Week 5

What is to give light must endure burning. – Victor Frankl

The following free verse poem is by Walt Whitman, who served as a nurse during the American Civil War.  In it he sees beyond the immediate violent conflict between North and South in tender recognition of the "divine" humanity of all involved, and the healing inevitably to come.  Notice the long verse lines stretching out from among the shorter and providing an expansive, heightened sense of feeling:

Reconciliation

WORD over all, beautiful as the sky!
Beautiful that war, and all its deeds of carnage, must in time be utterly lost;
That the hands of the sisters Death and Night, incessantly softly wash again, and ever again, this soil’d world:
... For my enemy is dead—a man divine as myself is dead;
I look where he lies, white-faced and still, in the coffin—I draw near;
I bend down, and touch lightly with my lips the white face in the coffin. We'll look at Whitman's "Song of Myself, which was the first poem in the collection called "Leaves of Grass," an extended description of and tribute to America and to the expansive persona of the poet.  It is a very important proto-modernist piece that has received much attention from poets and scholars and been very influential thematically and stylistically. In fact, Whitman is considered the first great architect of free verse form.

A White Heron

Welcome back to class.  I hope you are all doing well.  

     Today we pick up where we left off last week, reviewing the poem written about last week  ("The Summer Day"), Emily Dickinson's pieces, and on to ("nothing," by e.e.cummings) among others, and the prose fiction about fathers and sons, loss, guilt, and redemption, we have yet to review, by Hemingway, de Maupassant, Charles Bukowski.  In the coming weeks we'll cover Sarah Orne Jewett ("The White Heron").   We'll also decide on a film study.  We will discuss  similarities and differences in these stories, but here I will indicate some of the similarities in theme that I have noted:

• A narrator/protagonist who feels himself in opposition to family and/or others and thus feels isolated or alone and vulnerable to some degree
• A narrator/protagonist who struggles to find and assert himself and in so many ways feel strong
• A narrator/protagonist who discovers where his powers lie and then exercises them
• A narrator/protagonist who considers the consequences of actions, and regards with sympathy and/or antipathy the weak, meek, and humble
• A narrator/protagonist who seeks understanding, even wisdom, through reflection, reading and writing and/or communion with the natural world
• A narrator/protagonist who shows awareness of the social mask and who hides certain aspects of his character
• A narrator/protagonist who invites readers to see the challenges of growing up by relating key memories and experiences from that journey

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Homework:  in addition to composing an interpretative essay on a poetry and/or prose piece (#3 see directions below, due week 7 or 8), I give you two choices:  A short comparison of "Song of Myself," by Walt Whitman, and "The Negro Speaks of Rivers," by Langston Hughes; or you may want you to consider Follain's  "Music of Spheres" (handout selection).  Write up four or five questions that the situation depicted in the poem implies (the character, setting, action, imagery, point of view, tone) and what answers or, if not "answers," responses might be made to each.  Research the title phrase as part of your study of the poem. You will be awarded homework points for this work.

Recitation reminder:   bring something to recite (not by memory) for class, which should be fun, and good practice!  Here is a link to student performance videos:  http://www.nytimes.com/2013/12/20/theater/hamlet-student-instagram-videos.html?smid=fb-share&_r=0

Next week additional stories for those who want to read more:  Read the two stories "Misery" and "Joy" by the great Russian writer Anton Chekhov.  What constitutes the misery and joy in each?  What does Chekhov imply about human nature?

http://classiclit.about.com/library/bl-etexts/achekhov/bl-achek-misery.htm

http://www.online-literature.com/anton_chekhov/1103/

At the following URL, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/lewis-lapham/the-conquest-of-nature_b_2859691.html, is I think an excellent essay, by one well known, witty American writer on the human-animal relationship in historical and cultural perspective.  Animals, Lewis Lapham writes, elude our attempts to define them, even as we push so many to the brink in our "conquest" of the natural world.  An excerpt:

The eighteenth-century naturalists shared with Virgil the looking
to the animal kingdom for signs of good government. The Count of
Buffon, keeper of the royal botanical garden for King Louis XV,
recognized in 1767 the beaver as a master architect capable of
building important dams, but he was even more impressed by the
engineering of the beaver’s civil society, by “some
particular method of understanding one another, and of acting in
concert… However numerous the republic of beavers may be, peace
and good order are uniformly maintained in it.”

