Book. Like Shonagon, Dorothy is a keen observer of nature, and her writings are based on the ordinary activities of her life. Dorothy also has the gift of comparing things that seem different to most people, as when she likens a profusion of daffodils growing together to a highway. In addition, both writers are masters of the art of detail, and it is detail which forms the essence of good poetry. One cannot write effective poems about birds and flowers. One must write about daffodils and larks as Dorothy does. Good poems are often subtle, frequently ambiguous, but never vague. A poet must really look and really see the exact specific image. Dorothy's journals reflect a remarkable accuracy of observation. You may wish to re-read the passages from her journals in this chapter and notice her exact attention to colors, spatial relationships, and the specificity with which she names each bird and flower.
In your own journals, you can begin to discipline yourself to be as specific as possible. Instead of using words like "car," "dog," "tree," etc., learn to be more exact. Write "1994 Honda Civic," "golden retriever," and "catalpa." If you don't know the actual names of things, start learning. Part of your responsibility as a poet is to hold your reader's attention, and vague poems are boring. There are plenty of sources, such as The Audubon Society Encyclopedia of North American Birds, which I keep on my coffee table at all times so I can look up the names of birds that happen to visit my back yard. But you should never hesitate just to ask someone for information. The world is full of experts who are more than happy to share their knowledge of subjects from jazz to quilting to cranberry farming to making tortillas. Some of these experts are our grandparents, and it is just amazing the things they know that we don't. The following poem by the Twentieth Century poet, D.H. Lawrence, succeeds because of the specificity of its imagery.
Bavarian Gentians
Not every man has gentians in his house
in Soft September, at slow, Sad Michaelmas.
Bavarian gentians, big and dark, only dark
darkening the daytime torchlike with the smoking blueness of
Pluto's gloom,
ribbed and torchlike, with their blaze of darkness spread blue
down flattening into points, flattened under the sweep of white day
torch-flower of the blue-smoking darkness, Pluto's dark-blue daze,
black lamps from the halls of Dis, burning dark blue,
giving off darkness, blue darkness, as Demeter's pale lamps
give off light,
lead me then, lead me the way.
Reach me a gentian, give me a torch
let me guide myself with the blue, forked torch of this flower
down the darker and the darker stairs, where blue is darkened
on blueness.
even where Persephone goes, just now, from the frosted September
to the sightless realm where darkness was awake upon the dark
and Persephone herself is but a voice
or a darkness invisible enfolded in the deeper dark
of the arms Plutonic, and pierced with the passion of dense
gloom,
among the splendor of torches of darkness, shedding darkness
on the lost bride and her groom.
To appreciate this poem fully, you will need to use the ten-step procedure that you learned in Chapter 3. Of course you will want to look up the mythological figures, Pluto, Demeter, and Persephone, to whom Lawrence alludes. Also, if you have never seen a Bavarian gentian, you will need to get a book of botanical prints and see exactly what this flower looks like. This will help you appreciate the accuracy of Lawrence's description. The repeated use of the words "dark" and "darkness" along with the descending motion and the references to the coming of autumn should give you a hint about the poem's theme. Lawrence's biographers, Harry T. Moore and Warren Roberts, made the following comment about the genesis of this poem:
Lawrence... became desperately ill in Florence. In July
Frieda [Lawrence's wife] brought him to Baden-Baden for a
rest, and in September they returned to Bandol, where they
rented the Villa Beau Soleil. En route they had stopped in
Bavaria, where Lawrence wrote one of his greatest poems,
Bavarian Gentians... He knew that he was near death, which
he had held off for so long, to the astonishment of doctors.
He allowed one to examine him in Bavaria because he was also
a poet--Hans Carossa--who was amazed that Lawrence could go
on living.9
I think Dorothy Wordsworth would have liked this poem, even though it is not written in one of the traditional rhyming stanzas that would have been familiar to her. Lawrence's ability to find archetypal meaning in the specific colors and shapes of flowers gives the poem a timeless appeal.
Learning about detail is essential to the poet's craft. What else can a poet learn from Dorothy Wordsworth? Certainly her unique relationship with her brother calls us to reflect on the creative process itself and the subtle line between collaboration and plagiarism. In the world of traditional art, it was customary to learn from a master painter or poet, and imitation was the highest form of praise. Many sonnet writers have tried to emulate the style of Petrarch, the great Italian master of the form. In Japan, the same kind of mentoring took place among haiku poets. In Chapter 2, you read this poem by the eminent painter-poet, Yosa Buson:
On the temple bell
has settled, and is fast asleep,
a butterfly.
Masaoka Shiki, a haiku poet who lived from 1867 to 1902, admired Buson so much that he wrote this poem in his honor:
On the temple bell
has settled, and is glittering,
a firefly.
Is this plagiarism? In Japan, the answer is no. First of all, there is no attempt on Shiki's part to steal from Buson. He assumed that his readers were all familiar with the famous haiku by his predecessor and would recognize his own poem as a tribute to his mentor. Secondly, the two poems are not identical. Buson's poem takes place in the spring during the day, and Shiki's is a summer poem, set in the evening. As Harold Henderson, the translator of both poems points out, "The technique is exactly the same; the feeling conveyed is completely different."10 I the ethics of art, Henderson makes an important point. Every poet needs to learn technique, and the best place to learn it is from a poet who has already achieved greatness. Using the same technique as another poet is not plagiarism. But how about using another poet's words? Did William Wordsworth plagiarize, for example, when he referred to the dancing daffodils described in Dorothy's journal? To find the answer, you will have to look into your own conscience. If you are aware that another writer has used the same words that you then choose to put into a poem without giving credit to the original author, you are plagiarizing.
It is difficult sometimes not to plagiarize on an unconscious level. The more we read, the more beautiful lines of poetry float through our heads. When Keats wrote his epitaph, "Here lies one whose name is writ in water," was he thinking of Catullus' lines, "...her words should be written upon the wind and engraved in rapid water"? Unconscious plagiarism does not seem to me to be a crime, but if you are conscious of wanting to use another poet's words, you can honor that poet and save yourself from humiliation (and possible litigation) by using an epigraph. An epigraph is a short quotation placed at the beginning of a poem to indicate the idea or sentiment that inspired the poem. H. D. began a long poem which she entitled "Fragment Thirty-six" with an epigraph from Sappho:
Fragment Thirty-six
I know not what to do:
my mind is divided.--SAPPHO.
I know not what to do,
my mind is reft:
is song's gift best?
is love's gift loveliest?
I know not what to do,
now sleep has pressed
weight on your eyelids.
I have included only the first stanza of this poem so you can see how the epigraph works. By quoting directly from Sappho in the epigraph, H. D. gives credit to the poet who inspired her. Then when Sappho's exact words appear in the poem itself, the reader recognizes H. D.'s indebtedness to her mentor and some thematic connection between the two works. An epigraph is a wonderful device for avoiding plagiarism and adding a level of interest and complexity to your own poem.
Earlier I used the word "collaboration" as the pretty side of the coin whose ugly face is plagiarism. You may recall that I also mentioned in this chapter that William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge collaborated in writing some of their lyrical ballads. Although it is more common in song writing, collaboration, or shared authorship, does occasionally happen in poetry. A more common occurrence is the phenomenon I call the Muse Syndrome. In ancient Greek culture, a muse was a goddess who inspired an artist in his creative efforts. Tradition lists nine muses, each assigned to a specific art form. Calliope, the highest ranking of the group, was the Muse of Epic Poetry and Eloquence. The other muses included Clio, Muse of History; Euterpe, Goddess of Flute Playing; Thalia, Muse of Comedy; Melpomene, the Muse of Tragedy; Terpsichore, Muse of Lyric Poetry and Dance; Erato, the Muse of Love Poetry; Polyhymnia, the Muse first of Heroic Hymns and later of Mimic Art; and Urania, the Muse of Astronomy.11
This list is interesting because it tells us that the Greeks valued Epic Poetry above all other art forms. From the modern sociological perspective, this is worth noting, since Epic Poems are long narratives which glorify war, battle scenes, and the use of weapons. All of the heroes of Epic Poetry are warriors. The list of Muses is also interesting because the Greeks included History and Astronomy among the arts. Today, these ancient art forms are viewed as a social science and a physical science respectively. But what really makes this list interesting is the relationship between the Muse and the poet.
Traditionally, the poet would pray to his Muse for inspiration. Often he would even begin his poem with an invocation to the Muse. This is an accepted element in Epic Poetry. John Milton began Paradise Lost, a literary epic, with an invocation to Urania, the Muse of Astronomy, whom he associated with the Biblical Holy Spirit. An invocation is a prayer, calling upon a deity for help, protection, or inspiration. In a traditional relationship between the poet and his Muse, the poet specifically names his Muse and publicly calls upon her for help. This was a way of recognizing a source of creative inspiration outside the poet himself.
In later years, poets often entered into relationships with actual women who inspired their poetry in various ways. Sometimes a poet's spouse played the role of Muse, as Mary Shelley did for her husband Percy. The Nobel Prize winning Irish poet, William Butler Yeats, wrote some of his best poems about his unrequited love for the beautiful actress Maud Gonne. Jungian psychologists would refer to these modern muses as anima figures--women who represent the feminine side of the poet himself. A female poet might have an animus figure in her life--a man who represents her own masculine side. Sometimes these muses or anima figures devoted their entire lives and all of their own creative energies to keep the poet's inspiration alive. This is the Muse Syndrome. The Muse Syndrome is actually a form of collaborative creativity. However, unlike the Greek Muse who is called forth by name in the invocation at the beginning of the poem, the later muse figure often received no recognition at all. Has Dorothy Wordsworth come to mind? While the Muse Syndrome can be a symbiotic and mutually inspiring relationship, its shadow side, if the two participants do not recognize its nature, can resemble both cannibalism and plagiarism.
In your own life you probably find some of your inspiration in your relationships with others. There may even be a very special person who plays the role of muse for you. How can you avoid devouring your special friend? Awareness is the key. You can use your journal to explore the nature of your relationship with this person, and you must be absolutely honest with yourself if you discover that your friendship with this special person focuses primarily on your own needs. You must also avoid the egotistical fallacy that poets are more important than other people. They are not. In this regard, you might look to John Keats, the poet we studied in Chapter 3, as a role model. His fiancee, Fanny Brawne, was a great source of inspiration to him, but Keats did not place his needs above hers.
There are some practical things you can do to honor the muse in your life. You can write a poem thanking this person for the inspiration that he or she has given you. Or, you can dedicate a poem to that person. The idea behind these two suggestions is to give credit and recognition where it is due. Alternatively, if you discover that you are draining too much energy from one person, you might look for other sources of inspiration. I am very serious about this point. I have seen far too many cases of creative people who are completely unaware of the excessive demands and expectations they are placing on their creative support people. You might try a return to the traditional Greek custom of looking to an archetypal muse to guide your creativity. Spiritual figures, ancestors, saints, and elements in nature can also serve as muses. Or there man be a secret voice within you that you can name and call upon when your creativity needs direction. You will also remember from Chapter 2 that painters, musicians, and architects can play a muse-like role in a poet's life. In fact, any kind of artist--a writer, a gardener, a dancer, a chef--any person who helps to light the fire of creativity within you can be your muse.
I hope that reading the journals of Dorothy Wordsworth has already made you a better poet and a better person. Let's take a quick look at the fascinating Diary of Samuel Pepys. I mentioned the diary of this intriguing Londoner, who pronounced his last name "Peeps," earlier in this chapter. You will recall that he wrote in secret code because he included comments about his extra-marital affairs along with the myriad other details in this 1.3 million word diary.12 The most important thing a poet can learn from Pepys is that writing does not need to be static like a still life painting. Poetry can be dynamic and active. It can be inspired by people in motion and events, not solely by "emotion recollected in tranquility."
Pepys was what we would call a doer. He lived from 1633 to 1703 during a period known as the Restoration or the Neoclassical Age, a very extraverted and sociable time in British history. Pepys seems to have known almost everyone in London, and he has always reminded me of Geoffrey Chaucer, who lived in the same exciting city three hundred years earlier. The Wordsworths, who were born more than a hundred years later than Pepys, preferred the quiet life in the country, which was the Romantic ideal. In 1666, when Pepys was thirty-three years old, a great disaster occurred in his beloved London. Almost the entire city was destroyed in a terrible fire. Pepys describes this event in vivid detail in his diary. Since this is truly a private diary never intended for publication, you will notice that Pepys writes in a rather terse and hurried style, often omitting verbs. Pepys' diary was deciphered and published in the nineteenth century, and suddenly, long after his death, he became famous. His description of the Great Fire of London is so real and immediate that we feel the heat and the terror, as though we were hurrying through the city at Samuel's side:
So down, with my heart full of trouble, to the Lieutenant
of the Tower, who tells me that it begun this morning in the
King's baker's house in Pudding Lane, and that it hath burned
down St. Magnus' Church and most part of Fish Street already.
So I down to the waterside and there got a boat and through
bridge, and there saw a lamentable fire. Poor Mitchell's house,
as far as the Old Swan, already burned that way and the fire running
further, that in a very little time it got as far as the Steelyard
while I was there. Everybody endeavoring to remove their goods,
and flinging into the river or bringing them into lighters that
lay off. Poor people staying in their houses as long as till the
very fire touched them, and then running into boats or clambering
from one pair of stair by the waterside to another. And among other
things the poor pigeons I perceived were loath to leave their houses,
but hovered about the windows and balconies till they were some of them
burned, their wings, and fell down....
When we could endure no more upon the water, we to a little ale-house
on the Bankside over against the Three Cranes, and there stayed till
it was dark almost and saw the fire grow; and as it grew darker,
appeared more and more, and in corners and upon steeples and between
churches and houses, as far as we could see up the hill of the City,
in a most horrid malicious bloody flame, not like the fine flame of
an ordinary fire. Barbary and her husband away before us. We stayed
till, it being darkish, we saw the fire as only one entire arch of
fire from this to the other side of the bridge, and in a bow up the
hill, for an arch of above a mile long. It made me weep to see it.
The churches, houses, and all on fire and flaming at once, and a
horrid noise the flames made, and the cracking of houses at their
ruin.
Isn't this a stunning piece of descriptive writing? Although we don't really realize it at the time, we all live through many history-changing events. Your journal is the perfect place to jot down your immediate responses to these events as you experience them. From these notes, poems can emerge. Pepys' description of the frightened and disoriented pigeons, burning their wings is a very poetic sequence of images. In writing about events, it is not necessary for a poet to describe everything that happened in chronological order. Instead, the poet can select a few images that capture the essence of the event. For me, Pepys' pigeons tell the whole story of the Great Fire of London. Remember to use all of your senses when you make journal entries about events. We forget very quickly, and we will not be able to create a vivid and powerful poem based on a vague recollection.
Our journals can also help us find the meanings in current events. In Hardy's "Convergence of the Twain," for example, which you read in Chapter 2, Hardy found in the accidental sinking of the Titanic a message about excessive ostentation and vanity. When an event occurs that especially captures your attention, write some notes to yourself about the significance of this event. This will help you focus on a theme when you transform these notes into a poem. At the end of this chapter, I have included some poems that were written in response to specific events. In reading these poems, you will notice that the poet's perception of the event, not the event itself, is what gives the poem its power.
There are many other uses to which you can put your journal. You can use it to describe moods, dreams, passionate opinions and feelings about issues such as justice and racism. You can even use your journal to write letters to people--letters you will not necessarily want to send. All of these elements have been used as the basis for poems. But if you do not write your dream or your thought down, it will disappear, and it will never become a poem. I hope your journals will become your little treasures, as mine have become for me, scattered everywhere around my house, filled with tiny jewels waiting to be polished into poems.
QUESTIONS AND TOPICS FOR REVIEW
1. Define and provide and example of each of the following terms:
zuihitsu
miscellany
journal
diary
haibun
2. Who was the author of Narrow Road to the Deep North?
3. What techniques can a poet learn from reading each of the following works?
The Pillow Book of Sei Shonagon
The Journals of Dorothy Wordsworth
The Diary of Samuel Pepys
4. What is literary cannibalism? Give an example.
5. What is a persona? Give an example of the use of a persona in poetry.
6. Define and give an example of plagiarism.
7. What is an epigraph? How can an epigraph be used in poetry?
8. Explain the muse syndrome.
9. Define the terms anima and animus. How do these concepts relate to the muse syndrome?
10. Who were the Muses, and what was their function in ancient Greek art and literature?
TOPICS FOR DISCUSSION
1. Should there be guidelines for appropriateness in subject matter and language for poetry? Why or why not?
2. Should poetry ever be censored? Why or why not?
3. Research the plagiarism laws in your state and report your findings to the class.
4. Research the plagiarism policy of your college or university. What are the penalties for academic plagiarism? Do you believe that these penalties are fair? Should they be stricter or more lenient?
5. Should poetry and other art forms reflect the values of society, or should art play a visionary role, challenging society to a higher standard of values?
6. Should poets feel free to write on private family issues? Why or why not?
7. Research the positions of Poet Laureate in England and the United States. Who are the current Poet Laureates? Who were some of the previous ones? How do these positions in the two countries differ? How are they similar? Does Canada have a Poet Laureate? How about Mexico?
ACTIVITIES
1. Purchase a notebook which will become your poetry journal. Write in it as frequently as you can, preferably every day. You may wish to include some of the following topics:
descriptions of people
descriptions of places
lists
notes on the seasons of the year
descriptions of nature
notes on events and activities
descriptions of moods
letters to real, imaginary, or historic people
descriptions of dreams
emotional responses to situations and events
2. Write a series of collaborative lists by passing sheets of paper around the class, each with its own heading. Each student will add one or more items to each list. You may use some of Sei Shonagon's topics, or develop new ones of your own. Some possible topics for lists include:
Amusing Things
Depressing Things
Squalid Things
Things That Make the Heart Beat Faster
Embarrassing Things
Poignant Things
Disgusting Things
Exquisite Things
Read the completed lists in class and notice the variety of responses to the same stimulus.
3. Using one of the topics above or a topic of your own, write a spontaneous list in class, without collaborating with other students. Reformat your list, if necessary, into a poem that pleases you. Read your list poems to each other without critical comments. Notice of anyone included comparisons between items that are usually perceived to be different.
4. Organize a formal debate on the issue of censorship of poetry and other forms of literature. Include specific works of literature such as Huckleberry Finn, Paradise Lost, The Merchant of Venice, etc., in your arguments for and against censorship.
5. Organize a mock trial in which William Wordsworth is accused of plagiarizing from his sister Dorothy's journal. Mobilize prosecution and defense teams, and assign members of the class to play the parts of William, Dorothy, and various witnesses, including Samuel Taylor Coleridge.
6. Organize a similar mock trial in which Samuel Taylor Coleridge is accused of plagiarizing "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner" from a variety of sources. This project will require some time and extensive research. To prepare for this case, both the prosecution and defense teams will need to read "The Road to Xanadu," an essay by Professor Lowes, who contends that every detail in the poem can be found in Coleridge's reading.
ANALYTICAL WRITING ASSIGNMENTS
1. Write an analysis of Sylvia Plath's "Daddy," supporting or attacking the thesis that the father figure in the poem is "... not identical with but rather generalized from Plath's literal father."
2. Analyze William Blake's use of a variety of personas in his poetry collections entitled "Songs of Innocence" and "Songs of Experience." What effect does each persona create in conveying the meaning of the individual poem?
3. Write a paper analyzing Coleridge's use of two narrators in "Rime of the Ancient Mariner." What does each of these personas contribute to the overall effect and meaning of the poem?
4. Analyze the mythological elements in D.H. Lawrence's "Bavarian Gentians." How do these elements help to convey the poem's theme?
5. Study a botanical illustration of Bavarian gentians. Then write a paper analyzing how Lawrence uses the colors and shapes of these flowers to express the poem's theme.
6. Research the relationship between William Butler Yeats and Maud Gonne. Then analyze Yeats' comparison between Gonne and Helen of Troy in "No Second Troy" in the context of the overall theme and meaning of the poem.
7. Analyze the attitude or attitudes toward death in John Keats' "Ode to a Nightingale." You may wish to compare these attitudes to comments made by Keats in some of his personal letters.
8. Analyze how the use of specific natural settings influences the effect and themes of any of the following poems:
Roberts' "The Potato Harvest"
Lampman's "Winter Evening"
Kazato's "Golden Poplar"
9. Analyze the significance of the muse figure in any of the following poems:
Milton's "Methought I Saw My Late Espoused Saint"
Byron's "She Walks in Beauty"
Yeats' "No Second Troy"
10. The sonnet "Methought I Saw My Late Espoused Saint" by John Milton was based on a dream that Milton had after he had become completely blind. Research the context in which this poem was written and analyze the anima figure and the use of visual imagery in the poem.
11. Research the historic events surrounding Milton's sonnet "On the Late Massacre in Piedmont." Then analyze the poem's theme, focusing on Milton's use of political and religious rhetoric.
12. In each of the following poems, the poet has used a very ordinary event as the basis for contemplation. Choose one of the following poems and analyze how the poet presents his or her theme through attention to the details of this everyday event.
Takahashi's "Twilight"
Bishop's "Filling Station"
Stafford's "Traveling Through the Dark"
Avison's "A Nameless One"
13. Analyze William Wordsworth's "Lines" (Usually referred to as "Tintern Abbey") as an illustration of his definition of poetry as "...emotion recollected in tranquility."
14. Analyze the comic and satiric elements in Barbauld's "Washing-Day."
15. Compare the use of imagery in the poetry of Kobayashi Issa and Margaret Avison.
16. Compare and contrast Keats' "Ode to a Nightingale" and Shelley's "To a Sky-Lark."
17. Compare and contrast selected pairs of parallel poems from Blake's Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience.
18. Analyze the use of irony in the poetry of Paul Laurence Dunbar.
19. Analyze the focus on the microcosm and the macrocosm (the small world and the large world) in the poetry of Kobayashi Issa.
20. Analyze the use of symbols and archetypes in any of the following poems:
Coleridge's "Rime of the Ancient Mariner"
Dunbar's "We Wear the Mask"
Yeats' "No Second Troy"
CREATIVE WRITING ASSIGNMENTS
1. Cut an article out of the newspaper and use this current event as the basis for a poem.
2. After recording several dreams in your journal, select a dream that seems to have a theme and write a poem incorporating elements from this dream. It is not necessary to tell the entire dream in chronological order, since dreams are usually a series of symbolic images.
3. Write a poem which includes a detailed description of a plant, an animal, a bird, or a flower. Your poem will not necessarily be about this element, but the item described in your poem will help convey your theme.
4. Write a poem about a characteristic in a particular person that you find annoying. Then write a companion poem in that person's voice about an annoying personality trait or habit of your own.
5. Choose an ordinary event in your life that nevertheless seems meaningful to you and write a poem about it.
6. Write a poem using imagery to express a negative emotion such as envy, arrogance, rage, etc.
7. Choose a piece of writing, a quotation, or brief phrase that you have always liked and use it as the epigraph for a poem which you will write on a related theme.
8. Write a poem using a persona.
9. Write a poem about the person who has served as your muse.
10. Write a poem which includes a list. In poetry, lists are sometimes referred to as catalogues.
11. Choose a partner, and write a collaborative poem. There are a variety of methods of collaboration. You can write alternating lines or alternating stanzas, or one person can choose the theme while the other chooses the imagery. Or one poet can write the first draft and the other can edit and revise the poem. Part of the collaborative process is deciding how to go about writing a poem together.
ADDITIONAL POEMS FOR READING AND ANALYSIS
JOHN MILTON
England 1608-1674
Methought I Saw My Late Espoused Saint
Methought I saw my late espoused saint
Brought to me like Alcestis* from the grave,
Whom Jove's great son to her glad husband gave,
Rescued from death by force though pale and faint.
Mine, as whom washed from spot of childbed taint,
Purification in the old law did save,**
And such, as yet once more I trust to have
Full sight of her in heaven without restraint,
Came vested all in white, pure as her mind.
Her face was veiled, yet to my fancied sight
Love, sweetness, goodness, in her person shined
So clear, as in no face with more delight.
But O, as to embrace me she inclined,
I waked, she fled, and day brought back my night.***
* Hercules ("Jove's great son") rescued Alcestis, wife of Admetus, from the underworld.
** Milton's second wife, Katherine Woodcock, died after childbirth. The ancient Hebrew law prescribing purification of women after childbirth is described in Leviticus 12.
*** Milton became blind in 1651. This sonnet was written in 1658.
On the Late Massacre in Piedmont*
Avenge, O Lord, thy slaughtered saints, whose bones
Lie scattered on the Alpine mountains cold;
Even them who kept thy truth so pure of old
When all our fathers worshipped stocks and stones,
Forget not: in thy book record their groans
Who were thy sheep and in their ancient fold
Slain by the bloody Piemontese that rolled
Mother with infant down the rocks. Their moans
The vales redoubled to the hills, and they
To heaven. Their martyred blood and ashes sow
O'er all th' Italian fields, where still doth sway
The triple tyrant:** that from these may grow
A hundredfold, who having learnt thy way
Early may fly the Babylonian woe.***
* The Waldenses, a heretical sect who avoided graven images ("stocks and stones"), lived in the Piedmont area of northern Italy and were massacred in 1655. Milton and other European Protestants identified with the religious values of this sect.
** "The triple tyrant" refers to the Pope, wearing his tiara with three crowns.
*** Protestants during Milton's time often compared the Roman Catholic church with the evils of Babylon. See Revelations 17-18.
ANNA LAETITIA BARBAULD
England 1743-1825
Washing-Day
...and their voice,
Turning again toward childish treble, pipes
And whistles in its sound.--
The Muses are turned gossips; they have lost
The buskined step, and clear high-sounding phrase,
Language of the gods. Come then, domestic Muse,
In slipshod measure, loosely prattling on
Of farm or orchard, pleasant curds and cream,
Or drowning flies, or shoe lost in the mire
By little whimpering boy, with rueful face;
Come, Muse, and sing the dreaded Washing-Day.
Ye who beneath the yoke of wedlock bend,
With bowed soul, full well ye ken the day
Which week, smooth sliding after week, brings on
Too soon;-- for to that day nor peace belongs
Nor comfort;-- ere the first gray streak of dawn,
The red-armed washers come and chase repose.
Nor pleasant smile, nor quaint device of mirth,
E'er visited that day: the very cat,
From the wet kitchen scared and reeking hearth,
Visits the parlour,-- an unwonted guest.
The silent breakfast-meal is soon dispatched;
Uninterrupted, save by anxious looks
Cast at the lowering sky, if sky should lower.
From that last evil, O preserve us, heavens!
For should the skies pour down, adieu to all
Remains of quiet: then expect to hear
Of sad disasters,-- dirt and gravel stains
Hard to efface, and loaded lines at once
Snapped short,-- and linen-horse by dog thrown down,
And all the petty miseries of life.
Saints have been calm while stretched upon the rack,
And Guatimozin* smiled on burning coals;
But never yet did housewife notable
Greet with a smile a rainy washing-day.
--But grant the welkin fair, require not thou
Who call'st thyself perchance the master there,
Or study swept, or nicely dusted coat,
Or usual 'tendance;-- ask not, indiscreet,
Thy stockings mended, though the yawning rents
Gape wide as Erebus;** nor hope to find
Some snug recess impervious: shouldst thou try
The 'customed garden walks, thine eye shall rue
The budding fragrance of thy tender shrubs,
Myrtle or rose, all crushed beneath the weight
Of coarse checked apron,-- with impatient hand
Twitched off when showers impend: or crossing lines
Shall mar thy musings, as the wet cold sheet
Flaps in thy face abrupt. Woe to the friend
Whose evil stars have urged him forth to claim
On such a day the hospitable rites!
Looks, blank at best, and stinted courtesy,
Shall he receive. Vainly he feeds his hopes
With dinner of roast chicken, savoury pie,
Or tart or pudding:-- pudding he nor tart
That day shall eat; nor, though the husband try,
Mending what can't be helped, to kindle mirth,
From cheer deficient, shall his consort's brow
Clear up propitious:-- the unlucky guest
In silence dines, and early slinks away.
I well remember, when a child, the awe
This day struck into me; for then the maids,
I scarce knew why, looked cross, and drove me from them:
Nor soft caress could I obtain, nor hope
Usual indulgences; jelly or creams,
Relic of costly suppers, and set by
For me their petted one; or buttered toast,
When butter was forbid; or thrilling tale
Of ghost or witch, or murder-- so I went
And sheltered me beside the parlour fire:
There my dear grandmother, eldest of forms,
Tended the little ones, and watched from harm,
Anxiously fond, though oft her spectacles
With elfin cunning hid, and oft the pins
Drawn from her ravelled stocking, might have soured
One less indulgent.--
At intervals my mother's voice was heard,
Urging dispatch: briskly the work went on,
All hands employed to wash, to rinse, to wring,
To fold, and starch, and clap, and iron, and plait.
Then would I sit me down and ponder much
Why washings were. Sometimes through hollow bowl
Of pipe amused we blew, and sent aloft
The floating bubbles; little dreaming then
To see, Mongolfier,*** thy silken ball
Ride buoyant through the clouds-- so near approach
The sports of children and the toils of men.
Earth, air, and sky, and ocean, hath its bubbles,
And verse is one of them-- this most of all.
* Guatimozin was a Mexican king tortured by Cortez
** Erebus was a dark place on the way to Hades in Greek mythology.
*** In 1783, the brothers Jacques and Joseph Montgolfier made the world's first ascent in a hot-air balloon.
WILLIAM BLAKE
England 1757-1827
Between 1789 and 1794, Blake etched a collection of poems in two parts, "Songs of Innocence" and "Songs of Experience." "Songs of Innocence" reflects the innocent and naturally spiritual worldview of children. In contrast, "Songs of Experience" depicts the cynical, selfish, unjust, and evil world of adults, as Blake perceived it. There is extensive irony in both sets of poems. Blake also included several pairs of parallel but contrasting poems, such as "The Lamb" and "The Tyger" (see Chapter 2), presenting the innocent and the experienced view of life respectively. Some of these pairs of poems, such as "The Chimney Sweeper," have identical titles.
The Chimney Sweeper
from Songs of Experience
A little black thing among the snow
Crying "'weep, 'weep," in notes of woe!
"Where are thy father & mother? say?"
"They are both gone up to the church to pray.
"Because I was happy upon the heath,
And smil'd among the winter's snow;
They clothed me in the clothes of death,
And taught me to sing the notes of woe.
"And because I am happy, & dance & sing,
They think they have done me no injury,
And are gone to praise God & his Priest & King,
Who make up a heaven of our misery."
Holy Thursday
from Songs of Innocence
'Twas on a Holy Thursday,* their innocent faces clean,
The children walking two & two, in red & blue & green;
Grey headed beadles** walkd before with wands as white as snow,
Till into the high dome of Paul's they like Thames' waters flow.
O what a multitude they seemd, those flowers of London town!
Seated in companies they sit with radiance all their own.
The hum of multitudes was there, but multitudes of Lambs,--
Thousands of little boys & girls raising their innocent hands.
Now like a mighty wind they raise to heaven the voice of song,
Or like harmonious thunderings the seats of heaven among.
Beneath them sit the aged men, wise guardians of the poor;
Then cherish pity, lest you drive an angel from your door.***
* In the Church of England, it was customary to march poor and orphaned children from the charity schools of London to a service at St. Paul's Cathedral on Holy Thursday, thirty-nine days after Easter to celebrate the Ascension of Jesus.
** Beadles were low ranking church officers. They were assigned to keep the children in order.
*** See Hebrews 13:2. "Be not forgetful to entertain strangers: for thereby some have entertained angels unawares."
Holy Thursday
from Songs of Experience
Is this a holy thing to see,
In a rich and fruitful land,
Babes reduced to misery,
Fed with a cold and usurous hand?
Is that trembling cry a song?
Can it be a song of joy?
And so many children poor?
It is a land of poverty!
And their sun does never shine,
And their fields are bleak & bare,
And their ways are fill'd with thorns;
It is eternal winter there.
For where-e'er the sun does shine,
And where-e'er the rain does fall,
Babe can never hunger there,
Nor poverty the mind appall.
Infant Joy
from Songs of Innocence
"I have no name,
I am but two days old."
What shall I call thee?
"I happy am,
Joy is my name."
Sweet joy befall thee!
Pretty joy!
Sweet joy but two days old,
Sweet joy I call thee;
Thou dost smile,
I sing the while--
Sweet joy befall thee.
Infant Sorrow
from Songs of Experience
My mother groaned! my father wept.
Into the dangerous world I leapt,
Helpless, naked, piping loud;
Like a fiend hid in a cloud.
Struggling in my father's hands,
Striving against my swaddling bands;
Bound and weary I thought best
To sulk upon my mother's breast.
KOBAYASHI ISSA
Japan 1762-1826
A bush warbler
Wipes his muddy feet
On plum blossoms.
translated by Rose Anna Higashi
A man, just one--
also a fly, just one--
in the huge drawing room.
translated by Harold Henderson
Right at my feet--
and when did you get there,
snail?
translated by Harold Henderson
In its eye
are mirrored far-off mountains--
dragonfly!
translated by Harold Henderson
WILLIAM WORDSWORTH
England 1770-1850
LINES
Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey, on Revisiting the Banks of
the Wye during a Tour, July 13, 1798
Five years have passed; five summers, with the length
Of five long winters! and again I hear
These waters, rolling from their mountain‑springs
With a soft inland murmur.-- Once again
Do I behold these steep and lofty cliffs,
That on a wild secluded scene impress
Thoughts of more deep seclusion; and connect
The landscape with the quiet of the sky.
The day is come when I again repose
Here, under this dark Sycamore, and view
These plots of cottage ground, these orchard tufts,
Which at this season, with their unripe fruits,
Are clad in one green hue, and lose themselves
'Mid groves and copses. Once again I see
These hedgerows, hardly hedgerows, little lines
Of sportive wood run wild; these pastoral farms,
Green to the very door; and wreaths of smoke
Sent up, in silence, from among the trees!
With some uncertain notice, as might seem
Of vagrant dwellers in the houseless woods,
Or of some Hermit's cave, where by his fire
The Hermit sits alone.
These beauteous forms,
Through a long absence, have not been to me
As is a landscape to a blind man's eye;
But oft, in lonely rooms, and 'mid the din
Of towns and cities, I have owed to them,
In hours of weariness, sensations sweet,
Felt in the blood, and felt along the heart;
And passing even into my purer mind,
With tranquil restoration:-—feelings too
Of unremembered pleasure: such, perhaps,
As have no slight or trivial influence
On that best portion of a good man's life,
His little, nameless, unremembered, acts
Of kindness and of love. Nor less, I trust,
To them I may have owed another gift,
Of aspect more sublime; that blessed mood,
In which the burthen of the mystery,
In which the heavy and the weary weight
Of all this unintelligible world,
Is lightened:-—that serene and blessed mood,
In which the affections gently lead us on,-—
Until, the breath of this corporeal frame
And even the motion of our human blood
Almost suspended, we are laid asleep
In body, and become a living soul:
While with an eye made quiet by the power
Of harmony, and the deep power of joy,
We see into the life of things.
If this
Be but a vain belief, yet, oh! how oft-—
In darkness and amid the many shapes
Of joyless daylight; when the fretful stir
Unprofitable, and the fever of the world,
Have hung upon the beatings of my heart-—
How oft, in spirit, have I turned to thee,
O sylvan Wye! thou wanderer through the woods,
How often has my spirit turned to thee!
And now, with gleams of half‑extinguished thought,
With many recognitions dim and faint,
And somewhat of a sad perplexity,
The picture of the mind revives again;
While here I stand, not only with the sense
Of present pleasure, but with pleasing thoughts
That in this moment there is life and food
For future years. And so I dare to hope,
Though changed, no doubt, from what I was when first
I came among these hills; when like a roe
I bounded o'er the mountains, by the sides
Of the deep rivers, and the lonely streams,
Wherever nature led: more like a man
Flying from something that he dreads than one
Who sought the thing he loved. For nature then
(The coarser pleasures of my boyish days,
And their glad animal movements all gone by)
To me was all in all.-—I cannot paint
What then I was. The sounding cataract
Haunted me like a passion; the tall rock,
The mountain, and the deep and gloomy wood,
Their colors and their forms, were then to me
An appetite; a feeling and a love,
That had no need of a remoter charm,
By thought supplied, nor any interest
Unborrowed from the eye.-—That time is past,
And all its aching joys are now no more,
And all its dizzy raptures. Not for this
Faint I, nor mourn nor murmur; other gifts
Have followed; for such loss, I would believe,
Abundant recompense. For I have learned
To look on nature, not as in the hour
Of thoughtless youth; but hearing oftentimes
The still; sad music of humanity,
Nor harsh nor grating, though of ample power
To chasten and subdue. And I have felt
A presence that disturbs me with the joy
Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime
Of something far more deeply interfused,
Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,
And the round ocean and the living air,
And the blue sky, and in the mind of man:
A motion and a spirit, that impels
All thinking things, all objects of all thought,
And rolls through all things. Therefore am I still
A lover of the meadows and the woods,
And mountains; and of all that we behold
From this green earth; of all the mighty world
Of eye, and ear-—both what they half create,
And what perceive; well pleased to recognize
In nature and the language of the sense
The anchor of my purest thoughts, the nurse,
The guide, the guardian of my heart, and soul
Of all my moral being.
Nor perchance,
If I were not thus taught, should I the more
Suffer my genial spirits to decay:
For thou art with me here upon the banks
Of this fair river; thou my dearest Friend,
My dear, dear Friend; and in thy voice I catch
The language of my former heart, and read
My former pleasures in the shooting lights
Of thy wild eyes. Oh! yet a little while
May I behold in thee what I was once,
My dear, dear Sister! and this prayer I make,
Knowing that Nature never did betray
The heart that loved her; 'tis her privilege,
Through all the years of this our life, to lead
From joy to joy: for she can so inform
The mind that is within us, so impress
With quietness and beauty, and so feed
With lofty thoughts, that neither evil tongues,
Rash judgments, nor the sneers of selfish men,
Nor greetings where no kindness is, nor all
The dreary intercourse of daily life,
Shall e'er prevail against us, or disturb
Our cheerful faith, that all which we behold
Is full of blessings. Therefore let the moon
Shine on thee in thy solitary walk;
And let the misty mountain winds be free
To blow against thee: and, in after years,
When these wild ecstasies shall be matured
Into a sober pleasure; when thy mind
Shall be a mansion for all lovely forms,
Thy memory be as a dwelling place
For all sweet sounds and harmonies; oh! then,
If solitude, or fear, or pain, or grief
Should be thy portion, with what healing thoughts
Of tender joy wilt thou remember me,
And these my exhortations! Nor, perchance-—
If I should be where I no more can hear
Thy voice, nor catch from thy wild eyes these gleams
Of past existence-‑wilt thou then forget
That on the banks of this delightful stream
We stood together; and that I, so long
A worshiper of Nature, hither came
Unwearied in that service; rather say
With warmer love-—oh! with far deeper zeal
Of holier love. Nor wilt thou then forget,
That after many wanderings, many years
Of absence, these steep woods and lofty cliffs,
And this green pastoral landscape, were to me
More dear, both for themselves and for thy sake!
SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE
England 1772-1834
The Rime of the Ancient Mariner
Part I
It is an ancient Mariner
And he stoppeth one of three.
--"By thy long gray beard and glittering eye,
Now wherefore stopp'st thou me?
The Bridegroom's doors are opened wide,
And I am next of kin;
The guests are met, the feast is set:
May'st hear the merry din."
He holds him with his skinny hand,
"There was a ship," quoth he.
"Hold off! unhand me, graybeard loon!"
Eftsoons his hand dropped he.
He holds him with his glittering eye--
The Wedding Guest stood still,
And listens like a three years' child:
The Mariner hath his will.
The Wedding Guest sat on a stone:
He cannot choose but hear;
And thus spake on that ancient man,
The bright‑eyed Mariner.
"The ship was cheered, the harbor cleared,
Merrily did we drop
Below the kirk, below the hill,
Below the lighthouse top.
The Sun came up upon the left,
Out of the sea came he!
And he shone bright, and on the right
Went down into the sea.
Higher and higher every day,
Till over the mast at noon--"
The Wedding Guest here beat his breast,
For he heard the loud bassoon.
The bride hath paced into the hall,
Red as a rose is she;
Nodding their heads before her goes
The merry minstrelsy.
The Wedding Guest he beat his breast,
Yet he cannot choose but hear;
And thus spake on that ancient man,
The bright‑eyed Mariner.
And now the STORM‑BLAST came, and he
Was tyrannous and strong;
He struck with his o'ertaking wings,
And chased us south along.
With sloping masts and dipping prow,
As who pursued with yell and blow
Still treads the shadow of his foe,
And forward bends his head,
The ship drove fast, loud roared the blast,
And southward aye we fled.
And now there came both mist and snow,
And it grew wondrous cold:
And ice, mast‑high, came floating by,
As green as emerald.
And through the drifts the snowy clifts
Did send a dismal sheen:
Nor shapes of men nor beasts we ken--
The ice was all between.
The ice was here, the ice was there,
The ice was all around:
It cracked and growled, and roared and howled,
Like noises in a swound!
At length did cross an Albatross,
Thorough the fog it came;
As if it had been a Christian soul,
We hailed it in God's name.
It ate the food it ne'er had eat,
And round and round it flew.
The ice did split with a thunder‑fit;
The helmsman steered us through!
And a good south wind sprung up behind;
The Albatross did follow,
And every day, for food or play,
Came to the mariners' hollo!
In mist or cloud, on mast or shroud,
It perched for vespers nine;
Whiles all the night, through fog‑smoke white,
Glimmered the white Moon‑shine."
"God save thee, ancient Mariner!
From the fiends, that plague thee thus!--
Why look'st thou so?" With my crossbow
I shot the ALBATROSS.
Part 11
The Sun now rose upon the right:
Out of the sea came he,
Still hid in mist, and on the left
Went down into the sea.
And the good south wind still blew behind,
But no sweet bird did follow,
Nor any day for food or play
Came to the mariners' hollo!
And I had done a hellish thing,
And it would work 'em woe:
For all averred, I had killed the bird
That made the breeze to blow.
Ah Wretch! said they, the bird to slay,
That made the breeze to blow!
Nor dim nor red, like God's own head,
The glorious Sun uprist:
Then all averred, I had killed the bird
That brought the fog and mist.
'Twas right, said they, such birds to slay,
That bring the fog and mist.
The fair breeze blew, the white foam flew,
The furrow followed free;
We were the first that ever burst
Into that silent sea.
Down dropped the breeze, the sails dropped down,
'Twas sad as sad could be;
And we did speak only to break
The silence of the sea!
All in a hot and copper sky,
The bloody Sun, at noon,
Right up above the mast did stand,
No bigger than the Moon.
Day after day, day after day,
We stuck, nor breath nor motion;
As idle as a painted ship
Upon a painted ocean.
Water, water, everywhere,
And all the boards did shrink;
Water, water, everywhere,
Nor any drop to drink.
The very deep did rot: O Christ!
That ever this should be!
Yea, slimy things did crawl with legs
Upon the slimy sea.
About, about, in reel and rout
The death‑fires danced at night;
The water, like a witch's oils,
Burnt green, and blue and white.
And some in dreams assured were
Of the Spirit that plagued us so;
Nine fathom deep he had followed us
From the land of mist and snow.
And every tongue, through utter drought,
Was withered at the root;
We could not speak, no more than if
We had been choked with soot.
Ahl well‑a‑day! what evil looks
Had I from old and young!
Instead of the cross, the Albatross
About my neck was hung.
Part 111
There passed a weary time. Each throat
Was parched, and glazed each eye.
A weary time! a weary time!
How glazed each weary eye,
When looking westward, I beheld
A something in the sky.
At first it seemed a little speck,
And then it seemed a mist;
It moved and moved, and took at last
A certain shape, I wist.
A speck, a mist, a shape, I wist!
And still it neared an neared:
As if it dodged a water sprite,
It plunged and tacked and veered.
With throats unslaked, with black lips baked,
We could nor laugh nor wail;
Through utter drought all dumb we stood!
I bit my arm, I sucked the blood,
And cried, A sail! a sail!
With throats unslaked, with black lips baked,
Agape they heard me call:
Gramercy! they for joy did grin,
And all at once their breath drew in,
As they were drinking all.
See! see! (I cried) she tacks no more!
Hither to work us weal;
Without a breeze, without a tide,
She steadies with upright keel!
The western wave was all aflame.
The day was well nigh done!
Almost upon the western wave
Rested the broad bright Sun;
When that strange shape drove suddenly
Betwixt us and the Sun.
And straight the Sun was flecked with bars,
(Heaven's Mother send us grace!)
As if through a dungeon grate he peered
With broad and burning face.
Alas! (thought I, and my heart beat loud)
How fast she nears and nears!
Are those her sails that glance in the Sun,
Like restless gossameres?
Are those her ribs through which the Sun
Did peer, as through a grate?
And is that Woman all her crew?
Is that a DEATH? and are there two?
Is DEATH that woman's mate?
Her lips were red, her looks were free,
Her locks were yellow as gold:
Her skin was as white as leprosy,
The Nightmare LIFE‑IN-DEATH was she,
Who thicks man's blood with cold.
The naked hulk alongside came,
And the twain were casting dice;
"The game is done! I've won! I've won!"
Quoth she, and whistles thrice.
The Sun's rim dips; the stars rush out:
At one stride comes the dark;
With far‑heard whisper, o'er the sea,
Off shot the specter‑bark.
We listened and looked sideways up!
Fear at my heart, as at a cup,
My lifeblood seems to sip!
The stars were dim, and thick the night,
The steersman's face by his lamp gleamed white;
From the sails the dew did drip--
Till clomb above the eastern bar
The horned Moon, with one bright star
Within the nether tip.
One after one, by the star‑dogged Moon,
Too quick for groan or sigh,
Each turned his face with ghastly pang,
And cursed me with his eye.
Four times fifty living men,
(And I heard nor sigh nor groan)
With heavy thump, a lifeless lump,
They dropped down one by one.
The souls did from their bodies fly--
They fled to bliss or woe!
And every soul, it passed me by,
Like the whizz of my cross‑bow!
Part IV
"I fear thee, ancient Mariner!
I fear thy skinny hand!
And thou art long, and lank, and brown
As is the ribbed sea‑sand.
I fear thee and thy glittering eye,
And thy skinny hand, so brown."--
Fear not, fear not, thou Wedding Guest!
This body dropped not down.
Alone, alone, all, all alone,
Alone on a wide wide sea!
And never a saint took pity on
My soul in agony.
The many men, so beautiful
And they all dead did lie:
And a thousand thousand slimy things
Lived on; and so did I.
I looked upon the rotting sea,
And drew my eyes away;
I looked upon the rotting deck,
And there the dead men lay.
I looked to heaven, and tried to pray;
But or ever a prayer had gushed,
A wicked whisper came, and made
My heart as dry as dust.
I closed my lids, and kept them close,
And the balls like pulses beat,
For the sky and the sea, and the sea and the sky
Lay like a load on my weary eye,
And the dead were at my feet.
The cold sweat melted from their limbs,
Nor rot nor reek did they:
The look with which they looked on me
Had never passed away.
An orphan's curse would drag to hell
A spirit from on high;
But oh! more horrible than that
Is the curse in a dead man's eye!
Seven days, seven nights, I saw that curse,
And yet I could not die.
The moving Moon went up the sky,
And nowhere did abide:
Softly she was going up,
And a star or two beside--
Her beams bemocked the sultry main,
Like April hoar‑frost spread;
But where the ship's huge shadow lay,
The charmed water burnt alway
A still and awful red.
Beyond the shadow of the ship,
I watched the water snakes:
They moved in tracks of shining white,
And when they reared, the elfish light
Fell off in hoary flakes.
Within the shadow of the ship
I watched their rich attire:
Blue, glossy green, and velvet black,
They coiled and swam; and every track
Was a flash of golden fire.
O happy living things! no tongue
Their beauty might declare:
A spring of love gushed from my heart,
And I blessed them unaware:
Sure my kind saint took pity on me,
And I blessed them unaware.
The self‑same moment I could pray;
And from my neck so free
The Albatross fell off, and sank
Like lead into the sea.
Part V
Oh sleep! it is a gentle thing,
Beloved from pole to pole!
To Mary Queen the praise be given!
She sent the gentle sleep from Heaven,
That slid into my soul.
The silly buckets on the deck,
That had so long remained,
I dreamt that they were filled with dew;
And when I awoke, it rained.
My lips were wet, my throat was cold,
My garments all were dank;
Sure I had drunken in my dreams,
And still my body drank.
I moved, and could not feel my limbs:
I was so light-- almost
I thought that I had died in sleep,
And was a blessed ghost.
And soon I heard a roaring wind:
It did not come anear;
But with its sound it shook the sails,
That were so thin and sere.
The upper air burst into life!
And a hundred fire‑flags sheen
To and fro they were hurried about!
And to and fro, and in and out,
The wan stars danced between.
And the coming wind did roar more loud,
And the sails did sigh like sedge;
And the rain poured down from one black cloud;
The Moon was at its edge.
The thick black cloud was cleft, and still
The Moon was at its side:
Like waters shot from some high crag,
The lightning fell with never a jag,
A river steep and wide.
The loud wind never reached the ship,
Yet now the ship moved on!
Beneath the lightning and the Moon
The dead men gave a groan.
They groaned, they stirred, they all uprose,
Nor spake, nor moved their eyes;
It had been strange, even in a dream,
To have seen those dead men rise.
The helmsman steered, the ship moved on;
Yet never a breeze up‑blew;
The mariners all 'gan work the ropes,
Where they were wont to do;
They raised their limbs like lifeless tools--
We were a ghastly crew.
The body of my brother's son
Stood by me, knee to knee:
The body and I pulled at one rope,
But he said nought to me.
"I fear thee, ancient Mariner!"
Be calm, thou Wedding Guest!
'Twas not those souls that fled in pain,
Which to their corses came again,
But a troop of spirits blest:
For when it dawned they dropped their arms,
And clustered round the mast;
Sweet sounds rose slowly through their mouths,
And from their bodies passed.
Around, around, flew each sweet sound,
Then darted to the Sun;
Slowly the sounds came back again,
Now mixed, now one by one.
Sometimes a‑dropping from the sky
I heard the sky‑lark sing;
Sometimes all little birds that are,
How they seemed to fill the sea and air
With their sweet jargoning!
And now 'twas like all instruments,
Now like a lonely flute;
And now it is an angel's song,
That makes the heavens be mute.
It ceased; yet still the sails made on
A pleasant noise till noon,
A noise like of a hidden brook
In the leafy month of June,
That to the sleeping woods all night
Singeth a quiet tune.
Till noon we quietly sailed on,
Yet never a breeze did breathe:
Slowly and smoothly went the ship,
Moved onward from beneath.
Under the keel nine fathom deep,
From the land of mist and snow,
The spirit slid: and it was he
That made the ship to go.
The sails at noon left off their tune,
And the ship stood still also.
The Sun, right up above the mast,
Had fixed her to the ocean:
But in a minute she 'gan stir,
With a short uneasy motion--
Backwards and forwards half her length
With a short uneasy motion.
Then like a pawing horse let go,
She made a sudden bound:
It flung the blood into my head,
And I fell down in a swound.
How long in that same fit I lay,
I have not to declare;
But ere my living life returned,
I heard and in my soul discerned
Two voices in the air.
"Is it he?"quoth one, "Is this the man?
By him who died on cross,
With his cruel bow he laid full low
The harmless Albatross.
The spirit who bideth by himself
In the land of mist and snow,
He loved the bird that loved the man
Who shot him with his bow."
The other was a softer voice,
As soft as honey‑dew:
Quoth he, "The man hath penance done,
And penance more will do."
Part Vl
FIRST VOICE
"But tell me, tell me! speak again,
Thy soft response renewing--
What makes that ship drive on so fast?
What is the ocean doing?"
SECOND VOICE
"Still as a slave before his lord,
The ocean hath no blast;
His great bright eye most silently
Up to the Moon is cast--
If he may know which way to go;
For she guides him smooth or grim.
See, brother, see! how graciously
She looketh down on him."
FIRST VOICE
"But why drives on that ship so fast,
Without or wave or wind?"
SECOND VOICE
"The air is cut away before,
And closes from behind.
Fly, brother, fly! more high, more high!
Or we shall be belated:
For slow and slow that ship will go,
When the Mariner's trance is abated."
I woke, and we were sailing on
As in a gentle weather:
'Twas night, calm night, the moon was high;
The dead men stood together.
All stood together on the deck,
For a charnel‑dungeon fitter:
All fixed on me their stony eyes,
That in the Moon did glitter.
The pang, the curse, with which they died,
Had never passed away:
I could not draw my eyes from theirs,
Nor turn them up to pray.
And now this spell was snapped: once more
I viewed the ocean green,
And looked far forth, yet little saw
Of what had else been seen--
Like one, that on a lonesome road
Doth walk in fear and dread,
And having once turned round walks on,
And turns no more his head;
Because he knows, a frightful fiend
Doth close behind him tread.
But soon there breathed a wind on me,
Nor sound nor motion made: Its path was not upon the sea,
In ripple or in shade.
It raised my hair, it fanned my cheek
Like a meadow‑gale of spring--
It mingled strangely with my fears,
Yet it felt like a welcoming.
Swiftly, swiftly flew the ship,
Yet she sailed softly too:
Sweetly, sweetly blew the breeze--
On me alone it blew.
Oh! dream of joy! is this indeed
The lighthouse top I see?
Is this the hill? is this the kirk?
Is this mine own countree?
We drifted o'er the harbor‑bar,
And I with sobs did pray--
O let me be awake, my God!
Or let me sleep alway.
The harbor‑bay was clear as glass,
So smoothly it was strewn!
And on the bay the moonlight lay,
And the shadow of the Moon.
The rock shone bright, the kirk no less,
That stands above the rock:
The moonlight steeped in silentness
The steady weathercock.
And the bay was white with silent light,
Till rising from the same,
Full many shapes, that shadows were,
In crimson colors came.
A little distance from the prow
Those crimson shadows were:
I turned my eyes upon the deck--
Oh, Christ! what saw I there!
Each corse lay flat, lifeless and flat,
And, by the holy rood!
A man all light, a seraph‑man,
On every corse there stood.
This seraph‑band, each waved his hand:
It was a heavenly sight!
They stood as signals to the land,
Each one a lovely light;
This seraph‑band, each waved his hand,
No voice did they impart--
No voice; but oh! the silence sank
Like music on my heart.
But soon I heard the dash of oars,
I heard the Pilot's cheer;
My head was turned perforce away
And I saw a boat appear.
The Pilot and the Pilot's boy,
I heard them coming fast:
Dear Lord in Heaven! it was a joy
The dead men could not blast.
I saw a third-- I heard his voice:
It is the Hermit good!
He singeth loud his godly hymns
That he makes in the wood.
He'll shrieve my soul, he'll wash away
The Albatross's blood.
Part Vll
This Hermit good lives in that wood
Which slopes down to the sea.
How loudly his sweet voice he rears!
He loves to talk with marineres
That come from a far countree.
He kneels at morn, and noon, and eve--
He hath a cushion plump:
It is the moss that wholly hides
The rotted old oak stump.
The skiff‑boat neared: I heard them talk,
"Why, this is strange, I trow!
Where are those lights so many and fair,
That signal made but now?"
"Strange, by my faith!" the Hermit said--
"And they answered not our cheer!
The planks looked warped! and see those sails,
How thin they are and sere!
I never saw aught like to them,
Unless perchance it were
Brown skeletons of leaves that lag
My forest‑brook along;
When the ivy tod is heavy with snow,
And the owlet whoops to the wolf below,
That eats the she‑wolf's young."
"Dear Lord! it hath a fiendish look,"
The Pilot made reply,
"I am a‑feared"--"Push on, push on!"
Said the Hermit cheerily.
The boat came closer to the ship,
But I nor spake nor stirred;
The boat came close beneath the ship,
And straight a sound was heard.
Under the water it rumbled on,
Still louder and more dread:
It reached the ship, it split the bay;
The ship went down like lead.
Stunned by that loud and dreadful sound,
Which sky and ocean smote,
Like one that hath been seven days drowned
My body lay afloat;
But swift as dreams, myself I found
Within the Pilot's boat.
Upon the whirl, where sank the ship,
The boat spun round and round;
And all was still, save that the hill
Was telling of the sound.
I moved my lips-- the Pilot shrieked
And fell down in a fit;
The holy Hermit raised his eyes,
And prayed where he did sit.
I took the oars: the Pilot's boy,
Who now doth crazy go,
Laughed loud and long, and all the while
His eyes went to and fro.
"Ha! ha!" quoth he, "full plain I see,
The Devil knows how to row."
And now, all in my own countree,
I stood on the firm land!
The Hermit stepped forth from the boat,
And scarcely he could stand.
"O shrieve me, shrieve me, holy man!"
The Hermit crossed his brow.
"Say quick," quoth he, "I bid thee say
What manner of man art thou?"
Forthwith this frame of mine was wrenched
With a woeful agony,
Which forced me to begin my tale;
And then it left me free.
Since then, at an uncertain hour,
That agony returns:
And till my ghastly tale is told
This heart within me burns.
I pass, like night, from land to land;
I have strange power of speech;
That moment that his face I see,
I know the man that must hear me:
To him my tale I teach.
What loud uproar bursts from that door!
The wedding guests are there:
But in the garden‑bower the bride
And bridemaids singing are:
And hark the little vesper bell,
Which biddeth me to prayer!
O Wedding Guest! this soul hath been
Alone on a wide wide sea:
So lonely 'twas, that God himself
Scarce seemed there to be.
O sweeter than the marriage feast,
'Tis sweeter far to me,
To walk together to the kirk
With a goodly company!
To walk together to the kirk,
And all together pray,
While each to his great Father bends,
Old men, and babes, and loving friends
And youths and maidens gay!
Farewell, farewell! but this I tell
To thee, thou Wedding Guest!
He prayeth well, who loveth well
Both man and bird and beast.
He prayeth best, who loveth best
All things both great and small;
For the dear God who loveth us,
He made and loveth all.
The Mariner, whose eye is bright,
Whose beard with age is hoar,
Is gone: and now the Wedding Guest
Turned from the bridegroom's door.
He went like one that hath been stunned,
And is of sense forlorn:
A sadder and a wiser man,
He rose the morrow morn.
GEORGE GORDON, LORD BYRON
England 1788-1824
She Walks in Beauty
1
She walks in beauty, like the night
Of cloudless climes and starry skies;
And all that's best of dark and bright
Meet in her aspect and her eyes:
Thus mellow'd to that tender light
Which heaven to gaudy day denies.
2
One shade the more, one ray the less,
Had half impair'd the nameless grace
Which waves in every raven tress,
Or softly lightens o'er her face;
Where thoughts serenely sweet express
How pure, how dear their dwelling place.
3
And on that cheek, and o'er that brow,
So soft, so calm, yet eloquent,
The smiles that win, the tints that glow,
But tell of days in goodness spent,
A mind at peace with all below,
A heart whose love is innocent!
PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY
England 1792-1822
To a Sky-Lark
Hail to thee, blithe Spirit!
Bird thou never wert--
That from Heaven, or near it,
Pourest thy full heart
In profuse strains of unpremeditated art.
Higher still and higher
From the earth thou springest
Like a cloud of fire;
The blue deep thou wingest,
And singing still dost soar, and soaring ever singest.
In the golden lightning
Of the sunken Sun--
O'er which the clouds are brightning,
Thou dost float and run;
Like an unbodied joy whose race is just begun.
The pale purple even
Melts around thy flight,
Like a star of Heaven
In the broad day-light
Thou art unseen,--but yet I hear thy shrill delight,
Keen as are the arrows
Of that silver sphere,
Whose intense lamp narrows
In the white dawn clear
Until we hardly see--we feel that it is there.
All the earth and air
With thy voice is loud,
As when Night is bare
From one lonely cloud
The moon rains out her beams--and Heaven is overflowed.
What thou are we know not;
What is most like thee?
From rainbow clouds there flow not
Drops so bright to see
As from thy presence showers a rain of melody.
Like a Poet hidden
In the light of thought,
Singing hymns unbidden,
Till the world is wrought
To sympathy with hopes and fears it heeded not:
Like a high-born maiden
In a palace-tower,
Soothing her love-laden
Soul in secret hour,
With music sweet as love--which overflows her bower:
Like a glow-worm golden
In a dell of dew,
Scattering unbeholden
Its aerial hue
Among the flowers and grass which screen it from the view:
Like a rose embowered
In its own green leaves--
By warm winds deflowered--
Till the scent it gives
Makes faint with too much sweet those heavy-winged thieves:
Sound of vernal showers
On the twinkling grass,
Rain-awakened flowers,
All that ever was
Joyous, and clear and fresh, thy music doth surpass.
Teach us, Sprite or Bird,
What sweet thoughts are thine;
I have never heard
Praise of love or wine
That panted forth a flood of rapture so divine:
Chorus Hymeneal*
Or triumphal chaunt
Matched with thine would be all
But an empty vaunt,
A thing wherein we feel there is some hidden want.
What objects are the fountains
Of thy happy strain?
What fields or waves or mountains?
What shapes of sky or plain?
What love of thine own kind? what ignorance of pain?
With thy clear keen joyance
Languor cannot be--
Shadow of annoyance
Never came near thee;
Thou lovest--but ne'er knew love's sad satiety.
Waking or asleep,
Thou of death must deem
Things more true and deep
Than we mortals dream,
Or how could thy notes flow in such a chrystal stream?
We look before and after,
And pine for what is not--
Our sincerest laughter
With some pain is fraught--
Our sweetest songs are those that tell of saddest thought.
Yet if we could scorn
Hate and pride and fear;
If we were things born
Not to shed at tear,
I know not how thy joy we ever should come near.
Better than all measures
Of delightful sound--
Better than all treasures
That in books are found--
Thy skill to poet were, thou Scorner of the ground!
Teach me half the gladness
That thy brain must know,
Such harmonious madness
From thy lips would flow
The world should listen then--as I am listening now.
* Chorus Hymeneal refers to a marriage song. Hymen was the Greek god of marriage.
JOHN KEATS
England 1795-1821
Ode to a Nightingale
1
My heart aches, and a drowsy numbness pains
My sense, as though of hemlock I had drunk,
Or emptied some dull opiate to the drains
One minute past, and Lethe‑wards had sunk:
'Tis not through envy of thy happy lot,
But being too happy in thine happiness‑
That thou, light‑winged Dryad of the trees,
In some melodious plot
Of beechen green, and shadows numberless,
Singest of summer in full‑throated ease.
2
O, for a draught of vintage! that hath been
Cooled a long age in the deep‑delved earth,
Tasting of Flora and the country green,
Dance, and Provencal song, and sunburnt mirth!
O for a beaker full of the warm South,
Full of the true, the blushful Hippoerene,
With beaded bubbles winking at the brim,
And purple‑stained mouth
That I might drink, and leave the world unseen,
And with thee fade away into the forest dim:
3
Fade far away, dissolve, and quite forget
What thou among the leaves hast never known,
The weariness, the fever, and the fret
Here, where men sit and hear each other groan;
Where palsy shakes a few, sad, last gray hairs,
Where youth grows pale, and specter‑thin, and dies,
Where but to think is to be full of sorrow
And leaden‑eyed despairs,
Where Beauty cannot keep her lustrous eyes,
Or new Love pine at them beyond tomorrow.
4
Away! away! for I will fly to thee,
Not charioted by Bacchus and his pards,
But on the viewless wings of Poesy,
Though the dull brain perplexes and retards:
Already with thee! tender is the night,
And haply the Queen‑Moon is on her throne,
Clustered around by all her starry Fays;
But here there is no light,
Save what from heaven is with the breezes blown
Through verdurous glooms and winding mossy ways.
5
l cannot see what flowers are at my feet,
Nor what soft incense hangs upon the boughs,
But, in embalmed darkness, guess each sweet
Wherewith the seasonable month endows
The grass, the thicket, and the fruit tree wild;
White hawthorn, and the pastoral eglantine;
Fast fading violets covered up in leaves;
And mid‑May's eldest child,
The coming musk‑rose, full of dewy wine,
The murmurous haunt of flies on summer eves.
6
Darkling I listen; and for many a time
I have been half in love with easeful Death,
Called him soft names in many a mused rhyme,
To take into the air my quiet breath;
Now more than ever seems it rich to die,
To cease upon the midnight with no pain,
While thou art pouring forth thy soul abroad
In such an ecstasy
Still wouldst thou sing, and I have ears in vain‑
To thy high requiem become a sod.
7
Thou wast not born for death, immortal Bird!
No hungry generations tread thee down;
The voice I hear this passing night was heard
In ancient days by emperor and clown:
Perhaps the selfsame song that found a path
Through the sad heart of Ruth, when, sick for home,
She stood in tears amid the alien corn;
The same that ofttimes hath
Charmed magic casements, opening on the foam
Of perilous seas, in faery lands forlorn.
8
Forlorn! the very word is like a bell
To toll me back from thee to my sole self!
Adieu! the fancy cannot cheat so well
As she is famed to do, deceiving elf.
Adieu! adieu! thy plaintive anthem fades
Past the near meadows, over the still stream,
Up the hill side; and now 'tis buried deep
In the next valley‑glades:
Was it a vision, or a waking dream?
Fled is that music:‑Do I wake or sleep?
CHARLES G. D. ROBERTS
Canada 1860-1943
The Potato Harvest
A high bare field, brown from the plough, and borne
Aslant from sunset; amber wastes of sky
Washing the ridge; a clamour of crows that fly
In from the wide flats where the spent tides mourn
To yon their rocking roosts in pines wind-torn;
A line of grey snake-fence, that zigzags by
A pond and cattle; from the homestead nigh
The long deep summonings of the supper horn.
Black on the ridge, against that lonely flush,
A cart, and stoop-necked oxen; ranged beside,
Some barrels; and the day-worn harvest-folk,
Here, emptying their baskets, jar the hush
With hollow thunders. Down the dusk hillside
Lumbers the wain; and the day fades out like smoke.
ARCHIBALD LAMPMAN
Canada 1861-1899
Winter Evening
To-night the very horses springing by
Toss gold from whitened nostrils. In a dream
The streets that narrow to the westward gleam
Like rows of golden palaces; and high
From all the crowded chimneys tower and die
A thousand aureoles. Down in the west
The brimming plains beneath the sunset rest,
One burning sea of gold. Soon, soon shall fly
The glorious vision, and the hours shall feel
A mightier master; soon from height to height,
With silence and the sharp unpitying stars,
Stern creeping frosts, and winds that touch like steel,
Out of the depth beyond the eastern bars,
Glittering and still shall come the awful night.
WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS
Ireland 1865-1939
No Second Troy
Why should I blame her* that she filled my days
With misery, or that she would of late
Have taught to ignorant men most violent ways,
Or hurled the little streets upon the great,
Had they but courage equal to desire?
What could have made her peaceful with a mind
That nobleness made simple as a fire,
With beauty like a tightened bow, a kind
That is not natural in an age like this,
Being high and solitary and most stern?
Why, what could she have done, being what she is?
Was there another Troy for her to burn?**
* Yeats is referring to Maud Gonne, the beautiful Irish revolutionary whom he loved hopelessly for many years.
** Yeats compares Maud Gonne to Helen of Troy. Note that it was not Helen who burned Troy.
PAUL LAURENCE DUNBAR
America 1872-1906
We Wear the Mask
We wear the mask that grins and lies,
It hides our cheeks and shades our eyes--
This debt we pay to human guile;
With torn and bleeding hearts we smile,
And mouth with myriad subtleties.
Why should the world be over-wise,
In counting all our tears and sighs?
Nay let them only see us, while
We wear the mask.
We smile, but, O great Christ, our cries
To thee from tortured souls arise.
We sing, but oh the clay is vile
Beneath our feet, and long the mile;
But let the world dream otherwise,
We wear the mask.
The Poet
He sang of life, serenely sweet,
With, now and then, a deeper note.
From some high peak, nigh yet remote,
He voiced the world's absorbing beat.
He sang of love when earth was young,
And Love, itself, was in his lays.
But ah, the world, it turned to praise
A jingle in a broken tongue.
TOYO KAZATO
Issei (born in Japan, immigrated to America) 1886-? (deceased)
Golden Poplar
Looking through a small window's sudden light
I saw a poplar in the yard turn gold.
Though it is the hot Arizona desert,
Autumn has not forgotten to come.
Reflecting the rising sun
Golden leaves dance in the wind
With green leaves here and there
And even windows of the camp* are brightening.
Three years ago I saw a tall poplar
In the open fields of California
Soar into the blue sky.
Even now it must be beautiful
Reflecting the setting sun.
Autumn has come to the small
Windows of a crowded camp
Bringing a gentle heart to the people
From the distant California fields
Over a vast desert wasteland.
Autumn has not forgotten to come here.
* Kazato, who came to America in 1906, was interned in the relocation camp for Japanese Americans in Poston, Arizona, during World War II.
YURIKO TAKAHASHI
Issei 1900
Twilight
Dark red clouds are slowly disappearing.
Little bird shadows hurry to their nests.
Their sad chirps
call to their mates and their young.
Their painful voices touched me
at twilight standing by the river.
A wild dove coos in dark woods,
a lonely, interior voice.
Its call comforts a lonesome woman.
Winds make gentle rhythms
among cat tails on the bank.
A water fowl floats across a twilight river
twittering in peace,
as if he was oblivious to the war,
harmonizing with the tender stream in twilight.
ELIZABETH BISHOP
America 1911-1979
Filling Station
Oh, but it is dirty!
--this little filling station,
oil-soaked, oil-permeated
to a disturbing, over-all
black translucency.
Be careful with that match!
Father wears a dirty,
oil-soaked monkey suit
that cuts him under the arms,
and several quick and saucy
and greasy sons assist him
(it's a family filling station),
all quite thoroughly dirty.
Do they live in the station?
It has a cement porch
behind the pumps, and on it
a set of crushed and grease-
impregnated wickerwork;
on the wicker sofa
a dirty dog, quite comfy.
Some comic books provide
the only note of color--
of certain color. They lie
upon a big dim doily
draping a taboret
(part of the set), beside
a big hirsute begonia.
Why the extraneous plant?
Why the taboret?
Why, oh why, the doily?
(Embroidered in daisy stitch
with marguerites, I think,
and heavy with gray crochet.)
Somebody embroidered the doily.
Somebody waters the plant,
or oils it, maybe. Somebody
arranges the rows of cans
so that they softly say:
ESSO--so--so--so
to high-strung automobiles.
Somebody loves us all.
WILLIAM STAFFORD
America 1914
Traveling Through the Dark
Traveling through the dark I found a deer
dead on the edge of the Wilson River road.
It is usually best to roll them into the canyon:
that road is narrow; to swerve might make more dead.
By glow of the tail-light I stumbled back to the car
and stood by the heap, a doe, a recent killing;
she had stiffened already, almost cold.
I dragged her off; she was large in the belly.
My fingers touching her side brought me the reason--
her side was warm; her fawn lay there waiting,
alive, still, never to be born.
Beside the mountain road I hesitated.
The car aimed ahead its lowered parking lights;
under the hood purred the steady engine.
I stood in the glare of the warm exhaust turning red;
around our group I could hear the wilderness listen.
I thought hard for us all--my only swerving--
then pushed her over the edge into the river.
MARGARET AVISON
Canada 1918
A Nameless One
Hot in June a narrow winged
long-elbowed-thread-legged
living insect lived
and died within
the lodgers' second-floor bathroom here.
At 6 A.M.
wafting ceilingward,
no breeze but what it living made there;
at noon standing
still as a constellation of spruce needles
before the moment of
making it, whirling;
at four a
wilted flotsam, cornsilk, on the linoleum:
now that it is
over, I
look with new eyes
upon this room
adequate for one to
be, in.
Its insect-day
has threaded a needle
for me for my eyes dimming
over rips and tears and
thin places.
New Year's Poem
The Christmas twigs crispen and needles rattle
Along the windowledge.
A solitary pearl
Shed from the necklace spilled at last week's party
Lies in the suety, snow-luminous plainness
Of morning, on the windowledge beside them.
And all the furniture that circled stately
And hospitable when these rooms were brimmed
With perfumes, furs, and black-silver
Crisscross of seasonal conversation, lapses
Into its previous largeness.
I remember
Anne's rose-sweet gravity, and the stiff grave
Where cold so little can contain;
I mark the queer delightful skull and crossbones
Starlings and sparrows left, taking the crust,
And the long loop of winter wind
Smoothing its arc from dark Arcturus* down
To the bricked corner of the drifted courtyard,
And the still windowledge.
Gentle and just pleasure
It is, being human, to have won from space
This unchill, habitable interior
Which mirrors quietly the light
Of the snow, and the new year.
* Arcturus is a star in the constellation Botes.
FINDING THE POET
CHAPTER 5 POETIC FORMS
As you read the poems in the first four chapters of this book, you probably noticed the variety in the way different poems look on a printed page. Some poems, like "Rime of the Ancient Mariner," are very long but have short lines and short stanzas. Others, like Wordsworth's "Lines" ("Tintern Abbey"), are not divided into stanzas at all but have rather long lines. Then there are poems like Margaret Avison's "A Nameless One" that contain some long lines and some short ones. You also noticed that some poems rhyme while others don't. All of these elements-- the size of the poem, the length of its lines, how it is divided or not divided into smaller units of lines called stanzas, and whether or not it has rhythm and rhyme,-- are referred to as form or structure in poetry. Before we go any further, let me say that there is no particular form for poetry that is better than any other. The form that a poet chooses is determined by a variety of factors, but ideally, the poem's structure, like its vocabulary, should complement its meaning, purpose, and effect.
In this chapter, you will learn about a variety of different structures that have been used for writing poetry in various historic periods in several cultures. Since poetry is considered a type of creative writing, it might be logical to assume that poets have always just let their inspirations flow, allowing the poem to form itself naturally. Nothing could be farther from the truth. In fact, cultural expectations and aesthetic values in different time periods have strongly influenced the shapes and sizes of poems. These historic determiners have been so profound that a good student of poetry can often figure out what time period a poem was written in just by observing how the poem looks on the printed page. As a student and writer of poetry, this information can be invaluable to you. You need to know how your art form has developed over the years and why.
In English literature, there have been two noticeable trends in the development of poetic forms. The first is that the poets of every major historic period have tended to reject the aesthetic values of the period just preceding them. And the second is that, while innovations have occurred in each period, there has also been a tendency to look to history for inspiration, but since the period just preceding has almost always been in disfavor, poets have skipped backwards to even earlier centuries. Thus, the forms that the previous generation viewed as obsolete were reclaimed as fresh and new. The Moderns of the Twentieth Century, for example, detested the rigid forms of the Victorians, while the Victorians, in turn, reacted against the excessive freedom of expression of the Romantics. There is evidence even now that Modernist values have become exhausted and that poetry in the Twenty-first Century will probably return to a more Romantic poetic vision, perhaps even rejecting the Twentieth Century's passion for free verse (poetry that has neither rhyme, rhythm, nor a set stanza form) in favor of historic forms such as the sonnet, so popular with the Renaissance, Romantic, and Victorian poets.
As a poet now, you need to know about the forms which existed in the past. All of these are still available for you to use or to adapt. You are also, of course, always welcome to develop something new. But somehow, even innovation seems to come more easily to poets who have a firm grounding in historic aesthetics. With these thoughts in mind, let's take a very rapid look at the development of poetic forms in the English language. To assuage my own guilt about presenting this vast topic in such a superficial fashion, I must encourage you to take several literature classes, especially Survey of English Literature, or even History of the English Language. If you don't have time to take additional classes in language and literature, at the very least, you should get a good historic anthology of English literature, such as the Norton or the Oxford. They have both been invaluable to me. If you speak English every day, even if it is your second or third language, you owe it to yourself to learn all you can about this magnificent language, in which so much exquisite poetry has been written.
Our language has changed drastically over the years. A historic chart might help us get a grip on its development. The timeline below outlines the major periods in English literary history and notes the primary forms and poetic elements that were popular in each era. I have already referred to much of this information in previous chapters, but now you will see where it all fits from a chronological perspective.
MAJOR PERIODS IN ENGLISH LITERATURE--POETRY
l. Anglo-Saxon Period 450-1066
A. Major Works of Poetry
Caedmon's Hymn
The Dream of the Rood (Anonymous)
Beowulf (Anonymous)
The Wanderer (Anonymous)
The Battle of Maldon (Anonymous)
B. Characteristic Form
Four-beat line with
Caesura in the middle of the line
No rhyme
C. Other Poetic Elements
Alliteration
Understatement (litotes)
Kennings (descriptive compound words)
Elevated serious tone
ll. Middle English Period 1066-1485
A. Major Works of Poetry
Troilus and Criseide--Chaucer
The Canterbury Tales--Chaucer
The Pearl--(Anonymous)
Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (Anonymous)
The Vision of Piers Plowman--Langland
Morte Darthur--Malory
B. Characteristic Forms
French-influenced metrics
Rhyme
Iambic pentameter couplets
Rome Royal (seven-line rhymed stanzas in iambic pentameter)
Ballad
C. Other Poetic Elements
Allegory
Dream visions
Romance
Narrative
Vivid descriptive details
Humor
lll. The English Renaissance 1485-1603
A. Major Poets
Wyatt
Surrey
Sidney
Spenser
Shakespeare
Marlowe
B. Characteristic Forms
Iambic pentameter
Italian (Petrarchan) Sonnet
English (Shakespearean) Sonnet
Spenserian stanza
Ottava rima
Blank verse
C. Other Poetic Elements
Elaborate patterns of metrics and rhyme
Overstatement (hyperbole)
Elaborate extended metaphors (conceits)
Sensuous imagery
Allusions
Elevated language
lll. The Seventeenth Century 1603-1660
A. Major Poets
Donne
Herbert
Jonson
Marvell
Milton
B. Characteristic Forms
Cavalier poetry--short lyrics based on classical models
Metaphysical poetry--rough rhythms, unpredictable stanza forms
Sonnets
Blank verse
C. Other Poetic Elements
Great diversity among individual poets and schools
Cavalier style (Jonson)--simple, clear, brief, secular tone, classical models
Metaphysical style (Donne, Herbert, Marvell)--complex use of language
(puns), jarring imagery, metaphysical conceits (startling
extended metaphors) rough rhythms and disrespect for form,
religious and erotic themes
Baroque style (Milton)--extensive use of Latin vocabulary,
complex sentence structure, asymmetrical composition,
Biblical and mythological allusions.
lV. The Restoration 1660-1700 and The Neoclassical Period 1700-1785
A. Major Poets
Dryden
Pope
B. Characteristic Form
Heroic couplets
C. Other Poetic Elements
Occasional poetry on public topics
The Ode
Satire
Mock heroic
Classical Greek and Roman influences
Decline of the lyric
V. The Romantic Period 1785-1830
A. Major Poets
Burns
Blake
Wordsworth
Coleridge
Byron
Shelley
Keats
B. Characteristic Forms
Italian models
Italian sonnet
Ottava rima
Terza rima
Spenserian stanza
Blank verse
Ballad
C. Other Poetic Elements
Language of everyday speech
Emphasis on nature
Topics taken from ordinary life
Mystery
Romance
Fascination with the past--Classical, Medieval, and
Renaissance
Fascination with Asia
Vl. The Victorian Period 1830-1901
A. Major Poets
Elizabeth Barrett Browning
Tennyson
Robert Browning
Arnold
Hopkins
B. Characteristic Forms
Sonnet
Blank verse
Rhymed couplets
Rhymed quatrains
C. Other Poetic Elements
Narrative
Dramatic monologue
Careful attention to metrics and form
Emphasis on British ethical values
Innovations in rhythm and language (Hopkins)
Allegory
Religious themes
Pessimism (Arnold)
Vll. The Twentieth Century
A. Major Poets
Hardy
Yeats
Lawrence
Eliot
Auden
Thomas
B. Characteristic Forms
Blank verse
Free verse
Short rhymed stanzas
Syllabic verse
C. Other Poetic Elements
Lyric
Symbolism
Dramatic monologue
Re-discovery of metaphysical poetry
Imagism (influenced by haiku)
Complexity
Ambiguity
Regional poetry
Cultural diversity
In glancing through this timeline, you will notice the names of many poets whom we have already read. However, several of the terms I have used, particularly in describing characteristic forms of poetry, may be new to you. These terms, such as iambic pentameter, terza rima, and rime royal, are all defined for you in the glossary at the back of this book. But some of these forms have been so important historically that it seems necessary to discuss them in more detail now.
We'll begin with the Anglo-Saxons. The term Anglo-Saxon refers to both the Germanic people who immigrated to England in 450 A.D. and the language they spoke. Celtic people had inhabited the British Isles and Ireland from a much earlier time, and their languages are not linguistically related to Anglo-Saxon. The very Germanic sounding Anglo-Saxon is the ancestor of modern English. Anglo-Saxon poetry, which reflects the values of a sea-faring warrior culture, was originally oral. Beowulf, the greatest work of Anglo-Saxon poetry, was written down in about 750 A.D. by a Christian scholar when the poem was already very old.
All of Anglo-Saxon poetry is written in the same form. Each line has four beats with a strong pause, or caesura in the middle. Anglo-Saxon poetry is not divided into stanzas, and it does not rhyme. Its powerful effect is created by the four strong beats and the use of alliteration, or repeated consonant sounds at the beginnings of words. Usually a consonant sound which appears in the first half of the line is repeated after the caesura. Read the following lines from Beowulf in the original Anglo-Saxon. You will not be able to decipher the meaning of every word, but you will be able to recognize the four-beat line, the caesura, and the use of alliteration. The translation which follows tries to retain the basic form of the original.
"Heald pu nu, hruse nu haeled ne mostan,
eorla aehte! Hwaet, hyt aer on de
gode begeaton. Gup-dead fornam,
feorh-bealo frecne fyra gehwylcne
leoda minra, para de pis lif ofgeaf.
gesawon sele-dreamas. Nah hwa sweord wege
odde feormie faeted waege,
drync-faet deore; dugud ellor scoc.
"Hold thou now, Earth now hand of man cannot,
A great tribe's treasures. Truly, from thee
Brave men first got them; battle-death has taken,
Murderous fighting, the men, one and all,
Peers of my people: they have passed from this life,
Rest from hall-joys. None remains with me
To bear the sword, burnish the rich goblet,
Costly drinking-cup; the company has gone elsewhere.
Translated by Alfred David
Anglo-Saxon poetry has a slow, dignified cadence, and it creates an effect of high seriousness. Form and subject are perfectly matched in Anglo-Saxon poetry, which focuses on the cosmic implications of good and evil and the absolute responsibility of human beings to keep their word and live by a strict code of ethical values. Anglo-Saxon poetry contains no humor, no satire, and no romance of any kind.
You are probably aware that England was conquered by the Norman French in 1066, and the Anglo-
Saxon age came to an end. The English language assimilated many French words, and the French style of poetry came into vogue. French poetry, in turn, was strongly influenced by Italian poetry, and both were obsessed with metrics. In poetry, metrics refers to a poem's pattern of rhythm and rhyme. Anglo-Saxon poetry, with its four-beat line, did not have any particular rhythm or number of syllables per line, but French poetry was based on a prescribed rhythmic pattern and number of syllables per line and a prescribed pattern of rhymes at the end of lines. In Chapter 2, you read a translation of the opening lines of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales that maintained the original ten-syllable rhymed lines in a rhythmic pattern of unstressed and stressed syllables. This rhythmic pattern is known as iambic pentameter, and it became the most frequently used rhythmic pattern throughout the history of English poetry. Let's look at the original lines as Chaucer wrote them.
Whan that April with his showres soote
The droughte of March hath perced to the roote,
And bathed every veine in swich licour,
Of which vertu engendred is the flowr;
Whan Zephyrus eek with his sweete breeth
Inspired hath in every holt and heeth
The tendre croppes, and the yonge sonne
Hath in the Ram his halve cours yronne,
And smale fowles maken melodye
That sleepen al the night with open ye--
So priketh hem Nature in hir corages--
Thanne longen folk to goon on pilgrimages,
And palmeres for to seeken straunge strondes
To ferne halwes, couthe in sondry londes;
And specially from every shires ende
Of Engelond to Canterbury they wende,
The holy blisful martyr for to seeke
Than hem hath holpen whan that they were seke.
The language of Chaucer's day is called Middle English, and it has a softer sound than Anglo-Saxon. Read these lines aloud and notice how many English words you can actually recognize. Also notice the rhythmic pattern of an unaccented syllable followed by an accented syllable, a pattern that occurs five times per line. This rhythm is called iambic pentameter because a rhythmic unit of one unstressed syllable followed by one stressed syllable is known as an iambic foot, and there are five of these feet per line in this pattern. The word "pentameter" contains the root word "pent" which refers to the number five, as in the Pentagon, a five-sided building. So, iambic pentameter is simply a rhythmic pattern that contains five iambic feet. The word foot in poetry refers to any of several possible rhythmic units of stressed or unstressed syllables.
If you find this explanation a bit confusing, as my students always do, fortunately scholars have developed a system of diagramming poetic meter. This system is called scansion. Scansion is a method of depicting rhythms by using a curving mark--U--to indicate an unstressed syllable and a diagonal slash--/--to indicate a stressed syllable. Using scansion, a line of iambic pentameter would be diagrammed as follows:
U/ U/ U/ U/ U/
If we apply this diagram to the final line of the quotation from the Canterbury Tales above, it would look like this:
U / U / U / U / U /
That hem hath holpen whan that they were seke.
Scansion is a handy method of figuring out the rhythm of a poem. You should feel free to experiment with the other poems we have read. How about a couple of lines from Wordsworth's
"Tintern Abbey."
U / U / U / U / U /
Five years have past; five summers, with the length
U / U / U / U / U /
Of five long winters! and again I hear
Are you surprised? This poem is written in iambic pentameter also. I mentioned that iambic pentameter had been used more than any other rhythmic pattern in English poetry. Some linguists believe that English is a naturally iambic language-- that is, it often falls into a natural pattern of an unaccented syllable followed by an accented syllable. Whether or not this is actually true, you will notice that poems written in the iambic rhythm are easy to read and do seem to follow the natural flow of the language.
You might like to know the terminology for other rhythmic units (feet) and number of feet per line. Here is the list:
The Most Common Metrical Feet in English Poetry
iambic U/ awake
anapestic UU/ absolute
trochaic /U winter
dactylic /UU general
spondaic // hard knocks
Number of Feet Per Line in English Poetry
one foot monometer
two feet dimeter
three feet trimeter
four feet tetrameter
five feet pentameter
six feet hexameter
seven feet heptameter
eight feet octameter
Using these lists, can you figure out what meter Lord Byron used when he wrote "She Walks in Beauty"?
Write in the scansion marks yourself on the first stanza:
She walks in beauty like the night
Of cloudless climes and starry skies;
And all that's best of dark and bright
Meet in her aspect and her eyes.
If you guessed iambic tetrameter, you're correct, even though the fourth line does not follow the iambic rhythm perfectly. In reading that line, we would not really stress the word "in." Poetic rhythms should never be inflexible and absolute. As you read more and more poetry, you will notice that the great poets like Chaucer and Shakespeare, and the very good poets like Wordsworth and Byron will often vary the meter from time to time to avoid monotony and to create emphasis. In the fourth line of "She Walks in Beauty," the first foot, "Meet in," is actually trochaic rather than iambic. By emphasizing the word "meet" and reversing one foot of the expected rhythm, Byron calls the reader's attention to the fact that "... all that 's best of dark and bright" meet or converge in the lady's personal appearance and in her eyes. In fact, Byron wrote this poem to honor his cousin by marriage, Mrs. Robert John Wilmot, whom he met one beautiful starry evening when she was wearing a black spangled dress. The word "meet" brings together the starry sky, the sparking black dress, and the woman's beautiful eyes. A skillful poet like Byron can use rhythm to further the effect created by words and imagery.
Let's return for a moment to the lines from Chaucer's Canterbury Tales and Wordsworth's "Tintern Abbey." We agreed that they are both written in iambic pentameter, but are they really written in the same form? This will seem like a trick question if you have forgotten that form in English poetry from the Medieval Period on included two elements-- rhythm and rhyme. Actually, a third element, the shape of the stanzas into which the poem is divided is also a factor in determining the poem's form. Neither the Canterbury Tales nor "Tintern Abbey" is divided into stanzas, and they are written in the same meter, but do they use the same kind of rhyme? Chaucer's rhyme is easy to figure out. Look at the final word of each of his first ten lines:
soote
roote
licour
flowr
breeth
heeth
sonne
yronne
melodye
open ye
You will notice that the first two lines rhyme, the third and fourth lines rhyme, the fifth and sixth lines rhyme, and so on. When lines immediately next to each other rhyme, they are called couplets. We have now officially determined the form of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales: iambic pentameter couplets. Chaucer is credited with introducing this form into English, probably based on his extensive reading of French poetry. Iambic pentameter couplets were later called heroic couplets, and if you will glance at the timeline of English Literature, you will see that heroic couplets became very popular once again during the 1700s in the Neo-Classical period. As a form, they are fast paced and well suited to the narrative, or story telling style of poetry which was appreciated in both the Medieval and Neo-Classical Periods.
Is "Tintern Abbey" also written in couplets? Let's use the same method to find out. Here are the last words of the first ten lines:
length
hear
springs
again
cliffs
impress
connect
sky
repose
view
Do the lines next to each other rhyme? Do any of the lines rhyme with each other? No. Our conclusion, then, must be that "Tintern Abbey" is written in unrhymed iambic pentameter. This poetic form, also known as blank verse, was introduced into English literature in 1561 and became hugely popular with Shakespeare and the other great English Renaissance dramatist, Christopher Marlowe. Blank verse, which is very flexible and free flowing, has been used effectively in both drama and poetry, and it has returned to popularity in several different centuries. In addition to Wordsworth in the Romantic Period, the Victorians also liked blank verse, and so have the Moderns. In the poetry collection at the end of this chapter, you might like to read "Ulysses," an interesting poem by the Victorian poet Alfred, Lord Tennyson. I have always found the blank verse form fascinating. However, be careful not to confuse blank verse with free verse, a style of poetry that developed in the Twentieth Century. Free verse is poetry that has no pre-existing meter, stanza form, or rhyme scheme. For examples of free verse, you might want to review Elizabeth Bishop's "Filling Station" and Margaret Avison's "A Nameless One" which appear at the end of Chapter 4.
Blank verse is an interesting poetry form because its structure is based solely on meter, not on stanza form or rhyme. When poems do rhyme, we use letters of the alphabet to determine the rhyme pattern. For example, the first two lines that rhyme are designated with the letter A, and the next two lines that rhyme are called B, and so forth. Let's use Byron's "She Walks in Beauty" to ascertain the rhyme pattern in that poem. Here are the last words of each line:
Stanza 1
night A
skies B
bright A
eyes B
light A
denies B
Stanza 2
less C
grace D
tress C
face D
express C
place D
Stanza 3
brow E
eloquentF
glow E
spent F
below E
innocentF
You will notice that each of the three six-line stanzas has its own rhyme scheme. Instead of using couplets, Byron rhymed alternating lines. Thus, the first, third and fifth lines are designated A, while the second, fourth, and sixth lines are B. In the third stanza, Byron cleverly uses a technique known as sight rhyme. He rhymes the words "brow" and "glow." Obviously, the words "brow" and "glow" do not rhyme when they are pronounced, but seeing them on the printed page, they look as though they rhyme. This technique helps to relieve the monotony that rhyme can create and gives visual pleasure to the reader. When reading a poem aloud, please do not give in to the temptation to read sight rhymes as though they were sound rhymes. Just give each word its natural pronunciation.
Rhyme can give poetry structure, and it can create pleasing or disturbing sounds, depending on the effect the poet is trying to achieve. Rhymed poetry is also much easier to memorize than free verse and other kinds of unrhymed poetry. Rhyme has traditionally been used in songs because songs depend on sound more than other forms of poetry; people usually listen to songs rather than reading them on a printed page. Rhyme can help the singer remember the words to the song, and it can create a sense of familiarity for the listener. However, we must remember that rhyme was introduced into English from French and Italian, two Romance languages that rhyme more naturally than English. Predictable and forced rhymes such as "moon," "June," "spoon," etc., can really diminish a poem's effectiveness. In a popular song called "Honey," for example, the phrases "what the heck" and "hugged my neck" were used to create a rhyme in song that was supposed to be serious and deeply emotional. A poorly chosen rhyme can backfire and elicit a snicker from your reader rather than a sigh of sympathy.
When you write your own poetry, keep in mind that there is no rule that says you have to use rhyme. In the computer age, it is no longer necessary to memorize poetry, so one of rhyme's purposes has been deleted. If you do choose to use rhyme, try to avoid the "jingle effect" in which the predictable rhyme draws more attention to itself than to the meaning of the poem. You can try using sight rhyme as Byron did, or you can use slant rhyme (sometimes called half rhyme, off rhyme or near rhyme), a technique in which the rhyme sounds are similar but not exact. Coleridge used this device in the "Rime of the Ancient Mariner" when he rhymed the words "guest" and "beast." You might also use internal rhyme, in which the rhymes appear within the lines of poetry rather than at the end. Internal rhyme appears in there two lines from Keats' "Ode to a Nightingale."
Already with thee! tender is the night,
And haply the Queen-Moon is on her throne,
The words "thee" and "haply" rhyme in the middle of these two lines, creating a very subtle sound effect. Actually Keats also used an elaborate pattern of end rhyme in this poem, but he was a master of sound and metrics, and very few of us could write so highly structured a poem without sacrificing meaning and the sense of spontaneity that all good poems have.
We have looked at iambic pentameter couplets and blank verse, which were introduced into English literature in the Medieval Period and the Renaissance respectively. Another poetic form that evolved in the Medieval Period and remained popular throughout the Renaissance and is still with us today is the ballad. A ballad is really a popular song, and originally ballads were sung but not written down. They appealed to people who were not literate, and this was a large segment of the population of England and Scotland in those days. They were narrative, meaning that they told a story, and they usually focused on real-life tales of domestic tragedy or current events. They served the purpose that popular journalism and television talk shows do today. But for all their apparent simplicity, ballads are really thought-provoking poems that challenge the listener to ponder the mysteries of human motivation and psychology. Ballads also have a simple basic form which has endured throughout the centuries and has never gone out of style.
The ballad stanza is four lines. (In poetry, we refer to a four-line stanza as a quatrain.) The rhythm is basically iambic with four feet in the first and third lines (iambic tetrameter) and three feet in the second and fourth lines (iambic trimeter.) Also, the second and fourth lines rhyme. Using what we have learned about scansion, we can diagram the ballad stanza as follows:
U/ U/ U/ U/
U/ U/ U/ A
U/ U/ U/ U/
U/ U/ U/ A
These "rules" for the ballad stanza are flexible, and variations in rhyme and meter are common. I have included three of the most famous old ballads, "Edward," "Sir Patrick Spens," and "Barbara Allan" at the end of this chapter. All of them have fascinated me all of my life. As you read them carefully, you will notice that they move very rapidly. They have what is called a "skeletal" quality. The listener is only given the "bare bones" of the story, and he or she must piece together the rest using intuition and a basic knowledge of human motivation. In "Edward," for example, why would a mother "counsel" her son to kill his father? Or in "Barbara Allan," why did Barbara stand by, apparently with a cold heart, when Sir John Graeme, whom she loved, was dying of love for her? In ballads, psychosomatic factors such as dying of love are very real, and human feelings are recognized as very powerful, although they are seldom expressed directly.
Much of the information in a ballad is transmitted through dialogue, and the singer does not take the time to explain who is speaking or when the shift from one speaker to another occurs. Often one speaker is questioning another, as in "Edward." The effect of this fast paced question and answer technique is to place the listener in the position of a juror in a murder trial. The listener knows that a tragic event has happened, but he or she isn't sure why. The listener-juror also knows that many of the key facts will probably be omitted, the jury will have to reconstruct the evidence, and ultimately certain aspects of the tragedy will never be fully known. This is very much like life itself and may explain the enduring fascination with the ballad over the centuries.
The ballad has also profoundly influenced poetry. You may have already noticed that "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner" is a ballad. In looking at the first stanza, we can see that Coleridge has loosely followed the parameters for the ballad format.
It is an ancient Mariner
And he stoppeth one of three.
--"By thy long gray beard and glittering eye,
Now wherefore stopp'st thou me?
Here we have a quatrain that more or less follows a four, three, four, three metrical pattern and contains rhyme in the second and fourth lines. A dialogue also begins, using the questioning technique, and the reader is not told who the questioner is. The reader must simply keep on reading to find out that the questioner is the wedding guest who has been abruptly interrupted on his way to the wedding by the old sailor. Like Edward, the Ancient Mariner confesses to a murder and seeks some form of penance for his sin. Just as Edward does not ever explain exactly why he killed his father (one of my professors argued that incest was involved), the Ancient Mariner does not explain why he killed the albatross. These are issues for the reader to resolve based on his or her knowledge of human emotions and the human ego.
Coleridge also includes supernatural elements, which often appear in ballads, and he frequently expands the length of the stanza to six or even nine lines for dramatic effect. He also incorporated archetypal elements such as the albatross, the moon, and the hermit into the narrative, just as the hawk, the horse (reid-roan steid), and the castle (towirs and ha') are archetypes in "Edward." The symbolic elements in a ballad, like the mysterious events presented in the narrative, must be interpreted by the reader. I hope that you will catch the "ballad fever" as I have, and that you will never recover from it. Ballads have had a long and vigorous life in North America as well as in Scotland, Ireland, England, Italy, and Spain, and they are still an important part of our culture. The poems that you read by Emily Dickinson in Chapter 2 are written in the ballad stanza, and folk singer-song writers like Hank Williams in America and Gordon Lightfoot in Canada have carried on this ancient tradition, and elements of the ballad appear in African American blues music and Mexican American popular songs. Some of you are going to stick up your noses at the thought of listening to "country" music. Let me remind you that there is not place for snobbery in the world of poetry.
The ballad and the heroic couplet are what we refer to as fixed forms, meaning that the structure has been determined before the poem is written. In earlier centuries, much of English poetry was written in fixed forms, and perhaps the most challenging of these, the sonnet, originated in Italy and was introduced into English in the early 1500s. The European Renaissance was a time of great artistic creativity, and the aesthetics emphasized complexity and elaborate decorative detail. These same aesthetic values, which were celebrated in clothing, painting, dance, and architecture, were also applied to poetry. A wonderful Italian word, sprezzatura, captures the essence of Renaissance literature and art. Sprezzatura is the ability to do something that is so difficult and complex that it is almost impossible and make it look easy. Sprezzatura describes the sonnet perfectly. As you will remember from our discussion of Keats' "On First Looking into Chapman's Homer" in Chapter 3, a sonnet is a fourteen-line poem written in iambic pentameter using a specific rhyme scheme. The Italian sonnet, developed by Frances Petrarch, has a thematic division between the first eight lines (the octave) and the last six lines (the sestet), and the rhyme scheme reflects that division. The rhyme scheme for an Italian sonnet usually follows this pattern: ABBAABBA CDCDCD. Sometimes other variations occur in the last six lines, such as CDECDE, CDECED, or CDCDEE. The important thing to remember is that there is one rhyme pattern in the octave and another pattern in the sestet. These patterns should create a subliminal framework for the two parts of the poem.
The shift in meaning, sometimes referred to as the turn, between the first eight and the last six lines, can be accomplished in several different ways. The octave can ask a question and the sestet can answer it; the octave can present a problem and the sestet can offer a solution; the octave can describe a cause and the sestet can depict its effect. The poet can present any number of possible relationships between the two parts of the poem, but however the turn is accomplished, the meaning of the poem should be clear, and the shift should be graceful and subtle. This is where sprezzatura comes in. How easy do you think is to write a fourteen line poem in iambic pentameter with the rhyme scheme described above and a shift in meaning or focus after the eighth line, and say something meaningful that will touch the reader's heart, challenge his mind, appeal to her intuition, and inspire all of his and her senses?
I encourage you to give it a try. I have attempted many sonnets and have found it a very humbling experience. Perhaps you have been given the gift of sprezzatura in greater measure than I. You have already several Italian sonnets. You might want to re-read John Donne's "Holy Sonnet 10" and Gerard Manley Hopkins' "God's Grandeur" in Chapter 3 and John Milton's "Methought I Saw My Late Espoused Saint" in Chapter 4. As you review these poems, study them carefully to see how the poet has maintained the rhythm and the rhyme, and see if you can determine how the shift in meaning between the octave and the sestet occurs.
The Italian sonnet is one of the most challenging of the fixed forms, but the English apparently thought it was too easy, so they developed an even more difficult form of the sonnet. The English sonnet was introduced by Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, but it was perfected by William Shakespeare. Today, the Italian sonnet is often referred to as a Petrarchan sonnet, after its founder, Francis Petrarch, and the English sonnet is often called the Shakespearean sonnet, -- unfortunately slighting Surrey, its founder.
The English sonnet has several similarities to the Italian sonnet. It has fourteen lines, it is written in iambic pentameter, and it has a fixed rhyme scheme. But instead of being structurally and thematically divided into two parts, the Shakespearean sonnet is divided into four: three quatrains and a couplet. We can diagram an English sonnet as follows:
U/ U/ U/ U/ U/ A
U/ U/ U/ U/ U/ B First quatrain
U/ U/ U/ U/ U/ A
U/ U/ U/ U/ U/ B
U/ U/ U/ U/ U/ C
U/ U/ U/ U/ U/ D Second quatrain
U/ U/ U/ U/ U/ C
U/ U/ U/ U/ U/ D
U/ U/ U/ U/ U/ E
U/ U/ U/ U/ U/ F Third quatrain
U/ U/ U/ U/ U/ E
U/ U/ U/ U/ U/ F
U/ U/ U/ U/ U/ G Couplet
U/ U/ U/ U/ U/ G
The rhyme scheme reflects the thematic division of the poem into three sequences of images or thoughts followed by a contrasting conclusion. In a Shakespearean sonnet, the three quatrains often build upon each other, developing an idea or theme; then a sudden shift or reversal occurs in the couplet. Thus, English sonnets are often quite dramatic, leading the reader's thoughts in one direction then surprising him or her with an unexpected conclusion. Shakespeare wrote many beautiful English sonnets, and you have already read "Sonnet 130" ("My mistress' eyes are nothing like the sun") in Chapter 3. This surprising poem appears to criticize the lady by pointing out in the three quatrains that her eyes are not like the sun, her lips are not like coral, her skin is not like roses, her hair is like black wires, she has bad breath, and her voice does not have a musical quality. Then the couplet reverses the poem's direction completely when Shakespeare concludes:
And yet, by heaven, I think my love as rare
An any she belied with false compare.
His point is that he truly loves his lady and does not need to resort to the kind of "false comparisons" that create hypocritical and unrealistic portraits of women.
An even more stunning English sonnet is Shakespeare's "Sonnet 73."
That time of year thou mayst in be behold
When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang
Upon those boughs which shake against the cold,
Bare ruined choirs, where late the sweet birds sang.
In me thou seest the twilight of such day
As after sunset fadeth in the west;
Which by and by black night doth take away,
Death's second self that seals up all in rest.
In me thou seest the glowing of such fire,
That on the ashes of his youth doth lie,
As the deathbed whereon it must expire,
Consumed by that which it was nourished by.
This thou perceiv'st, which makes thy love more strong,
To love that well, which thou must leave ere long.
This is one of the most beautiful and important poems ever written in the English language. To do it justice, you should read it using the ten steps outlined in Chapter 3. As you will remember, Step 7 is: Examine the poem's form, genre, and poetic devices. You already know that this poem is an English sonnet, but you need to study the way Shakespeare used this form to support his purposes. Read the poem aloud and notice how the iambic pentameter rhythm flows as three long sentences in the three quatrains. The rhythm doesn't jerk along and then stop at the end of each line. Instead, it moves forward in the cadence of natural speech so that neither a listener nor a reader is ever aware of the poem's rigid form. The technique of running the meaning of a line of poetry on to the following line without a pause at the end of the first line is called enjambment, and Shakespeare is a master at this conversational technique. Read the poem once again to see how Shakespeare uses three different sets of images in the three quatrains, yet he ties them together in a chronological sequence emphasizing the similarity between the three sets of images with the repetition of the phrase "In me thou seest" at the beginning of the second and third quatrains.
The speaker begins the first quatrain by telling the listener that she can see images of autumn moving into winter when she looks at the speaker. The gist of the first quatrain, in modern, unpoetic English, might be: "When you look at me, you can see reminders of the time of the year when most of the leaves have fallen from the trees and the branches are bare, cold, and silent, and the birds have gone away." Obviously, these images all point to the coming of winter. The famous phrase "Bare ruined choirs" has elicited a tremendous amount of speculation on the part of scholars over the years. You might want to read some of the various interpretations of this phrase. But you can also use your own imagination. The branches themselves are bare and ruined, having lost their colorful leaves and the lovely birds that once nested and sang in the foliage. In a sense, the birds seem to be compared to a choir that has gone away and ended its music, leaving the branches "bare and ruined." However, the grammatical logic of the sentence seems to refer to the boughs themselves as a "bare ruined choir," not to the birds. Some readers think that Shakespeare is comparing the boughs to the choir loft of an ancient church that has fallen into disrepair. If you look up the word "choir" in the Oxford English Dictionary, you will discover that one meaning of the word is "That part of a church appropriated to the singers."
In fact, it is possible to visualize both images simultaneously-- bare, leafless trees, abandoned by the birds who have migrated to the south, and an old ruined church, bereft of the voices and songs of celebration that once filled its interior. Here Shakespeare challenges the reader's intuition. In the inner eye of imagination, does it really matter whether the boughs or the birds or an old church are being compared to a bare ruined choir? The real intuitive leap that Shakespeare asks us to make is to compare the speaker (and perhaps ourselves) to these images of cold, loss, silence, and ruin. What can we infer thematically from the first quatrain? Since winter is an archetype-- a universal symbol of ending and death, it's easy to conclude that the speaker in the poem is referring to his own advanced age and impending death.
Shakespeare begins his second quatrain with the phrase "In me thou seest," which echoes "thou mayst in me behold" from the first line of the poem. This signals to the reader that the second quatrain will parallel the first in some way. In this second quatrain, the speaker tells the listener that she can see images of twilight, sunset, and night time when she looks at him. Winter and night are both endings rather than beginnings, and Shakespeare emphasizes this fact be referring to night as "Death's second self." Here he uses another archetype when he equates sleep with death. He also creates the sense of the passage of time and a chronological flow toward the end of a human life by using the words "twilight," "sunset," and "night" sequentially.
In the third quatrain, Shakespeare repeats the exact words which he used to begin the second quatrain, "In me thou seest." By now the reader is ready for the third set of images. What will the listener see when she looks at the speaker? The third set of images also describes a process that leads to an ending-- the burning down of a fire that ultimately dies out in its own ashes. Shakespeare uses the phrase "ashes of his youth" and the word "deathbed" to emphasize the connection between the aging speaker and the image of a fire that is consumed over time by its own energy. A highly intuitive reader might think for a moment of the phoenix, the mythical bird that dies and is reborn from its own ashes, a little like the "sweet birds" of the first quatrain, who disappear in winter and return in spring. If the reader is especially intuitive and if he or she is sensitive to the cyclic movement of time in nature, the couplet will be less of a surprise than it will be to a thought oriented person.
But before we look at the couplet, let's look at the imagery from the three quatrains in chronological order: autumn moving into winter, twilight turning to night, and a fire burning down to ashes. Each is a natural process that takes place within a time frame, like the aging and death of a human being. To create a sense of urgency, Shakespeare places these three sets of images in order according to the length of time that the process requires to complete. The movement from autumn to winter is a matter of months or days; the shift from twilight to night can take perhaps an hour, and a fire can burn down in a matter of minutes. By the end of the first three quatrains, the reader has a strong sense of impending doom.
Then, true to the structure of the English sonnet, Shakespeare turns the direction of the poem completely away from its focus on aging and death and emphasizes instead the preciousness of the present moment. With the phrase "This thou perceiv'st," Shakespeare ties the couplet to the three quatrains, since to "behold," to "see," and to "perceive" have a similar meaning with the added implication of insight as well as visual sight in the word "perceive." The speaker declares to his loved one that her love for him is even stronger because of her awareness of the fleeting nature of human life. The final phrase of the poem leaves the reader with a mystery to ponder. Throughout the first three quatrains, the speaker has referred to his own aging and impending death, which his loved one can see when she looks at him. Yet in the last line, he says, "thou must leave ere long." Logically, we are taught to think that the person who is preparing to die, in this case the speaker, is the one who will be "leaving." But Shakespeare challenges us to see death in a different way. The one who is left alive "leaves" the relationship too, when a death occurs. The word "thou" and the word "I" are both only one syllable, and either one would have fit into the iambic rhythm of the line, so Shakespeare seems to have chosen the word "thou" deliberately, leaving us to meditate on the mystery of love and death.
I have provided several additional examples of Italian and English sonnets at the end of this chapter. I hope you will enjoy analyzing the rhythm, rhyme schemes, and structures of these poems, and that you will appreciate, as I do, the challenge that faces any poet who chooses to express his or her creative urges i a fixed form. The Renaissance provided many other fixed forms in addition to the sonnet. Three that became significant historically because they were reclaimed by the Romantic poets nearly three hundred years later are terza rima, ottava rima, and the Spenserian stanza. You will recall the cyclic evolution of English literature with each generation rejecting the values of the preceding generation and returning to an even earlier time for inspiration. This shift was especially strong when the Romantics turned away from the Neo-Classical obsession with heroic couplets (which the Neo-classicals adapted from Chaucer, not from the Renaissance), and turned to Italian and earlier English fixed forms for their highly emotional poems.
Terza rima is the stanza form that the great Italian poet, Dante, used when he wrote The Divine Comedy. It consists of three lines per stanza with an interlocking rhyme scheme in which the middle line of each stanza rhymes with the first and third lines of the following stanza. The rhyme scheme is diagrammed as follows: ABA BCB CDC, etc. Terza rima is written in iambic pentameter with an extra syllable. Percy Shelley adapted this stanza form for his beautiful poem, "Ode to the West Wind," which you will find at the end of this chapter.
Both Shelley and Keats helped to revive a stanza form named after Edmund Spenser, the English poet who wrote The Faerie Queene, a very long narrative poem which he began in 1580. The Spenserian stanza contains nine lines. The first eight are written in iambic pentameter, and the final line is iambic hexameter (six feet per line.) The rhyme scheme is: ABABBCBCC. Let's look at three Spenserian stanzas. First, we'll read from The Faerie Queene itself. The following is the fourth stanza of the poem and is the conclusion of Spenser's Invocation to the Muse, which is actually an elaborate compliment to Queen Elizabeth I, whose glory he compares to the sun by way of the Greek god Phoebus Apollo. (Remember the Renaissance love for complexity.) Spenser used deliberately archaic vocabulary and spelling in his attempt to capture a sense of medieval romance. The words "eke" (also) and "eyne" (medieval plural for eye) were already out of date in the Renaissance when Spenser wrote;
And with them eke, O Goddess heavenly bright,
Mirrour of grace and Majestie divine,
Great Lady of the greatest Isle, whose light
Like Phoebus lampe throughout the world doth shine,
Shed thy faire beams into my feeble eyne,
And raise my thoughts too humble and too vile,
To thinke of that true glorious type of thine,
The argument of mine afflicted stile:
The which to heare, vouchsafe, O dearest dred a-while.
Although Spenser's style is very elevated, you will be able to recognize the iambic pentameter in the first eight lines of this stanza and the hexameter in the final line. In a tribute to Spenser, Keats wrote his long medieval romance "The Eve of St. Agnes" in Spenserian stanzas in 1819. The first stanza appears below. Keats dispenses with the Invocation to the Muse and begins immediately by establishing the setting of the poem while appealing to the reader's senses. You will find the complete text of this beautiful sensual narrative at the end of this chapter.
St. Agnes' Eve--Ah, bitter chill it was!
The owl, for all his feathers, was a-cold;
The hare limp'd trembling through the frozen grass,
And silent was the flock in wooly fold:
Numb were the Beadsman's fingers, while he told
His rosary, and while his frosted breath,
Like pious incense from a censor old,
Seem'd taking flight for heaven, without a death,
Past the sweet Virgin's picture while his prayers he saith.
A third tribute in Spenserian stanzas is Shelley's magnificent elegy, "Adonais," written in 1821 to commemorate the death of Keats. Shelley may have chosen Spenserian stanzas for this poem because it was a stanza form that Keats loved and wrote in so beautifully. The final stanza of "Adonais" has fascinated readers for generations because it seems to foreshadow Shelley's own death, just a year after he wrote this poem. The word "bark" means "boat," and Shelley died in a boating accident when a small craft in which he was sailing became lost. In the poem, he refers to Keats as Adonais.
The breath who might I have invoked in song
Descend on me; by spirit's bark is driven,
Far from the shore, far from the trembling throng
Whose sails were never to the tempest given;
The massy earth and sphered skies are riven!
I am borne darkly, fearfully afar;
Whilst burning through the inmost veil of Heaven,
The soul of Adonais, like a star,
Beacons from the abode where the Eternal are.
As you read these three stanzas, take time to analyze the rhythm and the rhyme scheme. It is startling that three so different poems are written in exactly the same fixed form. This should give you some insight into the flexibility of this stanza and into the diverse creative gifts of these three poets. Far from stifling creativity, a fixed form can challenge a poet to remarkable and very personal achievements.
Although there are others, the final Renaissance stanza form I would like to introduce to you is ottava rima. If you guessed that this is an eight-line stanza, you are correct. It originated in Italy and was used by Tasso, Ariosto and others. Sir Thomas Wyatt introduced this stanza into English in the early 1500s. Ottava rima has lines of eleven syllables and a rhyme scheme of ABABABCC. Lord Byron chose this stanza form for his masterpiece, the long comic satiric poem, Don Juan. In stanza 22 of this poem, the narrator comments on the relationship between the parents of the hero, Don Juan. Notice the comic effect that Byron creates by using multi-syllabic rhyme, especially with the word "intellectual" and the phrase "hen-peck'd you all." He also creates a light and silly effect with the word "hen-peck'd" which is accented in reverse to fit into the iambic rhythm.
"Tis pity learned virgins ever wed
With persons of no sort of education,
Or gentlemen, who, though well-born and bred,
Grow tired of scientific conversation:
I don't choose to say much upon this head,
I'm a plain man, and in a single station,
But--Oh! ye lords of ladies intellectual,
Inform us truly, have they not hen-peck'd you all?
Throughout Don Juan, Byron has a roaring good time satirizing epic literature, his fellow Romantic poets, with whom he did not identify, and ottava rima itself. Stanza 205 is especially witty as Byron indulges in a bit of light hearted literary criticism and rhymes the words "Southy," "mouthey," and "drouthy."
Thou shalt believe in Milton, Dryden, Pope;
Thou shalt not set up Wordsworth, Coleridge, Southey;
Because the first is crazed beyond all hope,
The second drunk, the third so quaint and mouthey:
With Crabbe it may be difficult to cope,
And Campbell's Hippocrene is somewhat drouthy:
Thou shalt not steal from Samuel Rogers, nor--
Commit--flirtation with the muse of Moore.
Byron mentions Dryden and Pope as poets he admired along with Milton. Byron was one of the few poets living during the Romantic Period who preferred the values of the preceding Neo-Classical period. The Neo-Classical Period, sandwiched between the Seventeenth Century and the Romantic era, was a time of conservatism and strict adherence to rigid metrical principles. This was the generation following the Civil War during which King Charles I was executed and the Puritans took over Parliament. After the Restoration of Charles II, the people of England, including the poets, wanted nothing but peace, harmony, and predictability. They didn't want any more political surprises, and they were fed up with the excessive, overly elaborate, and far too imaginative poetry of the late Renaissance. They wanted to return to the simple, clear, restrained aesthetics of the Greek and Roman Classical Periods, and the Neo-Classical age began.
The heroic couplet was just the kind of poetry for them. It was a simple, straightforward form of poetry, and its unvarying familiarity was a source of endless comfort to Neo-Classical poets and readers. You will remember that Chaucer introduced the iambic pentameter couplet into English, but most scholars do not refer to Chaucer's poetry as heroic couplets. That term is usually applied only to iambic pentameter couplets that are end-stopped, meaning that there is a pause at the end of each line. If you will re-read the passage from Chaucer's Canterbury Tales which appears earlier in this chapter, you will notice that he uses a lot of enjambment, and that his lines flow very freely so that there is often not a pause at the end of a line, even though there is a rhyme.
The Neo-Classical poets, with their commitment to order and structure, adapted Chaucer's form to their own purposes. They developed a much more rigid format that called for a pause at the end of the first line and a complete stop at the end of the second line where the rhyme occurs. It is these end-stopped rhymed lines that are known today as heroic couplets, and the Neo-Classical poets who mastered this form were truly dancing in chains.
John Dryden and Alexander Pope were the two great English Neo-Classical poets, and it is a revelation to read their heroic couplets. Both of them achieve a natural sounding, fluid movement, even though there is a punctuation mark at the end of almost every line. In his brilliant mock heroic poem, "The Rape of the Lock," Pope satirized two upper-class families who were feuding because a gentleman from one family snipped off a lock of hair from a lady in the other family. In an attempt to make peace, Pope dramatized the event by comparing it to an epic battle, and in the comparison, the trivial nature of the feud becomes apparent. In the following lines, written in flawless heroic couplets, Pope describes the moment when the Baron actually cuts off Belinda's curl:
The Peer now spreads the glittering forfex wide,
To enclose the Lock; now joins it, to divide.
Even then, before the fatal engine closed,
A wretched Sylph too fondly interposed;
Fate urged the shears, and cut the Sylph in twain
(But airy substance soon unites again):
The meeting points the sacred hair dissever
From the fair head, forever and forever!
Then flashed the living lightning from her eyes,
And screams of horror rend the affrighted skies.
Not louder shrieks to pitying heaven are cast,
When husbands, or when lapdogs breathe their last:
Dryden, too reflected the values of his age by writing satiric, philosophical, or occasional poetry in heroic couplets. Occasional poetry is written to commemorate a specific event usually a public occasion. This type of poetry also appealed to the Neo-Classicals because they disliked excessively personal or emotional literature. In short, they rejected lyric poetry. A late Renaissance Metaphysical style poem like John Donne's "The Flea," which you read in Chapter 3, and which focuses on a speaker trying to talk a woman into giving in to him sexually, would have offended the Neo-Classical sense of decorum. Dryden was especially skillful in using heroic couplets to express the kind of restrained public sentiments that appealed to Neo-Classical tastes. In the very brief "Epigram on Milton," without the least show of emotion, politely compliments the author of Paradise Lost. The other two poets to whom he refers are the Classical poets, Homer and Virgil.
Epigram on Milton
Three poets, in three distant ages born,
Greece, Italy, and England did adorn.
The first in loftiness of thought surpassed,
The next in majesty, in both the last:
The force of Nature could not farther go;
To make a third, she joined the former two.
As the timeline which appears earlier in this chapter indicates, these various poetic forms have recycled in and out of popularity in ensuing generations. The sonnet, which was too personal and too emotional for the Neo-Classicals, came back into vogue with the sentimental Victorians, and blank verse became popular in the Twentieth Century. The ballad has managed to survive in every generation, though it did not appeal to the intellectuals of the Neo-Classical age. Other English speaking cultures have adapted these forms to their own creative purposes and developed new forms of their own. The limerick, a short, rhyming, comical poem, is an American invention, as is the blues stanza, which evolved from African American music. Haiku poetry, which originated in Japan, is also widely written in English, and several Modern poets have experimented with syllabic verse, poetry which is structured around a pre-determined number of syllables per line rather than on meter and rhyme.
Fixed forms are certainly not unique to European poetry. We have already read several Japanese poems, both tanka and haiku, and both of these are fixed forms which have interested readers outside Japan. One difference between the Asian tradition in literature and the English is that in both China and Japan the development of poetry has followed a more continuous flow with each generation learning from and honoring its predecessors. The Chinese and Japanese have not shared the English tendency to reject the poetic values of the preceding generation. As a result, the evolution of tanka and haiku took place over several hundred years based on artistic mentoring from one poetry master to the next.
Tanka is the older of these two fixed forms, dating to the earliest days of Japanese literacy in the 400s A.D. The Manyoshu, the most significant anthology of ancient Japanese poetry, compiled in about 750, contains hundreds of tanka. (The Japanese language does not employ singular and plural, so we will refer to one tanka or several tanka, one haiku or many haiku.) Japanese poetry has never used meter, probably because the language itself is monotonal. Neither has rhyme been used in Japanese poetry, perhaps because rhyme would simply be too easy. Every Japanese word ends in a vowel. Instead, Japanese fixed forms are based on the number of lines and the number of syllables per line. In this regard, the Japanese have always had a preference for uneven numbers. They would probably feel quite uncomfortable with the predictable symmetry of heroic couplets.
The structure of a tanka is five lines with a total of thirty-one syllables arranged in each line as follows: five, seven, five, seven, seven. The poems by Ono no Komachi and Murasaki Shikibu which you read at the end of Chapter 1 are all tanka, as are Akiko Yosano's poems in Chapter 2. Unfortunately, you will not be able to analyze the syllable count in these poems because they are translations. Although most of the translations maintain the five-line structure, translators usually feel that it is more important to capture the meaning and emotional impact of the poem rather than the correct number of syllables. if you decide to write some tanka of your own, why not take on the challenge of maintaining the correct syllable count.
While English and European poets often define a poem by its structure, the Japanese do not. Even though a tanka does have five lines and thirty-one syllables, it has other characteristics that define it more clearly for the Japanese. For example, a tanka poem is written in the first person point of view in the poet's own voice, not in the voice of a persona. Tanka almost always focus on the immediate emotional experience of the poet, and they are written spontaneously, usually at a moment of heightened feeling. They often contain imagery which connects elements from nature with human emotions, a characteristic they share with Shakespeare and many of the other great poets of the world. Tanka also sometimes contain verbal complexity, including puns, a technique used by the English Metaphysical poets John Donne and George Herbert.
Akiko Yosano, a Modern poet whom we read in Chapter 2, studied the tanka of Ono no Komachi and the other masters who lived a thousand years before her time, and she consciously incorporated their techniques into her poetry. The following tanka was written by the great Yakamochi Otomo, who lived from 718 to 785 and was probably responsible for compiling The Manyoshu.
So loud the deer cries, calling to his mate,
That the answering echo resounds
Through the mountains,
Where I am alone.
Translated by the Japanese Classics Translation
Committee, Seiichi Taki, Chairperson
Ono no Komachi lived in the Ninth Century and is considered one of the great geniuses of Japanese poetry. You have already read four of her poems. Here is another:
How helpless my heart!
Were the stream to tempt,
My body, like a reed
Severed at the roots,
Would drift along, I think.
Translated by Geoffrey Bownas and
Anthony Thwaite
And finally, here is a poem by Akiko Yosano, who was born in 1878 and died in 1942:
Sweet and sad
like love overwhelmed
with long sighs,
out of the depths of the willow
little by little
the moon appears.
Translated by Kenneth Rexroth and
Ikuko Atsumi
These tanka, written over a twelve hundred year period, share certain artistic principles in addition to their thirty-one syllable structure. Each captures an intense moment of emotion and expresses it both personally, in the poet's own voice, and archetypally, by connecting the deeply felt emotion with one of the eternal cycles of nature. Yakamochi feels his isolation intensify in the mating calls of deer, which contrast so profoundly with his own loneliness. Komachi, who has given in completely to helpless love, sees a parallel between her own loss of control and a reed which has been uprooted and floats down the river with no volition of its own. And Akiko sees the poignant and complex feelings of lovers in the slow rise of the moon through the tangled branches of the willow. A tanka poet must be willing to risk all in the certain knowledge that it is passion, and deeply felt emotion of every kind,-- loneliness, jealousy, anger, sorrow, and every imaginable combination of feelings that gives human beings their unique place on our planet. So profound are our emotional lives that we see reflections of our feelings in every manifestation of nature. This is the essence of the tanka poet's art. If you want to be a tanka poet, you must be prepared to dig into the deepest well of your emotions and bring them to light in the world of nature. To be a reader of tanka, you must respect and validate the feelings of other human beings without being judgmental or cynical.
A person who looks at tanka and haiku, which developed later, only in terms of their fixed form might conclude that a haiku is simply the first three lines of a tanka and that Japanese poets decided to make the tanka more challenging by shortening it. It is true that a haiku consists of three lines and a total of seventeen syllables arranged in a pattern of five, seven, and five syllables per line. And it does seem that historically the haiku grew out of the tanka tradition. However, what the haiku became, after about two hundred and fifty years of development, is very different from the tanka.
First of all, most haiku are written in the objective point of view, not in the poet's own voice, and the haiku poet almost never makes emotional statements such as "how helpless my heart," or "sweet and sad." Like a tanka, a haiku captures a moment in time, and it uses imagery from nature to express the intensity of that moment, but in a haiku it is nature, in its exquisite objectivity, that is at the forefront and human emotion, just one small element of nature, must be inferred by an intuitive reader.
A haiku actually has much more similarity to an artistic photograph than it does to a tanka poem. If you have ever studied photography, you know that a good photograph is based on certain principles of composition. It is really just an empty space that is filled with images in relation to each other. The photographer must consider elements such as the foreground, the background, the spatial relationships between the images at the top, bottom, and sides of the frame, the sizes of the images and their relationship to each other. A good photograph usually presents some images in contrast and some images in comparison to each other. When we say that a photograph is good, we mean that it has created some kind of profound effect on the viewer. And although the eye of the camera is objective, a good photograph can elicit a powerful emotional response. These principles are also true of haiku. Some readers have mistakenly assumed that a haiku does not express emotion; in fact, a haiku often evokes very deep feelings, but the poet must depend on the reader's ability to respond emotionally to the images in the poem. Thus, a haiku asks more from the reader than a tanka does.
A haiku poet who asks a great deal from his reader because he respects the depth of his reader's intuition, feelings, senses, and intellect, is the master himself--Matsuo Basho. Basho is to haiku as Shakespeare is to the English sonnet. Others have come before and after him, but Basho made the haiku one of the sublime creations of human art. It was Basho who first developed the technique that his literary biographer, Makoto Ueda, refers to as "surprising comparison."1 Basho read all of the great Japanese poets who preceded him, and like Sei Shonagon, he had the gift for finding comparisons in situations that others would see as contrasts. Since his stanza form was a three-line poem, Basho usually placed three images in each haiku, and in some subtle and startling way, these images where compared. His famous crow poem is a perfect example of this technique:
On a withered branch
a crow has settled--
autumn nightfall.
Translated by Harold Henderson
The old adage that "great minds think alike" is certainly true. Here we have a similar set of images to the first quatrain of Shakespeare's "Sonnet 73." The three images in the haiku are a withered branch, a crow, and the falling darkness. Although these are three separate things, they are compared, as in a photograph, in shades of gray and black. Also, the first two images are more distinct, and the final image of nightfall envelopes the other two, and the three become one. It is the ability to create harmony, or oneness out of disparate images that is Basho's gift to the world. It is both an artistic gift, based on his craft as a poet, and a philosophical gift, based on his commitment to the Zen Buddhist way of life.
In term of craft, Basho often used a device called synesthesia, or fusion of the senses, which has also been used by European poets. This technique is especially well suited to poetry, and it gives to poetry a dimension which photography, which is based primarily on visual imagery, cannot exploit to the same extent. In the following haiku, Basho combines the sense of sound with the visual sense of color:
The sea darkens
And a wild duck's call
Is faintly white.
The idea that the sound of a wild duck might have a color requires a subtle intuitive response on the part of the reader. The darkening sea and the cold, whitish sound of the duck, who flies unseen, creates a profound sense of the objective impersonalness of nature, which nevertheless harmonizes all things in its never ending cycles. This is the concept of sabi, or natural solitude (sometimes translated as "impersonal loneliness"), that is present in most of Basho's truly great haiku.
His famous frog poem also brings disparate elements together to create a sense of harmonious sabi:
An old pond:
a frog jumps in
water sound.
Translated by Harold Henderson
edited by Rose Anna Higashi
Basho often presents an image that seems to represent the eternal or changeless principle such as the old pond, the nightfall, or the darkening sea, coming into contact with a temporary or suddenly changing element, such as a crow, a wild duck, or a frog. Although the frog breaks the silence of the old pond and the crow invades the solitude of the withered branch, no conflict occurs. Here Basho communicates the Zen principle that change is the very essence of nature, and even elements that appear to be changeless, like an old pond, are in fact always in the process of change. Furthermore, the old pond does not resist the frog, the agent of change, and although the frog does alter the dynamics of the pond forever, no harm comes to either.
A simpler technique that Basho usually used was to include a kigo, or word indicating the season of the year, in each haiku. A haiku is a very small poem, and it must borrow from the larger world of nature to create archetypal responses to the seasons of the year and the emotions that human beings associate with each season. Shakespeare, of course, used this same technique in "Sonnet 73." In the following poem, the word "cherry," (meaning cherry blossoms), is the kigo that tells the reader that this poem occurs in spring:
After the chimes fade
Cherry fragrance continues:
Evening dusk.
Translated by Makoto Ueda
Using synesthesia, the poem also emphasizes the connectedness rather than the contrast between the three images in the poem. The sound of temple bells and the scent of cherry blossoms fuse together on a beautiful spring evening. And spring is the season of new life, energy, and creativity for human beings.
The next poem uses a kigo to evoke our archetypal response to winter as a time of endings and death. In fact, Basho wrote this poem just before his own death at the age of fifty in 1689.
On a journey ailing--
My dreams roam about
Over a withered moor.
Translated by Makoto Ueda
Yosa Buson, whose haiku you read at the end of Chapter 2, and Kobayashi Issa, whose haiku appear in Chapter 4, both lived after Basho and learned from him. Buson continued to use Basho's principle of three-image composition based on contrast and comparison, and Issa, who had a profound compassion for nature, emphasized the interconnectedness of all life. In Chapter 4, I mentioned Basho's haiku diary, Narrow Road to the Deep North. I certainly recommend that you read this little jewel. Basho's ability to capture nature's moments of transforming beauty and harmony in a seventeen-syllable poem is unsurpassed. If you would like to try to write haiku poetry or keep a haibun diary, you might as well learn from the master.
I hope our journey into the historic poetry forms of England and Japan has given you some new insight into your craft. In your own life as a poet, the entire world of poetic structure, from every cultural tradition, is at your disposal. And any form can be adapted to meet your needs. As Carl Jung observed, "Only that which changes remains true." Dryden's heroic couplets are not like Chaucer's iambic pentameter couplets, some of Gerard Manley Hopkins' sonnets have more than fourteen lines, and Richard Brautigan's haiku do not resemble Basho's. Every form should be allowed to evolve and grow in the hands of each new generation. Form exists to enhance a poet's creative expression, not to stifle it. The essence of creativity is finding the form that best supports the magic of each poet's vision.
NOTES
CHAPTER 5
1. Makoto Ueda, Matsuo Basho (Tokyo: Kodansha International Ltd., 1982), p. 40.
QUESTIONS AND TOPICS FOR REVIEW
1. What elements comprise the form of a poem?
2. What two trends characterized the development of form in English literature?
3. How did Japanese literature differ from English literature historically in the development of poetic forms?
4. What is the difference between free verse and blank verse?
5. What are the structural characteristics of Anglo-Saxon poetry?
6. Define the terms caesura and kenning.
7. How does Middle English poetry differ from Anglo-Saxon poetry?
8. Define the terms metrics and scansion.
9. Define and provide and example of iambic pentameter.
10. What are the names of the most commonly used metrical feet in English poetry?
11. Define the terms dimeter, trimeter, tetrameter, pentameter, and hexameter.
12. Define and provide an example of an iambic, anapestic, trochaic, and dactylic foot.
13. In what form is Chaucer's Canterbury Tales written?
14. In what form is Tennyson's "Ulysses" written?
15. What are heroic couplets, and how do they differ from iambic pentameter couplets?
16. What are sight rhyme, slant rhyme, and internal rhyme?
17. Define and provide an example of the ballad stanza.
18. What other elements, in addition to form, characterize the ballad?
19. What words are used to define a two line stanza, a four line stanza, a six line stanza, and an eight line stanza?
20. What is enjambment?
21. Define and provide an example of the Italian sonnet.
22. What is another name for the Italian sonnet?
23. Define and provide an example of the English sonnet.
24. What is another name for the English sonnet?
25. How are the Italian and the English sonnet similar? How are they different?
26. Define the word sprezzatura.
27. What is a fixed form?
28. Define and provide examples of terza rima, ottava rima, and Spenserian stanzas.
29. What is occasional poetry?
30. Why did Neo-Classical poets dislike lyric poetry?
31. What are the characteristics of Cavalier, Metaphysical, and Baroque poetry?
32. In what form is Shelley's "Adonais" written?
33. In what form is Byron's Don Juan written?
34. In what country were the limerick and the blues stanza developed?
35. Define and provide an example of the tanka.
36. Define and provide an example of the haiku.
37. What are the similarities between haiku and photography?
38. Define and provide an example of synesthesia.
39. What is sabi? How does Basho use this concept in his poetry?
40. Define kigo and explain how it is used in haiku poetry.
TOPICS FOR DISCUSSION
1. Which historic form of English poetry do you find most appealing? Why?
2. Which historic form of English poetry do you find least appealing? Why?
3. Discuss the differences between Chaucer's iambic pentameter couplets and Neo-classical heroic couplets. Which do you prefer and why?
4. Discuss the advantages and disadvantages of using rhyme in contemporary poetry.
5. Select an Italian sonnet and an English sonnet and discuss them both, focusing on rhythm, rhyme, imagery, and overall structure. Be sure to talk about how the poet creates the turn. Which of the two poems you have chosen seems more effective? Why?
6. What characteristics of the ballad do you find appealing? Why have intellectuals in some generations rejected the ballad?
7. What are the advantages and disadvantages of writing in free verse rather than in a fixed form?
8. Is it likely that some of the creativity will be lost if a poet writes occasional poetry rather than spontaneous lyric poetry? Why or why not?
9. In poetry, are there subtle cultural prejudices suggesting that bigger is better?
If so, how can haiku overcome these prejudices and be taken seriously as an art form?
10. Does tanka violate any unspoken cultural boundaries that limit excessive expressions of emotion?
11. In what ways is tanka similar to the blues?
12. How can a reader discern the theme of a haiku poem?
ACTIVITIES
1. Divide into groups and rewrite "Edward" in contemporary vocabulary and spelling. Then compare your revisions and discuss any discrepancies.
2. Organize a mock trial in which Edward is tried for murder. Both the prosecution and the defense will have to provide motivation for both Edward's and his mother's actions. The prosecution will have to decide whether Edwards' mother should be tried for conspiracy to commit murder.
3. Organize a field trip to a park or other outdoor setting for the purpose of writing haiku. Write the haiku spontaneously while you are actually in the natural setting. Share these haiku with the class when you return.
4. Divide into groups of two and write narrative poems in heroic couplets, taking turns writing alternate lines. You might be surprised where you story lines will go.
5. Each person should bring a favorite photograph to class. Arrange these photographs around the classroom and write haiku in response to the images in the photographs.
6. Divide into small groups and write a series of linked haiku. One person writes the first line, another person writes the second line, etc. You can also link one haiku to the next by using an image from the final line of a haiku in the first line of the following haiku.
7. Go to a library or other source and find tapes or recordings of ballads or blues songs. Choose several and listen to them in class together. What poetic elements do these songs contain. Discuss form, imagery, similes and metaphors, etc.
8. Read Shelley's "Ode to the West Wind" aloud in class, taking turns reading one stanza each. Then talk about the poem's theme and your personal responses to the poem.
ANALYTICAL WRITING ASSIGNMENTS
1. Analyze "Sir Patrick Spens" focusing on dramatic elements and imagery. For example, why does the elderly knight recommend Sir Patrick for the sea voyage? Why does Sir Patrick laugh when he first reads the king's letter? What actually happens to Sir Patrick and the Scots nobles? How do the images of "blood red wine," "cork heeled shoes," and the ladies with their fans and gold combs in their hair add to the dramatic development of the narrative?
2. Analyze the psychological elements in "Bonny Barbara Allan." For example, why is Sir John dying? Why does Barbara reject him at the moment of his death? Why does Sir John ask his friends to "be kind to Barbara Allan"? What effect does the death-bell have on Barbara? Why does she decide to die?
3. Analyze form and metaphor in Wyatt's "Whoso List to Hunt." In what form is this poem written, and how does Wyatt use the elements of this form to convey his theme? What metaphor unifies the imagery and theme of the poem?
4. Analyze Surrey's use of form and sound in "The Soote Season." Which form of the sonnet does he use? Discuss his use of rhyme and alliteration.
5. Compare and contrast the sonnets by Sidney and Spenser at the end of this chapter, focusing on form and imagery.
6. Compare and contrast any two sonnets, focusing on form, theme, imagery, etc.
7. Analyze the structure of Shelley's "Ode to the West Wind."
8. Analyze the structure and narrative progression of Keats' "The Eve of St. Agnes." You will need to do some research on the legend of St Agnes' Eve.
9. Analyze the imagery in "The Eve of St. Agnes" focusing on Keats's use of contrasts and opposites.
10. Analyze the theme of Tennyson's "Ulysses," explaining how Tennyson communicates this theme to the reader.
11. Research the story of Ulysses--he appears in Homer's Odyssey and Dante's Inferno. How does Tennyson use this story to unify his poem? Be sure to identify the other characters mentioned in the poem, Telemachus and Achilles, and the mariners. How do they contribute to the poem's meaning?
11. Analyze either sonnet by Elizabeth Barrett Browning, focusing on form, theme, and imagery.
12. Compare and contrast Browning's "Sonnet 32" and Embree's "Renaissance--Part I," focusing on form, theme, and imagery.
13. Select a ballad and a blues song and compare and contrast form, imagery, and other elements in these two art forms.
14. Gerard Manley Hopkins is sometimes called the father of Modern poetry, even though he lived during the Victorian Period. Analyze "The Windhover," focusing on the innovations he made in the sonnet form. You will need to do some research on "sprung rhythm," a technique Hopkins developed in which only the stressed syllables are counted in each line.
15. Analyze "The Windhover" focusing on theme, imagery, and word choices. You will need to use the Oxford English Dictionary to determine the meanings of some of the Anglo-Saxon and French words in the poem.
16. Compare and contrast Countee Cullen's "Yet Do I Marvel" to a sonnet written in an earlier century.
17. Compare and contrast the poetry of Richard Brautigan with traditional Japanese haiku.
CREATIVE WRITING ASSIGNMENTS
1. Write a love sonnet in either the Italian or the English form.
2. Rewrite this same sonnet in the other form.
3. Write a ballad on a current event or a tragic person who has lived during your own lifetime. Please remember that the ballad is not a cannibalistic form of literature.
4. Write a comic poem in heroic couplets.
5. Write a philosophical poem in blank verse.
6. Write a tanka or a series of tanka connecting your own emotional experiences with elements in nature.
7. Write an occasional poem celebrating some public event such as the inauguration of the President of the United States or the Prime Minister of Canada, Martin Luther King's Birthday, Cinch de Mayo, etc.
8. Write an occasional poem in a fixed form on an event that is important to you, such as your grandparent' anniversary, a friend's birthday, etc.
9. Write a series of haiku using kigo for inspiration. For example, kigo for autumn might be: falling leaves, cicadas, chrysanthemums, etc. Only use one kigo per haiku. For example, it is considered redundant to write a spring haiku that contains both butterflies and cherry blossoms.
10. Write a series of tanka using either Barbara Allan or Sir Patrick Spens as the persona who speaks in the poem. Focus on the range of their emotion, but remember to include imagery.
11. Write a blues song using "Fogyism" or "Chicago Mill Blues" as models. Note that a blues stanza is three lines long and the first two lines are identical. A blues song is seldom longer than four stanzas.
It must focus on authentic and immediate emotional experiences.
ADDITIONAL POEMS IN VARIOUS FORMS FOR READING AND DISCUSSION
The following anonymous traditional ballad is written in the Scottish dialect. The following vocabulary list may assist the reader:
brand--sword
sae--so
bluid--blood
gang--go
nae--no
mair--more
bot--but
erst--once
frie--free
dule--sorrow
drie--suffer
wae--woe
towirs--towers (castle)
ha--hall
maun--must
bairns--children
warldis--world's
late--let
thrae--through
ain--own
sic--such
counseils--counsel
Edward
"Why dois your brand sae drap wi' bluid,
Edward, Edward?
Why dois your brand sae drap wi' bluid?
And why sae sad gang yee, O?"
"O, I hae killed my hauke sae guid,
Mither, mither,
O, I hae killed my hauke sae guid,
And I had nae mair bot hee, O."
"Your haukis bluid was nevir sae reid,
Edward, Edward,
Your haukis bluid was nevir sae reid,
My deir son I tell thee, O."
"O, I hae killed my reid-roan steid,
Mither, mither,
O, I hae killed my reid-road steid,
That erst was sa fair and frie, O."
"Your steid was auld, and ye hae gat mair,
Edward, Edward,
Your steid was auld, and ye hae gat mair,
Sum other dule ye drie, O."
"O, I hae killed my fadir deir,
Mither, mither,
O, I had killed my fadir deir,
Alas, and wae is mee, O!"
"And whatten penance wul ye drie for that,
Edward, Edward,
And whatten penance wul ye drie for that?
My deir son, now tell me, O."
"Ile set my feit in yonder boat,
Mither, mither,
Ile set my feit in yonder boat,
And Ile fare ovir the sea, O."
"And what wul ye doe wi' your towirs and your ha',
Edward, Edward,
And what wul ye doe wi' your towirs and your ha',
That were sae fair to see, O?"
"Ile let thame stand tul they down fa',
Mither, mither.
Ile let thame stand tul they down fa',
For here nevir mair maun I bee, O."
"And what wul ye leive to your bairns and your wife,
Edward, Edward?
And what wul ye leive to yours bairns and your wife,
When ye gang ovir the sea, O?"
"The warldis room, late them beg thrae life,
Mither, mither,
The warldis room, late than beg thrae life,
For thame nevir mair wul I see, O."
"And what wul ye leive to your ain mither, deir,
Edward, Edward?
And what wul ye leive to your aim mither, deir?
My deir son, now tell me, O."
"The curse of hell frae me sall he beir,
Mither, mither,
The curse of hell frae me sall ye beir,
Sic counseils ye gave to me, O."
Bonny Barbara Allan (Anonymous)
It was in and about the Martinmas time,
When the green leaves were a-fallin';
That Sir John Graeme in the West Country
Fell in love with Barbara Allan.
He sent his man down through the town
To the place where she was dwellin':
"O haste and come to my master dear,
Gin ye be Barbara Allan."
O hooly,* hooly rase she up,
To the place where he was lyin',
And when she drew the curtain by:
"Young man, I think you're dyin'."
"O it's I'm sick, and very, very sick,
And 'til a' for Barbara Allan."
"O the better for me ye sal never be,
Though your heart's blood were a-spillin'.
"O dinna ye mind, young man," said she,
"When ye the cups were fillin',
That ye make the healths gae round and round,
And slighted Barbara Allan?"
He turned his face unto the wall,
And death was with him dealin':
"Adieu, adieu, my dear friends all,
And be kind to Barbara Allan."
And slowly, slowly, rase she up,
And slowly, slowly left him;
And sighing said she could not stay,
Since death of life had reft him.
She had not gane a mile but twa,
When she heard the dead-bell knellin',
And every jow** that the dead-bell ga'ed***
It cired, "Woe to Barbara Allan!"
"O mother, mother, make my bed.
O make it soft and narrow:
Since my love died for me today,
I'll die for him tomorrow."
* gently
** stroke
*** made
Sir Patrick Spens (Anonymous)
The king sits in Dumferline town,
Drinking the blude-reid wine:
"O whar will I get a guid sailor
To sail this ship of mine?
Up and spak an eldern knicht,
Sat at the king's richt knee:
"Sir Patrick Spens is the best sailor
That sails upon the sea."
The king has written a braid letter
And signed it wi' his hand,
And sent it to Sir Patrick Spens,
Was walking on the sand.
The first line that Sir Patrick read,
A loud lauch* lauched he;
The next line that Sir Patrick read,
The tear blinded his ee.
"O wha is this has done this deed,
This ill deed done to me,
To send me out this time o' the year,
To sail upon the sea?
"Make haste, make haste my mirry men all,
Our guid ship sails the morn,"
"O say na sae, my master dear,
For I fear a deadly storm.
"Late late yestre'en I saw the new moon
Wi' the auld moon in her arm,
And I fear, I fear, my dear master,
That we will come to harm."
O our Scots nobles were richt laith**
To weet their cork-heeled shoon***
But land owre a' the play were played
Their hats they swam aboon.
O lang, lang, may their ladies sit,
Wi' their fans into their hand,
Or e'er they see Sir Patrick Spens
Come sailing to the land.
O lang, lang may the ladies stand,
Wi' their gold kembs in their hair,
Waiting for their ain dear lords,
For they'll see thame na mair.
Half o'er, half o'er to Aberdour
It's fifty fadom deep,
And there lies guid Sir Patrick Spens,
Wi' the Scots lords at his feet.
* laugh
** loath
*** shoes
SIR THOMAS WYATT THE ELDER
England 1503-1542
Whoso List to Hunt*
Whoso list* to hunt, I know where is an hind,
But as for me, alas, I may no more.
The vain travail hath wearied me so sore
I am of them that farthest cometh behind.
Yet may I, by no means, my wearied mind
Draw from the deer, but as she fleeth afore,
Fainting I follow. I leave off therefore,
Since in a net I seek to hold the wind.
Whoso list her hunt, I put him out of doubt,
As well as I, may spend his time in vain.
And graven with diamonds in letters plain
There is written, her fair neck round about,
"Noli me tangere***, for Caesar's I am,
And wild for to hold, though I seem tame."
* This poem is an adaptation of Petrarch's Rime 190. It is traditionally assumed to refer to Anne Boleyn, who captured the attention of Henry VIII in 1526.
** list means to want to or to care to; a hind is a female red deer.
*** touch me not. According to Petrarch, Caesar's deer wore collars wearing the inscription, "Touch me not, for I am Caesar's."
HENRY HOWARD, EARL OF SURREY
England 1517-1547
The Soote Season*
The soote season, that bud and bloom forth brings,
With green hath clad the hill and eke the vale;
The nightingale with feathers new she sings;
The turtle to her make** hath told her tale.
Summer is come, for every spray now springs;
The hart hath hung his old head on the pale;
The buck in brake his winter coat he flings.
The fishes float with new repaired scale;
The adder all her slough away she slings,
The swift swallow pursueth the flies small;
The busy bee her honey now she mings.***
Winter is worn, that was the flowers' bale.
And thus I see among these pleasant things,
Each care decays, and yet my sorrow springs.
* This poem, which means "The Sweet Season," is an adaptation of Petrarch's Rime 310. Surrey has changed the descriptive details from nature from Italy to England.
** the turtledove to her mate
*** mingles
SIR PHILIP SIDNEY
England 1554-1586
The following poem is Number 31 in Sidney's sonnet sequence, "Astrophil and Stella." Astrophil is the persona who speaks in this poem.
With how sad steps, O Moon, thou climb'st the skies,
How silently, and with how wan a face!
What, may it be that even in heavenly place
That busy archer* his sharp arrows tries?
Sure, if that long-with-love-acquainted eyes
Can judge of Love, thou feel'st a Lover's case;
I read it in thy looks: thy languished grace,
To me that feel the like, thy state descries.
Then even of fellowship, O Moon, tell me
Is constant love deemed there but want of wit?
Are beauties there as proud as here they be?
Do they above love to be loved, and yet
Those lovers scorn whom that love doth possess?
Do they call virtue there ungratefulness?
*Cupid
EDMUND SPENSER
England 1551-1599
The following poem is Number 75 in Spenser's sonnet sequence "Amoretti." Note Spenser's use of archaic spelling.
One day I wrote her name upon the strand,
But came the waves and washed it away:
Agayne I wrote it with a second hand,
But came the tyde, and made my paynes his pray.
"Vayne man," sayd she, "that doest in vaine assay,*
A mortall thing so to immortalize,
For I my selve shall lyke to this decay,
And eek** my name bee wyped out lykewize."
"Not so," quod I, "let baser things devize,
To dy in dust, but you shall live by fame:
My verse your vertues rare shall eternize,
And in the heavens wryte your glorious name.
Where whenas death shall all the world subdew,
Our love shal live, and later life renew."
* to try or to attempt
** also
PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY
England 1792-1822
Ode to the West Wind
1
O wild West Wind, thou breath of Autumn's being,
Thou, from whose unseen presence the leaves dead
Are driven, like ghosts from an enchanter fleeing,
Yellow, and black, and pale, and hectic red,
Pestilence-stricken multitudes: O Thou,
Who chariotest to their dark wintry bed
The winged seeds, where they lie cold and low,
Each like a corpse within its grave, until
Thine azure sister of the Spring shall blow
Her clarion o'er the dreaming earth, and fill
(Driving sweet buds like flocks to feed in air)
With living hues and odours plain and hill:
Wild Spirit, which art moving everywhere;
Destroyer and Preserver; hear, O hear!
