E300 WEEK 8
03/16. Wed. Chapters 13-16, etc. A Mix: Poetry as Form and Foregrounded Language. Emily Dickinson: "I dwell in Possibility" (739), "Because I could not stop for Death" (886-87); W.C. Williams: "The Red Wheelbarrow" (739-40), "This is Just to Say" (740); G.M. Hopkins: "Pied Beauty" (742), "Spring and Fall" (789-90), "God's Grandeur" (1030), "The Windhover" (1030-31); E.E. Cummings: "in Just" (742-43); "The Twenty-Third Psalm" (756); Wilfred Owen: "Dulce et Decorum Est" (759-60); Robert Frost: "Fireflies in the Garden" (768-69), "Range Finding" (838), "Design" (838), "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening" (1019-20); Edgar Allan Poe: "The Raven" (785-88); Shakespeare: "Th'expense of spirit in a waste of shame" (814-15); Dylan Thomas: "Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night" (827-28); Elizabeth Bishop: "Sestina" (829-30); Marianne Moore "Poetry" (828-29); Archibald MacLeish: "Ars Poetica" (830-31); George Herbert: "Easter Wings" (847); Christopher Marlowe and Sir Walter Raleigh: "The Passionate Shepherd to His Love" and "The Nymph's Reply to the Shepherd" (913-15); Alfred Tennyson: "Ulysses" (928-30); Robert Browning: "My Last Duchess" (1009-10)
Chapter 13
Emily Dickinson: "I dwell in Possibility" (739); "Because I could not stop for Death" (886-87).
Connotation versus denotation – takes an ordinary word, possibility, that is often used vaguely, applies an architectural metaphor (plus implicit contrast with language) and ends up narrowing things down to a precise image: hands spreading wide to “gather Paradise.” There’s always a kind of irony at work in ED’s poems, I think – she’s formal, “Victorian,” yet her thoughts tend towards the absolute and are startling, like those of Blake. “Because I could not stop for Death” is a good example of this quality that makes her work so distinctive – the grim reaper further personified as a carriage driver: Gothic, and the reminder about children playing takes us back to the beginning. The effect is eerie, and really gives a sense that time has stopped while ultimate perspective is attained.
W.C. Williams: "The Red Wheelbarrow" (739-40), "This is Just to Say" (740)
Well, Wordsworth said there’s no essential difference between language of prose and metrical composition, and Williams takes him up on it. How come this is better than, say, Dr. Johnson’s “I put my hat upon my head / and walked into the Strand / And there I met another man / Whose hat was in his hand"? Well, that’s worth considering – what does Williams say on 740-41? He says it’s metrical, structured, and captures a feeling worth preserving. The first poem especially reads like an experiment in perception: just to fix our attention on that wheelbarrow, as if it were the center of the universe, at least for the moment. The other one just conveys the speaker’s satisfaction at having given in to his urge to eat those plums. Either one, I suppose, challenges the more exalted notion of poetry as heightened, elevated language written by lofty wordsmiths. Here there’s a more democratic sensibility, somewhat like WW’s in his Preface to LB.
Hopkins: "Pied Beauty" (742), "Spring and Fall" (789-90), "God's Grandeur" (1030), " Windhover" (1030-31)
So you want precision of image and word order? Coming right up. Hopkins sends even English professors running for their OED. Stipple? He catches the process and intensity, the purity, of natural things – birds in flight, chestnuts having fallen on the ground. He often does this by means of a Germanic propensity to combine words in unusual ways and to put ordinary words in sequences that reveal new patters, thereby capturing unique perceptions: Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls, etc. We notice that “Pied Beauty” is actually a prayer: for GMH, perception is one of the works of salvation: to put the necessary effort into seeing things as they are is to honor God. I think Hopkins doesn’t even take “denotation” granted; he would perhaps say that dictionaries don’t contain enough words to capturing the amazing variety of nature; for that, you need to be resourceful. Shelley said that the first poets had the ability to “see the before unapprehended relations of things.” That’s an apt way to describe GMH. The second poem, “Spring and Fall,” is cited under Ch. 14, “The Sounds of Poetry.” He called his verse sprung rhythm – the distinction is that it doesn’t really matter how many syllables a foot has; it will often begin with a strongly accented syllable. Notice how Hopkins marks certain of his syllables to make sure you get the accent right. At base, all he’s doing is emphasizing the strongly accentual quality of English speech and verse. The last two poems are in “further reading.” “God’s Grandeur” is a Petrarchan sonnet ABBA ABBA CDC DCD. It conveys a divine energy, perhaps what Dante called il primo amore, crackling through the creation, an energy that humankind persistently ignores as it follows its own petty interests in circles: to align one’s perceptions and will with what God may want: that’s the idea he promotes. And then there’s “The Windhover,” ABBA ABBA CDC DCD Petrarchan. The poem captures the lordly stasis and then the sudden downrush of the kestrel or windhover; since the poem’s dedicated to Christ, it makes sense to take this action as a reference to the Incarnation, lending it an air of exhilarating freedom. What’s the point of the two halves of the sestet ending the poem – I mean the reference to a plow that’s become shiny with use and embers that turn golden when they break open? Well, the speaker paid tribute to the “fire” (light and energy, I believe) he caught coming from the bird in its flight, and these last things are shiny, brilliantly intense: transformation reveals the energy of the plow and the embers as well, reinforcing the way the material, the bodily, gives way to the spirit within.
