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.