2
Thou on whose stream, 'mid the steep sky's commotion,
Loose clouds like Earth's decaying leaves are shed,
Shook from the tangled boughs of Heaven and Ocean,
Angels of rain and lightning: there are spread
On the blue surface of thine aery surge,
Like the bright hair uplifted from the head
Of some fierce Maenad even from the dim verge
Of the horizon to the zenith's height,
The locks of the approaching storm. Thou Dirge
Of the dying year, to which this closing night
Will be the dome of a vast sepulchre,
Vaulted with all thy congregated might
Of vapours, from whose solid atmosphere
Black rain and fire and hail will burst: O hear O hear!
3
Thou who didst waken from his summer dreams
The blue Mediterranean, where he lay,
Lulled by the coil of his chrystalline streams,
Beside a pumice isle in Baiae's bay,
And saw in sleep old palaces and towers
Quivering within the wave's intenser day.
All overgrown with azure moss and flowers
So sweet, the sense faints picturing them! Thou
For whose path the Atlantic's level powers
Cleave themselves into chasms, while far below
The sea-blooms and the oozy woods which wear
The sapless foliage of the ocean, know
Thy voice, and suddenly grow grey with fear,
And tremble and despoil themselves. O hear!
4
If I were a dead leaf thou mightest beat;
If I were a swift cloud to fly with thee;
A wave to pant beneath thy power, and share
The impulse of thy strength, only less free
Than thou, O Uncontrollable! If even
I were as in my boyhood, and could be
The comrade of thy wanderings over Heaven,
As then, when to outstrip thy skiey speed
Scarce seemed a vision; I would ne'er have striven.
As thus with thee in prayer in my sore need.
Oh! lift me as a wave, a leaf, a cloud!
I fall upon the thorns of life! I bleed!
A heavy weight of hours has chained and bowed
One too like thee: tameless, and swift, and proud.
5
Make me thy lyre, even as the forest is:
What if my leaves are falling like its ownwn!
The tumult of thy mighty harmonies
Will take from both a deep, autumnal tone,
Sweet though in sadness. Be thou, Spirit fierce,
My spirit! Be thou me, impetuous one!
Drive my dead thoughts over the universe
Like withered leaves to quicken a new birth!
And, by the incantation of this verse,
Scatter, as from an unextinguished hearth
Ashes and sparks, my words among mankind!
Be through my lips to unawakened Earth
The trumpet of a prophecy! O wind,
If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind?
JOHN KEATS
England 1795-1821
When I have fears that I may cease to be
When I have fears that I may cease to be
Before my pen has glean'd my teeming brain,
Before high piled books, in charactry,
Hold like rich garners the full ripen'd grain;
When I behold, upon the night's starr'd face.
Huge cloudy symbols of a high romance,
And think that I may never live to trace
Their shadows, with the magic hand of chance;
And when I feel, fair creature of an hour,
That I shall never look upon thee more,
Never have relish in the fairy power
Of unreflecting love;--then on the shore
Of the wide world I stand alone, and think
Till love and fame to nothingness do sink.
The Eve of St. Agnes
St. Agnes' Eve‑Ah, bitter chill it was!
The owl, for all his feathers, was a‑cold;
The hare limped trembling through the frozen grass,
And silent was the flock in woolly fold:
Numb were the Beadsman's fingers, while he told
His rosary, and while his frosted breath,
Like pious incense from a censer old,
Seemed taking flight for heaven, without a death,
Past the sweet Virgin's picture, while his prayer he saith.
2
His prayer he saith, this patient, holy man;
Then takes his lamp, and riseth from his knees,
And back returneth, meager, barefoot, wan,
Along the chapel aisle by slow degrees:
The sculptured dead, on each side, seem to freeze,
Imprisoned in black, purgatorial rails:
Knights, ladies, praying in dumb orat'ries,
He passeth by; and his weak spirit fails
To think how they may ache in icy hoods and mails.
3
Northward he turneth through a little door,
And scarce three steps, ere Music's golden tongue
Flattered to tears this aged man and poor;
But no‑already had his deathbed rung:
The joys of all his life were said and sung:
His was harsh penance on St Agnes' Eve:
Another way he went, and soon among
Rough ashes sat he for his soul's reprieve,
And all night kept awake, for sinners' sake to grieve.
4
That ancient Beadsman heard the prelude soft;
And so it chanced, for many a door was wide,
From hurry to and fro. Soon, up aloft,
The silver, snarling trumpets 'gan to chide:
The level chambers, ready with their pride,
Were glowing to receive a thousand guests:
The carved angels, ever eager‑eyed,
Stared, where upon their heads the cornice rests,
With hair blown back, and wings put crosswise on their breasts.
5
At length burst in the argent revelry,
With plume, tiara, and all rich array,
Numerous as shadows haunting faerily
The brain, new stuffed, in youth, with triumphs gay
Of old romance. These let us wish away,
And turn, sole‑thoughted, to one Lady there,
Whose heart had brooded, all that wintry day,
On love, and winged St. Agnes' saintly care,
As she had heard old dames full many times declare.
6
They told her how, upon St. Agnes' Eve,
Young virgins might have visions of delight,
And soft adorings from their loves receive
Upon the honeyed middle of the night,
If ceremonies due they did aright;
As, supperless to bed they must retire
And couch supine their beauties, lily white;
Nor look behind, nor sideways, but require
Of Heaven with upward eyes for all that they desire.
7
Full of this whim was thoughtful Madeline:
The music, yearning like a God in pain,
She scarcely heard: her maiden eyes divine,
Fixed on the floor, saw many a sweeping train
Pass by‑she heeded not at all: in vain
Came many a tiptoe, amorous cavalier,
And back retired; not cooled by high disdain;
But she saw not: her heart was otherwhere:
She sighed for Agnes' dreams, the sweetest of the year.
8
She danced along with vague, regardless eyes,
Anxious her lips, her breathing quick and short:
The hallowed hour was near at hand: she sighs
Amid the timbrels, and the thronged resort
Of whisperers in anger, or in sport;
'Mid looks of love, defiance, hate, and scorn,
Hoodwinked with faery fancy; all amort,
Save to St. Agnes and her lambs unshorn,
And all the bliss to be before tomorrow morn.
9
So, purposing each moment to retire,
She lingered still. Meantime, across the moors,
Had come young Porphyro, with heart on fire
For Madeline. Beside the portal doors,
Buttressed from moonlight, stands he, and implores
All saints to give him sight of Madeline,
But for one moment in the tedious hours,
That he might gaze and worship all unseen;
Perchance speak, kneel, touch, kiss‑in sooth such things have been
10
He ventures in: let no buzzed whisper tell:
All eyes be muffled, or a hundred swords
Will storm his heart, Love's fev'rous citadel:
For him, those Chambers held barbarian hordes,
Hyena foemen, and hot‑blooded lords,
Whose very dogs would execrations howl
Against his lineage: not one breast affords
Him any mercy, in that mansion foul, ‑
Save one old beldame, weak in body and in soul. _
11
Ah, happy chance! the aged creature came,
Shuffling along with ivory‑headed wand,
To where he stood, hid from the torch's flame,
Behind a broad hall‑pillar, far beyond
The sound of merriment and chorus bland:
He startled her; but soon she knew his face,
And grasped his fingers in her palsied hand,
Saying, "Mercy, Porphyro! hie thee from this place;
They are all here tonight, the whole bloodthirsty race!
12
"Get hence! get hence! there's dwarfish Hildebrand;
He had a fever late, and in the fit
He cursed thee and thine, both house and land:
Then there's that old Lord Maurice, not a whit
More tame for his gray hairs‑Alas me! flit!
Flit like a ghost away."‑"Ah, Gossip dear,
We're safe enough; here in this armchair sit,
And tell me how‑"Good Saints! not here, not here;
Follow me, child, or else these stones will be thy bier."
13
He followed through a lowly arched way,
Brushing the cobwebs with his lofty plume,
And as she muttered "Well‑a‑well‑a‑day!"
He found him in a little moonlight room,
Pale, latticed, chill, and silent as a tomb.
"Now tell me where is Madeline," said he,
"O tell me, Angela, by the holy loom
Which none but secret sisterhood may see,
When they St. Agnes' wool are weaving piously."
14
"St Agnes! Ah! it is St. Agnes' Eve‑
Yet men will murder upon holy days:
Thou must hold water in a witch's sieve,
And be liege lord of all the Elves and Fays,
To venture so: it fills me with amaze
To see thee, Porphyro!‑St. Agnes' Eve!
God's help! my lady fair the conjuror plays
This very night: good angels her deceive!
But let me laugh awhile, I've mickle time to grieve."
15
Feebly she laugheth in the languid moon,
While Porphyro upon her face doth look,
Like puzzled urchin on an aged crone
Who keepeth closed a wondrous riddle‑book,
As spectacled she sits in chimney nook.
But soon his eyes grew brilliant, when she told
His lady's purpose; and he scarce could brook
Tears, at the thought of those enchantments cold,
And Madeline asleep in lap of legends old.
16
Sudden a thought came like a full‑blown rose,
Flushing his brow, and in his pained heart
Made purple riot: then doth he propose
A stratagem, that makes the beldame start:
"A cruel man and impious thou art:
Sweet lady, let her pray, and sleep, and dream
Alone with her good angels, far apart
From wicked men like thee. Go, got‑I deem
Thou canst not surely be the same that thou didst seem."
17
"I will not harm her, by all saints I swear,"
Quoth Porphyro: "O may I ne'er find grace
When my weak voice shall whisper its last prayer,
If one of her soft ringlets I displace,
Or look with ruffian passion in her face:
Good Angela, believe me by these tears;
Or I will, even in a moment's space,
Awake, with horrid shout, my foemen's ears,
And beard them, though they be more fanged than wolves and bears."
18
"Ah! why wilt thou affright a feeble soul?
A poor, weak, palsy‑stricken, churchyard thing,4
Whose passing bells may ere the midnight toll;
Whose prayers for thee, each morn and evening,
Were never missed."‑Thus plaining, doth she bring
A gentler speech from burning Porphyro;
So woeful and of such deep sorrowing,
That Angela gives promise she will do
Whatever he shall wish, betide her weal or woe.
19
Which was, to lead him, in close secrecy,
Even to Madeline's chamber, and there hide
Him in a closet, of such privacy
That he might see her beauty unespied,
And win perhaps that night a peerless bride,
While legioned faeries paced the coverlet,
And pale enchantment held her sleepy‑eyed.
Never on such a night have lovers met,
Since Merlin paid his Demon all the monstrous debt.
20
"It shall be as thou wishest," said the Dame:
"All cates and dainties shall be stored there
Quickly on this feast night: by the tambour frame
Her own lute thou wilt see: no time to spare,
For I am slow and feeble, and scarce dare
On such a catering trust my dizzy head.
Wait here, my child, with patience; kneel in prayer
The while: Ah! thou must needs the lady wed,
Or may I never leave my grave among the dead."
21
So saying, she hobbled off with busy fear
The lover's endless minutes slowly passed:
The dame returned, and whispered in his ear
To follow her; with aged eyes aghast
From fright of dim espial. Safe at last,
Through many a dusky gallery, they gain
The maiden's chamber, silken, hushed, and chaste;
Where Porphyro took covert, pleased amain.
His poor guide hurried back with agues in her brain.
22
Her falt'ring hand upon the balustrade,
Old Angela was feeding for the stair,
When Madeline, St. Agnes' charmed maid,
Rose, like a missioned spirit, unaware:
With silver taper's light, and pious care,
She turned, and down the aged gossip led
To a safe level matting. Now prepare,
Young Porphyro, for gazing on that bed;
She comes, she comes again, like ringdove frayed and fled.
23
Out went the taper as she hurried in;
Its little smoke, in pallid moonshine, died:
She closed the door, she panted, all akin
To spirits of the air, and visions wide:
No uttered syllable, or, woe betide!
But to her heart, her heart was voluble,
Paining with eloquence her balmy side;
As though a tongueless nightingale should swell
Her throat in vain, and die, heart‑stifled, in her dell.
24
A casement high and triple‑arched there was,
All garlanded with carven imag'ries
Of fruits, and flowers, and bunches of knot‑grass,
And diamonded with panes of quaint device,
Innumerable of stains and splendid dyes,
As are the tiger‑moth's deep‑damasked wings;
And in the midst, 'mong thousand heraldries,
And twilight saints, and dim emblazonings,
A shielded scutcheon blushed with blood of queens and kings.
25
Full on this casement shone the wintry moon,
And threw warm gules on Madeline's fair breast,
As down she knelt for heaven's grace and boon;
Rose‑bloom fell on her hands, together pressed,
And on her silver cross soft amethyst,
And on her hair a glory, like a saint:
She seemed a splendid angel, newly dressed,
Save wings, for heaven‑Porphyro grew faint:
She knelt, so pure a thing, so free from mortal taint.
26
Anon his heart revives: her vespers done,
Of all its wreathed pearls her hair she frees;
Unclasps her warmed jewels one by one;
Loosens her fragrant bodice; by degrees
Her rich attire creeps rustling to her knees:
Half‑hidden, like a mermaid in sea‑weed,
Pensive awhile she dreams awake, and sees,
In fancy, fair St. Agnes in her bed,
But dares not look behind, or all the charm is fled.
27
Soon, trembling in her soft and chilly nest,
In sort of wakeful swoon, perplexed she lay,
Until the poppied warmth of sleep oppressed
Her soothed limbs, and soul fatigued away;
Flown, like a thought, until the morrow‑day;
Blissfully havened both from joy and pain;
Clasped like a missal where swart Paynims pray;
Blinded alike from sunshine and from rain,
As though a rose should shut, and be a bud again.
28
Stol'n to this paradise, and so entranced,
Porphyro gazed upon her empty dress,
And listened to her breathing, if it chanced
To wake into a slumberous tenderness;
Which when he heard, that minute did he bless,
And breathed himself: then from the closet crept,
Noiseless as fear in a wide wilderness,
And over the hushed carpet, silent, stepped,
And 'tween the curtains peeped, where, lo!‑how fast she slept.
29
Then by the bedside, where the faded moon
Made a dim, silver twilight, soft he set
A table, and, half anguished, threw thereon
A cloth of woven crimson, gold, and jet‑
O for some drowsy Morphean amulet!
The boisterous, midnight, festive clarion,
The kettledrum, and far‑heard clarinet,
Affray his ears, though but in dying tone‑
The hail door shuts again, and all the noise is gone.
30
And still she slept an azure‑lidded sleep,
In blanched linen, smooth, and lavendered,
While he from forth the closet brought a heap
Of candied apple, quince, and plum, and gourd;
With jellies soother than the creamy curd,
And lucent syrups, tinct with cinnamon;
Manna and dates, in argosy transferred
From Fez; and spiced dainties, every one,
From silken Samarcand to cedared Lebanon.
31
These delicates he heaped with glowing hand
On golden dishes and in baskets bright
Of wreathed silver: sumptuous they stand
In the retired quiet of the night,
Filling the chilly room with perfume light.‑
"And now, my love, my seraph fair, awaked
Thou art my heaven, and I thine eremite:
Open thine eyes, for meek St. Agnes' sake,
Or I shall drowse beside thee, so my soul doth ache."
32
Thus whispering, his warm, unnerved arm
Sank in her pillow. Shaded was her dream
By the dusk curtains: twas a midnight charm
Impossible to melt as iced stream:
The lustrous salvers in the moonlight gleam;
Broad golden fringe upon the carpet lies:
It seemed he never, never could redeem
From such a steadfast spell his lady's eyes;
So mused awhile, entoiled in woofed fantasies.
33
Awakening up, he took her hollow lute‑
Tumultuous‑and, in chords that tenderest be,
He played an ancient ditty, long since mute,
In Provence called "La belle dame sans merci"
Close to her ear touching the melody;
Wherewith disturbed, she uttered a soft moan:
He ceased‑she panted quick‑and suddenly
Her blue affrayed eyes wide open shone:
Upon his knees he sank, pale as smooth‑sculptured stone.
34
Her eyes were open, but she still beheld,
Now wide awake, the vision of her sleep:
There was a painful change, that nigh expelled
The blisses of her dream so pure and deep,
At which fair Madeline began to weep,
And moan forth witless words with many a sigh;
While still her gaze on Porphyro would keep,
Who knelt, with joined hands and piteous eye,
Fearing to move or speak, she looked so dreamingly.
35
"Ah, Porphyro!" said she, "but even now
Thy voice was at sweet tremble in mine ear,
Made tunable with every Sweetest vow;
And those sad eyes were spiritual and clear:
How changed thou art? how pallid, chill, and drear!
Give me that voice again, my Porphyro,
Those looks immortal, those complainings dear!
Oh leave me not in this eternal woe,
For if thou diest, my Love, I know not where to go."
36
Beyond a mortal man impassioned far
At these voluptuous accents, he arose,
Ethereal, flushed, and like a throbbing star
Seen mid the sapphire heaven's deep repose;
Into her dream he melted, as the rose
Blendeth its odor with the violet‑
Solution sweet: meantime the frost‑wind blows
Like Love's alarum pattering the sharp sleet
Against the windowpanes; St. Agnes' moon hath set.
37
'Tis dark: quick pattereth the flaw‑blown sleet:
"This is no dream, my bride, my Madeline!"
'Tis dark: the iced gusts still rave and beat:
"No dream, alas! alas! and woe is mine!
Porphyro will leave me here to fade and pine.‑
Cruel! what traitor could thee hither bring?
I curse not, for my heart is lost in thine,
Though thou forsakest a deceived thing‑
A dove forlorn and lost with sick unpruned wing."
38
"My Madeline! sweet dreamer! lovely bride!
Say, may I be for aye thy vassal blest?
Thy beauty's shield, heart‑shaped and vermcil dyed?
Ah, silver shrine, here will I take my rest
After so many hours of toil and quest,
A famished pilgrim‑saved by miracle.
Though I have found, I will not rob thy nest
Saving of thy sweet self; if thou think'st well
To trust, fair Madeline, to no rude infidel.
39
"Hark! 'tis an elfin‑storm from faery land,
Of haggard seeming, but a boon indeed:
Arise‑arise! the morning is at hand‑
The bloated wassaillers will never heed‑
Let us away, my love, with happy speed;
There are no ears to hear, or eyes to see‑
Drowned all in Rhenish and the sleepy mead:
Awake! arise! my love, and fearless be,
For o'er the southern moors I have a home for thee."
40
She hurried at his words, beset with fears,
For there were sleeping dragons all around,
At glaring watch, perhaps, with ready spears‑
Down the wide stairs a darkling way they found.‑
In all the house was heard no human sound.
A chain‑dropped lamp was flickering by each door;
The arras rich with horseman, hawk, and hound,
Fluttered in the besieging wind's uproar;
And the long carpets rose along the gusty floor.
41
They glide, like phantoms, into the wide hall;
Like phantoms, to the iron porch, they glide;
Where lay the Porter, in uneasy sprawl
With a huge empty flagon by his side:
The wakeful bloodhound rose, and shook his hide,
But his sagacious eye an inmate owns:
By one, and one, the bolts full easy slide:
The chains lie silent on the footworn stones;
The key turns, and the door upon its hinges groans.
42
And they are gone: aye, ages long ago
These lovers fled away into the storm.
That night the Baron dreamt of many a woe,
And all his warrior‑guests, with shade and form
Of witch, and demon, and large coffin‑worm,
Were long be‑nightmared. Angela the old
Died palsy‑twitched, with meager face deform;
The Beadsman, after thousand aves told,
For aye unsought for slept among his ashes cold.
ALFRED, LORD TENNYSON
England 1809-1892
Ulysses
It little profits that an idle king,
By this still hearth, among these barren crags,
Matched 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 enjoyed
Greatly, have suffered greatly, both with those
That loved me, and alone; on shore, and when
Through scudding drifts the rainy Hyades
Vexed 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 honored 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 wherethrough
Gleams that untraveled world whose margin fades
Forever and forever when I move.
How dull it is to pause, to make an end,
To rust unburnished, not to shine in use!
As though 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 scepter and the isle--
Well-loved of me, discerning to fulfill
This labor, by slow prudence to make mild
A rugged people, and through soft degrees
Subdue them to the useful and the good.
Most blameless is he, centered 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 toiled, 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 honor 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,
"Tis 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.
Though much is taken, much abides; and though
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.
ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING
England 1806-1861
The following poems are from Browning's forty-four sonnet sequence, "Sonnets from the Portuguese."
Although these were purported to be translations from the Portuguese language, in fact Elizabeth wrote them herself to express her love for her husband, Robert Browning.
32
The first time that the sun rose on thine oath
To love me, I looked forward to the moon
To slacken all those bonds which seemed too soon
And quickly tied to make a lasting troth.
Quick-loving hearts, I thought, may quickly loathe;
And looking on myself, I seemed not one
For such man's love!--more like an out-of-tune
Worn viol,* a good singer would be wroth
To spoil his song with, and which, snatched in haste,
Is laid down at the first ill-sounding note,
I did not wrong myself so, but I placed
A wrong on thee. For perfect strains may float
'Neath master-hands, from instruments defaced--
And great souls, at one stroke, may do and dote.
* Elizabeth compares herself to an old, worn out musical instrument. She was forty years old and Robert was thirty-four when they eloped.
43
How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.
I love thee to the depth and breadth and height
My soul can reach, when feeling out of sight
For the ends of Being and ideal Grace.
I love thee to the level of everyday's
Most quiet need, by sun and candlelight.
I love thee freely, as men strive for Right;
I love thee purely, as they turn from Praise.
I love thee with the passion put to use
In my old griefs, and with my childhood's faith.
I love thee with a love I seemed to lose
With my lost saints--I love thee with the breath,
Smiles, tears, of all my life!--and, if God choose,
I shall but love thee better after death.
GERARD MANLEY HOPKINS
England 1844-1889
The Windhover*
To Christ our Lord
I caught this morning morning's minion, king-
dom of daylight's dauphin, dapple-dawn-drawn Falcon, in his riding
Of the rolling level underneath him steady air, and striding
High there, how he rung upon the rein of a wimpling wing
In his ecstasy! them off, off forth on swing,
As a skate's heel sweeps smooth on a bow-bend: the hurl and gliding
Rebuffed the big wind. My heart in hiding
Stirred for a bird,--the achieve of, the mastery of the thing!
Brute beauty and valor and act, oh, air, pride, plume, here
Buckle! AND the fire that breaks from thee then a billion
Times told lovelier, more dangerous, O my chevalier!
No wonder of it: sheer plod makes plough down sillion
Shine, and blue-bleak embers, ah my dear,
Fall, gall themselves, and gash gold-vermilion.
* Hopkins is describing a kestrel, a small falcon which hovers on wind currents. Hopkins, a Roman Catholic priest, sees his spiritual values reflected in nature.
COUNTEE CULLEN
America 1903-1946
Yet Do I Marvel
I doubt not God is good, well meaning, kind.
And did he stoop to quibble could tell why
The little buried mole continues blind,
Why flesh that mirrors Him must some day die,
Make plain the reason tortured Tantalus
Is baited by the fickle fruit, declare
If merely brute caprice dooms Sisyphus
To struggling up a never-ending stair.
Inscrutable His ways are, and immune
To catechism by a mind too strewn
With petty cares to slightly understand
What awful brain compels His awful hand,
Yet do I marvel at this curious thing:
To make a poet black, and bid him sing!
AMERICAN BLUES
Fogyism (Sung by Sarah Martin and Ida Cox)
Why do people believe in some old sign?
Why do people believe in some old sign?
You hear a hoot owl holler, someone is surely dyin'.
Some will break a mirror and cry, "Bad luck for seven years,"
Some will break a mirror and cry, "Bad luck for seven years,"
And if a black cat crosses them, they'll break right down in tears.
To dream of muddy water--trouble is knocking at your door,
To dream of muddy water--trouble is knocking at your door,
Your man is sure to leave you and never return no more.
When your man comes home evil, tells you you are getting old,
When your man comes home evil, tells you you are getting old,
That's a sure sign he's got someone else bakin' his jelly roll.
From Chicago Mill Blues, by Peatie Wheatstraw
I used to have a woman that lived up on a hill,
I used to have a woman that lived up on a hill,
She was crazy 'bout me, ooh well, well, 'cause I worked at the Chicago mill.
You can hear the women hollerin' when the Chicago Mill whistle blows,
You can hear the women hollerin' when the Chicago Mill whistle blows,
Cryin', "Turn loose my man, ooh well, well, please and let him go."
If you want to have plenty women, why not work at the Chicago Mill?
If you want to have plenty women, why not work at the Chicago Mill?
You don't have to give them nothin', oooh well, just tell them that you will.
JEAN ANDERSON EMBREE
America 1925
Renaissance, Part I
Reflected in your eyes my better self
Emboldened to reach out, to take the world
And give it back augmented, I myself
Turn outward upward like a leaf unfurled
To the sun. New and soft, fragile, grand
My self emerges, beating stronger wings
Under your gaze, your protecting hand
Nearby. I feel like Psyche when she sings
And claps her hands for joy. I've been away
On a distant flight of soul--no butterfly
Has traveled more, past continent through day
And pain of night, and then hidden in dry
Husk of despair, unaware how much
I needed you and waited for your touch.
RICHARD BRAUTIGAN
America 1935-1984
Karma Repair Kit: Items 1-4
1. Get enough food to eat,
and eat it.
2. Find a place to sleep where it is quiet,
and sleep there.
3. Reduce intellectual and emotional noise
until you arrive at the silence of yourself,
and listen to it.
4.
Xerox Candy Bar
Ah,
you're just a copy
of all the candy bars
I've ever eaten.
Widow's Lament
It's not quite cold enough
to go borrow some firewood
from the neighbors.
Surprise
I lift the toilet seat
as if it were the nest of a bird
and I see cat tracks
all around the edge of the bowl.
The Wheel
The wheel: it's a thing like pears
rotting under a tree in August.
O golden wilderness!
The bees travel in covered wagons
and the Indians hide in the heat.
The Way She Looks at It
Every time I see him, I think:
Gee, and I glad he's not
my old man.
Man
With his hat on
he's about five inches taller
than a taxicab.
Haiku Ambulance
A piece of green pepper
fell
off the wooden salad bowl:
so what?
In a Cafe
I watched a man in a cafe fold a slice of bread
as if he were folding a birth certificate or looking
at the photograph of a dead lover.
FINDING THE POET
CHAPTER 6 POETIC GENRES
There are many confusing things in the world of poetry, but the difference between a form and a genre is the most confusing of all. I take comfort in the fact that there is a logical reason for this confusion. If you've ever studied logic, you've probably seen those diagrams of intersecting circles used to create overlapping categories. We can depict the genre versus form problem in the same way. The first circle, labeled "form," would include terza rima, ottava rima, Spenserian stanzas and many other poetic forms. The second circle, "genre," would contain categories such as elegy, ode, carpe diem, etc. Then, in the place where the two circles intersect, are sonnets, tanka, haiku, ballads, and several other types of poetry, each of which is both a form and a genre. In the last chapter, we discussed how form in poetry is based on factors such as meter, rhyme scheme, stanza length, or number of syllables per line. Genre, on the other hand, is a more nebulous term that refers to a classification or category of poetry, based on subject matter, style, poetic elements, etc. You can easily see why the confusion between form and genre occurs.
A sonnet, for example, is a fourteen-line poem written in iambic pentameter with a specific rhyme scheme. In that sense, it is a poetic form. However, it is also customary to write sonnets in the first person point of view focusing on personal emotional issues, particularly love. Furthermore, during the Renaissance, it was expected that sonnets would include beautiful imagery and elaborate comparisons known as conceits. In fact, Shakespeare satirizes this aspect of the sonnet in "Sonnet 130," ("My Mistress' Eyes are Nothing Like the Sun.") It was also conventional for the male sonnet writer to play the role of the tragically rejected lover, ever faithful to the cold, disdainful lady. The sonnets by Sir Philip Sidney, Edmund Spenser, Sir Thomas Wyatt and Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, which you read in Chapter 5, are all written in this tone. As you can see, in its classification as a short lyric poem focusing on love and containing certain conventional elements, the sonnet is a poetic genre as well as a form.
The same is true for haiku. On the one hand, a haiku is a three-line poem of seventeen syllables. On the other hand, it is an objective poem focusing on a moment in time, using images from nature and a reference to the season of the year to create a harmonious effect through contrast and comparison. The first definition, based on form, is the one that usually appears in American text books. The second, focusing on genre, comes closer to the way the Japanese view haiku. In fact there is another genre of poetry in Japan called senryu, which is also three lines, seventeen syllables, arranged in lines of five, seven, and five syllables. In form, senryu is identical to haiku, but these two genres are not confused in Japan because they serve such different purposes. Senryu is essentially a comic form of poetry, similar in effect to a limerick in America. Senryu tend to be somewhat smutty, with imagery based on bathroom humor. Whereas haiku are often used for Zen meditation, senryu, like any form of low humor, provides entertainment and relief from stress. I suppose that on a much deeper level, haiku and senryu serve similar ends, but in Japan, there is a clear understanding that although they share an identical form, these are two different genres of poetry.
We will all be more comfortable if we resign ourselves to the fact that some forms are also genres, and some genres also have a specific form. Now we can move ahead and look at some of the genres, or classifications of poetry that have interested poets and readers over the years. If you have studied the other arts, you know that the word genre is used in the same way in art and music to describe any category that has certain shared characteristics.
Literature itself is divided into genres such as poetry, drama, and prose, which includes the short story and the novel. A traditional way of classifying poetry is into three very broad categories: lyric, narrative, and didactic. We have already discussed both lyric and narrative poetry, but for the sake of review, lyric poetry focuses on the feelings and thoughts of the speaker in the poem. Many lyric poems, such as John Keats' "When I have fears that I may cease to be," are written in the poet's own voice. However, sometimes in lyric poetry the poet speaks through a persona, as Sir Philip Sidney does in his sonnet sequence, "Astrophil and Stella."
Narrative poetry tells a story. It usually follows some kind of chronological sequence focusing on events. Much of the Canterbury Tales is narrative, and medieval-style romances such as The Faerie Queene and "The Eve of St. Agnes" are narrative. Epic poetry, focusing on the activities and adventures of a warrior hero, is also classified as narrative. Famous epics include the Iliad and the Odyssey by the Greek poet Homer and the Aeneid by Virgil, a Roman epic poet. The long Anglo-Saxon poem Beowulf is sometimes categorized as a narrative, but the great British scholar J.R.R. Tolkien, says it is not a narrative but "...an heroic-elegiac poem."1 As you can see, there is ongoing controversy in the literary world as to the exact classification of various poems, but I think we are safe in placing ballads in the narrative genre.
We have not yet discussed didactic poetry, a genre which was in disgrace throughout the Twentieth Century and is thus ripe to return in the Twenty-First. Didactic poetry focuses on moral issues and aims to instruct the reader, providing lessons or guidelines for appropriate behavior or clarifying values. Much of the poetry in previous centuries has been didactic. John Milton's Paradise Lost is filled with religious interpretation, and Blake's poems often focus on the abuse of women and children as moral issues. Any poem that sends a message on social, religious, or political themes could be considered didactic. Didactic poetry was especially popular during the Anglo-Saxon, Medieval, Neo-Classical, and Victorian eras.
Sometimes a fourth general category, dramatic poetry, is added to lyric, narrative, and didactic. In earlier periods, particularly during the Greek Classical Period and the Renaissance, drama (usually viewed as a separate genre from poetry), contained strong poetic elements. The choric odes in a Greek play are actually poems, and both Shakespeare and Marlowe, the two great dramatists of the Renaissance, wrote plays in blank verse. There are also poems that are highly dramatic and in fact resemble little plays. One especially interesting genre of poetry is the dramatic monologue, a poem in which a speaker addresses a silent listener. A dramatic monologue is similar to a soliloquy in a play, when a single actor alone on the stage speaks directly to the audience. In a dramatic monologue, the poet creates the character, just as a playwright does, and there is not the sense that the poet is speaking in his or her own voice. Tennyson's "Ulysses," which you read at the end of Chapter 5, is a dramatic monologue.
Another Victorian poet who mastered the art of the dramatic monologue is Robert Browning. This fine British poet, whom I mentioned in the previous chapter as the husband of Elizabeth Barrett, wrote several dramatic monologues which he set in Italy during the Renaissance. Hiding behind the veil of afar-away historic setting, Browning criticized the patriarchal values of Victorian England. His most powerful tool is irony. In literature, irony is a discrepancy between what is expected and what actually occurs. This device is used extensively in drama, as life itself is filled with ironic situations. Browning creates an ironic contrast between the speaker's view of himself and the perception that the reader forms of the speaker based on the speaker's own words. As you read Browning's "My Last Duchess" at the end of this chapter, notice that the Duke, who is the speaker in this monologue, has a very high opinion of himself, an opinion that you will probably not share by the end of the poem. Be sure to follow the Ten Steps as you read this poem, and use your intuition. "My Last Duchess" is a brilliant poem, but it demands very careful attention on the reader's part. I'll give you one little hint. Browning's father-in-law, Mr. Barrett, was a tyrannical, controlling parent who did not allow any of his eleven children to marry. He even convinced his gifted daughter Elizabeth that she was an invalid so he could manage her life for her. How Robert Browning rescued Elizabeth from this poisonous environment is one of the great love stories of all time, and many scholars believe that he used his father-in-law as the model for the Duke in "My Last Duchess."
Within the three or four general categories of poetry which I have mentioned so far, there are many more narrowly defined genres into which poetry has been classified. Where have these classifications come from? Many of them are products of the Greek Classical heritage. Aristotle, in his Poetics, discusses categories of literature, and some of these genres have not changed much over the centuries. In Chapter 2, we discussed the carpe diem tradition, a type of lyric poetry celebrating the joy of living in the moment and "seizing the day." Three other types of poetry, the ode, the elegy, and the pastoral come to us from the Greek tradition and have also been appreciated in many later centuries. The ode, the elegy, and the pastoral are not exclusive categories. A poem could be both an elegy and a pastoral, and possibly all three. Shelley's "Adonais," which we discussed in Chapter 5 in connection with the Spenserian stanza, is a pastoral elegy. Let's look at these genres separately to see what their special characteristics are.
We'll begin with the ode. An ode is a rhymed lyric poem which can be written in any meter or stanza form. It has a stately and dignified tone, and it is often addressed to an element in nature or to an abstract concept. Keats and Shelley were both fond of odes, and you will remember that in "Ode to the West Wind," which you read in Chapter 5, Shelley speaks directly to the wind, just as Keats addresses the nightingale directly in "Ode to a Nightingale." The ode is of Greek origin, and originally odes were intended to be sung.
When I was in college, I found odes difficult to read because they contain very little if any narrative story line or human characters. And since I could never find a plot or narrative progression, the poem never seemed to be going anywhere. What I didn't learn until much later is that an ode isn't intended to "go" anywhere. It is a philosophical genre that intuitively follows the flow of the poet's thoughts. The other thing you need to know about an ode is that it is not about the object being addressed. In other words, "Ode to the West Wind" is not a poem about the wind, and "Ode to a Nightingale" is not about a bird. Shelley's ode is about the transforming power of creativity and Shelley's own passionate hope to serve mankind as a visionary and prophetic poet. Keats' ode is a philosophical response to beauty and death. The west wind and the nightingale are what T.S. Eliot referred to as the objective correlative, which means the physical and symbolic catalyst for the poet's thoughts. The post needs some object that can be experienced by the senses as a springboard from which to launch himself on his philosophical wanderings. This springboard is the objective correlative. An ode would be even more difficult to read if the poet didn't have some physical object like a nightingale on which t focus this thoughts.
To enjoy reading and writing odes, we must give up the obsession that some of us have with "realism." Of course it is not realistic for a grown man to stand around, passionately sharing his innermost longings with the wind. And in real life, John Keats probably didn't actually talk to birds. This brings us to the "wiling suspension of disbelief" so essential to appreciating poetry. This concept is a simple one. The reader simply suspends, or gives up his or her natural tendency not to believe the unlikely situation that is being presented in the poem. In other words, poetry has a reality of its own, and the reader must enter into that reality in order to experience a poem's mystery and majesty. The willing suspension of disbelief is a small price to pay in order to share the glory of a line like this:
I fall upon the thorns of life! I bleed!
Shelley was not bleeding when he wrote this line, and he was certainly not stepping on a thorn. He was, however, ridiculed by the few critics who read his poetry and ignored by almost everyone else. I know you are capable of getting past a literal approach to reading poetry, and this is especially important when reading an ode.
Let's look at Keats" "Ode on a Grecian Urn," probably the most famous ode in the English language. As you read the poem, try to visualize the urn, which is a Greek style vase decorated with figures of human beings and animals. Then think about the vase as the objective correlative, the real and physical, but also symbolic object which sets off the flow of Keats' thoughts. Of course you will want to use the ten-step process for reading a poem outlined in Chapter 3.
Ode on a Grecian Urn
Thou still unravish'd bride of quietness,
Thou foster-child of silence and show time,
Sylvan historian, who canst thus express
A flowery tale more sweetly than our rhyme:
What leaf-fring'd legend haunts about thy shape
Of deities or mortals, or of both.
In Tempe or the dales of Arcady?
What men or gods are these? What maidens loth?
What mad pursuit? What struggle to escape?
What pipes and timbrels? What wild ecstasy?
2
Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard
Are sweeter; therefore, ye soft pipes, play on;
Not to the sensual ear, but, more endear'd,
Pipe to the spirit ditties of no tone:
Fair youth, beneath the trees, thou canst not leave
Thy song, nor ever can those trees be bare;
Bold lover, never canst thou kiss,
Though winning near the goal--yet, do not grieve,
She cannot fade, though thou hast not thy bliss,
For ever wilt thou love, and she be fair!
3
Ah, happy, happy boughs! that cannot shed
Your leaves, nor ever bid the spring adieu;
And, happy melodist, unwearied,
For ever piping songs for ever new;
More happy love! more happy, happy love!
For ever warm and still to be enjoy'd,
For ever panting, and for ever young;
All breathing human passion far above,
That leaves a heart high-sorrowful and cloy'd,
A burning forehead, and a parching tongue.
4
Who are these coming to the sacrifice?
To what green altar, O mysterious priest,
Lead'st thou that heifer lowing at the skies,
And all her silken flanks with garlands drest?
What little town by river or sea shore,
Or mountain-built with peaceful citadel,
Is emptied of this folk, this pious morn?
And, little town, thy streets for evermore
Will silent be; and not a soul to tell
Why thou are desolate, can e'er return.
5
O Attic shape! Fair attitude! with brede
Of marble men and maidens overwrought,
With forest branches and the trodden weed;
Thou, silent form, dost tease us out of thought
As doth eternity: Cold Pastoral!
When old age shall this generation waste,
Thou shalt remain, in midst of other owe
Than ours, a friend to man, to whom thou say'st
"Beauty is truth, truth beauty," --that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.
As you proceed through this poem, you will notice that it contains many questions. In the first stanza, Keats speaks directly to the urn, which he refers to as a "still unravished bride of quietness," a "foster-child of silence and slow time," and a "Sylvan historian." Using your dictionary in Step 3, you noticed that the word "still" in line 1 could mean either "silent," "motionless," or "as yet." And you learned that the word "Sylvan" refers to something rustic which could be found "in a wood or forest." After addressing the urn, Keats then compliments its beauty by saying that the urn can tell "A flowery tale more sweetly" than Keats can in his poetry. Next, Keats begins to question the urn about the images that appear on it. In the second stanza, Keats speaks to the images themselves. Looking at the picture of a lover about to kiss his lady, Keats comments on the fact that both figures are forever frozen in time and that the lover will never be able to kiss the woman he loves. Keats consoles the lover by pointing out to him that, "For ever wilt thou love, and she be fair.!" Keats makes the point that time will never encroach on either of the lovers; the young man will never fall out of love, and the lady will always be young and beautiful. This famous line gives the reader a hint as to the poem's theme. Keats is celebrating the eternal beauty of art, which never changes although human beings, in contrast, fade and die.
In Stanza 3, Keats expresses his joy for the images on the urn, the trees, the musician, and the lovers, who will never change or grow weary or old. Fascinated by the vase, Keats continues in the fourth stanza to ask questions of the figures that appear on it. These pictures, created so long ago, of a priest about to perform a sacrifice at an altar and of a little town, will always be a mystery because the artist who created them has been dead for so many years, and no one is left to explain these images. In the final stanza, Keats speaks again to the vase itself, referring to its ancient Greek origin with the word "Attic." And once again Keats comments on the contrast between the lasting beauty of art and the human condition when he says, "When old age shall this generation waste,/ Thou shalt remain... ." As you work through Steps 5 and 6, focusing on the cultural and historic background of the poem and on Keats' life, you will no doubt come across many critical commentaries on this famous poem. You will discover that a controversy has raged for generations about the last two lines of the poem. Apparently it is the urn which says, "Beauty is truth, truth beauty," but some scholars believe that the quotation marks should be continued to the end of the poem so that the urn is speaking throughout the last two lines. Others argue that it is the lyric speaker in the poem, (Keats himself) who concludes "that is all...ye need to know."
I will let you resolve this dilemma for yourself or in discussion with your classmates. Even if you never come to agreement, Keats' ode will have achieved its end--to challenge you to think more deeply than we normally do about the brevity of human life and the need for our species to create works of art that can be treasured by future generations long after we are gone. Keats himself, as you will remember was in a perfect position to meditate on this issue because he was in the final states of terminal tuberculosis when he wrote this poem at the age of twenty-four. He also found the perfect objective correlative as a focal point for this thoughts. A lovely ancient Greek vase, decorated with human figures that will never change or move, is an ideal symbol for the beauty and truth that live forever in art.
Although all good poetry stimulates our thoughts, feelings, senses, and intuition, the ode is especially suited to poets and readers who enjoy sharing thoughts and insights in an intuitive way. The ode as a genre is not for the petty, the sarcastic, or the bitter. It is high-minded and lofty. Why not try writing an ode yourself? Your journal is probably filled by now with little jewels of wisdom that you have just never had time to focus and formalize. As soon as you find your objective correlative, your ode will be on its way.
Another genre that has played an important part in human culture for thousands of years is the elegy. An elegy is a poem honoring someone who has died. Please do not think of this as a morbid or depressing genre. Great elegies are inspiring and life affirming. They also address one or more of the various stages of grief, such as denial, anger, sorrow, acceptance, etc., thus providing consolation and healing for family members who have lost someone they love. An elegy can be written in any form or in free verse. Some elegies are written about someone who was very close to the poet such as a child or a spouse. Others are written as occasional poems when some public figure dies; in these cases the poet may not even have known the deceased personally.
The following elegy from the Manyoshu, written by a poet known only as Tajihi, has been a favorite of mine for many years. This poem laments the death of the poet's wife and expresses his personal and private grief:
The mallards call with evening from the reeds
And float with dawn midway on the water;
They sleep with their mates, it is said,
With white wings overlapping and tails a-sweep
Lest the frost should fall on them.
As the stream that flows never returns,
And as the wind that blows is never seen,
My wife, of this world, has left me,
Gone I know not whither!
So here, on the sleeves of these clothes
She used to have me wear,
I sleep now all alone!
Envoy
Cranes call flying to the reedy shore;
How desolate I remain
As I sleep alone!
Translated by the Japanese Classics Translation
Committee, Seiichi Taki, Chairperson
Mallard ducks, because they mate for life, are an archetypal symbol of marital fidelity. In this beautiful elegy, the wild ducks, sleeping with their wings overlapping in the cold of winter and the cranes calling over the water to their mates, remind the poet of the intimate love he shared with his wife. In the second stanza, the image of the poet sleeping alone on the long sleeves of the kimono he wore when he slept with his wife contrasts with the wings of the mallards who sleep together and provide warmth for one another. The coldness of the winter imagery in this poem is especially effective in expressing a sense of grief and loss.
Sometimes haiku function as elegies, as you will see in this stunning poem by Yosa Buson:
A piercing chill:
my dead wife's comb, in our bedroom,
under my heel...
Translated by Harold Henderson
Edited by Rose Anna Higashi
If you have ever happened upon a personal possession of a loved one shortly after that person died, you know how powerful a reminder of grief that experience can be. Basho wrote a haiku elegy for his mother when he visited his home town of Ueno after her death and was given a lock of his mother's hair by his elder brother. According to Makoto Ueda, "This is one of the rare cases in which a poem bares his emotions, no doubt because the grief he felt was uncontrollably intense."2
Should I hold it in my hand
It would melt in my burning tears--
Autumnal frost.
Translated by Makoto Ueda
This poem appears in one of Basho's haibun diaries entitled "The Journey of a Weather-Beaten Skeleton." In this journal Basho explains that "it," to which he refers in lines one and two of this haiku is the lock of his mother's hair. The images of a lock of white hair and strings of frost are compared in the poem, and the cold of late autumn underscores Basho's loneliness and grief.
The Seventeenth Century English poet Ben Jonson also produced some beautiful elegies. He wrote in the simple, symmetrical, restrained style of the Cavalier poets who paved the way for the Neo-Classical poetry of the next generation. These two elegies, on the deaths of two of his children, Mary and Benjamin, are touching in their simplicity. As the poems indicate, Mary lived for only six months, and Benjamin, who died on his own birthday, only lived to be seven.
On My First Daughter
Here lies, to each her parents' ruth,
Mary, the daughter of their youth;
Yet all heaven's gifts being heaven's due,
It makes the father less to rue.
At six months' end she parted hence
With safety of her innocence;
Whose soul heaven's queen, whose name she bears,
In comfort of her mother's tears,
Hath placed amongst her virgin-train:
Where, while that severed doth remain,
This grave partakes the fleshly birth;
Which cover lightly, gentle earth!
On My First Son
Farewell, thou child of my right hand, and joy;
My sin was too much hope of thee, loved boy:
Seven years thou wert lent to me, and I thee pay,
Exacted by thy fate, on the just day.
O could I lose all father now! For why
Will man lament the state he should envy,
To have so soon 'scaped world's and flesh's rage,
And, if no other misery, yet age?
Rest in soft peace, and asked, say, "Here doth lie
Ben Jonson his best piece of poetry."
For whose sake henceforth all his vows be such
As what he loves may never like too much.
In these poems, instead of expressing his grief, as Basho does in his haiku for his mother, Jonson is seeking consolation for himself and his wife, and peace for his children's souls. He takes comfort in the fact that his daughter, who died as an infant, "With safety of her innocence," will go to heaven without ever having committed a sin. And his son has escaped the miseries of the world, including old age. In both poems he comments on his children's names, again as a source of consolation. The Hebrew name Benjamin means, "child of the right hand," which also suggests "dexterous" and "fortunate," Jonson refers to his son's auspicious name in the first line of the poem. In the poem for his infant daughter, he mentions that she is named for Mary the mother of Jesus, "heaven's queen," and he declares that his daughter is now one of the virgins in the company of the Virgin Mary in heaven. Although these two poems were written in a very personal tone about Jonson's own children, they could serve as a source of healing for any family which has lost a child. The beauty and power of an elegy goes beyond the death of the individual it honors and provides consolation for the entire human race.
Jonson also wrote an elegy for Shakespeare which appeared at the beginning of the First Folio of Shakespeare's plays, published in 1623. This elegy has a much more public and formal tone than the brief poems on the deaths of his children. It is much longer, and it contains many Classical allusions and references to famous English writers such as Chaucer, Spenser, Beaumont, Kyd and Marlowe. As a public elegy for the greatest English writer who ever lived, it also mentions Queen Elizabeth and King James I, who were the monarchs during Shakespeare's lifetime. You will need to follow the Ten Steps to read this poem, and as you do, pay close attention to the poem's form and to the many references to historical and mythological figures. You will also enjoy the famous line, "And though thou hadst small Latin and less Greek," referring to Shakespeare's limited formal education.
To the Memory Of My Beloved, The Author, Mr.
William Shakespeare, and What He Hat Left Us
To draw no envy, Shakespeare, on thy name,
Am I thus ample to thy book and fame,
While I confess thy writings to be such
As neither man nor Muse can praise too much.
'Tis true, and all men's suffrage. But these ways
Were not the paths I meant unto thy praise ;
For silliest ignorance on these may light,
Which, when it sounds at best, but echoes right;
Or blind affection, which doth ne'er advance
The truth, but gropes, and urgeth all by chance;
Or crafty malice might pretend this praise,
And think to ruin where it seemed to raise.
These are as some infamous bawd or whore
Should praise a matron. What could hurt her more?
But thou art proof against them, and, indeed,
Above th' ill fortune of them, or the need.
I therefore will begin. Soul of the age!
The applause! delight! the wonder of our stage!
My Shakespeare, rise; I will not lodge thee by
Chaucer or Spenser, or bid Beaumont lie
A little further to make thee a room.
Thou art a monument without a tomb.
And art alive still while thy book doth live,
And we have wits to read and praise to give.
That I not mix thee so, my brain excuses,
I mean with great, but disproportioned Muses;
For, if I thought my judgment were of years,
I should commit thee surely with thy peers,
And tell how far thou didst our Lyly outshine,
Or sporting Kyd, or Marlowe's mighty line.
And though thou hadst small Latin and less Greek,
From thence to honor thee I would not seek
For names, but call forth thund'ring Aeschylus,
Euripides, and Sophocles to us,
Pacuvius, Accius, him of Cordova dead,
To life again, to hear thy buskin tread
And shake a stage; or when thy socks were on,
Leave thee alone for the comparison
Of all that insolent Greece or haughty Rome
Sent forth, or since did from their ashes come.
Triumph, my Britain; thou hast one to show
To whom all scenes of Europe homage owe.
He was not of an age, but for all time!
And all the Muses still were in their prime
When like Apollo he came forth to warm
Our ears, or like a Mercury to charm.
Nature herself was proud of his designs,
And joyed to wear the dressing of his lines,
Which were so richly spun, and woven so fit,
As, since, she will vouchsafe no other wit:
The merry Greek, tart Aristophanes,
Neat Terence, witty Plautus now not please,
But antiquated and deserted lie,
As they were not of Nature's family.
Yet must I not give Nature all; thy Art,
My gentle Shakespeare, must enjoy a part.
For though the poet's matter Nature be,
His Art doth give the fashion; and that he
Who casts to write a living line must sweat
(Such as thine are) and strike the second heat
Upon the Muses' anvil; turn the same,
And himself with it, that he thinks to frame,
Or for the laurel he may gain a scorn;
For a good poet's made as well as born.
And such wert thou! Look how the father's face
Lives in his issue; even so the race
Of Shakespeare's mind and manners brightly shines
In his well-turned and true-filed lines,
In each of which he seems to shake a lance,
As brandished at the eyes of ignorance.
Sweet swan of Avon, what a sight it were
To see thee in our waters yet appear,
And make those flights upon the banks of Thames
That so did take Eliza and our James!
But stay; I see thee in the hemisphere
Advanced and make a constellation there!
Shine forth, thou star of poets, and with rage
Or influence chide or cheer the drooping stage,
Which, since thy flight from hence, hath mourned like night,
And despairs day, but for thy volume's light.
Another type of elegy that is written in combination with one of the other genres is the pastoral elegy. The pastoral style of poetry was developed by the Greeks, especially Theocritus, as an alternate reality to the pressures and intrigues of city life. In pastoral poetry, shepherds and shepherdesses frolic in an idyllic setting in a rural world where all is simple, pure, and filled with sunlight. This rustic way of life contrasts sharply with the city world where insincere courtiers live lives of vanity, climbing up the ladder of success by flattering those who are wealthier and more powerful than themselves. In the conventions of pastoral poetry, city life is synonymous with hypocrisy and false values, and country life is filled with natural wisdom and the most sincere of motives. When we use the word conventions in reference to a poetic genre, we mean a certain set of characteristics that poems in that category are expected to have. The conventions of pastoral poetry may seem a little odd to contemporary readers. Like the ode, pastoral poetry does not strive for realism. The shepherd in pastoral poetry is depicted as an accomplished artist and philosopher who might just be the author himself in a thin disguise. if you find yourself smirking as you read a pastoral poem, ask yourself if you have ever watched even one episode of Star Trek with a straight face. Every culture creates escape literature or alternate realities in which human beings are nobler, purer, and more admirable than our ordinary selves. The Twentieth Century's obsession with Science Fiction and Fantasy literature and films is no stranger than the Greeks' fascination with the pastoral. The pastoral resurfaced during the Renaissance and became hugely popular. The complex and precarious lives of courtiers during the reigns of Henry VIII and his daughter, Elizabeth I, necessitated a fantasy world of security, innocence, and escape. Although the romantics adopted a somewhat more realistic view of nature, some elements of pastoral poetry can be found in romantic poetry too.
The pastoral elegy has been written in several different time periods. As you can guess, this genre is simply an elegy placed in a pastoral setting and incorporating the conventions of pastoral poetry. In the previous chapter, we read the final stanza of "Adonais," Shelley's pastoral elegy on the death of John Keats. You will find the complete poem, all fifty-three stanzas, at the end of this chapter. Shelley was careful to include all of the conventional elements of the pastoral elegy when he created "Adonais." These conventions include: a sorrowful invocation to the Muse, the participation of nature in the grieving process, a procession of mourners, a righteous denunciation of those who misuse the pastoral or other literary arts, and finally, a turn from despair to consolation.3 Try to find all of these elements as you make your way through "Adonais."
This poem may seem highly artificial to you, and perhaps far removed from John Keats, in whose honor the poem was ostensibly written. This is typical of the pastoral elegy which, as I have already pointed out, is a form of escape literature. You will notice, for example, that according to Shelley, Keats died because of a vicious review of his poem "Endymion" in the Quarterly Review. In Stanza 36, Shelley declares:
Our Adonais has drunk poison--oh!
What deaf and viperous murderer could crown
Life's early cup with such a draught of woe?
In the following stanza Shelley speaks directly to the reviewer:
Live thou, whose infamy is not thy fame!
Live! fear no heavier chastisement from me,
Thou noteless blot on a remembered name!
Although this is passionate poetry, we are all aware that Keats died of tuberculosis, and in fact, Keats and Shelley barely knew each other.
"Adonais" is not the only pastoral elegy in English. John Milton's "Lycidas," written in 1637 to commemorate the drowning of his friend Edward King, and Matthew Arnold's "Thyrsis," written in 1866 for the death of his friend Arthur Hugh Clough, are also pastoral elegies. Although I have not included either of these very famous elegies in this volume, they should be easy to find in any library. This genre must have provided some form of psychological relief from sorrow by transforming the speaker and the deceased into shepherds in a beautiful rural setting and following an almost liturgical chronology of familiar elements leading to the final consolation, as Shelley proclaims in Stanza 39 of "Adonais."
Peace, peace! he is not dead, he doth not sleep--
He hath awakened from the dream of life--
A more cynical view is that the pastoral elegy has little to do with grief or the dead person about whom it pretends to be written. Some readers and scholars perceive this genre as a form of cannibalism in disguise in which a pedantic poet seizes an opportunity to write a long-winded, overly elaborate poem heavily laden with Classical allusions, and designed to gain literary laurels for himself. Each generation has had to assess the pastoral elegy according to its own values, and I will leave this generation's evaluation of the pastoral elegy up to you.
Since I mentioned the word "cynicism," I might as well tell you that there are some genres of poetry that are based on making fun of other genres. We call this parody. Parody is a type of satire in which a artist ridicules another work of art by using the same form and conventions as the work he or she is satirizing, but trivializing them. Parody emerges whenever a genre starts taking itself too seriously. I'm sure you remember this poem by Richard Brautigan which you read at the end of the last chapter:
A piece of green pepper
fell
off the wooden salad bowl:
so what?
This charming parody has almost the same number of syllables as a haiku and uses some of the conventions of haiku. The poem contains two images that are contrasted with each other, the bell pepper and the salad bowl. One image, the salad bowl, will last for many years and could be considered the eternal element in the poem, like Basho's old pond or Buson's temple bell. The other image, the piece of green pepper, is the temporary image which interrupts the salad bowl's serenity, like the frog or the butterfly in the famous haiku by Basho and Buson. But instead of leading the reader to meditate on the harmonious relationship between the eternal and the temporary forces in the universe, Brautigan concludes, "so what?" And just in case we didn't get the humor in this conclusion, Brautigan prepares us by titling this poem "Haiku Ambulance," suggesting that something terribly wrong is about to happen in this haiku. I've always found this a very funny poem because haiku do seem totally pointless when you first read them, and those who do understand haiku often become such arrogant elitists, treating people who don't understand haiku like dolts. I don't believe that Brautigan meant any disrespect for the great haiku masters. In fact, he studied haiku, and his brief, fresh poems, filled with surprising contrasts and subtle humor, have many of the qualities of good haiku.
You will also remember having read a few lines from Alexander Pope's "The Rape of the Lock" in Chapter 5. This poem is also a parody, written in a special genre called the mock epic or mock heroic. Since all parody falls into the larger category of satire, a type of humor used to point our the foibles of human beings, a mock epic highlights human pettiness by presenting a trivial situation on a grand or epic scale. Only a truly dense reader could fail to notice the contrast between the epic grandeur of Beowulf, killing a dragon to save his people, and the Baron in "The Rape of the Lock," using his "weapon," a small pair of scissors, to cut off a lock of the "heroine," Belinda's hair. A mock epic usually includes several of the conventions of the epic, such as an invocation to the Muse, gods or supernatural beings, battle scenes, and a "warrior" hero. By using all of these grand elements to describe human beings in their most shallow moments, the poet can use the healing power of humor to nudge his readers into behaving with a bit more dignity. The purpose of satire is always to change human behavior, and humor can often achieve that end more effectively than criticism.
As you continue to study poetry on your own, you will discover many other genres in addition to those I have introduced in this chapter. Before we conclude, I would like to mention just one more--a genre that comes from the French Medieval tradition of Courtly Love, the aubaude. An aubaude, or dawn song, describes the regret of lovers who must separate in the morning after a night of romance. An aubaude can be written in any form, and sometimes it contains some of the conventions of Courtly Love, including the lover's religious passion for his lady, whom he worships with a love that highly idealized.
The following Twentieth Century aubaude by the American poet Richard Wilbur has a much more modern feel:
A Late Aubaude
You could be sitting now in a carrel
Turning some liver-spotted page,
Or rising in an elevator-cage
Toward Ladies' Apparel.
You could be planting a raucous bed
Of salvia, in rubber gloves,
Or lunching through a screed of someone's loves
With pitying head,
Or making some unhappy setter
Heel, or listening to a bleak
Lecture on Schoenberg's serial technique.
Isn't this better?
Think of all the time you are not
Wasting, and would not care to waste,
Such things, thank God, not being to your taste.
Think what a lot
Of time, by woman's reckoning,
You've saved, and so may spend on this,
You who had rather lie in bed and kiss
Than anything.
It's almost noon, you say? If so,
Time flies, and I need not rehearse
The rosebuds-theme of centuries of verse.
If you must go,
Wait for a while, then slip downstairs
And bring us up some chilled white wine,
And some blue cheese, and cracker, and some fine
Ruddy-skinned pears.
Wilbur's allusion to the "rose-buds theme of centuries of verse" refers to a poem by Robert Herrick which you will find at the end of this chapter and to the very old tradition of carpe diem poetry with which you are familiar. I hope that you have enjoyed learning about some of the traditional genres of poetry, and I also hope that, like Richard Wilbur, you will reclaim some of these old conventions and make them your own.
NOTES
CHAPTER 6
1. J.R.R. Tolkien, "Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics," in Donald K. Fry, ed., The Beowulf Poet: A Collection of Critical Essays (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1968), p. 38.
2. Makoto Ueda, Matsuo Basho (Tokyo: Kodansha International, Ltd., 1982), p. 26.
3. M.H. Abrams, ed., The Norton Anthology of English Literature, Sixth Edition, Vol. 2 (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1993), p. 718.
QUESTIONS AND TOPICS FOR REVIEW
1. What are the four general categories into which poetry is sometimes divided?
2. Define the word "genre."
3. How does senryu compare and contrast with haiku?
4. What is carpe diem poetry? Give an example.
5. Define and provide an example of didactic poetry.
6. Define narrative poetry and explain which genres are usually narrative.
7. Define and provide an example of the dramatic monologue.
8. What is irony, and how is it used in the dramatic monologue?
9. What is lyric poetry? Provide several examples.
10. What does the word "conventions" mean in poetry?
11. What are the conventions of epic poetry?
12. Define and provide an example of the elegy.
13. What was Theocritus' contribution to the development of poetry?
14. Explain the concept of the willing suspension of disbelief.
15. What are the conventions of pastoral poetry?
16. Define and provide an example of the ode.
17. Define the objective correlative and explain how it is used in an ode.
18. Define and provide an example of parody.
19. What is the relationship between satire and parody?
20. Define and provide an example of the mock epic.
21. What were the conventions of Courtly Love?
22. Define and provide an example of the aubaude.
23. Define and provide an example of the pastoral elegy.
TOPICS FOR DISCUSSION
1. Read each of the poems at the end of this chapter and be prepared to discuss which genre each poem belongs to and why. Remember that some genres are based on form while some are defined by their subject matter and conventions, and some belong to both categories. Also, some poems may have the characteristics of more than one genre.
2. Be prepared to discuss the form in which each of the poems in this chapter is written. Remember that not all poetic forms have specific names. If a poem's form does not have a specific name, you will need to describe its meter, rhyme scheme, and number of lines per stanza.
3. Discuss Keats' use of the objective correlative in "Ode on a Grecian Urn."
4. Which of Jonson's elegies do you prefer, the ones on his children or the one for Shakespeare? Be prepared to explain why.
5. Discuss your evaluation of the pastoral elegy, using Shelley's "Adonais" as the basis for your comments. Is this genre a genuine source of consolation, or a form of literary cannibalism?
6. Discuss the social, psychological, and historical value of the following genres. Which of these genres is still meaningful today, and why?
elegy
pastoral
pastoral elegy
carpe diem
pastoral elegy
dramatic monologue
satire
parody
aubaude
7. Discuss the techniques used by Browning to create "My Last Duchess."
Among other elements, focus on genre, theme, setting (time and place), and Browning's use of irony. Also, who is the speaker in the poem, and who is the listener? What actually happened to the Duchess?
ACTIVITIES
1. Divide into groups and analyze Jonson's elegy on Shakespeare, giving a different task to each group. Some of the tasks assigned to various groups might include:
Identify all of the people mentioned in the poem
Explain all of the Classical allusions in the poem
Identify the form of the poem and explain how Jonson uses this form
to create his desired effect
Look up the meanings of all of the words that may seem obscure
Provide some background information about Ben Jonson
Explain the poem's theme and what the reader learns in the poem
about Shakespeare
2. As a group, agree upon any poem in this chapter to analyze. Then divide into pairs and assign one step of the Ten Step process for analyzing a poem to each two-person team. This project, of course, can be adjusted to accommodate the size of your group.
3. An explication is a careful explanation of the meaning of a poem achieved by proceeding through the poem line by line or word by word. Divide into groups of five and explicate Keats' "Ode on a Grecian Urn," assigning one stanza to each group. Try to reach consensus in each group as to the meaning of each line, and report your findings to the larger group.
4. Use this same process to explicate Browning's "My Last Duchess," dividing into groups as appropriate.
5. Organize a mock trial in which the Duke is tried for murdering the Duchess. Organize into prosecution and defense teams and present your evidence. Call witnesses if necessary.
ANALYTICAL WRITING ASSIGNMENTS
1. Compare and contrast Jonson's elegies on his two children, focusing on form, imagery, theme, etc.
2. Write an explication of either Keats' "Ode on a Grecian Urn" or Jonson's elegy on Shakespeare. Remember that an explication is a line-by-line explanation of the meaning of a poem. You should begin an explication with some general comments about the overall theme, genre, and message of the poem before you begin you line-by-line analysis.
3. Select any poem from the collection at the end of this chapter and write an explication of the poem you have chosen.
4. Analyze "Adonais," focusing on Shelley's use of the conventions of the pastoral elegy.
5. Analyze Richard Wilbur's "A Late Aubaude," focusing on theme, form, imagery, and allusions.
6. Write an analysis of Browning's "My Last Duchess," focusing on Browning's use of irony and on the contrasting personalities of the Duke and the Duchess in the poem.
7. Write a comparison and contrast between Petrarch's "She used to let her golden hair fly free," and Shakespeare's "My mistress' eyes are nothing like the sun," (Sonnet 130 at the end of Chapter 3.)
8. Analyze Sophocles' Choric Ode from Antigone, focusing on theme and imagery.
9. Compare and contrast a sonnet by Louise Labe with a sonnet by Elizabeth Barrett Browning. Browning's poems appear at the end of Chapter 5.
10. Compare and Contrast Herrick's "To the Virgins to Make Much of Time" with Marvell's "To His Coy Mistress," which appears in Chapter 2.
11. Compare and contrast an elegy written in the Twentieth Century (see Roethke, Jarrell, Cohen and Atwood), with an elegy written in an earlier century (see Houseman, Dryden, or Jonson.)
12. Analyze Shiki's use of autumn and winter imagery to express his themes.
CREATIVE WRITING ASSIGNMENTS
1. Select a personal possession or an element in nature and write an ode, using this item as the objective correlative.
2. Write a parody of the ode that you have just written.
3. Write an occasional elegy for a public or historic figure whom you admire.
4. Write a lyric elegy about someone you love who has died.
4. Write an aubaude, placing it in a contemporary setting.
5. Write a carpe diem poem.
6. Write a dramatic monologue. Remember that you will have to create a speaker, a listener, and a setting for this poem.
7. Write a fantasy poem which includes an alternate world where human beings are nobler and purer than they are in the environment in which you are living.
8. Think about a conflict that someone among your family or friends is having and write a mock epic, using humor to trivialize this conflict. Your purpose is not to ridicule your friend, but to help bring about healing and resolution by putting the conflict in perspective.
9. Write a parody of a pastoral poem.
10. Find a satiric poem and write a parody of that satiric poem.
ADDITIONAL POEMS IN VARIOUS GENRES FOR READING AND ANALYSIS
SOPHOCLES
Greece 496-406 B.C.
Chorus from Antigone
Blest, they are the truly blest who all their lives
have never tasted devastation. For others, once
the gods have rocked a house to its foundations
the ruin will never cease, cresting on and on
from one generation on throughout the race--
like a great mounting tide
driven on by savage northern gales,
surging over the dead black depths
rolling up from the bottom dark heaves of sand
and the headlands, taking the storm's onslaught full-force,
roar, and the low moaning
echoes on and on
and now
as in ancient times I see the sorrows of the house,
the living heirs of the old ancestral kings,
piling on the sorrows of the dead
and one generation cannot free the next--
some god will bring them crashing down,
the race finds no release.
And now the light, the hope
springing up from the late last root
in the house of Oedipus, that hope's cut down in turn
by the long, bloody knife swung by the gods of death
by a senseless word
by fury at the heart.
Zeus,
yours is the power, Zeus, what man on earth
can override it, who can hold it back?
Power that neither Sleep, the all-ensnaring
no, nor the tireless months of heaven
can ever overmaster--young through all time,
mighty lord of power, you hold fast
the dazzling crystal mansions of Olympus.
And throughout the future, late and soon
as through the past, your law prevails:
no towering form of greatness
enters into the lives of mortals
free and clear of ruin.
True,
our dreams, our high hopes voyaging far and wide
bring sheer delight to many, to many others
delusion, blithe, mindless lusts
and the fraud steals on one slowly...unaware
till he trips and puts his foot into the fire,
He was a wise old man who coined
the famous saying: "Sooner or later
foul is fair, fair is foul
to the man the gods will ruin"--
He goes his way for a moment only
free of blinding ruin.
Translated by Robert Fagles
FRANCIS PETRARCH
Italy 1304-1374
Number 90
She used to let her golden hair fly free
For the wind to toy and tangle and molest;
Her eyes were brighter than the radiant west.
(Seldom they shine so now.) I used to see
Pity look out of those deep eyes for me.
("It was false pity," you would now protest.)
I had love's tinder heaped within by breast;
What wonder that the flame burned furiously?
She did not walk in any mortal way,
But with angelic progress; when she spoke,
Unearthly voices sang in unison.
She seemed divine among the dreary folk
Of earth. You say she is not so today?
Well, though the bow's unbent, the wound bleeds on.
Translated by Morris Bishop
LOUISE LABE
France 1525-1566
XIII
If I could linger on his lovely chest
happy, soaring with him for whom I see
myself die, if envy did not keep me
from living my brief days with him, and best
if holding me he'd say: "My dear friend,
let us enjoy each other and be sure
that no rainburst or seas or seastorm lure
us to separation before our lives end,"
if, while my arms were sleeping on the nape
of his neck like ivy circling a tree,
death came, jealous of our carefree rapport
as tenderly he kissed me more and more,
into his lips my soul would then escape
and, more than alive, I'd die in ecstasy.
Translated by Aliki Barnstone and
Willis Barnstone
XXIII
What good is it to me if long ago
you eloquently praised my golden hair,
compared my eyes and beauty to the flare
of two suns, where, you say, love bent the bow,
sending the darts that needled you with grief?
Where are your tears that faded in the ground?
Your death? by which your constant love is bound
in oaths and honor now beyond belief?
Your brutal goal was to make me a slave
beneath the ruse of being served by you.
Pardon me, friend, and for once hear me through:
I am outraged with anger and I rave.
Yet I am sure, wherever you have gone,
your martyrdom is hard as my black dawn.
Translated by Aliki Barnstone and
Willis Barnstone
CHRISTOPHER MARLOWE
England 1564-1593
The Passionate Shepherd to His Love
Come live with me and be my love,
And we will all the pleasures prove
That valleys, groves, hills, and fields,
Woods, or steepy mountain yields.
And we will sit upon the rocks,
Seeing the shepherds feed their flocks,
By shallow rivers to whose falls
Melodious birds sing madrigals.
And I will make thee beds of roses
And a thousand fragrant posies,
A cap of flowers, and a kirtle
Embroidered all with leaves of myrtle;
A gown make of the finest wool
Which from our pretty lambs we pull;
Fair lined slippers for the cold,
With buckles of the purest gold;
A belt of straw and ivy buds,
With coral clasps and amber studs:
And if these pleasures may thee move,
Come live with me, and be by love.
The shepherds' swains shall dance and sing
For thy delight each May morning:
If these delights thy mind may move,
Then live with me and be my love.
ROBERT HERRICK
England 1591-1674
To the Virgins, to Make Much of Time
Gather ye rosebuds while ye may,
Old time is still a-flying;
And this same flower that smiles today,
Tomorrow will be dying.
The glorious lamp of heaven, the sun,
The higher he's a getting,
The sooner will his race be run,
And nearer he's to setting.
That age is best which is the first,
When youth and blood are warmer;
But being spent, the worse, and worst
Times still succeed the former.
Then be not coy, but use your time,
And while ye may, go marry;
For having lost but once your prime,
You may forever tarry.
JOHN DRYDEN
England 1631-1700
To the Memory of Mr. Oldham*
Farewell, too little, and too lately known,
Whom I began to think and call my own:
For sure our souls were near allied, and thine
Cast in the same poetic mold as mine.
One common note on either lyre did strike,
And knaves and fools we both abhorred alike.
To the same goal did both our studies drive;
The last set out the soonest did arrive.
Thus Nisus fell upon the slippery place,
While his young friend performed and won the race;
O early ripe! to thy abundant store
What could advancing age have added more?
It might (what nature never gives the young)
Have taught the numbers of thy native tongue.
But satire needs not those, and wit will shine
Through the harsh cadence of a rugged line.
A noble error, and but seldom made,
When poets are by too much force betrayed.
Thy generous fruits, though gathered ere their prime,
Still showed a quickness; and maturing time
But mellows what we write to the dull sweets of rhyme.
Once more, hail and farewell; farewell thou young,
But ah too short, Marcellus of our tongue;
Thy brows with ivy, and with laurels bound;
But fate and gloomy night encompass thee around.
* John Oldham, a young poet who wrote satires which Dryden admired. Mr. Oldham lived from 1653-1683.
WILLIAM WORDSWORTH
England 1770-1850
Composed upon Westminster Bridge,
September 3, 1802
Earth has not any thing to show more fair:
Dull would he be of soul who could pass by
A sight so touching in its majesty:
This City now doth, like a garment, wear
The beauty of the morning; silent, bare,
Ships, towers, domes, theatres, and temples lie
Open unto the fields, and to the sky;
All bright and glittering in the smokeless air.
Never did sun more beautifully steep
In his first splendour, valley, rock, or hill;
Ne'er saw I, never felt, a calm so deep!
The river glideth at his own sweet will:
Dear God! the very houses seem asleep;
And all that mighty heart is lying still!
PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY
England 1792-1822
Adonais
AN ELEGY ON THE DEATH OF JOHN KEATS,
AUTHOR OF ENDYMION,HYPERION,ETC.
I weep for Adonais‑he is dead!
Oh, weep for Adonais! though our tears
Thaw not the frost which binds so dear a head!
And thou, sad Hour, selected from al] years
To mourn our loss, rouse thy obscure compeers,
And teach them thine own sorrow, say: with me
Died Adonais; till the Future dares
Forget the Past, his fate and fame shall be
An echo and a light unto eternity!
2
Where wert thou mighty Mother, when he lay,
When thy Son lay, pierced by the shaft which flies
In darkness? where was lorn Urania
When Adonais died? With veiled eyes,
'Mid listening Echoes, in her Paradise
She sate, while one, with soft enamored breath,
Rekindled all the fading melodies,
With which, like flowers that mock the corse beneath,
He had adorned and hid the coming bulk of death.
3
Oh, weep for Adonais‑he is dead!
Wake, melancholy Mother, wake and weep!
Yet wherefore? Quench within their burning bed
Thy fiery tears, and let thy loud heart keep
Like his, a mute and uncomplaining sleep;
For he is gone, where all things wise and fair
Descend:‑oh, dream not that the amorous Deep
Will yet restore him to the vital air;
Death feeds on his mute voice, and laughs at our despair.
4
Most musical of mourners, weep again!
Lament anew, Urania!‑He died,
Who was the Sire of an immortal strain,
Blind, old, and lonely, when his country's pride,
The priest, the slave, and the liberticide,
Trampled and mocked with many a loathed rite
Of lust and blood; he went, unterrified,
Into the gulf of death; but his clear Sprite
Yet reigns o'er earth; the third among the sons of light.
5
Most musical of mourners, weep again!
Not all to that bright station dared to climb;
And happier they their happiness who knew,
Whose tapers yet burn through that night of time
In which suns perished; others more sublime,
Struck by the envious wrath of man or God,
Have sunk, extinct in their refulgent prim
And some yet live, treading the thorny road,
Which leads, through toil and hate, to Fame's serene abode.
6
But now, thy youngest, dearest one, has perished
The nursling of thy widowhood, who grew,
Like a pale flower by some sad maiden cherished,
And fed with true‑love tears, instead of dew;
Most musical of mourners, weep anew!
Thy extreme hope, the loveliest and the last,
The bloom, whose petals nipped before they blew
Died on the promise of the fruit, is waste;
The broken lily lies‑the storm is overpast.
7
To that high Capital, where kingly Death
Keeps his pale court in beauty and decay,
He came; and bought, with price of purest breath,
A grave among the eternal.‑Come away!
Haste, while the vault of blue Italian day
Is yet his fitting charnel‑roof! while still
He lies, as if in dewy sleep he lay;
Awake him not! surely he takes his fill
Of deep and liquid rest, forgetful of all ill.
8
He will awake no more, oh, never more!‑
Within the twilight chamber spreads apace
The shadow of white Death, and at the door
Invisible Corruption waits to trace
His extreme way to her dim dwelling‑place;
The eternal Hunger sits, but pity and awe
Soothe her pale rage, nor dares she to deface
So fair a prey, till darkness and the law
Of change, shall o'er his sleep the mortal curtain draw.
9
Oh, weep for Adonais! The quick Dreams,
The passion‑winged Ministers of thought,
Who were his Flocks, whom near the living streams
Of his young spirit he fed, and whom he taught
The love which was its music, wander not‑
Wander no more, from kindling brain to brain,
But droop there, whence they sprung; and mourn their lot
Round the cold heart, where, after their sweet pain,
They ne'er will gather strength, or find a home again.
10
And one with trembling hand clasps his cold head,
And fans him with her moonlight wings, and cries,
"Our love, our hope, our sorrow, is not dead;
See, on the silken fringe of his faint eyes,
Like dew upon a sleeping flower, there lies
A tear some Dream has loosened from his brain."
Lost Angel of a ruined Paradise!
She knew not 'twas her own; as with no stain
She faded, like a cloud which had outwept its rain.
11
One from a lucid urn of starry dew
Washed his light limbs as if embalming them;
Another clipped her profuse locks, and threw
The wreath upon him, like an anadem,
Which frozen tears instead of pearls begem;
Another in her willful grief would break
Her bow and winged reeds, as if to stem
A greater loss with one which was more weak;
And dull the barbed fire against his frozen cheek.
12
Another Splendor on his mouth alit,
That mouth, whence it was wont to draw the breath
Which gave it strength to pierce the guarded wit,
And pass into the panting heart beneath
With lightning and with music: the damp death
Quenched its caress upon its icy lips;
And, as a dying meteor stains a wreath
Of moonlight vapor, which the cold night clips
It flushed through his pale limbs, and passed to its eclipse.
13
And others came . . . Desires and Adorations,
Winged Persuasions and veiled Destinies,
Splendors, and Glooms, and glimmering Incarnations
Of hopes and fears, and twilight Phantasies;
And Sorrow, with her family of Sighs,
And Pleasure, blind with tears, led by the gleam
Of her own dying smile instead of eyes,
Came in slow pomp;‑the moving pomp might seem
Like pageantry of mist on an autumnal stream.
14
All he had loved, and molded into thought
From shape, and hue, and odor, and sweet sound,
Lamented Adonais Morning sought
Her eastern watch‑tower, and her hair unbound,
Wet with the tears which should adorn the ground,
Dimmed the aerial eyes that kindle day;
Afar the melancholy thunder moaned,
Pale Ocean in unquiet slumber lay,
And the wild Winds flew round, sobbing in their dismay.
15
Lost Echo sits amid the voiceless mountains,
And feeds her grief with his remembered lay,
And will no more reply to winds or fountains,
Or amorous birds perched on the young green spray,
Or herdsman's horn, or bell at closing day;
Since she can mimic not his lips, more dear
Than those for whose disdain she pined away
Into a shadow of all sounds:‑a drear
Murmur, between their songs, is all the woodmen hear.
16
Grief made the young Spring wild, and she threw down
Her kindling buds, as if she Autumn were,
Or they dead leaves; since her delight is flown
For whom should she have waked the sullen year?
To Phoebus was not Hyacinth so dear,
Nor to himself Narcissus, as to both
Thou, Adonais; wan they stand and sere
Amid the faint companions of their youth
With dew all turned to tears; odor, to sighing ruth.
17
Thy spirit's sister, the lorn nightingale,
Mourns not her mate with such melodious pain;
Not so the eagle, who like thee could scale
Heaven, and could nourish in the sun's domain
Her mighty youth,3 with morning, doth complain,
Soaring and screaming round her empty nest,
As Albion wails for thee: the curse of Cain
Light on his head who pierced thy innocent breast,
And scared the angel soul that was its earthly guest!
18
Ah, woe is me! Winter is come and gone,
But grief returns with the revolving year;
The airs and streams renew their joyous tone;
The ants, the bees, the swallows reappear;
Fresh leaves and flowers deck the dead Seasons' bier;
The amorous birds now pair in every brake,
And build their mossy homes in field and brere;
And the green lizard, and the golden snake,
Like unimprisoned Hames, out of their trance awake.
19
Through wood and stream and field and hill and Ocean,
A quickening life from the Earth's heart has burst
As it has ever done, with change and motion,
From the great morning of the world when first
God dawned on Chaos; in its stream immersed
The lamps of Heaven flash with a softer light;
All baser things pant with life's sacred thirst;
Diffuse themselves; and spend in love's delight,
The beauty and the joy of their renewed might.
20
The leprous corpse touched by this spirit tender
Exhales itself in flowers of gentle breath;
Like incarnations of the stars, when splendor
Is changed to fragrance, they illumine death
And mock the merry worm that wakes beneath;
Nought we know, dies. Shall that alone which knows
Be as a sword consumed before the sheath
By sightless lightning?‑the intense atom glows
A moment, then is quenched in a most cold repose.
21
Alas! that all we loved of him should be,
But for our grief, as if it had not been.
And grief itself be mortal! Woe is me!
Whence are we, and why are we? of what scene
The actors or spectators? Great and mean
Meet massed in death, who lends what life must borrow.
As long as skies are blue, and fields are green,
Evening must usher night, night urge the morrow,
Month follow month with woe, and year wake year to sorrow.
22
He will awake no more, oh, never more!
"Wake thou," cried Misery, "childless Mother, rise
Out of thy sleep, and slake, in thy heart's core,
A wound more fierce than his with tears and sighs."
And all the Dreams that watched Urania's eyes,
And all the Echoes whom their sister's song
Had held in holy silence, cried, "Arise!"
Swift as a Thought by the snake Memory stung,
From her ambrosial rest the fading Splendor sprung.
23
She rose like an autumnal Night, that springs
Out of the East, and follows wild and drear
The golden Day, which, on eternal wings,
Even as a ghost abandoning a bier,
Has left the Earth a corpse. Sorrow and fear
So struck, so roused, so rapt Urania;
So saddened round her like an atmosphere
Of stormy mist; so swept her on her way
Even to the mournful place where Adonais lay.
24
Out of her secret Paradise she sped,
Through camps and cities rough with stone, and steel,
And human hearts, which to her aery tread
Yielding not, wounded the invisible
Palms of her tender feet where'er they fell:
And barbed tongues, and thoughts more sharp than they,
Rent the soft Form they never could repel,
Whose sacred blood, like the young tears of May,
Paved with eternal flowers that undeserving way.
25
In the death‑chamber for a moment Death,
Shamed by the presence of that living Might,
Blushed to annihilation, and the breath
Revisited those lips, and life's pale light
Flashed through those limbs, so late her dear delight.
"Leave me not wild and drear and comfortless,
As silent lightning leaves the starless night!
Leave me not!" cried Urania: her distress
Roused Death: Death rose and smiled, and met her vain caress.
26
"Stay yet awhile! speak to me once again;
Kiss me, so long but as a kiss may live;
And in my heartless breast and burning brain
That word, that kiss, shall all thoughts else survive,
With food of saddest memory kept alive,
Now thou art dead, as if it were a part
Of thee, my Adonais! I would give
All that I am to be as thou now art,
But I am chained to Time, and cannot thence depart!
27
"O gentle child, beautiful as thou wert,
Why didst thou leave the trodden paths of men
Too soon, and with weak hands though mighty heart
Dare the unpastured dragon in his den?
Defenseless as thou wert, oh! where was then
Wisdom the mirrored shield, or scorn the spear?
Or hadst thou waited the full cycle, when
Thy spirit should have filled its crescent sphere,
The monsters of life's waste had fled from thee like deer.
28
"The herded wolves, bold only to pursue;
The obscene ravens, clamorous o'er the dead;
The vultures, to the conqueror's banner true,
Who feed where Desolation first has fed,
And whose wings rain contagion;‑how they fled,
When like Apollo from his golden bow,
The Pythian of the age one arrow sped
And smiled!‑The spoilers tempt no second blow,
They fawn on the proud feet that spurn them lying low.
29
"The sun comes forth, and many reptiles spawn;
He sets, and each ephemeral insect then
Is gathered into death without a dawn,
And the immortal stars awake again;
So is it in the world of living men:
A godlike mind soars forth, in its delight
Making earth bare and veiling heaven, and when
It sinks, the swarms that dimmed or shared its light
Leave to its kindred lamps the spirit's awful night."
30
Thus ceased she: and the mountain shepherds came
Their garlands sere, their magic mantles rent;
The Pilgrim of Eternity, whose fame
Over his living head like Heaven is bent,
An early but enduring monument,
Came, veiling all the lightnings of his song
In sorrow; from her wilds Ierne sent
The sweetest lyrist of her saddest wrong,
And love taught grief to fall like music from his tongue.
31
Midst others of less note, came one frail Form,
A phantom among men; companionless
As the last cloud of an expiring storm,
Whose thunder is its knell; he, as I guess,
Had gazed on Nature's naked loveliness,
Actaeon‑like, and now he fled astray
With feeble steps offer the world's wilderness,
And his own thoughts, along that rugged way,
Pursued, like raging hounds, their father and their prey.
32
A pardlike Spirit beautiful and swift‑
A Love in desolation masked;‑a Power
Girt round with weakness;‑it can scarce uplift
The weight of the superincumbent hour;
It is a dying lamp, a falling shower,
A breaking billow;‑even whilst we speak
Is it not broken? On the withering flower
The killing sun smiles brightly: on a cheek
The life can burn in blood, even while the heart may break.
33
His head was bound with pansies overblown,
And faded violets, white, and pied, and blue;
And a light spear topped with a cypress cone,
Round whose rude shaft dark ivy‑tresses grew
Yet dripping with the forest's noonday dew,
Vibrated, as the ever‑beating heart
Shook the weak hand that grasped it; of that crew
He came the last, neglected and apart;
A herd‑abandoned deer, struck by the hunter's dart.
34
All stood aloof, and at his partial moans
Smiled through their tears; well knew that gentle band
Who in another's fate now wept his own;
As in the accents of an unknown land,
He sung new sorrow; sad Urania scanned
The Stranger's mien, and murmured: "Who art thou?"
He answered not, but with a sudden hand
Made bare his branded and ensanguined brow,
Which was like Cain's or Christ's‑oh! that it should be so!
35
What softer voice is hushed over the dead?
Athwart what brow is that dark mantle thrown?
What form leans sadly o'er the white death‑bed,
In mockery of monumental stone,
The heavy heart heaving without a moan?
If it be He, who, gentlest of the wise,
Taught, soothed, loved, honored the departed one;
Let me not vex, with inharmonious sighs,
The silence of that heart's accepted sacrifice.
36
Our Adonais has drunk poison‑oh!
What deaf and viperous murderer could crown
Life's early cup with such a draught of woe?
The nameless worm would now itself disown:
It felt, yet could escape the magic tone
Whose prelude held all envy, hate and wrong,
But what was howling in one breast alone,
Silent with expectation of the song,
Whose master's hand is cold, whose silver lyre unstrung.
37
Live thou, whose infamy is not thy fame!
Live! fear no heavier chastisement from me,
Thou noteless blot on a remembered name!
But be thyself, and know thyself to be!
And ever at thy season be thou free
To spill the venom when thy fangs o'erflow:
Remorse and Self‑contempt shall cling to thee;
Hot Shame shall burn upon thy secret brow,
And like a beaten hound tremble thou shalt‑as now.
38
Nor let us weep that our delight is fled
Far from these carrion kites‑ that scream below;
He wakes or sleeps with the enduring dead;
Thou canst not soar where he is sitting now.
Dust to the dust! but the pure spirit shall flow
Back to the burning fountain whence it came,
A portion of the Eternal, which must glow
Through time and change, unquenchably the same,
Whilst thy cold embers choke the sordid hearth of shame.
39
Peace, peace! he is not dead, he doth not sleep‑
He hath awakened from the dream of life‑
Tis we, who lost in stormy visions, keep
With phantoms an unprofitable strife,
And in mad trance strike with our spirit's knife
Invulnerable nothings.‑We decay
Like corpses in a charnel; fear and grief
Convulse us and consume us day by day,
And cold hopes swarm like worms within our living clay.
40
He has outsoared the shadow of our night;
Envy and calumny and hate and pain,
And that unrest which men miscall delight,
Can touch him not and torture not again;
From the contagion of the world's slow stain
He is secure, and now can never mourn
A heart grown cold, a head grown gray in vain;
Nor, when the spirit's self has ceased to burn,
With sparkless ashes load an unlamented urn.
41
He lives, he wakes‑'tis Death is dead, not he;
Mourn not for Adonais.‑Thou young Dawn,
Turn all thy dew to splendor, for from thee
The spirit thou lamentest is not gone;
Ye caverns and ye forests, cease to moans
Cease ye faint flowers and fountains, and thou Air,
Which like a morning veil thy scarf hadst thrown
O'er the abandoned Earth, now leave it bare
Even to the joyous stars which smile on its despair!
42
He is made one with Nature: there is heard
His voice in all her music, from the moan
Of thunder, to the song of night's sweet bird;
He is a presence to be felt and known
In darkness and in light, from herb and stone,
Spreading itself wherever that Power may move
Which has withdrawn his being to its own;
Which wields the world with never wearied love,
Sustains it from beneath, and kindles it above.
43
He is a portion of the loveliness
Which once he made more lovely: he doth bear
His part, while the one Spirit's plastic stress
Sweeps through the dull dense world, compelling there
All new s cessions to the forms they wear;
Torturing the unwilling dross that checks its flight
To its own likeness, as each mass may bear;
And bursting in its beauty and its might
From trees and beasts and men into the Heaven's light.
44
The splendors of the firmament of time
May be eclipsed, but are extinguished not;
Like stars to their appointed height they climb,
And death is a low mist which cannot blot
The brightness it may veil. When lofty thought
Lifts a young heart above its mortal lair,
And love and life contend in it, for what
Shall be its earthly doom, the dead live there
And move like winds of light on dark and stormy air.
45
The inheritors of unfulfilled renown
Rose from their thrones, built beyond mortal thought,
Far in the Unapparent. Chatterton
Rose pale, his solemn agony had not
Yet faded from him; Sidney, as he fought
And as he fell and as he lived and loved
Sublimely mild, a Spirit without spot,
Arose; and Lucan, by his death approved:
Oblivion as they rose shrank like a thing reproved.
46
And many more, whose names on Earth are dark
But whose transmitted effluence cannot die
So long as fire outlives the parent spark,
Rose, robed in dazzling immortality.
"Thou art become as one of us," they cry,
"It was for thee yon kingless sphere has long
Swung blind in unascended majesty,
Silent alone amid an Heaven of Song.
Assume thy winged throne, thou Vesper of our throng!"
47
Who mourns for Adonais? Oh, come forth,
Fond wretch! and know thyself and him aright.
Clasp with thy panting soul the pendulous Earth;
As from a center, dart thy spirit's light
Beyond all worlds, until its spacious might
Satiate the void circumference: then shrink
Even to a point within our day and night;
And keep thy heart light lest it make thee sink
When hope has kindled hope, and lured thee to the brink.
48
Or go to Rome, which is the sepulcher,
Oh, not of him, but of our joy: 'tis nought
That ages, empires, and religions there
Lie buried in the ravage they have wrought;
For such as he can lend‑they borrow not
Glory from those who made the world their prey;
And he is gathered to the kings of thought
Who waged contention with their time's decay,
And of the past are all that cannot pass away.
49
Go thou to Rome,‑at once the Paradise,
The grave, the city, and the wilderness;
And where its wrecks like shattered mountains rise,
And flowering weeds, and fragrant copses dress
The bones of Desolation's nakedness
Pass, till the Spirit of the spot shall lead
Thy footsteps to a slope of green access
Where, like an infant's smile, over the dead
A light of laughing flowers along the grass is spread,
50
And gray walls moulder round, on which dull Time
Feeds, like slow fire upon a hoary brand;
And one keen pyramids with wedge sublime,
Pavilioning the dust of him who planned
This refuge for his memory, doth stand
Like flame transformed to marble; and beneath,
A field is spread, on which a newer band
Have pitched in Heaven's smile their camp of death,
Welcoming him we lose with scarce extinguished breath.
51
Here pause: these graves are all too young as yet
To have outgrown the sorrow which consigned
Its charge to each; and if the seal is set,
Here, on one fountain of a mourning mind,
Break it not thou! too surely shalt thou find
Thine own well full, if thou returnest home,
Of tears and gall. From the world's bitter wind
Seek shelter in the shadow of the tomb.
What Adonais is, why fear we to become?
52
The One remains, the many change and pass;
Heaven's light forever shines, Earth's shadows fly;
Life, like a dome of many‑colored glass,
Stains the white radiance of Eternity,
Until Death tramples it to fragments.‑Die,
If thou wouldst be with that which thou dost seek!
Follow where all is fled!‑Rome's azure sky,
Flowers, ruins, statues, music, words, are weak
The glory they transfuse with fitting truth to speak.
53
Why linger, why turn back, why shrink, my Heart?
Thy hopes are gone before: from all things here
They have departed; thou shouldst now depart!
A light is past from the revolving year,
And man, and woman; and what still is dear
Attracts to crush, repels to make thee wither.
The soft sky smiles,‑the low wind whispers near:
'Tis Adonais calls! oh, hasten thither,
No more let life divide what Death can join together.
54
That Light whose smile kindles the Universe,
That Beauty in which all things work and move
That Benediction which the eclipsing Curse
Of birth can quench not, that sustaining Love
Which through the web of being blindly wove
By man and beast and earth and air and sea
Burns bright or dim, as each are mirrors of
The fire for which all thirst; now beams on me,
Consuming the last clouds of cold mortality.
55
The breath whose might I have invoked in song
Descends on me; my spirit's bark is driven,
Far from the shore, far from the trembling throng
Whose sails were never to the tempest given
The massy earth and sphered skies are riven!
I am borne darkly, fearfully afar
Whilst burning through the inmost veil of Heaven
The soul of Adonais, like a star
Beacons from the abode where the Eternal are.
ROBERT BROWNING
England 1812-1889
My Last Duchess
Ferrara*
That's my last duchess painted on the wall,
Looking as if she were alive. I call
That piece a wonder, now: Fra Pandolf's hands
Worked busily a day, and there she stands.
Will 't please you sit and look at her? I said
"Fra Pandolf" by design, for never read
Strangers like you that pictured countenance,
The depth and passion of its earnest glance,
But to myself they turned (since none puts by
The curtain I have drawn for you, but I)
And seemed as they would ask me, if they durst,
How such a glance came there; so, not the first
Are you to turn and ask thus. Sir, 'twas not
Her husband's presence only, called that spot
Of joy into the Duchess' cheek: perhaps
Fra Pandolf chanced to say "Her mantle laps
Over my lady's wrist too much," or "Paint
Must never hope to reproduce the faint
Half-flush that dies along her throat": such stuff
Was courtesy, she thought, and cause enough
For calling up that spot of joy. She had
A heart--how shall I say?--too soon make glad,
Too easily impressed; she liked what'er
She looked on, and her looks went everywhere.
Sir, 'twas all one! My favor at her breast,
The dropping of the daylight in the West,
The bough of cherries some officious fool
Broke in the orchard for her, the white mule
She rode with round the terrace--all and each
Would draw from her alike the approving speech,
Or blush, at least. She thanked men--good! but thanked
Somehow--I know not how--as if she ranked
My gift of a nine-hundred-years-old name
With anybody's gift. Who'd stoop to blame
This sort of trifling? Even if you had skill
In speech--(which I have not)--to make your will
Quite clear to such an one, and say, "Just this
Or that in you disgusts me; here you miss,
Or there exceed the mark"--and if she let
Herself be lessoned so, nor plainly set
Her wits to yours, forsooth, and made excuse
--E'en then would be some stooping; and I choose
Never to stoop. Oh sir, she smiled, no doubt,
Whene'er I passed her; but who passed without
Much the same smile? This grew; I gave commands;
Then all smiles stopped together. There she stands
As if alive. Will 't please you rise? We'll meet
The company below, then. I repeat,
The Count your master's known munificence
Is ample warrant that no just pretense
Of mine for dowry will be disallowed;
Though his fair daughter's self, as I avowed
At starting, is my object. Nay, we'll go
Together down, sir. Notice Neptune, though,
Taming a sea horse, thought a rarity,
Which Claus of Innsbruck cast in bronze for me!
* Browning based this monologue on the events in the life of Alfonso II, the Duke of Ferrara in Italy.
A. E. HOUSEMAN
England 1859-1936
To an Athlete Dying Young
The time you won your town the race
We chaired you through the market-place;
Man and boy stood cheering by,
And home we brought you shoulder-high.
Today, the road all runners come,
Shoulder-high we bring you home,
And set you at your threshold down,
Townsman of a stiller town.
Smart lad, to slip betimes away
From fields where glory does not stay
And early though the laurel grows
It withers quicker than the rose.
Eyes the shady night has shut
Cannot see the record cut,
And silence sounds no worse than cheers
After earth has stopped the ears:
Now you will not swell the rout
Of lads that wore their honours out,
Runners whom renown outran
And the name died before the man.
So set, before its echoes fade,
The fleet foot on the sill of shade,
And hold to the low lintel up
The still-defended challenge-cup.
And round that early laurelled head
Will flock to gaze the strengthless dead
And find unwithered on its curls
The garland briefer than a girl's.
MASAOKA SHIKI
Japan 1867-1902*
A snake falls
From the high stone wall:
Fierce autumn gale.
Again and again
From my sickbed I ask,
"How deep is the snow?"
A crimson berry
Splattering down on
The frost-white garden.
As the bat flies,
Its sound is dark
Through the grove of trees.
I want to sleep:
Go gently, won't you,
When you swat the flies.
So few the cicadas
This morning after
The autumn storm.
All poems by Shiki translated by Geoffrey Bownas
and Anthony Thwaite
* Shiki died of tuberculosis at the age of thirty-five. Several of his poems refer to his illness and impending death.
THEODORE ROETHKE
America 1908-1963
Elegy for Jane
My Student, Thrown by a Horse
I remember the neckcurls, limp and damp as tendrils;
And her quick look, a sidelong pickerel smile;
And how, once startled into talk, the light syllables leaped for her,
And she balanced in the delight of her thought,
A wren, happy, tail into the wind,
Her song trembling the twigs and small branches.
The shade sang with her;
The leaves, their whispers turned to kissing;
And the mold sang in the bleached valleys under the rose.
Oh, when she was sad, she cast herself down, into such a pure depth,
Even a father could not find her:
Scraping her cheek against straw;
Stirring the clearest water.
My sparrow, you are not here,
Waiting like a fern, making a spiny shadow.
The sides of wet stones cannot console me,
Nor the moss, wound with the last light.
If only I could nudge you from this sleep,
My maimed darling, my skittery pigeon.
Over this damp grave I speak the words of my love:
I, with no rights in this matter,
Neither father nor lover.
RANDALL JARRELL
America 1914-1965
The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner
From my mother's sleep I fell into the State,
And I hunched in its belly till my wet fur froze.
Six miles from earth, loosed from its dream of life,
I woke to black flak and the nightmare fighters.
When I died they washed me out of the turret with a hose.
LEONARD COHEN
Canada 1934
Elegy
Do not look for him
In brittle mountain streams:
They are too cold for any god;
And do not examine the angry rivers
For shreds of his soft body
Or turn the shore stones for his blood;
But in the warm salt ocean
He is descending through cliffs
Of slow green water
And the hovering coloured fish
Kiss his snow-bruised body
And build their secret nests
In his fluttering winding-sheet.
MARGARET ATWOOD
Canada 1939
Death of a Young Son by Drowning
He, who navigated with success
the dangerous river of his own birth
once more set forth
on a voyage of discovery
into the land I floated on
but could not touch to claim.
His feet slid on the bank,
the currents took him;
he swirled with ice and trees in the swollen water
and plunged into distant regions,
his head a bathysphere;
through his eyes' thin bubbles
he looked out, reckless adventurer
on a landscape stranger than Uranus
we have all been to and some remember.
There was an accident; the air locked,
he was hung in the river like a heart.
They retrieved the swamped body,
cairn of my plans and future charts,
with poles and hooks
from among the nudging logs.
It was spring, the sun kept shining, the new grass
lept to solidity;
my hands glistened with details.
After the long trip I was tired of waves.
My foot hit rock. The dreamed sails
collapsed, ragged.
I planted him in this country
like a flag.
FINDING THE POET
CHAPTER 7 ELEMENTS OF POETRY-- DICTION, SOUND, AND IMAGERY
At last we've come to my favorite part of poetry-- all those little tricks that poets keep up their sleeves to transform their musings into art. Academically, we refer to these with the rather generic term, "elements of poetry." We lump several different techniques into this category, some of which, such as word choices and sound devices, we have already discussed briefly. To some degree, everything in the next two chapters will seem familiar to you because it is not possible to explore poetry as extensively as we already have without touching on these elements, at least tangentially. Now we will approach them in a more systematic way. In this chapter and the next, we will discuss the following elements: diction, sound, imagery, tone and point of view, figures of speech, and finally, symbols and archetypes.
I've chosen this order according to the principle of increasing complexity. Every poem contains words, which is what diction is all about, but not every poem is symbolic or archetypal. Similarly, every poem creates some kind of sound if you read it orally, but not every poem includes figures of speech. However, please remember that in an actual poem, all of the elements function together to create a unified effect.
Before we begin, let me remind you that a complex poem is not necessarily superior to a simple one. A group of mid-Twentieth Century literary scholars known as the New Critics expresses a pronounced preference for poetry that was complex and filled with ambiguity and paradox. The favorite poet of these critics was T.S. Eliot. When you read Eliot's "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" in the next chapter, you will agree that Eliot's poetry is complex and ambiguous and that he uses many startling figures of speech, as did the Seventeenth Century poet, John Donne, who influenced Eliot. But please keep in mind that ambiguity, complexity, and paradox are poetic values that are strongly influenced by historic and cultural tastes. As you will remember from our brief survey of English poetic history in Chapter 5, complexity has been appreciated in the Renaissance, the Seventeenth Century, and the Twentieth Century. In Japan, the Heian Period (800-1200) during which Sei Shonagon, Murasaki Shikibu, and Ono no Komachi lived, also valued a complex, metaphysical style of poetry. Other historic periods, such as the Greek Classical Period, the Nara Period (700-800) in Japan, and the English Neo-Classical Period, have preferred simplicity. Classical values included clarity, restraint, and decorum over ambiguity, paradox, and complexity. I hope you will learn to appreciate all of the qualities that poetry has manifested over the years and that you will resist the temptation to read and imitate only the poets who are the trendy darlings of the moment.
Let's begin our study of the elements of poetry with diction, which is simply the words which appear in a poem. If a poet is writing in English, he or she has a choice of many thousands of words, since English has by far the largest vocabulary of any language. There are also many synonyms in English, and a poet must make an intuitive decision as to which word best serves his or her purpose. As we will see, words are sometimes chosen for their sound as well as their meaning. Other considerations include connotations, or the nuances of meaning associated with words, a concept we discussed in Chapter 3. Poets must also think about levels of diction, whether they want to write in very elevated formal language, in middle-of-the-road general English, or in informal language, dialect, or slang. Does the poet want to reflect the current idioms of the day, or to achieve a more timeless quality? Perhaps the poet even wants to create an archaic effect, as Edmund Spenser did in The Faerie Queene and Keats did in "The Eve of St. Agnes."
Sometimes the etymology, or historic derivation of a word can add levels of meaning. The use of puns, or plays on the various meanings of a word, is popular with metaphysical poets who thrive on the paradox and ambiguity to which I just referred. Another option is to coin, or make up one's own words, certainly a poet's right, since coining is the essence of creativity. And in today's global culture, it is common to find non-English words in English language poetry. In fact, a new genre of bi-lingual poetry has evolved. In California, where I live, many people are familiar with both Spanish and English just as many Canadians can read both English and French.
As we look at the following poem together, we will focus on the poet's choice of words and on the effect that vocabulary can have on the poem's final impact. I chose this poem by D.H. Lawrence entitled "How Beastly the Bourgeois Is" because the words "beastly" and "bourgeois" in the title are both highly charged with connotation. If you are a man who identifies with the British middle class, you might find this poem a bit painful. If so, you should immediately sit down and write a poem in rebuttal, perhaps a satire in heroic couplets entitled "How Dastardly D.H. Lawrence Is."
How Beastly the Bourgeois Is
How beastly the bourgeois is
especially the male of the species--
Presentable, eminently presentable--
shall I make you a present of him?
Isn't he handsome? isn't he healthy? isn't he a fine specimen?
doesn't he look the fresh clean Englishman, outside?
Isn't it god's own image? tramping his thirty miles a day
after partridges or a little rubber ball?
wouldn't you like to be like that, well off, and quite the thing?
Oh, but wait!
Let him meet a new emotion, let him be faced with another
man's need,
let him come home to a bit of moral difficulty, let life face
him with a new demand on his understanding
and then watch him go soggy, like a wet meringue.
Watch him turn into a mess; either a fool or a bully.
Just watch the display of him, confronted with a new demand
on his intelligence,
a new life-demand.
How beastly the bourgeois is
especially the male of the species--
Nicely groomed, like a mushroom
standing there so sleek and erect and eyeable--
and like a fungus, living on the remains of bygone life
sucking his life out of the dead leaves of greater life than his
own.
And even so, he's stale, he's been there too long.
Touch him, and you'll find he's all gone inside
just like an old mushroom, all wormy inside, and hollow
under a smooth skin and an upright appearance.
Full of seething, wormy, hollow feelings
rather nasty--
How beastly the bourgeois is!
Standing in their thousands, these appearances, in damp Eng-
land
what a pity they can't all be kicked over
like sickening toadstools, and left to melt back, swiftly
into the soil of England.
Of course you will want to do a little research into the life of David Herbert Lawrence to help you understand this uncomplimentary view of some of his fellow countrymen. You will discover that Lawrence, who lived a mere forty-five years from 1885 to 1930, was the son of a coal miner. He grew up with his four siblings in a dysfunctional low income family. He worked or finance his college education and commuted great distances to earn his teaching certificate at Nottingham University. If you should happen upon a photograph of Lawrence, you will probably agree that even the most generous hearted person would hesitate to call him "handsome," and unfortunately, he suffered from poor health most of his life, ultimately dying of tuberculosis. The men he describes in this poem are his opposites in every way: They are wealthy, handsome, healthy, athletic, unproductive, intellectually limited, and unemotional.
The poem's title, "How Beastly the Bourgeois Is," certainly captures the reader's attention, and the same phrase appears three more times throughout the poem. The word "beastly," which is used more by British speakers than by Americans, is a favorite word among the very group Lawrence is describing. According to the Oxford English Dictionary (the OED), one of its various meanings is, "...disgusting or offensive, especially from dirtiness: applied, by those who use strong language, to anyone who offends their tastes." Thus, it is certainly conceivable that a middle class British man might describe the life of a coal miner and his children as "beastly." And in describing this bourgeois gentleman as "handsome," "healthy," "a fine specimen," "fresh," and "clean," Lawrence creates a powerful irony, since he has just referred to this person as "beastly," certainly not a word that this gentleman would use to describe himself and his peers.
In studying the etymology of the word "beastly," it should be obvious that the current definition of this word evolved from its earlier meaning suggesting an animal-like quality. Indeed, the OED lists, "Resembling a beast in unintelligence; brutish, irrational, without thought." as a definition of the word "beastly" that was current from the 1200s through the 1800s. It is this earlier meaning of the word "beastly" that Lawrence employs when he says, "Let him meet a new emotion," "let life face/ him with a new demand on his understanding," "confronted with a new demand/ on his intelligence." Thus, when this earlier definition is applied to this handsome, healthy, clean man, he becomes, "soggy," "a mess," "a fool or a bully" because he has not developed either his intelligence or his emotions. Lawrence further emphasizes the animal-like aspects of this man in the twice repeated phrase, "especially the male of the species," a term that zoologists might use in studying animal behavior.
Interestingly, there is another very old definition of the word "beastly" in the Oxford English Dictionary: "Of the nature of living creatures (including man); animal, natural, carnal." This definition, as you have noticed, places both humankind and animals together in the natural order as part of the physical world in contrast with the spiritual world. This definition applies to the man in the poem also in that his spiritual life is completely absent. He is referred to a "hollow" and "sucking his life out of the dead leaves of greater life than his/ own."
In looking at these three definitions of the word "beastly," you can see that the connotations of this word have become increasingly negative over time. The very old use of the word, referring to the animal world as part of nature, is essentially neutral, or perhaps only slightly negative in the sense that medieval English speakers valued the spiritual world over the carnal. Unfortunately, the second definition associates animals with brutish, irrational, and stupid behavior and creates a very negative of animals. This negative perception is further reinforced by the third and most recent definition, which adds the idea of uncleanness and offensiveness to the word's connotations. This word "beastly," and many related words, such as "brutish" and "brutal," may be responsible in part for the attitudes which have led to the reprehensible treatment of animals by English speaking people over the centuries. The connotations of words can be very powerful because they reflect our values and even motivate our behavior.
Another strongly connotative word in Lawrence's poem is "bourgeois," a word of French origin. Originally, this word referred to a "French citizen or freeman" who lived in a city and was distinguished from a peasant, who would have been his social inferior, and a gentleman, who would have been his superior. The word first appeared in English in 1674, which makes it a much newer word than "beastly." Eventually, "bourgeois" came to refer to middle class people in any country, and by the 1800s, it meant, "Resembling the middle class in appearance, way of thinking, etc." It is this more recent definition that Lawrence seems to be using, along with the very negative connotations that came to be associated with this word.
Today, the phrase "middle class" refers primarily to a person's financial standing, but the word "bourgeois" suggests snobbery, shallow values, and insensitivity to the poor. Lawrence draws on these connotations when he says, "let him be faced with another/ man's need," and "living on the remains of bygone life." The word "bourgeois" also has political connotations. Socialists, who were especially active in England and Europe in the early decades of the Twentieth Century when Lawrence did a lot of his thinking and writing, were particularly hostile to the bourgeois. It might be possible to interpret this poem from a socialist or revolutionary perspective in the sense that Lawrence depicts the bourgeois as parasites and concludes, "what a pity they can't all be kicked over."
Just to demonstrate for yourself the strong connotations of the words "beastly" and "bourgeois," try substituting the synonyms "offensive" and "middle class," and read the poem aloud with these substitutions. Notice how insipid the overall effect of the poem becomes. This exercise will also demonstrate the interconnectedness of the elements in a poem. The sound of the poem changes completely when the two "b" sounds are removed. In choosing the words "beastly" and "bourgeois," Lawrence was also choosing to use alliteration, a sound device that involves the repetition of initial consonant sounds. This technique, as you will remember from Chapter 5, was especially popular in Anglo-Saxon poetry, the poetry of the ancestors of the men Lawrence so despises. Anglo-Saxon poetry is filled with deep emotion, profound spiritual values, and an absolute commitment to the welfare of one's countrymen. The phrase, "sucking his life out of the dead leaves of greater life than his/ own,"
which is also alliterative, creates a picture of a man who is inferior to his ancestors in every way. One can almost hear Beowulf's own voice castigating these "wormy" progeny for failing to maintain the noble values he died to defend.
Another striking element in this poem which we might miss if we focused only on diction is Lawrence's use of similes. We discussed similes in Chapter 3 when we analyzed Keats' "On First Looking Into Chapman's Homer." A simile is a comparison between two things which are not usually thought of as similar using "like" or "as." Similes and metaphors, which are comparisons without using "like" or "as," are categorized as figures of speech, and will be discussed further in the next chapter. But I think that they are such an important device that we can benefit from studying them more than once. In Chapter 4, I pointed out that the genius of Sei Shonagon and Dorothy Wordsworth was based on their ability to see similarities between things that most people perceive as different. In Chapter 5, we observed the same gift in the poetry of Matsuo Basho. I believe that this characteristic-- finding comparisons where other people see contrasts-- is one of the most significant aspects of poetry. Part of the very nature of the art form itself is the poet's visionary ability to connect elements in the universe in a meaningful way. These connections, which often take the form of similes and metaphors, help the reader to find wholeness in a world which seems fragmented and provide insight by creating bridges that are largely unavailable elsewhere.
Lawrence expresses his frustration with the shallowness of the British middle class by comparing them first to "wet meringue" and secondly to "a mushroom." In both cases he uses similes to create this comparison. Incidentally, if you know anything about confectionery, you will be aware that meringue is often shaped into the form of mushrooms, especially to decorate Christmas cakes called yule logs. The words "soggy," "hollow," and "wormy" deflate any image we may have visualized of a delicious yule log decorated with sweet, puffy, meringue mushrooms. Of these two comparisons, Lawrence explores the mushroom image at greater length.
In the second half of the poem, Lawrence uses the similes "like a mushroom," "like a fungus," and "like sickening toadstools." These similes, beginning with the "soggy meringue" and concluding with the "sickening toadstools," become increasingly unattractive, just as the images of the "handsome," "healthy," "fine specimen" from the first half of the poem degenerate into a "stale," "nasty," and poisonous parasite. Lawrence concludes that this mushroom is "all gone inside," that it no longer has any intrinsic value and it should simply be allowed to decompose, "to melt back, swiftly/ into the soil of England." In this extended comparison between Britain's middle class and a patch of rotting mushrooms, Lawrence moves from simile to metaphor and expresses his contempt in the strongest possible terms.
He is not suggesting a few changes or improvements in the social system. The only contribution the bourgeois can make to the culture, this metaphor suggests, is to die out and allow something new to grow out of the compost that their death will create. Many decades have passes since this poem was written, and the British middle class is still with us. Have the values that Lawrence attributes to them changed? Or is the middle class still shallow, intellectually limited, and profoundly lacking in compassion? Perhaps we should look at the "beastly" behavior in our own culture, or maybe even in ourselves, and look for the answer there.
Before we leave this poem behind, there are many other interesting word choices which you can explore on your own. Notice, for example, the pun on the words "presentable" and "present." And think about the connotations of the word "tramping" and the phrase "little rubber ball." Also, the unusual word "eyeable," creates an interesting echo of the word "edible." It seems to suggest something that is good to look at, like the "sleek," "erect" mushroom, something one can devour with one's eyes. Remember that every word in every poem has been specifically chosen by the poet to create a desired effect. At least in theory, every good poem contains no extra words, and even a long poem is as short as the poet can make it and still communicate his or her message to the reader.
Another important element of poetry is sound, and we discussed several aspects of sound, notably, rhythm, rhyme, and alliteration in Chapter 5. There are other sound devices available to poets also. In fact, most traditional poets were very sensitive to sound because the musical qualities of a poem were considered essential to the poem's unity, meaning, and effect. Even free verse poets often use some sound devices, even though they have chosen not to include a set pattern of rhythm and rhyme. An important idea to remember is that sound devices, like all of the elements of poetry, including form, diction, and figures of speech, should be used by the poet to enhance the poem's meaning and overall impression. A sound device or other poetic element that has a life of its own separate from the meaning of the poem can backfire and create an undesired effect, which usually turns out to be giggling on the part of the reader when the poet was trying to be serious.
Four interesting sound devices that can be used either in conjunction with or independent of rhythm and rhyme are euphony, cacophony, assonance, and onomatopoeia. I think of euphony and cacophony as opposite twins. Euphony is the deliberate use of pleasing sounds to create a harmonious effect. Euphony is used by skillful poets to complement the poem's meaning. It might be inappropriate, for example, to use euphony when describing the bombing of Hiroshima, unless the poet intended an ironic contrast. Cacophony (or its synonym, dissonance), as you might guess, is the deliberate use of discordant or unpleasant sounds for poetic effect. The American poet Stephen Crane, who died in 1900 at the age of twenty-nine, wrote a series of short, unpleasant sounding poems that are very effective in shocking the reader into thinking more deeply about the human condition. I read the following poem for the first time when I was in the eighth grade, at a time when adolescents begin to explore the shadow sides of their personalities. I was startled by the short lines, simple one or two syllable vocabulary, complete absence of rhythm, and the cacophonous effect of the key words, "creature" and "squatting," which grate on the ears. I was also fascinated by the window this dissonant poem opens into the dark human heart.
In the desert
I saw a creature, naked, bestial,
Who, squatting upon the ground,
Held his heart in his hands,
And ate of it.
I said, "Is it good, friend?"
"It is bitter-- bitter," he answered;
"But I like it
Because it is bitter,
And because it is my heart."
In another cacophonous poem, Crane laments the excessive greed in America during the age of the robber barons. In this poem too his lines jerk along, short and uneven, with no rhythmic flow. And he deliberately uses unpleasant sounding words such as "crash," "cheeked," "cryptic," "champing," "ratful," and "squeak" to depict the avarice of American millionaires as a very ugly thing. Notice that the words in the opening five lines, in which Crane describes "The impact of a dollar on the heart," create a pleasant effect with soft "s" and "w" sounds in words like "smiles," "warm," "sweeping," and "softly." Then when he switches his focus to "The impact of a million dollars," the ugly sounding words emerge.
The impact of a dollar upon the heart
Smiles warm red light,
Sweeping from the hearth rosily upon the white table,
With the hanging cool velvet shadows
Moving softly upon the door.
The impact of a million dollars
Is a crash of flunkeys,
And yawning emblems of Persia
Cheeked against oak, France and a sabre,
The outcry of old beauty
Whored by pimping merchants
To submission before wine and chatter.
Silly rich peasants stamp the carpets of men,
Dead men who dreamed fragrance and light
Into their woof, their lives;
The rug of an honest bear
Under the feet of a cryptic slave
Who speaks always of baubles,
Forgetting state, multitude, work, and state,
Champing and mouthing of hats,
Making ratful squeak of hats,
Hats.
Although you may not agree, some scholars feel that "ch," "cr," and "gr" sounds in English create a cacophonous effect whereas "l," "w," and "s" sounds are usually euphonious. Some people even think that "l" and "s" sounds remind the reader subliminally of the sound of flowing water, one of the most pleasant sounds to the human ear. In a very famous poem, the Nobel Prize winner William Butler Yeats, a contemporary of Stephen Crane, describes a beautiful, peaceful island in a lake in some of the most euphonious poetry I have ever read.
The Lake Isle of Innisfree
I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree,
And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made;
Nine bean-rows will I have there, a hive for the honey-bee.
And live alone in the bee-loud glade.
And I shall have some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow,
Dropping from the veils of morning to where the cricket sings;
There midnight's all a glimmer, and noon a purple glow,
And evening full of the linnet's wings.
I will arise and go now, for always night and day
I hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore;
While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements grey,
I hear it in the deep heart's core.
In this poem Yeats actually describes several pleasing sounds-- the buzzing of bees "in the bee-loud glade," the sounds of birds "and evening full of the linnet's wings," and the sound of water "I hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore." Notice how beautiful the "l" and "s" sounds are in the line I just quoted, and they really do recreate for us the soothing sound of water in a peaceful lake.
Read "The Impact of a Dollar Upon the Heart" and "The Lake Isle of Innisfree" again aloud, one right after the other. You may be startled by how strongly the sounds in a poem influence its overall effect.
Another interesting sound device, one of my favorites, is assonance. Assonance is the fraternal twin of alliteration. You will remember that alliteration is the repetition of initial consonant sounds, and you certainly must have noticed that Yeats uses this device effectively in "The Lake Isle of Innisfree." Assonance is the repetition of vowel sounds. Assonance can be related to euphony and cacophony in the sense that some vowel sounds, such as the short "a" sound in "aroma" and the "oo" sound in "moon" create a pleasing effect whereas the "u" sound in "dull" and the "a" sound in words like "axe" and "abstract" can sound rather inharmonious. Yeats used euphonious assonance in "The Lake Isle of Innisfree" when he chose the words, "I," "arise," "clay," "made," and "pavements grey." Assonance can be very effective because it does not have to follow a prescribed pattern as rhyme often does, and it can support a poem's theme in a subtle, perhaps even subliminal way.
Read the following poem by Gerard Manley Hopkins, one of the most sound-sensitive poets in the English tradition. Be sure to read the poem aloud. Then take the time to point out all of the sound devices that Hopkins uses. You should have no trouble finding examples of rhyme, rhythm, alliteration, euphony, and assonance in this joyful celebration of spring.
Spring
Nothing is so beautiful as Spring--
When weeds, in wheels, shoot long and lovely and lush;
Thrush's eggs look little low heavens, and thrush
Through the echoing timber does so rinse and wring
The ear, it strikes like lightnings to hear him sing;
The glassy peartree leaves and blooms, they brush
The descending blue; that blue is all in a rush
With richness; the racing lambs too have fair their fling.
What is all this juice and all this joy?
A strain of the earth's sweet being in the beginning
In Eden garden.--Have, get, before it cloy,
Before it cloud, Christ, lord and sour with sinning,
Innocent mind and Mayday in girl and boy,
Most, O maid's child, thy choice and worthy the winning.
As you study this poem, you will also find the other sound device I mentioned earlier-- onomatopoeia. I think this word fascinates poetry lovers because of its outrageous name as much as for its meaning. Onomatopoeia, according to the OED, is "The formation of a name or word by an imitation of the sound associated with the thing or action designated." In short, in onomatopoeia, something is named for the sound it makes. English words like "plop," "buzz," "splat," etc., are onomatopoeic, and other languages use onomatopoeia too. English speaking roosters, for example, say "cock-a-doodle-doo," but in Spanish roosters say "quiquiriqui." At a recent dinner party at my in-laws' home, I learned that the popular Japanese dish shabu shabu, which is meat and vegetables cooked quickly in hot broth, is named onomatopoeically. My mother-in-law told me that shabu shabu in Japanese means "swish, swish," indicating the speed with which the dish is cooked and the sound of the ingredients being quickly swirled around in the broth. Onomatopoeia is closely related to the formation of language itself, and it is a very creative phenomenon. I love the wonderfully descriptive quality of onomatopoeia, and the meanings of onomatopoeic words are often self-explanatory.
Let's return to Hopkins' "Spring" and take a long look at the phrase "...thrush/ Through the echoing timber does so rinse and wring/ The ear... ." Of course it's easy to spot the alliteration in the words "thrush" and "through," and it's not too difficult to figure out that "rinse" and "wring" contain both alliteration and assonance, since the "w" in "wring" is silent, and the "i" sounds in both words are very similar. But can you find the onomatopoeia? It's hidden in a pun on the word "wring." The phrase "rinse and wring" at first seems to refer to washing, and in this context, the sound of the thrush seems to wash out the listener's ears with a welcome springtime cleansing. But the word "ring," which is pronounced identically with "wring," onomatopoeically describes the sound of a bell, and this second meaning is reinforced by the words "echoing" and "timber." Hopkins creates a pun on the word "timber" too, because "timber" can refer to the woods where the thrush is singing or to the quality of his song. In a brilliant feat of metaphysical complexity, Hopkins metaphorically compares the sound of the thrush to both cleansing and to the lovely chiming of a bell. As you can see from this little example, sound devices in poetry do not simply create something for the reader to listen to in his or her head. They can also create comparisons and can, through synesthesia, make connections to our other senses. In addition, sound is profoundly connected to a poem's meaning.
Since you are now expert in reading poetry, you also noticed that Hopkins' "Spring" is an Italian sonnet. In the octave, Hopkins describes the exquisite beauty of nature as he imagines it in the Garden of Eden as described in the Bible before the fall of mankind. In the poem's turn, which seems to occur after the dash in line eleven, the speaker urges the reader to celebrate the beauty of nature with the innocent eyes of children before it is ruined by the corruption of adult behavior and perceptions. The words "cloy," "cloud," and "sour with sinning" create a different effect from the celebrative sound of the thrush whose "echoing timber does so rinse and wring/ The ear" in the octave. Notice how these sound changes support the poem's theme. And in the concluding two lines, after cautioning the listener about the danger of adult cynicism, the poem ends on an auditory upswing with the alliterative "m" and "w" sounds in
Innocent mind and Mayday in girl and boy'
Most, O maid's child, thy choice and worthy the winning.
The final alliterative phrase "worthy the winning" balances the previous alliterative phrase "sour with sinning," thus ending the poem on a note of cautious hope.
In Chapter 5, we studied poetic structure, and in this chapter we have looked at diction and sound devices. But as I pointed out earlier, these elements do not occur separately in poetry. I think it would be helpful to take a deeper look at Hopkins, who was a meticulous student and professor of poetry as well as a writer. He devoted his intellectual and creative energies to the question that we are now scrutinizing: How can a poet integrate all of the elements in a poem to achieve an organic and harmonious effect? With this idea in mind, let's take a second look at Hopkins' masterpiece, "The Windhover" in light of his poetic theories.
You probably remember struggling through "The Windhover" in Chapter 5. Hopkins is either a student's worst nightmare or an inspiring challenge of rare magnitude. Fortunately for me, and I hope for some of you, he has been the latter. I wrote an extended paper on Hopkins when I was working on my Master's Degree in English Literature, and the project propelled my appreciation of poetry forward with such momentum that I have to credit Hopkins with the fact that I still love to read and write poetry today. When I was in college, I was a little like some of your classmates. I was more interested in maintaining my exalted grade point average than in actually learning anything. But for some reason, when I was required to select a poet and spend the entire semester researching him, I threw caution to the wind and chose Hopkins. Why? I wanted to learn more about Hopkins because I couldn't understand any of his poems, yet I felt that a very creative soul was trying to communicate with me. I will be forever grateful that I finally took an academic risk, crossing the line into the unknown. If course I experienced attacks of sheer terror when halfway through the project, when it was too late to turn back, I learned by reading footnotes in an obscure book that my professor, an archetypal lofty and intimidating scholar, had written her doctoral dissertation on Hopkins.
Still I persevered, spending weekends in the library reading Hopkins' letters and trying to walk every step of this poet's lonely journey with him. I learned that Hopkins, born in 1844 to an affluent British Victorian family, horrified his parents by converting to Catholicism while a student at Oxford University. The rift with his family widened when he chose to become a priest of the Society of Jesus, known as the Jesuits. This order is still known today for their rigorous spiritual discipline and high academic standards. Hopkins, an extremely intuitive introvert, found quickly enough that life as a parish priest in working class neighborhoods was more than he could manage. Although he was compassionate and deeply sincere in his faith, he was too shy and overly sensitive to cope with the horrors of his parishioners' everyday lives. In a private letter he commented on the fact that sitting in the confessional for hours on end and hearing confessions actually made him physically ill. Ultimately Hopkins suffered a nervous breakdown after being assigned as a professor of classics at University College Dublin. Part of the stress he experienced had to do with a conflict which he perceived between his vocation as priest and his artistic gift as poet. Matsuo Basho suffered the same crisis of vocation, feeling drawn both to the life of a poet and that of a Zen Buddhist priest. Basho referred to himself as a bat because a bat is an animal who can't decide whether it is a bird or a rodent. After great struggle, Basho remained solely a poet, never entering the priesthood. Hopkins partially resolved his crisis by remaining in the priesthood but returning to writing poetry, which he had given up when he entered the Society of Jesus.
Hopkins entered into an extended correspondence with Robert Bridges, later Poet Laureate of England, whom Hopkins had met at Oxford. Bridges wrote the kind of polite, reserved, metrically correct poetry that Victorians liked, and his poetry is rarely read today. Hopkins, in contrast, was an innovative experimenter of the highest order and was almost unknown as a poet during his own lifetime. Literary historians have trouble categorizing Hopkins because, although he lived his entire life during the Victorian Period, his highly creative style foreshadows the iconoclastic style of the Twentieth Century. For this reason, as I mentioned in Chapter 5, Hopkins is often referred to as the father of Modern poetry. I think he would have enjoyed this pun.
Hopkins was especially creative when working with the elements of poetry we are focusing on here-- diction, sound, imagery, etc. He also like to experiment with rhythm and form. Only about fifty of his poems remain, and most of these are Italian sonnets. (He burned several of his poems when he entered the priesthood, but he had enough sense to send copies to Bridges.) His letters to Bridges are filled with his theories about how to expand the parameters of the Italian sonnet, which he found confining. One of his innovations was sprung rhythm, a way of breaking out of the limitations of the iambic pentameter line by counting only the five stressed syllables and allowing any number of unstressed syllables. "The Windhover" is written in sprung rhythm. Hopkins also expanded the length of the Italian sonnet by adding codas to some of his poems. A coda (from the Latin word cauda, meaning tail), is an old device similar to an envoy. It is the addition of a few lines at the end of a poem as a sort of conclusion. Codas are also sometimes added to musical compositions. Milton added codas to some of his sonnets, as did some of the earlier sonnet writers. As the scholar W. H. Gardner observed of Hopkins, "He led poetry forward by taking it back." 1
With his scholarly personality, Hopkins was able to re-introduce several old techniques gathered from his research into English poetry, creating a fresh "new" effect. By pushing the limits of form, rhythm, and language, Hopkins set the stage for the free verse that took the Twentieth Century by storm. Hopkins died at the age of forty-five in 1889, leaving all of his poems in the possession of Robert Bridges. Bridges kept these poems for almost thirty years. Then in 1918, he arranged for them to be published and wrote in introduction to the First Edition of the Poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins. The tone of this preface is somewhat apologetic, since Hopkins' poems so flagrantly defy Victorian poetic standards.
These apologies were not necessary, however, because in 1918, the English Speaking world was ready for something vastly different from the poetry of Tennyson and the other Victorians, and Hopkins' poems were a huge success. Some of you may have chosen to analyze Hopkins' "The Windhover" when you were studying poetic form in Chapter 5. If you did, you were in crowded company. "The Windhover" has been second only to Shakespeare's sonnets in the volume of literary analysis it has inspired. One reason for "The Windhover's" fascination to scholars, of course, could be its complexity. It is also a wonderful poem to study for its diction and its sound devices. Try reading it using the ten step process you learned in Chapter 3 and notice how Hopkins has expanded the form of the Italian sonnet by using sprung rhythm.
The Windhover:
To Christ Our Lord
I caught this morning morning's minion, king-
dom of daylight's dauphin, dapple-dawn-drawn Falcon, in
his riding
Of the level underneath him steady air, and striding
High there, how he rung upon the rein of a wimpling wing
In his ecstasy! then off, off forth on swing,
As a skate's heel sweeps smooth on a bow-bend: the hurl and
gliding
Rebuffed the big wind. My heart in hiding
Stirred for a bird,--the achieve of, the mastery of the thing!
Brute beauty and valour and act, oh, air, pride, plume, here
Buckle! AND the fire that breaks from thee then, a billion
Times told lovelier, more dangerous, O my chevalier!
No wonder of it: sheer plod makes plough down sillion
Shine, and blue-bleak ember, ah my dear,
Fall, gall themselves, and gash gold-vermilion.
Those of you who may have analyzed this poem already are aware of Hopkins' unusual diction. For example, he makes extensive use of words of French origin, many of which suggest royalty. If you are not familiar with them, you will certainly want to look up the words "minion," "dauphin," and "chevalier." The title word "windhover" is interesting too. Hopkins seems to have coined this word, creating the image of one who hovers in the wind, referring to a small falcon which scholars have identified as a kestrel. The logic of grammar should have led Hopkins to call this bird the "windhoverer," but like Shakespeare, Hopkins liked to change the grammatical functions of words. Thus, the verb "to hover" becomes part of a noun, the "windhover."
Hopkins also liked to delete words, especially the articles "a" and "the," which have almost no meaning and create no imagery in English. Hopkins had the greatest respect for his reader's intellect, emotions, perceptions, and intuitive powers, and he trusted that the reader could figure out his meaning even if certain unpoetic words were omitted. Look, for example, at the phrase "...sheer plod makes plough down sillion/ shine,... ." In doing your research, you may have discovered that the word "sillion" refers to the raised area between furrows created by a plough. If we were to reconstruct this sentence grammatically, reinserting the articles that have been omitted, it might come out something like this: "Just plodding along makes a plough shine down a furrow." In the conclusion of this poem, after having described the majesty of the kestrel hovering, then swooping through the sky, Hopkins comes down to earth and focuses on two very ordinary events, plowing a field, and embers falling in a fireplace. Both of these events, says the speaker in the poem, also have their moment of raging glory. Light can flash out, reflecting off a plough as it is pushed through the earth, and pieces of burned firewood often fall in the hearth, breaking into little pieces and revealing the brilliant, "gold-vermilion" color under the charred surface. These powerful images of sudden light reinforce the breathtaking beauty of the falcon's magnificent swooping flight through the wind (compared to an ice skater's graceful sweeping curve), and affirms Hopkins' vision of nature, even at its most humble, as the reflection of divine glory.
Another way that Hopkins omits words that contribute only to syntax and further condenses his poetic diction is by using, and sometimes coining, compound words. I'm sure you noticed the triple alliterative compound "dapple-dawn-drawn," a phrase that creates powerful visual imagery as well as sound. "Bow-bend" and "blue-bleak" are also alliterative compounds that appeal to several of the senses. And they omit the kinds of unpoetic words that would have to be included in a more conventional phrase such as "the bend of a bow" or "embers that are blue and bleak."
Compound words are wonderful devices to use in poetry for the reasons I have just given. They can add rhythm or sound, especially alliteration, to a poetic line, and they are very descriptive. A compound will always add imagery to a poem. They also shorten and condense the poem, thus heightening its dramatic effect. You might want to re-read Hopkins' "Spring and Fall," which appears in Chapter 3. In this brief poem, Hopkins uses several interesting compound words which he coined himself. Coining, as you will remember, is making up a new word. This is a very creative aspect of poetry which can either enhance a poem or totally confuse the reader. If you decide to call a tree a "gobryck" in one of your poems, you will only succeed in annoying your reader, who will look the word "gobryck" up in the dictionary, find that it is not there, and feel betrayed. To be effective, a coined word has to contain some familiar element that will allow the reader to make an intuitive leap and grasp the new meaning you intend. Newly coined compound words are usually easy for the reader to comprehend. If the reader knows the meaning of the two words you combine, he or she can quickly grasp the meaning of the new word you have just coined. Hopkins' word "windhover" is an example of a coined compound. Read the first eight lines of "Spring and Fall" and see if you can find four more coined words:
Margaret, are you grieving
Over Goldengrove unleaving?
Leaves, like the things of man, you
With your fresh thoughts care for, can you?
Ah! as the heart grows older
It will come to such sights colder
By and by, nor spare a sigh
Though worlds of wanwood leafmeal lie;
Three of these coined words, "Goldengrove," "wanwood," and "leafmeal," are newly coined compounds. In this poem, the speaker addresses a girl named Margaret who is crying because all of the leaves are falling from the trees on an autumn day, and everything seems to be dying. In this context, it is easy for the reader to conclude that the alliterative compound "Goldengrove" refers to a grove of trees that has turned yellow in the fall. Similarly, the word "wanwood," also a coined alliterative compound, refers to the pale colors of trees in the autumn. Hopkins apparently coined the word "leafmeal" by analogy to the word "piecemeal." I've always loved the complex imagery evoked by the very condensed and highly alliterative phrase "worlds of wanwood leafmeal lie." I picture a vast expanse of woodland in which pale leaves are scattered haphazardly (piecemeal) all around.
Did you find the fourth coined word? It's a verb, "unleaving." In a stroke of genius, Hopkins made up this word to describe the process by which trees let go of their leaves. I believe that a careful reader could discern the meanings of all four of these coined words, and apparently Hopkins thought so too. Remember that Hopkins did not coin words just for the fun of playing word games and certainly not to trick his reader. He was always balancing rhythm, sound, imagery, and diction, trying to make all of these elements work together to capture the essence of the thing he was describing. He called this essence inscape.
Hopkins believed that every individual thing in the universe was unique and had a special quality of its own which he called its inscape. John Pick, author of A Hopkins Reader, describes Hopkins' concept of inscape as follows:
Instead of viewing the world as a scientist who classifies
and categorizes or as a philosopher who seeks universals,
Hopkins sees each thing as highly individualized and different
from all other things, so much so that each object is to him
almost a separate species and the world becomes an endless
catalogue of sharply individuated selves.2
To Hopkins, the inscapes of nature were not something to be observed with a distant objective eye. They were the source of passion and beauty in the world. Hopkins once wrote, "I thought you sadly beauty of inscape was unknown and buried away from simple people and yet how near at hand it was if they had eyes to see it."3 Hopkins himself was so sensitive to nature's inscapes that he suffered great pain when he observed environmental abuse by human beings. Once when he saw an ash tree being cut down, he wrote, "I wished to die and not see the inscapes of the world destroyed any more."4
Later, Hopkins began to apply the word inscape to works of art. He felt that all of the elements of artistic composition, whether a musical composition, a painting, or a poem, should work together to create a powerful, unique effect, unlike anything else in the universe. In a letter to Robert Bridges, Hopkins explained the unusualness of his own poetry in the context of art and inscape:
No doubt my poetry errs on the side of oddness. I hope in time
to have a more balanced and Miltonic style. But as air, melody
is what strikes me most of all in music and design in painting,
so design, pattern, or what I am in the habit of calling 'inscape'
is what I above all aim at in poetry.5
In this passage it is clear that Hopkins is aware that all of the elements of a poem need to work together to create the design or inscape of the finished work of art. In coining a word like "wanwood" Hopkins was trying to bring several elements into harmony-- the rhythm and sound of the poem, and his desire to describe to the reader the exact unique qualities--visual, tactile, etc., of fallen leaves. But ultimately, the poem itself has its own special inscape, not just the scene in nature he is trying to describe.
To help you process this idea of inscape, you might want to re-read Hopkins' "Pied Beauty," which appears in Chapter 3. This poem, which is filled with interesting compounds, is itself a celebration of all the unique inscapes of nature. You can also have a special section in your journal where you describe the various inscapes that capture your attention. Remember, as Hopkins himself pointed out, inscapes are all around you, if only you have eyes to see them. Developing a sensitivity to inscapes will take you a long way toward using imagery effectively in your poems.
Before we proceed to a more detailed discussion of imagery, I want to return briefly to compound words, which can add so much to the inscape of a poem. The Old English, or Anglo-Saxon language was filled with fascinating compound words such as "middle-earth," "boast-words," and "water-monster." Many of these wonderfully descriptive compounds, such as "earring," and "mankind," still remain in our language. But when the French conquered England in 1066, the language changed in many ways, and one unfortunate change (from a poet's perspective), was the replacement of many old descriptive compounds with French words that create far less imagery. For example, the Anglo-Saxon compound "leechcraft" was replaced with the "modern" French word "medicine," and the word "goldhoard" became "treasure"
The Anglo-Saxons also used a special kind of poetic compound called a kenning. A kenning is a descriptive compound which is substituted in poetry for its synonym. For example, in Anglo-Saxon poetry, the ocean is referred to as the "swan-road" or the "whale-road," and the human body is called the "life-house" or the "bone-house." It seems to me that the word "swan-road" does much more to capture the inscape of the sea than the word "ocean" does. And the word "life-house" goes so much further to convey the vitality and spiritual energy of a human being than the word "body." Some other favorite kennings from Anglo-Saxon poetry are "world-candle" for "sun," "wolf-slopes" for "hills," and "slaughter-shaft" for "spear." The old kenning "deathbed" is still part of our vocabulary today.
Hopkins actually uses the kenning "bone-house" in the poem "The Caged Skylark" which appears at the end of this chapter. You will recall that Hopkins "modernized" some elements of English poetry by re-introducing elements from much earlier literary periods. I think the kenning is an especially powerful poetic device, a sort of vividly condensed description, and I hope that it will never disappear from English poetry. Some scholars have also observed that Anglo-Saxon poetry, with its four-beat line, which can contain any number of unstressed syllables, was the prototype for Hopkins' sprung rhythm. John Pick believes that Hopkins developed sprung rhythm on his own and later read such Old English poems as Piers Plowman to reinforce his poetic theories.6 Whether he did so consciously, or as Jung might say, through the collective unconscious, Hopkins brought several of the most effective elements of Anglo-Saxon poetry, sprung rhythm, compound words, and kennings into the modern world, revitalizing the sound, diction, and imagery of English poetry. I hope this little journey with Gerard Manley Hopkins has given you some insights into the challenge each poet faces in trying to bring the diverse element of every poem into harmony, creating a fresh, unique inscape.
I have spoken several times of imagery as one of the key elements in a poem, and I am assuming that you remember this term from our discussion of Sappho's poetry in Chapter 1. At that time, I mentioned that imagery in poetry is the use of words to appeal to any of the senses. We also discussed the imagery in Shakespeare's Sonnet 73, "That Time of Year Thou Mayst in Me Behold" in some detail in Chapter 5. Imagery is a crucial element of poetry because it is through our senses that we gather information from our earliest days of infancy. Our senses are also the window to memory. Think of one of your favorite memories from one of the winter holidays-- Thanksgiving, Christmas, Hanukkah, The New Year, or Ramadan. Probably this memory is associated with the taste of food, the scent of winter foliage, the sounds of special music, the touch of cold, bracing winter air, or the visual beauty of candles, colorful gifts, decorations, and tables laid out with the special foods of the season. Art uses imagery to connect with shared human experiences and memories.
In the following poem, D.H. Lawrence uses simple but effective imagery to evoke memories of childhood. As you read this poem, notice that it does not just rely on visual imagery but on sound, touch, and temperature as well.
Piano
Softly, in the dusk, a woman is singing to me;
Taking me back down the vista of years, till I see
A child sitting under the piano, in the boom of the tingling strings
And pressing the small, poised feet of a mother who smiles as she
sings.
In spite of myself, the insidious mastery of song
Betrays me back, till the heart of me weeps to belong
To the old Sunday evenings at home, with winter outside
And hymns in the cozy parlour, the tinkling piano our guide.
So now it is in vain for the singer to burst into clamour
With the great black piano appassionato. The glamour
Of childish days is upon me, my manhood is cast
Down in the flood of remembrance, I weep like a child for the past.
Like most good poets, Lawrence resists the temptation to explain to his readers the meaning of life. Instead, he shares a small memory that communicates through the senses and through emotion one aspect of human experience. An interesting phenomenon of poetry is that poems grow larger than themselves, not through all the many words, ideas, and explanations inserted by the writer but through the thoughts, emotions, and memories that the reader brings to the poem. A poet can help the reader by stimulating all of the reader's senses, thus allowing the reader to respond more completely to the poem's inherent emotions and thoughts.
Traditionally, we think of human beings as having five senses: sight, sound, smell, taste, and touch. And in our ordinary lives, most of us rely far too heavily on sight, dismissing as inappropriate or embarrassing all of the information we could gather by smelling, tasting, or listening. In the everyday world, dogs go around sniffing things, but people don't. In poetry, no such lines of decorum apply, and we are liberated through art to experience the world as fully as our senses and imaginations will allow. Two aspects of the sense of touch that can be used very effectively in poetry are temperature and kinesthetics. In "Piano," for example, Lawrence refers to "winter outside" and the "cozy parlour," suggesting a contrast between the cold of the outside world and the warmth and security that he felt at home with his mother. Cold and warm are physical sensations, but they also have strong emotional and archetypal properties. Keats also evokes these dimensions in "The Eve of St. Agnes," which you read in Chapter 5. The cold of the outside world, including the hostility of Porphyro's enemies, is strongly contrasted with the warmth in Madeline's room and the depth of the young lover's passion.
In the following poem, the contemporary American poet Vera Nazarov uses the imagery of warmth and sunlight to express the speaker's longing for love. Notice also that the references to ice cream, sunflower seeds, salt, and mint stimulate the reader's sense of taste and smell.
myth
"if i was a londoner, rich with complaint,
would you take me back to your house
which is sainted with lust and the listless shade?"
--Tanita Tikaram
on sundays
in east san jose
the sun is harsh on the backs
of the dark-eyed men
--shirtless
hips listless in denim--
as they lean over their cars
like lovers
songs i can't understand
tumble like water
out of car stereos
and the slow ice cream trucks
tinkle like leaves,
calling to the sun-bright children.
*
i sit on the porch,
eat sunflower seeds
until my lip swells with salt,
drink cold mint tea,
and dream of a man
with hair like burning gold,
eyes as pale as a winter ocean...
pale as the skin of my thighs...
hands warm
as the seldom-come rain.
Nazarov also refers to men "as they lean over their cars." This is a kinesthetic image. Kinesthetics refers to physical motion, especially the movement of the muscles in the body. By using kinesthetic imagery, the poet can physically involve the reader in the poem. Other elements, such as rhythm and sound, can help create a kinesthetic effect. In a poem entitled "The Dance," the American poet William Carlos Williams describes a painting by Peter Brueghel the Elder, a Flemish painter who lived from 1520 to 1569. The painting depicts a kermess, a Dutch festival which included feasting, games, and dancing. In the poem, Williams uses a rollicking rhythm, enjambment, and many verbs ending in "ing" to create the lively, ongoing rhythmic simulation of the dance. As you read the poem, notice how your body begins to respond to the movement.
The Dance
In Brueghel's great picture, The Kermess,
the dancers go round, they go round and
around, the squeal and the blare and the
tweedle of bagpipes, a bugle and fiddles
tipping their bellies (sound as the thick-
sided glasses whose wash they impound)
their hips and their bellies off balance
to turn them. Kicking and rolling about
the Fair Grounds, swinging their butts, those
shanks must be sound to bear up under such
rollicking measures, prance as they dance
in Brueghel's great picture, The Kermess.
Theodore Roethke uses a similar technique in "My Papa's Waltz." Using form, rhythm, and rhyme, he creates the repetitious, jerky movements of a child dancing with a large, inebriated adult.
My Papa's Waltz
The whiskey on your breath
Could make a small boy dizzy;
But I hung on like death:
Such waltzing was not easy.
We romped until the pans
Slid from the kitchen shelf;
My mother's countenance
Could not unfrown itself.
The hand that held my wrist
Was battered on one knuckle;
At every step you missed
My right ear scraped a buckle.
You beat time on my head
With a palm caked hard by dirt,
Then waltzed me off to bed
Still clinging to your shirt.
I studied this poem when I was in college, and it was presented by my professor as a lively, amusing poem about a loving relationship between a father and a son. Recently, a group of students in my poetry class chose to analyze this poem, and they concluded that it was about an abusive relationship in a dysfunctional alcoholic family. They used the phrases "whiskey on your breath," "hung on like death," "not easy," "battered on one knuckle," "My right ear scraped a buckle," and "You beat time on my head" to argue that the drunken father was actually frightening and inflicting pain on the son who was forced to pretend that this alcohol-induced encounter was a "normal" expression of fatherly affection. These two contrasting interpretations, of course, reflect changing values and levels of awareness in American culture. It seems to me that both interpretations have their own validity based on the elements in the poem itself and the perceptions and emotions that the reader brings to the poem.
In addition to evoking memories, archetypes, and physical and emotional experiences, imagery can be a way of sharing information in a poem. In everyday life, we learn by looking and listening, and the same is true in poetry. Imagery in the form of description can take us to far away places we have never visited and teach us about things we have not known before. Imaginative imagery can even create a world of fantasy and make it real for us.
In a very famous poem "Mending Wall," Robert Frost takes us to rural New England, a place where many of us have never been, and teaches us how to mend an old stone wall between two farms. Along the way he give us food for thought about why people think they need walls in the first place. Notice how Frost combines narrative, dialogue, and descriptive imagery in this simple, yet compelling poem:
Mending Wall
Something there is that doesn't love a wall,
That sends the frozen-ground-swell under it
And spills the upper boulders in the sun,
And makes gaps even two can pass abreast.
The work of hunters is another thing:
I have come after them and made repair
Where they have left not one stone on a stone,
But they would have the rabbit out of hiding,
To please the yelping dogs. The gaps I mean,
No one has seen them made or heard them made,
But at spring mending-time we find them there.
I let my neighbor know beyond the hill;
And on a day we meet to walk the line
And set the wall between us once again.
We keep the wall between us as we go.
To each the boulders that have fallen to each.
And some are loaves and some so nearly balls
We have to use a spell to make them balance:
"Stay where you are until our backs are turned!"
We wear our fingers rough with handling them.
Oh, just another kind of outdoor game,
One on a side. It comes to little more:
There where it is we do not need the wall:
He is all pine and I am apple orchard.
My apple trees will never get across
And eat the cones under his pines, I tell him.
He only says, "Good fences make good neighbors."
Spring is the mischief in me, and I wonder
If I could put a notion in his head:
"Why do they make good neighbors? Isn't it
Where there are cows? But here there are no cows.
Before I built a wall I'd ask to know
What I was walling in or walling out,
And to whom I was like to give offense.
Something there is that doesn't love a wall,
That wants it down." I could say "Elves" to him,
But it's not elves exactly, and I'd rather
He said it for himself. I see him there,
Bringing a stone grasped firmly by the top
In each hand, like an old-stone savage armed.
He moves in darkness as it seems to me,
Not of woods only and the shade of trees.
He will not go behind his father's saying,
And he likes having thought of it so well
He says again, "Good fences make good neighbors."
Another poet who uses imagery very effectively by writing in a plain conversational style and describing the most ordinary scenes and events with remarkable accuracy is Elizabeth Bishop. Like Frost, Bishop also has a knack for narrative, and she encourages the reader to find meaning in life's everyday events. You will recall the fascinating descriptive details in her poem "Filling Station," which appears in Chapter 4. In "The Fish," you will learn quite a bit about fishing, but you will discover even more about compassion and the dignity of life.
The Fish
I caught a tremendous fish
and held him beside the boat
half out of water, with my hook
fast in the corner of his mouth.
He didn't fight.
He hadn't fought at all.
He hung a grunting weight,
battered and venerable
and homely. Here and there
his brown skin hung in strips
like ancient wallpaper,
and its pattern of darker brown
was like wallpaper:
shapes like full-blown roses
stained and lost through age.
He was speckled with barnacles,
fine rosettes of lime,
and infested
with tiny white sea-lice,
and underneath two or three
rags of green weed hung down.
While the gills were breathing in
the terrible oxygen
--the frightening gills,
fresh and crisp with blood,
that can cut so badly--
I thought of the coarse white flesh
packed in like feathers,
the big bones and the little bones,
the dramatic reds and blacks
of his shiny entrails,
and the pink swim-bladder
like a big peony.
I looked into his eyes
which were far larger than mine
but shallower, and yellowed,
the iris backed and packed
with tarnished tinfoil
seen through the lenses
of old scratched isinglass.
They shifted a little, but not
to return my stare.
--It was more like the tipping
of an old object toward the light.
I admired his sullen face,
the mechanism of his jaw,
and then I saw
that from his lip
--if you could call it a lip--
grim, wet, and weaponlike,
hung five old pieces of fish-line,
or four and a wire leader
with the swivel still attached,
with all their five big hooks
grown firmly in his mouth.