Edward Estlin.E. Cummings: "in Just" (742-43)
Cummings is a joy to read – he’s very free and inventive with English, which I think is just fine. He refuses to be constrained by just about any convention you’d care to name, including spelling and punctuation, word choice, and syntax. You could say that where Hopkins employs his coinages and joinings-together in a rather strict way, like the Jesuit Priest that he is, Cummings gives us a gleeful kind of creativity – wild and free, very child-like, though sometimes there’s a dark thought or a shadow lurking. Spring, here, is filled with infinite opportunity – it’s been raining, so the whole area is “puddle-wonderful and “mud-luscious.” Even in Cumming’s most creative and playful poems, like “anyone lived in a prettyhow town,” the words make a strange kind of sense, as if you can mix up the parts of speech and language still insistently means something, tells a story, appeals to our emotions: “when by now and tree by leaf / she laughed his joy she cried his grief / bird by snow and stir by still /
anyone's any was all to her.”
"The Twenty-Third Psalm" (756)
Not everything in the Bible is poetry, but the psalms make up some of the finest in it. Traditionally they are attributed to King David, but what we have in front of us is the stately, uplifting English of translators working on commission for Shakespeare’s own King James I. The sheer beauty of the language is in itself moving. The Norton editors remind us that there are controlling metaphors and extended metaphors, with the latter extending over part of the poem, the former over the entire poem. Here in this psalm the controlling metaphor is of course that God is a shepherd who guides the speaker through dangers, but at the end of the poem this shepherd becomes a gracious host and strong protector. The editors rightly suggest that metaphor both clarifies (here God’s relationship with humanity is the issue) and evokes or provokes feelings about what is clarified.
Wilfred Owen: "Dulce et Decorum Est" (759-60)
Simile is a mainstay in this poem, and the ugliness of those similes are the means of the poet’s taking-down of what he calls the old lie: Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori. It’s from Horace’s Ode 3.2, and Horace was exhorting Roman men to seek training in war lest they be unable to defend their empire from the Parthians and others. WWI soldier Owen treats it as a general platitude, which is what it certainly sounds like outside its immediate context.
Robert Frost: "Fireflies in the Garden" (768-69), "Range Finding" (838), "Design" (838), "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening" (1019-20)
The Norton editors address symbol in the section where we find “Fireflies,” pointing out that symbols may be more or less generated on the fly by individual poets, or they may be traditional and “pre-fab,” so to speak. I think Frost is pointing out that the fireflies aren’t really to be treated as symbols of anything, or their activity compared with the movement and shining of the stars in the sky. He sort of sets the fireflies up as if he were going to invest them with deep symbolism, and then gives up because that kind of investment just seems unnecessary, unsustainable. I’ve always thought Frost quite respectful of nature and its processes; he doesn’t often like to allow his own fancifulness to stomp all over it. Apparently, as wordsmiths and imaginers, “if we say we have no sin, we deceive ourselves” (1 John 10). In “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening,” Frost’s combination of depth and elegant simplicity is remarkable: the poem is hypnotic and suggestive of a feeling of weariness that goes beyond the ordinary, everyday things that make a person tired, as if the speaker has reached the end of life’s road but still feels the burden of “miles to go” before the final sleep. “Range Finding” and “Design” suggest Frost’s power of description and intuition as an observer of nature, its process and patterns.
