"It is finished."

Well, on the rare chance that some of you may find your way back to this venue (doubtful, I know!), one last post. I use Lily Briscoe's words for the post's title, of course. And, indeed, that novel still seems to be inhabiting my consciousness -- I always seem to find I dream my life differently when I'm in the vicinity of a To the Lighthouse reading experience. Regardless of what you thought of that novel, I sensed we mostly all agreed that Woolf is stunningly gifted with language. And somehow, to me, she seems so uniquely able to clarify moments of experience that relate to our paths through life, to render a poetic apprehension of life that is incommunicable but which we recognize as true, and which seems somehow akin to a religious swelling out into the universe (not unlike Gabriel Conroy's experience at the end of "The Dead"). Anyway, after the stress of the semester's endgame, and after all the harried days, I hope you are experiencing something like what Mrs. Ramsay does when we read that "she grew still like a tree which has been tossing and quivering and now, when the breeze falls, settles, leaf by leaf into quiet" (118). And as for our time together this semester, what a pleasure: thank you for your hard work and good cheer. I get stressed, too, and look towards the end and the winter break, but I feel sentimental, too, knowing that our fifteen weeks together must end (the broken hallelujah yet again, right?!). With this emotion, too, Woolf is so poignant, reaching so poetically at the evanescence of life: "Here sitting on the world, she thought, for she could not shake herself free from the sense that everything this morning was happening for the first time, perhaps for the last time, as a traveller, even though he is half asleep knows, looking out of the train window, that he must look now, for he will never see that town, or that mule-cart, or that woman at work in the fields, again" (194).

I've enjoyed reading your awards papers. I wish I could somehow tally up the various "winners" for you, but, as expected, there was a great range of responses. Kurtz frequently appeared as most outstanding supporting character, but other great choices included Michael Furey, the dead soldier in "Dulce et Decorum est," Mr. Ramsay and James Ramsay in TTL, the old man in Heaney's "Casualty" (I felt rather sorry that Freddy Malins was shut out of this one, though!); for supporting female characters, Gretta Conroy and "Goblin Market"'s Lizzie and Laura were the most frequent choices, and there were votes, as well, for the models in "In an Artist's Studio" and for Browning's Porphyria. The most outstanding lead male was most often Gabriel Conroy or Charlie Marlow, but Arthur Hallam or the speaker of In Memoriam, A.H.H. were wonderful choices; for lead females, of course it tended to be Mrs. Ramsay or Lily Briscoe, but also the Lady of Shalott, the female-personified Autumn in Keats's ode, and the inspiring Aurora Leigh. The most outstanding setting saw awards for the Misses Morkans' house in "The Dead," the coastline and chalk cliffs of "Dover Beach," the sludgy, hellish battlefield of "Dulce et Decorum est," the Arve valley and fearsome Alps of "Mont Blanc," the cottage and wintry surroundings of "Frost at Midnight." The most outstanding poem saw multiple votes for "Do Not Go Gentle into that Good Night," In Memoriam, A.H.H., "Dulce et Decorum est," "Digging, and "To Autumn." And, finally, the most outstanding work of fiction was almost evenly divided between "The Dead," Heart of Darkness, and To the Lighthouse.

Well, that's a wrap everyone. Happy holidays. Be well. Keep in touch.

Rushdie and the Fatwa

Apropos of last night's reading and discussion, a relatively recent issue of Vanity Fair features an interesting look back at the fatwa (now 26+ years ago) and the debates that surrounded Rushdie's novel The Satanic Verses. It's well worth reading: you'll learn much about Rushdie, his work, and a controversy that revealed much about the tenor of our times.

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."

