"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!).

Mrs. Ramsay's Artistry

Lily and Mrs. Ramsay present strong female characters that represent two different motivating factors. Lily wants to be an artist and channels her creativity through painting, and Mrs. Ramsay is a good wife, she tends her children, soothes her husband, and hosts many guests. Lily forges ahead in her painting as she attempts a lifestyle that challenges traditional gender roles. As she observes her surroundings, Lily both admires and resents the woman that Mrs. Ramsay is, her poise and beauty, and the relationship that she has with her husband and children. However Mrs. Ramsay reaches beyond the role that Lily assigns. In her domestication, Mrs. Ramsay finds her own outlets for Artistry. Perhaps even a more sophisticated artistry. She envelopes chaos and beauty, pain and dissension, and masters the aspects of her home to create unified, balanced beauty. This is evident in the dinner seen and in her relationships. A particular poignant example on Page 81, demonstrates not only creativity in motherhood, but a confidence and comfortableness as she invites others to participate in her artistry.
"But she let them take their time to choose: she let Rose, particularly, take up this and then that, and hold her jewels against the black dress, for this little ceremony of choosing jewels, which was gone through every night, was what Rose liked best, she knew. She had some hidden reason of her own for attaching great importance to this choosing what her mother was to wear. What was the reason, Mrs. Ramsay wondered, standing still to let her clasp the necklace she had chosen, divining, through her own past, some deep, some buried, some quite speechless feeling that one had  for one's mother at Rose's age."
Rose potentially attributes significance to adorning her mother with jewels because she has seen the great care that Mrs. Ramsay puts into presentation. She deems this moment as an honor, and reveres her mother's splendor. Mrs. Ramsay patiently allows Rose to examine all of her 'tools' giving her guided authority in this little project. Not only is she including Rose in her art, she is raising Rose to be balanced beauty herself.

"Lily Briscoe knew all that. Sitting opposite him, could she not see, as in an X-ray photograph, the ribs and thigh bones of the young man's desire to impress himself, lying dark in the mist of his flesh --that thin mist which convention had laid over his burning desire to break into the conversation?" (90-91) These lines, and the whole section around them, truly show Lily as a strong, intelligent woman. They show how well she's able to read a crowd, to understand someone's emotional undercurrent. I chose the lines because they remind me of the strong woman I've had and have in my life over the years. My mother and grandmother, aunts and cousins who seem to know exactly what's happening to you and around you before you do. I also chose it because I think so many people can feel the way Tansley feels in the situation. He's intelligent, but out of his element. He seems to be a truly kind person, yet he's afraid to show his true colors among these people that stand a rung higher on the social ladder. Lily seems to struggle with the notion that Mr. Tansley may actually be a decent person under his negative comments regarding the Ramsey's, but she senses something is in there beyond 'women can't read, women can't write.' I suppose I chose what I chose as a strange homage to the strong females in my family. The one's who can see through your bullshit before you know you're lying. The ones who maybe accept a small amount of bullshit just because they love you. The ones who don't take any and still love you and help you better yourself. Those people are important. Happy Thanksgiving.

"Some one had blundered"

I hope I’m not the only one being driven by this question. If asked for a theme, an idea of what is trying to be asked, explained, understood, well this question or ... statement? seems it to me. I’ll take this definition for blundered: “move clumsily or as if unable to see," in this respect referring to really all the characters involved. That they all, in a way, are jarring against each other; always the constant collective tipping the easel (or almost) in ignorance. We are all of us just being a purple triangle trying to fill in the space of two masses with some harmony, but the colors are off, too little, too much. The picture displaces the frame, the mold doesn't fit the throne. Everyone is disconnected in their own way, unable to see beyond the hive. That even in the fluid motions of everyday life is that jarring inability, and not just between people but the common place as well. How terror would behold Mrs. Ramsay just by hearing the same shore she has for all the years preceding, and it's out of nowhere, a sound that seemed to soothe her suddenly taking this ominous form. We at best see through a veil, and perhaps clarity is not a virtue, perhaps to blunder in this way, to be blind and clumsy in our dealings with each other is better than true clarity, that clarity is terror and, because it seems to be a dying cliché, ignorance is bliss, or if not bliss at the least bearable. Bearable in the sense that ignorance allows infinite definition, that ignorance is pliable and apt to change, and that change is necessary that a set definition robs not only hope but imagination and fills it in with bricks. Can I be so bold as to say that this theme, this glorification of ignorance, of a definition, of a friend, a family member may even relate to "Modern Fiction"? To allow the same breadth of movement between words and lines and syntax as people do with their misinterpretations of each other? Maybe, or maybe Jasper blundered by interrupting Mr. Bankes and Lily, or Cam by running restlessly, or Mr. Ramsay in his vanity or the Mrs. in hers. Maybe it has a real solid point I need to get to, like a man-slaughter in the novel, although that seems highly unlikely, you never know. All I know for certain is that there is some rumpus in this blunder.

Mr. Ramsey

When we talked about Mr. Ramsey I couldn't help but be reminded of Gabriel Conroy. They are both intellectual men and their intelligence seems to hinder them from being "fully human" in some sense. Mr. Ramsey finds himself distracted from his reality, his wife and eight children, because he is thinking about poetry and his work. He so desperately wants to be remembered for his body of work (as we discussed in class) that he has a difficult time valuing what he does have (his wife and children); he values his family on the surface, but is sort of unable to really connect with his children. Gabriel displays the same problems: he knows how intelligent he is and he struggles to truly connect with the people around him, especially his wife. Obviously there are other differences between the two men, but I think that this theme of "intelligence harming our humanity and ability to connect with others" is interesting.