A green line, frayed at the end
where he broke it, two heavier lines,
and a fine black thread
still crimped from the strain and snap
where it broke and he got away.
Like medals with their ribbons
frayed and wavering,
a five-haired beard of wisdom
trailing from his aching jaw.
I stared and stared
and victory filled up
the little rented boat,
from the pool of bilge
where oil had spread a rainbow
around the rusted engine
to the bailer rusted orange,
the sun-cracked thwarts,
the oarlocks on their strings,
the gunnels--until everything
was rainbow, rainbow, rainbow!
And I let the fish go.
I believe that all of the poems that I have offered you in this chapter are good poems because they make effective use of diction, sound, and imagery, and they succeed in sharing some human emotion or thought with the reader. Some are certainly easier to understand than others, and some are probably better poems that others. I cautioned you at the very beginning of this book not to dwell on judging a poem's value but to try to appreciate every poem, including your own, for what it has to offer. But now, perhaps it's time to begin to evaluate poetry, not with the goal of harshly pointing out everything that is wrong with a poem, but to affirm what a poem does well. The checklist below summarizes much of what you have already learned. As you read it through, think about the poems that you have already read, and as you read the additional poems at the end of this chapter, apply this checklist to each poem, looking for the qualities that make each poem succeed.
CHECKLIST QUALITIES THAT CHARACTERIZE A GOOD POEM
1. Has the poet structured the poem so that each part or section seems to contribute to and harmonize with the poem's over-all effect?
2. Is the poem as short as it can possibly be to achieve its most powerful effect, or does it seem to go on too long, perhaps containing confusing ideas or too much repetition?
3. Has the poet made effective use of diction, including the connotations of words?
4. Do the sounds in the poem help achieve the poet's purpose and contribute to the poem's final effect?
5. Does the imagery in the poem appeal powerfully to the reader's senses and support the poem's meaning? If the poem is descriptive, does the poet capture the inscape of the thing he or she is describing?
6. If the poem contains an epigraph or allusions, do they contribute additional meaning to the poem, or do they detract from the poem's effectiveness?
7. Does the poet avoid plagiarism and literary cannibalism?
8. Does the poet avoid too much explanation, thus allowing the reader to make his or her own response to the poem?
9. Does the title contribute to the reader's understanding and appreciation of the poem?
10. After several reading, is the poem's meaning accessible to the reader?
11. Does the poem share with the reader some meaningful aspect of the human experience?
12. Is the poem interesting, thought provoking, stimulating, and fresh?
NOTES
CHAPTER 7
1. John Pick, ed., Gerard Manley Hopkins The Windhover, p. 1.
2. John Pick, ed., A Hopkins Reader, p. 19-20.
3. A Hopkins Reader, p. 20
4. A Hopkins Reader, p. 20
5. A Hopkins Reader, p. 149-150.
6. A Hopkins Reader, p. 24
QUESTIONS AND TOPICS FOR REVIEW
1. Why are diction, sound devices, and imagery important elements of poetry?
2. Who were the New Critics, and which aspects of poetry did they value most?
3. Define the terms connotation and denotation.
4. What are some of the levels of diction in which a poet can choose to write?
5. Define the term etymology and explain how etymology can be used effectively in writing poetry.
6. Explain the etymologies of the words "beastly" and "bourgeois."
7. Define a provide several examples of alliteration.
8. Define the terms simile and metaphor and provide an example of each.
9. Define the following terms and provide an example of each from the poetry you have read:
euphony
cacophony
assonance
onomatopoeia
synesthesia
10. What is a coda?
11. Explain Hopkins' concept of sprung rhythm, illustrating your explanation with examples.
12. What were some of Hopkins' innovations in the use of diction?
13. In what ways did Anglo-Saxon poetry influence Hopkins?
14. Define Hopkins' theory of inscape and provide examples.
15. What is a kenning? Give several examples.
16. Exactly what is imagery in poetry?
17. Define kinesthetic imagery and provide several examples.
18. What are some of the characteristics of good poetry?
TOPICS FOR DISCUSSION
1. Discuss the elements of poetry that D.H. Lawrence uses to communicate his theme in "How Beastly the Bourgeois Is."
2. What kinds of imagery does Crane use in "The Impact of a Dollar" to depict the contrast between the impact of a dollar and the impact of a million dollars?
3. Discuss the sound devices in Yeats' "The Lake Isle of Innisfree."
4. Discuss the diction in Hopkins' "The Windhover."
5. What are the advantages of using compound words in poetry?
6. What are the advantages and disadvantages of using coined words in poetry?
7. Discuss the advantages and disadvantages of writing bi-lingual poetry or poetry in dialect.
8. Discuss the epigraph in Vera Nazarov's poem "Myth." What is the relationship between the epigraph and the poem?
9. Discuss the two interpretations of Roethke's "My Papa's Waltz" given in this chapter. Then discuss which interpretation seems most plausible to you and why.
10. Discuss the possible social and political interpretations of Frost's "Mending Wall."
11. Discuss the imagery in Bishop's "The Fish." What is the poem's theme? Why did the speaker in the poem let the fish go?
ACTIVITIES
1. Choose a poem from any chapter in this book which you consider to be a good poem. Be prepared to explain to your classmates which of the characteristics of good poetry this poem possesses. This activity can be done in pairs or in small groups, and each group can report back to the larger group on the characteristics of the poem they have chosen.
2. Working in pairs or in small groups, choose any poem from this chapter and focus on its diction, especially denotation, connotation, etymologies, and level of diction. Then report back to the group on the significance of diction on the poem's overall effect.
3. Working in pairs or in small groups, select any poem in this chapter and analyze the sound devices used in the poem. Report your findings to the larger group.
4. Using the material which appears in the poem itself, organize a debate between the two farmers who appear in Frost's "Mending Wall," focusing on whether or not the wall should be repaired, removed, or allowed to fall down. Select two members of the class to play the two farmers.
5. Organize a debate between the speaker in "How Beastly the Bourgeois Is" and a member of the British middle class.
6. Organize a debate between the speaker in "The Impact of a Dollar" and someone who is or aspires to be a millionaire. These debates, of course, are dramatizations, and must be based on the material given in the poems themselves.
7. Working in pairs or in small groups, prepare a discussion of any poem of your choice focusing on how the various aspects of the poem, form, genre, diction, sound, imagery, etc., work together to communicate the poet's message.
ANALYTICAL WRITING ASSIGNMENTS
1. Compare and contrast Hopkins' "The Windhover" and Shelley's "To a Sky-Lark," which appears in Chapter 4. Focus on theme and imagery in these two poems.
2. Compare and contrast Frost's "Mending Wall" and Bishop's "The Fish," focusing on diction and imagery.
3. Compare and contrast Williams' "The Dance" and Roethke's "My Papa's Waltz," focusing on form, rhythm, and sound devices.
4. Explicate Frost's "Mending Wall."
5. Analyze Bishop's "The Fish," focusing on diction and imagery. Use your dictionary to look up any boating or fishing terminology that may be unfamiliar to you.
6. Compare and contrast the Chorus from Antigone in Chapter 6 and Matthew Arnold's "Dover Beach," focusing on imagery and theme.
7. Analyze the diction in Hopkins' "The Starlight Night," focusing on kennings, compounds, and coined words. How does the diction in the poem support the inscapes and the theme Hopkins is trying to communicate?
8. Analyze the sound devices in Hopkins' "The Caged Skylark."
9. Explicate Hopkins' "Carrion Comfort."
10. Research the use of the coda in poetry. Then analyze Hopkins' "That Nature is a Heraclitean Fire and of the Comfort of the Resurrection" as an extended Italian sonnet with a coda.
11. Analyze the diction, focusing on the use of dialect, in Langston Hughes' "Fire."
12. Select any poem in this chapter and analyze it, focusing on diction, sound devices, or imagery.
13. Select any poem in this chapter which you consider to be a good poem and analyze it, explaining which elements or characteristics make it a good poem.
1.CREATIVE WRITING ASSIGNMENTS
1. Select a poem that you have previously written and revise this poem focusing on diction. Your goal is to make your revision shorter than the original and even more effective in its impact on the reader.
2. Using your journal, describe several inscapes that fascinate you. Then select one of these inscapes and use it as the basis of a poem focusing primarily on imagery.
3. Write a poem using primarily visual imagery. Then re-write the poem three times, focusing first on auditory imagery (sounds), secondly on tactile imagery (touch), and thirdly on gustatory and olfactory imagery (taste and smell.) Then revise the poem once more, incorporating the most effective elements of the various types of imagery.
4. Make a list of compound words in your journal. Then incorporate some of these compound words into a poem.
5. Write a poem using at least two coined words. Take turns reading these poems in class to see if the members of the class can discern the meanings of the coined words. This assignment requires a bit of risk taking. Please agree not to make fun of each other if the newly coined words fail to communicate. Think of this assignment as an experiment.
6. Write a poem using alliteration and assonance.
7. If you are familiar with a dialect other than Standard English, write a poem in that dialect.
8. If you know another language in addition to English, write a bi-lingual poem.
9. Write a poem using onomatopoeia.
10. In your journal make a list of contemporary kennings. Then write a poem in which one or more of these kennings appear.
11. In your journal make a list of all the images that you associate with a special holiday. Be sure to use all of your senses. Then write a poem based on these images.
ADDITIONAL POEMS FOR READING AND ANALYSIS FOCUSING ON DICTION, SOUND, AND IMAGERY
WALT WHITMAN
America 1819-1892
Cavalry Crossing a Ford
A line in long array where they wind betwixt green islands,
They make a serpentine course, their arms flash in the sun--hark to
the musical clank,
Behold the silvery river, in it the splashing horses loitering stop to
drink,
Behold the brown-faced men, each group, each person a picture, the
negligent rest on the saddles,
Some emerge on the opposite bank, others are just entering the ford
---while,
Scarlet and blue and snowy white,
The guidon flags flutter gayly in the wind.
A Prairie Sunset
Shot gold, maroon and violet, dazzling silver, emerald, fawn,
The earth's whole amplitude and Nature's multiform power consign'd
for once to colors;
The light, the general air posses'd by them--colors till now
unknown,
No limit, confine--not the Western sky alone--the high meridian--
North, south, all,
Pure luminous color fighting the silent shadows to the last.
MATTHEW ARNOLD
England 1822-1888
The sea is calm tonight.
The tide is full, the moon lies fair
Upon the straits;--on the French coast the light
Gleams and is gone; the cliffs of England stand,
Glimmering and vast, out in the tranquil bay.
Come to the window, sweet is the night-air!
Only, from the long line of spray
Where the sea meets the moon-blanched land,
Listen! you hear the grating roar
Of pebbles which the waves draw back, and fling,
At their return, up the high strand,
Begin, and cease, and then again begin,
With tremulous cadence slow, and bring
The eternal note of sadness in.
Sophocles* long ago
Heard to on the Aegean, and it brought
Into his mind the turbid ebb and flow
Of human misery; we
Find also in the sound a thought,
Hearing it by this distant northern sea.
The Sea of Faith
Was once, too, at the full, and round earth's shore
Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furled.
But now I only hear
Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,
Retreating, to the breath
Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear
And naked shingles of the world.
Ah, love, let us be true
To one another! for the world, which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight
Where ignorant armies clash by night.
* See the Chorus from Antigone in Chapter 6.
GERARD MANLEY HOPKINS
England 1844-1889
The Starlight Night
Look at the stars! look, look up at the skies!
O look at all the fire-folk sitting in the air!
The bright boroughs, the circle-citadels there!
Down in dim woods the diamond delves! the elves'-eyes!
The grey lawns cold where gold, where quickgold lies!
Wind-beat whitebeam! airy abeles set on a flare!
Flake-doves set floating forth at a farmyard scare!
Ah well! it is all a purchase, all is a prize.
Buy then! bid then!--What?--Prayer, patience, alms, vows.
Look, look: a May-mess, like on orchard boughs!
Look! March-bloom, like on mealed-with-yellow sallows!
These are indeed the barn; withindoors house
The shocks. This piece-bright paling shuts the spouse
Christ home, Christ and his mother and all his hallows.
The Caged Skylark
As a dare-gale skylark scanted in a dull cage
Man's mounting spirit in his bone-house, mean house,
dwells--
That bird beyond the remembering his free fells;
This in drudgery, day-labouring-out life's age.
Though aloft on turf or perch or poor low stage,
Both sing sometimes the sweetest, sweetest spells,
Yet both droop deadly sometimes in their cells
Or wring their barriers in bursts of fear or rage.
Not that the sweet-fowl, song-fowl, needs no rest--
Why, hear him, hear him babble and drop down to his nest,
But his own nest, wild nest, no prison.
Man's spirit will be flesh-bound when found at best
But uncumbered: meadow-down is not distressed
For a rainbow footing it nor he for his bones risen.
Carrion Comfort
Not, I'll not, carrion comfort, Despair, not feast on thee;
Not untwist--slack they may be--these last strands of man
In me or most weary, cry I can no more. I can;
Can something, hope, wish day come, not choose not to be.
But ah, but O thou terrible, why wouldst thou rude on me
Thy wring-world right foot rock? lay a lionlimb against me?
scan
With darksome devouring eyes my bruised bones? and fan,
O in turns of tempest, me heaped there; me frantic to avoid
thee and flee?
Why? That my chaff might fly; my grain lie, sheer and
clear.
Nay in all that toil, that coil since (seems) I kissed the rod,
Hand rather, my heart lo! lapped strength, stole joy, would
laugh, cheer.
Cheer whom though? the hero whose heaven-handling flung
me, foot trod
Me? or me that fought him? O which one? is it each one?
That night, that year
Of now done darkness I wretch lay wrestling with (my
God!) my God.
That Nature is a Heraclitean Fire and of the
Comfort of the Resurrection
Cloud-puffball, torn tufts, tossed pillows flaunt forth, then
chevy on an air-
built thoroughfare: heaven -roysterers, in gay-gangs they
throng; they glitter in marches.
Down roughcast, down dazzling whitewash, wherever an
elm arches,
Shivelights and shadowtackle in long lashes lace, lance, and
pair.
Delightfully the bright wind boisterous ropes, wrestles, beats
earth bare
Of yestertempest's creases; in pool and rut peel parches
Squandering ooze to squeezed dough, crust, dust; stanches,
starches
Squadroned masks and manmarks treadmire toil there
Footfretted in it. Million-fueled, nature's bonfire burns on.
But quench her bonniest, dearest to her, her clearest-selved
spark
Man, how fast his firedint, his mark on mind, is gone!
Both are in a unfathomable, all is in an enormous dark
Drowned. O pity and indignation! Manshape, that shone
Sheer off, disseveral, a star, death blots black out; nor mark
Is any of him at all so stark
But vastness blurs and time beats level. Enough! the
Resurrection,
A heart's clarion! Away grief's gasping, joyless days, de-
jection.
Across my foundering deck shone
A beacon, and eternal beam. Flesh face, and mortal trash
Fall to the residuary worm; world's wildfire, leave but ash:
In a flash, at a trumpet crash,
I am all at once what Christ is, since he was what I am, and
This Jack, joke, poor potsherd, patch, matchwood, immortal
diamond,
Is immortal diamond.
AKIKO YOSANO
Japan (1878-1942)
Labor Pains
I am sick today,
sick in my body,
eyes wide open, silent,
I lie on the bed of childbirth.
Why do I,
so used to the nearness of death,
to pain and blood and screaming,
now uncontrollably tremble with dread?
A nice young doctor tried to comfort me,
and talked about the joy of giving birth.
Since I know better than he about this matter,
what good purpose can his prattle serve?
Knowledge is not reality.
Experience belongs to the past.
Let those who lack immediacy be silent.
Let observers be content to observe.
I am all alone,
totally, utterly, entirely on my own,
gnawing my lips, holding my body rigid,
waiting on inexorable fate.
There is only one truth.
I shall give birth to a child,
truth driving outward from my inwardness.
Neither good nor bad; real, no sham about it.
With the first labor pains,
suddenly the sun goes pale.
The indifferent world goes strangely calm.
I am alone.
It is alone I am.
Translated by Kenneth Rexroth and Ikuko Atsumi
LANGSTON HUGHES
America (1902-1967)
Fire
Fire,
Fire, Lord!
Fire gonna burn ma soul!
I ain't been good,
I ain't been clean--
I been stinkin', low-down, mean.
Fire,
Fire, Lord!
Fire gonna burn ma soul!
Tell me, brother,
Do you believe
If you wanta go to heaben
Got to moan an' grieve?
Fire,
Fire, Lord!
Fire gonna burn ma soul!
I been stealin',
Been tellin'lies,
Had more women
Than Pharaoh had wives.
Fire,
Fire, Lord!
Fire gonna burn ma soul!
I means Fire, Lord!
Fire gonna burn ma soul!
STEVIE SMITH
England 1902-1971
Not Waving But Drowning
Nobody heard him, the dead man,
But still he lay moaning:
I was much further out than you thought
And not waving but drowning.
Poor chap, he always loved larking
And now he's dead
It must have been too cold for him his heart gave way,
They said.
Oh, no no no, it was too cold always
(Still the dead one lay moaning)
I was much too far out all my life
And not waving but drowning.
MAY SARTON
America (1914-1995)
December Moon
Before going to bed
After a fall of snow
I look out on the field
Shining there in the moonlight
So calm, untouched and white
Snow silence fills my head
After I leave the window.
Hours later near dawn
When I look down again
The whole landscape has changed
The perfect surface gone
Criss-crossed and written on
Where the wild creatures ranged
While the moon rose and shone.
Why did my dog not bark?
Why did I hear no sound?
There on the snow-locked ground
In the tumultuous dark?
How much can come, how much can go
When the December moon is bright,
What worlds of play we'll never know
Sleeping away the cold white night
After a fall of snow.
GARY SNYDER
America (Born, 1930)
Before the Stuff Comes Down
Walking out of the "big E"*
Dope store of the suburb,
canned music plugging up your ears
the wide aisles,
miles of wares
from nowheres,
Suddenly it's California:
Live oak, brown grasses
Butterflies over the parking lot and the freeway
A Turkey Buzzard power in the blue air.
A while longer,
Still here.
* The Emporium, a large department store in northern California
FINDING THE POET
CHAPTER 8 ELEMENTS OF POETRY-- TONE, FIGURES OF SPEECH, AND SYMBOLISM
We continue our journey into some of the more subtle and complex aspects of poetry, tone, figures of speech, and symbolism. We are no longer beginners, and in learning to discern and interpret these elements, we will ultimately derive an even deeper appreciation of some of the world's great poems. But first, we will look at several poems of varying quality focusing on tone.
In poetry, tone refers to the poet's attitude toward the material being presented in the poem. A poem's tone might be humorous, sarcastic, didactic, apologetic, sorrowful, joyful, reverent, contemptuous, ironic, serious, light, or any of an almost infinite number of possible attitudes. We might describe the tone of the following poem by Dorothy Parker as whimsical:
On Being a Woman
Why is it, when I am in Rome,
I'd give my eye to be at home,
But when on native earth I be,
My soul is sick for Italy?
And why with you, my love, my lord,
Am I spectacularly bored,
Yet do you up and leave me--then
I scream to have you back again?
Dorothy Parker was famous in the 1920s and 30s for writing humorous, witty poems about sophisticated city people. Although the reader may smile or laugh at her poems, her tone also has a bite. On a deeper level, she is satirizing the selfishness and shallowness of human beings, especially in their treatment of the opposite sex. This secondary and more serious level of satire is apparent in this sonnet about the end of a relationship:
Sonnet For the End of a Sequence
So take my vows and scatter them to sea;
Who swears the sweetest is no more than human.
And say no kinder words than these of me:
"Ever she longed for peace, but was a woman!
And thus they are, whose silly female dust
Needs little enough to clutter it and bind it,
Who meet a slanted gaze, and ever must
Go build themselves a soul to dwell behind it."
For now I am my own again, my friend!
This scar but points the whiteness of my breast;
This frenzy, like its betters, spins an end,
And now I am my own. And that is best.
Therefore, I am immeasurably grateful
To you, for proving shallow, false, and hateful.
The haiku master Basho also used humor sometimes, but his tone lacks the bitter edge discernible in Parker's poetry. Instead of jabbing at other human beings, Basho gently mocks himself:
I took a kimono off
To feel lighter
Only putting it in the load
On my back.
Translated by Nobuyuki Yuasa
This self-deprecating tone is common in Zen poetry and art since one of the teachings of Zen Buddhism is that the human ego, especially when it strives for perfection, is a source of suffering for everyone. Basho's poetry is appreciated in Japan, not just for its aesthetic excellence, but also as a medium for Zen meditation. The following poem also has a tone of humorous self-satire:
Had I crossed the pass
Supported by a stick,
I would have spared myself
The fall from the horse.
Translated by Nobuyuki Yuasa
Kobayashi Issa, whose poems you read in Chapter 4, was also a haiku poet and a devout Buddhist, but not of the Zen sect. Issa's poems often express a highly sarcastic tone aimed at the samurai and the hypocritical Buddhists of his day, all of whom he detested.
For each single fly
that's swatted, "Namu Amida
Butsu" is the cry.
Translated by Harold Henderson
In the Buddhist tradition, any form of killing, even of insects, is considered immoral. In this poem, Issa satirizes a family of self-righteous Buddhists who assuage their own consciences after killing flies by offering the all-purpose prayer, to the Buddha, "Namu Amida Butsu." Issa also resented the fact that ordinary people (like himself) had to get off their horses and crouch by the side of the road as a sign of respect when a daimyo, a samurai military leader, rode by. The following haiku expresses his contempt for the samurai's arrogant self-importance:
A daimyo!--And who
makes him get off his horse?
Cherry blossoms do!
Translated by Harold Henderson
Issa's tone reminds me a little of William Blake in "Songs of Experience," when he bitterly satirizes the self-righteous hypocrites of Eighteenth Century England. You might want to review "Holy Thursday," which appears in Chapter 4. In comparing these two poets, however, I think that Issa's tone contains a much stronger dose of humor than Blake's.
An element which can help a poet control the tone of a poem is point of view. As you know, point of view refers to the way in which the reader is allowed to see and hear what is being presented in the poem. In first person point of view, a speaker presents the information in the poem in his or her own voice. This person may be a persona who has been created by the poet, like a character in a short story. We discussed this concept in Chapter 4 when we compared "Daddy" by Sylvia Plath, written in the poet's own voice, to "The Chimney Sweeper" by William Blake, written in the voice of a child of Blake's creation.
In the following poem, Edwin Arlington Robinson communicates to the reader in the first person point of view through a persona:
Richard Cory
Whenever Richard Cory went down town,
We people on the pavement looked at him:
He was a gentleman from sole to crown,
Clean favored, and imperially slim.
And he was always quietly arrayed,
And he was always human when he talked;
But still he fluttered pulses when he said,
"Good morning," and he glittered when he walked.
And he was rich--yes, richer than a king--
And admirably schooled in every grace:
In fine, we thought that he was everything
To make us wish that we were in his place.
So we worked on, and waited for the light,
And went without the meat, and cursed the bread;
And Richard Cory, one calm summer night,
Went home and put a bullet through his head.
The dramatic conclusion of this poem comes as a surprise to the reader because the persona who describes Richard Cory does so in very superficial terms, admiring him for his good looks, his wealth, and his power. The speaker, who identifies with the blue collar workers in the town, does not know anything about Richard Cory's heart and soul. If the poem had been written from Richard's point of view just before his suicide, he probably would not have focused on how handsome he was and all the prestige and money he enjoyed. In selecting a narrator who expresses such superficial values, Robinson is able to use irony to satirize American values.
One of the most difficult aspects of reading poetry is trying to determine whether a poet is writing in his or her own voice or using a persona. To be honest, sometimes only the poet knows. If a poet chooses to write in the first person point of view without a persona, it is possible to establish a very intimate and honest relationship with the reader, as my former student, Lorna Dee Cervantes does in the following poem:
Mexico City: Spring
There is a city built in green,
a praying mantis city,
a city with claws,
where some eat
and the city eats all.
To walk in the streets is to bleed.
Pobres! Pobres!*
With palms extended
they cast their hooks.
I am picked cold.
I sit in the plazas and bleed.
I drink my twelve peso wine
and it spatters out from these holes.
Mi compadres all get drunk
while I drown in the sound of blood.
"Mexico City"
they say,
"is a good time."
as the pobres pass
with an ounce of my flesh
in their hands.
Mexico City;
spring.
* In Spanish, pobres means "the poor ones." Mi compadres--my friends.
In this poem Cervantes effectively communicates to the reader the agony she felt in Mexico City surrounded on one side by those who were living in horrible poverty and on the other by her insensitive traveling companions who just wanted to party. Because she speaks directly to the reader in her own voice, only the reader understands her pain.
Sometimes even when the poet appears to be speaking in the first person in his or her own voice, there can be additional levels of complexity in tone and point of view. Read the following poem by Leslie Marmon Silko carefully, paying close attention to the voice of the speaker.
Where the Mountain Lion Lay
Down with the Deer
I climb the black rock mountain
stepping from day to day
silently.
I smell the wind for my ancestors
pale blue leaves
crushed wild mountain smell.
Returning
up the gray stone cliff
where I descended
a thousand years ago.
Returning to faded black stone.
where mountain lion lay down with deer.
It is better to stay up here
watching the wind's reflection
in tall yellow flowers.
The old ones who remember me are gone
the old songs are all forgotten
and the story of my birth.
How I danced in snow-frost moonlight
distant stars to the end of the Earth,
How I swam away
in freezing mountain water
narrow mossy canyon tumbling down
out of the mountain
out of the deep canyon stone
down
the memory
spilling out
into the world.
In this poem the voice of the poet evolves into the mythic and historic voice of her Native American ancestors, traveling over distances in time and space. Many poets, including Milton, Blake, and Yeats have spoken in mythic or prophetic voices, sharing a vision for the whole culture.
It takes a skillful poet to speak in a prophetic voice. Someone who lacks Yeats' powers with language, tone, and archetype might simply come off as an egomaniac. Whatever voice the poet chooses to write in, he or she must always be sensitive to tone. If the speaker is overly arrogant, too opinionated, sexist, or bigoted, and the poet is not intending to create an ironic tone, he or she can certainly lose the reader's sympathy. Browning's use of the arrogant narrator in "My Last Duchess," which you read in Chapter 6, was very effective because the poet intended an ironic contrast between the grotesque egotism of the Duke and the gentle kindness and sensitivity of the Duchess. On the other hand, some readers might think that D.H. Lawrence, apparently speaking in his own voice, was too opinionated in "How Beastly the Bourgeois Is," which you read in the previous chapter. The American scholar John Ciardi referred to the relationship between poet and reader based on the tone of the poem as "the sympathetic contract." He explained this relationship as follows:
Every poem makes some demand upon the reader's sympathies.
In addressing his subject, the poet takes an attitude toward
it and adopts a tone he believes to be appropriate. His sense
of what is appropriate, either in tone or in attitude, is of
course a question of values. As such, it is obviously basic to
the effect of the poem upon the reader. The reader may be right
or wrong in disagreeing with the poet's values, but once such a
disagreement has occurred, that poem has failed for that reader.1
Ciardi cited "Invictus," written in 1875 by William Ernest Henley, as an example of a poem which breaks the sympathetic contract. In fact, Ciardi referred to "Invictus" (which means "unconquered" in Latin), as "the most widely known bad poem in English."2
Invictus
Out of the night that covers me,
Black as the pit from pole to pole,
I thank whatever gods may be
For my unconquerable soul.
In the fell clutch of circumstance
I have not winced nor cried aloud.
Under the blugeoning of Chance
My head is bloody by unbowed.
Beyond this place of wrath and tears
Looms but the Horror of the shade,
And yet the menace of the years
Finds, and shall find, me unafraid.
It matters not how strait the gate,
How charged with punishment the scroll.
I am the master of my fate;
I am the captain of my soul.
According to Ciardi, this poem is not bad because of any technical flaw or because of its subject matter. It fails, in Ciardi's opinion, because of its tone:
One feels that Henley is not really reacting from his own
profoundest depths but that he is making some sort of
over-dramatic speech about pessimism. There is a failure
of character in the tone he has assumed. The poet has
presented himself as unflinchingly valiant. The reader
cannot help but find him merely inflated and self-dramatizing.3
This poem was enormously popular during the Victorian era and throughout the first half of the Twentieth Century. In fact, Henley suffered from tubercular arthritis from the time he was a child and had a foot amputated. Afterwards, he spent a year in a hospital in Edinburgh receiving treatment to save his other foot. With typical Victorian earnestness, Henley may have felt that it was inappropriate to refer specifically to his disability in the poem. As a result, even though Henley was in fact "unflinchingly valiant," the poem does have a rather arrogant tone. However, since Victorians clearly admired this poem, and Ciardi's remarks were written in 1959, we will have to conclude that even the tone of a poem is influenced by historic and cultural factors.
For those of you who write poetry, how can you avoid adopting an inappropriate tone and thus breaking the sympathetic contract with your reader. The truth is, you can't. There will always be people who don't like your poems simply because they feel no sympathy for your subject or for the emotions and thoughts you are expressing. However, you can lessen the possibility of a rift with your reader by taking a long, hard look at your own ego. In real life, arrogant, self-absorbed people are the last to realize that others turn away from them because their egotistical behavior is just plain embarrassing.
Poetry can be embarrassing too if the poet thinks more highly of himself or herself than of the reader. You can use your journal to explore your relationship with your reader. Make a list of the individuals or groups of people you would like to have as readers. Then read one of your poems aloud and imagine that you are one of the people on your list listening to the poem. Is there anything in the tone of the poem that might alienate your reader? Very few poems, even Shakespeare's, are appreciated by everyone, but poets can certainly try to adopt a tone that invites the reader into the poem. Do not confuse this process with telling the reader exactly what he or she wants to hear. Poetry often challenges the readers' values and makes them squirm. Challenging your readers is different from boring, excluding, or patronizing them.
The following poem by the Canadian poet Anne Hebert certainly does not make the reader feel comfortable. Yet the objective tone, like a camera pulling the reader into a beautiful scene which somehow becomes a vision of horror, succeeds in expressing Hebert's theme, which her translators refer to as "a woman in a bizarre domestic setting, repressed and sad."4
Life in the Castle
It is an ancestral castle
With no tables or fire
With no dust or rug.
The perverse spell of this place
Is wholly in its shiny mirrors.
The only possible thing to do here
Is to look at oneself day and night.
Toss your image into the hard fountains
Your hardest image no shadow no color.
See, these mirrors are deep
Like closets
Some corpse always lives there under the silver
Immediately covers your image
And sticks to you like seaweed.
It adjusts to you, skinny and naked,
And simulates love in a slow bitter shiver.
Translated by Aliki Barnstone and
Willis Barnstone
Readers who feel no sympathy for the pain of stifled, repressed, wealthy women whose lives are limited by tradition are free, of course, to reject this poem. But if they do, the sympathetic contract will have been broken by the reader, not the poet, who has carefully controlled the poem's tone.
Let's say no more about tone in poetry for the moment and proceed to one of poetry's most fascinating elements-- figures of speech. A figure of speech is an unusual way of using language. Thus, figures of speech are really an aspect of poetic diction-- the use of words in an unexpected way. In the previous chapter, we scrutinized Gerard Manley Hopkins' innovative diction, and in Chapter 3 we discussed the two most common figures of speech in poetry, simile and metaphor. Simile and metaphor are so valuable to poetry because, as I have already mentioned, one of the functions of poetry is to help the reader make connections between things that appear unrelated and ultimately gain a deeper sense of the connectedness between all things in the universe. Similes and metaphors, which are comparisons, help clarify these relationships for the reader. Because they are by far the most important figures of speech, we will briefly review simile and metaphor. Then we will discuss several other types of figurative language--hyperbole, litotes, personification, apostrophe, synecdoche, metonymy, and oxymoron.
A really great simile or metaphor can take your breath away. It can startle you into a new level of awareness. As you remember, a simile is a comparison using "like" or "as," and a metaphor is a comparison which does not use the words "like" or "as." Similes and metaphors abound in poetry because poets are always trying to help their readers see relationships from a new angle. In the poem by Anne Hebert which you just read, the similes "these mirrors are deep/ Like closets" and "Some corpse always lives there/...And sticks to you like seaweed" help the reader to recognize the secret, hidden horrors lying beneath the comfortable life Hebert describes.
A poem which is famous for its figures of speech is "Dream Deferred" by Langston Hughes. This stunning poem, written in 1951, presents a series of five similes in response to the question, "What happens to a dream deferred?" Then the poem concludes with an implied metaphor.
Dream Deferred
What happens to a dream deferred?
Does it dry up
like a raisin in the sun?
Or fester like a sore--
And then run?
Does it stink like rotten mean?
Or crust and sugar over--
like a syrupy sweet?
Maybe it just sags
like a heavy load.
Or does it explode?
This prophetic poem, which on one level refers to the denied aspirations of African Americans before the Civil Rights Movement, rivets the reader's attention with its final question, "Or does it explode?"
In fact, the struggle for racial equality in America has been very explosive, and many lives have been sacrificed. In using the term implied metaphor, I mean that the poet makes a comparison indirectly. Hughes does not say that a postponed dream is a bomb waiting to go off; that would be a metaphor. An implied metaphor occurs when the second object, to which the first object is being compared, is not actually named. In this case, the deferred dream is mentioned, but the bomb is not.
Another level of subtlety in this poem lies in its universality. In fact, Hughes mentions nothing about race or civil rights or America. I hope that this poem will outlive America's racial conflicts, and in fact, it could refer to any deep longing that has been denied-- on an individual or global level. I admire Hughes' skill in presenting similes that are so vivid and specific, describing so accurately the various responses that people have to unrealized hopes. Yet the dynamics that cause the dreams to be deferred are left entirely to the reader's imagination.
We use similes and metaphors constantly in our everyday speech. We've all heard the over-used expression, "She's an angel," or "He's such a weasel," or "It was like a dream." I like even these trite figures of speech because they add imagery and instant recognition to our ordinary conversations. Saying that someone is a weasel creates a complex set of images, suggesting sneaky, dishonest, cowardly, and manipulative behavior. Of course, I'm sure you're aware that most of the animal similes and metaphors that we apply to people-- "She's a dog," "He's a pig," "She eats like a bird," or "He's so catty," have very little resemblance to the actual behaviors of animals. These similes and metaphors are based on human perceptions.
My father used to decorate his daily conversations with folk similes such as "happy as a clam," "snug as a bug in a rug," and "smart as a whip." I've always liked the dubious logic in these comparisons. We also use folk metaphors based on sports and occupations, such as "undermining someone's authority," "striking out," "dropping the ball," and "hitting the nail on the head." These are wonderfully descriptive expressions, but let's fact it; they are cliches. You're not going to get very far as a poet if you pepper your poems (to use a folk metaphor), with old, overused similes and metaphors. Your job is to come up with new ones.
Although I criticized her in Chapter 4 for her cannibalistic poem "Daddy," I admire the creativity in many of Sylvia Plath's other poems. I especially enjoy her little poem "Metaphors," written in 1960.
Metaphors
I'm a riddle in nine syllables,
An elephant, a ponderous house,
A melon strolling on two tendrils.
O red fruit, ivory, fine timbers!
This loaf's big with its yeasty rising.
Money's new-minted in this fat purse.
I'm a means, a stage, a cow in calf.
I've eaten a bag of green apples,
Boarded the train there's no getting off.
This clever nine-line poem gives you a series of hints in the form of metaphors. Did you figure out that Plath was talking about being pregnant? The tone of the poem is interesting too. The first eight lines are playful and light, but the final line suggests the serious commitment that motherhood requires.
During the Renaissance and in the Seventeenth Century, specific types of elaborate or extended metaphors called conceits became popular. You may recall a sonnet entitled "Whoso List to Hunt," by Sir Thomas Wyatt, which you read in Chapter 5. This entire poem is a complex extended metaphor or conceit in which the lady who is the object of the poet's unrequited love is compared to a deer, and the hapless lover, in this case Wyatt himself, is metaphorically compared to a hunter. An extended implied metaphor occurs in a poem entitled "The Collar" by the Seventeenth Century poet and clergyman George Herbert. The title of the poem refers to the clerical collar which Herbert wore in his vocation as a priest in the Church of England. The poem itself never mentions the collar, which symbolically restricts the wearer's movements and controls his behavior, but the poem depicts the speaker's initial struggle and final acceptance of the limitations placed on him because of his decision to wear the collar. The poem begins with Herbert himself pounding on the table in a fit of anger.
The Collar
I struck the board and cried, "No more;
I will abroad!
What? shall I ever sigh and pine?
My lines and life are free, free as the road,
Loose as the wind, as large as store.
Shall I be still in suit?
Have I no harvest but a thorn
To let me blood, and not restore
What I have lost with cordial fruit?
Sure there was wine
Before my sighs did dry it; there was corn
Before my tears did drown it.
Is the year only lost to me?
Have I no bays to crown it,
No flowers, no garlands gay? all blasted?
All wasted?
Not so, my heart; but there is fruit,
And thou hast hands.
Recover all thy sigh-blown age
On double pleasures: leave thy cold dispute
Of what is fit and not. Forsake thy cage,
Thy rope of sands,
Which petty thoughts have made, and made to thee
Good cable, to enforce and draw,
And be thy law,
While thou didst wink and wouldst not see.
Away! take heed;
I will abroad.
Call in thy death's-head there; tie up thy fears.
He that forbears
To suit and serve his need
Deserves his load."
But as I raved and grew more fierce and wild
At every word,
Methoughts I heard one calling, Child!
And I replied, My Lord.
In addition to the extended implied metaphor comparing the life of clerical service to wearing a restrictive collar, Herbert also introduces some interesting similes and the famous metaphor of the "rope of sands." Herbert, along with several other Seventeenth Century English poets, including John Donne, was known as a metaphysical poet. The metaphysical poets were the wild innovators of their day. They wrote complex, passionate poems using unusual comparisons, a colloquial tone, down to earth diction which included puns, and unusual forms with rough rhythms and odd rhymes. Their style contrasted with their contemporaries, the Cavalier poets, such as Ben Jonson, who wrote polite, risk-free, decorous poems in carefully controlled forms. The metaphysical poets are known for a figure of speech called the metaphysical conceit. A metaphysical conceit is an extended metaphor which compares two very dissimilar things in a startling, perhaps even shocking way. In Chapter 3, you read "A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning," in which John Donne compared a married couple to the two feet of a compass. In an even stranger series of metaphysical conceits, Donne compares himself to a town that has been captured by the enemy and a woman who has become engaged to the wrong man in this religious sonnet in which he begs God to kidnap him:
Holy Sonnet Number 14
Batter my heart, three-personed God; for you
As yet but knock, breathe, shine, and seek to mend;
That I may rise and stand, o'erthrow me, and bend
Your force to break, blow, burn, and make me new.
I, like an usurped town, to another due
Labor to admit you, but O, to no end;
Reason, your viceroy in me, me should defend,
But is captived, and proves weak or untrue.
Yet dearly I love you, and would be loved fain,
But am betrothed unto your enemy.
Divorce me, untie or break that knot again;
Take me to you, imprison me, for I,
Except you enthrall me, never shall be free,
Nor ever chaste, except you ravish me.
This sonnet is very complex and requires careful explication. In addition to his powerful diction, passionate tone, and unusual similes and metaphors, Donne also uses a heavy dose of exaggeration. While similes and metaphors are by far the most frequently used figures of speech in poetry, hyperbole (overstatement), and litotes (understatement), are a close second. Like all figures of speech, overstatement and understatement defy the rules of ordinary logic. If we say, "I love bread pudding," or "I'll just die if I don't pass Algebra," we are obviously exaggerating, just as John Donne was when he asked God to put him in prison. Poets use exaggeration to emphasize the feelings and themes they want to express. In the following poem, Nikki Giovanni uses simile, metaphor, and hyperbole to define for the reader her vision of the glory of poetry:
Poetry
poetry is motion graceful
as a fawn
gentle as a teardrop
strong like the eye
finding peace in a crowded room
we poets tend to think
our words are golden
though emotion speaks too
loudly to be defined
by silence
sometimes after midnight or just before
the dawn
we sit typewriter in hand
pulling loneliness around us
forgetting our lovers or children
who are sleeping
ignoring the weary wariness
of our own logic
to compose a poem
no one understands it
it never says "love me" for poets are
beyond love
it never says "accept me" for poems seek not
acceptance but controversy
it only says "i am" and therefore
i concede that you are too
a poem is pure energy
horizontally contained
between the mind
of the poet and the ear of the reader
if it does not sing discard the ear
for poetry is song
if it does not delight discard
the heart for poetry is joy
if it does not inform then close
off the brain for it is dead
if it cannot heed the insistent message
that life is precious
which is all we poets
wrapped in our loneliness
are trying to say
Giovanni obviously does not expect readers to amputate their ears, hearts, and brains if they have trouble grasping poetry. She uses these absurd exaggerations to stress how deeply she believes in poetry's message that "life is precious."
Litotes, or understatement, can also capture the reader's attention by creating an ironic contrast between what is meant and what is actually said. Anglo-Saxon poetry is filled with litotes. In fact, the cultural communication style of the Anglo-Saxon people seems to have been based on a kind of dry wit that deliberately de-emphasized even the most dramatic situations. My favorite example of Anglo-Saxon litotes occurs in the narrative poem "The Battle of Maldon," which describes a skirmish in which a small band of Anglo-Saxons were defeated by Viking marauders. The Anglo-Saxons lost this battle partially because some of their own troops abandoned them. This outrageous betrayal of Anglo-Saxon ethics is described by the poet in the following sentence: "Then there retired from the battle those who did not wish to be there." Other priceless examples of Anglo-Saxon understatement include these phrases from Beowulf describing battle scenes: "That was not a good bargain, that on both sides they had to pay with the lives of friends." and "...he was weaker in swimming the lake when death took him."
Even today, litotes is popular in British conversation. For example, an English person is likely to say, "It's a bit brisk" when in fact it is freezing outside. The American poet T.S. Eliot, who chose to become a British citizen, often adopts an understated tone. His poem "Journey of the Magi" is a dramatic monologue written in the voice of one of the wise men who traveled to see the Christ Child. The speaker describes this experience many years later in the most ordinary language imaginable. As a Christian and a member of the Church of England, Eliot must have believed that the birth of Jesus was one of the most significant events in human history. Yet the speaker in the monologue never even mentions the Christ Child, and his comments about actually discovering the Holy Family are filled with litotes:
and so we continued
And arrived at evening, not a moment too soon
Finding the place; it was (you may say) satisfactory.
As you read the entire poem, notice that the speaker seems to be describing a boring, inconvenient, and extended trip that he took a long time ago. The second half of the poem contains Biblical allusions. The three trees refer to the three crosses at Calvary where Jesus was crucified, the white horse suggests the white horse of Christ the conqueror in the Book of Revelations, and the reference to "dicing for pieces of silver" evokes both Jesus' betrayal by Judas and the soldiers who gambled for Jesus' clothes during his crucifixion. These allusions are incorporated into the speaker's deadpan description of his journey.
Journey of the Magi
"A cold coming we had of it,
Just the worst time of the year
For a journey, and such a long journey:
The ways deep and the weather sharp,
The very dead of winter."
And the camels galled, sore-footed, refractory,
Lying down in the melting snow.
There were times we regretted
The summer palaces on slopes, the terraces,
And the silken girls bringing sherbet.
Then the camel men cursing and grumbling
And running away, and wanting their liquor and women,
And the night-fires going out, and the lack of shelters,
And the cities hostile and the towns unfriendly
And the villages dirty and charging high prices:
A hard time we had of it.
At the end we preferred to travel all night,
Sleeping in snatches,
With the voices singing in our ears, saying
That this was all folly.
Then at dawn we came down to a temperate valley,
Wet, below the snow line, smelling of vegetation;
With a running stream and a water-mill beating the darkness,
And three trees on the low sky,
And an old white horse galloped away in the meadow
Then we came to a tavern with vine-leaves over the lintel,
Six hands at an open door dicing for pieces of silver,
And feet kicking the empty wine-skins.
But there was no information, and so we continued
And arrived at evening, not a moment too soon
Finding the place; it was (you may say) satisfactory.
All this was a long time ago, I remember,
And I would do it again, but set down
This set down
This: were we led all that way for
Birth or Death? There was a Birth, certainly,
We had evidence and no doubt. I had seen birth and death,
But had thought they were different; this Birth was
Hard and bitter agony for us, like Death, our death.
We returned to our places, these Kingdoms,
But no longer at ease here, in the old dispensation,
With an alien people clutching their gods.
I should be glad of another death.
Why does Eliot use so much litotes throughout this poem? Perhaps he does so to contrast with and heighten the effect of the poem's conclusion. The speaker ends his monologue by stating that he is "...no longer at ease here, in the old dispensation,/ With an alien people clutching their gods," suggesting that his journey was life-transforming after all. In fact, he states that the birth he witnessed was "...like Death, our death," and he concludes, "I should be glad of another death." Like the anonymous poet of "The Battle of Maldon," Eliot describes a moment of great emotional anguish as though he were discussing the weather, ironically hinting at the great depth of feeling that is left unsaid.
At the end of this Chapter, I have included another dramatic monologue by Eliot-- "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock." This poem, which contains some brilliant similes and metaphors and several literary and Biblical allusions, is also filled with litotes. The speaker is a middle aged, self-conscious, and insecure man who is in the midst of an identity and life crisis of major magnitude, yet he says, in a monumental understatement, "I have measured out my life with coffee spoons."
Another figure of speech, personification, occurs fairly frequently in poetry. It is sometimes called anthropomorphism, which means attributing human characteristics to anything that is not human, such as a plant, an animal, or an object. A psychologist might call this "projection," and some very literal minded readers and critics object to personification because it is unrealistic. For people who feel this way, personification breaks the sympathetic contract. The Romantic poets were fond of personification and a related figure of speech, the apostrophe. Apostrophe is a form of personification in which the speaker in the poem actually addresses an object, such as the moon, as though it were listening. A poet can also use apostrophe to speak to a dead or absent person, and in these cases, the apostrophe is technically not a form of personification. In stanza IV of "Ode: Intimations of Immortality," Wordsworth uses both personification and apostrophe:
Ye blessed Creatures, I have heard the call
Ye to each other make; I see
The heavens laugh with you in your jubilee;
My heart is at your festival,
My head hath its coronal,
The fulness of your bliss, I feel--I feel it all.
Oh evil day! if I were sullen
While Earth herself is adorning,
This sweet May-morning,
And the Children are culling
On every side,
In a thousand valleys far and wide,
Fresh flowers; while the sun shines warm,
And the Babe leaps up on his Mother's arm:--
I hear, I hear, with joy I hear!
--But there's a Tree, of many, one,
A single Field which I have looked upon,
Both of them speak of something that is gone:
The Pansy at my feet
Doth the same tale repeat:
Whither is fled the visionary gleam?
Where is it now, the glory and the dream?
What do you think? Can you accept the fact that the speaker, in this case Wordsworth himself, is addressing the "blessed Creatures" of nature and that the heavens are laughing and pansies are telling tales? I've never had a problem with personification myself. It has always been clear to me that the world of poetry is not a literal world. But if personification seems corny to you, probably you will not be using it in your own poems. On second thought, you might want to look at this poem by Allen Ginsberg that uses apostrophe in a humorous but poignant way:
A Supermarket in California
What thoughts I have of you tonight, Walt Whitman, for I walked
down the sidestreets under the trees with a headache self-conscious
looking at the full moon.
In my hungry fatigue, and shopping for images, I went into the neon
fruit supermarket, dreaming of your enumerations!
What peaches and what penumbras! Whole families shopping at night!
Aisles full of husbands! Wives in the avocados, babies in the tomatoes!
--and you, Garcia Lorca, what were you doing down by the watermelons?
I saw you, Walt Whitman, childless, lonely old grubber, poking
among the meats in the refrigerator and eyeing the grocery boys.
I heard you asking questions of each: Who killed the pork chops?
What price bananas? Are you my Angel?
I wandered in and out of the brilliant stacks of cans following you,
and followed in my imagination by the store detective.
We strode down the open corridors together in our solitary fancy
tasting artichokes, possessing every frozen delicacy, and never passing the
cashier.
Where are we going, Walt Whitman? The doors close in an hour.
Which way does the beard point tonight/
(I touch your book and dream of our odyssey in the supermarket and
feel absurd.)
Will we walk all night through solitary streets? The trees add shade
to shade, lights out in the houses, we'll both be lonely.
Will we stroll dreaming of the lost America of love past blue automobiles
in driveways, home to our silent cottage?
Ah, dear father, graybeard, lonely old courage-teacher, what America
did you have when Charon quit poling his ferry and you got out on
a smoking bank and stood watching the boat disappear on the black waters
of Lethe?
By addressing a dead American poet, Walt Whitman, Ginsberg, who is also an American, seeks to assuage his own sorrow about America's lost glory. Whitman, who celebrated America's vitality in his poems more than one hundred years ago, seems a sympathetic listener to the lonely contemporary who feels an alienation and loss of greatness in America today.
Another figure of speech, oxymoron, seems to have become a household word these days. An oxymoron is a two-word figure of speech in which the two elements appear to contradict each other. It's popular today to refer to the term "military intelligence" as an oxymoron. In poetry, phrases like "blind mouths," used by John Milton, and the Shakespearean phrase "sweet sorrow" are oxymorons. The expression "pretty ugly" could be interpreted as an oxymoron too, although the word "pretty" obviously has two meanings. Why would a poet use an oxymoron? For the same reason that any figure of speech is used-- to jolt the reader into perceiving reality from a new angle. Although an oxymoron appears to be illogical, there is a poetic truth in the seeming contradiction. A "blind mouth" makes perfect sense as a description of someone who is eager to speak but utterly uninformed or lacking in wisdom. And the parting of Romeo and Juliet, described as "sweet sorrow," has a profound ring of truth that is difficult to explain in a sentence, but if you have ever said a lingering goodbye to someone you love passionately, you know what that sweet sorrow is. Oxymorons take us to the edge of verbal communication then give us a nudge into the world of intuitive knowing.
Two other figures of speech, synecdoche and metonymy, also define relationships in a new way. These related figures refer to a person or thing by mentioning another object to which the first is closely related. Referring to attorneys or business people as "suits" or women as "skirts" is metonymy, and so is referring to the Cuban government as "Havana" or to someone in a movie as a "hired gun." Synecdoche, a specific type of metonymy, involves mentioning only part of something as a substitute for the whole. In "Journey of the Magi," for example, T.S. Eliot referred to "Six hands at an open door," indicating to the reader that he was describing three men "dicing for pieces of silver." In the following line, Eliot described "feet kicking the empty wine-skins." Obviously, human beings were attached to the kicking feet, but only their feet, engaged in this rather violent activity, seem significant. In everyday conversation, we use synecdoche frequently. "Give me a hand," is a common expression, but the person who requests "a hand" from someone certainly wants help from the entire person. Referring to cattle as "head" is synecdoche also. This expression has crept into the human world too, in the phrase "head count," used to determine how many people are present. In poetry, metonymy and synecdoche can be used to emphasize the aspects of people and things that seem most important. If a person is an expert at creating perfumes, referring to him or her as a "nose" makes sense, and ironically, I have actually met people whose business suit seemed the most significant thing about them.
Fascinating as figures of speech are by themselves, like all of the elements of poetry, they interact with other elements. Figures of speech are closely related to diction, sound, imagery, and tone. And sometimes all of these elements work together to create a deeper level of meaning in a poem known as symbolism. Symbolism occurs in poetry when the images or events described in the poem represent something more in addition to their surface or literal meaning-- usually an emotion, an idea, or some other abstraction. symbolism is important because our thoughts and feelings are simply abstractions in our minds and hearts and cannot be communicated easily unless they are transformed into symbolic images that can be perceived through the senses. In "The Sick Rose" by William Blake, which appears in Chapter 2, the speaker may be referring to an actual rose, but he probably intends a symbolic meaning. The illustration which Blake engraved to accompany this poem depicts a young woman, emerging from the petals of the flower. Let's look at this brief poem again.
The Sick Rose
O Rose, thou art sick:
The invisible worm
That flies in the night,
In the howling storm,
Has found out thy bed
Of crimson joy;
And his dark secret love
Does thy life destroy.
Readers have variously interpreted the worm in this poem as symbolizing prostitution, venereal disease, promiscuity, or poverty, and the rose as an archetypal symbol of femininity, youth, beauty, or vulnerability. The wonder of symbolism, of course, is that it is open to interpretation. And the poet will never tell you what a symbol means or even whether an image is intended to be symbolic.
The interpretation of symbolism in poetry can become a messy battleground. To help you keep from getting wounded, I'll give you one piece of advice: A poem's symbolic message must emerge from the imagery in the poem itself, not solely from the reader's imagination. If a reader decided to interpret "The Sick Rose" as an allegory on the joy of reading classical literature, he or she would have to find specific images in the poem to support this interpretation. The images in this poem include a rose, a worm, the night, a storm, and a bed. It would really be a stretch of the imagination to conclude that any of these images could symbolize literature, and although the word "joy" actually appears in the poem, its context appears to have nothing to do with reading. If you will just follow this one rule, letting the images in the poem guide you, learning to discern the symbolic meanings in poetry can be a great journey of awakening.
We talked about archetypes in Chapter 2. As you will recall, an archetype is a universal symbol that communicates beyond the barriers of language, place, culture, and history. There is something in the collective human unconscious that "knows" that a circle symbolizes completeness or wholeness, a stone symbolizes eternity or stability, and the sun symbolizes growth, healing, and enlightenment. Blake is a highly archetypal poet. His famous paired poems "The Lamb" and "The Tyger," for example, are based on the concepts of innocence, purity, and sacrificial love associated with the lamb and destructiveness, manipulation, and evil associated with the tiger. Archetypes communicate so effectively because there is usually something in the very essence of the symbolic object that embodies the qualities that it symbolizes. For example, lambs really are gentle, docile, and trusting, and they are frequently sacrificed for food. Also, the sun really does bring light into darkness and help all the crops to grow, thus nourishing the whole world. A few archetypes, however, are based on human projection. The tiger, for example, may appear evil and destructive to human beings, but in the world of nature, the tiger is simply a carnivore trying to survive.
Archetypes also take the form of symbolic human and animal figures such as the earth mother, the maiden, the hero, the wise old man, the trickster, and many other universal characters. Madeline in Keats' "The Eve of St. Agnes" is an archetypal maiden, and the hermit, who appears at the end of Coleridge's "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner," is an archetypal wise old man. The duke in Browning's "My Last Duchess" is an archetypal despot, and Ulysses in Tennyson's poem is an archetypal hero. The beauty of archetypes is that they never get trite or old and that they keep re-appearing in new disguises. Both Porphyro in "The Eve of St. Agnes" and the Ancient Mariner are hero archetypes, but their external appearances and the particulars of their adventures are different. It is on the deeper level that they are the same. Like Beowulf and thousands of other literary heroes, they embark on a journey of heroic discovery, they risk their very lives, face rejection and humiliation, and ultimately triumph. One might even argue that "The Fish" in Elizabeth Bishop's poem is a hero archetype. Like Ulysses, he has fought many battles and won, and now that he is old, he still has the courage and cunning to face the next adventure.
Another powerful aspect of archetypes is that they help to condense the poem because the reader intuitively recognizes the archetype and does not need to have it explained. When a poet uses archetypes, he or she can economize on words, and the poem's dramatic power is heightened. The seasons of the year are archetypes which function in the same way. This is one of the reasons for the enduring appeal of haiku. The following haiku by Basho uses a kigo, or reference to the season of the year, to stimulate the reader's emotional response:
Whenever I speak out
My lips are chilled--
Autumnal wind.
Translated by Makoto Ueda
Basho's editor and translator, Makoto Ueda, makes this comment about the poem:
The poem expresses bitter frustration with the lack of
communication among individuals. Probably Basho had been
talking with someone who did not understand or misunderstood
what he said; now recalling the incident in his bitter
memory as he walked alone in the autumn wind, he regretted
that he had even spoken.5
Notice that Ueda's explanation is longer than the poem itself. The poet simply relies on the reader's intuitive ability to interpret the significance of chilled lips in an autumn wind.
Sometimes all of the elements in a poem create a symbolic pattern. This is called allegory. An allegory is usually a narrative in which all of the characters and events have a secondary symbolic meaning. Can you explain the allegorical significance of the following poem, written in the form of a dialogue by Christina Rossetti?
Up-Hill
Does the road wind up-hill all the way?
Yes, to the very end.
Will the day's journey take the whole long day?
From morn to night, my friend.
But is there for the night a resting-place?
A roof for when the slow dark hours begin.
May not the darkness hide it from my face?
You cannot miss that inn.
Shall I meet other wayfarers at night?
Those who have gone before.
Then must I knock, or call when just in sight?
They will not keep you standing at the door.
Shall I find comfort, travel-sore and weak?
Of labour you shall find the sum.
Will there be beds for me and all who seek?
Yea, beds for all who come.
Not all of the symbolism in poetry is based on archetypes or allegory. An image in a poem sometimes takes on a particular meaning only within that poem. And some poets create entire collections of symbols that are unique to their poetry. The Irish Nobel Prize winning poet William Butler Yeats is known for his personal symbolism. The Norton Anthology of English Literature states that Yeats is "... beyond question the greatest twentieth-century poet of the English language,"6 and the Norton editors describe Yeats as "... a realist-symbolist-Metaphysical poet with an uncanny power over words."7 Yeats uses the gyre in several of his poems as a symbol of his vision of history. A gyre, or upward moving spiral, seems a perfect objective correlative for Yeats' theory of the cyclic nature of human history because he believed that as history moved forward (or upward), historical patterns were often repeated. Yeats referred to each cycle of history as a "gyre," and he apparently felt that the two-thousand-year cycle of the Christian era was coming to an end, having been preceded by the Greco-Roman and Babylonian gyres of history.
This theory is evident in Yeats' famous poem "The Second Coming," in which he expresses a profound fear that civilization is completely degenerating and that instead of a Messiah, some unspeakable monster will lead the next gyre of history. As you read this poem, you will notice that Yeats uses the Latin phrase, "Spiritus Mundi" to refer to what Carl Jung would call the collective unconscious. Also, pay close attention to the "shape with lion body and the head of a man." This seems to be a symbolic figure. After reading the poem several times and thinking about it, what do you believe that his figure with "A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun" symbolizes in the poem?
The Second Coming
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the center cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches toward Bethlehem to be born?
It might help you to know that the poem was written in 1919 and makes a reference to the Russian Revolution-- "The best lack all conviction, while the worst/ Are full of passionate intensity." Certainly Yeats was living in a time of war and horror on a global scale. How does the image of the falcon who "cannot hear the falconer" support Yeats' theory that this gyre of history is coming to an end? Do the falcon and the falconer seem symbolic to you? What references does Yeats make to events in Christian history? How are these references integrated into the poem's symbolic context?
The poem that you have just read is a major poem. We might even call it a great poem, even though its message is deeply troubling. It is a poem in which form, rhythm, diction, sound, tone, imagery, figures of speech, and symbolism all function together to create an effect so powerful that it stuns the reader on both the conscious and unconscious levels. It contains individual lines, phrases, and images that are so memorable that they will return to the reader again and again over the years.
Yeats' style on the surface appears very simple, with the plain diction so characteristic of modern poetry, yet he achieves a profound sense of significance that allows the reader to connect with the deepest levels of human emotion and thought. His use of myth, archetype, personal symbols, and allusions give his poems a universality and power that few poets in any generation have achieved.
Like all great poets, Yeats respects his reader and does not feel obligated to simplify the reader's task. At the end of this chapter, you will find more poems by William Butler Yeats. You will need to use the ten-step process from Chapter 3 to read them, and you may have to do some research in cultural history and mythology. I hope you will feel, as I do, that reading great poetry is worth every effort.
We concluded the previous chapter with a list of characteristics that make a poem good. Do you have a sense now of what makes a poem great? Here are some of my own thoughts about great poetry. You may want to make a list of your own.
QUALITIES THAT CHARACTERIZE A GREAT POEM
1. All of the elements in the poem function together to create a stunning and glorious effect, even if the poem's theme is disturbing to the reader.
2. The poem has a significance, vitality, and universality that communicates to readers beyond the parameters of history and culture.
3. The poem communicates to the reader on both the conscious and unconscious level, appealing to all four personality functions-- thought, emotion, sense, and intuition.
4. The poem's tone is carefully controlled to achieve the poet's intended effect without breaking the sympathetic contract with the reader; this quality also characterizes a good poem.
4. The poem has a "fragrance" that lingers in the reader's thoughts, feelings, and senses, making it memorable over the years.
5. The poem can be re-read many times, and with each re-reading, the reader gains some new perception, insight, or appreciation of the poem.
6. The poem has the potential to raise the reader's level of consciousness, profoundly changing the reader's awareness of human experience.
7. The poem communicates with the reader beyond the level of rational analysis, providing the reader with a mystical, spiritual, religious, or similarly profound experience.
8. The poem also has all of the qualities of a good poem.
NOTES
CHAPTER 8
1. John Ciardi, How Does a Poem Mean? (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1959), p. 846.
2. Ciardi, p. 848.
3. Ciardi, p. 848.
4. Aliki Barnstone and Willis Barnstone, eds., A Book of Women Poets (New York: Schocken Books, 1981), p. 229.
5. Makoto Ueda, Matsuo Basho (Tokyo: Kodansha International Ltd., 1982) p. 61.
6. M.H. Abrams, ed., The Norton Anthology of English Literature, Sixth Edition, Vol II, p. 1863.
7. Abrams, p. 1862.
QUESTIONS AND TOPICS FOR REVIEW
1. Define tone in poetry.
2. How can the point of view of a poem influence its tone? Give examples.
3. How can the use of a persona influence the tone of a poem? Give examples.
4. Explain the sympathetic contract. Who developed this concept?
5. Define figures of speech in poetry.
6. What is a simile? Provide several examples.
7. Define the word metaphor and provide several examples.
8. What is an implied metaphor? Give a specific example from one of the poems in this chapter.
9. Who were the metaphysical poets?
10. What are some of the characteristics of metaphysical poetry?
11. What is a metaphysical conceit? Give a specific example from one of the poems in this chapter.
12. Define the following terms, and provide examples, both from poetry and from everyday language:
hyperbole
litotes
personification
apostrophe
oxymoron
metonymy
synecdoche
13. What is symbolism? Give an example of the use of symbolism in poetry.
14. What is the most important rule to remember when interpreting symbolism in poetry?
15. List several examples of the use of archetypes in poetry.
16. Define allegory, and provide an example of an allegorical poem.
17. What did the gyre symbolize in the poetry of William Butler Yeats?
18. What are some of the characteristics of great poetry?
TOPICS FOR DISCUSSION
1. How can the tone of a poem exclude or alienate a reader? Give examples.
2. Do any of the poems in this chapter have an ironic tone? If so, which ones, and why did the poet choose to use irony?
3. Does the poet fail to maintain the sympathetic contract for you in any of the poems in this chapter-- including the selections at the end? If so, how or why was the contract broken?
4. As the reader, have you broken the sympathetic contract with the poet in any of these poems? If so, why has this occurred?
5. Do you agree with Ciardi that "Invictus" is a bad poem? Why or why not? You may wish to review the checklist of qualities that characterize a good poem at the end of Chapter 7.
6. Do you believe that any of the poems in this chapter have the characteristics of great poetry? If so, which poems, and why?
7. Do some of the poems in this chapter lack the qualities of great, or perhaps even of good poetry? If so, be prepared to explain why.
8. Who is the speaker in Silko's "Where Mountain Lion Lay Down with Deer"?
9. Discuss the similes in Hughes' "Dream Deferred." What are some of the human situations that these similes might describe?
10. Discuss the various possible symbolic interpretations of Blake's "The Sick Rose."
11. Discuss several possible allegorical interpretations of Rossetti's "Up-Hill."
12. Discuss Giovanni's definition of poetry in her poem "Poetry." Do you agree with her definition of poetry, or do you see poetry differently?
13. Discuss the use of metaphor and puns in Shakespeare's "Sonnet 143" and Donne's "A Hymn to God the Father," which appear at the end of this chapter. (Here's a hint: John Donne's last name was pronounced "Done.")
ACTIVITIES
1. Everyone in the class will make his or her own list of the characteristics of great poetry. Bring these lists to class for all to share. Notice whether several of the same qualities appear on several people's lists. Using consensus, compile a list which the class can agree upon of the characteristics of a great poem. Do not be afraid to disagree, to engage in debate, and to compromise.
2. Take turns reading "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" in class, each student reading a different section. Then discuss the poem's tone, theme, use of imagery, figures of speech, allusions, and symbolism. Each of these elements can be assigned to a small group of students who will report their perceptions to the class.
3. Organize a debate with one side arguing that "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock is a good (or even a bad) poem, but not a great poem. The other side will argue the case that it is a great poem.
4. Assign someone to research the history and characteristics of Byzantine art and to bring art books with reproductions of Byzantine art to class. Use this information as you discuss the relationship between Byzantine art and Yeats' poem "Sailing to Byzantium."
5. Assign an individual or a group of students to research and report on the myth of Zeus, Leda, and Helen, from Greek mythology. Then analyze together how Yeats has incorporated this myth into his poem, "Leda and the Swan."
6. Yeats himself said that his poem "Leda and the Swan" was intended as "an annunciation." Assign a group of students to research and explain the Christian concept of the Annunciation, illustrating their discussion with art books or slides depicting European paintings of the Annunciation. Assign someone else to find paintings depicting the myth of Leda and the Swan. Remembering Yeats' theory of the gyres of history, discuss the annunciation theme and its implications in this poem.
7. Assign one group of students to research the life and poetry of Walt Whitman and another group to research the life and poetry of Allen Ginsberg. Report your findings to the class and then discuss Ginsberg's "A Supermarket in California" in light of this shared information.
ANALYTICAL WRITING ASSIGNMENTS
1. Analyze elements from Metaphysical poetry in Herbert's "The Pulley."
2. Analyze the use of metaphor in Donne's "A Lecture upon the Shadow."
3. Research the context from which the "To be or not to be" soliloquy from Shakespeare's Hamlet was taken. Then analyze the passage, focusing on its theme and the poetic devices Shakespeare uses to express that theme.
4. Write an explication of one of the following poems:
John Donne's "Holy Sonnet Number 14"
Yeats' "The Second Coming " or
"Sailing to Byzantium"
Frost's "The Silken Tent"
Dickinson's "After great pain, a formal feeling comes"
5. Analyze Dickinson's "There's a certain Slant of light," focusing on personification and simile.
6. Analyze e.e.cummings' "the Cambridge ladies who live in furnished souls," focusing on theme and tone.
7. Analyze Yeats' "The Wild Swans at Coole," focusing on theme and imagery.
8. Analyze Burns' "A Red, Red Rose," focusing on simile, metaphor, and hyperbole.
9. Analyze the passage from Shakespeare's Macbeth, focusing on metaphor and archetype.
10. Analyze the tone in Herbert's "The Collar."
11. Compare and contrast Cervantes' "Mexico City: Spring" and Hebert's "Life in the Castle," focusing on tone, point of view, and theme.
12. Compare and contrast selected haiku by Basho and Issa, focusing on tone and theme.
13. Analyze Eliot's "Journey of the Magi," focusing on theme, figures of speech, and allusions.
14. Analyze Yeats' "The Second Coming," focusing on symbolism and theme.
CREATIVE WRITING ASSIGNMENTS
1. Select a poem that you have already written for a pervious assignment, and revise the poem, focusing primarily on tone. In your revision, you may wish to change the poem's point of view, use a persona, add or delete irony or humor, etc.
2. Go to a museum or look through several art books and find a painting that fascinates you. Then write a poem incorporating some of the images or themes from the painting.
3. Write a poem incorporating a character or theme from world mythology.
4. Everyone in the class will re-write Henley's "Invictus." Each student should make additions or deletions as he or she sees fit. Some options might include changing the title, making adjustments in the tone, adding imagery, or inserting symbols or archetypes. Share your revisions with one another and discuss the effect of the changes that have been made. Are any of these revisions better than the original poem?
5. Write a comic satire of "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock."
6. Write an allegorical poem.
7. Write a poem which contains at least one oxymoron.
8. Write a poem which contains hyperbole. Then re-write the same poem using litotes.
9. Write a poem based on an extended metaphor.
10. Write a poem which includes at least one archtypal figue or element.
ADDITIONAL POEMS FOR READING AND ANALYSIS FOCUSING ON TONE, FIGURES OF SPEECH, AND SYMBOLISM
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
England 1564-1616
From Hamlet
To be or not to be,--that is the question:--
Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,
And by opposing end them?--To die,--to sleep,--
No more; and by a sleep to say we end
The heart-ache and the thousand natural shocks
That flesh is heir to,--'tis a consummation
Devoutly to be wish'd. To die,--to sleep;--
To sleep! perchance to dream:--aye, there's the rub;
For in that sleep of death what dreams may come,
When we have shuffled off this mortal coil,
Must give us pause: there's the respect
That makes a calamity of so long life;
For who would bear the whips and scorns of time,
The oppressor's wrong, the proud man's contumely,
The pangs of despis'd love, the law's delay,
The insolence of office, and the spurns
That patient merit of the unworthy takes,
When he himself might his quietus make
With a bare bodkin? who would fardels bear,
To grunt and sweat under a weary life,
But that the dread of something after death,--
The undiscovered country, from whose bourn
No traveler returns,--puzzles the will,
And makes us rather bear those ills we have
Than to fly to others that we know not of?
Thus conscience does make cowards of us all;
From King Lear
No, no, no, no! Come, let's away to prison.
We two alone will sing like birds i' the cage.
When thou dost ask me blessing, I'll kneel down
And ask of thee forgiveness. So we'll live,
And pray, and sing, and tell old tales, and laugh
At gilded butterflies, and hear poor rogues
Talk of Court news. And we'll talk with them too,
Who loses and who wins, who's in, who's out.
And take upon's the mystery of things
As if we were God's spies. And we'll wear out,
In a walled prison, packs and sects of great ones
That ebb and flow by the moon.
From Macbeth
Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,
To the last syllable of recorded time,
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!
Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage
And then is heard no more. It is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.
Sonnet 29
When in disgrace with fortune and men's eyes
I all alone beweep my outcast state,
And trouble deaf Heaven with my bootless cries,
And look upon myself and curse my fate,
Wishing me like to one more rich in hope,
Featured like him, like him with friends possessed,
Desiring this man's art and that man's scope,
With what I most enjoy contented least--
Yet in these thoughts myself almost despising,
Haply I think on thee, and then my state,
Like to the lark at break of day arising
From sullen earth, sings hymns at Heaven's gate.
For thy sweet love remembered such wealth brings
That then I scorn to change my state with kings.
Sonnet 55
Not marble, nor the gilded monuments
Of princes, shall outlive this rhyme.
But you shall shine more bright in these contents
Than unswept stone, besmeared with sluttish time.
When wasteful war shall statues overturn,
And broils root out the work of masonry,
Nor Mars his sword, nor war's quick fire shall burn
The living record of your memory.
'Gainst death and all-oblivious enmity
Shall you pace forth. Your praise shall still find room
Even in the eyes of all posterity
That wear this world out to the ending doom.
So, till the judgment that yourself arise,
You live in this, and dwell in lovers' eyes.
Sonnet 143
Lo, as a careful housewife runs to catch
One of her feathered creatures broke away,
Sets down her babe, and makes all swift dispatch
In pursuit of the thing she would have stay
Whilst her neglected child holds her in chase,
Cries to catch her whose busy care is bent
To follow that which flies before her face,
Not prizing her poor infant's discontent--
So runn'st thou after that which flies from thee
Whilst I thy babe chase thee afar behind.
But if thou catch thy hope, turn back to me,
And play the mother's part, kiss me, be kind.
So will I pray that thou mayst have thy "Will,"
If thou turn back and my loud crying still.
JOHN DONNE
England 1572-1631
A Lecture upon the Shadow
Stand still, and I will read to thee
A lecture, Love, on love's philosophy.
These three hours that we have spent
Walking here, two shadows went
Along with us, which we ourselves produced;
But, now the sun is just above our head,
We do those shadows tread
And to brave clearness all things are reduced.
So, whilst our infant loves did grow,
Disguises did and shadows flow
From us and our care; but now 'tis not so.
That love hath not attained the high'st degree
Which is still diligent lest others see.
Except our loves at this noon stay,
We shall new shadows make the other way.
As the first were made to blind
Others, these which come behind
Will work upon ourselves, and blind our eyes.
If our loves faint and westwardly decline,
To me falsely thine
And I to thee mine actions shall disguise;
The morning shadows wear away,
But these grow longer all the day,
But, oh, love's day is short if love decay.
Love is a growing or full constant light,
And his first minute after noon is night.
A Hymn to God the Father
Wilt thou forgive that sin where I begun,
Which is my sin, though it were done before?
Wilt thou forgive that sin through which I run,
And do run still, though still I do deplore?
When thou hast done, thou hast not done,
For I have more.
Wilt thou forgive that sin by which I have won
Others to sin? and made my sin their door?
Wilt thou forgive that sin which I did shun
A year or two, but wallowed in a score?
When thou hast done, thou hast not done,
For I have more.
I have a sin of fear, that when I have spun
My last thread, I shall perish on the shore;
Swear by thy self, that at my death thy Son
Shall shine as he shines now and heretofore;
And, having done that, thou hast done,
I fear no more.
GEORGE HERBERT
England 1593-1633
The Pulley
When God first made man,
Having a glass of blessings standing by,
"Let us," said he, "pour on him all we can:
Let the world's riches, which dispersed lie,
Contract into a span."
So strength first made a way;
Then beauty flowed, then wisdom, honor, pleasure.
When almost all was out, God made a stay,
Perceiving that, alone of all his treasure,
Rest in the bottom lay.
"For if I should," said he,
"Bestow this jewel also on my creature,
He would adore my gifts instead of me,
And rest in Nature, not the God of Nature;
So both should losers be.
"Yet let him keep the rest,
But keep then with repining restlessness:
Let him be rich and weary, that at least,
If goodness lead him not, yet weariness
May toss him to my breast."
ROBERT BURNS
Scotland 1759-1796
A Red, Red Rose
O My Luve's like a red, red rose,
That's newly sprung in June;
O My Luve's like the melodie
That's sweetly played in tune,
As fair art thou, my bonnie lass,
So deep in luve am I;
And I will luve thee still, my dear,
Till a' the seas gang dry.
Till a' the seas gang dry, my dear,
And the rocks melt wi' the sun;
O I will love thee still, my dear,
While the sands o' life shall run.
And fare thee weel, my only luve,
And fare thee weel awhile!
And I will come again, my luve,
Though it were ten thousand mile.
EMILY DICKINSON
America 1830-1866
After great pain, a formal feeling comes
After great pain, a formal feeling comes--
The Nerves sit ceremonious, like Tombs--
The stiff Heart questions was it He, that bore,
And Yesterday, or Centuries before?
The Feet mechanical, go round--
Of Ground, or Air, or Ought--
A Wooden way
Regardless grown,
A Quartz contentment, like a stone--
This is the Hour of Lead--
Remembered, if outlived,
As Freezing persons, recollect the Snow--
First--Chill--then Stupor--then the letting go--
There's a certain Slant of light
There's a certain Slant of light,
Winter Afternoons--
That oppresses, like the Heft
Of Cathedral Tunes--
Heavenly Hurt, it gives us--
We can find no scar,
But internal difference,
Where the Meanings, are--
None may teach it--Any--
'Tis the Seal Despair--
An imperial affliction
Sent us of the Air--
When it comes, the Landscape listens--
Shadows--hold their breath--
When it goes, 'tis like the Distance
On the look of Death--
WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS
Ireland 1865-1939
The Wild Swans at Coole
The trees are in their autumn beauty,
The woodland paths are dry,
Under the October twilight the water
Mirrors a still sky;
Upon the brimming water among the stones
Are nine-and-fifty swans.
The nineteenth autumn has come upon me
Since I first made my count;
I saw, before I had well finished,
All suddenly mount
And scatter wheeling in great broken rings
Upon their clamourous wings.
I have looked upon those brilliant creatures,
And now my heart is sore.
All's changed since I, hearing at twilight,
The first time on this shore,
The bell-beat of their wings above my head,
Trod with a lighter tread.
Unwearied still, lover by lover,
They paddle in the cold
Companionable streams or climb the air;
Their hearts have not grown old;
Passion or conquest, wander where they will,
Attend upon them still.
But now they drift on the still water,
Mysterious, beautiful;
Among what rushes will they build,
By what lake's edge or pool
Delight men's eyes when I awake some day
To find they have flown away?
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
The 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?
Sailing to Byzantium
1
That is no country for old men. The young
In one another's arms, birds in the trees
--Those dying generations--at their song,
The salmon-falls, the mackerel-crowded seas,
Fish, flesh, or fowl, commend all summer long
Whatever is begotten, born, and dies.
Caught in that sensual music all neglect
Monuments of unaging intellect.
2
And aged man is but a paltry thing,
A tattered coat upon a stick, unless
Soul clap its hands and sing, and louder sing
For every tatter in its mortal dress,
Nor is there singing school but studying
Monuments of its own magnificence;
And therefore I have sailed the seas and come
To the holy city of Byzantium.
3
O sages standing in God's holy fire
As in the gold mosaic of a wall,
Come from the holy fire, perne in a gyre,
And be the singing-masters of my soul.
Consume my heart away; sick with desire
And fastened to a dying animal
It knows not what it is; and gather me
Into the artifice of eternity.
4
Once out of nature I shall never take
My bodily form from any natural thing,
But such a form as Grecian goldsmiths make
Of hammered gold and gold enamelling
To keep a drowsy Emperor awake;
Or set upon a golden bough to sing
To lords and ladies of Byzantium
Of what is past, or passing, or to come.
ROBERT FROST
America 1874-1963
The Silken Tent
She is as in a field a silken tent
At midday when a sunny summer breeze
Has dried the dew and all its ropes relent,
So that in guys it gently sways at ease,
And its supporting central cedar pole,
That is its pinnacle to heavenward
And signifies the sureness of the soul,
Seems to owe naught to any single cord,
But strictly held by none, is loosely bound
By countless silken ties of love and thought
To everything on earth the compass round,
And only by one's going slightly taut
In the capriciousness of summer air
Is of the slightest bondage made aware.
T.S. ELIOT
America (Naturalized British Citizen) 1888-1965
The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock
S'io credessi che mia risposta fosse
A persona che mai tornasse al mondo,
Questa fiamma staria senza piu scosse.
Ma per cio che giammai do questo fondo
Non torno vivo alcun, s'i'odo il vero,
Senza tema d'infamia ti rispondo*
(* The epigram above is from Dante's Inferno. "If I thought that my reply would be to one who would ever return to the world, this flame would stay without further movement; but since none has ever returned alive from this depth, if what I hear is true, I answer you without fear of infamy." This translation is from The Norton Anthology of English Literature.)
Let us go then, you and I,
When the evening is spread our against the sky
Like a patient etherised upon a table;
Let us go, through certain half-deserted streets,
The muttering retreats
Of restless nights in one-night cheap hotels
And sawdust restaurants with oyster-shells:
Streets that follow like a tedious argument
Of insidious intent
To lead you to an overwhelming question . . .
Oh, do not ask, 'What is it?'
Let us go and make our visit.
In the room the women come and go
Talking of Michelangelo.
The yellow fog that rubs its back upon the window-panes,
The yellow smoke that rubs its muzzle on the window-panes.
Licked its tongue into the corners of the evening,
Lingered upon the pools that stand in drains,
Let fall upon its back the soot that falls from chimneys,
Slipped by the terrace, make a sudden leap,
And seeing that it was a soft October night,
Curled once about the house, and fell asleep.
And indeed there will be time
For the yellow smoke that slides along the street
Rubbing its back upon the window-panes;
There will be time, there will be time
To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet;
There will be time to murder and create,
And time for all the works and days of hands
That lift and drop a question on your plate;
Time for you and time for me,
And time yet for a hundred indecisions,
And for a hundred visions and revisions,
Before the taking of a toast and tea.
In the room the women come and go
Talking of Michelangelo.
And indeed there will be time
To wonder, "Do I dare?' and "Do I dare?'
Time to turn back and descend the stair,
With a bald spot in the middle of my hair--
("They will say: 'How his hair is growing thin!')
My morning coat, my collar mounting firmly to the chin,
My necktie rich and modest, but asserted by a simple pin--
(They will say: 'But how his arms and legs are thin!)
Do I dare
Disturb the universe?
In a minute there is time
For decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse.
For I have known them all already, known them all--
Have known the evenings, mornings, afternoons,
I have measured out my life in coffee spoons;
I know the voices dying with a dying fall
Beneath the music from a farther room.
So how should I presume?
And I have known the eyes already, known them all--
The eyes that fix you in a formulated phrase,
And when I am formulated, sprawling on a pin,
When I am pinned and wriggling on the wall,
Then how should I begin
To spit out all the butt-ends of my days and ways?
And how should I presume?
And I have known the arms already, known them all--
Arms that are braceleted and white and bare
(But in the lamplight, downed with light brown hair!)
Is it perfume from a dress
That makes me so digress?
Arms that lie along a table, or wrap about a shawl.
And should I then presume?
And how should I begin?
.....
Shall I say, I have gone at dusk through narrow streets
And watched the smoke that rises from the pipes
Of lonely men in shirt-sleeves, leaning out of windows?...
I should have been a pair of ragged claws
Scuttling across the floors of silent seas.
.....
And the afternoon, the evening, sleeps so peacefully!
Smoothed by long fingers,
Asleep...tired...or it malingers,
Stretched on the floor, here beside you and me.
Should I, after tea and cakes and ices,
Have the strength to force the moment to its crisis?
But though I have wept and fasted, wept and prayed,
Though I have seen my head (grown slightly bald) brought in
upon a platter,
I am no prophet--and here's no great matter;
I have seen the moment of my greatness flicker,
And I have seen the eternal Footman hold my coat, and snicker.
And in short, I was afraid.
And would it have been worth it, after all,
After the cups, the marmalade, the tea,
Among the porcelain, among some talk of you and me,
Would it have been worth while,
To have bitten off the matter with a smile,
To have squeezed the universe into a ball
To roll it towards some overwhelming question,
To say: 'I am Lazarus, come from the dead,
Come back to tell you all, I shall tell you all'--
If one, settling a pillow by her head,
Should say: 'That is not what I meant at all.
That is not it, at all.'
And would it have been worth it, after all,
Would it have been worth while,
After the sunsets and the dooryards and the sprinkled streets,
After the novels, after the teacups, after the skirts that trail along
the floor--
And this, and so much more?--
It is impossible to say just what I mean!
But as if a magic lantern threw the nerves in patterns on a
screen:
Would it have been worth while
If one, settling a pillow or throwing off a shawl,
And turning toward the window, should say:
'That is not it at all,
That is not what I meant, at all.'
.....
No! I am not Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be;
Am an attendant lord, one that will do
To swell a progress, start a scene or two,
Advise the prince; no doubt, and easy tool,
Deferential, glad to be of use,
Politic, cautious, and meticulous;
Full of high sentence, but a bit obtuse;
At time, indeed, almost ridiculous--
Almost, at times, the Fool.
I grow old...I grow old...
I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled.
Shall I part my hair behind? Do I dare to eat a peach?
I shall wear white flannel trousers, and walk upon the beach.
I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each.
I do not think that they will sing to me.
I have seen them riding seaward on the waves
Combing the white hair of the waves blown back
When the wind blows the water white and black.
We have lingered in the chambers of the sea
By sea-girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown
Till human voices wake us, and we drown.
e.e.cummings
America 1894-1962
the Cambridge ladies who live in furnished souls
are unbeautiful and have comfortable minds
(also, with the church's protestant blessings
daughters, unscented shapeless spirited)
they believe in Christ and Longfellow, both dead,
are invariably interested in so many things--
at the present writing one still finds
delighted fingers knitting for the is it Poles?
perhaps. While permanent faces coyly bandy
scandal of Mrs. N and Professor D
....the Cambridge ladies do not care, above
Cambridge if sometimes in its box of
sky lavender and cornerless, the
moon rattles like a fragment of angry candy
FINDING THE POET
CHAPTER 9 ELEMENTS OF POETRY--THEME
In the previous eight chapters, you have learned a great deal about poetry. You have read some wonderful poems, and I hope you've also written some. Together, we have studied most of the important aspects of poetry, and I encourage you to spend the rest of your life exploring the rest. I have saved our discussion of theme for the end of our section on the elements of poetry because I believe that's where it belongs.
As you know, the theme of a poem is its message; a theme is a universal insight or lesson. A theme in poetry is not just an idea or a single abstraction such as love or loneliness. Some readers might say that Robert Burns' famous poem "A Red Red Rose," which you read in the previous chapter, is on the theme of love. In an way, this is true, but when we analyze literature, we must discipline ourselves to state the theme of a piece of writing in a complete, well focused sentence. For example, if we say that Burns' poem is about love, that simple statement does not clarify for the reader what attitude about love is being expressed in the poem. The reader would have a much more coherent understanding of the theme if we stated, "Robert Burns' poem 'A Red Red Rose' expresses the conviction that love is eternal and can endure separation and adversity." Similarly, if we had the courage to assert that T.S. Eliot's "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" is on the theme of loneliness, we would probably not be wrong. However, if we stated that "Eliot's 'The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock' expresses the alienation, insecurity, and fear experienced by many middle-aged people," a reader would have a better chance to focus on the poem's message.
When we speak and write about theme in poetry, we must also remember that the theme is not about the poet or the characters in the poem. For example, the theme of "Richard Cory" is not that Richard was lonely and depressed in spite of his wealth. The character of Richard is simply one of the elements that Edwin Arlington Robinson used to express his theme. Thus, we might way that "'Richard Cory,' by Edwin Arlington Robinson, expresses the theme that money and prestige are not sufficient to provide a meaningful life." Similarly, John Donne's "A Hymn to God the Father" is not on the theme of Donne's own fears about the afterlife. Instead, we might say that, "John Donne's 'A Hymn to God the Father' expresses the theme of doubt, pointing out that even among people of faith, the fear that God may not exist still remains."
I hope the examples that I have just given illustrate the idea that a theme is a universal message, not just an issue or concern of the poet or of a character who appears in the poem. In the same vein, Sylvia Plath's poem "Metaphors" celebrates the transforming power of pregnancy, not just the combination of delight and fear that Plath herself experienced when she was pregnant. In the sense that a poetic theme is universal, it should be meaningful to all readers, not just to readers who have had the same experience as the one described in the poem. Because it deals with human issues of loneliness and separation, even a young woman, who will never be in Prufrock's situation, should be able to appreciate the themes in "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock." Similarly, even men, who will obviously never experience pregnancy, should be able to share the sense of wonder about the creation of new life expressed in Plath's "Metaphors." And even an atheist should be able to empathize with the anguish and doubt described in Donne's "A Hymn to God the Father." Beneath the particular images and events described in a poem lies its theme, a general message about the nature of being human.
You will notice that most poems do not contain a statement of theme. A poem is not like an analytical essay which should contain a thesis-- a general statement that focuses and limits the scope of the essay. This is one of the principal differences between poetry and analytical writing. Although the poet usually does not state the theme directly, he or she may hint at it in various ways. The reader's job is to learn how to look for these hints. Let's scrutinize the following poem by Gwendolyn Brooks to see if we can determine its theme:
Sadie and Maud
Maud went to college.
Sadie stayed at home.
Sadie scraped life
With a fine-tooth comb.
She didn't leave a tangle in.
Her comb found every strand.
Sadie was one of the livingest chits
In all the land.
Sadie bore two babies
Under her maiden name.
Maud and Ma and Papa
Nearly died of shame.
When Sadie said her last so-long
Her girls struck out from home.
(Sadie had left as heritage
Her fine-tooth comb.)
Maud, who went to college,
Is a thin brown mouse.
She is living all alone
In this old house.
In this poem, Brooks uses a device borrowed from traditional rhetoric and often used in analytical writing-- comparison and contrast. Actually, the poem is based primarily on contrast. By pointing out the differences between the two sisters' lives, Brooks helps the reader to see that the choice of life style that each sister has made has both enriched and impoverished her life. We know that the theme of the poem is not about Sadie and Maud, and it is not about Gwendolyn Brooks. Thinking and feeling our way through the images in this poem, can we find a universal human message beneath the surface? How about something straightforward like, "Gwendolyn Brooks' 'Sadie and Maud' explores the theme that every person both gains and loses from the choices that he or she makes."
You will notice in all the examples I've given that I am careful to include the author's name and the name of the poem, followed by my statement of what I believe the poem's theme to be. I am modeling this technique for you because this is a good method of developing the thesis for an analytical essay. Any meaningful analysis of a poem should include the poem's theme in the discussion since the theme is, after all, the point of the poem. A poetry analysis which focuses on elements in the poem such as synecdoche, metonymy, and oxymorons without trying to come to grips with what the poem is really all about is a pretty pointless exercise. You can develop a thesis for an analysis of a poem by beginning with your statement of theme then inserting the elements you intend to analyze as they help to reveal the poem's theme. Of course, you will only be ready to do this after you have completed the ten-step process for reading a poem and looked carefully at all of the elements in the poem. Let's try this system on "Sadie and Maud" to create a hypothetical thesis statement for an analysis of this poem. How about, "Gwendolyn Brooks uses contrasting imagery and metaphor in her poem 'Sadie and Maud' to explore the theme that career choices both enhance and limit the quality of human life."
Maybe you don't think that "Sadie and Maud" is about the effects of life style choices at all. Maybe you think this poem is about the idea that living life fully is more important than receiving a formal education. You should know by now that you have the right to interpret a poem as you see fit. But you need to provide evidence from the poem itself to support your interpretation. Have you noticed that interpreting the theme of a poem is a similar process to analyzing symbols and archetypes? Let's look at a famous poem by Robert Frost to see if we can discern its theme and identify the elements that Frost uses to suggest his theme to the reader.
Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening
Whose woods these are I think I know.
His house is in the village, though;
He will not see me stopping here
To watch his woods fill up with snow.
My little horse must think it queer
To stop without a farmhouse near
Between the woods and frozen lake
The darkest evening of the year.
He gives his harness bells a shake
To ask if there is some mistake.
The only other sound's the sweep
Of easy wind and downy flake.
The woods are lovely, dark, and deep,
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep.
This poem has a surface simplicity that is typical of Frost's style, and he usually includes some well-chosen images that might be symbolic. This poem also has a setting, just as many short stories do, and the setting-- which includes time and place-- can also help hint at the poem's theme. In this poem, the speaker is driving a horse and buggy along a country road during a snow fall in the middle of winter, perhaps on the winter solstice. The narrator unexpectedly stops his horse and gazes out through the darkness and snow into the woods beyond. Then he decides to continue his journey, reminding himself that he has things to do-- "promises to keep," and a long distance to travel-- "miles to go before I sleep." What do you think? Do you see any archetypes here? How about winter? And how about the darkness and the snow? Some readers think that winter, darkness, and snow carry archetypal overtones of death. Is it possible that, while the speaker is stopped in the lonely, silent, dark and snowy night, he has an intimation of his own death, but a moment later, like his horse, he "shakes it off" and continues his ordinary, task-oriented life. If this interpretation is valid, the final word in the poem, "sleep," is a metaphoric synonym for death. If this way of looking at the poem makes sense to you, how could you develop a thesis for an analysis focusing on theme? Here's a possibility: "In 'Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening,' Robert Frost uses imagery and archetypes to explore the theme that nature reveals our human mortality in rare moments of reflection." There are many other ways of interpreting this poem and hundreds of possible ways of stating its theme. As long as you find the theme in the elements of the poem itself, your interpretation should be as valid as anyone else's.
What if we were able to speak to Robert Frost in the next world? Would he be able to give us a clearer understanding of the theme of this poem and the symbolic meanings of his images? Probably not. I believe that Carl Jung was correct when he asserted that the creative process works through the poet as its medium, and the poet is not always fully conscious of exactly what his or her poems are all about. And I know from my own experience of writing poetry for the past twenty-five years, that the poet is often not aware of a theme at all when she or he begins to write. In my case, usually an image or a situation inspires me to begin writing, and I just hope that the poem will have some point by the time I'm finished. I've learned to trust this creative process. If an image gains a powerful hold on my imagination, I believe that there is a theme hiding behind that image somewhere and that theme will find a way of revealing itself to the reader. My job is to choose my words carefully and present the images as clearly as I can. A poem that I wrote a long time ago illustrates this process.
Black Jack Springs, June 25
Wild roses jumble like weeds along the old fences.
I've never seen the land so green.
Grandma said they had a rainy winter,
And even last night, my first night home
For months and months, there was the sharp
Sound of water on the metal awnings
Above the sleeping porch windows
As I lay looking out at the big elm
Against the cloudy night sky.
Lightning flashed, and the little redbud tree
Came out of darkness. Then the thunder.
The neighbors' puppy howled and hid
Under the back porch steps,
Over across the alley.
I was happier then than I had been
For months and months.
Today, we're out in the country looking for the cemetery
Where some of our people are buried.
Grandma thinks she knows.
Is it Oak Hill or Quaker Valley?
No, that's not right.
They put your uncle Jimmy there.
Maybe it was over to Joplin or out to Lowell.
Grandpa's ninety, and he's driving,
But he shouldn't be.
He's run into a lot of ditches lately.
Grandma says you might as well shoot him
As tell him he can't drive.
A bob-white quail skitters across the road;
Grandma points out a scissor-tail flycatcher,
Then a cardinal.
Grandpa's elderly Oldsmobile wanders over to the left
Across the faint center line.
No one is coming from the other way,
So I don't say a thing.
But I read in this morning's paper
That Custer was killed on the Little Big Horn
On June 25.
Shoal Creek is a livelier place to die;
It's higher than usual, and the mad tangle of vegetation
Grows right down to the water's edge,
And some of the trumpet vines dangle in.
Tiger lilies and century plants are everywhere,
And a few white faced cattle graze
Right up to the dense thickets of sumac and oak.
We forget about the graveyard,
And Grandpa tells me
That they used to drive his Model T
Over to Black Jack, not too far from here,
And fill up their barrels with spring water.
Grandma tries to tell me
Just how good that spring water tasted.
When I first wrote this poem, I just wanted to record my responses to an afternoon drive I took with my mother and her parents on a visit to the Ozarks where I was born. I was struck by the fact that although my grandfather was much too old to drive safely, I did not have the courage to tell him that he should stop driving. I was actually willing to risk my life to maintain my grandfather's dignity. These were my thoughts when I wrote the poem. Later, someone who had read this poem said to me, "I like the way you contrast life and death in this poem, with the cemetery symbolizing death and the spring water symbolizing life, and your grandparents, even though they are very old, choose life over death by focusing on the spring water at the end of the poem and forgetting about the graveyard." This response startled me because I had thought of this as a simple descriptive poem, and I had not consciously included any symbolism. Nor had I deliberately included the theme of the triumph of life over death.
In a poem I wrote more recently, again theme was not my primary objective. I was playing with an objective correlative. I wanted to contrast designs that appear in nature with designs made by human beings, and I used pinstripes as my focal point.
Pinstripes
There are very few pinstripes in nature.
Occasionally clouds will send out long thin fingers,
But there is a softness to them,
A willingness to give way, to fade into curves,
To dissipate.
Sometimes rocks have long striations
That run parallel in an almost geometric way,
But their strident hues bring a strangeness to stones,
And the lines are never perfect.
If a draftsman were to measure them,
They would fall between the little markings
On his instrument.
What about zebras?
Have you ever really looked at one?
Their stripes curve around those chubby bodies
In the oddest way.
A zebra's stripes can lead you
Down a road filled with surprises.
There is a lesson here
For those who are clothed in pinstripes.
I have a bad habit of getting to the end of a poem I'm writing and suddenly panicking because the poem doesn't seem to have a theme. So I tack one on to the end of the poem. I came dangerously close to doing that in this poem. In several other poems I've written, I've actually had to chop off the last several lines because I was getting too explanatory. A poem should not need any explanation. Its theme should naturally emerge out of the images and the other elements in the poem. What do you think the theme of "Pinstripes" is? Even though I wrote it, I would still have to think carefully to formulate a statement of the poem's theme. How about this: "In 'Pinstripes' Rose Anna Higashi uses contrasting imagery to explore the theme that some human beings lack the flexibility and spontaneity of nature."
I hope I've made the point that poets seldom start with a theme first and then write a poem to illustrate that theme. Poets are usually inspired by a deeply felt emotion or an inscape that captures their imaginations. Sometimes a place or a dramatic incident inspires a poem. To be honest, I wrote "Pinstripes" after gazing at all the pinstriped suits lined up in my husband's closet. Sometimes even a dream can create the impetus for a poem. The following poem by Samuel Taylor Coleridge came from a dream:
Kubla Khan
Or, a Vision in a Dream. A Fragment
In Xanadu did Kubla Khan
A stately pleasure-dome decree:
Where Alph, the sacred river, ran
Through caverns measureless to man
Down to a sunless sea.
So twice five miles of fertile ground
With walls and towers were girdled round:
And there were gardens bright with sinuous rills,
Where blossomed many an incense-bearing tree;
And here were forests ancient as the hills,
Enfolding sunny spots of greenery.
But oh! that deep romantic chasm which slanted
Down the green hill athwart a cedarn cover!
A savage place! as holy and enchanted
As e'er beneath a waning moon was haunted
By woman wailing for her demon-lover!
And from this chasm, with ceaseless turmoil seething,
As if this earth in fast thick pants were breathing,
A mighty fountain momently was forced:
Amid whose swift half-intermitted burst
Huge fragments vaulted like rebounding hail,
Or chaffy grain beneath the thresher's flail:
And 'mid these dancing rocks at once and ever
It flung up momently the sacred river.
Five miles meandering with a mazy motion
Through wood and dale the sacred river ran,
Then reached the caverns measureless to man,
And sank in tumult to a lifeless ocean:
And 'mid this tumult Kubla heard from far
Ancestral voices prophesying war!
The shadow of the dome of pleasure
Floated midway on the waves;
Where was heard the mingled measure
From the fountain and the caves.
It was a miracle of rare device,
A sunny pleasure-dome with caves of ice!
A damsel with a dulcimer
In a vision once I saw:
It was an Abyssinian maid,
And on her dulcimer she played,
Singing of Mount Abora.
Could I revive within me
Her symphony and song,
To such a deep delight 'twould win me,
That with music loud and long,
I would build that dome in air,
That sunny dome! those caves of ice!
And all who heard should see them there,
And all should cry, Beware! Beware!
His flashing eyes, his floating hair!
Weave a circle round him thrice,
And close your eyes with holy dread,
For he on honey-dew hath fed,
And drunk the milk of Paradise.
Unfortunately, Coleridge was addicted to opium, and this poem was the product of an opium-induced dream. He began writing as soon as he woke up, trying to capture the vision from his dream. He was interrupted by a visitor, and later when he returned to writing the poem, he was unable to remember the rest of the dream. Thus, the poem remains a fragment, as Coleridge himself calls it, and its theme is very difficult to discern. Although the poem is filled with vivid and beautiful imagery, it is not easy to find a universal message beneath the surface of these lovely images. What can we learn from "Kubla Khan"? It seems to me that this poem illustrates the fact that beauty of diction and imagery are not quite enough to make a poem succeed. A poem really does need to share some meaningful perception of human experience with the reader. If we were to compare "Kubla Khan" with Coleridge's masterpiece, "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner," which appears in Chapter 4, it would be obvious that "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner" contains several significant themes and truly shares some important insights with the reader. Somehow the reader feels much more satisfied after reading "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner" than after reading "Kubla Khan." However, it is not right for me to discourage you. Perhaps you prefer "Kubla Khan," and you might even see themes in that poem which have eluded me.
We must not forget that ultimately a poem must communicate something to the reader about what it means to be human. It is through the poem's theme that this is achieved. But the mysterious thing about theme in poetry is that it should be completely invisible on the surface of the poem. Another subtlety is the fact that the words and images in a poem should be as specific as possible yet its theme is universal. In a good poem, the particular images or events described by the poet are then transformed in the reader's understanding to a shared human insight, even if the reader has never experienced the exact situation being described. The following poem by Adrienne Rich describes a very specific set of circumstances, yet its theme reaches out to everyone.
Aunt Jennifer's Tigers
Aunt Jennifer's tigers prance across a screen,
Bright topaz denizens of a world of green.
They do not fear the men beneath the tree;
They pace in sleek chivalric certainty.
Aunt Jennifer's fingers fluttering through the wool
Find even the ivory needle hard to pull.
The massive weight of Uncle's wedding band
Sits heavily upon Aunt Jennifer's hand.
When Aunt is dead, her terrified hands will lie
Still ringed with ordeals she was mastered by.
The tigers in the panel that she made
Will go on prancing, proud and unafraid.
This poem seems to be describing a specific woman named Jennifer who has created a magnificent needlework panel depicting courageous tigers on a green background. The composition also includes a tree and some men who do not frighten the tigers in the least. Although Aunt Jennifer has made this screen filled with fearless tigers, she herself is a passive person who finds her marriage oppressive-- "The massive weight of Uncle's wedding band/ Sits heavily upon Aunt Jennifer's hand." And she has never been the master of her own fate. From this specific situation, the reader can infer certain themes. Some readers might conclude that the poem's theme has to do with the repressive nature of marriage. Others might focus on the contrast between the world of art and imagination and the ordinary world of everyday tasks. A more feminist interpretation might focus on the abuse of women through male intimidation. A reader who chose to write an analysis of "Aunt Jennifer's Tigers" would of course be free to explore any theme that he or she perceived in the poem. But that analysis would need to include a clearly stated thesis including both the poem's theme and the specific elements in the poem to be analyzed.
The final idea I would like for you to remember about theme is that a poem's theme and its subject are not the same thing. In terms of subject, "Aunt Jennifer's Tigers" is about needlework, but this is certainly not the theme of the poem. Aunt Jennifer could have created beautiful cakes decorated with ferocious tigers, and the poem would still have expressed the same themes. The following poem by the Chilean poet and Nobel Prize winner, Pablo Neruda, is about the growing, shipping, and selling of South American fruit by an American corporation. Although the subject of this poem has to do with fruit, its theme is very different.
The United Fruit Co.
When the trumpet sounded, it was
all prepared on the earth,
and Jehovah parceled out the earth
to Coca-Cola, Inc., Anaconda,
Ford Motors, and other entities:
The Fruit Company, Inc.
reserved for itself the most succulent,
the central coast of my own land,
the delicate waist of America.
It rechristened its territories
as the "Banana Republics"
and over the sleeping dead,
over the restless heroes
who brought about the greatness,
the liberty and the flags,
it established the comic opera:
abolished the independencies.
presented the crowns of Caesar,
unsheathed envy, attracted
the dictatorship of the flies
Trujillo flies, Tacho flies,
Carias flies, Martinez flies,
Ubico flies, damp flies,
of modest blood and marmalade,
drunken flies who zoom
over the ordinary graves,
circus flies, wise flies
well trained in tyranny.
Among the bloodthirsty flies
the Fruit Company lands its ships,
taking off the coffee and the fruit;
the treasure of our submerged
territories flows as though
on plates into the ships.
Meanwhile Indians are falling
into the sugared chasms
of the harbors, wrapped
for burial in the mist of the dawn:
a body rolls, a thing
that has no name, a fallen cipher,
a cluster of dead fruit
thrown down on the dump.
Translated by Robert Bly
What do you think the theme of this poem is? Again, the images will guide us. How about all of those flies? Neruda uses the word "flies" at least ten times, and it does not create a pretty picture. This is not a poem by Kobayashi Issa expressing Buddhist compassion for the vulnerable insects of the world. Instead, the reader begins to visualize hideous fruit flies swarming over rotting fruit. The names Trujillo, Tacho, Carias, Martinez, and Ubico refer to political dictators in South America-- "the dictatorship of the flies." The conclusion of the poem presents another disturbing image-- Native Americans thrown away on a garbage dump like "a cluster of dead fruit." These images of death, rotting fruit, and flies present a very strong indication of the poem's theme. The poem is certainly saying something about the exploitation of natural resources and native people. Our first impulse might be to formulate a statement of theme something like this: "In 'The United Fruit Co.' Pablo Neruda expresses the theme of the exploitation of South American natural resources and native people by greedy dictators and American corporations." In a way, this is the theme of the poem, but has it really been stated as a universal insight into human experience? Aren't we still confusing the subject of the poem with its theme? When analyzing poetry, we need to look for the deepest level of universality when we express a poem's theme. On the deepest level, the poem is about the exploitation of the poor and vulnerable by the rich and greedy. Although Neruda wrote about the cynical abuse of natural and human resources in his own country and specifically mentioned the names of certain American corporations and actual South American dictators, his message could be applied to similar situations in many places throughout the world. Let's try again to state the poem's theme in more universal language. How about this: "In 'The United Fruit Co.' Pablo Neruda uses vivid imagery to express the theme of the exploitation and abuse of natural resources and native people by those who are powerful, wealthy , and self-serving."
I hope that you will remember these principles as you explore the rest of the poems in this book. Keep in mind that the theme does not reveal itself to the reader right away. You will need to study all of the elements of the poem and reflect carefully before you can begin to clarify a statement of the poem's theme. And you will always need to be cautious not to confuse the poem's subject with its theme. Searching for the deepest and most universal level of a poem's theme is one of the most profound and meaningful aspects of being a reader of poetry. There is so much in the world that divides and separates people and so much energy being poured into focusing on differences that poetry is one of our last refuges where we can go to connect with one another on our deepest level of humanity.
QUESTIONS AND TOPICS FOR REVIEW
1. What is a theme in poetry?
2. When discussing a poem, what elements should be included in a statement of theme?
3. How can a statement of theme be revised to become a thesis statement for an analytical essay?
4. Why is the theme of a poem not about the poet nor about one of the characters in the poem?
5. Do most poems contain a statement of theme? Why or why not?
6. How can the reader determine the theme of a poem?
7. Do most poets start with the theme first and then write the poem? Why or why not?
8. What is the difference between a poem's subject and its theme?
9. Why is it important to express a poem's theme in its most universal form?
TOPICS FOR DISCUSSION
1. Discuss the various possible themes in Frost's "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening."
2. Discuss the theme or themes in Coleridge's "Kubla Khan."
3. Discuss the various methods that a reader can use to discern the theme of a poem.
4. Re-read Coleridge's "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner," which appears in Chapter 4, and discuss the various possible themes in this poem.
5. Discuss whether or not a reader's gender might influence his or her interpretation of a poem's theme. You may wish to use Rich's "Aunt Jennifer's Tigers" and Eliot's "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock," which appears in Chapter 8, as the basis of this discussion.
6. Discuss whether or not a reader's political or economic values might influence his or her interpretation of a poem's theme. Use Neruda's "The United Fruit Co." as the basis for this discussion.
7. Re-read John Donne's "A Lecture Upon the Shadow," which appears in Chapter 8.
Then discuss the poem's theme. What elements or poetic techniques does Donne use to express this theme?
8. Discuss the theme of Yakamochi Otomo's "While I waited and wondered," which appears at the end of this chapter. How does Yakamochi convey his theme to the reader? (Just as a point of information, it is customary in Japan to refer to writers by their given names rather than their family names. There have been many famous poets in Japan from the Otomo family, including Yakamochi's father, Tabito.)
ACTIVITIES
1. Working in pairs, rewrite the following statements of theme, revising for clarity and focus, and adding or deleting as necessary.
A. "Sadie and Maud" is about how she was smarter than her sister,
even though her sister went to college.
B. Frost's poem about riding around in the snow is about the poet's
death wish.
C. Higashi's "Pinstripes" is about how she doesn't like pinstripes.
D. Coleridge's "Kubla Khan" is a totally hopeless poem that has
nothing to say.
E. Rich must have some kind of grudge against men. You can see it
in her poem about her aunt's tigers.
F. Neruda expresses a lot of anti-American propaganda in his
fruit poem.
G. Otomo's poem is about how he wants to give a branch of orange
blossoms to a lady.
H. Otomo's other poem is on how he's really sorry that he didn't
talk to his brother more before he died.
I. Percy's poem "Ozymandias" in a way reminds me of Yeats'
"The Second Coming."
J. Browning's "Porphyria's Lover" is a creepy poem about murder.
K. In "Domination of Black" the poet feels very afraid
because it is so dark outside.
L. "Love the Wild Swan" is a sonnet about swans. It reminds me
of Yeats too.
Share your revised statements of theme with your classmates and discuss the improvements you have made.
2. Again working in pairs, and using the revised statements of theme, develop each into a thesis statement for an analytical essay. You will need to decide which elements of the poem you will be analyzing. Share these thesis statements with the class.
3. Assign someone to research the influence of Modern painting on the poetry of Wallace Stevens. Then discuss these influences in his poem "Domination of Black."
4. Arrange a mock murder trial for the narrator in Browning's "Porphyria's Lover." You will need a prosecutor, a defense attorney, and someone to play the narrator himself who will be asked to testify.
Other members of the class will play the jury who will deliberate his fate.
5. Every member of the class will write a statement of theme for Auden's "The Unknown Citizen." Write some of these on the board and discuss the poem in light of these statements of theme.
6. Assign someone to research the story of Caedmon and to bring a translation of the Anglo-Saxon poem "Caedmon's Hymn" to class. Use this information as the basis for a discussion of Levertov's "Caedmon."
ANALYTICAL WRITING ASSIGNMENTS
1. Select one of the thesis statements developed in Activity #2 above, and write an analytical essay which includes this thesis statement.
2. Develop a thesis statement and write an analytical essay on Shelley's " Ozymandias."
3. Using your own statement of theme for Auden's "The Unknown Citizen," develop this into a thesis statement and write an analytical essay on this poem.
4. Write an analytical essay focusing on theme and imagery in Stevens' "Domination of Black."
5. Write an analytical essay comparing and contrasting Yeats' "The Wild Swans at Coole," which appears in Chapter 8, and Jeffers' "Love the Wild Swan."
6. Write an analytical essay on Angelou's "Caged Bird," focusing on theme, sound devices, and archetypes.
CREATIVE WRITING ASSIGNMENTS
1. Select a poem that you have written for a previous assignment. Edit this poem carefully to remove any thematic or explanatory statements that you may have included.
2. Select a fairly long poem that you have written for a previous assignment. Remove the last several lines of the poem. Does the poem still make sense? Does it still communicate your theme to the reader?
3. Select a poem that you have previously written and that you are willing to share with another student for peer editing. Exchange poems (you may wish to do this anonymously) and edit your classmate's poem, focusing on three areas-- diction, tone, and theme. Delete any thematic or explanatory statements that you find in your classmate's poem. Also, make some specific comments or recommendations about strengthening the poem's diction and tone. Finally, write a statement of theme for the poem that you have just edited. Return the poems to their authors. Read the comments and suggestions and think about their value. Are you surprised by your classmate's statement of your poem's theme? If you feel comfortable doing so, you may wish to read some of these poems and the statements of theme to the class for discussion.
4. Searching through your journal or your memory, focus on a dramatic incident that you have experienced that remains significant to you. Using descriptive imagery and a narrative format, recount this incident in the form of a poem. Stop when you reach the conclusion of the narrative, and do not add any explanatory comments. Pass these poems around the class. Each reader will write a statement of theme on the back of each poem he or she reads. When your poem is returned to you, read all of the statements of theme and think about which one best expresses what this incident meant to you. Then edit your poem to refocus the imagery and events to help reveal the poem's theme more clearly.
5. Record your dreams in your journal for several days. Then select one of your dreams and use it as the basis of a poem. Read these poems to each other in class and discuss what you perceive the themes of these poems to be. Here's a hint: If you can't remember your dreams, try keeping your eyes closed for a few minutes when you first wake up in the morning. Your dreams may come back to you.
ADDITIONAL POEMS FOR READING AND ANALYSIS FOCUSING ON THEME
YAKAMOCHI OTOMO
Japan 718-785
While I waited and wondered,
The orange-tree that grows in my garden,
Spreading out a hundred branches,
Has burst into bloom, as the fifth month
For garland-making draws near.
Every morning and every day I go out
To see the flowers and keep close guard,
Lest they should fall off
Before you, whom I love as the breath of life,
Have seen them once on a night when the moon
Is clear as a shining mirror.
But the wicked cuckoo,
Though I chase him again and again,
Comes crying in the sad hours of dawn
And wantonly scatters the blooms on the ground.
Knowing not what to do,
I have reached and broken off these with my hand,
Pray, see them, my lady!
Envoys
These are the orange-blossoms of my garden
I had intended you to see
Some time after mid-month
On a clear moonlight night.
The cuckoo has scattered
My orange blossoms on the ground.
Oh, had he only come
After you had seen the flowers!
Translated by The Japanese Classics Translation
Committee, Seiichi Taki, Chairperson
An Elegy on the Death of His Younger Brother
When, at our Sovereign's command,
I started on my travels
To rule the province far-off as the skies,
My brother followed me across the hills of Nara
As far as Izumi's shining bed;
There we stayed our horses,
And in parting, said I:
'In safely I shall go and come back home,
Be happy, pray to the gods and wait.'
Ever since, I have sorely missed him,
With the road stretching far
And rivers and mountains between us;
While thus eager for a sight of him,
A courier came--how gladly I received him!
I asked!--With what strange, wild words he
answered me!
My dearest brother--of all times of the year,
In autumn when the waving susuki blooms,
At his home where blow the bush-clovers,
Neither walking in his court at morn,
Nor treading the ground at eve,
He passed through the village of his native Saho,
And rose into white clouds trailing
Over the tree-tops of the hill:
So the courier said.
Envoys
Although I wished him health,
He rose into white-trailing clouds,
How sad I am to hear!
Had I known him destined thus,
I had shown him the breakers on the jutting rocks
Of the sea of Koshi!
Translated by the Japanese Classics Translation
Committee, Seiichi Taki, Chairperson
PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY
England 1792-1822
Ozymandias*
I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert...Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed:
And on the pedestal these words appear:
'My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!'
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.
* Rameses ll, pharaoh of Egypt in the thirteenth century B.C. was called Ozymandias by the Greeks.
ROBERT BROWNING
England 1812-1889
Porphyria's Lover
The rain set early in to-night,
The sullen wind was soon awake,
It tore the elm-tops down for spite,
And did its worst to vex the lake:
I listened with heart fit to break.
When glided in Porphyria; straight
She shut the cold out and the storm,
And kneeled and made the cheerless grate
Blaze up, and all the cottage warm;
Which done, she rose, and from her form
Withdrew the dripping cloak and shawl,
And laid her soiled gloves by, untied
Her hat and let the damp hair fall,
And, last, she sat down by my side
And called me. When no voice replied,
She put my arm around her waist,
And made her smooth white shoulder bare,
And all her yellow hair displaced,
And stooping, make my cheek lie there
And spread, o'er all, her yellow hair,
Murmuring how she loved me--she
Too weak, for all her heart's endeavor,
To set its struggling passion free
From pride, and vainer ties dissever,
And give herself to me forever.
But passion sometimes would prevail,
Nor could tonight's gay feast restrain
A sudden thought of one so pale
For love of her, and all in vain:
So, she was come through wind and rain.
Be sure I looked up at her eyes
Happy and proud; at last I knew
Porphyria worshipped me; surprise
Made my heart swell, and still it grew
While I debated what to do.
That moment she was mine, mine, fair,
Perfectly pure and good: I found
A thing to do, and all her hair
In one long yellow string I wound
Three times her little throat around
And strangled her. No pain felt she;
I am quite sure she felt no pain.
As a shut bud that hold a bee,
I warily oped her lids: again
Laughed the blue eyes without a stain.
And I untightened next the tress
About her neck, her cheek once more
Blushed bright beneath my burning kiss:
I propped her head up as before
Only this time my shoulder bore,
Her head, which droops upon it still:
The smiling rosy little head,
So glad it has its utmost will,
That all it scorned at once is fled,
And I, its love, am gained instead!
Porphyria's love: she guessed not how
Her darling one wish would be heard.
And thus we sit together now,
And all night long we have not stirred,
And yet God has not said a word!
WALLACE STEVENS
America 1879-1955
Domination of Black
At night, by the fire,
The colors of the bushes
And of the fallen leaves,
Repeating themselves,
Turned in the room,
Like the leaves themselves
Turning in the wind.
Yes: but the colors of the heavy hemlocks
Came striding.
And I remembered the cry of the peacocks.
The colors of their tails
Were like the leaves themselves
Turning in the wind,
In the twilight wind.
They swept over the room,
Just as they flew from the boughs of the hemlocks
Down to the ground.
I heard them cry--the peacocks.
Was it a cry against the twilight
Or against the leaves themselves
Turning in the wind,
Turning as the flames
Turned in the fire,
Turning as the tails of the peacocks
Turned in the loud fire,
Loud as the hemlocks
Full of the cry of the peacocks?
Or was it a cry against the hemlocks?
Out of the window,
I saw how the planets gathered
Like the leaves themselves
Turning in the wind.
I saw how the night came,
Came striding like the color of the heavy hemlocks.
I felt afraid.
And I remembered the cry of the peacocks.
ROBINSON JEFFERS
America 1887-1962
Love the Wild Swan
"I hate my verses, every line, every word.
Oh pale and brittle pencil ever to try
One grass-blade's curve, or the throat of one bird
That clings to twig, ruffled against white sky.
Oh cracked and twilight mirrors ever to catch
One color, one glinting flash, of the splendor of things.
Unlucky hunter, Oh bullets of wax,
The lion beauty, the wild-swan wings, the storm of the wings."
--This wild swan of a world is no hunter's game.
Better bullets than yours would crack in the flame.
Does it matter whether you hate your...self? At least
Love your eyes that can see, your mind that can
Hear the music, the thunder of the wings. Love the wild swan.
W.H. AUDEN
England 1907-1973
The Unknown Citizen
(To JS/07/M/378
This Marble Monument
Is Erected by the State)
He was found by the Bureau of Statistics to be
One against whom there was no official complaint,
And all the reports on his conduct agree
That, in the modern sense of an old-fashioned word, he
was a saint,
For in everything he did he served the Greater Community.
Except for the War till the day he retired
He worked in a factory and never got fired,
But satisfied his employers, Fudge Motors Inc.
Yet he wasn't a scab or odd in his views,
For his Union reports that he paid his dues,
(Our report on his Union shows it was sound)
And our Social Psychology workers found
That he was popular with his mates and liked a drink.
The Press are convinced that he bought a paper every day
And that his reactions to advertisements were normal in
every way.
Policies taken out in his name prove that he was fully insured,
And his Health-card shows he was once in hospital but left
it cured.
Both Producers Research and High-Grade Living declare
He was fully sensible to the advantages of the Installment Plan
And had everything necessary to the Modern Man,
A phonograph, a radio, a car and a frigidaire.
Our researchers into Public Opinion are content
That he held the proper opinions for the time of year;
When there was peace, he was for peace; when there was war,
he went.
He was married and added five children to the population,
Which our Eugenist says was the right number for a parent of
his generation.
And our teachers report that he never interfered with
their education.
Was he free? Was he happy? The question is absurd:
Had anything been wrong, we should certainly have heard.
DENISE LEVERTOV
England Born 1923
Caedmon*
All the others talked as if
talk were a dance.
Clodhopper I, with clumsy feet
would break the gliding ring.
Early I learned to
hunch myself
close by the door:
then when the talk began
I'd wipe my
mouth and wend
unnoticed back to the barn
to be with the warm beasts,
dumb among body sounds
of the simple ones.
I'd see by a twist
of lit rush the motes
of gold moving
from shadow to shadow
slow in the wake
of deep untroubled sighs.
The cows
munched or stirred or were still. I
was at home and lonely,
both in good measure. Until
the sudden angel affrighted me--light effacing
my feeble beam,
a forest of torches, feathers of flame, sparks upflying:
but the cows as before
were calm, and nothing was burning,
nothing but I, as that hand of fire
touched my lips and scorched my tongue
and pulled by voice
into the ring of the dance.
*Caedmon, according to the Anglo-Saxon historian, Bede, was a poor cowherd who lived in the Seventh Century. He felt self-conscious about his inability to sing in social gatherings and always excused himself and returned to the barn. There he was visited by an angel who gave him the gift of singing and composing music. The Anglo-Saxon poem "Caedmon's Hymn" is attributed to him.
MAYA ANGELOU
America Born 1928
Caged Bird
A free bird leaps
on the back of the wind
and floats downstream
till the current ends
and dips his wing
in the orange sun rays
and dares to claim the sky.
But a bird that stalks
down his narrow cage
can seldom see through
his bars of rage
his wings are clipped and
his feet are tied
so he opens his mouth to sing.
The caged bird sings
with a fearful trill
of things unknown
but longed for still
and his tune is heard
on the distant hill
for the caged bird
sings of freedom.
The free bird thinks of another breeze
and the trade winds soft through the sighing trees
and the fat worms waiting on a dawn-bright lawn
and he names the sky his own.
But a caged bird stands on the grave of dreams
his shadow shouts on a nightmare scream
his wings are clipped and his feet are tied
and he opens his throat to sing.
The caged bird sings
with a fearful trill
of things unknown
but longed for still
and his tune is heard
on the distant hill
for the caged bird
sings of freedom.
FINDING THE POET
CHAPTER 10 POEMS ABOUT FAMILY
You know quite a bit about the elements of poetry by now. And I hope that you have a greater feeling of both confidence and curiosity when you sit down to read a new poem for the first time. In the next six chapters, we will be looking at poetry by subject, and you will be able to apply all that you have learned about poetic form and genre and all of the various poetic techniques and elements when you analyze these poems. Also, we will be reading primarily Twentieth Century and Contemporary poetry in these upcoming chapters. In previous chapters, I tried to give you a sampling of some of the best known traditional English and American poets and a few of the great traditional poets from other countries as well. I think it is important for students to develop a sense of historic perspective before proceeding to the poets who are writing today.
In our focus on specific subjects, we will took first at poems about family relationships. However, keep in mind that these poems might explore a variety of different themes. I'm sure you still recall our discussion in Chapter 9 on the distinction between a poem's subject and its theme. While certain themes, such as love, loss, and conflicting values, might naturally lend themselves to poems about family relationships, poets of course have the right to express any theme in conjunction with any subject. As readers, we must be careful not to assume that a poem on a particular subject, such as fatherhood, should also convey a particular theme. Let's look at several poems about fathers. As you read them, notice the variety in tone, form, diction, imagery, etc. You will need to play close attention to all of these elements and allow your own feelings to respond to each poem before you begin to discern its theme. We'll begin with a poem by the Canadian poet, George Bowering, who was born in 1935:
My Father in New Zealand
Everyone agrees,
when you visit New Zealand
you are back in the Fifties.
The Fifties! My father is still alive!
I looked around for him on the long main street of Wellington.
I kept turning on Cuba street to see if he was behind me.
I listened for his quiet voice in the Auckland airport.
I lifted brims of bent sheepmen's hats, looking for his face.
He was there somewhere, I had no right
to wander both islands without talking with him.
I rued the hours I spent in the wrong places,
the Vibrations disco in Christchurch, the Maori bars,
the poetry reading at the library. He
would never show up in such a place, and my time
was running out.
Every time I watched a flashing leg
instead of seeking his dear old frame
I was suffused with guilt, a true Canadian abroad.
Dear Ewart, if they are right you are there somewhere,
& I have twenty years to find you
before you are gone again, maybe to some other country.
But how many years do I have left, whose frame
looks so much like yours? Can I wait twenty years,
hoping you move to a closer country?
Are you in New Zealand, looking for me too?
I am a lot older now, I look more like you.
Call me by the secret name we had when I was a child,
the name we never spoke. I'll hear you if I can get there.
Although this poem is filled with specific references to New Zealand, on a deeper level it is about the profound sense of loss over the death of a father. The poem's tone takes on an oddly comic quality when the speaker (probably not a persona) announces that since being in New Zealand is like being back in the 1950s, then he should be able to find his father, who was still alive in the fifties, if he just searches around in New Zealand. The absurdity of this proposal underscores the unresolved grief and continued longing of the son who has never quite accepted his father's death and is now beginning to think about his own. I find the final two lines very touching. Somehow the reference to the secret name from childhood suggests an intimacy and love between the father and the son that no one else could ever quite understand. And now that the father is gone, no one knows the speaker's secret name.
In a poem with a very different tone, Janice Mirikitani describes her father with images of iron and desert wind. Mirikitani uses one Japanese word in this poem-- hakujin. This is an old fashioned Japanese word that refers to white people. Tule Lake is the name of a camp where Japanese Americans were relocated during World War II.
For My Father
He came over the ocean
carrying Mt. Fuji on
his back/ Tule Lake on his chest
hacked through the brush
of deserts
and made them grow
strawberries
we stole berries
from the stem
we could not afford them
for breakfast
his eyes held
nothing
as he whipped us
for stealing.
the desert had dried
his soul.
wordless
he sold
the rich,
full berries
to hakujin
whose children
pointed at our eyes
they ate fresh
strawberries
on corn flakes.
Father,
i wanted to scream
at your silence.
Your strength
was a stranger
i could never touch.
iron
in your eyes
to shield
the pain
to shield desert-like wind
from patches
of strawberries
grown
from
tears.
In this poem the poet appears to be speaking in her own voice without the touch of irony and humor of Bowering's poem about his father. The theme of "For My Father" certainly does not hide far beneath the surface. Robert Hayden has also written a poem about a quiet, hard working father who carried a lot of anger around with him. Hayden uses winter as the archetypal backdrop for his poem.
Those Winter Sundays
Sundays too my father got up early
and put his clothes on in the blueblack cold,
then with cracked hands that ached
from labor in the weekday weather made
banked fires blaze. No one ever thanked him.
I'd wake and hear the cold splintering, breaking.
When the rooms were warm, he'd call,
and slowly I would rise and dress,
fearing the chronic angers of that house,
Speaking indifferently to him,
who had driven out the cold
and polished my good shoes as well.
What did I know, what did I know
of love's austere and lonely offices?
Does the tone of Hayden's poem seem different to you from Mirikitani's? Both deal with childhood experiences in which the poets interacted with their fathers in a very limited way. But the two poems seem to create very different effects. Whereas Mirikitani says, "the desert had dried/ his soul," Hayden concludes, "...what did I know/ of love's austere and lonely offices?" While Mirikitani seems to have answered her own questions about her father and speaks directly to him, Hayden, who never addresses his father directly, admits that he never thanked his father for working hard and keeping away the cold and that he did not understand when he was younger that his father's actions toward him may have been expressions of love. For which father does the reader feel greater sympathy? Could Mirikitani's father, in his own "austere and lonely" way, also have been expressing love toward his daughter, or was he just an abusive father? Are there any details in the poem that help the reader understand the father's behavior? Ultimately, does the reader feel more sympathy for Mirikitani or for her father? Is there any unintentional irony in this poem?
In a poem written in 1952, the Welsh poet, Dylan Thomas, speaks directly to his father without using a persona. Although the poem focuses on a deeply emotional topic--the impending death of the poet's father, D.J. Thomas, Dylan chose a highly structured and extremely difficult form-- the villanelle. The villanelle, a fixed form of French origin, contains six stanzas of iambic pentameter. The first five stanzas contain three lines, and the final stanza contains four lines. The complex rhyme pattern, which contains only two rhymes, is as follows: ABA, ABA, ABA, ABA, ABA, ABAA. A villanelle also includes repeated lines. As you read the poem, you will notice that the first and third lines of the first stanza repeat throughout the poem and provide the final two lines. This poem, which has become a classic in the Twentieth Century, is remarkable for its extreme complexity of form combined with the depth of the emotion it expresses.
Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night
Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
Though wise men at their end know dark is right,
Because their words had forked no lightning they
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Good men, the last wave by, crying how bright
Their frail deeds might have danced in a green bay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
Wild men who caught and sang the sun in flight,
And learn, too late, they grieved it on its way,
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Grave men, near death, who see with blinding sight
Blind eyes could blaze like meteors and be gay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
And you, my father, there on the sad height,
Curse, bless me now with your fierce tears, I pray,
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
In addition to using the difficult villanelle form, Thomas also used metaphor throughout this poem. The repeated phrases "Do not go gentle into that good night" and "Rage, rage against the dying of the light" are metaphoric expressions that refer to his father's impending death. In both sentences, Dylan Thomas urges his father not to die passively but to resist death with all his energy. He also contrasts his father's situation with that of several other groups of men who must also face death--"wise men," "Good men," "Wild men," and "Grave men." Each of these groups represents a particular male archetype, ending with a pun on the word "Grave." You might want to think about the characteristics of each of these four groups of men, all of whom Thomas uses as models to urge his father to battle against death. This poem also ends with a tone of deep emotion when the poet addresses his father directly, asking for either his curses or his blessing, whichever will help his father to prolong his life. This poem remains a profound and deeply moving expression of a son's love for his father in the face of certain death and loss.
Langston Hughes also wrote many poems about family relationships, but he usually used a persona. In the poem which follows, which is written in dialect, Hughes speaks in the voice of a mother who is sharing some advice with her son:
Mother to Son
Well, son, I'll tell you:
Life for me ain't been no crystal stair.
It's had tacks in it,
And splinters,
And boards torn up,
And places with no carpet on the floor--
Bare.
But all the time
I'se been a-climbin' on,
And reachin' landin's,
And turnin' corners,
And sometimes goin' in the dark
Where there ain't been no light.
So boy, don't you turn back.
Don't you set down on the steps
'Cause you finds it's kinder hard.
Don't you fall now--
For I'se still goin', honey,
I'se still climbin',
And life for me ain't been no crystal stair.
This dramatic monologue is also based on an extended metaphor--the comparison between life and a staircase. In this metaphor, what is significant about the fact that both the mother and the son are ascending rather than descending this set of stairs?
In another poem written in dialect, Hughes again explores a family relationship, this time the interactions between a man and woman. This poem is written as a dialogue presenting a conflict between the two characters, Hammond and Hattie.
Early Evening Quarrel
Where is that sugar, Hammond?
I sent you this morning to buy?
I say, where is that sugar
I sent you this morning to buy?
Coffee without sugar
Makes a good woman cry.
I ain't got no sugar, Hattie,
I gambled your dime away.
Ain't got no sugar, I
Done gambled that dime away.
But if you's a wise woman, Hattie,
You ain't gonna have nothin to say.
I ain't no wise woman, Hammond.
I am evil and mad.
Ain't no sense in a good woman
Bein' treated so bad.
I don't treat you bad, Hattie,
Neither does I treat you good.
But I reckon I could treat you
Worser if I would.
Lawd, these things we women
Have to stand!
I wonder is there anywhere a
Do-right man?
Which character do you think Hughes intended the reader to sympathize with, Hattie or Hammond? What evidence in the poem leads you to this conclusion? Also, does it seem significant, or perhaps symbolic that Hattie will have to do without sugar because of Hammond's gambling? What do you think the theme of this poem is?
Gwendolyn Brooks presents a very different picture of a couple in this very brief poem written in 1960:
The Bean Eaters
They eat beans mostly, this old yellow pair.
Dinner is a casual affair.
Plain chipware on a plain and creaking wood,
Tin flatware.
Two who are Mostly Good.
Two who have lived their day,
But keep on putting on their clothes
And putting things away.
And remembering...
Remembering with twinklings and twinges,
As they lean over the beans in their rented back room that
is full of beads and receipts and dolls and cloths,
tobacco crumbs, vases and fringes.
You might want to re-read this poem aloud to appreciate the sound devices that Brooks has used. Do you think the speaker is being ironic when she refers to the old couple's dinner as "a casual affair?"
Pay close attention to the details of their home and in particular to their dishes and table. What is significant about the fact that they "eat beans mostly?" What do the other objects in their environment reveal about them and their relationship? This couple seems almost to have become one person rather than two individuals. How does Brooks create this effect? As the reader, how do you feel about this couple? Do you like them better than Hattie and Hammond? Why or why not? What role does emotion play in this poem?
Grandparents have inspired many poems, and this one by Ramona C. Wilson of the Colville tribe in Washington, uses imagery and the poet's own voice to describe her grandmother to the reader.
Keeping Hair
My grandmother had braids
at the thickest, pencil wide
held with bright wool
cut from her bed shawl.
No teeth left but white hair
combed and wet carefully
early each morning.
The small wild plants found among stones
on the windy and brown plateaus
revealed their secrets to her hand
and yielded to her cooking pots.
She made a sweet amber water
from willows,
boiling the life out
to pour onto her old head.
"It will keep your hair."
She bathed my head once
rain water not sweeter.
The thought that once
when I was so very young
her work-bent hands
very gently and smoothly
washed my hair in willows
may also keep my heart.
What does the poet choose to tell us about her grandmother? What images are created by the description of the grandmother washing the child's hair with willow water? How does the poet feel about her grandmother? How does she convey these feelings to the reader?
Denise Levertov also uses her own voice and descriptive imagery to write about her mother at the age of ninety.
The 90th Year
High in the jacaranda shines the gilded thread
of a small bird's curlicue of song--too high
for her so see or hear.
I've learned
not to say, these last years,
"O, look!--O listen, Mother!"
as I used to.
(It was she
who taught me to look;
to name the flowers when I was still close to the ground,
my face level with theirs;
or to watch the sublime metamorphoses
unfold and unfold
over the walled back gardens of our street...
It had not been given her
to know the flesh as good in itself,
as the flesh of a fruit is good. To her
the human body has been a husk,
a shell in which souls were prisoned.
Yet, from within it, with how much gazing
her life has paid tribute to the world's body!
How tears of pleasure
would choke her, when a perfect voice,
deep or high, clove to its note unfaltering!)
She has swept the crackling seedpods,
the litter of mauve blossoms, off the cement path,
tipped them into the rubbish bucket.
She's made her bed, washed up the breakfast dishes,
wiped the hotplate. I've taken the butter and milkjug
back to the fridge next door--but it's not my place,
visiting here, to usurp the tasks
that weave the day's pattern.
Now she is leaning forward in her chair,
by the lamp lit in the daylight,
rereading War and Peace.
When I look up
from her wellworn copy of The Divine Milieu,
which she wants me to read, I see her hand
loose on the black stem of the magnifying glass,
she is dozing.
"I am so tired," she has written to me, "of appreciating
the gift of life."
In addition to imagery, does Levertov use any other elements of poetry, such as metaphor? If so, can you point out examples? What is the theme of this poem? How does this poem's theme differ from the theme of Wilson's "Keeping Hair"? Which poem gives the reader greater insight into the personality of the elderly woman being described?
At the end of this chapter, you will find additional poems about family relationships. Although these poems are on a variety of themes, you may be surprised at how frequently poets choose to write in their own voices when describing family members. This technique can certainly create the effect of vivid realism and intimacy. There is also, however, the danger of cannibalism and other violations of privacy. Do any of the poems that you have already read in this chapter violate the privacy of the people being described? Has the poet ever told us too much or too little? I hope you will take the time to think about these issues when you write your own poetry as well. Writing about family is one of the most powerfully emotional experiences for a poet and his or her reader, and poetry, perhaps more than any other medium, has the potential to clarify these relationships with remarkable insight. Because of the depth of our feelings for our relatives, we must also practice restraint.
QUESTIONS AND TOPICS FOR REVIEW
1. What is the theme of George Bowering's "My Father in New Zealand"?
2. What is the setting of Janice Mirikitani's "For My Father"? Remember that setting includes both time and place. How does the setting influence the poem's theme?
3. What role does the season of the year play in Robert Hayden's "Those Winter Sundays"?
4. Define the villanelle. Which of the poems in this chapter is written in this form?
5. How does Dylan Thomas use archetype and metaphor in "Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night"?
6. How does the use of dialect influence the tone and effect of Langston Hughes' "Mother to Son"?
7. How does Hughes develop the two characters in "Early Evening Quarrel"?
8. How does Gwendolyn Brooks develop the two characters in "The Bean Eaters"?
9. What is the theme of Denise Levertov's "The 90th Year"? How does the poet convey this theme?
10. What are some of the disadvantages of writing about family members in the first person point of view?
11. What are some of the advantages of writing about family members in the first person point of view?
TOPICS FOR DISCUSSION
1. Do any of the poems in this chapter have the qualities of a great poem? (You may wish to review this list at the end of Chapter 8.) If so, which poems, and why?
2. Are any of the poems in this chapter cannibalistic? If so, which ones, and why?
3. Naomi Clark, author of "The Breaker," which appears at the end of this chapter, was born in Texas. How do the references to native plants and animals from Texas contribute to the poem's theme and effect?
4. Discuss the various possible meanings of the word breaker in Clark's poem. Who or what is the breaker referred to in the poem's title?
5. What is the symbolic significance of the snow globe in Howard Nemerov's poem?
6. Is the grandmother in Paula Gunn Allen's poem a literal or mythic figure or both? What elements in the poem lead you to your conclusions about the grandmother?
7. How does James Reiss incorporate imagery from a dream into his poem "Suenos"?
How do these dream images contribute to the poem's theme?
8. Discuss the significance of the title of Rita Dove's poem "Daystar." Discuss the other word choices in the poem also.
9. Discuss the tone of Laureen Mar's "My Mother, Who Came from China, Where She Never Saw Snow." Does the speaker in this poem ever adopt an ironic tone?
ACTIVITIES
1. Write a statement of theme for each of the nine poems which appears in the first part of this chapter.
2. Working in pairs, compare your statements of theme and make any changes that seem necessary.
3. Write some of these statements of theme on the board and discuss them as a group.
4. Assign someone to research the significance of willows in the Native American culture of the Pacific Northwest. Discuss Ramona C. Wilson's "Keeping Hair" in light of this information.
5. Assign someone to gather some information about the two books the mother and daughter are reading in Denise Levertov's "The 90th Year." What do these books reveal about the two women in the poem? How do these books relate to the poem's theme?
6. Assign someone to bring to class actual examples or photographs of weavings done by Native Americans of New Mexico. Discuss the relationship between these weavings and Paula Gunn Allen's poem "Grandmother."
ANALYTICAL WRITING ASSIGNMENTS
1. Analyze the relationship between form and theme in Dylan Thomas' "Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night."
2. Analyze the relationship between tone and theme in Bowering's "My Father in New Zealand."
3. Compare and contrast Denise Levertov's "The 90th Year" and May Sarton's "For My Mother," focusing on theme and imagery.
4. Analyze Howard Nemerov's "The Snow Globe," focusing on form and theme.
5. Compare and contrast Hughes' "Early Evening Quarrel" and Brooks' "The Bean Eaters," focusing on characterization and theme.
6. Analyze Naomi Clark's "The Breaker," focusing on the relationships between the speaker, the horse Maria, and the speaker's father. How does Clark define these relationships, and how do they contribute to the poem's theme?
7. Analyze the relationship between imagery and theme in James Reiss' "Suenos."
8. Analyze Rita Dove's "Daystar," focusing on point of view and theme.
9. Analyze Laureen Mar's "My Mother, Who Came from China, Where She Never Saw Snow," focusing on theme, imagery, and figures of speech.
CREATIVE WRITING ASSIGNMENTS
1. Write a poem in which your parents (or someone else's) are compared in some way.
2. Write a poem in which your parents (or someone else's) are contrasted in some way.
3. Write a poem on the subject of sibling rivalry. This poem can be written in a serious or comic tone, in any point of view, and on any theme. Share these poems after you have written them and discuss choices of themes, tones, points of view, etc.
4. In your journal, make a list of images that you associate with one of your grandparents. Then write a poem about your grandparent, using these images to structure your poem.
5. Write an elegy for one of your relatives who has died.
6. Write a poem about a toy or an animal which was important to you when you were a child.
7. Write a poem based on a dialogue between two of your relatives.
8. Write a poem which connects yourself with your ancient ancestors. Use imagery, symbolism, myth, or archetypes to make this connection.
9. Write a poem based on a dream in which one of your relatives appears.
10. Revise a poem that you have written in your own voice about a family relationship by using a persona instead of your own voice.
ADDITIONAL POEMS ON FAMILY RELATIONSHIPS FOR READING AND ANALYSIS
MAY SARTON
America 1914-1995
For My Mother
August 3, 1992
Once more
I summon you
Out of the past
With poignant love,
You who nourished the poet
And the lover.
I see your gray eyes
Looking out to sea
In those Rockport summers,
Keeping a distance
Within the closeness
Which was never intrusive
Opening out
Into the world.
And what I remember
Is how you never stopped creating
And how people sent me
Dresses you had designed
With rich embroidery
In brilliant colors
Because they could not bear
To give them away
Or cast them aside.
I summon you now
Not to think of
The ceaseless battle
With pain and ill health,
The frailty and the anguish.
No, today I remember
The creator,
The lion-hearted.
HOWARD NEMEROV
America Born, 1920
The Snow Globe
A long time age, when I was a child,
They left my light on while I went to sleep,
As though they would have wanted me beguiled
By brightness if at all; dark was too deep.
And they left me one toy, a village white
With the fresh snow and silently in glass
Frozen forever. But if you shook it,
The snow would rise up in the rounded space
And from the limits of the universe
Snow itself down again. O world of white,
First home of dreams! Now that I have my dead,
I want so cold an emblem to rehearse
How many of them have gone from the world's light
As I have gone, too, from my snowy bed.
NAOMI CLARK
America 1932-1992
The Breaker
Maria, we called you:
a Spanish mare, they said, up from Mexico--
born to the saddle but skittish, liable to panic.
We were not, anymore, the kind of family to keep saddle horses.
Straddled bareback, past dry holes and dry grey slush pits, past the
mound where
we buried the cows, I'd stolen time from field and chickens
to ride low, nag transformed, under the scrub oak branches,
through darkening johnson grass where puma screamed,
out onto the Great Staked Plains.
You sold cheaper than a nag,
kicked out the end of the trailer, the gate off the horselot.
All night I heard you circling the barbed wire, stamping.
All night I rode through the sky.
You were a small, dark mare, Spanish, bought for a plowhorse.
I remember you in chains, Maria, the day he broke you to
plow-harness.
Tied to a post, you drag the heavy iron beam, the heavy
log chains,
twist and kick, whipped, driven round
and round, Foam flies, and blood, with the broken harness,
with the trampled harness, the slipped chains.
Your eyes turn white.
Only when you both fall does it end. Next day
you plow ten rows before it starts.
You come to me now, Maria,
in so many dreams: your mad eyes,
your flinches, your broken stance, the slouch in heavy harness,
your bowed head blindered, the break into frenzy.
My hands burn to heal you, to gentle you, to gentle your eyes.
Maria, you lift strong black wings,
rise free over the mesquites and the prickly pear, over the Caprock,
over the untrampled high grass of the Llano into the age of
Comanche, Apache.
And the man who broke you?
How shall I heal him, how stretch out my hand
in healing, my cold hands in healing
and warmth, how gentle?
O father, how shall I heal you?
What wings from the fire where you burn, and I the breaker?
PAULA GUNN ALLEN
America Born, 1939
Grandmother
Out of her own body she pushed
silver thread, light, air
and carried it carefully on the dark, flying
where nothing moved.
Out of her body she extruded
shining wire, life, and wove the light
on the void.
From beyond time,
beyond oak* trees and bright clear water flow,
she was given the work of weaving the strands
of her body, her pain, her vision
into creation, and the gift of having created,
to disappear.
After her,
the women and the men weave blankets into tales of life,
memories of light and ladders,
infinity-eyes, and rain.
After her I sit on my laddered rain-bearing rug
and mend the tear with string.
* Paula Gunn Allen is a member of the Oak Clan of the Laguna Pueblo.
JAMES REISS
America Born, 1941
Suenos*
In my dreams I always speak Spanish.
The cemetery may be in Brooklyn,
and I may be kneeling on a rise
looking out at the skyline of the city,
but I will whisper, Mira el sol.**
And it is true the late morning
sun will turn that bank of skyscrapers
the color of bleached bone in Sonora,
and all the window washers of Manhattan
will white-out like a TV screen
in Venezuela turning to snow.
But the gray face on the headstone photograph
has a nose like my father's,
and his voice had the lilt of the ghettos
of central Europe.
So I should kneel lower and say something
in Yiddish about fathers, grandfathers,
the hacked limbs of a family tree
that reaches as high as Manhattan.
I should say, Grandpa, I loved those times
we ran through the underpasses in Central
Park, you with your cane, I with my ice
cream cones, shouting for echoes,
bursting out into sunlight--
if I only knew the language to say it in.
* "Suenos" means dreams in Spanish.
** "Mira el sol" means "look at the sun" in Spanish.
RITA DOVE
America Born, 1952
Daystar
She wanted a little room for thinking:
but she saw diapers steaming on the line,
a doll slumped behind the door.
So she lugged a chair behind the garage
to sit out the children's naps.
Sometimes there were things to watch--
the pinched armor of a vanished cricket,
a floating maple leaf. Other days
she stared until she was assured
when she closed her eyes
she'd see only her own vivid blood.
She had an hour, at best, before Liza appeared
pouting from the top of the stairs.
And just what was mother doing
out back with the field mice? Why,
building a palace. Later
that night when Thomas rolled over and
lurched into her, she would open her eyes
and think of the place that was hers
for an hour--where
she was nothing,
pure nothing, in the middle of the day.
LAUREEN MAR
America Born, 1953.
My Mother, Who Came from China,
Where She Never Saw Snow
In the huge, rectangular room, the ceiling
a machinery of pipes and fluorescent lights,
ten rows of women hunch over machines,
their knees pressing against pedals
and hands pushing the shiny fabric thick as tongues
through metal and thread.
My mother bends her head to one of these machines.
Her hair is coarse and wiry, black as burnt scrub.
She wears glasses to shield her intense eyes.
A cone of orange thread spins. Around her,
talk flutters harshly in Toisan wah.
Chemical stings. She pushes cloth
through a pounding needle, under, around, and out,
breaks thread with a snap against fingerbone, tooth.
Sleeve after sleeve, sleeve.
It is easy. The same piece.
For eight or nine hours, sixteen bundles maybe,
250 sleeves to ski coats, all the same.
It is easy, only once she's run the needle
through her hand. She earns money
by each piece, on a good day,
thirty dollars. Twenty-four years.
It is frightening how fast she works.
She and the women who were taught sewing
terms in English as Second Language.
Dull thunder passes through her fingers.
FINDING THE POET
CHAPTER 11 POETRY AND PLACE
Places fascinate poets almost as much as people do. Poets have been writing about places for thousands of years, but once again we will be focusing on Twentieth Century and Contemporary poems about places. The word place can be defined in many ways. A place can be a country, a region, a city, a building, a room, an outdoor area, or even the inside of a car. A place can also be an area in fiction, fantasy, or the imagination. And as with poems about people, poems about places can be on any theme. Sometimes a place provides the setting of a poem, just as it does in a novel or a short story. In literature, setting refers to the time and place in which a work of literature occurs. Narrative poems which tell a story have to happen somewhere and at some point in time. A writer usually chooses his or her settings carefully because a setting can enhance the theme and the other elements in a poem. As you know, places have their own personalities, and we often associate myths and significant historical events with particular places. Some places have a special spiritual aura, and even the weather associated with a place can add to the meaning and significance of a poem.
In the following two poems by Gary Snyder, the subject and theme are similar, but the poet has chosen different settings. These are the first two poems in a series entitled "Four Poems for Robin." In all of the poems in this series, Snyder appears to speak in his own voice, addressing a woman who was his sweetheart many years earlier. In the two poems I have included here, the setting in which the poem takes place is contrasted with an earlier setting based on memory.
Siwashing it Out Once in Siuslaw Forest
I slept under rhododendron
All night blossoms fell
Shivering on a sheet of cardboard
Feet stuck in my pack
Hands deep in my pockets
Barely able to sleep.
I remembered when we were in school
Sleeping together in a big warm bed
We were the youngest lovers
When we broke up we were still nineteen.
Now our friends are married
You teach school back east
I dont mind living this way
Green hills the long blue beach
But sometimes sleeping in the open
I think back when I had you.
A Spring Night in Shokoku-ji
Eight years ago this May
We walked under cherry blossoms
At night in an orchard in Oregon.
All that I wanted then
Is forgotten now, but you.
Here in the night
In a garden of the old capital
I feel the trembling ghost of Yugao
I remember your cool body
Naked under a summer cotton dress.
On the surface, these poems appear to be simple statements of longing for a past lover. But in fact, Snyder has made very effective use of both time and place, contrasting the present with the past in a series of memories. The first poem actually focuses on three places and three points in time--the present, where the poet still sometimes sleeps in the open and lives near "the long blue beach," probably on the Oregon coast; a point in the past when he slept under the rhododendrons in Siuslaw Forest, an area surrounding the Siuslaw River in west central Oregon; and an earlier time when he and Robin were lovers in high school. Snyder also contrasts the cold, associated with the present "sleeping in the open," and with his memory of sleeping while "Shivering on a sheet of cardboard" in Siuslaw Forest with the warmth of his memory of "Sleeping together in a big warm bed." In this first poem, cold is associated with the times and places when the poet is alone, and warmth is associated with the time and place when he was with his youthful lover.
In the second poem, Snyder again contrasts the present with the past, using the season of the year to evoke memory. The poet in now in Japan at a Zen temple in Kyoto, "the old capital." It is spring, and he remembers a time eight years earlier when he walked "under cherry blossoms" in Oregon with Robin. Cherry blossoms have for centuries been associated with the fleeting beauty of spring in Japan. Coincidentally, Oregon is also famous for its beautiful cherry blossoms, and parts of Oregon have a climate similar to Japan's. Also, spring carries archetypal overtones of new life and young love. In the second poem Snyder makes a literary allusion--to Yugao, a character in Murasaki Shikibu's one-thousand-year-old classic, The Tale of Genji. The story of Yugao appears early in the novel, when the hero, Prince Genji, is still in his teens. He falls in love with Yugao, a mysterious and introverted young woman about whom he knows very little. He takes her to a deserted old mansion for a night of romance, and suddenly Yugao becomes possessed by an evil spirit and dies under very mysterious circumstances. Genji is filled with grief, remorse, and guilt and is haunted by her memory for many years. Can you see why Snyder chose to include this reference to "the trembling ghost of Yugao" in a poem about his own memories about the loss of a young love?
