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