To the Lighthouse Playlist

I find that when I'm doing any kind of work, I need background noise. I assembled a playlist that I've been listening to while reading Woolf and thought I'd share. I'm not sure if an account is required to listen to the playlist, but you can find it here. The final song, "A Cloak of Elvenkind" reminds me of James.

The Widening Gyre

Well, we have a new phrase to add to our lexicon of unease as we turn the corner into a new century: the widening gyre joins "the horror, the horror," the heart of darkness, the dead, the weakening eye of day, the waste land, etc. In the deadened, spiritless atmosphere of our recent poems, do we expect the "blessed Hope" of the Darkling Thrush or the ghastly monster represented by the sphinx in Yeats's poem? Anyway, since we'll only have a brief amount time to return to Yeats's poem on Friday, I was hoping some of you might like to leave some comments here on "The Second Coming." What do you think of this poem? What is the significance of falconry in the logic of the poem? What is the vision the speaker has and how does he respond to it? Can you explain what the speaker comes to know in l.19-20? What is the second coming in this poem? ... Here, by the way, is a reading of "The Second Coming" by the great contemporary Irish novelist, Colum McCann.

Passing Bells

On Remembrance Day, here perhaps is a voice that was meant to read Owen's "Anthem for Doomed Youth": Sir Ian McKellen ...

My 5 for Your 5

The previous post (see below) seeks your comments about "The Dead," but lest we get too serious and work-oriented here on this blog, let me try for a bit levity. Since we will watch a film during the balance of the week, maybe you'd be willing draw from your moviegoing careers and nominate your Top 5 films (it doesn't necessarily have to be the best five films, as you'll see from my list, but might also include films that just represented a memorable moviegoing experience). Annotations are optional (but preferred!). This is difficult and provisional, but here's an attempt:

• Wings of Desire: Wim Wenders' most transcendent film; haunting, poetic, beautiful story about an angel who decides to give up immortality to become human.

• Jaws: I can never get enough of this one, perhaps because, while still thrilled by the narrative, I increasingly appreciate the craft and the genius of the filmmaking. It's also probably the most memorable "film event" of my life: my grandparents took me to see it as an eleven year-old, against my mother's strict warning that they not do so! I remember wearing brand new sneakers that night, which ensured that my visceral discomfort stretched from head to toe. Incidentally, my grandparents would further enrage my mother by taking me, the following summer, to see Tarzan -- the version where Bo Derek is naked for about 100 minutes; this film (but for Bo, of course) would undoubtedly be in my list of Top 5 most horrible films I've ever seen.

• The English Patient: this would probably also be in my Top 5 literary works list. I'm a sucker for this film. I was so sad when I learned that the director, Anthony Minghella, died suddenly a few years ago; he was an amazing talent. This is one of those rare cases when book and film nourish and augment each other in the best of ways.

• It's a Wonderful Life: does it need a justification? Is there a film with a bigger emotional payoff at the end than this one?

• Cinema Paradiso: this is perhaps the most flawed of the five films I include, but you have to love a film that celebrates the love of film. And it comes with its own wallop of an emotional payoff during the poignant coda.

It's painful to leave out Peter Jackson's grandly stirring The Lord of the Rings films, as well as the first Alien film (sci-fi suspense doesn't get any better), and somehow I feel the original Star Wars should be in the running merely because of the movie experience it offered to this then twelve year-old ("You're all clear, Kid, now let's blow this thing and go home!" ah, the goosebumps!) -- it's also the only film I ever saw more than twice (five times, in fact) in the theater ... And I've neglected comedies ... Anyway, have at it ... if you'd like! And while you're at it, you could always drop down to the "Canon Fodder" post below (10/5) and add your ten entries for what works you think must be found in a literature curriculum!

The Hazards of Love

I guess I'm borrowing my title here from that Decemberists record from some years ago that so seems to divide the band's fans into two camps (in a love it or hate it kind of way ... I happen to be very pro-Hazards of Love!) ... Anyway, Gabriel experiences the hazards of love, to be sure, and my intent here is to create this thread to share and discuss any passages from "The Dead" that you find to be worthy of comment or question, especially as we look ahead to the film on Wednesday and Friday. It'd be great to collect some observations and testimony about your reading of the story, and then, later in the week, about your impressions of the film. Does the film enhance (or possibly detract from) your understanding of and appreciation for the story? Of Gabriel's character? Are there particular scenes or aspects that stand out? I certainly pick up new things every time I watch the film: John Huston clearly has a wonderful attention to detail that must arise not only from his skill as a filmmaker, but also from his deep immersion in Joyce's story. As I mentioned yesterday, I always get a kick out of Mr. Browne: if you've been noticing how much he drinks during the party, you'll appreciate, as the guests leave the party near the end of the film, the visual joke of seeing Browne crumpled up and sleeping at the foot of the stairs.