Neither poem is really about Oregon or Japan or winter or spring, but the settings provide powerful archetypal images that help Snyder communicate his theme of the loss of young love. Although our own circumstances were probably different, many of us, when reading these poems, can also feel a poignant longing for the first person we ever loved. Another poet who is famous for the way she incorporates time and place into her poems is Elizabeth Bishop. You have already read "Filling Station" (in Chapter 4) and "The Fish" (in Chapter 7), and you are familiar with Bishop's informal, conversational style and her minute attention to detail. In the following poem, Bishop describes an experience that she had when she was seven years old. The Irish prose writer, James Joyce, would refer to this experience as an epiphany, a moment of recognition and sudden understanding. Much of literature is an attempt to share with the reader these rare moments of insight. Bishop is very specific in including the setting in this poem. It takes place in a dentist's waiting room in Worcester, Massachusetts, late on a February day in 1918. Although the poem is long, it is very easy to read. After you have finished, you will want to think about the relationship between setting and theme in this poem.
In the Waiting Room
In Worcester, Massachusetts,
I went with Aunt Consuelo
to keep her dentist's appointment
and sat and waited for her
in the dentist's waiting room.
It was winter. It got dark
early. The waiting room
was full of grown-up people,
arctics and overcoats,
lamps and magazines.
My aunt was inside
what seemed like a long time
and while I waited I read
the National Geographic
(I could read) and carefully
studied the photographs:
the inside of a volcano,
black, and full of ashes;
then it was spilling over
in rivulets of fire.
Osa and Martin Johnson
dressed in riding breeches,
laced boots, and pith helmets.
A dead man slung on a pole
--"Long Pig," the caption said.
Babies with pointed heads
wound round and round with string;
black, naked women with necks
wound round and round with wire
like the necks of light bulbs.
Their breasts were horrifying.
I read it right straight through.
I was too shy to stop.
And then I looked at the cover:
the yellow margins, the date.
Suddenly, from inside,
came an oh! of pain
--Aunt Consuelo's voice--
not very loud or long.
I wasn't at all surprised;
even then I knew she was
a foolish, timid woman.
I might have been embarrassed,
but wasn't. What took me
completely by surprise
was that it was me:
my voice, in my mouth.
Without thinking at all
I was my foolish aunt,
I--we--were falling, falling,
our eyes glued to the cover
of the National Geographic,
February, 1918.
I said to myself: three days
and you'll be seven years old.
I was saying it to stop
the sensation of falling off
the round, turning world
into cold, blue-black space.
But I felt: you are an I,
you are an Elizabeth,
you are one of them.
Why should you be one, too?
I scarcely dared to look
to see what it was I was.
I gave a sidelong glance
--I couldn't look any higher--
at shadowy gray knees,
trousers and skirts and boots
and different pairs of hands
lying under the lamps.
I knew that nothing stranger
had ever happened, that nothing
stranger could ever happen.
Why should I be my aunt,
or me, or anyone?
What similarities--
boots, hands, the family voice
I felt in my throat, or even
the National Geographic
and those awful hanging breasts--
held us all together
or made us all just one?
How--I didn't know any
word for it--how "unlikely"...
How had I come to be here,
like them, and overhear
a cry of pain that could have
got loud and worse but hadn't?
The waiting room was bright
and too hot. It was sliding
beneath a big black wave,
another, and another.
Then I was back in it.
The War was on. Outside,
in Worcester, Massachusetts,
were night and slush and cold,
and it was still the fifth
of February, 1918.
What kind of a moment of recognition did the poet have at the age of seven? Didn't she suddenly realize that she was a member of the human race, along with all the pain that being human entails? How did reading the National Geographic help her to come to this awareness? Did the fact that she was in a dentist's waiting room also contribute to her insight? How do the people depicted in the magazine compare and contrast with the people in the waiting room? Why are the breasts of the women in the magazine horrifying to the girl? Is there any significance in the fact that it is dark and winter outside when the little girl comes to her realization of her own humanity? What about the fact that this epiphany occurred in 1918, in the middle of World War I?
It would be difficult to separate the setting from the theme of this poem. The images of natural disasters and culturally inflicted pain depicted in the magazine, the pain associated with dentistry, and the ultimate pain and death which accompany war connect with the theme of the child's recognition of the unavoidable pain inherent in the human experience. These images create an ironic contrast with the passive behavior of the people in the waiting room and the perception of Worcester, Massachusetts, as a peaceful and "civilized" town.
Another poet from Massachusetts who uses setting in an ironic fashion is e.e. cummings. While Bishop's poems are deceptively easy to read, cummings' are difficult. One of the difficulties in cummings' style is its apparent vagueness in contrast with Bishop's specificity. Cummings developed a unique experimental style that rejected traditional elements such as capital letters and punctuation. His diction is also very unusual, using familiar words in unfamiliar ways. You read cummings' "the Cambridge ladies who live in furnished souls" in Chapter 8, and no doubt you noticed his satiric tone, ridiculing complacent middle-class New Englanders. He conveys a similar message in "anyone lived in a pretty how town." In this poem, the "town" which provides the setting for the poem is a very generic place filled with people who are too busy and uncaring to focus on the hero, whom cummings calls "anyone." Nor do the townspeople care about "noone," who loves anyone. Cummings communicates the impersonal, self-absorbed behavior of the people of the town by repeating the seasons of the year and the phrase "sun moon stars rain." These repetitions create the sense of the passage of time and the sameness of the lives of the people in the town who never stop to learn, to grow, or to care for anyone or noone.
anyone lived in a pretty how town
anyone lived in a pretty how town
(with up so floating many bells down)
spring summer autumn winter
he sang his didn't he danced his did.
Women and men(both little and small)
cared for anyone not at all
they sowed their isn't they reaped their same
sun moon stars rain
children guessed(but only a few
and down they forgot as up they grew
autumn winter spring summer)
that noone loved him more by more
when by now and tree by leaf
she laughed his joy she cried his grief
bird by snow and stir by still
anyone's any was all to her
someones married their everyones
laughed their cryings and did their dance
(sleep wake hope and then)they
said their nevers they slept their dream
stars rain sun moon
(and only the snow can begin to explain
how children are apt to forget to remember
with up so floating many bells down)
one day anyone died i guess
(and noone stooped to kiss his face)
busy folk buried them side by side
little by little and was by was
all by all and deep by deep
and more by more they dream their sleep
noone and anyone earth by april
wish by spirit and if by yes.
Women and men(both dong and ding)
summer autumn winter spring
reaped their sowing and went their came
sun moon stars rain.
You will need to read this poem many times and give it a lot of thought. The first two lines of the seventh stanza have always fascinated me: "one day anyone died i guess/ (and noone stooped to kiss his face). The fact that the narrator adds "i guess" after announcing anyone's death underscores the completely impersonal treatment that the hero, anyone, has always received in the town, except for the love he received from noone--"noone loved him more by more." Calling anyone's wife "noone" is such an ironic touch, because the word "noone" also refers to the people of the town, none of whom care at all for anyone. The pun in the line "noone stooped to kiss his face" has always struck me as very powerful. The double meaning underscores the poem's theme--his wife stooped to kiss his face when he died, bending over his dead body in love, but no one from the town stooped, in this case, lowered themselves to give him any attention, much less to give him a kiss. The cruelty of conventional life in a small town is a repeated theme in the poetry of e.e. cummings.
We have seen the close relationship between setting and theme in the poems we have just read by Bishop and cummings. Sometimes in poems about places, the place itself is the subject of the poem, not just its setting. The Australian poet A.D. Hope creates a complex and thought-provoking portrait of his own country in the following poem:
Australia
A Nation of trees, drab green and desolate grey
In the field uniform of modern wars,
Darkens her hills, those endless, outstretched paws
Of Sphinx demolished or stone lion worn away.
They call her a young country, but they lie:
She is the last of lands, the emptiest,
A woman beyond her change of life, a breast
Still tender but within the womb is dry.
Without songs, architecture, history:
The emotions and superstitions of younger lands,
Her rivers of water drown among inland sands,
The river of her immense stupidity
Floods her monotonous tribes from Cairns to Perth.
In them the last the ultimate men arrive
Whose boast is not: "we live" but "we survive",
A type who will inhabit the dying earth.
And her five cities, like five teeming sores,
Each drains her: a vast parasite robber-state
Where second-hand Europeans pullulate
Timidly on the edge of alien shores.
Yet there are some like me turn gladly home
From the lush jungle of modern thought, to find
The Arabian desert of the human mind,
Hoping, if still from the deserts the prophets come,
Such savage and scarlet as no green hills dare
Springs in that waste, some spirit which escapes
The learned doubt, the chatter of cultured apes
Which is called civilization over there.
This poem will also require several readings. You will need to think carefully about the poem's tone, especially the shift in tone at the beginning of the sixth stanza, starting with the word "Yet." Hope also includes some interesting descriptive metaphors which you will want to study. You should also give some attention to the allusion to the Sphinx in the first stanza and to the "Arabian desert of the human mind" in the sixth stanza. How would you describe Hope's attitude toward Australia? Does his express his feelings, or is the poem primarily an intellectual statement? How would you characterize the poem's theme? Does the poem have a universal message beyond the comments about Australia?
In another poem that focuses specifically on place as part of the poem's subject and theme is Margaret Atwood's "At the Tourist Centre in Boston." This poem, written in the voice of the Canadian poet, describes a relief map of Canada on display in Boston. The speaker is disturbed by the contrast between the real country, so vivid in her own memory, and the shallow simplification depicted by the map.
At the Tourist Centre in Boston
There is my country under glass,
a white relief-
map with red dots for the cities,
reduced to the size of a wall
and beside it 10 blowup snapshots
one for each province,
in purple-browns and odd reds,
the green of the trees dulled;
all blues however
of an assertive purity.
Mountains and lakes and more lakes
(though Quebec is a restaurant and Ontario the empty
interior of the parliament buildings),
with nobody climbing the trails and hauling out
the fish and splashing in the water
but arrangements of grinning tourists--
look here, Saskatchewan
is a flat lake, some convenient rocks
where two children pose with a father
and the mother is cooking something
in immaculate slacks by a smokeless fire,
her teeth white as detergent.
Whose dream is this, I would like to know:
is this a manufactured
hallucination, a cynical fiction, a lure
for export only?
I seem to remember people,
at least in the cities, also slush,
machines, and assorted garbage. Perhaps
that was my private mirage
which will just evaporate
when I go back. Or the citizens will be gone,
run off to the peculiarly-
green forests
to wait among the brownish mountains
for the platoons of tourists
and plan their odd red massacres.
Unsuspecting
window lady, I ask you:
Do you see nothing
watching you from the water?
Was the sky ever that blue?
Who really lives there?
Most of us have probably felt the anger that Atwood expresses when we are faced with examples of stereotypes of our own country, city, or neighborhood. Our own memories are vivid and specific, and the "tourist" view reduces a culture to an impersonal, antiseptic, unrealistic "fiction." This poem brings up several issues related to how various cultures view one another and how one culture may attempt to create a false image for political or economic purposes. You could probably write several interesting statements of theme for this poem.
In another interesting poem that draws its imagery from a place, Garrett Hongo describes a photograph of himself and his father taken in Hawaii on a day when a volcano almost erupted. The poem is essentially narrative and includes comments made by Hongo's father in Hawaiian dialect.
The Hongo Store
29 Miles Volcano
Hilo, Hawaii
from a photograph
My parents felt those rumblings
Coming deep from the earth's belly,
Thudding like the bell of the Buddhist Church.
Tremors in the ground swayed the bathinette
Where I lay squalling in soapy water.
My mother carried me around the house,
Back through the orchids, ferns, and plumeria
Of that greenhouse world behind the store,
And jumped between gas pumps into the car.
My father gave it the gun
And said, "Be quiet," as he searched
The frequencies, flipping for the right station
(The radio squealing more loudly than I could cry).
And then even the echoes stopped--
The only sound the Edsel's grinding
And the bark and crackle of radio news
Saying stay home or go to church.
"Dees time she no blow!"
My father said, driving back
Over the red ash covering the road.
"I worried she went go for broke already!"
So in this print the size of a matchbook,
The dark skinny man, shirtless and grinning,
A toothpick in the corner of his smile,
Lifts a naked baby above his head --
Behind him the plate glass of the store only
cracked.
The events described in this poem focus on Hongo's parents' responses to the rumblings in the nearby volcano, and volcanoes are certainly a very integral part of the everyday life as well as the mythology of Hawaii. But is this poem really about Hawaii in the same sense that Hope's poem is about Australia and Atwood's poem is about Canada? Isn't this poem really about several more universal ideas, such as protective parenting and the relationship between nature and human beings?
As we have seen, places can play a variety of roles in poetry, from providing the setting to enhancing the theme to serving as the subject of the poem itself. Some places, such as the ocean, mountains, and volcanoes, have their own archetypal properties. I hope that you will develop an even greater sensitivity to place in your own poetry and your own life. I also hope that you will enjoy the poems that appear at the end of this chapter, each of which focuses on place in a unique way.
QUESTIONS AND TOPICS FOR REVIEW
1. What is the meaning of the word setting when it is applied to literature?
2. How can the setting of a poem enhance its theme? Provide examples.
3. What does the word epiphany refer to in literature?
4. Who is responsible for applying the word epiphany to literature in this way?
5. What is the exact setting of Elizabeth Bishop's "In the Waiting Room"?
6. What are some of the features of e.e. cummings' poetic style?
7. What is the theme of cummings' "anyone lived in a pretty how town"?
8. How does the setting of Margaret Atwood's "At the Tourist Centre in Boston" support the poem's theme?
9. Provide examples of places that are also archetypes.
TOPICS FOR DISCUSSION
1. Discuss the effect created by the settings of Gary Snyder's "Siwashing It Out Once in Siuslaw Forest" and "A Spring Night in Shokoku-ji." How does Snyder convey these settings to the reader? Does he give the reader enough information to visualize these settings adequately? How much effort does Snyder expect the reader to make to experience these settings?
2. Discuss the use of the caesura in Snyder's "Siwashing It Out Once in Siuslaw Forest." (See Chapter 5 for a discussion of the caesura.) What effect does the caesura create in this poem?
3. Discuss the use of archetypes in cummings' "anyone lived in a pretty how town," especially bells, sun, moon, stars, rain, and the four seasons. How do these archetypes help convey the poem's theme?
4. Discuss the metaphor of sowing and reaping in cummings' "anyone lived in a pretty how town."
5. Discuss the events described in Garrett Hongo's "The Hongo Store." Who is the speaker in this poem, and how did this narrator gather the information he shares with the reader?
6. Describe the plants, buildings, and automobile mentioned in "The Hongo Store." How do these elements contribute to the poem's theme and overall effect?
7. Do all of the poems in this chapter, including those at the end, have the qualities of a good poem? (You may wish to review the checklist entitled "Qualities That Characterize a Good Poem," which appears near the end of Chapter 7.) Why or why not?
8. Discuss Louis Simpson's "A Night in Odessa," focusing on the events that occur in this narrative and symbolic elements in the poem. Does the grandfather's umbrella seem to be symbolic? If so, what does it symbolize? How about the wolf and the blood dripping from the young wife's side? What is significant about the fact that this poem is set in Odessa?
9. Discuss the imagery and figures of speech in Charles Simic's "Butcher Shop." How do these elements help you to understand the poem's theme?
10. Discuss the point of view, tone, and setting in Arthur Nortje's "Letter from Pretoria Central Prison." Do you think the poet is writing in his own voice, or has he created a persona? How can you find out?
ACTIVITIES
1. Research the climates and natural vegetation of west central and coastal Oregon and the area of Japan around Kyoto. How does this information contribute to a greater appreciation of Snyder's poems "Siwashing It Out Once in Siuslaw Forest" and "A Spring Night in Shokoku-ji"?
2. Assign a member of the class to read the "Yugao" chapter of The Tale of Genji and to find some Japanese illustrations of The Tale of Genji, preferably of Yugao. What connections in theme, setting, and other elements, are apparent between "Yugao" and Snyder's "A Spring Night in Shokoku-ji"? Murasaki's story of "Yugao" takes place in autumn and winter whereas Snyder's poem is set in the spring. Discuss the possible symbolic significance of this contrast.
3. Research the etymology and various religious meanings of the word epiphany. Then discuss the application of this word to poetry. Which of the poems in this chapter describe epiphany experiences?
4. Go to a library and obtain the February 1918 issue of National Geographic. Identify Osa and Martin Johnson. How does the photograph of the Johnsons contrast with the photographs of the African women and children which appear in this issue of the magazine? How do these and other contrasting photographs in the magazine contribute to your understanding of the theme of Elizabeth Bishop's poem "In the Waiting Room"?
5. Write a statement of theme for Hope's "Australia," Atwood, "At the Tourist Centre in Boston," and Hongo's "The Hongo Store." Share and discuss these statements of theme with the class.
6. Research the significance of the volcano in Hawaiian culture and mythology, including the specific volcano referred to in Hongo's poem, "The Hongo Store." How does this information contribute to a greater appreciation of the poem's theme?
ANALYTICAL WRITING ASSIGNMENTS
1. Analyze A.D. Hope's "Australia," focusing on figures of speech and theme.
2. Analyze Kenneth Slessor's "Beach Burial," focusing on setting, form, and theme. You may wish to do some research on the Battle of El Alamein, and incorporate your findings into this analysis.
3. Analyze Judith Wright's "At Cooloola," focusing on setting and narrative to explore the theme of contrasting cultural values.
4. Analyze Toshiko Takata's "The Seacoast of Mera," focusing on setting and the season of the year as archetypes to express the poem's theme.
5. Analyze Robert Lowell's "The Public Garden," focusing on how sound, diction, and contrasting seasonal imagery help to express the poem's theme.
6. Research style and theme in the poetry of Derek Walcott and Seamus Heaney, both winners of the Nobel Prize for Literature. Then select a poem by each and write a comparison and contrast, focusing on selected elements of poetry and theme. It is not necessary to limit your choice of poems to those which appear in this chapter.
7. Analyze Derek Walcott's use of setting and imagery to express the theme of "A Far Cry from Africa."
8. Analyze the use of form, sound devices, and imagery to express the theme of Seamus Heaney's "Poor Women in a City Church."
9. Analyze Gwendolyn MacEwen's "Inside the Great Pyramid," focusing on setting and metaphor, as they help reveal the poem's theme.
10. Analyze setting, archetypes, and theme in Joy Harjo's "Watching Crow, Looking South Towards the Manzano Mountains."
CREATIVE WRITING ASSIGNMENTS
1. Write a poem about an epiphany experience that you had as a child. Include the setting as a significant element in this poem.
2. Write a poem based on a memory associated with the first person you loved as a teenager or young adult. Include the setting as an integral part of this poem.
3. Write a poem about the country where you were born. Feel free to adopt any tone or point of view in writing this poem. Allow the theme of the poem to emerge naturally out of the poem's imagery.
4. Write a poem which contrasts the city or neighborhood where you live with some other place.
5. Write a poem about a place based on a photograph or a painting. This poem may be on any theme.
6. Write a poem set in a place where a battle, war, or other significant tragic event occurred. You must be very sensitive to avoid literary cannibalism when writing this poem.
7. Write a poem in which weather or climate is an important element.
8. Write a poem set in a place which is significant in mythology. Make allusions to the myth associated with this place in your poem.
9. Write a poem in which two different places are compared in some way.
10. Write a poem set in a place where some specific kind of work occurs. You may wish to write about your own work place. Allow the images in this poem to help determine its theme.
11. Write a poem with a fictionalized or fantasy setting. This setting should be appropriate for the poem's theme.
ADDITIONAL POEMS ABOUT PLACES FOR READING AND ANALYSIS
KENNETH SLESSOR
Australia 1901-1971
Beach Burial
Softly and humbly to the Gulf of Arabs
The convoys of dead sailors come;
At night they sway and wander in the waters far under,
But morning rolls them in the foam.
Between the sob and clubbing of the gunfire
Someone, it seems, has time for this,
To pluck them from the shallows and bury them in burrows
And tread the sand upon their nakedness;
And each cross, the driven stake of tidewood,
Bears the last signature of men,
Written with such perplexity, with such bewildered pity,
The words choke as they begin--
"Unknown seaman"--the ghostly pencil
Wavers and fades, the purple drips,
The breath of the wet season has washed their inscriptions
As blue as drowned men's lips,
Dead seamen, gone in search of the same landfall,
Whether as enemies they fought,
Or fought with us, or neither; the sand joins them together,
Enlisted on the other front.
El Alamein*
* El Alamein, in northern Egypt, was the site of a major battle, won by the British in World War II.
JUDITH WRIGHT
Australia Born, 1915
At Cooloola
The blue crane fishing in Cooloola's twilight
has fished there longer than our centuries.
He is the certain heir of lake and evening,
and he will wear their colour till he dies,
but I'm a stranger, come of a conquering people.
I cannot share his calm, who watch his lake,
being unloved by all my eyes delight in,
and made uneasy, for an old murder's sake.
Those dark-skinned people who once named Cooloola
knew that no land is lost or won by wars,
for earth is spirit: the invader's feet will tangle
in nets there and his blood be thinned by fears.
Riding at noon and ninety years ago,
my grandfather was beckoned by a ghost--
a black accoutred warrior armed for fighting,
who sank into bare plain, as now into time past.
White shores of sand, plumed reed and paperbark,
clear heavenly levels frequented by crane and swan--
I know that we are justified only by love,
but oppressed by arrogant guilt, have room for none.
And walking on clean sand among the prints
of bird and animal, I am challenged by a driftwood spear
thrust from the water; and, like my grandfather,
must quiet a heart accused by its own fear.
TOSHIKO TAKATA
Japan Born, 1916
The Seacoast at Mera
One day this summer,
I swam on the seacoast at Mera,
off the point of Boso peninsula.
Bathing at the edge of the rocks
with no shadow of other people near me,
the surf washed my body smooth
and made it flush all over.
When I took off my swimsuit
in the shadow of the rocks and dried myself
my summer had ended.
On my way back along the steep trail,
I looked back casually and found around the rocky point
four or five women divers standing in the surf
and only the summer day from which I was stealing away
shining above them.
Translated by Kenneth Rexroth and Ikuko Atsumi
ROBERT LOWELL
America 1917-1977
The Public Garden
Burnished, burned-out, still burning as the year
you lead me to our stamping ground.
The city and its cruising cars surround
the Public Garden. All's alive--
the children crowding home from school at five,
punting a football in the bricky air,
the sailors and their pick-ups under trees
with Latin labels. And the jaded flock
of swanboats paddles to its dock.
The park is drying.
Dead leaves thicken to a ball
inside the basin of a fountain where
the heads of four stone lions stare
and suck on empty fawcets. Night
deepens. From the arched bridge, we see
the shedding park-bound mallards, how they keep
circling and diving in the lanternlight,
searching for something hidden in the muck.
And now the moon, earth's friend, that cared so much
for us, and cared so little, comes again--
always a stranger! As we walk,
it lies like chalk
over the waters. Everything's aground.
Remember summer? Bubbles filled
the fountain, and we splashed. We drowned
in Eden, while Jehovah's grass-green lyre
was rustling all about us in the leaves
that gurgled by us, turning upside down...
The fountain's failing waters flash around
the garden. Nothing catches fire.
LOUIS SIMPSON
Jamaica Born, 1923
A Night in Odessa
Grandfather puts down his tea-glass
and makes his excuses
and sets off, taking his umbrella.
The street-lamps shine through a fog
and drunkards reel on the pavement.
One man clenches his fists in anger,
another utters terrible sobs...
And women look on calmly.
They like those passionate sounds.
He walks on, grasping his umbrella.
His path lies near the forest.
Suddenly a wolf leaps in the path,
jaws dripping. The man strikes
with the point of his umbrella...
A howl, and the wolf has vanished.
Go on, grandfather, hop!
It takes brains to live here,
not to be beaten and torn
or to lie drunk in a ditch,
Hold on to your umbrella!
He's home. When he opens the door
his wife jumps to greet him.
Her name is Ninotchka,
she is young and dark and slender,
married only a month or so.
She hurries to get his supper.
But when she puts down the dish
she presses a hand to her side
and he sees that from her hand
red drops of blood are falling.
DEREK WALCOTT
St. Lucia, Caribbean Born 1930
A Far Cry from Africa
A wind is ruffling the tawny pelt
Of Africa. Kikuyu, quick as flies,
Batten upon the bloodstreams of the veldt.
Corpses are scattered through a paradise.
Only the worm, colonel of carrion, cries:
"Waste no compassion on these separate dead!"
Statistics justify and scholars seize
The salients of colonial policy.
What is that to the white child hacked in bed?
To savages, expendable as Jews?
Threshed out by beaters, the long rushes break
In a white dust of ibises whose cries
Have wheeled since civilization's dawn
From the parched river or beast-teeming plain.
The violence of beast on beast is read
As natural law. but upright man
Seeks his divinity by inflicting pain.
Delirious as these worried beasts, his wars
Dance to the tightened carcass of a drum,
While he calls courage still that native dread
Of the white peace contracted by the dead.
Again brutish necessity wipes its hands
Upon the napkin of a dirty cause, again
A waste of our compassion, as with Spain,
The gorilla wrestles with the superman.
I who am poisoned with the blood of both,
Where shall I turn, divided to the vein?
I who have cursed
The drunken officer of British rule, how choose
Between this Africa and the English tongue I love?
Betray them both, or give back what they give?
How can I face such slaughter and be cool?
How can I turn from Africa and live?
CHARLES SIMIC
Yugoslavia* Born 1938
Butcher Shop
Sometimes walking late at night
I stop before a closed butcher shop.
There is a single light in the store
Like the light in which the convict digs his tunnel.
An apron hangs on the hook:
The blood on it smeared into a map
Of the great continents of blood,
The great rivers and oceans of blood.
There are knives that glitter like altars
In a dark church
Where they bring the cripple and the imbecile
To be healed.
There is a wooden slab where bones are broken,
Scraped clean:--a river dried to its bed
Where I am fed,
Where deep in the night I hear a voice.
* Charles Simic moved to the United States when he was young. He lives in America and writes in English.
SEAMUS HEANEY
Northern Ireland Born, 1939
Poor Women in a City Church
The small wax candles melt to light,
Flicker in marble, reflect bright
Asterisks on brass candlesticks:
At the Virgin's altar on the right
Blue flames are jerking on wicks.
Old dough-faced women with black shawls
Drawn down tight kneel in the stalls.
Cold yellow candle-tongues, blue flame
Mince and caper as whispered calls
Take wing up to the Holy Name.
Thus each day in the sacred place
They kneel. Golden shrines, altar lace,
Marble columns and cool shadows
Still them. In the gloom you cannot trace
A wrinkle on their beeswax brows.
GWENDOLYN MACEWEN
Canada 1941-1989
Inside the Great Pyramid
all day the narrow shaft
received us; everyone
came out sweating and
gasping for air, and one
old man collapsed
upon a stair;
I thought:
the fact that it has stood
so long
is no guarantee
it will stand today,
but went in anyway
and heard when I was
halfway up a long
low rumbling like
the echo of ancient stones
first straining to their place;
I thought:
we have made this, we
have made this.
I scrambled out into
the scandalous sun and saw
the desert was an hourglass
we had forgotten to invert,
a tasselled camel falling
to his knees, the River
filling the great waterclock
of earth.
ARTHUR NORTJE
South Africa 1942-1970
Letter from Pretoria Central Prison
The bell wakes me at 6 in the pale spring dawn
with the familiar rumble of the guts negotiating
murky corridors that smell of bodies. My eyes
find salutary the insurgent light of distances.
Waterdrops rain crystal cold, my wet face in
ascent from an iron basin
greets its rifled shadow in the doorway.
They walk us to the workshop. I am eminent,
the blacksmith of the block; these active hours
fly like sparks in the furnace, I hammer metals
with zest letting the sweating muscles
forge a forgetfulness of worlds more magnetic.
The heart being at rest, life peaceable,
your words filter softly through my fibres.
Taken care of, in no way am I unhappy,
being changed to neutral. You must decide
today, tomorrow, bear responsibility,
take gaps in pavement crowds, refine ideas.
Our food we get on time. Most evenings
I read books, Jane Austen
for elegance, agreeableness (Persuasion).
Trees are green beyond the wall, leaves through the mesh
are cool in sunshine
among the monastic white flowers of spring that floats
prematurely across the exercise yard, a square
of the cleanest stone I have ever walked on.
Sentinels smoke in their boxes, the wisps
curling lovely through the barbed wire.
Also music and cinema, yesterday double feature.
At 4 p.m. it's back to the cell, don't laugh
to hear how accustomed one becomes. You spoke
of hospital treatment--I see the smart nurses
bringing you grapefruit and tea--good
luck to the troublesome kidney.
Sorry there's no more space. But date your reply.
JOY HARJO
America Born, 1951
Watching Crow, Looking South Towards the Manzano Mountains
crow floats in winter sun
a black sliver
in a white ocean of sky
he is the horizon
drifting south of Albuquerque
the horizon dances
along the blue edge
of the Manzanos
wind is an arch
a curve
on the black wing of crow
a warm south wind
if it stays for a while
will keep a crow dancing for thirty years
on the ridge
of a blue mountain breeze.
FINDING THE POET
CHAPTER 12 POETRY AND CULTURE
Culture has a very strong influence on poetry. How we dress, what we eat, the music we listen to, the language we speak, the way we worship, if we worship at all-- these and so many other aspects of our everyday lives comprise what we would loosely call our culture. The word "culture," of course, has several meanings, two of which, according to The New Merriam-Webster Pocket Dictionary, are "the act of developing by education and training," and "a stage of advancement in civilization." In a way, both of these concepts could apply to the aspects of popular culture that I just mentioned. Through our parents and ancestors and a community with which we identify, we learn a set of aesthetic, ethical, and perhaps spiritual values, and these determine our level of civilization, along with our language, history, and education. Today, we hear the phrase "cultural diversity" everywhere, and the term seems to refer to the variety of smaller cultures or civilizations within a larger society. Cultural diversity is not new. Indeed, for thousands of years, contrasting cultures have lived in close proximity and interacted in various ways.
Sometimes cultural diversity has been a source of great enrichment for a civilization, and as in the case of England after the Norman Conquest, a new culture, which drew on the best qualities of the two pre-existing cultures, evolved. At other times, cultural diversity has led to hatred, persecution, and war, and civilization, in all its various meanings, has suffered. In still other contexts, such as in Singapore and Malaysia today, diverse groups such as Indians, Chinese, and Malaysians coexist in harmony while maintaining their unique cultural values and influencing each other very little. In the world of poetry, these various patterns are also present.
Often in poetry, culture functions in much the same way as setting. It provides the background or context in which the events or images described in the poem occur. Culture is closely related to place, since climate, geography, and language, all of which are connected with places, help determine how a civilization develops. In poetry, too, cultural images and language patterns often connect with a specific region or a particular place. In the same way, culture is frequently expressed through images of family, since it is from our parents and extended family members that we learn our cultural values. You might want to re-read the two previous chapters--on "Poems About Family" and "Poetry and Place," and notice how many of the poems in these two chapters really express cultural values as well.
While cultural diversity, as I have mentioned, has always been a part of human civilization, we will again be studying poems that present cultural values from the Modern and Contemporary perspectives. Let's begin with a poem by Gary Soto, a California poet born in 1952, whose grandparents came from Mexico. As you will discover, this poem is on the universal theme of initiation--the passage from childhood into adulthood. Yet the Mexican American culture in which the poet lives provides a background or setting for the particular story of initiation which the poet shares with the reader in his own voice.
Behind Grandma's House
At ten I wanted fame. I had a comb
And two Coke bottles, a tube of Bryl-creem.
I borrowed a dog, one with
Mismatched eyes and a happy tongue,
And wanted to prove I was tough
In the alley, kicking over trash cans,
A dull chime of tuna cans falling.
I hurled light bulbs like grenades
And men teachers held their heads,
Fingers of blood lengthening
On the ground. I flicked rocks at cats,
Their goofy faces spurred with foxtails.
I kicked fences. I shooed pigeons.
I broke a branch from a flowering peach
And frightened ants with a stream of spit.
I said "Chale," "In your face," and "No way
Daddy-O" to an imaginary priest
Until grandma came into the alley,
Her apron flapping in a breeze,
Her hair mussed, and said, "Let me help you,"
And punched me between the eyes.
Only the Spanish word "Chale," an insulting epithet, suggests that this poems was written by a Latino poet. His reference to a priest (in this case, an imaginary one) and to his grandmother's willingness to "help" him by using corporal punishment might also reflect certain cultural values in the Latino community, although one could argue that the Irish American, Italian American and several other communities could also be reflected in these images. The references to Coke, Bryl-creem, tuna cans, and the popular slang phrases, "goofy" and "No way Daddy-O" are familiar to many Americans who grew up in the 1960s. The poem, spoken in the voice of the Chicano narrator, re-creates a time and place easily recognized by thousands of readers who come from a variety of family backgrounds yet also identified with a larger popular culture. The 1960s were a decade in which challenges to authority, especially to male authority figures, were unusually plentiful, and the boy in the poem, in addition to tormenting cats and ripping branches off of trees, imagines acts of violence and insult toward a priest and a male teacher. Ironically, it is his grandmother who "helps" him get past these immature acts of aggression and (the reader assumes), learn to interact with adult males and with his environment in a more responsible way. Although the poem is on the universal theme of a boy's initiation into adulthood, on a more subtle level it also explores the theme, so central to Latino culture, of "respeto," or the importance of respect, especially toward one's elders.
As I have said, the culture from which a poem evolves can serve as a kind of setting for the poem. In Soto's "Behind Grandma's House," the time, place, and cultural context provide a background on which the poem's universal theme is presented. Although the poem takes place in California in 1962 in a Chicano family, its appeal to readers transcends time, place, and culture. Readers who were not even born yet in the 1960s have had their own struggles with authority and with immature destructive behavior. And in every culture, people have to find ways to grow up. Many of us, regardless of our background, knew an archetypal figure like the grandmother in Soto's poem who served as the catalyst for our initiation into adulthood.
Many poets write about culture more directly than Soto did in "Behind Grandma's House." In many cases culture itself is either the subject or the theme of the poem. Often poets have expressed an elegiac sense of loss for cultural values that have been eroded, either dissipated with the passage of time or replaced by the values of another culture. The African American poet Margaret Walker expresses a poignant feeling of cultural loss in the following poem:
Lineage
My grandmothers were strong.
They followed plows and bent to toil.
They moved through fields sowing seed.
They touched earth and grain grew.
They were full of sturdiness and singing.
My grandmothers were strong.
My grandmothers were full of memories.
Smelling of soap and onions and wet clay
With veins rolling roughly over quick hands
They have many clean words to say.
My grandmothers were strong.
Why am I not as they?
In this poem, the poet, apparently speaking in her own voice, contrasts herself with her grandmothers. We learn that her grandmothers were strong; in fact the narrator tells us this three times in this brief poem. With this much repetition, I think the reader can feel safe in assuming that Walker considers her grandmothers' strength to be one of the central ideas of this poem. We are also told that the grandmothers were skillful, nurturing farmers whose lives were filled with song and with memories. The references to the smells associated with the grandmothers--"...soap and onions and wet clay" reinforce the image of these women as nurturers and supporters of the family. For me, the most moving line in the poem is "They have many clean words to say." Interestingly, this sentence is written in the present tense whereas all of the other sentences describing the grandmothers are in the past tense, leading the reader to assume that the grandmothers are no longer living. However, their "clean words," still seem to be alive for their granddaughter. The phrase "clean words," harmonizes with the scent of soap and contrasts with the"wet clay" and with the description of the women bending to plant seeds in the dirt. "Clean words" also bring to mind their opposite-- "dirty words," language which is crude or disrespectful. These grandmothers are elegant, gracious women who do not speak ill of others.
The narrator surprises the reader in the final line by asking, "Why am I not like they?" This is all we learn about the speaker herself; she is not like her grandmothers. The reader is left to make the inference that the narrator feels that she herself is weak, not gifted in nurturing, empty of song and memories, and not blessed with the kind of pure spirit that would give her "many clean words to say." Clearly, the speaker feels that something enormous has been lost. In titling the poem "Lineage," Walker refers to her ancestry, and her description of her grandmothers is filled with admiration and respect. She depicts herself in contrast as lacking their magnitude of character. The reader is left to ponder why this terrible loss has occurred. Walker offers no further explanation, so the reader must return to the poem itself. The grandmothers belonged to a way of life that has almost disappeared from our earth. They were rural farmers who tilled the soil and lived in harmony with the natural rhythms of the seasons. They were strong women who sang as they worked and transmitted the family's traditions to their children. They were treasured matriarchs. How many of us are living that life today? A sociologist could talk about the disruption in family values and dilution of culture that began to occur when large numbers of rural families moved to heavily populated urban areas and got jobs in impersonal factories or as domestic servants, far separated from their country traditions and the graves of their ancestors.
This cultural loss took place all over America and increased with each decade of the Twentieth Century. Every ethnic group was affected, but the African American family was decimated more than any other. Readers who are aware that Walker is an African American poet will visualize African American women in the poem's descriptions, but Walker does not identify either herself or her grandmothers as African American. Like Soto's poem, "Lineage" has a wide universal appeal. It addresses a loss of strength of character that is noticeable all over the world along with the shift to an impersonal urban "civilization," a planet-wide culture lived out of harmony with nature in which our matriarchs are no longer treasured and revered.
Another poem that laments a loss of cultural values is Rosario Castellanos' "Silence Concerning an Ancient Stone." Castellanos, who was born in Chiapas, Mexico, and educated at the University of Mexico and in Madrid, expresses the sense that part of her very self has been lost with the death of her ancestral culture. In this poem, which is rich with imagery, similes, and metaphors, Castellanos alludes to the suppressed art, architecture, religion, and language of the native civilization that flourished in Mexico before the arrival of the Spanish and other European cultures.
Silence Concerning an Ancient Stone
Here I am, seated, with all my words,
like a basket of green fruit, intact.
The fragments
of a thousand destroyed ancient gods
seek and draw near each other in my blood. They long
to rebuild their statue.
From their shattered mouths
a song strives to rise to my mouth,
a scent of burned resins, some gesture
of mysterious wrought stone.
But I am oblivion, treason,
the shell that did not keep from the sea
even the echo of the smallest wave.
I look not for the submerged temples,
but only at the trees that above the ruins
move their vast shadow, with acid teeth bite
the wind as it passes.
And the seals close under my eyes like
the flower under the searching fingers of a blind man.
But I know: behind
my body another body crouches,
and round about me many breaths
furtively cross
like nocturnal beasts in the jungle.
I know: somewhere,
like the cactus in the desert,
a constellated heart of spines,
it is waiting for a name, as the cactus the rain.
But I know only a few words
in the lapidary language
under which they buried my ancestor alive.
Translated by George D. Schade
I hope that you will discuss this poem at length with your classmates. It is a beautiful, haunting poem, filled with images of the flora and fauna of Mexico and bursting with archetypal similes and metaphors. I especially love the metaphor, "I am...the shell that did not keep from the sea/ even the echo of the smallest wave." What a cosmic awareness of loss those lines express! Although this poem is much more specific in its cultural context than the poems by Soto and Walker that we just read, I believe that it still expresses a universal theme. All of us have sensed a kind of lost glory with the fading of our ancestors' civilization, a feeling that art, religion, and language were once so much more magnificent than they are today. And many of us have experienced a mysterious awareness of our ancestors' presence, "like nocturnal beasts in the jungle."
Unfortunately, sometimes cultural loss escalates into cultural conflict. When this occurs, poets are there to express the pain. This brief, ironic poem by the African American poet Countee Cullen comments on the racist values that have permeated American culture for centuries:
For a Lady I Know
She even thinks that up in heaven
Her class lies late and snores,
While poor black cherubs rise at seven
To do celestial chores.
This poem, written in 1925, could have been written yesterday. Although Cullen adopts a humorous tone, his message is very clear. Cullen always maintained a gentlemanly tone in his poetry, and he even has the courtesy to refer to this racist and religious hypocrite as a "Lady." Of course, calling her as a lady compounds the irony of the poem and adds to its satiric effect.
Claude McKay, also writing in the 1920s, adopts a much blunter tone in this compelling sonnet about the erosion of American culture due to hatred. McKay, also of African ancestry, immigrated to America from Jamaica. Like Cullen and Walker, he does not mention his own race, and although he says America "feeds me bread of bitterness, " and uses the words "hell" and "hate" to characterize American culture, he makes no specific references to race or racism. He does, however, convey to the reader enormous personal pain combined with a heartbreaking love for his country.
America
Although she feeds me bread of bitterness,
And sinks into my throat her tiger's tooth,
Stealing my breath of life, I confess
I love this cultured hell that tests my youth.
Her vigor flows like tides into my blood,
Giving me strength erect against her hate,
Her bigness sweeps my being like a flood.
Yet, as a rebel fronts a king in state,
I stand within her walls with not a shred
Of terror, malice, not a word of jeer.
Darkly I gaze into the days ahead,
And see her might and granite wonders there,
Beneath the touch of Time's unerring hand,
Like priceless treasures sinking in the sand.
Like Castellanos, McKay fills his poem with challenging figures of speech, such as "her tiger's tooth" and "Her bigness sweeps my being like a flood." This sonnet concludes with a prophetic vision expressed as a simile. The speaker looks into the future and sees America's "might.../ Like priceless treasures sinking in the sand." Again the reader is challenged to search the images in the poem for the cause and effect relationships to which McKay alludes. Why will the priceless treasures of American civilization sink into oblivion? A reader three hundred years into the future might actually have difficulty finding the answer in this sonnet itself. Both McKay and Walker assume a certain cultural and historic awareness on their reader's part. And indeed it would be difficult to find any reader of poetry in the world today who is totally unaware of the struggles with racial hatred and cultural conflict that have characterized all of American history.
Mitsuye Yamada addresses the issue of conflicting cultural values more specifically in the following poem. The phrase "allegiance to the emperor" refers to the Emperor of Japan, and the poem mentions "this war." The reader should have no difficulty concluding that the poem describes the stresses experienced by Japanese Americans during World War II. Yamada presents this tension in a multi-generational context. The poem is written in Yamada's own voice, describing both her own reaction and her mother's to the pressure put on them by U.S. Government officials to "forswear allegiance" to Japan, the country of their birth. Yamada herself, who was born in 1923 and was thus a young adult during the war, resolves this conflict more easily than her mother, who argues that "double loyalty," forbidden by America, should be her right.
The Question of Loyalty
I met the deadline
for alien registration
once before
was numbered fingerprinted
and ordered not to travel
without a permit.
But alien still they said I must
forswear allegiance to the emperor.
For me that was easy
I didn't even know him
but my mother who did cried out
If I sign this
What will I be?
I am doubly loyal
to my American children
also to my own people.
How can double mean nothing?
I wish no one to lose this war.
Everyone does.
I was poor
at math.
I signed
my only ticket out.
Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni also explores the conflict and pain associated with living in two cultures. In this poem, entitled, "Indian Movie, New Jersey," the poet describes her level of comfort while inside a movie theater watching an Indian movie with friends who are also Indian immigrants. While depicting the scene in the theater, Divakaruni uses three Indian words, "qurbani," which means "sacrifice;" "dosti," which means "friendship;" and "pakoras," which are deep fried Indian appetizers. As the speaker and her friends prepare to leave the comfort and cultural familiarity of the theater, they begin to think about the conflicts they will be facing in the wider culture when they step out onto the streets of New Jersey. The poet refers to "Dotbusters," which are xenophobic American gangs who attack Indians. As you read this poem, notice the poignant and ironic contrast between the plot of the movie and the "American dream" that called the speaker and her friends to emigrate from India.
Indian Movie, New Jersey
Not like the white filmstars, all rib
and gaunt cheekbone, the Indian sex-goddess
smiles plumply from behind a flowery
branch. Below her brief red skirt, her thighs
are satisfying-solid, redeeming
as tree trunks. She swings her hips
and the men-viewers whistle. The lover-hero
dances in to a song, his lip-sync
a little off, but no matter, we
know the words already and sing along.
It is safe here, the day
golden and cool so no one sweats,
roses on every bush and the Dal Lake
clean again.
The sex-goddess switches
to thickened English to emphasize
a joke. We laugh and clap. Here
we need not be embarrassed by words
dropping like lead pellets into foreign ears.
The flickering movie-light
wipes from our faces years of America, sons
who want mohawks and refuse to run
the family store, daughters who date
on the sly.
When at the end the hero
dies for his friend who also
loves the sex-goddess and now can marry her,
we weep, understanding. Even the men
clear their throats to say, "What qurbani!
What dosti!" After, we mill around
unwilling to leave, exchange greetings
and good news: a new gold chain, a trip
to India. We do not speak
of motel raids, canceled permits, stones
thrown through glass windows, daughters and sons
raped by Dotbusters.
In the dim foyer
we can pull around us the faint, comforting smell
of incense and pakoras, can arrange
our children's marriages with hometown boys and girls,
open a franchise, win a million
in the mail. We can retire
in India, a yellow two-storied house
with wrought-iron gates, our own
Ambassador car. Or at least
move to a rich white suburb, Summerfield
of Fort Lee, with neighbors that will
talk to us. Here while the film-songs still echo
in the corridors and restrooms, we can trust
in movie truths: sacrifice, success, love and luck,
the America that was supposed to be.
Although cultural conflict, as expressed by McKay, Yamada, and Divakaruni, continues to be a very real and challenging theme in both life and literature, sometimes poets write about the joyous aspects of culture. Cultural identity can be a source of pride and an impetus to creative expression. Anoma Kanie, a contemporary poet from the Ivory Coast, wrote the following poem in French. Although she alludes to political, economic, and environmental stresses in Africa today, the poem is essentially a celebration and affirmation of the gifts that the poet feels that she has received from her home continent.
All That You Have Given Me, Africa
All that you have given me, Africa
Lakes, forests, misted lagoons
All that you have given me,
Music, dances, all night stories around a fire
All that you have etched in my skin
Pigments of my ancestors
Indelible in my blood
All that you have given me Africa
Makes me walk
With a step that is like no other
Hip broken under the weight of time,
Feet large with journeys,
All that you have left to me
Even this lassitude bound to my heels,
I bear it with pride on my forehead
My health is no more to be lost
And I go forward
Praising my race which is no better
Or worse than any other.
All that you have given me Africa,
Savannahs gold in the noonday sun
Your beasts that men call wicked,
Your mines, inexplicable treasures
Obsession of a hostile world
Your suffering for lost paradises,
All that, I protect with an unforgiving hand
As far as the clear horizons
So that your heaven-given task
May be safe forever.
Translated by Kathleen Weaver
I find the lines "Praising my race which is no better/ Or worse than any other" very interesting. Julia Alvarez expresses a similar sentiment in a sonnet which is part of a thirty-three sonnet sequence she wrote to celebrate her own thirty-third birthday. Alvarez, who was born in New York of parents who came from the Dominican Republic, honors her own family inheritance in a joyful tone.
The Women on My Mother's Side Were Known
The women on my mother's side were known
for beauty and were given lovely names
passed down for generations. I knew them
as my pretty aunts: Laura, who could turn
any head once, and Anna, whose husband
was so devoted he would lay his handkerchief
on seats for her and when she rose thanked
her; there was Rosa, who got divorced twice,
her dark eyes and thick hair were to blame;
and my mother Julia, who was a catch
and looks it in her wedding photographs.
My sister got her looks, I got her name,
and it suits me that between resemblance
and words, I got the right inheritance.
Although the poet suggests that her sister, and not she herself, inherited her mother's beauty, there is no sense of disappointment or self-pity. In fact, Alvarez concludes that the gift of poetry, which she calls "words," is for her "the right inheritance."
Whether culture is used as a setting, or as a subject itself to explore themes such as cultural loss, conflict, or celebration, it continues to be a source of inspiration to poets. A good poem about culture also has universal appeal. Alvarez and Kanie's poems acclaiming their own heritages can evoke a sense of cultural pride in any reader, just as Divakaruni's poem reminds us all that there will always be cultural challenges for us to face.
QUESTIONS AND TOPICS FOR REVIEW
1. What are some of the meanings of the word "culture"?
2. What is popular culture?
3. Define the term cultural diversity.
4. Historically, what have been some of the positive and negative effects of cultural diversity?
5. In poetry, how can culture function in much the same way as setting?
6. What is the theme of Gary Soto's "Behind Grandma's House"?
7. What kind of cultural loss does Margaret Walker discuss in "Lineage"?
8. What kind of cultural loss does Rosario Castellanos discuss in "Silence Concerning an Ancient Stone"?
9. How would you characterize the tone of Countee Cullen's "For a Lady I Know"?
10. In what poetic form is Claude McKay's "America" written?
11. What is the theme of McKay's "America"? You may wish to review the discussion in Chapter 9 on the distinction between subject and theme in poetry.
12. How does Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni use setting to present the theme of conflicting cultural values?
13. Which of the poets in this chapter focused primarily on cultural pride and celebration?
14. How can a poem written from a specific cultural perspective also have universal appeal?
TOPICS FOR DISCUSSION
1. Should poets assume that the reader is aware of the cultural context in which a poem is written if the poet does not include specific references to that context? Use Margaret Walker's "Lineage" and Claude McKay's "America" as the basis of your discussion.
2. Discuss the imagery and figures of speech in Rosario Castellanos' "Silence Concerning an Ancient Stone." How do these elements help convey the poem's theme?
3. Using Countee Cullen's "For a Lady I Know" as the basis for your discussion, talk about examples of cultural insensitivity that you have personally witnessed.
4. Using Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni's "Indian Movie, New Jersey" as the basis of your discussion, define the American Dream. What elements of the American Dream are also evident in the Indian movie that Divakaruni and her friends have watched? In what ways are Divakaruni and her friends living the American Dream in New Jersey? What do you think the American Dream means to the Dotbusters who harass Indians in New Jersey?
5. Using Gary Soto's "Behind Grandma's House" as the basis of your discussion, share your own experiences of initiation with your classmates. Were there any aspects of these experiences of initiation that were connected to the culture in which you grew up?
6. Pablo Neruda's "Sweetness, Always," which appears at the end of this chapter, is written from a world-wide perspective. How does the poet create this context?
7. How does Seamus Heaney use images from his upbringing in Ireland to create the setting of "Digging"? What is the theme of this poem? How does the poet compare and contrast himself with his father and his grandfather?
8. Read Gary Soto's "Black Hair" aloud in class. Then discuss the attitude toward baseball expressed in this poem. Share you own experiences with sports with each other. Are these experiences tied to the place where you live (or lived as a child) and your cultural upbringing? Cite specific examples.
9. Read Jose Emilio Pacheco's "High Treason" together in class. Then discuss the poem's theme. Is this a patriotic poem, or does it express a treasonous attitude toward Pacheco's country? Discuss what patriotism means to you. Are any of the other poem in this chapter patriotic? Do any of them betray the poet's country or culture?
10. Judith Ortiz Cofer's "The Idea of Islands" compares and contrasts two places where the poet has lived. Identify the two places and discuss how she conveys this comparison and contrast to the reader. Was the transition from one culture to the other easy or difficult for the speaker in the poem? Discuss challenges you have faced if you have moved from one place and culture to another. Did you ever suffer from culture shock? If so, how did you respond?
11. In "Heritage," Linda Hogan refers to parents and grandparents who came from different cultures. Read the poem together and discuss its theme. What gifts has the speaker received form each of the family members she mentions? What are the advantages of growing up in a multi-cultural family? Are there any disadvantages? What do the last two lines of the poem mean to you?
ACTIVITIES
1. Using Mitsuye Yamada's "The Question of Loyalty" as a resource, organize a debate on the issue of whether or not it is possible to be loyal to two different countries.
2. Watch a film from a different culture, and perhaps a different language, from your own. Discuss with the class the attitudes, activities, or values expressed in this film that differed from your own cultural values. Then comment on the aspects of the film that are also shared in your own culture. After this discussion, write a spontaneous poem which incorporates images from both cultures.
3. Assign someone to research the life of Langston Hughes and report his or her findings to the class. Then get a volunteer to read Hughes' "Theme for English B" aloud for the group. This poem was written in 1951 when Hughes was nearly fifty years old, yet the speaker in the poem is twenty-two. Which of the other details in the poem are also fictionalized? Which of the details were true of Hughes' own life? Discuss Hughes' possible motives for using a persona in this poem.
4. Watch the Italian film Il Postino (The Postman) outside of class. An actor plays the poet Pablo Neruda in this movie. In what ways does the film explore the cultural differences and similarities between the two central characters, the Italian postman and the Chilean poet? What is the theme of this film? What attitudes toward poetry are expressed? How does poetry transform the lives of the both poet and the postman? Are any of the attitudes expressed in Neruda's "Sweetness, Always," also presented in the film?
5. Write statements of theme for Rahel's "To My Country," Jose Emilio Pacheco's "High Treason," and Anoma Kanie's "All That You Have Given Me, Africa." Compare, contrast, and discuss these statements of theme. Did most of the students feel that these three poems were written on similar themes, or were the themes of these poems perceived to be different?
6. Find a volunteer to research the life and cultural background of N. Scott Momaday and report this information to the class. Find another volunteer to read the poem "Earth and I Gave You Turquoise" aloud. Then discuss the relationship between the images in the poem and Momaday's cultural background. Does the poem also contain mythic or archetypal elements? In what traditional genre is this poem written?
7. Assign a class member to research the life and cultural background of Lucille Clifton. Another student will read "Come Home From the Movies" to the class. Then discuss this poem's point of view and theme. Do you think it is written in the poet's own voice, or is she using a persona. Is the poet critical of her own culture? If so, discuss specific examples from the poem. What is the central metaphor in this poem?
ANALYTICAL WRITING ASSIGNMENT
1. Compare and contrast A.D. Hope's "Australia" (in Chapter 11) and Claude McKay's "America," focusing on theme, tone, and imagery.
2. Compare and contrast Margaret Walker's "Lineage" and Julia Alvarez's "The Women on My Mother's Side Were Known," focusing on point of view, tone, and theme.
3. Compare and contrast Claude McKay's "America" and Julia Alvarez's "The Women on My Mother's Side Were Known," focusing on theme, imagery, and the use of the sonnet form.
4. Analyze Pablo Neruda's "Sweetness, Always," focusing on tone, metaphor, and theme.
5. Compare and contrast Seamus Heaney's "Digging" with Robert Hayden's "Those Winter Sundays" (in Chapter 11,) focusing on theme, imagery and tone.
6. Analyze N.Scott Momaday's "Earth and I Gave You Turquoise," focusing on setting, imagery, point of view, and theme.
7. Compare and contrast Rahel's "To My Country" and Barry Spacks' "Finding a Yiddish Paper on the Riverside Line," focusing on point of view, setting, imagery, and theme.
8. Analyze Judith Ortiz Cofer's "The Idea of Islands," focusing on theme, imagery, and diction.
9. Compare and contrast "Behind Grandma's House" and "Black Hair" by Gary Soto, focusing on theme, point of view, and narrative technique. Pay special attention to the initiation theme in both poems.
10. Analyze Linda Hogan's "Heritage," focusing on point of view, theme, and the cultural values expressed in this poem. What poetic devices does Hogan use to express these values?
CREATIVE WRITING ASSIGNMENTS
1. Write a poem on the theme of initiation. Place this poem in a specific cultural context.
2. In your journal, make a list of the aspects of your own culture that are worthy of celebration. Then write a poem of cultural celebration incorporating these elements. Include specific imagery to make this celebration concrete for your reader.
3. Edit and revise the poem that you wrote as part of Activity 2. (This activity involved writing a spontaneous poem incorporating images from two contrasting cultures.) As you edit, add or delete words or images that help clarify the poem's theme. Think about whether your poem is primarily a comparison or a contrast.
4. Write a poem criticizing some aspects of the culture in which you live. Pay special attention to the tone of this poem. You may wish to adopt a satiric tone. You may also choose to write in a persona.
5. Write a poem expressing a sense of loss over some aspect of your own heritage that has disappeared from your life.
6. Write a poem that focuses on the subject of cultural conflict. The cultures depicted in the poem do not have to be your own.
7. Write a poem about a childhood experience in which you either attended or participated in a sporting event. Include images from your cultural upbringing in this poem.
8. Many of you were raised in families that were comprised of more than one culture. If this is true of your heritage, write a poem which incorporates imagery from these various cultures. Then revise this poem to help clarify its theme.
9. Write a poem expressing your feelings about the country where you live. Communicate these feelings using specific images.
10. Write a poem which contrasts the food you ate as a child with the food you eat now. This poem can be written on any theme. Edit and revise this poem to help its theme to emerge.
ADDITIONAL POEMS FROM CULTURAL PERSPECTIVES FOR READING AND ANALYSIS
RAHEL*
Israel 1890-1931
To My Country
I haven't sung your praise,
nor glorified your name
in tales of bravery
and the spoils of war.
I only plant a tree
on Jordan's quiet banks.
I only wear a path over the fields.
Surely very meagre,
Mother, I know.
Surely very meagre,
your daughter's offering:
Only a joyous shout
on a radiant day,
only secret weeping
over your barrenness.
Translated by Diane Mintz
* Rahel Blaustein signed her poems only using her first name. She was born in Russia and immigrated to Palestine.
LANGSTON HUGHES
America 1902-1967
Theme for English B
The instructor said,
Go home and write
a page tonight
And let that page come out of you--
Then, it will be true.
I wonder if it's that simple?
I am twenty-two, colored, born in Winston-Salem.
I went to school there, then Durham, then here
to this college on the hill above Harlem.
I am the only colored student in my class.
The steps from the hill lead down into Harlem,
through a park, then I cross St. Nicholas,
Eighth Avenue, Seventh, and I come to the Y,
the Harlem Branch Y, where I take the elevator
up to my room, sit down, and write this page:
It's not easy to know what is true for you and me
at twenty-two, my age. But I guess I'm what
I feel and see and hear, Harlem, I hear you:
hear you, hear me--we two--you, me, talk on this page.
(I hear New York, too.)Me--who?
Well, I like to eat, sleep, drink, and be in love.
I like to work, read, learn, and understand life.
I like a pipe for a Christmas present,
or records--Bessie, bop, or Bach.
I guess being colored doesn't make me not like
the same things other folks like who are other races.
So will my page be colored that I write?
Being me, it will not be white.
But it will be
a part of you, instructor.
You are white--
yet a part of me, as I am a part of you.
That's American.
Sometimes perhaps you don't want to be a part of me.
Nor do I often want to be a part of you.
But we are, that's true!
As I learn from you,
I guess you learn from me--
although you're older--and white--
and somewhat more free.
This is my page for English B.
PABLO NERUDA
Chile 1904-1973
Sweetness, Always
Why such harsh machinery?
Why, to write down the stuff
and people of every day,
must poems be dressed up in gold,
in old and fearful stone?
I want verses of felt or feather
which scarcely weigh, mild verses
with the intimacy of beds
where people have loved and dreamed.
I want poems stained
by hands and everydayness.
Verses of pastry which melt
into milk and sugar in the mouth,
air and water to drink,
the bites and kisses of love.
I long for eatable sonnets,
poems of honey and flour.
Vanity keeps prodding us
to lift ourselves skyward
or to make deep and useless
tunnels underground.
So we forget the joyous
love-needs of our bodies.
We forget about pastries.
We are not feeding the world.
In Madras a long time since,
I saw a sugary pyramid,
a tower of confectionery--
one level after another,
and in the construction, rubies,
and other blushing delights,
medieval and yellow.
Someone dirtied his hands
to cook up so much sweetness.
Brother poets from here
and there, from earth and sky,
from Medellin, from Veracruz,
Abyssinia, Antofagasta,
do you know the recipe for honeycombs?
Let's forget all about that stone.
Let your poetry fill up
the equinoctial pastry shop
our mouths long to devour--
all the children's mouths
and the poor adults also.
Don't go on without seeing,
relishing, understanding
all these hearts of sugar.
Don't be afraid of sweetness.
With us or without us,
sweetness will go on living
and is infinitely alive,
forever being revived,
for it's in a man's mouth,
whether he's eating or singing,
that sweetness has its place.
Translated by Alastair Reid
BARRY SPACKS
America Born 1931
Finding a Yiddish Paper on the Riverside Line
Again I hold these holy letters,
Never learned. Dark candelabras.
Once they glowed in the yellow light
Through the chicken smell of Friday night,
My father in his peach-stained shirt
Scrubbing off twelve hours' dirt
While I drew my name on misted glass.
Now trim suburban houses pass
And on my lap the headlines loom
Like strangers in the living room.
N. Scott Momaday
America Born, 1934
Earth and I Gave You Turquoise
Earth and I gave you turquoise
when you walked singing
We lived laughing in my house
and told old stories
You grew ill when the owl cried
We will meet on Black Mountain
I will bring you corn for planting
and we will make fire
Children will come to your breast
You will heal my heart
I speak your name many times
The wild cane remembers you
My younger brother's house is filled
I go there to sing
We have not spoken of you
but our songs are sad
When the Moon Woman goes to you
I will follow her white way
Tonight they dance near Chinle
by the seven elms
There your loom whispered beauty
They will eat mutton
and drink coffee till morning
You and I will not be there
I saw a crow by Red Rock
standing on one leg
It was the black of your hair
The years are heavy
I will ride the swiftest horse
You will hear the drumming of hooves
LUCILLE CLIFTON
America Born, 1936
come home from the movies
come home from the movies,
black girls and boys,
the picture be over and the screen
be cold as our neighborhood.
come home from the show,
don't be the show.
take off some flowers and plant them,
pick us some papers and read them,
stop making some babies and raise them.
come home from the movies
black girls and boys,
show our fathers how to walk like men,
they already know how to dance.
SEAMUS HEANEY
Northern Ireland Born 1939
Digging
Between my finger and my thumb
The squat pen rests; snug as a gun.
Under my window, a clean rasping sound
When the space sinks into gravelly ground:
My father, digging. I look down
Till his straining rump among the flowerbeds
Bends low, comes up twenty years away
Stooping in rhythm through potato drills
Where he was digging.
The coarse boot nestled on the lug, the shaft
Against the inside knee was levered firmly.
He rooted out tall tops, buried the bright edge deep
To scatter new potatoes that we picked
Loving their cool hardness in our hands.
By God, the old man could handle a spade.
Just like his old man.
My grandfather cut more turf in a day
Than any other man on Toner's bog.
Once I carried him milk in a bottle
Corked sloppily with paper. He straightened up
To drink it, then fell to right away.
Nicking and slicing neatly, heaving sods
Over his shoulder, going down and down
For the good turf. Digging.
The cold smell of potato mould, the squelch and slap
Of soggy peat, the curt cuts of an edge
Through living roots awaken in my head.
But I've no spade to follow men like them.
Between my finger and my thumb
The squat pen rests.
I'll dig with it.
JOSE EMILIO PACHECO
Mexico Born 1939
High Treason
I do not love my country. Its abstract lustre
is beyond my grasp.
But (although it sounds bad) I would give my life
for ten places in it, for certain people,
seaports, pinewoods, fortresses,
a run-down city, gray, grotesque,
various figures from its history,
mountains
(and three or four rivers).
Translated by Alastair Reid
LINDA HOGAN
America 1947
Heritage
From my mother, the antique mirror
where I watch my face take on her lines.
She left me the smell of baking bread
to warm fine hairs in my nostrils,
she left the large white breasts that weigh down
my body.
From my father I take his brown eyes,
the plague of locusts that leveled our crops,
they flew in formation like buzzards.
From my uncle the whittled wood
that rattles like bones
and is white
and smells like all our old houses
that are no longer there. He was the man
who sang old chants to me, the words
my father was told not to remember.
From my grandfather who never spoke
I learned to fear silence.
I learned to kill a snake
when you're begging for rain.
And grandmother, blue-eyed woman
whose skin was brown,
she used snuff.
When her coffee can full of black saliva
spilled on me
it was like the brown cloud of grasshoppers
that leveled her fields.
It was the brown stain
that covered my white shirt,
my whiteness a shame.
That sweet black liquid like the food
she chewed up and spit into my father's mouth
when he was an infant.
It was the brown earth of Oklahoma
stained with oil
She said tobacco would purge your body of poisons.
I has more medicine than stones and knives
against your enemies.
That tobacco is the dark night that covers me.
She said it is wise to eat the flesh of deer
so you will be swift and travel over many miles.
She told me how our tribe has always followed a stick
that pointed west
that pointed east.
From my family I have learned the secrets
of never having a home.
JUDITH ORTIZ COFER
Puerto Rico 1952
The Idea of Islands
The place where I was born,
that mote in a cartographer's eye,
interests you?
Today Atlanta is like a port city
enveloped in mist. The temperature
is plunging with the abandon
of a woman rushing to a rendezvous.
Since you ask, things were simpler
on the island. Food and shelter
were never the problem. Most days,
a hat and a watchful eye were all
one needed for protection, the climate being
rarely inclement. Fruit could be plucked
from trees languishing under the weight
of their own fecundity. The thick sea
spewed out fish that crawled into the pots
of women whose main occupation was to dress
each other's manes with scarlet hibiscus,
which as you may know, blooms
without restraint in the tropics.
I was always the ambitious one, overdressed
by my neighbors' standards, and unwilling
to eat mangoes three times a day.
In truth, I confess to spending my youth
guarding the fire by the beach, waiting
to be rescued from the futile round
of paradisial life.
How do I like the big city?
City lights are just as bright
as the stars that enticed me then;
the traffic ebbs and rises like the tides
and in a crowd,
everyone is an island.
GARY SOTO
America Born, 1952
Black Hair
At eight, I was brilliant with my body.
In July, that ring of heat
We all jumped through, I sat in the bleachers
Of Romain Playground, in the lengthening
Shade that rose from our dirty feet.
The game before us was more than baseball.
It was a figure--Hector Moreno
Quick and hard with turned muscles,
His crouch the one I assumed before an altar
Of worn baseball cards, in my room.
I came here because I was Mexican, a stick
Of brown light in love with those
Who could do it--the triple and the hard slide,
The gloves eating balls into double plays.
What could I do with 50 pounds, my shyness,
My black torch of hair, about to go out?
Father was dead, his face no longer
Hanging over the table or our sleep,
And mother was the terror of mouths
Twisting hurt by butter knives.
In the bleachers I was brilliant with my body,
Waving players in and stomping my feet,
Growing sweaty in the presence of white shirts.
I chewed sunflower seeds. I drank water
And bit my arm through the late innings.
When Hector lined balls into deep
Center, in my mind I rounded the bases
With him, my face flared, my hair lifting
Beautifully, because we were coming home
To the arms of brown people.
CHAPTER 1 WHAT IS A POET?
Poetry is the most mysterious of all professions. It's also the most ordinary. I've known many poets during my lifetime, but the ones with whom I've felt the most intimate kinship have been dead for a very long time-- people like Geoffrey Chaucer, William Shakespeare, Matsuo Basho, Emily Dickinson, and Langston Hughes. All of these people, and the hundreds of other poets I have known, have changed my life in some way, just as a pebble tossed into a quiet pond changes the dynamics of the pond's world forever.
One of the great mysteries of poetry is this subtle way in which it communicates to a reader or a listener over time, across cultures, past genders, straight into what William Butler Yeats calls "...the deep heart's core."1 How rare it is in everyday life to communicate with anyone with such intimacy, yet our longing to share thoughts and feelings with others in this deeper way is part of what makes us human.
ISLAND
Wave of sorrow,
Do not drown me now:
I see the island
Still ahead somehow.
I see the island
And its sands are fair:
Wave of sorrow,
Take me there.
Have you ever felt this way? I know you have. I teach poetry among other things at Evergreen Valley College in San Jose, California. Recently I gave a midterm examination to one of my classes, and the test included several poems, including this brief one by Langston Hughes. I asked the students to choose one poem to analyze. Among the other poems were a sonnet by Shakespeare and a dramatic monologue by Robert Browning. (If you don't know what a sonnet or a dramatic monologue is, keep reading. You will learn a great deal about poetry in this book.) But almost all of the students chose to write about "Island." I've been teaching long enough to know that they probably chose this poem because it looked so easy.
This, too, is one of the mysteries of poetry. To be powerful, a poem does not have to be long, complex, or filled with difficult words. And a poem which looks simple and "easy" may in fact communicate to the reader with a depth and complexity that is truly startling. This is where my students got their surprise. As I read essay after essay on this "simple" little poem, each student's response had a unique richness. I believe that many of the students, when they arrived at the end of their essay, had traveled a universal journey with this poem that they had not intended to take.
Some wrote about metaphor, allegory, archetypes, and structure because we had learned all of these terms, and they knew that a student's job is to convince the professor that he or she has learned all of the material being covered on the test. Some of them even remembered that Langston Hughes was an African-American who lived from 1902 to 1967 and wrote about the struggle for dignity and equality before the Civil Rights Movement. One student point out that the wave of sorrow-- the personal grief expressed by the speaker in the poem-- was the very vehicle that would carry him or her to safely and healing, represented by the island. If the speaker had not been filled with grief, his wave would not have had the momentum to land him on the glorious island.
As I read all of these essays, I felt that many of the students had actually connected with the power of sorrow that Hughes was trying to express. So many times, I had to lay a paper aside as my own sorrow over my father's recent death and the illness of someone I love washed over me. And like the speaker in the poem, my heart called out, "Do not drown me now!"
Do you see what I mean when I tell you that poetry is the most mysterious, yet the most ordinary of human endeavors? I also want you to know that poetry is not something to be endured or suffered through. It is an ancient yet still living art intended for your healing. What kind of deep grief do you think Langston Hughes felt to write a poem like "Island"? And what gave him the courage to share this most vulnerable of emotions with millions of strangers, including you?
Poets have existed on our planet since pre-history along with painters, singers, dancers, priestesses, priests, healers, hunters, gatherers, craftspeople, farmers, and caretakers of animals. A poet is someone who uses words to communicate with others in a profoundly meaningful way. The poet's words go beyond the sharing of information or opinions and move straight into the listener's heart and soul. Could an ancient fisherman who had caught nothing for many days and whose children were beginning to starve have stood on the shore and called out to the turbulent sea, "Wave of sorrow, do not drown me now"? If he did, he was a poet.
Did you notice that this imaginary ancient poet did not write anything down on a piece of papyrus or chisel any marks into a stone? The words themselves are what make someone a poet. We call this oral poetry, and it certainly predated any form of writing. Memory was important to ancient pre-literate people, and the poet took on the mysterious and powerful role of speaker for the culture. Among other things, she or he memorized family genealogies, historic occurrences, and crucial moments in the life of the tribe. The poet then told of these events in a highly dramatic fashion at gatherings and celebrations, helping the clan to identify their values and honor their spiritual beliefs.
Often the poet's words were sung, perhaps accompanied by a drum or a harp, and among ancient people the link between poetry, song, dance, drama, and religious liturgy was very close. One must always remember that ancient people were far more spiritual than human beings in the last few centuries have been and that the original impulse toward poetic expression was religious. Also, in the ancient world the poet was deeply revered for his or her ability to use words to express the profoundly felt spiritual experiences of the whole tribe or clan.
The ancient world was also a more community oriented world than we live in today. Clans or tribes were really extended families who shared a language, a values system, and spiritual beliefs. Individualism was not helpful to the survival of the clan. I certainly cannot imagine an ancient poet singing a song at a tribal gathering with phrases like, "I gotta be me," or "I did it my way."
In addition to being more community oriented, ancient people lived in a much closer relationship to nature than we do today. Early poetry includes many references to natural phenomena such as sunrise and sunset and the changing seasons. Plants, animals, weather, and geographical elements also appear frequently in ancient poetry. One of the earliest pieces of written literature is The Rigveda, compiled in India in approximately the year 1,000 B.C. The Rigveda is a collection of sacred hymns which celebrate the spiritual lives and values of the ancient Vedic or Hindu people. The poem which follows is dedicated to Ratri, the goddess of night, and it expresses some of the anxiety that ancient people felt when darkness descended upon their world at the end of each day.
NIGHT
When night comes on, the goddess shines
In many places with her eyes:
All glorious she has decked herself.
Immortal goddess far and wide,
She fills the valleys and the heights:
Darkness she drives away with light.
The goddess now, as she comes on,
Is turning out her sister, Dawn:
Far off the darkness hastes away.
So, goddess, come to-day to us:
At thy approach we seek our homes,
As birds their nests upon the tree.
The villagers have gone to rest
And footed beasts and winged birds;
The hungry hawk himself is still.
Ward off from us she-wolf and wolf,
Ward off the robber, goddess Night:
So take us safe across the gloom.
The darkness, thickly painting black,
Has, palpable, come nigh to me:
Like debts, O Dawn, clear it away.
I have brought up a hymn, like kine,
For thee, as one who wins a fight:
This, Heaven's daughter, Night, accept.
Translated by A. A. Macdonnell
As you re-read this poem with your dictionary at hand, you will want to look up the word kine.
Also, notice the names of specific animals with which the Vedic people shared their environment. Are any of these animals part of your environment today? Among other things, the Vedic people experienced anxieties about dangerous animals, robbers, and debts, and they asked for divine help in dealing with these problems. Do you ever worry about things just before you fall asleep at night? Have you ever felt afraid of the dark? Do you share any of the Vedic people's anxieties?
The Chinese were also among the earliest people to use written language to create poetry. The Book of Songs is a magnificent anthology of ancient Chinese poetry which was compiled about 600 B.C. May of these poems were already very old when they were placed in this collection. Like the poems in The Rigveda, these ancient Chinese poems reflect a very close relationship between nature and human experience. They also reflect the ancient Chinese values system that has been associated with the Confucian ideal-- respect for ancestors and parents and fear of incompetent leadership and social chaos. The following poem expresses a theme which is also central to Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet, the conflict between passion between a young man and woman and family responsibility. The poet makes references to trees and gardens to describe this conflict.
I beg of you, Chung Tzu,
Do not climb into our homestead,
Do not break the willows we have planted.
Not that I mind about the willows,
But I am afraid of my father and mother.
Chung Tzu I dearly love;
But of what my father and mother say
Indeed I am afraid.
I beg of you, Chung Tzu,
Do not climb over our wall,
Do not break the mulberry trees we have planted.
Not that I mind about the mulberry trees,
But I am afraid of my brothers.
Chung Tzu I dearly love;
But of what my brothers say
Indeed I am afraid.
I beg of you, Chung Tzu,
Do not climb into our garden,
Do not break the hard-wood we have planted.
Not that I mind about the hard-wood,
But I am afraid of what people will say.
Chung Tzu I dearly love;
But of all that people will say
Indeed I am afraid.
Translated by Arthur Waley
Have you ever been afraid to tell your parents or family members the truth about something that was very important to you? What were you afraid would happen if the truth came out? How important is personal love to you? What would you do if you fell in love with someone your family didn't like? Have you ever denied something that you valued because you were afraid of what people would think? Ancient poems like the two above that have not disappeared with the passage of time often capture eternal human conflicts as they are acted out over and over again on the great stage of nature.
Another source of ancient written poetry which has been read by generations of people from a variety of cultures is The Book of Psalms. This collection of ancient religious songs appears in the Hebrew Old Testament, and about half of the psalms are attributed to David, the second King of Israel, who lived around 1,000 B.C. Some of the other psalms are thought to have been composed in the fifth and fourth centuries B.C. The psalms express a variety of moods and themes, including a strong sense of celebration for the relationship between nature, human experience, and God. This feeling of sacred celebration is especially well expressed in one of the most famous songs in this collection, "Psalm 23," which I will include in two different translations.
PSALM 23
The Lord is my shepherd; I shall
not want.
He maketh me to lie down in
green pastures: he leadeth me beside
the still waters.
He restoreth my soul: he leadeth
me in the paths of righteousness for
his name's sake.
Yea, though I walk through the
valley of the shadow of death, I will
fear no evil: for thou art with me;
thy rod and thy staff they comfort me.
Thou preparest a table before me
in the presence of mine enemies: thou
anointest my head with oil; my cup
runneth over.
Surely goodness and mercy shall
follow me all the days of my life: and
I will dwell in the house of the Lord
for ever.
The translation above was done by a committee of scholars appointed by King James I of England in 1611. The following translation was completed by a group of American Biblical scholars in 1970.
PSALM 23
The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not
want.
In verdant pastures he gives me
repose;
Beside restful waters he leads me;
he refreshes my soul.
He guides me in right paths
for his name's sake.
Even though I walk in the dark valley
I fear no evil; for you are at my side
With your rod and your staff
that give me courage.
You spread the table before me
in the sight of my foes;
You anoint my head with oil;
my cup overflows.
Only goodness and kindness follow me
all the days of my life;
And I shall dwell in the house of the
Lord
for years to come.
Translated by the Catholic Biblical
Association of America
Which of these translations do you prefer? As you can imagine, translation can be a difficult and complex process, especially when ancient texts are involved. The King James translation obviously contains language, especially verb and pronoun forms, that have now become archaic, but many readers prefer this older translation for its poetic qualities. However, in both translations the images of water, oil, food, and a kind and nurturing shepherd capture David's sense of gratitude for the peace and security he felt in his relationship with his creator. Think about a time when you felt truly safe and secure. What kinds of images come to your mind when you remember this feeling of complete serenity? Have you ever had to face a difficult situation that you thought you might not be able to handle, but somehow everything turned out better than you could ever have imagined?
As we can see in these examples of ancient poetry from India, China, and Israel, even thousands of years ago, poets were real people. They felt deep emotions such as fear, love, and profound longings for peace and security. They also experienced the same moments of joy that people treasure today. Another ancient poet who had a very strong and interesting personality was Sappho. She was born on the island of Lesbos in Greece and lived between the 7th and 6th centuries B.C. Like the ancient Asian and Middle Eastern cultures we have just observed, the ancient Greeks also produced a large volume of written poetry, and as you will discover later in this book, the Greeks influenced the development of poetry throughout Europe, including English language poetry, for more than two thousand years. And according to poet and translator Willis Barnstone, "Sappho was considered the most important lyric poet of Western antiquity."2 In Chapter 6 you will find a detailed discussion of the contributions that the Greeks have made to poetry, and I will define terms such as lyric, narrative, and didactic poetry. For now, it might be helpful to know that lyric poetry is any poem that expresses a speaker's feelings, thoughts, or mood. Applying this term rather loosely, all of the poems we have read so far in this chapter could be called lyric poems.
Sappho's lyric poems are especially powerful because of the astounding way she combines deeply felt emotion with striking imagery. In poetry, imagery is the use of words that appeal to any of the senses. We will study imagery, along with some of the other important elements of poetry in Chapter 7. In Psalm 23, as you will remember, the phrase, "... he leadeth me beside the still waters" appeals to our sense of sight as well as sound, smell, and taste. It is my opinion that imagery is the most important element of poetry because it makes the poem part of the reader's physical and emotional experience forever, even if the poem has been translated from another language, another culture, or another period in history. Like David, Sappho is a master of memorable imagery. Read the four short poems that follow and let yourself experience then with all of your senses as well as your emotions.
Like a mountain whirlwind
punishing the oak trees,
love shattered my heart.
I could not hope
to touch the sky
with my two arms.
The glow and beauty of the stars
are nothing near the splendid moon
when in her roundness she burns silver
about the world.
In gold sandals
dawn like a thief
fell upon me.
In the next poem, Sappho addresses Aphrodite, the Goddess of Love and Beauty, using a profusion of beautiful images:
Leave Krete and come to this holy temple
where the graceful grove of apple trees
circles an altar smoking with frank-
incense.
Here roses leave shadows on the ground
and cold springs bubble through apple branches
where shuddering leaves pour down pro-
found sleep.
In our meadow where horses graze
and wild flowers of spring blossom,
anise shoots fill the air with a-
roma.
And here, Aphrodite, pour
heavenly nectar into gold cups
and fill them gracefully with sud-
den joy.
All poems by Sappho translated by
Willis Barnstone
When Sappho refers to Aphrodite in this poem, she assumes that the reader is familiar with the entire Pantheon of Greek gods and goddesses, just as the author of "Night" assumes that his reader will recognize his reference to the Hindu goddess Ratri. In poetry, a reference to anything, including people, places, events, etc., is called an allusion. Ancient poets were almost always writing for readers of their own culture, and they could safely assume a vast area of shared knowledge about the history, religion, and even the geography of their nation. Thus, an allusion to a beautiful and charismatic goddess like Aphrodite could create a wealth of images in the minds of Greek readers and add a richness to the poem without requiring a lot of extra words.
I love allusions in poetry, and you will discover that poets throughout history, including contemporary poets, often use this interesting device. However, there is an obvious drawback when the reader is unfamiliar with the poem's historic or cultural context. In such cases, an allusion can become meaningless at best, and annoying at worst. Also, allusions can be overused, as students who have tried to read the seventeenth century British poet, John Milton, have discovered. Milton, one of the best educated men who ever lived, assumed that his reader was knowledgeable in every aspect of Greek and other European mythology and every character and episode in the Bible. In some cases, I will add footnotes to some of the poems you will be reading to explain allusions that might be obscure for contemporary readers. However, it is really the student's responsibility to approach every poem as a journey of discovery. You should always keep a dictionary at hand, and every library has wonderful reference books on history, mythology, the Bible, and other ancient scriptures. Poems are not intended for speedreading, and every poet deserves the respect you pay to him or her when you take the time to savor every word and every allusion the poet offers you.
As we have noticed, many of the allusions in ancient poetry are references to the gods and goddesses that inhabited their spiritual world and interacted with human beings. A modern term for this phenomenon is mythology. Unfortunately, the word myth has taken on a rather negative connotation today, suggesting that something is made up or untrue, as when someone says, "Oh, that's just a myth." This attitude has caused tremendous confusion in contemporary people's understanding of mythology. Think again about this definition of mythology as poetry, stories, and plays about gods and goddesses as they interact with human beings in various ways. These stories have a profound significance in defining the values of the culture from which they evolved and in explaining the relationship between human beings, divine beings, and nature. Whether or not these stories are true is irrelevant to the values and relationships they clarify.
As you proceed through this book, you will read many poems that make references to Hindu, Buddhist, Greek, and Roman mythology, stories in the Bible, fairy tales, quasi-historical incidents, etc. Poets like Sappho and others choose to include these allusions because they offer the reader some insight or point of reference to help them grasp the poet's message. The beauty of mythology in all its myriad forms is that it helps the poet and the reader to leap across centuries and over thousands of miles to share an insight about what it means to be human in our mysteriously spiritual world.
In discussing poets and some of the special ways they express themselves, I've tried to give you a feeling for how diverse a group poets really are. A poet can be either a man or a woman. A poet can write long, story-like poems or brief expressions of feeling. Poets have populated our world in every historic age, in every culture, and in every geographic area. You cannot tell by looking at someone if she or he is a poet. Some poets are introverts and others are extroverts. Some are rich; others are poor. Some were recognized and appreciated during their own lifetimes while others remained completely obscure. Every stereotype about poets has turned out to be untrue. I would like for you to start to think of yourself as a member of this group.
I have believed for many years not that every person is capable of writing poetry. In earlier centuries, all educated people learned how to write poetry as well as to analyze the great classics of world poetry. And in my studies of great poets from earlier time periods, I have observed that most of them were also careful students, tirelessly reading great poetry and mastering the elements of their craft. In recent decades, our system of education has separated the scholarly analysis of poetry and the writing of poetry into two distinct disciplines. In fact, in some universities, Literary Studies and Creative Writing programs are housed in separate buildings and their faculties seldom if ever even speak to each other. Our curriculum also reflects this division. If you are a student, you have probably signed up for either a Creative Writing class, in which you will be expected to write poems, or a Poetry class, in which you will be required to read and analyze poetry. Both groups lose in this tragic dichotomy.
I have met many student poets who say things like, "I just love to express my feelings." Yet when I read the students' work, it is obvious that they have never read excellent poetry and that they are not even familiar with the tools of their trade. Conversely, we have all met the pedantic scholar who can tell us all about onomatopoeia but is hopelessly out of touch with his or her inner creative voice. I recently gave a workshop with one of my colleagues, Sterling Warner, at a large convention of English Professors. Our topic was to present some techniques that could be used in the teaching of Creative Writing on the college level. Among the participants was a professor who was also the editor of an important literary journal. Sterling and I used some of the writings of the ancient Japanese woman writer, Sei Shonagon to illustrate how creative ideas can be generated for students. At the end of our workshop we said, "Okay, let's do some writing of our own using these techniques." The rest of the participants eagerly started to write, but the editor immediately stood up and walked out of the room. Can you see the irony in this situation? This person was willing to evaluate and judge the merit of other people's writing, but he was not willing to take even the slightest risk into the world of self-expression.
I believe that our educations can be greatly enhanced if we return to a more classical approach to the study of poetry. Like the great poetry masters from India, China, Israel, and Greece, we can be both scholars and writers. This is the thesis of my book, and I hope you will welcome this opportunity to find the poet within yourself along with the great poets of the world.
NOTES
CHAPTER 1
1. From "The Lake Isle of Innisfree."
2. Aliki Barnstone and Willis Barnstone, eds., A Book of Women Poets
(New York: Schocken Books, 1981), p. 30.
GUIDELINES FOR ACTIVITIES
Let me remind you once again that poets are real people, even those who are anonymous or dead. Keeping this truth in mind, it would be wise of you to show them the same courtesy that you would like to receive from a stranger who is reading your writing for the first time. At the beginning of your journey in the study of poetry, it is not necessary for you to focus on whether or not you like a particular poet or poem. If you dislike a poem on first reading it, you would be prudent to remain silent. A poem rarely reveals all it has to offer upon first reading, and someone else may recognize something of value in the poem which you failed to perceive. I give this advice to you to save you from embarrassment. Please remember that one must learn a vast amount about a subject before one becomes a critic.
Similarly, I ask you to show the same sensitivity to your Instructor and your classmates. When we are studying poetry, we are entering the deepest well of human emotion on our planet. If we are really to learn something about poetry, we must all become vulnerable. Therefore, an atmosphere of mutual support and trust is essential. If a student shares a poem which he or she has written, it is the responsibility of everyone in the class to listen with complete attention and respect. This should also be true even if a classmate is reading one of the poems from this text. Please remember above all that poetry is not a competitive art form, and that every poem that has ever been written has a value for some reader somewhere. However, as you learn more and more about poetry, a natural process of evaluation will emerge for you, and you will begin to recognize why some poems are more memorable and effective than others. Please do not initiate this evaluative process without your Instructor's guidance. Too much criticism at the beginning of the journey will interfere with your ability to learn about and appreciate the timeless glory of poetry.
QUESTIONS AND TOPICS FOR REVIEW
1. Define the word poet.
2. List some of the responsibilities of traditional poets.
3. Who or what provides these services today?
4. Are any of these services no longer needed? If not, why not?
5. Specifically, which cultures were among the earliest to produce
written poetry?
6. What are the names of some of the most important early collections
of poetry?
7. Define the following terms:
oral poetry
lyric poetry
imagery
allusion
mythology
8. Provide an example of each of the terms you have just defined.
TOPICS FOR DISCUSSION
1. Is it still appropriate to discuss religious poetry today?
Why or why not?
2. Many ancient poems express the speaker's anxiety about his or her
relationship with God, nature, or other people. What are some
of the anxieties that are common in our culture today? Would
these make appropriate topics for poetry? Are some of these
anxieties the same as those expressed by the ancients?
3. List your favorite mythological figures. They can come from any
culture. What is it about these beings that makes them
interesting to you?
ACTIVITIES
1. This activity can be done either individually or in groups.
Select a poet from an earlier time period and spend a couple
of hours in the library gathering information about this
person. If you wish, choose a poet about whom you know
nothing. Jot down some notes about this person's life
such as:
country of birth
native language
childhood experiences
family background
education
marital status
sexual preference
occupation (many poets have other jobs besides writing)
religion
hobbies and interests, etc.
Some poets from earlier centuries whom you might find interesting are:
Sappho
David
Li Po
Tu Fu
Po Chu-i
Yakamochi Otomo
Ono no Komachi
Murasaki Shikibu
Dante Alighieri
Frances Petrarch (Francesco Petrarca)
Giovanni Boccaccio
Geoffrey Chaucer
Marie de France
Francois Villon
Louise Labe
William Shakespeare
Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz
John Milton
Alexander Pope
After completing your research, give a brief summary of your findings
to the rest of the class. These presentations should be oral,
very informal, and not graded. The purpose of this activity to
discover the diversity, as well as the similarities among the
great poets of the world.
After a few presentations have been given, the class may wish to discuss
the following ideas:
A. What are some of the differences between these poets?
B. How were their lives similar?
C. Which of these poets would you like to study further?
Why?
D. What were some of the stresses or anxieties experienced
by these poets?
2. Read through the collection at the end of this chapter entitled
ADDITIONAL POEMS FROM ANCIENT AND MEDIEVAL LITERATURE.
Volunteer to read one of these poems to the class. The group
will then discuss the poem focusing on some of the following
topics:
A. What emotions is the poet trying to express?
B. Is there a conflict being presented in the poem?
If so, what is it?
C. What kind of imagery does the poet use?
D. Does the poet's cultural or historic background seem
to influence his or her methods of expression?
How?
E. Does the poet use any allusions? If so, are you
able to understand their significance?
F. Is the poet writing within a mythological context?
If so, what does this context add to the poem?
ANALYTICAL WRITING ASSIGNMENTS
1. Select any poem from Chapter 1. Develop a thesis and analyze the
poem focusing on one or more of the following elements:
A. Emotional content
B. Social, cultural, or religious values being expressed
C. The attitude toward nature being expressed
D. The use of imagery
E. The use of allusions
F. Mythological content
2. Select any ancient or medieval poet and write a brief biography of
him or her. You will need to document the sources of your information
and include a WORKS CITED page at the end of your paper.
3. Write a paper in which you include both biographical and analytical
materials. Here are some possibilities:
A. The use of imagery and allusions to sheep herding
in the poetry of David.
B. The significance of Aphrodite in the life and
poetry of Sappho.
C. Buddhist influences in the poetry of Murasaki
Shikibu.
D. Satire in Geoffrey Chaucer's poetry.
4. Select any two poems from this chapter and write a comparison
and contrast between these poems. Include a clearly written
thesis statement in which you specify which elements (such as
imagery, mythological content, etc.) you will be using to analyze
the similarities and differences between these poems.
CREATIVE WRITING ASSIGNMENTS
1. Write a brief poem in which you use images from nature to
express a personal emotion. Do not concern yourself with
structure, line length, etc. Write your poem in any form
that seems comfortable.
2. Write a brief poem that celebrates one of your ancestors. Use
specific imagery to make this person come to life for the reader.
3. Tell a story about a crucial event in your family's history. Try to
structure this story into rhythmic lines rather than sentences
and paragraphs.
4. Write a poem describing an anxiety you experienced as a child.
5. Write a poem which includes one or more allusions to help explain
an emotional or spiritual experience. You may use allusions to
mythology, literature, popular culture, current events, etc.
After you have written your poem, ask yourself whether someone
one hundred years from now would be likely to understand your
allusions.
ADDITIONAL POEMS FROM ANCIENT AND MEDIEVAL LITERATURE
ANCIENT EGYPTIAN POETRY
From The Leiden Hymns 1238 B.C.
How splendid you ferry the skyways,
Horus* of Twin Horizons,**
The needs of each new day
firm in your timeless pattern,
Who fashion the years,
weave months into order--
Days, nights, and the very hours
move to the gait of your striding.
Refreshed by your diurnal shining, you quicken,
bright above yesterday,
Making the zone of night sparkle
although you belong to the light,
Sole one awake there
--sleep is for mortals,
Who go to rest grateful:
your eyes oversee.
And theirs by the millions you open
when your face new-rises, beautiful;
Not a bypath escapes your affection
during your season on earth.
Stepping swift over stars,
riding the lightning flash,
You circle the earth in an instant,
with a god's ease crossing heaven,
Treading the dark paths of the underworld,
yet, sun on each roadway,
You deign to walk daily with men.
The faces of all are upturned to you,
As mankind and gods
alike lift their morningsong:
"Lord of the daybreak,
Welcome!"
Translated by John L. Foster
* Horus is the hawk-headed sun god.
** Twin Horizons refers to dawn and dusk.
Love Songs 1300-1100 B.C.
I was simply off to see Nefrus my friend,
Just to sit and chat at her place
(about men),
When there, hot on his horses, comes Mehy
(oh god, I said to myself, it's Mehy!)
Right over the crest of the road
wheeling along with the boys
Oh Mother Hathor,* what shall I do?
Don't let him see me!
Where can I hide?
Make me a small creeping thing
to slip by his eye
(sharp as Horus')
unseen.
Oh, look at you, feet--
(this road is a river!)
you walk me right out of my depth!
Someone, silly heart, is exceedingly ignorant here--
aren't you a little too easy near Mehy?
If he sees that I see him, I know
he will know how my heart flutters (Oh, Mehy!)
I know I will blurt out,
"Please take me?"
(I mustn't!)
No, all he would do is brag out my name,
just one of the many...(I know)...
Mehy would make me just one of the girls
for all the boys in the palace.
(Oh Mehy)
Translated by John L. Foster
* Hathor is the Egyptian mother of the gods and Queen of Heaven.
I think I'll go home and lie very still,
feigning terminal illness.
Then the neighbors will all troop over to stare,
my love, perhaps, among them.
How she'll smile while the specialists
snarl in their teeth!--
she perfectly well knows what ails me.
Translated by John L. Foster
THE OLD TESTAMENT
Israel 1000-300 B.C.
Psalm 121
I lift up my eyes toward the moun-
tains;
whence shall help come to me?
My help is from the Lord,
who made heaven and earth.
May he not suffer your foot to slip;
may he slumber not who guards
you:
Indeed he neither slumbers nor sleeps,
the guardian of Israel.
The Lord is your guardian; the Lord
is your shade;
he is beside you at your right hand.
The sun shall not harm you by day,
nor the moon by night.
The Lord will guard you from all evil;
he will guard your life.
The Lord will guard your coming
and your going,
both now and forever.
Translation: The New American Bible
Psalm 137
By the rivers of Babylon,* there
we sat down, yea, we wept, when
we remembered Zion.
We hanged our harps upon the
willows in the midst thereof.
For there they that carried us
away captive required of us a song;
and they that wasted us required of us
mirth, saying, Sing us one of the songs
of Zion.
How shall we sing the Lord's
song in a strange land?
If I forget thee, O Jerusalem,
let my right hand forget
her cunning.
If I do not remember thee, let my
tongue cleave to the roof of my
mouth; if I prefer not Jerusalem
above my chief joy.
Remember, O Lord, the children
of Edom* in the day of Jerusalem;
who said, Rase it, rase it, even to the
foundation thereof.
O daughter of Babylon, who are
to be destroyed; happy shall he be,
that rewardeth thee as thou hast
served us.
Happy shall he be, that taketh and
dashes thy little ones against the
stones.
Translation: The King James Bible
* On the Euphrates River. The Hebrews were taken in captivity to
Babylon after the Babylonians captured and sacked Jerusalem in 586 B.C.
** The Edomites helped the Babylonians defeat Jerusalem.
Psalm 150
Praise the Lord in his sanctuary,
praise him in the firmament of his
strength.
Praise him for his mighty deeds,
praise him for his sovereign
majesty.
Praise him with the blast of the
trumpet.
praise him with lyre and harp,
Praise him with timbrel and dance,
praise him with strings and pipe.
Praise him with sounding cymbals,
praise him with clanging cymbals,
Let everything that has breath
praise the Lord! Alleluia
Translation: The New American Bible
CATULLUS
Rome 84?-54? B.C.
Love Lyrics
(Catullus wrote the following love poems to a woman he calls Lesbia.
She was probably Clodia, a married woman and the sister of a violent
and cynical Roman political gangster. Catullus' poems express the wide
range of emotions he experienced during this love affair.)
There are many who think of Quintia in terms of beauty,
but to me she is merely tall and golden white, erect,
and I admit each of these separate distinctions in her favor,
yet I object, deny,
that the word "beauty" describes her person;
for she has no charm, not even a grain of salt in her whole body
to give you appetite--
now Lesbia has beauty, she is everything
that's handsome, glorious,
and she has captured all that Venus* has to offer
in ways of love.
* Venus is the Roman Goddess of love.
When at last after long despair, our hopes ring true again
and long-starved desire eats, O then the mind leaps in the sunlight--
Lesbia
so it was with me when you returned. Here was a treasure
more valuable than gold; you, whom I love beyond hope, giving yourself
to me again. That hour, a year of holidays, radiant,
where is the man more fortunate than I,
where can he find anything in life more glorious
than the sight of all his wealth restored?
My life, my love, you say our love will last forever;
O gods remember
her pledge, convert the words of her avowal into a prophecy.
Now let her blood speak, let sincerity govern each syllable fallen
from her lips, so that the long years of our lives shall be
a contract of true love inviolate
against time itself, a symbol of eternity.
My woman says that she would rather wear the wedding-veil for me
than anyone; even if Jupiter* himself came storming after her;
that's what she says, but when a woman talks to a hungry,
ravenous lover, her words should be written upon the wind
and engraved in rapid water.
* Jupiter is the supreme god in Roman mythology. Sometimes called Jove,
he is the equivalent of the Greek god Zeus.
There was a time, O Lesbia, when you said Catullus was the only man
on earth who could understand you,
who could twine his arms round you, even Jove himself less welcome.
And when I thought of you, my dear, you were not the mere flesh and
the means by which a lover finds momentary rapture.
My love was half paternal, as a father greets his son or
smiles at his daughter's husband.
Although I know you well (too well), my love now turns to fire
and you are small and shallow.
Is this a miracle? Your wounds in love's own battle
have made me your companion, perhaps a greater lover,
but O, my dear, I'll never be
the modest boy who saw you as a lady, delicate and sweet,
a paragon of virtue.
You are the cause of this destruction, Lesbia,
that has fallen upon my mind;
this mind that has ruined itself
by fatal constancy.
And now it cannot rise from its own misery
to wish that you become
best of women, nor can it fail
to love you even though all is lost and you destroy
all hope.
If man can find rich consolation, remembering his good deeds and all he
has done,
if he remembers his loyalty to others, nor abuses his religion by heartless
betrayal
of friends to the anger of powerful gods,
then, my Catullus, the long years before you shall not sink in darkness
with all hope gone,
wandering, dismayed, through the ruins of love.
All the devotion that man gives to man, you have given, Catullus,
your heart and your brain flowed into a love that was desolate, wasted, nor
can it return.
But why, why do you crucify love and yourself through the years?
Take what the gods have to offer and standing serene, rise forth as a rock
against darkening skies;
and yet you do nothing but grieve, sunken deep in your sorrow,
Catullus,
for it is hard, hard to throw aside years lived in poisonous love that has
tainted your brain
and must end.
If this seems impossible now, you must rise
to salvation. O gods of pity and mercy, descend and witness my sorrow, if
ever
you have looked upon man in his hour of death, see me now in despair.
Tear this loathsome disease from my brain. Look, a subtle corruption has
entered my bones.
no longer shall happiness flow through my veins like a river.
No longer I pray
that she love me again, that her body be chaste, mine forever.
Cleanse my soul of this sickness of love, give me power to rise, resurrected,
to thrust love aside.
I have given my heart to the gods. O hear me, omnipotent heaven,
and ease me of love and its pain.
Translated by Horace Gregory
LI PO
China 701-762 A.D.
You ask me why I dwell in the green mountain;
I smile and make no reply for my heart is free of care.
As the peach-blossom flows down stream and is gone
into the unknown,
I have a world apart that is not among men.
Translated by Robert Kotewall and
Norman L. Smith
TU FU
China 712-770 A.D.
This night at Fu-chou in moonlight,
In her chamber she alone looks out;
Afar I pity my little children
That they know not yet to think of Ch'ang-an.
In the sweet mist her cloud-like tresses are damp;
In the clear moonlight her jade-like arms are cold.
When shall we two nestle against those unfilled curtains,
With the moon displaying the dried tear-stains of us both?
Translated by Robert Kotewall and
Norman L. Smith
PO CHU-I
China 772-846 A.D.
At the End of Spring
to Yuan Chen*
The flower of the pear-tree gathers and turns to fruit;
The swallows' eggs have hatched into young birds.
When the Seasons' changes thus confront the mind
What comfort can the Doctrine of Tao give?
It will teach me to watch the days and months fly
Without grieving that Youth slips away:
If the Fleeting World is but a long dream,
It does not matter whether one is young or old.
But ever since the day that my friend left my side
And has lived in exile in the City of Chiang-ling,
There is one wish I cannot quite destroy:
That from time to time we may chance to meet again.
Translated by Arthur Waley
* Yuan Chen was Po Chu-i's dear friend. Yuan Chen was banished in 805
for behaving inappropriately toward an official.
On Board Ship: Reading Yuan Chen's Poems
I take your poems in my hand and read them beside the candle:
The poems are finished: the candle is low: dawn not yet come.
With sore eyes by the guttering candle still I sit in the dark,
Listening to waves that, driven by the wind, strike the prow of the ship.
Translated by Arthur Waley
The Red Cockatoo
Sent as a present from Annam--
A red cockatoo.
Coloured like the peach-tree blossom,
Speaking with the speech of men.
And they did to it what is always done
To the learned and the eloquent.
They took a cage with stout bars
And shut it up inside.
Translated by Arthur Waley
Old Age*
We are growing old together, you and I,
Let us ask ourselves, what is age like?
The dull eye is closed ere night comes;
The idle head still uncombed at noon.
Propped on a staff, sometimes a walk abroad;
Or all day sitting with closed doors.
One dares not look in the mirror's polished face;
One cannot read small-letter books.
Deeper and deeper one's love of old friends;
Fewer and fewer one's dealings with young men.
One thing only, the pleasure of idle talk
Is great as even, when you and I meet.
Translated by Arthur Waley
* Written in 835, this poem was addressed to Liu Yu-hsi, who, like
Po Chu-i, was born in 772.
Dreaming of Yuan Chen*
At night you came and took my hand and we wandered
together in my dreams.
When I woke in the morning there was no one to stop the
tears that fell on my handkerchief.
On the banks of the Ch'ang my aged body three times has
passed through sickness;
At Hsien-yang to the grasses on your grave eight times has
autumn come.
You lie buried beneath the springs and your bones are
mingled with the clay.
I-- lodging in the world of men; my hair white as snow.
A-wei and Han-lang both followed in their turn;
Among the shadows of the Terrace of Night did you know
them or not?
Translated by Arthur Waley
* This poem was written eight years after Yuan Chen's death when
Po Chu-i was sixty-eight. Po Chu-i was in his twenties when he met
Yuan Chen.
KAKINOMOTO HITOMARO
Japan active c. 700 A.D.
On Parting from His Wife*
In the sea of Iwami,
By the cape of Kara,
There amid the stones under sea
Grows the deep-sea miru weed;
There along the rocky strand
Grows the sleek sea-tangle.
Like the swaying sea-tangle,
Unresisting would she lie beside me--
My wife whom I love with a love
Deep as the miru-growing ocean.
But few are the nights
We two have lain together.
Away I have come, parting from her
Even as the creeping vines do part.
My heart aches within me;
I turn back to gaze--
But because of the yellow leaves
Of Watari Hill,
Flying and fluttering in the air,
I cannot see her plainly
My wife waving her sleeve to me.
Now as the moon, sailing through the cloud rift
Above the mountain of Yakami,
Disappears, leaving me full of regret,
So vanishes my love out of sight;
Now sinks at last the sun,
Coursing down the western sky.
I thought myself a strong man,
But the sleeves of my garment
Are wetted through with tears.
Envoys**
My black steed
Galloping fast,
Away have I come,
Leaving under distant skies
The dwelling-place of my love.
Oh, yellow leaves
Falling on the autumn hill,
Cease a while
To fly and flutter in the air
That I may see my love's dwelling-place!
Translated by The Japanese Classics Translation
Committee, Seiichi Taki, Chairperson
* Like most Japanese poems from this time period, this poem is
untitled.
** An envoy (called hanka in Japanese) is a short stanza that concludes
a longer poem. The English poet Geoffrey Chaucer also concluded some of his
poems with envoys.
YAMANOE OKURA
Japan 660-733 A.D.
When I eat melon,
I remember my children;
When I eat chestnuts,
Even more do I recall them.
Whence did they come to me?
Before my eyes they will linger,
And I cannot sleep in peace.
Envoy
What use to me
Silver, gold and jewels?
No treasure can surpass children!
Translated by The Japanese Classics Translation
Committee, Seiichi Taki, Chairperson
A Dialogue on Poverty
On nights when, wind mixing in, the rain falls,
on nights when, rain mixing in, the snow falls,
I'm utterly lost, it's so cold
I take out a piece of black salt and nibble it,
I sip hot water with sake dregs.
Coughing, nose snuffing,
scratching my skimpy beard,
I boast to myself, "I'm the only one
who's worthy." But it's so cold
I pull the hempen quilt over myself,
put on all the cloth vests
I have. On such a cold night,
someone poorer than I am--
his father and mother must be starved, freezing,
his wife and children must be feebly weeping.
At a time like this, what are you doing
to live through it all?
Heaven and earth are wide, they say,
but for me they have grown narrow.
The sun and the moon are bright, they say,
but for me they do not shine.
Is this so for everyone, or for me alone?
I happened to be born a human
but am no worse than others.
Yet vests with no cotton,
mere rags tattered and dangling
like sea-fleece, are hung on my shoulders.
In this flattened hut, this leaning hut,
on straw spread on the bare ground
father and mother by my pillow,
wife and children by my feet
surround me, whimpering.
From the stove no steam spurts up,
in the steamer a spider weaves its web,
and rice-cooking forgotten,
we moan like thrushes--
when, as they say, "to cut the ends
of what's too short already"
with stick in hand the village chief shouts,
he comes to our sleeping-place and yells at us.
Is it as helpless as this,
the way of the world?
Envoy
I find this world sad and wearying, but cannot fly away
because I am not a bird.
Translated by Hiroaki Sato and
Burton Watson
ONO NO KOMACHI
Japan 9th Century
Doesn't he realize
that I am not
like the swaying kelp
in the surf,
where the seaweed gatherer
can come as often as he wants.
Translated by Kenneth Rexroth and
Ikuko Atsumi
In the daytime
I can cope with them,
but when I see those jealous eyes
even in dreams,
it is more than I can bear.
Translated by Kenneth Rexroth and
Ikuko Atsumi
He does not come.
Tonight in the dark of the moon
I wake wanting him.
My breasts heave and blaze.
My heart chars.
Translated by Kenneth Rexroth and
Ikuko Atsumi
The colors of the flowers fade
as the long rains fall,
as lost in thought,
I grow older.
Translated by Kenneth Rexroth and
Ikuko Atsumi
MURASAKI SHIKIBU
Japan 974-1031
I feel of others' affairs
as though they were
the water birds I watch
floating idly on the water.
My idleness comes
only from sorrow.
Translated by Kenneth Rexroth and
Ikuko Atsumi
Be close, you say;
But the first thing I met
On getting close
Were your feelings
Thin as summer clothes.
Translated by Richard Bowring
As they weaken,
Even insects in the hedge
Find it hard to stop;
Do they too feel sadness
In autumn partings?
Translated by Richard Bowring
Vaguely disturbing;
Did it, or did it not exist?
The morning glory
Dimly opening
In the pre-dawn sky.
Translated by Richard Bowring
Frozen stiff
By ice and frost
My writing brush
Cannot express
The inexpressible.
Translated by Richard Bowring
HILDEGARD OF BINGEN
Germany 1098-1179
Antiphon for Divine Wisdom
Sophia!*
you of the whirling wings,
circling encompassing
energy of God:
you quicken the world in your clasp.
One wing soars in heaven
one wing sweeps the earth
and the third flies all around us.
Praise to Sophia!
Let all the earth praise her!
Translated by Barbara Newman
* Sophia is the spirit of divine wisdom. She is associated with
the dove, the sign of the Holy Spirit.
Antiphon for the Holy Spirit
The Spirit of God
is a life that bestows life,
root of world-tree
and wind in its boughs.
Scrubbing out sin,
she rubs oil into wounds.
She is glistening life
alluring all praise,
all-awakening,
all-resurrecting.
Translated by Barbara Newman
Song to the Creator
You, all-accomplishing
Word of the Father,
are the light of primordial
daybreak over the spheres.
You the foreknowing
mind of divinity,
foresaw all your works
as you willed them,
your prescience hidden
in the heart of your power,
your power like a wheel around the world,
whose circling never began
and never slides to an end.
Translated by Barbara Newman
JALALODDIN RUMI
Afghanistan 1207-1283
What I most want
is to spring out of this personality
then to sit apart from that leaping.
I've lived too long where I can be reached.
Translated by Coleman Barks
Don't come to us without bringing music.
We celebrate with drum and flute,
with wine not from grapes,
in a place you cannot imagine.
Translated by Coleman Barks
Sometimes visible, sometimes not, sometimes
devout Christians, sometimes staunchly Jewish.
Until our inner love fits into everyone,
all we can do is take daily these different shapes.
Translated by Coleman Barks
Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing
there is a field. I'll meet you there.
When the soul lies down in that grass,
the world is too full to talk about.
Ideas, language, even the phrase each other
doesn't make any sense.
Translated by Coleman Barks
Why Wine is Forbidden
When the Prophet's ray of Intelligence
struck the dimwitted man he was with,
the man got very happy and talkative.
Soon he began unmannerly raving.
This is the problem with a selflessness
that comes quickly,
as with wine.
If the wine-drinker
has a deep gentleness in him,
he will show that,
when drunk.
But if he has hidden anger and arrogance,
those appear,
and since most people do,
wine is forbidden to everyone.
Translated by Coleman Barks
GEOFFREY CHAUCER
England 1340-1400
From the General Prologue to The Canterbury Tales
Two Portraits
The Prioress
There was also a Nun, a Prioress,
Whose smile was gentle and full of guilelessness.
"By St. Loy" was the worst oath she would say.
She sang mass well, in a becoming way,
Intoning through her nose the words divine,
And she was known as Madame Eglantine.
She spoke good French, as taught at Stratford-Bow
For the Parisian French she did not know.
She was schooled to eat so primly and so well
That from her lips no morsel ever fell.
She wet her fingers lightly in the dish
Of sauce, for courtesy was her first wish.
With every bite she did her skillful best
To see that no drop fell upon her breast.
She always wiped her upper lip so clean
That in her cup was never to be seen
A hint of grease when she had drunk her share.
She reached out for her meat with comely air.
She was a great delight and always tried
To imitate court ways, and had her pride,
Both amiable and gracious in her dealings.
As for her charity and tender feelings,
She melted at whatever was piteous.
She would weep if she but came upon a mouse
Caught in a trap, or if it were dead or bleeding.
Some little dogs that she took pleasure feeding
On roasted meat or mild or good wheat bread
She had, but how she wept to find one dead
Or yelping from a blow that made it smart,
And all was sympathy and loving heart.
Neat was her wimple in its every plait,
Her nose well formed, her eyes as gray as slate.
Her mouth was very small and soft and red.
She had so wide a brow I think her head
Was nearly a span broad, for certainly
She was not undergrown, as all could see.
She wore her cloak with dignity and charm,
And had her rosary about her arm,
The small beads coral and the larger green,
And from them hung a brooch or golden sheen,
On it a large A and a crown above;
Beneath, "All things are subject unto love".
The Wife of Bath
A worthy woman there was from near the city
Of Bath, but somewhat deaf, and more's the pity.
For weaving she possessed so great a bent
She outdid the people of Ypres and of Ghent!
No other woman dreamed of such a thing
As to precede her at the offering,
Or if any did, she fell in such a wrath
She dried up all the charity in Bath.
She wore fine kerchiefs of old-fashioned air,
And on a Sunday morning, I could swear,
She had ten pounds of linen on her head.
Her stockings were of finest scarlet-red,
Laced tightly, and her shoes were soft and new.
Bold was her face, and fair, and red in hue.
She had been an excellent woman all her life
Five men in turn had taken her to wife,
Omitting other youthful company--
But let that pass for now! Over the sea
She had traveled freely; many a distant stream
She crossed, and visited Jerusalem
Three times. She had been at Rome and at Boulogne,
At the shrine of Compostella, and at Cologne.
She had wandered by the way through many a scene.
Her teeth were set with little gaps between.
Easily on her ambling horse she sat.
She was well wimpled, and she wore a hat
As wide in circuit as a shield or targe.
A skirt swathed up her hips, and they were large.
Upon her feet she wore sharp-rowled spurs.
She was a good fellow; a ready tongue was hers.
All remedies of love she knew by name,
For she had all the tricks of that old game.
Translated by Theodore Morrison
FRANCOIS VILLON
France 1431-?
Ballade
Brother humans who live on after us
Don't let your hearts harden against us
For if you have pity on wretches like us
More likely God will show mercy to you
You see us five, six, hanging here
As for the flesh we loved too well
A while ago it was eaten and has rotted away
And we the bones turn to ashes and dust
Let no one make us the butt of jokes
But pray God that he absolve us all.
Don't be insulted that we call you
Brothers, even if it was by Justice
We were put to death, for you understand
Not every person has the same good sense
Speak up for us, since we can't ourselves
Before the son of the virgin Mary
That his mercy toward us shall keep flowing
Which is what keeps us from hellfire
We are dead, may no one taunt us
But pray God that he absolve us all.
The rain has rinsed and washed us
The sun dried us and turned us black
Magpies and ravens have pecked out our eyes
And plucked our beards and eyebrows
Never ever can we stand still
Now here, now there, as the wind shifts
At its whim it keeps swinging us
Pocked by birds worse than a sewing thimble
Therefore don't join in our brotherhood
But pray God that he absolve us all.
Prince Jesus, master over all
Don't let us fall into hell's dominion
We've nothing to do or settle down there
Men, there's nothing here to laugh at
But pray God that he absolve us all.
Translated by Galway Kinnell
FINDING THE POET
CHAPTER 2 CREATIVITY
Just the word creativity makes some people nervous. Obviously, poets are creative, but somehow "ordinary" people think of creativity as some obscure gift (more of a curse, really), that has been bestowed only on a few of the most accomplished artists. These people use words like "talent" to differentiate the creatives from all the rest of us. There is also a widely held belief that creative people suffer from some sort of neurosis and that their lives are always filled with anguish. This stereotype also includes visions of poets and painters as emaciated, unwashed misfits who lack the social skills to interact with the rest of the culture in any normal way. Where did we get these stereotypes? And is it any wonder that the very idea of being creative seems threatening to some of us?
We can thank Sigmund Freud for some of this. The great modern psychologist Carl Jung, once a colleague of Freud's, ultimately came to disagree with some of Freud's perceptions about creativity. Jung refers to "... the idea held by the Freudian school that artists without exception are narcissistic--by which is meant that they are undeveloped persons with infantile and auto-erotic traits."1 Jung believed that Freud's psychoanalytic method of evaluating poetry as a form of neurosis was inappropriate. In a lecture entitled "On the Relation of Analytical Psychology to Poetry" which Jung delivered to the Society for German Language and Literature in Zurich in 1922, he made some comments about the nature of poetry and creativity that are still worth considering today. Sweeping aside Freud's approach to poetry, Jung declared, "In order to do justice to a work of art, analytical psychology must rid itself entirely of medical prejudice; for a work art is not a disease, and consequently requires a different approach from the medical one."2
Jung went on to point out that poets come from a variety of backgrounds and have very diverse personal and emotional lives. Your studies in Chapter 1 should certainly have corroborated this observation. Two of the poets you have already read provide a fascinating study in contrasts, yet as writers they share the honor of being among the greatest observers of human nature in all the world of poetry. These two poets, Geoffrey Chaucer and Murasaki Shikibu, literally lived in two different worlds. Murasaki, a low ranking aristocrat, lived in Kyoto between the Eighth and Ninth Centuries and served as a lady in waiting for a rather joyless princess. A widow, Murasaki found little pleasure in the shallow intrigues of court life and did not welcome the advances of the retired emperor who wanted her as his mistress. Introverted in nature, she found consolation in artistic expression and in studying the teachings of the Buddha. She seems to have spent much of her adult life writing her masterpiece, The Tale of Genji, the world's first novel, a brilliant study in human psychology which also contains several hundred poems. Chaucer, born in London about four hundred years after Murasaki, was the ultimate extravert. He held a variety of bureaucratic jobs, including tax collector, and served three different kings of England. Although he was born a commoner, he thrived on associating with aristocrats, but he also had a number of friends and acquaintances in other trades and occupations. His long narrative poem, The Canterbury Tales, fictionalizes the stories of a group of pilgrims who are traveling to Canterbury Cathedral to honor the popular Christian martyr Thomas Becket. Chaucer's pilgrims and their stories provide one of the finest series of character portraits in all of world literature. Chaucer and Murasaki are good examples of Carl Jung's theory of creativity.
You may have noticed that I referred to Murasaki as an introvert and to Chaucer as an extravert. These are concepts which Jung added to our vocabulary and to our understanding of human personalities. An introvert is a person whose mind or thoughts turn inward. An introvert directs his or her thoughts or efforts toward that which is internal or spiritual. Creatively, an introvert responds to material within his or her own mind and heart and shares these perceptions with others. An extravert, on the other hand, turns to the outside world for stimulation and inspiration.3 An extraverted artist responds to people and objects around him or her and processes these materials creatively to produce a work of art. In a description of herself in her diary, Murasaki's introverted tendencies are apparent:
So I seem to be misunderstood, and they think that I am shy.
There have been times when I have been forced to sit in
their company, and on such occasions I have tried to avoid
their petty criticisms, not because I am particularly shy but
because I consider it all so distasteful; as a result, I am now
known as somewhat of a dullard.
Translated by Richard Bowring
Have you ever felt this way? Have you ever felt dull and inadequate because you do not sparkle in social situations? Do you think of excuses to avoid gathering with other people so you can be alone with your own ideas and imaginings? You may be an introvert like Murasaki, and the poetry you create may reflect the richly decorated interior world which has always been part of your life.
The extraverted Geoffrey Chaucer needed more than his own thoughts and feelings for inspiration. He constantly gathered information from the people and places he visited and transformed these images into vivid, realistic poetry. You may be more like Chaucer. Maybe you love to travel, meet new people, attend concerts and social events, and you feel energized by the excitement that all of this stimulation creates. If so, your poetry will reflect the extravert's fascination with the always changing world around us. In the opening lines of the General Prologue to The Canterbury Tales, Chaucer sets the scene for the stories that will follow. As you read these famous lines, notice that Chaucer's attention is clearly focused on scenes and events outside of himself:
As soon as April pierces to the root
The drought of March, and bathes each bud and shoot
Through every vein of sap with gentle showers
From whose engendering liquor springs the flowers;
When zephyrs have breathed softly all about
Inspiring every wood and field to sprout,
And in the zodiac the youthful sun
His journey halfway through the Ram has run;
When little birds are busy with their song
Who sleep with open eyes the whole night long
Life stirs their hearts and tingles in them so,
Then off as pilgrims people long to go,
And palmers to set out for distant strands
And foreign shrines renowned in many lands.
And specially in England people ride
To Canterbury from every countryside
To visit there the blessed martyred saint
Who gave them strength when they were sick and faint.
Translated by Theodore Morrison
Let us return for a moment to Jung 's famous speech on the relationship between psychology and poetry. After asserting that a work of art is not a disease and that poets are not necessarily narcissistic neurotics, Jung elaborated on why he felt that psychoanalyzing poets as a way of trying to understand their creative work was not productive. "But when applied to a work of art... it strips the work of art of its shimmering robes and exposes the nakedness and drabness of Homo sapiens, to which species the poet and artist also belong."4 Jung's point is that magnificent works of art have been produced by very ordinary people through the mysterious power of creativity. Murasaki, a rather unhappy and bored lady in waiting, and Chaucer, a social climbing tax collector, put on the "shimmering robes" of art to create The Tale of Genji and The Canterbury Tales while personally remaining rather ordinary, perhaps even uninteresting people. Whether or not either was neurotic is of no interest to Carl Jung. He believed that the creative process uses human beings as its medium in much the same way that plants use soil as their medium. In referring to art, Jung said, "One might almost describe it as a living being that uses man only as a nutrient medium, employing his capacities according to its own laws and shaping itself to the fulfillment of its own creative purpose."5 Using the plant metaphor again, Jung pointed out that a plant is certainly more than a product of the soil in which it grew. Thus, he concludes that the work of art has a life beyond the individual poet who created it. Jung wrote, "What is essential in a work of art is that it should rise far above the realm of personal life and speak from the spirit and heart of the poet as man to the spirit and heart of mankind."6
I agree with Jung's theory that a work of art finally belongs to the human race and not to Murasaki Shikibu or Geoffrey Chaucer. Nevertheless, I have always been fascinated by the lives of poets, not so much to determine whether they were narcissistic but because I am amazed by the variety of methods that poets employ to cooperate with the creative force which chooses them as its media. Since I write poetry myself, I have always been comforted by the fact that there are so many ways to go about producing a poem. Or perhaps I should say there are so many ways that a poem uses us to create itself. This is a very important idea for a student of poetry to grasp.
In addition to the concepts of introversion and extraversion, Jung's theory of the Four Personality Functions can also be helpful in understanding creativity. Jung believed that every human personality operates on the basis of four psychological functions, Sensation, Thinking, Feeling, and Intuition. While every personality contains all four functions, in most people, one function is more fully developed and becomes dominant. Thus, a "feeling" person will respond to most situations emotionally, while a "thinking" person tends to be logical when responding to people and events. Jung thought of thinking and feeling as "rational" functions and sensation and intuition as "non-rational." He often depicted these four functions in circular form, like a compass, with the dominant function at the top of the compass and the individual's weakest function at the bottom. Each person's weakest function Jung associated with the Shadow, the aspect of the personality which may be denied or unconscious. If a personality function is particularly weak, its shadow aspect may be associated with the negative, unpleasant side of the personality.7
Poets have dominant or weak personality functions like everyone else, and when the creative force engages the poet, it often works through the poet's dominant personality function. You may have noticed the extreme depth of emotion, for example, in the poems in Chapter 1 by Catullus and Ono no Komachi. In their poems about the pain of passionate love, thinking is not their primary concern. On the other hand, Hildegard of Bingen and Jalaloddin Rumi are both highly intuitive poets who are expressing the subtleties of mystical spiritual experiences. In contrast, notice the emphasis on the world of the senses in this description of the place where the evil monsters, Grendel and his mother, live in the Anglo-Saxon epic poem, Beowulf:
They hold to the secret land, the wolf-slopes, the windy
headlands, the dangerous fen-paths, where the mountain stream
goes down under the darkness of the hills, the flood under the
earth. It is not far from here, measured in miles, that the mere
stands; over it hang frost-covered woods, trees fast of root
close over the water. There each night may be seen fire on the
flood, a fearful wonder. ...That is no pleasant place. From it
the surging waves rise up black to the heavens when the wind stirs
up awful storms, until the air becomes gloomy, the skies weep.
Translated by E.T. Donaldson
If you have not already done so, you may wish to consider whether you are primarily a thinker, and feeler, a person of the senses, or an intuitive. Your response to the poems you have read so far can give you a hint. Did you find this description from Beowulf fascinating and intriguing? Did you find yourself shivering with the cold and shaking in fear as you entered into this mysterious, damp and dark world? Or were you bored by this passage's lack of intellectual content? You may recall that I cautioned you in Chapter 1 to remain silent if you disliked one of the poems you were asked to read. Often students at first dislike a poem which appeals to their weaker or shadow personality function. Thus, a thinking person, on reading Catullus, might respond, "You idiot, why did you let that woman take advantage of you? You're a lousy poet!" This is a much easier response to make than the following: "Maybe I don't appreciate Catullus' poetry because I have not developed my own feelings fully and have never taken an emotional risk."
Fortunately, a vast amount of research has been done recently based on Jung's theories of introversion, extraversion, and the four personality functions. Much of this research can be helpful to you in understanding your own personality and how creativity works in your life. It can also help you respond to poetry and other forms of art in a deeper and more meaningful way. A popular presentation of Jung's ideas that I have found interesting is Please Understand Me, written by psychologists David Keirsey and Marilyn Bates. This book also incorporates the research of Isabel Myers and Katheryn Briggs. You may have heard of the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, a personality test, and if you are a student in a college or university, you can probably go to the counseling office or psychology department and arrange to take this personality test yourself. It is designed to identify sixteen different patterns of action and has been very useful, among other things, in helping guidance counselors in making decisions about appropriate career choices. It can help you determine whether you are an introvert or an extravert and may give you some insights into how you can best go about achieving your academic and creative goals.
This test, along with Jung's research and Please Understand Me, has created a renewed interest in the ancient belief in personality types, going all the way back to the Greek physician Hippocrates' description of the Sanguine, Choleric, Phlegmatic, and Melancholic temperaments. Updating these concepts just a bit, Keirsey and Bates discuss these four personality types as the Dionysian, the Epimethean, the Promethean, and the Apollonian temperaments.8 These names are taken, of course, from the Greek gods whose personalities typify these temperaments. Jung would refer to each of these figures as an archetype. According to Jung, "Archetypes are fundamental patterns of symbol formation which are observed to recur throughout mankind in the contents of the mythologies of all peoples."9 In other words, an archetype is a universal symbol. Circles, stones, and birds, for example, are archetypes which appear in the art and myths of every culture, usually representing wholeness, permanence, and freedom respectively. Do you remember Okura's "Dialogue on Poverty" from Chapter 1? The bird archetype appears in the envoy at the end of that poem when Okura says:
I find this world sad and wearying, but cannot fly away
because I am not a bird.
Some of these symbols take the form of human personalities. The Dionysian personality, for example, is a here and now, fun loving, exciting, light-hearted, charismatic, and perhaps somewhat self-destructive but generally lucky individual. A Dionysian does not worry about complex social problems and does not feel compelled to follow the rules.10 Every culture has myths and stories about charming rascals and tricksters, and in real life we all know people whose personalities reflect this archetype. These people are sensual, impulsive, easily bored, and not particularly focused on completion or accomplishments. Artistically, a Dionysian personality is more interested in creativity as play and enjoys the process of creating more than the end product.
The Dionysian archetype has spawned an entire genre, or category of poetry--the carpe diem school.
In poetry, the carpe diem theme, which means, "seize the day" in Latin, is a reflection of the Dionysian values system. Hundreds of poems have been written over the years expressing ideas such as "Eat, drink, and be merry," "Gather ye rosebuds while ye may," etc. The Seventeenth Century British poet, Andrew Marvell's brilliant poem "To His Coy Mistress" expresses the essence of the Dionysian attitude:
TO HIS COY MISTRESS
Had we but world enough, and time,
This coyness, lady, were no crime.
We would sit down, and think which way
To walk, and pass our long love's day.
Thou by the Indian Ganges' side
Shouldst rubies find; I by the tide
Of Humber would complain. I would
Love you ten years before the Flood,
And you should, if you please, refuse
Till the conversion of the Jews.
My vegetable love should grow
Vaster than empires, and more slow;
An hundred years should go to praise
Thine eyes, and on thy forehead gaze;
Two hundred to adore each breast,
But thirty thousand to the rest;
An age at least to every part,
And the last age should show your heart.
For, lady, you deserve this state,
Nor would I love at lower rate.
But at my back I always hear
Time's winged chariot hurrying near;
And yonder all before us lie
Deserts of vast eternity.
Thy beauty shall no more be found,
Nor, in thy marble vault shall sound
My echoing song; then worms shall try
That long preserved virginity,
And your quaint honor turn to dust,
And into ashes all my lust:
The grave's a fine and private place,
But none, I think, do there embrace.
Now therefore, while the youthful hue
Sits on thy skin like morning dew,
And while thy willing soul transpires
At every pore with instant fires,
Now let us sport us while we may,
And now, like amorous birds of prey,
Rather at once our time devour
Than languish in his slow-chapped power.
Let us roll all our strength and all
Our sweetness up into one ball,
And tear our pleasures with rough strife
Through the iron gates of life:
Thus, though we cannot make our sun
Stand still, yet we will make him run.
Read this poem several times and then look up all of the allusions such as the references to the Ganges and Humber rivers and to the story of the Flood in the Old Testament. Also, notice that the poem is written in three verse paragraphs, like a syllogism, a type of logical argument which begins with the word if and ends with a conclusion prefaced by the word therefore. But Marvell is really mocking the logical way of approaching life and trying to convince his woman friend that because life is so short (note his allusion to the sun god Apollo's chariot), she should give in to his sexual advances. Note too how cleverly Marvell stretches out the slow pace in the opening section of the poem when he says to the woman that if they had all the time in the world for their "vegetable love" to grow, he would be in no hurry. But the pace of the poem picks up rapidly in the conclusion, and the final verse paragraph is much shorter than the first. Marvell saves his most powerful images, the "amorous birds of prey" and the "iron gates of life" for his concluding argument. With a combination of comic logic and powerfully sensual images, achieving an effect which is both playful and disturbing, Marvell speaks in Dionysus' own voice about the intense attraction of living for the moment.
The Chinese and Japanese traditions also have a long history of poetry based on the Dionysian archetype and vision of creativity. Remember that although Dionysus was a Greek god, the archetype on which he is based is universal. The Sixth Century Chinese poet Li Po, whom you met in Chapter 1, is famous for his poems about drinking, living for the moment, and responding with intensity to his immediate environment. The following poem expresses Li Po's Dionysian spirit:
BRING IN THE WINE
Look there!
The waters of the Yellow River,
coming down from Heaven,
rush in their flow to the sea,
never turn back again
Look there!
Bright in the mirrors of mighty halls
a grieving for white hair,
this morning blue-black strands of silk,
now turned to snow with evening.
For satisfaction in this life
taste pleasure to the limit,
And never let a goblet of gold
face the bright moon empty.
Heaven bred in me talents,
and they must be put to use.
I toss away a thousand in gold,
it comes right back to me.
So boil a sheep
butcher an ox,
make merry for a while,
And when you sit yourself to drink, always
down three hundred cups.
Hey, Master Ts'en,
Ho, Tan-ch'iu,
Bring in the wine!
Keep the cups coming!
And I, I'll sing you a song,
You bend me your ears and listen--
The bells and the drums, the tastiest morsels,
it's not these that I love--
All I want is to stay dead drunk
and never sober up.
The sages and worthies of ancient days
now lie silent forever,
And only the greatest drinkers
have a fame that lingers on!
Once long ago
the prince of Ch'en
held a party at P'ing-lo Lodge.
A gallon of wine cost ten thousand cash,
all the joy and laughter they pleased.
So you, my host,
How can you tell me you're short on cash?
Go right out!
Buy us some wine!
And I'll do the pouring for you!
Then take my dappled horse,
Take my furs worth a fortune,
Just call the boy to get them,
and trade them for lovely wine,
And here together we'll melt the sorrows
of all eternity!
Translated by Stephen Owen
You may have noticed that the archetypes I mentioned from Please Understand Me, Dionysus, Epimetheus, Prometheus, and Apollo are all male, and I suggest that you do some research and find out what kinds of personalities and creative behavior patterns are represented by these four temperaments.
An interesting book that explores feminine archetypes from the Jungian perspective is Goddesses in Every Everywoman, by Jean Shinoda Bolen. Bolen, a Jungian psychiatrist, elaborates on the work done by Jung, Myers and Briggs, Keirsey and Bates, and many others. Her thesis also is that individuals connect with archetypal personalities, and that these archetypes guide the ways in which people work, play, interact with others, and engage in creative activities. Bolen focuses on the Greek goddesses Athena, Artemis, Hestia, Aphrodite, Hera, Demeter, and Persephone.
You may recall a poem from Chapter 1 by Sappho which ends with the stanza:
And here, Aphrodite, pour
heavenly nectar into gold cups
and fill them gracefully with sud-
den joy.
It is no accident that Sappho addressed this poem to the goddess of love and beauty. If you have done any additional research on Sappho, you know that she was a passionate, sensuous woman who had a highly developed aesthetic sense and lived for love. Jung might say that the Aphrodite archetype motivated Sappho's life and her poetry. Bolen refers to Aphrodite as the "Alchemical Goddess" because of her "...magic process or power of transformation."11 Women whose personalities reflect the Aphrodite archetype are highly creative and approach their work as though it were a love affair ultimately transforming itself into the birth of a child. Among the four personality functions, sensing is the most highly developed in an Aphrodite temperament, and an Aphrodite-style poet, like Sappho, uses beautiful and sensual imagery poems, as we have seen. Bolen describes the creative process of an Aphrodite temperament:
Creativity is also a "sensual" process for many people;
it is an in-the-moment sensory experience involving touch,
sound, imagery, movement, and sometimes even smell and taste.
An artist engrossed in a creative process, like a lover, often
finds that all her senses are heightened and that she receives
perceptual impressions through many channels.12
Another poet who epitomizes the Aphrodite temperament is the Twentieth Century Japanese poet Akiko Yosano. Akiko engages all of her physical senses in her passionate poems. Like other Aphrodite personalities, Akiko does not always write about love, but no matter what her subject, she uses her senses to express her theme. Notice the highly intensified imagery in these five short untitled poems:
I see drops of rain
On the floating leaves of white lotus;
In the small boat
Where my lover paints,
I hold open an umbrella.
Slipping
From these two feet of silk gauze
Along my kimono sleeve,
The firefly, swept away
On the blue wind of evening.
Do you know
Who bit her sleeve
At the Osaka inn
Reading your poem
That cold autumn day?
Hair all tangled this morning--
Shall I smooth it
With spring rain
Dripping from the jet-black
Wings of swallows?
He lured me in
Yet brushed away the hand
That sought to touch--
Still, still,
The smell of his clothes, the gentle darkness!
Translated by Sanford Goldstein and
Seishi Shinoda
Obviously, not all women express their creativity in the Aphrodite style of Sappho and Akiko, just as not all men write in the carpe diem style of Dionysus. Again, I urge you to do some research on your own into the temperaments of Athena, Demeter, and the other Greek goddesses to discover which archetype seems closest to your own personality. Understanding your own temperament can help you to work with your natural creative tendencies and express your own true voice as a poet. Remember Jung's assertion that creativity is simply a force that uses human beings as its medium. Knowing yourself can help you be a more welcoming medium when creativity comes to call.
Fortunately, there are some practical things you can do to become more sensitive to creativity at work. Think about your own interests, for example, and ask yourself what kinds of things inspire you. Do you like to listen to music while you're writing? Maybe you get inspired by looking at a fascinating painting or photograph, or perhaps you are the kind of person who likes to construct things like an architect. In my years of studying the lives of poets, it has become obvious to me that there is frequently a strong correlation between the arts. Many poets are active in other art forms besides writing, and they adapt the techniques from their secondary art form to the writing of poetry. The British poet William Blake, for example, was actually better known as an artistic engraver during his own lifetime than he was as a writer. And the poet Thomas Hardy, also from England, was trained as an architect. The Nineteenth Century American poet, Emily Dickinson, structured her poems in the forms of the hymns of her Puritan ancestors, and the Twentieth Century American poet Langston Hughes, whose poem we read at the beginning of Chapter 1, was influenced by the Blues.
At the end of this chapter, you will find a collection of poems that reflect the relationship between poetry and other art forms. Please read them carefully and notice whether you are more drawn to musical poems, painterly poems, or architectural poems. This will give you some insight into how you might want to go about putting your own poems on paper. Also, you can begin to nurture your other artistic interests. Do not limit yourself to the three I have just mentioned, however. Cooking, dancing, sewing, gardening, traveling, and participating in sports-- any number of activities can enhance your creativity. To prove my point, I would like to end this chapter with a little poem of my own that was inspired by my love of eating:
CHEESE
How luscious cheese can be--
Swiss, eaten almost warm
With the big bubbles
That the tongue likes to touch,
And the mellow taste
And chewy feel
That makes a foil
For sweet French bread
And apples crisp
From autumn's newest crop.
Brie can bring such a soft joy
To the mouth,
And the nose welcomes
His mystery scent.
But Stilton is the queen,
Jeweled in her necklaces of blue,
Old and elegant, with a history
Full of secrets
That are not ours to know.
She is friends with the golden pears
And almost no one else,
Yet she lets us coax her near
Where her fragrance alone
Can bring us to the edge
Of ecstasy.
NOTES
CHAPTER 2
1. Mark Schorer, Josephine Miles, and Gordon McKenzie, eds.,
Criticism: The Foundations of Modern Literary Judgment (New York:
Harcourt, Brace & World, Inc., 1958), p. 119.
2. Joseph Campbell, ed., The Portable Jung (New York: Penguin
Books, 1984), p. 308.
3. Ira Progoff, Jung's Psychology And Its Social Meaning (New York:
Anchor Books, 1973), p. 95.
4. Campbell, p. 306.
5. Campbell, p. 309.
6. Schorer, p. 119.
7. Progoff, p. 93.
8. David Keirsey and Marilyn Bates, Please Understand Me:
Character and Temperament Types (Del Mar, CA: Prometheus Nemesis
Book Company, 1984), p. 29.
9. Progoff, p. 58.
10. Keirsey, p. 39.
11. Jean Shinoda Bolen, Goddesses in Everywoman (New York:
Harper & Row, 1984), p. 224.
12. Bolen, p. 241.
QUESTIONS AND TOPICS FOR REVIEW
1. What was Freud's view of poets?
2. How did Jung's view of poets and poetry differ from Freud's?
3. Define the words introvert and extravert.
4. Provide examples of poets who write in the introverted and the
extraverted style.
5. According to Jung, what are the Four Personality Functions?
6. Define Jung's concept of the shadow.
7. What is the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator?
8. Explain the Dionysian Temperament.
9. Provide an example of a poem that expresses Dionysian values.
10. Define the term carpe diem.
11. What is an archetype?
12. List several examples of archetypes from the poems you have read.
13. Explain the characteristics of an Aphrodite-type personality.
14. Which poems have we read that reflect Aphrodite's values?
15. What are some of the other art forms that often have a close
relationship to poetry?
TOPICS FOR DISCUSSION
1. Do you think some people are naturally more creative that others?
Why? Or why not?
2. Discuss ways that people can enhance their creativity. Suggest
methods in addition to those presented in this chapter.
3. According to Jung, people are often attracted to their opposites.
For example, thinking people frequently fall in love with feeling
people. How can our lives be enriched by cultivating relationships
with:
thinking people
feeling people
sensing people
intuitive people?
4. Discuss ways in which everyone can develop all four personality functions
more fully.
5. Which personality function seems to be primary in each of these
poets? You will need to read the section at the end of this
chapter entitled POETRY IN RELATION TO MUSIC, ART, AND
ARCHITECTURE.
Li Po
Thomas Hardy
Akiko Yosano
Catullus
Federico Garcia Lorca
William Blake
Emily Dickinson
Yosa Buson
6. See if you can find the same archetype in several different
poems. Flowers and water, for example, appear in several
of the poems you have read. Discuss the various possible
symbolic meanings of each of the archetypes you have chosen
to analyze.
ACTIVITIES
1. For the next class session, bring a small object that has been
meaningful to you, perhaps for a long time. In small groups,
discuss why you treasure this object. Give everyone a chance
to talk about his or her special possession. Then see of you
can discern any patterns in the kinds of things that people have
brought. Were many of the objects gifts? Were they inherited?
Were they possessions from childhood? Were they made of materials
from nature? Are some of the objects also archetypes? Notice
that it is possible for an object to have both personal and archetypal
symbolic value.
2. Each member of the class should select a different archetypal
personality from mythology and research that person's
temperament and style of creativity. Any of the gods from
the Greek Pantheon would be good choices, such as Athena,
Aphrodite, Demeter, Hestia, Zeus, Aries, Hephaestus,etc.
Do not limit yourself to Greek mythology, however. Native
American mythology is filled with fascinating archetypal
figures, and so is Norse mythology. The Hindu gods such as
Indra, Varuna, and Agni are also interesting. Report your
findings informally to the class. You might want to focus
on some of the following ideas:
A. How does this figure express his or her creativity?
B. Does anyone in the class identify with this figure's
temperament?
C. Can you think of characters in literature, films,
history, or popular culture who have temperaments
similar to any of these archetypes?
D. What can students learn from any of these archetypal
figures that can help the student express himself
or herself creatively?
3. Go to a library and check out several art books. (Even better, go
to a museum.) Find an artist whose work you love and study his
or her technique. This activity can also be done in groups. What
can you learn as writers from this visual artist? You may wish
to focus on:
A. What kinds of images appear in the paintings?
B. Are any of these images also archetypes?
C. Do the paintings appeal primarily to the senses,
or do they also have emotional, intellectual,
. or intuitive appeal?
D. How are the images arranged in the space?
E. Do you think the painting has a message or a theme?
If so, what is it?
4. Take turns reading the poems included in POETRY IN RELATION TO
MUSIC, ART, AND ARCHITECTURE at the end of this chapter. Which
of the poems or poets seem most interesting to you? Can you
explain why?
5. Keep a record for several days of the times of day, places, and
situations when you feel most creative. Discuss these findings
with your classmates. You will notice some similarities and
some differences about your creativity patterns. What does this
tell you about yourselves?
6. Read "Suzanne Takes You Down" by Leonard Cohen and "Hey Jude" by
John Lennon and Paul McCartney. Discuss what you consider to be
the theme of each poem. Then obtain recordings of both poems
sung by their authors. Listen to these recordings as a group.
Do you believe that the music adds or detracts from the two
poems? Why do you feel as you do?
ANALYTICAL WRITING ASSIGNMENTS
1. Choose a poem by Emily Dickinson from POETRY IN RELATION TO
MUSIC, ART, AND ARCHITECTURE at the end of this chapter.
Write a paper analyzing the influence of music on the poem.
You might wish to include sound, rhythm, stanza form, and
phrasing in your discussion.
2. Go to the library and get a book that reproduces William Blake's
engravings of his own poems. Then select one or several of
Blake's poems and analyze the relationship between the poems
and the engravings.
3. Analyze the influence of American Blues on the poetry of Langston
Hughes.
4. Select one or more poems by Thomas Hardy. Then analyze the structure
of the poem as though you were explaining an architectural
design.
5. Research the Spanish (Andalucian) musical genre called Cante Jondo. Then write
a paper discussing the influence of Cante Jondo on Lorca's
poem "Guitar."
6. Find a Japanese art book that reproduces some of Yosa Buson's
paintings. Then write a paper explaining the techniques
from painting that Buson applied to the composition of
his poems.
7. Research the elements of Classical Greek aesthetics and design.
Then write a paper analyzing the influence of Greek artistic
values on H.D.'s poetry.
8. Choose any poem in this chapter and analyze the archetypes in
the poem.
9. Compare and contrast Marvell's "To His Coy Mistress" and Li Po's
"Bring on the Wine" focusing on the carpe diem theme.
10. Analyze the imagery (words which appeal to the senses) in the
opening lines of Chaucer's General Prologue to The Canterbury
Tales.
11. Analyze "The Altar" or "Easter Wings" by George Herbert as examples
of shaped verse. Discuss the relationship between the shape
and the theme of the poem.
12. Write a paper comparing and contrasting the visual effects in
selected poems by H.D. and Yosa Buson.
CREATIVE WRITING ASSIGNMENTS
1. This assignment is designed to help you use both sides of your
brain. If you are right handed, write a brief descriptive
poem with your left hand. If you are left handed, write a
brief descriptive poem with your right hand.
2. If you believe that you are an extravert, try to write a poem
based only on your inner thoughts and feelings. If you believe
that you are an introvert, write a poem based only on external
stimuli. The purpose of this assignment is to help you balance
the extravert and introvert aspects of your temperament.
3. Write a poem expressing the carpe diem theme.
4. Write a poem about your favorite food.
5. Listen to your favorite piece of music. Then write a few lines
in a free flowing style expressing whatever thoughts, feelings,
images, etc., the music brought our in you.
6. Imagine that you are one of the archetypal figures from mythology
discussed in this chapter. Then write a poem in the voice of
that mythological person.
7. Imagine that you are an archetypal object such as a stone, a river,
the wind, etc. Then write a poem in the voice of that archetypal
object.
8. Write a poem in the voice of your own shadow.
9. Think about the symbolic object that you shared with the class.
Then write a poem in which that object appears in some way.
10. Look at an interesting painting or photograph. Then write a poem
which responds to the painting in some way.
POETRY IN RELATION TO MUSIC, ART, AND ARCHITECTURE
POETRY AND MUSIC
EMILY DICKINSON
America 1830-1886
A narrow Fellow in the Grass*
Occasionally rides--
You may have met Him--did you not
His notice sudden is--
The Grass divides as with a Comb--
A spotted shaft is seen--
And then it closes at your feet
And opens further on--
He likes a Boggy Acre
A Floor too cool for Corn--
Yet when a Boy, and Barefoot--
I more than once at Noon
Have passed, I thought, a Whip lash
Unbraiding in the Sun
When stooping to secure it
It wrinkled, and was gone--
Several of Nature's People
I know, and they know me--
I feel for them a transport
Of cordiality--
But never met this Fellow
Attended, or alone
Without a tighter breathing
And Zero at the Bone--
* Emily Dickinson did not title her poems. She capitalized most
nouns and used dashes instead of other forms of punctuation.
I heard a Fly buzz--when I died--
The Stillness in the Room
Was like the Stillness in the Air--
Between the Heaves of Storm--
The Eyes around--had wrung them dry--
And Breaths were gathering firm
For that last Onset--when the King
Be witnessed--in the room--
I willed my Keepsakes--Signed away
What portion of me be
Assignable--and then it was
There interposed a Fly--
With Blue--uncertain stumbling Buzz--
Between the light--and me--
And then the Windows failed--and then
I could not see to see--
Because I could not stop for Death--
He kindly stopped for me--
The Carriage held but just Ourselves--
And Immortality.
We slowly drove--He knew not haste
And I had put away
My labor and my leisure too,
For His Civility--
We passed the School, where Children strove
At Recess--in the Ring--
We passed the Fields of Gazing Grain--
We passed the Setting Sun--
Or rather--He passed Us--
The Dews drew quivering and chill--
For only Gossamer, my Gown--
My Tippet--only Tulle--
We paused before a House that seemed
A swelling of the Ground--
The Roof was scarcely visible--
The Cornice--in the Ground--
Since then--'tis Centuries--and yet
Feels shorter than the Day
I first surmised the Horses' Heads
Were toward Eternity--
FEDERICO GARCIA LORCA
Spain 1899-1936
Guitar
Begins the crying
of the guitar.
From the earliest dawn
the strokes are breaking.
Begins the crying
of the guitar.
It is futile
to stop its sound.
It is impossible
to stop its sound.
It is crying a monotone
like the crying of water,
like the crying of wind
over fallen snow.
It is impossible
to stop its sound.
It is crying over things
far off.
Burning sound of the South
which covets white camellias.
It is crying the arrow without aim,
the evening without tomorrow,
and the first dead bird on the branch.
O guitar!
Heart heavily wounded
by five sharp swords.
Translated by Keith Waldrop
Llanto por Ignacio Sanchez Mejias Part I
The Dying Matador
A coffin on wheels is the bed
At five in the afternoon.
Bones and flutes sound in his ears
At five in the afternoon.
The bull was bellowing through his forehead
At five in the afternoon.
The room was rainbowed with agony
At five in the afternoon.
From far away the gangrene comes already
At five in the afternoon.
The trumpet of the lily through green groins
At five in the afternoon.
Like suns his wounds were burning
At five in the afternoon.
And the crowd was breaking the windows
At five in the afternoon.
At five in the afternoon.
Ay, what a terrible five in the afternoon!
It was five by all the clocks!
It was five in the shade of the afternoon.
Translated by Roy Campbell
LANGSTON HUGHES
America 1902-1967
The Weary Blues
Droning a drowsy syncopated tune,
Rocking back and forth to a mellow croon,
I heard a Negro play.
Down on Lenox Avenue the other night
By the pale dull pallor of an old gas light
He did a lazy sway....
He did a lazy sway....
To the tune o' those Weary Blues.
With his ebony hands on each ivory key
He made that poor piano moan with melody.
O Blues!
Swaying to and fro on his rickety stool
He played that sad raggy tune like a musical fool.
Sweet Blues!
Coming from a black man's soul.
O Blues!
In a deep song voice with a melancholy tone
I heard that Negro sing, that old piano moan--
"Ain't got nobody in all this world,
Ain't got nobody but ma self.
I's gwine to quit ma frownin'
And put ma troubles on the shelf."
Thump, thump, thump, went his foot on the floor.
He played a few chords than he sang some more--
"I got the Weary Blues
And I can't be satisfied.
Got the Weary Blues
And can't be satisfied--
I ain't happy no mo'
And I wish that I had died."
And far into the night he crooned that tune.
The stars went out and so did the moon.
The singer stopped singing and went to bed
While the Weary Blues echoed through his head
He slept like a rock or a man that's dead.
Trumpet Player
The Negro
With the trumpet at his lips
Has dark moons of weariness
Beneath his eyes
Where the smoldering memory
Of slave ships
Blazed to the crack of whips
About his thighs.
The Negro
With the trumpet at his lips
Has a head of vibrant hair
Tamed down,
Patent-leathered now
Until it gleams
Like jet--
Were jet a crown.
The music
From the trumpet at his lips
Is honey
Mixed with liquid fire.
