Week 4

Hubble Image:  a giant cluster of about 3,000 stars called Westerlund 2, named for Swedish astronomer Bengt Westerlund who discovered the grouping in the 1960s. The cluster resides in a raucous stellar breeding ground known as Gum 29, located 20,000 light-years away from Earth in the constellation Carina. (NASA.gov)

One Day I Wrote her Name                                    Edmund Spenser (1553-1599)

One day I wrote her name upon the strand,

But came the waves and washed it away:

Again I wrote it with a second hand,

But came the tide, and made my pains his prey.

"Vain man," said she, "that dost in vain assay,

A mortal thing so to immortalize;

For I myself shall like to this decay,

And eke my name be wiped out likewise."

"Not so," (quod I) "let baser things devise

To die in dust, but you shall live by fame:

My verse your vertues rare shall eternize,

And in the heavens write your glorious name:

Where whenas death shall all the world subdue,

Our love shall live, and later life renew."

This World is not Conclusion             Emily Dickinson (1830-1886)

This World is not Conclusion.

A Species stands beyond—

Invisible, as Music—

But positive, as Sound—

It beckons, and it baffles—

Philosophy—don't know—

And through a Riddle, at the last—

Sagacity, must go—

To guess it, puzzles scholars—

To gain it, Men have borne

Contempt of Generations

And Crucifixion, shown—

Faith slips—and laughs, and rallies—

Blushes, if any see—

Plucks at a twig of Evidence—

And asks a Vane, the way—

Much Gesture, from the Pulpit—

Strong Hallelujahs roll—

Narcotics cannot still the Tooth

That nibbles at the soul—

Six Elements of the Human Condition ( from author Paul Ricouer)

1.     Finitude  (our sense of limitation, mortality)

2.     Estrangement from God or the Divine, the numinous

3.     All is in process, we are all becoming, too, and transcendence is part of this process; the truth is never whole and complete, we see in part.

4.     The paradox of the freedom and burden of human choice.  The give and take tension of every moment’s choice.

5.     Our existence lies within and through others, people primarily, sociality being a primary aspect of human nature.

6.     Our identity is linked to our origins and participation in the universe or cosmos.

We can talk about the ideas listed above, those associated with the human condition, in relation to the stories and poems we read, including the Christian texts, Old and New Testaments, which depict the creation as the work of an all-knowing, all-powerful father figure to whom we owe obedience, respect, and gratitude, and whose judgment we may fear, mercy desire.  The first book, Genesis, is here:  http://www.kingjamesbibleonline.org/Genesis-Chapter-1/ and tells the story of Creation by word (and act) from a formless void, into the familiar world of living forms, including that of man and woman.  It is a very old story, Bronze Age, written sometime between 1100 to 1400 B.C.E., but describing events from a much earlier period before the invention of writing (cuneiform and hieroglyphics) when rule by kings and priests, an elite class, had grown up in the ancient Middle East.

-------------------The Romantic poets such as William Wordworth and others who followed ( and the later modernists, too, such as William Carlos Williams) sought an aesthetic rooted in common experience, that of ordinary people, the natural and urban world and our relationships to all. The early 20th century movement known as Imagism in fact made it practice to strip poetry to clear concrete physical details, as clear and solid as a piece of sculpture; the details of the image were to "speak for themselves," so as to free the poem from sentimentality, ideology, dogma, doctrine, stale language, what have you.  The imagists were influenced by Asian poetry, haiku and tanka, which you probably remember from grade school.  Haiku is unrhymed and typically limited to three lines of 5, 7, and 5 syllables, and expressive of some aspect of Nature's seasonal show, and our perceptions of the simultaneous arising of phenomenon.  I reproduce some here below:

Haiku   (lines of 5, 7, and 5 syllables, considered a closed form)

After spring sunset

Mist rises from the river

Spreading like a flood.

                                                Chora

A bare pecan tree

slips a pencil shadow down

a moonlit snow slope.

                                                Etheridge Knight

From the bough

floating down river,

insect song.

                                    Issa (1763-1827)

The bougainvillea

Beckons with its flowered stem

Of sunlit fuschia

Yellow butterfly

Fluttering over the roof

Against the blue sky

                        --Vincent Bellito, student

the dalai lama

sitting lotus on the floor

on my girlfriend’s shirt

                        --Matt Dee, student

Rain kicks down my door

Like quarterbacks settle scores

Tougher than ever before

                        --Michelle Rodriguez, student

In a Station of the Metro         by Ezra Pound  (1885-1972)

The apparition of these faces in the crowd;

Petals on a wet black bough.