Please do start sharing your responses to the latter stages of the story, too (especially as we look ahead to our 20 minutes of concluding conversation on Friday). What/when, specifically, is the moment of epiphany for Gabriel in this story? If an epiphany involves seeing the world or one's self anew, what is it that Gabriel learns? What is his response upon hearing Gretta's story about Michael Furey and then in what ways does that response evolve? What does it mean when we learn that "the time had come for him to set out on his journey westward"? By the end of the story, and we start to work our way through this question in class today, how do you understand the many connotations of the story's title? How do you respond to this story and film personally -- in what ways does it speak to you and your own life? Well, there should be something in there that will tempt you. Hope to see some of you drop by this space and share a thought or observation in the coming days! Enjoy the film!

Owen's Haunting Flares

With any and every encounter, it seems, Owen's poems get emblazoned in my consciousness. I'm always moved so deeply by those bugles "calling ... from sad shires" and by that "drawing-down of blinds" at "each slow dusk" in "Anthem for Doomed Youth." How poignant it is, too, to see this postcard Owen wrote to his mom to let her know (in code) that he was about to be transferred to the front lines. And then "Dulce et Decorum est," wow. Fellow poet Siegfried Sassoon noted that "it was Owen who revealed how, out of realistic horror and scorn, poetry might be made." That's an interesting notion: how does one take such gritty realism, such disturbing imagery and detail, such "sludge," "fatigue" and "cud," and make elevated poetry out of it? What an utterly compelling and haunting depiction of exhaustion and weariness at the beginning of "Dulce," isn't it? -- with that herd-like movement of the men who no longer have eyes to see what's around them (and, indeed, the reference to them being "all blind" -- figuratively, certainly, but maybe almost literally, too (as I think Brittani mentioned at one point) -- might make us think of Marlow's lost vision amidst the fog in Heart of Darkness). The fatigue is so palpable that even the "Five-Nines," the artillery shells fired by the Germans at the fleeing soldiers, are themselves "tired" and "outstripped" (l.8). And then those frantic wake-up calls of "Gas! Gas!" as the reality of war's violence reaches a new stage with the gas attack in the second stanza.

Speaking of the reality of war's violence, it was hoped that the new phenomenon in war poetry -- its graphic, gruesome, and utterly realistic qualities -- would somehow have a practical effect in changing our behavior (remember the God of "Channel Firing" indicting humankind for making "red war yet redder"). I always think of Randall Jarrell's (1914-1965) tiny but potent war poem, "The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner." It's a brilliant poem about the airmen who would hang out of B52 bombers to provide cover fire for bombing runs. The protest is more compacted and subtle than it is in Owen's poem, but it's assuredly there (e.g., "I fell into the State" -- like leaving the protective womb of the mother and being claimed by the machinery and institutional power of the State, only to become utterly expendable and dehumanized, a nameless casualty of war who callously gets "washed ... out of the turret with a hose").The painful callousness in the last line ("When I died they washed me out of the turret with a hose") captures the grim reality that one didn't tend to survive more than a couple weeks in this role before they had to wipe down the plane and get the next guy in there.

I think, too, of the soldiers writing poems and letters and journals out in those deserts of Iraq and Afghanistan. It's obviously important that the general public reads this kind of testimony. Being able to write in this way and to turn the experience into art may be a way, at least partially, for some soldiers and veterans to transmute their trauma and other difficult emotions into something more manageable. 

I remember a very powerful and moving article in the New Yorker some years ago (2006, I think), called "Soldiers' Stories," that assembled a selection of letters, emails, journal entries, personal essays etc. from soldiers in Iraq (in fact, I keep a photocopy of part of the article in my Wilfred Owen notes for class). One soldier writes to his mother thusly:

"The worst thing here is not the searing heat or the cold nights. It’s the waiting. Waiting for the wind to stop blowing and the sand to quit grinding against your skin. Waiting for a moment of privacy in a tent packed with seventy other men, in a camp packed with seven hundred other tents, in a base packed with fifteen thousand soldiers, all looking for a clean place to go to the bathroom… Waiting for the bone-rattling coughs from dust finer than powdered sugar to stop attacking you lungs. Waiting for the generals to order the battalion to move north, toward Tikrit, where others—Iraqis—are also waiting; waiting for us."

All of this traces back to Wilfred Owen, as do the lyrics to a song like Bob Dylan's "Masters of War." We are only recently removed from the one-hundred year anniversary of the action of the Great War, the war to end all wars (or so it was hoped at the time). You might want to look at this recent article in The Economist, which reflects on WW I as "the defining event of the twentieth century." We'll return to the Great War in the middle section ("Time Passes") of To the Lighthouse, which turns the novel, unexpectedly, into an unconventional war novel.

Chinua Achebe, 1930-2013

It's worth nothing at this moment, as we prepare to finish our discussions of Heart of Darkness, that Chinua Achebe died about two and a half years ago at the age of 82. It's hard to overstate his importance to the fields and endeavors of African and postcolonial literatures; his ideas, his critiques, and his own literary characters both haunt and challenge the parameters and ideologies of Englishness that you carry around in all those pages of the literary anthology. We read and we understand differently today because of individuals like Chinua Achebe.

