Weel 11

And so we've come to week 11, to the fall season, and to your final day in the literature course.  I hope you have enjoyed the readings.  There were many we did not get time to address, but they remain for your leisure.  You can access the links here indefinitely, that is until such time as I take the site down.  

     Some themes to think about as you write the in-class essay (posted last week):  

Authority/Society and the Individual:  how authority is defined, how founded and invested, its impacts and relations to those figures and institutions that commonly wield it and/or are affected by it,  parents, teachers, police, the citizen, the child or youth, what have you–all the institutions and people and cultural activities in our society that claim and command our attention by weight of authority ( as distinguished from mere power or physical force).  In literature, the author creates or writes and the story that is told may be in fiction or non-fiction form, in poetry or prose, but its truths such as they are tell us something,  shape our understanding of what it means to be human and to exist in a world that is palpable and real, but ever-changing and always beyond us in so many ways. 

The Natural World:  the womb of all life, Nature is the alpha and omega, and whatever face Nature wears, for good or ill, our fates are linked inextricably.  Whether the world ( and we ourselves) appears as it does in accordance with some divine plan or design or Fate, whether what science calls natural selection and chance events are an aspect of that, whether the mythic stories of creation, lost paradises and first peoples are "true", certainly the world is unfolding and we along with it, witness to, and participant in the show.

Art:  the made world, constructed from the material elements of the world and human imagination and ingenuity and energy and will and the desire to control and shape the experience we are thrown into at birth, and from which only death will deliver us, ultimately.  What does it all mean?  What pleasures, what pains, what needs? To these art address itself.

Love:  What connects us to this world, to this life we are given, however briefly, and what does it ask of us along the way? What is the power and authority that love exerts? What will we do, for good or ill, for its sake or at its promptings?

Year’s End                                        by Richard Wilbur (b.1921)

Now winter downs the dying of the year,   

And night is all a settlement of snow;

From the soft street the rooms of houses show   

A gathered light, a    atmosphere,   

Like frozen-over lakes whose ice is thin   

And still allows some stirring down within.

I’ve known the wind by water banks to shake

The late leaves down, which frozen where they fell   

And held in ice as dancers in a spell   

Fluttered all winter long into a lake;   

Graved on the dark in gestures of descent,   

They seemed their own most perfect monument.

There was perfection in the death of ferns   

Which laid their fragile cheeks against the stone   

A million years. Great mammoths overthrown   

Composedly have made their long sojourns,   

Like palaces of patience, in the gray

And changeless lands of ice. And at Pompeii

The little dog lay curled and did not rise   

But slept the deeper as the ashes rose

And found the people incomplete, and froze   

The random hands, the loose unready eyes   

Of men expecting yet another sun

To do the shapely thing they had not done.

These sudden ends of time must give us pause.   

We fray into the future, rarely wrought

Save in the tapestries of afterthought.

More time, more time. Barrages of applause   

Come muffled from a buried radio.

The New-year bells are wrangling with the snow.

The poet Richard Wilbur, a winner of the Pulitzer Prize and one time Poet Laureate, said the following:  “What poetry does with ideas is to redeem them from abstraction and submerge them in sensibility.”  Poetry makes us feel, brings our senses into the moment or view described (as does prose, I might add) Moreover he wants his students to memorize poetry: 

“The kind of poetry I like best, and try to write, uses the whole instrument,” he says. “Meter, rhyme, musical expression—and everything is done for the sake of what’s being said, not for the sake of prettiness.” At the same time, he believes that “For anyone who knows how to use these forms powerfully, they make for a stronger kind of poetry than free verse can ever be.”

“All these traditional means are ways of being rhythmically clear,” he explains: “making the emphases strong, making it clear what words are important. Rhyme is not just making a jingling noise, but telling what words deserve emphasis. Meter, too, tells what the rhythm of thought is. It doesn’t necessarily sound like music, but it has the strength of sound underlying everything being said. I encourage my students to memorize poems. If a poem is good, it is well to say it again and again in your mind until you’ve found all the intended tones and emphases.” He adds, “One of the great fascinations of poetry is that you’re going almost naked: the equipment is so small, just language.”

Good luck on your recitations and paperwork.  It was a pleasure having you all in class!