PoemoftheWeek

[Scheherazade]

I would like to read and discuss more poetry (and not only to help someone with their homeworks! ;)). So shall we try this? We will have a new poem every Monday and discuss it during the following week.

* Please post a new poem only on a Monday (please wait till it is Monday in your corner of the world).

* The same person cannot post another poem within the same month.


Even though it is Tuesday today, I will post the first poem to get things moving:

Poem of the Week (Sep 26th - Oct 3rd):



ANNABEL LEE

It was many and many a year ago,
In a kingdom by the sea,
That a maiden there lived whom you may know
By the name of ANNABEL LEE;
And this maiden she lived with no other thought
Than to love and be loved by me.

I was a child and she was a child,
In this kingdom by the sea;
But we loved with a love that was more than love-
I and my Annabel Lee;
With a love that the winged seraphs of heaven
Coveted her and me.

And this was the reason that, long ago,
In this kingdom by the sea,
A wind blew out of a cloud, chilling
My beautiful Annabel Lee;
So that her highborn kinsman came
And bore her away from me,
To shut her up in a sepulchre
In this kingdom by the sea.

The angels, not half so happy in heaven,
Went envying her and me-
Yes!- that was the reason (as all men know,
In this kingdom by the sea)
That the wind came out of the cloud by night,
Chilling and killing my Annabel Lee.

But our love it was stronger by far than the love
Of those who were older than we-
Of many far wiser than we-
And neither the angels in heaven above,
Nor the demons down under the sea,
Can ever dissever my soul from the soul
Of the beautiful Annabel Lee.

For the moon never beams without bringing me dreams
Of the beautiful Annabel Lee;
And the stars never rise but I feel the bright eyes
Of the beautiful Annabel Lee;
And so, all the night-tide, I lie down by the side
Of my darling- my darling- my life and my bride,
In the sepulchre there by the sea,
In her tomb by the sounding sea.

by Edgar Allan Poe, 1849

[Aurora Ariel]

Annabel Lee is actually one of my favourite EAP poems and I was sent this in my inbox a few weeks ago.I've actually still got it there and was sent it by the poem hunter website, which I subscribed to and receive a lucky poem everyday.Though sometimes I've had a few when I haven't checked my email and I get some lovely poetic surprizes and some familar ones to!Has anyone else done this and been surprized by receiving one of their favourite poems or opened their email to find a new poem they have never read before?

[Scheherazade]

I grew up hearing this poem from my parents (translated, not in English) and well before I knew who Poe was, I had learnt it by heart. And when I read it in English at university, I was over the moon!

The pure, naive love in the poem and sadness of it, without being soppy, touches my heart every time I read it.

And I learnt what 'sepulchre' means while reading this poem.

Did you know that this is the last poem Poe wrote?

[chatnoir1311]

I read it the first time , and really enjoyed it!!! It's so lovely !

[Kaltrina]

it's really a beautiful poem. I read so many times and whenever i read it I have the same pleasure and the same great feeling as if I am reading it for the first time... :D

[Rosevn]

hi all,

Yes, it's a very beautiful poem that I can't help re-reading it. I also read it for the first time :)

I especially like this:


I was a child and she was a child,
In this kingdom by the sea;
But we loved with a love that was more than love-
I and my Annabel Lee;
With a love that the winged seraphs of heaven
Coveted her and me.

This Edgar Allan Poe must be a lovable man who was so sweet with his beloved one, right? :cool:

Thank you, Scheherazade! :ladysman:

[Scheherazade]

Found a copy of the original manuscript of the poem:

http://www.columbia.edu/acis/textarchive/rare/76a.gif


http://www.columbia.edu/acis/textarchive/rare/76b.gif

[Aurora Ariel]

Thanks for posting his manuscript.I love seeing old manuscripts.Also in museums and art galleries.Previously I had not seen this one.I have a thing for looking at the poets handwriting;it feels one can get a greater connection and then see for themself that they truely were once alive and their hand brushed along the page.It's quite a strange feeling that can come over you if you have read their poetry before, but in a reproduced text and not having seen their ink writing;which curls around by their own hand in a very personal style.It makes me wonder about the exact moment of creation and poetic inspiration;almost frozen in time to be viewed by future generations.I wonder, with the digital age, what will happen as nowdays most seem to type instead of writing with ink.Is this the end of manuscripts?Maby a poets handwriting and paper and pen will no longer exist?

[Scheherazade]

I wonder, with the digital age, what will happen as nowdays most seem to type instead of writing with ink.Is this the end of manuscripts?Maby a poets handwriting and paper and pen will no longer exist? I agree with you Aurora that seeing a writer/poet's manuscripts (especially with some revisions on them) makes them 'real' to us. Like you, I cannot help wondering what they were feeling/thinking or what led them to that moment when they had the inspritation to write that particular piece. I also try to get an idea about the person who held the pen. Although I understand where your worries are stemming from, I am not sure if it will ever come to the point of making pen and paper obsolete. Like e-books cannot replace the actual printed books, I would like to think that 'the real thing' will survive owing to its personal touch and intimacy.


Since it is another month and no one else has posted another poem, I will do the honour again! :D

Poem for October 3rd - 10th:



The World is Too Much With Us

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!
This Sea that bares her bosom to the moon,
The winds that will be howling at all hours
And are up-gather'd 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 wreathèd horn.

William Wordsworth

[amuse]

i've never read the whole thing; thanks Scher. these lines are beautiful:



And neither the angels in heaven above,
Nor the demons down under the sea,
Can ever dissever my soul from the soul
Of the beautiful Annabel Lee.

And so, all the night-tide, I lie down by the side
Of my darling- my darling- my life and my bride,
In the sepulchre there by the sea,
In her tomb by the sounding sea.9

[ADLforApril]

To go back to "Annabel Lee," I think that the poem is twisted when you consider the subject and Poe's relationship with her. Knowing that Poe is writing of his 13 year old cousin whom he married and presumably had sexual relations with makes this poem rather creepy.

[Scheherazade]

The World is Too Much With Us

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!I am sure I have mentioned this somewhere else in the Forum but these lines carry so much depth to me. The whole poem refers to industrialisation but when I read tthe opening lines, I feel some kind of angst, questioning, some kind of Judgement Day reflection. I can very easily say that these are among the lines which have moved most in English poetry (as little as I have read of it).

This Sea that bares her bosom to the moon,
The winds that will be howling at all hours
And are up-gather'd 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 wreathèd horn.
The yearning for nature in these latter lines is so strong and so passionate. I have never been someone who had close ties with nature (apart from the sea) but I can almost feel his desperation and resentment and agree with it.

[Ashen]

I wonder, if these poets of old had access to a keyboard, would they have gladly given up the slow and tedious and often inefficient use of pen and paper? I know, it is a romantic thought, to take your pen and paper and write a few lines, watching your ideas flow fluidly from your mind onto the page.
Im not a complete advocate of a keyboard (laptop in this case) as I do often find myself somewhere with a sudden inspirationk, and my trusty Wordpad program nowhere to be found, wishing I had a scrap of paper and anything to write with. But for the most part, the bulk of my writing is done by pushing keys. I personally find it much easier to pull the ideas from my mind and get them on the page without losing anything.
S.

[A Hard Rain]

by charles bukowski

love is a dog from hell

feet of chese
coffeepot soul
hands that hate poolsticks
eyes like paperclips
I prefer red wine
I am bored on airliners
I am docile during earthquakes
I am sleepy at funerals
I puke at parades
and am scrificial at chess
and **** and caring
I smell urine in churches
I can no longer read
I can no longer sleep

eyes like paper clips
my green eyes
I prefer white wine

my box of rubers is getting
stale
I take them out
Trojan-Enz
lubricated
for greater sensitivity
I take them out
and put three of them on

the walls of my bedroom are blue

Linda where did you go?
Katherine where did you go?
(and Nina went to England)

I have toenail clippers
and Windex glass cleaner
green eyes
blue bedroom
bright machinegun sun

this whole thing is like a seal
caught on oily rocks
and circled by the Long Beach Marching Band
at 3:36 p.m.

there is a ticking behind me
but no clock
I feel something crawling along
the left side of my nose:
memories of airliners

my mother had false teeth
my father had false teeth
and every Saturday of their lives
they took up all the rugs in their house
waxed the hardwood floors
and covered them with rugs again

and Nina is in England
and Irene is on ATD
and I take my green eyes
and lay down in my blue bedroom.

[Scheherazade]

I am not familiar with Bukowski's works... I remember reading one of his poems somewhere here and liking it but... this one, I am afraid, does not do much for me... apart from getting an 'Ugh'. I am probably not deep/intelligent/learned/philosophical enough (delete as appropriate) to appreciate this. I don't mind raw writings but to me this is more than raw... a little unpalatable.

*edit*

Here is the other Bukowski thread (http://www.online-literature.com/forums/showthread.php?t=4151&highlight=bukowski)

[blp]

this one, I am afraid, does not do much for me... apart from getting an 'Ugh'. I am probably not deep/intelligent/learned/philosophical enough (delete as appropriate) to appreciate this. I don't mind raw writings but to me this is more than raw... a little unpalatable.

Jeez, Louise. What on earth are you talking about? I can barely find anything offensive in that poem at all. And I think it's often really beautiful.

[Scheherazade]

Jeez, Louise. What on earth are you talking about? I can barely find anything offensive in that poem at all. And I think it's often really beautiful.I did not say that I find it offensive but just not 'tasteful' and, bar couple of lines, I can't see the 'poetic beauty' in this poem. He seems to be complaining about a stagnant life but wrote even more stagnant poem.

[blp]

But he found a lot of strong images to express it, and some humour.

OK! What a very stimulating chat. But now it's time for another...poem of the week:

Dream Song 29
by John Berryman


There sat down, once, a thing on Henry's heart
só heavy, if he had a hundred years
& more, & weeping, sleepless, in all them time
Henry could not make good.
Starts again always in Henry's ears
the little cough somewhere, an odour, a chime.

And there is another thing he has in mind
like a grave Sienese face a thousand years
would fail to blur the still profiled reproach of. Ghastly,
with open eyes, he attends, blind.
All the bells say: too late. This is not for tears;
thinking.

But never did Henry, as he thought he did,
end anyone and hacks her body up
and hide the pieces, where they may be found.
He knows: he went over everyone, & nobody's missing.
Often he reckons, in the dawn, them up.
Nobody is ever missing.

[blp]

Darn. Oh well.

Time for another. Who's posting?

[chmpman]

Since it is Wednesday, and no new poem, I'll post one.

The Sun Rises and Sets
by Li Po, translated by Stephen Owen

The sun comes up from its nook in the east,
Seems to rise from beneath the earth,
Passes on through Heaven,
sets once again in the western sea,
And where, oh, where, can its team of six dragons
ever find any rest?
Its daily beginnings and endings,
since ancient times never resting.
And man is not made of its Primal Stuff--
how can he linger beside it long?
Plants feel no thanks for their flowering in spring's wind,
Nor do trees hate losing their leaves
under autumn skies:
Who wields the whip that drives along
four seasons of changes--
The rise and the ending of all things
is just the way things are.

Hsi-ho! Hsi-ho! [goddess who drove sun's carriage]
Why must you always drown yourself
in those wild and reckless waves?
What power had Lu-yang [legendary figure stopped sun's path
to continue a fight]
That he halted your course by shaking his spear?
This perverts the Path of things,
errs from Heaven's will--
So many lies and deceits!
I'll wrap this Mighty Mudball of a world
all up in a bag
And be wild and free like Chaos itself!


[these are much needed side notes]

[~Maude~]

oops, I just found this and it looks like no one has posted a poem for this week yet so I'll sneek on up even though it's a few days late.

11/2/05-11/7/05 by Margaret Atwood

Siren Song

This is the one song everyone
would like to learn: the song
that is irresistable:

the song that forces men
to leap overboard in squadrons
even though they see the beached skulls

the song nobody knows
because anyone who has heard it
is dead, and the others can't remember.

Shall I tell you the secret
and if I do, will you get me
out of this bird suit?

I don't enjoy it here
squatting on this island
looking picturesque and mythical

with these two feathery maniacs,
I don't enjoy singing
this trio, fatal and valuable.

I will tell the secret to you,
to you, only to you.
Come closer. This song

is a cry for help: Help me!
Only you, only you can,
you are unique

at last. Alas
it is a boring song
but it works everytime.

[IrishCanadian]

Well I too am a few days late, but this week is free. Though not my favorite poet, this is my favorite poem. He seems to be able to introduce with such subtle euphony. and the last line ... well i love it.

SHE WLKS IN BEAUTY by Byron

She walks in beauty, like the night
Of cloudless climes and starry skies;
And all that's best of dark and bright
Meet in her aspect and her eyes:
Thus mellowed to that tender light
Which heaven to gaudy day denies.

One shade the more, one ray the less,
Had half impaired the nameless grace
Which waves in every raven tress,
Or softly lightens o'er her face;
Where thoughts serenely sweet express
How pure, how dear their dwelling-place.

And on that cheek, and o'er that brow,
So soft, so calm, yet eloquent,
The smiles that win, the tints that glow,
But tell of days in goodness spent,
A mind at peace with all below,
A heart whose love is innocent!

[~Maude~]

I liked it, very nice. I hope people will start sharing more poems.

[Darlin]

One of my favorite poems.

THE LABORATORY by: Robert Browning (1812-1889)

I

Now that I, tying thy glass mask tightly,
May gaze thro' these faint smokes curling whitely,
As thou pliest thy trade in this devil's-smithy--
Which is the poison to poison her, prithee?

II

He is with her; and they know that I know
Where they are, what they do: they believe my tears flow
While they laugh, laugh at me, at me fled to the drear
Empty church, to pray God in, for them! -- I am here.

III

Grind away, moisten and mash up thy paste,
Pound at thy powder, -- I am not in haste!
Better sit thus, and observe thy strange things,
Than go where men wait me and dance at the King's.

IV

That in the mortar -- you call it a gum?
Ah, the brave tree whence such gold oozings come!
And yonder soft phial, the exquisite blue,
Sure to taste sweetly, -- is that poison too?

V

Had I but all of them, thee and thy treasures,
What a wild crowd of invisible pleasures!
To carry pure death in an earring, a casket,
A signet, a fan-mount, a filligree-basket!

VI

Soon, at the King's, a mere lozenge to give
And Pauline should have just thirty minutes to live!
But to light a pastille, and Elise, with her head
And her breast and her arms and her hands, should drop dead!

VII

Quick -- is it finished? The colour's too grim!
Why not soft like the phial's, enticing and dim?
Let it brighten her drink, let her turn it and stir,
And try it and taste, ere she fix and prefer!

VIII

What a drop! She's not little, no minion like me--
That's why she ensnared him: this never will free
The soul from those masculine eyes, -- say, 'no!'
To that pulse's magnificent come-and-go.

IX

For only last night, as they whispered, I brought
My own eyes to bear on her so, that I thought
Could I keep them one half minute fixed, she would fall,
Shrivelled; she fell not; yet this does not all!

X

Not that I bid you spare her the pain!
Let death be felt and the proof remain;
Brand, burn up, bite into its grace--
He is sure to remember her dying face!