You now probably understand why Achebe's critique (which is available to you on our Moodle site) became as controversial as Heart of Darkness itself. Many feel that Achebe's novel, Things Fall Apart, in which he tries, through fictional narrative, to tell the African side of the story of colonization, was far more effective in countering the problems of Heart of Darkness than his more polemical, scholarly approach in the essay you read. Still, Achebe has many valuable and compelling issues to raise in the essay once you move away from the more baldly accusatory (and thus more problematic) moments ("thoroughgoing racist" etc.). We learn, if nothing else, to think about how "the Other" is represented and to ask who has the power to do that representing. The great literary critic Edward Said argues that HoD is "a work that has functioned ever since to reassure Westerners that they had the right to rule the Third World"; he admires Conrad for dating imperialism and showing its "illusions and tremendous violence and waste," but at the same time he notes that "Conrad's tragic limitation is that even though he could see clearly that on one level imperialism was essentially pure dominance and land-grabbing, he could not then conclude that imperialism had to end so that 'natives' could lead lives free from European domination." He believes Conrad was still beholden to that "redeeming idea."

Appropriately, a good many articles about (and tributes to) Achebe appeared in the days and weeks after his death. The Nation republished a 2009 article on Things Fall Apart, which includes these lines: "Among the greatest qualities of Things Fall Apart is the vigor of its revolt against the everyday amalgamations and condescension that treat Africa as an undifferentiated wasteland. Indeed, without ever stooping to polemic, Achebe sustains this quiet rebellion on nearly every page.... Achebe's defiance of Western contempt is married to a subtle but unmistakable appeal to Africans not to submit to feelings of inferiority, and this achievement is all the more remarkable for the book's utter lack of mawkishness." There's also this tribute from The Guardian ...

This is the end... and the beginning

Heart of Darkness!!!
Easy to tell but I'm a fan of this unendingly interesting novella.  I'm curious about your initial reactions to the text- what struck you as interesting/odd, why do you think this novella is still relevant/widely discussed?
Eric brought up the historical context with England's pervading sense of inevitable decline.  One of the reasons for this was the Sepoy rebellion of 1857- the same year of Conrad's birth.  The rebellion took place in India where Britain had a large imperial presence and it rocked the contemporary idea that British imperialism was an overall positive agenda that was welcomed by the colonized and colonizers alike.  This new fear that imperialism could come back to haunt the metropolis was the atmosphere that Conrad experienced in his life.  How/does Heart of Darkness reflect this negative effect of imperialism on Britain and its citizens?
For those of you interested in this topic I recommend King Leopold's Ghost by Adam Hochschild. Great book about King Leopold's acquisition of the Congo and the impressive pr campaign he ran to disguise the exploitation of that region and its people.  I'll be bringing in some info about Chinua Achebe's article "An Image of Africa" which condemns Conrad as "a thoroughgoing racist".  Achebe also has a book of essays titled The Education of a British Protected Child that discusses his relationship with his children and his nation as well as the difficult position a Western educated African person finds themselves in.  And of course his amazing novel Things Fall Apart.  
I'm interested in the way Heart of Darkness has seeped into our cultural conscience and our discussion of the Thames makes me think of the Langston Hughes poem "The Negro Speaks of Rivers" as well as the Seinfeld spoof of "the horror, the horror" so I'm including both- enjoy!

The Negro Speaks of Rivers

Langston Hughes, 1902 - 1967

I’ve known rivers:
I’ve known rivers ancient as the world and older than the
     flow of human blood in human veins.

My soul has grown deep like the rivers.

I bathed in the Euphrates when dawns were young.
I built my hut near the Congo and it lulled me to sleep.
I looked upon the Nile and raised the pyramids above it.
I heard the singing of the Mississippi when Abe Lincoln 
     went down to New Orleans, and I’ve seen its muddy 
     bosom turn all golden in the sunset.

I’ve known rivers:
Ancient, dusky rivers.

My soul has grown deep like the rivers.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i7mr9F7kHMM

Porphyria the Doll

It wasn't until I read "Porphyria's Lover" again that I realized that the speaker begins to treat Porphyria like a doll. In line 44 "I warily oped her lids: again" reminded me of playing with my dolls as a little girl. When you would tilt the dolls head back their eyes would close and they would only open if you forced them open with your finger. When you would set the doll back up her eyes would open, in Porphyria's case they would not of course. Also, in line 52 when the speaker says "The smiling rosy little head" this really begins to feel like Porphyria has become some sort of an object, almost as if she is not really dead to him because now she can do what ever the speaker wants. She won't be smiling too much anymore...

Browning's Rogues

Well besides my reference to the films Rear Window (if you haven't yet seen this one, you must!) and Boxing Helena (if you haven't yet seen this one, you probably shouldn't!), I'm reminded, too, of Tom Petty's song and video for "Mary Jane's Last Dance," about a morgue assistant who brings a female corpse (played by Kim Basinger in the video!) home for a dinner date. Nearly too perfect (even if a bit on the macabre side) for "Porphyria's Lover," eh?! There seem to be all kinds of possibilities for accompanying music for this poem; besides the songs we heard today (the Burt Bacharach/Dionne Warwick chestnut "Anyone Who Had a Heart," "Maxwell's Silver Hammer," and, as you left, Michael Jackson's "The Girl is Mine"), there's also the more recent "Can't Do Without You," by Caribou, that megahit by The Police, "Every Breath You Take" (that I never realized was about obsession), and even Josh Ritter's "Kathleen" ("I'll be the one to drive you back home, Kathleen ... I'll have you back by break of day / I know you are waiting and I know it is not for me").