The rhythm
From the trumpet at his lips
Is ecstasy
Distilled from old desire--
Desire
That is longing for the moon
Where the moonlight's but a spotlight
In his eyes,
Desire
That is longing for the sea
Where the sea's a bar-glass
Sucker size.
The Negro
With the trumpet at his lips
Whose jacket
Has a fine one-button roll,
Does not know
Upon what riff the music slips
Its hypodermic needle
To his soul--
But softly
As the tune comes from his throat
Trouble
Mellows to a golden note.
LEONARD COHEN
Canada b. 1934
Suzanne Takes You Down
Suzanne takes you down
to her place near the river,
you can hear the boats go by
you can stay the night beside her.
And you know that she's half crazy
but that's why you want to be there
and she feeds you tea and oranges
that come all the way from China.
Just when you mean to tell her
that you have no gifts to give her
she gets you on her wave-length
and she lets the river answer
that you've always been her lover.
And you want to travel with her,
you want to travel blind
and you know that she can trust you
because you've touched her perfect body
with your mind.
Jesus was a sailor
when he walked upon the water
and he spent a long time watching
from a lonely wooden tower
and when he knew for certain
only drowning men could see him
he said All men will be sailors then
until the sea shall free them,
but he himself was broken
long before the sky would open,
forsaken, almost human,
he sank beneath your wisdom like a stone.
And you want to travel with him,
you want to travel blind
and you think maybe you'll trust him
because he touched your perfect body
with his mind.
Suzanne takes your hand
and she leads you to the river,
she is wearing rags and feathers
from Salvation Army counters.
The sun pours down like honey
on our lady of the harbor
as she shows you where to look
among the garbage and the flowers,
there are heroes in the seaweed
there are children in the morning,
they are leaning out for love
they will lean that way forever
while Suzanne holds the mirror.
And you want to travel with her
and you want to travel blind
and you're sure that she can find you
because she's touched your perfect body
with her mind.
JOHN LENNON AND PAUL MCCARTNEY
England
Hey Jude
Hey Jude, don't make it bad,
take a sad song and make it better,
remember to let her into your heart,
then you can start to make it better.
Hey Jude, don't be afraid,
you were made to go out and get her,
the minute you let her under your skin,
then you begin to make it better.
And anytime you feel the pain,
Hey Jude refrain,
don't carry the world upon your
shoulders.
For well you know that it's a fool,
who plays it cool,
by making his world a little colder.
Hey Jude don't let me down
you have found her now go and get her,
remember (Hey Jude) to let her into your
heart,
then you can start to make it better.
So let it out and let it in
Hey Jude begin,
you're waiting for someone to perform
with.
And don't you know that it's just you.
Hey Jude, you'll do,
the movement you need is on your
shoulder.
Hey Jude, don't make it bad,
take a sad song and make it better,
remember to let her under your skin,
then you'll begin to make it better.
POETRY AND VISUAL ART
WILLIAM BLAKE
England 1757-1827
Little Lamb, who made thee?
Dost thou know who made thee?
Gave thee life & bid thee feed,
By the stream & o'er the mead;
Gave thee clothing of delight,
Softest clothing wooly bright;
Gave thee such a tender voice,
Making all the vales rejoice!
Little Lamb who made thee?
Dost thou know who make thee?
Little Lamb I'll tell thee
Little Lamb I'll tell thee!
He is called by thy name,
For he calls himself a Lamb;
He is meek & he is mild,
He became a little child;
I a child & thou a lamb,
We are called by his name.
Little Lamb God bless thee.
Little Lamb God bless thee.
The Tiger
Tiger! Tiger! burning bright
In the forests of the night,
What immortal hand or eye
Could frame thy fearful symmetry?
In what distant deeps or skies
Burnt the fire of thine eyes?
On what wings dare he aspire?
What the hand dare seize the fire?
And what shoulder, & what art,
Could twist the sinews of thy heart?
And when thy heart began to beat,
What dread hand? & what dread feet?
What the hammer? what the chain?
In what furnace was thy brain?
What the anvil? what dread grasp
Dare its deadly terrors clasp?
When the stars threw down their spears
And water'd heaven with their tears,
Did he smile his work to see?
Did he who make the Lamb make thee?
Tiger! Tiger! burning bright
In the forests of the night,
What immortal hand or eye
Dare frame thy fearful symmetry?
The Sick Rose
O Rose, thou art sick.
The invisible worm
That flies in the night
In the howling storm
Has found out thy bed
Of crimson joy,
And his dark secret love
Does thy life destroy.
A Poison Tree
I was angry with my friend:
I told my wrath, my wrath did end.
I was angry with my foe:
I told it not, my wrath did grow.
And I waterd it in fears,
Night & morning with my tears;
And I sunned it with smiles,
And with soft deceitful wiles.
And it grew both day and night,
Till it bore an apple bright.
And my foe beheld it shine,
And he knew that it was mine,
And into my garden stole,
When the night had veild the pole;
In the morning glad I see
My foe outstretchd beneath the tree.
YOSA BUSON
Japan 1716-1783
Sudden shower:
Grasping the grass-blades
A shoal of sparrows.
Translated by Geoffrey Bownas and
Anthony Thwaite
Spring rain:
soaking on the roof
A child's rag ball.
Translated by Geoffrey Bownas and
Anthony Thwaite
On the temple bell
has settled, and is fast asleep,
a butterfly.
Translated by Harold Henderson
Blossoms on the pear--
and a woman in the moonlight
reads a letter there.*
Translated by Harold Henderson
* Japanese poetry does not use rhyme. The translator, Harold Henderson,
added rhyme to several of his translations of Japanese Haiku.
A mountain pheasant,
treading on its tail, the springtime's
setting sun.
Translated by Harold Henderson
Morning haze:
as in a painting of a dream,
men go their ways.
Translated by Harold Henderson
A mountain ant,
it is clearly seen
on a white peony.
Translated by Yuki Sawa
and Edith M. Shiffert
A village of a hundred houses
and not even a single gate
with chrysanthemums.
Translated by Yuki Sawa
and Edith M. Shiffert
POETRY AND ARCHITECTURE
GEORGE HERBERT
England 1593-1633
The Altar
A broken A L T A R, Lord, thy servant rears,
Made of a heart, and cemented with tears:
Whose parts are as thy hand did frame;
No workman's tool hath touched the same.
A HEART alone
Is such a stone,
As nothing but
Thy power doth cut.
Wherefore each part
Of my hard heart
Meets in this frame,
To praise thy Name:
That, if I chance to hold my peace,
These stones to praise thee may not cease.
Oh let thy blessed S A C R I F I C E be mine,
And sanctify this A L T A R to be thine.
Easter Wings
Lord, who createdst man in wealth and store,
Though foolishly he lost the same,
Decaying more and more
Till he became
Most poor:
With thee
O let me rise
As larks, harmoniously,
And sing this day thy victories:
Then shall the fall further the flight in me.
My tender age in sorrow did begin:
And still with sickness and shame
Thou didst so punish sin,
That I became
Most thin.
With thee
Let me combine,
And feel this day thy victory;
For, if I imp my wing on thine,
Affliction shall advance the flight in me.
THOMAS HARDY
England 1840-1928
Neutral Tones
We stood by a pond that winter day,
And the sun was white, as though chidden of God,
And a few leaves lay on the starving sod;
--They had fallen from an ash, and were gray.
Your eyes on me were as eyes that rove
Over tedious riddles of years ago;
And some words played between us to a fro
On which lost the more by our love.
The smile on your mouth was the deadest thing
Alive enough to have strength to die;
And a grin of bitterness swept thereby
Like an ominous bird a-wing...
Since then, keen lessons that love deceives,
And wrings with wrong, have shaped to me
Your face, and the God-curst sun, and a tree,
And a pond edged with grayish leaves.
The Darkling Thrush
I leant upon a coppice gate
When Frost was spectre-gray,
And Winter's dregs made desolate
The weakening eye of day.
The tangled bine-stems scored the sky
Like strings of broken lyres,
And all mankind that haunted nigh
Had sought their household fires.
The land's sharp features seemed to be
The Century's corpse outleant,*
His crypt the cloudy canopy,
The wind his death-lament.
The ancient pulse of germ and birth
Was shrunken hard and dry,
And every spirit upon earth
Seemed fervorless as I.
At once a voice arose among
The bleak twigs overhead
In a full-throated evensong
Of joy illimited;
An aged thrush, frail, gaunt, and small,
In blast-beruffled plume,
Had chosen thus to fling his soul
Upon the growing gloom.
So little cause for carolings
Of such ecstatic sound
Was written on terrestrial things
Afar or nigh around,
That I could think there trembled through
His happy good-night air
Some blessed Hope, whereof he knew
And I was unaware.
* This poem was written on December 31, 1900.
The Convergence of the Twain
(Lines on the Loss of the Titanic)*
1
In solitude of the sea
Deep from human vanity,
And the Pride of Life that planned her, stilly couches she.
2
Steel chambers late the pyres
Of her salamandrine fires,
Cold currents thrid, and turn to rhythmic tidal lyres.
3
Over the mirrors meant
To glass the opulent
The sea-worm crawls--grotesque, slimed, dumb, indifferent.
4
Jewels in joy designed
To ravish the sensuous mind
Lie lightless, all their sparkles bleared and black and blind.
5
Dim moon-eyed fishes near
Gaze at the gilded gear
And query: "What does this vaingloriousness down here?"...
6
Well: while was fashioning
This creature of cleaving wing,
The Immanent Will that stirs and urges everything
7
Prepared a sinister mate
For her--so gaily great--
A Shape of Ice, for the time far and dissociate.
8
And as the smart ship grew
In stature, grace, and hue,
In shadowy silent distance grew the iceberg too.
9
Alien they seemed to be:
No mortal eye could see
The intimate welding of their later history,
10
Or sign that they were bent
By paths coincident
On being anon twin halves of one august event,
11
Till the Spinner of the Years
Said "Now!" And each one hears,
And consummation comes, and jars two hemispheres.
* The Titanic, the largest and most luxurious ocean liner of its day, sank on its first voyage on April 15, 1912, because it collided with an iceberg.
H.D. (HILDA DOOLITTLE)
America 1886-1961
Sea Poppies
Amber husk
fluted with gold,
fruit on the sand
marked with a rich grain,
treasure
spilled near the shrub-pines
to bleach on the boulders:
your stalk has caught root
among the wet pebbles
and drift flung by the sea
and grated shells
and split conch-shells.
Beautiful, wide-spread
fire upon leaf,
what meadow yields
so fragrant a leaf
as your bright leaf?
Helen*
All Greece hates
the still eyes in the white face,
the lustre as of olives
where she stands,
and the white hands.
All Greece reviles
the wan face when she smiles,
hating it deeper still
when she grows wan and white,
remembering past enchantments
and past ills.
Greece sees unmoved,
God's daughter, born of love,
the beauty of cool feet
and slenderest knees,
could love indeed the maid,
only if she were laid,
white ash amid funereal cypresses.
* Helen, the beautiful wife of the Greek leader Menelaus, was abducted by Paris, a Trojan prince. She was blamed for the Trojan War in spite of having been kidnapped.
Pear Tree
Silver dust,
lifted from the earth,
higher than my arms reach,
you have mounted,
O silver,
higher than my arms reach,
you front us with great mass;
no flower ever opened
so staunch a white leaf,
no flower ever parted silver
from such rare silver;
O white pear,
your flower-tufts
thick on the branch
bring summer and ripe fruits
in their purple heart.
Evadne*
I first tasted under Apollo's lips,
love and love sweetness,
I, Evadne;
my hair is made of crisp violets
or hyacinth which the wind combs back
across some rock shelf;
I, Evadne,
was made of the god of light.
His hair was crisp to my mouth,
as the flower of the crocus,
across my cheek,
cool as the silver-cress
on Erotos bank;
between by chin and my throat,
his mouth slipped over and over.
Still between my arm and shoulder,
I feel the brush of his hair,
and my hands keep the gold they took,
as they wandered over and over,
that great arm-full of yellow flowers.
* Evadne, daughter of Poseidon and Pitane, bore Apollo a son, Iamus, who became a famous soothsayer.
FINDING THE POET
CHAPTER 3 READING POETRY
Reading a poem is one of the great experiences of life. Most of you know this, but there are still some of you who have horror stories to tell. I'm afraid there are still a few of those teachers around who believe that only their way of interpreting a poem is correct. And they feel that it is their duty to tell you that you are wrong if you don't agree with them. Those instructors may have poisoned your love of poetry and impaired your self-esteem as a scholar. Nevertheless, I suggest that you take King Lear's advice and "...forget and forgive..." You will not progress in your understanding of poetry if you hold on to these unpleasant memories.
Let's turn our thoughts instead to the adventure of reading a poem and slowly, one step at a time, unlocking all its secrets.
On First Looking into Chapman's Homer
Much have I travell'd in the realms of gold,
And many goodly states and kingdoms seen;
Round many western islands have I been
Which bards in fealty to Apollo hold.
Oft of one wide expanse had I been told
That deep-browed Homer ruled as his demesne;
Yet did I never breathe its pure serene
Till I heard Chapman speak out loud and bold:
Then felt I like some watcher of the skies
When a new planet swims into his ken;
Or like stout Cortez when with eagle eyes
He star'd at the Pacific--and all his men
Look'd at each other with a wild surmise--
Silent, upon a peak in Darien.
by John Keats, 1816
I love this poem because to me, it is about the joy of reading poetry. But you need to discover the poem's meaning for yourself. Reading a poem is not like reading the newspaper. You cannot expect to extract a poem's meaning on the first, second, or even the third reading. A poem is a highly condensed vehicle for communicating meaningful experience using words. Even with all of my years of experience, I almost never feel that I understand a poem on first reading it. I would like for you to read this poem by John Keats several times, and each time you will need to focus on a different aspect of the poem. I hope the following checklist will help you:
1. Read the poem aloud. Just enjoy the sound of the poem. Feel its pace, and listen for any rhythms, rhymes or other sounds the poem may contain. Have fun with the way the words roll off your tongue. Do not worry about what the poem means on this first reading. Your intuition will already be at work as you appreciate the way your voice recreates the poem. Read in your own natural voice. It is not necessary to read poetry in an artificially dramatic fashion. It would be silly, for example, to affect a British accent because the author of this poem was from England. When you read the poem out loud, it becomes your poem.
2. Read the poem again to understand its sentence patterns. A poem does not look like a group of sentences and paragraphs, but it often is. Try to read the poem as though it were a paragraph, stopping at the ends of sentences instead of at the ends of lines. This will help you understand the relationships from thought to thought in a poem. Also notice if the poem has a beginning, middle, and end and if it has any changes in focus or direction. You may notice that this poem by Keats contains only two sentences. The first sentence ends at the end of the fourth line, and the second sentence continues to the final word of the poem. However, there is a colon at the end of the eighth line, and the next line begins with the word "Then." This suggests that the part of the sentence that follows the colon is of some significance, and the word "Then" hints at some sort of cause and effect relationship between the first eight lines and the last six lines. Do not feel nervous if you still do not understand the meanings of the sentences in the poem; you still have a few more steps to go.
3. Use a dictionary. Once you have a feel for the overall flow of the sentences or phrases in the poem, get out your dictionary and look up all of the words you are even slightly unsure of. With experience, you will learn that poets often use words that have multiple definitions, adding complexity to the poem's possible interpretations. You don't want to miss any of these nuances. Also, the meanings of words change over time. The Oxford English Dictionary, often referred to as the O.E.D., is a wonderful source that provides the history of every word in the language along with all of the changes in meaning that each word has undergone. You may discover, for example, that the word "stout," which appears in line 11 of Keats' poem originally meant "proud, fierce, brave, and resolute." Later, however, it came to mean "having a thick or massive body." Which meaning do you think Keats intended in this poem?
You will also need to think about the connotations and denotations of the words in the poem. The denotation of a word is its meaning or definition as listed in the dictionary. A word's connotation, on the other hand, is its personality, or the feelings and associations that the word evokes in people. The word "stench," for example, has a negative connotation, whereas the word "aroma" has a positive one. Poets are highly sensitive to connotations, and they choose their words carefully to create just the effect they desire.
In Keats' poem you may notice several words such as "realms," "gold," "goodly," and "pure" which have positive connotations while there are no words that elicit a negative response from the reader.
As for denotations, Keats probably uses several words which are unfamiliar to you. Some of the words you may need to look up in the dictionary might be: "bards," "fealty," "demesne," "ken," and "surmise."
Notice that the word "surmise" is usually a verb, suggesting an action, but here Keats uses it as a noun. Also, the word "serene" is usually an adjective, as when we refer to someone as a very serene person. However, in this poem the word "serene" is a noun, and you may be surprised to learn its meaning. There are also several names in this poem which you may not recognize. This brings us to our next step.
4. Look up all of the allusions in the poem, including all of the names of people and places. You will have to be resourceful here. Reference books that you will find especially helpful include an encyclopedia of mythology, a Biblical encyclopedia, an atlas, and a biographical dictionary that lists the manes and accomplishments of famous people. You will certainly have to know who Chapman and Homer are if you ever hope to understand this poem by Keats. Other allusions include references to Apollo, Cortez, and Darien. You will be amused to discover that Keats apparently thought that Cortez discovered the Pacific Ocean, whereas in fact it was Balboa. You will notice that the second sentence of the poem gives two examples of exciting discoveries--an astronomer discovering a new planet ("...some watcher of the skies/When a new planet swims into his ken") and an explorer finding a previously unknown ocean ("...stout Cortez when with eagle eyes/He star'd at the Pacific.") He compares these two exciting discoveries with his own experience of discovery described in the phrase: " I heard Chapman speak out loud and bold." Keats makes the relationship between his excitement in reading the Greek poet Homer, author of The Iliad, in the excellent translation by George Chapman and the discoveries made by famous astronomers and explorers in the phrase "Then felt I like" at the beginning of the ninth line. Getting a firm grip on the vocabulary and allusions in a poem should help you begin to piece together its meaning. But you will still have more work to do.
5. Find out about the cultural and historic context in which the poem was written. Once again, libraries are full of information about literary history. You should have no difficulty discovering that Keats lived in England during the Romantic Period, a time when people hungered for new forms of knowledge and experience. Bored by the conservatism of the Neo-Classical age which had preceded their own, the Romantics looked to an even earlier time in English history for inspiration--the Elizabethan Period, also known as the English Renaissance. The Renaissance, like the Romantic Period, was a time of individualism, creativity, and fascination with discoveries of all kinds. Both time periods were inspired by a passion for the values and art of the Greek Classical Period. Homer, who probably lived in the Ninth Century B.C., is traditionally accepted to be the author of both The Iliad and The Odyssey, two epic poems which "...may be considered the beginnings of the continuing tradition from which modern Western literature has developed."1 George Chapman's translation of Homer was written in 1616, during the Elizabethan Period. Keats' poem is thus a tribute to both the Greek heroic tradition and the English Renaissance. Keats even chose a Renaissance poetic form, the sonnet, as the structure of his poem.
6. Find out something about the poet. Do you remember the statement I quoted from Carl Jung in Chapter 2 saying that art should rise above the personal life of the poet, communicating instead from the universal heart and spirit of the poet to the universal human spirit of the reader? In the same speech, Jung admitted that although art is ultimately a universal medium, it can still be helpful to know something about the poet. Said Jung, "It is undeniable that the poet's psychic disposition permeates his work root and branch. Nor is there anything new in the statement that personal factors largely influence the poet's choice and use of his materials."2 Keats' choice of the sonnet, a fourteen-line rhymed poetic form of Italian origin, is an example of a personal factor which influenced his selection of materials. Yosa Buson would not have chosen to write his poems as sonnets, just as Keats would never have chosen to write in the three-line, seventeen syllable haiku form.
Even though it may seem obvious that personal factors do influence many of the elements in a poem, there has still been a great deal of debate over the years about whether or not a poet's personal life has any relevance to the poem. When I went to college, T.S. Eliot's belief that the poem should stand on its own merit was very much in vogue. Eliot, a very influential Twentieth Century poet, was always careful to mask his own personality in his own poems, and he disliked "...the poetic exploitation of the author's own personality"3 in all poetry. This attitude led to a very impersonal and analytical approach to the study of poetry for several generations. Students were taught to think their way through poems and ignore any personal factors, including the poet's own feelings and intuitions. Consequently, many of my professors told us nothing about the poets, and even the textbooks we used contained very little biographical information. Although I can appreciate the value of letting a poem stand on its own as a message to "universal man," I always felt that I might be missing something by knowing nothing about the writer.
Conversely, both students and instructors make a serious mistake if they assume all poems are autobiographical and that if a poem has a speaker, that voice is always the poet sharing his or her own experiences. Nevertheless, I have found that some basic information about the poet can be very helpful. The fact that Buson was a painter, for example, may have helped you to appreciate the visual details, composition, and perspective in his poems.
Similarly, there is a vast amount of information available about John Keats. Some of this information, like the fact that Keats was barely over five feet tall, may be irrelevant to the poem. But other details, such as the fact that Keats was only twenty-one years old when he wrote this poem and that he had in fact traveled very little and was always short of money, may contribute to your appreciation of this poem. Certainly the poem has a sense of youthful exuberance and enthusiasm. And for a young man who had limited financial resources and was not a member of the aristocracy (his father, a hostler, had died in a fall from a horse when Keats was fourteen), reading a classic of world literature could be a source of adventure, "travel," and liberation.
When I was a student, I got into the habit of going to the library and checking out a few books about every author I was assigned to write a paper on in any of my literature classes. I probably did this out of insecurity at the beginning because I felt more confident in composing my papers if I knew something about the author and something about what the critics had to say about him or her. A secondary benefit I received was my continuing fascination with poets as creative people. As a result, I gained some insight into how poets work, and this has helped me in writing my own poetry.
Keats, for example, was an extraverted person who was strongly impressed by environmental factors and gained most of his inspiration from external stimuli. He wrote "To a Nightingale," for example, after actually hearing a nightingale singing in a friend's garden. And "On First Looking into Chapman's Homer" is not the only poem Keats wrote in response to something he had read. He has another sonnet entitled, "On Sitting Down to Read King Lear Once Again." In fact, Keats was so susceptible to outside influences that he passed up the opportunity to develop a friendship with the poet Percy Bysshe Shelly for fear that Shelley would influence his poetry too strongly. He was also a very sensuous person who loved colors, sights, smells, textures, etc. Unfortunately, Keats contracted terminal tuberculosis when he was about twenty-three, and he wrote all of his major poems by the age of twenty-four. At twenty-six, he was dead.
I have always felt a certain urgency in Keats' poetry, an appreciation of all the sensuous beauty that the world has to offer combined with an awareness that human life is very short. Unlike the carpe diem poets, Keats did not live just for his own pleasure. Although he deeply loved his fiancee, Fanny Brawne, he did not marry her and run the risk of infecting her with tuberculosis. Instead, he poured all his youthful sensual energy into creating beautiful poems. I have always found his epitaph, which he wrote himself, especially poignant: "Here lies one whose name is writ in water." Keats was never a famous or successful poet during his own lifetime, and he thought he would be forgotten. Today, he is viewed as one of the greatest poets of the Romantic Tradition.
These are the kinds of insights you can gain simply by doing a little reading about each author whose poems you are trying to understand. Of course, this takes a little extra time, but poetry is worth it. After you have learned a few things about the poet and the world in which he or she lived, you will need to scrutinize the poem itself a little more carefully.
7. Examine the poem's form, genre, and poetic devices. This process will be much easier for you when you have completed Chapters 5, 6, and 7, where these elements will be discussed in depth. For now, you can simply look at the poem to see if it seems to have any particular kind of structure, as you did with the "architectural" poems in Chapter 2. You can also ask yourself if the poem's subject matter seems to place it in any special category. I've already told you that "On First Looking into Chapman's Homer" is an Italian sonnet, so you might want to skip ahead to the discussion of Italian Sonnets in Chapter 5. These poems, which are fourteen lines in length, usually have a shift of focus or direction of some kind between the first eight lines and the last six lines. Notice that Keats describes his life before he read Chapman's translation of Homer in the first eight lines of this sonnet. In the last six lines, beginning with the word "Then," he describes his feelings after he read Homer. Keats also uses several effective poetic devices in these last six lines, especially comparisons, which are called similes and metaphors. These devices are discussed in more detail in Chapter 7; however, you may notice that Keats says that he felt "like some watcher of the skies" and "like stout Cortez." In these similes Keats compares his emotional excitement to the sense of wonder and discovery experienced by great astronomers and explorers. He also says that Cortez stared at the Pacific Ocean "with eagle eyes." This kind of comparison, in which the poet does not use the words "as" or "like," is called a metaphor. Keats is comparing Cortez's eyes to those of an eagle. In this compliment to Cortez, Keats describes a kind of expanded vision, since eagles are able to see tiny objects from a great height. But since Keats is really comparing himself to Cortez, he is saying that reading Homer has given himself an expanded vision that he did not have before. Analyzing the form and poetic devices used by the writer can really help you gain some understanding of the poem's meaning.
8. Write a paraphrase of the poem. When you feel that you are able to follow the poet's flow of thoughts, you understand his or her vocabulary, including the connotations of the words in the poem, you have looked up all the allusions, and you've found out something about the time and place in which the poem was written along with some basic information about the author, and you have a good grasp of the poem's structure and poetic elements, then you are ready to write the poem out in your own words. This can be a lot of fun. It feels just a little naughty to strip a beautiful poem of its "shimmering robes" and rephrase it into a pair of Levi's and a tee shirt, but believe me, you are doing the poet no harm, and you are helping yourself to clarify your reading of the poem. A paraphrase is simply a restatement in your own words. When you paraphrase, you do not need to use the same word order or sentence structure as the original. The idea is to come up with a comprehensible statement in your own language which is true to the spirit of the original poem. For example, in paraphrasing the fifth and sixth lines of "On First Looking into Chapman's Homer," you might write something like, "I had often been told about a large area that the wise Homer ruled as his realm;" Notice that this clause changes Keats' word order but clarifies his meaning for modern readers. I hope you don't think I'm going to paraphrase the rest of the poem for you. That's your job.
9. Read the poem again, focusing on the four personality functions. Which function seems dominant in this poem? What effect does the poem have on you? As you gain more experience in reading and writing poetry, you will discover that the best poems appeal to all four personality functions. The poem entitled "Cheese" that I shared with you at the end of Chapter 2 has very limited appeal because it is a sense only sort of poem. It may be interesting in the way it emphasizes the sensory aspects of cheese, and it may even be somewhat amusing and perhaps a little intuitive in comparing stilton, one of the world's smelliest cheeses, to an aging yet still elegant monarch, but ultimately the poem lacks emotional appeal and has next to no intellectual content.
If the poems you are writing seem shallow or limited, do not criticize yourself. Try to look at your poems objectively, appreciate them for the value that they have, and treat them with respect. I've taken the risk of sharing a poem with you that is not my best, but I still like it. We do not need to create unrealistic expectations for each poem we write.
Keats got very lucky when he wrote "On First Looking into Chapman's Homer." This poem has emotional, intellectual, sensual, and intuitive appeal. He expresses strong emotions about the joy of reading, yet he makes us think about the importance of intellectual and physical discovery. He engages our physical senses with his vivid descriptions, and his similes and metaphors require us to make intuitive leaps to compare people and things which might not logically seem to be alike. Other poets in the English language tradition who are masters at balancing the four personality functions are William Shakespeare, John Donne, Emily Dickinson, and Gerard Manley Hopkins. You will have an opportunity to apply this ten-step method to reading some of their poems later in this chapter. We have now come to the final step.
10. Write a statement of the poem's theme. In literature, a theme is a general statement about the overall meaning or purpose of the work. Therefore, an inappropriate statement of the theme of "On First Looking into Chapman's Homer" would be, "This poem is about how Keats feels that he had a great time reading this book." Theme is what the poem, not the poet, is trying to say to "universal man" (and woman.) A better statement of theme for this poem might be, "'On First Looking into Chapman's Homer' by John Keats affirms the fact that reading great literature can be a life-changing source of inspiration and discovery." However, this is only my statement of the poem's theme; you must come up with your own. After proceeding through all of these ten steps, you may have gained a deeper insight into this poem than I have.
It may surprise you to know that the theme is often the last thing the poet thinks of when composing the poem. Frequently the poet is simply inspired by some stimulus, as Hardy was when he heard an old bird chirping cheerfully on a gloomy day and was thus motivated to write "The Darkling Thrush." Similarly, Buson seems to have been inspired to write one of his very famous haiku poems when he was struck by the dazzling shades of white when he saw a woman in moonlight reading a letter on white paper under a pear tree covered in silvery white blossoms. What is this poem's theme? We must be careful not to confuse a poem's theme with its subject. The theme of Keats' poems is not really about Homer, and the theme of "The Darkling Thrush" is not about listening to a bird singing. Neither is the theme of Buson's haiku about a woman standing under a pear tree. Buson's theme might be something like "The spirit of the Buddha unites all things into a harmonious whole." But we would need to follow the ten steps that we just applied to Keats' poem before we would feel comfortable writing a statement of theme for Buson's haiku.
The theme of a poem sometimes comes to a poet intuitively after he or she has written down a response to an internal or external stimulus. This is when the relationship between the poet and the reader becomes especially crucial. It is not the poet's job to state the poem's theme. The reader must infer the theme from the images, the archetypes, allusions, connotations of words, and other elements provided by the poem.
Similarly, I advise you to put the poem's theme on the bottom of the list when you write your own poetry. Poems which are written consciously on a specific theme such as "war is evil" are often pretentious, preachy, and uninteresting. You will also run the risk of writing a "thinking" poem to the exclusion of sensing, feeling, and intuition if you write a poem only to address a theme. Your poems will reach out to your readers much more effectively of you begin with the stimulus that sparked your creativity and then let your thoughts, emotions, perceptions and intuitive responses work together.
I hope you have discovered that being able to read a poem effectively will also enhance your understanding of the craft of poetry and will ultimately stimulate your own creativity. I encourage you to read all kinds of poetry and to read with passion. I caution you once again to be humble and to respect every poem you read, including your own poetry and the work of your classmates. The brilliant mystic poetry of William Blake looks like childish drivel to people who are ignorant, and Buson's haiku poems seem pointless to those who have never studied the aesthetics of Zen Buddhist art. I hope you will also treasure your own understanding of the poems you have read regardless of how others may have interpreted these poems. Finally, I hope you will continue to read and to write in a spirit of trust--trusting yourself, your Instructor, and your classmates as you don together the "shining robes" of poetry.
NOTES
CHAPTER 3
1. Louis Kronenberger, ed., Atlantic Brief Lives (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1971), p. 375.
2. Schorer, p. 119.
3. M. H. Abrams, ed., The Norton Anthology of English Literature, Sixth Edition, Vol. 2 (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1993), p. 2139.
QUESTION AND TOPICS FOR REVIEW
1. Review the ten steps in reading and understanding a poem.
2. What is the Oxford English Dictionary, and why is it especially helpful to students of poetry?
3. Define the words connotation and denotation.
4. In poetry, what is a simile? What is a metaphor?
5. Define the word theme as it applies to literature.
6. In literature, what is a genre?
7. What is a paraphrase?
TOPICS FOR DISCUSSION
1. Who was Homer, and why is he so important in world literature?
2. Who was George Chapman, and why was he so important to John Keats?
3. What are some of the characteristics of the Italian sonnet?
4. Discuss some of the factors in the time and place in which Keats lived that may have influenced "On First Looking into Chapman's Homer."
5. Discuss some of the factors in Keats' own life that may have influenced the poem.
6. Share your paraphrases of "On First Looking into Chapman's Homer." What are the similarities and differences between them? Do some of the paraphrases help clarify the poem's meaning better than others?
7. Share your statements of the theme of "On First Looking into Chapman's Homer." Again, notice the similarities and differences between them. As a group, can you agree on two or three statements that seem to express the poem's theme most effectively?
8. Keats made an error in assuming that Cortez discovered the Pacific Ocean. In fact, Balboa made that discovery. How significant is Keats' error in the overall meaning of the poem?
ACTIVITIES
1. Form groups of three or four and select a poem from Chapters 1, 2, or 3 for each group to read. Work through the ten steps in reading a poem together, and report your findings back to the class. Be sure to include your paraphrase and your statement of theme in your report.
2. Select any poem from Chapters 1, 2, or 3, and read the poem in class. Then discuss the emotional, intellectual, sensual, and intuitive aspects of the poem. Is one function stronger in the poem than others?
3. Bring an Oxford English Dictionary to class. Then select any poem and look up the meanings of any of the words that are unfamiliar to you. Finally, discuss the connotations and denotations of the words in the poem. How does this information help you understand the poem's meaning?
4. Choose a poem from a different time period and or a different culture from your own. Do some research on the cultural and historical background of the poem. Do any of your findings help you understand the poem better? Share your discoveries with the class.
5. Choose any poet we have studied and do some research on the poet's life. (You did some preliminary research on the lives of poets in Activity 1 at the end of Chapter 1. You may wish to continue researching the same poet.) Then choose a poem by the author you have researched and see if your knowledge of the poet's life gives you a better understanding of the poem. Report your findings informally to the class.
ANALYTICAL WRITING ASSIGNMENTS
1. Select any poem from Chapters 1, 2, or 3 and write a paraphrase of the poem.
2. Prepare a brief written report on a poet, including an analysis of the meaning of one of his or her poems and a discussion of the poet's creative process in constructing the poem. Include any biographical information that seems pertinent.
3. Write an analysis of any poem starting with a statement of the poem's theme. Explain which elements in the poem led you to interpret the poem's theme as you did. You may wish to include connotations and denotations of words, allusions, structure, poetic devices, historical and biographical factors, etc.
4. Read Shakespeare's Sonnet 130 very carefully, following the ten step for reading a poem. Then analyze the poem as a satire on unrealistic love sonnets.
5. Read John Donne's "The Flea" very carefully. On one level, you may discover that the poem is a comic carpe diem poem about a man whose lover kills a flea who has bitten both of them. On another level, the poem is an oddly persuasive argument. Explain the events that take place in this poem and analyze the intellectual, sensual, emotional, and intuitive aspects of the poem.
6. John Donne's "A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning" is also an argument. Analyze the thesis of the speaker's argument in the poem and the evidence he provides to support this argument. Pay special attention to the simile of the compass near the end of the poem.
7. Select one of the poems by Emily Dickinson in Chapter 2. Analyze the ways in which Dickinson challenges her reader to respond intuitively to the poem.
8. What is being described in Dickinson's "A Narrow Fellow in the Grass"?
Write a paper explaining how Dickinson communicates to the reader the subject of the poem without ever naming it.
9. Analyze the use of archetypes in Sor Juana de la Cruz's "First Villancico."
10. Analyze the intellectual, sensual, emotional, and intuitive aspects of Gerard Manley Hopkins' "God's Grandeur."
11. State the theme of Hopkins' "Spring and Fall." Then analyze the elements in the poem that led you to your conclusions about the poem's theme.
12. Research the life and cultural background of William Shakespeare, John Donne, Emily Dickinson, or Gerard Manley Hopkins. Write a paper focusing on elements in the poet's personal life that may have influenced his or her style and choice of subjects and themes.
CREATIVE WRITING ASSIGNMENTS
In all of the creative writing assignments I have suggested so far, I have deliberately avoided telling you how to construct your poems. I have done this consciously to allow for the diversity of creative styles, and I want you to discover for yourself whether or not you want to write rhymed poems, structured stanzas, rhythmic poetry, or free verse, poetry which has no predetermined structure, rhyme, or rhythm. You may have felt a little insecure at first, but writing poetry is a process of discovery. You might want to write in a variety of structures and styles until you find something that feels comfortable for now.
1. Write a poem that responds in some way to something you have read.
2. Write a poem on any subject in fourteen lines. Try to create some kind of shift in direction or focus after the eighth line.
3. Write a three-line poem which uses at least two of the senses.
4. Sit in your back yard or in a park for at least half an hour. Then write a poem which responds to what you saw, heard, smelled, felt, etc.
5. Write a poem based on an external or internal stimulus. Try to let the poem evolve intuitively and allow the theme to emerge naturally. After you have written the poem, write a statement of the poem's theme on the back of the paper.
6. Trade poems with a classmate and go through the ten steps in reading each other's poems. Then share your paraphrases and statements of theme with each other. Compare your own statement of theme with the statement which your classmate has written about your poem. Were you surprised?
ADDITIONAL POEMS FOR READING AND ANALYSIS
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
England 1564-1616
Sonnet 18
Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?
Thou art more lovely and more temperate:
Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,
And summer's lease hath all too short a date:
Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines
And often is his gold complexion dimmed;
And every fair from fair sometimes declines,
By chance or nature's changing course untrimmed;
But thy eternal summer shall not fade ,
Nor lose possession of that fair thou ow'st,
Nor shall death brag thou wander'st in his shade,
When in eternal lines to time thou grow'st:
So long as men can breathe, or eyes can see,
So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.
Sonnet 116
Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments; love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove:
O, no, it is an ever-fixed mark,
That looks on tempests and is never shaken;
It is the star to every wand'ring bark,
Whose worth's unknown although his highth be taken.
Love's not Time's fool, though lips and cheeks
Within his bending sickle's compass come;
Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,
But bears it out even to the edge of doom.
If this be error and upon me proved,
I never writ, nor no man ever loved.
Sonnet 130
My mistress' eyes are nothing like the sun;
Coral is far more red than her lips' red;
If snow be white, why then her breasts are dun;
If hairs be wires, black wires grow on her head.
I have seen roses damasked red and white,
But no such roses see I in her cheeks;
And in some perfumes is there more delight
Than in the breath that from my mistress reeks.
I love to hear her speak, yet well I know
That music hath a far more pleasing sound;
I grant I never saw a goddess go;
My mistress, when she walks, treads on the ground.
And yet, by heaven, I think my love as rare
As any she belied with false compare.
JOHN DONNE
England 1572-1631
The Good-Morrow
I wonder, by my troth, what thou and I
Did, till we loved? Were we not weaned till then,
But sucked on country pleasures, childishly?
Or snorted we in the seven sleepers' den?
'Twas so; but this, all pleasures fancies be.
If ever any beauty I did see,
Which I desired and got, 'twas but a dream of thee.
And now good morrow to our waking souls,
Which watch not one another out of fear;
For love all love of other sights controls,
And makes one little room an everywhere.
Let sea-discoverers to new worlds have gone,
Let maps to others, worlds on worlds have shown:
Let us possess one world; each hath one, and is one.
My face in thine eye, thine in mine appears,
And true plain hearts do in the faces rest;
Where can we find two better hemispheres,
Without sharp North, without declining West?
Whatever lives was not mixed equally;
If our two loves be one, or thou and I
Love so alike that none do slacken, none can die.
The Flea
Mark but this flea, and mark in this,
How little that which thou deniest me is;
Me it sucked first, and now sucks thee,
And in this flea our two bloods mingled be;
Thou know'st that this cannot be said
A sin, a shame, or loss of maidenhead,
Yet this enjoys before it woo
And pampered swells with one blood made of two,
And this, alas, is more than we would do.
Oh, stay, three lives in one flea spare,
Where we almost, nay more than married are.
This flea is you and I, and this
Our marriage bed and marriage temple is;
Though parents grudge, and you, we are met,
And cloistered in these living walls of jet.
Though use make you apt to kill me,
Let not to that self-murder added be,
And sacrilege, thee sins in killing three.
Cruel and sudden, hast thou since
Purpled thy nail with blood of innocence?
Wherein could this flea guilty be,
Except in that drop which it sucked from thee?
Yet thou triumph'st, and say'st that thou
Find'st not thy self nor me the weaker now;
'Tis true; then learn how false fears be:
Just so much honor, when thou yield'st to me,
Will waste as this flea's death took life from thee.
A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning
As virtuous men pass mildly away,
And whisper to their souls to go,
Whilst some of their sad friends do say
The breath goes now, and some say, No;
So let us melt, and make no noise,
No tear-floods, nor sigh-tempests move;
'Twere profanation of our joys
To tell the laity our love.
Moving of th' earth brings harms and fears,
Men reckon what it did and meant;
But trepidation of the spheres,
Though greater far, is innocent.
Dull sublunary lovers' love
(Whose soul is sense) cannot admit
Absence, because it doth remove
Those things which elemented it.
But we, by a love so much refined
That our selves know not what it is,
Inter-assured of the mind,
Care less, eyes, lips, and hands to miss.
Our two souls therefore, which are one,
Though I must go, endure not yet
A breach, but an expansion,
Like gold to airy thinness beat.
If they be two, they are two so
As stiff twin compasses are two;
Thy soul, the fixed foot, makes no show
To move, but doth, if th' other do.
And though it at the center sit,
Yet when the other far doth roam,
It leans and harkens after it,
And grows erect, as that comes home.
Such wilt thou be to me, who must
Like th' other foot, obliquely run;
Thy firmness makes my circle just,
And makes me end where I begun.
Holy Sonnet 10
Death, be not proud, though some have called thee
Mighty and dreadful, for thou are not so;
For those whom thou think'st thou dost overthrow
Die not, poor Death, nor yet canst thou kill me.
From rest and sleep, which but thy pictures be,
Much pleasure; then from thee much more must flow,
And soonest our best men with thee do go,
Rest of their bones, and soul's delivery.
Thou are slave to fate, chance, kings, and desperate men,
And dost with poison, war, and sickness dwell,
And poppy or charms can make us sleep as well
And better than thy stroke; why swell'st thou then?
One short sleep past, we wake eternally
And death shall be no more; Death, thou shalt die.
SOR JUANA INES DE LA CRUZ
Mexico (1648?-1695)
From the Fifth Villancico*, in alternating voices,
written for the Feast of the Nativity in Puebla, 1689
Because my Lord was born to suffer,
let Him stay awake.
Because for me He is awake,
let him fall asleep.
Let Him stay awake--
there is no pain for one who loves
as painlessness would be.
Let Him sleep--
for one who sleeps, in dreaming,
prepares himself to die.
Silence, now He sleeps!
Careful, He's awake!
Do not disturb Him, no!
Yes, He must be waked!
Let him wake and wake!
Let Him have his sleep!
Translated by Alan S. Trueblood
* A villancico is a poetic form derived from the simple language and strong rhythms of peasant songs, written as part of the religious festivals in Mexico.
From the First Villancico, written for the
Nativity of Our Lord, Puebla, 1689
Since Love is shivering
in the ice and cold,
since hoarfrost and snow
have ringed him round,
who will come to his aid?
Water!
Earth!
Air!
No, Fire will!
Since the Child is assailed
by pains and ills
and has no breath left
to face his woes,
who will come to his aid?
Fire!
Earth!
Water!
No, but Air will!
Since the loving child
is burning hot,
that he breathes a volcanic
deluge of flame, who will come to his aid?
Air!
Fire!
Earth!
No, Water will!
Since today the Child
leaves heaven for earth
and finds nowhere to rest
his head in this world,
who will come to his aid?
Water!
Fire!
Air!
No, but Earth will!
Translated by Alan S. Trueblood
GERARD MANLEY HOPKINS
England 1844-1889
The world is charged with the grandeur of God.
It will flame out, like shining from shook foil;
It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil
Crushed. Why do men then now not reck his rod?
Generations have trod, have trod, have trod;
And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil;
And wears man's smudge and shares man's smell: the soil
Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.
And for all this, nature is never spent;
There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;
And though the last lights off the black West went
Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward springs--
Because the Holy Ghost over the bent
World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.
Pied Beauty
Glory be to God for dappled things--
For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow;
For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim;
Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls, finches' wings;
Landscape plotted and pieced--fold, fallow, and plough;
And all trades, their gear and tackle and trim.
All things counter, original, spare, strange;
Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)
With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim;
He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change:
Praise him.
Spring and Fall
to a young child
Margaret are you grieving
Over Goldengrove unleaving?
Leaves like the things of man, you
With your fresh thoughts care for, can you?
Ah! as the heart grows older
It will come to such sights colder
By and by, nor spare a sigh
Though worlds of wanwood leafmeal lie;
And yet you will weep and know why.
Now no matter, child, the name:
Sorrows springs are the same,
Nor mouth had, no nor mind, expressed
What heart heard of, ghost guessed:
It is the blight man was born for,
It is Margaret you mourn for.
T.S. ELIOT
America (Naturalized British Citizen) (1888-1965)
From Landscapes
Rannoch, by Glencoe
Here the crow starves, here the patient stag
Breeds for the rifle. Between the soft moor
And the soft sky, scarcely room
To leap or soar. Substance crumbles, in the thin air
Moon cold or moon hot. The road winds in
Listlessness of ancient war
Languor of broken steel,
Clamor of confused wrong, apt
In silence. Memory is strong
Beyond the bone. Pride snapped,
Shadow of pride is long, in the long pass
No concurrence of bone.
Cape Ann
O quick quick quick quick hear the song sparrow,
Swamp sparrow, fox sparrow, vesper sparrow
At dawn and dusk. Follow the dance
Of the goldfinch at noon. Leave to chance
The Blackburnian warbler, the shy one. Hail
With shrill whistle the note of the quail, the bobwhite
With shrill whistle the note of the quail, the bobwhite
Dodging by baybush. Follow the feet
Of the walker, the water thrush. Follow the flight
Of the dancing arrow, the purple martin. Greet
In silence the bullbat. All are delectable. Sweet sweet sweet
But resign this land at the end, resign it
To its true owner, the tough one, the sea gull.
The palaver is finished.
FINDING THE POET
CHAPTER 4 KEEPING A JOURNAL
The relationship between keeping a journal and writing poetry is a very intimate one. In fact, the journal is often the raw material from which a poem emerges. I encourage everyone who has an interest in poetry to keep a journal. Poetry does not always just jump out of our pen onto the paper or out of our brain into the word processor. Sometimes it takes a while for the original stimulus to work its way into words and to find a form. If we do not jot down a few notes and keep them in a safe place, we can forget all about that flash of inspiration, and the poem will never be written. It makes me sad to think about all the brilliant poems that have never come to light because someone just didn't take the time to record that moment of insight or perception that was destined to be a poem.
You know that many of your most inspired moments come at completely inopportune times. Nothing is more frustrating than coming up with a stunning idea while you're driving on the freeway. The images for an entire poem came to me once while I was standing in a casino watching my husband play Blackjack. What did I do? I excused myself and went into the women's rest room and wrote the poem down on a scrap of paper I happened to find in my purse. This experience taught me never to leave home without a notebook.
It doesn't matter what kind of notebook you use. I like to carry a tiny spiral notebook--the kind you can buy in the grocery store--in my purse for emergency flashes of insight. I don't get so many of those that I can let even a few slip away. This same kind of notebook would work for a shirt pocket or a hip pocket. When I travel, I take along a large three-hole notebook so I can record in sentences and paragraphs all the people, places, and events I experience. Some of these experiences might turn out to be poems later. If I'm having a very busy day, I just jot down on the back of one of the pages the date, place, and a few individual words such as "shopping with Kathleen and Marny, green depression glass," or "river boat, dinner, blackberry cobbler, country music, 'Take Me Back to Tulsa,' blue heron," to remind me of the high points of the day--people and images I really want to remember. Then when I'm ready to write my journal out, I can just check the backs of the pages to jog my memory, and everything will be in the right sequence. Recently I spent the entire eight hours or so it took me to fly home to California from a family reunion in Missouri writing out my travel journal from the notes on the backs of the pages in my notebook. It gave me a tremendous sense of satisfaction to arrive home knowing that none of the really important moments were lost. Who knows how many poems might some day be born out of that three ring notebook?
Other writers use other kinds of journals. I admire the high-tech types who keep notes on their computers or electronic notebooks. Other people I know purchase those beautiful bound books with blank pages and use those for journals. I like that idea because it gives respect and dignity to journal keeping. Poets and all writers should honor all of the tools of their trade, even their pens and paper. I also like the idea of keeping multiple notebooks--one in your car, one at work, and notebooks in various rooms at home. Of course, this brings up the issue of privacy.
I am well aware that most poets feel that their personal writings are very private, and they don't want anyone snooping into their notebooks. I feel the same way, and fortunately, my husband never looks at any of my private writings. Many writers are not so lucky, especially young people who are still living with their nuclear family.
In Japan, where journal keeping has been a part of every literate person's life for the past thousand years, secretly reading other people's journals has evolved into a fine art. In Japan, where direct confrontation is considered rude and tasteless, people sometimes send important messages to family members by leaving their diaries lying around. Japanese literature is filled with scenes in which people discover some significant aspect of a family member's personality by reading that person's journal. Tanizaki's The Key, Dazai's The Setting Sun, and Inoue's The Hunting Gun are all beautifully written novels in which pivotal moments occur because someone has read someone else's diary. This is a very subtle form of communication that requires some level of consent on the writer's part. My favorite journal of all time is The Pillow Book of Sei Shonagon, written by a court lady in Kyoto who lived at the same time as Murasaki Shikibu. Near the end of her lengthy journal, Sei Shonagon wrote:
I wrote these notes at home, when I had a good deal of time
to myself and thought no one would notice what I was doing.
Everything that I have seen and felt is included. Since much of
it might appear malicious and even harmful to other people, I
was careful to keep my book hidden. But now it has become
public, which is the last thing I expected.1
Obviously, Shonagon knew that her "private" journal had a reading audience. She even remarks in a rather self-congratulatory tone, "Readers have declared, however, that I can be proud of my work. This has surprised me greatly... ."2 Fascinating as the Japanese view of the relationship between the writers and readers of journals may be, I find that most North Americans do not want to share their journals with anyone. If you are among the many who really do want privacy, you will have to take steps to provide your own security. If you live in a household where there is good communication and a lot of trust, all you will have to do is tell the people you live with that your writings are private and it is very important to you that this privacy be respected. If you life in an environment where people do not respect boundaries, you will have to initiate your own security measures. Hiding a journal probably won't work if you live with snoopy people. It will only inspire their curiosity, and they will set out on a quest to poke around into your private writings--assuming of course that you are writing about them. I know people who have left decoy journals hidden in spots where they just might be found.
Samuel Pepys, whose diary you will meet in this chapter, wrote his diary in a secret code. These subversive measures seem awfully exhausting to me. Why not just get yourself a strong metal box and keep your private writings locked up? Alternatively, ask yourself what is so secret about your writings anyway. Would the world really come to an end if someone else read your journal?
Maybe we need to think more carefully about why we are keeping a journal in the first place. I make a distinction between a journal and a diary. I think of a journal as a miscellaneous collection of notes,
a sort of storehouse for future poems and writing projects. A journal does not require any particular structure, it does not need to be chronological, and it does not need to be kept up every day. On the other hand, I think of a diary as a daily chronology recording events and experiences in one's life. Sei Shonagon's Pillow Book is a journal; in Japanese it is called a zuihitsu, which means, "following the brush," to suggest the spontaneity of this form of writing. Sometimes this style of writing is called a miscellany in English. Conversely, The Diary of Samuel Pepys is in fact a diary. It focuses on the daily events in Pepys' life in chronological order. If you should choose to read this fascinating piece of literature, you will discover why Pepys wrote it in secret code. Among other things, Pepys, a respectable married man, chronicles his adventures with his various mistresses.
There are other kinds of journals also, such as poetic memoirs, which include personal observations in prose with poems interspersed. Travel diaries can also be very interesting, and some of them also contain poems. There is a genre in Japan called haibun, or haiku diary, in which the poet included haiku poems in a prose diary which may include descriptions of people, places, nature, or philosophical observations. Haibun can be a very effective form of literature because it puts the very brief haiku poems in context, often providing information about the time, place, and situation which inspired these poems. Matsuo Basho's Narrow Road to the Deep North is an example of haibun at its very best.
You may have noticed that I referred to both haibun and The Diary of Samuel Pepys as literature. In Japan, the journal writing capital of the world, diaries and journals have always been considered literature, even those that were written only for the author's private self-expression. In fact, The Pillow Book of Sei Shonagon and Narrow Road to the Deep North are considered second and third only to The Tale of Genji in quality and importance in the entire history of Japanese literature. The Western tradition has not held diaries on the same level of esteem. Dorothy Wordsworth's journals, for example, have not been valued as highly as her brother William's poetry. This is perhaps a prejudice that Western readers might want to reconsider. Journals have a wonderful spontaneous quality and often contain breathtakingly beautiful descriptions and insightful observations. We also might want to re-think our view of the line between public and private literature.
You might want to write a journal some time that is a work of literature in itself. But for now, you're probably keeping a journal as a repository for ideas that can be turned into poems. If you're new to journaling, you'll need to think about what kinds of things to write down. Your personal interests should guide you. If you're an extravert, you'll probably want to focus on people, places, and events. Don't let yourself be influenced by other people's opinions of "literary material." If you love baseball and ice hockey, write down some notes about the games you attend or the sports you actually participate in. Anything can evolve into a wonderful poem if the writer has enough passion for his or her subject. If you are more introverted, you might want to record some of your dreams or simply describe some of your moods. I like to take notes about what is going on in nature such as exactly when the acorns started to fall, when the moon was full, what the sunset looked like, etc. I find that nature can often provide a framework for the feelings I try to express in a poem.
A journal can also be very helpful in leading you to a better understanding of how your own creativity works. You will probably discover, for example, that you prefer writing at certain times of day and not at others. Some poets are morning people, inspired especially by the dawn; others are night owls who like to write all alone when everyone else is asleep. Still others write in little spurts whenever they can find the time. Over time, you will also probably observe that you will feel more like writing during certain seasons of the year. Don't be surprised if you have a huge burst of creativity in the spring only to be disappointed at the end of summer when you barely have the energy to lift a pencil. The important thing is to respect your own natural rhythms and to honor the subjects that really matter to you.
I would like to share with you some selections from the journals and diaries of famous people. Do not feel compelled to imitate any of these. I present them to you only so that you can see the wealth of possibility that journaling can offer to a poet. Studying this diversity of writing styles and subject matter will, I hope, expand your own vision of this mysterious process of creating poems from observations, thoughts, and feelings that first found expression in a private notebook. Notebooks are places where lists, details, events, moods, dreams, themes, and passions are freely expressed. These are also the stuff that poems are made of.
I will begin with my favorite, whom I have already introduced to you, Sei Shonagon. The title of her journal, The Pillow Book, may need some explanation. Horrible as this may sound, pillows in ancient Japan were more like pieces of furniture than soft cushions. They were really wooden neck rests with drawers that could be used for hiding private writings. Thus, it became customary for men and women to write informal books in their bedrooms and stash them in their pillows. This genre, which seems to be unique to Japan, became known as makura no soshi, or notes of the pillow, the precursor to the zuihitsu, or occasional writings. Apparently many people wrote these kinds of journals during the Heian period (800-1200 A.D.), the time during which Sei Shonagon and Murasaki Shikibu lived, but Shonagon's Makura no Soshi is the only one of its type to survive.3
The Pillow Book of Sei Shonagon is the most poetic work of prose writing that I have ever read. It is a long, complex collection that contains historically accurate descriptions of the everyday goings on in the lives of the royal family members and courtiers in Heian Japan. Shonagon never misses a name or a detail. She is an avid, extraverted people watcher and a sharp critic. No breach of decorum escapes her scrutiny, as in the following assessment of a courtier named Masahiro:
Masahiro really is a laughing-stock. I wonder what it is like for
his parents and friends. If people see him with a decent-looking
servant, they always call for the fellow and laughingly ask how
he can wait upon such a master and what he thinks of him. There
are skilled dyers and weavers in Masahiro's household, and when
to comes to dress, whether it be the colour of his under-robe or
the style of his cloak, he is more elegant than most men; yet the
only effect of his elegance is to make people say, 'What a shame
someone else isn't wearing these things!'
If she is harsh with people, Shonagon is infinitely sensitive toward nature, as these two little paragraphs will attest:
I remember a clear morning in the Ninth Month when it had
been raining all night. Despite the bright sun, dew was still
dripping from the chrysanthemums in the garden. On the
bamboo fences and criss-cross hedges I saw tatters of spider
webs; and where the threads were broken the raindrops hung on
them like strings of white pearls. I was greatly moved and
delighted.
As it became sunnier, the dew gradually vanished from the
clover and the other plants where it had lain so heavily; the
branches began to stir, then suddenly sprang up of their own
accord. Later I described to people how beautiful it all was.
What most impressed me was that they were not al all
impressed.
As much as I love her gossipy accounts of people and events and her exquisitely beautiful descriptions of nature, it is her lists that make Shonagon the poetic genius that she is. Her lists are very much like poems that combine images around a theme. These lists usually bring together elements from nature and from human experience to present her theme in a manner that is both shallow and profound. "Squalid Things" is a personal favorite of mine:
Squalid Things
The back of a piece of embroidery.
The inside of a cat's ear,
A swarm of mice, who still have no fur, when they come
wriggling out of their nest.
The seams of a fur robe that has not yet been lined.
Darkness in a place that does not give the impression of being
very clean.
A rather unattractive woman who looks after a large brood of
children.
A woman who falls ill and remains unwell for a long time. In
the mind of her lover, who is not particularly devoted to her, she
must appear rather squalid.
Notice that the images at the beginning of the list are vivid and interesting details that appeal to our senses. But the final item evokes our emotions. The word "squalid" seems an unusual one to describe the undevoted lover's perception of his woman, and the reader is really left contemplating the profound loneliness of the sick woman who suffers not only from her illness but from the pain of not being loved. Here the list takes us beyond the word "squalid" and beyond the pathetic lovers as we meditate on how much more terrible it is to be unloved than to look into our cat's ear.
Did you also notice that Shonagon is not afraid to let us see her shadow? Perhaps because The Pillow Book at least purports to be a private journal, Shonagon gives herself permission to share even her most ungenerous thoughts, like her comment about the unattractive woman. We all like to think of ourselves as nice people, but we can learn from Shonagon that our journey as poets will be short if we only write about "nice" things. A journal is a safe place for putting down some of our rude, judgmental, or even angry observations. In the following list, Shonagon really lets her nasty side out:
Things That are Unpleasant to See
Someone in a robe whose back seam is crooked.
People who wear their clothes with the collars pulled back.
A High Court Noble's carriage that has dirty blinds.
People who insist on bringing out all their children when they
receive a visit from someone who rarely comes to see them.
Boys who wear high clogs with their trouser-skirts. I
realize this is a modern fashion, but I still don't like it. ...
A lean, hairy man taking a nap in the daytime. Does it
occur to him what a spectacle he is making of himself? Ugly
men should sleep only at night, for they cannot be seen in the
dark and, besides, most people are in bed themselves. But they
should get up at the crack of dawn, so that no one has to see
them lying down.
A pretty woman looks even prettier when she gets up after
taking a nap on a summer day. But an unattractive woman
should avoid such things, for her face will be all puffy and shining,
and, if she is not lucky, her cheeks will have an ugly, lopsided
look. When two people, having taken a nap together in the
daytime, wake up and see each other's sleep-swollen faces, how
dreary life must seem to them!
Even in this list, which begins on a shallow note of fashion policing, Shonagon takes us on a journey of the human spirit. We have all had moments when we have felt the dreariness of life, and Shonagon makes us see that dreariness in the swollen faces of the two who have just awakened to see each other at their worst. Let's face it. Life gets a lot worse than this for those of us who don't live in the elitist world of the Heian court, but poets do sometimes show us humanity at its very worst. Gone are the days when European poets only wrote in "poetic" language and only chose "noble" subjects for their themes.
Today, there is almost no subject and no level of dreariness that a poet somewhere is unwilling to share with a reader. This fact brings up the centuries old and never resolved question of appropriateness in art. Are there some words that just should not be used in poetry? Are there some subjects that should remain forever taboo? Over time, changing tastes and attitudes toward political correctness create turmoil for artists, and debates rage among school boards, publishers, gallery owners, etc., when a work of art is deemed offensive by some segment of society. James Joyce and D.H.Lawrence, two British novelists who wrote in the first half of the Twentieth Century, were both accused of writing pornography. The Romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley was expelled from Oxford University for writing an essay advocating atheism. Thomas More, author of Utopia, was publicly executed when he refused to sign the act of Succession and Supremacy, the document that separated Henry Vlll and England from the Roman Catholic Church. More recently, Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn has come under attack because it contains a racially offensive word. What can we conclude from these examples? The written word is very powerful; people can be profoundly affected even by a single word.
The power of words, as we know, is one of the qualities that makes poetry the sublime and necessary art form that it is. Poetry can touch the human mind, heart, spirit, and senses in a way that no other form of communication can. But when anything becomes this powerful, there will be people who will be terribly threatened by it and will want to control or destroy it. They will start talking about literature as a "dangerous influence," and they will begin to agitate for various forms of censorship. Debates of this sort are going on somewhere in the world at this very moment.
I cannot resolve the issue of the censorship of poetry for you. Personally, I have always opposed censorship because mass hysteria can and has led to the persecution of authentic art. It is also my opinion that people who persecute artists are almost always uninformed about the nature of art and unable to evaluate a work of art in context. I must admit, for example, that I am personally offended by the following passage from John Milton's Paradise Lost in which Adam and Eve are described:
Two of far nobler shape, erect and tall,
Godlike erect, with native honor clad
In naked majesty, seemed lords of all,
And worthy seemed; for in their looks divine
The image of their glorious Maker shone,
Truth, wisdom, sanctitude severe and pure--
Severe, but in true filial freedom placed,
Whence true authority in men; though both
Not equal, as their sex not equal seemed;
For contemplation he and valor formed,
For softness she and sweet attractive grace;
He for God only, she for God in him.
Can you see why women today might take offense? Milton clearly sees women as decorative objects who are mentally and spiritually inferior to men. A little research into Milton's personal life will affirm that he viewed his three successive wives and his daughters as subordinate to himself. In addition to being a sexist, Milton was a religious bigot who wrote anti-Catholic propaganda, referring to the Pope as the "triple tyrant,"4 among other unpleasant epithets. Should we throw out the writings of this prejudiced poet who is viewed by many scholars as second only to Shakespeare in importance in the history of English literature? Although I dislike Milton, I would have to say no.
Instead, we have to look at his poetry in its historic and cultural context. In fact, Milton's values were very much shared by most British men during the 1600s. English women historically were not sent to school, and only daughters of aristocratic families were taught by private tutors to read and write. British universities were open to men only until the latter part of the Nineteenth Century. English women were raised to stay at home and focus their attention on domestic activities and needlework. One hundred and twenty years after Milton's death, Percy Shelley's mother-in-law, Mary Wollstonecraft, wrote a long essay entitled A Vindication of the Rights of Woman. Her thesis is to advocate for the education of English girls. In support of her argument, she quotes the very passage by Milton that you have just read, and her comment is, "How grossly do they insult us who thus advise us to render ourselves gentle, domestic brutes!" Although Wollstonecraft lived during the relatively open-minded Romantic Period, she was hated and ridiculed by men of her own time and the Victorians who followed. A Twentieth Century scholar, Russell Noyes, made this observation in 1956:
When Mary Wollstonecraft spoke out, she used great plainness
of speech and her book aroused widespread opposition. After
its publication, she was called a 'hyena in petticoats' and
denounced as a social outcast. Actually, her teachings seem
conservative when compared to the present status of English
and American women.5
As this example illustrates, Milton's views on the status of women were not only shared by men during his own lifetime but for many generations after his death, and those who opposed this majority view were harshly rejected. When we read Milton, we must understand that whether we like it or not, his writings accurately reflect the Seventeenth Century British opinion that women were mentally inferior to men.
His religious views were also shared by many of his countrymen. Milton lived during a time of great religious upheaval. In fact, Milton, a Puritan, was a member of a political faction which started a civil war in England culminating in the execution of King Charles l and the control of the English government for eleven years by the Puritan dominated Parliament. Puritans detested both Catholics and members of the Church of England. After they subsequently lost control of English politics and the monarchy was restored, the Puritans found themselves the victims of religious persecution at the hands of the Church of England. This state of religious tension ultimately led to the immigration of English Puritans to America. What did these Pilgrims do in America? They persecuted the peaceful Quakers and burned several of their own women at the stake, falsely accusing them of witchcraft.
The Puritans continued the traditional British anti-Catholic values in America also, and back in England, Catholics were not allowed to hold public office or graduate from universities for generations. In fact, it was officially illegal to be Catholic in England until 1829. English Catholic poets who suffered varying degrees of persecution and ostracization include John Dryden, Alexander Pope, John Donne, and Gerard Manley Hopkins. Under pressure from King James l, Donne finally converted to the Church of England and became Dean of St. Paul's Cathedral. One of his motives for this conversion could have been his need to support his wife and their twelve children, seven of whom survived. I hope you see how important it is to look at a poet and his or her work in the framework of the time and place in which this poet lived. Far from censoring poets because their views don't conform to our own, we can learn valuable lessons from writers like John Milton that will help us understand how our own opinions about religion and sexual identity have evolved.
As a writer of poetry, I encourage you to focus on the subjects that you feel passionately called to write about and use the words that seem best to express what you have to say. Not everyone will like your words or your subject. In fact, even the most innocuous poem is bound to offend someone. And if you write on social issues, you run the risk of being deemed politically incorrect. As a poet, you will just have to take your chances and be true to your heart and soul. If you are ridiculed for your writing, you will be in good company.
Having said this, I must admit that I do not necessarily believe that all poets are entirely pure in their motives. Some writers deliberately use offensive language solely for the pleasure of shocking and annoying their readers and gaining attention for themselves. Then these would-be artists rationalize their motives as "pure art." Or they focus on profoundly disturbing topics claiming that they are merely "reflecting the values of the culture." This trend has been taken to extremes in the film industry where offensive language, gratuitous violence, abuse of women, and racist behavior are routinely included in films, apparently on the theory that shock sells. Particularly inexcusable is the argument that this kind of "art" reflects society. Although many might disagree with me, I believe that it is not the artist's job merely to "reflect the culture." It is also his or her responsibility to play a visionary role in leading the culture to a higher level of consciousness. In this context, perhaps we can take a poet like Milton to task for failing to recognize his own prejudices, even if they were widely shared by his contemporaries.
Jonathan Swift spoke out for the rights of women when it was not politically correct to do so, and the English Romantic poet Lord Byron advocated the emancipation of Catholics to an unsympathetic House of Lords. In America, Paul Laurence Dunbar expressed the feelings of African Americans before the Harlem Renaissance, a time of great creativity for African American artists that began in the early 1920s. Dunbar's poetry made it easier for Langston Hughes to find an audience, and ultimately, Hughes and other poets played a profound role in the American Civil Rights movement. Historic British poets whose work has had a visionary quality include William Blake, Percy Shelley, and William Butler Yeats.
My point is that because poetry is such a powerful medium, poets must be especially careful to discern their own motivations and to rise above immature, shallow, and selfish influences. They must also look at their own values with a critical eye, not relying solely on the opinions of their peers. There is another very sensitive issue that poets must be aware of. One of my professors referred to this issue as "literary cannibalism." Cannibalism in poetry is the temptation to write about the private misfortunes of others, particularly members of one's own family. Let me give you an example. I attended a public poetry reading several years ago in which a poet stood up and informed the audience that the poem she was about to read was about her daughter's abortion. I remember feeling outraged that this poet would violate her daughter's privacy in this way and furthermore that she would use this painful experience to advance her own career as a poet. Certainly there is nothing wrong with writing about abortion, a topic about which people have very deep feelings. The ethical issue for me had to do with sensationalizing the private pain of a family member. In another example of literary cannibalism, a very famous Twentieth Century American poet added to his own fame by writing about his wife's mental illness. Although many will argue that all topics must be open to the artist, I hope you will give some thought to the ramifications of literary cannibalism. The following poem by the brilliant American poet Sylvia Plath might give you something to think about.
Daddy
You do not do, you do not do
Any more, black shoe
In which I have lived like a foot
For thirty years, poor and white,
Barely daring to breathe or Achoo.
Daddy, I have had to kill you.
You died before I had time--
Marble-heavy, a bag full of God,
Ghastly statue with one gray toe
Big as a Frisco seal
And a head in the freakish Atlantic
Where it pours bean green over blue
In the waters off beautiful Nauset.
I used to pray to recover you.
Ach, du.
In the German tongue, in the Polish town
Scraped flat by the roller
Of wars, wars, wars.
But the name of the town is common.
My Polack friend
Says there are a dozen or two.
So I never could tell where you
Put your foot, your root,
I never could talk to you.
The tongue stuck in my jaw.
It stuck in a barb wire snare.
Ich, ich, ich, ich,
I could hardly speak.
I thought every German was you.
And the language obscene
An engine, an engine
Chuffing me off like a Jew.
A Jew to Dachau, Auschwitz, Belsen.
I began to talk like a Jew.
I think I may well be a Jew.
The snows of the Tyrol, the clear beer of Vienna
Are not very pure or true.
With my gipsy ancestress and my weird luck
And my Taroc pack and my Taroc pack
I may be a bit of a Jew.
I have always been scared of you,
With your Luftwaffe, your gobbledygoo.
And your neat mustache
And your Aryan eye, bright blue.
Panzer-man, panzer-man, O You--
Not God but a swastika
So black no sky could squeak through.
Every woman adores a Fascist,
The boot in the face, the brute
Brute heart of a brute like you.
You stand at the blackboard, daddy,
In the picture I have of you,
A cleft in your chin instead of your foot
But no less a devil for that, no not
Any less the black man who
Bit my pretty red heart in two.
I was ten when they buried you.
At twenty I tried to die
And get back, back, back to you.
I thought even the bones would do.
But they pulled me out of the sack,
And they stuck me together with glue.
And then I knew what to do.
I made a model of you,
A man in black with a Meinkampf look
And a love of the rack and the screw.
And I said, I do, I do.
So daddy, I'm finally through.
The black telephone's off the root,
The voices just can't worm through.
If I've killed one man, I've killed two--
The vampire who said he was you
And drank my blood for a year,
Seven years, if you want to know.
Daddy, you can lie back now.
There's a stake in your fat black heart
And the villagers never liked you.
They are dancing and stamping on you.
They always knew it was you.
Daddy, daddy, you bastard, I'm through.
Sylvia Plath's father, Otto Plath, was a German immigrant and a college professor. He died of a gangrenous leg when Sylvia was eight years old. She makes several specific references to her father's appearance, background, and profession in the poem. Many readers and critics, including Elizabeth Hardwick have been shocked by the viciousness of Plath's attack on her dead father. Hardwick has pointed out that Mr. Plath never killed anyone, and that it is Sylvia herself who has a "fat black heart" and an ungenerous spirit. In response to this kind of criticism, Plath's literary editors, Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar, have written, "The problem with such remarks, which are representative of a good many attacks which have been mounted against Plath, is that the literary figure of "Daddy" in the poem of that name... is not identical with, but rather generalized from, Plath's literal father."6 I find this explanation difficult to accept, especially in light of the fact that the poet so carefully included details about her literal father and autobiographical references to her own suicide attempt and recently failed marriage. It is not easy to see the father in this poem as a generalized or archetypal father figure. A daughter's relationship with her father is certainly a universal theme, and many readers have appreciated "Daddy" in that context. But, ethically speaking, is the real Mr. Plath, who is dead, able to respond to any of his daughters charges against him, including comparing him to Adolph Hitler and the devil?
This question might bring us back to Sei Shonagon, who blithely ridicules Masahiro as a laughingstock, while Masahiro, who might very well have been a charming and decent man, has no voice to tell us what his life was really all about. In her defense, Shonagon's journal, unlike Plath's poem, is at least ostensibly a private piece of writing. But how much of the shadow should we express, even in our journals, and how much cannibalism should we allow ourselves in our poetry? If we remember that the shadow is really the aspect of our personality that we have denied or not developed, we might use our journals more profitably to try to develop those aspects of our personality that threaten us. John Milton's personal writings reveal a deep attraction to and fear of the emotional power of women. If you feel threatened by the opposite sex, of if you feel the need to scapegoat, you might want to make some lists in your journal such as, "Why I Am Afraid of Women," or "Why I Am Homophobic," or "Why I Feel the Need to Humiliate Men," or "Why I Don't Have Any Asian Friends." Some startling poems could evolve out of these lists.
You can also learn to avoid literary cannibalism by fictionalizing your poems and creating a persona, a voice who speaks in the poem who is understood not to be the poet. This is the same technique as using first person point of view in a short story or novel. Readers all understand that Huckleberry Finn, the narrator in the novel by the same name, is not Mark Twain. The same thing can happen in poetry. The Romantic poet w
William Blake, whose poems you read in Chapter 2, used a variety of personas in his collections called Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience. A theme which runs through both sets of poems is the exploitation of children by greedy and hypocritical adults. In particular, Blake advocated child labor reform, and the use of children as chimney sweeps was especially disturbing to him. In Songs of Innocence, he includes a poem called "The Chimney Sweeper," written in the voice of a boy who has been sold as an indentured laborer by his own father. The use of the persona is especially effective in this poem because of the ironic contrast between the boy's innocence and faith and the cynical manipulation by adults that the reader is able to infer. When the boy first started working, he was so young that he could not pronounce the word "sweep" yet, so instead he said "weep." The connotations of this word create for the adult reader a picture of the sorrow that is ahead for this trusting boy. The last line of the poem is especially ironic because the boy is truly trying to do his "duty," but have the adults in his life been as conscientious in doing their ethical duty toward him?
The Chimney Sweeper
When my mother died I was very young,
And my father sold me while yet my tongue
Could scarcely cry''weep! 'weep! 'weep! 'weep!'
So your chimneys I sweep, & in soot I sleep.
There's little Tom Dacre, who cried when his head
That curl'd like a lamb's back, was shav'd: so I said
'Hush, Tom! never mind it, for when your head's
bare
You know that the soot cannot spoil your white
hair.'
And so he was quiet, & that very night,
As Tom was a-sleeping, he had such a sight!
That thousands of sweepers, Dick, Joe, Ned,
& Jack,
Were all of them lock'd up in coffins of black.
And by came an Angel who had a bright key,
And he open'd the coffins & set them all free;
Then down a green plain leaping, laughing, they
run,
And wash in a river, and shine in the Sun.
Then naked & white, all their bags left behind,
They rise upon clouds and sport in the wind;
And the Angel told Tom, if he'd be a good boy,
He'd have God for his father, & never want joy.
And so Tom awoke; and we rose in the dark,
And got with our bags and our brushes to work.
Tho' the morning was cold, Tom was happy &
warm;
So if all do their duty they need not fear harm.
Notice that the use of the persona in this poem separates Blake's personal life and relationship with his biological father from the issue of social child abuse. The use of the child narrator, who innocently describes his friend Tom's death dream, creates tremendous sympathy for the exploited children in the poem. By fictionalizing the events in the poem, Blake presents his theme without cannibalizing any actual people. Contrast this poem with Plath's "Daddy." Which poem has a more clearly presented theme? Which creates a higher level of sympathy for the abused child? Which poem do you think will continue to inspire readers in future generations?
I hope you have grasped the idea that with a little fictionalizing and the use of a persona, a very personal perception can be transformed into a poem of great power and passion without violating your privacy or anyone else's. Here is a final thought about literary cannibalism. When in doubt, always take the high road. Read the truly great poets like Shakespeare, Chaucer, and Murasaki. You will see that they ignore none of life's sorrow, yet the power of their poetry is never based on viciousness or the exploitation of other people's pain.
Although some of what she says is unkind, I encourage you to read The Pillow Book of Sei shonagon in its entirety. There is much that a journal writer and poet can gain from reading this great classic. Here is a list of some of the valuable lessons that I have leaned from Sei Shonagon:
1. Pay close attention to nature. Shonagon places all of her observations in the context of the seasons of the year. She is particularly skillful at observing how changes in nature influence human life.
2. Great writing encompasses the ordinary. It is not necessary to include larger than life scenes of travel and adventure to be a good writer. As a lady in waiting, Shonagon spent most of her life in virtual confinement, yet she found great fascination in the daily activities of those around her. In your own journal, you may discover that everyday events, placed in the context of the changing seasons, can connect with universal themes.
3. Negative thoughts are part of being human. In the world of art, there is no such thing as a "wrong" emotion. Shonagon expresses a variety of critical, angry, and judgmental attitudes. In your journal, you can safely express all of your feelings, even those that are not considered socially attractive. You will need to develop a mature level of discernment when you transfer these feelings into poetry.
4. Writing lists is an excellent source of inspiration. Shonagon's lists are filled with fascinating specific images. It is easy to turn the images from a list into poetry.
5. Anyone can focus on contrasts, but a great writer can see comparisons. Shonagon's real genius is her ability to see similarities between things that other people would think of as being different. Try to train yourself to see the comparison, for example, between the back of a piece of embroidery and a sick, unloved woman. One of the most important functions of a poet is to make connections which readers would not ordinarily make for themselves.
Let's look at another journal that in its own way is as beautifully written as Sei Shonagon's Pillow Book-- The Journals of Dorothy Wordsworth. Dorothy was the sister of William Wordsworth, one of the founders of the Romantic movement in English poetry and ultimately Poet Laureate of England. Dorothy was a devoted companion to her brother William and spent her entire adult life as a member of his household. She never married, and after William married, Dorothy remained in his home and helped to care for his five children. Earlier, she, William, and Samuel Taylor Coleridge had all benefited from a symbiotic relationship in which the three strongly influenced each other's writing. Between 1797 and 1802, the three lived near each other in England's beautiful lake district and met regularly to discuss poetry and share their perceptions of nature. Both William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge wrote some of their best poetry during this time of close association.
The Lyrical Ballads, a collection of poems by William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge published in 1798, was the first major work of Romantic poetry in England. The Preface, which William added in 1802, contains his now famous definition of poetry as "... the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings." He further refined this definition by saying that poetry was "... emotion recollected in tranquility."7 This definition gives us some insight into how William Wordsworth wrote his poetry and into the unique relationship he had with his sister Dorothy.
Apparently the Wordsworths, often accompanied by Coleridge, would take walks in the countryside observing nature in its various seasonal manifestations. The three were profoundly moved by the beauty of nature, and Dorothy would record their observations in her journals. (These journals are now known as The Alfoxden Journal and The Grasmere Journals, referring to the villages where Dorothy and William were living at the time.) Later, recollecting these strong emotional responses in the tranquility of their home, William wrote his poems, using Dorothy's journals to jog his memory.
In the following passage from The Alfoxden Journal, Dorothy describes the magnificent daffodils that she and William observed while walking together in April of 1802:
When we were in the woods beyond Gowbarrow park we saw a few
daffodils close to the water side. We fancied that the lake
had floated the seeds ashore and that the little colony had so
sprung up. But as we went along there were more and yet more and
at last under the boughs of the trees, we saw that there was a
long belt of them along the shore, about the breadth of a country
turnpike road. I never saw daffodils so beautiful they grew among
the mossy stones about and about them, some rested their heads upon
these stones as on a pillow for weariness, and the rest tossed and
reeled and danced and seemed as if they verily laughed with the wind
that blew upon them over the lake, they looked so gay ever glancing
ever changing. This wind blew directly over the lake to them. There
was here and there a little knot and a few stragglers a few yards
higher up but they were so few as not the disturb the simplicity
and unity and life of that one busy highway.
Two years later, relying heavily on this description in Dorothy's journal, William wrote this beautiful poem, which has helped to make him world famous:
I wandered lonely as a cloud
I wandered lonely as a cloud
That floats on high o'er vales and hills,
When all at once I saw a crowd,
A host, of golden daffodils;
Beside the lake, beneath the trees,
Fluttering and dancing in the breeze.
Continuous as the stars that shine
And twinkle on the milky way,
They stretched in never-ending line
Along the margin of a bay;
Ten thousand saw I at a glance,
Tossing their heads in sprightly dance.
The waves beside them danced; but they
Out-did the sparkling waves in glee:
A poet could not but be gay,
In such a jocund company:
I gazed--and gazed--but little thought
What wealth the show to me had brought:
For oft when on my couch I lie
I vacant or in pensive mood,
They flash upon that inward eye
Which is the bliss of solitude;
And then my heart with pleasure fills
And dances with the daffodils.
This lovely poem certainly illustrates William's definition of poetry as "emotion recollected in tranquility." In another outing in February of 1798, Dorothy describes how sheep rub up against fences, leaving behind tufts of wool and spots of red paint that was used to mark the sheep for identification:
Walked a great part of the way to Stowey with Coleridge. The
morning warm and sunny. The young lasses seen on the hill-tops,
in the villages and roads, in their summer holiday clothes--
pink petticoats and blue. Mothers with their children in arms,
and the little ones that could just walk, tottering by their side.
Midges or small flies spinning in the sunshine; the songs of the
lark and the redbreast; daisies upon the turf; the hazels in
blossom; honeysuckles budding. I saw one solitary strawberry
flower under a hedge. The furze gay with blossom. The moss
rubbed from the pailings by the sheep, that leave locks of wool,
and the red marks with which they are spotted, upon the wood.
This image found its way into a long poem called "The Ruined Cottage" which William wrote in 1798. The section quoted below seems to have been inspired by the passage from Dorothy's Alfoxden Journal:
And, looking round, I saw the corner-stones,
Till then unmark'd, on either side the door
Will dull red stains discoloured and stuck o'er
With tufts and hairs of wool, as if the sheep
That feed upon the commons thither came
Familiarly and found a couching-place
Even at her threshold.
Are you starting to wonder about the authorship of these poems? Students know very well that if they lift material from another source and place it into a research paper without giving credit to the original writer, they are guilty of plagiarism. Yet history has always given William full credit for all of his poems, and he himself always accepted that recognition. One might argue that Dorothy was simply playing the role of recording secretary, listing a few images for her brother, who was the real poetic genius, to transform into sublime poems. But if we read her journals carefully, it becomes apparent that she herself had a remarkable gift for observation, as this passage from The Grasmere Journals reveals:
We rested a long time under a wall. Sheep and lambs were in the
field--cottages smoking. As I lay down on the grass, I observed
the glittering silver line on the ridges of the Backs of the sheep,
owing to their situation respecting the Sun--which made them look
beautiful but with something of strangeness, like animals of another
kind--as if belonging to a more splendid world.
In a section of the "Preface to the Lyrical Ballads" called "What is a Poet?" William Wordsworth defined a poet as "...a man speaking to men."8 He apparently meant that definition literally, and he seems to have been only partially aware of his sister's profound contribution to his own success as a poet. The story of their relationship has a tragic ending. At the age of about fifty-four, Dorothy, who had previously been a sweet, loving, and giving person, lost her sanity completely and became hateful and at times violent. To his credit, William cared for her with great kindness and patience until his own death five years before hers. In one of my trips to England, I visited their graves in a small churchyard in the lovely little town of Grasmere. I was overwhelmed with a poignant sense of loss. I must try to avoid both literary cannibalism and inept psychoanalysis. But one cannot help but wonder how Dorothy's life might have been different if England had been the kind of country that welcomed and nurtured poets like Sappho and Sei Shonagon, and if poetry had been defined as "men and women speaking to women and men."
Although Dorothy Wordsworth's writings have not received the same level of literary recognition, there are several similarities between her journals and Sei Shonagon's Pillow Book. Like Shonagon, Dorothy is a keen observer of nature, and her writings are based on the ordinary activities of her life. Dorothy also has the gift of comparing things that seem different to most people, as when she likens a profusion of daffodils growing together to a highway. In addition, both writers are masters of the art of detail, and it is detail which forms the essence of good poetry. One cannot write effective poems about birds and flowers. One must write about daffodils and larks as Dorothy does. Good poems are often subtle, frequently ambiguous, but never vague. A poet must really look and really see the exact specific image. Dorothy's journals reflect a remarkable accuracy of observation. You may wish to re-read the passages from her journals in this chapter and notice her exact attention to colors, spatial relationships, and the specificity with which she names each bird and flower.
In your own journals, you can begin to discipline yourself to be as specific as possible. Instead of using words like "car," "dog," "tree," etc., learn to be more exact. Write "1994 Honda Civic," "golden retriever," and "catalpa." If you don't know the actual names of things, start learning. Part of your responsibility as a poet is to hold your reader's attention, and vague poems are boring. There are plenty of sources, such as The Audubon Society Encyclopedia of North American Birds, which I keep on my coffee table at all times so I can look up the names of birds that happen to visit my back yard. But you should never hesitate just to ask someone for information. The world is full of experts who are more than happy to share their knowledge of subjects from jazz to quilting to cranberry farming to making tortillas. Some of these experts are our grandparents, and it is just amazing the things they know that we don't. The following poem by the Twentieth Century poet, D.H. Lawrence, succeeds because of the specificity of its imagery.
Bavarian Gentians
Not every man has gentians in his house
in Soft September, at slow, Sad Michaelmas.
Bavarian gentians, big and dark, only dark
darkening the daytime torchlike with the smoking blueness of
Pluto's gloom,
ribbed and torchlike, with their blaze of darkness spread blue
down flattening into points, flattened under the sweep of white day
torch-flower of the blue-smoking darkness, Pluto's dark-blue daze,
black lamps from the halls of Dis, burning dark blue,
giving off darkness, blue darkness, as Demeter's pale lamps
give off light,
lead me then, lead me the way.
Reach me a gentian, give me a torch
let me guide myself with the blue, forked torch of this flower
down the darker and the darker stairs, where blue is darkened
on blueness.
even where Persephone goes, just now, from the frosted September
to the sightless realm where darkness was awake upon the dark
and Persephone herself is but a voice
or a darkness invisible enfolded in the deeper dark
of the arms Plutonic, and pierced with the passion of dense
gloom,
among the splendor of torches of darkness, shedding darkness
on the lost bride and her groom.
To appreciate this poem fully, you will need to use the ten-step procedure that you learned in Chapter 3. Of course you will want to look up the mythological figures, Pluto, Demeter, and Persephone, to whom Lawrence alludes. Also, if you have never seen a Bavarian gentian, you will need to get a book of botanical prints and see exactly what this flower looks like. This will help you appreciate the accuracy of Lawrence's description. The repeated use of the words "dark" and "darkness" along with the descending motion and the references to the coming of autumn should give you a hint about the poem's theme. Lawrence's biographers, Harry T. Moore and Warren Roberts, made the following comment about the genesis of this poem:
Lawrence... became desperately ill in Florence. In July
Frieda [Lawrence's wife] brought him to Baden-Baden for a
rest, and in September they returned to Bandol, where they
rented the Villa Beau Soleil. En route they had stopped in
Bavaria, where Lawrence wrote one of his greatest poems,
Bavarian Gentians... He knew that he was near death, which
he had held off for so long, to the astonishment of doctors.
He allowed one to examine him in Bavaria because he was also
a poet--Hans Carossa--who was amazed that Lawrence could go
on living.9
I think Dorothy Wordsworth would have liked this poem, even though it is not written in one of the traditional rhyming stanzas that would have been familiar to her. Lawrence's ability to find archetypal meaning in the specific colors and shapes of flowers gives the poem a timeless appeal.
Learning about detail is essential to the poet's craft. What else can a poet learn from Dorothy Wordsworth? Certainly her unique relationship with her brother calls us to reflect on the creative process itself and the subtle line between collaboration and plagiarism. In the world of traditional art, it was customary to learn from a master painter or poet, and imitation was the highest form of praise. Many sonnet writers have tried to emulate the style of Petrarch, the great Italian master of the form. In Japan, the same kind of mentoring took place among haiku poets. In Chapter 2, you read this poem by the eminent painter-poet, Yosa Buson:
On the temple bell
has settled, and is fast asleep,
a butterfly.
Masaoka Shiki, a haiku poet who lived from 1867 to 1902, admired Buson so much that he wrote this poem in his honor:
On the temple bell
has settled, and is glittering,
a firefly.
Is this plagiarism? In Japan, the answer is no. First of all, there is no attempt on Shiki's part to steal from Buson. He assumed that his readers were all familiar with the famous haiku by his predecessor and would recognize his own poem as a tribute to his mentor. Secondly, the two poems are not identical. Buson's poem takes place in the spring during the day, and Shiki's is a summer poem, set in the evening. As Harold Henderson, the translator of both poems points out, "The technique is exactly the same; the feeling conveyed is completely different."10 I the ethics of art, Henderson makes an important point. Every poet needs to learn technique, and the best place to learn it is from a poet who has already achieved greatness. Using the same technique as another poet is not plagiarism. But how about using another poet's words? Did William Wordsworth plagiarize, for example, when he referred to the dancing daffodils described in Dorothy's journal? To find the answer, you will have to look into your own conscience. If you are aware that another writer has used the same words that you then choose to put into a poem without giving credit to the original author, you are plagiarizing.
It is difficult sometimes not to plagiarize on an unconscious level. The more we read, the more beautiful lines of poetry float through our heads. When Keats wrote his epitaph, "Here lies one whose name is writ in water," was he thinking of Catullus' lines, "...her words should be written upon the wind and engraved in rapid water"? Unconscious plagiarism does not seem to me to be a crime, but if you are conscious of wanting to use another poet's words, you can honor that poet and save yourself from humiliation (and possible litigation) by using an epigraph. An epigraph is a short quotation placed at the beginning of a poem to indicate the idea or sentiment that inspired the poem. H. D. began a long poem which she entitled "Fragment Thirty-six" with an epigraph from Sappho:
Fragment Thirty-six
I know not what to do:
my mind is divided.--SAPPHO.
I know not what to do,
my mind is reft:
is song's gift best?
is love's gift loveliest?
I know not what to do,
now sleep has pressed
weight on your eyelids.
I have included only the first stanza of this poem so you can see how the epigraph works. By quoting directly from Sappho in the epigraph, H. D. gives credit to the poet who inspired her. Then when Sappho's exact words appear in the poem itself, the reader recognizes H. D.'s indebtedness to her mentor and some thematic connection between the two works. An epigraph is a wonderful device for avoiding plagiarism and adding a level of interest and complexity to your own poem.
Earlier I used the word "collaboration" as the pretty side of the coin whose ugly face is plagiarism. You may recall that I also mentioned in this chapter that William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge collaborated in writing some of their lyrical ballads. Although it is more common in song writing, collaboration, or shared authorship, does occasionally happen in poetry. A more common occurrence is the phenomenon I call the Muse Syndrome. In ancient Greek culture, a muse was a goddess who inspired an artist in his creative efforts. Tradition lists nine muses, each assigned to a specific art form. Calliope, the highest ranking of the group, was the Muse of Epic Poetry and Eloquence. The other muses included Clio, Muse of History; Euterpe, Goddess of Flute Playing; Thalia, Muse of Comedy; Melpomene, the Muse of Tragedy; Terpsichore, Muse of Lyric Poetry and Dance; Erato, the Muse of Love Poetry; Polyhymnia, the Muse first of Heroic Hymns and later of Mimic Art; and Urania, the Muse of Astronomy.11
This list is interesting because it tells us that the Greeks valued Epic Poetry above all other art forms. From the modern sociological perspective, this is worth noting, since Epic Poems are long narratives which glorify war, battle scenes, and the use of weapons. All of the heroes of Epic Poetry are warriors. The list of Muses is also interesting because the Greeks included History and Astronomy among the arts. Today, these ancient art forms are viewed as a social science and a physical science respectively. But what really makes this list interesting is the relationship between the Muse and the poet.
Traditionally, the poet would pray to his Muse for inspiration. Often he would even begin his poem with an invocation to the Muse. This is an accepted element in Epic Poetry. John Milton began Paradise Lost, a literary epic, with an invocation to Urania, the Muse of Astronomy, whom he associated with the Biblical Holy Spirit. An invocation is a prayer, calling upon a deity for help, protection, or inspiration. In a traditional relationship between the poet and his Muse, the poet specifically names his Muse and publicly calls upon her for help. This was a way of recognizing a source of creative inspiration outside the poet himself.
In later years, poets often entered into relationships with actual women who inspired their poetry in various ways. Sometimes a poet's spouse played the role of Muse, as Mary Shelley did for her husband Percy. The Nobel Prize winning Irish poet, William Butler Yeats, wrote some of his best poems about his unrequited love for the beautiful actress Maud Gonne. Jungian psychologists would refer to these modern muses as anima figures--women who represent the feminine side of the poet himself. A female poet might have an animus figure in her life--a man who represents her own masculine side. Sometimes these muses or anima figures devoted their entire lives and all of their own creative energies to keep the poet's inspiration alive. This is the Muse Syndrome. The Muse Syndrome is actually a form of collaborative creativity. However, unlike the Greek Muse who is called forth by name in the invocation at the beginning of the poem, the later muse figure often received no recognition at all. Has Dorothy Wordsworth come to mind? While the Muse Syndrome can be a symbiotic and mutually inspiring relationship, its shadow side, if the two participants do not recognize its nature, can resemble both cannibalism and plagiarism.
In your own life you probably find some of your inspiration in your relationships with others. There may even be a very special person who plays the role of muse for you. How can you avoid devouring your special friend? Awareness is the key. You can use your journal to explore the nature of your relationship with this person, and you must be absolutely honest with yourself if you discover that your friendship with this special person focuses primarily on your own needs. You must also avoid the egotistical fallacy that poets are more important than other people. They are not. In this regard, you might look to John Keats, the poet we studied in Chapter 3, as a role model. His fiancee, Fanny Brawne, was a great source of inspiration to him, but Keats did not place his needs above hers.
There are some practical things you can do to honor the muse in your life. You can write a poem thanking this person for the inspiration that he or she has given you. Or, you can dedicate a poem to that person. The idea behind these two suggestions is to give credit and recognition where it is due. Alternatively, if you discover that you are draining too much energy from one person, you might look for other sources of inspiration. I am very serious about this point. I have seen far too many cases of creative people who are completely unaware of the excessive demands and expectations they are placing on their creative support people. You might try a return to the traditional Greek custom of looking to an archetypal muse to guide your creativity. Spiritual figures, ancestors, saints, and elements in nature can also serve as muses. Or there man be a secret voice within you that you can name and call upon when your creativity needs direction. You will also remember from Chapter 2 that painters, musicians, and architects can play a muse-like role in a poet's life. In fact, any kind of artist--a writer, a gardener, a dancer, a chef--any person who helps to light the fire of creativity within you can be your muse.
I hope that reading the journals of Dorothy Wordsworth has already made you a better poet and a better person. Let's take a quick look at the fascinating Diary of Samuel Pepys. I mentioned the diary of this intriguing Londoner, who pronounced his last name "Peeps," earlier in this chapter. You will recall that he wrote in secret code because he included comments about his extra-marital affairs along with the myriad other details in this 1.3 million word diary.12 The most important thing a poet can learn from Pepys is that writing does not need to be static like a still life painting. Poetry can be dynamic and active. It can be inspired by people in motion and events, not solely by "emotion recollected in tranquility."
Pepys was what we would call a doer. He lived from 1633 to 1703 during a period known as the Restoration or the Neoclassical Age, a very extraverted and sociable time in British history. Pepys seems to have known almost everyone in London, and he has always reminded me of Geoffrey Chaucer, who lived in the same exciting city three hundred years earlier. The Wordsworths, who were born more than a hundred years later than Pepys, preferred the quiet life in the country, which was the Romantic ideal. In 1666, when Pepys was thirty-three years old, a great disaster occurred in his beloved London. Almost the entire city was destroyed in a terrible fire. Pepys describes this event in vivid detail in his diary. Since this is truly a private diary never intended for publication, you will notice that Pepys writes in a rather terse and hurried style, often omitting verbs. Pepys' diary was deciphered and published in the nineteenth century, and suddenly, long after his death, he became famous. His description of the Great Fire of London is so real and immediate that we feel the heat and the terror, as though we were hurrying through the city at Samuel's side:
So down, with my heart full of trouble, to the Lieutenant
of the Tower, who tells me that it begun this morning in the
King's baker's house in Pudding Lane, and that it hath burned
down St. Magnus' Church and most part of Fish Street already.
So I down to the waterside and there got a boat and through
bridge, and there saw a lamentable fire. Poor Mitchell's house,
as far as the Old Swan, already burned that way and the fire running
further, that in a very little time it got as far as the Steelyard
while I was there. Everybody endeavoring to remove their goods,
and flinging into the river or bringing them into lighters that
lay off. Poor people staying in their houses as long as till the
very fire touched them, and then running into boats or clambering
from one pair of stair by the waterside to another. And among other
things the poor pigeons I perceived were loath to leave their houses,
but hovered about the windows and balconies till they were some of them
burned, their wings, and fell down....
When we could endure no more upon the water, we to a little ale-house
on the Bankside over against the Three Cranes, and there stayed till
it was dark almost and saw the fire grow; and as it grew darker,
appeared more and more, and in corners and upon steeples and between
churches and houses, as far as we could see up the hill of the City,
in a most horrid malicious bloody flame, not like the fine flame of
an ordinary fire. Barbary and her husband away before us. We stayed
till, it being darkish, we saw the fire as only one entire arch of
fire from this to the other side of the bridge, and in a bow up the
hill, for an arch of above a mile long. It made me weep to see it.
The churches, houses, and all on fire and flaming at once, and a
horrid noise the flames made, and the cracking of houses at their
ruin.
Isn't this a stunning piece of descriptive writing? Although we don't really realize it at the time, we all live through many history-changing events. Your journal is the perfect place to jot down your immediate responses to these events as you experience them. From these notes, poems can emerge. Pepys' description of the frightened and disoriented pigeons, burning their wings is a very poetic sequence of images. In writing about events, it is not necessary for a poet to describe everything that happened in chronological order. Instead, the poet can select a few images that capture the essence of the event. For me, Pepys' pigeons tell the whole story of the Great Fire of London. Remember to use all of your senses when you make journal entries about events. We forget very quickly, and we will not be able to create a vivid and powerful poem based on a vague recollection.
Our journals can also help us find the meanings in current events. In Hardy's "Convergence of the Twain," for example, which you read in Chapter 2, Hardy found in the accidental sinking of the Titanic a message about excessive ostentation and vanity. When an event occurs that especially captures your attention, write some notes to yourself about the significance of this event. This will help you focus on a theme when you transform these notes into a poem. At the end of this chapter, I have included some poems that were written in response to specific events. In reading these poems, you will notice that the poet's perception of the event, not the event itself, is what gives the poem its power.
There are many other uses to which you can put your journal. You can use it to describe moods, dreams, passionate opinions and feelings about issues such as justice and racism. You can even use your journal to write letters to people--letters you will not necessarily want to send. All of these elements have been used as the basis for poems. But if you do not write your dream or your thought down, it will disappear, and it will never become a poem. I hope your journals will become your little treasures, as mine have become for me, scattered everywhere around my house, filled with tiny jewels waiting to be polished into poems.
QUESTIONS AND TOPICS FOR REVIEW
1. Define and provide and example of each of the following terms:
zuihitsu
miscellany
journal
diary
haibun
2. Who was the author of Narrow Road to the Deep North?
3. What techniques can a poet learn from reading each of the following works?
The Pillow Book of Sei Shonagon
The Journals of Dorothy Wordsworth
The Diary of Samuel Pepys
4. What is literary cannibalism? Give an example.
5. What is a persona? Give an example of the use of a persona in poetry.
6. Define and give an example of plagiarism.
7. What is an epigraph? How can an epigraph be used in poetry?
8. Explain the muse syndrome.
9. Define the terms anima and animus. How do these concepts relate to the muse syndrome?
10. Who were the Muses, and what was their function in ancient Greek art and literature?
TOPICS FOR DISCUSSION
1. Should there be guidelines for appropriateness in subject matter and language for poetry? Why or why not?
2. Should poetry ever be censored? Why or why not?
3. Research the plagiarism laws in your state and report your findings to the class.
4. Research the plagiarism policy of your college or university. What are the penalties for academic plagiarism? Do you believe that these penalties are fair? Should they be stricter or more lenient?
5. Should poetry and other art forms reflect the values of society, or should art play a visionary role, challenging society to a higher standard of values?
6. Should poets feel free to write on private family issues? Why or why not?
7. Research the positions of Poet Laureate in England and the United States. Who are the current Poet Laureates? Who were some of the previous ones? How do these positions in the two countries differ? How are they similar? Does Canada have a Poet Laureate? How about Mexico?
ACTIVITIES
1. Purchase a notebook which will become your poetry journal. Write in it as frequently as you can, preferably every day. You may wish to include some of the following topics:
descriptions of people
descriptions of places
lists
notes on the seasons of the year
descriptions of nature
notes on events and activities
descriptions of moods
letters to real, imaginary, or historic people
descriptions of dreams
emotional responses to situations and events
2. Write a series of collaborative lists by passing sheets of paper around the class, each with its own heading. Each student will add one or more items to each list. You may use some of Sei Shonagon's topics, or develop new ones of your own. Some possible topics for lists include:
Amusing Things
Depressing Things
Squalid Things
Things That Make the Heart Beat Faster
Embarrassing Things
Poignant Things
Disgusting Things
Exquisite Things
Read the completed lists in class and notice the variety of responses to the same stimulus.
3. Using one of the topics above or a topic of your own, write a spontaneous list in class, without collaborating with other students. Reformat your list, if necessary, into a poem that pleases you. Read your list poems to each other without critical comments. Notice of anyone included comparisons between items that are usually perceived to be different.
4. Organize a formal debate on the issue of censorship of poetry and other forms of literature. Include specific works of literature such as Huckleberry Finn, Paradise Lost, The Merchant of Venice, etc., in your arguments for and against censorship.
5. Organize a mock trial in which William Wordsworth is accused of plagiarizing from his sister Dorothy's journal. Mobilize prosecution and defense teams, and assign members of the class to play the parts of William, Dorothy, and various witnesses, including Samuel Taylor Coleridge.
6. Organize a similar mock trial in which Samuel Taylor Coleridge is accused of plagiarizing "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner" from a variety of sources. This project will require some time and extensive research. To prepare for this case, both the prosecution and defense teams will need to read "The Road to Xanadu," an essay by Professor Lowes, who contends that every detail in the poem can be found in Coleridge's reading.
ANALYTICAL WRITING ASSIGNMENTS
1. Write an analysis of Sylvia Plath's "Daddy," supporting or attacking the thesis that the father figure in the poem is "... not identical with but rather generalized from Plath's literal father."
2. Analyze William Blake's use of a variety of personas in his poetry collections entitled "Songs of Innocence" and "Songs of Experience." What effect does each persona create in conveying the meaning of the individual poem?
3. Write a paper analyzing Coleridge's use of two narrators in "Rime of the Ancient Mariner." What does each of these personas contribute to the overall effect and meaning of the poem?
4. Analyze the mythological elements in D.H. Lawrence's "Bavarian Gentians." How do these elements help to convey the poem's theme?
5. Study a botanical illustration of Bavarian gentians. Then write a paper analyzing how Lawrence uses the colors and shapes of these flowers to express the poem's theme.
6. Research the relationship between William Butler Yeats and Maud Gonne. Then analyze Yeats' comparison between Gonne and Helen of Troy in "No Second Troy" in the context of the overall theme and meaning of the poem.
7. Analyze the attitude or attitudes toward death in John Keats' "Ode to a Nightingale." You may wish to compare these attitudes to comments made by Keats in some of his personal letters.
8. Analyze how the use of specific natural settings influences the effect and themes of any of the following poems:
Roberts' "The Potato Harvest"
Lampman's "Winter Evening"
Kazato's "Golden Poplar"
9. Analyze the significance of the muse figure in any of the following poems:
Milton's "Methought I Saw My Late Espoused Saint"
Byron's "She Walks in Beauty"
Yeats' "No Second Troy"
10. The sonnet "Methought I Saw My Late Espoused Saint" by John Milton was based on a dream that Milton had after he had become completely blind. Research the context in which this poem was written and analyze the anima figure and the use of visual imagery in the poem.
11. Research the historic events surrounding Milton's sonnet "On the Late Massacre in Piedmont." Then analyze the poem's theme, focusing on Milton's use of political and religious rhetoric.
12. In each of the following poems, the poet has used a very ordinary event as the basis for contemplation. Choose one of the following poems and analyze how the poet presents his or her theme through attention to the details of this everyday event.
Takahashi's "Twilight"
Bishop's "Filling Station"
Stafford's "Traveling Through the Dark"
Avison's "A Nameless One"
13. Analyze William Wordsworth's "Lines" (Usually referred to as "Tintern Abbey") as an illustration of his definition of poetry as "...emotion recollected in tranquility."
14. Analyze the comic and satiric elements in Barbauld's "Washing-Day."
15. Compare the use of imagery in the poetry of Kobayashi Issa and Margaret Avison.
16. Compare and contrast Keats' "Ode to a Nightingale" and Shelley's "To a Sky-Lark."
17. Compare and contrast selected pairs of parallel poems from Blake's Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience.
18. Analyze the use of irony in the poetry of Paul Laurence Dunbar.
19. Analyze the focus on the microcosm and the macrocosm (the small world and the large world) in the poetry of Kobayashi Issa.
20. Analyze the use of symbols and archetypes in any of the following poems:
Coleridge's "Rime of the Ancient Mariner"
Dunbar's "We Wear the Mask"
Yeats' "No Second Troy"
CREATIVE WRITING ASSIGNMENTS
1. Cut an article out of the newspaper and use this current event as the basis for a poem.
2. After recording several dreams in your journal, select a dream that seems to have a theme and write a poem incorporating elements from this dream. It is not necessary to tell the entire dream in chronological order, since dreams are usually a series of symbolic images.
3. Write a poem which includes a detailed description of a plant, an animal, a bird, or a flower. Your poem will not necessarily be about this element, but the item described in your poem will help convey your theme.
4. Write a poem about a characteristic in a particular person that you find annoying. Then write a companion poem in that person's voice about an annoying personality trait or habit of your own.
5. Choose an ordinary event in your life that nevertheless seems meaningful to you and write a poem about it.
6. Write a poem using imagery to express a negative emotion such as envy, arrogance, rage, etc.
7. Choose a piece of writing, a quotation, or brief phrase that you have always liked and use it as the epigraph for a poem which you will write on a related theme.
8. Write a poem using a persona.
9. Write a poem about the person who has served as your muse.
10. Write a poem which includes a list. In poetry, lists are sometimes referred to as catalogues.
11. Choose a partner, and write a collaborative poem. There are a variety of methods of collaboration. You can write alternating lines or alternating stanzas, or one person can choose the theme while the other chooses the imagery. Or one poet can write the first draft and the other can edit and revise the poem. Part of the collaborative process is deciding how to go about writing a poem together.
ADDITIONAL POEMS FOR READING AND ANALYSIS
JOHN MILTON
England 1608-1674
Methought I Saw My Late Espoused Saint
Methought I saw my late espoused saint
Brought to me like Alcestis* from the grave,
Whom Jove's great son to her glad husband gave,
Rescued from death by force though pale and faint.
Mine, as whom washed from spot of childbed taint,
Purification in the old law did save,**
And such, as yet once more I trust to have
Full sight of her in heaven without restraint,
Came vested all in white, pure as her mind.
Her face was veiled, yet to my fancied sight
Love, sweetness, goodness, in her person shined
So clear, as in no face with more delight.
But O, as to embrace me she inclined,
I waked, she fled, and day brought back my night.***
* Hercules ("Jove's great son") rescued Alcestis, wife of Admetus, from the underworld.
** Milton's second wife, Katherine Woodcock, died after childbirth. The ancient Hebrew law prescribing purification of women after childbirth is described in Leviticus 12.
*** Milton became blind in 1651. This sonnet was written in 1658.
On the Late Massacre in Piedmont*
Avenge, O Lord, thy slaughtered saints, whose bones
Lie scattered on the Alpine mountains cold;
Even them who kept thy truth so pure of old
When all our fathers worshipped stocks and stones,
Forget not: in thy book record their groans
Who were thy sheep and in their ancient fold
Slain by the bloody Piemontese that rolled
Mother with infant down the rocks. Their moans
The vales redoubled to the hills, and they
To heaven. Their martyred blood and ashes sow
O'er all th' Italian fields, where still doth sway
The triple tyrant:** that from these may grow
A hundredfold, who having learnt thy way
Early may fly the Babylonian woe.***
* The Waldenses, a heretical sect who avoided graven images ("stocks and stones"), lived in the Piedmont area of northern Italy and were massacred in 1655. Milton and other European Protestants identified with the religious values of this sect.
** "The triple tyrant" refers to the Pope, wearing his tiara with three crowns.
*** Protestants during Milton's time often compared the Roman Catholic church with the evils of Babylon. See Revelations 17-18.
ANNA LAETITIA BARBAULD
England 1743-1825
Washing-Day
...and their voice,
Turning again toward childish treble, pipes
And whistles in its sound.--
The Muses are turned gossips; they have lost
The buskined step, and clear high-sounding phrase,
Language of the gods. Come then, domestic Muse,
In slipshod measure, loosely prattling on
Of farm or orchard, pleasant curds and cream,
Or drowning flies, or shoe lost in the mire
By little whimpering boy, with rueful face;
Come, Muse, and sing the dreaded Washing-Day.
Ye who beneath the yoke of wedlock bend,
With bowed soul, full well ye ken the day
Which week, smooth sliding after week, brings on
Too soon;-- for to that day nor peace belongs
Nor comfort;-- ere the first gray streak of dawn,
The red-armed washers come and chase repose.
Nor pleasant smile, nor quaint device of mirth,
E'er visited that day: the very cat,
From the wet kitchen scared and reeking hearth,
Visits the parlour,-- an unwonted guest.
The silent breakfast-meal is soon dispatched;
Uninterrupted, save by anxious looks
Cast at the lowering sky, if sky should lower.
From that last evil, O preserve us, heavens!
For should the skies pour down, adieu to all
Remains of quiet: then expect to hear
Of sad disasters,-- dirt and gravel stains
Hard to efface, and loaded lines at once
Snapped short,-- and linen-horse by dog thrown down,
And all the petty miseries of life.
Saints have been calm while stretched upon the rack,
And Guatimozin* smiled on burning coals;
But never yet did housewife notable
Greet with a smile a rainy washing-day.
--But grant the welkin fair, require not thou
Who call'st thyself perchance the master there,
Or study swept, or nicely dusted coat,
Or usual 'tendance;-- ask not, indiscreet,
Thy stockings mended, though the yawning rents
Gape wide as Erebus;** nor hope to find
Some snug recess impervious: shouldst thou try
The 'customed garden walks, thine eye shall rue
The budding fragrance of thy tender shrubs,
Myrtle or rose, all crushed beneath the weight
Of coarse checked apron,-- with impatient hand
Twitched off when showers impend: or crossing lines
Shall mar thy musings, as the wet cold sheet
Flaps in thy face abrupt. Woe to the friend
Whose evil stars have urged him forth to claim
On such a day the hospitable rites!
Looks, blank at best, and stinted courtesy,
Shall he receive. Vainly he feeds his hopes
With dinner of roast chicken, savoury pie,
Or tart or pudding:-- pudding he nor tart
That day shall eat; nor, though the husband try,
Mending what can't be helped, to kindle mirth,
From cheer deficient, shall his consort's brow
Clear up propitious:-- the unlucky guest
In silence dines, and early slinks away.
I well remember, when a child, the awe
This day struck into me; for then the maids,
I scarce knew why, looked cross, and drove me from them:
Nor soft caress could I obtain, nor hope
Usual indulgences; jelly or creams,
Relic of costly suppers, and set by
For me their petted one; or buttered toast,
When butter was forbid; or thrilling tale
Of ghost or witch, or murder-- so I went
And sheltered me beside the parlour fire:
There my dear grandmother, eldest of forms,
Tended the little ones, and watched from harm,
Anxiously fond, though oft her spectacles
With elfin cunning hid, and oft the pins
Drawn from her ravelled stocking, might have soured
One less indulgent.--
At intervals my mother's voice was heard,
Urging dispatch: briskly the work went on,
All hands employed to wash, to rinse, to wring,
To fold, and starch, and clap, and iron, and plait.
Then would I sit me down and ponder much
Why washings were. Sometimes through hollow bowl
Of pipe amused we blew, and sent aloft
The floating bubbles; little dreaming then
To see, Mongolfier,*** thy silken ball
Ride buoyant through the clouds-- so near approach
The sports of children and the toils of men.
Earth, air, and sky, and ocean, hath its bubbles,
And verse is one of them-- this most of all.
* Guatimozin was a Mexican king tortured by Cortez
** Erebus was a dark place on the way to Hades in Greek mythology.
*** In 1783, the brothers Jacques and Joseph Montgolfier made the world's first ascent in a hot-air balloon.
WILLIAM BLAKE
England 1757-1827
Between 1789 and 1794, Blake etched a collection of poems in two parts, "Songs of Innocence" and "Songs of Experience." "Songs of Innocence" reflects the innocent and naturally spiritual worldview of children. In contrast, "Songs of Experience" depicts the cynical, selfish, unjust, and evil world of adults, as Blake perceived it. There is extensive irony in both sets of poems. Blake also included several pairs of parallel but contrasting poems, such as "The Lamb" and "The Tyger" (see Chapter 2), presenting the innocent and the experienced view of life respectively. Some of these pairs of poems, such as "The Chimney Sweeper," have identical titles.
The Chimney Sweeper
from Songs of Experience
A little black thing among the snow
Crying "'weep, 'weep," in notes of woe!
"Where are thy father & mother? say?"
"They are both gone up to the church to pray.
"Because I was happy upon the heath,
And smil'd among the winter's snow;
They clothed me in the clothes of death,
And taught me to sing the notes of woe.
"And because I am happy, & dance & sing,
They think they have done me no injury,
And are gone to praise God & his Priest & King,
Who make up a heaven of our misery."
Holy Thursday
from Songs of Innocence
'Twas on a Holy Thursday,* their innocent faces clean,
The children walking two & two, in red & blue & green;
Grey headed beadles** walkd before with wands as white as snow,
Till into the high dome of Paul's they like Thames' waters flow.
O what a multitude they seemd, those flowers of London town!
Seated in companies they sit with radiance all their own.
The hum of multitudes was there, but multitudes of Lambs,--
Thousands of little boys & girls raising their innocent hands.
Now like a mighty wind they raise to heaven the voice of song,
Or like harmonious thunderings the seats of heaven among.
Beneath them sit the aged men, wise guardians of the poor;
Then cherish pity, lest you drive an angel from your door.***
* In the Church of England, it was customary to march poor and orphaned children from the charity schools of London to a service at St. Paul's Cathedral on Holy Thursday, thirty-nine days after Easter to celebrate the Ascension of Jesus.
** Beadles were low ranking church officers. They were assigned to keep the children in order.
*** See Hebrews 13:2. "Be not forgetful to entertain strangers: for thereby some have entertained angels unawares."
Holy Thursday
from Songs of Experience
Is this a holy thing to see,
In a rich and fruitful land,
Babes reduced to misery,
Fed with a cold and usurous hand?
Is that trembling cry a song?
Can it be a song of joy?
And so many children poor?
It is a land of poverty!
And their sun does never shine,
And their fields are bleak & bare,
And their ways are fill'd with thorns;
It is eternal winter there.
For where-e'er the sun does shine,
And where-e'er the rain does fall,
Babe can never hunger there,
Nor poverty the mind appall.
Infant Joy
from Songs of Innocence
"I have no name,
I am but two days old."
What shall I call thee?
"I happy am,
Joy is my name."
Sweet joy befall thee!
Pretty joy!
Sweet joy but two days old,
Sweet joy I call thee;
Thou dost smile,
I sing the while--
Sweet joy befall thee.
Infant Sorrow
from Songs of Experience
My mother groaned! my father wept.
Into the dangerous world I leapt,
Helpless, naked, piping loud;
Like a fiend hid in a cloud.
Struggling in my father's hands,
Striving against my swaddling bands;
Bound and weary I thought best
To sulk upon my mother's breast.
KOBAYASHI ISSA
Japan 1762-1826
A bush warbler
Wipes his muddy feet
On plum blossoms.
translated by Rose Anna Higashi
A man, just one--
also a fly, just one--
in the huge drawing room.
translated by Harold Henderson
Right at my feet--
and when did you get there,
snail?
translated by Harold Henderson
In its eye
are mirrored far-off mountains--
dragonfly!
translated by Harold Henderson
WILLIAM WORDSWORTH
England 1770-1850
LINES
Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey, on Revisiting the Banks of
the Wye during a Tour, July 13, 1798
Five years have passed; five summers, with the length
Of five long winters! and again I hear
These waters, rolling from their mountain‑springs
With a soft inland murmur.-- Once again
Do I behold these steep and lofty cliffs,
That on a wild secluded scene impress
Thoughts of more deep seclusion; and connect
The landscape with the quiet of the sky.
The day is come when I again repose
Here, under this dark Sycamore, and view
These plots of cottage ground, these orchard tufts,
Which at this season, with their unripe fruits,
Are clad in one green hue, and lose themselves
'Mid groves and copses. Once again I see
These hedgerows, hardly hedgerows, little lines
Of sportive wood run wild; these pastoral farms,
Green to the very door; and wreaths of smoke
Sent up, in silence, from among the trees!
With some uncertain notice, as might seem
Of vagrant dwellers in the houseless woods,
Or of some Hermit's cave, where by his fire
The Hermit sits alone.
These beauteous forms,
Through a long absence, have not been to me
As is a landscape to a blind man's eye;
But oft, in lonely rooms, and 'mid the din
Of towns and cities, I have owed to them,
In hours of weariness, sensations sweet,
Felt in the blood, and felt along the heart;
And passing even into my purer mind,
With tranquil restoration:-—feelings too
Of unremembered pleasure: such, perhaps,
As have no slight or trivial influence
On that best portion of a good man's life,
His little, nameless, unremembered, acts
Of kindness and of love. Nor less, I trust,
To them I may have owed another gift,
Of aspect more sublime; that blessed mood,
In which the burthen of the mystery,
In which the heavy and the weary weight
Of all this unintelligible world,
Is lightened:-—that serene and blessed mood,
In which the affections gently lead us on,-—
Until, the breath of this corporeal frame
And even the motion of our human blood
Almost suspended, we are laid asleep
In body, and become a living soul:
While with an eye made quiet by the power
Of harmony, and the deep power of joy,
We see into the life of things.
If this
Be but a vain belief, yet, oh! how oft-—
In darkness and amid the many shapes
Of joyless daylight; when the fretful stir
Unprofitable, and the fever of the world,
Have hung upon the beatings of my heart-—
How oft, in spirit, have I turned to thee,
O sylvan Wye! thou wanderer through the woods,
How often has my spirit turned to thee!
And now, with gleams of half‑extinguished thought,
With many recognitions dim and faint,
And somewhat of a sad perplexity,
The picture of the mind revives again;
While here I stand, not only with the sense
Of present pleasure, but with pleasing thoughts
That in this moment there is life and food
For future years. And so I dare to hope,
Though changed, no doubt, from what I was when first
I came among these hills; when like a roe
I bounded o'er the mountains, by the sides
Of the deep rivers, and the lonely streams,
Wherever nature led: more like a man
Flying from something that he dreads than one
Who sought the thing he loved. For nature then
(The coarser pleasures of my boyish days,
And their glad animal movements all gone by)
To me was all in all.-—I cannot paint
What then I was. The sounding cataract
Haunted me like a passion; the tall rock,
The mountain, and the deep and gloomy wood,
Their colors and their forms, were then to me
An appetite; a feeling and a love,
That had no need of a remoter charm,
By thought supplied, nor any interest
Unborrowed from the eye.-—That time is past,
And all its aching joys are now no more,
And all its dizzy raptures. Not for this
Faint I, nor mourn nor murmur; other gifts
Have followed; for such loss, I would believe,
Abundant recompense. For I have learned
To look on nature, not as in the hour
Of thoughtless youth; but hearing oftentimes
The still; sad music of humanity,
Nor harsh nor grating, though of ample power
To chasten and subdue. And I have felt
A presence that disturbs me with the joy
Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime
Of something far more deeply interfused,
Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,
And the round ocean and the living air,
And the blue sky, and in the mind of man:
A motion and a spirit, that impels
All thinking things, all objects of all thought,
And rolls through all things. Therefore am I still
A lover of the meadows and the woods,
And mountains; and of all that we behold
From this green earth; of all the mighty world
Of eye, and ear-—both what they half create,
And what perceive; well pleased to recognize
In nature and the language of the sense
The anchor of my purest thoughts, the nurse,
The guide, the guardian of my heart, and soul
Of all my moral being.
Nor perchance,
If I were not thus taught, should I the more
Suffer my genial spirits to decay:
For thou art with me here upon the banks
Of this fair river; thou my dearest Friend,
My dear, dear Friend; and in thy voice I catch
The language of my former heart, and read
My former pleasures in the shooting lights
Of thy wild eyes. Oh! yet a little while
May I behold in thee what I was once,
My dear, dear Sister! and this prayer I make,
Knowing that Nature never did betray
The heart that loved her; 'tis her privilege,
Through all the years of this our life, to lead
From joy to joy: for she can so inform
The mind that is within us, so impress
With quietness and beauty, and so feed
With lofty thoughts, that neither evil tongues,
Rash judgments, nor the sneers of selfish men,
Nor greetings where no kindness is, nor all
The dreary intercourse of daily life,
Shall e'er prevail against us, or disturb
Our cheerful faith, that all which we behold
Is full of blessings. Therefore let the moon
Shine on thee in thy solitary walk;
And let the misty mountain winds be free
To blow against thee: and, in after years,
When these wild ecstasies shall be matured
Into a sober pleasure; when thy mind
Shall be a mansion for all lovely forms,
Thy memory be as a dwelling place
For all sweet sounds and harmonies; oh! then,
If solitude, or fear, or pain, or grief
Should be thy portion, with what healing thoughts
Of tender joy wilt thou remember me,
And these my exhortations! Nor, perchance-—
If I should be where I no more can hear
Thy voice, nor catch from thy wild eyes these gleams
Of past existence-‑wilt thou then forget
That on the banks of this delightful stream
We stood together; and that I, so long
A worshiper of Nature, hither came
Unwearied in that service; rather say
With warmer love-—oh! with far deeper zeal
Of holier love. Nor wilt thou then forget,
That after many wanderings, many years
Of absence, these steep woods and lofty cliffs,
And this green pastoral landscape, were to me
More dear, both for themselves and for thy sake!
SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE
England 1772-1834
The Rime of the Ancient Mariner
Part I
It is an ancient Mariner
And he stoppeth one of three.
--"By thy long gray beard and glittering eye,
Now wherefore stopp'st thou me?
The Bridegroom's doors are opened wide,
And I am next of kin;
The guests are met, the feast is set:
May'st hear the merry din."
He holds him with his skinny hand,
"There was a ship," quoth he.
"Hold off! unhand me, graybeard loon!"
Eftsoons his hand dropped he.
He holds him with his glittering eye--
The Wedding Guest stood still,
And listens like a three years' child:
The Mariner hath his will.
The Wedding Guest sat on a stone:
He cannot choose but hear;
And thus spake on that ancient man,
The bright‑eyed Mariner.
"The ship was cheered, the harbor cleared,
Merrily did we drop
Below the kirk, below the hill,
Below the lighthouse top.
The Sun came up upon the left,
Out of the sea came he!
And he shone bright, and on the right
Went down into the sea.
Higher and higher every day,
Till over the mast at noon--"
The Wedding Guest here beat his breast,
For he heard the loud bassoon.
The bride hath paced into the hall,
Red as a rose is she;
Nodding their heads before her goes
The merry minstrelsy.
The Wedding Guest he beat his breast,
Yet he cannot choose but hear;
And thus spake on that ancient man,
The bright‑eyed Mariner.
And now the STORM‑BLAST came, and he
Was tyrannous and strong;
He struck with his o'ertaking wings,
And chased us south along.
With sloping masts and dipping prow,
As who pursued with yell and blow
Still treads the shadow of his foe,
And forward bends his head,
The ship drove fast, loud roared the blast,
And southward aye we fled.
And now there came both mist and snow,
And it grew wondrous cold:
And ice, mast‑high, came floating by,
As green as emerald.
And through the drifts the snowy clifts
Did send a dismal sheen:
Nor shapes of men nor beasts we ken--
The ice was all between.
The ice was here, the ice was there,
The ice was all around:
It cracked and growled, and roared and howled,
Like noises in a swound!
At length did cross an Albatross,
Thorough the fog it came;
As if it had been a Christian soul,
We hailed it in God's name.
It ate the food it ne'er had eat,
And round and round it flew.
The ice did split with a thunder‑fit;
The helmsman steered us through!
And a good south wind sprung up behind;
The Albatross did follow,
And every day, for food or play,
Came to the mariners' hollo!
In mist or cloud, on mast or shroud,
It perched for vespers nine;
Whiles all the night, through fog‑smoke white,
Glimmered the white Moon‑shine."
"God save thee, ancient Mariner!
From the fiends, that plague thee thus!--
Why look'st thou so?" With my crossbow
I shot the ALBATROSS.
Part 11
The Sun now rose upon the right:
Out of the sea came he,
Still hid in mist, and on the left
Went down into the sea.
And the good south wind still blew behind,
But no sweet bird did follow,
Nor any day for food or play
Came to the mariners' hollo!
And I had done a hellish thing,
And it would work 'em woe:
For all averred, I had killed the bird
That made the breeze to blow.
Ah Wretch! said they, the bird to slay,
That made the breeze to blow!
Nor dim nor red, like God's own head,
The glorious Sun uprist:
Then all averred, I had killed the bird
That brought the fog and mist.
'Twas right, said they, such birds to slay,
That bring the fog and mist.
The fair breeze blew, the white foam flew,
The furrow followed free;
We were the first that ever burst
Into that silent sea.
Down dropped the breeze, the sails dropped down,
'Twas sad as sad could be;
And we did speak only to break
The silence of the sea!
All in a hot and copper sky,
The bloody Sun, at noon,
Right up above the mast did stand,
No bigger than the Moon.
Day after day, day after day,
We stuck, nor breath nor motion;
As idle as a painted ship
Upon a painted ocean.
Water, water, everywhere,
And all the boards did shrink;
Water, water, everywhere,
Nor any drop to drink.
The very deep did rot: O Christ!
That ever this should be!
Yea, slimy things did crawl with legs
Upon the slimy sea.
About, about, in reel and rout
The death‑fires danced at night;
The water, like a witch's oils,
Burnt green, and blue and white.
And some in dreams assured were
Of the Spirit that plagued us so;
Nine fathom deep he had followed us
From the land of mist and snow.
And every tongue, through utter drought,
Was withered at the root;
We could not speak, no more than if
We had been choked with soot.
Ahl well‑a‑day! what evil looks
Had I from old and young!
Instead of the cross, the Albatross
About my neck was hung.
Part 111
There passed a weary time. Each throat
Was parched, and glazed each eye.
A weary time! a weary time!
How glazed each weary eye,
When looking westward, I beheld
A something in the sky.
At first it seemed a little speck,
And then it seemed a mist;
It moved and moved, and took at last
A certain shape, I wist.
A speck, a mist, a shape, I wist!
And still it neared an neared:
As if it dodged a water sprite,
It plunged and tacked and veered.
With throats unslaked, with black lips baked,
We could nor laugh nor wail;
Through utter drought all dumb we stood!
I bit my arm, I sucked the blood,
And cried, A sail! a sail!
With throats unslaked, with black lips baked,
Agape they heard me call:
Gramercy! they for joy did grin,
And all at once their breath drew in,
As they were drinking all.
See! see! (I cried) she tacks no more!
Hither to work us weal;
Without a breeze, without a tide,
She steadies with upright keel!
The western wave was all aflame.
The day was well nigh done!
Almost upon the western wave
Rested the broad bright Sun;
When that strange shape drove suddenly
Betwixt us and the Sun.
And straight the Sun was flecked with bars,
(Heaven's Mother send us grace!)
As if through a dungeon grate he peered
With broad and burning face.
Alas! (thought I, and my heart beat loud)
How fast she nears and nears!
Are those her sails that glance in the Sun,
Like restless gossameres?
Are those her ribs through which the Sun
Did peer, as through a grate?
And is that Woman all her crew?
Is that a DEATH? and are there two?
Is DEATH that woman's mate?
Her lips were red, her looks were free,
Her locks were yellow as gold:
Her skin was as white as leprosy,
The Nightmare LIFE‑IN-DEATH was she,
Who thicks man's blood with cold.
The naked hulk alongside came,
And the twain were casting dice;
"The game is done! I've won! I've won!"
Quoth she, and whistles thrice.
The Sun's rim dips; the stars rush out:
At one stride comes the dark;
With far‑heard whisper, o'er the sea,
Off shot the specter‑bark.
We listened and looked sideways up!
Fear at my heart, as at a cup,
My lifeblood seems to sip!
The stars were dim, and thick the night,
The steersman's face by his lamp gleamed white;
From the sails the dew did drip--
Till clomb above the eastern bar
The horned Moon, with one bright star
Within the nether tip.
One after one, by the star‑dogged Moon,
Too quick for groan or sigh,
Each turned his face with ghastly pang,
And cursed me with his eye.
Four times fifty living men,
(And I heard nor sigh nor groan)
With heavy thump, a lifeless lump,
They dropped down one by one.
The souls did from their bodies fly--
They fled to bliss or woe!
And every soul, it passed me by,
Like the whizz of my cross‑bow!
Part IV
"I fear thee, ancient Mariner!
I fear thy skinny hand!
And thou art long, and lank, and brown
As is the ribbed sea‑sand.
I fear thee and thy glittering eye,
And thy skinny hand, so brown."--
Fear not, fear not, thou Wedding Guest!
This body dropped not down.
Alone, alone, all, all alone,
Alone on a wide wide sea!
And never a saint took pity on
My soul in agony.
The many men, so beautiful
And they all dead did lie:
And a thousand thousand slimy things
Lived on; and so did I.
I looked upon the rotting sea,
And drew my eyes away;
I looked upon the rotting deck,
And there the dead men lay.
I looked to heaven, and tried to pray;
But or ever a prayer had gushed,
A wicked whisper came, and made
My heart as dry as dust.
I closed my lids, and kept them close,
And the balls like pulses beat,
For the sky and the sea, and the sea and the sky
Lay like a load on my weary eye,
And the dead were at my feet.
The cold sweat melted from their limbs,
Nor rot nor reek did they:
The look with which they looked on me
Had never passed away.
An orphan's curse would drag to hell
A spirit from on high;
But oh! more horrible than that
Is the curse in a dead man's eye!
Seven days, seven nights, I saw that curse,
And yet I could not die.
The moving Moon went up the sky,
And nowhere did abide:
Softly she was going up,
And a star or two beside--
Her beams bemocked the sultry main,
Like April hoar‑frost spread;
But where the ship's huge shadow lay,
The charmed water burnt alway
A still and awful red.
Beyond the shadow of the ship,
I watched the water snakes:
They moved in tracks of shining white,
And when they reared, the elfish light
Fell off in hoary flakes.
Within the shadow of the ship
I watched their rich attire:
Blue, glossy green, and velvet black,
They coiled and swam; and every track
Was a flash of golden fire.
O happy living things! no tongue
Their beauty might declare:
A spring of love gushed from my heart,
And I blessed them unaware:
Sure my kind saint took pity on me,
And I blessed them unaware.
The self‑same moment I could pray;
And from my neck so free
The Albatross fell off, and sank
Like lead into the sea.
Part V
Oh sleep! it is a gentle thing,
Beloved from pole to pole!
To Mary Queen the praise be given!
She sent the gentle sleep from Heaven,
That slid into my soul.
The silly buckets on the deck,
That had so long remained,
I dreamt that they were filled with dew;
And when I awoke, it rained.
My lips were wet, my throat was cold,
My garments all were dank;
Sure I had drunken in my dreams,
And still my body drank.
I moved, and could not feel my limbs:
I was so light-- almost
I thought that I had died in sleep,
And was a blessed ghost.
And soon I heard a roaring wind:
It did not come anear;
But with its sound it shook the sails,
That were so thin and sere.
The upper air burst into life!
And a hundred fire‑flags sheen
To and fro they were hurried about!
And to and fro, and in and out,
The wan stars danced between.
And the coming wind did roar more loud,
And the sails did sigh like sedge;
And the rain poured down from one black cloud;
The Moon was at its edge.
The thick black cloud was cleft, and still
The Moon was at its side:
Like waters shot from some high crag,
The lightning fell with never a jag,
A river steep and wide.
The loud wind never reached the ship,
Yet now the ship moved on!
Beneath the lightning and the Moon
The dead men gave a groan.
They groaned, they stirred, they all uprose,
Nor spake, nor moved their eyes;
It had been strange, even in a dream,
To have seen those dead men rise.
The helmsman steered, the ship moved on;
Yet never a breeze up‑blew;
The mariners all 'gan work the ropes,
Where they were wont to do;
They raised their limbs like lifeless tools--
We were a ghastly crew.
The body of my brother's son
Stood by me, knee to knee:
The body and I pulled at one rope,
But he said nought to me.
"I fear thee, ancient Mariner!"
Be calm, thou Wedding Guest!
'Twas not those souls that fled in pain,
Which to their corses came again,
But a troop of spirits blest:
For when it dawned they dropped their arms,
And clustered round the mast;
Sweet sounds rose slowly through their mouths,
And from their bodies passed.
Around, around, flew each sweet sound,
Then darted to the Sun;
Slowly the sounds came back again,
Now mixed, now one by one.
Sometimes a‑dropping from the sky
I heard the sky‑lark sing;
Sometimes all little birds that are,
How they seemed to fill the sea and air
With their sweet jargoning!
And now 'twas like all instruments,
Now like a lonely flute;
And now it is an angel's song,
That makes the heavens be mute.
It ceased; yet still the sails made on
A pleasant noise till noon,
A noise like of a hidden brook
In the leafy month of June,
That to the sleeping woods all night
Singeth a quiet tune.
Till noon we quietly sailed on,
Yet never a breeze did breathe:
Slowly and smoothly went the ship,
Moved onward from beneath.
Under the keel nine fathom deep,
From the land of mist and snow,
The spirit slid: and it was he
That made the ship to go.
The sails at noon left off their tune,
And the ship stood still also.
The Sun, right up above the mast,
Had fixed her to the ocean:
But in a minute she 'gan stir,
With a short uneasy motion--
Backwards and forwards half her length
With a short uneasy motion.
Then like a pawing horse let go,
She made a sudden bound:
It flung the blood into my head,
And I fell down in a swound.
How long in that same fit I lay,
I have not to declare;
But ere my living life returned,
I heard and in my soul discerned
Two voices in the air.
"Is it he?"quoth one, "Is this the man?
By him who died on cross,
With his cruel bow he laid full low
The harmless Albatross.
The spirit who bideth by himself
In the land of mist and snow,
He loved the bird that loved the man
Who shot him with his bow."
The other was a softer voice,
As soft as honey‑dew:
Quoth he, "The man hath penance done,
And penance more will do."
Part Vl
FIRST VOICE
"But tell me, tell me! speak again,
Thy soft response renewing--
What makes that ship drive on so fast?
What is the ocean doing?"
SECOND VOICE
"Still as a slave before his lord,
The ocean hath no blast;
His great bright eye most silently
Up to the Moon is cast--
If he may know which way to go;
For she guides him smooth or grim.
See, brother, see! how graciously
She looketh down on him."
FIRST VOICE
"But why drives on that ship so fast,
Without or wave or wind?"
SECOND VOICE
"The air is cut away before,
And closes from behind.
Fly, brother, fly! more high, more high!
Or we shall be belated:
For slow and slow that ship will go,
When the Mariner's trance is abated."
I woke, and we were sailing on
As in a gentle weather:
'Twas night, calm night, the moon was high;
The dead men stood together.
All stood together on the deck,
For a charnel‑dungeon fitter:
All fixed on me their stony eyes,
That in the Moon did glitter.
The pang, the curse, with which they died,
Had never passed away:
I could not draw my eyes from theirs,
Nor turn them up to pray.
And now this spell was snapped: once more
I viewed the ocean green,
And looked far forth, yet little saw
Of what had else been seen--
Like one, that on a lonesome road
Doth walk in fear and dread,
And having once turned round walks on,
And turns no more his head;
Because he knows, a frightful fiend
Doth close behind him tread.
But soon there breathed a wind on me,
Nor sound nor motion made: Its path was not upon the sea,
In ripple or in shade.
It raised my hair, it fanned my cheek
Like a meadow‑gale of spring--
It mingled strangely with my fears,
Yet it felt like a welcoming.
Swiftly, swiftly flew the ship,
Yet she sailed softly too:
Sweetly, sweetly blew the breeze--
On me alone it blew.
Oh! dream of joy! is this indeed
The lighthouse top I see?
Is this the hill? is this the kirk?
Is this mine own countree?
We drifted o'er the harbor‑bar,
And I with sobs did pray--
O let me be awake, my God!
Or let me sleep alway.
The harbor‑bay was clear as glass,
So smoothly it was strewn!
And on the bay the moonlight lay,
And the shadow of the Moon.
The rock shone bright, the kirk no less,
That stands above the rock:
The moonlight steeped in silentness
The steady weathercock.
And the bay was white with silent light,
Till rising from the same,
Full many shapes, that shadows were,
In crimson colors came.
A little distance from the prow
Those crimson shadows were:
I turned my eyes upon the deck--
Oh, Christ! what saw I there!
Each corse lay flat, lifeless and flat,
And, by the holy rood!
A man all light, a seraph‑man,
On every corse there stood.
This seraph‑band, each waved his hand:
It was a heavenly sight!
They stood as signals to the land,
Each one a lovely light;
This seraph‑band, each waved his hand,
No voice did they impart--
No voice; but oh! the silence sank
Like music on my heart.
But soon I heard the dash of oars,
I heard the Pilot's cheer;
My head was turned perforce away
And I saw a boat appear.
The Pilot and the Pilot's boy,
I heard them coming fast:
Dear Lord in Heaven! it was a joy
The dead men could not blast.
I saw a third-- I heard his voice:
It is the Hermit good!
He singeth loud his godly hymns
That he makes in the wood.
He'll shrieve my soul, he'll wash away
The Albatross's blood.
Part Vll
This Hermit good lives in that wood
Which slopes down to the sea.
How loudly his sweet voice he rears!
He loves to talk with marineres
That come from a far countree.
He kneels at morn, and noon, and eve--
He hath a cushion plump:
It is the moss that wholly hides
The rotted old oak stump.
The skiff‑boat neared: I heard them talk,
"Why, this is strange, I trow!
Where are those lights so many and fair,
That signal made but now?"
"Strange, by my faith!" the Hermit said--
"And they answered not our cheer!
The planks looked warped! and see those sails,
How thin they are and sere!
I never saw aught like to them,
Unless perchance it were
Brown skeletons of leaves that lag
My forest‑brook along;
When the ivy tod is heavy with snow,
And the owlet whoops to the wolf below,
That eats the she‑wolf's young."
"Dear Lord! it hath a fiendish look,"
The Pilot made reply,
"I am a‑feared"--"Push on, push on!"
Said the Hermit cheerily.
The boat came closer to the ship,
But I nor spake nor stirred;
The boat came close beneath the ship,
And straight a sound was heard.
Under the water it rumbled on,
Still louder and more dread:
It reached the ship, it split the bay;
The ship went down like lead.
Stunned by that loud and dreadful sound,
Which sky and ocean smote,
Like one that hath been seven days drowned
My body lay afloat;
But swift as dreams, myself I found
Within the Pilot's boat.
Upon the whirl, where sank the ship,
The boat spun round and round;
And all was still, save that the hill
Was telling of the sound.
I moved my lips-- the Pilot shrieked
And fell down in a fit;
The holy Hermit raised his eyes,
And prayed where he did sit.
I took the oars: the Pilot's boy,
Who now doth crazy go,
Laughed loud and long, and all the while
His eyes went to and fro.
"Ha! ha!" quoth he, "full plain I see,
The Devil knows how to row."
And now, all in my own countree,
I stood on the firm land!
The Hermit stepped forth from the boat,
And scarcely he could stand.
"O shrieve me, shrieve me, holy man!"
The Hermit crossed his brow.
"Say quick," quoth he, "I bid thee say
What manner of man art thou?"
Forthwith this frame of mine was wrenched
With a woeful agony,
Which forced me to begin my tale;
And then it left me free.
Since then, at an uncertain hour,
That agony returns:
And till my ghastly tale is told
This heart within me burns.
I pass, like night, from land to land;
I have strange power of speech;
That moment that his face I see,
I know the man that must hear me:
To him my tale I teach.
What loud uproar bursts from that door!
The wedding guests are there:
But in the garden‑bower the bride
And bridemaids singing are:
And hark the little vesper bell,
Which biddeth me to prayer!
O Wedding Guest! this soul hath been
Alone on a wide wide sea:
So lonely 'twas, that God himself
Scarce seemed there to be.
O sweeter than the marriage feast,
'Tis sweeter far to me,
To walk together to the kirk
With a goodly company!
To walk together to the kirk,
And all together pray,
While each to his great Father bends,
Old men, and babes, and loving friends
And youths and maidens gay!
Farewell, farewell! but this I tell
To thee, thou Wedding Guest!
He prayeth well, who loveth well
Both man and bird and beast.
He prayeth best, who loveth best
All things both great and small;
For the dear God who loveth us,
He made and loveth all.
The Mariner, whose eye is bright,
Whose beard with age is hoar,
Is gone: and now the Wedding Guest
Turned from the bridegroom's door.
He went like one that hath been stunned,
And is of sense forlorn:
A sadder and a wiser man,
He rose the morrow morn.
GEORGE GORDON, LORD BYRON
England 1788-1824
She Walks in Beauty
1
She walks in beauty, like the night
Of cloudless climes and starry skies;
And all that's best of dark and bright
Meet in her aspect and her eyes:
Thus mellow'd to that tender light
Which heaven to gaudy day denies.
2
One shade the more, one ray the less,
Had half impair'd the nameless grace
Which waves in every raven tress,
Or softly lightens o'er her face;
Where thoughts serenely sweet express
How pure, how dear their dwelling place.
3
And on that cheek, and o'er that brow,
So soft, so calm, yet eloquent,
The smiles that win, the tints that glow,
But tell of days in goodness spent,
A mind at peace with all below,
A heart whose love is innocent!
PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY
England 1792-1822
To a Sky-Lark
Hail to thee, blithe Spirit!
Bird thou never wert--
That from Heaven, or near it,
Pourest thy full heart
In profuse strains of unpremeditated art.
Higher still and higher
From the earth thou springest
Like a cloud of fire;
The blue deep thou wingest,
And singing still dost soar, and soaring ever singest.
In the golden lightning
Of the sunken Sun--
O'er which the clouds are brightning,
Thou dost float and run;
Like an unbodied joy whose race is just begun.
The pale purple even
Melts around thy flight,
Like a star of Heaven
In the broad day-light
Thou art unseen,--but yet I hear thy shrill delight,
Keen as are the arrows
Of that silver sphere,
Whose intense lamp narrows
In the white dawn clear
Until we hardly see--we feel that it is there.
All the earth and air
With thy voice is loud,
As when Night is bare
From one lonely cloud
The moon rains out her beams--and Heaven is overflowed.
What thou are we know not;
What is most like thee?
From rainbow clouds there flow not
Drops so bright to see
As from thy presence showers a rain of melody.
Like a Poet hidden
In the light of thought,
Singing hymns unbidden,
Till the world is wrought
To sympathy with hopes and fears it heeded not:
Like a high-born maiden
In a palace-tower,
Soothing her love-laden
Soul in secret hour,
With music sweet as love--which overflows her bower:
Like a glow-worm golden
In a dell of dew,
Scattering unbeholden
Its aerial hue
Among the flowers and grass which screen it from the view:
Like a rose embowered
In its own green leaves--
By warm winds deflowered--
Till the scent it gives
Makes faint with too much sweet those heavy-winged thieves:
Sound of vernal showers
On the twinkling grass,
Rain-awakened flowers,
All that ever was
Joyous, and clear and fresh, thy music doth surpass.
Teach us, Sprite or Bird,
What sweet thoughts are thine;
I have never heard
Praise of love or wine
That panted forth a flood of rapture so divine:
Chorus Hymeneal*
Or triumphal chaunt
Matched with thine would be all
But an empty vaunt,
A thing wherein we feel there is some hidden want.
What objects are the fountains
Of thy happy strain?
What fields or waves or mountains?
What shapes of sky or plain?
What love of thine own kind? what ignorance of pain?
With thy clear keen joyance
Languor cannot be--
Shadow of annoyance
Never came near thee;
Thou lovest--but ne'er knew love's sad satiety.
Waking or asleep,
Thou of death must deem
Things more true and deep
Than we mortals dream,
Or how could thy notes flow in such a chrystal stream?
We look before and after,
And pine for what is not--
Our sincerest laughter
With some pain is fraught--
Our sweetest songs are those that tell of saddest thought.
Yet if we could scorn
Hate and pride and fear;
If we were things born
Not to shed at tear,
I know not how thy joy we ever should come near.
Better than all measures
Of delightful sound--
Better than all treasures
That in books are found--
Thy skill to poet were, thou Scorner of the ground!
Teach me half the gladness
That thy brain must know,
Such harmonious madness
From thy lips would flow
The world should listen then--as I am listening now.
* Chorus Hymeneal refers to a marriage song. Hymen was the Greek god of marriage.
JOHN KEATS
England 1795-1821
Ode to a Nightingale
1
My heart aches, and a drowsy numbness pains
My sense, as though of hemlock I had drunk,
Or emptied some dull opiate to the drains
One minute past, and Lethe‑wards had sunk:
'Tis not through envy of thy happy lot,
But being too happy in thine happiness‑
That thou, light‑winged Dryad of the trees,
In some melodious plot
Of beechen green, and shadows numberless,
Singest of summer in full‑throated ease.
2
O, for a draught of vintage! that hath been
Cooled a long age in the deep‑delved earth,
Tasting of Flora and the country green,
Dance, and Provencal song, and sunburnt mirth!
O for a beaker full of the warm South,
Full of the true, the blushful Hippoerene,
With beaded bubbles winking at the brim,
And purple‑stained mouth
That I might drink, and leave the world unseen,
And with thee fade away into the forest dim:
3
Fade far away, dissolve, and quite forget
What thou among the leaves hast never known,
The weariness, the fever, and the fret
Here, where men sit and hear each other groan;
Where palsy shakes a few, sad, last gray hairs,
Where youth grows pale, and specter‑thin, and dies,
Where but to think is to be full of sorrow
And leaden‑eyed despairs,
Where Beauty cannot keep her lustrous eyes,
Or new Love pine at them beyond tomorrow.
4
Away! away! for I will fly to thee,
Not charioted by Bacchus and his pards,
But on the viewless wings of Poesy,
Though the dull brain perplexes and retards:
Already with thee! tender is the night,
And haply the Queen‑Moon is on her throne,
Clustered around by all her starry Fays;
But here there is no light,
Save what from heaven is with the breezes blown
Through verdurous glooms and winding mossy ways.
5
l cannot see what flowers are at my feet,
Nor what soft incense hangs upon the boughs,
But, in embalmed darkness, guess each sweet
Wherewith the seasonable month endows
The grass, the thicket, and the fruit tree wild;
White hawthorn, and the pastoral eglantine;
Fast fading violets covered up in leaves;
And mid‑May's eldest child,
The coming musk‑rose, full of dewy wine,
The murmurous haunt of flies on summer eves.
6
Darkling I listen; and for many a time
I have been half in love with easeful Death,
Called him soft names in many a mused rhyme,
To take into the air my quiet breath;
Now more than ever seems it rich to die,
To cease upon the midnight with no pain,
While thou art pouring forth thy soul abroad
In such an ecstasy
Still wouldst thou sing, and I have ears in vain‑
To thy high requiem become a sod.
7
Thou wast not born for death, immortal Bird!
No hungry generations tread thee down;
The voice I hear this passing night was heard
In ancient days by emperor and clown:
Perhaps the selfsame song that found a path
Through the sad heart of Ruth, when, sick for home,
She stood in tears amid the alien corn;
The same that ofttimes hath
Charmed magic casements, opening on the foam
Of perilous seas, in faery lands forlorn.
8
Forlorn! the very word is like a bell
To toll me back from thee to my sole self!
Adieu! the fancy cannot cheat so well
As she is famed to do, deceiving elf.
Adieu! adieu! thy plaintive anthem fades
Past the near meadows, over the still stream,
Up the hill side; and now 'tis buried deep
In the next valley‑glades:
Was it a vision, or a waking dream?
Fled is that music:‑Do I wake or sleep?
CHARLES G. D. ROBERTS
Canada 1860-1943
The Potato Harvest
A high bare field, brown from the plough, and borne
Aslant from sunset; amber wastes of sky
Washing the ridge; a clamour of crows that fly
In from the wide flats where the spent tides mourn
To yon their rocking roosts in pines wind-torn;
A line of grey snake-fence, that zigzags by
A pond and cattle; from the homestead nigh
The long deep summonings of the supper horn.
Black on the ridge, against that lonely flush,
A cart, and stoop-necked oxen; ranged beside,
Some barrels; and the day-worn harvest-folk,
Here, emptying their baskets, jar the hush
With hollow thunders. Down the dusk hillside
Lumbers the wain; and the day fades out like smoke.
ARCHIBALD LAMPMAN
Canada 1861-1899
Winter Evening
To-night the very horses springing by
Toss gold from whitened nostrils. In a dream
The streets that narrow to the westward gleam
Like rows of golden palaces; and high
From all the crowded chimneys tower and die
A thousand aureoles. Down in the west
The brimming plains beneath the sunset rest,
One burning sea of gold. Soon, soon shall fly
The glorious vision, and the hours shall feel
A mightier master; soon from height to height,
With silence and the sharp unpitying stars,
Stern creeping frosts, and winds that touch like steel,
Out of the depth beyond the eastern bars,
Glittering and still shall come the awful night.
WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS
Ireland 1865-1939
No Second Troy
Why should I blame her* that she filled my days
With misery, or that she would of late
Have taught to ignorant men most violent ways,
Or hurled the little streets upon the great,
Had they but courage equal to desire?
What could have made her peaceful with a mind
That nobleness made simple as a fire,
With beauty like a tightened bow, a kind
That is not natural in an age like this,
Being high and solitary and most stern?