XI

Is it done? Take my mask off! Nay, be not morose
It kills her, and this prevents seeing it close:
The delicate droplet, my whole fortune's fee--
If it hurts her, beside, can it ever hurt me?

XII

Now, take all my jewels, gorge gold to your fill,
You may kiss me, old man, on my mouth if you will!
But brush this dust off me, lest horror it brings
Ere I know it -- next moment I dance at the King's!

[Virgil]

Strange poem. But interesting. My favorite stanza: X

Not that I bid you spare her the pain!
Let death be felt and the proof remain;
Brand, burn up, bite into its grace--
He is sure to remember her dying face!

[Darlin]

Strange indeed but it’s full of emotion namely revenge. I don’t know, I’ve enjoyed this since my high school years. If sounds so conniving and convincing. One of my favorite stanzas is:

He is with her; and they know that I know
Where they are, what they do: they believe my tears flow
While they laugh, laugh at me, at me fled to the drear
Empty church, to pray God in, for them! -- I am here.

There plotting death! And the last line – he’s off to dance at the Kings and to wreak that havoc! *insert evil laugh* Morbid perhaps but well done! :D

[yellowfeverlime]

i know that it is not a monday, and that i am not supposed to do it, but i can't help it! Well, first i wanna ask, can i put one of my own poems up for poem of the week?

[Scheherazade]

YFL,

This thread is for already published and somewhat known poets and poems to give us a chance to discuss those. You can always post your own poems in the Personal Poetry section.

[yellowfeverlime]

I do but i am not really a fan of the layout...

[Scheherazade]

I am sorry that the Forum's layout does not satisfy you. Maybe you can take your suggestions to the Admin at the Literature Network subforum: http://www.online-literature.com/forums/forumdisplay.php?f=9

[michela]

I ha ve to say iì'm defenetely agree with Scheherazade,i don't mind raw in poetry 'cause writing has to be different from speaking you know i mean? Anyway i know this is just my opinion and that Bukoswski was a good journalist but being honnest i don't like him.

[Virgil]

I went and checked out his poetry on the web. I don't like him either. Not only is it distasteful, but it's poor. Sorry if I offended anyone. Lawrence Ferlingetti can be distasteful at times, but he's an average or so poet. I didn't feel like Burkoski was even average.

[Riesa]

I went and checked out his poetry on the web. I don't like him either. Not only is it distasteful, but it's poor. Sorry if I offended anyone. Lawrence Ferlingetti can be distasteful at times, but he's an average or so poet. I didn't feel like Burkoski was even average.

I think to fully appreciate him, you need to have an affinity for the underworld. There is, to some, something darkly romantic about the lost alcoholic poet. I, for one, can find the tragedy and the humour in him. Bukowski is kind of like Tom Waits' music to me. I love T.W., but he can be disturbing, and in general people either love him or hate him. and if these posts represent how people feel about Bukowski, one either loves him or hates him, too. But enough about him.

A new poem:

Lying in a Hammock
at William Duffy's Farm
in Pine Island, Minnesota
by James Wright

Over my head, I see the Bronze butterfly,
Asleep on the black trunk,
Blowing like a leaf in green shadow.
Down the ravine behind the empty house,
The cowbells follow one another
Into the distances of the afternoon.
To my right,
In a field of sunlight between two pines,
The droppings of last year's horses
Blaze up into golden stones.
I lean back, as the evening darkens and comes on.
A chicken hawk floats over, looking for home.
I have wasted my life.

[Riesa]

:blush: oops, I just realized that this is the WEEKLY poem thread, sorry. go back to discussing, THE LABORATORY by: Robert Browning. Pretend I wasn't here.

[Virgil]

I think to fully appreciate him, you need to have an affinity for the underworld. There is, to some, something darkly romantic about the lost alcoholic poet. I, for one, can find the tragedy and the humour in him.


It's not that he's disturbing that makes him a poor poet to me. He may be darkly romantic. I've known lots of people who might be called darkly romantic. That didn't make them poets. It's his use of language that makes unpoetic to me. It doesn't strike me as being very artful.

[Riesa]

It's his use of language that makes him poetic to me, though. I guess it comes down to individual feeling and interpretation of his poetry. To each his own :D

[Virgil]

I think the week has passed and we can tackle Reisa's poem.


I think to fully appreciate him, you need to have an affinity for the underworld. There is, to some, something darkly romantic about the lost alcoholic poet. I, for one, can find the tragedy and the humour in him. Bukowski is kind of like Tom Waits' music to me. I love T.W., but he can be disturbing, and in general people either love him or hate him. and if these posts represent how people feel about Bukowski, one either loves him or hates him, too. But enough about him.

A new poem:

Lying in a Hammock
at William Duffy's Farm
in Pine Island, Minnesota
by James Wright

Over my head, I see the Bronze butterfly,
Asleep on the black trunk,
Blowing like a leaf in green shadow.
Down the ravine behind the empty house,
The cowbells follow one another
Into the distances of the afternoon.
To my right,
In a field of sunlight between two pines,
The droppings of last year's horses
Blaze up into golden stones.
I lean back, as the evening darkens and comes on.
A chicken hawk floats over, looking for home.
I have wasted my life.


Fine poem, Reisa. The capture of just the perfect moment. One question: how do one year old horse's droppings "blaze"? And why "golden stones"?

[rachel]

Virgil,
have you never gone riding and see old droppings on a sunny day. if old they really can shine a strange brown shot thru with gold and when a ray of sunshine strikes across them they do "blaze". for real.
And as far as Bukowski, he did say he wrote to save himself from madness. He never said he was any good!
Browning's poem is very chilling. It glaringly shows what happens when grief or shock is not dealt with quickly in a positive way. to forgive takes an act of the will not any emotions per se and without forgiveness the heart darkens and becomes like stone.
There is a scripture that says" the heart is treacherous and who can know it?"
To step by step plan the demise of anyone is to my mind the blackest of black acts and makes me think of Columbine.
very disturbing to me. I never see any beauty in unkindness. Just cannot and I have tried.

[Virgil]

Thanks Rachel. I've been riding but I never noticed day old droppings. I'll have ask my wife; she's been around horses more than I have. She claims she married a jackass. No, I'm only kidding. She doesn't claim that, but the joke fell to easily off my lips.

[Virgil]

Let me post another poem for the week, one by George Herbert, a 17th century metaphysical poet. Keep in mind he was an Anglican priest (if that's the right term). Most of his poetry has religious themes. This one ("The Collar") I particularly like. It's an expression of his desire to break free of his religious duties. But it has a surprise ending. The collar, of course, refers to the religious collar that he apparently wears but it's a pun as well; the collar as a yoke.


The Collar by George Herbert

I Struck the board, and cried, "No more.
I will abroad.
What ? shall I ever sigh and pine ?
My lines and life are free; free as the road,
Loose as the wind, as large as store.
Shall I be still in suit ?
Have I no harvest but a thorn
To let me blood, and not restore
What I have lost with cordial fruit ?
Sure there was wine
Before my sighs did dry it: there was corn
Before my tears did drown it.
Is the year only lost to me ?
Have I no bays to crown it ?
No flowers, no garlands gay ? all blasted ?
All wasted ?
Not so, my heart: but there is fruit,
And you have hands.
Recover all your sigh-blown age
On double pleasures: leave your cold dispute
Of what is fit, and not. Forsake your cage,
Your rope of sands,
Which petty thoughts have made, and made to you
Good cable, to enforce and draw,
And be your law,
While you did wink and would not see.
Away; take heed:
I will abroad.
Call in your death’s head there: tie up your fears.
He that forbears
To suit and serve his need,
Deserves his load."
But as I raved and grew more fierce and wild
At every word,
I thought I heard one calling, "Child !"
And I replied, "My Lord."


Edit: I noticed that it didn't paste in the post as I copied it. He indents in many places for emphasis and for stanza structure. This was lost from the copy/paste. Sorry.

[rachel]

He echos what I have gone thru many times in my walk with God. But he is covenanted as I am and that is a bond stronger than whims and fancies, of h ormones and changing humours thru the passage of years. I love it, I love metaphysical poetry for the most part.
oh and dear Virgil, jackass droppings long sat in the wind and rain and harsh unyielding sun have not the same glitter nor cast. they seem to stubbornly stay dark grey like their owner. jackass indeed. sweet man perhaps but never that. goyim perhaps never jackass.

[Virgil]

He echos what I have gone thru many times in my walk with God. But he is covenanted as I am and that is a bond stronger than whims and fancies, of h ormones and changing humours thru the passage of years. I love it, I love metaphysical poetry for the most part.
oh and dear Virgil, jackass droppings long sat in the wind and rain and harsh unyielding sun have not the same glitter nor cast. they seem to stubbornly stay dark grey like their owner. jackass indeed. sweet man perhaps but never that. goyim perhaps never jackass.
:lol: Thanks, Rachel. You're a dear.

[Riesa]

Hey guys, somehow missed Virgil's question. Rachel is right, of course, what else? :)
Horse droppings turn from dark to light with the passage of time, and generally keep their shape, unless disturbed somehow. I always thought of that line as taking something as mundane as waste, and turning it into a precious thing, gold. How small moments or a glance at a winter river (while driving bickering children to school), can catch your eye, and fill your heart and soul with wonder and the joy to be alive.

also, I take it you two haven't seen a spotted baby jack before? There is sweetness and loveliness in the lowliest creature, (not saying that you are lowly, Virgil :) just defending my lovely equine friends) and I'm too distracted to read the above poem, Virgil. I just brought home my new puppy. Check out the animal posts in the near future for some puppy pix.

[Virgil]

Oh, a new puppy!!! I must see pictures.

[rachel]

I think brandi must be THE most loved and cherished of dogs, how blessed she is to have a tender and devoted owner like you Virgil.
Riesa why don't you write a book of poetry. You see things thru the eyes of the Creator and tired hearts and broken minds would find nourishment and peace in your words that come down softly always into my mind like dove's feathers bringing such a hushed and holy quiet feeling.

[Scheherazade]

Last week, Jay and I spent over an hour discussing this poem and would like to hear your interpretations too... Not necessarily what you studied and were told it meant at school but your own thoughts and feelings about the poem.

The Lake Isle of Innisfree

I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree,
And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made:
Nine bean-rows will I have there, a hive for the honeybee,
And live alone in the bee-loud glade.

And I shall have some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow
Dropping from the veils of the morning to where the cricket sings;
There midnight's all a glimmer, and noon a purple glow,
And evenings full of the linnet's wings.

I will arise and go now, for always night and day
I hear the lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore;
While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements gray,
I hear it in the deep heart's core.

-- William Butler Yeats

[lavendar1]

Several impressions and thoughts...

Like most poets, Yeats was no doubt a very reflective man. And when I read the name of the isle, I'm thinking of it literally --In - is - free, almost as though Yeats believes that only by getting in touch with his deepest self will he "have some peace." He writes with an almost wistfulness, as if he wishes to convince himself that it could be so simple, so matter-of-fact to get to this 'place': I will arise and go now."

I know, too, that Yeats (like alot of Irish writers) spent a chunk of his 'writing life' outside Ireland. Perhaps his absence from his homeland made his heart grow fonder of it; his reminiscences of the peaceful places of his times there seem to be coming from "the deep heart's core."

I'm hearing a little of Thoreau's self reliance in the poem, too: Yeats speaks of living alone in a cabin, of taking care of his own needs while he appreciates nature. Thoreau, in fact, wrote a poem called The Inward Morning, that (like its name implies) is a morning communion with both his inner self and with nature.

[Virgil]

Scher

Great choice. I love this poem. There were certain poems I would memorize when I was younger. This was one of them. So I know this extremely well. I'll try not to hog the whole thing up.

Two quick points of literary allusion, one obvious, one not so. The obvious is the reverence for nature and the "peace" that it brings. This echoes Wordsworth's "Tintern Abbey" where nature is a healing place and religious place. We see this with "midnight's all a glimmer, and noon a purple glow" and other lines. The second point, not so obvious, is the allusion to Henry David Thoreau's Walden Pond, where Thoreau goes and builds a cabin by a pond for a few years and lives by growing beans. And that's waht the poet narrator does too: "small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made:/Nine bean-rows will I have there...And live alone in the bee-loud glade."

Another other important thing I see in this are the repetitions. Words he repeats: "arise" (2x), "go" (3x), "peace" (2x), "dropping" (2x). Still another are nature's sounds that are identified: "bee-loud", "cricket sings", "linnets wings", and the "water lapping with low sounds." And still another are the rhyming vowels, all long, accented vowels: free/bee, made/glade, slow/glow, sings/wings, day/gray, shore/core.

And finally one last thing that must be pointed out is the repeated phrase, "I will arise and go now" in the first and third stanzas. It serves as a return, a rondo and thereby structures the poem. So much more here, I've left out the central point, but I'll let others add and explain.

[IrishCanadian]

WOW. I always considered this poem as more of a practicle ditty regaurding the land of beauty and freedom (as mentioned by lavendar1: in is free). Yeats did in fact roam natural areas in search of the fairy folk as well as for personal reflsction. But I never thought much of this poem other than a reminiscence of a time he had at the Isle of Innisfree. Cool.

[Scheherazade]

I have to post a disclaimer that I have not studied this poem nor am I familiar with the Thoreau poems mentioned (though I will look them up... I will arise and go now... ;)).
Like most poets, Yeats was no doubt a very reflective man. And when I read the name of the isle, I'm thinking of it literally --In - is - free, almost as though Yeats believes that only by getting in touch with his deepest self will he "have some peace." He writes with an almost wistfulness, as if he wishes to convince himself that it could be so simple, so matter-of-fact to get to this 'place': I will arise and go now." I love this interpretation, Lavendar :)

Virgil> Thank you very much for highlighting the important references in the poem but I really would like to hear your interpretation of the poem. What does it say to you? What do you think it is about?

My interpretation is somewhat different...

I consider this poem as an ode to procrastination. The persona in the poem is talking about this lovely, heavenly, out-of-this-world place which, he knows, will bring peace of mind and happiness to him. He is daydreaming about the place 'While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements gray,'... His desire to be there (to find peace?) is so very deep. However, the fact that the poem starts and ends with the line 'I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree' tells me that he is still not getting up and going; ie, not taking the actions to reach this peaceful place (might be both physical or metaphorical). If he took the necessary actions, rather than simply musing about them, he will probably find the peace he is longing for but... alas...

We all do this at times, don't we?

:)

[Xamonas Chegwe]

I love this poem, especially the phrase 'bee-loud glade'. It's a beautiful way of describing a place of peaceful, busy-yet-lazy summer.

I'm not a great one for reading about poems. I prefer to read the things themselves and form my own stupid ideas about what they mean. I'll do my best to describe how I read this one.

I see it as a longing for the unattainable, or rather, longing for the briefly attainable to become permanent. He wants a place of perpetual summer. That the island is within a lake and therefore ringed by land is, I think, significant too. It is surrounded by the world at large but cut off by the lake's water. I think Yeats wants his perfection to be his alone (he says, 'to live alone', in fact). He longs for an escape from the rat-race and hustle (roadways & pavements). A splendid isolation. Bucolic bliss. And I think that he longs as much for a spiritual retreat as a physical one - an escape from fame perhaps - I've never been quite decided if that's the case.