Well, I enjoyed the discussion this morning -- there were so many insightful comments and observations that helped us deal with our challenge with Browning's poems: i.e., how to make them more than merely chilling Gothic studies. How do we get nearer to a poems like these? What pathways allow us to historicize them as definitively Victorian poems? As the various comments established, it would seem, certainly, that we could approach them in the contexts of (1) class issues, (2) of the relationship between material beauty (each of the two poems we read, to varying degrees, features fancy clothing or luxurious furnishings, decorations, ornaments, etc.) and morality (in the form of concern for the poor or lower classes, perhaps), (3) of "the gaze" and male desire to inscribe and fix female identity or sexuality, (4) of the Victorian desire (represented via both Porphyria's Lover and the Duke) to mold behavior (sexual or otherwise) and thus stabilize the moral/social order, (5) of the nature of love and the balance between the sexes (remember Blake's indictment of a "dark secret love," love that goes underground and that is governed by secrecy and control and illicit behaviors, etc.), and (6) of that issue of trying to preserve the hallelujah moment & freeze time (and the danger, as Katie noted, of trying too hard to do so, of presuming to try to "smother" the moment), among many others, I'm sure. One could imagine these dramatic monologues -- as unique and as strange as they are -- being put into serious conversation with such poems as "The Sick Rose," "Ode to a Nightingale," "The Lady of Shalott," "Mariana," "Goblin Market," "In an Artist's Studio," and Aurora Leigh.

Quiz time

Thanks to all who were able to make it to the study session today!  I've put together an identification practice and answer guide for those interested- I simply copying it into the blog here.  I hope it proves useful:

*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;

*And here we are as on a darkling plain

 Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,

 Where ignorant armies clash by night.

*And moving through a mirror clear

 That hangs before her all the year,

 Shadows of the world appear.

*Darkling I listen; and, for many a time

 I have been half in love with easeful Death,

 Call'd 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,

*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!

*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:

*Smokes in the sun-thaw; whether the eave-drops fall

 Heard only in the trances of the blast,

 Or if the secret ministry of frost

 Shall hang them up in silent icicles,

 Quietly shining to the quiet Moon.

*Twilight and evening bell,

 And after that the dark!

 And may there be no sadness of farewell,

 When I embark;

*Methinks, it should have been impossible

 Not to love all things in a world so filled;

 Where the breeze warbles, and the mute still air

 Is Music slumbering on her instrument.

*Its subject mountains their unearthly forms

 Pile around it, ice and rock; broad vales between

 Of frozen floods, unfathomable deeps,

 Blue as the overhanging heaven,

*Crab-apples, dewberries,

 Pine-apples, blackberries,

 Apricots, strawberries; --

 All ripe together

 In summer weather, --

*The blue deep thou wingest,

 And singing still dost soar, and soaring ever singest.

*Bird thou never wert,

 That from Heaven, or near it,

 Pourest thy full heart

 In profuse strains of unpremeditated art.

*The Sea of Faith

 Was once, too, at the full, and round earth’s shore

 Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furled.

*Forlorn! the very word is like a bell

    To toll me back from thee to my sole self!

*--every canvas means

 The same one meaning, neither more nor less.

*

*

*

*

*

*

A

N

S

W

E

R

S

*

*

Composed upon Westminster Bridge- Wordsworth

Dover Beach- Matthew Arnold

The Lady of Shalott- Tennyson

Ode to a Nightingale- Keats

Ode to the West Wind- Shelley

Ode to a Nightingale- Keats

Frost at Midnight- Coleridge

Crossing the Bar- Tennyson

The Eolian Harp- Coleridge

Mont Blanc- Shelley

Goblin Market- Rosetti

To a Skylark- Shelley

To a Skylark- Shelley

Dover Beach- Matthew Arnold

Ode to a Nightingale- Keats

In an Artist’s Studio- Rosetti

"Goodbye Blue Sky"

Matthew Arnold, “Dover Beach” 

I know I am a little late to the game for this poem, but since I was sick on Monday when we discussed it in class I thought I would point out something that intrigued me.

Starting with the first line, “the sea is calm tonight.” The speaker is asserting both a fact and  setting the scene, as well as the mood of the poem as a whole. The word “calm” in particular catches my eye, as it is often associated as both a positive state of mind and often precedes something bad suggested by the idiom “the calm before the storm.” The speaker here insists that the night is fair, but underneath the surface things are not all well. (Fine, yet not fine at all).

This tension is fully exposed in the last stanza when the speaker discusses “the eternal note of sadness” (14) from stanza one and explains it as an almost “constant uncertainty,” an oxymoron in itself, but still the truth.  The speaker then explains how all earthly beauty, however fragile or innocent it may be at times, is a façade concealing the  truly vicious reality of existence. “…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…” (29-34)  “Lie” is my favorite word in the poem both meaning the world is spread out in front of the speaker and audience as well as suggesting the non- factual nature of the world, driving home the theme of unrest beneath the surface within the poem.

Again I was not apart of the group discussion so if I have repeated or mutilated any points within the discussion I apologize.  In the interest of finding something original, while reading this poem I couldn’t help thinking about Arnold’s poem in reference to Pink Floyd’s “The Wall”  in particular the song “Goodbye Blue Sky” (I hope it wasn’t the musical reference of the day)  The song discusses, in a way, similar themes as “Dover Beach” while also  mirroring  its structure, starting with calm ambient noises (birds chirping, the wind…) gradually sounds of airplanes start to overwhelm the sounds of nature and a child innocently points them out, “Look, mummy/ There's an airplane up in the sky.” The airplanes are supposedly German bombers in WWII, and the menacing reality of the scene is exposed. Both Arnold’s poem from the 1800’s and  Pink Floyd’s album released in 1979, while in reference to separate world altering events, are meant to exemplify the shattering of expectations or assumptions made in youth about the nature of life.