News that Stays News

Well, lo and behold, you have read your last poem for this course. I think back to some of your responses, when, on the first day of class, I asked you to describe your relationship with poetry in one word: "conflicted," "frenemies," "50/50," "budding," "unexercised," "rollercoaster," "appreciative," "theoretical," "strained," "complicated," et al. Anyway, I hope many of you saw the relationship improve, and that you found the poetry we read and discussed increasingly enjoyable. I'm always interested in writers who can describe the virtues of reading poetry, in part because some of us often need to be reminded of its value. Wordsworth, Shelley, and Arnold have done it in their various "manifestos," but I recently came upon a contemporary version. Here are some snippets from an essay by Jane Hirschfield -- "Poetry and the Constellation of Surprise" -- that tell us how poetry can enrich our lives if we open ourselves up to it, read it regularly, listen to its music, seek out its insights and meanings, etc.:

"Each instant of a good poem provides the enactment of an unfathomable transformation. From the silence preceding the title's first word to that first word, from the first word to the second, everything is changed. The illimitable possibility of the empty page becomes some constellation of feeling, thought, interior shift, and musical gesture: the many-leveled experience we feel as 'meaning.' A good poem makes self and world knowable in new ways, brings us into an existence opened, augmented, and altered. Part of its work, then, must also be to surprise -- to awaken into a new circumference is to be startled.

"Poems transport us into unanticipatable comprehensions. In this, lyric epiphany is like any learning sharply won: its surprise is the signal of strongly shifted knowledge. But one of the distinguishing powers of art is that it unseals its experience freshly not only once, but many times. Good poems provide an informing so simultaneously necessary and elusive that they are never, it seems, taken in fully, and can never be fully used up. New each time they are read, good poems offer a kind of mirror-reflection of Tantalus's Hell -- each time we enter poetry's realm, we find hunger both wholly present and wholly answered....

"It is, of course, we who house poems as much as their words, and we ourselves must be the locus of poetry's depth of newness. Still, the permeability seems to travel both ways: a changed self will find new meanings in a good poem, but a good poem also changes the shape of the self. Having read it, we are not who we were the moment before.... Art lives in what it awakens in us.... Through a good poem's eyes we see the world liberated from what we would have it do. Existence does not guarantee us destination, nor trust, nor equity, nor one moment beyond this instant's almost weightless duration. It is a triteness to say that the only thing to be counted upon is that what you count on will not be what comes. Utilitarian truths evaporate: we die. Poems allow us not only to bear the tally and toll of our transience, but to perceive, within their continually surprising abundance, a path through the grief of that insult into joy."

I love that last sentence about poetry helping us bear the "tally and toll of our transience" and directing us to joy, but if you want a one-line substitute for all of this, how about this nugget from Ezra Pound: "Poetry is news that stays news." I hope each of you manage to store away at least a few poems after this term, and that you will thereby find some news that stays news in your lives. Maybe we can even keep a tally of them here (if you'd be inclined to share which one(s) work for you at this level, and how) -- or, when you finish your "awards paper," maybe you'd even be inclined to post a portion of your "most outstanding poem of the semester" write-up, or at least the poem you chose and a sentence or two explaining why.

On a Lark

This past Monday, we puzzled through Auden's "Musee des Beaux Arts" and eventually considered that death might be both the "miraculous birth" for which the aged hope and the "it" that the children don't want to happen. That moment in class reminded me that someone once said that the subject of every great poem is, in some way, death. I'm not sure to what extent I believe that's true, but it certainly gives me something to ponder. Philip Larkin was an individual and a poet who in various ways testified to a lifelong dread of death; this is probably nowhere more apparent than in possibly his most famous poem, "Aubade" (which should be in your anthologies), which refers to "the sure extinction that we travel to / And shall be lost in always. Not to be here, / Not to be anywhere, / And soon; nothing more terrible, nothing more true" (l. 17-20). There may be no other poem I can think of that faces death (and the fear of death) in such a bluntly direct and honest way: "most things may never happen:" the speaker continues, "this one will" (l. 34).

Anyway, I wanted to create this invitation to get some conversation going, in advance of tomorrow's class, about Larkin's "Church Going." What do you think about the (possibly) multiple connotations of the poem's title? And what about those opening stanzas, which reveal to us, among other things, that the speaker has a kind of fascination with churches and visits them often -- despite his attempt to make us think he's rather indifferent to churches and religion. What details in those opening stanzas stand out to you? For example, that the speaker lets "the door thud shut" (l.2) suggests a kind of alienation, isolation, and entrapment.