I really like Scheherazade's take on it too. It's not a way I've ever looked at the piece, but it will probably colour my readings from now on (in a nice way). By the way, the name of the island literally means "Isle of heather".

[IrishCanadian]

I consider this poem as an ode to procrastination. The persona in the poem is talking about this lovely, heavenly, out-of-this-world place which, he knows, will bring peace of mind and happiness to him. He is daydreaming about the place 'While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements gray,'... His desire to be there (to find peace?) is so very deep. However, the fact that the poem 'I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree' starts and ends with this line tells me that he is still not getting up and going; ie, not taking the actions to reach this peaceful place (might be both physical or metaphorical). If he took the necessary actions, rather than simply musing about them, he will probably find the peace, he is longing for but... alas...

:)
Very very interesting. Yeats was in love (as you probably know) with a republicanist Maud Gonne (at the time of their life Ireland was in a political and literal war for freedom from British rule). He did his work to "up the rebels" and fought in words agains the Brittish rule. He loved Maud Gonne (partially) because she was very farceably active in this time of political oppression. She did not love him, however, because he only wrote ... no actual actions. Perhaps the sentiments of procastination were shades of his personl life's conflict with his political innaction. ???

[Virgil]

Virgil> Thank you very much for highlighting the important references in the poem but I really would like to hear your interpretation of the poem. What does it say to you? What do you think it is about?
:)
Ok. I will.

First kudos to Lavendar for pointing out the noun, "Innisfree" as a place to be free. I for all these years took it as an actual place, and it is an actual place. In the Google Image game, Reisa posted a picture of it. I never thought about it as having meaning. It is a place to be free and Innis, sujests inward or inner, so a place of inner freedom. A bit of serendipity, but who knows the name might have inspired the poem. Xamonas, is Innisfree celtic for Isle of Heather?


I think everyone else is also on the mark (the isolation, the buccholic setting, even the procrastination).
The key I think is "I will arise and go now." He's not there. It's all a mental excercise. It's all recall, perhaps all wish. Is it procrastination or just impractical? The poem isn't definitive. He's never in motion, just stands which supports procrastination. Certainly there is stark contrast between the gray pavement and Innisfree. If he could get there he knows he'll get peace, ala Wordsworth in "Tintern Abbey". Do we believe him that he's going to go? I've questioned it, but there's nothing to suggest that he won't. He even gets specific, he's going to build a cabin.

So, if you force me to stretch myself and articulate my impressions, I think it might be a wish, but an impractical one. He's been there, he's absobed it, it's in his heart's core, but to build a cabin out of clay and wattles (clay?, wattles?, come on) just is impractical. Nature is just too magnificent: midnight all a glimmer, noon a purple glow. Too imaginary. And the fact that he has to tell himself twice to arise and go, coupled that he's never in motion, really does suggest, he ain't getting there. I think it's a wish, it's in his heart, but it's impractical, which by the way would be a break from Wordsworth.

[Scheherazade]

By the way, the name of the island literally means "Isle of heather".Very interesting... OK, let's carried away and read too much into it! Does heather have a significant meaning? Language of the flowers kind of way? :D

Yeats was in love (as you probably know) with a republicanist Maud Gonne (at the time of their life Ireland was in a political and literal war for freedom from British rule). He did his work to "up the rebels" and fought in words agains the Brittish rule. He loved Maud Gonne (partially) because she was very farceably active in this time of political oppression. She did not love him, however, because he only wrote ... no actual actions. Perhaps the sentiments of procastination were shades of his personl life's conflict with his political innaction. ???Had no idea and another valid suggestion, I think.
I think everyone else is also on the mark (the isolation, the buccholic setting, even the procrastination). Why, thank you, Virgil! :D - On a serious note, thanks for your interpretation, too! :)

Like Xamonas, I don't like reading about poems (or other literary works for that matter) unless I am really stuck and/or intrigued and I am very glad we can come up with different interpretations which are all very interesting among ourselves! :)

[Riesa]

As you wish, Virgil.

http://www.usm.maine.edu/~mcgrath/ireland_images/images_of_ireland/Joyce/Innisfree.jpg

[ktd222]

I don't know if anyones picked this out, but for me, the poems less about procrastination and more about 'ability.' The speaker's ability to choose whenever he wants he can go to this place(Innisfree). Uses of phrases, like
I will in stanzas 1 and 3, and I shall in stanza 2 are all showing command--command over when he goes to this place. Go now,he says. Total control.
I agree with Virgil that he has been to this place just by the fact that he gets very detailed as far as describing Innisfree.
So by the end of the poem, it says While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements gray, I hear it in the deep heart's core. Its almost as if he is standing, almost straddling, one leg on the roadway and the other leg on
the pavement, and in between these two places is his body; and
inside is this place(Innisfree). Connecting him to all of these places, and almost showing you(the reader) his ability to choose, whenever he wants to,
he can go to Innisfree.

Its probably irrelevant, but its kinda freaky that if you take a look at the poem:
I WILL arise and go now, and go to Innisfree,
And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made;
Nine bean rows will I have there, a hive for the honey bee,
And live alone in the bee-loud glade.

And I shall have some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow, 5
Dropping from the veils of the morning to where the cricket sings;
There midnight's all a glimmer, and noon a purple glow,
And evening full of the linnet's wings.

I will arise and go now, for always night and day
I hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore; 10
While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements gray,
I hear it in the deep heart's core.

imagine this line:



While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements gray

visualize the line above as solid mass, and visualize him straddling with one
leg on the phrase While I stand on the roadway, and the other leg on
the phrase or on the pavements gray. So his body points upward towards the rest of the poem which just happens to all be description of Innisfree. Look at all the lines devoted to describing Innisfree--The image
come to life. And the importance of sounds of words...its too much. This really is a great poem!

[Jay]

I agree with Virgil that he has been to this place just by the fact that he gets very detailed as far as describing Innisfree.
I don't think him being very detailed in describing Innisfree means he's ever been there. It could have been any other island. How are you, from that description, to figure out he was talking about Innisfree if he didn't 'hint' that in the title and mention its name in the poem?

I think the poem might be about a dying man. He might be dying for real or from within, I don't think it's of much importance which. His Innisfree might be his picture of heaven. It's peaceful and calm and he seems to be trying to get there for some time and for a reason he can't get there, be it it's too far away (if we're thinking about the actual Innisfree), or out of reach if it's only a dream, an image (a symbol of peace, heaven, whichever you prefer), as if he's dying he won't get there no matter what the location of the island is (that is if you don't believe in an afterlife).

[IrishCanadian]

Have you ever wondered what the poet would say if he were alive today to read this thread?

[Riesa]

Have you ever wondered what the poet would say if he were alive today to read this thread?

Funny, I was just thinking that exact thing last night.

[Xamonas Chegwe]

Xamonas, is Innisfree celtic for Isle of Heather?
....
but to build a cabin out of clay and wattles (clay?, wattles?, come on) just is impractical.

Yes, it is Irish gaelic - I looked it up in an online Irish dictionary - can't remember which - I went through the google directory / reference / dictionaries / world languages. There are dictionaries for everything from Albanian to Zulu in there, arranged alphabetically - very useful favourite to have in my opinion.

Yeats is referring to traditional, pre-industrial methods of making houses in Ireland. 'Wattle & Daub' is how it's usually termed in English. And, lacking bricks, concrete & an abundance of timber, it's an extremely practical, strong and long-lasting way of constructing houses. See here (http://www.wealddown.co.uk/poplar-cottage-construction-thatch-wattle-and-daub.htm)

[Scheherazade]

I think that is the beauty of poetry - or literary works for that matter - that we all read the same text but interpret them differently and each of these interpretations can be as valid as the other as long as they get enough support from the text. The interpretations of a work is not only what the writer means but also the reader's contribution to that work, drawing from their own experiences and personalities at times; and I believe that the richness of intrepretations is an indicator of author's/poet's success... that they are able to address so many people.

[Xamonas Chegwe]

On the subject of Maud Gonne. Another of my favourite Yeats poems is, 'No Second Troy', where he compares her courage with his own reluctance to take a physically active role in the rebellion. My favourite line is, "Had they but courage equal to desire?", which sums up the image of his reluctance feeling perfectly.

[ktd222]

I don't think him being very detailed in describing Innisfree means he's ever been there. It could have been any other island. How are you, from that description, to figure out he was talking about Innisfree if he didn't 'hint' that in the title and mention its name in the poem?

I think the poem might be about a dying man. He might be dying for real or from within, I don't think it's of much importance which. His Innisfree might be his picture of heaven. It's peaceful and calm and he seems to be trying to get there for some time and for a reason he can't get there, be it it's too far away (if we're thinking about the actual Innisfree), or out of reach if it's only a dream, an image (a symbol of peace, heaven, whichever you prefer), as if he's dying he won't get there no matter what the location of the island is (that is if you don't believe in an afterlife).


You are right. It must have been the late hours speaking. But, take a look at
what he wrote about Innisfree, literally. Yeats being from Ireland; there is an island off Ireland named Innisfree; He names it DIRECTLY as Innisfree in the poem; and so I'm just assuming that he is talking about that specific island. Or am I totally off-base?

As for the poems meaning, there is no reference to dying in the poem. No mention or allusion to Heaven or the afterlife. Innisfree is a place just as he describes. A place where he can go to find peace. Its not that he can't get to Innisfree. In the opening phrase of each stanza I will, I shall(can), I will, each is followed by a description of Innisfree. It is as if when he says these commands--he is there at Innisfree describing it.

He is there, He has been there, thats why he can describe it so well. There is a tone of command and not delay or inability. A tone that would contrast well
against this poem is T.S. Elliots The Love Song of Alfred J. Prufrock, where he constantly states there will be time, there will be time. Thats a tone of delay or procrastination or never able to 'get' to a destination.

Holla back!

[Virgil]

Yes, it is Irish gaelic - I looked it up in an online Irish dictionary - can't remember which - I went through the google directory / reference / dictionaries / world languages. There are dictionaries for everything from Albanian to Zulu in there, arranged alphabetically - very useful favourite to have in my opinion.

Thanks, but I don't know what to make of that. How does it fit?


Yeats is referring to traditional, pre-industrial methods of making houses in Ireland. 'Wattle & Daub' is how it's usually termed in English. And, lacking bricks, concrete & an abundance of timber, it's an extremely practical, strong and long-lasting way of constructing houses. See here

That was very interesting. I didn't realize that. It's still not practical, though. I mean not practical in the sense that you're just going to get up and go and build this house on impulse: "I will arise and go now". Hmm. Actually it does add a layer of nastalgia, perhaps. This old Irish custom. Perhaps recalls a mythic age, something Yeats was interested in. Double hmm.

[Virgil]

You are right. It must have been the late hours speaking. But, take a look at
what he wrote about Innisfree, literally. Yeats being from Ireland; there is an island off Ireland named Innisfree; He names it DIRECTLY as Innisfree in the poem; and so I'm just assuming that he is talking about that specific island. Or am I totally off-base?

He is there, He has been there, thats why he can describe it so well. There is a tone of command and not delay or inability. A tone that would contrast well
against this poem is T.S. Elliots The Love Song of Alfred J. Prufrock, where he constantly states there will be time, there will be time. Thats a tone of delay or procrastination or never able to 'get' to a destination.
I don't think you're off base. How we read the tone is critical. I still don't feel it as a tone of command, as you say. I still feel it's a longing rather than determined.

[Virgil]

visualize the line above as solid mass, and visualize him straddling with one
leg on the phrase While I stand on the roadway, and the other leg on
the phrase or on the pavements gray. So his body points upward towards the rest of the poem which just happens to all be description of Innisfree.
That is a really interesting observation.

[ktd222]

Virgil--
Could you please explain to me how a tone of longing would read like?
Use the phrases of I will and I shall.
To me it is under his command because the word 'will' is defined as to order
or direct by his own will or to determine by an act of choice(merriam webster dictionary). In this case, then, yeats is exercising his command or will over when he will go to Innisfree.
But I do see your point that the poems about longing as well. Anyways maybe I just like too much to discuss the points of views.

This is really cool that we can discuss poetry in a forum.
Should I post the next poem?

[Jay]

But, take a look at
what he wrote about Innisfree, literally. Yeats being from Ireland; there is an island off Ireland named Innisfree; He names it DIRECTLY as Innisfree in the poem; and so I'm just assuming that he is talking about that specific island. Or am I totally off-base?
No, you're not, I was just more seeing the poem as it is, from an annonymous person's POV, not Yeats' (therefore dismissing the idea of Yeats being Irish, probably having visited Innisfree).

[Xamonas Chegwe]

there is an island off Ireland named Innisfree; He names it DIRECTLY as Innisfree in the poem; and so I'm just assuming that he is talking about that specific island. Or am I totally off-base?

The Innisfree in the poem is not off the coast of Ireland but within a lake in county Sligo. See Riesa's post on the previous page. Innisfree is a common name for an island in Ireland, there are several dotted about. At least one in Canada too.

[Virgil]

Virgil--
Could you please explain to me how a tone of longing would read like?
Use the phrases of I will and I shall.
To me it is under his command because the word 'will' is defined as to order
or direct by his own will or to determine by an act of choice(merriam webster dictionary). In this case, then, yeats is exercising his command or will over when he will go to Innisfree.
But I do see your point that the poems about longing as well. Anyways maybe I just like too much to discuss the points of views.

This is really cool that we can discuss poetry in a forum.
Should I post the next poem?
ktd - I'll try later tonight. I'll have to think about that for a little while.

For everyone's information, I looked up the poem in my Norton's Anthology of English Lit, checking to see if there were any annotations. There were two:
Innisfree - Island in Lough Gill, County Sligo. "My father had read to me some passage out of [Thoreau's] Walden, and I planned to live there some day in a cottage on a island called Innisfree"
wattles - Stakes interwoven with twigs or branches.

Perhaps it really was procrastination, because as far as I know, he never built that cottage.

[Xamonas Chegwe]

Perhaps it really was procrastination, because as far as I know, he never built that cottage.

:lol: :lol: :lol:

Nice point Virgil.

[ktd222]

Lets say I believe you all, then, you all need to give me some evidence and explanation to why you believe the poem means what you all think?
How do you know that as your reading the poem, the image of him going there and describing Innisfree isn't happening? For me the will, shall is present tense.

Use exerpts out of the poem ;) if you want to. Change my mind for me Jay? Virgil? anyone.

[Virgil]

Virgil--
Could you please explain to me how a tone of longing would read like?
Use the phrases of I will and I shall.
To me it is under his command because the word 'will' is defined as to order
or direct by his own will or to determine by an act of choice(merriam webster dictionary). In this case, then, yeats is exercising his command or will over when he will go to Innisfree.
But I do see your point that the poems about longing as well. Anyways maybe I just like too much to discuss the points of views.

This is really cool that we can discuss poetry in a forum.
Should I post the next poem?
I'll try, but I'm not sure I can put it into words. If a person says I will do that, it is possible by the tone of how he says it to detect a lack of committment. I've done it myself, hearing my own words at work for instance saying I would do something but at the same time realizing the difficulty of doing it and that I probably wouldn't do it. On a page it's harder to really get that across. But I sense it, others do to, I think. The poem is completely static. He doesn't even put it in the present tense; "I will, I shall" are future tense. And everything else is nastalgic reminiscing.