Edgar Allan Poe: "The Raven" (785-88)
ABCBBB, or with internal rhyme AA,B,CC,CB,B,B. This is called the Raven stanza. And its meter is trochaic octameter. The tripping-downward trochaic meter and the internal rhyme lead the reader along until he or she gets caught up in the speaker’s obsession and distress. Poe’s Gothic imagination is delightfully macabre and gets under our skin, and in his treatise on composition he boasts that he can choose a tone for his poems and then generate the right metrics and sound effects to make it stick. The bird’s utterance doesn’t change; its refrain is simply “nevermore.” But the speaker’s state of mind changes from something like bemusement to horror as the bird’s single reply seems more and more prophetic of doom and eternal loss, the very things that the speaker had attempted to hide within himself: his doom is to be obsessed with grief, and this grief will spill out over everything around him, investing it with dread and Gothic horror. Of course, there’s always Bart Simpson’s reading: “Hey Lisa, know what’s scarier than nothing? ANYTHING!”
Shakespeare: "Th'expense of spirit in a waste of shame" (814-15)
Shift in tone is the theme covered by the editors in this poem’s area. The last two lines undo the attempt to sum up the wisdom of experience. Sex is radically irrational and has nothing to do with what people “know,” so they seldom benefit from experience with it. The English sonnet’s structure ABAB CDCD EFEF GG allows for this kind of rapid overturning of what has gone before, and it admirably suits Shakespeare’s keen wit, his sense for the repetitive folly of humankind. We notice, too, that the poem is something like an argument – a fair amount of the sonnets read like that; as the Norton editors point out, poetry can take all sorts of discursive forms, much as prose can: even a brief poem can tell a story if that’s what the poet wants to do; it can take the form of reasoning or logic, try to convince us of something like a piece of rhetoric, or take on the aura of a play that represents a unified action, and so forth.
Dylan Thomas: "Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night" (827-28)
This poem is cast in the form of a villanelle, which originally seems to have meant simply “country song.” Its current highly structured form is mostly a C19 development. Anyway, it has five tercets or sets of three lines, and a final quatrain or set of four lines. The rhyme pattern, as you can trace it, is complex and the challenge for the poet is to express deep feeling within the narrow constraints imposed by the rhyme. Thomas pulls it off wonderfully, turning it into an opportunity to underscore the contrasting word-pair “night/light.”
Elizabeth Bishop: "Sestina" (829-30)
See the Glossary A11 for a detailed description of the sestina form, which goes back to C12 troubadour poet Arnaut Daniel. 39 lines = six sestets or stanzas of six lines, and one concluding tercet or set of three lines. The order in which the lines’ end words are repeated is 615243 from one stanza to the next. That’s pretty intricate and mathematically precise! So the challenge for the poet is to keep refunctioning and recontextualizing the end words as building blocks for new verses. Rhyme isn’t the point here – a sestina is essentially blank verse mathematically arranged. Well, somebody ought to come up with a Lost Stanza: 4, 8, 15, 16, 23, 42. But seriously, it seems that Bishop uses the form to explore the different perspectives of a child and her grandmother. The refunctioning of the same words in different contexts, perhaps, suggests the way in which language is both something common to everyone and yet something intimate and experienced as private. One might say much the same about experience itself, I suppose. What Wordsworth called “the primary laws of our nature,” the most elemental passions (love, grief, anger, etc.), seem the same for everyone, but everyone experiences them as if they were unique.
Marianne Moore "Poetry" (828-29)
Poet-Critic Robert Pinsky writes of this famous poem, “Moore, as I understand her project, champions both clarity and complexity, rejecting the shallow notion that they are opposites” (http://www.slate.com/id/2221785/). What does it mean to present “real toads in imaginary gardens”? And over against Yeats’ criticism of Blake about being too much a “literalist of the imagination” to favor deep craftsmanship, Moore defends Blake’s insistence on being true to his own vision. She introduces the terms “rawness” and “genuine” in a manner that suggests they’re not quite compatible but also not to be considered in mutual isolation – only someone who’s looking for both is really interested in poetry. Another subject of exploration is just what makes poetry poetry, in formal terms – Moore’s poems sometimes follow pretty strict rules regarding the number of syllables in a line, and in “Poetry” she employs some rhyme, but of course her poems often read almost like prose sentences.