Here is a link to the song :    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=58_S5e0AVU0

Dover Beach

I am intrigued by the "ignorant armies" in the last line of the poem. This poem was written around 1851, right after The Revolution of 1848 in Europe. Although the Revolution did not play a role in Great Britain, I imagine that Arnold was well aware of what was going on through Europe and the rest of the world. During the Revolution there was a series of political upheavals. When I read the "ignorant armies" I wondered if perhaps Arnold was talking about the people who played a role in the Revolution. The last stanza also says that the world "hath neither joy, nor love, nor light... nor help for pain." This is despite the fact that the world "seems to lie before us like a land of dreams." I don't know anything really about Arnold's political ideology, but I wonder if perhaps this poem is in some ways commenting on the political upheavals; maybe he is saying that the Revolution is "ignorant" and leaving the world without "joy," "love," or "light."

Canon Fodder

In "The Study of Poetry," Matthew Arnold makes various grand claims for poetry, including that "more and more mankind will discover that we have to turn to poetry to interpret life for us, to console us, to sustain us." Because of the importance accorded to poetry, though, Arnold must subsequently state that "if we conceive thus highly of the destinies of poetry, we must also set our standard for poetry high, since poetry, to be capable of fulfilling such high destinies, must be poetry of a high order of excellence." And there's the rub, right? How do we judge when poetry (or fiction or any individual work of literature) is of "a high order of excellence"? For years and years, English departments have built curriculums around "the canon," those works of literature that every self-respecting student of literary studies must know. Here, by the way, is the full roll call from the Modern Library's ranking of the "100 Best Novels", including the accompanying reader's list.

All of this has me wondering what would be on your personal canon of required works. That is, if you were in charge of building a curriculum (in our department here at U.M., say), what literary works would you consider essential to have appear in the classroom at some point? And would you move beyond traditional notions of the canon and include, for example, any films? Pieces of music? Literature that might normally be classified as merely "popular"? Critics like to debate the case of Bob Dylan, for example, specifically the fact that he has been a frequent nominee for a Nobel Prize in literature. So, would "Mr. Tambourine Man" or "Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands" be plausible reading in a literary studies class?! If you're reading this post, why don't you leave a comment with ten works that would be in your canon!

Aural Pleasure

I've mentioned to a couple of you that it helps me to understand a poem if I hear an audio recording of it.  There is a recording of "Crossing the Bar" on the poetry foundation website- I'm including a link.  I've been playing it over Mozart's Requiem: Lacrimosa (available on spotify).  I do realize my time frames are way off, but the subject matter is right on!  Enjoy

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/174588

Music Lessons

As we move on to the Victorians, a moment to say "Adieu!" to the Romantics. I'm always so taken by that last stanza of "To Autumn," even though I'm never quite able to articulate its power and meaning fully enough -- I feel its truth more than I understand it sometimes, you might say (I think of Stanley Plumly's great line regarding those moments when we experience "a hearing just ahead of knowing"; this can happen with both poetry and music, when they speak/communicate something specific to us, but something we can't quite pin down or articulate). In any event, I'm fascinated by the fact that it seems to be nature's music (lambs bleating, gnats choiring, hedge-crickets singing, red-breasts whistling, swallows twittering) that, above all, has something to teach the speaker. What and how music teaches is, I guess, the big question. It reminds me of a wonderful quote by the great composer/musician, Daniel Barenboim: "Music provides the possibility, on the one hand, to escape from life and, on the other hand, to understand it much better than in many other disciplines." Do you agree with that, I wonder? It's easy to buy into the part about escape (how many of us turn to our iPods when our airplane hits some turbulence, for example, or when we need to unwind after a taxing day, or when we need to keep ourselves motivated during a workout, etc.), but in what sense do you think music helps us to understand life better? Somehow answering that question might help attune us to the mindset of Keats's speaker in that serene and yet foreboding final stanza ...

The Sublime (& Skippin' Reels of Rhyme)

A few odds & ends for you as we approach our last class session with the Romantics. First of all, as a kind of footnote to "Ode to a Nightingale": our song of the day on Monday was Buckley's cover of Cohen's "Hallelujah," but it could very well have been Dylan's "Mr. Tambourine Man." For those of you who are so inclined, check out Dylan's lyric and see what you think about this possibly being a folk song version of Keats's ode; it relates that same kind of desperate pursuit of one's muse ("and if you hear vague traces of skippin' reels of rhyme / To your tambourine in time, it's just a ragged clown behind / ... / in the jingle jangle morning I'll come following you").