Let's hold off on the next poem for another few days. Perhaps some might still want to add to this discussion.

[ktd222]

No, you're not, I was just more seeing the poem as it is, from an annonymous person's POV, not Yeats' (therefore dismissing the idea of Yeats being Irish, probably having visited Innisfree).


You are not, because then you wouldn't have reference ideas about a dying man or heaven because there is no mention of those ideas.
If you think you are, use the poem as evidence and tell me why.

[ktd222]

I'll try, but I'm not sure I can put it into words. If a person says I will do that, it is possible by the tone of how he says it to detect a lack of committment. I've done it myself, hearing my own words at work for instance saying I would do something but at the same time realizing the difficulty of doing it and that I probably wouldn't do it. On a page it's harder to really get that across. But I sense it, others do to, I think. The poem is completely static. He doesn't even put it in the present tense; "I will, I shall" are future tense. And everything else is nastalgic reminiscing.

Let's hold off on the next poem for another few days. Perhaps some might still want to add to this discussion.

He tells you he will go, and specifies by saying now. The tone of command comes back to me, again.

[Virgil]

He tells you he will go, and specifies by saying now. The tone of command comes back to me, again.
But I had forgotten to mention in that post that the repetitions enforce the static feeling. It's like a person who keeps saying, "i'll get to that, yeah, I'll get to that, really, I'll get to that." You may be right as far as we can catagorically tell. But the lack of action in the poem, the reminicing, the repetitions, the the future tense of "I will", all work for me to undermine the narrator's committment. Even the long vowels that he uses throughout kind of give it a static feeling. There's no action really taken.

Jinshui on another thread of poetry pasted a poem from Wordsworth (similar to "Tintern Abbey") that could have been running through Yeat's mind as he wrote this:

I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud by William Wordsworth
I WANDERED lonely as a cloud
That floats on high o'er vales and hills,
When all at once I saw a crowd,
A host, of golden daffodils;
Beside the lake, beneath the trees,
Fluttering and dancing in the breeze.

Continuous as the stars that shine
And twinkle on the milky way,
They stretched in never-ending line
Along the margin of a bay: 10
Ten thousand saw I at a glance,
Tossing their heads in sprightly dance.

The waves beside them danced; but they
Out-did the sparkling waves in glee:
A poet could not but be gay,
In such a jocund company:
I gazed--and gazed--but little thought
What wealth the show to me had brought:

For oft, when on my couch I lie
In vacant or in pensive mood, 20
They flash upon that inward eye
Which is the bliss of solitude;
And then my heart with pleasure fills,
And dances with the daffodils.


It's the last stanza which I think relates to "Innisfree". Is Innisfree in Yeat's mind like the daffodills in Wordsworth's? Wordsworth has visited them in the past, but now lying stationary on a couch they flash back. For Wordsworth they give him "bliss" for Yeats, "peace".

[IrishCanadian]

"I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud" was in a childerens anthology when i was younger and it is fully responsible for my love of poetry. This poem basically was my introduction to all poetry! What a great week this week.

[Scheherazade]

But, take a look at what he wrote about Innisfree, literally. Yeats being from Ireland; there is an island off Ireland named Innisfree; He names it DIRECTLY as Innisfree in the poem; and so I'm just assuming that he is talking about that specific island. Or am I totally off-base?
I have always thought that Innisfree represents an idyllic place; it is of little consequence that it actually exists. The persona might have been there and it might be his idea of of a refuge; a sanctuary (he might be talking about this particular place because it comes really close to his idea of 'sanctuary'?)

As for the line, 'I will...', as I stated in my initial post on the poem too, it shows a willingness and ability but the fact remains that he is not getting up and going. The poem starts and ends with this line, which shows that the persona is not taking the action. He spends his time thinking, dreaming, musing about this wonderful place, which he needs to go to find peace but he simply is not! The constant use of 'will' shows that he is postponing the actual action.
Lets say I believe you all, then, you all need to give me some evidence and explanation to why you believe the poem means what you all think?
How do you know that as your reading the poem, the image of him going there and describing Innisfree isn't happening? For me the will, shall is present tense.

Use exerpts out of the poem if you want to. Change my mind for me Jay? Virgil? anyone.The aim of the thread is not to change other people's minds on certain poems or make them agree with us. I am sure those who have been posting will agree with me that we are all here to share our interpretations and hear theirs as a way of expanding our understandings. I can easily say that almost every post here has made me think about the poem again and understand it better. It has become more meaningful and richer owing to these different perspectives even though I do not necessarily agree with every interpretation.
Should I post the next poem?This is how it goes:


* Please post a new poem only on a Monday.

* The same person cannot post another poem within the same month.So please feel free to post the next poem on Monday. :)

[ktd222]

But I had forgotten to mention in that post that the repetitions enforce the static feeling. It's like a person who keeps saying, "i'll get to that, yeah, I'll get to that, really, I'll get to that." You may be right as far as we can catagorically tell. But the lack of action in the poem, the reminicing, the repetitions, the the future tense of "I will", all work for me to undermine the narrator's committment. Even the long vowels that he uses throughout kind of give it a static feeling. There's no action really taken.


I disagree. I think these repitions are actually transporting us to this place. And the fact that the transport can be done by a short phrase shows his control of the 'transport' to this place. It is like having a password that permits you to go to this place. So repititon is the necesary password is the transport that will allow him be at Innisfree and continually go back there.

[Scheherazade]

And the fact that the transport can be done by a short phrase shows his control of the 'transport' to this place. 'Beam me up, Scotty!'???


http://www.crystalinks.com/beamtransporter.jpg

:D

[ktd222]

She is one of my favorite poets. I chose this poem to showcase some of her many talents: connecting the senses. I hope you enjoy!

At the Fishhouses
by Elizabeth Bishop


Although it is a cold evening,
down by one of the fishhouses
an old man sits netting,
his net, in the gloaming almost invisible,
a dark purple-brown,
and his shuttle worn and polished.
The air smells so strong of codfish
it makes one's nose run and one's eyes water.
The five fishhouses have steeply peaked roofs
and narrow, cleated gangplanks slant up
to storerooms in the gables
for the wheelbarrows to be pushed up and down on.
All is silver: the heavy surface of the sea,
swelling slowly as if considering spilling over,
is opaque, but the silver of the benches,
the lobster pots, and masts, scattered
among the wild jagged rocks,
is of an apparent translucence
like the small old buildings with an emerald moss
growing on their shoreward walls.
The big fish tubs are completely lined
with layers of beautiful herring scales
and the wheelbarrows are similarly plastered
with creamy iridescent coats of mail,
with small iridescent flies crawling on them.
Up on the little slope behind the houses,
set in the sparse bright sprinkle of grass,
is an ancient wooden capstan,
cracked, with two long bleached handles
and some melancholy stains, like dried blood,
where the ironwork has rusted.
The old man accepts a Lucky Strike.
He was a friend of my grandfather.
We talk of the decline in the population
and of codfish and herring
while he waits for a herring boat to come in.
There are sequins on his vest and on his thumb.
He has scraped the scales, the principal beauty,
from unnumbered fish with that black old knife,
the blade of which is almost worn away.

Down at the water's edge, at the place
where they haul up the boats, up the long ramp
descending into the water, thin silver
tree trunks are laid horizontally
across the gray stones, down and down
at intervals of four or five feet.

Cold dark deep and absolutely clear,
element bearable to no mortal,
to fish and to seals . . . One seal particularly
I have seen here evening after evening.
He was curious about me. He was interested in music;
like me a believer in total immersion,
so I used to sing him Baptist hymns.
I also sang "A Mighty Fortress Is Our God."
He stood up in the water and regarded me
steadily, moving his head a little.
Then he would disappear, then suddenly emerge
almost in the same spot, with a sort of shrug
as if it were against his better judgment.
Cold dark deep and absolutely clear,
the clear gray icy water . . . Back, behind us,
the dignified tall firs begin.
Bluish, associating with their shadows,
a million Christmas trees stand
waiting for Christmas. The water seems suspended
above the rounded gray and blue-gray stones.
I have seen it over and over, the same sea, the same,
slightly, indifferently swinging above the stones,
icily free above the stones,
above the stones and then the world.
If you should dip your hand in,
your wrist would ache immediately,
your bones would begin to ache and your hand would burn
as if the water were a transmutation of fire
that feeds on stones and burns with a dark gray flame.
If you tasted it, it would first taste bitter,
then briny, then surely burn your tongue.
It is like what we imagine knowledge to be:
dark, salt, clear, moving, utterly free,
drawn from the cold hard mouth
of the world, derived from the rocky breasts
forever, flowing and drawn, and since
our knowledge is historical, flowing, and flown.

[Petrarch's Love]

I've never read this poem before but I'm glad you posted it. I had two immediate reactions to it. The first being an admiration for the descriptions of the evening. It made me miss cold foggy evenings by the sea with their pungeant smell and taste of salt and fish. Especially the description of everything silvery opaque but with "apparent translucence" perfectly captures the strange quality of such a scene in which every smell and touch has a biting reality, but images seem almost ghostly in the shifting reflected light of water and scales in an atmosphere of mist. I love the way such an ethereal sense is juxtoposed with such earthy descriptions as that of the rust "like dried blood."

In the second place, I was very struck by the end of the poem with its comparison of knowledge and the taste of sea water. So often in poetry a discussion of knowledge is set within either a discussion of learning or reading, or it is concerned with knowledge gained as a result of a specific dramatic experience. Here there seems to be an organic almost instinctive association with knowledge. Knowledge is set within the context of a familiar and perhaps everyday experience for the author. It is bred in the context of existing in and observing a place: watching the hands of the fishermen, singing to the seal, and, most importantly, dipping one's hand into the ocean--the ocean which permeates everything in both the scene and the poem.

I've probably written too much already, so I'll let someone else address the wonderful "flowing, and flown" of the final line.

[Virgil]

ktd
Wow. You picked a fine poem. We must have similar tastes.

As Petrarch points out, the ending with the generalizations of what knowledge is is the climax of the poem and from which I think everything else must be understood. Let me just comment on the first stanza on this post.

One thing I see is just how non-metrical the lines are. If the senstences were reconfigured without lines, it could easily be straight prose. It's highly descriptive and contains a little narrative action of the old fisherman working. Nothing is romanticized. It's all raw, hard, and very real. "The air smells so strong of codfish/it makes one's nose run and one's eyes water." It's a world of nets, pots, wheelbarrows, masts, rocks, tubs, wooden capstan, scales, knife, blade. Great words of hard reality of a place where people aren't into abstract thinking. The closest that any mental process in the stanza is the talk of declining population, and even that is based on raw observation. The whole place seems dishelved, aging. Old man, old buildings, cracked capstan, rusted ironwork, worn shuttle, worn knife blade. One phrase that seems out of place (so it's either very important or a mistake) is "melancholy stains." It's the only place I think that she blatently ascribes an emotional response to an inanimate object. Otherwise, it's all detailed, objective (or at least it feels that way) rendering of a scene and interplay with the old man. Another thing to note is that it is in present tense.

One literary allusion, I think, and again Wordsworth. If anyone has time, see how this compares with Wordsworth's "The Ruined Cottage." There too an old man set in a decaying cottage becomes the vehicle for knowledge/insight for a woman named Margaret.

Let's comment on this stanza and then move on to the other.

[ktd222]

I’m just commenting on the first stanza as well.

Starting her poem with although sets up an exception in the scene she is describing. That, in spite of the fact(although) the atmosphere in the evening is cold--an old man sits netting.-- The two, I guess you could say sub-scenes, seemingly don’t belong in one scene. A curious use of a comma, also, seemingly separates the description of the atmosphere being cold, and descriptions of the old man, and things that are man-made for man use, in the first sentence.

"apparent translucence" perfectly captures the strange quality of such a scene in which every smell and touch has a biting reality, but images seem almost ghostly in the shifting reflected light of water and scales in an atmosphere of mist. I love the way such an ethereal sense is juxtoposed

The whole place seems dishelved, aging. Old man, old buildings, cracked capstan, rusted ironwork, worn shuttle, worn knife blade.
Yes. Two worlds, based on Bishop’s description of things begin to develop. The ‘dishelved’ world, as you say Virgil, where everything man, man-made, is susecptable to aging and wearing out. Old man, worn shuttle, worn knife etc…And the natural world beginning to be described: beautiful herring with creamy iridescent coats of mail, iridescent flies.
And a few times, describing the insolubility of the two worlds: The air smells so strong of codfish it makes one’s nose run and one’s eyes water; …surface of the sea is opaque, but the silver of the benches, lobster pots, and masts is of apparent translucence.

One phrase that seems out of place (so it's either very important or a mistake) is "melancholy stains." It's the only place I think that she blatently ascribes an emotional response to an inanimate object.
Yes; but I think the former. And you don’t know who’s blood it is thats melancholy. But a connection of the senses, more than just a perceived sense, but a sense of meaning also begins to develop. The air smells so strong of codfish it makes one’s nose run and one’s eyes water ; There are sequins on his vest…He has scraped the scales, the principle beauty, from unnumbered fish. The scales are described as the principle beauty of fish, but a weird transformation occurs where the sequins on his vest, which are basically fish scales, is talked about as if the scales are just a prized or worn ‘thing’ to the old man.
Lots of compare and contrast, layering, transforming, is going on in the first stanza.

[Virgil]

Starting her poem with although sets up an exception in the scene she is describing. That, in spite of the fact(although) the atmosphere in the evening is cold--an old man sits netting.-- The two, I guess you could say sub-scenes, seemingly don’t belong in one scene. A curious use of a comma, also, seemingly separates the description of the atmosphere being cold, and descriptions of the old man, and things that are man-made for man use, in the first sentence.

Yes, I think you're absolutely right. She is setting up a duality of sorts, initiated with "although" as you say. Good observation. That comma is rather troublesome. Do you think it's a typo? It's grammatically incorrect.


Yes. Two worlds, based on Bishop’s description of things begin to develop. The ‘dishelved’ world, as you say Virgil, where everything man, man-made, is susecptable to aging and wearing out. Old man, worn shuttle, worn knife etc…And the natural world beginning to be described: beautiful herring with creamy iridescent coats of mail, iridescent flies.
And a few times, describing the insolubility of the two worlds: The air smells so strong of codfish it makes one’s nose run and one’s eyes water; …surface of the sea is opaque, but the silver of the benches, lobster pots, and masts is of apparent translucence.

Yes, I didn't pick up on it: iridescent (infinite) nature versuses aging (finite)mortality. Very good.

I don't know what to make of the second stanza. It's so nothing coming between the first and third. She shifts her line of sight to the water's edge and it's still in present tense. And "silver tree trunks" are not very realistic, which fits with iridescent nature. But then she gives a very specific geometric image here, the horizontal trunks laid across the stones at intervals. I'm sure she intends to have this image carry a lot of meaning, but frankly I don't get it. What do you think?