Archibald MacLeish: "Ars Poetica" (830-31)
This is a poem that ought to make any New Critic’s heart sing: “A poem should not mean / But be.” Indeed! But what’s strange is the way MacLeish keeps insisting that a poem ought to be silent, wordless, mute, dumb. Now how in tarnation, you ask, can that be since a poem is nothing if not a succession of words, generally treated as an utterance, as something spoken? And besides, what makes language “language” is its inherent intentionality, leaving aside the intricacies of specific intentions. I think MacLeish’s insistence may come down to the formalist attempt to treat a poem as a self-contained universe, rather like a sculpture that draws the world into itself, represents nothing unless it represents itself, or just presents itself, maybe until it becomes like that red wheelbarrow in the William Carlos Williams poem, the wheelbarrow upon which “so much depends” but which is nonplussed by it all. I don’t know. But if you tend closely to those silent or motionless things to which MacLeish compares a poem – globed fruit, an old medallion, casement ledge stone, birds in flight, the climbing moon, and so forth – they all might be said to have quite an emotional effect on us. Isn’t the idea, then, that a poem is to be experienced and not simply talked about, analyzed, and whatnot? And it’s not supposed to serve up all the answers or provide therapy, either: you shall have nothing “For all the history of grief” but “An empty doorway and a maple leaf.” “We murder to dissect,” as Wordsworth once wrote. And it’s true that the New Critics were engaged in the project of safeguarding poetry reading as an experience, one worthy to be placed alongside any other kind of experience in modern life. John Keats’ notion in “Ode on a Grecian Urn” is not exactly the same as MacLeish’s, but there’s an affinity to consider: the Urn says to the speaker, “‘Beauty is truth, truth beauty,’ -- that is all / Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.” Keats had written in one of his letters that “What the imagination seizes upon as Beauty must be Truth,” or words to that effect. Art is constantly provoking us to analyze it or to try to get it to answer our questions about all sorts of things, but in the end it just tells us to pipe down and enjoy the beautiful sounds and sights.
George Herbert: "Easter Wings" (847)
Nice example of a poem’s appearance reinforcing its meaning. Herbert’s two wing-shaped stanzas trace first the making-poor of humanity through sin, and then the speaker’s own “thinness” as a result of the same process. The length of the lines contracts and swells in accordance with the contraction or expansion of spiritual aspiration, hope for better things.
Marlowe and Sir Walter Raleigh: "The Passionate Shepherd to His Love" and "The Nymph's Reply" (913-15)
Sometimes what poets are responding to is other poets, and this is a case in point. Marlowe gives the positive version of pastoral longing, while Raleigh responds to that pitch borrowing the sensibility of a worldly-wise shepherdess who isn’t so easily fooled. Both poets would have known that pastoral poetry from Theocritus and Vergil onwards was just as much about complaining over one’s erotic frustrations and overall harsh life as it was about uttering pretty sentiments on the theme of nature and the joys of living in the countryside.
Alfred Tennyson: "Ulysses" (928-30)
Tiresias had told Odysseus that he must leave Ithaca one last time to propitiate the gods, so Tennyson’s idea comes from Homer. Here we find a modern mind confronting Greek striving. In Homer, all the wandering was for the sake of getting home and re-establishing order on Ithaca. But here the point seems to be that adventurism is its own purpose. Ulysses laments that he has “become a name”; his words are no longer oriented towards action. What he says about experience is almost Paterian—Ulysses, too, wants “to burn with that hard, gem-like flame,” to expand life into a continual moment of great intensity, blotting out the ordinary or transforming it. The second, more public, part of the poem—”This is my son, mine own Telemachus…” implies a rejection of the task Homer set for his hero. Tennyson isn’t interested, I suppose, in the historical element of Odyssean lore—the “task” of the Odyssey was to revitalize a more domesticated land with its former heroic values. But in Tennyson’s recasting, revitalization means rejecting the domestic life and setting out again as a wanderer towards death. Ulysses stands apart from his son, to whom he would gladly cede the task of ruling over the human herd animals of Ithaca. When Ulysses addresses his old comrades, he sounds like Satan in Paradise Lost—his will is “To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.” This is a very general directive, not a call to strive towards some specific goal. Exploring psychological states is one of Tennyson’s main enterprises, and one might say the same of Browning and some other Victorian poets. Isobel Armstrong’s thesis about Victorian poetry is partly that it constituted an alternative realm where more nuance could be developed regarding issues that prose authors were writing about.
Robert Browning: "My Last Duchess" (1009-10)
As the editors point out, the speaker is loosely based on Duke Alfonso II of Ferrara. The poem is, like Tennyson’s “Ulysses,” a dramatic monologue – it’s spoken to a silent listener, an agent for an aristocrat whose daughter the Duke wants now to marry. The Victorian poet Browning seems fascinated with twisted psyches; that’s the direction his exploration of individualism takes. Here, the Duke is the ultimate objectifier of women, “disappearing” them into works of art, and he is insanely jealous.
