Of Villanelles and Blackberries

If, after our discussion of Dylan Thomas's "Do Not Go Gentle Into that Good Night," you're curious about other striking and virtuosic examples of villanelles, you'd do well to look at Elizabeth Bishop's "One Art." As I think about Bishop's and Thomas's poems together, it's fascinating to see two poets choose a poetic form with almost rigidly mathematical dictates to be the vehicle for their overwhelming and uncontainable emotion (dealing with loss, mortality, etc.). There's so much to talk about there, somehow. As for Bishop's poem, notice how brilliantly it relates and enlarges its catalog of losses, starting with seemingly inconsequential losses (the "lost door keys" and "the hour badly spent" in line 5) and proceeding to losses that start to cut deeper (her mother's watch, then one of her houses, then "two rivers, and a continent") -- ending finally with the greatest loss of all ("even losing you"), her love, which finally gives the lie to her refrain that "the art of losing isn't hard to master." It is, in fact, very hard to master.

Also, for those who liked the Seamus Heaney poems we read, be sure to check out another of his famous poems (and one of my favorites), "Blackberry-Picking." It's too bad we couldn't have worked it into our class schedule, as it's the kind of poem that would converse nicely with Wordsworth's "Immortality Ode," Keats's "To Autumn," and other poems that contemplate innocence and experience and that use the seasons to comment on human transience and mortality. Recalling "Digging," this poem also invokes issues of rural agricultural life, labor, memory, and writing and rhythm. The poem begins, we might say, with lines that suggest the joys and innocence of childhood ("You ate that first one and its flesh was sweet" et al.), but gradually reveals that adult awareness of passing time, and our attempts to slow it ("We hoarded the fresh berries in the byre"). We hope to retain those things that we hold dear ("Life stand still here!" demanded Mrs. Ramsay), but of course we know that we cannot: "It wasn't fair," concludes Heaney's poem, "That all the lovely canfuls smelt of rot. / Each year I hoped they'd keep, knew they would not."