And then what do you make of the final 2/3 of this poem? In what ways does the speaker seem to contradict what he sets us up to think in the very opening of the poem? Why does he, in fact, tend often to go into churches? What brings him back? What do he and the poem eventually conclude about churches and religious experience? Is he as "bored" and "uninformed" as he says he is (l. 46)? Maybe if we can get a few modest observations and passages circulating here in this space we can make more efficient work of this tomorrow ...

My pitch for LIT 376

For those of you considering enrolling in John Glendening's spring class LIT 376 Darwin and the Environment:

Professor Glendening is very knowledgeable in the field of Darwinism.  I experienced this first hand last spring when I took a seminar with him.  We covered novels from the Romantic period that dealt with British imperialism.  "Heart of Darkness" was one of these- my information about the Sepoy revolt was learned in his class.

Small classes rock!  If you haven't had the opportunity to take part in a small literature class, which is somewhat rare at undergraduate level, I recommend it.  The depth of discussion that can be achieved in a small class is highly rewarding.  While it may sound intimidating, it usually takes me 2-3 class sessions to feel truly comfortable, the experience is not nearly as scary as it might sound.

Have a great holiday!!!

Behind the Cotton Wool

Lily Briscoe's declaration "It is finished" (208) refers to a number of things, one senses: the lighthouse voyage is finished, her painting is finished, your reading of the novel is finished. It all happens at the same time. Regarding the last of those three termini, you're to be congratulated! To read this novel at any time, much less during the pressures of an academic semester, is no easy task; I hope, though, that Woolf and To the Lighthouse yielded some rewards, and that you may have occasion to return to the novel again in the future. I know few novels come alive and comfort and nourish me -- and articulate my experience of life's big questions -- the way this one does. It's ultimately about feeling rather than story (similar in this regard, maybe, to our experience of those last paragraphs of Joyce's "The Dead"), I think, and if it works for you I think you really do find yourself aware of (and perhaps mesmerized by) the beauty, the profound questions, and the ineffable mysteries of existence. Maybe, then, the novel works on us similarly to those words Mrs. Ramsay recalls from the dinner party, which "began washing from side to side of her mind rhythmically, and as they washed, words, like little shaded lights, one red, one blue, one yellow, lit up in the dark of her mind, and seemed leaving their perches to fly across and across, or to cry out and to be echoed" (119). And all the while it seems so exquisitely calibrated between joy and melancholy (ah, yes, there's occasion for that word "bittersweet" yet again). I hope maybe you'll still be inclined to share some more reflective observations and conclusions about the novel in this space in the coming days.

Incidentally, this passage from Woolf's autobiographical book Moments of Being is worth contemplating, especially after some of those passages (about painting, about writing, about life) we reviewed from Part 3 of To the Lighthouse:

“And so I go on to suppose that the shock-receiving capacity is what makes me a writer. I hazard the explanation that a shock is at once in my case followed by the desire to explain it. I feel that I have had a blow; but it is not, as I thought as a child, simply a blow from an enemy hidden behind the cotton wool of daily life; it is or will become a revelation of some order; it is a token of some real thing behind appearances; and I make it real by putting it into words. It is only by putting it into words that I make it whole; this wholeness means that it has lost its power to hurt me; it gives me, perhaps because by doing so I take away the pain, a great delight to put the severed parts together. Perhaps this is the strongest pleasure known to me. It is the rapture I get when in writing I seem to be discovering what belongs to what; making a scene come right; making a character come together. From this I reach what I might call a philosophy; at any rate it is a constant idea of mine; that behind the cotton wool is hidden a pattern; that we – I mean all human beings – are connected with this; that the whole world is a work of art; that we are parts of the work of art. Hamlet or a Beethoven quartet is the truth about this vast mass that we call the world. But there is no Shakespeare, there is no Beethoven; certainly and emphatically there is no God; we are the words; we are the music; we are the thing itself. And I see this when I have a shock.”

As we prepare to part ways in a few weeks, I wish for you all -- both in the near and longer-term future -- that you find intimations of that "real thing behind appearances." Maybe even as you gather with family and friends later this week when you, too, will seek those moments when all become "conscious of making a party together in a hollow, on an island" (97) (and may there be some culinary equivalent of the Boeuf en Daube on your tables!).