Why, what could she have done, being what she is?
Was there another Troy for her to burn?**
* Yeats is referring to Maud Gonne, the beautiful Irish revolutionary whom he loved hopelessly for many years.
** Yeats compares Maud Gonne to Helen of Troy. Note that it was not Helen who burned Troy.
PAUL LAURENCE DUNBAR
America 1872-1906
We Wear the Mask
We wear the mask that grins and lies,
It hides our cheeks and shades our eyes--
This debt we pay to human guile;
With torn and bleeding hearts we smile,
And mouth with myriad subtleties.
Why should the world be over-wise,
In counting all our tears and sighs?
Nay let them only see us, while
We wear the mask.
We smile, but, O great Christ, our cries
To thee from tortured souls arise.
We sing, but oh the clay is vile
Beneath our feet, and long the mile;
But let the world dream otherwise,
We wear the mask.
The Poet
He sang of life, serenely sweet,
With, now and then, a deeper note.
From some high peak, nigh yet remote,
He voiced the world's absorbing beat.
He sang of love when earth was young,
And Love, itself, was in his lays.
But ah, the world, it turned to praise
A jingle in a broken tongue.
TOYO KAZATO
Issei (born in Japan, immigrated to America) 1886-? (deceased)
Golden Poplar
Looking through a small window's sudden light
I saw a poplar in the yard turn gold.
Though it is the hot Arizona desert,
Autumn has not forgotten to come.
Reflecting the rising sun
Golden leaves dance in the wind
With green leaves here and there
And even windows of the camp* are brightening.
Three years ago I saw a tall poplar
In the open fields of California
Soar into the blue sky.
Even now it must be beautiful
Reflecting the setting sun.
Autumn has come to the small
Windows of a crowded camp
Bringing a gentle heart to the people
From the distant California fields
Over a vast desert wasteland.
Autumn has not forgotten to come here.
* Kazato, who came to America in 1906, was interned in the relocation camp for Japanese Americans in Poston, Arizona, during World War II.
YURIKO TAKAHASHI
Issei 1900
Twilight
Dark red clouds are slowly disappearing.
Little bird shadows hurry to their nests.
Their sad chirps
call to their mates and their young.
Their painful voices touched me
at twilight standing by the river.
A wild dove coos in dark woods,
a lonely, interior voice.
Its call comforts a lonesome woman.
Winds make gentle rhythms
among cat tails on the bank.
A water fowl floats across a twilight river
twittering in peace,
as if he was oblivious to the war,
harmonizing with the tender stream in twilight.
ELIZABETH BISHOP
America 1911-1979
Filling Station
Oh, but it is dirty!
--this little filling station,
oil-soaked, oil-permeated
to a disturbing, over-all
black translucency.
Be careful with that match!
Father wears a dirty,
oil-soaked monkey suit
that cuts him under the arms,
and several quick and saucy
and greasy sons assist him
(it's a family filling station),
all quite thoroughly dirty.
Do they live in the station?
It has a cement porch
behind the pumps, and on it
a set of crushed and grease-
impregnated wickerwork;
on the wicker sofa
a dirty dog, quite comfy.
Some comic books provide
the only note of color--
of certain color. They lie
upon a big dim doily
draping a taboret
(part of the set), beside
a big hirsute begonia.
Why the extraneous plant?
Why the taboret?
Why, oh why, the doily?
(Embroidered in daisy stitch
with marguerites, I think,
and heavy with gray crochet.)
Somebody embroidered the doily.
Somebody waters the plant,
or oils it, maybe. Somebody
arranges the rows of cans
so that they softly say:
ESSO--so--so--so
to high-strung automobiles.
Somebody loves us all.
WILLIAM STAFFORD
America 1914
Traveling Through the Dark
Traveling through the dark I found a deer
dead on the edge of the Wilson River road.
It is usually best to roll them into the canyon:
that road is narrow; to swerve might make more dead.
By glow of the tail-light I stumbled back to the car
and stood by the heap, a doe, a recent killing;
she had stiffened already, almost cold.
I dragged her off; she was large in the belly.
My fingers touching her side brought me the reason--
her side was warm; her fawn lay there waiting,
alive, still, never to be born.
Beside the mountain road I hesitated.
The car aimed ahead its lowered parking lights;
under the hood purred the steady engine.
I stood in the glare of the warm exhaust turning red;
around our group I could hear the wilderness listen.
I thought hard for us all--my only swerving--
then pushed her over the edge into the river.
MARGARET AVISON
Canada 1918
A Nameless One
Hot in June a narrow winged
long-elbowed-thread-legged
living insect lived
and died within
the lodgers' second-floor bathroom here.
At 6 A.M.
wafting ceilingward,
no breeze but what it living made there;
at noon standing
still as a constellation of spruce needles
before the moment of
making it, whirling;
at four a
wilted flotsam, cornsilk, on the linoleum:
now that it is
over, I
look with new eyes
upon this room
adequate for one to
be, in.
Its insect-day
has threaded a needle
for me for my eyes dimming
over rips and tears and
thin places.
New Year's Poem
The Christmas twigs crispen and needles rattle
Along the windowledge.
A solitary pearl
Shed from the necklace spilled at last week's party
Lies in the suety, snow-luminous plainness
Of morning, on the windowledge beside them.
And all the furniture that circled stately
And hospitable when these rooms were brimmed
With perfumes, furs, and black-silver
Crisscross of seasonal conversation, lapses
Into its previous largeness.
I remember
Anne's rose-sweet gravity, and the stiff grave
Where cold so little can contain;
I mark the queer delightful skull and crossbones
Starlings and sparrows left, taking the crust,
And the long loop of winter wind
Smoothing its arc from dark Arcturus* down
To the bricked corner of the drifted courtyard,
And the still windowledge.
Gentle and just pleasure
It is, being human, to have won from space
This unchill, habitable interior
Which mirrors quietly the light
Of the snow, and the new year.
* Arcturus is a star in the constellation Botes.
FINDING THE POET
CHAPTER 5 POETIC FORMS
As you read the poems in the first four chapters of this book, you probably noticed the variety in the way different poems look on a printed page. Some poems, like "Rime of the Ancient Mariner," are very long but have short lines and short stanzas. Others, like Wordsworth's "Lines" ("Tintern Abbey"), are not divided into stanzas at all but have rather long lines. Then there are poems like Margaret Avison's "A Nameless One" that contain some long lines and some short ones. You also noticed that some poems rhyme while others don't. All of these elements-- the size of the poem, the length of its lines, how it is divided or not divided into smaller units of lines called stanzas, and whether or not it has rhythm and rhyme,-- are referred to as form or structure in poetry. Before we go any further, let me say that there is no particular form for poetry that is better than any other. The form that a poet chooses is determined by a variety of factors, but ideally, the poem's structure, like its vocabulary, should complement its meaning, purpose, and effect.
In this chapter, you will learn about a variety of different structures that have been used for writing poetry in various historic periods in several cultures. Since poetry is considered a type of creative writing, it might be logical to assume that poets have always just let their inspirations flow, allowing the poem to form itself naturally. Nothing could be farther from the truth. In fact, cultural expectations and aesthetic values in different time periods have strongly influenced the shapes and sizes of poems. These historic determiners have been so profound that a good student of poetry can often figure out what time period a poem was written in just by observing how the poem looks on the printed page. As a student and writer of poetry, this information can be invaluable to you. You need to know how your art form has developed over the years and why.
In English literature, there have been two noticeable trends in the development of poetic forms. The first is that the poets of every major historic period have tended to reject the aesthetic values of the period just preceding them. And the second is that, while innovations have occurred in each period, there has also been a tendency to look to history for inspiration, but since the period just preceding has almost always been in disfavor, poets have skipped backwards to even earlier centuries. Thus, the forms that the previous generation viewed as obsolete were reclaimed as fresh and new. The Moderns of the Twentieth Century, for example, detested the rigid forms of the Victorians, while the Victorians, in turn, reacted against the excessive freedom of expression of the Romantics. There is evidence even now that Modernist values have become exhausted and that poetry in the Twenty-first Century will probably return to a more Romantic poetic vision, perhaps even rejecting the Twentieth Century's passion for free verse (poetry that has neither rhyme, rhythm, nor a set stanza form) in favor of historic forms such as the sonnet, so popular with the Renaissance, Romantic, and Victorian poets.
As a poet now, you need to know about the forms which existed in the past. All of these are still available for you to use or to adapt. You are also, of course, always welcome to develop something new. But somehow, even innovation seems to come more easily to poets who have a firm grounding in historic aesthetics. With these thoughts in mind, let's take a very rapid look at the development of poetic forms in the English language. To assuage my own guilt about presenting this vast topic in such a superficial fashion, I must encourage you to take several literature classes, especially Survey of English Literature, or even History of the English Language. If you don't have time to take additional classes in language and literature, at the very least, you should get a good historic anthology of English literature, such as the Norton or the Oxford. They have both been invaluable to me. If you speak English every day, even if it is your second or third language, you owe it to yourself to learn all you can about this magnificent language, in which so much exquisite poetry has been written.
Our language has changed drastically over the years. A historic chart might help us get a grip on its development. The timeline below outlines the major periods in English literary history and notes the primary forms and poetic elements that were popular in each era. I have already referred to much of this information in previous chapters, but now you will see where it all fits from a chronological perspective.
MAJOR PERIODS IN ENGLISH LITERATURE--POETRY
l. Anglo-Saxon Period 450-1066
A. Major Works of Poetry
Caedmon's Hymn
The Dream of the Rood (Anonymous)
Beowulf (Anonymous)
The Wanderer (Anonymous)
The Battle of Maldon (Anonymous)
B. Characteristic Form
Four-beat line with
Caesura in the middle of the line
No rhyme
C. Other Poetic Elements
Alliteration
Understatement (litotes)
Kennings (descriptive compound words)
Elevated serious tone
ll. Middle English Period 1066-1485
A. Major Works of Poetry
Troilus and Criseide--Chaucer
The Canterbury Tales--Chaucer
The Pearl--(Anonymous)
Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (Anonymous)
The Vision of Piers Plowman--Langland
Morte Darthur--Malory
B. Characteristic Forms
French-influenced metrics
Rhyme
Iambic pentameter couplets
Rome Royal (seven-line rhymed stanzas in iambic pentameter)
Ballad
C. Other Poetic Elements
Allegory
Dream visions
Romance
Narrative
Vivid descriptive details
Humor
lll. The English Renaissance 1485-1603
A. Major Poets
Wyatt
Surrey
Sidney
Spenser
Shakespeare
Marlowe
B. Characteristic Forms
Iambic pentameter
Italian (Petrarchan) Sonnet
English (Shakespearean) Sonnet
Spenserian stanza
Ottava rima
Blank verse
C. Other Poetic Elements
Elaborate patterns of metrics and rhyme
Overstatement (hyperbole)
Elaborate extended metaphors (conceits)
Sensuous imagery
Allusions
Elevated language
lll. The Seventeenth Century 1603-1660
A. Major Poets
Donne
Herbert
Jonson
Marvell
Milton
B. Characteristic Forms
Cavalier poetry--short lyrics based on classical models
Metaphysical poetry--rough rhythms, unpredictable stanza forms
Sonnets
Blank verse
C. Other Poetic Elements
Great diversity among individual poets and schools
Cavalier style (Jonson)--simple, clear, brief, secular tone, classical models
Metaphysical style (Donne, Herbert, Marvell)--complex use of language
(puns), jarring imagery, metaphysical conceits (startling
extended metaphors) rough rhythms and disrespect for form,
religious and erotic themes
Baroque style (Milton)--extensive use of Latin vocabulary,
complex sentence structure, asymmetrical composition,
Biblical and mythological allusions.
lV. The Restoration 1660-1700 and The Neoclassical Period 1700-1785
A. Major Poets
Dryden
Pope
B. Characteristic Form
Heroic couplets
C. Other Poetic Elements
Occasional poetry on public topics
The Ode
Satire
Mock heroic
Classical Greek and Roman influences
Decline of the lyric
V. The Romantic Period 1785-1830
A. Major Poets
Burns
Blake
Wordsworth
Coleridge
Byron
Shelley
Keats
B. Characteristic Forms
Italian models
Italian sonnet
Ottava rima
Terza rima
Spenserian stanza
Blank verse
Ballad
C. Other Poetic Elements
Language of everyday speech
Emphasis on nature
Topics taken from ordinary life
Mystery
Romance
Fascination with the past--Classical, Medieval, and
Renaissance
Fascination with Asia
Vl. The Victorian Period 1830-1901
A. Major Poets
Elizabeth Barrett Browning
Tennyson
Robert Browning
Arnold
Hopkins
B. Characteristic Forms
Sonnet
Blank verse
Rhymed couplets
Rhymed quatrains
C. Other Poetic Elements
Narrative
Dramatic monologue
Careful attention to metrics and form
Emphasis on British ethical values
Innovations in rhythm and language (Hopkins)
Allegory
Religious themes
Pessimism (Arnold)
Vll. The Twentieth Century
A. Major Poets
Hardy
Yeats
Lawrence
Eliot
Auden
Thomas
B. Characteristic Forms
Blank verse
Free verse
Short rhymed stanzas
Syllabic verse
C. Other Poetic Elements
Lyric
Symbolism
Dramatic monologue
Re-discovery of metaphysical poetry
Imagism (influenced by haiku)
Complexity
Ambiguity
Regional poetry
Cultural diversity
In glancing through this timeline, you will notice the names of many poets whom we have already read. However, several of the terms I have used, particularly in describing characteristic forms of poetry, may be new to you. These terms, such as iambic pentameter, terza rima, and rime royal, are all defined for you in the glossary at the back of this book. But some of these forms have been so important historically that it seems necessary to discuss them in more detail now.
We'll begin with the Anglo-Saxons. The term Anglo-Saxon refers to both the Germanic people who immigrated to England in 450 A.D. and the language they spoke. Celtic people had inhabited the British Isles and Ireland from a much earlier time, and their languages are not linguistically related to Anglo-Saxon. The very Germanic sounding Anglo-Saxon is the ancestor of modern English. Anglo-Saxon poetry, which reflects the values of a sea-faring warrior culture, was originally oral. Beowulf, the greatest work of Anglo-Saxon poetry, was written down in about 750 A.D. by a Christian scholar when the poem was already very old.
All of Anglo-Saxon poetry is written in the same form. Each line has four beats with a strong pause, or caesura in the middle. Anglo-Saxon poetry is not divided into stanzas, and it does not rhyme. Its powerful effect is created by the four strong beats and the use of alliteration, or repeated consonant sounds at the beginnings of words. Usually a consonant sound which appears in the first half of the line is repeated after the caesura. Read the following lines from Beowulf in the original Anglo-Saxon. You will not be able to decipher the meaning of every word, but you will be able to recognize the four-beat line, the caesura, and the use of alliteration. The translation which follows tries to retain the basic form of the original.
"Heald pu nu, hruse nu haeled ne mostan,
eorla aehte! Hwaet, hyt aer on de
gode begeaton. Gup-dead fornam,
feorh-bealo frecne fyra gehwylcne
leoda minra, para de pis lif ofgeaf.
gesawon sele-dreamas. Nah hwa sweord wege
odde feormie faeted waege,
drync-faet deore; dugud ellor scoc.
"Hold thou now, Earth now hand of man cannot,
A great tribe's treasures. Truly, from thee
Brave men first got them; battle-death has taken,
Murderous fighting, the men, one and all,
Peers of my people: they have passed from this life,
Rest from hall-joys. None remains with me
To bear the sword, burnish the rich goblet,
Costly drinking-cup; the company has gone elsewhere.
Translated by Alfred David
Anglo-Saxon poetry has a slow, dignified cadence, and it creates an effect of high seriousness. Form and subject are perfectly matched in Anglo-Saxon poetry, which focuses on the cosmic implications of good and evil and the absolute responsibility of human beings to keep their word and live by a strict code of ethical values. Anglo-Saxon poetry contains no humor, no satire, and no romance of any kind.
You are probably aware that England was conquered by the Norman French in 1066, and the Anglo-
Saxon age came to an end. The English language assimilated many French words, and the French style of poetry came into vogue. French poetry, in turn, was strongly influenced by Italian poetry, and both were obsessed with metrics. In poetry, metrics refers to a poem's pattern of rhythm and rhyme. Anglo-Saxon poetry, with its four-beat line, did not have any particular rhythm or number of syllables per line, but French poetry was based on a prescribed rhythmic pattern and number of syllables per line and a prescribed pattern of rhymes at the end of lines. In Chapter 2, you read a translation of the opening lines of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales that maintained the original ten-syllable rhymed lines in a rhythmic pattern of unstressed and stressed syllables. This rhythmic pattern is known as iambic pentameter, and it became the most frequently used rhythmic pattern throughout the history of English poetry. Let's look at the original lines as Chaucer wrote them.
Whan that April with his showres soote
The droughte of March hath perced to the roote,
And bathed every veine in swich licour,
Of which vertu engendred is the flowr;
Whan Zephyrus eek with his sweete breeth
Inspired hath in every holt and heeth
The tendre croppes, and the yonge sonne
Hath in the Ram his halve cours yronne,
And smale fowles maken melodye
That sleepen al the night with open ye--
So priketh hem Nature in hir corages--
Thanne longen folk to goon on pilgrimages,
And palmeres for to seeken straunge strondes
To ferne halwes, couthe in sondry londes;
And specially from every shires ende
Of Engelond to Canterbury they wende,
The holy blisful martyr for to seeke
Than hem hath holpen whan that they were seke.
The language of Chaucer's day is called Middle English, and it has a softer sound than Anglo-Saxon. Read these lines aloud and notice how many English words you can actually recognize. Also notice the rhythmic pattern of an unaccented syllable followed by an accented syllable, a pattern that occurs five times per line. This rhythm is called iambic pentameter because a rhythmic unit of one unstressed syllable followed by one stressed syllable is known as an iambic foot, and there are five of these feet per line in this pattern. The word "pentameter" contains the root word "pent" which refers to the number five, as in the Pentagon, a five-sided building. So, iambic pentameter is simply a rhythmic pattern that contains five iambic feet. The word foot in poetry refers to any of several possible rhythmic units of stressed or unstressed syllables.
If you find this explanation a bit confusing, as my students always do, fortunately scholars have developed a system of diagramming poetic meter. This system is called scansion. Scansion is a method of depicting rhythms by using a curving mark--U--to indicate an unstressed syllable and a diagonal slash--/--to indicate a stressed syllable. Using scansion, a line of iambic pentameter would be diagrammed as follows:
U/ U/ U/ U/ U/
If we apply this diagram to the final line of the quotation from the Canterbury Tales above, it would look like this:
U / U / U / U / U /
That hem hath holpen whan that they were seke.
Scansion is a handy method of figuring out the rhythm of a poem. You should feel free to experiment with the other poems we have read. How about a couple of lines from Wordsworth's
"Tintern Abbey."
U / U / U / U / U /
Five years have past; five summers, with the length
U / U / U / U / U /
Of five long winters! and again I hear
Are you surprised? This poem is written in iambic pentameter also. I mentioned that iambic pentameter had been used more than any other rhythmic pattern in English poetry. Some linguists believe that English is a naturally iambic language-- that is, it often falls into a natural pattern of an unaccented syllable followed by an accented syllable. Whether or not this is actually true, you will notice that poems written in the iambic rhythm are easy to read and do seem to follow the natural flow of the language.
You might like to know the terminology for other rhythmic units (feet) and number of feet per line. Here is the list:
The Most Common Metrical Feet in English Poetry
iambic U/ awake
anapestic UU/ absolute
trochaic /U winter
dactylic /UU general
spondaic // hard knocks
Number of Feet Per Line in English Poetry
one foot monometer
two feet dimeter
three feet trimeter
four feet tetrameter
five feet pentameter
six feet hexameter
seven feet heptameter
eight feet octameter
Using these lists, can you figure out what meter Lord Byron used when he wrote "She Walks in Beauty"?
Write in the scansion marks yourself on the first stanza:
She walks in beauty like the night
Of cloudless climes and starry skies;
And all that's best of dark and bright
Meet in her aspect and her eyes.
If you guessed iambic tetrameter, you're correct, even though the fourth line does not follow the iambic rhythm perfectly. In reading that line, we would not really stress the word "in." Poetic rhythms should never be inflexible and absolute. As you read more and more poetry, you will notice that the great poets like Chaucer and Shakespeare, and the very good poets like Wordsworth and Byron will often vary the meter from time to time to avoid monotony and to create emphasis. In the fourth line of "She Walks in Beauty," the first foot, "Meet in," is actually trochaic rather than iambic. By emphasizing the word "meet" and reversing one foot of the expected rhythm, Byron calls the reader's attention to the fact that "... all that 's best of dark and bright" meet or converge in the lady's personal appearance and in her eyes. In fact, Byron wrote this poem to honor his cousin by marriage, Mrs. Robert John Wilmot, whom he met one beautiful starry evening when she was wearing a black spangled dress. The word "meet" brings together the starry sky, the sparking black dress, and the woman's beautiful eyes. A skillful poet like Byron can use rhythm to further the effect created by words and imagery.
Let's return for a moment to the lines from Chaucer's Canterbury Tales and Wordsworth's "Tintern Abbey." We agreed that they are both written in iambic pentameter, but are they really written in the same form? This will seem like a trick question if you have forgotten that form in English poetry from the Medieval Period on included two elements-- rhythm and rhyme. Actually, a third element, the shape of the stanzas into which the poem is divided is also a factor in determining the poem's form. Neither the Canterbury Tales nor "Tintern Abbey" is divided into stanzas, and they are written in the same meter, but do they use the same kind of rhyme? Chaucer's rhyme is easy to figure out. Look at the final word of each of his first ten lines:
soote
roote
licour
flowr
breeth
heeth
sonne
yronne
melodye
open ye
You will notice that the first two lines rhyme, the third and fourth lines rhyme, the fifth and sixth lines rhyme, and so on. When lines immediately next to each other rhyme, they are called couplets. We have now officially determined the form of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales: iambic pentameter couplets. Chaucer is credited with introducing this form into English, probably based on his extensive reading of French poetry. Iambic pentameter couplets were later called heroic couplets, and if you will glance at the timeline of English Literature, you will see that heroic couplets became very popular once again during the 1700s in the Neo-Classical period. As a form, they are fast paced and well suited to the narrative, or story telling style of poetry which was appreciated in both the Medieval and Neo-Classical Periods.
Is "Tintern Abbey" also written in couplets? Let's use the same method to find out. Here are the last words of the first ten lines:
length
hear
springs
again
cliffs
impress
connect
sky
repose
view
Do the lines next to each other rhyme? Do any of the lines rhyme with each other? No. Our conclusion, then, must be that "Tintern Abbey" is written in unrhymed iambic pentameter. This poetic form, also known as blank verse, was introduced into English literature in 1561 and became hugely popular with Shakespeare and the other great English Renaissance dramatist, Christopher Marlowe. Blank verse, which is very flexible and free flowing, has been used effectively in both drama and poetry, and it has returned to popularity in several different centuries. In addition to Wordsworth in the Romantic Period, the Victorians also liked blank verse, and so have the Moderns. In the poetry collection at the end of this chapter, you might like to read "Ulysses," an interesting poem by the Victorian poet Alfred, Lord Tennyson. I have always found the blank verse form fascinating. However, be careful not to confuse blank verse with free verse, a style of poetry that developed in the Twentieth Century. Free verse is poetry that has no pre-existing meter, stanza form, or rhyme scheme. For examples of free verse, you might want to review Elizabeth Bishop's "Filling Station" and Margaret Avison's "A Nameless One" which appear at the end of Chapter 4.
Blank verse is an interesting poetry form because its structure is based solely on meter, not on stanza form or rhyme. When poems do rhyme, we use letters of the alphabet to determine the rhyme pattern. For example, the first two lines that rhyme are designated with the letter A, and the next two lines that rhyme are called B, and so forth. Let's use Byron's "She Walks in Beauty" to ascertain the rhyme pattern in that poem. Here are the last words of each line:
Stanza 1
night A
skies B
bright A
eyes B
light A
denies B
Stanza 2
less C
grace D
tress C
face D
express C
place D
Stanza 3
brow E
eloquentF
glow E
spent F
below E
innocentF
You will notice that each of the three six-line stanzas has its own rhyme scheme. Instead of using couplets, Byron rhymed alternating lines. Thus, the first, third and fifth lines are designated A, while the second, fourth, and sixth lines are B. In the third stanza, Byron cleverly uses a technique known as sight rhyme. He rhymes the words "brow" and "glow." Obviously, the words "brow" and "glow" do not rhyme when they are pronounced, but seeing them on the printed page, they look as though they rhyme. This technique helps to relieve the monotony that rhyme can create and gives visual pleasure to the reader. When reading a poem aloud, please do not give in to the temptation to read sight rhymes as though they were sound rhymes. Just give each word its natural pronunciation.
Rhyme can give poetry structure, and it can create pleasing or disturbing sounds, depending on the effect the poet is trying to achieve. Rhymed poetry is also much easier to memorize than free verse and other kinds of unrhymed poetry. Rhyme has traditionally been used in songs because songs depend on sound more than other forms of poetry; people usually listen to songs rather than reading them on a printed page. Rhyme can help the singer remember the words to the song, and it can create a sense of familiarity for the listener. However, we must remember that rhyme was introduced into English from French and Italian, two Romance languages that rhyme more naturally than English. Predictable and forced rhymes such as "moon," "June," "spoon," etc., can really diminish a poem's effectiveness. In a popular song called "Honey," for example, the phrases "what the heck" and "hugged my neck" were used to create a rhyme in song that was supposed to be serious and deeply emotional. A poorly chosen rhyme can backfire and elicit a snicker from your reader rather than a sigh of sympathy.
When you write your own poetry, keep in mind that there is no rule that says you have to use rhyme. In the computer age, it is no longer necessary to memorize poetry, so one of rhyme's purposes has been deleted. If you do choose to use rhyme, try to avoid the "jingle effect" in which the predictable rhyme draws more attention to itself than to the meaning of the poem. You can try using sight rhyme as Byron did, or you can use slant rhyme (sometimes called half rhyme, off rhyme or near rhyme), a technique in which the rhyme sounds are similar but not exact. Coleridge used this device in the "Rime of the Ancient Mariner" when he rhymed the words "guest" and "beast." You might also use internal rhyme, in which the rhymes appear within the lines of poetry rather than at the end. Internal rhyme appears in there two lines from Keats' "Ode to a Nightingale."
Already with thee! tender is the night,
And haply the Queen-Moon is on her throne,
The words "thee" and "haply" rhyme in the middle of these two lines, creating a very subtle sound effect. Actually Keats also used an elaborate pattern of end rhyme in this poem, but he was a master of sound and metrics, and very few of us could write so highly structured a poem without sacrificing meaning and the sense of spontaneity that all good poems have.
We have looked at iambic pentameter couplets and blank verse, which were introduced into English literature in the Medieval Period and the Renaissance respectively. Another poetic form that evolved in the Medieval Period and remained popular throughout the Renaissance and is still with us today is the ballad. A ballad is really a popular song, and originally ballads were sung but not written down. They appealed to people who were not literate, and this was a large segment of the population of England and Scotland in those days. They were narrative, meaning that they told a story, and they usually focused on real-life tales of domestic tragedy or current events. They served the purpose that popular journalism and television talk shows do today. But for all their apparent simplicity, ballads are really thought-provoking poems that challenge the listener to ponder the mysteries of human motivation and psychology. Ballads also have a simple basic form which has endured throughout the centuries and has never gone out of style.
The ballad stanza is four lines. (In poetry, we refer to a four-line stanza as a quatrain.) The rhythm is basically iambic with four feet in the first and third lines (iambic tetrameter) and three feet in the second and fourth lines (iambic trimeter.) Also, the second and fourth lines rhyme. Using what we have learned about scansion, we can diagram the ballad stanza as follows:
U/ U/ U/ U/
U/ U/ U/ A
U/ U/ U/ U/
U/ U/ U/ A
These "rules" for the ballad stanza are flexible, and variations in rhyme and meter are common. I have included three of the most famous old ballads, "Edward," "Sir Patrick Spens," and "Barbara Allan" at the end of this chapter. All of them have fascinated me all of my life. As you read them carefully, you will notice that they move very rapidly. They have what is called a "skeletal" quality. The listener is only given the "bare bones" of the story, and he or she must piece together the rest using intuition and a basic knowledge of human motivation. In "Edward," for example, why would a mother "counsel" her son to kill his father? Or in "Barbara Allan," why did Barbara stand by, apparently with a cold heart, when Sir John Graeme, whom she loved, was dying of love for her? In ballads, psychosomatic factors such as dying of love are very real, and human feelings are recognized as very powerful, although they are seldom expressed directly.
Much of the information in a ballad is transmitted through dialogue, and the singer does not take the time to explain who is speaking or when the shift from one speaker to another occurs. Often one speaker is questioning another, as in "Edward." The effect of this fast paced question and answer technique is to place the listener in the position of a juror in a murder trial. The listener knows that a tragic event has happened, but he or she isn't sure why. The listener-juror also knows that many of the key facts will probably be omitted, the jury will have to reconstruct the evidence, and ultimately certain aspects of the tragedy will never be fully known. This is very much like life itself and may explain the enduring fascination with the ballad over the centuries.
The ballad has also profoundly influenced poetry. You may have already noticed that "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner" is a ballad. In looking at the first stanza, we can see that Coleridge has loosely followed the parameters for the ballad format.
It is an ancient Mariner
And he stoppeth one of three.
--"By thy long gray beard and glittering eye,
Now wherefore stopp'st thou me?
Here we have a quatrain that more or less follows a four, three, four, three metrical pattern and contains rhyme in the second and fourth lines. A dialogue also begins, using the questioning technique, and the reader is not told who the questioner is. The reader must simply keep on reading to find out that the questioner is the wedding guest who has been abruptly interrupted on his way to the wedding by the old sailor. Like Edward, the Ancient Mariner confesses to a murder and seeks some form of penance for his sin. Just as Edward does not ever explain exactly why he killed his father (one of my professors argued that incest was involved), the Ancient Mariner does not explain why he killed the albatross. These are issues for the reader to resolve based on his or her knowledge of human emotions and the human ego.
Coleridge also includes supernatural elements, which often appear in ballads, and he frequently expands the length of the stanza to six or even nine lines for dramatic effect. He also incorporated archetypal elements such as the albatross, the moon, and the hermit into the narrative, just as the hawk, the horse (reid-roan steid), and the castle (towirs and ha') are archetypes in "Edward." The symbolic elements in a ballad, like the mysterious events presented in the narrative, must be interpreted by the reader. I hope that you will catch the "ballad fever" as I have, and that you will never recover from it. Ballads have had a long and vigorous life in North America as well as in Scotland, Ireland, England, Italy, and Spain, and they are still an important part of our culture. The poems that you read by Emily Dickinson in Chapter 2 are written in the ballad stanza, and folk singer-song writers like Hank Williams in America and Gordon Lightfoot in Canada have carried on this ancient tradition, and elements of the ballad appear in African American blues music and Mexican American popular songs. Some of you are going to stick up your noses at the thought of listening to "country" music. Let me remind you that there is not place for snobbery in the world of poetry.
The ballad and the heroic couplet are what we refer to as fixed forms, meaning that the structure has been determined before the poem is written. In earlier centuries, much of English poetry was written in fixed forms, and perhaps the most challenging of these, the sonnet, originated in Italy and was introduced into English in the early 1500s. The European Renaissance was a time of great artistic creativity, and the aesthetics emphasized complexity and elaborate decorative detail. These same aesthetic values, which were celebrated in clothing, painting, dance, and architecture, were also applied to poetry. A wonderful Italian word, sprezzatura, captures the essence of Renaissance literature and art. Sprezzatura is the ability to do something that is so difficult and complex that it is almost impossible and make it look easy. Sprezzatura describes the sonnet perfectly. As you will remember from our discussion of Keats' "On First Looking into Chapman's Homer" in Chapter 3, a sonnet is a fourteen-line poem written in iambic pentameter using a specific rhyme scheme. The Italian sonnet, developed by Frances Petrarch, has a thematic division between the first eight lines (the octave) and the last six lines (the sestet), and the rhyme scheme reflects that division. The rhyme scheme for an Italian sonnet usually follows this pattern: ABBAABBA CDCDCD. Sometimes other variations occur in the last six lines, such as CDECDE, CDECED, or CDCDEE. The important thing to remember is that there is one rhyme pattern in the octave and another pattern in the sestet. These patterns should create a subliminal framework for the two parts of the poem.
The shift in meaning, sometimes referred to as the turn, between the first eight and the last six lines, can be accomplished in several different ways. The octave can ask a question and the sestet can answer it; the octave can present a problem and the sestet can offer a solution; the octave can describe a cause and the sestet can depict its effect. The poet can present any number of possible relationships between the two parts of the poem, but however the turn is accomplished, the meaning of the poem should be clear, and the shift should be graceful and subtle. This is where sprezzatura comes in. How easy do you think is to write a fourteen line poem in iambic pentameter with the rhyme scheme described above and a shift in meaning or focus after the eighth line, and say something meaningful that will touch the reader's heart, challenge his mind, appeal to her intuition, and inspire all of his and her senses?
I encourage you to give it a try. I have attempted many sonnets and have found it a very humbling experience. Perhaps you have been given the gift of sprezzatura in greater measure than I. You have already several Italian sonnets. You might want to re-read John Donne's "Holy Sonnet 10" and Gerard Manley Hopkins' "God's Grandeur" in Chapter 3 and John Milton's "Methought I Saw My Late Espoused Saint" in Chapter 4. As you review these poems, study them carefully to see how the poet has maintained the rhythm and the rhyme, and see if you can determine how the shift in meaning between the octave and the sestet occurs.
The Italian sonnet is one of the most challenging of the fixed forms, but the English apparently thought it was too easy, so they developed an even more difficult form of the sonnet. The English sonnet was introduced by Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, but it was perfected by William Shakespeare. Today, the Italian sonnet is often referred to as a Petrarchan sonnet, after its founder, Francis Petrarch, and the English sonnet is often called the Shakespearean sonnet, -- unfortunately slighting Surrey, its founder.
The English sonnet has several similarities to the Italian sonnet. It has fourteen lines, it is written in iambic pentameter, and it has a fixed rhyme scheme. But instead of being structurally and thematically divided into two parts, the Shakespearean sonnet is divided into four: three quatrains and a couplet. We can diagram an English sonnet as follows:
U/ U/ U/ U/ U/ A
U/ U/ U/ U/ U/ B First quatrain
U/ U/ U/ U/ U/ A
U/ U/ U/ U/ U/ B
U/ U/ U/ U/ U/ C
U/ U/ U/ U/ U/ D Second quatrain
U/ U/ U/ U/ U/ C
U/ U/ U/ U/ U/ D
U/ U/ U/ U/ U/ E
U/ U/ U/ U/ U/ F Third quatrain
U/ U/ U/ U/ U/ E
U/ U/ U/ U/ U/ F
U/ U/ U/ U/ U/ G Couplet
U/ U/ U/ U/ U/ G
The rhyme scheme reflects the thematic division of the poem into three sequences of images or thoughts followed by a contrasting conclusion. In a Shakespearean sonnet, the three quatrains often build upon each other, developing an idea or theme; then a sudden shift or reversal occurs in the couplet. Thus, English sonnets are often quite dramatic, leading the reader's thoughts in one direction then surprising him or her with an unexpected conclusion. Shakespeare wrote many beautiful English sonnets, and you have already read "Sonnet 130" ("My mistress' eyes are nothing like the sun") in Chapter 3. This surprising poem appears to criticize the lady by pointing out in the three quatrains that her eyes are not like the sun, her lips are not like coral, her skin is not like roses, her hair is like black wires, she has bad breath, and her voice does not have a musical quality. Then the couplet reverses the poem's direction completely when Shakespeare concludes:
And yet, by heaven, I think my love as rare
An any she belied with false compare.
His point is that he truly loves his lady and does not need to resort to the kind of "false comparisons" that create hypocritical and unrealistic portraits of women.
An even more stunning English sonnet is Shakespeare's "Sonnet 73."
That time of year thou mayst in be behold
When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang
Upon those boughs which shake against the cold,
Bare ruined choirs, where late the sweet birds sang.
In me thou seest the twilight of such day
As after sunset fadeth in the west;
Which by and by black night doth take away,
Death's second self that seals up all in rest.
In me thou seest the glowing of such fire,
That on the ashes of his youth doth lie,
As the deathbed whereon it must expire,
Consumed by that which it was nourished by.
This thou perceiv'st, which makes thy love more strong,
To love that well, which thou must leave ere long.
This is one of the most beautiful and important poems ever written in the English language. To do it justice, you should read it using the ten steps outlined in Chapter 3. As you will remember, Step 7 is: Examine the poem's form, genre, and poetic devices. You already know that this poem is an English sonnet, but you need to study the way Shakespeare used this form to support his purposes. Read the poem aloud and notice how the iambic pentameter rhythm flows as three long sentences in the three quatrains. The rhythm doesn't jerk along and then stop at the end of each line. Instead, it moves forward in the cadence of natural speech so that neither a listener nor a reader is ever aware of the poem's rigid form. The technique of running the meaning of a line of poetry on to the following line without a pause at the end of the first line is called enjambment, and Shakespeare is a master at this conversational technique. Read the poem once again to see how Shakespeare uses three different sets of images in the three quatrains, yet he ties them together in a chronological sequence emphasizing the similarity between the three sets of images with the repetition of the phrase "In me thou seest" at the beginning of the second and third quatrains.
The speaker begins the first quatrain by telling the listener that she can see images of autumn moving into winter when she looks at the speaker. The gist of the first quatrain, in modern, unpoetic English, might be: "When you look at me, you can see reminders of the time of the year when most of the leaves have fallen from the trees and the branches are bare, cold, and silent, and the birds have gone away." Obviously, these images all point to the coming of winter. The famous phrase "Bare ruined choirs" has elicited a tremendous amount of speculation on the part of scholars over the years. You might want to read some of the various interpretations of this phrase. But you can also use your own imagination. The branches themselves are bare and ruined, having lost their colorful leaves and the lovely birds that once nested and sang in the foliage. In a sense, the birds seem to be compared to a choir that has gone away and ended its music, leaving the branches "bare and ruined." However, the grammatical logic of the sentence seems to refer to the boughs themselves as a "bare ruined choir," not to the birds. Some readers think that Shakespeare is comparing the boughs to the choir loft of an ancient church that has fallen into disrepair. If you look up the word "choir" in the Oxford English Dictionary, you will discover that one meaning of the word is "That part of a church appropriated to the singers."
In fact, it is possible to visualize both images simultaneously-- bare, leafless trees, abandoned by the birds who have migrated to the south, and an old ruined church, bereft of the voices and songs of celebration that once filled its interior. Here Shakespeare challenges the reader's intuition. In the inner eye of imagination, does it really matter whether the boughs or the birds or an old church are being compared to a bare ruined choir? The real intuitive leap that Shakespeare asks us to make is to compare the speaker (and perhaps ourselves) to these images of cold, loss, silence, and ruin. What can we infer thematically from the first quatrain? Since winter is an archetype-- a universal symbol of ending and death, it's easy to conclude that the speaker in the poem is referring to his own advanced age and impending death.
Shakespeare begins his second quatrain with the phrase "In me thou seest," which echoes "thou mayst in me behold" from the first line of the poem. This signals to the reader that the second quatrain will parallel the first in some way. In this second quatrain, the speaker tells the listener that she can see images of twilight, sunset, and night time when she looks at him. Winter and night are both endings rather than beginnings, and Shakespeare emphasizes this fact be referring to night as "Death's second self." Here he uses another archetype when he equates sleep with death. He also creates the sense of the passage of time and a chronological flow toward the end of a human life by using the words "twilight," "sunset," and "night" sequentially.
In the third quatrain, Shakespeare repeats the exact words which he used to begin the second quatrain, "In me thou seest." By now the reader is ready for the third set of images. What will the listener see when she looks at the speaker? The third set of images also describes a process that leads to an ending-- the burning down of a fire that ultimately dies out in its own ashes. Shakespeare uses the phrase "ashes of his youth" and the word "deathbed" to emphasize the connection between the aging speaker and the image of a fire that is consumed over time by its own energy. A highly intuitive reader might think for a moment of the phoenix, the mythical bird that dies and is reborn from its own ashes, a little like the "sweet birds" of the first quatrain, who disappear in winter and return in spring. If the reader is especially intuitive and if he or she is sensitive to the cyclic movement of time in nature, the couplet will be less of a surprise than it will be to a thought oriented person.
But before we look at the couplet, let's look at the imagery from the three quatrains in chronological order: autumn moving into winter, twilight turning to night, and a fire burning down to ashes. Each is a natural process that takes place within a time frame, like the aging and death of a human being. To create a sense of urgency, Shakespeare places these three sets of images in order according to the length of time that the process requires to complete. The movement from autumn to winter is a matter of months or days; the shift from twilight to night can take perhaps an hour, and a fire can burn down in a matter of minutes. By the end of the first three quatrains, the reader has a strong sense of impending doom.
Then, true to the structure of the English sonnet, Shakespeare turns the direction of the poem completely away from its focus on aging and death and emphasizes instead the preciousness of the present moment. With the phrase "This thou perceiv'st," Shakespeare ties the couplet to the three quatrains, since to "behold," to "see," and to "perceive" have a similar meaning with the added implication of insight as well as visual sight in the word "perceive." The speaker declares to his loved one that her love for him is even stronger because of her awareness of the fleeting nature of human life. The final phrase of the poem leaves the reader with a mystery to ponder. Throughout the first three quatrains, the speaker has referred to his own aging and impending death, which his loved one can see when she looks at him. Yet in the last line, he says, "thou must leave ere long." Logically, we are taught to think that the person who is preparing to die, in this case the speaker, is the one who will be "leaving." But Shakespeare challenges us to see death in a different way. The one who is left alive "leaves" the relationship too, when a death occurs. The word "thou" and the word "I" are both only one syllable, and either one would have fit into the iambic rhythm of the line, so Shakespeare seems to have chosen the word "thou" deliberately, leaving us to meditate on the mystery of love and death.
I have provided several additional examples of Italian and English sonnets at the end of this chapter. I hope you will enjoy analyzing the rhythm, rhyme schemes, and structures of these poems, and that you will appreciate, as I do, the challenge that faces any poet who chooses to express his or her creative urges i a fixed form. The Renaissance provided many other fixed forms in addition to the sonnet. Three that became significant historically because they were reclaimed by the Romantic poets nearly three hundred years later are terza rima, ottava rima, and the Spenserian stanza. You will recall the cyclic evolution of English literature with each generation rejecting the values of the preceding generation and returning to an even earlier time for inspiration. This shift was especially strong when the Romantics turned away from the Neo-Classical obsession with heroic couplets (which the Neo-classicals adapted from Chaucer, not from the Renaissance), and turned to Italian and earlier English fixed forms for their highly emotional poems.
Terza rima is the stanza form that the great Italian poet, Dante, used when he wrote The Divine Comedy. It consists of three lines per stanza with an interlocking rhyme scheme in which the middle line of each stanza rhymes with the first and third lines of the following stanza. The rhyme scheme is diagrammed as follows: ABA BCB CDC, etc. Terza rima is written in iambic pentameter with an extra syllable. Percy Shelley adapted this stanza form for his beautiful poem, "Ode to the West Wind," which you will find at the end of this chapter.
Both Shelley and Keats helped to revive a stanza form named after Edmund Spenser, the English poet who wrote The Faerie Queene, a very long narrative poem which he began in 1580. The Spenserian stanza contains nine lines. The first eight are written in iambic pentameter, and the final line is iambic hexameter (six feet per line.) The rhyme scheme is: ABABBCBCC. Let's look at three Spenserian stanzas. First, we'll read from The Faerie Queene itself. The following is the fourth stanza of the poem and is the conclusion of Spenser's Invocation to the Muse, which is actually an elaborate compliment to Queen Elizabeth I, whose glory he compares to the sun by way of the Greek god Phoebus Apollo. (Remember the Renaissance love for complexity.) Spenser used deliberately archaic vocabulary and spelling in his attempt to capture a sense of medieval romance. The words "eke" (also) and "eyne" (medieval plural for eye) were already out of date in the Renaissance when Spenser wrote;
And with them eke, O Goddess heavenly bright,
Mirrour of grace and Majestie divine,
Great Lady of the greatest Isle, whose light
Like Phoebus lampe throughout the world doth shine,
Shed thy faire beams into my feeble eyne,
And raise my thoughts too humble and too vile,
To thinke of that true glorious type of thine,
The argument of mine afflicted stile:
The which to heare, vouchsafe, O dearest dred a-while.
Although Spenser's style is very elevated, you will be able to recognize the iambic pentameter in the first eight lines of this stanza and the hexameter in the final line. In a tribute to Spenser, Keats wrote his long medieval romance "The Eve of St. Agnes" in Spenserian stanzas in 1819. The first stanza appears below. Keats dispenses with the Invocation to the Muse and begins immediately by establishing the setting of the poem while appealing to the reader's senses. You will find the complete text of this beautiful sensual narrative at the end of this chapter.
St. Agnes' Eve--Ah, bitter chill it was!
The owl, for all his feathers, was a-cold;
The hare limp'd trembling through the frozen grass,
And silent was the flock in wooly fold:
Numb were the Beadsman's fingers, while he told
His rosary, and while his frosted breath,
Like pious incense from a censor old,
Seem'd taking flight for heaven, without a death,
Past the sweet Virgin's picture while his prayers he saith.
A third tribute in Spenserian stanzas is Shelley's magnificent elegy, "Adonais," written in 1821 to commemorate the death of Keats. Shelley may have chosen Spenserian stanzas for this poem because it was a stanza form that Keats loved and wrote in so beautifully. The final stanza of "Adonais" has fascinated readers for generations because it seems to foreshadow Shelley's own death, just a year after he wrote this poem. The word "bark" means "boat," and Shelley died in a boating accident when a small craft in which he was sailing became lost. In the poem, he refers to Keats as Adonais.
The breath who might I have invoked in song
Descend on me; by spirit's bark is driven,
Far from the shore, far from the trembling throng
Whose sails were never to the tempest given;
The massy earth and sphered skies are riven!
I am borne darkly, fearfully afar;
Whilst burning through the inmost veil of Heaven,
The soul of Adonais, like a star,
Beacons from the abode where the Eternal are.
As you read these three stanzas, take time to analyze the rhythm and the rhyme scheme. It is startling that three so different poems are written in exactly the same fixed form. This should give you some insight into the flexibility of this stanza and into the diverse creative gifts of these three poets. Far from stifling creativity, a fixed form can challenge a poet to remarkable and very personal achievements.
Although there are others, the final Renaissance stanza form I would like to introduce to you is ottava rima. If you guessed that this is an eight-line stanza, you are correct. It originated in Italy and was used by Tasso, Ariosto and others. Sir Thomas Wyatt introduced this stanza into English in the early 1500s. Ottava rima has lines of eleven syllables and a rhyme scheme of ABABABCC. Lord Byron chose this stanza form for his masterpiece, the long comic satiric poem, Don Juan. In stanza 22 of this poem, the narrator comments on the relationship between the parents of the hero, Don Juan. Notice the comic effect that Byron creates by using multi-syllabic rhyme, especially with the word "intellectual" and the phrase "hen-peck'd you all." He also creates a light and silly effect with the word "hen-peck'd" which is accented in reverse to fit into the iambic rhythm.
"Tis pity learned virgins ever wed
With persons of no sort of education,
Or gentlemen, who, though well-born and bred,
Grow tired of scientific conversation:
I don't choose to say much upon this head,
I'm a plain man, and in a single station,
But--Oh! ye lords of ladies intellectual,
Inform us truly, have they not hen-peck'd you all?
Throughout Don Juan, Byron has a roaring good time satirizing epic literature, his fellow Romantic poets, with whom he did not identify, and ottava rima itself. Stanza 205 is especially witty as Byron indulges in a bit of light hearted literary criticism and rhymes the words "Southy," "mouthey," and "drouthy."
Thou shalt believe in Milton, Dryden, Pope;
Thou shalt not set up Wordsworth, Coleridge, Southey;
Because the first is crazed beyond all hope,
The second drunk, the third so quaint and mouthey:
With Crabbe it may be difficult to cope,
And Campbell's Hippocrene is somewhat drouthy:
Thou shalt not steal from Samuel Rogers, nor--
Commit--flirtation with the muse of Moore.
Byron mentions Dryden and Pope as poets he admired along with Milton. Byron was one of the few poets living during the Romantic Period who preferred the values of the preceding Neo-Classical period. The Neo-Classical Period, sandwiched between the Seventeenth Century and the Romantic era, was a time of conservatism and strict adherence to rigid metrical principles. This was the generation following the Civil War during which King Charles I was executed and the Puritans took over Parliament. After the Restoration of Charles II, the people of England, including the poets, wanted nothing but peace, harmony, and predictability. They didn't want any more political surprises, and they were fed up with the excessive, overly elaborate, and far too imaginative poetry of the late Renaissance. They wanted to return to the simple, clear, restrained aesthetics of the Greek and Roman Classical Periods, and the Neo-Classical age began.
The heroic couplet was just the kind of poetry for them. It was a simple, straightforward form of poetry, and its unvarying familiarity was a source of endless comfort to Neo-Classical poets and readers. You will remember that Chaucer introduced the iambic pentameter couplet into English, but most scholars do not refer to Chaucer's poetry as heroic couplets. That term is usually applied only to iambic pentameter couplets that are end-stopped, meaning that there is a pause at the end of each line. If you will re-read the passage from Chaucer's Canterbury Tales which appears earlier in this chapter, you will notice that he uses a lot of enjambment, and that his lines flow very freely so that there is often not a pause at the end of a line, even though there is a rhyme.
The Neo-Classical poets, with their commitment to order and structure, adapted Chaucer's form to their own purposes. They developed a much more rigid format that called for a pause at the end of the first line and a complete stop at the end of the second line where the rhyme occurs. It is these end-stopped rhymed lines that are known today as heroic couplets, and the Neo-Classical poets who mastered this form were truly dancing in chains.
John Dryden and Alexander Pope were the two great English Neo-Classical poets, and it is a revelation to read their heroic couplets. Both of them achieve a natural sounding, fluid movement, even though there is a punctuation mark at the end of almost every line. In his brilliant mock heroic poem, "The Rape of the Lock," Pope satirized two upper-class families who were feuding because a gentleman from one family snipped off a lock of hair from a lady in the other family. In an attempt to make peace, Pope dramatized the event by comparing it to an epic battle, and in the comparison, the trivial nature of the feud becomes apparent. In the following lines, written in flawless heroic couplets, Pope describes the moment when the Baron actually cuts off Belinda's curl:
The Peer now spreads the glittering forfex wide,
To enclose the Lock; now joins it, to divide.
Even then, before the fatal engine closed,
A wretched Sylph too fondly interposed;
Fate urged the shears, and cut the Sylph in twain
(But airy substance soon unites again):
The meeting points the sacred hair dissever
From the fair head, forever and forever!
Then flashed the living lightning from her eyes,
And screams of horror rend the affrighted skies.
Not louder shrieks to pitying heaven are cast,
When husbands, or when lapdogs breathe their last:
Dryden, too reflected the values of his age by writing satiric, philosophical, or occasional poetry in heroic couplets. Occasional poetry is written to commemorate a specific event usually a public occasion. This type of poetry also appealed to the Neo-Classicals because they disliked excessively personal or emotional literature. In short, they rejected lyric poetry. A late Renaissance Metaphysical style poem like John Donne's "The Flea," which you read in Chapter 3, and which focuses on a speaker trying to talk a woman into giving in to him sexually, would have offended the Neo-Classical sense of decorum. Dryden was especially skillful in using heroic couplets to express the kind of restrained public sentiments that appealed to Neo-Classical tastes. In the very brief "Epigram on Milton," without the least show of emotion, politely compliments the author of Paradise Lost. The other two poets to whom he refers are the Classical poets, Homer and Virgil.
Epigram on Milton
Three poets, in three distant ages born,
Greece, Italy, and England did adorn.
The first in loftiness of thought surpassed,
The next in majesty, in both the last:
The force of Nature could not farther go;
To make a third, she joined the former two.
As the timeline which appears earlier in this chapter indicates, these various poetic forms have recycled in and out of popularity in ensuing generations. The sonnet, which was too personal and too emotional for the Neo-Classicals, came back into vogue with the sentimental Victorians, and blank verse became popular in the Twentieth Century. The ballad has managed to survive in every generation, though it did not appeal to the intellectuals of the Neo-Classical age. Other English speaking cultures have adapted these forms to their own creative purposes and developed new forms of their own. The limerick, a short, rhyming, comical poem, is an American invention, as is the blues stanza, which evolved from African American music. Haiku poetry, which originated in Japan, is also widely written in English, and several Modern poets have experimented with syllabic verse, poetry which is structured around a pre-determined number of syllables per line rather than on meter and rhyme.
Fixed forms are certainly not unique to European poetry. We have already read several Japanese poems, both tanka and haiku, and both of these are fixed forms which have interested readers outside Japan. One difference between the Asian tradition in literature and the English is that in both China and Japan the development of poetry has followed a more continuous flow with each generation learning from and honoring its predecessors. The Chinese and Japanese have not shared the English tendency to reject the poetic values of the preceding generation. As a result, the evolution of tanka and haiku took place over several hundred years based on artistic mentoring from one poetry master to the next.
Tanka is the older of these two fixed forms, dating to the earliest days of Japanese literacy in the 400s A.D. The Manyoshu, the most significant anthology of ancient Japanese poetry, compiled in about 750, contains hundreds of tanka. (The Japanese language does not employ singular and plural, so we will refer to one tanka or several tanka, one haiku or many haiku.) Japanese poetry has never used meter, probably because the language itself is monotonal. Neither has rhyme been used in Japanese poetry, perhaps because rhyme would simply be too easy. Every Japanese word ends in a vowel. Instead, Japanese fixed forms are based on the number of lines and the number of syllables per line. In this regard, the Japanese have always had a preference for uneven numbers. They would probably feel quite uncomfortable with the predictable symmetry of heroic couplets.
The structure of a tanka is five lines with a total of thirty-one syllables arranged in each line as follows: five, seven, five, seven, seven. The poems by Ono no Komachi and Murasaki Shikibu which you read at the end of Chapter 1 are all tanka, as are Akiko Yosano's poems in Chapter 2. Unfortunately, you will not be able to analyze the syllable count in these poems because they are translations. Although most of the translations maintain the five-line structure, translators usually feel that it is more important to capture the meaning and emotional impact of the poem rather than the correct number of syllables. if you decide to write some tanka of your own, why not take on the challenge of maintaining the correct syllable count.
While English and European poets often define a poem by its structure, the Japanese do not. Even though a tanka does have five lines and thirty-one syllables, it has other characteristics that define it more clearly for the Japanese. For example, a tanka poem is written in the first person point of view in the poet's own voice, not in the voice of a persona. Tanka almost always focus on the immediate emotional experience of the poet, and they are written spontaneously, usually at a moment of heightened feeling. They often contain imagery which connects elements from nature with human emotions, a characteristic they share with Shakespeare and many of the other great poets of the world. Tanka also sometimes contain verbal complexity, including puns, a technique used by the English Metaphysical poets John Donne and George Herbert.
Akiko Yosano, a Modern poet whom we read in Chapter 2, studied the tanka of Ono no Komachi and the other masters who lived a thousand years before her time, and she consciously incorporated their techniques into her poetry. The following tanka was written by the great Yakamochi Otomo, who lived from 718 to 785 and was probably responsible for compiling The Manyoshu.
So loud the deer cries, calling to his mate,
That the answering echo resounds
Through the mountains,
Where I am alone.
Translated by the Japanese Classics Translation
Committee, Seiichi Taki, Chairperson
Ono no Komachi lived in the Ninth Century and is considered one of the great geniuses of Japanese poetry. You have already read four of her poems. Here is another:
How helpless my heart!
Were the stream to tempt,
My body, like a reed
Severed at the roots,
Would drift along, I think.
Translated by Geoffrey Bownas and
Anthony Thwaite
And finally, here is a poem by Akiko Yosano, who was born in 1878 and died in 1942:
Sweet and sad
like love overwhelmed
with long sighs,
out of the depths of the willow
little by little
the moon appears.
Translated by Kenneth Rexroth and
Ikuko Atsumi
These tanka, written over a twelve hundred year period, share certain artistic principles in addition to their thirty-one syllable structure. Each captures an intense moment of emotion and expresses it both personally, in the poet's own voice, and archetypally, by connecting the deeply felt emotion with one of the eternal cycles of nature. Yakamochi feels his isolation intensify in the mating calls of deer, which contrast so profoundly with his own loneliness. Komachi, who has given in completely to helpless love, sees a parallel between her own loss of control and a reed which has been uprooted and floats down the river with no volition of its own. And Akiko sees the poignant and complex feelings of lovers in the slow rise of the moon through the tangled branches of the willow. A tanka poet must be willing to risk all in the certain knowledge that it is passion, and deeply felt emotion of every kind,-- loneliness, jealousy, anger, sorrow, and every imaginable combination of feelings that gives human beings their unique place on our planet. So profound are our emotional lives that we see reflections of our feelings in every manifestation of nature. This is the essence of the tanka poet's art. If you want to be a tanka poet, you must be prepared to dig into the deepest well of your emotions and bring them to light in the world of nature. To be a reader of tanka, you must respect and validate the feelings of other human beings without being judgmental or cynical.
A person who looks at tanka and haiku, which developed later, only in terms of their fixed form might conclude that a haiku is simply the first three lines of a tanka and that Japanese poets decided to make the tanka more challenging by shortening it. It is true that a haiku consists of three lines and a total of seventeen syllables arranged in a pattern of five, seven, and five syllables per line. And it does seem that historically the haiku grew out of the tanka tradition. However, what the haiku became, after about two hundred and fifty years of development, is very different from the tanka.
First of all, most haiku are written in the objective point of view, not in the poet's own voice, and the haiku poet almost never makes emotional statements such as "how helpless my heart," or "sweet and sad." Like a tanka, a haiku captures a moment in time, and it uses imagery from nature to express the intensity of that moment, but in a haiku it is nature, in its exquisite objectivity, that is at the forefront and human emotion, just one small element of nature, must be inferred by an intuitive reader.
A haiku actually has much more similarity to an artistic photograph than it does to a tanka poem. If you have ever studied photography, you know that a good photograph is based on certain principles of composition. It is really just an empty space that is filled with images in relation to each other. The photographer must consider elements such as the foreground, the background, the spatial relationships between the images at the top, bottom, and sides of the frame, the sizes of the images and their relationship to each other. A good photograph usually presents some images in contrast and some images in comparison to each other. When we say that a photograph is good, we mean that it has created some kind of profound effect on the viewer. And although the eye of the camera is objective, a good photograph can elicit a powerful emotional response. These principles are also true of haiku. Some readers have mistakenly assumed that a haiku does not express emotion; in fact, a haiku often evokes very deep feelings, but the poet must depend on the reader's ability to respond emotionally to the images in the poem. Thus, a haiku asks more from the reader than a tanka does.
A haiku poet who asks a great deal from his reader because he respects the depth of his reader's intuition, feelings, senses, and intellect, is the master himself--Matsuo Basho. Basho is to haiku as Shakespeare is to the English sonnet. Others have come before and after him, but Basho made the haiku one of the sublime creations of human art. It was Basho who first developed the technique that his literary biographer, Makoto Ueda, refers to as "surprising comparison."1 Basho read all of the great Japanese poets who preceded him, and like Sei Shonagon, he had the gift for finding comparisons in situations that others would see as contrasts. Since his stanza form was a three-line poem, Basho usually placed three images in each haiku, and in some subtle and startling way, these images where compared. His famous crow poem is a perfect example of this technique:
On a withered branch
a crow has settled--
autumn nightfall.
Translated by Harold Henderson
The old adage that "great minds think alike" is certainly true. Here we have a similar set of images to the first quatrain of Shakespeare's "Sonnet 73." The three images in the haiku are a withered branch, a crow, and the falling darkness. Although these are three separate things, they are compared, as in a photograph, in shades of gray and black. Also, the first two images are more distinct, and the final image of nightfall envelopes the other two, and the three become one. It is the ability to create harmony, or oneness out of disparate images that is Basho's gift to the world. It is both an artistic gift, based on his craft as a poet, and a philosophical gift, based on his commitment to the Zen Buddhist way of life.
In term of craft, Basho often used a device called synesthesia, or fusion of the senses, which has also been used by European poets. This technique is especially well suited to poetry, and it gives to poetry a dimension which photography, which is based primarily on visual imagery, cannot exploit to the same extent. In the following haiku, Basho combines the sense of sound with the visual sense of color:
The sea darkens
And a wild duck's call
Is faintly white.
The idea that the sound of a wild duck might have a color requires a subtle intuitive response on the part of the reader. The darkening sea and the cold, whitish sound of the duck, who flies unseen, creates a profound sense of the objective impersonalness of nature, which nevertheless harmonizes all things in its never ending cycles. This is the concept of sabi, or natural solitude (sometimes translated as "impersonal loneliness"), that is present in most of Basho's truly great haiku.
His famous frog poem also brings disparate elements together to create a sense of harmonious sabi:
An old pond:
a frog jumps in
water sound.
Translated by Harold Henderson
edited by Rose Anna Higashi
Basho often presents an image that seems to represent the eternal or changeless principle such as the old pond, the nightfall, or the darkening sea, coming into contact with a temporary or suddenly changing element, such as a crow, a wild duck, or a frog. Although the frog breaks the silence of the old pond and the crow invades the solitude of the withered branch, no conflict occurs. Here Basho communicates the Zen principle that change is the very essence of nature, and even elements that appear to be changeless, like an old pond, are in fact always in the process of change. Furthermore, the old pond does not resist the frog, the agent of change, and although the frog does alter the dynamics of the pond forever, no harm comes to either.
A simpler technique that Basho usually used was to include a kigo, or word indicating the season of the year, in each haiku. A haiku is a very small poem, and it must borrow from the larger world of nature to create archetypal responses to the seasons of the year and the emotions that human beings associate with each season. Shakespeare, of course, used this same technique in "Sonnet 73." In the following poem, the word "cherry," (meaning cherry blossoms), is the kigo that tells the reader that this poem occurs in spring:
After the chimes fade
Cherry fragrance continues:
Evening dusk.
Translated by Makoto Ueda
Using synesthesia, the poem also emphasizes the connectedness rather than the contrast between the three images in the poem. The sound of temple bells and the scent of cherry blossoms fuse together on a beautiful spring evening. And spring is the season of new life, energy, and creativity for human beings.
The next poem uses a kigo to evoke our archetypal response to winter as a time of endings and death. In fact, Basho wrote this poem just before his own death at the age of fifty in 1689.
On a journey ailing--
My dreams roam about
Over a withered moor.
Translated by Makoto Ueda
Yosa Buson, whose haiku you read at the end of Chapter 2, and Kobayashi Issa, whose haiku appear in Chapter 4, both lived after Basho and learned from him. Buson continued to use Basho's principle of three-image composition based on contrast and comparison, and Issa, who had a profound compassion for nature, emphasized the interconnectedness of all life. In Chapter 4, I mentioned Basho's haiku diary, Narrow Road to the Deep North. I certainly recommend that you read this little jewel. Basho's ability to capture nature's moments of transforming beauty and harmony in a seventeen-syllable poem is unsurpassed. If you would like to try to write haiku poetry or keep a haibun diary, you might as well learn from the master.
I hope our journey into the historic poetry forms of England and Japan has given you some new insight into your craft. In your own life as a poet, the entire world of poetic structure, from every cultural tradition, is at your disposal. And any form can be adapted to meet your needs. As Carl Jung observed, "Only that which changes remains true." Dryden's heroic couplets are not like Chaucer's iambic pentameter couplets, some of Gerard Manley Hopkins' sonnets have more than fourteen lines, and Richard Brautigan's haiku do not resemble Basho's. Every form should be allowed to evolve and grow in the hands of each new generation. Form exists to enhance a poet's creative expression, not to stifle it. The essence of creativity is finding the form that best supports the magic of each poet's vision.
NOTES
CHAPTER 5
1. Makoto Ueda, Matsuo Basho (Tokyo: Kodansha International Ltd., 1982), p. 40.
QUESTIONS AND TOPICS FOR REVIEW
1. What elements comprise the form of a poem?
2. What two trends characterized the development of form in English literature?
3. How did Japanese literature differ from English literature historically in the development of poetic forms?
4. What is the difference between free verse and blank verse?
5. What are the structural characteristics of Anglo-Saxon poetry?
6. Define the terms caesura and kenning.
7. How does Middle English poetry differ from Anglo-Saxon poetry?
8. Define the terms metrics and scansion.
9. Define and provide and example of iambic pentameter.
10. What are the names of the most commonly used metrical feet in English poetry?
11. Define the terms dimeter, trimeter, tetrameter, pentameter, and hexameter.
12. Define and provide an example of an iambic, anapestic, trochaic, and dactylic foot.
13. In what form is Chaucer's Canterbury Tales written?
14. In what form is Tennyson's "Ulysses" written?
15. What are heroic couplets, and how do they differ from iambic pentameter couplets?
16. What are sight rhyme, slant rhyme, and internal rhyme?
17. Define and provide an example of the ballad stanza.
18. What other elements, in addition to form, characterize the ballad?
19. What words are used to define a two line stanza, a four line stanza, a six line stanza, and an eight line stanza?
20. What is enjambment?
21. Define and provide an example of the Italian sonnet.
22. What is another name for the Italian sonnet?
23. Define and provide an example of the English sonnet.
24. What is another name for the English sonnet?
25. How are the Italian and the English sonnet similar? How are they different?
26. Define the word sprezzatura.
27. What is a fixed form?
28. Define and provide examples of terza rima, ottava rima, and Spenserian stanzas.
29. What is occasional poetry?
30. Why did Neo-Classical poets dislike lyric poetry?
31. What are the characteristics of Cavalier, Metaphysical, and Baroque poetry?
32. In what form is Shelley's "Adonais" written?
33. In what form is Byron's Don Juan written?
34. In what country were the limerick and the blues stanza developed?
35. Define and provide an example of the tanka.
36. Define and provide an example of the haiku.
37. What are the similarities between haiku and photography?
38. Define and provide an example of synesthesia.
39. What is sabi? How does Basho use this concept in his poetry?
40. Define kigo and explain how it is used in haiku poetry.
TOPICS FOR DISCUSSION
1. Which historic form of English poetry do you find most appealing? Why?
2. Which historic form of English poetry do you find least appealing? Why?
3. Discuss the differences between Chaucer's iambic pentameter couplets and Neo-classical heroic couplets. Which do you prefer and why?
4. Discuss the advantages and disadvantages of using rhyme in contemporary poetry.
5. Select an Italian sonnet and an English sonnet and discuss them both, focusing on rhythm, rhyme, imagery, and overall structure. Be sure to talk about how the poet creates the turn. Which of the two poems you have chosen seems more effective? Why?
6. What characteristics of the ballad do you find appealing? Why have intellectuals in some generations rejected the ballad?
7. What are the advantages and disadvantages of writing in free verse rather than in a fixed form?
8. Is it likely that some of the creativity will be lost if a poet writes occasional poetry rather than spontaneous lyric poetry? Why or why not?
9. In poetry, are there subtle cultural prejudices suggesting that bigger is better?
If so, how can haiku overcome these prejudices and be taken seriously as an art form?
10. Does tanka violate any unspoken cultural boundaries that limit excessive expressions of emotion?
11. In what ways is tanka similar to the blues?
12. How can a reader discern the theme of a haiku poem?
ACTIVITIES
1. Divide into groups and rewrite "Edward" in contemporary vocabulary and spelling. Then compare your revisions and discuss any discrepancies.
2. Organize a mock trial in which Edward is tried for murder. Both the prosecution and the defense will have to provide motivation for both Edward's and his mother's actions. The prosecution will have to decide whether Edwards' mother should be tried for conspiracy to commit murder.
3. Organize a field trip to a park or other outdoor setting for the purpose of writing haiku. Write the haiku spontaneously while you are actually in the natural setting. Share these haiku with the class when you return.
4. Divide into groups of two and write narrative poems in heroic couplets, taking turns writing alternate lines. You might be surprised where you story lines will go.
5. Each person should bring a favorite photograph to class. Arrange these photographs around the classroom and write haiku in response to the images in the photographs.
6. Divide into small groups and write a series of linked haiku. One person writes the first line, another person writes the second line, etc. You can also link one haiku to the next by using an image from the final line of a haiku in the first line of the following haiku.
7. Go to a library or other source and find tapes or recordings of ballads or blues songs. Choose several and listen to them in class together. What poetic elements do these songs contain. Discuss form, imagery, similes and metaphors, etc.
8. Read Shelley's "Ode to the West Wind" aloud in class, taking turns reading one stanza each. Then talk about the poem's theme and your personal responses to the poem.
ANALYTICAL WRITING ASSIGNMENTS
1. Analyze "Sir Patrick Spens" focusing on dramatic elements and imagery. For example, why does the elderly knight recommend Sir Patrick for the sea voyage? Why does Sir Patrick laugh when he first reads the king's letter? What actually happens to Sir Patrick and the Scots nobles? How do the images of "blood red wine," "cork heeled shoes," and the ladies with their fans and gold combs in their hair add to the dramatic development of the narrative?
2. Analyze the psychological elements in "Bonny Barbara Allan." For example, why is Sir John dying? Why does Barbara reject him at the moment of his death? Why does Sir John ask his friends to "be kind to Barbara Allan"? What effect does the death-bell have on Barbara? Why does she decide to die?
3. Analyze form and metaphor in Wyatt's "Whoso List to Hunt." In what form is this poem written, and how does Wyatt use the elements of this form to convey his theme? What metaphor unifies the imagery and theme of the poem?
4. Analyze Surrey's use of form and sound in "The Soote Season." Which form of the sonnet does he use? Discuss his use of rhyme and alliteration.
5. Compare and contrast the sonnets by Sidney and Spenser at the end of this chapter, focusing on form and imagery.
6. Compare and contrast any two sonnets, focusing on form, theme, imagery, etc.
7. Analyze the structure of Shelley's "Ode to the West Wind."
8. Analyze the structure and narrative progression of Keats' "The Eve of St. Agnes." You will need to do some research on the legend of St Agnes' Eve.
9. Analyze the imagery in "The Eve of St. Agnes" focusing on Keats's use of contrasts and opposites.
10. Analyze the theme of Tennyson's "Ulysses," explaining how Tennyson communicates this theme to the reader.
11. Research the story of Ulysses--he appears in Homer's Odyssey and Dante's Inferno. How does Tennyson use this story to unify his poem? Be sure to identify the other characters mentioned in the poem, Telemachus and Achilles, and the mariners. How do they contribute to the poem's meaning?
11. Analyze either sonnet by Elizabeth Barrett Browning, focusing on form, theme, and imagery.
12. Compare and contrast Browning's "Sonnet 32" and Embree's "Renaissance--Part I," focusing on form, theme, and imagery.
13. Select a ballad and a blues song and compare and contrast form, imagery, and other elements in these two art forms.
14. Gerard Manley Hopkins is sometimes called the father of Modern poetry, even though he lived during the Victorian Period. Analyze "The Windhover," focusing on the innovations he made in the sonnet form. You will need to do some research on "sprung rhythm," a technique Hopkins developed in which only the stressed syllables are counted in each line.
15. Analyze "The Windhover" focusing on theme, imagery, and word choices. You will need to use the Oxford English Dictionary to determine the meanings of some of the Anglo-Saxon and French words in the poem.
16. Compare and contrast Countee Cullen's "Yet Do I Marvel" to a sonnet written in an earlier century.
17. Compare and contrast the poetry of Richard Brautigan with traditional Japanese haiku.
CREATIVE WRITING ASSIGNMENTS
1. Write a love sonnet in either the Italian or the English form.
2. Rewrite this same sonnet in the other form.
3. Write a ballad on a current event or a tragic person who has lived during your own lifetime. Please remember that the ballad is not a cannibalistic form of literature.
4. Write a comic poem in heroic couplets.
5. Write a philosophical poem in blank verse.
6. Write a tanka or a series of tanka connecting your own emotional experiences with elements in nature.
7. Write an occasional poem celebrating some public event such as the inauguration of the President of the United States or the Prime Minister of Canada, Martin Luther King's Birthday, Cinch de Mayo, etc.
8. Write an occasional poem in a fixed form on an event that is important to you, such as your grandparent' anniversary, a friend's birthday, etc.
9. Write a series of haiku using kigo for inspiration. For example, kigo for autumn might be: falling leaves, cicadas, chrysanthemums, etc. Only use one kigo per haiku. For example, it is considered redundant to write a spring haiku that contains both butterflies and cherry blossoms.
10. Write a series of tanka using either Barbara Allan or Sir Patrick Spens as the persona who speaks in the poem. Focus on the range of their emotion, but remember to include imagery.
11. Write a blues song using "Fogyism" or "Chicago Mill Blues" as models. Note that a blues stanza is three lines long and the first two lines are identical. A blues song is seldom longer than four stanzas.
It must focus on authentic and immediate emotional experiences.
ADDITIONAL POEMS IN VARIOUS FORMS FOR READING AND DISCUSSION
The following anonymous traditional ballad is written in the Scottish dialect. The following vocabulary list may assist the reader:
brand--sword
sae--so
bluid--blood
gang--go
nae--no
mair--more
bot--but
erst--once
frie--free
dule--sorrow
drie--suffer
wae--woe
towirs--towers (castle)
ha--hall
maun--must
bairns--children
warldis--world's
late--let
thrae--through
ain--own
sic--such
counseils--counsel
Edward
"Why dois your brand sae drap wi' bluid,
Edward, Edward?
Why dois your brand sae drap wi' bluid?
And why sae sad gang yee, O?"
"O, I hae killed my hauke sae guid,
Mither, mither,
O, I hae killed my hauke sae guid,
And I had nae mair bot hee, O."
"Your haukis bluid was nevir sae reid,
Edward, Edward,
Your haukis bluid was nevir sae reid,
My deir son I tell thee, O."
"O, I hae killed my reid-roan steid,
Mither, mither,
O, I hae killed my reid-road steid,
That erst was sa fair and frie, O."
"Your steid was auld, and ye hae gat mair,
Edward, Edward,
Your steid was auld, and ye hae gat mair,
Sum other dule ye drie, O."
"O, I hae killed my fadir deir,
Mither, mither,
O, I had killed my fadir deir,
Alas, and wae is mee, O!"
"And whatten penance wul ye drie for that,
Edward, Edward,
And whatten penance wul ye drie for that?
My deir son, now tell me, O."
"Ile set my feit in yonder boat,
Mither, mither,
Ile set my feit in yonder boat,
And Ile fare ovir the sea, O."
"And what wul ye doe wi' your towirs and your ha',
Edward, Edward,
And what wul ye doe wi' your towirs and your ha',
That were sae fair to see, O?"
"Ile let thame stand tul they down fa',
Mither, mither.
Ile let thame stand tul they down fa',
For here nevir mair maun I bee, O."
"And what wul ye leive to your bairns and your wife,
Edward, Edward?
And what wul ye leive to yours bairns and your wife,
When ye gang ovir the sea, O?"
"The warldis room, late them beg thrae life,
Mither, mither,
The warldis room, late than beg thrae life,
For thame nevir mair wul I see, O."
"And what wul ye leive to your ain mither, deir,
Edward, Edward?
And what wul ye leive to your aim mither, deir?
My deir son, now tell me, O."
"The curse of hell frae me sall he beir,
Mither, mither,
The curse of hell frae me sall ye beir,
Sic counseils ye gave to me, O."
Bonny Barbara Allan (Anonymous)
It was in and about the Martinmas time,
When the green leaves were a-fallin';
That Sir John Graeme in the West Country
Fell in love with Barbara Allan.
He sent his man down through the town
To the place where she was dwellin':
"O haste and come to my master dear,
Gin ye be Barbara Allan."
O hooly,* hooly rase she up,
To the place where he was lyin',
And when she drew the curtain by:
"Young man, I think you're dyin'."
"O it's I'm sick, and very, very sick,
And 'til a' for Barbara Allan."
"O the better for me ye sal never be,
Though your heart's blood were a-spillin'.
"O dinna ye mind, young man," said she,
"When ye the cups were fillin',
That ye make the healths gae round and round,
And slighted Barbara Allan?"
He turned his face unto the wall,
And death was with him dealin':
"Adieu, adieu, my dear friends all,
And be kind to Barbara Allan."
And slowly, slowly, rase she up,
And slowly, slowly left him;
And sighing said she could not stay,
Since death of life had reft him.
She had not gane a mile but twa,
When she heard the dead-bell knellin',
And every jow** that the dead-bell ga'ed***
It cired, "Woe to Barbara Allan!"
"O mother, mother, make my bed.
O make it soft and narrow:
Since my love died for me today,
I'll die for him tomorrow."
* gently
** stroke
*** made
Sir Patrick Spens (Anonymous)
The king sits in Dumferline town,
Drinking the blude-reid wine:
"O whar will I get a guid sailor
To sail this ship of mine?
Up and spak an eldern knicht,
Sat at the king's richt knee:
"Sir Patrick Spens is the best sailor
That sails upon the sea."
The king has written a braid letter
And signed it wi' his hand,
And sent it to Sir Patrick Spens,
Was walking on the sand.
The first line that Sir Patrick read,
A loud lauch* lauched he;
The next line that Sir Patrick read,
The tear blinded his ee.
"O wha is this has done this deed,
This ill deed done to me,
To send me out this time o' the year,
To sail upon the sea?
"Make haste, make haste my mirry men all,
Our guid ship sails the morn,"
"O say na sae, my master dear,
For I fear a deadly storm.
"Late late yestre'en I saw the new moon
Wi' the auld moon in her arm,
And I fear, I fear, my dear master,
That we will come to harm."
O our Scots nobles were richt laith**
To weet their cork-heeled shoon***
But land owre a' the play were played
Their hats they swam aboon.
O lang, lang, may their ladies sit,
Wi' their fans into their hand,
Or e'er they see Sir Patrick Spens
Come sailing to the land.
O lang, lang may the ladies stand,
Wi' their gold kembs in their hair,
Waiting for their ain dear lords,
For they'll see thame na mair.
Half o'er, half o'er to Aberdour
It's fifty fadom deep,
And there lies guid Sir Patrick Spens,
Wi' the Scots lords at his feet.
* laugh
** loath
*** shoes
SIR THOMAS WYATT THE ELDER
England 1503-1542
Whoso List to Hunt*
Whoso list* to hunt, I know where is an hind,
But as for me, alas, I may no more.
The vain travail hath wearied me so sore
I am of them that farthest cometh behind.
Yet may I, by no means, my wearied mind
Draw from the deer, but as she fleeth afore,
Fainting I follow. I leave off therefore,
Since in a net I seek to hold the wind.
Whoso list her hunt, I put him out of doubt,
As well as I, may spend his time in vain.
And graven with diamonds in letters plain
There is written, her fair neck round about,
"Noli me tangere***, for Caesar's I am,
And wild for to hold, though I seem tame."
* This poem is an adaptation of Petrarch's Rime 190. It is traditionally assumed to refer to Anne Boleyn, who captured the attention of Henry VIII in 1526.
** list means to want to or to care to; a hind is a female red deer.
*** touch me not. According to Petrarch, Caesar's deer wore collars wearing the inscription, "Touch me not, for I am Caesar's."
HENRY HOWARD, EARL OF SURREY
England 1517-1547
The Soote Season*
The soote season, that bud and bloom forth brings,
With green hath clad the hill and eke the vale;
The nightingale with feathers new she sings;
The turtle to her make** hath told her tale.
Summer is come, for every spray now springs;
The hart hath hung his old head on the pale;
The buck in brake his winter coat he flings.
The fishes float with new repaired scale;
The adder all her slough away she slings,
The swift swallow pursueth the flies small;
The busy bee her honey now she mings.***
Winter is worn, that was the flowers' bale.
And thus I see among these pleasant things,
Each care decays, and yet my sorrow springs.
* This poem, which means "The Sweet Season," is an adaptation of Petrarch's Rime 310. Surrey has changed the descriptive details from nature from Italy to England.
** the turtledove to her mate
*** mingles
SIR PHILIP SIDNEY
England 1554-1586
The following poem is Number 31 in Sidney's sonnet sequence, "Astrophil and Stella." Astrophil is the persona who speaks in this poem.
With how sad steps, O Moon, thou climb'st the skies,
How silently, and with how wan a face!
What, may it be that even in heavenly place
That busy archer* his sharp arrows tries?
Sure, if that long-with-love-acquainted eyes
Can judge of Love, thou feel'st a Lover's case;
I read it in thy looks: thy languished grace,
To me that feel the like, thy state descries.
Then even of fellowship, O Moon, tell me
Is constant love deemed there but want of wit?
Are beauties there as proud as here they be?
Do they above love to be loved, and yet
Those lovers scorn whom that love doth possess?
Do they call virtue there ungratefulness?
*Cupid
EDMUND SPENSER
England 1551-1599
The following poem is Number 75 in Spenser's sonnet sequence "Amoretti." Note Spenser's use of archaic spelling.
One day I wrote her name upon the strand,
But came the waves and washed it away:
Agayne I wrote it with a second hand,
But came the tyde, and made my paynes his pray.
"Vayne man," sayd she, "that doest in vaine assay,*
A mortall thing so to immortalize,
For I my selve shall lyke to this decay,
And eek** my name bee wyped out lykewize."
"Not so," quod I, "let baser things devize,
To dy in dust, but you shall live by fame:
My verse your vertues rare shall eternize,
And in the heavens wryte your glorious name.
Where whenas death shall all the world subdew,
Our love shal live, and later life renew."
* to try or to attempt
** also
PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY
England 1792-1822
Ode to the West Wind
1
O wild West Wind, thou breath of Autumn's being,
Thou, from whose unseen presence the leaves dead
Are driven, like ghosts from an enchanter fleeing,
Yellow, and black, and pale, and hectic red,
Pestilence-stricken multitudes: O Thou,
Who chariotest to their dark wintry bed
The winged seeds, where they lie cold and low,
Each like a corpse within its grave, until
Thine azure sister of the Spring shall blow
Her clarion o'er the dreaming earth, and fill
(Driving sweet buds like flocks to feed in air)
With living hues and odours plain and hill:
Wild Spirit, which art moving everywhere;
Destroyer and Preserver; hear, O hear!
2
Thou on whose stream, 'mid the steep sky's commotion,
Loose clouds like Earth's decaying leaves are shed,
Shook from the tangled boughs of Heaven and Ocean,
Angels of rain and lightning: there are spread
On the blue surface of thine aery surge,
Like the bright hair uplifted from the head
Of some fierce Maenad even from the dim verge
Of the horizon to the zenith's height,
The locks of the approaching storm. Thou Dirge
Of the dying year, to which this closing night
Will be the dome of a vast sepulchre,
Vaulted with all thy congregated might
Of vapours, from whose solid atmosphere
Black rain and fire and hail will burst: O hear O hear!
3
Thou who didst waken from his summer dreams
The blue Mediterranean, where he lay,
Lulled by the coil of his chrystalline streams,
Beside a pumice isle in Baiae's bay,
And saw in sleep old palaces and towers
Quivering within the wave's intenser day.
All overgrown with azure moss and flowers
So sweet, the sense faints picturing them! Thou
For whose path the Atlantic's level powers
Cleave themselves into chasms, while far below
The sea-blooms and the oozy woods which wear
The sapless foliage of the ocean, know
Thy voice, and suddenly grow grey with fear,
And tremble and despoil themselves. O hear!
4
If I were a dead leaf thou mightest beat;
If I were a swift cloud to fly with thee;
A wave to pant beneath thy power, and share
The impulse of thy strength, only less free
Than thou, O Uncontrollable! If even
I were as in my boyhood, and could be
The comrade of thy wanderings over Heaven,
As then, when to outstrip thy skiey speed
Scarce seemed a vision; I would ne'er have striven.
As thus with thee in prayer in my sore need.
Oh! lift me as a wave, a leaf, a cloud!
I fall upon the thorns of life! I bleed!
A heavy weight of hours has chained and bowed
One too like thee: tameless, and swift, and proud.
5
Make me thy lyre, even as the forest is:
What if my leaves are falling like its ownwn!
The tumult of thy mighty harmonies
Will take from both a deep, autumnal tone,
Sweet though in sadness. Be thou, Spirit fierce,
My spirit! Be thou me, impetuous one!
Drive my dead thoughts over the universe
Like withered leaves to quicken a new birth!
And, by the incantation of this verse,
Scatter, as from an unextinguished hearth
Ashes and sparks, my words among mankind!
Be through my lips to unawakened Earth
The trumpet of a prophecy! O wind,
If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind?
JOHN KEATS
England 1795-1821
When I have fears that I may cease to be
When I have fears that I may cease to be
Before my pen has glean'd my teeming brain,
Before high piled books, in charactry,
Hold like rich garners the full ripen'd grain;
When I behold, upon the night's starr'd face.
Huge cloudy symbols of a high romance,
And think that I may never live to trace
Their shadows, with the magic hand of chance;
And when I feel, fair creature of an hour,
That I shall never look upon thee more,
Never have relish in the fairy power
Of unreflecting love;--then on the shore
Of the wide world I stand alone, and think
Till love and fame to nothingness do sink.
The Eve of St. Agnes
St. Agnes' Eve‑Ah, bitter chill it was!
The owl, for all his feathers, was a‑cold;
The hare limped trembling through the frozen grass,
And silent was the flock in woolly fold:
Numb were the Beadsman's fingers, while he told
His rosary, and while his frosted breath,
Like pious incense from a censer old,
Seemed taking flight for heaven, without a death,
Past the sweet Virgin's picture, while his prayer he saith.
2
His prayer he saith, this patient, holy man;
Then takes his lamp, and riseth from his knees,
And back returneth, meager, barefoot, wan,
Along the chapel aisle by slow degrees:
The sculptured dead, on each side, seem to freeze,
Imprisoned in black, purgatorial rails:
Knights, ladies, praying in dumb orat'ries,
He passeth by; and his weak spirit fails
To think how they may ache in icy hoods and mails.
3
Northward he turneth through a little door,
And scarce three steps, ere Music's golden tongue
Flattered to tears this aged man and poor;
But no‑already had his deathbed rung:
The joys of all his life were said and sung:
His was harsh penance on St Agnes' Eve:
Another way he went, and soon among
Rough ashes sat he for his soul's reprieve,
And all night kept awake, for sinners' sake to grieve.
4
That ancient Beadsman heard the prelude soft;
And so it chanced, for many a door was wide,
From hurry to and fro. Soon, up aloft,
The silver, snarling trumpets 'gan to chide:
The level chambers, ready with their pride,
Were glowing to receive a thousand guests:
The carved angels, ever eager‑eyed,
Stared, where upon their heads the cornice rests,
With hair blown back, and wings put crosswise on their breasts.
5
At length burst in the argent revelry,
With plume, tiara, and all rich array,
Numerous as shadows haunting faerily
The brain, new stuffed, in youth, with triumphs gay
Of old romance. These let us wish away,
And turn, sole‑thoughted, to one Lady there,
Whose heart had brooded, all that wintry day,
On love, and winged St. Agnes' saintly care,
As she had heard old dames full many times declare.
6
They told her how, upon St. Agnes' Eve,
Young virgins might have visions of delight,
And soft adorings from their loves receive
Upon the honeyed middle of the night,
If ceremonies due they did aright;
As, supperless to bed they must retire
And couch supine their beauties, lily white;
Nor look behind, nor sideways, but require
Of Heaven with upward eyes for all that they desire.
7
Full of this whim was thoughtful Madeline:
The music, yearning like a God in pain,
She scarcely heard: her maiden eyes divine,
Fixed on the floor, saw many a sweeping train
Pass by‑she heeded not at all: in vain
Came many a tiptoe, amorous cavalier,
And back retired; not cooled by high disdain;
But she saw not: her heart was otherwhere:
She sighed for Agnes' dreams, the sweetest of the year.
8
She danced along with vague, regardless eyes,
Anxious her lips, her breathing quick and short:
The hallowed hour was near at hand: she sighs
Amid the timbrels, and the thronged resort
Of whisperers in anger, or in sport;
'Mid looks of love, defiance, hate, and scorn,
Hoodwinked with faery fancy; all amort,
Save to St. Agnes and her lambs unshorn,
And all the bliss to be before tomorrow morn.
9
So, purposing each moment to retire,
She lingered still. Meantime, across the moors,
Had come young Porphyro, with heart on fire
For Madeline. Beside the portal doors,
Buttressed from moonlight, stands he, and implores
All saints to give him sight of Madeline,
But for one moment in the tedious hours,
That he might gaze and worship all unseen;
Perchance speak, kneel, touch, kiss‑in sooth such things have been
10
He ventures in: let no buzzed whisper tell:
All eyes be muffled, or a hundred swords
Will storm his heart, Love's fev'rous citadel:
For him, those Chambers held barbarian hordes,
Hyena foemen, and hot‑blooded lords,
Whose very dogs would execrations howl
Against his lineage: not one breast affords
Him any mercy, in that mansion foul, ‑
Save one old beldame, weak in body and in soul. _
11
Ah, happy chance! the aged creature came,
Shuffling along with ivory‑headed wand,
To where he stood, hid from the torch's flame,
Behind a broad hall‑pillar, far beyond
The sound of merriment and chorus bland:
He startled her; but soon she knew his face,
And grasped his fingers in her palsied hand,
Saying, "Mercy, Porphyro! hie thee from this place;
They are all here tonight, the whole bloodthirsty race!
12
"Get hence! get hence! there's dwarfish Hildebrand;
He had a fever late, and in the fit
He cursed thee and thine, both house and land:
Then there's that old Lord Maurice, not a whit
More tame for his gray hairs‑Alas me! flit!
Flit like a ghost away."‑"Ah, Gossip dear,
We're safe enough; here in this armchair sit,
And tell me how‑"Good Saints! not here, not here;
Follow me, child, or else these stones will be thy bier."
13
He followed through a lowly arched way,
Brushing the cobwebs with his lofty plume,
And as she muttered "Well‑a‑well‑a‑day!"
He found him in a little moonlight room,
Pale, latticed, chill, and silent as a tomb.
"Now tell me where is Madeline," said he,
"O tell me, Angela, by the holy loom
Which none but secret sisterhood may see,
When they St. Agnes' wool are weaving piously."
14
"St Agnes! Ah! it is St. Agnes' Eve‑
Yet men will murder upon holy days:
Thou must hold water in a witch's sieve,
And be liege lord of all the Elves and Fays,
To venture so: it fills me with amaze
To see thee, Porphyro!‑St. Agnes' Eve!
God's help! my lady fair the conjuror plays
This very night: good angels her deceive!
But let me laugh awhile, I've mickle time to grieve."
15
Feebly she laugheth in the languid moon,
While Porphyro upon her face doth look,
Like puzzled urchin on an aged crone
Who keepeth closed a wondrous riddle‑book,
As spectacled she sits in chimney nook.
But soon his eyes grew brilliant, when she told
His lady's purpose; and he scarce could brook
Tears, at the thought of those enchantments cold,
And Madeline asleep in lap of legends old.
16
Sudden a thought came like a full‑blown rose,
Flushing his brow, and in his pained heart
Made purple riot: then doth he propose
A stratagem, that makes the beldame start:
"A cruel man and impious thou art:
Sweet lady, let her pray, and sleep, and dream
Alone with her good angels, far apart
From wicked men like thee. Go, got‑I deem
Thou canst not surely be the same that thou didst seem."
17
"I will not harm her, by all saints I swear,"
Quoth Porphyro: "O may I ne'er find grace
When my weak voice shall whisper its last prayer,
If one of her soft ringlets I displace,
Or look with ruffian passion in her face:
Good Angela, believe me by these tears;
Or I will, even in a moment's space,
Awake, with horrid shout, my foemen's ears,
And beard them, though they be more fanged than wolves and bears."
18
"Ah! why wilt thou affright a feeble soul?
A poor, weak, palsy‑stricken, churchyard thing,4
Whose passing bells may ere the midnight toll;
Whose prayers for thee, each morn and evening,
Were never missed."‑Thus plaining, doth she bring
A gentler speech from burning Porphyro;
So woeful and of such deep sorrowing,
That Angela gives promise she will do
Whatever he shall wish, betide her weal or woe.
19
Which was, to lead him, in close secrecy,
Even to Madeline's chamber, and there hide
Him in a closet, of such privacy
That he might see her beauty unespied,
And win perhaps that night a peerless bride,
While legioned faeries paced the coverlet,
And pale enchantment held her sleepy‑eyed.
Never on such a night have lovers met,
Since Merlin paid his Demon all the monstrous debt.
20
"It shall be as thou wishest," said the Dame:
"All cates and dainties shall be stored there
Quickly on this feast night: by the tambour frame
Her own lute thou wilt see: no time to spare,
For I am slow and feeble, and scarce dare
On such a catering trust my dizzy head.
Wait here, my child, with patience; kneel in prayer
The while: Ah! thou must needs the lady wed,
Or may I never leave my grave among the dead."
21
So saying, she hobbled off with busy fear
The lover's endless minutes slowly passed:
The dame returned, and whispered in his ear
To follow her; with aged eyes aghast
From fright of dim espial. Safe at last,
Through many a dusky gallery, they gain
The maiden's chamber, silken, hushed, and chaste;
Where Porphyro took covert, pleased amain.
His poor guide hurried back with agues in her brain.
22
Her falt'ring hand upon the balustrade,
Old Angela was feeding for the stair,
When Madeline, St. Agnes' charmed maid,
Rose, like a missioned spirit, unaware:
With silver taper's light, and pious care,
She turned, and down the aged gossip led
To a safe level matting. Now prepare,
Young Porphyro, for gazing on that bed;
She comes, she comes again, like ringdove frayed and fled.
23
Out went the taper as she hurried in;
Its little smoke, in pallid moonshine, died:
She closed the door, she panted, all akin
To spirits of the air, and visions wide:
No uttered syllable, or, woe betide!
But to her heart, her heart was voluble,
Paining with eloquence her balmy side;
As though a tongueless nightingale should swell
Her throat in vain, and die, heart‑stifled, in her dell.
24
A casement high and triple‑arched there was,
All garlanded with carven imag'ries
Of fruits, and flowers, and bunches of knot‑grass,
And diamonded with panes of quaint device,
Innumerable of stains and splendid dyes,
As are the tiger‑moth's deep‑damasked wings;
And in the midst, 'mong thousand heraldries,
And twilight saints, and dim emblazonings,
A shielded scutcheon blushed with blood of queens and kings.
25
Full on this casement shone the wintry moon,
And threw warm gules on Madeline's fair breast,
As down she knelt for heaven's grace and boon;
Rose‑bloom fell on her hands, together pressed,
And on her silver cross soft amethyst,
And on her hair a glory, like a saint:
She seemed a splendid angel, newly dressed,
Save wings, for heaven‑Porphyro grew faint:
She knelt, so pure a thing, so free from mortal taint.
26
Anon his heart revives: her vespers done,
Of all its wreathed pearls her hair she frees;
Unclasps her warmed jewels one by one;
Loosens her fragrant bodice; by degrees
Her rich attire creeps rustling to her knees:
Half‑hidden, like a mermaid in sea‑weed,
Pensive awhile she dreams awake, and sees,
In fancy, fair St. Agnes in her bed,
But dares not look behind, or all the charm is fled.
27
Soon, trembling in her soft and chilly nest,
In sort of wakeful swoon, perplexed she lay,
Until the poppied warmth of sleep oppressed
Her soothed limbs, and soul fatigued away;
Flown, like a thought, until the morrow‑day;
Blissfully havened both from joy and pain;
Clasped like a missal where swart Paynims pray;
Blinded alike from sunshine and from rain,
As though a rose should shut, and be a bud again.
28
Stol'n to this paradise, and so entranced,
Porphyro gazed upon her empty dress,
And listened to her breathing, if it chanced
To wake into a slumberous tenderness;
Which when he heard, that minute did he bless,
And breathed himself: then from the closet crept,
Noiseless as fear in a wide wilderness,
And over the hushed carpet, silent, stepped,
And 'tween the curtains peeped, where, lo!‑how fast she slept.
29
Then by the bedside, where the faded moon
Made a dim, silver twilight, soft he set
A table, and, half anguished, threw thereon
A cloth of woven crimson, gold, and jet‑
O for some drowsy Morphean amulet!
The boisterous, midnight, festive clarion,
The kettledrum, and far‑heard clarinet,
Affray his ears, though but in dying tone‑
The hail door shuts again, and all the noise is gone.
30
And still she slept an azure‑lidded sleep,
In blanched linen, smooth, and lavendered,
While he from forth the closet brought a heap
Of candied apple, quince, and plum, and gourd;
With jellies soother than the creamy curd,
And lucent syrups, tinct with cinnamon;
Manna and dates, in argosy transferred
From Fez; and spiced dainties, every one,
From silken Samarcand to cedared Lebanon.
31
These delicates he heaped with glowing hand
On golden dishes and in baskets bright
Of wreathed silver: sumptuous they stand
In the retired quiet of the night,
Filling the chilly room with perfume light.‑
"And now, my love, my seraph fair, awaked
Thou art my heaven, and I thine eremite:
Open thine eyes, for meek St. Agnes' sake,
Or I shall drowse beside thee, so my soul doth ache."
32
Thus whispering, his warm, unnerved arm
Sank in her pillow. Shaded was her dream
By the dusk curtains: twas a midnight charm
Impossible to melt as iced stream:
The lustrous salvers in the moonlight gleam;
Broad golden fringe upon the carpet lies:
It seemed he never, never could redeem
From such a steadfast spell his lady's eyes;
So mused awhile, entoiled in woofed fantasies.
33
Awakening up, he took her hollow lute‑
Tumultuous‑and, in chords that tenderest be,
He played an ancient ditty, long since mute,
In Provence called "La belle dame sans merci"
Close to her ear touching the melody;
Wherewith disturbed, she uttered a soft moan:
He ceased‑she panted quick‑and suddenly
Her blue affrayed eyes wide open shone:
Upon his knees he sank, pale as smooth‑sculptured stone.
34
Her eyes were open, but she still beheld,
Now wide awake, the vision of her sleep:
There was a painful change, that nigh expelled
The blisses of her dream so pure and deep,
At which fair Madeline began to weep,
And moan forth witless words with many a sigh;
While still her gaze on Porphyro would keep,
Who knelt, with joined hands and piteous eye,
Fearing to move or speak, she looked so dreamingly.
35
"Ah, Porphyro!" said she, "but even now
Thy voice was at sweet tremble in mine ear,
Made tunable with every Sweetest vow;
And those sad eyes were spiritual and clear:
How changed thou art? how pallid, chill, and drear!
Give me that voice again, my Porphyro,
Those looks immortal, those complainings dear!
Oh leave me not in this eternal woe,
For if thou diest, my Love, I know not where to go."
36
Beyond a mortal man impassioned far
At these voluptuous accents, he arose,
Ethereal, flushed, and like a throbbing star
Seen mid the sapphire heaven's deep repose;
Into her dream he melted, as the rose
Blendeth its odor with the violet‑
Solution sweet: meantime the frost‑wind blows
Like Love's alarum pattering the sharp sleet
Against the windowpanes; St. Agnes' moon hath set.
37
'Tis dark: quick pattereth the flaw‑blown sleet:
"This is no dream, my bride, my Madeline!"
'Tis dark: the iced gusts still rave and beat:
"No dream, alas! alas! and woe is mine!
Porphyro will leave me here to fade and pine.‑
Cruel! what traitor could thee hither bring?
I curse not, for my heart is lost in thine,
Though thou forsakest a deceived thing‑
A dove forlorn and lost with sick unpruned wing."
38
"My Madeline! sweet dreamer! lovely bride!
Say, may I be for aye thy vassal blest?
Thy beauty's shield, heart‑shaped and vermcil dyed?
Ah, silver shrine, here will I take my rest
After so many hours of toil and quest,
A famished pilgrim‑saved by miracle.
Though I have found, I will not rob thy nest
Saving of thy sweet self; if thou think'st well
To trust, fair Madeline, to no rude infidel.
39
"Hark! 'tis an elfin‑storm from faery land,
Of haggard seeming, but a boon indeed:
Arise‑arise! the morning is at hand‑
The bloated wassaillers will never heed‑
Let us away, my love, with happy speed;
There are no ears to hear, or eyes to see‑
Drowned all in Rhenish and the sleepy mead:
Awake! arise! my love, and fearless be,
For o'er the southern moors I have a home for thee."
40
She hurried at his words, beset with fears,
For there were sleeping dragons all around,
At glaring watch, perhaps, with ready spears‑
Down the wide stairs a darkling way they found.‑
In all the house was heard no human sound.
A chain‑dropped lamp was flickering by each door;
The arras rich with horseman, hawk, and hound,
Fluttered in the besieging wind's uproar;
And the long carpets rose along the gusty floor.
41
They glide, like phantoms, into the wide hall;
Like phantoms, to the iron porch, they glide;
Where lay the Porter, in uneasy sprawl
With a huge empty flagon by his side:
The wakeful bloodhound rose, and shook his hide,
But his sagacious eye an inmate owns:
By one, and one, the bolts full easy slide:
The chains lie silent on the footworn stones;
The key turns, and the door upon its hinges groans.
42
And they are gone: aye, ages long ago
These lovers fled away into the storm.
That night the Baron dreamt of many a woe,
And all his warrior‑guests, with shade and form
Of witch, and demon, and large coffin‑worm,
Were long be‑nightmared. Angela the old
Died palsy‑twitched, with meager face deform;
The Beadsman, after thousand aves told,
For aye unsought for slept among his ashes cold.
ALFRED, LORD TENNYSON
England 1809-1892
Ulysses
It little profits that an idle king,
By this still hearth, among these barren crags,
Matched 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 enjoyed
Greatly, have suffered greatly, both with those
That loved me, and alone; on shore, and when
Through scudding drifts the rainy Hyades
Vexed 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 honored 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 wherethrough
Gleams that untraveled world whose margin fades
Forever and forever when I move.
How dull it is to pause, to make an end,
To rust unburnished, not to shine in use!
As though 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 scepter and the isle--
Well-loved of me, discerning to fulfill
This labor, by slow prudence to make mild
A rugged people, and through soft degrees
Subdue them to the useful and the good.
Most blameless is he, centered 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 toiled, 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 honor 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,
"Tis 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.
Though much is taken, much abides; and though
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.
ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING
England 1806-1861
The following poems are from Browning's forty-four sonnet sequence, "Sonnets from the Portuguese."
Although these were purported to be translations from the Portuguese language, in fact Elizabeth wrote them herself to express her love for her husband, Robert Browning.
32
The first time that the sun rose on thine oath
To love me, I looked forward to the moon
To slacken all those bonds which seemed too soon
And quickly tied to make a lasting troth.
Quick-loving hearts, I thought, may quickly loathe;
And looking on myself, I seemed not one
For such man's love!--more like an out-of-tune
Worn viol,* a good singer would be wroth
To spoil his song with, and which, snatched in haste,
Is laid down at the first ill-sounding note,
I did not wrong myself so, but I placed
A wrong on thee. For perfect strains may float
'Neath master-hands, from instruments defaced--
And great souls, at one stroke, may do and dote.
* Elizabeth compares herself to an old, worn out musical instrument. She was forty years old and Robert was thirty-four when they eloped.
43
How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.
I love thee to the depth and breadth and height
My soul can reach, when feeling out of sight
For the ends of Being and ideal Grace.
I love thee to the level of everyday's
Most quiet need, by sun and candlelight.
I love thee freely, as men strive for Right;
I love thee purely, as they turn from Praise.
I love thee with the passion put to use
In my old griefs, and with my childhood's faith.
I love thee with a love I seemed to lose
With my lost saints--I love thee with the breath,
Smiles, tears, of all my life!--and, if God choose,
I shall but love thee better after death.
GERARD MANLEY HOPKINS
England 1844-1889
The Windhover*
To Christ our Lord
I caught this morning morning's minion, king-
dom of daylight's dauphin, dapple-dawn-drawn Falcon, in his riding
Of the rolling level underneath him steady air, and striding
High there, how he rung upon the rein of a wimpling wing
In his ecstasy! them off, off forth on swing,
As a skate's heel sweeps smooth on a bow-bend: the hurl and gliding
Rebuffed the big wind. My heart in hiding
Stirred for a bird,--the achieve of, the mastery of the thing!
Brute beauty and valor and act, oh, air, pride, plume, here
Buckle! AND the fire that breaks from thee then a billion
Times told lovelier, more dangerous, O my chevalier!
No wonder of it: sheer plod makes plough down sillion
Shine, and blue-bleak embers, ah my dear,
Fall, gall themselves, and gash gold-vermilion.
* Hopkins is describing a kestrel, a small falcon which hovers on wind currents. Hopkins, a Roman Catholic priest, sees his spiritual values reflected in nature.
COUNTEE CULLEN
America 1903-1946
Yet Do I Marvel
I doubt not God is good, well meaning, kind.
And did he stoop to quibble could tell why
The little buried mole continues blind,
Why flesh that mirrors Him must some day die,
Make plain the reason tortured Tantalus
Is baited by the fickle fruit, declare
If merely brute caprice dooms Sisyphus
To struggling up a never-ending stair.
Inscrutable His ways are, and immune
To catechism by a mind too strewn
With petty cares to slightly understand
What awful brain compels His awful hand,
Yet do I marvel at this curious thing:
To make a poet black, and bid him sing!
AMERICAN BLUES
Fogyism (Sung by Sarah Martin and Ida Cox)
Why do people believe in some old sign?
Why do people believe in some old sign?
You hear a hoot owl holler, someone is surely dyin'.
Some will break a mirror and cry, "Bad luck for seven years,"
Some will break a mirror and cry, "Bad luck for seven years,"
And if a black cat crosses them, they'll break right down in tears.
To dream of muddy water--trouble is knocking at your door,
To dream of muddy water--trouble is knocking at your door,
Your man is sure to leave you and never return no more.
When your man comes home evil, tells you you are getting old,
When your man comes home evil, tells you you are getting old,
That's a sure sign he's got someone else bakin' his jelly roll.
From Chicago Mill Blues, by Peatie Wheatstraw
I used to have a woman that lived up on a hill,
I used to have a woman that lived up on a hill,
She was crazy 'bout me, ooh well, well, 'cause I worked at the Chicago mill.
You can hear the women hollerin' when the Chicago Mill whistle blows,
You can hear the women hollerin' when the Chicago Mill whistle blows,
Cryin', "Turn loose my man, ooh well, well, please and let him go."
If you want to have plenty women, why not work at the Chicago Mill?
If you want to have plenty women, why not work at the Chicago Mill?
You don't have to give them nothin', oooh well, just tell them that you will.
JEAN ANDERSON EMBREE
America 1925
Renaissance, Part I
Reflected in your eyes my better self
Emboldened to reach out, to take the world
And give it back augmented, I myself
Turn outward upward like a leaf unfurled
To the sun. New and soft, fragile, grand
My self emerges, beating stronger wings
Under your gaze, your protecting hand
Nearby. I feel like Psyche when she sings
And claps her hands for joy. I've been away
On a distant flight of soul--no butterfly
Has traveled more, past continent through day
And pain of night, and then hidden in dry
Husk of despair, unaware how much
I needed you and waited for your touch.
RICHARD BRAUTIGAN
America 1935-1984
Karma Repair Kit: Items 1-4
1. Get enough food to eat,
and eat it.
2. Find a place to sleep where it is quiet,
and sleep there.
3. Reduce intellectual and emotional noise
until you arrive at the silence of yourself,
and listen to it.
4.
Xerox Candy Bar
Ah,
you're just a copy
of all the candy bars
I've ever eaten.
Widow's Lament
It's not quite cold enough
to go borrow some firewood
from the neighbors.
Surprise
I lift the toilet seat
as if it were the nest of a bird
and I see cat tracks
all around the edge of the bowl.
The Wheel
The wheel: it's a thing like pears
rotting under a tree in August.
O golden wilderness!
The bees travel in covered wagons
and the Indians hide in the heat.
The Way She Looks at It
Every time I see him, I think:
Gee, and I glad he's not
my old man.
Man
With his hat on
he's about five inches taller
than a taxicab.
Haiku Ambulance
A piece of green pepper
fell
off the wooden salad bowl:
so what?
In a Cafe
I watched a man in a cafe fold a slice of bread
as if he were folding a birth certificate or looking
at the photograph of a dead lover.
FINDING THE POET
CHAPTER 6 POETIC GENRES
There are many confusing things in the world of poetry, but the difference between a form and a genre is the most confusing of all. I take comfort in the fact that there is a logical reason for this confusion. If you've ever studied logic, you've probably seen those diagrams of intersecting circles used to create overlapping categories. We can depict the genre versus form problem in the same way. The first circle, labeled "form," would include terza rima, ottava rima, Spenserian stanzas and many other poetic forms. The second circle, "genre," would contain categories such as elegy, ode, carpe diem, etc. Then, in the place where the two circles intersect, are sonnets, tanka, haiku, ballads, and several other types of poetry, each of which is both a form and a genre. In the last chapter, we discussed how form in poetry is based on factors such as meter, rhyme scheme, stanza length, or number of syllables per line. Genre, on the other hand, is a more nebulous term that refers to a classification or category of poetry, based on subject matter, style, poetic elements, etc. You can easily see why the confusion between form and genre occurs.
A sonnet, for example, is a fourteen-line poem written in iambic pentameter with a specific rhyme scheme. In that sense, it is a poetic form. However, it is also customary to write sonnets in the first person point of view focusing on personal emotional issues, particularly love. Furthermore, during the Renaissance, it was expected that sonnets would include beautiful imagery and elaborate comparisons known as conceits. In fact, Shakespeare satirizes this aspect of the sonnet in "Sonnet 130," ("My Mistress' Eyes are Nothing Like the Sun.") It was also conventional for the male sonnet writer to play the role of the tragically rejected lover, ever faithful to the cold, disdainful lady. The sonnets by Sir Philip Sidney, Edmund Spenser, Sir Thomas Wyatt and Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, which you read in Chapter 5, are all written in this tone. As you can see, in its classification as a short lyric poem focusing on love and containing certain conventional elements, the sonnet is a poetic genre as well as a form.
The same is true for haiku. On the one hand, a haiku is a three-line poem of seventeen syllables. On the other hand, it is an objective poem focusing on a moment in time, using images from nature and a reference to the season of the year to create a harmonious effect through contrast and comparison. The first definition, based on form, is the one that usually appears in American text books. The second, focusing on genre, comes closer to the way the Japanese view haiku. In fact there is another genre of poetry in Japan called senryu, which is also three lines, seventeen syllables, arranged in lines of five, seven, and five syllables. In form, senryu is identical to haiku, but these two genres are not confused in Japan because they serve such different purposes. Senryu is essentially a comic form of poetry, similar in effect to a limerick in America. Senryu tend to be somewhat smutty, with imagery based on bathroom humor. Whereas haiku are often used for Zen meditation, senryu, like any form of low humor, provides entertainment and relief from stress. I suppose that on a much deeper level, haiku and senryu serve similar ends, but in Japan, there is a clear understanding that although they share an identical form, these are two different genres of poetry.
We will all be more comfortable if we resign ourselves to the fact that some forms are also genres, and some genres also have a specific form. Now we can move ahead and look at some of the genres, or classifications of poetry that have interested poets and readers over the years. If you have studied the other arts, you know that the word genre is used in the same way in art and music to describe any category that has certain shared characteristics.
Literature itself is divided into genres such as poetry, drama, and prose, which includes the short story and the novel. A traditional way of classifying poetry is into three very broad categories: lyric, narrative, and didactic. We have already discussed both lyric and narrative poetry, but for the sake of review, lyric poetry focuses on the feelings and thoughts of the speaker in the poem. Many lyric poems, such as John Keats' "When I have fears that I may cease to be," are written in the poet's own voice. However, sometimes in lyric poetry the poet speaks through a persona, as Sir Philip Sidney does in his sonnet sequence, "Astrophil and Stella."
Narrative poetry tells a story. It usually follows some kind of chronological sequence focusing on events. Much of the Canterbury Tales is narrative, and medieval-style romances such as The Faerie Queene and "The Eve of St. Agnes" are narrative. Epic poetry, focusing on the activities and adventures of a warrior hero, is also classified as narrative. Famous epics include the Iliad and the Odyssey by the Greek poet Homer and the Aeneid by Virgil, a Roman epic poet. The long Anglo-Saxon poem Beowulf is sometimes categorized as a narrative, but the great British scholar J.R.R. Tolkien, says it is not a narrative but "...an heroic-elegiac poem."1 As you can see, there is ongoing controversy in the literary world as to the exact classification of various poems, but I think we are safe in placing ballads in the narrative genre.
We have not yet discussed didactic poetry, a genre which was in disgrace throughout the Twentieth Century and is thus ripe to return in the Twenty-First. Didactic poetry focuses on moral issues and aims to instruct the reader, providing lessons or guidelines for appropriate behavior or clarifying values. Much of the poetry in previous centuries has been didactic. John Milton's Paradise Lost is filled with religious interpretation, and Blake's poems often focus on the abuse of women and children as moral issues. Any poem that sends a message on social, religious, or political themes could be considered didactic. Didactic poetry was especially popular during the Anglo-Saxon, Medieval, Neo-Classical, and Victorian eras.
Sometimes a fourth general category, dramatic poetry, is added to lyric, narrative, and didactic. In earlier periods, particularly during the Greek Classical Period and the Renaissance, drama (usually viewed as a separate genre from poetry), contained strong poetic elements. The choric odes in a Greek play are actually poems, and both Shakespeare and Marlowe, the two great dramatists of the Renaissance, wrote plays in blank verse. There are also poems that are highly dramatic and in fact resemble little plays. One especially interesting genre of poetry is the dramatic monologue, a poem in which a speaker addresses a silent listener. A dramatic monologue is similar to a soliloquy in a play, when a single actor alone on the stage speaks directly to the audience. In a dramatic monologue, the poet creates the character, just as a playwright does, and there is not the sense that the poet is speaking in his or her own voice. Tennyson's "Ulysses," which you read at the end of Chapter 5, is a dramatic monologue.
Another Victorian poet who mastered the art of the dramatic monologue is Robert Browning. This fine British poet, whom I mentioned in the previous chapter as the husband of Elizabeth Barrett, wrote several dramatic monologues which he set in Italy during the Renaissance. Hiding behind the veil of afar-away historic setting, Browning criticized the patriarchal values of Victorian England. His most powerful tool is irony. In literature, irony is a discrepancy between what is expected and what actually occurs. This device is used extensively in drama, as life itself is filled with ironic situations. Browning creates an ironic contrast between the speaker's view of himself and the perception that the reader forms of the speaker based on the speaker's own words. As you read Browning's "My Last Duchess" at the end of this chapter, notice that the Duke, who is the speaker in this monologue, has a very high opinion of himself, an opinion that you will probably not share by the end of the poem. Be sure to follow the Ten Steps as you read this poem, and use your intuition. "My Last Duchess" is a brilliant poem, but it demands very careful attention on the reader's part. I'll give you one little hint. Browning's father-in-law, Mr. Barrett, was a tyrannical, controlling parent who did not allow any of his eleven children to marry. He even convinced his gifted daughter Elizabeth that she was an invalid so he could manage her life for her. How Robert Browning rescued Elizabeth from this poisonous environment is one of the great love stories of all time, and many scholars believe that he used his father-in-law as the model for the Duke in "My Last Duchess."
Within the three or four general categories of poetry which I have mentioned so far, there are many more narrowly defined genres into which poetry has been classified. Where have these classifications come from? Many of them are products of the Greek Classical heritage. Aristotle, in his Poetics, discusses categories of literature, and some of these genres have not changed much over the centuries. In Chapter 2, we discussed the carpe diem tradition, a type of lyric poetry celebrating the joy of living in the moment and "seizing the day." Three other types of poetry, the ode, the elegy, and the pastoral come to us from the Greek tradition and have also been appreciated in many later centuries. The ode, the elegy, and the pastoral are not exclusive categories. A poem could be both an elegy and a pastoral, and possibly all three. Shelley's "Adonais," which we discussed in Chapter 5 in connection with the Spenserian stanza, is a pastoral elegy. Let's look at these genres separately to see what their special characteristics are.
We'll begin with the ode. An ode is a rhymed lyric poem which can be written in any meter or stanza form. It has a stately and dignified tone, and it is often addressed to an element in nature or to an abstract concept. Keats and Shelley were both fond of odes, and you will remember that in "Ode to the West Wind," which you read in Chapter 5, Shelley speaks directly to the wind, just as Keats addresses the nightingale directly in "Ode to a Nightingale." The ode is of Greek origin, and originally odes were intended to be sung.
When I was in college, I found odes difficult to read because they contain very little if any narrative story line or human characters. And since I could never find a plot or narrative progression, the poem never seemed to be going anywhere. What I didn't learn until much later is that an ode isn't intended to "go" anywhere. It is a philosophical genre that intuitively follows the flow of the poet's thoughts. The other thing you need to know about an ode is that it is not about the object being addressed. In other words, "Ode to the West Wind" is not a poem about the wind, and "Ode to a Nightingale" is not about a bird. Shelley's ode is about the transforming power of creativity and Shelley's own passionate hope to serve mankind as a visionary and prophetic poet. Keats' ode is a philosophical response to beauty and death. The west wind and the nightingale are what T.S. Eliot referred to as the objective correlative, which means the physical and symbolic catalyst for the poet's thoughts. The post needs some object that can be experienced by the senses as a springboard from which to launch himself on his philosophical wanderings. This springboard is the objective correlative. An ode would be even more difficult to read if the poet didn't have some physical object like a nightingale on which t focus this thoughts.
To enjoy reading and writing odes, we must give up the obsession that some of us have with "realism." Of course it is not realistic for a grown man to stand around, passionately sharing his innermost longings with the wind. And in real life, John Keats probably didn't actually talk to birds. This brings us to the "wiling suspension of disbelief" so essential to appreciating poetry. This concept is a simple one. The reader simply suspends, or gives up his or her natural tendency not to believe the unlikely situation that is being presented in the poem. In other words, poetry has a reality of its own, and the reader must enter into that reality in order to experience a poem's mystery and majesty. The willing suspension of disbelief is a small price to pay in order to share the glory of a line like this:
I fall upon the thorns of life! I bleed!
Shelley was not bleeding when he wrote this line, and he was certainly not stepping on a thorn. He was, however, ridiculed by the few critics who read his poetry and ignored by almost everyone else. I know you are capable of getting past a literal approach to reading poetry, and this is especially important when reading an ode.
Let's look at Keats" "Ode on a Grecian Urn," probably the most famous ode in the English language. As you read the poem, try to visualize the urn, which is a Greek style vase decorated with figures of human beings and animals. Then think about the vase as the objective correlative, the real and physical, but also symbolic object which sets off the flow of Keats' thoughts. Of course you will want to use the ten-step process for reading a poem outlined in Chapter 3.
Ode on a Grecian Urn
Thou still unravish'd bride of quietness,
Thou foster-child of silence and show time,
Sylvan historian, who canst thus express
A flowery tale more sweetly than our rhyme:
What leaf-fring'd legend haunts about thy shape
Of deities or mortals, or of both.
In Tempe or the dales of Arcady?
What men or gods are these? What maidens loth?
What mad pursuit? What struggle to escape?
What pipes and timbrels? What wild ecstasy?
2
Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard
Are sweeter; therefore, ye soft pipes, play on;
Not to the sensual ear, but, more endear'd,
Pipe to the spirit ditties of no tone:
Fair youth, beneath the trees, thou canst not leave
Thy song, nor ever can those trees be bare;
Bold lover, never canst thou kiss,
Though winning near the goal--yet, do not grieve,
She cannot fade, though thou hast not thy bliss,
For ever wilt thou love, and she be fair!
3
Ah, happy, happy boughs! that cannot shed
Your leaves, nor ever bid the spring adieu;
And, happy melodist, unwearied,
For ever piping songs for ever new;
More happy love! more happy, happy love!
For ever warm and still to be enjoy'd,
For ever panting, and for ever young;
All breathing human passion far above,
That leaves a heart high-sorrowful and cloy'd,
A burning forehead, and a parching tongue.
4
Who are these coming to the sacrifice?
To what green altar, O mysterious priest,
Lead'st thou that heifer lowing at the skies,
And all her silken flanks with garlands drest?
What little town by river or sea shore,
Or mountain-built with peaceful citadel,
Is emptied of this folk, this pious morn?
And, little town, thy streets for evermore
Will silent be; and not a soul to tell
Why thou are desolate, can e'er return.
5
O Attic shape! Fair attitude! with brede
Of marble men and maidens overwrought,
With forest branches and the trodden weed;
Thou, silent form, dost tease us out of thought
As doth eternity: Cold Pastoral!
When old age shall this generation waste,
Thou shalt remain, in midst of other owe
Than ours, a friend to man, to whom thou say'st
"Beauty is truth, truth beauty," --that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.
As you proceed through this poem, you will notice that it contains many questions. In the first stanza, Keats speaks directly to the urn, which he refers to as a "still unravished bride of quietness," a "foster-child of silence and slow time," and a "Sylvan historian." Using your dictionary in Step 3, you noticed that the word "still" in line 1 could mean either "silent," "motionless," or "as yet." And you learned that the word "Sylvan" refers to something rustic which could be found "in a wood or forest." After addressing the urn, Keats then compliments its beauty by saying that the urn can tell "A flowery tale more sweetly" than Keats can in his poetry. Next, Keats begins to question the urn about the images that appear on it. In the second stanza, Keats speaks to the images themselves. Looking at the picture of a lover about to kiss his lady, Keats comments on the fact that both figures are forever frozen in time and that the lover will never be able to kiss the woman he loves. Keats consoles the lover by pointing out to him that, "For ever wilt thou love, and she be fair.!" Keats makes the point that time will never encroach on either of the lovers; the young man will never fall out of love, and the lady will always be young and beautiful. This famous line gives the reader a hint as to the poem's theme. Keats is celebrating the eternal beauty of art, which never changes although human beings, in contrast, fade and die.
In Stanza 3, Keats expresses his joy for the images on the urn, the trees, the musician, and the lovers, who will never change or grow weary or old. Fascinated by the vase, Keats continues in the fourth stanza to ask questions of the figures that appear on it. These pictures, created so long ago, of a priest about to perform a sacrifice at an altar and of a little town, will always be a mystery because the artist who created them has been dead for so many years, and no one is left to explain these images. In the final stanza, Keats speaks again to the vase itself, referring to its ancient Greek origin with the word "Attic." And once again Keats comments on the contrast between the lasting beauty of art and the human condition when he says, "When old age shall this generation waste,/ Thou shalt remain... ." As you work through Steps 5 and 6, focusing on the cultural and historic background of the poem and on Keats' life, you will no doubt come across many critical commentaries on this famous poem. You will discover that a controversy has raged for generations about the last two lines of the poem. Apparently it is the urn which says, "Beauty is truth, truth beauty," but some scholars believe that the quotation marks should be continued to the end of the poem so that the urn is speaking throughout the last two lines. Others argue that it is the lyric speaker in the poem, (Keats himself) who concludes "that is all...ye need to know."
I will let you resolve this dilemma for yourself or in discussion with your classmates. Even if you never come to agreement, Keats' ode will have achieved its end--to challenge you to think more deeply than we normally do about the brevity of human life and the need for our species to create works of art that can be treasured by future generations long after we are gone. Keats himself, as you will remember was in a perfect position to meditate on this issue because he was in the final states of terminal tuberculosis when he wrote this poem at the age of twenty-four. He also found the perfect objective correlative as a focal point for this thoughts. A lovely ancient Greek vase, decorated with human figures that will never change or move, is an ideal symbol for the beauty and truth that live forever in art.
Although all good poetry stimulates our thoughts, feelings, senses, and intuition, the ode is especially suited to poets and readers who enjoy sharing thoughts and insights in an intuitive way. The ode as a genre is not for the petty, the sarcastic, or the bitter. It is high-minded and lofty. Why not try writing an ode yourself? Your journal is probably filled by now with little jewels of wisdom that you have just never had time to focus and formalize. As soon as you find your objective correlative, your ode will be on its way.
Another genre that has played an important part in human culture for thousands of years is the elegy. An elegy is a poem honoring someone who has died. Please do not think of this as a morbid or depressing genre. Great elegies are inspiring and life affirming. They also address one or more of the various stages of grief, such as denial, anger, sorrow, acceptance, etc., thus providing consolation and healing for family members who have lost someone they love. An elegy can be written in any form or in free verse. Some elegies are written about someone who was very close to the poet such as a child or a spouse. Others are written as occasional poems when some public figure dies; in these cases the poet may not even have known the deceased personally.
The following elegy from the Manyoshu, written by a poet known only as Tajihi, has been a favorite of mine for many years. This poem laments the death of the poet's wife and expresses his personal and private grief:
The mallards call with evening from the reeds
And float with dawn midway on the water;
They sleep with their mates, it is said,
With white wings overlapping and tails a-sweep
Lest the frost should fall on them.
As the stream that flows never returns,
And as the wind that blows is never seen,
My wife, of this world, has left me,
Gone I know not whither!
So here, on the sleeves of these clothes
She used to have me wear,
I sleep now all alone!
Envoy
Cranes call flying to the reedy shore;
How desolate I remain
As I sleep alone!
Translated by the Japanese Classics Translation
Committee, Seiichi Taki, Chairperson
Mallard ducks, because they mate for life, are an archetypal symbol of marital fidelity. In this beautiful elegy, the wild ducks, sleeping with their wings overlapping in the cold of winter and the cranes calling over the water to their mates, remind the poet of the intimate love he shared with his wife. In the second stanza, the image of the poet sleeping alone on the long sleeves of the kimono he wore when he slept with his wife contrasts with the wings of the mallards who sleep together and provide warmth for one another. The coldness of the winter imagery in this poem is especially effective in expressing a sense of grief and loss.
Sometimes haiku function as elegies, as you will see in this stunning poem by Yosa Buson:
A piercing chill:
my dead wife's comb, in our bedroom,
under my heel...
Translated by Harold Henderson
Edited by Rose Anna Higashi
If you have ever happened upon a personal possession of a loved one shortly after that person died, you know how powerful a reminder of grief that experience can be. Basho wrote a haiku elegy for his mother when he visited his home town of Ueno after her death and was given a lock of his mother's hair by his elder brother. According to Makoto Ueda, "This is one of the rare cases in which a poem bares his emotions, no doubt because the grief he felt was uncontrollably intense."2
Should I hold it in my hand
It would melt in my burning tears--
Autumnal frost.
Translated by Makoto Ueda
This poem appears in one of Basho's haibun diaries entitled "The Journey of a Weather-Beaten Skeleton." In this journal Basho explains that "it," to which he refers in lines one and two of this haiku is the lock of his mother's hair. The images of a lock of white hair and strings of frost are compared in the poem, and the cold of late autumn underscores Basho's loneliness and grief.
The Seventeenth Century English poet Ben Jonson also produced some beautiful elegies. He wrote in the simple, symmetrical, restrained style of the Cavalier poets who paved the way for the Neo-Classical poetry of the next generation. These two elegies, on the deaths of two of his children, Mary and Benjamin, are touching in their simplicity. As the poems indicate, Mary lived for only six months, and Benjamin, who died on his own birthday, only lived to be seven.
On My First Daughter
Here lies, to each her parents' ruth,
Mary, the daughter of their youth;
Yet all heaven's gifts being heaven's due,
It makes the father less to rue.
At six months' end she parted hence
With safety of her innocence;
Whose soul heaven's queen, whose name she bears,
In comfort of her mother's tears,
Hath placed amongst her virgin-train:
Where, while that severed doth remain,
This grave partakes the fleshly birth;
Which cover lightly, gentle earth!
On My First Son
Farewell, thou child of my right hand, and joy;
My sin was too much hope of thee, loved boy:
Seven years thou wert lent to me, and I thee pay,
Exacted by thy fate, on the just day.
O could I lose all father now! For why
Will man lament the state he should envy,
To have so soon 'scaped world's and flesh's rage,
And, if no other misery, yet age?
Rest in soft peace, and asked, say, "Here doth lie
Ben Jonson his best piece of poetry."
For whose sake henceforth all his vows be such
As what he loves may never like too much.
In these poems, instead of expressing his grief, as Basho does in his haiku for his mother, Jonson is seeking consolation for himself and his wife, and peace for his children's souls. He takes comfort in the fact that his daughter, who died as an infant, "With safety of her innocence," will go to heaven without ever having committed a sin. And his son has escaped the miseries of the world, including old age. In both poems he comments on his children's names, again as a source of consolation. The Hebrew name Benjamin means, "child of the right hand," which also suggests "dexterous" and "fortunate," Jonson refers to his son's auspicious name in the first line of the poem. In the poem for his infant daughter, he mentions that she is named for Mary the mother of Jesus, "heaven's queen," and he declares that his daughter is now one of the virgins in the company of the Virgin Mary in heaven. Although these two poems were written in a very personal tone about Jonson's own children, they could serve as a source of healing for any family which has lost a child. The beauty and power of an elegy goes beyond the death of the individual it honors and provides consolation for the entire human race.
Jonson also wrote an elegy for Shakespeare which appeared at the beginning of the First Folio of Shakespeare's plays, published in 1623. This elegy has a much more public and formal tone than the brief poems on the deaths of his children. It is much longer, and it contains many Classical allusions and references to famous English writers such as Chaucer, Spenser, Beaumont, Kyd and Marlowe. As a public elegy for the greatest English writer who ever lived, it also mentions Queen Elizabeth and King James I, who were the monarchs during Shakespeare's lifetime. You will need to follow the Ten Steps to read this poem, and as you do, pay close attention to the poem's form and to the many references to historical and mythological figures. You will also enjoy the famous line, "And though thou hadst small Latin and less Greek," referring to Shakespeare's limited formal education.
To the Memory Of My Beloved, The Author, Mr.
William Shakespeare, and What He Hat Left Us
To draw no envy, Shakespeare, on thy name,
Am I thus ample to thy book and fame,
While I confess thy writings to be such
As neither man nor Muse can praise too much.
'Tis true, and all men's suffrage. But these ways
Were not the paths I meant unto thy praise ;
For silliest ignorance on these may light,
Which, when it sounds at best, but echoes right;
Or blind affection, which doth ne'er advance
The truth, but gropes, and urgeth all by chance;
Or crafty malice might pretend this praise,
And think to ruin where it seemed to raise.
These are as some infamous bawd or whore
Should praise a matron. What could hurt her more?
But thou art proof against them, and, indeed,
Above th' ill fortune of them, or the need.
I therefore will begin. Soul of the age!
The applause! delight! the wonder of our stage!
My Shakespeare, rise; I will not lodge thee by
Chaucer or Spenser, or bid Beaumont lie
A little further to make thee a room.
Thou art a monument without a tomb.
And art alive still while thy book doth live,
And we have wits to read and praise to give.
That I not mix thee so, my brain excuses,
I mean with great, but disproportioned Muses;
For, if I thought my judgment were of years,
I should commit thee surely with thy peers,
And tell how far thou didst our Lyly outshine,
Or sporting Kyd, or Marlowe's mighty line.
And though thou hadst small Latin and less Greek,
From thence to honor thee I would not seek
For names, but call forth thund'ring Aeschylus,
Euripides, and Sophocles to us,
Pacuvius, Accius, him of Cordova dead,
To life again, to hear thy buskin tread
And shake a stage; or when thy socks were on,
Leave thee alone for the comparison
Of all that insolent Greece or haughty Rome
Sent forth, or since did from their ashes come.
Triumph, my Britain; thou hast one to show
To whom all scenes of Europe homage owe.
He was not of an age, but for all time!
And all the Muses still were in their prime
When like Apollo he came forth to warm
Our ears, or like a Mercury to charm.
Nature herself was proud of his designs,
And joyed to wear the dressing of his lines,
Which were so richly spun, and woven so fit,
As, since, she will vouchsafe no other wit:
The merry Greek, tart Aristophanes,
Neat Terence, witty Plautus now not please,
But antiquated and deserted lie,
As they were not of Nature's family.
Yet must I not give Nature all; thy Art,
My gentle Shakespeare, must enjoy a part.
For though the poet's matter Nature be,
His Art doth give the fashion; and that he
Who casts to write a living line must sweat
(Such as thine are) and strike the second heat
Upon the Muses' anvil; turn the same,
And himself with it, that he thinks to frame,
Or for the laurel he may gain a scorn;
For a good poet's made as well as born.
And such wert thou! Look how the father's face
Lives in his issue; even so the race
Of Shakespeare's mind and manners brightly shines
In his well-turned and true-filed lines,
In each of which he seems to shake a lance,
As brandished at the eyes of ignorance.
Sweet swan of Avon, what a sight it were
To see thee in our waters yet appear,
And make those flights upon the banks of Thames
That so did take Eliza and our James!
But stay; I see thee in the hemisphere
Advanced and make a constellation there!
Shine forth, thou star of poets, and with rage
Or influence chide or cheer the drooping stage,
Which, since thy flight from hence, hath mourned like night,
And despairs day, but for thy volume's light.
Another type of elegy that is written in combination with one of the other genres is the pastoral elegy. The pastoral style of poetry was developed by the Greeks, especially Theocritus, as an alternate reality to the pressures and intrigues of city life. In pastoral poetry, shepherds and shepherdesses frolic in an idyllic setting in a rural world where all is simple, pure, and filled with sunlight. This rustic way of life contrasts sharply with the city world where insincere courtiers live lives of vanity, climbing up the ladder of success by flattering those who are wealthier and more powerful than themselves. In the conventions of pastoral poetry, city life is synonymous with hypocrisy and false values, and country life is filled with natural wisdom and the most sincere of motives. When we use the word conventions in reference to a poetic genre, we mean a certain set of characteristics that poems in that category are expected to have. The conventions of pastoral poetry may seem a little odd to contemporary readers. Like the ode, pastoral poetry does not strive for realism. The shepherd in pastoral poetry is depicted as an accomplished artist and philosopher who might just be the author himself in a thin disguise. if you find yourself smirking as you read a pastoral poem, ask yourself if you have ever watched even one episode of Star Trek with a straight face. Every culture creates escape literature or alternate realities in which human beings are nobler, purer, and more admirable than our ordinary selves. The Twentieth Century's obsession with Science Fiction and Fantasy literature and films is no stranger than the Greeks' fascination with the pastoral. The pastoral resurfaced during the Renaissance and became hugely popular. The complex and precarious lives of courtiers during the reigns of Henry VIII and his daughter, Elizabeth I, necessitated a fantasy world of security, innocence, and escape. Although the romantics adopted a somewhat more realistic view of nature, some elements of pastoral poetry can be found in romantic poetry too.
The pastoral elegy has been written in several different time periods. As you can guess, this genre is simply an elegy placed in a pastoral setting and incorporating the conventions of pastoral poetry. In the previous chapter, we read the final stanza of "Adonais," Shelley's pastoral elegy on the death of John Keats. You will find the complete poem, all fifty-three stanzas, at the end of this chapter. Shelley was careful to include all of the conventional elements of the pastoral elegy when he created "Adonais." These conventions include: a sorrowful invocation to the Muse, the participation of nature in the grieving process, a procession of mourners, a righteous denunciation of those who misuse the pastoral or other literary arts, and finally, a turn from despair to consolation.3 Try to find all of these elements as you make your way through "Adonais."
This poem may seem highly artificial to you, and perhaps far removed from John Keats, in whose honor the poem was ostensibly written. This is typical of the pastoral elegy which, as I have already pointed out, is a form of escape literature. You will notice, for example, that according to Shelley, Keats died because of a vicious review of his poem "Endymion" in the Quarterly Review. In Stanza 36, Shelley declares:
Our Adonais has drunk poison--oh!
What deaf and viperous murderer could crown
Life's early cup with such a draught of woe?
In the following stanza Shelley speaks directly to the reviewer:
Live thou, whose infamy is not thy fame!
Live! fear no heavier chastisement from me,
Thou noteless blot on a remembered name!
Although this is passionate poetry, we are all aware that Keats died of tuberculosis, and in fact, Keats and Shelley barely knew each other.
"Adonais" is not the only pastoral elegy in English. John Milton's "Lycidas," written in 1637 to commemorate the drowning of his friend Edward King, and Matthew Arnold's "Thyrsis," written in 1866 for the death of his friend Arthur Hugh Clough, are also pastoral elegies. Although I have not included either of these very famous elegies in this volume, they should be easy to find in any library. This genre must have provided some form of psychological relief from sorrow by transforming the speaker and the deceased into shepherds in a beautiful rural setting and following an almost liturgical chronology of familiar elements leading to the final consolation, as Shelley proclaims in Stanza 39 of "Adonais."
Peace, peace! he is not dead, he doth not sleep--
He hath awakened from the dream of life--
A more cynical view is that the pastoral elegy has little to do with grief or the dead person about whom it pretends to be written. Some readers and scholars perceive this genre as a form of cannibalism in disguise in which a pedantic poet seizes an opportunity to write a long-winded, overly elaborate poem heavily laden with Classical allusions, and designed to gain literary laurels for himself. Each generation has had to assess the pastoral elegy according to its own values, and I will leave this generation's evaluation of the pastoral elegy up to you.
Since I mentioned the word "cynicism," I might as well tell you that there are some genres of poetry that are based on making fun of other genres. We call this parody. Parody is a type of satire in which a artist ridicules another work of art by using the same form and conventions as the work he or she is satirizing, but trivializing them. Parody emerges whenever a genre starts taking itself too seriously. I'm sure you remember this poem by Richard Brautigan which you read at the end of the last chapter:
A piece of green pepper
fell
off the wooden salad bowl:
so what?
This charming parody has almost the same number of syllables as a haiku and uses some of the conventions of haiku. The poem contains two images that are contrasted with each other, the bell pepper and the salad bowl. One image, the salad bowl, will last for many years and could be considered the eternal element in the poem, like Basho's old pond or Buson's temple bell. The other image, the piece of green pepper, is the temporary image which interrupts the salad bowl's serenity, like the frog or the butterfly in the famous haiku by Basho and Buson. But instead of leading the reader to meditate on the harmonious relationship between the eternal and the temporary forces in the universe, Brautigan concludes, "so what?" And just in case we didn't get the humor in this conclusion, Brautigan prepares us by titling this poem "Haiku Ambulance," suggesting that something terribly wrong is about to happen in this haiku. I've always found this a very funny poem because haiku do seem totally pointless when you first read them, and those who do understand haiku often become such arrogant elitists, treating people who don't understand haiku like dolts. I don't believe that Brautigan meant any disrespect for the great haiku masters. In fact, he studied haiku, and his brief, fresh poems, filled with surprising contrasts and subtle humor, have many of the qualities of good haiku.
You will also remember having read a few lines from Alexander Pope's "The Rape of the Lock" in Chapter 5. This poem is also a parody, written in a special genre called the mock epic or mock heroic. Since all parody falls into the larger category of satire, a type of humor used to point our the foibles of human beings, a mock epic highlights human pettiness by presenting a trivial situation on a grand or epic scale. Only a truly dense reader could fail to notice the contrast between the epic grandeur of Beowulf, killing a dragon to save his people, and the Baron in "The Rape of the Lock," using his "weapon," a small pair of scissors, to cut off a lock of the "heroine," Belinda's hair. A mock epic usually includes several of the conventions of the epic, such as an invocation to the Muse, gods or supernatural beings, battle scenes, and a "warrior" hero. By using all of these grand elements to describe human beings in their most shallow moments, the poet can use the healing power of humor to nudge his readers into behaving with a bit more dignity. The purpose of satire is always to change human behavior, and humor can often achieve that end more effectively than criticism.
As you continue to study poetry on your own, you will discover many other genres in addition to those I have introduced in this chapter. Before we conclude, I would like to mention just one more--a genre that comes from the French Medieval tradition of Courtly Love, the aubaude. An aubaude, or dawn song, describes the regret of lovers who must separate in the morning after a night of romance. An aubaude can be written in any form, and sometimes it contains some of the conventions of Courtly Love, including the lover's religious passion for his lady, whom he worships with a love that highly idealized.
The following Twentieth Century aubaude by the American poet Richard Wilbur has a much more modern feel:
A Late Aubaude
You could be sitting now in a carrel
Turning some liver-spotted page,
Or rising in an elevator-cage
Toward Ladies' Apparel.
You could be planting a raucous bed
Of salvia, in rubber gloves,
Or lunching through a screed of someone's loves
With pitying head,
Or making some unhappy setter
Heel, or listening to a bleak
Lecture on Schoenberg's serial technique.
Isn't this better?
Think of all the time you are not
Wasting, and would not care to waste,
Such things, thank God, not being to your taste.
Think what a lot
Of time, by woman's reckoning,
You've saved, and so may spend on this,
You who had rather lie in bed and kiss
Than anything.
It's almost noon, you say? If so,
Time flies, and I need not rehearse
The rosebuds-theme of centuries of verse.
If you must go,
Wait for a while, then slip downstairs
And bring us up some chilled white wine,
And some blue cheese, and cracker, and some fine
Ruddy-skinned pears.
Wilbur's allusion to the "rose-buds theme of centuries of verse" refers to a poem by Robert Herrick which you will find at the end of this chapter and to the very old tradition of carpe diem poetry with which you are familiar. I hope that you have enjoyed learning about some of the traditional genres of poetry, and I also hope that, like Richard Wilbur, you will reclaim some of these old conventions and make them your own.
NOTES
CHAPTER 6
1. J.R.R. Tolkien, "Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics," in Donald K. Fry, ed., The Beowulf Poet: A Collection of Critical Essays (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1968), p. 38.
2. Makoto Ueda, Matsuo Basho (Tokyo: Kodansha International, Ltd., 1982), p. 26.
3. M.H. Abrams, ed., The Norton Anthology of English Literature, Sixth Edition, Vol. 2 (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1993), p. 718.
QUESTIONS AND TOPICS FOR REVIEW
1. What are the four general categories into which poetry is sometimes divided?
2. Define the word "genre."
3. How does senryu compare and contrast with haiku?
4. What is carpe diem poetry? Give an example.
5. Define and provide an example of didactic poetry.
6. Define narrative poetry and explain which genres are usually narrative.
7. Define and provide an example of the dramatic monologue.
8. What is irony, and how is it used in the dramatic monologue?
9. What is lyric poetry? Provide several examples.
10. What does the word "conventions" mean in poetry?
11. What are the conventions of epic poetry?
12. Define and provide an example of the elegy.
13. What was Theocritus' contribution to the development of poetry?
14. Explain the concept of the willing suspension of disbelief.
15. What are the conventions of pastoral poetry?
16. Define and provide an example of the ode.
17. Define the objective correlative and explain how it is used in an ode.
18. Define and provide an example of parody.
19. What is the relationship between satire and parody?
20. Define and provide an example of the mock epic.
21. What were the conventions of Courtly Love?
22. Define and provide an example of the aubaude.
23. Define and provide an example of the pastoral elegy.
TOPICS FOR DISCUSSION
1. Read each of the poems at the end of this chapter and be prepared to discuss which genre each poem belongs to and why. Remember that some genres are based on form while some are defined by their subject matter and conventions, and some belong to both categories. Also, some poems may have the characteristics of more than one genre.
2. Be prepared to discuss the form in which each of the poems in this chapter is written. Remember that not all poetic forms have specific names. If a poem's form does not have a specific name, you will need to describe its meter, rhyme scheme, and number of lines per stanza.
3. Discuss Keats' use of the objective correlative in "Ode on a Grecian Urn."
4. Which of Jonson's elegies do you prefer, the ones on his children or the one for Shakespeare? Be prepared to explain why.
5. Discuss your evaluation of the pastoral elegy, using Shelley's "Adonais" as the basis for your comments. Is this genre a genuine source of consolation, or a form of literary cannibalism?
6. Discuss the social, psychological, and historical value of the following genres. Which of these genres is still meaningful today, and why?
elegy
pastoral
pastoral elegy
carpe diem
pastoral elegy
dramatic monologue
satire
parody
aubaude
7. Discuss the techniques used by Browning to create "My Last Duchess."
Among other elements, focus on genre, theme, setting (time and place), and Browning's use of irony. Also, who is the speaker in the poem, and who is the listener? What actually happened to the Duchess?
ACTIVITIES
1. Divide into groups and analyze Jonson's elegy on Shakespeare, giving a different task to each group. Some of the tasks assigned to various groups might include:
Identify all of the people mentioned in the poem
Explain all of the Classical allusions in the poem
Identify the form of the poem and explain how Jonson uses this form
to create his desired effect
Look up the meanings of all of the words that may seem obscure
Provide some background information about Ben Jonson
Explain the poem's theme and what the reader learns in the poem
about Shakespeare
2. As a group, agree upon any poem in this chapter to analyze. Then divide into pairs and assign one step of the Ten Step process for analyzing a poem to each two-person team. This project, of course, can be adjusted to accommodate the size of your group.
3. An explication is a careful explanation of the meaning of a poem achieved by proceeding through the poem line by line or word by word. Divide into groups of five and explicate Keats' "Ode on a Grecian Urn," assigning one stanza to each group. Try to reach consensus in each group as to the meaning of each line, and report your findings to the larger group.
4. Use this same process to explicate Browning's "My Last Duchess," dividing into groups as appropriate.
5. Organize a mock trial in which the Duke is tried for murdering the Duchess. Organize into prosecution and defense teams and present your evidence. Call witnesses if necessary.
ANALYTICAL WRITING ASSIGNMENTS
1. Compare and contrast Jonson's elegies on his two children, focusing on form, imagery, theme, etc.
2. Write an explication of either Keats' "Ode on a Grecian Urn" or Jonson's elegy on Shakespeare. Remember that an explication is a line-by-line explanation of the meaning of a poem. You should begin an explication with some general comments about the overall theme, genre, and message of the poem before you begin you line-by-line analysis.
3. Select any poem from the collection at the end of this chapter and write an explication of the poem you have chosen.
4. Analyze "Adonais," focusing on Shelley's use of the conventions of the pastoral elegy.
5. Analyze Richard Wilbur's "A Late Aubaude," focusing on theme, form, imagery, and allusions.
6. Write an analysis of Browning's "My Last Duchess," focusing on Browning's use of irony and on the contrasting personalities of the Duke and the Duchess in the poem.
7. Write a comparison and contrast between Petrarch's "She used to let her golden hair fly free," and Shakespeare's "My mistress' eyes are nothing like the sun," (Sonnet 130 at the end of Chapter 3.)
8. Analyze Sophocles' Choric Ode from Antigone, focusing on theme and imagery.
9. Compare and contrast a sonnet by Louise Labe with a sonnet by Elizabeth Barrett Browning. Browning's poems appear at the end of Chapter 5.
10. Compare and Contrast Herrick's "To the Virgins to Make Much of Time" with Marvell's "To His Coy Mistress," which appears in Chapter 2.
11. Compare and contrast an elegy written in the Twentieth Century (see Roethke, Jarrell, Cohen and Atwood), with an elegy written in an earlier century (see Houseman, Dryden, or Jonson.)
12. Analyze Shiki's use of autumn and winter imagery to express his themes.
CREATIVE WRITING ASSIGNMENTS
1. Select a personal possession or an element in nature and write an ode, using this item as the objective correlative.
2. Write a parody of the ode that you have just written.
3. Write an occasional elegy for a public or historic figure whom you admire.
4. Write a lyric elegy about someone you love who has died.
4. Write an aubaude, placing it in a contemporary setting.
5. Write a carpe diem poem.
6. Write a dramatic monologue. Remember that you will have to create a speaker, a listener, and a setting for this poem.
7. Write a fantasy poem which includes an alternate world where human beings are nobler and purer than they are in the environment in which you are living.
8. Think about a conflict that someone among your family or friends is having and write a mock epic, using humor to trivialize this conflict. Your purpose is not to ridicule your friend, but to help bring about healing and resolution by putting the conflict in perspective.
9. Write a parody of a pastoral poem.
10. Find a satiric poem and write a parody of that satiric poem.
ADDITIONAL POEMS IN VARIOUS GENRES FOR READING AND ANALYSIS
SOPHOCLES
Greece 496-406 B.C.
Chorus from Antigone
Blest, they are the truly blest who all their lives
have never tasted devastation. For others, once
the gods have rocked a house to its foundations
the ruin will never cease, cresting on and on
from one generation on throughout the race--
like a great mounting tide
driven on by savage northern gales,
surging over the dead black depths
rolling up from the bottom dark heaves of sand
and the headlands, taking the storm's onslaught full-force,
roar, and the low moaning
echoes on and on
and now
as in ancient times I see the sorrows of the house,
the living heirs of the old ancestral kings,
piling on the sorrows of the dead
and one generation cannot free the next--
some god will bring them crashing down,
the race finds no release.
And now the light, the hope
springing up from the late last root
in the house of Oedipus, that hope's cut down in turn
by the long, bloody knife swung by the gods of death
by a senseless word
by fury at the heart.
Zeus,
yours is the power, Zeus, what man on earth
can override it, who can hold it back?
Power that neither Sleep, the all-ensnaring
no, nor the tireless months of heaven
can ever overmaster--young through all time,
mighty lord of power, you hold fast
the dazzling crystal mansions of Olympus.
And throughout the future, late and soon
as through the past, your law prevails:
no towering form of greatness
enters into the lives of mortals
free and clear of ruin.