If any of you want to read that famous (and wonderful) stolen boat episode that I cited (last week?) from Wordsworth's autobiographical poem The Prelude, you can find it here. As he remembers rowing (with exhilaration) out into the lake in the early evening, he looks up to see the mountain (which hadn't been visible from the shore) suddenly looming over him ("growing still in stature the grim shape / Towered up between me and the stars"), which produces trembling and drives him hastily back to his mooring place. This takes us from the realm of sentimental Romanticism (a day by the ocean, a serene sail on the lake, a walk in the sun, dancing with daffodils, etc.) into the realm of the sublime, reminding us that joy can be mingled with fear, exhilaration with doubt and anxiety. Another example, this time from the world of painting, as I showed you in class, might be J.M.W. Turner's The Passage of St. Gothard. In Turner's tight vertical composition, you see an alpine setting that has a dizzying effect (reminding us a little of the descriptions of Nature in "Kubla Khan," or maybe, for some, Gandalf's fall from the bridge at Khazad-dum with the balrog?!), that directs the viewer's eye down to the abyss and produces a sense (perhaps) of vertiginous terror. The sublime, then, involves both aesthetic appreciation but also an anxious confrontation with the savage grandeur of Nature.

Here is Schopenhauer, who, in The World as Will and Representation, distinguishes between two kinds of aesthetic experience, the beautiful and the sublime: "The feeling of the sublime is distinct from the feeling of the beautiful only by virtue of an additional element, namely an elevation above the relationship -- recognized as hostile -- between the object contemplated and the will in general." This "hostility" is "occasioned by the sight of a power that is incomparably superior to the individual and that threatens him with annihilation."

flashback friday

Just remembered this great song by jazz bassist/cellist Esperanza Spalding inspired by Blake's poem "Little Fly" from the Songs of Experience.


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w2JRGv91urY

Sweet Sadness

Well, our time with the Romantics is starting to run short (though the incomparable Keats still awaits us)! If anyone wants to begin the climb up "Mont Blanc" by leaving some comments in this space in advance of tomorrow's class, so much the better. As for this past Wednesday's class, it reminded me that I'm always drawn to that stanza late in "To a Sky-Lark," highlighted by Brittani, when the speaker laments that "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" (l.86-90); in his "A Defence of Poetry," by the way, Shelley refers to that "melancholy which is inseparable from the sweetest melody." I wonder to what extent you agree with the psychology of this proposal? Do we have any lived data/examples to confirm or challenge it? It reminds me, too, of Blake's Introduction to the Songs of Innocence when, after hearing the piper's song, the child "wept with joy to hear" (l.12): such a strange notion when you stop to think about it, isn't it -- "weeping with joy"? ...

Re-directing the matter into a less weighty/scholarly direction, and mindful of Shelley's melancholy/sweetest melody pairing, I wonder what you might offer as being among the most melancholy songs/musical pieces of all time (The "Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness" awards, perhaps, with a nod to that Smashing Pumpkins record of many years ago!). I always think of Sinatra's "It Was a Very Good Year." The Beatles's "Yesterday"? Radiohead's "Fake Plastic Trees" (strangely)? Simon & Garfunkle's "Bridge Over Troubled Water"? "Puff the Magic Dragon"?! Oh, for me, one of the sweetest melodies that makes me feel deeply melancholy is "Greensleeves." What would you add to the compilation?

Also related to the "Sky-lark" discussion, we'll continue to talk about birds as emissaries from another world, another (higher) reality. And certainly these early poems will resonate quite profoundly when we get to a poem like Hardy's "The Darkling Thrush" at the very end of the nineteenth century (and Hopkins's "The Windhover," too). The question of whether birdsong can be considered music was a very active one through the centuries, especially during the Middle Ages, whose most prominent thinkers tended to conclude that, no, it's not: they argued that birdsong contains elements of musicality (distinct individual pitches, well-modulated melodies, etc.), but that since there's no expression of rationality in the music we can't understand them as musica (which may help us understand why instrumental music, at least before the late eighteenth century and beyond, was considered to be inferior to vocal music). The music of Nature is at the heart of British Romanticism, though (witness, of course, Coleridge's Eolian harp and then these various birds), in ways that suggest that Nature itself is the invisible performer, and in ways that remind us that there were big ontological questions being worked out related to how human beings understand music. It's a long way from this to the likes of Kacey Musgraves, Mumford & Sons, The Lumineers, and Macklemore & Lewis -- or, then again, maybe it's not!

Kubla Khan

I just wanted to point out something interesting I noticed today while re-ready this poem. Hearing it out loud made some particular words pop out. I would like to look at two lines in particular; in line 5 "Down to a sunless sea" and then in line 28 "And sank in tumult to a lifeless ocean".  I feel that the water in this poem has a deeper significance  and when line 28 was read it felt like line 5 was being repeated but in a deeper sense. I think that the sunless sea leads to a lifeless ocean and this truly shows how dark, this poem is.

Secret ministry

I think "the secret ministry of frost" has to do with a return to nature. The speaker is surrounded by nature in the poem and although he is in "solitude" the stanza does not express loneliness, while the stanza of his memory and the man-made school does.  He imagines a future of natural life for his child where "all seasons shall be sweet to thee".  Even winter, which is typically thought of as a harsh side of nature, is represented gently by Coleridge.  Nature is also aligned with religion around line 60 with the "eternal language" and "Great universal Teacher".

