Week 3

Writing, at its best, is a lonely life.  Organizations for writers palliate the writer's loneliness but I doubt if they improve his writing.  He grows in public stature as he sheds his loneliness and often his work deteriorates.  For he does his work alone and if he is a good enough writer he must face eternity, or the lack of it, each day.
                                                       –from Ernest Hemingway's Nobel Prize Acceptance Speech in 1954

Welcome back. Hope you've had a good week.  Today we will continue discussing Week 1 and 2 poetry selections, including, briefly, "Sestina," by Swinburne, American writer Kate Chopin (1860-1904),  and "The Ant and the Grasshopper," by Englishman Somerset Maugham (1874-1965) and next week perhaps  several short stories by Alice Munro and Ernest Hemingway (1899-1960).

I'll return  your homework, submitted last week, and see to your first response essay.  I've also a couple of extra pieces, just below, in honor of birds, the very creatures whose protection inspired early wildlife conservation efforts (the Audubon Society) and the beautifully composed and influential book by Rachel Carson entitled Silent Spring.  The beauty and delicacy of birds and birdsong have old poetic associations; even in their predatory aspect, the creatures of the air embody spiritual dimensions of human interest and value.

First, the song of the nightingale,  a bird not found in the Americas but whose song is accounted amongst the most beautiful of birds and to whom poets such as William Shakespeare and John Keats have paid tribute:  https://www.freesound.org/people/reinsamba/sounds/120226/

Next a Maya poem:

from Songs of Dzitbalche                     translated from the Mayan text (18^th century)

You are singing little dove,

on the branches of the silk-cotton tree

And there also is the cuckoo,

and many other little birds.

All are rejoicing,

The songbirds of our god, our Lord.

And our goddess

Has her little birds,

The turtledove, the redbird,

The black and yellow songbirds, and

            The hummingbird.

These are the birds of the beautiful

            Goddess, our Lady.

If there is such happiness

Among the creatures,

Why do our hearts not also rejoice?

At daybreak all is jubilant.

Let only joy, only songs,

enter our thoughts.

I found the poem above in a book called Earth Prayers From Around the World.  Clearly the Maya poet knew and loved the various birds, and indicates their association with what was believed holy, god and goddess. To make sacred daily life through recognition of divine essences and beings is something both poets and priests assume.
     Beginning in the 16th century, the Maya culture was largely destroyed and their lands colonized by the Spanish conquistadors, who then sought by force to convert them to Christianity.  The Mayas had the only fully developed writing system in the Pre-Columbian Americas but nearly all of the books in which they had recorded their history and thoughts were destroyed.

Birds have inspired many conservationists and writers.  Poets have traditionally identified with the beautiful song and flight of birds, poetry being seen as song, and winged by inspiration. Birds often personify freedom, and joy, the aspirations of the unbound soul. In the following ode "To A Skylark," the poet Percy Bysse Shelley emulates the songbird, as he praises it thus:

Better than all measures

                Of delightful sound,

         Better than all treasures

                That in books are found,

Thy skill to poet were, thou scorner of the ground!

         Teach me half the gladness

                That thy brain must know,

         Such harmonious madness

                From my lips would flow

The world should listen then, as I am listening now. (lines 95-105)

The form here is lyrical, musical and emotionally expressive, and the occasion finds the poet reminded of humanity, of how our joy and sorrow mingle:   

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. (90-95)

In Swinburne's "Sestina," he represents his soul as a bird and proceeds to reflect upon its nature.  As you can readily see in the first stanza below, the six words used to form the representative pattern are day, night, way, light, may, and delight.  Each will reappear, circulate, in each of the six stanzas and in the final three line envoi in the characteristic sestina form. In addition, the words he chose rhyme:

I saw my soul at rest upon a day 

      As a bird sleeping in the nest of night, 

Among soft leaves that give the starlight way 

      To touch its wings but not its eyes with light; 

So that it knew as one in visions may, 

      And knew not as men waking, of delight. (lines 1-5)

This bird, this soul of the poet, is a dreaming being, sheltered, half hidden, half revealed, continuously nesting apart from the daily round of activity.  It is other-worldy, as befits the notion of a soul, but ensconced in green leaves and starlight,  so we can see it readily.  This bird-soul image represents the poet and his song, his poetry, which has been praised for its musicality,  lyricism.  Described as small and frail and given to "nervous gestures"  and ill health, the poet might well see his soul as a delicate bird, "a nursling of the large-eyed night" (line 26).  And by his description we feel a kind of pathos. Its way is "a lost star's way" (line 17).  Night and day, the bird-soul sleeps, taking pleasure or "faint delight" in a world apart, of sensations likened to the music of minstrels (lines 19-20), those poets of medieval Europe who sang poetry.  In the end, the poet-speaker exhorts his song/self to take the light for soon enough it will be extinguished, and all delight, too.  The poet reminds his readers that we are mortal, with no assurance that the soul or self/bird survives.

The following poem is a sonnet (little song) in which the poet, overlooking the sea, upbraids his readers for giving too much of their attention and time to worldly matters ("getting and spending"), and for being "out of tune" with Nature.  He takes his pleasure in the sensuous elements of sea, wind, and moon, and longs for the old pagan times, as the allusions to Proteus and Triton make clear.  

The World Is Too Much With Us                 by William Wordsworth  

The world is too much with us; late and soon,

Getting and spending we lay waste our powers:

Little we see in Nature that is ours;

We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!

The Sea that bares her bosom to the moon;

The winds that will be howling at all hours,

And are up-gathered now like sleeping flowers;

For this, for everything, we are out of tune;

It moves us not.–Great God!  I’d rather be

A Pagan suckled in a creed outworn;

So might I, standing on this pleasant lea,

Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn;

Have sight of Proteus* rising from the sea;

Or hear old Triton^ blow his wreathed horn.

*In Greek mythology, a sea god who could change his shape at will.

^Another ancient Greek sea god, represented as having the torso of a man and the tail of a fish.

These final two poems make jest of the imagined conceptual division between body and soul:

Troubles With The Soul At Morning Calisthenics   Anna Swir (1909-1984), translation

Lying down I lift my legs,

my soul by mistake jumps into my legs.

This is not convenient for her,

besides, she must branch,

for the legs are two.

When I stand on my head

my soul sinks down to my head.

She is then in her place.

But how long can you stand on your head,

especially if you do not know

how to stand on your head.

I Starve My Belly For A Sublime Purpose

Three days

I starve my belly

so that it learns

to eat the sun.

I say to it:  Belly

I am ashamed of you.  You must

Spiritualize yourself.  You must 

eat the sun.

The belly keeps silent

for three days.  It’s not easy

to waken in it higher aspirations.

Yet I hope for the best.

This morning, tanning myself on the beach,

I noticed that, little by little,

it begins to shine.

As I stressed last week, in poetry and prose imagery– represented objects, feelings, and ideas– appeals to our senses–of sight, sound, movement inward and outward, scent, taste, touch, and mind or thought.  Poets and prose writers seek language to express experience in uncommon, extraordinary ways and their work, at its best, invites us to see what we might otherwise not. The language will often be concrete, denoting something that exists in the material world, and tied to the abstract, denoting something that exists conceptually, such as goodness, beauty, truth, freedom, power.  Good poems have extraordinary expressive force and enhance our appreciation of language. Language  literal and figurative– metaphor, simile, personification–and the elements of sound such as alliteration, consonance and assonance, speak to our senses and imagination and intellect. 

Homework:  Finish reading the prose short stories in week one's handout, and  "The Story of an Hour," a short story by Kate Chopin.  There will be a comprehension quiz next week.  Have a great weekend!