                                                       Prothontary Warbler (Audubon Society) 

The modernists experimented with free verse, often focusing on the things, the concrete particulars of perceptions, natural or manufactured, at times atomized, shown in relative isolation, their meaning and apparently random or fragmentary quality suggestive of the greater whole.  The following is a very famous poem  reflective of the imagist movement:

The Red Wheelbarrow                                 William Carlos Williams (1883-1963)

so much depends

upon

a red wheel

barrow

glazed with rain

water

beside the white 

chickens

And here is another by Williams:

Young Woman At A Window

She sits with

tears on

her cheek


her cheek on

her hand


the child

in her lap


his nose 

pressed

to the glass

At Harper's you may read an excellent little piece by an accomplished American poet named Tony Hoagland on why poetry matters and the 20 he offers as instructive:  http://harpers.org/blog/2013/04/twenty-little-poems-that-could-save-america/3/

from Ralph Waldo Emerson's essay Self-Reliance       

       There is a time in every man's education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide; that he must take himself for better, for worse, as his portion; that though the wide universe is full of good, no kernel of nourishing corn can come to him but through his toil bestowed on that plot of ground which is given to him to till. The power which resides in him is new in nature, and none but he knows what that is which he can do, nor does he know until he has tried. Not for nothing one face, one character, one fact, makes much impression on him, and another none. This sculpture in the memory is not without preestablished harmony. The eye was placed where one ray should fall, that it might testify of that particular ray. We but half express ourselves, and are ashamed of that divine idea which each of us represents. It may be safely trusted as proportionate and of good issues, so it be faithfully imparted, but God will not have his work made manifest by cowards. A man is relieved and gay when he has put his heart into his work and done his best; but what he has said or done otherwise, shall give him no peace. It is a deliverance which does not deliver. In the attempt his genius deserts him; no muse befriends; no invention, no hope.

        Trust thyself: every heart vibrates to that iron string. Accept the place the divine providence has found for you, the society of your contemporaries, the connection of events. Great men have always done so, and confided themselves childlike to the genius of their age, betraying their perception that the absolutely trustworthy was seated at their heart, working through their hands, predominating in all their being.

-----------------------------   So-called nonsense literature, like the prose novel Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, by Lewis Carroll, is typically set in fantastical places and features strange creatures we wouldn't expect to meet in real life.  Often the plot events and speech are equally mystifying or silly but the premium seems to be on defying what is strictly logical or plausible, the conventional, the everyday, in favor of wordplay, fantasy, and fun.  We have to let go for a time, to sing, dance, play, and love.   Nonsense works appeal to children and to the child in us all. And perhaps in them we may find something beyond age.

The poem below, in the form of a ballad, has always been a favorite of mine, and one easily memorized.  It is by a poet much admired by the late Beatle John Lennon, who wrote some nonsense verse himself.

The Owl and the Pussycat               by Edmund Lear (1812-1888)

The Owl and the Pussy-cat went to sea 

   In a beautiful pea green boat,

They took some honey, and plenty of money,   

  Wrapped up in a five pound note.

The Owl looked up to the stars above,   

  And sang to a small guitar,’

O lovely Pussy! O Pussy my love,     

  What a beautiful Pussy you are, 

      You are,       

      You are!

What a beautiful Pussy you are!’

Pussy said to the Owl, ‘You elegant fowl!   

   How charmingly sweet you sing!

O let us be married! too long we have tarried:   

   But what shall we do for a ring?’

They sailed away, for a year and a day,   

  To the land where the Bong-tree grows

And there in a wood a Piggy-wig stood   

   With a ring at the end of his nose,         

       His nose,         

       His nose,

With a ring at the end of his nose.

‘Dear pig, are you willing to sell for one shilling

    Your ring?’ Said the Piggy, ‘I will.’

So they took it away, and were married next day   

    By the Turkey who lives on the hill.

They dined on mince, and slices of quince,   

    Which they ate with a runcible spoon;

And hand in hand, on the edge of the sand,   

    They danced by the light of the moon,         

        The moon,         

        The moon,

They danced by the light of the moon.

Here, too, a short commentary on nonsense lyrics by George Orwell:  http://www.nonsenselit.org/Lear/essays/orwell_1.html
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Writing Assignment #2 (Due week 5)

In “The Summer Day” on page 2 of the week one poetry handout, poet Mary Oliver speaks from a field where she muses upon what is before her, and asks readers to do the same.   She is in the habit of paying attention, bearing witness, and in an assuming, almost childlike way poses several questions.  Provide a 300-350 word reading of the poem (an essay description and interpretative response) that identifies how she puts the lines together, how she begins, the tenor of the questions she asks and the responses she gives, her use of imagery, setting and action, and the points she derives as she moves from beginning to end.  If you have already written about this one, choose another for an explication in short essay form.