[Petrarch's Love]

I agree that the middle stanza somehow seems insignificant, and perhaps a bit puzzling. While I'm not sure I can find anything terribly profound in the lines, I do think that it serves a practical purpose in the poem by serving as a transition between the two longer stanzas, and between the two "worlds" (that of eternal irridecent nature, and that of mortal man) which we seem to be identifying in the poem. I think the "silver tree trunks" Virgil points to are key since they are a part of that "almost translucent" world of nature and at the same time they are trees that have been felled (encountered mortality) to be put to practical use by men. The first stanza seems to me more connected to the world of man-made things and contains a conversation with an old and mortal man, while the third stanza is more about the natural realm, an "element bearable to no mortal" in which one sings to the seals. In the second stanza the tree trunks, evenly spaced every four to five feet, both literally form a path between the actual locations of the place where the fisherman weaves his net and the edge of the water, and figuratively form a path between the two worlds these locations represent in the poem.

This seems to me the way the way the stanza is functioning on a practical level as a connector between the two parts of the poem. Perhaps someone else has some more enlightening insights into its larger significance?

[ktd222]

That comma is rather troublesome. Do you think it's a typo? It's grammatically incorrect.
I would hope not. If you’ve ever read some of her well known works like One Art-- that final rendering took around twenty drafts, to strike a balance with the poem’s elements(including syntax) with the overall meaning in that poem.
Plus, don’t editors also get a chance at correcting punctuation before poems are published.
So what if we take what you’ve identified as syntactically incorrect and put that incorrectness into the context of At the Fishhouses and see if anything happens. Which seems to me: that if you read the opening lines of this poem with the comma after the word evening, you must momentarily pause yourself before continuing on reading the next line--Almost subtly distinguishing those two sub-scene/object descriptions. And, the odd placement of the comma also gives the whole scene--incorrectness--to it, as you say, Virgil. And, as we’ve all already sensed that there are ‘two worlds’ and these worlds do not exist in harmony.


I don't know what to make of the second stanza. It's so nothing coming between the first and third. She shifts her line of sight to the water's edge and it's still in present tense. And "silver tree trunks" are not very realistic, which fits with iridescent nature. But then she gives a very specific geometric image here, the horizontal trunks laid across the stones at intervals. I'm sure she intends to have this image carry a lot of meaning, but frankly I don't get it. What do you think?

I have an idea but I can't explain it in writing, yet. Give me a little time. Petrarch is on to something though.

I think the "silver tree trunks" Virgil points to are key since they are a part of that "almost translucent" world of nature and at the same time they are trees that have been felled (encountered mortality) to be put to practical use by men.

figuratively form a path between the two worlds these locations represent in the poem.

[Xamonas Chegwe]

I love the image in the last stanza,

"your hand would burn
as if the water were a transmutation of fire
that feeds on stones and burns with a dark gray flame."

It's a great way of describing erosion, "feeds on stones", it struck me the first time I read it. And the image of a "dark gray flame" is haunting.

Can anyone tell me when the poem was written? It has a very modern feel.

[ktd222]

I think the "silver tree trunks" Virgil points to are key since they are a part of that "almost translucent" world of nature and at the same time they are trees that have been felled (encountered mortality) to be put to practical use by men.
I agree Petrarch. A naturally grown thing like a tree transforming for human purpose itself(the tree) becomes part of the mortal world. Silver of the tree trunks goes back to silver of the benches, lobster pots, masts, small old building. Facing mortality? Wow! It is as though, for me at least, the object begins ‘to sense’. Maybe this goes back to the ‘melancholy stains’ you identified in an earlier post Virgil? The wooden capstan has melancholy feelings about something. Bits and pieces of the reasons for inanimate objects sensing is coming into play.

But then she gives a very specific geometric image here, the horizontal trunks laid across the stones at intervals. I'm sure she intends to have this image carry a lot of meaning, but frankly I don't get it. What do you think?
The length of stanza 1 & 3 are so long compared to stanza 2. Their might be another element of the poem we’ve overlooked: direction. If you step back and visualize the three stanzas as wholly making up the scene Bishop is describing:
stanza 1 is mortal world
stanza 2 transition
stanza 3 natural world.

Couple this with elements of direction and description, and intent for stanza 2 does seem to be happening.
Maybe the short length of stanza 2 compared with stanzas 1 & 3 develops an ever so slight, but connection nontheless, between the two worlds that are described with such opposite-ness.
Haul up the boats is directed toward the mortal world. Horizontally lay are the tree trunks which have been transformed for human purpose. No direction. The silver tree trunks match well with silver of the benches, lobster pots, masts, small old building and with iridescent flies and iridescent herring scales. The tree trunk is itself transforming before our eyes at intervals of four or five feet at a time. I think a lyric is occurring in the second stanza where the elements we’ve talked about have set up this thing where transformation is occurring before us.
Like you said Virgil:

But then she gives a very specific geometric image here, the horizontal trunks laid across the stones at intervals. I'm sure she intends to have this image carry a lot of meaning, but frankly I don't get it. What do you think?

Before stanza 2, the description of objects in the scene has definitive belonging to one world or the other. But, stanza 2 serves as a connectedness between such an opposite described worlds.


Is there any other opinions of stanza 2 before we move on to stanza 3?

[Virgil]

The length of stanza 1 & 3 are so long compared to stanza 2. Their might be another element of the poem we’ve overlooked: direction. If you step back and visualize the three stanzas as wholly making up the scene Bishop is describing:
stanza 1 is mortal world
stanza 2 transition
stanza 3 natural world.

Couple this with elements of direction and description, and intent for stanza 2 does seem to be happening.
Maybe the short length of stanza 2 compared with stanzas 1 & 3 develops an ever so slight, but connection nontheless, between the two worlds that are described with such opposite-ness.

I agree with everything here except your characterization of stanza 3. Yes it is the natural world, but I think it's a transcendent natural world, a world of God, infinity, ritual, perhaps even transfiguration. She talks to a seal and their shared belief in babtism. But it's the seal that is immersed, not the narrator. There is a barrier between them, the seal can dive into the "cold dark deep and absolutely cear" water, but no mortal. The two cannot meet on the same plane. The seal can submerge below, while at best she can only dip her hand, and even then the consequences could be grave. It's not just the tangible natural world. It is charged with spirituality that mortality cannot fully grasp.

Xamonas is right; what a great sentence this is: "If you should dip your hand in,/your wrist would ache immediately,/your bones would begin to ache and your hand would burn/as if the water were a transmutation of fire,/that feeds on stones and burns with a dark gray flame." BTW, this sounds so much like D.H. Lawrence. I wonder if she revered him?

And so it becomes a religious experience, this interaction with nature. It is a babtismal experience, that is an acceptance of a new life, knowledge gained. It projects I think ahead to her death and the old man's death, another transmutation, bitter knowledge. After the word "transmutation" the style too transmutes. Suddenly, abstract concepts come in: imagination, knowledge, free, world, forever, historical.

For those interested:
The last stanza of "A Mighty Fortress Is Our God":

That word above all earthly powers, no thanks to them, abideth;
The Spirit and the gifts are ours through Him Who with us sideth:
Let goods and kindred go, this mortal life also;
The body they may kill: God’s truth abideth still,
His kingdom is forever.

[Petrarch's Love]

It's not just the tangible natural world. It is charged with spirituality that mortality cannot fully grasp.

And so it becomes a religious experience, this interaction with nature. It is a babtismal experience, that is an acceptance of a new life, knowledge gained. It projects I think ahead to her death and the old man's death, another transmutation, bitter knowledge.

I also like ktd222's summation of the main themes in the three stanzas (very similar to the way I had been schematizing things) but I'm glad that Virgil is pushing us to address stanza three to mean not just nature but some sort of transcendental realm of experience. I think the suggestion that this foreshadows her own death and that of the old man is an interesting one. It certainly expresses what seems to be one aspect of the poignancy of the last line, "our knowledge is historical, flowing and flown." The move in this line from the present to the past tense is as simple and direct as the phrase "here today and gone tomorrow," yet at the same time it really wonderfully poetic and somehow grand. It seems to imply simultaneously that we as individuals are flowing and flown, that history as a whole is flowing and flown, and that, indeed all of human knowledge is flowing and flown--both here and gone--eternally mortal.

I also think "transmutation" is an important word here, and that it stands at an important turn in the poem. It stood out to me the first time I read it in the way that words sometimes stand out without you really being aware why. Now I'm beginning to see that it might stands ambiguously for the potential to be "transmuted" (changed) by either birth in a kind of baptism, or by death. The distinction between birth and death seems to be blurred, just as the distinction between the elements of fire and water is blurred. At the end of the poem there seems to be a sense of a mortal cycle of birth and death, and of something which, to quote Virgil "mortality cannot fully grasp." Do you feel that in the conclusion there is some way in which we are to understand that it is possible for us to attain that elusive knowledge--perhaps almost by virtue of our own inevitable mortality--or does this ultimate knowledge remain firmly out of our reach--never accessible by any but the creatures of the sea. I wondered what people thought?

[Virgil]

Do you feel that in the conclusion there is some way in which we are to understand that it is possible for us to attain that elusive knowledge--perhaps almost by virtue of our own inevitable mortality--or does this ultimate knowledge remain firmly out of our reach--never accessible by any but the creatures of the sea. I wondered what people thought?
A critical question! I would guess that she feels it's not invitable: "If you tasted it..." with emphasis on "if". Does the old man in the first stanza have this knowledge? I don't know. Does the seal have it? I'm not certain but I would suspect yes. Does the narrator have it? She tastes it, but is that complete knowledge? If knowledge is historical, what about the declining population from the first stanza? Here's a great metaphor: "drawn from the cold hard mouth/of the world". So the world/ocean is envision as a mouth, "derived from the rocky breasts" (mother nature?). The mouth of the world counterpoints the narrator's mouth above it that tastes the bitter brine. Again duality, opposites.

Lots of other questions: Why in the third stanza does she shift to predominantly past tense? And notice she jumps back to present when she returns to the trees: "Back behind us,/the dignified tall firs begin./Bluish, associating with their shadows,/a million Christmas trees stand/waiting for Christmas." The "firs begin" what? She doesn't complete the sentence. And of course Christmas brings it to another ritual of birth. And then the stanza goes to the subjuntive tense, "If".

[ktd222]

I was just imagining by looking at the whole, not in depth reading the third stanza, yet. I do agree with you Virgil that there is another world of existence—Spiritual. But I didn't know about a spiritual world until reading stanza 3. Aren’t these three lines odd:

Cold dark deep and absolutely clear,
element bearable to no mortal,
to fish and to seals…

Fish and seals are mortal too, right? So what do fish and seals have that human do not that allows them to live in a place where no mortal can bear? Both seals and the narrator are believers in total immersion. Yet, the seal, and maybe the narrator(I'm not sure), is the only able to immerse in this spiritual world of cold dark deep and absolutely clear. I think, apart from the narrator, the difference is humans have a need to ‘know’. It seems to me belief in the spiritual world is not enough. We have a need to dissect the wholeness, by breaking it into elements, and studying those elements.
The seal’s scene is fluid: cold dark deep and absolutely clear. We view the same scene in segments. The water seems suspended above the rounded gray and blue-gray stones…above the stones and then the world. And in the case at the bottom of stanza 3, the you learnt how the body would respond in this environment:

If you should dip your hand in,
your wrist would ache immediately,
your bones would begin to ache and your hand would burn
as if the water were a transmutation of fire
that feeds on stones and burns with a dark gray flame.
If you tasted it, it would first taste bitter,
then briny, then surely burn your tongue.

And unwisely extrapolating over to imagine how scenes unimaginable would look and feel:

It is like what we imagine knowledge to be:
dark, salt, clear, moving, utterly free,
drawn from the cold hard mouth
of the world, derived from the rocky breasts
forever, flowing and drawn, and since
our knowledge is historical, flowing, and flown.

The knowledge is what immerses us. And that knowledge is what develops ‘worlds’ in which we cannot fully grasp, like the spiritual world.

Transmutation is a very prevalent theme in this poem. It is the change in function of objects that we see developing throughout. At which viewpoint(for lack of a better word) must certain objects be viewed for their true un-mutated function? In this poems case: not through knowledge immersion can we grasp spiritual immersion.

[Xamonas Chegwe]

It's Monday here, so I'm going to dive in with a new poem.

It's by James Joyce from Pomes Penyeach and it's very short but no less interesting for all that.


Tilly

He travels after a winter sun,
Urging the cattle along a cold red road,
Calling to them, a voce they know,
He drives his beasts above Cabra.

The voice tells them home is warm.
They moo and make brute music with their hoofs.
He drives them with a flowering branch before him,
Smoke pluming their foreheads.

Boor, bond of the herd,
Tonight stretch full by the fire!
I bleed by the black stream
For my torn bough!

I was reminded of this because the 'A meditation upon a broomstick' mentioned a torn off branch and there was a lot of talk about Joyce in the overrated authors thread. So I dug it out and posted it.

The origin of the name is interesting:


These poems were offered to Ezra Pound in 1926, who said "They belong in the Bible or in the family album with the portraits." In March 1927, though, Archibald MacLeish responded very favorably so Joyce went ahead with publication.

First published 6 (or 7) July 1927 by Shakespeare & Co, with a pale-green cover (the color of Joyce's favorite 'Caville' apples), selling for a shilling (twelvepence) or twelve francs, according to Ellmann. The lone review was in the 'Daily Herald'.

Jeffares and Kennelly explain: "This book cost a shilling, so that we might have expected from its title a dozen poems, but Joyce followed an Irish custom in adding a 'tilly' (from Irish tuilleadh, an added measure), a thirteenth poem, the first poem in the book being titled 'Tilly'. He probably had in mind the custom of Dublin milkmen and milkwomen of pouring an extra amount of milk into the purchaser's receptacle from the small, usually pint-sized, tilly can that accompanied a larger can or churn."

I love the idea that the tree that provided the drovers goad is actually the narrator. The rest of the book is interesting too. Short, simple poems with a lot of depth.

[Virgil]

Cold dark deep and absolutely clear,
element bearable to no mortal,
to fish and to seals…

Fish and seals are mortal too, right? So what do fish and seals have that human do not that allows them to live in a place where no mortal can bear? Both seals and the narrator are believers in total immersion. Yet, the seal, and maybe the narrator(I'm not sure), is the only able to immerse in this spiritual world of cold dark deep and absolutely clear. I think, apart from the narrator, the difference is humans have a need to ‘know’.
I took the difference btween humans and seals to be that the seals are immortatal, in the sense that every seal is a continuation of the previous. There are no personality distinctions between them as humans. Therefore they are connected to the infinite, unlike man, who can only reach the infinte through knowledge, ritual, death. I don't know if I'm correct. This is how I read it though.

When I started this, I thought this was a fine poem. Now I think this is a GREAT poem!

[Virgil]

I was reminded of this because the 'A meditation upon a broomstick' mentioned a torn off branch and there was a lot of talk about Joyce in the overrated authors thread. So I dug it out and posted it.

Xamonas - I didn't read the "Broomstick" thread. But the torn bough here reminds me of Frazier's The Golden Bough. The golden bough was a branch broken from a sacred tree by Aeneas before going into the underworld. Do you think Joyce is alluding to that? I'm not familiar with this poem, so I've got some homework. For instance, where or what is "Cabra?" And what is the significance of the name, "Boor?" And what is a "bond of the herd"?