True,
our dreams, our high hopes voyaging far and wide
bring sheer delight to many, to many others
delusion, blithe, mindless lusts
and the fraud steals on one slowly...unaware
till he trips and puts his foot into the fire,
He was a wise old man who coined
the famous saying: "Sooner or later
foul is fair, fair is foul
to the man the gods will ruin"--
He goes his way for a moment only
free of blinding ruin.
Translated by Robert Fagles
FRANCIS PETRARCH
Italy 1304-1374
Number 90
She used to let her golden hair fly free
For the wind to toy and tangle and molest;
Her eyes were brighter than the radiant west.
(Seldom they shine so now.) I used to see
Pity look out of those deep eyes for me.
("It was false pity," you would now protest.)
I had love's tinder heaped within by breast;
What wonder that the flame burned furiously?
She did not walk in any mortal way,
But with angelic progress; when she spoke,
Unearthly voices sang in unison.
She seemed divine among the dreary folk
Of earth. You say she is not so today?
Well, though the bow's unbent, the wound bleeds on.
Translated by Morris Bishop
LOUISE LABE
France 1525-1566
XIII
If I could linger on his lovely chest
happy, soaring with him for whom I see
myself die, if envy did not keep me
from living my brief days with him, and best
if holding me he'd say: "My dear friend,
let us enjoy each other and be sure
that no rainburst or seas or seastorm lure
us to separation before our lives end,"
if, while my arms were sleeping on the nape
of his neck like ivy circling a tree,
death came, jealous of our carefree rapport
as tenderly he kissed me more and more,
into his lips my soul would then escape
and, more than alive, I'd die in ecstasy.
Translated by Aliki Barnstone and
Willis Barnstone
XXIII
What good is it to me if long ago
you eloquently praised my golden hair,
compared my eyes and beauty to the flare
of two suns, where, you say, love bent the bow,
sending the darts that needled you with grief?
Where are your tears that faded in the ground?
Your death? by which your constant love is bound
in oaths and honor now beyond belief?
Your brutal goal was to make me a slave
beneath the ruse of being served by you.
Pardon me, friend, and for once hear me through:
I am outraged with anger and I rave.
Yet I am sure, wherever you have gone,
your martyrdom is hard as my black dawn.
Translated by Aliki Barnstone and
Willis Barnstone
CHRISTOPHER MARLOWE
England 1564-1593
The Passionate Shepherd to His Love
Come live with me and be my love,
And we will all the pleasures prove
That valleys, groves, hills, and fields,
Woods, or steepy mountain yields.
And we will sit upon the rocks,
Seeing the shepherds feed their flocks,
By shallow rivers to whose falls
Melodious birds sing madrigals.
And I will make thee beds of roses
And a thousand fragrant posies,
A cap of flowers, and a kirtle
Embroidered all with leaves of myrtle;
A gown make of the finest wool
Which from our pretty lambs we pull;
Fair lined slippers for the cold,
With buckles of the purest gold;
A belt of straw and ivy buds,
With coral clasps and amber studs:
And if these pleasures may thee move,
Come live with me, and be by love.
The shepherds' swains shall dance and sing
For thy delight each May morning:
If these delights thy mind may move,
Then live with me and be my love.
ROBERT HERRICK
England 1591-1674
To the Virgins, to Make Much of Time
Gather ye rosebuds while ye may,
Old time is still a-flying;
And this same flower that smiles today,
Tomorrow will be dying.
The glorious lamp of heaven, the sun,
The higher he's a getting,
The sooner will his race be run,
And nearer he's to setting.
That age is best which is the first,
When youth and blood are warmer;
But being spent, the worse, and worst
Times still succeed the former.
Then be not coy, but use your time,
And while ye may, go marry;
For having lost but once your prime,
You may forever tarry.
JOHN DRYDEN
England 1631-1700
To the Memory of Mr. Oldham*
Farewell, too little, and too lately known,
Whom I began to think and call my own:
For sure our souls were near allied, and thine
Cast in the same poetic mold as mine.
One common note on either lyre did strike,
And knaves and fools we both abhorred alike.
To the same goal did both our studies drive;
The last set out the soonest did arrive.
Thus Nisus fell upon the slippery place,
While his young friend performed and won the race;
O early ripe! to thy abundant store
What could advancing age have added more?
It might (what nature never gives the young)
Have taught the numbers of thy native tongue.
But satire needs not those, and wit will shine
Through the harsh cadence of a rugged line.
A noble error, and but seldom made,
When poets are by too much force betrayed.
Thy generous fruits, though gathered ere their prime,
Still showed a quickness; and maturing time
But mellows what we write to the dull sweets of rhyme.
Once more, hail and farewell; farewell thou young,
But ah too short, Marcellus of our tongue;
Thy brows with ivy, and with laurels bound;
But fate and gloomy night encompass thee around.
* John Oldham, a young poet who wrote satires which Dryden admired. Mr. Oldham lived from 1653-1683.
WILLIAM WORDSWORTH
England 1770-1850
Composed upon Westminster Bridge,
September 3, 1802
Earth has not any thing to show more fair:
Dull would he be of soul who could pass by
A sight so touching in its majesty:
This City now doth, like a garment, wear
The beauty of the morning; silent, bare,
Ships, towers, domes, theatres, and temples lie
Open unto the fields, and to the sky;
All bright and glittering in the smokeless air.
Never did sun more beautifully steep
In his first splendour, valley, rock, or hill;
Ne'er saw I, never felt, a calm so deep!
The river glideth at his own sweet will:
Dear God! the very houses seem asleep;
And all that mighty heart is lying still!
PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY
England 1792-1822
Adonais
AN ELEGY ON THE DEATH OF JOHN KEATS,
AUTHOR OF ENDYMION,HYPERION,ETC.
I weep for Adonais‑he is dead!
Oh, weep for Adonais! though our tears
Thaw not the frost which binds so dear a head!
And thou, sad Hour, selected from al] years
To mourn our loss, rouse thy obscure compeers,
And teach them thine own sorrow, say: with me
Died Adonais; till the Future dares
Forget the Past, his fate and fame shall be
An echo and a light unto eternity!
2
Where wert thou mighty Mother, when he lay,
When thy Son lay, pierced by the shaft which flies
In darkness? where was lorn Urania
When Adonais died? With veiled eyes,
'Mid listening Echoes, in her Paradise
She sate, while one, with soft enamored breath,
Rekindled all the fading melodies,
With which, like flowers that mock the corse beneath,
He had adorned and hid the coming bulk of death.
3
Oh, weep for Adonais‑he is dead!
Wake, melancholy Mother, wake and weep!
Yet wherefore? Quench within their burning bed
Thy fiery tears, and let thy loud heart keep
Like his, a mute and uncomplaining sleep;
For he is gone, where all things wise and fair
Descend:‑oh, dream not that the amorous Deep
Will yet restore him to the vital air;
Death feeds on his mute voice, and laughs at our despair.
4
Most musical of mourners, weep again!
Lament anew, Urania!‑He died,
Who was the Sire of an immortal strain,
Blind, old, and lonely, when his country's pride,
The priest, the slave, and the liberticide,
Trampled and mocked with many a loathed rite
Of lust and blood; he went, unterrified,
Into the gulf of death; but his clear Sprite
Yet reigns o'er earth; the third among the sons of light.
5
Most musical of mourners, weep again!
Not all to that bright station dared to climb;
And happier they their happiness who knew,
Whose tapers yet burn through that night of time
In which suns perished; others more sublime,
Struck by the envious wrath of man or God,
Have sunk, extinct in their refulgent prim
And some yet live, treading the thorny road,
Which leads, through toil and hate, to Fame's serene abode.
6
But now, thy youngest, dearest one, has perished
The nursling of thy widowhood, who grew,
Like a pale flower by some sad maiden cherished,
And fed with true‑love tears, instead of dew;
Most musical of mourners, weep anew!
Thy extreme hope, the loveliest and the last,
The bloom, whose petals nipped before they blew
Died on the promise of the fruit, is waste;
The broken lily lies‑the storm is overpast.
7
To that high Capital, where kingly Death
Keeps his pale court in beauty and decay,
He came; and bought, with price of purest breath,
A grave among the eternal.‑Come away!
Haste, while the vault of blue Italian day
Is yet his fitting charnel‑roof! while still
He lies, as if in dewy sleep he lay;
Awake him not! surely he takes his fill
Of deep and liquid rest, forgetful of all ill.
8
He will awake no more, oh, never more!‑
Within the twilight chamber spreads apace
The shadow of white Death, and at the door
Invisible Corruption waits to trace
His extreme way to her dim dwelling‑place;
The eternal Hunger sits, but pity and awe
Soothe her pale rage, nor dares she to deface
So fair a prey, till darkness and the law
Of change, shall o'er his sleep the mortal curtain draw.
9
Oh, weep for Adonais! The quick Dreams,
The passion‑winged Ministers of thought,
Who were his Flocks, whom near the living streams
Of his young spirit he fed, and whom he taught
The love which was its music, wander not‑
Wander no more, from kindling brain to brain,
But droop there, whence they sprung; and mourn their lot
Round the cold heart, where, after their sweet pain,
They ne'er will gather strength, or find a home again.
10
And one with trembling hand clasps his cold head,
And fans him with her moonlight wings, and cries,
"Our love, our hope, our sorrow, is not dead;
See, on the silken fringe of his faint eyes,
Like dew upon a sleeping flower, there lies
A tear some Dream has loosened from his brain."
Lost Angel of a ruined Paradise!
She knew not 'twas her own; as with no stain
She faded, like a cloud which had outwept its rain.
11
One from a lucid urn of starry dew
Washed his light limbs as if embalming them;
Another clipped her profuse locks, and threw
The wreath upon him, like an anadem,
Which frozen tears instead of pearls begem;
Another in her willful grief would break
Her bow and winged reeds, as if to stem
A greater loss with one which was more weak;
And dull the barbed fire against his frozen cheek.
12
Another Splendor on his mouth alit,
That mouth, whence it was wont to draw the breath
Which gave it strength to pierce the guarded wit,
And pass into the panting heart beneath
With lightning and with music: the damp death
Quenched its caress upon its icy lips;
And, as a dying meteor stains a wreath
Of moonlight vapor, which the cold night clips
It flushed through his pale limbs, and passed to its eclipse.
13
And others came . . . Desires and Adorations,
Winged Persuasions and veiled Destinies,
Splendors, and Glooms, and glimmering Incarnations
Of hopes and fears, and twilight Phantasies;
And Sorrow, with her family of Sighs,
And Pleasure, blind with tears, led by the gleam
Of her own dying smile instead of eyes,
Came in slow pomp;‑the moving pomp might seem
Like pageantry of mist on an autumnal stream.
14
All he had loved, and molded into thought
From shape, and hue, and odor, and sweet sound,
Lamented Adonais Morning sought
Her eastern watch‑tower, and her hair unbound,
Wet with the tears which should adorn the ground,
Dimmed the aerial eyes that kindle day;
Afar the melancholy thunder moaned,
Pale Ocean in unquiet slumber lay,
And the wild Winds flew round, sobbing in their dismay.
15
Lost Echo sits amid the voiceless mountains,
And feeds her grief with his remembered lay,
And will no more reply to winds or fountains,
Or amorous birds perched on the young green spray,
Or herdsman's horn, or bell at closing day;
Since she can mimic not his lips, more dear
Than those for whose disdain she pined away
Into a shadow of all sounds:‑a drear
Murmur, between their songs, is all the woodmen hear.
16
Grief made the young Spring wild, and she threw down
Her kindling buds, as if she Autumn were,
Or they dead leaves; since her delight is flown
For whom should she have waked the sullen year?
To Phoebus was not Hyacinth so dear,
Nor to himself Narcissus, as to both
Thou, Adonais; wan they stand and sere
Amid the faint companions of their youth
With dew all turned to tears; odor, to sighing ruth.
17
Thy spirit's sister, the lorn nightingale,
Mourns not her mate with such melodious pain;
Not so the eagle, who like thee could scale
Heaven, and could nourish in the sun's domain
Her mighty youth,3 with morning, doth complain,
Soaring and screaming round her empty nest,
As Albion wails for thee: the curse of Cain
Light on his head who pierced thy innocent breast,
And scared the angel soul that was its earthly guest!
18
Ah, woe is me! Winter is come and gone,
But grief returns with the revolving year;
The airs and streams renew their joyous tone;
The ants, the bees, the swallows reappear;
Fresh leaves and flowers deck the dead Seasons' bier;
The amorous birds now pair in every brake,
And build their mossy homes in field and brere;
And the green lizard, and the golden snake,
Like unimprisoned Hames, out of their trance awake.
19
Through wood and stream and field and hill and Ocean,
A quickening life from the Earth's heart has burst
As it has ever done, with change and motion,
From the great morning of the world when first
God dawned on Chaos; in its stream immersed
The lamps of Heaven flash with a softer light;
All baser things pant with life's sacred thirst;
Diffuse themselves; and spend in love's delight,
The beauty and the joy of their renewed might.
20
The leprous corpse touched by this spirit tender
Exhales itself in flowers of gentle breath;
Like incarnations of the stars, when splendor
Is changed to fragrance, they illumine death
And mock the merry worm that wakes beneath;
Nought we know, dies. Shall that alone which knows
Be as a sword consumed before the sheath
By sightless lightning?‑the intense atom glows
A moment, then is quenched in a most cold repose.
21
Alas! that all we loved of him should be,
But for our grief, as if it had not been.
And grief itself be mortal! Woe is me!
Whence are we, and why are we? of what scene
The actors or spectators? Great and mean
Meet massed in death, who lends what life must borrow.
As long as skies are blue, and fields are green,
Evening must usher night, night urge the morrow,
Month follow month with woe, and year wake year to sorrow.
22
He will awake no more, oh, never more!
"Wake thou," cried Misery, "childless Mother, rise
Out of thy sleep, and slake, in thy heart's core,
A wound more fierce than his with tears and sighs."
And all the Dreams that watched Urania's eyes,
And all the Echoes whom their sister's song
Had held in holy silence, cried, "Arise!"
Swift as a Thought by the snake Memory stung,
From her ambrosial rest the fading Splendor sprung.
23
She rose like an autumnal Night, that springs
Out of the East, and follows wild and drear
The golden Day, which, on eternal wings,
Even as a ghost abandoning a bier,
Has left the Earth a corpse. Sorrow and fear
So struck, so roused, so rapt Urania;
So saddened round her like an atmosphere
Of stormy mist; so swept her on her way
Even to the mournful place where Adonais lay.
24
Out of her secret Paradise she sped,
Through camps and cities rough with stone, and steel,
And human hearts, which to her aery tread
Yielding not, wounded the invisible
Palms of her tender feet where'er they fell:
And barbed tongues, and thoughts more sharp than they,
Rent the soft Form they never could repel,
Whose sacred blood, like the young tears of May,
Paved with eternal flowers that undeserving way.
25
In the death‑chamber for a moment Death,
Shamed by the presence of that living Might,
Blushed to annihilation, and the breath
Revisited those lips, and life's pale light
Flashed through those limbs, so late her dear delight.
"Leave me not wild and drear and comfortless,
As silent lightning leaves the starless night!
Leave me not!" cried Urania: her distress
Roused Death: Death rose and smiled, and met her vain caress.
26
"Stay yet awhile! speak to me once again;
Kiss me, so long but as a kiss may live;
And in my heartless breast and burning brain
That word, that kiss, shall all thoughts else survive,
With food of saddest memory kept alive,
Now thou art dead, as if it were a part
Of thee, my Adonais! I would give
All that I am to be as thou now art,
But I am chained to Time, and cannot thence depart!
27
"O gentle child, beautiful as thou wert,
Why didst thou leave the trodden paths of men
Too soon, and with weak hands though mighty heart
Dare the unpastured dragon in his den?
Defenseless as thou wert, oh! where was then
Wisdom the mirrored shield, or scorn the spear?
Or hadst thou waited the full cycle, when
Thy spirit should have filled its crescent sphere,
The monsters of life's waste had fled from thee like deer.
28
"The herded wolves, bold only to pursue;
The obscene ravens, clamorous o'er the dead;
The vultures, to the conqueror's banner true,
Who feed where Desolation first has fed,
And whose wings rain contagion;‑how they fled,
When like Apollo from his golden bow,
The Pythian of the age one arrow sped
And smiled!‑The spoilers tempt no second blow,
They fawn on the proud feet that spurn them lying low.
29
"The sun comes forth, and many reptiles spawn;
He sets, and each ephemeral insect then
Is gathered into death without a dawn,
And the immortal stars awake again;
So is it in the world of living men:
A godlike mind soars forth, in its delight
Making earth bare and veiling heaven, and when
It sinks, the swarms that dimmed or shared its light
Leave to its kindred lamps the spirit's awful night."
30
Thus ceased she: and the mountain shepherds came
Their garlands sere, their magic mantles rent;
The Pilgrim of Eternity, whose fame
Over his living head like Heaven is bent,
An early but enduring monument,
Came, veiling all the lightnings of his song
In sorrow; from her wilds Ierne sent
The sweetest lyrist of her saddest wrong,
And love taught grief to fall like music from his tongue.
31
Midst others of less note, came one frail Form,
A phantom among men; companionless
As the last cloud of an expiring storm,
Whose thunder is its knell; he, as I guess,
Had gazed on Nature's naked loveliness,
Actaeon‑like, and now he fled astray
With feeble steps offer the world's wilderness,
And his own thoughts, along that rugged way,
Pursued, like raging hounds, their father and their prey.
32
A pardlike Spirit beautiful and swift‑
A Love in desolation masked;‑a Power
Girt round with weakness;‑it can scarce uplift
The weight of the superincumbent hour;
It is a dying lamp, a falling shower,
A breaking billow;‑even whilst we speak
Is it not broken? On the withering flower
The killing sun smiles brightly: on a cheek
The life can burn in blood, even while the heart may break.
33
His head was bound with pansies overblown,
And faded violets, white, and pied, and blue;
And a light spear topped with a cypress cone,
Round whose rude shaft dark ivy‑tresses grew
Yet dripping with the forest's noonday dew,
Vibrated, as the ever‑beating heart
Shook the weak hand that grasped it; of that crew
He came the last, neglected and apart;
A herd‑abandoned deer, struck by the hunter's dart.
34
All stood aloof, and at his partial moans
Smiled through their tears; well knew that gentle band
Who in another's fate now wept his own;
As in the accents of an unknown land,
He sung new sorrow; sad Urania scanned
The Stranger's mien, and murmured: "Who art thou?"
He answered not, but with a sudden hand
Made bare his branded and ensanguined brow,
Which was like Cain's or Christ's‑oh! that it should be so!
35
What softer voice is hushed over the dead?
Athwart what brow is that dark mantle thrown?
What form leans sadly o'er the white death‑bed,
In mockery of monumental stone,
The heavy heart heaving without a moan?
If it be He, who, gentlest of the wise,
Taught, soothed, loved, honored the departed one;
Let me not vex, with inharmonious sighs,
The silence of that heart's accepted sacrifice.
36
Our Adonais has drunk poison‑oh!
What deaf and viperous murderer could crown
Life's early cup with such a draught of woe?
The nameless worm would now itself disown:
It felt, yet could escape the magic tone
Whose prelude held all envy, hate and wrong,
But what was howling in one breast alone,
Silent with expectation of the song,
Whose master's hand is cold, whose silver lyre unstrung.
37
Live thou, whose infamy is not thy fame!
Live! fear no heavier chastisement from me,
Thou noteless blot on a remembered name!
But be thyself, and know thyself to be!
And ever at thy season be thou free
To spill the venom when thy fangs o'erflow:
Remorse and Self‑contempt shall cling to thee;
Hot Shame shall burn upon thy secret brow,
And like a beaten hound tremble thou shalt‑as now.
38
Nor let us weep that our delight is fled
Far from these carrion kites‑ that scream below;
He wakes or sleeps with the enduring dead;
Thou canst not soar where he is sitting now.
Dust to the dust! but the pure spirit shall flow
Back to the burning fountain whence it came,
A portion of the Eternal, which must glow
Through time and change, unquenchably the same,
Whilst thy cold embers choke the sordid hearth of shame.
39
Peace, peace! he is not dead, he doth not sleep‑
He hath awakened from the dream of life‑
Tis we, who lost in stormy visions, keep
With phantoms an unprofitable strife,
And in mad trance strike with our spirit's knife
Invulnerable nothings.‑We decay
Like corpses in a charnel; fear and grief
Convulse us and consume us day by day,
And cold hopes swarm like worms within our living clay.
40
He has outsoared the shadow of our night;
Envy and calumny and hate and pain,
And that unrest which men miscall delight,
Can touch him not and torture not again;
From the contagion of the world's slow stain
He is secure, and now can never mourn
A heart grown cold, a head grown gray in vain;
Nor, when the spirit's self has ceased to burn,
With sparkless ashes load an unlamented urn.
41
He lives, he wakes‑'tis Death is dead, not he;
Mourn not for Adonais.‑Thou young Dawn,
Turn all thy dew to splendor, for from thee
The spirit thou lamentest is not gone;
Ye caverns and ye forests, cease to moans
Cease ye faint flowers and fountains, and thou Air,
Which like a morning veil thy scarf hadst thrown
O'er the abandoned Earth, now leave it bare
Even to the joyous stars which smile on its despair!
42
He is made one with Nature: there is heard
His voice in all her music, from the moan
Of thunder, to the song of night's sweet bird;
He is a presence to be felt and known
In darkness and in light, from herb and stone,
Spreading itself wherever that Power may move
Which has withdrawn his being to its own;
Which wields the world with never wearied love,
Sustains it from beneath, and kindles it above.
43
He is a portion of the loveliness
Which once he made more lovely: he doth bear
His part, while the one Spirit's plastic stress
Sweeps through the dull dense world, compelling there
All new s cessions to the forms they wear;
Torturing the unwilling dross that checks its flight
To its own likeness, as each mass may bear;
And bursting in its beauty and its might
From trees and beasts and men into the Heaven's light.
44
The splendors of the firmament of time
May be eclipsed, but are extinguished not;
Like stars to their appointed height they climb,
And death is a low mist which cannot blot
The brightness it may veil. When lofty thought
Lifts a young heart above its mortal lair,
And love and life contend in it, for what
Shall be its earthly doom, the dead live there
And move like winds of light on dark and stormy air.
45
The inheritors of unfulfilled renown
Rose from their thrones, built beyond mortal thought,
Far in the Unapparent. Chatterton
Rose pale, his solemn agony had not
Yet faded from him; Sidney, as he fought
And as he fell and as he lived and loved
Sublimely mild, a Spirit without spot,
Arose; and Lucan, by his death approved:
Oblivion as they rose shrank like a thing reproved.
46
And many more, whose names on Earth are dark
But whose transmitted effluence cannot die
So long as fire outlives the parent spark,
Rose, robed in dazzling immortality.
"Thou art become as one of us," they cry,
"It was for thee yon kingless sphere has long
Swung blind in unascended majesty,
Silent alone amid an Heaven of Song.
Assume thy winged throne, thou Vesper of our throng!"
47
Who mourns for Adonais? Oh, come forth,
Fond wretch! and know thyself and him aright.
Clasp with thy panting soul the pendulous Earth;
As from a center, dart thy spirit's light
Beyond all worlds, until its spacious might
Satiate the void circumference: then shrink
Even to a point within our day and night;
And keep thy heart light lest it make thee sink
When hope has kindled hope, and lured thee to the brink.
48
Or go to Rome, which is the sepulcher,
Oh, not of him, but of our joy: 'tis nought
That ages, empires, and religions there
Lie buried in the ravage they have wrought;
For such as he can lend‑they borrow not
Glory from those who made the world their prey;
And he is gathered to the kings of thought
Who waged contention with their time's decay,
And of the past are all that cannot pass away.
49
Go thou to Rome,‑at once the Paradise,
The grave, the city, and the wilderness;
And where its wrecks like shattered mountains rise,
And flowering weeds, and fragrant copses dress
The bones of Desolation's nakedness
Pass, till the Spirit of the spot shall lead
Thy footsteps to a slope of green access
Where, like an infant's smile, over the dead
A light of laughing flowers along the grass is spread,
50
And gray walls moulder round, on which dull Time
Feeds, like slow fire upon a hoary brand;
And one keen pyramids with wedge sublime,
Pavilioning the dust of him who planned
This refuge for his memory, doth stand
Like flame transformed to marble; and beneath,
A field is spread, on which a newer band
Have pitched in Heaven's smile their camp of death,
Welcoming him we lose with scarce extinguished breath.
51
Here pause: these graves are all too young as yet
To have outgrown the sorrow which consigned
Its charge to each; and if the seal is set,
Here, on one fountain of a mourning mind,
Break it not thou! too surely shalt thou find
Thine own well full, if thou returnest home,
Of tears and gall. From the world's bitter wind
Seek shelter in the shadow of the tomb.
What Adonais is, why fear we to become?
52
The One remains, the many change and pass;
Heaven's light forever shines, Earth's shadows fly;
Life, like a dome of many‑colored glass,
Stains the white radiance of Eternity,
Until Death tramples it to fragments.‑Die,
If thou wouldst be with that which thou dost seek!
Follow where all is fled!‑Rome's azure sky,
Flowers, ruins, statues, music, words, are weak
The glory they transfuse with fitting truth to speak.
53
Why linger, why turn back, why shrink, my Heart?
Thy hopes are gone before: from all things here
They have departed; thou shouldst now depart!
A light is past from the revolving year,
And man, and woman; and what still is dear
Attracts to crush, repels to make thee wither.
The soft sky smiles,‑the low wind whispers near:
'Tis Adonais calls! oh, hasten thither,
No more let life divide what Death can join together.
54
That Light whose smile kindles the Universe,
That Beauty in which all things work and move
That Benediction which the eclipsing Curse
Of birth can quench not, that sustaining Love
Which through the web of being blindly wove
By man and beast and earth and air and sea
Burns bright or dim, as each are mirrors of
The fire for which all thirst; now beams on me,
Consuming the last clouds of cold mortality.
55
The breath whose might I have invoked in song
Descends on me; my spirit's bark is driven,
Far from the shore, far from the trembling throng
Whose sails were never to the tempest given
The massy earth and sphered skies are riven!
I am borne darkly, fearfully afar
Whilst burning through the inmost veil of Heaven
The soul of Adonais, like a star
Beacons from the abode where the Eternal are.
ROBERT BROWNING
England 1812-1889
My Last Duchess
Ferrara*
That's my last duchess painted on the wall,
Looking as if she were alive. I call
That piece a wonder, now: Fra Pandolf's hands
Worked busily a day, and there she stands.
Will 't please you sit and look at her? I said
"Fra Pandolf" by design, for never read
Strangers like you that pictured countenance,
The depth and passion of its earnest glance,
But to myself they turned (since none puts by
The curtain I have drawn for you, but I)
And seemed as they would ask me, if they durst,
How such a glance came there; so, not the first
Are you to turn and ask thus. Sir, 'twas not
Her husband's presence only, called that spot
Of joy into the Duchess' cheek: perhaps
Fra Pandolf chanced to say "Her mantle laps
Over my lady's wrist too much," or "Paint
Must never hope to reproduce the faint
Half-flush that dies along her throat": such stuff
Was courtesy, she thought, and cause enough
For calling up that spot of joy. She had
A heart--how shall I say?--too soon make glad,
Too easily impressed; she liked what'er
She looked on, and her looks went everywhere.
Sir, 'twas all one! My favor at her breast,
The dropping of the daylight in the West,
The bough of cherries some officious fool
Broke in the orchard for her, the white mule
She rode with round the terrace--all and each
Would draw from her alike the approving speech,
Or blush, at least. She thanked men--good! but thanked
Somehow--I know not how--as if she ranked
My gift of a nine-hundred-years-old name
With anybody's gift. Who'd stoop to blame
This sort of trifling? Even if you had skill
In speech--(which I have not)--to make your will
Quite clear to such an one, and say, "Just this
Or that in you disgusts me; here you miss,
Or there exceed the mark"--and if she let
Herself be lessoned so, nor plainly set
Her wits to yours, forsooth, and made excuse
--E'en then would be some stooping; and I choose
Never to stoop. Oh sir, she smiled, no doubt,
Whene'er I passed her; but who passed without
Much the same smile? This grew; I gave commands;
Then all smiles stopped together. There she stands
As if alive. Will 't please you rise? We'll meet
The company below, then. I repeat,
The Count your master's known munificence
Is ample warrant that no just pretense
Of mine for dowry will be disallowed;
Though his fair daughter's self, as I avowed
At starting, is my object. Nay, we'll go
Together down, sir. Notice Neptune, though,
Taming a sea horse, thought a rarity,
Which Claus of Innsbruck cast in bronze for me!
* Browning based this monologue on the events in the life of Alfonso II, the Duke of Ferrara in Italy.
A. E. HOUSEMAN
England 1859-1936
To an Athlete Dying Young
The time you won your town the race
We chaired you through the market-place;
Man and boy stood cheering by,
And home we brought you shoulder-high.
Today, the road all runners come,
Shoulder-high we bring you home,
And set you at your threshold down,
Townsman of a stiller town.
Smart lad, to slip betimes away
From fields where glory does not stay
And early though the laurel grows
It withers quicker than the rose.
Eyes the shady night has shut
Cannot see the record cut,
And silence sounds no worse than cheers
After earth has stopped the ears:
Now you will not swell the rout
Of lads that wore their honours out,
Runners whom renown outran
And the name died before the man.
So set, before its echoes fade,
The fleet foot on the sill of shade,
And hold to the low lintel up
The still-defended challenge-cup.
And round that early laurelled head
Will flock to gaze the strengthless dead
And find unwithered on its curls
The garland briefer than a girl's.
MASAOKA SHIKI
Japan 1867-1902*
A snake falls
From the high stone wall:
Fierce autumn gale.
Again and again
From my sickbed I ask,
"How deep is the snow?"
A crimson berry
Splattering down on
The frost-white garden.
As the bat flies,
Its sound is dark
Through the grove of trees.
I want to sleep:
Go gently, won't you,
When you swat the flies.
So few the cicadas
This morning after
The autumn storm.
All poems by Shiki translated by Geoffrey Bownas
and Anthony Thwaite
* Shiki died of tuberculosis at the age of thirty-five. Several of his poems refer to his illness and impending death.
THEODORE ROETHKE
America 1908-1963
Elegy for Jane
My Student, Thrown by a Horse
I remember the neckcurls, limp and damp as tendrils;
And her quick look, a sidelong pickerel smile;
And how, once startled into talk, the light syllables leaped for her,
And she balanced in the delight of her thought,
A wren, happy, tail into the wind,
Her song trembling the twigs and small branches.
The shade sang with her;
The leaves, their whispers turned to kissing;
And the mold sang in the bleached valleys under the rose.
Oh, when she was sad, she cast herself down, into such a pure depth,
Even a father could not find her:
Scraping her cheek against straw;
Stirring the clearest water.
My sparrow, you are not here,
Waiting like a fern, making a spiny shadow.
The sides of wet stones cannot console me,
Nor the moss, wound with the last light.
If only I could nudge you from this sleep,
My maimed darling, my skittery pigeon.
Over this damp grave I speak the words of my love:
I, with no rights in this matter,
Neither father nor lover.
RANDALL JARRELL
America 1914-1965
The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner
From my mother's sleep I fell into the State,
And I hunched in its belly till my wet fur froze.
Six miles from earth, loosed from its dream of life,
I woke to black flak and the nightmare fighters.
When I died they washed me out of the turret with a hose.
LEONARD COHEN
Canada 1934
Elegy
Do not look for him
In brittle mountain streams:
They are too cold for any god;
And do not examine the angry rivers
For shreds of his soft body
Or turn the shore stones for his blood;
But in the warm salt ocean
He is descending through cliffs
Of slow green water
And the hovering coloured fish
Kiss his snow-bruised body
And build their secret nests
In his fluttering winding-sheet.
MARGARET ATWOOD
Canada 1939
Death of a Young Son by Drowning
He, who navigated with success
the dangerous river of his own birth
once more set forth
on a voyage of discovery
into the land I floated on
but could not touch to claim.
His feet slid on the bank,
the currents took him;
he swirled with ice and trees in the swollen water
and plunged into distant regions,
his head a bathysphere;
through his eyes' thin bubbles
he looked out, reckless adventurer
on a landscape stranger than Uranus
we have all been to and some remember.
There was an accident; the air locked,
he was hung in the river like a heart.
They retrieved the swamped body,
cairn of my plans and future charts,
with poles and hooks
from among the nudging logs.
It was spring, the sun kept shining, the new grass
lept to solidity;
my hands glistened with details.
After the long trip I was tired of waves.
My foot hit rock. The dreamed sails
collapsed, ragged.
I planted him in this country
like a flag.
FINDING THE POET
CHAPTER 7 ELEMENTS OF POETRY-- DICTION, SOUND, AND IMAGERY
At last we've come to my favorite part of poetry-- all those little tricks that poets keep up their sleeves to transform their musings into art. Academically, we refer to these with the rather generic term, "elements of poetry." We lump several different techniques into this category, some of which, such as word choices and sound devices, we have already discussed briefly. To some degree, everything in the next two chapters will seem familiar to you because it is not possible to explore poetry as extensively as we already have without touching on these elements, at least tangentially. Now we will approach them in a more systematic way. In this chapter and the next, we will discuss the following elements: diction, sound, imagery, tone and point of view, figures of speech, and finally, symbols and archetypes.
I've chosen this order according to the principle of increasing complexity. Every poem contains words, which is what diction is all about, but not every poem is symbolic or archetypal. Similarly, every poem creates some kind of sound if you read it orally, but not every poem includes figures of speech. However, please remember that in an actual poem, all of the elements function together to create a unified effect.
Before we begin, let me remind you that a complex poem is not necessarily superior to a simple one. A group of mid-Twentieth Century literary scholars known as the New Critics expresses a pronounced preference for poetry that was complex and filled with ambiguity and paradox. The favorite poet of these critics was T.S. Eliot. When you read Eliot's "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" in the next chapter, you will agree that Eliot's poetry is complex and ambiguous and that he uses many startling figures of speech, as did the Seventeenth Century poet, John Donne, who influenced Eliot. But please keep in mind that ambiguity, complexity, and paradox are poetic values that are strongly influenced by historic and cultural tastes. As you will remember from our brief survey of English poetic history in Chapter 5, complexity has been appreciated in the Renaissance, the Seventeenth Century, and the Twentieth Century. In Japan, the Heian Period (800-1200) during which Sei Shonagon, Murasaki Shikibu, and Ono no Komachi lived, also valued a complex, metaphysical style of poetry. Other historic periods, such as the Greek Classical Period, the Nara Period (700-800) in Japan, and the English Neo-Classical Period, have preferred simplicity. Classical values included clarity, restraint, and decorum over ambiguity, paradox, and complexity. I hope you will learn to appreciate all of the qualities that poetry has manifested over the years and that you will resist the temptation to read and imitate only the poets who are the trendy darlings of the moment.
Let's begin our study of the elements of poetry with diction, which is simply the words which appear in a poem. If a poet is writing in English, he or she has a choice of many thousands of words, since English has by far the largest vocabulary of any language. There are also many synonyms in English, and a poet must make an intuitive decision as to which word best serves his or her purpose. As we will see, words are sometimes chosen for their sound as well as their meaning. Other considerations include connotations, or the nuances of meaning associated with words, a concept we discussed in Chapter 3. Poets must also think about levels of diction, whether they want to write in very elevated formal language, in middle-of-the-road general English, or in informal language, dialect, or slang. Does the poet want to reflect the current idioms of the day, or to achieve a more timeless quality? Perhaps the poet even wants to create an archaic effect, as Edmund Spenser did in The Faerie Queene and Keats did in "The Eve of St. Agnes."
Sometimes the etymology, or historic derivation of a word can add levels of meaning. The use of puns, or plays on the various meanings of a word, is popular with metaphysical poets who thrive on the paradox and ambiguity to which I just referred. Another option is to coin, or make up one's own words, certainly a poet's right, since coining is the essence of creativity. And in today's global culture, it is common to find non-English words in English language poetry. In fact, a new genre of bi-lingual poetry has evolved. In California, where I live, many people are familiar with both Spanish and English just as many Canadians can read both English and French.
As we look at the following poem together, we will focus on the poet's choice of words and on the effect that vocabulary can have on the poem's final impact. I chose this poem by D.H. Lawrence entitled "How Beastly the Bourgeois Is" because the words "beastly" and "bourgeois" in the title are both highly charged with connotation. If you are a man who identifies with the British middle class, you might find this poem a bit painful. If so, you should immediately sit down and write a poem in rebuttal, perhaps a satire in heroic couplets entitled "How Dastardly D.H. Lawrence Is."
How Beastly the Bourgeois Is
How beastly the bourgeois is
especially the male of the species--
Presentable, eminently presentable--
shall I make you a present of him?
Isn't he handsome? isn't he healthy? isn't he a fine specimen?
doesn't he look the fresh clean Englishman, outside?
Isn't it god's own image? tramping his thirty miles a day
after partridges or a little rubber ball?
wouldn't you like to be like that, well off, and quite the thing?
Oh, but wait!
Let him meet a new emotion, let him be faced with another
man's need,
let him come home to a bit of moral difficulty, let life face
him with a new demand on his understanding
and then watch him go soggy, like a wet meringue.
Watch him turn into a mess; either a fool or a bully.
Just watch the display of him, confronted with a new demand
on his intelligence,
a new life-demand.
How beastly the bourgeois is
especially the male of the species--
Nicely groomed, like a mushroom
standing there so sleek and erect and eyeable--
and like a fungus, living on the remains of bygone life
sucking his life out of the dead leaves of greater life than his
own.
And even so, he's stale, he's been there too long.
Touch him, and you'll find he's all gone inside
just like an old mushroom, all wormy inside, and hollow
under a smooth skin and an upright appearance.
Full of seething, wormy, hollow feelings
rather nasty--
How beastly the bourgeois is!
Standing in their thousands, these appearances, in damp Eng-
land
what a pity they can't all be kicked over
like sickening toadstools, and left to melt back, swiftly
into the soil of England.
Of course you will want to do a little research into the life of David Herbert Lawrence to help you understand this uncomplimentary view of some of his fellow countrymen. You will discover that Lawrence, who lived a mere forty-five years from 1885 to 1930, was the son of a coal miner. He grew up with his four siblings in a dysfunctional low income family. He worked or finance his college education and commuted great distances to earn his teaching certificate at Nottingham University. If you should happen upon a photograph of Lawrence, you will probably agree that even the most generous hearted person would hesitate to call him "handsome," and unfortunately, he suffered from poor health most of his life, ultimately dying of tuberculosis. The men he describes in this poem are his opposites in every way: They are wealthy, handsome, healthy, athletic, unproductive, intellectually limited, and unemotional.
The poem's title, "How Beastly the Bourgeois Is," certainly captures the reader's attention, and the same phrase appears three more times throughout the poem. The word "beastly," which is used more by British speakers than by Americans, is a favorite word among the very group Lawrence is describing. According to the Oxford English Dictionary (the OED), one of its various meanings is, "...disgusting or offensive, especially from dirtiness: applied, by those who use strong language, to anyone who offends their tastes." Thus, it is certainly conceivable that a middle class British man might describe the life of a coal miner and his children as "beastly." And in describing this bourgeois gentleman as "handsome," "healthy," "a fine specimen," "fresh," and "clean," Lawrence creates a powerful irony, since he has just referred to this person as "beastly," certainly not a word that this gentleman would use to describe himself and his peers.
In studying the etymology of the word "beastly," it should be obvious that the current definition of this word evolved from its earlier meaning suggesting an animal-like quality. Indeed, the OED lists, "Resembling a beast in unintelligence; brutish, irrational, without thought." as a definition of the word "beastly" that was current from the 1200s through the 1800s. It is this earlier meaning of the word "beastly" that Lawrence employs when he says, "Let him meet a new emotion," "let life face/ him with a new demand on his understanding," "confronted with a new demand/ on his intelligence." Thus, when this earlier definition is applied to this handsome, healthy, clean man, he becomes, "soggy," "a mess," "a fool or a bully" because he has not developed either his intelligence or his emotions. Lawrence further emphasizes the animal-like aspects of this man in the twice repeated phrase, "especially the male of the species," a term that zoologists might use in studying animal behavior.
Interestingly, there is another very old definition of the word "beastly" in the Oxford English Dictionary: "Of the nature of living creatures (including man); animal, natural, carnal." This definition, as you have noticed, places both humankind and animals together in the natural order as part of the physical world in contrast with the spiritual world. This definition applies to the man in the poem also in that his spiritual life is completely absent. He is referred to a "hollow" and "sucking his life out of the dead leaves of greater life than his/ own."
In looking at these three definitions of the word "beastly," you can see that the connotations of this word have become increasingly negative over time. The very old use of the word, referring to the animal world as part of nature, is essentially neutral, or perhaps only slightly negative in the sense that medieval English speakers valued the spiritual world over the carnal. Unfortunately, the second definition associates animals with brutish, irrational, and stupid behavior and creates a very negative of animals. This negative perception is further reinforced by the third and most recent definition, which adds the idea of uncleanness and offensiveness to the word's connotations. This word "beastly," and many related words, such as "brutish" and "brutal," may be responsible in part for the attitudes which have led to the reprehensible treatment of animals by English speaking people over the centuries. The connotations of words can be very powerful because they reflect our values and even motivate our behavior.
Another strongly connotative word in Lawrence's poem is "bourgeois," a word of French origin. Originally, this word referred to a "French citizen or freeman" who lived in a city and was distinguished from a peasant, who would have been his social inferior, and a gentleman, who would have been his superior. The word first appeared in English in 1674, which makes it a much newer word than "beastly." Eventually, "bourgeois" came to refer to middle class people in any country, and by the 1800s, it meant, "Resembling the middle class in appearance, way of thinking, etc." It is this more recent definition that Lawrence seems to be using, along with the very negative connotations that came to be associated with this word.
Today, the phrase "middle class" refers primarily to a person's financial standing, but the word "bourgeois" suggests snobbery, shallow values, and insensitivity to the poor. Lawrence draws on these connotations when he says, "let him be faced with another/ man's need," and "living on the remains of bygone life." The word "bourgeois" also has political connotations. Socialists, who were especially active in England and Europe in the early decades of the Twentieth Century when Lawrence did a lot of his thinking and writing, were particularly hostile to the bourgeois. It might be possible to interpret this poem from a socialist or revolutionary perspective in the sense that Lawrence depicts the bourgeois as parasites and concludes, "what a pity they can't all be kicked over."
Just to demonstrate for yourself the strong connotations of the words "beastly" and "bourgeois," try substituting the synonyms "offensive" and "middle class," and read the poem aloud with these substitutions. Notice how insipid the overall effect of the poem becomes. This exercise will also demonstrate the interconnectedness of the elements in a poem. The sound of the poem changes completely when the two "b" sounds are removed. In choosing the words "beastly" and "bourgeois," Lawrence was also choosing to use alliteration, a sound device that involves the repetition of initial consonant sounds. This technique, as you will remember from Chapter 5, was especially popular in Anglo-Saxon poetry, the poetry of the ancestors of the men Lawrence so despises. Anglo-Saxon poetry is filled with deep emotion, profound spiritual values, and an absolute commitment to the welfare of one's countrymen. The phrase, "sucking his life out of the dead leaves of greater life than his/ own,"
which is also alliterative, creates a picture of a man who is inferior to his ancestors in every way. One can almost hear Beowulf's own voice castigating these "wormy" progeny for failing to maintain the noble values he died to defend.
Another striking element in this poem which we might miss if we focused only on diction is Lawrence's use of similes. We discussed similes in Chapter 3 when we analyzed Keats' "On First Looking Into Chapman's Homer." A simile is a comparison between two things which are not usually thought of as similar using "like" or "as." Similes and metaphors, which are comparisons without using "like" or "as," are categorized as figures of speech, and will be discussed further in the next chapter. But I think that they are such an important device that we can benefit from studying them more than once. In Chapter 4, I pointed out that the genius of Sei Shonagon and Dorothy Wordsworth was based on their ability to see similarities between things that most people perceive as different. In Chapter 5, we observed the same gift in the poetry of Matsuo Basho. I believe that this characteristic-- finding comparisons where other people see contrasts-- is one of the most significant aspects of poetry. Part of the very nature of the art form itself is the poet's visionary ability to connect elements in the universe in a meaningful way. These connections, which often take the form of similes and metaphors, help the reader to find wholeness in a world which seems fragmented and provide insight by creating bridges that are largely unavailable elsewhere.
Lawrence expresses his frustration with the shallowness of the British middle class by comparing them first to "wet meringue" and secondly to "a mushroom." In both cases he uses similes to create this comparison. Incidentally, if you know anything about confectionery, you will be aware that meringue is often shaped into the form of mushrooms, especially to decorate Christmas cakes called yule logs. The words "soggy," "hollow," and "wormy" deflate any image we may have visualized of a delicious yule log decorated with sweet, puffy, meringue mushrooms. Of these two comparisons, Lawrence explores the mushroom image at greater length.
In the second half of the poem, Lawrence uses the similes "like a mushroom," "like a fungus," and "like sickening toadstools." These similes, beginning with the "soggy meringue" and concluding with the "sickening toadstools," become increasingly unattractive, just as the images of the "handsome," "healthy," "fine specimen" from the first half of the poem degenerate into a "stale," "nasty," and poisonous parasite. Lawrence concludes that this mushroom is "all gone inside," that it no longer has any intrinsic value and it should simply be allowed to decompose, "to melt back, swiftly/ into the soil of England." In this extended comparison between Britain's middle class and a patch of rotting mushrooms, Lawrence moves from simile to metaphor and expresses his contempt in the strongest possible terms.
He is not suggesting a few changes or improvements in the social system. The only contribution the bourgeois can make to the culture, this metaphor suggests, is to die out and allow something new to grow out of the compost that their death will create. Many decades have passes since this poem was written, and the British middle class is still with us. Have the values that Lawrence attributes to them changed? Or is the middle class still shallow, intellectually limited, and profoundly lacking in compassion? Perhaps we should look at the "beastly" behavior in our own culture, or maybe even in ourselves, and look for the answer there.
Before we leave this poem behind, there are many other interesting word choices which you can explore on your own. Notice, for example, the pun on the words "presentable" and "present." And think about the connotations of the word "tramping" and the phrase "little rubber ball." Also, the unusual word "eyeable," creates an interesting echo of the word "edible." It seems to suggest something that is good to look at, like the "sleek," "erect" mushroom, something one can devour with one's eyes. Remember that every word in every poem has been specifically chosen by the poet to create a desired effect. At least in theory, every good poem contains no extra words, and even a long poem is as short as the poet can make it and still communicate his or her message to the reader.
Another important element of poetry is sound, and we discussed several aspects of sound, notably, rhythm, rhyme, and alliteration in Chapter 5. There are other sound devices available to poets also. In fact, most traditional poets were very sensitive to sound because the musical qualities of a poem were considered essential to the poem's unity, meaning, and effect. Even free verse poets often use some sound devices, even though they have chosen not to include a set pattern of rhythm and rhyme. An important idea to remember is that sound devices, like all of the elements of poetry, including form, diction, and figures of speech, should be used by the poet to enhance the poem's meaning and overall impression. A sound device or other poetic element that has a life of its own separate from the meaning of the poem can backfire and create an undesired effect, which usually turns out to be giggling on the part of the reader when the poet was trying to be serious.
Four interesting sound devices that can be used either in conjunction with or independent of rhythm and rhyme are euphony, cacophony, assonance, and onomatopoeia. I think of euphony and cacophony as opposite twins. Euphony is the deliberate use of pleasing sounds to create a harmonious effect. Euphony is used by skillful poets to complement the poem's meaning. It might be inappropriate, for example, to use euphony when describing the bombing of Hiroshima, unless the poet intended an ironic contrast. Cacophony (or its synonym, dissonance), as you might guess, is the deliberate use of discordant or unpleasant sounds for poetic effect. The American poet Stephen Crane, who died in 1900 at the age of twenty-nine, wrote a series of short, unpleasant sounding poems that are very effective in shocking the reader into thinking more deeply about the human condition. I read the following poem for the first time when I was in the eighth grade, at a time when adolescents begin to explore the shadow sides of their personalities. I was startled by the short lines, simple one or two syllable vocabulary, complete absence of rhythm, and the cacophonous effect of the key words, "creature" and "squatting," which grate on the ears. I was also fascinated by the window this dissonant poem opens into the dark human heart.
In the desert
I saw a creature, naked, bestial,
Who, squatting upon the ground,
Held his heart in his hands,
And ate of it.
I said, "Is it good, friend?"
"It is bitter-- bitter," he answered;
"But I like it
Because it is bitter,
And because it is my heart."
In another cacophonous poem, Crane laments the excessive greed in America during the age of the robber barons. In this poem too his lines jerk along, short and uneven, with no rhythmic flow. And he deliberately uses unpleasant sounding words such as "crash," "cheeked," "cryptic," "champing," "ratful," and "squeak" to depict the avarice of American millionaires as a very ugly thing. Notice that the words in the opening five lines, in which Crane describes "The impact of a dollar on the heart," create a pleasant effect with soft "s" and "w" sounds in words like "smiles," "warm," "sweeping," and "softly." Then when he switches his focus to "The impact of a million dollars," the ugly sounding words emerge.
The impact of a dollar upon the heart
Smiles warm red light,
Sweeping from the hearth rosily upon the white table,
With the hanging cool velvet shadows
Moving softly upon the door.
The impact of a million dollars
Is a crash of flunkeys,
And yawning emblems of Persia
Cheeked against oak, France and a sabre,
The outcry of old beauty
Whored by pimping merchants
To submission before wine and chatter.
Silly rich peasants stamp the carpets of men,
Dead men who dreamed fragrance and light
Into their woof, their lives;
The rug of an honest bear
Under the feet of a cryptic slave
Who speaks always of baubles,
Forgetting state, multitude, work, and state,
Champing and mouthing of hats,
Making ratful squeak of hats,
Hats.
Although you may not agree, some scholars feel that "ch," "cr," and "gr" sounds in English create a cacophonous effect whereas "l," "w," and "s" sounds are usually euphonious. Some people even think that "l" and "s" sounds remind the reader subliminally of the sound of flowing water, one of the most pleasant sounds to the human ear. In a very famous poem, the Nobel Prize winner William Butler Yeats, a contemporary of Stephen Crane, describes a beautiful, peaceful island in a lake in some of the most euphonious poetry I have ever read.
The Lake Isle of Innisfree
I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree,
And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made;
Nine bean-rows will I have there, a hive for the honey-bee.
And live alone in the bee-loud glade.
And I shall have some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow,
Dropping from the veils of morning to where the cricket sings;
There midnight's all a glimmer, and noon a purple glow,
And evening full of the linnet's wings.
I will arise and go now, for always night and day
I hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore;
While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements grey,
I hear it in the deep heart's core.
In this poem Yeats actually describes several pleasing sounds-- the buzzing of bees "in the bee-loud glade," the sounds of birds "and evening full of the linnet's wings," and the sound of water "I hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore." Notice how beautiful the "l" and "s" sounds are in the line I just quoted, and they really do recreate for us the soothing sound of water in a peaceful lake.
Read "The Impact of a Dollar Upon the Heart" and "The Lake Isle of Innisfree" again aloud, one right after the other. You may be startled by how strongly the sounds in a poem influence its overall effect.
Another interesting sound device, one of my favorites, is assonance. Assonance is the fraternal twin of alliteration. You will remember that alliteration is the repetition of initial consonant sounds, and you certainly must have noticed that Yeats uses this device effectively in "The Lake Isle of Innisfree." Assonance is the repetition of vowel sounds. Assonance can be related to euphony and cacophony in the sense that some vowel sounds, such as the short "a" sound in "aroma" and the "oo" sound in "moon" create a pleasing effect whereas the "u" sound in "dull" and the "a" sound in words like "axe" and "abstract" can sound rather inharmonious. Yeats used euphonious assonance in "The Lake Isle of Innisfree" when he chose the words, "I," "arise," "clay," "made," and "pavements grey." Assonance can be very effective because it does not have to follow a prescribed pattern as rhyme often does, and it can support a poem's theme in a subtle, perhaps even subliminal way.
Read the following poem by Gerard Manley Hopkins, one of the most sound-sensitive poets in the English tradition. Be sure to read the poem aloud. Then take the time to point out all of the sound devices that Hopkins uses. You should have no trouble finding examples of rhyme, rhythm, alliteration, euphony, and assonance in this joyful celebration of spring.
Spring
Nothing is so beautiful as Spring--
When weeds, in wheels, shoot long and lovely and lush;
Thrush's eggs look little low heavens, and thrush
Through the echoing timber does so rinse and wring
The ear, it strikes like lightnings to hear him sing;
The glassy peartree leaves and blooms, they brush
The descending blue; that blue is all in a rush
With richness; the racing lambs too have fair their fling.
What is all this juice and all this joy?
A strain of the earth's sweet being in the beginning
In Eden garden.--Have, get, before it cloy,
Before it cloud, Christ, lord and sour with sinning,
Innocent mind and Mayday in girl and boy,
Most, O maid's child, thy choice and worthy the winning.
As you study this poem, you will also find the other sound device I mentioned earlier-- onomatopoeia. I think this word fascinates poetry lovers because of its outrageous name as much as for its meaning. Onomatopoeia, according to the OED, is "The formation of a name or word by an imitation of the sound associated with the thing or action designated." In short, in onomatopoeia, something is named for the sound it makes. English words like "plop," "buzz," "splat," etc., are onomatopoeic, and other languages use onomatopoeia too. English speaking roosters, for example, say "cock-a-doodle-doo," but in Spanish roosters say "quiquiriqui." At a recent dinner party at my in-laws' home, I learned that the popular Japanese dish shabu shabu, which is meat and vegetables cooked quickly in hot broth, is named onomatopoeically. My mother-in-law told me that shabu shabu in Japanese means "swish, swish," indicating the speed with which the dish is cooked and the sound of the ingredients being quickly swirled around in the broth. Onomatopoeia is closely related to the formation of language itself, and it is a very creative phenomenon. I love the wonderfully descriptive quality of onomatopoeia, and the meanings of onomatopoeic words are often self-explanatory.
Let's return to Hopkins' "Spring" and take a long look at the phrase "...thrush/ Through the echoing timber does so rinse and wring/ The ear... ." Of course it's easy to spot the alliteration in the words "thrush" and "through," and it's not too difficult to figure out that "rinse" and "wring" contain both alliteration and assonance, since the "w" in "wring" is silent, and the "i" sounds in both words are very similar. But can you find the onomatopoeia? It's hidden in a pun on the word "wring." The phrase "rinse and wring" at first seems to refer to washing, and in this context, the sound of the thrush seems to wash out the listener's ears with a welcome springtime cleansing. But the word "ring," which is pronounced identically with "wring," onomatopoeically describes the sound of a bell, and this second meaning is reinforced by the words "echoing" and "timber." Hopkins creates a pun on the word "timber" too, because "timber" can refer to the woods where the thrush is singing or to the quality of his song. In a brilliant feat of metaphysical complexity, Hopkins metaphorically compares the sound of the thrush to both cleansing and to the lovely chiming of a bell. As you can see from this little example, sound devices in poetry do not simply create something for the reader to listen to in his or her head. They can also create comparisons and can, through synesthesia, make connections to our other senses. In addition, sound is profoundly connected to a poem's meaning.
Since you are now expert in reading poetry, you also noticed that Hopkins' "Spring" is an Italian sonnet. In the octave, Hopkins describes the exquisite beauty of nature as he imagines it in the Garden of Eden as described in the Bible before the fall of mankind. In the poem's turn, which seems to occur after the dash in line eleven, the speaker urges the reader to celebrate the beauty of nature with the innocent eyes of children before it is ruined by the corruption of adult behavior and perceptions. The words "cloy," "cloud," and "sour with sinning" create a different effect from the celebrative sound of the thrush whose "echoing timber does so rinse and wring/ The ear" in the octave. Notice how these sound changes support the poem's theme. And in the concluding two lines, after cautioning the listener about the danger of adult cynicism, the poem ends on an auditory upswing with the alliterative "m" and "w" sounds in
Innocent mind and Mayday in girl and boy'
Most, O maid's child, thy choice and worthy the winning.
The final alliterative phrase "worthy the winning" balances the previous alliterative phrase "sour with sinning," thus ending the poem on a note of cautious hope.
In Chapter 5, we studied poetic structure, and in this chapter we have looked at diction and sound devices. But as I pointed out earlier, these elements do not occur separately in poetry. I think it would be helpful to take a deeper look at Hopkins, who was a meticulous student and professor of poetry as well as a writer. He devoted his intellectual and creative energies to the question that we are now scrutinizing: How can a poet integrate all of the elements in a poem to achieve an organic and harmonious effect? With this idea in mind, let's take a second look at Hopkins' masterpiece, "The Windhover" in light of his poetic theories.
You probably remember struggling through "The Windhover" in Chapter 5. Hopkins is either a student's worst nightmare or an inspiring challenge of rare magnitude. Fortunately for me, and I hope for some of you, he has been the latter. I wrote an extended paper on Hopkins when I was working on my Master's Degree in English Literature, and the project propelled my appreciation of poetry forward with such momentum that I have to credit Hopkins with the fact that I still love to read and write poetry today. When I was in college, I was a little like some of your classmates. I was more interested in maintaining my exalted grade point average than in actually learning anything. But for some reason, when I was required to select a poet and spend the entire semester researching him, I threw caution to the wind and chose Hopkins. Why? I wanted to learn more about Hopkins because I couldn't understand any of his poems, yet I felt that a very creative soul was trying to communicate with me. I will be forever grateful that I finally took an academic risk, crossing the line into the unknown. If course I experienced attacks of sheer terror when halfway through the project, when it was too late to turn back, I learned by reading footnotes in an obscure book that my professor, an archetypal lofty and intimidating scholar, had written her doctoral dissertation on Hopkins.
Still I persevered, spending weekends in the library reading Hopkins' letters and trying to walk every step of this poet's lonely journey with him. I learned that Hopkins, born in 1844 to an affluent British Victorian family, horrified his parents by converting to Catholicism while a student at Oxford University. The rift with his family widened when he chose to become a priest of the Society of Jesus, known as the Jesuits. This order is still known today for their rigorous spiritual discipline and high academic standards. Hopkins, an extremely intuitive introvert, found quickly enough that life as a parish priest in working class neighborhoods was more than he could manage. Although he was compassionate and deeply sincere in his faith, he was too shy and overly sensitive to cope with the horrors of his parishioners' everyday lives. In a private letter he commented on the fact that sitting in the confessional for hours on end and hearing confessions actually made him physically ill. Ultimately Hopkins suffered a nervous breakdown after being assigned as a professor of classics at University College Dublin. Part of the stress he experienced had to do with a conflict which he perceived between his vocation as priest and his artistic gift as poet. Matsuo Basho suffered the same crisis of vocation, feeling drawn both to the life of a poet and that of a Zen Buddhist priest. Basho referred to himself as a bat because a bat is an animal who can't decide whether it is a bird or a rodent. After great struggle, Basho remained solely a poet, never entering the priesthood. Hopkins partially resolved his crisis by remaining in the priesthood but returning to writing poetry, which he had given up when he entered the Society of Jesus.
Hopkins entered into an extended correspondence with Robert Bridges, later Poet Laureate of England, whom Hopkins had met at Oxford. Bridges wrote the kind of polite, reserved, metrically correct poetry that Victorians liked, and his poetry is rarely read today. Hopkins, in contrast, was an innovative experimenter of the highest order and was almost unknown as a poet during his own lifetime. Literary historians have trouble categorizing Hopkins because, although he lived his entire life during the Victorian Period, his highly creative style foreshadows the iconoclastic style of the Twentieth Century. For this reason, as I mentioned in Chapter 5, Hopkins is often referred to as the father of Modern poetry. I think he would have enjoyed this pun.
Hopkins was especially creative when working with the elements of poetry we are focusing on here-- diction, sound, imagery, etc. He also like to experiment with rhythm and form. Only about fifty of his poems remain, and most of these are Italian sonnets. (He burned several of his poems when he entered the priesthood, but he had enough sense to send copies to Bridges.) His letters to Bridges are filled with his theories about how to expand the parameters of the Italian sonnet, which he found confining. One of his innovations was sprung rhythm, a way of breaking out of the limitations of the iambic pentameter line by counting only the five stressed syllables and allowing any number of unstressed syllables. "The Windhover" is written in sprung rhythm. Hopkins also expanded the length of the Italian sonnet by adding codas to some of his poems. A coda (from the Latin word cauda, meaning tail), is an old device similar to an envoy. It is the addition of a few lines at the end of a poem as a sort of conclusion. Codas are also sometimes added to musical compositions. Milton added codas to some of his sonnets, as did some of the earlier sonnet writers. As the scholar W. H. Gardner observed of Hopkins, "He led poetry forward by taking it back." 1
With his scholarly personality, Hopkins was able to re-introduce several old techniques gathered from his research into English poetry, creating a fresh "new" effect. By pushing the limits of form, rhythm, and language, Hopkins set the stage for the free verse that took the Twentieth Century by storm. Hopkins died at the age of forty-five in 1889, leaving all of his poems in the possession of Robert Bridges. Bridges kept these poems for almost thirty years. Then in 1918, he arranged for them to be published and wrote in introduction to the First Edition of the Poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins. The tone of this preface is somewhat apologetic, since Hopkins' poems so flagrantly defy Victorian poetic standards.
These apologies were not necessary, however, because in 1918, the English Speaking world was ready for something vastly different from the poetry of Tennyson and the other Victorians, and Hopkins' poems were a huge success. Some of you may have chosen to analyze Hopkins' "The Windhover" when you were studying poetic form in Chapter 5. If you did, you were in crowded company. "The Windhover" has been second only to Shakespeare's sonnets in the volume of literary analysis it has inspired. One reason for "The Windhover's" fascination to scholars, of course, could be its complexity. It is also a wonderful poem to study for its diction and its sound devices. Try reading it using the ten step process you learned in Chapter 3 and notice how Hopkins has expanded the form of the Italian sonnet by using sprung rhythm.
The Windhover:
To Christ Our Lord
I caught this morning morning's minion, king-
dom of daylight's dauphin, dapple-dawn-drawn Falcon, in
his riding
Of the level underneath him steady air, and striding
High there, how he rung upon the rein of a wimpling wing
In his ecstasy! then off, off forth on swing,
As a skate's heel sweeps smooth on a bow-bend: the hurl and
gliding
Rebuffed the big wind. My heart in hiding
Stirred for a bird,--the achieve of, the mastery of the thing!
Brute beauty and valour and act, oh, air, pride, plume, here
Buckle! AND the fire that breaks from thee then, a billion
Times told lovelier, more dangerous, O my chevalier!
No wonder of it: sheer plod makes plough down sillion
Shine, and blue-bleak ember, ah my dear,
Fall, gall themselves, and gash gold-vermilion.
Those of you who may have analyzed this poem already are aware of Hopkins' unusual diction. For example, he makes extensive use of words of French origin, many of which suggest royalty. If you are not familiar with them, you will certainly want to look up the words "minion," "dauphin," and "chevalier." The title word "windhover" is interesting too. Hopkins seems to have coined this word, creating the image of one who hovers in the wind, referring to a small falcon which scholars have identified as a kestrel. The logic of grammar should have led Hopkins to call this bird the "windhoverer," but like Shakespeare, Hopkins liked to change the grammatical functions of words. Thus, the verb "to hover" becomes part of a noun, the "windhover."
Hopkins also liked to delete words, especially the articles "a" and "the," which have almost no meaning and create no imagery in English. Hopkins had the greatest respect for his reader's intellect, emotions, perceptions, and intuitive powers, and he trusted that the reader could figure out his meaning even if certain unpoetic words were omitted. Look, for example, at the phrase "...sheer plod makes plough down sillion/ shine,... ." In doing your research, you may have discovered that the word "sillion" refers to the raised area between furrows created by a plough. If we were to reconstruct this sentence grammatically, reinserting the articles that have been omitted, it might come out something like this: "Just plodding along makes a plough shine down a furrow." In the conclusion of this poem, after having described the majesty of the kestrel hovering, then swooping through the sky, Hopkins comes down to earth and focuses on two very ordinary events, plowing a field, and embers falling in a fireplace. Both of these events, says the speaker in the poem, also have their moment of raging glory. Light can flash out, reflecting off a plough as it is pushed through the earth, and pieces of burned firewood often fall in the hearth, breaking into little pieces and revealing the brilliant, "gold-vermilion" color under the charred surface. These powerful images of sudden light reinforce the breathtaking beauty of the falcon's magnificent swooping flight through the wind (compared to an ice skater's graceful sweeping curve), and affirms Hopkins' vision of nature, even at its most humble, as the reflection of divine glory.
Another way that Hopkins omits words that contribute only to syntax and further condenses his poetic diction is by using, and sometimes coining, compound words. I'm sure you noticed the triple alliterative compound "dapple-dawn-drawn," a phrase that creates powerful visual imagery as well as sound. "Bow-bend" and "blue-bleak" are also alliterative compounds that appeal to several of the senses. And they omit the kinds of unpoetic words that would have to be included in a more conventional phrase such as "the bend of a bow" or "embers that are blue and bleak."
Compound words are wonderful devices to use in poetry for the reasons I have just given. They can add rhythm or sound, especially alliteration, to a poetic line, and they are very descriptive. A compound will always add imagery to a poem. They also shorten and condense the poem, thus heightening its dramatic effect. You might want to re-read Hopkins' "Spring and Fall," which appears in Chapter 3. In this brief poem, Hopkins uses several interesting compound words which he coined himself. Coining, as you will remember, is making up a new word. This is a very creative aspect of poetry which can either enhance a poem or totally confuse the reader. If you decide to call a tree a "gobryck" in one of your poems, you will only succeed in annoying your reader, who will look the word "gobryck" up in the dictionary, find that it is not there, and feel betrayed. To be effective, a coined word has to contain some familiar element that will allow the reader to make an intuitive leap and grasp the new meaning you intend. Newly coined compound words are usually easy for the reader to comprehend. If the reader knows the meaning of the two words you combine, he or she can quickly grasp the meaning of the new word you have just coined. Hopkins' word "windhover" is an example of a coined compound. Read the first eight lines of "Spring and Fall" and see if you can find four more coined words:
Margaret, are you grieving
Over Goldengrove unleaving?
Leaves, like the things of man, you
With your fresh thoughts care for, can you?
Ah! as the heart grows older
It will come to such sights colder
By and by, nor spare a sigh
Though worlds of wanwood leafmeal lie;
Three of these coined words, "Goldengrove," "wanwood," and "leafmeal," are newly coined compounds. In this poem, the speaker addresses a girl named Margaret who is crying because all of the leaves are falling from the trees on an autumn day, and everything seems to be dying. In this context, it is easy for the reader to conclude that the alliterative compound "Goldengrove" refers to a grove of trees that has turned yellow in the fall. Similarly, the word "wanwood," also a coined alliterative compound, refers to the pale colors of trees in the autumn. Hopkins apparently coined the word "leafmeal" by analogy to the word "piecemeal." I've always loved the complex imagery evoked by the very condensed and highly alliterative phrase "worlds of wanwood leafmeal lie." I picture a vast expanse of woodland in which pale leaves are scattered haphazardly (piecemeal) all around.
Did you find the fourth coined word? It's a verb, "unleaving." In a stroke of genius, Hopkins made up this word to describe the process by which trees let go of their leaves. I believe that a careful reader could discern the meanings of all four of these coined words, and apparently Hopkins thought so too. Remember that Hopkins did not coin words just for the fun of playing word games and certainly not to trick his reader. He was always balancing rhythm, sound, imagery, and diction, trying to make all of these elements work together to capture the essence of the thing he was describing. He called this essence inscape.
Hopkins believed that every individual thing in the universe was unique and had a special quality of its own which he called its inscape. John Pick, author of A Hopkins Reader, describes Hopkins' concept of inscape as follows:
Instead of viewing the world as a scientist who classifies
and categorizes or as a philosopher who seeks universals,
Hopkins sees each thing as highly individualized and different
from all other things, so much so that each object is to him
almost a separate species and the world becomes an endless
catalogue of sharply individuated selves.2
To Hopkins, the inscapes of nature were not something to be observed with a distant objective eye. They were the source of passion and beauty in the world. Hopkins once wrote, "I thought you sadly beauty of inscape was unknown and buried away from simple people and yet how near at hand it was if they had eyes to see it."3 Hopkins himself was so sensitive to nature's inscapes that he suffered great pain when he observed environmental abuse by human beings. Once when he saw an ash tree being cut down, he wrote, "I wished to die and not see the inscapes of the world destroyed any more."4
Later, Hopkins began to apply the word inscape to works of art. He felt that all of the elements of artistic composition, whether a musical composition, a painting, or a poem, should work together to create a powerful, unique effect, unlike anything else in the universe. In a letter to Robert Bridges, Hopkins explained the unusualness of his own poetry in the context of art and inscape:
No doubt my poetry errs on the side of oddness. I hope in time
to have a more balanced and Miltonic style. But as air, melody
is what strikes me most of all in music and design in painting,
so design, pattern, or what I am in the habit of calling 'inscape'
is what I above all aim at in poetry.5
In this passage it is clear that Hopkins is aware that all of the elements of a poem need to work together to create the design or inscape of the finished work of art. In coining a word like "wanwood" Hopkins was trying to bring several elements into harmony-- the rhythm and sound of the poem, and his desire to describe to the reader the exact unique qualities--visual, tactile, etc., of fallen leaves. But ultimately, the poem itself has its own special inscape, not just the scene in nature he is trying to describe.
To help you process this idea of inscape, you might want to re-read Hopkins' "Pied Beauty," which appears in Chapter 3. This poem, which is filled with interesting compounds, is itself a celebration of all the unique inscapes of nature. You can also have a special section in your journal where you describe the various inscapes that capture your attention. Remember, as Hopkins himself pointed out, inscapes are all around you, if only you have eyes to see them. Developing a sensitivity to inscapes will take you a long way toward using imagery effectively in your poems.
Before we proceed to a more detailed discussion of imagery, I want to return briefly to compound words, which can add so much to the inscape of a poem. The Old English, or Anglo-Saxon language was filled with fascinating compound words such as "middle-earth," "boast-words," and "water-monster." Many of these wonderfully descriptive compounds, such as "earring," and "mankind," still remain in our language. But when the French conquered England in 1066, the language changed in many ways, and one unfortunate change (from a poet's perspective), was the replacement of many old descriptive compounds with French words that create far less imagery. For example, the Anglo-Saxon compound "leechcraft" was replaced with the "modern" French word "medicine," and the word "goldhoard" became "treasure"
The Anglo-Saxons also used a special kind of poetic compound called a kenning. A kenning is a descriptive compound which is substituted in poetry for its synonym. For example, in Anglo-Saxon poetry, the ocean is referred to as the "swan-road" or the "whale-road," and the human body is called the "life-house" or the "bone-house." It seems to me that the word "swan-road" does much more to capture the inscape of the sea than the word "ocean" does. And the word "life-house" goes so much further to convey the vitality and spiritual energy of a human being than the word "body." Some other favorite kennings from Anglo-Saxon poetry are "world-candle" for "sun," "wolf-slopes" for "hills," and "slaughter-shaft" for "spear." The old kenning "deathbed" is still part of our vocabulary today.
Hopkins actually uses the kenning "bone-house" in the poem "The Caged Skylark" which appears at the end of this chapter. You will recall that Hopkins "modernized" some elements of English poetry by re-introducing elements from much earlier literary periods. I think the kenning is an especially powerful poetic device, a sort of vividly condensed description, and I hope that it will never disappear from English poetry. Some scholars have also observed that Anglo-Saxon poetry, with its four-beat line, which can contain any number of unstressed syllables, was the prototype for Hopkins' sprung rhythm. John Pick believes that Hopkins developed sprung rhythm on his own and later read such Old English poems as Piers Plowman to reinforce his poetic theories.6 Whether he did so consciously, or as Jung might say, through the collective unconscious, Hopkins brought several of the most effective elements of Anglo-Saxon poetry, sprung rhythm, compound words, and kennings into the modern world, revitalizing the sound, diction, and imagery of English poetry. I hope this little journey with Gerard Manley Hopkins has given you some insights into the challenge each poet faces in trying to bring the diverse element of every poem into harmony, creating a fresh, unique inscape.
I have spoken several times of imagery as one of the key elements in a poem, and I am assuming that you remember this term from our discussion of Sappho's poetry in Chapter 1. At that time, I mentioned that imagery in poetry is the use of words to appeal to any of the senses. We also discussed the imagery in Shakespeare's Sonnet 73, "That Time of Year Thou Mayst in Me Behold" in some detail in Chapter 5. Imagery is a crucial element of poetry because it is through our senses that we gather information from our earliest days of infancy. Our senses are also the window to memory. Think of one of your favorite memories from one of the winter holidays-- Thanksgiving, Christmas, Hanukkah, The New Year, or Ramadan. Probably this memory is associated with the taste of food, the scent of winter foliage, the sounds of special music, the touch of cold, bracing winter air, or the visual beauty of candles, colorful gifts, decorations, and tables laid out with the special foods of the season. Art uses imagery to connect with shared human experiences and memories.
In the following poem, D.H. Lawrence uses simple but effective imagery to evoke memories of childhood. As you read this poem, notice that it does not just rely on visual imagery but on sound, touch, and temperature as well.
Piano
Softly, in the dusk, a woman is singing to me;
Taking me back down the vista of years, till I see
A child sitting under the piano, in the boom of the tingling strings
And pressing the small, poised feet of a mother who smiles as she
sings.
In spite of myself, the insidious mastery of song
Betrays me back, till the heart of me weeps to belong
To the old Sunday evenings at home, with winter outside
And hymns in the cozy parlour, the tinkling piano our guide.
So now it is in vain for the singer to burst into clamour
With the great black piano appassionato. The glamour
Of childish days is upon me, my manhood is cast
Down in the flood of remembrance, I weep like a child for the past.
Like most good poets, Lawrence resists the temptation to explain to his readers the meaning of life. Instead, he shares a small memory that communicates through the senses and through emotion one aspect of human experience. An interesting phenomenon of poetry is that poems grow larger than themselves, not through all the many words, ideas, and explanations inserted by the writer but through the thoughts, emotions, and memories that the reader brings to the poem. A poet can help the reader by stimulating all of the reader's senses, thus allowing the reader to respond more completely to the poem's inherent emotions and thoughts.
Traditionally, we think of human beings as having five senses: sight, sound, smell, taste, and touch. And in our ordinary lives, most of us rely far too heavily on sight, dismissing as inappropriate or embarrassing all of the information we could gather by smelling, tasting, or listening. In the everyday world, dogs go around sniffing things, but people don't. In poetry, no such lines of decorum apply, and we are liberated through art to experience the world as fully as our senses and imaginations will allow. Two aspects of the sense of touch that can be used very effectively in poetry are temperature and kinesthetics. In "Piano," for example, Lawrence refers to "winter outside" and the "cozy parlour," suggesting a contrast between the cold of the outside world and the warmth and security that he felt at home with his mother. Cold and warm are physical sensations, but they also have strong emotional and archetypal properties. Keats also evokes these dimensions in "The Eve of St. Agnes," which you read in Chapter 5. The cold of the outside world, including the hostility of Porphyro's enemies, is strongly contrasted with the warmth in Madeline's room and the depth of the young lover's passion.
In the following poem, the contemporary American poet Vera Nazarov uses the imagery of warmth and sunlight to express the speaker's longing for love. Notice also that the references to ice cream, sunflower seeds, salt, and mint stimulate the reader's sense of taste and smell.
myth
"if i was a londoner, rich with complaint,
would you take me back to your house
which is sainted with lust and the listless shade?"
--Tanita Tikaram
on sundays
in east san jose
the sun is harsh on the backs
of the dark-eyed men
--shirtless
hips listless in denim--
as they lean over their cars
like lovers
songs i can't understand
tumble like water
out of car stereos
and the slow ice cream trucks
tinkle like leaves,
calling to the sun-bright children.
*
i sit on the porch,
eat sunflower seeds
until my lip swells with salt,
drink cold mint tea,
and dream of a man
with hair like burning gold,
eyes as pale as a winter ocean...
pale as the skin of my thighs...
hands warm
as the seldom-come rain.
Nazarov also refers to men "as they lean over their cars." This is a kinesthetic image. Kinesthetics refers to physical motion, especially the movement of the muscles in the body. By using kinesthetic imagery, the poet can physically involve the reader in the poem. Other elements, such as rhythm and sound, can help create a kinesthetic effect. In a poem entitled "The Dance," the American poet William Carlos Williams describes a painting by Peter Brueghel the Elder, a Flemish painter who lived from 1520 to 1569. The painting depicts a kermess, a Dutch festival which included feasting, games, and dancing. In the poem, Williams uses a rollicking rhythm, enjambment, and many verbs ending in "ing" to create the lively, ongoing rhythmic simulation of the dance. As you read the poem, notice how your body begins to respond to the movement.
The Dance
In Brueghel's great picture, The Kermess,
the dancers go round, they go round and
around, the squeal and the blare and the
tweedle of bagpipes, a bugle and fiddles
tipping their bellies (sound as the thick-
sided glasses whose wash they impound)
their hips and their bellies off balance
to turn them. Kicking and rolling about
the Fair Grounds, swinging their butts, those
shanks must be sound to bear up under such
rollicking measures, prance as they dance
in Brueghel's great picture, The Kermess.
Theodore Roethke uses a similar technique in "My Papa's Waltz." Using form, rhythm, and rhyme, he creates the repetitious, jerky movements of a child dancing with a large, inebriated adult.
My Papa's Waltz
The whiskey on your breath
Could make a small boy dizzy;
But I hung on like death:
Such waltzing was not easy.
We romped until the pans
Slid from the kitchen shelf;
My mother's countenance
Could not unfrown itself.
The hand that held my wrist
Was battered on one knuckle;
At every step you missed
My right ear scraped a buckle.
You beat time on my head
With a palm caked hard by dirt,
Then waltzed me off to bed
Still clinging to your shirt.
I studied this poem when I was in college, and it was presented by my professor as a lively, amusing poem about a loving relationship between a father and a son. Recently, a group of students in my poetry class chose to analyze this poem, and they concluded that it was about an abusive relationship in a dysfunctional alcoholic family. They used the phrases "whiskey on your breath," "hung on like death," "not easy," "battered on one knuckle," "My right ear scraped a buckle," and "You beat time on my head" to argue that the drunken father was actually frightening and inflicting pain on the son who was forced to pretend that this alcohol-induced encounter was a "normal" expression of fatherly affection. These two contrasting interpretations, of course, reflect changing values and levels of awareness in American culture. It seems to me that both interpretations have their own validity based on the elements in the poem itself and the perceptions and emotions that the reader brings to the poem.
In addition to evoking memories, archetypes, and physical and emotional experiences, imagery can be a way of sharing information in a poem. In everyday life, we learn by looking and listening, and the same is true in poetry. Imagery in the form of description can take us to far away places we have never visited and teach us about things we have not known before. Imaginative imagery can even create a world of fantasy and make it real for us.
In a very famous poem "Mending Wall," Robert Frost takes us to rural New England, a place where many of us have never been, and teaches us how to mend an old stone wall between two farms. Along the way he give us food for thought about why people think they need walls in the first place. Notice how Frost combines narrative, dialogue, and descriptive imagery in this simple, yet compelling poem:
Mending Wall
Something there is that doesn't love a wall,
That sends the frozen-ground-swell under it
And spills the upper boulders in the sun,
And makes gaps even two can pass abreast.
The work of hunters is another thing:
I have come after them and made repair
Where they have left not one stone on a stone,
But they would have the rabbit out of hiding,
To please the yelping dogs. The gaps I mean,
No one has seen them made or heard them made,
But at spring mending-time we find them there.
I let my neighbor know beyond the hill;
And on a day we meet to walk the line
And set the wall between us once again.
We keep the wall between us as we go.
To each the boulders that have fallen to each.
And some are loaves and some so nearly balls
We have to use a spell to make them balance:
"Stay where you are until our backs are turned!"
We wear our fingers rough with handling them.
Oh, just another kind of outdoor game,
One on a side. It comes to little more:
There where it is we do not need the wall:
He is all pine and I am apple orchard.
My apple trees will never get across
And eat the cones under his pines, I tell him.
He only says, "Good fences make good neighbors."
Spring is the mischief in me, and I wonder
If I could put a notion in his head:
"Why do they make good neighbors? Isn't it
Where there are cows? But here there are no cows.
Before I built a wall I'd ask to know
What I was walling in or walling out,
And to whom I was like to give offense.
Something there is that doesn't love a wall,
That wants it down." I could say "Elves" to him,
But it's not elves exactly, and I'd rather
He said it for himself. I see him there,
Bringing a stone grasped firmly by the top
In each hand, like an old-stone savage armed.
He moves in darkness as it seems to me,
Not of woods only and the shade of trees.
He will not go behind his father's saying,
And he likes having thought of it so well
He says again, "Good fences make good neighbors."
Another poet who uses imagery very effectively by writing in a plain conversational style and describing the most ordinary scenes and events with remarkable accuracy is Elizabeth Bishop. Like Frost, Bishop also has a knack for narrative, and she encourages the reader to find meaning in life's everyday events. You will recall the fascinating descriptive details in her poem "Filling Station," which appears in Chapter 4. In "The Fish," you will learn quite a bit about fishing, but you will discover even more about compassion and the dignity of life.
The Fish
I caught a tremendous fish
and held him beside the boat
half out of water, with my hook
fast in the corner of his mouth.
He didn't fight.
He hadn't fought at all.
He hung a grunting weight,
battered and venerable
and homely. Here and there
his brown skin hung in strips
like ancient wallpaper,
and its pattern of darker brown
was like wallpaper:
shapes like full-blown roses
stained and lost through age.
He was speckled with barnacles,
fine rosettes of lime,
and infested
with tiny white sea-lice,
and underneath two or three
rags of green weed hung down.
While the gills were breathing in
the terrible oxygen
--the frightening gills,
fresh and crisp with blood,
that can cut so badly--
I thought of the coarse white flesh
packed in like feathers,
the big bones and the little bones,
the dramatic reds and blacks
of his shiny entrails,
and the pink swim-bladder
like a big peony.
I looked into his eyes
which were far larger than mine
but shallower, and yellowed,
the iris backed and packed
with tarnished tinfoil
seen through the lenses
of old scratched isinglass.
They shifted a little, but not
to return my stare.
--It was more like the tipping
of an old object toward the light.
I admired his sullen face,
the mechanism of his jaw,
and then I saw
that from his lip
--if you could call it a lip--
grim, wet, and weaponlike,
hung five old pieces of fish-line,
or four and a wire leader
with the swivel still attached,
with all their five big hooks
grown firmly in his mouth.
A green line, frayed at the end
where he broke it, two heavier lines,
and a fine black thread
still crimped from the strain and snap
where it broke and he got away.
Like medals with their ribbons
frayed and wavering,
a five-haired beard of wisdom
trailing from his aching jaw.
I stared and stared
and victory filled up
the little rented boat,
from the pool of bilge
where oil had spread a rainbow
around the rusted engine
to the bailer rusted orange,
the sun-cracked thwarts,
the oarlocks on their strings,
the gunnels--until everything
was rainbow, rainbow, rainbow!
And I let the fish go.
I believe that all of the poems that I have offered you in this chapter are good poems because they make effective use of diction, sound, and imagery, and they succeed in sharing some human emotion or thought with the reader. Some are certainly easier to understand than others, and some are probably better poems that others. I cautioned you at the very beginning of this book not to dwell on judging a poem's value but to try to appreciate every poem, including your own, for what it has to offer. But now, perhaps it's time to begin to evaluate poetry, not with the goal of harshly pointing out everything that is wrong with a poem, but to affirm what a poem does well. The checklist below summarizes much of what you have already learned. As you read it through, think about the poems that you have already read, and as you read the additional poems at the end of this chapter, apply this checklist to each poem, looking for the qualities that make each poem succeed.
CHECKLIST QUALITIES THAT CHARACTERIZE A GOOD POEM
1. Has the poet structured the poem so that each part or section seems to contribute to and harmonize with the poem's over-all effect?
2. Is the poem as short as it can possibly be to achieve its most powerful effect, or does it seem to go on too long, perhaps containing confusing ideas or too much repetition?
3. Has the poet made effective use of diction, including the connotations of words?
4. Do the sounds in the poem help achieve the poet's purpose and contribute to the poem's final effect?
5. Does the imagery in the poem appeal powerfully to the reader's senses and support the poem's meaning? If the poem is descriptive, does the poet capture the inscape of the thing he or she is describing?
6. If the poem contains an epigraph or allusions, do they contribute additional meaning to the poem, or do they detract from the poem's effectiveness?
7. Does the poet avoid plagiarism and literary cannibalism?
8. Does the poet avoid too much explanation, thus allowing the reader to make his or her own response to the poem?
9. Does the title contribute to the reader's understanding and appreciation of the poem?
10. After several reading, is the poem's meaning accessible to the reader?
11. Does the poem share with the reader some meaningful aspect of the human experience?
12. Is the poem interesting, thought provoking, stimulating, and fresh?
NOTES
CHAPTER 7
1. John Pick, ed., Gerard Manley Hopkins The Windhover, p. 1.
2. John Pick, ed., A Hopkins Reader, p. 19-20.
3. A Hopkins Reader, p. 20
4. A Hopkins Reader, p. 20
5. A Hopkins Reader, p. 149-150.
6. A Hopkins Reader, p. 24
QUESTIONS AND TOPICS FOR REVIEW
1. Why are diction, sound devices, and imagery important elements of poetry?
2. Who were the New Critics, and which aspects of poetry did they value most?
3. Define the terms connotation and denotation.
4. What are some of the levels of diction in which a poet can choose to write?
5. Define the term etymology and explain how etymology can be used effectively in writing poetry.
6. Explain the etymologies of the words "beastly" and "bourgeois."
7. Define a provide several examples of alliteration.
8. Define the terms simile and metaphor and provide an example of each.
9. Define the following terms and provide an example of each from the poetry you have read:
euphony
cacophony
assonance
onomatopoeia
synesthesia
10. What is a coda?
11. Explain Hopkins' concept of sprung rhythm, illustrating your explanation with examples.
12. What were some of Hopkins' innovations in the use of diction?
13. In what ways did Anglo-Saxon poetry influence Hopkins?
14. Define Hopkins' theory of inscape and provide examples.
15. What is a kenning? Give several examples.
16. Exactly what is imagery in poetry?
17. Define kinesthetic imagery and provide several examples.
18. What are some of the characteristics of good poetry?
TOPICS FOR DISCUSSION
1. Discuss the elements of poetry that D.H. Lawrence uses to communicate his theme in "How Beastly the Bourgeois Is."
2. What kinds of imagery does Crane use in "The Impact of a Dollar" to depict the contrast between the impact of a dollar and the impact of a million dollars?
3. Discuss the sound devices in Yeats' "The Lake Isle of Innisfree."
4. Discuss the diction in Hopkins' "The Windhover."
5. What are the advantages of using compound words in poetry?
6. What are the advantages and disadvantages of using coined words in poetry?
7. Discuss the advantages and disadvantages of writing bi-lingual poetry or poetry in dialect.
8. Discuss the epigraph in Vera Nazarov's poem "Myth." What is the relationship between the epigraph and the poem?
9. Discuss the two interpretations of Roethke's "My Papa's Waltz" given in this chapter. Then discuss which interpretation seems most plausible to you and why.
10. Discuss the possible social and political interpretations of Frost's "Mending Wall."
11. Discuss the imagery in Bishop's "The Fish." What is the poem's theme? Why did the speaker in the poem let the fish go?
ACTIVITIES
1. Choose a poem from any chapter in this book which you consider to be a good poem. Be prepared to explain to your classmates which of the characteristics of good poetry this poem possesses. This activity can be done in pairs or in small groups, and each group can report back to the larger group on the characteristics of the poem they have chosen.
2. Working in pairs or in small groups, choose any poem from this chapter and focus on its diction, especially denotation, connotation, etymologies, and level of diction. Then report back to the group on the significance of diction on the poem's overall effect.
3. Working in pairs or in small groups, select any poem in this chapter and analyze the sound devices used in the poem. Report your findings to the larger group.
4. Using the material which appears in the poem itself, organize a debate between the two farmers who appear in Frost's "Mending Wall," focusing on whether or not the wall should be repaired, removed, or allowed to fall down. Select two members of the class to play the two farmers.
5. Organize a debate between the speaker in "How Beastly the Bourgeois Is" and a member of the British middle class.
6. Organize a debate between the speaker in "The Impact of a Dollar" and someone who is or aspires to be a millionaire. These debates, of course, are dramatizations, and must be based on the material given in the poems themselves.
7. Working in pairs or in small groups, prepare a discussion of any poem of your choice focusing on how the various aspects of the poem, form, genre, diction, sound, imagery, etc., work together to communicate the poet's message.
ANALYTICAL WRITING ASSIGNMENTS
1. Compare and contrast Hopkins' "The Windhover" and Shelley's "To a Sky-Lark," which appears in Chapter 4. Focus on theme and imagery in these two poems.
2. Compare and contrast Frost's "Mending Wall" and Bishop's "The Fish," focusing on diction and imagery.
3. Compare and contrast Williams' "The Dance" and Roethke's "My Papa's Waltz," focusing on form, rhythm, and sound devices.
4. Explicate Frost's "Mending Wall."
5. Analyze Bishop's "The Fish," focusing on diction and imagery. Use your dictionary to look up any boating or fishing terminology that may be unfamiliar to you.
6. Compare and contrast the Chorus from Antigone in Chapter 6 and Matthew Arnold's "Dover Beach," focusing on imagery and theme.
7. Analyze the diction in Hopkins' "The Starlight Night," focusing on kennings, compounds, and coined words. How does the diction in the poem support the inscapes and the theme Hopkins is trying to communicate?
8. Analyze the sound devices in Hopkins' "The Caged Skylark."
9. Explicate Hopkins' "Carrion Comfort."
10. Research the use of the coda in poetry. Then analyze Hopkins' "That Nature is a Heraclitean Fire and of the Comfort of the Resurrection" as an extended Italian sonnet with a coda.
11. Analyze the diction, focusing on the use of dialect, in Langston Hughes' "Fire."
12. Select any poem in this chapter and analyze it, focusing on diction, sound devices, or imagery.
13. Select any poem in this chapter which you consider to be a good poem and analyze it, explaining which elements or characteristics make it a good poem.
1.CREATIVE WRITING ASSIGNMENTS
1. Select a poem that you have previously written and revise this poem focusing on diction. Your goal is to make your revision shorter than the original and even more effective in its impact on the reader.
2. Using your journal, describe several inscapes that fascinate you. Then select one of these inscapes and use it as the basis of a poem focusing primarily on imagery.
3. Write a poem using primarily visual imagery. Then re-write the poem three times, focusing first on auditory imagery (sounds), secondly on tactile imagery (touch), and thirdly on gustatory and olfactory imagery (taste and smell.) Then revise the poem once more, incorporating the most effective elements of the various types of imagery.
4. Make a list of compound words in your journal. Then incorporate some of these compound words into a poem.
5. Write a poem using at least two coined words. Take turns reading these poems in class to see if the members of the class can discern the meanings of the coined words. This assignment requires a bit of risk taking. Please agree not to make fun of each other if the newly coined words fail to communicate. Think of this assignment as an experiment.
6. Write a poem using alliteration and assonance.
7. If you are familiar with a dialect other than Standard English, write a poem in that dialect.
8. If you know another language in addition to English, write a bi-lingual poem.
9. Write a poem using onomatopoeia.
10. In your journal make a list of contemporary kennings. Then write a poem in which one or more of these kennings appear.
11. In your journal make a list of all the images that you associate with a special holiday. Be sure to use all of your senses. Then write a poem based on these images.
ADDITIONAL POEMS FOR READING AND ANALYSIS FOCUSING ON DICTION, SOUND, AND IMAGERY
WALT WHITMAN
America 1819-1892
Cavalry Crossing a Ford
A line in long array where they wind betwixt green islands,
They make a serpentine course, their arms flash in the sun--hark to
the musical clank,
Behold the silvery river, in it the splashing horses loitering stop to
drink,
Behold the brown-faced men, each group, each person a picture, the
negligent rest on the saddles,
Some emerge on the opposite bank, others are just entering the ford
---while,
Scarlet and blue and snowy white,
The guidon flags flutter gayly in the wind.
A Prairie Sunset
Shot gold, maroon and violet, dazzling silver, emerald, fawn,
The earth's whole amplitude and Nature's multiform power consign'd
for once to colors;
The light, the general air posses'd by them--colors till now
unknown,
No limit, confine--not the Western sky alone--the high meridian--
North, south, all,
Pure luminous color fighting the silent shadows to the last.
MATTHEW ARNOLD
England 1822-1888
The sea is calm tonight.
The tide is full, the moon lies fair
Upon the straits;--on the French coast the light
Gleams and is gone; the cliffs of England stand,
Glimmering and vast, out in the tranquil bay.
Come to the window, sweet is the night-air!
Only, from the long line of spray
Where the sea meets the moon-blanched land,
Listen! you hear the grating roar
Of pebbles which the waves draw back, and fling,
At their return, up the high strand,
Begin, and cease, and then again begin,
With tremulous cadence slow, and bring
The eternal note of sadness in.
Sophocles* long ago
Heard to on the Aegean, and it brought
Into his mind the turbid ebb and flow
Of human misery; we
Find also in the sound a thought,
Hearing it by this distant northern sea.
The Sea of Faith
Was once, too, at the full, and round earth's shore
Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furled.
But now I only hear
Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,
Retreating, to the breath
Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear
And naked shingles of the world.
Ah, love, let us be true
To one another! for the world, which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight
Where ignorant armies clash by night.
* See the Chorus from Antigone in Chapter 6.
GERARD MANLEY HOPKINS
England 1844-1889
The Starlight Night
Look at the stars! look, look up at the skies!
O look at all the fire-folk sitting in the air!
The bright boroughs, the circle-citadels there!
Down in dim woods the diamond delves! the elves'-eyes!
The grey lawns cold where gold, where quickgold lies!
Wind-beat whitebeam! airy abeles set on a flare!
Flake-doves set floating forth at a farmyard scare!
Ah well! it is all a purchase, all is a prize.
Buy then! bid then!--What?--Prayer, patience, alms, vows.
Look, look: a May-mess, like on orchard boughs!
Look! March-bloom, like on mealed-with-yellow sallows!
These are indeed the barn; withindoors house
The shocks. This piece-bright paling shuts the spouse
Christ home, Christ and his mother and all his hallows.
The Caged Skylark
As a dare-gale skylark scanted in a dull cage
Man's mounting spirit in his bone-house, mean house,
dwells--
That bird beyond the remembering his free fells;
This in drudgery, day-labouring-out life's age.
Though aloft on turf or perch or poor low stage,
Both sing sometimes the sweetest, sweetest spells,
Yet both droop deadly sometimes in their cells
Or wring their barriers in bursts of fear or rage.
Not that the sweet-fowl, song-fowl, needs no rest--
Why, hear him, hear him babble and drop down to his nest,
But his own nest, wild nest, no prison.
Man's spirit will be flesh-bound when found at best
But uncumbered: meadow-down is not distressed
For a rainbow footing it nor he for his bones risen.
Carrion Comfort
Not, I'll not, carrion comfort, Despair, not feast on thee;
Not untwist--slack they may be--these last strands of man
In me or most weary, cry I can no more. I can;
Can something, hope, wish day come, not choose not to be.
But ah, but O thou terrible, why wouldst thou rude on me
Thy wring-world right foot rock? lay a lionlimb against me?
scan
With darksome devouring eyes my bruised bones? and fan,
O in turns of tempest, me heaped there; me frantic to avoid
thee and flee?
Why? That my chaff might fly; my grain lie, sheer and
clear.
Nay in all that toil, that coil since (seems) I kissed the rod,
Hand rather, my heart lo! lapped strength, stole joy, would
laugh, cheer.
Cheer whom though? the hero whose heaven-handling flung
me, foot trod
Me? or me that fought him? O which one? is it each one?
That night, that year
Of now done darkness I wretch lay wrestling with (my
God!) my God.
That Nature is a Heraclitean Fire and of the
Comfort of the Resurrection
Cloud-puffball, torn tufts, tossed pillows flaunt forth, then
chevy on an air-
built thoroughfare: heaven -roysterers, in gay-gangs they
throng; they glitter in marches.
Down roughcast, down dazzling whitewash, wherever an
elm arches,
Shivelights and shadowtackle in long lashes lace, lance, and
pair.
Delightfully the bright wind boisterous ropes, wrestles, beats
earth bare
Of yestertempest's creases; in pool and rut peel parches
Squandering ooze to squeezed dough, crust, dust; stanches,
starches
Squadroned masks and manmarks treadmire toil there
Footfretted in it. Million-fueled, nature's bonfire burns on.
But quench her bonniest, dearest to her, her clearest-selved
spark
Man, how fast his firedint, his mark on mind, is gone!
Both are in a unfathomable, all is in an enormous dark
Drowned. O pity and indignation! Manshape, that shone
Sheer off, disseveral, a star, death blots black out; nor mark
Is any of him at all so stark
But vastness blurs and time beats level. Enough! the
Resurrection,
A heart's clarion! Away grief's gasping, joyless days, de-
jection.
Across my foundering deck shone
A beacon, and eternal beam. Flesh face, and mortal trash
Fall to the residuary worm; world's wildfire, leave but ash:
In a flash, at a trumpet crash,
I am all at once what Christ is, since he was what I am, and
This Jack, joke, poor potsherd, patch, matchwood, immortal
diamond,
Is immortal diamond.
AKIKO YOSANO
Japan (1878-1942)
Labor Pains
I am sick today,
sick in my body,
eyes wide open, silent,
I lie on the bed of childbirth.
Why do I,
so used to the nearness of death,
to pain and blood and screaming,
now uncontrollably tremble with dread?
A nice young doctor tried to comfort me,
and talked about the joy of giving birth.
Since I know better than he about this matter,
what good purpose can his prattle serve?
Knowledge is not reality.
Experience belongs to the past.
Let those who lack immediacy be silent.
Let observers be content to observe.
I am all alone,
totally, utterly, entirely on my own,
gnawing my lips, holding my body rigid,
waiting on inexorable fate.
There is only one truth.
I shall give birth to a child,
truth driving outward from my inwardness.
Neither good nor bad; real, no sham about it.
With the first labor pains,
suddenly the sun goes pale.
The indifferent world goes strangely calm.
I am alone.
It is alone I am.
Translated by Kenneth Rexroth and Ikuko Atsumi
LANGSTON HUGHES
America (1902-1967)
Fire
Fire,
Fire, Lord!
Fire gonna burn ma soul!
I ain't been good,
I ain't been clean--
I been stinkin', low-down, mean.
Fire,
Fire, Lord!
Fire gonna burn ma soul!
Tell me, brother,
Do you believe
If you wanta go to heaben
Got to moan an' grieve?
Fire,
Fire, Lord!
Fire gonna burn ma soul!
I been stealin',
Been tellin'lies,
Had more women
Than Pharaoh had wives.
Fire,
Fire, Lord!
Fire gonna burn ma soul!
I means Fire, Lord!
Fire gonna burn ma soul!
STEVIE SMITH
England 1902-1971
Not Waving But Drowning
Nobody heard him, the dead man,
But still he lay moaning:
I was much further out than you thought
And not waving but drowning.
Poor chap, he always loved larking
And now he's dead
It must have been too cold for him his heart gave way,
They said.
Oh, no no no, it was too cold always
(Still the dead one lay moaning)
I was much too far out all my life
And not waving but drowning.
MAY SARTON
America (1914-1995)
December Moon
Before going to bed
After a fall of snow
I look out on the field
Shining there in the moonlight
So calm, untouched and white
Snow silence fills my head
After I leave the window.
Hours later near dawn
When I look down again
The whole landscape has changed
The perfect surface gone
Criss-crossed and written on
Where the wild creatures ranged
While the moon rose and shone.
Why did my dog not bark?
Why did I hear no sound?
There on the snow-locked ground
In the tumultuous dark?
How much can come, how much can go
When the December moon is bright,
What worlds of play we'll never know
Sleeping away the cold white night
After a fall of snow.
GARY SNYDER
America (Born, 1930)
Before the Stuff Comes Down
Walking out of the "big E"*
Dope store of the suburb,
canned music plugging up your ears
the wide aisles,
miles of wares
from nowheres,
Suddenly it's California:
Live oak, brown grasses
Butterflies over the parking lot and the freeway
A Turkey Buzzard power in the blue air.
A while longer,
Still here.
* The Emporium, a large department store in northern California
FINDING THE POET
CHAPTER 8 ELEMENTS OF POETRY-- TONE, FIGURES OF SPEECH, AND SYMBOLISM
We continue our journey into some of the more subtle and complex aspects of poetry, tone, figures of speech, and symbolism. We are no longer beginners, and in learning to discern and interpret these elements, we will ultimately derive an even deeper appreciation of some of the world's great poems. But first, we will look at several poems of varying quality focusing on tone.
In poetry, tone refers to the poet's attitude toward the material being presented in the poem. A poem's tone might be humorous, sarcastic, didactic, apologetic, sorrowful, joyful, reverent, contemptuous, ironic, serious, light, or any of an almost infinite number of possible attitudes. We might describe the tone of the following poem by Dorothy Parker as whimsical:
On Being a Woman
Why is it, when I am in Rome,
I'd give my eye to be at home,
But when on native earth I be,
My soul is sick for Italy?
And why with you, my love, my lord,
Am I spectacularly bored,
Yet do you up and leave me--then
I scream to have you back again?
Dorothy Parker was famous in the 1920s and 30s for writing humorous, witty poems about sophisticated city people. Although the reader may smile or laugh at her poems, her tone also has a bite. On a deeper level, she is satirizing the selfishness and shallowness of human beings, especially in their treatment of the opposite sex. This secondary and more serious level of satire is apparent in this sonnet about the end of a relationship:
Sonnet For the End of a Sequence
So take my vows and scatter them to sea;
Who swears the sweetest is no more than human.
And say no kinder words than these of me:
"Ever she longed for peace, but was a woman!
And thus they are, whose silly female dust
Needs little enough to clutter it and bind it,
Who meet a slanted gaze, and ever must
Go build themselves a soul to dwell behind it."
For now I am my own again, my friend!
This scar but points the whiteness of my breast;
This frenzy, like its betters, spins an end,
And now I am my own. And that is best.
Therefore, I am immeasurably grateful
To you, for proving shallow, false, and hateful.
The haiku master Basho also used humor sometimes, but his tone lacks the bitter edge discernible in Parker's poetry. Instead of jabbing at other human beings, Basho gently mocks himself:
I took a kimono off
To feel lighter
Only putting it in the load
On my back.
Translated by Nobuyuki Yuasa
This self-deprecating tone is common in Zen poetry and art since one of the teachings of Zen Buddhism is that the human ego, especially when it strives for perfection, is a source of suffering for everyone. Basho's poetry is appreciated in Japan, not just for its aesthetic excellence, but also as a medium for Zen meditation. The following poem also has a tone of humorous self-satire:
Had I crossed the pass
Supported by a stick,
I would have spared myself
The fall from the horse.
Translated by Nobuyuki Yuasa
Kobayashi Issa, whose poems you read in Chapter 4, was also a haiku poet and a devout Buddhist, but not of the Zen sect. Issa's poems often express a highly sarcastic tone aimed at the samurai and the hypocritical Buddhists of his day, all of whom he detested.
For each single fly
that's swatted, "Namu Amida
Butsu" is the cry.
Translated by Harold Henderson
In the Buddhist tradition, any form of killing, even of insects, is considered immoral. In this poem, Issa satirizes a family of self-righteous Buddhists who assuage their own consciences after killing flies by offering the all-purpose prayer, to the Buddha, "Namu Amida Butsu." Issa also resented the fact that ordinary people (like himself) had to get off their horses and crouch by the side of the road as a sign of respect when a daimyo, a samurai military leader, rode by. The following haiku expresses his contempt for the samurai's arrogant self-importance:
A daimyo!--And who
makes him get off his horse?
Cherry blossoms do!
Translated by Harold Henderson
Issa's tone reminds me a little of William Blake in "Songs of Experience," when he bitterly satirizes the self-righteous hypocrites of Eighteenth Century England. You might want to review "Holy Thursday," which appears in Chapter 4. In comparing these two poets, however, I think that Issa's tone contains a much stronger dose of humor than Blake's.
An element which can help a poet control the tone of a poem is point of view. As you know, point of view refers to the way in which the reader is allowed to see and hear what is being presented in the poem. In first person point of view, a speaker presents the information in the poem in his or her own voice. This person may be a persona who has been created by the poet, like a character in a short story. We discussed this concept in Chapter 4 when we compared "Daddy" by Sylvia Plath, written in the poet's own voice, to "The Chimney Sweeper" by William Blake, written in the voice of a child of Blake's creation.
In the following poem, Edwin Arlington Robinson communicates to the reader in the first person point of view through a persona:
Richard Cory
Whenever Richard Cory went down town,
We people on the pavement looked at him:
He was a gentleman from sole to crown,
Clean favored, and imperially slim.
And he was always quietly arrayed,
And he was always human when he talked;
But still he fluttered pulses when he said,
"Good morning," and he glittered when he walked.
And he was rich--yes, richer than a king--
And admirably schooled in every grace:
In fine, we thought that he was everything
To make us wish that we were in his place.
So we worked on, and waited for the light,
And went without the meat, and cursed the bread;
And Richard Cory, one calm summer night,
Went home and put a bullet through his head.
The dramatic conclusion of this poem comes as a surprise to the reader because the persona who describes Richard Cory does so in very superficial terms, admiring him for his good looks, his wealth, and his power. The speaker, who identifies with the blue collar workers in the town, does not know anything about Richard Cory's heart and soul. If the poem had been written from Richard's point of view just before his suicide, he probably would not have focused on how handsome he was and all the prestige and money he enjoyed. In selecting a narrator who expresses such superficial values, Robinson is able to use irony to satirize American values.
One of the most difficult aspects of reading poetry is trying to determine whether a poet is writing in his or her own voice or using a persona. To be honest, sometimes only the poet knows. If a poet chooses to write in the first person point of view without a persona, it is possible to establish a very intimate and honest relationship with the reader, as my former student, Lorna Dee Cervantes does in the following poem:
Mexico City: Spring
There is a city built in green,
a praying mantis city,
a city with claws,
where some eat
and the city eats all.
To walk in the streets is to bleed.
Pobres! Pobres!*
With palms extended
they cast their hooks.
I am picked cold.
I sit in the plazas and bleed.
I drink my twelve peso wine
and it spatters out from these holes.
Mi compadres all get drunk
while I drown in the sound of blood.
"Mexico City"
they say,
"is a good time."
as the pobres pass
with an ounce of my flesh
in their hands.
Mexico City;
spring.
* In Spanish, pobres means "the poor ones." Mi compadres--my friends.
In this poem Cervantes effectively communicates to the reader the agony she felt in Mexico City surrounded on one side by those who were living in horrible poverty and on the other by her insensitive traveling companions who just wanted to party. Because she speaks directly to the reader in her own voice, only the reader understands her pain.
Sometimes even when the poet appears to be speaking in the first person in his or her own voice, there can be additional levels of complexity in tone and point of view. Read the following poem by Leslie Marmon Silko carefully, paying close attention to the voice of the speaker.
Where the Mountain Lion Lay
Down with the Deer
I climb the black rock mountain
stepping from day to day
silently.
I smell the wind for my ancestors
pale blue leaves
crushed wild mountain smell.
Returning
up the gray stone cliff
where I descended
a thousand years ago.
Returning to faded black stone.
where mountain lion lay down with deer.
It is better to stay up here
watching the wind's reflection
in tall yellow flowers.
The old ones who remember me are gone
the old songs are all forgotten
and the story of my birth.
How I danced in snow-frost moonlight
distant stars to the end of the Earth,
How I swam away
in freezing mountain water
narrow mossy canyon tumbling down
out of the mountain
out of the deep canyon stone
down
the memory
spilling out
into the world.
In this poem the voice of the poet evolves into the mythic and historic voice of her Native American ancestors, traveling over distances in time and space. Many poets, including Milton, Blake, and Yeats have spoken in mythic or prophetic voices, sharing a vision for the whole culture.
It takes a skillful poet to speak in a prophetic voice. Someone who lacks Yeats' powers with language, tone, and archetype might simply come off as an egomaniac. Whatever voice the poet chooses to write in, he or she must always be sensitive to tone. If the speaker is overly arrogant, too opinionated, sexist, or bigoted, and the poet is not intending to create an ironic tone, he or she can certainly lose the reader's sympathy. Browning's use of the arrogant narrator in "My Last Duchess," which you read in Chapter 6, was very effective because the poet intended an ironic contrast between the grotesque egotism of the Duke and the gentle kindness and sensitivity of the Duchess. On the other hand, some readers might think that D.H. Lawrence, apparently speaking in his own voice, was too opinionated in "How Beastly the Bourgeois Is," which you read in the previous chapter. The American scholar John Ciardi referred to the relationship between poet and reader based on the tone of the poem as "the sympathetic contract." He explained this relationship as follows:
Every poem makes some demand upon the reader's sympathies.
In addressing his subject, the poet takes an attitude toward
it and adopts a tone he believes to be appropriate. His sense
of what is appropriate, either in tone or in attitude, is of
course a question of values. As such, it is obviously basic to
the effect of the poem upon the reader. The reader may be right
or wrong in disagreeing with the poet's values, but once such a
disagreement has occurred, that poem has failed for that reader.1
Ciardi cited "Invictus," written in 1875 by William Ernest Henley, as an example of a poem which breaks the sympathetic contract. In fact, Ciardi referred to "Invictus" (which means "unconquered" in Latin), as "the most widely known bad poem in English."2
Invictus
Out of the night that covers me,
Black as the pit from pole to pole,
I thank whatever gods may be
For my unconquerable soul.
In the fell clutch of circumstance
I have not winced nor cried aloud.
Under the blugeoning of Chance
My head is bloody by unbowed.
Beyond this place of wrath and tears
Looms but the Horror of the shade,
And yet the menace of the years
Finds, and shall find, me unafraid.
It matters not how strait the gate,
How charged with punishment the scroll.
I am the master of my fate;
I am the captain of my soul.
According to Ciardi, this poem is not bad because of any technical flaw or because of its subject matter. It fails, in Ciardi's opinion, because of its tone:
One feels that Henley is not really reacting from his own
profoundest depths but that he is making some sort of
over-dramatic speech about pessimism. There is a failure
of character in the tone he has assumed. The poet has
presented himself as unflinchingly valiant. The reader
cannot help but find him merely inflated and self-dramatizing.3
This poem was enormously popular during the Victorian era and throughout the first half of the Twentieth Century. In fact, Henley suffered from tubercular arthritis from the time he was a child and had a foot amputated. Afterwards, he spent a year in a hospital in Edinburgh receiving treatment to save his other foot. With typical Victorian earnestness, Henley may have felt that it was inappropriate to refer specifically to his disability in the poem. As a result, even though Henley was in fact "unflinchingly valiant," the poem does have a rather arrogant tone. However, since Victorians clearly admired this poem, and Ciardi's remarks were written in 1959, we will have to conclude that even the tone of a poem is influenced by historic and cultural factors.
For those of you who write poetry, how can you avoid adopting an inappropriate tone and thus breaking the sympathetic contract with your reader. The truth is, you can't. There will always be people who don't like your poems simply because they feel no sympathy for your subject or for the emotions and thoughts you are expressing. However, you can lessen the possibility of a rift with your reader by taking a long, hard look at your own ego. In real life, arrogant, self-absorbed people are the last to realize that others turn away from them because their egotistical behavior is just plain embarrassing.
Poetry can be embarrassing too if the poet thinks more highly of himself or herself than of the reader. You can use your journal to explore your relationship with your reader. Make a list of the individuals or groups of people you would like to have as readers. Then read one of your poems aloud and imagine that you are one of the people on your list listening to the poem. Is there anything in the tone of the poem that might alienate your reader? Very few poems, even Shakespeare's, are appreciated by everyone, but poets can certainly try to adopt a tone that invites the reader into the poem. Do not confuse this process with telling the reader exactly what he or she wants to hear. Poetry often challenges the readers' values and makes them squirm. Challenging your readers is different from boring, excluding, or patronizing them.
The following poem by the Canadian poet Anne Hebert certainly does not make the reader feel comfortable. Yet the objective tone, like a camera pulling the reader into a beautiful scene which somehow becomes a vision of horror, succeeds in expressing Hebert's theme, which her translators refer to as "a woman in a bizarre domestic setting, repressed and sad."4
Life in the Castle
It is an ancestral castle
With no tables or fire
With no dust or rug.
The perverse spell of this place
Is wholly in its shiny mirrors.
The only possible thing to do here
Is to look at oneself day and night.
Toss your image into the hard fountains
Your hardest image no shadow no color.
See, these mirrors are deep
Like closets
Some corpse always lives there under the silver
Immediately covers your image
And sticks to you like seaweed.
It adjusts to you, skinny and naked,
And simulates love in a slow bitter shiver.
Translated by Aliki Barnstone and
Willis Barnstone
Readers who feel no sympathy for the pain of stifled, repressed, wealthy women whose lives are limited by tradition are free, of course, to reject this poem. But if they do, the sympathetic contract will have been broken by the reader, not the poet, who has carefully controlled the poem's tone.
Let's say no more about tone in poetry for the moment and proceed to one of poetry's most fascinating elements-- figures of speech. A figure of speech is an unusual way of using language. Thus, figures of speech are really an aspect of poetic diction-- the use of words in an unexpected way. In the previous chapter, we scrutinized Gerard Manley Hopkins' innovative diction, and in Chapter 3 we discussed the two most common figures of speech in poetry, simile and metaphor. Simile and metaphor are so valuable to poetry because, as I have already mentioned, one of the functions of poetry is to help the reader make connections between things that appear unrelated and ultimately gain a deeper sense of the connectedness between all things in the universe. Similes and metaphors, which are comparisons, help clarify these relationships for the reader. Because they are by far the most important figures of speech, we will briefly review simile and metaphor. Then we will discuss several other types of figurative language--hyperbole, litotes, personification, apostrophe, synecdoche, metonymy, and oxymoron.
A really great simile or metaphor can take your breath away. It can startle you into a new level of awareness. As you remember, a simile is a comparison using "like" or "as," and a metaphor is a comparison which does not use the words "like" or "as." Similes and metaphors abound in poetry because poets are always trying to help their readers see relationships from a new angle. In the poem by Anne Hebert which you just read, the similes "these mirrors are deep/ Like closets" and "Some corpse always lives there/...And sticks to you like seaweed" help the reader to recognize the secret, hidden horrors lying beneath the comfortable life Hebert describes.
A poem which is famous for its figures of speech is "Dream Deferred" by Langston Hughes. This stunning poem, written in 1951, presents a series of five similes in response to the question, "What happens to a dream deferred?" Then the poem concludes with an implied metaphor.
Dream Deferred
What happens to a dream deferred?
Does it dry up
like a raisin in the sun?
Or fester like a sore--
And then run?
Does it stink like rotten mean?
Or crust and sugar over--
like a syrupy sweet?
Maybe it just sags
like a heavy load.
Or does it explode?
This prophetic poem, which on one level refers to the denied aspirations of African Americans before the Civil Rights Movement, rivets the reader's attention with its final question, "Or does it explode?"
In fact, the struggle for racial equality in America has been very explosive, and many lives have been sacrificed. In using the term implied metaphor, I mean that the poet makes a comparison indirectly. Hughes does not say that a postponed dream is a bomb waiting to go off; that would be a metaphor. An implied metaphor occurs when the second object, to which the first object is being compared, is not actually named. In this case, the deferred dream is mentioned, but the bomb is not.
Another level of subtlety in this poem lies in its universality. In fact, Hughes mentions nothing about race or civil rights or America. I hope that this poem will outlive America's racial conflicts, and in fact, it could refer to any deep longing that has been denied-- on an individual or global level. I admire Hughes' skill in presenting similes that are so vivid and specific, describing so accurately the various responses that people have to unrealized hopes. Yet the dynamics that cause the dreams to be deferred are left entirely to the reader's imagination.
We use similes and metaphors constantly in our everyday speech. We've all heard the over-used expression, "She's an angel," or "He's such a weasel," or "It was like a dream." I like even these trite figures of speech because they add imagery and instant recognition to our ordinary conversations. Saying that someone is a weasel creates a complex set of images, suggesting sneaky, dishonest, cowardly, and manipulative behavior. Of course, I'm sure you're aware that most of the animal similes and metaphors that we apply to people-- "She's a dog," "He's a pig," "She eats like a bird," or "He's so catty," have very little resemblance to the actual behaviors of animals. These similes and metaphors are based on human perceptions.
My father used to decorate his daily conversations with folk similes such as "happy as a clam," "snug as a bug in a rug," and "smart as a whip." I've always liked the dubious logic in these comparisons. We also use folk metaphors based on sports and occupations, such as "undermining someone's authority," "striking out," "dropping the ball," and "hitting the nail on the head." These are wonderfully descriptive expressions, but let's fact it; they are cliches. You're not going to get very far as a poet if you pepper your poems (to use a folk metaphor), with old, overused similes and metaphors. Your job is to come up with new ones.
Although I criticized her in Chapter 4 for her cannibalistic poem "Daddy," I admire the creativity in many of Sylvia Plath's other poems. I especially enjoy her little poem "Metaphors," written in 1960.
Metaphors
I'm a riddle in nine syllables,
An elephant, a ponderous house,
A melon strolling on two tendrils.
O red fruit, ivory, fine timbers!
This loaf's big with its yeasty rising.
Money's new-minted in this fat purse.
I'm a means, a stage, a cow in calf.
I've eaten a bag of green apples,
Boarded the train there's no getting off.
This clever nine-line poem gives you a series of hints in the form of metaphors. Did you figure out that Plath was talking about being pregnant? The tone of the poem is interesting too. The first eight lines are playful and light, but the final line suggests the serious commitment that motherhood requires.
During the Renaissance and in the Seventeenth Century, specific types of elaborate or extended metaphors called conceits became popular. You may recall a sonnet entitled "Whoso List to Hunt," by Sir Thomas Wyatt, which you read in Chapter 5. This entire poem is a complex extended metaphor or conceit in which the lady who is the object of the poet's unrequited love is compared to a deer, and the hapless lover, in this case Wyatt himself, is metaphorically compared to a hunter. An extended implied metaphor occurs in a poem entitled "The Collar" by the Seventeenth Century poet and clergyman George Herbert. The title of the poem refers to the clerical collar which Herbert wore in his vocation as a priest in the Church of England. The poem itself never mentions the collar, which symbolically restricts the wearer's movements and controls his behavior, but the poem depicts the speaker's initial struggle and final acceptance of the limitations placed on him because of his decision to wear the collar. The poem begins with Herbert himself pounding on the table in a fit of anger.
The Collar
I struck the board and cried, "No more;
I will abroad!
What? shall I ever sigh and pine?
My lines and life are free, free as the road,
Loose as the wind, as large as store.
Shall I be still in suit?
Have I no harvest but a thorn
To let me blood, and not restore
What I have lost with cordial fruit?
Sure there was wine
Before my sighs did dry it; there was corn
Before my tears did drown it.
Is the year only lost to me?
Have I no bays to crown it,
No flowers, no garlands gay? all blasted?
All wasted?
Not so, my heart; but there is fruit,
And thou hast hands.
Recover all thy sigh-blown age
On double pleasures: leave thy cold dispute
Of what is fit and not. Forsake thy cage,
Thy rope of sands,
Which petty thoughts have made, and made to thee
Good cable, to enforce and draw,
And be thy law,
While thou didst wink and wouldst not see.
Away! take heed;
I will abroad.
Call in thy death's-head there; tie up thy fears.
He that forbears
To suit and serve his need
Deserves his load."
But as I raved and grew more fierce and wild
At every word,
Methoughts I heard one calling, Child!
And I replied, My Lord.
In addition to the extended implied metaphor comparing the life of clerical service to wearing a restrictive collar, Herbert also introduces some interesting similes and the famous metaphor of the "rope of sands." Herbert, along with several other Seventeenth Century English poets, including John Donne, was known as a metaphysical poet. The metaphysical poets were the wild innovators of their day. They wrote complex, passionate poems using unusual comparisons, a colloquial tone, down to earth diction which included puns, and unusual forms with rough rhythms and odd rhymes. Their style contrasted with their contemporaries, the Cavalier poets, such as Ben Jonson, who wrote polite, risk-free, decorous poems in carefully controlled forms. The metaphysical poets are known for a figure of speech called the metaphysical conceit. A metaphysical conceit is an extended metaphor which compares two very dissimilar things in a startling, perhaps even shocking way. In Chapter 3, you read "A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning," in which John Donne compared a married couple to the two feet of a compass. In an even stranger series of metaphysical conceits, Donne compares himself to a town that has been captured by the enemy and a woman who has become engaged to the wrong man in this religious sonnet in which he begs God to kidnap him:
Holy Sonnet Number 14
Batter my heart, three-personed God; for you
As yet but knock, breathe, shine, and seek to mend;
That I may rise and stand, o'erthrow me, and bend
Your force to break, blow, burn, and make me new.
I, like an usurped town, to another due
Labor to admit you, but O, to no end;
Reason, your viceroy in me, me should defend,
But is captived, and proves weak or untrue.
Yet dearly I love you, and would be loved fain,
But am betrothed unto your enemy.
Divorce me, untie or break that knot again;
Take me to you, imprison me, for I,
Except you enthrall me, never shall be free,
Nor ever chaste, except you ravish me.
This sonnet is very complex and requires careful explication. In addition to his powerful diction, passionate tone, and unusual similes and metaphors, Donne also uses a heavy dose of exaggeration. While similes and metaphors are by far the most frequently used figures of speech in poetry, hyperbole (overstatement), and litotes (understatement), are a close second. Like all figures of speech, overstatement and understatement defy the rules of ordinary logic. If we say, "I love bread pudding," or "I'll just die if I don't pass Algebra," we are obviously exaggerating, just as John Donne was when he asked God to put him in prison. Poets use exaggeration to emphasize the feelings and themes they want to express. In the following poem, Nikki Giovanni uses simile, metaphor, and hyperbole to define for the reader her vision of the glory of poetry:
Poetry
poetry is motion graceful
as a fawn
gentle as a teardrop
strong like the eye
finding peace in a crowded room
we poets tend to think
our words are golden
though emotion speaks too
loudly to be defined
by silence
sometimes after midnight or just before
the dawn
we sit typewriter in hand
pulling loneliness around us
forgetting our lovers or children
who are sleeping
ignoring the weary wariness
of our own logic
to compose a poem
no one understands it
it never says "love me" for poets are
beyond love
it never says "accept me" for poems seek not
acceptance but controversy
it only says "i am" and therefore
i concede that you are too
a poem is pure energy
horizontally contained
between the mind
of the poet and the ear of the reader
if it does not sing discard the ear
for poetry is song
if it does not delight discard
the heart for poetry is joy
if it does not inform then close
off the brain for it is dead
if it cannot heed the insistent message
that life is precious
which is all we poets
wrapped in our loneliness
are trying to say
Giovanni obviously does not expect readers to amputate their ears, hearts, and brains if they have trouble grasping poetry. She uses these absurd exaggerations to stress how deeply she believes in poetry's message that "life is precious."
Litotes, or understatement, can also capture the reader's attention by creating an ironic contrast between what is meant and what is actually said. Anglo-Saxon poetry is filled with litotes. In fact, the cultural communication style of the Anglo-Saxon people seems to have been based on a kind of dry wit that deliberately de-emphasized even the most dramatic situations. My favorite example of Anglo-Saxon litotes occurs in the narrative poem "The Battle of Maldon," which describes a skirmish in which a small band of Anglo-Saxons were defeated by Viking marauders. The Anglo-Saxons lost this battle partially because some of their own troops abandoned them. This outrageous betrayal of Anglo-Saxon ethics is described by the poet in the following sentence: "Then there retired from the battle those who did not wish to be there." Other priceless examples of Anglo-Saxon understatement include these phrases from Beowulf describing battle scenes: "That was not a good bargain, that on both sides they had to pay with the lives of friends." and "...he was weaker in swimming the lake when death took him."
Even today, litotes is popular in British conversation. For example, an English person is likely to say, "It's a bit brisk" when in fact it is freezing outside. The American poet T.S. Eliot, who chose to become a British citizen, often adopts an understated tone. His poem "Journey of the Magi" is a dramatic monologue written in the voice of one of the wise men who traveled to see the Christ Child. The speaker describes this experience many years later in the most ordinary language imaginable. As a Christian and a member of the Church of England, Eliot must have believed that the birth of Jesus was one of the most significant events in human history. Yet the speaker in the monologue never even mentions the Christ Child, and his comments about actually discovering the Holy Family are filled with litotes:
and so we continued
And arrived at evening, not a moment too soon
Finding the place; it was (you may say) satisfactory.
As you read the entire poem, notice that the speaker seems to be describing a boring, inconvenient, and extended trip that he took a long time ago. The second half of the poem contains Biblical allusions. The three trees refer to the three crosses at Calvary where Jesus was crucified, the white horse suggests the white horse of Christ the conqueror in the Book of Revelations, and the reference to "dicing for pieces of silver" evokes both Jesus' betrayal by Judas and the soldiers who gambled for Jesus' clothes during his crucifixion. These allusions are incorporated into the speaker's deadpan description of his journey.
Journey of the Magi
"A cold coming we had of it,
Just the worst time of the year
For a journey, and such a long journey:
The ways deep and the weather sharp,
The very dead of winter."
And the camels galled, sore-footed, refractory,
Lying down in the melting snow.
There were times we regretted
The summer palaces on slopes, the terraces,
And the silken girls bringing sherbet.
Then the camel men cursing and grumbling
And running away, and wanting their liquor and women,
And the night-fires going out, and the lack of shelters,
And the cities hostile and the towns unfriendly
And the villages dirty and charging high prices:
A hard time we had of it.
At the end we preferred to travel all night,
Sleeping in snatches,
With the voices singing in our ears, saying
That this was all folly.
Then at dawn we came down to a temperate valley,
Wet, below the snow line, smelling of vegetation;
With a running stream and a water-mill beating the darkness,
And three trees on the low sky,
And an old white horse galloped away in the meadow
Then we came to a tavern with vine-leaves over the lintel,
Six hands at an open door dicing for pieces of silver,
And feet kicking the empty wine-skins.
But there was no information, and so we continued
And arrived at evening, not a moment too soon
Finding the place; it was (you may say) satisfactory.
All this was a long time ago, I remember,
And I would do it again, but set down
This set down
This: were we led all that way for
Birth or Death? There was a Birth, certainly,
We had evidence and no doubt. I had seen birth and death,
But had thought they were different; this Birth was
Hard and bitter agony for us, like Death, our death.
We returned to our places, these Kingdoms,
But no longer at ease here, in the old dispensation,
With an alien people clutching their gods.
I should be glad of another death.
Why does Eliot use so much litotes throughout this poem? Perhaps he does so to contrast with and heighten the effect of the poem's conclusion. The speaker ends his monologue by stating that he is "...no longer at ease here, in the old dispensation,/ With an alien people clutching their gods," suggesting that his journey was life-transforming after all. In fact, he states that the birth he witnessed was "...like Death, our death," and he concludes, "I should be glad of another death." Like the anonymous poet of "The Battle of Maldon," Eliot describes a moment of great emotional anguish as though he were discussing the weather, ironically hinting at the great depth of feeling that is left unsaid.
At the end of this Chapter, I have included another dramatic monologue by Eliot-- "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock." This poem, which contains some brilliant similes and metaphors and several literary and Biblical allusions, is also filled with litotes. The speaker is a middle aged, self-conscious, and insecure man who is in the midst of an identity and life crisis of major magnitude, yet he says, in a monumental understatement, "I have measured out my life with coffee spoons."
Another figure of speech, personification, occurs fairly frequently in poetry. It is sometimes called anthropomorphism, which means attributing human characteristics to anything that is not human, such as a plant, an animal, or an object. A psychologist might call this "projection," and some very literal minded readers and critics object to personification because it is unrealistic. For people who feel this way, personification breaks the sympathetic contract. The Romantic poets were fond of personification and a related figure of speech, the apostrophe. Apostrophe is a form of personification in which the speaker in the poem actually addresses an object, such as the moon, as though it were listening. A poet can also use apostrophe to speak to a dead or absent person, and in these cases, the apostrophe is technically not a form of personification. In stanza IV of "Ode: Intimations of Immortality," Wordsworth uses both personification and apostrophe:
Ye blessed Creatures, I have heard the call
Ye to each other make; I see
The heavens laugh with you in your jubilee;
My heart is at your festival,
My head hath its coronal,
The fulness of your bliss, I feel--I feel it all.
Oh evil day! if I were sullen
While Earth herself is adorning,
This sweet May-morning,
And the Children are culling
On every side,
In a thousand valleys far and wide,
Fresh flowers; while the sun shines warm,
And the Babe leaps up on his Mother's arm:--
I hear, I hear, with joy I hear!
--But there's a Tree, of many, one,
A single Field which I have looked upon,
Both of them speak of something that is gone:
The Pansy at my feet
Doth the same tale repeat:
Whither is fled the visionary gleam?
Where is it now, the glory and the dream?
What do you think? Can you accept the fact that the speaker, in this case Wordsworth himself, is addressing the "blessed Creatures" of nature and that the heavens are laughing and pansies are telling tales? I've never had a problem with personification myself. It has always been clear to me that the world of poetry is not a literal world. But if personification seems corny to you, probably you will not be using it in your own poems. On second thought, you might want to look at this poem by Allen Ginsberg that uses apostrophe in a humorous but poignant way:
A Supermarket in California
What thoughts I have of you tonight, Walt Whitman, for I walked
down the sidestreets under the trees with a headache self-conscious
looking at the full moon.
In my hungry fatigue, and shopping for images, I went into the neon
fruit supermarket, dreaming of your enumerations!
What peaches and what penumbras! Whole families shopping at night!
Aisles full of husbands! Wives in the avocados, babies in the tomatoes!
--and you, Garcia Lorca, what were you doing down by the watermelons?
I saw you, Walt Whitman, childless, lonely old grubber, poking
among the meats in the refrigerator and eyeing the grocery boys.
I heard you asking questions of each: Who killed the pork chops?
What price bananas? Are you my Angel?
I wandered in and out of the brilliant stacks of cans following you,
and followed in my imagination by the store detective.
We strode down the open corridors together in our solitary fancy
tasting artichokes, possessing every frozen delicacy, and never passing the
cashier.
Where are we going, Walt Whitman? The doors close in an hour.
Which way does the beard point tonight/
(I touch your book and dream of our odyssey in the supermarket and
feel absurd.)
Will we walk all night through solitary streets? The trees add shade
to shade, lights out in the houses, we'll both be lonely.
Will we stroll dreaming of the lost America of love past blue automobiles
in driveways, home to our silent cottage?
Ah, dear father, graybeard, lonely old courage-teacher, what America
did you have when Charon quit poling his ferry and you got out on
a smoking bank and stood watching the boat disappear on the black waters
of Lethe?
By addressing a dead American poet, Walt Whitman, Ginsberg, who is also an American, seeks to assuage his own sorrow about America's lost glory. Whitman, who celebrated America's vitality in his poems more than one hundred years ago, seems a sympathetic listener to the lonely contemporary who feels an alienation and loss of greatness in America today.
Another figure of speech, oxymoron, seems to have become a household word these days. An oxymoron is a two-word figure of speech in which the two elements appear to contradict each other. It's popular today to refer to the term "military intelligence" as an oxymoron. In poetry, phrases like "blind mouths," used by John Milton, and the Shakespearean phrase "sweet sorrow" are oxymorons. The expression "pretty ugly" could be interpreted as an oxymoron too, although the word "pretty" obviously has two meanings. Why would a poet use an oxymoron? For the same reason that any figure of speech is used-- to jolt the reader into perceiving reality from a new angle. Although an oxymoron appears to be illogical, there is a poetic truth in the seeming contradiction. A "blind mouth" makes perfect sense as a description of someone who is eager to speak but utterly uninformed or lacking in wisdom. And the parting of Romeo and Juliet, described as "sweet sorrow," has a profound ring of truth that is difficult to explain in a sentence, but if you have ever said a lingering goodbye to someone you love passionately, you know what that sweet sorrow is. Oxymorons take us to the edge of verbal communication then give us a nudge into the world of intuitive knowing.
Two other figures of speech, synecdoche and metonymy, also define relationships in a new way. These related figures refer to a person or thing by mentioning another object to which the first is closely related. Referring to attorneys or business people as "suits" or women as "skirts" is metonymy, and so is referring to the Cuban government as "Havana" or to someone in a movie as a "hired gun." Synecdoche, a specific type of metonymy, involves mentioning only part of something as a substitute for the whole. In "Journey of the Magi," for example, T.S. Eliot referred to "Six hands at an open door," indicating to the reader that he was describing three men "dicing for pieces of silver." In the following line, Eliot described "feet kicking the empty wine-skins." Obviously, human beings were attached to the kicking feet, but only their feet, engaged in this rather violent activity, seem significant. In everyday conversation, we use synecdoche frequently. "Give me a hand," is a common expression, but the person who requests "a hand" from someone certainly wants help from the entire person. Referring to cattle as "head" is synecdoche also. This expression has crept into the human world too, in the phrase "head count," used to determine how many people are present. In poetry, metonymy and synecdoche can be used to emphasize the aspects of people and things that seem most important. If a person is an expert at creating perfumes, referring to him or her as a "nose" makes sense, and ironically, I have actually met people whose business suit seemed the most significant thing about them.
Fascinating as figures of speech are by themselves, like all of the elements of poetry, they interact with other elements. Figures of speech are closely related to diction, sound, imagery, and tone. And sometimes all of these elements work together to create a deeper level of meaning in a poem known as symbolism. Symbolism occurs in poetry when the images or events described in the poem represent something more in addition to their surface or literal meaning-- usually an emotion, an idea, or some other abstraction. symbolism is important because our thoughts and feelings are simply abstractions in our minds and hearts and cannot be communicated easily unless they are transformed into symbolic images that can be perceived through the senses. In "The Sick Rose" by William Blake, which appears in Chapter 2, the speaker may be referring to an actual rose, but he probably intends a symbolic meaning. The illustration which Blake engraved to accompany this poem depicts a young woman, emerging from the petals of the flower. Let's look at this brief poem again.
The Sick Rose
O Rose, thou art sick:
The invisible worm
That flies in the night,
In the howling storm,
Has found out thy bed
Of crimson joy;
And his dark secret love
Does thy life destroy.
Readers have variously interpreted the worm in this poem as symbolizing prostitution, venereal disease, promiscuity, or poverty, and the rose as an archetypal symbol of femininity, youth, beauty, or vulnerability. The wonder of symbolism, of course, is that it is open to interpretation. And the poet will never tell you what a symbol means or even whether an image is intended to be symbolic.
The interpretation of symbolism in poetry can become a messy battleground. To help you keep from getting wounded, I'll give you one piece of advice: A poem's symbolic message must emerge from the imagery in the poem itself, not solely from the reader's imagination. If a reader decided to interpret "The Sick Rose" as an allegory on the joy of reading classical literature, he or she would have to find specific images in the poem to support this interpretation. The images in this poem include a rose, a worm, the night, a storm, and a bed. It would really be a stretch of the imagination to conclude that any of these images could symbolize literature, and although the word "joy" actually appears in the poem, its context appears to have nothing to do with reading. If you will just follow this one rule, letting the images in the poem guide you, learning to discern the symbolic meanings in poetry can be a great journey of awakening.
We talked about archetypes in Chapter 2. As you will recall, an archetype is a universal symbol that communicates beyond the barriers of language, place, culture, and history. There is something in the collective human unconscious that "knows" that a circle symbolizes completeness or wholeness, a stone symbolizes eternity or stability, and the sun symbolizes growth, healing, and enlightenment. Blake is a highly archetypal poet. His famous paired poems "The Lamb" and "The Tyger," for example, are based on the concepts of innocence, purity, and sacrificial love associated with the lamb and destructiveness, manipulation, and evil associated with the tiger. Archetypes communicate so effectively because there is usually something in the very essence of the symbolic object that embodies the qualities that it symbolizes. For example, lambs really are gentle, docile, and trusting, and they are frequently sacrificed for food. Also, the sun really does bring light into darkness and help all the crops to grow, thus nourishing the whole world. A few archetypes, however, are based on human projection. The tiger, for example, may appear evil and destructive to human beings, but in the world of nature, the tiger is simply a carnivore trying to survive.
Archetypes also take the form of symbolic human and animal figures such as the earth mother, the maiden, the hero, the wise old man, the trickster, and many other universal characters. Madeline in Keats' "The Eve of St. Agnes" is an archetypal maiden, and the hermit, who appears at the end of Coleridge's "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner," is an archetypal wise old man. The duke in Browning's "My Last Duchess" is an archetypal despot, and Ulysses in Tennyson's poem is an archetypal hero. The beauty of archetypes is that they never get trite or old and that they keep re-appearing in new disguises. Both Porphyro in "The Eve of St. Agnes" and the Ancient Mariner are hero archetypes, but their external appearances and the particulars of their adventures are different. It is on the deeper level that they are the same. Like Beowulf and thousands of other literary heroes, they embark on a journey of heroic discovery, they risk their very lives, face rejection and humiliation, and ultimately triumph. One might even argue that "The Fish" in Elizabeth Bishop's poem is a hero archetype. Like Ulysses, he has fought many battles and won, and now that he is old, he still has the courage and cunning to face the next adventure.
Another powerful aspect of archetypes is that they help to condense the poem because the reader intuitively recognizes the archetype and does not need to have it explained. When a poet uses archetypes, he or she can economize on words, and the poem's dramatic power is heightened. The seasons of the year are archetypes which function in the same way. This is one of the reasons for the enduring appeal of haiku. The following haiku by Basho uses a kigo, or reference to the season of the year, to stimulate the reader's emotional response:
Whenever I speak out
My lips are chilled--
Autumnal wind.
Translated by Makoto Ueda
Basho's editor and translator, Makoto Ueda, makes this comment about the poem:
The poem expresses bitter frustration with the lack of
communication among individuals. Probably Basho had been
talking with someone who did not understand or misunderstood
what he said; now recalling the incident in his bitter
memory as he walked alone in the autumn wind, he regretted
that he had even spoken.5
Notice that Ueda's explanation is longer than the poem itself. The poet simply relies on the reader's intuitive ability to interpret the significance of chilled lips in an autumn wind.
Sometimes all of the elements in a poem create a symbolic pattern. This is called allegory. An allegory is usually a narrative in which all of the characters and events have a secondary symbolic meaning. Can you explain the allegorical significance of the following poem, written in the form of a dialogue by Christina Rossetti?
Up-Hill
Does the road wind up-hill all the way?
Yes, to the very end.
Will the day's journey take the whole long day?
From morn to night, my friend.
But is there for the night a resting-place?
A roof for when the slow dark hours begin.
May not the darkness hide it from my face?
You cannot miss that inn.
Shall I meet other wayfarers at night?
Those who have gone before.
Then must I knock, or call when just in sight?
They will not keep you standing at the door.
Shall I find comfort, travel-sore and weak?
Of labour you shall find the sum.
Will there be beds for me and all who seek?
Yea, beds for all who come.
Not all of the symbolism in poetry is based on archetypes or allegory. An image in a poem sometimes takes on a particular meaning only within that poem. And some poets create entire collections of symbols that are unique to their poetry. The Irish Nobel Prize winning poet William Butler Yeats is known for his personal symbolism. The Norton Anthology of English Literature states that Yeats is "... beyond question the greatest twentieth-century poet of the English language,"6 and the Norton editors describe Yeats as "... a realist-symbolist-Metaphysical poet with an uncanny power over words."7 Yeats uses the gyre in several of his poems as a symbol of his vision of history. A gyre, or upward moving spiral, seems a perfect objective correlative for Yeats' theory of the cyclic nature of human history because he believed that as history moved forward (or upward), historical patterns were often repeated. Yeats referred to each cycle of history as a "gyre," and he apparently felt that the two-thousand-year cycle of the Christian era was coming to an end, having been preceded by the Greco-Roman and Babylonian gyres of history.
This theory is evident in Yeats' famous poem "The Second Coming," in which he expresses a profound fear that civilization is completely degenerating and that instead of a Messiah, some unspeakable monster will lead the next gyre of history. As you read this poem, you will notice that Yeats uses the Latin phrase, "Spiritus Mundi" to refer to what Carl Jung would call the collective unconscious. Also, pay close attention to the "shape with lion body and the head of a man." This seems to be a symbolic figure. After reading the poem several times and thinking about it, what do you believe that his figure with "A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun" symbolizes in the poem?
The Second Coming
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the center cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches toward Bethlehem to be born?
It might help you to know that the poem was written in 1919 and makes a reference to the Russian Revolution-- "The best lack all conviction, while the worst/ Are full of passionate intensity." Certainly Yeats was living in a time of war and horror on a global scale. How does the image of the falcon who "cannot hear the falconer" support Yeats' theory that this gyre of history is coming to an end? Do the falcon and the falconer seem symbolic to you? What references does Yeats make to events in Christian history? How are these references integrated into the poem's symbolic context?
The poem that you have just read is a major poem. We might even call it a great poem, even though its message is deeply troubling. It is a poem in which form, rhythm, diction, sound, tone, imagery, figures of speech, and symbolism all function together to create an effect so powerful that it stuns the reader on both the conscious and unconscious levels. It contains individual lines, phrases, and images that are so memorable that they will return to the reader again and again over the years.
Yeats' style on the surface appears very simple, with the plain diction so characteristic of modern poetry, yet he achieves a profound sense of significance that allows the reader to connect with the deepest levels of human emotion and thought. His use of myth, archetype, personal symbols, and allusions give his poems a universality and power that few poets in any generation have achieved.
Like all great poets, Yeats respects his reader and does not feel obligated to simplify the reader's task. At the end of this chapter, you will find more poems by William Butler Yeats. You will need to use the ten-step process from Chapter 3 to read them, and you may have to do some research in cultural history and mythology. I hope you will feel, as I do, that reading great poetry is worth every effort.
We concluded the previous chapter with a list of characteristics that make a poem good. Do you have a sense now of what makes a poem great? Here are some of my own thoughts about great poetry. You may want to make a list of your own.
QUALITIES THAT CHARACTERIZE A GREAT POEM
1. All of the elements in the poem function together to create a stunning and glorious effect, even if the poem's theme is disturbing to the reader.
2. The poem has a significance, vitality, and universality that communicates to readers beyond the parameters of history and culture.
3. The poem communicates to the reader on both the conscious and unconscious level, appealing to all four personality functions-- thought, emotion, sense, and intuition.
4. The poem's tone is carefully controlled to achieve the poet's intended effect without breaking the sympathetic contract with the reader; this quality also characterizes a good poem.
4. The poem has a "fragrance" that lingers in the reader's thoughts, feelings, and senses, making it memorable over the years.
5. The poem can be re-read many times, and with each re-reading, the reader gains some new perception, insight, or appreciation of the poem.
6. The poem has the potential to raise the reader's level of consciousness, profoundly changing the reader's awareness of human experience.
7. The poem communicates with the reader beyond the level of rational analysis, providing the reader with a mystical, spiritual, religious, or similarly profound experience.
8. The poem also has all of the qualities of a good poem.
NOTES
CHAPTER 8
1. John Ciardi, How Does a Poem Mean? (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1959), p. 846.
2. Ciardi, p. 848.
3. Ciardi, p. 848.
4. Aliki Barnstone and Willis Barnstone, eds., A Book of Women Poets (New York: Schocken Books, 1981), p. 229.
5. Makoto Ueda, Matsuo Basho (Tokyo: Kodansha International Ltd., 1982) p. 61.
6. M.H. Abrams, ed., The Norton Anthology of English Literature, Sixth Edition, Vol II, p. 1863.
7. Abrams, p. 1862.
QUESTIONS AND TOPICS FOR REVIEW
1. Define tone in poetry.
2. How can the point of view of a poem influence its tone? Give examples.
3. How can the use of a persona influence the tone of a poem? Give examples.
4. Explain the sympathetic contract. Who developed this concept?
5. Define figures of speech in poetry.
6. What is a simile? Provide several examples.
7. Define the word metaphor and provide several examples.
8. What is an implied metaphor? Give a specific example from one of the poems in this chapter.
9. Who were the metaphysical poets?
10. What are some of the characteristics of metaphysical poetry?
11. What is a metaphysical conceit? Give a specific example from one of the poems in this chapter.
12. Define the following terms, and provide examples, both from poetry and from everyday language:
hyperbole
litotes
personification
apostrophe
oxymoron
metonymy
synecdoche
13. What is symbolism? Give an example of the use of symbolism in poetry.
14. What is the most important rule to remember when interpreting symbolism in poetry?
15. List several examples of the use of archetypes in poetry.
16. Define allegory, and provide an example of an allegorical poem.
17. What did the gyre symbolize in the poetry of William Butler Yeats?
18. What are some of the characteristics of great poetry?
TOPICS FOR DISCUSSION
1. How can the tone of a poem exclude or alienate a reader? Give examples.
2. Do any of the poems in this chapter have an ironic tone? If so, which ones, and why did the poet choose to use irony?
3. Does the poet fail to maintain the sympathetic contract for you in any of the poems in this chapter-- including the selections at the end? If so, how or why was the contract broken?
4. As the reader, have you broken the sympathetic contract with the poet in any of these poems? If so, why has this occurred?
5. Do you agree with Ciardi that "Invictus" is a bad poem? Why or why not? You may wish to review the checklist of qualities that characterize a good poem at the end of Chapter 7.
6. Do you believe that any of the poems in this chapter have the characteristics of great poetry? If so, which poems, and why?
7. Do some of the poems in this chapter lack the qualities of great, or perhaps even of good poetry? If so, be prepared to explain why.
8. Who is the speaker in Silko's "Where Mountain Lion Lay Down with Deer"?
9. Discuss the similes in Hughes' "Dream Deferred." What are some of the human situations that these similes might describe?
10. Discuss the various possible symbolic interpretations of Blake's "The Sick Rose."
11. Discuss several possible allegorical interpretations of Rossetti's "Up-Hill."
12. Discuss Giovanni's definition of poetry in her poem "Poetry." Do you agree with her definition of poetry, or do you see poetry differently?
13. Discuss the use of metaphor and puns in Shakespeare's "Sonnet 143" and Donne's "A Hymn to God the Father," which appear at the end of this chapter. (Here's a hint: John Donne's last name was pronounced "Done.")
ACTIVITIES
1. Everyone in the class will make his or her own list of the characteristics of great poetry. Bring these lists to class for all to share. Notice whether several of the same qualities appear on several people's lists. Using consensus, compile a list which the class can agree upon of the characteristics of a great poem. Do not be afraid to disagree, to engage in debate, and to compromise.
2. Take turns reading "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" in class, each student reading a different section. Then discuss the poem's tone, theme, use of imagery, figures of speech, allusions, and symbolism. Each of these elements can be assigned to a small group of students who will report their perceptions to the class.
3. Organize a debate with one side arguing that "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock is a good (or even a bad) poem, but not a great poem. The other side will argue the case that it is a great poem.
4. Assign someone to research the history and characteristics of Byzantine art and to bring art books with reproductions of Byzantine art to class. Use this information as you discuss the relationship between Byzantine art and Yeats' poem "Sailing to Byzantium."
5. Assign an individual or a group of students to research and report on the myth of Zeus, Leda, and Helen, from Greek mythology. Then analyze together how Yeats has incorporated this myth into his poem, "Leda and the Swan."
6. Yeats himself said that his poem "Leda and the Swan" was intended as "an annunciation." Assign a group of students to research and explain the Christian concept of the Annunciation, illustrating their discussion with art books or slides depicting European paintings of the Annunciation. Assign someone else to find paintings depicting the myth of Leda and the Swan. Remembering Yeats' theory of the gyres of history, discuss the annunciation theme and its implications in this poem.
7. Assign one group of students to research the life and poetry of Walt Whitman and another group to research the life and poetry of Allen Ginsberg. Report your findings to the class and then discuss Ginsberg's "A Supermarket in California" in light of this shared information.
ANALYTICAL WRITING ASSIGNMENTS
1. Analyze elements from Metaphysical poetry in Herbert's "The Pulley."
2. Analyze the use of metaphor in Donne's "A Lecture upon the Shadow."
3. Research the context from which the "To be or not to be" soliloquy from Shakespeare's Hamlet was taken. Then analyze the passage, focusing on its theme and the poetic devices Shakespeare uses to express that theme.
4. Write an explication of one of the following poems:
John Donne's "Holy Sonnet Number 14"
Yeats' "The Second Coming " or
"Sailing to Byzantium"
Frost's "The Silken Tent"
Dickinson's "After great pain, a formal feeling comes"
5. Analyze Dickinson's "There's a certain Slant of light," focusing on personification and simile.
6. Analyze e.e.cummings' "the Cambridge ladies who live in furnished souls," focusing on theme and tone.
7. Analyze Yeats' "The Wild Swans at Coole," focusing on theme and imagery.
8. Analyze Burns' "A Red, Red Rose," focusing on simile, metaphor, and hyperbole.
9. Analyze the passage from Shakespeare's Macbeth, focusing on metaphor and archetype.
10. Analyze the tone in Herbert's "The Collar."
11. Compare and contrast Cervantes' "Mexico City: Spring" and Hebert's "Life in the Castle," focusing on tone, point of view, and theme.