Coleridge

Did anyone else find Coleridge to be a tougher read than our other Romantic poets? I found him challenging.
In both poems I noticed that he used more 'high-brow' language than the other Romantic poets.  Words like "sequacious" and " desulatory," but he also uses forms and tenses of common words that I found somewhat confusing "boldlier" instead of boldly or "stilly" for still (all from The Eolian Harp).
I picked up on a lexicon of flight in The Eolian Harp- middle of the second stanza.  The words "floating witchery," "gales," "birds of Paradise," and "wing" all reflect a freedom from the limitations of gravity- flight of some kind.  I started thinking about how this fit into the poem overall and when I'm stuck on a poem I will often go back to the title.  Well... music (such as would come from a harp, Eolian or not) is often represented as floating through the air.  Think about cartoons, the music never falls out of the instrument and then marches over to the hearer.  Maybe Coleridge was trying to make his medium (a poem) match his subject (the music of a harp and its effect) by including flying and floating imagery.
Side note: if you don't have a footnote for this "cot" is a small house or cottage

Ode- Wordsworth

In class we began to discuss the religious overtone throughout "Ode on Intimations." Someone mentioned the idea of Christianity in lines that mention a Tree and God. To me it seems clear that this poem is discussing the Christian God. I did a bit of research and from what I have found Wordsworth seemed to have been a devout member of the Church of England.* However, a few other people stated that they didn't think it was strictly the Christian God being spoken of. Considering that Wordsworth was a devout Christian, what would lead the audience to believe that Wordsworth is speaking of anything but the Christian God?

This idea made me think a lot about literary criticism and in particular the question of whether or not the meaning of a piece of literature depends on the author or the audience. What do you guys think? Can the audience decide whether or not this poem is about Christianity, or does the audience get to decide for themselves what it is about? I personally have always felt that what the audience has to say about literature is most important; however, I also think that the intention of the author and the author's background should have some play in the interpretation of literature by the audience.


*Correct me if my research is incorrect

Blake's Leavetaking

One of the casualties of the packed nature of the schedule in this particular course is that we often can't stop to reflect on the authors' biographical stories and details in any significant way, which is unfortunate considering how interesting (and, often, how (melo)dramatic) these life stories tend to be. Blake is already fast receding as we move into Wordsworth and then on to Coleridge later this week, but you might look up accounts of his final years when he was weak with illness and then finally slipped away in February of 1827. He was bed-ridden -- often shivering and tormented -- by the summer of 1825 with what he referred to as "this abominable Ague." Feeble as he was, though, and wracked by chest infections, he continued to work on his paintings and watercolors. His devotion to his wife Catherine (whom he married when he was 24 and she 20), which was lifelong, was also on display in his last years, months, and days. It is said that on the day of his death he stopped his work and turned to Catherine (who was in tears), and said, "Stay Kate! Keep just as you are -- I will draw your portrait -- for you have ever been an angel to me." It was recorded that he put the completed portrait down and then began to sing verses and hymns (out of palpable gladness). He died at 6:00 that evening in what was described as a "glorious manner": his eyes were said to have brightened and he burst out into singing of the things he saw in heaven. He was buried the day before their 45th wedding anniversary. It sounds like a departure worthy of a Romantic poet, no?!

By the way, you may really want to seek out high quality renditions of his various plates, engravings, watercolors, etc. You can find a whole archive of them here at the Blake Archive, including the various plates that accompanied the Songs of Innocence and Experience. Some of his latest works, I believe, which he was working on right up until the time of his death, were water color illustrations for Dante's The Divine Comedy. One critic, noting his visual artistry, went so far as to designate him as "far and away the greatest artist Britain has ever produced."

I remember wandering lonely as a cloud

I'm interested in the last stanza* and the idea of memory in the poem.  In that stanza we learn that the poem is the retelling of a memory. This is about the joy a memory can give us "then my heart with pleasure fills".  It also shows how memory can bring nature, or at least the feelings nature gives us, into a domesticated setting.

*Disclaimer: Poetry is not what I do best in the literary world. If I misuse terms, feel free to correct me. If you see the poem differently, please say so. If poetry is challenging for you, come talk to me and we will figure it out together!

A Visionary Gleam

Well, once again, that line from the film (now nearly 25 years old!) Field of Dreams: "if you build it they will come." Will you? Well, Curtis has already been here, getting the Blake discussion going, so that's a good sign (and do feel free to continue his thread by adding comments to his post). In any event, I thought it would be a good idea to create a kind of electronic parlor room, an overflow vestibule, where we might share and collect some thoughts, observations, and questions that elude the headlong rush of our 50-minute class periods. No need to be formal, necessarily -- in fact, a dash of irreverence now and then would be a good thing, I'm sure!

Had we had time this past Monday (especially since it relates to my question to you about assessing your relationship to poetry in one word), I might have read this poem by Billy Collins. There's some instructional value in here regarding waterskiing and feeling around for light switches:

Introduction to Poetry

I ask them to take a poem


and hold it up to the light

like a color slide 



or press an ear against its hive.



I say drop a mouse into a poem


and watch him probe his way out,



or walk inside the poem's room


and feel the walls for a light switch. 
 


I want them to waterski


across the surface of a poem
waving at the author's name on the shore. 


But all they want to do
is tie the poem to a chair with rope


and torture a confession out of it.



They begin beating it with a hose
to find out what it really means.

We'll start rather gently with the most accessible of Blake's poems; their forms are comforting and recognizable, even if, content-wise, and especially in the benighted poems of the Songs of Experience, there's of course much caustic fervor and moral indignation for us to contemplate. See you tomorrow -- and, once again, I'm looking forward to working with all of you this semester!

When I read this poem I really was feeling a sense of reminiscence from when the author was a child. I feel that he is trying to convey the perspective from his formative years now told as an adult. Reading this, I myself had felt kind a sigh of remembrance of the innocence of youth.