My first impressions on this is that Joyce is recreating a mythic scene. In addition to the Golden Bough allusion, if that's what it is, cattle were linked to many myths and rituals for the Greeks, Romans, and Celts. This could be a start, or I could be leading you down a wrong path. Other thoughts?

[ktd222]

I took the difference btween humans and seals to be that the seals are immortatal, in the sense that every seal is a continuation of the previous. There are no personality distinctions between them as humans. Therefore they are connected to the infinite, unlike man, who can only reach the infinte through knowledge, ritual, death. I don't know if I'm correct. This is how I read it though.QUOTE]

Your right! I think from our view. But I also think from the seal's perspective, a sense of differentiation exist too.

[QUOTE]One seal particularly
I have seen here evening after evening.
He was curious about me. He was interested in music

Out of a population of seals in the sea, the narrator connects with a 'particular' seal with a curious nature. An interest in music. She shows us that personality distinctions exists in all species.

So in a literal sense, both humans and seals are not mortal, but their is some aspect of the sense that the seal knows cannot be used to accurately imagine the spiritual world.


Then he would disappear, then suddenly emerge
almost in the same spot, with a sort of shrug
as if it were against his better judgment.

The seal knows better than to take part in the ritual for total immersion.
So I think she is making a connection with all species. Showing that we all have the capability, and through the use of the wrong senses, are misguided and unable to become totally immersed like the seal.


Now I think this is a GREAT poem!
I agree!!!
I need another day before even reading another poem.

[Petrarch's Love]

Now I think this is a GREAT poem!

Took the words right out of my mouth. I really enjoyed discussing it.

Now on to this week's poem. I'm not quite sure what I think yet. I feel there's some meaning to it that I havn't grasped on my first reading. There were certain lines that struck my fancy. I like the association of the voice with the warmth of home and the making of "brute music with their hooves."

I also agree that having the narrator turn out to be the tree which is bleeding and bereft of its bough is powerful, but I'm not sure what sort of statement he is trying to make with this. Virgil may be on to something with the golden bough reference. Actually a closer parallel is from earlier in the Aeneid (book three I believe) when Aeneas plucks a bough from a tree only to find that it bleeds. It turns out that the tree is inhabited by the spirit of his fellow Trojan, Polydorus, who speaks to the hero about how he was betrayed and killed. I don't remember that there was any bleeding associated with the later episode of the Golden Bough (although this may just be faulty memory), but its association with the underworld would tie in with the "black stream" mentioned in Joyce's poem.

Joyce may also have been thinking of a scene from Dante's Inferno which was itself inspired by the Polydorus episode in the Aeneid and would account for both the bleeding tree and a possible reference to the "black stream" of the underworld. In canto 13 Dante encounters a tree which bleeds when he snaps off one of its branches. He then has a conversation with the spirit inside the tree, which is condemned in this way for commiting suicide. There are a few other references to bleeding trees in epics (in Tasso's Gerusaleme Liberata for example) but I think the Dante and the original in the Aeneid are probably the most relevant.

Cabra is evidently a suburb of Dublin in Ireland.

I thought Boor was probably the sheep dog who works to "bind" the sheep together, but I could be wrong. Any other suggestions?

Also, what does the "smoke plumming their foreheads" refer to? Is this a reference to rising dust that looks like smoke? I found it a confusing image.

[Xamonas Chegwe]

"Boor" means uneducated oaf or ruffian. It's an insult hurled by the tree.

I think "bond of the herd" implies that the young man is himself the slave of the cattle, and is another insult, but I may be wrong on that score.

And I think the "smoke plumming their foreheads" refers to steam rising from them on a cool day.

I like the 'Golden Bough', 'Aeneid' & 'Inferno' connections. I always had the impression that there was something else going on in this poem, and these are all good ideas.

Personally, I absolutely love the way we are led to blithely accept this as a quiet, pastoral sketch, not even considering who the narrator might be, if we think of a narrator at all. But then this is turned on it's head in the last stanza. We are forced to examine our own assumptions - if you like, shown the meta-narrative.

I also like the fact that there is so much crammed into such a short poem. Joyce's writing is always word-rich, full of imagery and subtext. You always feel that there's more going on than the obvious.

[Virgil]

Whoever mentioned Dante's Inferno is probably correct. Here's from a paragraph from Spark Notes:


Summary: Canto XIII
In the Second Ring of the Seventh Circle of Hell, Virgil and Dante enter a strange wood filled with black and gnarled trees. Dante hears many cries of suffering but cannot see the souls that utter them. Virgil cryptically advises him to snap a twig off of one of the trees. He does so, and the tree cries out in pain, to Dante’s amazement. Blood begins to trickle down its bark. The souls in this ring—those who were violent against themselves or their possessions (Suicides and Squanderers, respectively)—have been transformed into trees.

And here are the first 6o lines from Canto XIII, Inferno:

Nessus had not yet reached the other bank
When we on this side moved into a wood
That was not marked at all by any path:

No leaves of green but of a blackish color,
5 No branches smooth but gnarled and tangled up,
No fruits were growing, only thorns of poison.

No wild beasts, shunning the furrowed farmlands
Between Cecina and Corneto, burrow
Underbrush that is so thick and barbed.

10 Inside here nest the repugnant Harpies
Who chased the Trojans from the Strophades
With foul prophecies of coming losses.

They have wide wings, human necks and faces,
Feet with claws, and big feathered bellies;
15 They shriek laments from up in the strange trees.

"Before you enter farther," my kind master
Began saying to me, "know you are here
Within the second circle and will remain

"Until you come out to the dreadful sand.
20 Look carefully, then, and you shall witness things
That would destroy your faith in words of mine."

I heard deep wailings rising from all sides,
Without discerning anyone who made them,
So that, completely baffled, I stopped short.

25 I think he thought that I was thinking that
All of the voices from among the trunks
Rose up from people who were hiding from us.

My master said to me, "If you tear off
A tiny twig from one of the growths here,
30 Your thoughts will also be nipped in the bud."

Then reaching out my hand a bit ahead,
I snapped a shoot off from a massive thornbush,
And the trunk of it cried, "Why do you break me?"

And after it had darkened with its blood,
35 It started up again, "Why do you rip me?
Do you possess no pity in your soul?

"Men we were and now we are mere stumps.
Surely your hand ought to have been kinder
Even if we had been the souls of serpents."

40 Just as a green log blazing at one end
Oozes sap out of the other, all the while
Hissing with the air that it blows out,

So from that broken bough issued together
Words and blood: at that I let the tip
45 Fall, standing like a man stricken with fear.

To him my sage responded, "Wounded spirit,
Had he been able to believe before
What he had witnessed only in my verses,

"He would not have raised his hand against you.
50 But so incredible a thing caused me
To urge him to an act I now regret.

"But tell him who you were, to make amends
By refreshing your fame in the world above
To which he is permitted to return."

55 And the trunk: "Your sweet words so attract me
I cannot remain still, and be not loath
If I become caught up in conversation.

I think that there are four or five streams/rivers in Inferno, but I'm not sure which one is the black stream.

Xamonas - Meta-narrative? I don't see what you mean.

[Xamonas Chegwe]

By meta-narrative, I mean that we only realise at the end that the identity of the narrator has a bearing on the poem; that is important at all. This is a level of the poem that we never usually think about. Do we consider the identity of the narrator in "Ode to Autumn", for example?

We are used to reading bucolic idylls about pastoral scenes and assume this is one more of the same. But the last 2 lines smash that notion. It's a lovely twist. It's like an actor in a film winking at the camera. Or (since I've just finished rereading it) John Fowles's anachronistic asides in "The French Lieutenant's Woman".

Meta-narrative - a layer of meaning above the obvious.

I'm beginning to think that Dante was probably a big influence on this poem too. Although I see it as an inspiration rather than another layer of meaning. Thanks for the quote.

[Virgil]

I still don't get the meta-narrative part. I assume meta-narrative is the same thing as meta-fiction.


Metafiction is fiction about fiction: novels and stories that call attention to their fictional status and their own compositional procedures. -From The Art of Fiction by David Lodge.


Do we consider the identity of the narrator in "Ode to Autumn", for example?
Of course we do. Who's actually speaking is critical to understanding any work.

Two possibilities:
(1) An omniscient narrator's voice for the first two stanzas and a different voice for the third.
(2) The voice of the third stanza is far-reaching enough to observe the events of the first two stanzas and then address Boor in the third.

Interestingly the word "voice" is mentioned twice in the poem, and probably is the key to it all. I think the second possiblity is the most likely (although one hesitates with Joyce when it comes to multiple point of views). All in all, given the allusions and this voice shifting, I still don't know what to make of this poem.

[Xamonas Chegwe]

Another (and my preferred) possibility - and the reason for my use of the term meta-narrative.
(3) The realisation of the origin of the narrator's voice in the third stanza, forces us to re-examine our feelings / thoughts about the first two.

Consider an example from a completely different artform: You are watching the opening sequence of a film. You see a battleship carving through a calm sea. You can make out sailors on the decks, swapping cigarettes, laughing and joking. The camera pulls back and you realise that you are watching this scene through the periscope of a submarine. You hear the first line of dialogue, "Fire one!"

The poem presents a similar change of POV in my view. The scene is altered by the realisation of the identity of the viewer. At first we (quite naturally, because we are meant to!) assume it is Joyce himself, watching this boy and his cattle pass by above Cabra. The switcheroo takes us by surprise - at least it did me.

PS

The best (worst) thing about this poem is that you can't recapture that moment of realisation. It only happens the very first time you read the poem (unless you have a really bad memory!). After that, your thoughts are coloured from the very start by what you know is coming. (This just occurred to me whilst writing this post and it opens up a whole new level of meaning - It's moments like this that make me realise why I like poetry so much!)

I wonder if Joyce thought of that when he wrote the thing.

[Virgil]

Another (and my preferred) possibility - and the reason for my use of the term meta-narrative.
(3) The realisation of the origin of the narrator's voice in the third stanza, forces us to re-examine our feelings / thoughts about the first two.

Consider an example from a completely different artform: You are watching the opening sequence of a film. You see a battleship carving through a calm sea. You can make out sailors on the decks, swapping cigarettes, laughing and joking. The camera pulls back and you realise that you are watching this scene through the periscope of a submarine. You hear the first line of dialogue, "Fire one!"

Yes, I agree with you here. Your term meta-narrative threw me off. Do you think that the shift is the whole point of the poem? I get the feeling that there's more to what Joyce is saying, but I can't for the life of me pin it down. All these allusions, to what end?

[Virgil]

Here's some other observations, none of which adds up to an epiphany for me:
The poem starts in day time ("winter sun") and ends at night. Joyce sets up opposing motifs: cold road versus warm home, warm fire. Why is a branch flowering in the winter time? There's a lot of speaking in the poem: He calling, voice they know, cows moo. Perhaps within the context of the collected poems of that book, this one poem may make more sense.

[Xamonas Chegwe]

Here's some other observations, none of which adds up to an epiphany for me:
The poem starts in day time ("winter sun") and ends at night. Joyce sets up opposing motifs: cold road versus warm home, warm fire. Why is a branch flowering in the winter time? There's a lot of speaking in the poem: He calling, voice they know, cows moo. Perhaps within the context of the collected poems of that book, this one poem may make more sense.

Very interesting point about the flowering branch in winter - I hadn't noticed! - So few words and I miss something like that. I suppose it could be late winter, on the cusp of spring? Blackthorn can flower as early as late February, producing white blossom before any leaves. But there may be more to it.

The line is, "He travels after a winter sun". I took this to mean that the poem was set in the twilight. This would fit with cattle being led back to their byres following a day in the pasture, hence talk of home being warm.

I really love short poems. They often have as much to say as long ones and they're much easier to reread many times.

I'm not sure that there is much insight into this particular poem to be gained from the rest of the book. It was written in 1904, the rest variously between 1912 and 1924. There is not any discernable connection in terms of theme, as far as I can see. They are all nice and short though. :nod:

[Virgil]

Ok, since it's Monday in some parts of the world, I'm going to post the poem for this week. I'm posting Ezra Pound's Canto XVII from his book The Cantos, which he published in parts throughout his lifetime, starting in the mid 1920's. Canto XVII, it says here was published in 1933. The cantos are supposed to be an autobigraphical journey, but a journey in which he morphs (to use a contemporary word) with history and myth. The poem is not as complicated as it might seem, once you get over the allusions. Let me list it up front so people aren't intimidated. Allusions here are Odysseus's journey, that of Jason (of the Golden Fleece), and a ship's entrance into Venice. The names are mostly pagan dieties except for the Italian names, which are of Reniassance craftsmen, who Pound idealized.

XVII By Ezra Pound
So that the vines burst from my fingers
And the bees weighted with pollen
More heavily in the vine-shoots:
Chirr—chir—chir-rikk—a purring sound,
And the birds sleepily in the branches.
ZAGREUS! IO ZAGREUS.
With the first pale-clear of the heave
And the cities set in the hills,
And the goddess of the fair knees
Moving there, with the oak-woods behind her,
The green slope, with white hounds
leaping about her;
And thence down to the creek’s mouth, until evening,
Flat water before me,
and the trees growing in water,
Marble trunks out of stillness,
On past the palazzo,
in the stillness,
The light now, not of the sun.
Chrysophrase,
And the water green clear, and blue clear;
On, to the great cliffs of amber.
Between them,
Cave of Nerea,
she like a great shell curved,
And the boat drawn without sound,
Without odor of ship-work,
No bird cry, nor any noise of wave moving,
Nor splash of porpoise, nor any noise of wave moving,
Within her cave, Nerea,
she like a great shell curved
In the suavity of the rock,
cliff green-gray in the far,
In the near, the gate-cliffs of amber,
And the wave
green clear, and blue clear,
And the cave salt-white, and glare-purple,
cool, porphyry smooth,
the rock sea-worn.
No gull-cry, no sound of porpoise,
Sand as malachite, and no cold there,
the light not of the sun.

Zagreus, feeding his panthers,
the turf clear as on hills under light.
And under the almond-trees, gods,
with them, choros nympharum. Gods,
Hermes and Athene,
As shaft of compass,
Between them, trembled—
To the left is the place of fauns,
sylva nympharum;
The low wood, moor-scrub,
the doe, the young spotted dear,
leap up through the broom-plants,
as dry leaf amid yellow.
And by one cut of the hills,
the great alley of Memnons.
Beyond, sea, crests seen over dune
Night sea churning shingle,
To the left, the alley of cypress.
A boat came,
One man holding her sail,
Guiding her with oar caught over gunwhale, saying:
“ There, in the forest of marble,
“ the stone trees—out of water—
“ the arbours of stone—
“ marble leaf, over leaf,
“ silver, steel over steel,
“ silver beaks rising and crossing,
“ prow set against prow,
“ stone, ply over ply,
“ the gilt beams flare of an evening”
Borso, Carmagnola, the men of craft, i vitrei,
Thither, at one time, time after time,
And the waters richer than glass,
Bronze gold, the blaze over the silver,
Dye-pots in the torch-light,
The flash of wave under prows,
And the silver beaks rising and crossing.
Stone trees, white and rose-white in the darkness,
Cypress there by the towers,
Drift under hulls in the night.