12. Compare and contrast selected haiku by Basho and Issa, focusing on tone and theme.
13. Analyze Eliot's "Journey of the Magi," focusing on theme, figures of speech, and allusions.
14. Analyze Yeats' "The Second Coming," focusing on symbolism and theme.
CREATIVE WRITING ASSIGNMENTS
1. Select a poem that you have already written for a pervious assignment, and revise the poem, focusing primarily on tone. In your revision, you may wish to change the poem's point of view, use a persona, add or delete irony or humor, etc.
2. Go to a museum or look through several art books and find a painting that fascinates you. Then write a poem incorporating some of the images or themes from the painting.
3. Write a poem incorporating a character or theme from world mythology.
4. Everyone in the class will re-write Henley's "Invictus." Each student should make additions or deletions as he or she sees fit. Some options might include changing the title, making adjustments in the tone, adding imagery, or inserting symbols or archetypes. Share your revisions with one another and discuss the effect of the changes that have been made. Are any of these revisions better than the original poem?
5. Write a comic satire of "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock."
6. Write an allegorical poem.
7. Write a poem which contains at least one oxymoron.
8. Write a poem which contains hyperbole. Then re-write the same poem using litotes.
9. Write a poem based on an extended metaphor.
10. Write a poem which includes at least one archtypal figue or element.
ADDITIONAL POEMS FOR READING AND ANALYSIS FOCUSING ON TONE, FIGURES OF SPEECH, AND SYMBOLISM
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
England 1564-1616
From Hamlet
To be or not to be,--that is the question:--
Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,
And by opposing end them?--To die,--to sleep,--
No more; and by a sleep to say we end
The heart-ache and the thousand natural shocks
That flesh is heir to,--'tis a consummation
Devoutly to be wish'd. To die,--to sleep;--
To sleep! perchance to dream:--aye, there's the rub;
For in that sleep of death what dreams may come,
When we have shuffled off this mortal coil,
Must give us pause: there's the respect
That makes a calamity of so long life;
For who would bear the whips and scorns of time,
The oppressor's wrong, the proud man's contumely,
The pangs of despis'd love, the law's delay,
The insolence of office, and the spurns
That patient merit of the unworthy takes,
When he himself might his quietus make
With a bare bodkin? who would fardels bear,
To grunt and sweat under a weary life,
But that the dread of something after death,--
The undiscovered country, from whose bourn
No traveler returns,--puzzles the will,
And makes us rather bear those ills we have
Than to fly to others that we know not of?
Thus conscience does make cowards of us all;
From King Lear
No, no, no, no! Come, let's away to prison.
We two alone will sing like birds i' the cage.
When thou dost ask me blessing, I'll kneel down
And ask of thee forgiveness. So we'll live,
And pray, and sing, and tell old tales, and laugh
At gilded butterflies, and hear poor rogues
Talk of Court news. And we'll talk with them too,
Who loses and who wins, who's in, who's out.
And take upon's the mystery of things
As if we were God's spies. And we'll wear out,
In a walled prison, packs and sects of great ones
That ebb and flow by the moon.
From Macbeth
Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,
To the last syllable of recorded time,
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!
Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage
And then is heard no more. It is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.
Sonnet 29
When in disgrace with fortune and men's eyes
I all alone beweep my outcast state,
And trouble deaf Heaven with my bootless cries,
And look upon myself and curse my fate,
Wishing me like to one more rich in hope,
Featured like him, like him with friends possessed,
Desiring this man's art and that man's scope,
With what I most enjoy contented least--
Yet in these thoughts myself almost despising,
Haply I think on thee, and then my state,
Like to the lark at break of day arising
From sullen earth, sings hymns at Heaven's gate.
For thy sweet love remembered such wealth brings
That then I scorn to change my state with kings.
Sonnet 55
Not marble, nor the gilded monuments
Of princes, shall outlive this rhyme.
But you shall shine more bright in these contents
Than unswept stone, besmeared with sluttish time.
When wasteful war shall statues overturn,
And broils root out the work of masonry,
Nor Mars his sword, nor war's quick fire shall burn
The living record of your memory.
'Gainst death and all-oblivious enmity
Shall you pace forth. Your praise shall still find room
Even in the eyes of all posterity
That wear this world out to the ending doom.
So, till the judgment that yourself arise,
You live in this, and dwell in lovers' eyes.
Sonnet 143
Lo, as a careful housewife runs to catch
One of her feathered creatures broke away,
Sets down her babe, and makes all swift dispatch
In pursuit of the thing she would have stay
Whilst her neglected child holds her in chase,
Cries to catch her whose busy care is bent
To follow that which flies before her face,
Not prizing her poor infant's discontent--
So runn'st thou after that which flies from thee
Whilst I thy babe chase thee afar behind.
But if thou catch thy hope, turn back to me,
And play the mother's part, kiss me, be kind.
So will I pray that thou mayst have thy "Will,"
If thou turn back and my loud crying still.
JOHN DONNE
England 1572-1631
A Lecture upon the Shadow
Stand still, and I will read to thee
A lecture, Love, on love's philosophy.
These three hours that we have spent
Walking here, two shadows went
Along with us, which we ourselves produced;
But, now the sun is just above our head,
We do those shadows tread
And to brave clearness all things are reduced.
So, whilst our infant loves did grow,
Disguises did and shadows flow
From us and our care; but now 'tis not so.
That love hath not attained the high'st degree
Which is still diligent lest others see.
Except our loves at this noon stay,
We shall new shadows make the other way.
As the first were made to blind
Others, these which come behind
Will work upon ourselves, and blind our eyes.
If our loves faint and westwardly decline,
To me falsely thine
And I to thee mine actions shall disguise;
The morning shadows wear away,
But these grow longer all the day,
But, oh, love's day is short if love decay.
Love is a growing or full constant light,
And his first minute after noon is night.
A Hymn to God the Father
Wilt thou forgive that sin where I begun,
Which is my sin, though it were done before?
Wilt thou forgive that sin through which I run,
And do run still, though still I do deplore?
When thou hast done, thou hast not done,
For I have more.
Wilt thou forgive that sin by which I have won
Others to sin? and made my sin their door?
Wilt thou forgive that sin which I did shun
A year or two, but wallowed in a score?
When thou hast done, thou hast not done,
For I have more.
I have a sin of fear, that when I have spun
My last thread, I shall perish on the shore;
Swear by thy self, that at my death thy Son
Shall shine as he shines now and heretofore;
And, having done that, thou hast done,
I fear no more.
GEORGE HERBERT
England 1593-1633
The Pulley
When God first made man,
Having a glass of blessings standing by,
"Let us," said he, "pour on him all we can:
Let the world's riches, which dispersed lie,
Contract into a span."
So strength first made a way;
Then beauty flowed, then wisdom, honor, pleasure.
When almost all was out, God made a stay,
Perceiving that, alone of all his treasure,
Rest in the bottom lay.
"For if I should," said he,
"Bestow this jewel also on my creature,
He would adore my gifts instead of me,
And rest in Nature, not the God of Nature;
So both should losers be.
"Yet let him keep the rest,
But keep then with repining restlessness:
Let him be rich and weary, that at least,
If goodness lead him not, yet weariness
May toss him to my breast."
ROBERT BURNS
Scotland 1759-1796
A Red, Red Rose
O My Luve's like a red, red rose,
That's newly sprung in June;
O My Luve's like the melodie
That's sweetly played in tune,
As fair art thou, my bonnie lass,
So deep in luve am I;
And I will luve thee still, my dear,
Till a' the seas gang dry.
Till a' the seas gang dry, my dear,
And the rocks melt wi' the sun;
O I will love thee still, my dear,
While the sands o' life shall run.
And fare thee weel, my only luve,
And fare thee weel awhile!
And I will come again, my luve,
Though it were ten thousand mile.
EMILY DICKINSON
America 1830-1866
After great pain, a formal feeling comes
After great pain, a formal feeling comes--
The Nerves sit ceremonious, like Tombs--
The stiff Heart questions was it He, that bore,
And Yesterday, or Centuries before?
The Feet mechanical, go round--
Of Ground, or Air, or Ought--
A Wooden way
Regardless grown,
A Quartz contentment, like a stone--
This is the Hour of Lead--
Remembered, if outlived,
As Freezing persons, recollect the Snow--
First--Chill--then Stupor--then the letting go--
There's a certain Slant of light
There's a certain Slant of light,
Winter Afternoons--
That oppresses, like the Heft
Of Cathedral Tunes--
Heavenly Hurt, it gives us--
We can find no scar,
But internal difference,
Where the Meanings, are--
None may teach it--Any--
'Tis the Seal Despair--
An imperial affliction
Sent us of the Air--
When it comes, the Landscape listens--
Shadows--hold their breath--
When it goes, 'tis like the Distance
On the look of Death--
WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS
Ireland 1865-1939
The Wild Swans at Coole
The trees are in their autumn beauty,
The woodland paths are dry,
Under the October twilight the water
Mirrors a still sky;
Upon the brimming water among the stones
Are nine-and-fifty swans.
The nineteenth autumn has come upon me
Since I first made my count;
I saw, before I had well finished,
All suddenly mount
And scatter wheeling in great broken rings
Upon their clamourous wings.
I have looked upon those brilliant creatures,
And now my heart is sore.
All's changed since I, hearing at twilight,
The first time on this shore,
The bell-beat of their wings above my head,
Trod with a lighter tread.
Unwearied still, lover by lover,
They paddle in the cold
Companionable streams or climb the air;
Their hearts have not grown old;
Passion or conquest, wander where they will,
Attend upon them still.
But now they drift on the still water,
Mysterious, beautiful;
Among what rushes will they build,
By what lake's edge or pool
Delight men's eyes when I awake some day
To find they have flown away?
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
The 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?
Sailing to Byzantium
1
That is no country for old men. The young
In one another's arms, birds in the trees
--Those dying generations--at their song,
The salmon-falls, the mackerel-crowded seas,
Fish, flesh, or fowl, commend all summer long
Whatever is begotten, born, and dies.
Caught in that sensual music all neglect
Monuments of unaging intellect.
2
And aged man is but a paltry thing,
A tattered coat upon a stick, unless
Soul clap its hands and sing, and louder sing
For every tatter in its mortal dress,
Nor is there singing school but studying
Monuments of its own magnificence;
And therefore I have sailed the seas and come
To the holy city of Byzantium.
3
O sages standing in God's holy fire
As in the gold mosaic of a wall,
Come from the holy fire, perne in a gyre,
And be the singing-masters of my soul.
Consume my heart away; sick with desire
And fastened to a dying animal
It knows not what it is; and gather me
Into the artifice of eternity.
4
Once out of nature I shall never take
My bodily form from any natural thing,
But such a form as Grecian goldsmiths make
Of hammered gold and gold enamelling
To keep a drowsy Emperor awake;
Or set upon a golden bough to sing
To lords and ladies of Byzantium
Of what is past, or passing, or to come.
ROBERT FROST
America 1874-1963
The Silken Tent
She is as in a field a silken tent
At midday when a sunny summer breeze
Has dried the dew and all its ropes relent,
So that in guys it gently sways at ease,
And its supporting central cedar pole,
That is its pinnacle to heavenward
And signifies the sureness of the soul,
Seems to owe naught to any single cord,
But strictly held by none, is loosely bound
By countless silken ties of love and thought
To everything on earth the compass round,
And only by one's going slightly taut
In the capriciousness of summer air
Is of the slightest bondage made aware.
T.S. ELIOT
America (Naturalized British Citizen) 1888-1965
The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock
S'io credessi che mia risposta fosse
A persona che mai tornasse al mondo,
Questa fiamma staria senza piu scosse.
Ma per cio che giammai do questo fondo
Non torno vivo alcun, s'i'odo il vero,
Senza tema d'infamia ti rispondo*
(* The epigram above is from Dante's Inferno. "If I thought that my reply would be to one who would ever return to the world, this flame would stay without further movement; but since none has ever returned alive from this depth, if what I hear is true, I answer you without fear of infamy." This translation is from The Norton Anthology of English Literature.)
Let us go then, you and I,
When the evening is spread our against the sky
Like a patient etherised upon a table;
Let us go, through certain half-deserted streets,
The muttering retreats
Of restless nights in one-night cheap hotels
And sawdust restaurants with oyster-shells:
Streets that follow like a tedious argument
Of insidious intent
To lead you to an overwhelming question . . .
Oh, do not ask, 'What is it?'
Let us go and make our visit.
In the room the women come and go
Talking of Michelangelo.
The yellow fog that rubs its back upon the window-panes,
The yellow smoke that rubs its muzzle on the window-panes.
Licked its tongue into the corners of the evening,
Lingered upon the pools that stand in drains,
Let fall upon its back the soot that falls from chimneys,
Slipped by the terrace, make a sudden leap,
And seeing that it was a soft October night,
Curled once about the house, and fell asleep.
And indeed there will be time
For the yellow smoke that slides along the street
Rubbing its back upon the window-panes;
There will be time, there will be time
To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet;
There will be time to murder and create,
And time for all the works and days of hands
That lift and drop a question on your plate;
Time for you and time for me,
And time yet for a hundred indecisions,
And for a hundred visions and revisions,
Before the taking of a toast and tea.
In the room the women come and go
Talking of Michelangelo.
And indeed there will be time
To wonder, "Do I dare?' and "Do I dare?'
Time to turn back and descend the stair,
With a bald spot in the middle of my hair--
("They will say: 'How his hair is growing thin!')
My morning coat, my collar mounting firmly to the chin,
My necktie rich and modest, but asserted by a simple pin--
(They will say: 'But how his arms and legs are thin!)
Do I dare
Disturb the universe?
In a minute there is time
For decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse.
For I have known them all already, known them all--
Have known the evenings, mornings, afternoons,
I have measured out my life in coffee spoons;
I know the voices dying with a dying fall
Beneath the music from a farther room.
So how should I presume?
And I have known the eyes already, known them all--
The eyes that fix you in a formulated phrase,
And when I am formulated, sprawling on a pin,
When I am pinned and wriggling on the wall,
Then how should I begin
To spit out all the butt-ends of my days and ways?
And how should I presume?
And I have known the arms already, known them all--
Arms that are braceleted and white and bare
(But in the lamplight, downed with light brown hair!)
Is it perfume from a dress
That makes me so digress?
Arms that lie along a table, or wrap about a shawl.
And should I then presume?
And how should I begin?
.....
Shall I say, I have gone at dusk through narrow streets
And watched the smoke that rises from the pipes
Of lonely men in shirt-sleeves, leaning out of windows?...
I should have been a pair of ragged claws
Scuttling across the floors of silent seas.
.....
And the afternoon, the evening, sleeps so peacefully!
Smoothed by long fingers,
Asleep...tired...or it malingers,
Stretched on the floor, here beside you and me.
Should I, after tea and cakes and ices,
Have the strength to force the moment to its crisis?
But though I have wept and fasted, wept and prayed,
Though I have seen my head (grown slightly bald) brought in
upon a platter,
I am no prophet--and here's no great matter;
I have seen the moment of my greatness flicker,
And I have seen the eternal Footman hold my coat, and snicker.
And in short, I was afraid.
And would it have been worth it, after all,
After the cups, the marmalade, the tea,
Among the porcelain, among some talk of you and me,
Would it have been worth while,
To have bitten off the matter with a smile,
To have squeezed the universe into a ball
To roll it towards some overwhelming question,
To say: 'I am Lazarus, come from the dead,
Come back to tell you all, I shall tell you all'--
If one, settling a pillow by her head,
Should say: 'That is not what I meant at all.
That is not it, at all.'
And would it have been worth it, after all,
Would it have been worth while,
After the sunsets and the dooryards and the sprinkled streets,
After the novels, after the teacups, after the skirts that trail along
the floor--
And this, and so much more?--
It is impossible to say just what I mean!
But as if a magic lantern threw the nerves in patterns on a
screen:
Would it have been worth while
If one, settling a pillow or throwing off a shawl,
And turning toward the window, should say:
'That is not it at all,
That is not what I meant, at all.'
.....
No! I am not Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be;
Am an attendant lord, one that will do
To swell a progress, start a scene or two,
Advise the prince; no doubt, and easy tool,
Deferential, glad to be of use,
Politic, cautious, and meticulous;
Full of high sentence, but a bit obtuse;
At time, indeed, almost ridiculous--
Almost, at times, the Fool.
I grow old...I grow old...
I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled.
Shall I part my hair behind? Do I dare to eat a peach?
I shall wear white flannel trousers, and walk upon the beach.
I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each.
I do not think that they will sing to me.
I have seen them riding seaward on the waves
Combing the white hair of the waves blown back
When the wind blows the water white and black.
We have lingered in the chambers of the sea
By sea-girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown
Till human voices wake us, and we drown.
e.e.cummings
America 1894-1962
the Cambridge ladies who live in furnished souls
are unbeautiful and have comfortable minds
(also, with the church's protestant blessings
daughters, unscented shapeless spirited)
they believe in Christ and Longfellow, both dead,
are invariably interested in so many things--
at the present writing one still finds
delighted fingers knitting for the is it Poles?
perhaps. While permanent faces coyly bandy
scandal of Mrs. N and Professor D
....the Cambridge ladies do not care, above
Cambridge if sometimes in its box of
sky lavender and cornerless, the
moon rattles like a fragment of angry candy
FINDING THE POET
CHAPTER 9 ELEMENTS OF POETRY--THEME
In the previous eight chapters, you have learned a great deal about poetry. You have read some wonderful poems, and I hope you've also written some. Together, we have studied most of the important aspects of poetry, and I encourage you to spend the rest of your life exploring the rest. I have saved our discussion of theme for the end of our section on the elements of poetry because I believe that's where it belongs.
As you know, the theme of a poem is its message; a theme is a universal insight or lesson. A theme in poetry is not just an idea or a single abstraction such as love or loneliness. Some readers might say that Robert Burns' famous poem "A Red Red Rose," which you read in the previous chapter, is on the theme of love. In an way, this is true, but when we analyze literature, we must discipline ourselves to state the theme of a piece of writing in a complete, well focused sentence. For example, if we say that Burns' poem is about love, that simple statement does not clarify for the reader what attitude about love is being expressed in the poem. The reader would have a much more coherent understanding of the theme if we stated, "Robert Burns' poem 'A Red Red Rose' expresses the conviction that love is eternal and can endure separation and adversity." Similarly, if we had the courage to assert that T.S. Eliot's "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" is on the theme of loneliness, we would probably not be wrong. However, if we stated that "Eliot's 'The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock' expresses the alienation, insecurity, and fear experienced by many middle-aged people," a reader would have a better chance to focus on the poem's message.
When we speak and write about theme in poetry, we must also remember that the theme is not about the poet or the characters in the poem. For example, the theme of "Richard Cory" is not that Richard was lonely and depressed in spite of his wealth. The character of Richard is simply one of the elements that Edwin Arlington Robinson used to express his theme. Thus, we might way that "'Richard Cory,' by Edwin Arlington Robinson, expresses the theme that money and prestige are not sufficient to provide a meaningful life." Similarly, John Donne's "A Hymn to God the Father" is not on the theme of Donne's own fears about the afterlife. Instead, we might say that, "John Donne's 'A Hymn to God the Father' expresses the theme of doubt, pointing out that even among people of faith, the fear that God may not exist still remains."
I hope the examples that I have just given illustrate the idea that a theme is a universal message, not just an issue or concern of the poet or of a character who appears in the poem. In the same vein, Sylvia Plath's poem "Metaphors" celebrates the transforming power of pregnancy, not just the combination of delight and fear that Plath herself experienced when she was pregnant. In the sense that a poetic theme is universal, it should be meaningful to all readers, not just to readers who have had the same experience as the one described in the poem. Because it deals with human issues of loneliness and separation, even a young woman, who will never be in Prufrock's situation, should be able to appreciate the themes in "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock." Similarly, even men, who will obviously never experience pregnancy, should be able to share the sense of wonder about the creation of new life expressed in Plath's "Metaphors." And even an atheist should be able to empathize with the anguish and doubt described in Donne's "A Hymn to God the Father." Beneath the particular images and events described in a poem lies its theme, a general message about the nature of being human.
You will notice that most poems do not contain a statement of theme. A poem is not like an analytical essay which should contain a thesis-- a general statement that focuses and limits the scope of the essay. This is one of the principal differences between poetry and analytical writing. Although the poet usually does not state the theme directly, he or she may hint at it in various ways. The reader's job is to learn how to look for these hints. Let's scrutinize the following poem by Gwendolyn Brooks to see if we can determine its theme:
Sadie and Maud
Maud went to college.
Sadie stayed at home.
Sadie scraped life
With a fine-tooth comb.
She didn't leave a tangle in.
Her comb found every strand.
Sadie was one of the livingest chits
In all the land.
Sadie bore two babies
Under her maiden name.
Maud and Ma and Papa
Nearly died of shame.
When Sadie said her last so-long
Her girls struck out from home.
(Sadie had left as heritage
Her fine-tooth comb.)
Maud, who went to college,
Is a thin brown mouse.
She is living all alone
In this old house.
In this poem, Brooks uses a device borrowed from traditional rhetoric and often used in analytical writing-- comparison and contrast. Actually, the poem is based primarily on contrast. By pointing out the differences between the two sisters' lives, Brooks helps the reader to see that the choice of life style that each sister has made has both enriched and impoverished her life. We know that the theme of the poem is not about Sadie and Maud, and it is not about Gwendolyn Brooks. Thinking and feeling our way through the images in this poem, can we find a universal human message beneath the surface? How about something straightforward like, "Gwendolyn Brooks' 'Sadie and Maud' explores the theme that every person both gains and loses from the choices that he or she makes."
You will notice in all the examples I've given that I am careful to include the author's name and the name of the poem, followed by my statement of what I believe the poem's theme to be. I am modeling this technique for you because this is a good method of developing the thesis for an analytical essay. Any meaningful analysis of a poem should include the poem's theme in the discussion since the theme is, after all, the point of the poem. A poetry analysis which focuses on elements in the poem such as synecdoche, metonymy, and oxymorons without trying to come to grips with what the poem is really all about is a pretty pointless exercise. You can develop a thesis for an analysis of a poem by beginning with your statement of theme then inserting the elements you intend to analyze as they help to reveal the poem's theme. Of course, you will only be ready to do this after you have completed the ten-step process for reading a poem and looked carefully at all of the elements in the poem. Let's try this system on "Sadie and Maud" to create a hypothetical thesis statement for an analysis of this poem. How about, "Gwendolyn Brooks uses contrasting imagery and metaphor in her poem 'Sadie and Maud' to explore the theme that career choices both enhance and limit the quality of human life."
Maybe you don't think that "Sadie and Maud" is about the effects of life style choices at all. Maybe you think this poem is about the idea that living life fully is more important than receiving a formal education. You should know by now that you have the right to interpret a poem as you see fit. But you need to provide evidence from the poem itself to support your interpretation. Have you noticed that interpreting the theme of a poem is a similar process to analyzing symbols and archetypes? Let's look at a famous poem by Robert Frost to see if we can discern its theme and identify the elements that Frost uses to suggest his theme to the reader.
Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening
Whose woods these are I think I know.
His house is in the village, though;
He will not see me stopping here
To watch his woods fill up with snow.
My little horse must think it queer
To stop without a farmhouse near
Between the woods and frozen lake
The darkest evening of the year.
He gives his harness bells a shake
To ask if there is some mistake.
The only other sound's the sweep
Of easy wind and downy flake.
The woods are lovely, dark, and deep,
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep.
This poem has a surface simplicity that is typical of Frost's style, and he usually includes some well-chosen images that might be symbolic. This poem also has a setting, just as many short stories do, and the setting-- which includes time and place-- can also help hint at the poem's theme. In this poem, the speaker is driving a horse and buggy along a country road during a snow fall in the middle of winter, perhaps on the winter solstice. The narrator unexpectedly stops his horse and gazes out through the darkness and snow into the woods beyond. Then he decides to continue his journey, reminding himself that he has things to do-- "promises to keep," and a long distance to travel-- "miles to go before I sleep." What do you think? Do you see any archetypes here? How about winter? And how about the darkness and the snow? Some readers think that winter, darkness, and snow carry archetypal overtones of death. Is it possible that, while the speaker is stopped in the lonely, silent, dark and snowy night, he has an intimation of his own death, but a moment later, like his horse, he "shakes it off" and continues his ordinary, task-oriented life. If this interpretation is valid, the final word in the poem, "sleep," is a metaphoric synonym for death. If this way of looking at the poem makes sense to you, how could you develop a thesis for an analysis focusing on theme? Here's a possibility: "In 'Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening,' Robert Frost uses imagery and archetypes to explore the theme that nature reveals our human mortality in rare moments of reflection." There are many other ways of interpreting this poem and hundreds of possible ways of stating its theme. As long as you find the theme in the elements of the poem itself, your interpretation should be as valid as anyone else's.
What if we were able to speak to Robert Frost in the next world? Would he be able to give us a clearer understanding of the theme of this poem and the symbolic meanings of his images? Probably not. I believe that Carl Jung was correct when he asserted that the creative process works through the poet as its medium, and the poet is not always fully conscious of exactly what his or her poems are all about. And I know from my own experience of writing poetry for the past twenty-five years, that the poet is often not aware of a theme at all when she or he begins to write. In my case, usually an image or a situation inspires me to begin writing, and I just hope that the poem will have some point by the time I'm finished. I've learned to trust this creative process. If an image gains a powerful hold on my imagination, I believe that there is a theme hiding behind that image somewhere and that theme will find a way of revealing itself to the reader. My job is to choose my words carefully and present the images as clearly as I can. A poem that I wrote a long time ago illustrates this process.
Black Jack Springs, June 25
Wild roses jumble like weeds along the old fences.
I've never seen the land so green.
Grandma said they had a rainy winter,
And even last night, my first night home
For months and months, there was the sharp
Sound of water on the metal awnings
Above the sleeping porch windows
As I lay looking out at the big elm
Against the cloudy night sky.
Lightning flashed, and the little redbud tree
Came out of darkness. Then the thunder.
The neighbors' puppy howled and hid
Under the back porch steps,
Over across the alley.
I was happier then than I had been
For months and months.
Today, we're out in the country looking for the cemetery
Where some of our people are buried.
Grandma thinks she knows.
Is it Oak Hill or Quaker Valley?
No, that's not right.
They put your uncle Jimmy there.
Maybe it was over to Joplin or out to Lowell.
Grandpa's ninety, and he's driving,
But he shouldn't be.
He's run into a lot of ditches lately.
Grandma says you might as well shoot him
As tell him he can't drive.
A bob-white quail skitters across the road;
Grandma points out a scissor-tail flycatcher,
Then a cardinal.
Grandpa's elderly Oldsmobile wanders over to the left
Across the faint center line.
No one is coming from the other way,
So I don't say a thing.
But I read in this morning's paper
That Custer was killed on the Little Big Horn
On June 25.
Shoal Creek is a livelier place to die;
It's higher than usual, and the mad tangle of vegetation
Grows right down to the water's edge,
And some of the trumpet vines dangle in.
Tiger lilies and century plants are everywhere,
And a few white faced cattle graze
Right up to the dense thickets of sumac and oak.
We forget about the graveyard,
And Grandpa tells me
That they used to drive his Model T
Over to Black Jack, not too far from here,
And fill up their barrels with spring water.
Grandma tries to tell me
Just how good that spring water tasted.
When I first wrote this poem, I just wanted to record my responses to an afternoon drive I took with my mother and her parents on a visit to the Ozarks where I was born. I was struck by the fact that although my grandfather was much too old to drive safely, I did not have the courage to tell him that he should stop driving. I was actually willing to risk my life to maintain my grandfather's dignity. These were my thoughts when I wrote the poem. Later, someone who had read this poem said to me, "I like the way you contrast life and death in this poem, with the cemetery symbolizing death and the spring water symbolizing life, and your grandparents, even though they are very old, choose life over death by focusing on the spring water at the end of the poem and forgetting about the graveyard." This response startled me because I had thought of this as a simple descriptive poem, and I had not consciously included any symbolism. Nor had I deliberately included the theme of the triumph of life over death.
In a poem I wrote more recently, again theme was not my primary objective. I was playing with an objective correlative. I wanted to contrast designs that appear in nature with designs made by human beings, and I used pinstripes as my focal point.
Pinstripes
There are very few pinstripes in nature.
Occasionally clouds will send out long thin fingers,
But there is a softness to them,
A willingness to give way, to fade into curves,
To dissipate.
Sometimes rocks have long striations
That run parallel in an almost geometric way,
But their strident hues bring a strangeness to stones,
And the lines are never perfect.
If a draftsman were to measure them,
They would fall between the little markings
On his instrument.
What about zebras?
Have you ever really looked at one?
Their stripes curve around those chubby bodies
In the oddest way.
A zebra's stripes can lead you
Down a road filled with surprises.
There is a lesson here
For those who are clothed in pinstripes.
I have a bad habit of getting to the end of a poem I'm writing and suddenly panicking because the poem doesn't seem to have a theme. So I tack one on to the end of the poem. I came dangerously close to doing that in this poem. In several other poems I've written, I've actually had to chop off the last several lines because I was getting too explanatory. A poem should not need any explanation. Its theme should naturally emerge out of the images and the other elements in the poem. What do you think the theme of "Pinstripes" is? Even though I wrote it, I would still have to think carefully to formulate a statement of the poem's theme. How about this: "In 'Pinstripes' Rose Anna Higashi uses contrasting imagery to explore the theme that some human beings lack the flexibility and spontaneity of nature."
I hope I've made the point that poets seldom start with a theme first and then write a poem to illustrate that theme. Poets are usually inspired by a deeply felt emotion or an inscape that captures their imaginations. Sometimes a place or a dramatic incident inspires a poem. To be honest, I wrote "Pinstripes" after gazing at all the pinstriped suits lined up in my husband's closet. Sometimes even a dream can create the impetus for a poem. The following poem by Samuel Taylor Coleridge came from a dream:
Kubla Khan
Or, a Vision in a Dream. A Fragment
In Xanadu did Kubla Khan
A stately pleasure-dome decree:
Where Alph, the sacred river, ran
Through caverns measureless to man
Down to a sunless sea.
So twice five miles of fertile ground
With walls and towers were girdled round:
And there were gardens bright with sinuous rills,
Where blossomed many an incense-bearing tree;
And here were forests ancient as the hills,
Enfolding sunny spots of greenery.
But oh! that deep romantic chasm which slanted
Down the green hill athwart a cedarn cover!
A savage place! as holy and enchanted
As e'er beneath a waning moon was haunted
By woman wailing for her demon-lover!
And from this chasm, with ceaseless turmoil seething,
As if this earth in fast thick pants were breathing,
A mighty fountain momently was forced:
Amid whose swift half-intermitted burst
Huge fragments vaulted like rebounding hail,
Or chaffy grain beneath the thresher's flail:
And 'mid these dancing rocks at once and ever
It flung up momently the sacred river.
Five miles meandering with a mazy motion
Through wood and dale the sacred river ran,
Then reached the caverns measureless to man,
And sank in tumult to a lifeless ocean:
And 'mid this tumult Kubla heard from far
Ancestral voices prophesying war!
The shadow of the dome of pleasure
Floated midway on the waves;
Where was heard the mingled measure
From the fountain and the caves.
It was a miracle of rare device,
A sunny pleasure-dome with caves of ice!
A damsel with a dulcimer
In a vision once I saw:
It was an Abyssinian maid,
And on her dulcimer she played,
Singing of Mount Abora.
Could I revive within me
Her symphony and song,
To such a deep delight 'twould win me,
That with music loud and long,
I would build that dome in air,
That sunny dome! those caves of ice!
And all who heard should see them there,
And all should cry, Beware! Beware!
His flashing eyes, his floating hair!
Weave a circle round him thrice,
And close your eyes with holy dread,
For he on honey-dew hath fed,
And drunk the milk of Paradise.
Unfortunately, Coleridge was addicted to opium, and this poem was the product of an opium-induced dream. He began writing as soon as he woke up, trying to capture the vision from his dream. He was interrupted by a visitor, and later when he returned to writing the poem, he was unable to remember the rest of the dream. Thus, the poem remains a fragment, as Coleridge himself calls it, and its theme is very difficult to discern. Although the poem is filled with vivid and beautiful imagery, it is not easy to find a universal message beneath the surface of these lovely images. What can we learn from "Kubla Khan"? It seems to me that this poem illustrates the fact that beauty of diction and imagery are not quite enough to make a poem succeed. A poem really does need to share some meaningful perception of human experience with the reader. If we were to compare "Kubla Khan" with Coleridge's masterpiece, "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner," which appears in Chapter 4, it would be obvious that "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner" contains several significant themes and truly shares some important insights with the reader. Somehow the reader feels much more satisfied after reading "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner" than after reading "Kubla Khan." However, it is not right for me to discourage you. Perhaps you prefer "Kubla Khan," and you might even see themes in that poem which have eluded me.
We must not forget that ultimately a poem must communicate something to the reader about what it means to be human. It is through the poem's theme that this is achieved. But the mysterious thing about theme in poetry is that it should be completely invisible on the surface of the poem. Another subtlety is the fact that the words and images in a poem should be as specific as possible yet its theme is universal. In a good poem, the particular images or events described by the poet are then transformed in the reader's understanding to a shared human insight, even if the reader has never experienced the exact situation being described. The following poem by Adrienne Rich describes a very specific set of circumstances, yet its theme reaches out to everyone.
Aunt Jennifer's Tigers
Aunt Jennifer's tigers prance across a screen,
Bright topaz denizens of a world of green.
They do not fear the men beneath the tree;
They pace in sleek chivalric certainty.
Aunt Jennifer's fingers fluttering through the wool
Find even the ivory needle hard to pull.
The massive weight of Uncle's wedding band
Sits heavily upon Aunt Jennifer's hand.
When Aunt is dead, her terrified hands will lie
Still ringed with ordeals she was mastered by.
The tigers in the panel that she made
Will go on prancing, proud and unafraid.
This poem seems to be describing a specific woman named Jennifer who has created a magnificent needlework panel depicting courageous tigers on a green background. The composition also includes a tree and some men who do not frighten the tigers in the least. Although Aunt Jennifer has made this screen filled with fearless tigers, she herself is a passive person who finds her marriage oppressive-- "The massive weight of Uncle's wedding band/ Sits heavily upon Aunt Jennifer's hand." And she has never been the master of her own fate. From this specific situation, the reader can infer certain themes. Some readers might conclude that the poem's theme has to do with the repressive nature of marriage. Others might focus on the contrast between the world of art and imagination and the ordinary world of everyday tasks. A more feminist interpretation might focus on the abuse of women through male intimidation. A reader who chose to write an analysis of "Aunt Jennifer's Tigers" would of course be free to explore any theme that he or she perceived in the poem. But that analysis would need to include a clearly stated thesis including both the poem's theme and the specific elements in the poem to be analyzed.
The final idea I would like for you to remember about theme is that a poem's theme and its subject are not the same thing. In terms of subject, "Aunt Jennifer's Tigers" is about needlework, but this is certainly not the theme of the poem. Aunt Jennifer could have created beautiful cakes decorated with ferocious tigers, and the poem would still have expressed the same themes. The following poem by the Chilean poet and Nobel Prize winner, Pablo Neruda, is about the growing, shipping, and selling of South American fruit by an American corporation. Although the subject of this poem has to do with fruit, its theme is very different.
The United Fruit Co.
When the trumpet sounded, it was
all prepared on the earth,
and Jehovah parceled out the earth
to Coca-Cola, Inc., Anaconda,
Ford Motors, and other entities:
The Fruit Company, Inc.
reserved for itself the most succulent,
the central coast of my own land,
the delicate waist of America.
It rechristened its territories
as the "Banana Republics"
and over the sleeping dead,
over the restless heroes
who brought about the greatness,
the liberty and the flags,
it established the comic opera:
abolished the independencies.
presented the crowns of Caesar,
unsheathed envy, attracted
the dictatorship of the flies
Trujillo flies, Tacho flies,
Carias flies, Martinez flies,
Ubico flies, damp flies,
of modest blood and marmalade,
drunken flies who zoom
over the ordinary graves,
circus flies, wise flies
well trained in tyranny.
Among the bloodthirsty flies
the Fruit Company lands its ships,
taking off the coffee and the fruit;
the treasure of our submerged
territories flows as though
on plates into the ships.
Meanwhile Indians are falling
into the sugared chasms
of the harbors, wrapped
for burial in the mist of the dawn:
a body rolls, a thing
that has no name, a fallen cipher,
a cluster of dead fruit
thrown down on the dump.
Translated by Robert Bly
What do you think the theme of this poem is? Again, the images will guide us. How about all of those flies? Neruda uses the word "flies" at least ten times, and it does not create a pretty picture. This is not a poem by Kobayashi Issa expressing Buddhist compassion for the vulnerable insects of the world. Instead, the reader begins to visualize hideous fruit flies swarming over rotting fruit. The names Trujillo, Tacho, Carias, Martinez, and Ubico refer to political dictators in South America-- "the dictatorship of the flies." The conclusion of the poem presents another disturbing image-- Native Americans thrown away on a garbage dump like "a cluster of dead fruit." These images of death, rotting fruit, and flies present a very strong indication of the poem's theme. The poem is certainly saying something about the exploitation of natural resources and native people. Our first impulse might be to formulate a statement of theme something like this: "In 'The United Fruit Co.' Pablo Neruda expresses the theme of the exploitation of South American natural resources and native people by greedy dictators and American corporations." In a way, this is the theme of the poem, but has it really been stated as a universal insight into human experience? Aren't we still confusing the subject of the poem with its theme? When analyzing poetry, we need to look for the deepest level of universality when we express a poem's theme. On the deepest level, the poem is about the exploitation of the poor and vulnerable by the rich and greedy. Although Neruda wrote about the cynical abuse of natural and human resources in his own country and specifically mentioned the names of certain American corporations and actual South American dictators, his message could be applied to similar situations in many places throughout the world. Let's try again to state the poem's theme in more universal language. How about this: "In 'The United Fruit Co.' Pablo Neruda uses vivid imagery to express the theme of the exploitation and abuse of natural resources and native people by those who are powerful, wealthy , and self-serving."
I hope that you will remember these principles as you explore the rest of the poems in this book. Keep in mind that the theme does not reveal itself to the reader right away. You will need to study all of the elements of the poem and reflect carefully before you can begin to clarify a statement of the poem's theme. And you will always need to be cautious not to confuse the poem's subject with its theme. Searching for the deepest and most universal level of a poem's theme is one of the most profound and meaningful aspects of being a reader of poetry. There is so much in the world that divides and separates people and so much energy being poured into focusing on differences that poetry is one of our last refuges where we can go to connect with one another on our deepest level of humanity.
QUESTIONS AND TOPICS FOR REVIEW
1. What is a theme in poetry?
2. When discussing a poem, what elements should be included in a statement of theme?
3. How can a statement of theme be revised to become a thesis statement for an analytical essay?
4. Why is the theme of a poem not about the poet nor about one of the characters in the poem?
5. Do most poems contain a statement of theme? Why or why not?
6. How can the reader determine the theme of a poem?
7. Do most poets start with the theme first and then write the poem? Why or why not?
8. What is the difference between a poem's subject and its theme?
9. Why is it important to express a poem's theme in its most universal form?
TOPICS FOR DISCUSSION
1. Discuss the various possible themes in Frost's "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening."
2. Discuss the theme or themes in Coleridge's "Kubla Khan."
3. Discuss the various methods that a reader can use to discern the theme of a poem.
4. Re-read Coleridge's "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner," which appears in Chapter 4, and discuss the various possible themes in this poem.
5. Discuss whether or not a reader's gender might influence his or her interpretation of a poem's theme. You may wish to use Rich's "Aunt Jennifer's Tigers" and Eliot's "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock," which appears in Chapter 8, as the basis of this discussion.
6. Discuss whether or not a reader's political or economic values might influence his or her interpretation of a poem's theme. Use Neruda's "The United Fruit Co." as the basis for this discussion.
7. Re-read John Donne's "A Lecture Upon the Shadow," which appears in Chapter 8.
Then discuss the poem's theme. What elements or poetic techniques does Donne use to express this theme?
8. Discuss the theme of Yakamochi Otomo's "While I waited and wondered," which appears at the end of this chapter. How does Yakamochi convey his theme to the reader? (Just as a point of information, it is customary in Japan to refer to writers by their given names rather than their family names. There have been many famous poets in Japan from the Otomo family, including Yakamochi's father, Tabito.)
ACTIVITIES
1. Working in pairs, rewrite the following statements of theme, revising for clarity and focus, and adding or deleting as necessary.
A. "Sadie and Maud" is about how she was smarter than her sister,
even though her sister went to college.
B. Frost's poem about riding around in the snow is about the poet's
death wish.
C. Higashi's "Pinstripes" is about how she doesn't like pinstripes.
D. Coleridge's "Kubla Khan" is a totally hopeless poem that has
nothing to say.
E. Rich must have some kind of grudge against men. You can see it
in her poem about her aunt's tigers.
F. Neruda expresses a lot of anti-American propaganda in his
fruit poem.
G. Otomo's poem is about how he wants to give a branch of orange
blossoms to a lady.
H. Otomo's other poem is on how he's really sorry that he didn't
talk to his brother more before he died.
I. Percy's poem "Ozymandias" in a way reminds me of Yeats'
"The Second Coming."
J. Browning's "Porphyria's Lover" is a creepy poem about murder.
K. In "Domination of Black" the poet feels very afraid
because it is so dark outside.
L. "Love the Wild Swan" is a sonnet about swans. It reminds me
of Yeats too.
Share your revised statements of theme with your classmates and discuss the improvements you have made.
2. Again working in pairs, and using the revised statements of theme, develop each into a thesis statement for an analytical essay. You will need to decide which elements of the poem you will be analyzing. Share these thesis statements with the class.
3. Assign someone to research the influence of Modern painting on the poetry of Wallace Stevens. Then discuss these influences in his poem "Domination of Black."
4. Arrange a mock murder trial for the narrator in Browning's "Porphyria's Lover." You will need a prosecutor, a defense attorney, and someone to play the narrator himself who will be asked to testify.
Other members of the class will play the jury who will deliberate his fate.
5. Every member of the class will write a statement of theme for Auden's "The Unknown Citizen." Write some of these on the board and discuss the poem in light of these statements of theme.
6. Assign someone to research the story of Caedmon and to bring a translation of the Anglo-Saxon poem "Caedmon's Hymn" to class. Use this information as the basis for a discussion of Levertov's "Caedmon."
ANALYTICAL WRITING ASSIGNMENTS
1. Select one of the thesis statements developed in Activity #2 above, and write an analytical essay which includes this thesis statement.
2. Develop a thesis statement and write an analytical essay on Shelley's " Ozymandias."
3. Using your own statement of theme for Auden's "The Unknown Citizen," develop this into a thesis statement and write an analytical essay on this poem.
4. Write an analytical essay focusing on theme and imagery in Stevens' "Domination of Black."
5. Write an analytical essay comparing and contrasting Yeats' "The Wild Swans at Coole," which appears in Chapter 8, and Jeffers' "Love the Wild Swan."
6. Write an analytical essay on Angelou's "Caged Bird," focusing on theme, sound devices, and archetypes.
CREATIVE WRITING ASSIGNMENTS
1. Select a poem that you have written for a previous assignment. Edit this poem carefully to remove any thematic or explanatory statements that you may have included.
2. Select a fairly long poem that you have written for a previous assignment. Remove the last several lines of the poem. Does the poem still make sense? Does it still communicate your theme to the reader?
3. Select a poem that you have previously written and that you are willing to share with another student for peer editing. Exchange poems (you may wish to do this anonymously) and edit your classmate's poem, focusing on three areas-- diction, tone, and theme. Delete any thematic or explanatory statements that you find in your classmate's poem. Also, make some specific comments or recommendations about strengthening the poem's diction and tone. Finally, write a statement of theme for the poem that you have just edited. Return the poems to their authors. Read the comments and suggestions and think about their value. Are you surprised by your classmate's statement of your poem's theme? If you feel comfortable doing so, you may wish to read some of these poems and the statements of theme to the class for discussion.
4. Searching through your journal or your memory, focus on a dramatic incident that you have experienced that remains significant to you. Using descriptive imagery and a narrative format, recount this incident in the form of a poem. Stop when you reach the conclusion of the narrative, and do not add any explanatory comments. Pass these poems around the class. Each reader will write a statement of theme on the back of each poem he or she reads. When your poem is returned to you, read all of the statements of theme and think about which one best expresses what this incident meant to you. Then edit your poem to refocus the imagery and events to help reveal the poem's theme more clearly.
5. Record your dreams in your journal for several days. Then select one of your dreams and use it as the basis of a poem. Read these poems to each other in class and discuss what you perceive the themes of these poems to be. Here's a hint: If you can't remember your dreams, try keeping your eyes closed for a few minutes when you first wake up in the morning. Your dreams may come back to you.
ADDITIONAL POEMS FOR READING AND ANALYSIS FOCUSING ON THEME
YAKAMOCHI OTOMO
Japan 718-785
While I waited and wondered,
The orange-tree that grows in my garden,
Spreading out a hundred branches,
Has burst into bloom, as the fifth month
For garland-making draws near.
Every morning and every day I go out
To see the flowers and keep close guard,
Lest they should fall off
Before you, whom I love as the breath of life,
Have seen them once on a night when the moon
Is clear as a shining mirror.
But the wicked cuckoo,
Though I chase him again and again,
Comes crying in the sad hours of dawn
And wantonly scatters the blooms on the ground.
Knowing not what to do,
I have reached and broken off these with my hand,
Pray, see them, my lady!
Envoys
These are the orange-blossoms of my garden
I had intended you to see
Some time after mid-month
On a clear moonlight night.
The cuckoo has scattered
My orange blossoms on the ground.
Oh, had he only come
After you had seen the flowers!
Translated by The Japanese Classics Translation
Committee, Seiichi Taki, Chairperson
An Elegy on the Death of His Younger Brother
When, at our Sovereign's command,
I started on my travels
To rule the province far-off as the skies,
My brother followed me across the hills of Nara
As far as Izumi's shining bed;
There we stayed our horses,
And in parting, said I:
'In safely I shall go and come back home,
Be happy, pray to the gods and wait.'
Ever since, I have sorely missed him,
With the road stretching far
And rivers and mountains between us;
While thus eager for a sight of him,
A courier came--how gladly I received him!
I asked!--With what strange, wild words he
answered me!
My dearest brother--of all times of the year,
In autumn when the waving susuki blooms,
At his home where blow the bush-clovers,
Neither walking in his court at morn,
Nor treading the ground at eve,
He passed through the village of his native Saho,
And rose into white clouds trailing
Over the tree-tops of the hill:
So the courier said.
Envoys
Although I wished him health,
He rose into white-trailing clouds,
How sad I am to hear!
Had I known him destined thus,
I had shown him the breakers on the jutting rocks
Of the sea of Koshi!
Translated by the Japanese Classics Translation
Committee, Seiichi Taki, Chairperson
PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY
England 1792-1822
Ozymandias*
I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert...Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed:
And on the pedestal these words appear:
'My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!'
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.
* Rameses ll, pharaoh of Egypt in the thirteenth century B.C. was called Ozymandias by the Greeks.
ROBERT BROWNING
England 1812-1889
Porphyria's Lover
The rain set early in to-night,
The sullen wind was soon awake,
It tore the elm-tops down for spite,
And did its worst to vex the lake:
I listened with heart fit to break.
When glided in Porphyria; straight
She shut the cold out and the storm,
And kneeled and made the cheerless grate
Blaze up, and all the cottage warm;
Which done, she rose, and from her form
Withdrew the dripping cloak and shawl,
And laid her soiled gloves by, untied
Her hat and let the damp hair fall,
And, last, she sat down by my side
And called me. When no voice replied,
She put my arm around her waist,
And made her smooth white shoulder bare,
And all her yellow hair displaced,
And stooping, make my cheek lie there
And spread, o'er all, her yellow hair,
Murmuring how she loved me--she
Too weak, for all her heart's endeavor,
To set its struggling passion free
From pride, and vainer ties dissever,
And give herself to me forever.
But passion sometimes would prevail,
Nor could tonight's gay feast restrain
A sudden thought of one so pale
For love of her, and all in vain:
So, she was come through wind and rain.
Be sure I looked up at her eyes
Happy and proud; at last I knew
Porphyria worshipped me; surprise
Made my heart swell, and still it grew
While I debated what to do.
That moment she was mine, mine, fair,
Perfectly pure and good: I found
A thing to do, and all her hair
In one long yellow string I wound
Three times her little throat around
And strangled her. No pain felt she;
I am quite sure she felt no pain.
As a shut bud that hold a bee,
I warily oped her lids: again
Laughed the blue eyes without a stain.
And I untightened next the tress
About her neck, her cheek once more
Blushed bright beneath my burning kiss:
I propped her head up as before
Only this time my shoulder bore,
Her head, which droops upon it still:
The smiling rosy little head,
So glad it has its utmost will,
That all it scorned at once is fled,
And I, its love, am gained instead!
Porphyria's love: she guessed not how
Her darling one wish would be heard.
And thus we sit together now,
And all night long we have not stirred,
And yet God has not said a word!
WALLACE STEVENS
America 1879-1955
Domination of Black
At night, by the fire,
The colors of the bushes
And of the fallen leaves,
Repeating themselves,
Turned in the room,
Like the leaves themselves
Turning in the wind.
Yes: but the colors of the heavy hemlocks
Came striding.
And I remembered the cry of the peacocks.
The colors of their tails
Were like the leaves themselves
Turning in the wind,
In the twilight wind.
They swept over the room,
Just as they flew from the boughs of the hemlocks
Down to the ground.
I heard them cry--the peacocks.
Was it a cry against the twilight
Or against the leaves themselves
Turning in the wind,
Turning as the flames
Turned in the fire,
Turning as the tails of the peacocks
Turned in the loud fire,
Loud as the hemlocks
Full of the cry of the peacocks?
Or was it a cry against the hemlocks?
Out of the window,
I saw how the planets gathered
Like the leaves themselves
Turning in the wind.
I saw how the night came,
Came striding like the color of the heavy hemlocks.
I felt afraid.
And I remembered the cry of the peacocks.
ROBINSON JEFFERS
America 1887-1962
Love the Wild Swan
"I hate my verses, every line, every word.
Oh pale and brittle pencil ever to try
One grass-blade's curve, or the throat of one bird
That clings to twig, ruffled against white sky.
Oh cracked and twilight mirrors ever to catch
One color, one glinting flash, of the splendor of things.
Unlucky hunter, Oh bullets of wax,
The lion beauty, the wild-swan wings, the storm of the wings."
--This wild swan of a world is no hunter's game.
Better bullets than yours would crack in the flame.
Does it matter whether you hate your...self? At least
Love your eyes that can see, your mind that can
Hear the music, the thunder of the wings. Love the wild swan.
W.H. AUDEN
England 1907-1973
The Unknown Citizen
(To JS/07/M/378
This Marble Monument
Is Erected by the State)
He was found by the Bureau of Statistics to be
One against whom there was no official complaint,
And all the reports on his conduct agree
That, in the modern sense of an old-fashioned word, he
was a saint,
For in everything he did he served the Greater Community.
Except for the War till the day he retired
He worked in a factory and never got fired,
But satisfied his employers, Fudge Motors Inc.
Yet he wasn't a scab or odd in his views,
For his Union reports that he paid his dues,
(Our report on his Union shows it was sound)
And our Social Psychology workers found
That he was popular with his mates and liked a drink.
The Press are convinced that he bought a paper every day
And that his reactions to advertisements were normal in
every way.
Policies taken out in his name prove that he was fully insured,
And his Health-card shows he was once in hospital but left
it cured.
Both Producers Research and High-Grade Living declare
He was fully sensible to the advantages of the Installment Plan
And had everything necessary to the Modern Man,
A phonograph, a radio, a car and a frigidaire.
Our researchers into Public Opinion are content
That he held the proper opinions for the time of year;
When there was peace, he was for peace; when there was war,
he went.
He was married and added five children to the population,
Which our Eugenist says was the right number for a parent of
his generation.
And our teachers report that he never interfered with
their education.
Was he free? Was he happy? The question is absurd:
Had anything been wrong, we should certainly have heard.
DENISE LEVERTOV
England Born 1923
Caedmon*
All the others talked as if
talk were a dance.
Clodhopper I, with clumsy feet
would break the gliding ring.
Early I learned to
hunch myself
close by the door:
then when the talk began
I'd wipe my
mouth and wend
unnoticed back to the barn
to be with the warm beasts,
dumb among body sounds
of the simple ones.
I'd see by a twist
of lit rush the motes
of gold moving
from shadow to shadow
slow in the wake
of deep untroubled sighs.
The cows
munched or stirred or were still. I
was at home and lonely,
both in good measure. Until
the sudden angel affrighted me--light effacing
my feeble beam,
a forest of torches, feathers of flame, sparks upflying:
but the cows as before
were calm, and nothing was burning,
nothing but I, as that hand of fire
touched my lips and scorched my tongue
and pulled by voice
into the ring of the dance.
*Caedmon, according to the Anglo-Saxon historian, Bede, was a poor cowherd who lived in the Seventh Century. He felt self-conscious about his inability to sing in social gatherings and always excused himself and returned to the barn. There he was visited by an angel who gave him the gift of singing and composing music. The Anglo-Saxon poem "Caedmon's Hymn" is attributed to him.
MAYA ANGELOU
America Born 1928
Caged Bird
A free bird leaps
on the back of the wind
and floats downstream
till the current ends
and dips his wing
in the orange sun rays
and dares to claim the sky.
But a bird that stalks
down his narrow cage
can seldom see through
his bars of rage
his wings are clipped and
his feet are tied
so he opens his mouth to sing.
The caged bird sings
with a fearful trill
of things unknown
but longed for still
and his tune is heard
on the distant hill
for the caged bird
sings of freedom.
The free bird thinks of another breeze
and the trade winds soft through the sighing trees
and the fat worms waiting on a dawn-bright lawn
and he names the sky his own.
But a caged bird stands on the grave of dreams
his shadow shouts on a nightmare scream
his wings are clipped and his feet are tied
and he opens his throat to sing.
The caged bird sings
with a fearful trill
of things unknown
but longed for still
and his tune is heard
on the distant hill
for the caged bird
sings of freedom.
FINDING THE POET
CHAPTER 10 POEMS ABOUT FAMILY
You know quite a bit about the elements of poetry by now. And I hope that you have a greater feeling of both confidence and curiosity when you sit down to read a new poem for the first time. In the next six chapters, we will be looking at poetry by subject, and you will be able to apply all that you have learned about poetic form and genre and all of the various poetic techniques and elements when you analyze these poems. Also, we will be reading primarily Twentieth Century and Contemporary poetry in these upcoming chapters. In previous chapters, I tried to give you a sampling of some of the best known traditional English and American poets and a few of the great traditional poets from other countries as well. I think it is important for students to develop a sense of historic perspective before proceeding to the poets who are writing today.
In our focus on specific subjects, we will took first at poems about family relationships. However, keep in mind that these poems might explore a variety of different themes. I'm sure you still recall our discussion in Chapter 9 on the distinction between a poem's subject and its theme. While certain themes, such as love, loss, and conflicting values, might naturally lend themselves to poems about family relationships, poets of course have the right to express any theme in conjunction with any subject. As readers, we must be careful not to assume that a poem on a particular subject, such as fatherhood, should also convey a particular theme. Let's look at several poems about fathers. As you read them, notice the variety in tone, form, diction, imagery, etc. You will need to play close attention to all of these elements and allow your own feelings to respond to each poem before you begin to discern its theme. We'll begin with a poem by the Canadian poet, George Bowering, who was born in 1935:
My Father in New Zealand
Everyone agrees,
when you visit New Zealand
you are back in the Fifties.
The Fifties! My father is still alive!
I looked around for him on the long main street of Wellington.
I kept turning on Cuba street to see if he was behind me.
I listened for his quiet voice in the Auckland airport.
I lifted brims of bent sheepmen's hats, looking for his face.
He was there somewhere, I had no right
to wander both islands without talking with him.
I rued the hours I spent in the wrong places,
the Vibrations disco in Christchurch, the Maori bars,
the poetry reading at the library. He
would never show up in such a place, and my time
was running out.
Every time I watched a flashing leg
instead of seeking his dear old frame
I was suffused with guilt, a true Canadian abroad.
Dear Ewart, if they are right you are there somewhere,
& I have twenty years to find you
before you are gone again, maybe to some other country.
But how many years do I have left, whose frame
looks so much like yours? Can I wait twenty years,
hoping you move to a closer country?
Are you in New Zealand, looking for me too?
I am a lot older now, I look more like you.
Call me by the secret name we had when I was a child,
the name we never spoke. I'll hear you if I can get there.
Although this poem is filled with specific references to New Zealand, on a deeper level it is about the profound sense of loss over the death of a father. The poem's tone takes on an oddly comic quality when the speaker (probably not a persona) announces that since being in New Zealand is like being back in the 1950s, then he should be able to find his father, who was still alive in the fifties, if he just searches around in New Zealand. The absurdity of this proposal underscores the unresolved grief and continued longing of the son who has never quite accepted his father's death and is now beginning to think about his own. I find the final two lines very touching. Somehow the reference to the secret name from childhood suggests an intimacy and love between the father and the son that no one else could ever quite understand. And now that the father is gone, no one knows the speaker's secret name.
In a poem with a very different tone, Janice Mirikitani describes her father with images of iron and desert wind. Mirikitani uses one Japanese word in this poem-- hakujin. This is an old fashioned Japanese word that refers to white people. Tule Lake is the name of a camp where Japanese Americans were relocated during World War II.
For My Father
He came over the ocean
carrying Mt. Fuji on
his back/ Tule Lake on his chest
hacked through the brush
of deserts
and made them grow
strawberries
we stole berries
from the stem
we could not afford them
for breakfast
his eyes held
nothing
as he whipped us
for stealing.
the desert had dried
his soul.
wordless
he sold
the rich,
full berries
to hakujin
whose children
pointed at our eyes
they ate fresh
strawberries
on corn flakes.
Father,
i wanted to scream
at your silence.
Your strength
was a stranger
i could never touch.
iron
in your eyes
to shield
the pain
to shield desert-like wind
from patches
of strawberries
grown
from
tears.
In this poem the poet appears to be speaking in her own voice without the touch of irony and humor of Bowering's poem about his father. The theme of "For My Father" certainly does not hide far beneath the surface. Robert Hayden has also written a poem about a quiet, hard working father who carried a lot of anger around with him. Hayden uses winter as the archetypal backdrop for his poem.
Those Winter Sundays
Sundays too my father got up early
and put his clothes on in the blueblack cold,
then with cracked hands that ached
from labor in the weekday weather made
banked fires blaze. No one ever thanked him.
I'd wake and hear the cold splintering, breaking.
When the rooms were warm, he'd call,
and slowly I would rise and dress,
fearing the chronic angers of that house,
Speaking indifferently to him,
who had driven out the cold
and polished my good shoes as well.
What did I know, what did I know
of love's austere and lonely offices?
Does the tone of Hayden's poem seem different to you from Mirikitani's? Both deal with childhood experiences in which the poets interacted with their fathers in a very limited way. But the two poems seem to create very different effects. Whereas Mirikitani says, "the desert had dried/ his soul," Hayden concludes, "...what did I know/ of love's austere and lonely offices?" While Mirikitani seems to have answered her own questions about her father and speaks directly to him, Hayden, who never addresses his father directly, admits that he never thanked his father for working hard and keeping away the cold and that he did not understand when he was younger that his father's actions toward him may have been expressions of love. For which father does the reader feel greater sympathy? Could Mirikitani's father, in his own "austere and lonely" way, also have been expressing love toward his daughter, or was he just an abusive father? Are there any details in the poem that help the reader understand the father's behavior? Ultimately, does the reader feel more sympathy for Mirikitani or for her father? Is there any unintentional irony in this poem?
In a poem written in 1952, the Welsh poet, Dylan Thomas, speaks directly to his father without using a persona. Although the poem focuses on a deeply emotional topic--the impending death of the poet's father, D.J. Thomas, Dylan chose a highly structured and extremely difficult form-- the villanelle. The villanelle, a fixed form of French origin, contains six stanzas of iambic pentameter. The first five stanzas contain three lines, and the final stanza contains four lines. The complex rhyme pattern, which contains only two rhymes, is as follows: ABA, ABA, ABA, ABA, ABA, ABAA. A villanelle also includes repeated lines. As you read the poem, you will notice that the first and third lines of the first stanza repeat throughout the poem and provide the final two lines. This poem, which has become a classic in the Twentieth Century, is remarkable for its extreme complexity of form combined with the depth of the emotion it expresses.
Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night
Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
Though wise men at their end know dark is right,
Because their words had forked no lightning they
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Good men, the last wave by, crying how bright
Their frail deeds might have danced in a green bay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
Wild men who caught and sang the sun in flight,
And learn, too late, they grieved it on its way,
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Grave men, near death, who see with blinding sight
Blind eyes could blaze like meteors and be gay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
And you, my father, there on the sad height,
Curse, bless me now with your fierce tears, I pray,
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
In addition to using the difficult villanelle form, Thomas also used metaphor throughout this poem. The repeated phrases "Do not go gentle into that good night" and "Rage, rage against the dying of the light" are metaphoric expressions that refer to his father's impending death. In both sentences, Dylan Thomas urges his father not to die passively but to resist death with all his energy. He also contrasts his father's situation with that of several other groups of men who must also face death--"wise men," "Good men," "Wild men," and "Grave men." Each of these groups represents a particular male archetype, ending with a pun on the word "Grave." You might want to think about the characteristics of each of these four groups of men, all of whom Thomas uses as models to urge his father to battle against death. This poem also ends with a tone of deep emotion when the poet addresses his father directly, asking for either his curses or his blessing, whichever will help his father to prolong his life. This poem remains a profound and deeply moving expression of a son's love for his father in the face of certain death and loss.
Langston Hughes also wrote many poems about family relationships, but he usually used a persona. In the poem which follows, which is written in dialect, Hughes speaks in the voice of a mother who is sharing some advice with her son:
Mother to Son
Well, son, I'll tell you:
Life for me ain't been no crystal stair.
It's had tacks in it,
And splinters,
And boards torn up,
And places with no carpet on the floor--
Bare.
But all the time
I'se been a-climbin' on,
And reachin' landin's,
And turnin' corners,
And sometimes goin' in the dark
Where there ain't been no light.
So boy, don't you turn back.
Don't you set down on the steps
'Cause you finds it's kinder hard.
Don't you fall now--
For I'se still goin', honey,
I'se still climbin',
And life for me ain't been no crystal stair.
This dramatic monologue is also based on an extended metaphor--the comparison between life and a staircase. In this metaphor, what is significant about the fact that both the mother and the son are ascending rather than descending this set of stairs?
In another poem written in dialect, Hughes again explores a family relationship, this time the interactions between a man and woman. This poem is written as a dialogue presenting a conflict between the two characters, Hammond and Hattie.
Early Evening Quarrel
Where is that sugar, Hammond?
I sent you this morning to buy?
I say, where is that sugar
I sent you this morning to buy?
Coffee without sugar
Makes a good woman cry.
I ain't got no sugar, Hattie,
I gambled your dime away.
Ain't got no sugar, I
Done gambled that dime away.
But if you's a wise woman, Hattie,
You ain't gonna have nothin to say.
I ain't no wise woman, Hammond.
I am evil and mad.
Ain't no sense in a good woman
Bein' treated so bad.
I don't treat you bad, Hattie,
Neither does I treat you good.
But I reckon I could treat you
Worser if I would.
Lawd, these things we women
Have to stand!
I wonder is there anywhere a
Do-right man?
Which character do you think Hughes intended the reader to sympathize with, Hattie or Hammond? What evidence in the poem leads you to this conclusion? Also, does it seem significant, or perhaps symbolic that Hattie will have to do without sugar because of Hammond's gambling? What do you think the theme of this poem is?
Gwendolyn Brooks presents a very different picture of a couple in this very brief poem written in 1960:
The Bean Eaters
They eat beans mostly, this old yellow pair.
Dinner is a casual affair.
Plain chipware on a plain and creaking wood,
Tin flatware.
Two who are Mostly Good.
Two who have lived their day,
But keep on putting on their clothes
And putting things away.
And remembering...
Remembering with twinklings and twinges,
As they lean over the beans in their rented back room that
is full of beads and receipts and dolls and cloths,
tobacco crumbs, vases and fringes.
You might want to re-read this poem aloud to appreciate the sound devices that Brooks has used. Do you think the speaker is being ironic when she refers to the old couple's dinner as "a casual affair?"
Pay close attention to the details of their home and in particular to their dishes and table. What is significant about the fact that they "eat beans mostly?" What do the other objects in their environment reveal about them and their relationship? This couple seems almost to have become one person rather than two individuals. How does Brooks create this effect? As the reader, how do you feel about this couple? Do you like them better than Hattie and Hammond? Why or why not? What role does emotion play in this poem?
Grandparents have inspired many poems, and this one by Ramona C. Wilson of the Colville tribe in Washington, uses imagery and the poet's own voice to describe her grandmother to the reader.
Keeping Hair
My grandmother had braids
at the thickest, pencil wide
held with bright wool
cut from her bed shawl.
No teeth left but white hair
combed and wet carefully
early each morning.
The small wild plants found among stones
on the windy and brown plateaus
revealed their secrets to her hand
and yielded to her cooking pots.
She made a sweet amber water
from willows,
boiling the life out
to pour onto her old head.
"It will keep your hair."
She bathed my head once
rain water not sweeter.
The thought that once
when I was so very young
her work-bent hands
very gently and smoothly
washed my hair in willows
may also keep my heart.
What does the poet choose to tell us about her grandmother? What images are created by the description of the grandmother washing the child's hair with willow water? How does the poet feel about her grandmother? How does she convey these feelings to the reader?
Denise Levertov also uses her own voice and descriptive imagery to write about her mother at the age of ninety.
The 90th Year
High in the jacaranda shines the gilded thread
of a small bird's curlicue of song--too high
for her so see or hear.
I've learned
not to say, these last years,
"O, look!--O listen, Mother!"
as I used to.
(It was she
who taught me to look;
to name the flowers when I was still close to the ground,
my face level with theirs;
or to watch the sublime metamorphoses
unfold and unfold
over the walled back gardens of our street...
It had not been given her
to know the flesh as good in itself,
as the flesh of a fruit is good. To her
the human body has been a husk,
a shell in which souls were prisoned.
Yet, from within it, with how much gazing
her life has paid tribute to the world's body!
How tears of pleasure
would choke her, when a perfect voice,
deep or high, clove to its note unfaltering!)
She has swept the crackling seedpods,
the litter of mauve blossoms, off the cement path,
tipped them into the rubbish bucket.
She's made her bed, washed up the breakfast dishes,
wiped the hotplate. I've taken the butter and milkjug
back to the fridge next door--but it's not my place,
visiting here, to usurp the tasks
that weave the day's pattern.
Now she is leaning forward in her chair,
by the lamp lit in the daylight,
rereading War and Peace.
When I look up
from her wellworn copy of The Divine Milieu,
which she wants me to read, I see her hand
loose on the black stem of the magnifying glass,
she is dozing.
"I am so tired," she has written to me, "of appreciating
the gift of life."
In addition to imagery, does Levertov use any other elements of poetry, such as metaphor? If so, can you point out examples? What is the theme of this poem? How does this poem's theme differ from the theme of Wilson's "Keeping Hair"? Which poem gives the reader greater insight into the personality of the elderly woman being described?
At the end of this chapter, you will find additional poems about family relationships. Although these poems are on a variety of themes, you may be surprised at how frequently poets choose to write in their own voices when describing family members. This technique can certainly create the effect of vivid realism and intimacy. There is also, however, the danger of cannibalism and other violations of privacy. Do any of the poems that you have already read in this chapter violate the privacy of the people being described? Has the poet ever told us too much or too little? I hope you will take the time to think about these issues when you write your own poetry as well. Writing about family is one of the most powerfully emotional experiences for a poet and his or her reader, and poetry, perhaps more than any other medium, has the potential to clarify these relationships with remarkable insight. Because of the depth of our feelings for our relatives, we must also practice restraint.
QUESTIONS AND TOPICS FOR REVIEW
1. What is the theme of George Bowering's "My Father in New Zealand"?
2. What is the setting of Janice Mirikitani's "For My Father"? Remember that setting includes both time and place. How does the setting influence the poem's theme?
3. What role does the season of the year play in Robert Hayden's "Those Winter Sundays"?
4. Define the villanelle. Which of the poems in this chapter is written in this form?
5. How does Dylan Thomas use archetype and metaphor in "Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night"?
6. How does the use of dialect influence the tone and effect of Langston Hughes' "Mother to Son"?
7. How does Hughes develop the two characters in "Early Evening Quarrel"?
8. How does Gwendolyn Brooks develop the two characters in "The Bean Eaters"?
9. What is the theme of Denise Levertov's "The 90th Year"? How does the poet convey this theme?
10. What are some of the disadvantages of writing about family members in the first person point of view?
11. What are some of the advantages of writing about family members in the first person point of view?
TOPICS FOR DISCUSSION
1. Do any of the poems in this chapter have the qualities of a great poem? (You may wish to review this list at the end of Chapter 8.) If so, which poems, and why?
2. Are any of the poems in this chapter cannibalistic? If so, which ones, and why?
3. Naomi Clark, author of "The Breaker," which appears at the end of this chapter, was born in Texas. How do the references to native plants and animals from Texas contribute to the poem's theme and effect?
4. Discuss the various possible meanings of the word breaker in Clark's poem. Who or what is the breaker referred to in the poem's title?
5. What is the symbolic significance of the snow globe in Howard Nemerov's poem?
6. Is the grandmother in Paula Gunn Allen's poem a literal or mythic figure or both? What elements in the poem lead you to your conclusions about the grandmother?
7. How does James Reiss incorporate imagery from a dream into his poem "Suenos"?
How do these dream images contribute to the poem's theme?
8. Discuss the significance of the title of Rita Dove's poem "Daystar." Discuss the other word choices in the poem also.
9. Discuss the tone of Laureen Mar's "My Mother, Who Came from China, Where She Never Saw Snow." Does the speaker in this poem ever adopt an ironic tone?
ACTIVITIES
1. Write a statement of theme for each of the nine poems which appears in the first part of this chapter.
2. Working in pairs, compare your statements of theme and make any changes that seem necessary.
3. Write some of these statements of theme on the board and discuss them as a group.
4. Assign someone to research the significance of willows in the Native American culture of the Pacific Northwest. Discuss Ramona C. Wilson's "Keeping Hair" in light of this information.
5. Assign someone to gather some information about the two books the mother and daughter are reading in Denise Levertov's "The 90th Year." What do these books reveal about the two women in the poem? How do these books relate to the poem's theme?
6. Assign someone to bring to class actual examples or photographs of weavings done by Native Americans of New Mexico. Discuss the relationship between these weavings and Paula Gunn Allen's poem "Grandmother."
ANALYTICAL WRITING ASSIGNMENTS
1. Analyze the relationship between form and theme in Dylan Thomas' "Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night."
2. Analyze the relationship between tone and theme in Bowering's "My Father in New Zealand."
3. Compare and contrast Denise Levertov's "The 90th Year" and May Sarton's "For My Mother," focusing on theme and imagery.
4. Analyze Howard Nemerov's "The Snow Globe," focusing on form and theme.
5. Compare and contrast Hughes' "Early Evening Quarrel" and Brooks' "The Bean Eaters," focusing on characterization and theme.
6. Analyze Naomi Clark's "The Breaker," focusing on the relationships between the speaker, the horse Maria, and the speaker's father. How does Clark define these relationships, and how do they contribute to the poem's theme?
7. Analyze the relationship between imagery and theme in James Reiss' "Suenos."
8. Analyze Rita Dove's "Daystar," focusing on point of view and theme.
9. Analyze Laureen Mar's "My Mother, Who Came from China, Where She Never Saw Snow," focusing on theme, imagery, and figures of speech.
CREATIVE WRITING ASSIGNMENTS
1. Write a poem in which your parents (or someone else's) are compared in some way.
2. Write a poem in which your parents (or someone else's) are contrasted in some way.
3. Write a poem on the subject of sibling rivalry. This poem can be written in a serious or comic tone, in any point of view, and on any theme. Share these poems after you have written them and discuss choices of themes, tones, points of view, etc.
4. In your journal, make a list of images that you associate with one of your grandparents. Then write a poem about your grandparent, using these images to structure your poem.
5. Write an elegy for one of your relatives who has died.
6. Write a poem about a toy or an animal which was important to you when you were a child.
7. Write a poem based on a dialogue between two of your relatives.
8. Write a poem which connects yourself with your ancient ancestors. Use imagery, symbolism, myth, or archetypes to make this connection.
9. Write a poem based on a dream in which one of your relatives appears.
10. Revise a poem that you have written in your own voice about a family relationship by using a persona instead of your own voice.
ADDITIONAL POEMS ON FAMILY RELATIONSHIPS FOR READING AND ANALYSIS
MAY SARTON
America 1914-1995
For My Mother
August 3, 1992
Once more
I summon you
Out of the past
With poignant love,
You who nourished the poet
And the lover.
I see your gray eyes
Looking out to sea
In those Rockport summers,
Keeping a distance
Within the closeness
Which was never intrusive
Opening out
Into the world.
And what I remember
Is how you never stopped creating
And how people sent me
Dresses you had designed
With rich embroidery
In brilliant colors
Because they could not bear
To give them away
Or cast them aside.
I summon you now
Not to think of
The ceaseless battle
With pain and ill health,
The frailty and the anguish.
No, today I remember
The creator,
The lion-hearted.
HOWARD NEMEROV
America Born, 1920
The Snow Globe
A long time age, when I was a child,
They left my light on while I went to sleep,
As though they would have wanted me beguiled
By brightness if at all; dark was too deep.
And they left me one toy, a village white
With the fresh snow and silently in glass
Frozen forever. But if you shook it,
The snow would rise up in the rounded space
And from the limits of the universe
Snow itself down again. O world of white,
First home of dreams! Now that I have my dead,
I want so cold an emblem to rehearse
How many of them have gone from the world's light
As I have gone, too, from my snowy bed.
NAOMI CLARK
America 1932-1992
The Breaker
Maria, we called you:
a Spanish mare, they said, up from Mexico--
born to the saddle but skittish, liable to panic.
We were not, anymore, the kind of family to keep saddle horses.
Straddled bareback, past dry holes and dry grey slush pits, past the
mound where
we buried the cows, I'd stolen time from field and chickens
to ride low, nag transformed, under the scrub oak branches,
through darkening johnson grass where puma screamed,
out onto the Great Staked Plains.
You sold cheaper than a nag,
kicked out the end of the trailer, the gate off the horselot.
All night I heard you circling the barbed wire, stamping.
All night I rode through the sky.
You were a small, dark mare, Spanish, bought for a plowhorse.
I remember you in chains, Maria, the day he broke you to
plow-harness.
Tied to a post, you drag the heavy iron beam, the heavy
log chains,
twist and kick, whipped, driven round
and round, Foam flies, and blood, with the broken harness,
with the trampled harness, the slipped chains.
Your eyes turn white.
Only when you both fall does it end. Next day
you plow ten rows before it starts.
You come to me now, Maria,
in so many dreams: your mad eyes,
your flinches, your broken stance, the slouch in heavy harness,
your bowed head blindered, the break into frenzy.
My hands burn to heal you, to gentle you, to gentle your eyes.
Maria, you lift strong black wings,
rise free over the mesquites and the prickly pear, over the Caprock,
over the untrampled high grass of the Llano into the age of
Comanche, Apache.
And the man who broke you?
How shall I heal him, how stretch out my hand
in healing, my cold hands in healing
and warmth, how gentle?
O father, how shall I heal you?
What wings from the fire where you burn, and I the breaker?
PAULA GUNN ALLEN
America Born, 1939
Grandmother
Out of her own body she pushed
silver thread, light, air
and carried it carefully on the dark, flying
where nothing moved.
Out of her body she extruded
shining wire, life, and wove the light
on the void.
From beyond time,
beyond oak* trees and bright clear water flow,
she was given the work of weaving the strands
of her body, her pain, her vision
into creation, and the gift of having created,
to disappear.
After her,
the women and the men weave blankets into tales of life,
memories of light and ladders,
infinity-eyes, and rain.
After her I sit on my laddered rain-bearing rug
and mend the tear with string.
* Paula Gunn Allen is a member of the Oak Clan of the Laguna Pueblo.
JAMES REISS
America Born, 1941
Suenos*
In my dreams I always speak Spanish.
The cemetery may be in Brooklyn,
and I may be kneeling on a rise
looking out at the skyline of the city,
but I will whisper, Mira el sol.**
And it is true the late morning
sun will turn that bank of skyscrapers
the color of bleached bone in Sonora,
and all the window washers of Manhattan
will white-out like a TV screen
in Venezuela turning to snow.
But the gray face on the headstone photograph
has a nose like my father's,
and his voice had the lilt of the ghettos
of central Europe.
So I should kneel lower and say something
in Yiddish about fathers, grandfathers,
the hacked limbs of a family tree
that reaches as high as Manhattan.
I should say, Grandpa, I loved those times
we ran through the underpasses in Central
Park, you with your cane, I with my ice
cream cones, shouting for echoes,
bursting out into sunlight--
if I only knew the language to say it in.
* "Suenos" means dreams in Spanish.
** "Mira el sol" means "look at the sun" in Spanish.
RITA DOVE
America Born, 1952
Daystar
She wanted a little room for thinking:
but she saw diapers steaming on the line,
a doll slumped behind the door.
So she lugged a chair behind the garage
to sit out the children's naps.
Sometimes there were things to watch--
the pinched armor of a vanished cricket,
a floating maple leaf. Other days
she stared until she was assured
when she closed her eyes
she'd see only her own vivid blood.
She had an hour, at best, before Liza appeared
pouting from the top of the stairs.
And just what was mother doing
out back with the field mice? Why,
building a palace. Later
that night when Thomas rolled over and
lurched into her, she would open her eyes
and think of the place that was hers
for an hour--where
she was nothing,
pure nothing, in the middle of the day.
LAUREEN MAR
America Born, 1953.
My Mother, Who Came from China,
Where She Never Saw Snow
In the huge, rectangular room, the ceiling
a machinery of pipes and fluorescent lights,
ten rows of women hunch over machines,
their knees pressing against pedals
and hands pushing the shiny fabric thick as tongues
through metal and thread.
My mother bends her head to one of these machines.
Her hair is coarse and wiry, black as burnt scrub.
She wears glasses to shield her intense eyes.
A cone of orange thread spins. Around her,
talk flutters harshly in Toisan wah.
Chemical stings. She pushes cloth
through a pounding needle, under, around, and out,
breaks thread with a snap against fingerbone, tooth.
Sleeve after sleeve, sleeve.
It is easy. The same piece.
For eight or nine hours, sixteen bundles maybe,
250 sleeves to ski coats, all the same.
It is easy, only once she's run the needle
through her hand. She earns money
by each piece, on a good day,
thirty dollars. Twenty-four years.
It is frightening how fast she works.
She and the women who were taught sewing
terms in English as Second Language.
Dull thunder passes through her fingers.
FINDING THE POET
CHAPTER 11 POETRY AND PLACE
Places fascinate poets almost as much as people do. Poets have been writing about places for thousands of years, but once again we will be focusing on Twentieth Century and Contemporary poems about places. The word place can be defined in many ways. A place can be a country, a region, a city, a building, a room, an outdoor area, or even the inside of a car. A place can also be an area in fiction, fantasy, or the imagination. And as with poems about people, poems about places can be on any theme. Sometimes a place provides the setting of a poem, just as it does in a novel or a short story. In literature, setting refers to the time and place in which a work of literature occurs. Narrative poems which tell a story have to happen somewhere and at some point in time. A writer usually chooses his or her settings carefully because a setting can enhance the theme and the other elements in a poem. As you know, places have their own personalities, and we often associate myths and significant historical events with particular places. Some places have a special spiritual aura, and even the weather associated with a place can add to the meaning and significance of a poem.
In the following two poems by Gary Snyder, the subject and theme are similar, but the poet has chosen different settings. These are the first two poems in a series entitled "Four Poems for Robin." In all of the poems in this series, Snyder appears to speak in his own voice, addressing a woman who was his sweetheart many years earlier. In the two poems I have included here, the setting in which the poem takes place is contrasted with an earlier setting based on memory.
Siwashing it Out Once in Siuslaw Forest
I slept under rhododendron
All night blossoms fell
Shivering on a sheet of cardboard
Feet stuck in my pack
Hands deep in my pockets
Barely able to sleep.
I remembered when we were in school
Sleeping together in a big warm bed
We were the youngest lovers
When we broke up we were still nineteen.
Now our friends are married
You teach school back east
I dont mind living this way
Green hills the long blue beach
But sometimes sleeping in the open
I think back when I had you.
A Spring Night in Shokoku-ji
Eight years ago this May
We walked under cherry blossoms
At night in an orchard in Oregon.
All that I wanted then
Is forgotten now, but you.
Here in the night
In a garden of the old capital
I feel the trembling ghost of Yugao
I remember your cool body
Naked under a summer cotton dress.
On the surface, these poems appear to be simple statements of longing for a past lover. But in fact, Snyder has made very effective use of both time and place, contrasting the present with the past in a series of memories. The first poem actually focuses on three places and three points in time--the present, where the poet still sometimes sleeps in the open and lives near "the long blue beach," probably on the Oregon coast; a point in the past when he slept under the rhododendrons in Siuslaw Forest, an area surrounding the Siuslaw River in west central Oregon; and an earlier time when he and Robin were lovers in high school. Snyder also contrasts the cold, associated with the present "sleeping in the open," and with his memory of sleeping while "Shivering on a sheet of cardboard" in Siuslaw Forest with the warmth of his memory of "Sleeping together in a big warm bed." In this first poem, cold is associated with the times and places when the poet is alone, and warmth is associated with the time and place when he was with his youthful lover.
In the second poem, Snyder again contrasts the present with the past, using the season of the year to evoke memory. The poet in now in Japan at a Zen temple in Kyoto, "the old capital." It is spring, and he remembers a time eight years earlier when he walked "under cherry blossoms" in Oregon with Robin. Cherry blossoms have for centuries been associated with the fleeting beauty of spring in Japan. Coincidentally, Oregon is also famous for its beautiful cherry blossoms, and parts of Oregon have a climate similar to Japan's. Also, spring carries archetypal overtones of new life and young love. In the second poem Snyder makes a literary allusion--to Yugao, a character in Murasaki Shikibu's one-thousand-year-old classic, The Tale of Genji. The story of Yugao appears early in the novel, when the hero, Prince Genji, is still in his teens. He falls in love with Yugao, a mysterious and introverted young woman about whom he knows very little. He takes her to a deserted old mansion for a night of romance, and suddenly Yugao becomes possessed by an evil spirit and dies under very mysterious circumstances. Genji is filled with grief, remorse, and guilt and is haunted by her memory for many years. Can you see why Snyder chose to include this reference to "the trembling ghost of Yugao" in a poem about his own memories about the loss of a young love?
Neither poem is really about Oregon or Japan or winter or spring, but the settings provide powerful archetypal images that help Snyder communicate his theme of the loss of young love. Although our own circumstances were probably different, many of us, when reading these poems, can also feel a poignant longing for the first person we ever loved. Another poet who is famous for the way she incorporates time and place into her poems is Elizabeth Bishop. You have already read "Filling Station" (in Chapter 4) and "The Fish" (in Chapter 7), and you are familiar with Bishop's informal, conversational style and her minute attention to detail. In the following poem, Bishop describes an experience that she had when she was seven years old. The Irish prose writer, James Joyce, would refer to this experience as an epiphany, a moment of recognition and sudden understanding. Much of literature is an attempt to share with the reader these rare moments of insight. Bishop is very specific in including the setting in this poem. It takes place in a dentist's waiting room in Worcester, Massachusetts, late on a February day in 1918. Although the poem is long, it is very easy to read. After you have finished, you will want to think about the relationship between setting and theme in this poem.
In the Waiting Room
In Worcester, Massachusetts,
I went with Aunt Consuelo
to keep her dentist's appointment
and sat and waited for her
in the dentist's waiting room.
It was winter. It got dark
early. The waiting room
was full of grown-up people,
arctics and overcoats,
lamps and magazines.
My aunt was inside
what seemed like a long time
and while I waited I read
the National Geographic
(I could read) and carefully
studied the photographs:
the inside of a volcano,
black, and full of ashes;
then it was spilling over
in rivulets of fire.
Osa and Martin Johnson
dressed in riding breeches,
laced boots, and pith helmets.
A dead man slung on a pole
--"Long Pig," the caption said.
Babies with pointed heads
wound round and round with string;
black, naked women with necks
wound round and round with wire
like the necks of light bulbs.
Their breasts were horrifying.
I read it right straight through.
I was too shy to stop.
And then I looked at the cover:
the yellow margins, the date.
Suddenly, from inside,
came an oh! of pain
--Aunt Consuelo's voice--
not very loud or long.
I wasn't at all surprised;
even then I knew she was
a foolish, timid woman.
I might have been embarrassed,
but wasn't. What took me
completely by surprise
was that it was me:
my voice, in my mouth.
Without thinking at all
I was my foolish aunt,
I--we--were falling, falling,
our eyes glued to the cover
of the National Geographic,
February, 1918.
I said to myself: three days
and you'll be seven years old.
I was saying it to stop
the sensation of falling off
the round, turning world
into cold, blue-black space.
But I felt: you are an I,
you are an Elizabeth,
you are one of them.
Why should you be one, too?
I scarcely dared to look
to see what it was I was.
I gave a sidelong glance
--I couldn't look any higher--
at shadowy gray knees,
trousers and skirts and boots
and different pairs of hands
lying under the lamps.
I knew that nothing stranger
had ever happened, that nothing
stranger could ever happen.
Why should I be my aunt,
or me, or anyone?
What similarities--
boots, hands, the family voice
I felt in my throat, or even
the National Geographic
and those awful hanging breasts--
held us all together
or made us all just one?
How--I didn't know any
word for it--how "unlikely"...
How had I come to be here,
like them, and overhear
a cry of pain that could have
got loud and worse but hadn't?
The waiting room was bright
and too hot. It was sliding
beneath a big black wave,
another, and another.
Then I was back in it.
The War was on. Outside,
in Worcester, Massachusetts,
were night and slush and cold,
and it was still the fifth
of February, 1918.
What kind of a moment of recognition did the poet have at the age of seven? Didn't she suddenly realize that she was a member of the human race, along with all the pain that being human entails? How did reading the National Geographic help her to come to this awareness? Did the fact that she was in a dentist's waiting room also contribute to her insight? How do the people depicted in the magazine compare and contrast with the people in the waiting room? Why are the breasts of the women in the magazine horrifying to the girl? Is there any significance in the fact that it is dark and winter outside when the little girl comes to her realization of her own humanity? What about the fact that this epiphany occurred in 1918, in the middle of World War I?
It would be difficult to separate the setting from the theme of this poem. The images of natural disasters and culturally inflicted pain depicted in the magazine, the pain associated with dentistry, and the ultimate pain and death which accompany war connect with the theme of the child's recognition of the unavoidable pain inherent in the human experience. These images create an ironic contrast with the passive behavior of the people in the waiting room and the perception of Worcester, Massachusetts, as a peaceful and "civilized" town.
Another poet from Massachusetts who uses setting in an ironic fashion is e.e. cummings. While Bishop's poems are deceptively easy to read, cummings' are difficult. One of the difficulties in cummings' style is its apparent vagueness in contrast with Bishop's specificity. Cummings developed a unique experimental style that rejected traditional elements such as capital letters and punctuation. His diction is also very unusual, using familiar words in unfamiliar ways. You read cummings' "the Cambridge ladies who live in furnished souls" in Chapter 8, and no doubt you noticed his satiric tone, ridiculing complacent middle-class New Englanders. He conveys a similar message in "anyone lived in a pretty how town." In this poem, the "town" which provides the setting for the poem is a very generic place filled with people who are too busy and uncaring to focus on the hero, whom cummings calls "anyone." Nor do the townspeople care about "noone," who loves anyone. Cummings communicates the impersonal, self-absorbed behavior of the people of the town by repeating the seasons of the year and the phrase "sun moon stars rain." These repetitions create the sense of the passage of time and the sameness of the lives of the people in the town who never stop to learn, to grow, or to care for anyone or noone.
anyone lived in a pretty how town
anyone lived in a pretty how town
(with up so floating many bells down)
spring summer autumn winter
he sang his didn't he danced his did.
Women and men(both little and small)
cared for anyone not at all
they sowed their isn't they reaped their same
sun moon stars rain
children guessed(but only a few
and down they forgot as up they grew
autumn winter spring summer)
that noone loved him more by more
when by now and tree by leaf
she laughed his joy she cried his grief
bird by snow and stir by still
anyone's any was all to her
someones married their everyones
laughed their cryings and did their dance
(sleep wake hope and then)they
said their nevers they slept their dream
stars rain sun moon
(and only the snow can begin to explain
how children are apt to forget to remember
with up so floating many bells down)
one day anyone died i guess
(and noone stooped to kiss his face)
busy folk buried them side by side
little by little and was by was
all by all and deep by deep
and more by more they dream their sleep
noone and anyone earth by april
wish by spirit and if by yes.
Women and men(both dong and ding)
summer autumn winter spring
reaped their sowing and went their came
sun moon stars rain.
You will need to read this poem many times and give it a lot of thought. The first two lines of the seventh stanza have always fascinated me: "one day anyone died i guess/ (and noone stooped to kiss his face). The fact that the narrator adds "i guess" after announcing anyone's death underscores the completely impersonal treatment that the hero, anyone, has always received in the town, except for the love he received from noone--"noone loved him more by more." Calling anyone's wife "noone" is such an ironic touch, because the word "noone" also refers to the people of the town, none of whom care at all for anyone. The pun in the line "noone stooped to kiss his face" has always struck me as very powerful. The double meaning underscores the poem's theme--his wife stooped to kiss his face when he died, bending over his dead body in love, but no one from the town stooped, in this case, lowered themselves to give him any attention, much less to give him a kiss. The cruelty of conventional life in a small town is a repeated theme in the poetry of e.e. cummings.
We have seen the close relationship between setting and theme in the poems we have just read by Bishop and cummings. Sometimes in poems about places, the place itself is the subject of the poem, not just its setting. The Australian poet A.D. Hope creates a complex and thought-provoking portrait of his own country in the following poem:
Australia
A Nation of trees, drab green and desolate grey
In the field uniform of modern wars,
Darkens her hills, those endless, outstretched paws
Of Sphinx demolished or stone lion worn away.
They call her a young country, but they lie:
She is the last of lands, the emptiest,
A woman beyond her change of life, a breast
Still tender but within the womb is dry.
Without songs, architecture, history:
The emotions and superstitions of younger lands,
Her rivers of water drown among inland sands,
The river of her immense stupidity
Floods her monotonous tribes from Cairns to Perth.
In them the last the ultimate men arrive
Whose boast is not: "we live" but "we survive",
A type who will inhabit the dying earth.
And her five cities, like five teeming sores,
Each drains her: a vast parasite robber-state
Where second-hand Europeans pullulate
Timidly on the edge of alien shores.
Yet there are some like me turn gladly home
From the lush jungle of modern thought, to find
The Arabian desert of the human mind,
Hoping, if still from the deserts the prophets come,
Such savage and scarlet as no green hills dare
Springs in that waste, some spirit which escapes
The learned doubt, the chatter of cultured apes
Which is called civilization over there.
This poem will also require several readings. You will need to think carefully about the poem's tone, especially the shift in tone at the beginning of the sixth stanza, starting with the word "Yet." Hope also includes some interesting descriptive metaphors which you will want to study. You should also give some attention to the allusion to the Sphinx in the first stanza and to the "Arabian desert of the human mind" in the sixth stanza. How would you describe Hope's attitude toward Australia? Does his express his feelings, or is the poem primarily an intellectual statement? How would you characterize the poem's theme? Does the poem have a universal message beyond the comments about Australia?
In another poem that focuses specifically on place as part of the poem's subject and theme is Margaret Atwood's "At the Tourist Centre in Boston." This poem, written in the voice of the Canadian poet, describes a relief map of Canada on display in Boston. The speaker is disturbed by the contrast between the real country, so vivid in her own memory, and the shallow simplification depicted by the map.
At the Tourist Centre in Boston
There is my country under glass,
a white relief-
map with red dots for the cities,
reduced to the size of a wall
and beside it 10 blowup snapshots
one for each province,
in purple-browns and odd reds,
the green of the trees dulled;
all blues however
of an assertive purity.
Mountains and lakes and more lakes
(though Quebec is a restaurant and Ontario the empty
interior of the parliament buildings),
with nobody climbing the trails and hauling out
the fish and splashing in the water
but arrangements of grinning tourists--
look here, Saskatchewan
is a flat lake, some convenient rocks
where two children pose with a father
and the mother is cooking something
in immaculate slacks by a smokeless fire,
her teeth white as detergent.
Whose dream is this, I would like to know:
is this a manufactured
hallucination, a cynical fiction, a lure
for export only?
I seem to remember people,
at least in the cities, also slush,
machines, and assorted garbage. Perhaps
that was my private mirage
which will just evaporate
when I go back. Or the citizens will be gone,
run off to the peculiarly-
green forests
to wait among the brownish mountains
for the platoons of tourists
and plan their odd red massacres.
Unsuspecting
window lady, I ask you:
Do you see nothing
watching you from the water?
Was the sky ever that blue?
Who really lives there?
Most of us have probably felt the anger that Atwood expresses when we are faced with examples of stereotypes of our own country, city, or neighborhood. Our own memories are vivid and specific, and the "tourist" view reduces a culture to an impersonal, antiseptic, unrealistic "fiction." This poem brings up several issues related to how various cultures view one another and how one culture may attempt to create a false image for political or economic purposes. You could probably write several interesting statements of theme for this poem.
In another interesting poem that draws its imagery from a place, Garrett Hongo describes a photograph of himself and his father taken in Hawaii on a day when a volcano almost erupted. The poem is essentially narrative and includes comments made by Hongo's father in Hawaiian dialect.
The Hongo Store
29 Miles Volcano
Hilo, Hawaii
from a photograph
My parents felt those rumblings
Coming deep from the earth's belly,
Thudding like the bell of the Buddhist Church.
Tremors in the ground swayed the bathinette
Where I lay squalling in soapy water.
My mother carried me around the house,
Back through the orchids, ferns, and plumeria
Of that greenhouse world behind the store,
And jumped between gas pumps into the car.
My father gave it the gun
And said, "Be quiet," as he searched
The frequencies, flipping for the right station
(The radio squealing more loudly than I could cry).
And then even the echoes stopped--
The only sound the Edsel's grinding
And the bark and crackle of radio news
Saying stay home or go to church.
"Dees time she no blow!"
My father said, driving back
Over the red ash covering the road.
"I worried she went go for broke already!"
So in this print the size of a matchbook,
The dark skinny man, shirtless and grinning,
A toothpick in the corner of his smile,
Lifts a naked baby above his head --
Behind him the plate glass of the store only
cracked.
The events described in this poem focus on Hongo's parents' responses to the rumblings in the nearby volcano, and volcanoes are certainly a very integral part of the everyday life as well as the mythology of Hawaii. But is this poem really about Hawaii in the same sense that Hope's poem is about Australia and Atwood's poem is about Canada? Isn't this poem really about several more universal ideas, such as protective parenting and the relationship between nature and human beings?
As we have seen, places can play a variety of roles in poetry, from providing the setting to enhancing the theme to serving as the subject of the poem itself. Some places, such as the ocean, mountains, and volcanoes, have their own archetypal properties. I hope that you will develop an even greater sensitivity to place in your own poetry and your own life. I also hope that you will enjoy the poems that appear at the end of this chapter, each of which focuses on place in a unique way.
QUESTIONS AND TOPICS FOR REVIEW
1. What is the meaning of the word setting when it is applied to literature?
2. How can the setting of a poem enhance its theme? Provide examples.
3. What does the word epiphany refer to in literature?
4. Who is responsible for applying the word epiphany to literature in this way?
5. What is the exact setting of Elizabeth Bishop's "In the Waiting Room"?
6. What are some of the features of e.e. cummings' poetic style?
7. What is the theme of cummings' "anyone lived in a pretty how town"?
8. How does the setting of Margaret Atwood's "At the Tourist Centre in Boston" support the poem's theme?
9. Provide examples of places that are also archetypes.
TOPICS FOR DISCUSSION
1. Discuss the effect created by the settings of Gary Snyder's "Siwashing It Out Once in Siuslaw Forest" and "A Spring Night in Shokoku-ji." How does Snyder convey these settings to the reader? Does he give the reader enough information to visualize these settings adequately? How much effort does Snyder expect the reader to make to experience these settings?
2. Discuss the use of the caesura in Snyder's "Siwashing It Out Once in Siuslaw Forest." (See Chapter 5 for a discussion of the caesura.) What effect does the caesura create in this poem?
3. Discuss the use of archetypes in cummings' "anyone lived in a pretty how town," especially bells, sun, moon, stars, rain, and the four seasons. How do these archetypes help convey the poem's theme?
4. Discuss the metaphor of sowing and reaping in cummings' "anyone lived in a pretty how town."
5. Discuss the events described in Garrett Hongo's "The Hongo Store." Who is the speaker in this poem, and how did this narrator gather the information he shares with the reader?
6. Describe the plants, buildings, and automobile mentioned in "The Hongo Store." How do these elements contribute to the poem's theme and overall effect?
7. Do all of the poems in this chapter, including those at the end, have the qualities of a good poem? (You may wish to review the checklist entitled "Qualities That Characterize a Good Poem," which appears near the end of Chapter 7.) Why or why not?
8. Discuss Louis Simpson's "A Night in Odessa," focusing on the events that occur in this narrative and symbolic elements in the poem. Does the grandfather's umbrella seem to be symbolic? If so, what does it symbolize? How about the wolf and the blood dripping from the young wife's side? What is significant about the fact that this poem is set in Odessa?
9. Discuss the imagery and figures of speech in Charles Simic's "Butcher Shop." How do these elements help you to understand the poem's theme?
10. Discuss the point of view, tone, and setting in Arthur Nortje's "Letter from Pretoria Central Prison." Do you think the poet is writing in his own voice, or has he created a persona? How can you find out?
ACTIVITIES
1. Research the climates and natural vegetation of west central and coastal Oregon and the area of Japan around Kyoto. How does this information contribute to a greater appreciation of Snyder's poems "Siwashing It Out Once in Siuslaw Forest" and "A Spring Night in Shokoku-ji"?
2. Assign a member of the class to read the "Yugao" chapter of The Tale of Genji and to find some Japanese illustrations of The Tale of Genji, preferably of Yugao. What connections in theme, setting, and other elements, are apparent between "Yugao" and Snyder's "A Spring Night in Shokoku-ji"? Murasaki's story of "Yugao" takes place in autumn and winter whereas Snyder's poem is set in the spring. Discuss the possible symbolic significance of this contrast.
3. Research the etymology and various religious meanings of the word epiphany. Then discuss the application of this word to poetry. Which of the poems in this chapter describe epiphany experiences?
4. Go to a library and obtain the February 1918 issue of National Geographic. Identify Osa and Martin Johnson. How does the photograph of the Johnsons contrast with the photographs of the African women and children which appear in this issue of the magazine? How do these and other contrasting photographs in the magazine contribute to your understanding of the theme of Elizabeth Bishop's poem "In the Waiting Room"?
5. Write a statement of theme for Hope's "Australia," Atwood, "At the Tourist Centre in Boston," and Hongo's "The Hongo Store." Share and discuss these statements of theme with the class.
6. Research the significance of the volcano in Hawaiian culture and mythology, including the specific volcano referred to in Hongo's poem, "The Hongo Store." How does this information contribute to a greater appreciation of the poem's theme?
ANALYTICAL WRITING ASSIGNMENTS
1. Analyze A.D. Hope's "Australia," focusing on figures of speech and theme.
2. Analyze Kenneth Slessor's "Beach Burial," focusing on setting, form, and theme. You may wish to do some research on the Battle of El Alamein, and incorporate your findings into this analysis.
3. Analyze Judith Wright's "At Cooloola," focusing on setting and narrative to explore the theme of contrasting cultural values.
4. Analyze Toshiko Takata's "The Seacoast of Mera," focusing on setting and the season of the year as archetypes to express the poem's theme.
5. Analyze Robert Lowell's "The Public Garden," focusing on how sound, diction, and contrasting seasonal imagery help to express the poem's theme.
6. Research style and theme in the poetry of Derek Walcott and Seamus Heaney, both winners of the Nobel Prize for Literature. Then select a poem by each and write a comparison and contrast, focusing on selected elements of poetry and theme. It is not necessary to limit your choice of poems to those which appear in this chapter.
7. Analyze Derek Walcott's use of setting and imagery to express the theme of "A Far Cry from Africa."
8. Analyze the use of form, sound devices, and imagery to express the theme of Seamus Heaney's "Poor Women in a City Church."
9. Analyze Gwendolyn MacEwen's "Inside the Great Pyramid," focusing on setting and metaphor, as they help reveal the poem's theme.
10. Analyze setting, archetypes, and theme in Joy Harjo's "Watching Crow, Looking South Towards the Manzano Mountains."
CREATIVE WRITING ASSIGNMENTS
1. Write a poem about an epiphany experience that you had as a child. Include the setting as a significant element in this poem.
2. Write a poem based on a memory associated with the first person you loved as a teenager or young adult. Include the setting as an integral part of this poem.
3. Write a poem about the country where you were born. Feel free to adopt any tone or point of view in writing this poem. Allow the theme of the poem to emerge naturally out of the poem's imagery.
4. Write a poem which contrasts the city or neighborhood where you live with some other place.
5. Write a poem about a place based on a photograph or a painting. This poem may be on any theme.
6. Write a poem set in a place where a battle, war, or other significant tragic event occurred. You must be very sensitive to avoid literary cannibalism when writing this poem.
7. Write a poem in which weather or climate is an important element.
8. Write a poem set in a place which is significant in mythology. Make allusions to the myth associated with this place in your poem.
9. Write a poem in which two different places are compared in some way.
10. Write a poem set in a place where some specific kind of work occurs. You may wish to write about your own work place. Allow the images in this poem to help determine its theme.
11. Write a poem with a fictionalized or fantasy setting. This setting should be appropriate for the poem's theme.
ADDITIONAL POEMS ABOUT PLACES FOR READING AND ANALYSIS
KENNETH SLESSOR
Australia 1901-1971
Beach Burial
Softly and humbly to the Gulf of Arabs
The convoys of dead sailors come;
At night they sway and wander in the waters far under,
But morning rolls them in the foam.
Between the sob and clubbing of the gunfire
Someone, it seems, has time for this,
To pluck them from the shallows and bury them in burrows
And tread the sand upon their nakedness;
And each cross, the driven stake of tidewood,
Bears the last signature of men,
Written with such perplexity, with such bewildered pity,
The words choke as they begin--
"Unknown seaman"--the ghostly pencil
Wavers and fades, the purple drips,
The breath of the wet season has washed their inscriptions
As blue as drowned men's lips,
Dead seamen, gone in search of the same landfall,
Whether as enemies they fought,
Or fought with us, or neither; the sand joins them together,
Enlisted on the other front.
El Alamein*
* El Alamein, in northern Egypt, was the site of a major battle, won by the British in World War II.
JUDITH WRIGHT
Australia Born, 1915
At Cooloola
The blue crane fishing in Cooloola's twilight
has fished there longer than our centuries.
He is the certain heir of lake and evening,
and he will wear their colour till he dies,
but I'm a stranger, come of a conquering people.
I cannot share his calm, who watch his lake,
being unloved by all my eyes delight in,
and made uneasy, for an old murder's sake.
Those dark-skinned people who once named Cooloola
knew that no land is lost or won by wars,
for earth is spirit: the invader's feet will tangle
in nets there and his blood be thinned by fears.
Riding at noon and ninety years ago,
my grandfather was beckoned by a ghost--
a black accoutred warrior armed for fighting,
who sank into bare plain, as now into time past.
White shores of sand, plumed reed and paperbark,
clear heavenly levels frequented by crane and swan--
I know that we are justified only by love,
but oppressed by arrogant guilt, have room for none.
And walking on clean sand among the prints
of bird and animal, I am challenged by a driftwood spear
thrust from the water; and, like my grandfather,
must quiet a heart accused by its own fear.
TOSHIKO TAKATA
Japan Born, 1916
The Seacoast at Mera
One day this summer,
I swam on the seacoast at Mera,
off the point of Boso peninsula.
Bathing at the edge of the rocks
with no shadow of other people near me,
the surf washed my body smooth
and made it flush all over.
When I took off my swimsuit
in the shadow of the rocks and dried myself
my summer had ended.
On my way back along the steep trail,
I looked back casually and found around the rocky point
four or five women divers standing in the surf
and only the summer day from which I was stealing away
shining above them.
Translated by Kenneth Rexroth and Ikuko Atsumi
ROBERT LOWELL
America 1917-1977
The Public Garden
Burnished, burned-out, still burning as the year
you lead me to our stamping ground.
The city and its cruising cars surround
the Public Garden. All's alive--
the children crowding home from school at five,
punting a football in the bricky air,
the sailors and their pick-ups under trees
with Latin labels. And the jaded flock
of swanboats paddles to its dock.
The park is drying.
Dead leaves thicken to a ball
inside the basin of a fountain where
the heads of four stone lions stare
and suck on empty fawcets. Night
deepens. From the arched bridge, we see
the shedding park-bound mallards, how they keep
circling and diving in the lanternlight,
searching for something hidden in the muck.
And now the moon, earth's friend, that cared so much
for us, and cared so little, comes again--
always a stranger! As we walk,
it lies like chalk
over the waters. Everything's aground.
Remember summer? Bubbles filled
the fountain, and we splashed. We drowned
in Eden, while Jehovah's grass-green lyre
was rustling all about us in the leaves
that gurgled by us, turning upside down...
The fountain's failing waters flash around
the garden. Nothing catches fire.
LOUIS SIMPSON
Jamaica Born, 1923
A Night in Odessa
Grandfather puts down his tea-glass
and makes his excuses
and sets off, taking his umbrella.
The street-lamps shine through a fog
and drunkards reel on the pavement.
One man clenches his fists in anger,
another utters terrible sobs...
And women look on calmly.
They like those passionate sounds.
He walks on, grasping his umbrella.
His path lies near the forest.
Suddenly a wolf leaps in the path,
jaws dripping. The man strikes
with the point of his umbrella...
A howl, and the wolf has vanished.
Go on, grandfather, hop!
It takes brains to live here,
not to be beaten and torn
or to lie drunk in a ditch,
Hold on to your umbrella!
He's home. When he opens the door
his wife jumps to greet him.
Her name is Ninotchka,
she is young and dark and slender,
married only a month or so.
She hurries to get his supper.
But when she puts down the dish
she presses a hand to her side
and he sees that from her hand
red drops of blood are falling.
DEREK WALCOTT
St. Lucia, Caribbean Born 1930
A Far Cry from Africa
A wind is ruffling the tawny pelt
Of Africa. Kikuyu, quick as flies,
Batten upon the bloodstreams of the veldt.
Corpses are scattered through a paradise.
Only the worm, colonel of carrion, cries:
"Waste no compassion on these separate dead!"
Statistics justify and scholars seize
The salients of colonial policy.
What is that to the white child hacked in bed?
To savages, expendable as Jews?
Threshed out by beaters, the long rushes break
In a white dust of ibises whose cries
Have wheeled since civilization's dawn
From the parched river or beast-teeming plain.
The violence of beast on beast is read
As natural law. but upright man
Seeks his divinity by inflicting pain.
Delirious as these worried beasts, his wars
Dance to the tightened carcass of a drum,
While he calls courage still that native dread
Of the white peace contracted by the dead.
Again brutish necessity wipes its hands
Upon the napkin of a dirty cause, again
A waste of our compassion, as with Spain,
The gorilla wrestles with the superman.
I who am poisoned with the blood of both,
Where shall I turn, divided to the vein?
I who have cursed
The drunken officer of British rule, how choose
Between this Africa and the English tongue I love?
Betray them both, or give back what they give?
How can I face such slaughter and be cool?
How can I turn from Africa and live?
CHARLES SIMIC
Yugoslavia* Born 1938
Butcher Shop
Sometimes walking late at night
I stop before a closed butcher shop.
There is a single light in the store
Like the light in which the convict digs his tunnel.
An apron hangs on the hook:
The blood on it smeared into a map
Of the great continents of blood,
The great rivers and oceans of blood.
There are knives that glitter like altars
In a dark church
Where they bring the cripple and the imbecile
To be healed.
There is a wooden slab where bones are broken,
Scraped clean:--a river dried to its bed
Where I am fed,
Where deep in the night I hear a voice.
* Charles Simic moved to the United States when he was young. He lives in America and writes in English.
SEAMUS HEANEY
Northern Ireland Born, 1939
Poor Women in a City Church
The small wax candles melt to light,
Flicker in marble, reflect bright
Asterisks on brass candlesticks:
At the Virgin's altar on the right
Blue flames are jerking on wicks.
Old dough-faced women with black shawls
Drawn down tight kneel in the stalls.
Cold yellow candle-tongues, blue flame
Mince and caper as whispered calls
Take wing up to the Holy Name.
Thus each day in the sacred place
They kneel. Golden shrines, altar lace,
Marble columns and cool shadows
Still them. In the gloom you cannot trace
A wrinkle on their beeswax brows.
GWENDOLYN MACEWEN
Canada 1941-1989
Inside the Great Pyramid
all day the narrow shaft
received us; everyone
came out sweating and
gasping for air, and one
old man collapsed
upon a stair;
I thought:
the fact that it has stood
so long
is no guarantee
it will stand today,
but went in anyway
and heard when I was
halfway up a long
low rumbling like
the echo of ancient stones
first straining to their place;
I thought:
we have made this, we
have made this.
I scrambled out into
the scandalous sun and saw
the desert was an hourglass
we had forgotten to invert,
a tasselled camel falling
to his knees, the River
filling the great waterclock
of earth.
ARTHUR NORTJE
South Africa 1942-1970
Letter from Pretoria Central Prison
The bell wakes me at 6 in the pale spring dawn
with the familiar rumble of the guts negotiating
murky corridors that smell of bodies. My eyes
find salutary the insurgent light of distances.
Waterdrops rain crystal cold, my wet face in
ascent from an iron basin
greets its rifled shadow in the doorway.
They walk us to the workshop. I am eminent,
the blacksmith of the block; these active hours
fly like sparks in the furnace, I hammer metals
with zest letting the sweating muscles
forge a forgetfulness of worlds more magnetic.
The heart being at rest, life peaceable,
your words filter softly through my fibres.
Taken care of, in no way am I unhappy,
being changed to neutral. You must decide
today, tomorrow, bear responsibility,
take gaps in pavement crowds, refine ideas.
Our food we get on time. Most evenings
I read books, Jane Austen
for elegance, agreeableness (Persuasion).
Trees are green beyond the wall, leaves through the mesh
are cool in sunshine
among the monastic white flowers of spring that floats
prematurely across the exercise yard, a square
of the cleanest stone I have ever walked on.
Sentinels smoke in their boxes, the wisps
curling lovely through the barbed wire.
Also music and cinema, yesterday double feature.
At 4 p.m. it's back to the cell, don't laugh
to hear how accustomed one becomes. You spoke
of hospital treatment--I see the smart nurses
bringing you grapefruit and tea--good
luck to the troublesome kidney.
Sorry there's no more space. But date your reply.
JOY HARJO
America Born, 1951
Watching Crow, Looking South Towards the Manzano Mountains
crow floats in winter sun
a black sliver
in a white ocean of sky
he is the horizon
drifting south of Albuquerque
the horizon dances
along the blue edge
of the Manzanos
wind is an arch
a curve
on the black wing of crow
a warm south wind
if it stays for a while
will keep a crow dancing for thirty years
on the ridge
of a blue mountain breeze.
FINDING THE POET
CHAPTER 12 POETRY AND CULTURE
Culture has a very strong influence on poetry. How we dress, what we eat, the music we listen to, the language we speak, the way we worship, if we worship at all-- these and so many other aspects of our everyday lives comprise what we would loosely call our culture. The word "culture," of course, has several meanings, two of which, according to The New Merriam-Webster Pocket Dictionary, are "the act of developing by education and training," and "a stage of advancement in civilization." In a way, both of these concepts could apply to the aspects of popular culture that I just mentioned. Through our parents and ancestors and a community with which we identify, we learn a set of aesthetic, ethical, and perhaps spiritual values, and these determine our level of civilization, along with our language, history, and education. Today, we hear the phrase "cultural diversity" everywhere, and the term seems to refer to the variety of smaller cultures or civilizations within a larger society. Cultural diversity is not new. Indeed, for thousands of years, contrasting cultures have lived in close proximity and interacted in various ways.
Sometimes cultural diversity has been a source of great enrichment for a civilization, and as in the case of England after the Norman Conquest, a new culture, which drew on the best qualities of the two pre-existing cultures, evolved. At other times, cultural diversity has led to hatred, persecution, and war, and civilization, in all its various meanings, has suffered. In still other contexts, such as in Singapore and Malaysia today, diverse groups such as Indians, Chinese, and Malaysians coexist in harmony while maintaining their unique cultural values and influencing each other very little. In the world of poetry, these various patterns are also present.
Often in poetry, culture functions in much the same way as setting. It provides the background or context in which the events or images described in the poem occur. Culture is closely related to place, since climate, geography, and language, all of which are connected with places, help determine how a civilization develops. In poetry, too, cultural images and language patterns often connect with a specific region or a particular place. In the same way, culture is frequently expressed through images of family, since it is from our parents and extended family members that we learn our cultural values. You might want to re-read the two previous chapters--on "Poems About Family" and "Poetry and Place," and notice how many of the poems in these two chapters really express cultural values as well.
While cultural diversity, as I have mentioned, has always been a part of human civilization, we will again be studying poems that present cultural values from the Modern and Contemporary perspectives. Let's begin with a poem by Gary Soto, a California poet born in 1952, whose grandparents came from Mexico. As you will discover, this poem is on the universal theme of initiation--the passage from childhood into adulthood. Yet the Mexican American culture in which the poet lives provides a background or setting for the particular story of initiation which the poet shares with the reader in his own voice.
Behind Grandma's House
At ten I wanted fame. I had a comb
And two Coke bottles, a tube of Bryl-creem.
I borrowed a dog, one with
Mismatched eyes and a happy tongue,
And wanted to prove I was tough
In the alley, kicking over trash cans,
A dull chime of tuna cans falling.
I hurled light bulbs like grenades
And men teachers held their heads,
Fingers of blood lengthening
On the ground. I flicked rocks at cats,
Their goofy faces spurred with foxtails.
I kicked fences. I shooed pigeons.
I broke a branch from a flowering peach
And frightened ants with a stream of spit.
I said "Chale," "In your face," and "No way
Daddy-O" to an imaginary priest
Until grandma came into the alley,
Her apron flapping in a breeze,
Her hair mussed, and said, "Let me help you,"
And punched me between the eyes.
Only the Spanish word "Chale," an insulting epithet, suggests that this poems was written by a Latino poet. His reference to a priest (in this case, an imaginary one) and to his grandmother's willingness to "help" him by using corporal punishment might also reflect certain cultural values in the Latino community, although one could argue that the Irish American, Italian American and several other communities could also be reflected in these images. The references to Coke, Bryl-creem, tuna cans, and the popular slang phrases, "goofy" and "No way Daddy-O" are familiar to many Americans who grew up in the 1960s. The poem, spoken in the voice of the Chicano narrator, re-creates a time and place easily recognized by thousands of readers who come from a variety of family backgrounds yet also identified with a larger popular culture. The 1960s were a decade in which challenges to authority, especially to male authority figures, were unusually plentiful, and the boy in the poem, in addition to tormenting cats and ripping branches off of trees, imagines acts of violence and insult toward a priest and a male teacher. Ironically, it is his grandmother who "helps" him get past these immature acts of aggression and (the reader assumes), learn to interact with adult males and with his environment in a more responsible way. Although the poem is on the universal theme of a boy's initiation into adulthood, on a more subtle level it also explores the theme, so central to Latino culture, of "respeto," or the importance of respect, especially toward one's elders.
As I have said, the culture from which a poem evolves can serve as a kind of setting for the poem. In Soto's "Behind Grandma's House," the time, place, and cultural context provide a background on which the poem's universal theme is presented. Although the poem takes place in California in 1962 in a Chicano family, its appeal to readers transcends time, place, and culture. Readers who were not even born yet in the 1960s have had their own struggles with authority and with immature destructive behavior. And in every culture, people have to find ways to grow up. Many of us, regardless of our background, knew an archetypal figure like the grandmother in Soto's poem who served as the catalyst for our initiation into adulthood.
Many poets write about culture more directly than Soto did in "Behind Grandma's House." In many cases culture itself is either the subject or the theme of the poem. Often poets have expressed an elegiac sense of loss for cultural values that have been eroded, either dissipated with the passage of time or replaced by the values of another culture. The African American poet Margaret Walker expresses a poignant feeling of cultural loss in the following poem:
Lineage
My grandmothers were strong.
They followed plows and bent to toil.
They moved through fields sowing seed.
They touched earth and grain grew.
They were full of sturdiness and singing.
My grandmothers were strong.
My grandmothers were full of memories.
Smelling of soap and onions and wet clay
With veins rolling roughly over quick hands
They have many clean words to say.
My grandmothers were strong.
Why am I not as they?
In this poem, the poet, apparently speaking in her own voice, contrasts herself with her grandmothers. We learn that her grandmothers were strong; in fact the narrator tells us this three times in this brief poem. With this much repetition, I think the reader can feel safe in assuming that Walker considers her grandmothers' strength to be one of the central ideas of this poem. We are also told that the grandmothers were skillful, nurturing farmers whose lives were filled with song and with memories. The references to the smells associated with the grandmothers--"...soap and onions and wet clay" reinforce the image of these women as nurturers and supporters of the family. For me, the most moving line in the poem is "They have many clean words to say." Interestingly, this sentence is written in the present tense whereas all of the other sentences describing the grandmothers are in the past tense, leading the reader to assume that the grandmothers are no longer living. However, their "clean words," still seem to be alive for their granddaughter. The phrase "clean words," harmonizes with the scent of soap and contrasts with the"wet clay" and with the description of the women bending to plant seeds in the dirt. "Clean words" also bring to mind their opposite-- "dirty words," language which is crude or disrespectful. These grandmothers are elegant, gracious women who do not speak ill of others.
The narrator surprises the reader in the final line by asking, "Why am I not like they?" This is all we learn about the speaker herself; she is not like her grandmothers. The reader is left to make the inference that the narrator feels that she herself is weak, not gifted in nurturing, empty of song and memories, and not blessed with the kind of pure spirit that would give her "many clean words to say." Clearly, the speaker feels that something enormous has been lost. In titling the poem "Lineage," Walker refers to her ancestry, and her description of her grandmothers is filled with admiration and respect. She depicts herself in contrast as lacking their magnitude of character. The reader is left to ponder why this terrible loss has occurred. Walker offers no further explanation, so the reader must return to the poem itself. The grandmothers belonged to a way of life that has almost disappeared from our earth. They were rural farmers who tilled the soil and lived in harmony with the natural rhythms of the seasons. They were strong women who sang as they worked and transmitted the family's traditions to their children. They were treasured matriarchs. How many of us are living that life today? A sociologist could talk about the disruption in family values and dilution of culture that began to occur when large numbers of rural families moved to heavily populated urban areas and got jobs in impersonal factories or as domestic servants, far separated from their country traditions and the graves of their ancestors.
This cultural loss took place all over America and increased with each decade of the Twentieth Century. Every ethnic group was affected, but the African American family was decimated more than any other. Readers who are aware that Walker is an African American poet will visualize African American women in the poem's descriptions, but Walker does not identify either herself or her grandmothers as African American. Like Soto's poem, "Lineage" has a wide universal appeal. It addresses a loss of strength of character that is noticeable all over the world along with the shift to an impersonal urban "civilization," a planet-wide culture lived out of harmony with nature in which our matriarchs are no longer treasured and revered.
Another poem that laments a loss of cultural values is Rosario Castellanos' "Silence Concerning an Ancient Stone." Castellanos, who was born in Chiapas, Mexico, and educated at the University of Mexico and in Madrid, expresses the sense that part of her very self has been lost with the death of her ancestral culture. In this poem, which is rich with imagery, similes, and metaphors, Castellanos alludes to the suppressed art, architecture, religion, and language of the native civilization that flourished in Mexico before the arrival of the Spanish and other European cultures.
Silence Concerning an Ancient Stone
Here I am, seated, with all my words,
like a basket of green fruit, intact.
The fragments
of a thousand destroyed ancient gods
seek and draw near each other in my blood. They long
to rebuild their statue.
From their shattered mouths
a song strives to rise to my mouth,
a scent of burned resins, some gesture
of mysterious wrought stone.
But I am oblivion, treason,
the shell that did not keep from the sea
even the echo of the smallest wave.
I look not for the submerged temples,
but only at the trees that above the ruins
move their vast shadow, with acid teeth bite
the wind as it passes.
And the seals close under my eyes like
the flower under the searching fingers of a blind man.
But I know: behind
my body another body crouches,
and round about me many breaths
furtively cross
like nocturnal beasts in the jungle.
I know: somewhere,
like the cactus in the desert,
a constellated heart of spines,
it is waiting for a name, as the cactus the rain.
But I know only a few words
in the lapidary language
under which they buried my ancestor alive.
Translated by George D. Schade
I hope that you will discuss this poem at length with your classmates. It is a beautiful, haunting poem, filled with images of the flora and fauna of Mexico and bursting with archetypal similes and metaphors. I especially love the metaphor, "I am...the shell that did not keep from the sea/ even the echo of the smallest wave." What a cosmic awareness of loss those lines express! Although this poem is much more specific in its cultural context than the poems by Soto and Walker that we just read, I believe that it still expresses a universal theme. All of us have sensed a kind of lost glory with the fading of our ancestors' civilization, a feeling that art, religion, and language were once so much more magnificent than they are today. And many of us have experienced a mysterious awareness of our ancestors' presence, "like nocturnal beasts in the jungle."
Unfortunately, sometimes cultural loss escalates into cultural conflict. When this occurs, poets are there to express the pain. This brief, ironic poem by the African American poet Countee Cullen comments on the racist values that have permeated American culture for centuries:
For a Lady I Know
She even thinks that up in heaven
Her class lies late and snores,
While poor black cherubs rise at seven
To do celestial chores.
This poem, written in 1925, could have been written yesterday. Although Cullen adopts a humorous tone, his message is very clear. Cullen always maintained a gentlemanly tone in his poetry, and he even has the courtesy to refer to this racist and religious hypocrite as a "Lady." Of course, calling her as a lady compounds the irony of the poem and adds to its satiric effect.
Claude McKay, also writing in the 1920s, adopts a much blunter tone in this compelling sonnet about the erosion of American culture due to hatred. McKay, also of African ancestry, immigrated to America from Jamaica. Like Cullen and Walker, he does not mention his own race, and although he says America "feeds me bread of bitterness, " and uses the words "hell" and "hate" to characterize American culture, he makes no specific references to race or racism. He does, however, convey to the reader enormous personal pain combined with a heartbreaking love for his country.
America
Although she feeds me bread of bitterness,
And sinks into my throat her tiger's tooth,
Stealing my breath of life, I confess
I love this cultured hell that tests my youth.
Her vigor flows like tides into my blood,
Giving me strength erect against her hate,
Her bigness sweeps my being like a flood.
Yet, as a rebel fronts a king in state,
I stand within her walls with not a shred
Of terror, malice, not a word of jeer.
Darkly I gaze into the days ahead,
And see her might and granite wonders there,
Beneath the touch of Time's unerring hand,
Like priceless treasures sinking in the sand.
Like Castellanos, McKay fills his poem with challenging figures of speech, such as "her tiger's tooth" and "Her bigness sweeps my being like a flood." This sonnet concludes with a prophetic vision expressed as a simile. The speaker looks into the future and sees America's "might.../ Like priceless treasures sinking in the sand." Again the reader is challenged to search the images in the poem for the cause and effect relationships to which McKay alludes. Why will the priceless treasures of American civilization sink into oblivion? A reader three hundred years into the future might actually have difficulty finding the answer in this sonnet itself. Both McKay and Walker assume a certain cultural and historic awareness on their reader's part. And indeed it would be difficult to find any reader of poetry in the world today who is totally unaware of the struggles with racial hatred and cultural conflict that have characterized all of American history.
Mitsuye Yamada addresses the issue of conflicting cultural values more specifically in the following poem. The phrase "allegiance to the emperor" refers to the Emperor of Japan, and the poem mentions "this war." The reader should have no difficulty concluding that the poem describes the stresses experienced by Japanese Americans during World War II. Yamada presents this tension in a multi-generational context. The poem is written in Yamada's own voice, describing both her own reaction and her mother's to the pressure put on them by U.S. Government officials to "forswear allegiance" to Japan, the country of their birth. Yamada herself, who was born in 1923 and was thus a young adult during the war, resolves this conflict more easily than her mother, who argues that "double loyalty," forbidden by America, should be her right.
The Question of Loyalty
I met the deadline
for alien registration
once before
was numbered fingerprinted
and ordered not to travel
without a permit.
But alien still they said I must
forswear allegiance to the emperor.
For me that was easy
I didn't even know him
but my mother who did cried out
If I sign this
What will I be?
I am doubly loyal
to my American children
also to my own people.
How can double mean nothing?
I wish no one to lose this war.
Everyone does.
I was poor
at math.
I signed
my only ticket out.
Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni also explores the conflict and pain associated with living in two cultures. In this poem, entitled, "Indian Movie, New Jersey," the poet describes her level of comfort while inside a movie theater watching an Indian movie with friends who are also Indian immigrants. While depicting the scene in the theater, Divakaruni uses three Indian words, "qurbani," which means "sacrifice;" "dosti," which means "friendship;" and "pakoras," which are deep fried Indian appetizers. As the speaker and her friends prepare to leave the comfort and cultural familiarity of the theater, they begin to think about the conflicts they will be facing in the wider culture when they step out onto the streets of New Jersey. The poet refers to "Dotbusters," which are xenophobic American gangs who attack Indians. As you read this poem, notice the poignant and ironic contrast between the plot of the movie and the "American dream" that called the speaker and her friends to emigrate from India.
Indian Movie, New Jersey
Not like the white filmstars, all rib
and gaunt cheekbone, the Indian sex-goddess
smiles plumply from behind a flowery
branch. Below her brief red skirt, her thighs
are satisfying-solid, redeeming
as tree trunks. She swings her hips
and the men-viewers whistle. The lover-hero
dances in to a song, his lip-sync
a little off, but no matter, we
know the words already and sing along.
It is safe here, the day
golden and cool so no one sweats,
roses on every bush and the Dal Lake
clean again.
The sex-goddess switches
to thickened English to emphasize
a joke. We laugh and clap. Here
we need not be embarrassed by words
dropping like lead pellets into foreign ears.
The flickering movie-light
wipes from our faces years of America, sons
who want mohawks and refuse to run
the family store, daughters who date
on the sly.
When at the end the hero
dies for his friend who also
loves the sex-goddess and now can marry her,
we weep, understanding. Even the men
clear their throats to say, "What qurbani!
What dosti!" After, we mill around
unwilling to leave, exchange greetings
and good news: a new gold chain, a trip
to India. We do not speak
of motel raids, canceled permits, stones
thrown through glass windows, daughters and sons
raped by Dotbusters.
In the dim foyer
we can pull around us the faint, comforting smell
of incense and pakoras, can arrange
our children's marriages with hometown boys and girls,
open a franchise, win a million
in the mail. We can retire
in India, a yellow two-storied house
with wrought-iron gates, our own
Ambassador car. Or at least
move to a rich white suburb, Summerfield
of Fort Lee, with neighbors that will
talk to us. Here while the film-songs still echo
in the corridors and restrooms, we can trust
in movie truths: sacrifice, success, love and luck,
the America that was supposed to be.
Although cultural conflict, as expressed by McKay, Yamada, and Divakaruni, continues to be a very real and challenging theme in both life and literature, sometimes poets write about the joyous aspects of culture. Cultural identity can be a source of pride and an impetus to creative expression. Anoma Kanie, a contemporary poet from the Ivory Coast, wrote the following poem in French. Although she alludes to political, economic, and environmental stresses in Africa today, the poem is essentially a celebration and affirmation of the gifts that the poet feels that she has received from her home continent.
All That You Have Given Me, Africa
All that you have given me, Africa
Lakes, forests, misted lagoons
All that you have given me,
Music, dances, all night stories around a fire
All that you have etched in my skin
Pigments of my ancestors
Indelible in my blood
All that you have given me Africa
Makes me walk
With a step that is like no other
Hip broken under the weight of time,
Feet large with journeys,
All that you have left to me
Even this lassitude bound to my heels,
I bear it with pride on my forehead
My health is no more to be lost
And I go forward
Praising my race which is no better
Or worse than any other.
All that you have given me Africa,
Savannahs gold in the noonday sun
Your beasts that men call wicked,
Your mines, inexplicable treasures
Obsession of a hostile world
Your suffering for lost paradises,
All that, I protect with an unforgiving hand
As far as the clear horizons
So that your heaven-given task
May be safe forever.
Translated by Kathleen Weaver
I find the lines "Praising my race which is no better/ Or worse than any other" very interesting. Julia Alvarez expresses a similar sentiment in a sonnet which is part of a thirty-three sonnet sequence she wrote to celebrate her own thirty-third birthday. Alvarez, who was born in New York of parents who came from the Dominican Republic, honors her own family inheritance in a joyful tone.
The Women on My Mother's Side Were Known
The women on my mother's side were known
for beauty and were given lovely names
passed down for generations. I knew them
as my pretty aunts: Laura, who could turn
any head once, and Anna, whose husband
was so devoted he would lay his handkerchief
on seats for her and when she rose thanked
her; there was Rosa, who got divorced twice,
her dark eyes and thick hair were to blame;
and my mother Julia, who was a catch
and looks it in her wedding photographs.
My sister got her looks, I got her name,
and it suits me that between resemblance
and words, I got the right inheritance.
Although the poet suggests that her sister, and not she herself, inherited her mother's beauty, there is no sense of disappointment or self-pity. In fact, Alvarez concludes that the gift of poetry, which she calls "words," is for her "the right inheritance."
Whether culture is used as a setting, or as a subject itself to explore themes such as cultural loss, conflict, or celebration, it continues to be a source of inspiration to poets. A good poem about culture also has universal appeal. Alvarez and Kanie's poems acclaiming their own heritages can evoke a sense of cultural pride in any reader, just as Divakaruni's poem reminds us all that there will always be cultural challenges for us to face.
QUESTIONS AND TOPICS FOR REVIEW
1. What are some of the meanings of the word "culture"?
2. What is popular culture?
3. Define the term cultural diversity.
4. Historically, what have been some of the positive and negative effects of cultural diversity?
5. In poetry, how can culture function in much the same way as setting?
6. What is the theme of Gary Soto's "Behind Grandma's House"?
7. What kind of cultural loss does Margaret Walker discuss in "Lineage"?
8. What kind of cultural loss does Rosario Castellanos discuss in "Silence Concerning an Ancient Stone"?
9. How would you characterize the tone of Countee Cullen's "For a Lady I Know"?
10. In what poetic form is Claude McKay's "America" written?
11. What is the theme of McKay's "America"? You may wish to review the discussion in Chapter 9 on the distinction between subject and theme in poetry.
12. How does Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni use setting to present the theme of conflicting cultural values?
13. Which of the poets in this chapter focused primarily on cultural pride and celebration?
14. How can a poem written from a specific cultural perspective also have universal appeal?
TOPICS FOR DISCUSSION
1. Should poets assume that the reader is aware of the cultural context in which a poem is written if the poet does not include specific references to that context? Use Margaret Walker's "Lineage" and Claude McKay's "America" as the basis of your discussion.
2. Discuss the imagery and figures of speech in Rosario Castellanos' "Silence Concerning an Ancient Stone." How do these elements help convey the poem's theme?
3. Using Countee Cullen's "For a Lady I Know" as the basis for your discussion, talk about examples of cultural insensitivity that you have personally witnessed.
4. Using Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni's "Indian Movie, New Jersey" as the basis of your discussion, define the American Dream. What elements of the American Dream are also evident in the Indian movie that Divakaruni and her friends have watched? In what ways are Divakaruni and her friends living the American Dream in New Jersey? What do you think the American Dream means to the Dotbusters who harass Indians in New Jersey?
5. Using Gary Soto's "Behind Grandma's House" as the basis of your discussion, share your own experiences of initiation with your classmates. Were there any aspects of these experiences of initiation that were connected to the culture in which you grew up?
6. Pablo Neruda's "Sweetness, Always," which appears at the end of this chapter, is written from a world-wide perspective. How does the poet create this context?
7. How does Seamus Heaney use images from his upbringing in Ireland to create the setting of "Digging"? What is the theme of this poem? How does the poet compare and contrast himself with his father and his grandfather?
8. Read Gary Soto's "Black Hair" aloud in class. Then discuss the attitude toward baseball expressed in this poem. Share you own experiences with sports with each other. Are these experiences tied to the place where you live (or lived as a child) and your cultural upbringing? Cite specific examples.
9. Read Jose Emilio Pacheco's "High Treason" together in class. Then discuss the poem's theme. Is this a patriotic poem, or does it express a treasonous attitude toward Pacheco's country? Discuss what patriotism means to you. Are any of the other poem in this chapter patriotic? Do any of them betray the poet's country or culture?
10. Judith Ortiz Cofer's "The Idea of Islands" compares and contrasts two places where the poet has lived. Identify the two places and discuss how she conveys this comparison and contrast to the reader. Was the transition from one culture to the other easy or difficult for the speaker in the poem? Discuss challenges you have faced if you have moved from one place and culture to another. Did you ever suffer from culture shock? If so, how did you respond?
11. In "Heritage," Linda Hogan refers to parents and grandparents who came from different cultures. Read the poem together and discuss its theme. What gifts has the speaker received form each of the family members she mentions? What are the advantages of growing up in a multi-cultural family? Are there any disadvantages? What do the last two lines of the poem mean to you?
ACTIVITIES
1. Using Mitsuye Yamada's "The Question of Loyalty" as a resource, organize a debate on the issue of whether or not it is possible to be loyal to two different countries.
2. Watch a film from a different culture, and perhaps a different language, from your own. Discuss with the class the attitudes, activities, or values expressed in this film that differed from your own cultural values. Then comment on the aspects of the film that are also shared in your own culture. After this discussion, write a spontaneous poem which incorporates images from both cultures.
3. Assign someone to research the life of Langston Hughes and report his or her findings to the class. Then get a volunteer to read Hughes' "Theme for English B" aloud for the group. This poem was written in 1951 when Hughes was nearly fifty years old, yet the speaker in the poem is twenty-two. Which of the other details in the poem are also fictionalized? Which of the details were true of Hughes' own life? Discuss Hughes' possible motives for using a persona in this poem.
4. Watch the Italian film Il Postino (The Postman) outside of class. An actor plays the poet Pablo Neruda in this movie. In what ways does the film explore the cultural differences and similarities between the two central characters, the Italian postman and the Chilean poet? What is the theme of this film? What attitudes toward poetry are expressed? How does poetry transform the lives of the both poet and the postman? Are any of the attitudes expressed in Neruda's "Sweetness, Always," also presented in the film?
5. Write statements of theme for Rahel's "To My Country," Jose Emilio Pacheco's "High Treason," and Anoma Kanie's "All That You Have Given Me, Africa." Compare, contrast, and discuss these statements of theme. Did most of the students feel that these three poems were written on similar themes, or were the themes of these poems perceived to be different?
6. Find a volunteer to research the life and cultural background of N. Scott Momaday and report this information to the class. Find another volunteer to read the poem "Earth and I Gave You Turquoise" aloud. Then discuss the relationship between the images in the poem and Momaday's cultural background. Does the poem also contain mythic or archetypal elements? In what traditional genre is this poem written?
7. Assign a class member to research the life and cultural background of Lucille Clifton. Another student will read "Come Home From the Movies" to the class. Then discuss this poem's point of view and theme. Do you think it is written in the poet's own voice, or is she using a persona. Is the poet critical of her own culture? If so, discuss specific examples from the poem. What is the central metaphor in this poem?
ANALYTICAL WRITING ASSIGNMENT
1. Compare and contrast A.D. Hope's "Australia" (in Chapter 11) and Claude McKay's "America," focusing on theme, tone, and imagery.
2. Compare and contrast Margaret Walker's "Lineage" and Julia Alvarez's "The Women on My Mother's Side Were Known," focusing on point of view, tone, and theme.
3. Compare and contrast Claude McKay's "America" and Julia Alvarez's "The Women on My Mother's Side Were Known," focusing on theme, imagery, and the use of the sonnet form.
4. Analyze Pablo Neruda's "Sweetness, Always," focusing on tone, metaphor, and theme.
5. Compare and contrast Seamus Heaney's "Digging" with Robert Hayden's "Those Winter Sundays" (in Chapter 11,) focusing on theme, imagery and tone.
6. Analyze N.Scott Momaday's "Earth and I Gave You Turquoise," focusing on setting, imagery, point of view, and theme.
7. Compare and contrast Rahel's "To My Country" and Barry Spacks' "Finding a Yiddish Paper on the Riverside Line," focusing on point of view, setting, imagery, and theme.
8. Analyze Judith Ortiz Cofer's "The Idea of Islands," focusing on theme, imagery, and diction.
9. Compare and contrast "Behind Grandma's House" and "Black Hair" by Gary Soto, focusing on theme, point of view, and narrative technique. Pay special attention to the initiation theme in both poems.
10. Analyze Linda Hogan's "Heritage," focusing on point of view, theme, and the cultural values expressed in this poem. What poetic devices does Hogan use to express these values?
CREATIVE WRITING ASSIGNMENTS
1. Write a poem on the theme of initiation. Place this poem in a specific cultural context.
2. In your journal, make a list of the aspects of your own culture that are worthy of celebration. Then write a poem of cultural celebration incorporating these elements. Include specific imagery to make this celebration concrete for your reader.
3. Edit and revise the poem that you wrote as part of Activity 2. (This activity involved writing a spontaneous poem incorporating images from two contrasting cultures.) As you edit, add or delete words or images that help clarify the poem's theme. Think about whether your poem is primarily a comparison or a contrast.
4. Write a poem criticizing some aspects of the culture in which you live. Pay special attention to the tone of this poem. You may wish to adopt a satiric tone. You may also choose to write in a persona.
5. Write a poem expressing a sense of loss over some aspect of your own heritage that has disappeared from your life.
6. Write a poem that focuses on the subject of cultural conflict. The cultures depicted in the poem do not have to be your own.
7. Write a poem about a childhood experience in which you either attended or participated in a sporting event. Include images from your cultural upbringing in this poem.
8. Many of you were raised in families that were comprised of more than one culture. If this is true of your heritage, write a poem which incorporates imagery from these various cultures. Then revise this poem to help clarify its theme.
9. Write a poem expressing your feelings about the country where you live. Communicate these feelings using specific images.
10. Write a poem which contrasts the food you ate as a child with the food you eat now. This poem can be written on any theme. Edit and revise this poem to help its theme to emerge.
ADDITIONAL POEMS FROM CULTURAL PERSPECTIVES FOR READING AND ANALYSIS
RAHEL*
Israel 1890-1931
To My Country
I haven't sung your praise,
nor glorified your name
in tales of bravery
and the spoils of war.
I only plant a tree
on Jordan's quiet banks.
I only wear a path over the fields.
Surely very meagre,
Mother, I know.
Surely very meagre,
your daughter's offering:
Only a joyous shout
on a radiant day,
only secret weeping
over your barrenness.
Translated by Diane Mintz
* Rahel Blaustein signed her poems only using her first name. She was born in Russia and immigrated to Palestine.
LANGSTON HUGHES
America 1902-1967
Theme for English B
The instructor said,
Go home and write
a page tonight
And let that page come out of you--
Then, it will be true.
I wonder if it's that simple?
I am twenty-two, colored, born in Winston-Salem.
I went to school there, then Durham, then here
to this college on the hill above Harlem.
I am the only colored student in my class.
The steps from the hill lead down into Harlem,
through a park, then I cross St. Nicholas,
Eighth Avenue, Seventh, and I come to the Y,
the Harlem Branch Y, where I take the elevator
up to my room, sit down, and write this page:
It's not easy to know what is true for you and me
at twenty-two, my age. But I guess I'm what
I feel and see and hear, Harlem, I hear you:
hear you, hear me--we two--you, me, talk on this page.
(I hear New York, too.)Me--who?
Well, I like to eat, sleep, drink, and be in love.
I like to work, read, learn, and understand life.
I like a pipe for a Christmas present,
or records--Bessie, bop, or Bach.
I guess being colored doesn't make me not like
the same things other folks like who are other races.
So will my page be colored that I write?
Being me, it will not be white.
But it will be
a part of you, instructor.
You are white--
yet a part of me, as I am a part of you.
That's American.
Sometimes perhaps you don't want to be a part of me.
Nor do I often want to be a part of you.
But we are, that's true!
As I learn from you,
I guess you learn from me--
although you're older--and white--
and somewhat more free.
This is my page for English B.
PABLO NERUDA
Chile 1904-1973
Sweetness, Always
Why such harsh machinery?
Why, to write down the stuff
and people of every day,
must poems be dressed up in gold,
in old and fearful stone?
I want verses of felt or feather
which scarcely weigh, mild verses
with the intimacy of beds
where people have loved and dreamed.
I want poems stained
by hands and everydayness.
Verses of pastry which melt
into milk and sugar in the mouth,
air and water to drink,
the bites and kisses of love.
I long for eatable sonnets,
poems of honey and flour.
Vanity keeps prodding us
to lift ourselves skyward
or to make deep and useless
tunnels underground.
So we forget the joyous
love-needs of our bodies.
We forget about pastries.
We are not feeding the world.
In Madras a long time since,
I saw a sugary pyramid,
a tower of confectionery--
one level after another,
and in the construction, rubies,
and other blushing delights,
medieval and yellow.
Someone dirtied his hands
to cook up so much sweetness.
Brother poets from here
and there, from earth and sky,
from Medellin, from Veracruz,
Abyssinia, Antofagasta,
do you know the recipe for honeycombs?
Let's forget all about that stone.
Let your poetry fill up
the equinoctial pastry shop
our mouths long to devour--
all the children's mouths
and the poor adults also.
Don't go on without seeing,
relishing, understanding
all these hearts of sugar.
Don't be afraid of sweetness.
With us or without us,
sweetness will go on living
and is infinitely alive,
forever being revived,
for it's in a man's mouth,
whether he's eating or singing,
that sweetness has its place.
Translated by Alastair Reid
BARRY SPACKS
America Born 1931
Finding a Yiddish Paper on the Riverside Line
Again I hold these holy letters,
Never learned. Dark candelabras.
Once they glowed in the yellow light
Through the chicken smell of Friday night,
My father in his peach-stained shirt
Scrubbing off twelve hours' dirt
While I drew my name on misted glass.
Now trim suburban houses pass
And on my lap the headlines loom
Like strangers in the living room.
N. Scott Momaday
America Born, 1934
Earth and I Gave You Turquoise
Earth and I gave you turquoise
when you walked singing
We lived laughing in my house
and told old stories
You grew ill when the owl cried
We will meet on Black Mountain
I will bring you corn for planting
and we will make fire
Children will come to your breast
You will heal my heart
I speak your name many times
The wild cane remembers you
My younger brother's house is filled
I go there to sing
We have not spoken of you
but our songs are sad
When the Moon Woman goes to you
I will follow her white way
Tonight they dance near Chinle
by the seven elms
There your loom whispered beauty
They will eat mutton
and drink coffee till morning
You and I will not be there
I saw a crow by Red Rock
standing on one leg
It was the black of your hair
The years are heavy
I will ride the swiftest horse
You will hear the drumming of hooves
LUCILLE CLIFTON
America Born, 1936
come home from the movies
come home from the movies,
black girls and boys,
the picture be over and the screen
be cold as our neighborhood.
come home from the show,
don't be the show.
take off some flowers and plant them,
pick us some papers and read them,
stop making some babies and raise them.
come home from the movies
black girls and boys,
show our fathers how to walk like men,
they already know how to dance.
SEAMUS HEANEY
Northern Ireland Born 1939
Digging
Between my finger and my thumb
The squat pen rests; snug as a gun.
Under my window, a clean rasping sound
When the space sinks into gravelly ground:
My father, digging. I look down
Till his straining rump among the flowerbeds
Bends low, comes up twenty years away
Stooping in rhythm through potato drills
Where he was digging.
The coarse boot nestled on the lug, the shaft
Against the inside knee was levered firmly.
He rooted out tall tops, buried the bright edge deep
To scatter new potatoes that we picked
Loving their cool hardness in our hands.
By God, the old man could handle a spade.
Just like his old man.
My grandfather cut more turf in a day
Than any other man on Toner's bog.
Once I carried him milk in a bottle
Corked sloppily with paper. He straightened up
To drink it, then fell to right away.
Nicking and slicing neatly, heaving sods
Over his shoulder, going down and down
For the good turf. Digging.
The cold smell of potato mould, the squelch and slap
Of soggy peat, the curt cuts of an edge
Through living roots awaken in my head.
But I've no spade to follow men like them.
Between my finger and my thumb
The squat pen rests.
I'll dig with it.
JOSE EMILIO PACHECO
Mexico Born 1939
High Treason
I do not love my country. Its abstract lustre
is beyond my grasp.
But (although it sounds bad) I would give my life
for ten places in it, for certain people,
seaports, pinewoods, fortresses,
a run-down city, gray, grotesque,
various figures from its history,
mountains
(and three or four rivers).
Translated by Alastair Reid
LINDA HOGAN
America 1947
Heritage
From my mother, the antique mirror
where I watch my face take on her lines.
She left me the smell of baking bread
to warm fine hairs in my nostrils,
she left the large white breasts that weigh down
my body.
From my father I take his brown eyes,
the plague of locusts that leveled our crops,
they flew in formation like buzzards.
From my uncle the whittled wood
that rattles like bones
and is white
and smells like all our old houses
that are no longer there. He was the man
who sang old chants to me, the words
my father was told not to remember.
From my grandfather who never spoke
I learned to fear silence.
I learned to kill a snake
when you're begging for rain.
And grandmother, blue-eyed woman
whose skin was brown,
she used snuff.
When her coffee can full of black saliva
spilled on me
it was like the brown cloud of grasshoppers
that leveled her fields.
It was the brown stain
that covered my white shirt,
my whiteness a shame.
That sweet black liquid like the food
she chewed up and spit into my father's mouth
when he was an infant.
It was the brown earth of Oklahoma
stained with oil
She said tobacco would purge your body of poisons.
I has more medicine than stones and knives
against your enemies.
That tobacco is the dark night that covers me.
She said it is wise to eat the flesh of deer
so you will be swift and travel over many miles.
She told me how our tribe has always followed a stick
that pointed west
that pointed east.
From my family I have learned the secrets
of never having a home.
JUDITH ORTIZ COFER
Puerto Rico 1952
The Idea of Islands
The place where I was born,
that mote in a cartographer's eye,
interests you?
Today Atlanta is like a port city
enveloped in mist. The temperature
is plunging with the abandon
of a woman rushing to a rendezvous.
Since you ask, things were simpler
on the island. Food and shelter
were never the problem. Most days,
a hat and a watchful eye were all
one needed for protection, the climate being
rarely inclement. Fruit could be plucked
from trees languishing under the weight
of their own fecundity. The thick sea
spewed out fish that crawled into the pots
of women whose main occupation was to dress
each other's manes with scarlet hibiscus,
which as you may know, blooms
without restraint in the tropics.
I was always the ambitious one, overdressed
by my neighbors' standards, and unwilling
to eat mangoes three times a day.
In truth, I confess to spending my youth
guarding the fire by the beach, waiting
to be rescued from the futile round
of paradisial life.
How do I like the big city?
City lights are just as bright
as the stars that enticed me then;
the traffic ebbs and rises like the tides
and in a crowd,
everyone is an island.
GARY SOTO
America Born, 1952
Black Hair
At eight, I was brilliant with my body.
In July, that ring of heat
We all jumped through, I sat in the bleachers
Of Romain Playground, in the lengthening
Shade that rose from our dirty feet.
The game before us was more than baseball.
It was a figure--Hector Moreno
Quick and hard with turned muscles,
His crouch the one I assumed before an altar
Of worn baseball cards, in my room.
I came here because I was Mexican, a stick
Of brown light in love with those
Who could do it--the triple and the hard slide,
The gloves eating balls into double plays.
What could I do with 50 pounds, my shyness,
My black torch of hair, about to go out?
Father was dead, his face no longer
Hanging over the table or our sleep,
And mother was the terror of mouths
Twisting hurt by butter knives.
In the bleachers I was brilliant with my body,
Waving players in and stomping my feet,
Growing sweaty in the presence of white shirts.
I chewed sunflower seeds. I drank water
And bit my arm through the late innings.
When Hector lined balls into deep
Center, in my mind I rounded the bases
With him, my face flared, my hair lifting
Beautifully, because we were coming home
To the arms of brown people.
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