Buffon was accustomed, as were Virgil and Leonardo, not only to the
company of horses and bees but also to the sight and sound of ducks,
cows, chickens, pigs, turtles, goats, rabbits, hawks. They supplied
the bacon, the soup, and the eggs, but they also invited the question
asked by Ralph Waldo Emerson in 1836: “Who can guess… how
much industry and providence and affection we have caught from the
pantomime of brutes?”

How the Animal World Lost Its License to Teach

Not much if the brutes are nowhere to be found. Over the course of
the last two centuries, animals have become all but invisible in the
American scheme of things, drummed out of the society of their
myth-making companions, gone from the rural as well as the urban
landscape. John James Audubon in 1813 on the shore of the Ohio River
marveled at the slaughter of many thousands of wild pigeons by men
amassed in the hundreds, armed with guns, torches, and iron poles. In
1880, on a Sioux reservation in the Dakota Territory, Luther Standing
Bear could not eat of “the vile-smelling cattle”
substituted for “our own wild buffalo” that the white
people had been killing “as fast as possible.”

And in the short video found at the following URL, you can see the power of imagination exemplified in William Blake's lines beginning "To see a world in a grain of sand" magnified by application of modern technology:  https://www.ted.com/talks/louie_schwartzberg_hidden_miracles_of_the_natural_world

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If possible  next week or the next we will look at autobiographical excerpts by Gertrude Bonnin (Zitkala Sa), a Native American writer who recorded her memories of Sioux life in South Dakota, including the influence of her mother, the natural world around them, the legends and rituals of her tribe, and her meeting with white missionaries.  In addition, "The Navaho Night Chant," a piece still performed today by the Navaho, offers a look into the way that poetry and chanting come together in a ritual of healing and transformation intended to return its participants to a renewed sense of vitality and wholeness.

                                                      Tintern Abbey (12th Century)

I have also a selection of poems I'd like to address, time permitting.  They will serve to underscore some of the narrative themes in the prose pieces we are reading, and provide review of the theme of the artist's relationship to art itself.   One is "Tintern Abbey," a romantic poem in blank verse by William Wordsworth:  http://www.rc.umd.edu/rchs/reader/tabbey.html   At the following link you may read background and see in photos the beauty of the abbey:  http://www.castlewales.com/tintern.html  Another is Alfred Lord Tennyson's rhymed narrative (ballad) of "The Lady of Shallot," based on the medieval tales of King Arthur. And yet others:  and John Keats's "Ode on a Grecian Urn" and "Ode to a Nightingale."  

Posted below is the description of essay 3, which is due week 7 or 8.  I'd like you to read  

 "The White Heron" . Be prepared to identify plot elements, themes, and symbolism apparent in the story.

 Essay #3, due week 7 or 8: Compose a 600-700 word (minimum length) essay that introduces the text(s) by title and author and proceeds to support a thesis point or claim about the text(s). You may address poetry and/or prose selections. If you have two or more selections, they must be addressed under a comprehensive thesis, the essay unified by the thesis, with each serving to illustrate, develop and support your thesis. Include some description of the formal structure of the poem and/or prose elements, for example, stanza form, line length and rhyme pattern, use of repetition or anaphora, use of narrative structure, setting, plot, character,  conspicuous sound devices, imagery, figurative elements (such as metaphor, simile, symbol, personification).  Remember, narrative always involves the perspective or point of view of the narrator (first person or third person typically, as well as plot, setting, character development, tone or mood, and central thematic concerns. Lyric poems may have little in the way of narrative or story, though they always have a speaker and the speaker provides perspective, along with whatever other voices may be presented in the poem.  Provide support and evidence for your claims in the form of textual summary and direct quotation, formatted in the MLA style, with line citations. Avoid using quotation unnecessarily or dropping quotations in without commentary. Integrate short quotations into the text with quotation marks and slashes to indicate line breaks. Quotations of 4 and more lines should be block formatted. Title your essay (do not use the poetry or prose story title in the essay title unless a subtitle is also present). Double‐space the lines.