“In the gloom the gold
Gathers the light about it.”

Now supine in burrow, half over-arched bramble,
One eye for the sea, through the peek-hole,
Gray light, with Athene.
Zothar and her elephants, the gold loin-cloth,
The sistrum, shaken, shaken,
the cohorts of her dancers.
And Aletha, by the bend of the shore,
with her eyes seaward,
and in her hands sea-wrack
Salt-bright with foam.
Kore through the bright meadow,
with green-gray dust in the grass:
“For this hour, brother of Circe.”
Arm laid over my shoulder,
Saw the sun for three days, and none after,
Splendour, as the splendour of Hermes,
And shipped thence
to the stone place,
Pale white, over water,
known water,
And the white forest of marble, bent bough over bough,
The pleached arbour of stone,
Thither Borso, when they shot the barbed arrow at him,
And Carmagnola, between the two columns,
Sigismundo, after that wreck in Dalmatia.
Sunset like the grasshopper flying.

Edit: Unfortunately the spacing of the lines, which I think has some significance on how you read the line, did not come through in the cut and paste. I can't help that. I don't feel, however, its a huge significance.

[Scheherazade]

For future reference, to give everyone equal chance to post poems:
* Please post a new poem only on a Monday. (Please wait till it is Monday in your part of the world)

* The same person cannot post another poem within the same month.

I have never read anything by Ezra Pound. This poem seems full of imagery... Almost too much so; like Virgil suggested, they make the poem seem a little blurred and complicated but once past those... what is there?

Would like to hear your opinions.

[Virgil]

For future reference, to give everyone equal chance to post poems:

I have never read anything by Ezra Pound. This poem seems full of imagery... Almost too much so; like Virgil suggested, they make the poem seem a little blurred and complicated but once past those... what is there?

Would like to hear your opinions.
Sorry if I jumped the gun, Scher.

Funny you should say that about imagery. Ezra Pound was at the forefront of modern poetry, and he believed that a modern poem should just be the setting side by side of imagery. For instance, he gave this little poem as an example:
[
In a Station of the Metro by Ezra Pound
The apparition of these faces in the crowd;
Petals on a wet, black bough.

That's it. That's the whole poem. Three images, if you include the title, and from there the reader is to inductively infer his meaning. As to Canto XVII, it is a compiling of images, layered multi-fold. Sorry if the poem is too long, I didn't realize just how long until just layed out.

[ktd222]

Don't worry about posting again Virgil, I don't mind. I'm reading the poem now and do disagree with Scheherazade; I already see something happening in the poem. We will tackle this poem stanza by stanza? I'll have time to respond Monday evening.

[Scheherazade]

Don't worry about posting again Virgil, I don't mind. I'm reading the poem now and do disagree with Scheherazade ktd222, I am really not sure what it is that you disagree with and disagreeing for the sake of disagreement will not do.

-My reminder was not only directed at Virgil but also at people who have joined the Forum recently, like yourself. This Forum is visited by people from all around the world and it is good to have some rules to ensuring that everyone is getting an equal chance; and as a Moderator, I would like to make sure that it is so. I do believe that Virgil's was an honest mistake, which is why his post was not deleted.

- I readily admitted that I had not read any of Pounds' works and I didn't express any opinion apart from the fact that the poem is rich with imagery and asked others' opinion on what they see when those are pushed aside. Do you disagree that imagery is used generously in the poem? Or that they make the poem a little complicated? If that is the case, it is purely a matter of familiarity and taste.


Virgil,

The length of the poem is not an issue at all. After reading again today (it was 1 am when I read it last night and didn't want to make hasty, tired posts about it), I am a little taken with it. The imagery used is -although I still think it is a little on the heavy side- is beautiful and used for a... noble cause. In my eyes, the poem is rich with sexual references (describing a very intimate moment) and the imagery makes a wonderful job of masking those so that it does not seem crude or tasteless.

I think I would like to re-read it again later on to go through some of the references and imagery.

*edit*

In a Station of the Metro by Ezra Pound

The apparition of these faces in the crowd;
Petals on a wet, black bough. I think this is amazing; says so much in two lines and leaves so much to the reader's interpretation as well.

[Petrarch's Love]

Wow, a poem like this might take us a couple weeks to untangle :lol: . Just from my quick reading of the poem I thought maybe it would be a good idea if we could sort out some of the allusions in the poem, so here are a few glosses I could make right away. Maybe others can contribute more.

I first noticed the line in all caps. "ZAGREUS, IO ZAGREUS." Zagreus is a figure from Greek mythology. He was the son of Zeus and Persephone, but Hera (jealous as usual) had the Titans tear him to pieces and start devouring him. Somehow his heart was saved from the carnage and Zeus swallowed it which led to the creation of Dionysius (I think there's another version where Zeus gives the heart to someone else, but it ends up the same with the heart engendering Dionysus). The Dionysus connection would probably explain the reference to vines in the opening of the poem. I'm not sure, but I believe Zagreus was raised by Apollo before he was torn to pieces. If so, there could be some significance in his transfer from associations with the art of Apollo to the vines of Dionysus.

Just in terms of language, "Io" is the Italian word for "I" (so he's declaring "I Zagreus"). A use of Italian later in the poem, "i vitrei," refers to glassworkers.

The poem as a whole seems to work around metamorphoses (indeed, the Zagreus story may be in Ovid's Metamorphoses, I can't remember). The tree trunks of a forest inhabited by mythic figures morph into the marble columns of the buildings in Venice "growing" up out of the water. The water itself goes from being water, to "waters richer than glass," to a discussion of actual glass and glass makers. Both topically and stylistically the poem seems to blur the boundries between images, and especially the boundries between what is artful or man-made, and what is natural. I really enjoy this element of the poem.

Also, this is the first of Pound's canti I've ever read, and I was wondering if Virgil or anyone else who's read them might comment on how it fits into the rest of the sequence. I feel as though perhaps we're missing out on some significance this context makes clearer?

[Virgil]

- I readily admitted that I had not read any of Pounds' works and I didn't express any opinion apart from the fact that the poem is rich with imagery and asked others' opinion on what they see when those are pushed aside. Do you disagree that imagery is used generously in the poem? Or that they make the poem a little complicated? If that is the case, it is purely a matter of familiarity and taste.


Virgil,

The length of the poem is not an issue at all. After reading again today (it was 1 am when I read it last night and didn't want to make hasty, tired posts about it), I am a little taken with it. The imagery used is -although I still think it is a little on the heavy side- is beautiful and used for a... noble cause. In my eyes, the poem is rich with sexual references (describing a very intimate moment) and the imagery makes a wonderful job of masking those so that it does not seem crude or tasteless.

I think I would like to re-read it again later on to go through some of the references and imagery.

*edit*
I think this is amazing; says so much in two lines and leaves so much to the reader's interpretation as well.
I'm glad people like it. I was a little concerned, since the vague allusions can put readers off. It's almost all descriptive imagery. I don't think he makes any catagorical statements; we are supposed to infer meaning and emotion from the various images and actions he describes. And the rhythm and echoes of the language also very much add to the meaning. You know, as many times I've read this poem, I don't think I've picked up on the sexual imagery. You're right; it's there. Perhaps Scher, you can point it out.



I first noticed the line in all caps. "ZAGREUS, IO ZAGREUS." Zagreus is a figure from Greek mythology. He was the son of Zeus and Persephone, but Hera (jealous as usual) had the Titans tear him to pieces and start devouring him. Somehow his heart was saved from the carnage and Zeus swallowed it which led to the creation of Dionysius (I think there's another version where Zeus gives the heart to someone else, but it ends up the same with the heart engendering Dionysus). The Dionysus connection would probably explain the reference to vines in the opening of the poem. I'm not sure, but I believe Zagreus was raised by Apollo before he was torn to pieces. If so, there could be some significance in his transfer from associations with the art of Apollo to the vines of Dionysus.

Just in terms of language, "Io" is the Italian word for "I" (so he's declaring "I Zagreus"). A use of Italian later in the poem, "i vitrei," refers to glassworkers.

You know, that's ["IO ZAGREUS"] the only catagorical statement. No wait, I found another: "(I) Saw the sun for three days" is another, but I can't find any others.


Also, this is the first of Pound's canti I've ever read, and I was wondering if Virgil or anyone else who's read them might comment on how it fits into the rest of the sequence. I feel as though perhaps we're missing out on some significance this context makes clearer?

I'll do a little research on that and summarize it in a post.

[Scheherazade]

You know, as many times I've read this poem, I don't think I've picked up on the sexual imagery. You're right; it's there. Perhaps Scher, you can point it out.Really? That is interesting. Like you said, the poem is very descriptive and, to me, it describes a very intimate moment (love making): 'purring sound, heave, the goddess of the fair knees, white hounds leaping about her, Cave of Nerea, Arm laid over my shoulder'... Like you said 'Jason and his ship's entrance to Venice'... So many to count.

Now I am curious to know what your interpretation of the poem is and what made you post this poem. What do you think the imagery is used to describe? To me, from my very first reading, it has been about the decription of a sexual act so I am wondering how others interpret the meaning of the poem as well as the literary references. :)

[ktd222]

There are three things I noticed:

1)The first sentence-
So that the vines burst from my fingers
And the bees weighted with pollen
More heavily in the vine-shoots:
Chirr—chir—chir-rikk—a purring sound,
And the birds sleepily in the branches.
ZAGREUS! IO ZAGREUS.
Reads almost as an action occurring. Chirr—chir—chir-rikk—a purring sound. But whats more interesting is the action in the sentence above seems ‘enabled’ because of some other events had happened So that the vines burst from my fingers… I do not know of which events, yet. Do you guys get the same sense?
It is as if the poem is beginning in action; and the way the sentence is set up makes that action or sentence dependent.

2)That gets to my next observation: the poems movement seems to going backwards in time, forward to present, then even farther to a time where The light now, not of the sun. Starting from the poems first sentence in action, going down stanza 1 we get a lot of placement words coupled with descriptions of a place.
With the first pale-clear of the heave
And the cities set in the hills,
And the goddess of the fair knees
Moving there, with the oak-woods behind her,
The green slope, with white hounds
leaping about her;
And thence[/I](From that place or time) down to the creek’s mouth, until evening,
[I]Flat water before me,(Back to the present)and the trees growing in water,
Marble trunks out of stillness,
On past the palazzo,(Back to the past)in the stillness,
The light now, not of the sun.And so on…
We, the reader, are jumping to all of these places. To the place of Gods; to a place where there is no ‘real’ light; to a place where no birds cry, nor any noise of wave moving; to a place where the sand is of malachite, and there is no cold.

3)There is also a heavy sound of rrr’s in the first sentence. And for me, as I’m reading the rest of stanza 1, any word that has an r sound brings me immediately back to the image of sentence one.


---
Maybe this couples with the sexual imagery you see Sher.

[Virgil]

There are three things I noticed:

1)The first sentence-
So that the vines burst from my fingers
And the bees weighted with pollen
More heavily in the vine-shoots:
Chirr—chir—chir-rikk—a purring sound,
And the birds sleepily in the branches.
ZAGREUS! IO ZAGREUS.
Reads almost as an action occurring. Chirr—chir—chir-rikk—a purring sound. But whats more interesting is the action in the sentence above seems ‘enabled’ because of some other events had happened So that the vines burst from my fingers… I do not know of which events, yet. Do you guys get the same sense?.
Yes, time is jumbled throughout the poem.


2)That gets to my next observation: the poems movement seems to going backwards in time, forward to present, then even farther to a time where The light now, not of the sun. Yes. I think he's morphing diferent myths together with his journey.

3)There is also a heavy sound of rrr’s in the first sentence. And for me, as I’m reading the rest of stanza 1, any word that has an r sound brings me immediately back to the image of sentence one.
Interesting, but where? You make an interesting point. I've never quite understood the "chirr". He is emphasizing the "r" sound but where does he follow up with it?

[Xamonas Chegwe]

Personally, I find this full of interesting images but pretty directionless. I can see where Scher is coming from with the sex angle, but a ship entering a harbour is a pretty sexual metaphor at the best of times, so it's only natural that the same metaphorical images would overlap somewhat. But (puts Freud hat on) I sink you vill agree zat most sings come down to ZEX in ze final analyzis, ja?

I've never been a big fan of Pound. I've always seen his work as style heavy and substance light. But I must admit that this is the first time I've read one of his poems several times (so that I could comment fairly) and it did grow on me. I can't see myself rushing out to buy any books full of Ezra though (although I may reread the few poems I've got in compendiums.)

I'm not quite sure where the wooded hills come into it though. Venice is a flat city in a flat environment. Woods there may have been in earlier times, but hills, never. The best of the imagery is definitely that comparing Venice's architecture to trees coming from the water though - that I do like. Unfortunately, there is much that is too abstruse and life's too short to go reading commentaries on every poem I read to find out what the hell they mean. If there's not enough there for me to make up my own mind (right or wrong) I lose interest.

And I like em short too. :nod:

But hey, if we all liked the same poems and they were all that got posted here, it would be a dull thread. (Translates as - "Thanks for posting this pile of ******") ;)

[lafedra690]

I know nothing about a lot of things, now I must say that Annabel Lee is a poem which can put all your senses together to understand it totally ( that is what I had to do!!) and think about your first love,the first time you felt moved by this strange feeling that no one has ever dared to explained.

[Scheherazade]

Personally, I find this full of interesting images but pretty directionless. I can see where Scher is coming from with the sex angle, but a ship entering a harbour is a pretty sexual metaphor at the best of times, so it's only natural that the same metaphorical images would overlap somewhat. But (puts Freud hat on) I sink you vill agree zat most sings come down to ZEX in ze final analyzis, ja?:D:D:D
I'm not quite sure where the wooded hills come into it though. Venice is a flat city in a flat environment. Woods there may have been in earlier times, but hills, never. The best of the imagery is definitely that comparing Venice's architecture to trees coming from the water though - that I do like. I have never been to Venice myself (been on my 'TO-DO LIST' forever!:p) but I thought 'oak woods behind her' refers to the headboard/frame of the bed and hills to the curves of a woman's body...
Unfortunately, there is much that is too abstruse and life's too short to go reading commentaries on every poem I read to find out what the hell they mean. If there's not enough there for me to make up my own mind (right or wrong) I lose interest. I agree with this and I like the challenge of coming up with my own interpretations.

Virgil>I am wondering whether you missed my post earlier but I am curious to know why you chose this particular poem to be this week's poem and also what it means to you once you peel away all the references and metaphors and what not. :)

[Virgil]

:Virgil>I am wondering whether you missed my post earlier but I am curious to know why you chose this particular poem to be this week's poem and also what it means to you once you peel away all the references and metaphors and what not. :)
No, Scher I haven't forgotten. I've just been busy. I'll try now.

Here are some of the reasons I like this poem; let me just list technical reasons, the craft of it as poetry first:
1. The layering of images; everyone has already commented on it.
2. The way the images just interweave with each other; here's where I've used the word morph. One scene suddenly shifts into another, as if they just grow out of each other. It's really hard to tell when the character is Odysseus, when it's Jason, when it's the Venetians, and when it's himself/narrator. Other poets have done this before, but I'm not sure anyone has doen it to this extent.
3. Each line has such perfect rhythm and breath that if you read them, it sounds like a latin chant. Here, listen:

Cave of Nerea,
she like a great shell curved,
And the boat drawn without sound,
Without odor of ship-work,
No bird cry, nor any noise of wave moving,
Nor splash of porpoise, nor any noise of wave moving,
Within her cave, Nerea,
she like a great shell curved
In the suavity of the rock,
cliff green-gray in the far,
In the near, the gate-cliffs of amber,
And the wave
green clear, and blue clear,
And the cave salt-white, and glare-purple,
cool, porphyry smooth,
the rock sea-worn.
No gull-cry, no sound of porpoise,
Sand as malachite, and no cold there,
the light not of the sun.
He even suggests it later: choros nympharum, chorus of nymphs. BTW, the foreign language words should be italizised in my copy of the poem; that too didn't convert over in the cut & paste.

Let me try to summarize what I think the poem is about. The cantos are supposed to be the autobiographical development of Pound as a poet. Pound hated modern consumerism (we've heard others rail in other threads about that), but his solution was not socialism/communism (that was just another economic construct). His solution was dictatorship; he sided with Mussolini and Hitler in WWII. The poem is an epiphany that great art exists in cultures like Renaissance Venice, where commerce is (to his understanding) by artisans. He thought Mussolini would recreate Renaissance Venice in the 20th century. (BTW, anyone who thinks great artists have any special insight into society is fooling themselves.) The poem takes the questing hero Odysseus blurs it with his persona, blurs it with the finding of the golden fleece, blurs it with a journey to Venice with famous Ventian artisans, and wraps it with pagan religious imagery. Now I'm not sure how the sexual imagery fits in, except to suggest that pagan religion was mixed with the sexual.

Got to go for now. My wife is calling me to take the dog out.

[Petrarch's Love]

1)The first sentence-
So that the vines burst from my fingers
And the bees weighted with pollen
More heavily in the vine-shoots:
Chirr—chir—chir-rikk—a purring sound,
And the birds sleepily in the branches.
ZAGREUS! IO ZAGREUS.
Reads almost as an action occurring. Chirr—chir—chir-rikk—a purring sound. But whats more interesting is the action in the sentence above seems ‘enabled’ because of some other events had happened So that the vines burst from my fingers… I do not know of which events, yet. Do you guys get the same sense?
It is as if the poem is beginning in action; and the way the sentence is set up makes that action or sentence dependent.
And what's even more interesting is that the first sntence isn't a sentence at all. While "vines burst from my fingers" could be a sentence on its own, the modifying "so that" at the beginning makes it neccessarily dependent upon something that isn't written in here. There is no verb in the rest of the phrase. This unfinished phrase, just hanging at the beginning of the poem is one of the most instantly arresting things about the poem. I think this is what leads to a sense of anticipation or of an action unfinished.


Let me try to summarize what I think the poem is about. The cantos are supposed to be the autobiographical development of Pound as a poet. Pound hated modern consumerism (we've heard others rail in other threads about that), but his solution was not socialism/communism (that was just another economic construct). His solution was dictatorship; he sided with Mussolini and Hitler in WWII. The poem is an epiphany that great art exists in cultures like Renaissance Venice, where commerce is (to his understanding) by artisans. He thought Mussolini would recreate Renaissance Venice in the 20th century. (BTW, anyone who thinks great artists have any special insight into society is fooling themselves.)
Thanks for posting the background, Virgil. I never knew much about Pound because I've never been deeply interested in his work. What a strange theory. Mussolini recreating Renaissance Venice huh? Did he think he was going to find some great artistic dictator--a type of philosopher king in a hyper idealistic world?


I'm not quite sure where the wooded hills come into it though. Venice is a flat city in a flat environment. Woods there may have been in earlier times, but hills, never.
I agree that the "wooded hills" wouldn't make much sense in Venice. I thought this was probably just another instance of the many metamorphoses of one image into another. The wooded hills may belong to the mythic setting in which the story of Zagreus and some of the other gods takes place. This story, and its hilly setting then morphs into the marble trunks of the buildings in Venice. I thought Sher's idea about the headboard was really interesting.

[Virgil]

Thanks for posting the background, Virgil. I never knew much about Pound because I've never been deeply interested in his work. What a strange theory. Mussolini recreating Renaissance Venice huh?
Something like that.



Did he think he was going to find some great artistic dictator--a type of philosopher king in a hyper idealistic world?

Yes, and during WWII he preached from Italy over the radio waves to the American soldiers how they were going to lose or something like that. When the Allies took over Italy he was arrested for treason, and I think was spared the death penalty on the claim he was insane. Hemingway I believe vouched for him at his trial. He then spent quite a few years (15 or so?) in an asylem until he was released in the late 50's or early 60's. After being released, he just went silent for the rest of his life, never wrote, never spoke in public, and hardly even in private. I'm going on memory here, so I think what I've described is the general gist, but I could be off on a minor detail or so. If anyone has any further information or clarification, feel free to add.

[Xamonas Chegwe]

Virgil,

According to good old Wiki, he continued to write both in the asylum and afterwards in Italy - see here (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ezra_Pound).

I knew he had a reputation as a racist but never the extent of it before. It puts BLP's "London..." in perspective, don't you think?

[Virgil]

Virgil,

According to good old Wiki, he continued to write both in the asylum and afterwards in Italy - see here (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ezra_Pound).

I knew he had a reputation as a racist but never the extent of it before. It puts BLP's "London..." in perspective, don't you think?
Thanks. I guess he did write afterwards.

BLP is a young fellow who got carried away in his poem. I don't think he's a bad person.

[Taliesin]

We hope it is the correct time to post this:

Secind Coming by Yeats

TURNING and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born

[IrishCanadian]

What a great choice Teliesin! This poem gives me the kreeps because it is so close to discribing the world i see around me. And because of this you can really sympathise with the "Spiritus Mundi."

[Petrarch's Love]

A powerful poem. Those first few lines are remarkably haunting and disturbing--the sort of lines that sometimes run through one's head like strains of ominous music in a minor key. The poem is at the same time painfully direct--straightforwardly declaring that "mere anarchy is loosed upon the world"--and strangely enigmatic in its sweeping apocalyptic imagery of bloody tides and rough beasts. It's always seemed like a testament to Yeats' power as a writer that one feels there has truly been some sort of revelation, both awful and awe-full, made in this poem, even as the content of the poem seems to be nihilistically denying us any sort of comfort or stability, even in religion.

[Scheherazade]

Does anyone know when Yeats wrote this poem and his religious inclinations?

Love the lines:
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

[Xamonas Chegwe]

Scher, I was about to quote the same lines. They always have been my favourite.

I remember seeing this poem first in the preface of a novel (can't remember which, it's been used in many) and it amazed me. I went straight out and bought a cheap collection of Yeats.

The poem was written in 1920, just after the 1st world war and is filled with the despair that Yeats felt after that catastrophe. Also, the 'Easter Rising' had taken place in Ireland in 1916, which moved Yeats deeply (see the poem Easter 1916). Yeats was a supporter of Irish republicanism but took no active part in any uprisings himself (a fact which often troubled him - see No Second Troy).

He also had unorthodox occult views, the 'gyre' mentioned at the start of the poem refers to his belief in circularity of history (I'm not sure of the complete details, but he wrote at least one book on the subject.).

I would have to put this in my top ten favourite poems - not least because it played a huge part in getting me interested in poetry in the first place.

[IrishCanadian]

Yeats was a religious Chrsitian but he did also (as Chegwe points out) believe in the less orthadox and mythical powers of the historical folk tales of his background. He went through fases. I don't know what fase we was in when he wrote this but his powerful allusion to the weary and tired Second comming can be read on many different levels. Is that beast he speaks of the Second comming? If it were an evil force it would not fit with the mood of the rest of the poem because an evil would thrive while "The best lack all conviction, while the worst / Are full of passionate intensity." The failior of the Easter Riseing was weaighing heavily on a lot of the Irish rebels dureing this time because home-rule from the English was close but nearly unrealistc. 1921 brought another battle of sorts ... I wish i rememberd more off hand, but I'll have to re-study some of that history.

[ktd222]

Virgil,

I've been gone the passed week. I would like to continue discussing the poem you posted. Is that ok with you?

[ktd222]

I think the poem is about the struggle between believing whole-heartedly in the existence of God and religion, and the 'coming' of the times. Does God exist? Their is to be a time when this Second Coming is suppose to happen. If the Second Coming passes without evidence, then what are we on earth left to believe? Certainly faith in God and religion becomes less believable.

So the thing(religion) that holds this world together, sane, and survivable, is diminishing as the Second Coming arrives without any evidence that God exist.
TURNING and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

[Virgil]

Does anyone know when Yeats wrote this poem and his religious inclinations?

Published in 1920/21. I'll give my thoughts on this poem later this week, but here's what the annotation in my Norton's Anthology of English Literature says on it:


This poem expresses Yeat's sense of the dissolution of the civilization of his time, the end of one cycle of history and the approach of another. He called each cycle of history a "gyre" (line 1)--literally a circular or spiral turn (Yeats pronouced it with a hard g). He imagines a falconer losing control of the falcon which sweeps in ever widening circles around him until it breaks away altogether, and sees this as a symbol of the end of the present gyre of civilization--what he once described as "all our scientific democratic fact-finding heterogenous civilization." The birth of Christ brought to an end the cycle that had lasted from what Yeats called the "Babylonian mathematical starlight" (2000 BC) to the dissolution of Greco-Roman culture. "What if the irrational return?" Yeats asked in the prose work A Vision. "What if the circle begin again?" He speculates that "we may be about to accept the most implacable authority the world has known." The new Nativity ("the rough beast" of lines 21-22) is deliberately mysterious, both terrible and regenerative.

Hopefully this didn't take the charm out of the poem. Yeats had a bunch of kooky ideas, and this cycle of history (I think he was wrong about the end of democratic, scientific civilization) is among them. But it's a great poem.

[chmpman]

XC,
The first few lines of this poem were included as a preface to Chinua Achebe's "Things Fall Apart", about the disintegration of African tribal culture in the face of missionaries and the encroachment of European technology. I'm not sure if this is the one you had in mind, but it is the only novel I'm familiar with offhand that quotes this poem.

[Xamonas Chegwe]

chmpman,

No, I believe it was a science fiction novel. But at the time I was reading about 2 or 3 a week, so it really could have been anything. There's a lot to be said for unemployment and a library card when you think about it. Nowadays I'm lucky to manage 2 -3 books in a month.

[Scheherazade]

Thanks everyone who answered my question re.date of the poem and Yeats' religious profile (Virgil, thanks for the extra info as well) :)


The poem was written in 1920, just after the 1st world war and is filled with the despair that Yeats felt after that catastrophe.I pretty much agree with this. I think the first part of the poem reflects a great disappointment and sense of despair; like Petrarch's Love's said, they are quite disturbing. Not being familiar with Yeats' theory of cycle of history, I thought the falconer = God is losing the control of things in the world, which is signalled by the WWI. After experiencing the war, things don't seem to make sense anymore: the chaos and suffering in the world along with lack of divine justice make people question their faith. The only hope, the Second Coming, does not seem promising or good enough either because the image offered is not a comforting one in the second part of the poem.

I find the title very poignant. Somehow I expect some hope or promise of something better but the poem does just the opposite. It acutely states that there is no hope.
So the thing(religion) that holds this world together, sane, and survivable, is diminishing as the Second Coming arrives without any evidence that God exist.I agree that the poem indicates that what is good in this world is diminishing fast but I am not sure that the Second Coming has actually happened. I feel there is a sense of expectation: things are so out of hand in the world that it would be a good time for it (even though it will not be a pleasant one).

[Petrarch's Love]

I agree that the poem indicates that what is good in this world is diminishing fast but I am not sure that the Second Coming has actually happened. I feel there is a sense of expectation: things are so out of hand in the world that it would be a good time for it (even though it will not be a pleasant one).

I agree that the second coming has not yet been realised. A lot of the punch of the poem is that it puts its reader in a state of nervous expectation that "some revelation is at hand...the Second Coming is at hand," and dread in the "rough beast slouching toward Bethlehem to be born." I wonder what people's thoughts are about that "rough beast." As I say, it certainly seems to be an object of dread and fear, and could be interpreted in the most cynical possible light as a sort of commentary on the potential of religion to ironically become the source of great anarchy and violence in religious wars etc. (the birth of the child in Bethlehem figured as the coming of a "rough beast," and tying in with the centuries "vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,"). At the same time, religious thought often invokes a right and worshipful fear or dread of God in His overwhelming power, and it is not unusual to tie birth or generation to pain and upheaval, so I wonder if there might be something to the interpretation cited by Virgil from the Norton, of the beast--and the poem as a whole--as "both terrible and regenerative." Is this poem devoid of hope, or hopeful in a terrifying birth through dramatic destruction kind of way? Thoughts?

[IrishCanadian]

"Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born"

I don't think its devoid of hope. The second comming seems to start off here the way Christ died the first time. In this sence it is litterally a second comming of the same. Being the same Christ that He is there is Love and Joy and all those other capital letter words of goodness. Perhaps the conotation is that this time around the Lord is going to have a tougher time and He knows it. In the mean time He still feels the effects of His last birth and death ... humanity is heavey on His bones. Thus the sad state of affairs which calls Him : "the falcon cannot hear the falconer." I think it is a hope-less poem so to speak but leaves room for hope. The world has once again reached such a a terrible terrible devastating conditioned that the extremity of the second comming is necessary.

[ktd222]

I am not sure that the Second Coming has actually happened. I feel there is a sense of expectation: things are so out of hand in the world that it would be a good time for it (even though it will not be a pleasant one).

Scher,

I agree.
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep...its hour come round at last,


Somehow I expect some hope or promise of something better but the poem does just the opposite. It acutely states that there is no hope

I also agree. The writer is unsure of the Second Coming himself.
Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

There is a question mark missing at the end of this poem. This question mark is important because it adds to the unsure-ness of the writer himself of this Second Coming. Even though he says 'surely'(an expectation) twice to begin this stanza, the writer himself is not fully convinced of it.
The best lack all conviction
There is a doubt growing in the writer.

[Taliesin]

We feel that the messiah in that poem is not a benevolent creature, but cruel and indifferent to the suffering of others.(A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun) Comes like a nightmare.
Uncaring how it's coming destroys all the beauty and pain of this world. Just wanting for that final battle.
We think that one wouldn't want that sort of an apocalyptic battle (even if it is between good and evil and good will probably win) happen in our lifetimes. It would be like the Chinese curse: "May you live in interesting times". One would like to have his ordinary, everyday life to be continued.
Well, we mean something in the style of "Good Omens" by Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett.
The author seems to have lost it's belief in God or thinks that it is not benevolent, but indifferent to human suffering.

[Xamonas Chegwe]

There is a question mark missing at the end of this poem. This question mark is important because it adds to the unsure-ness of the writer himself of this Second Coming. Even though he says 'surely'(an expectation) twice to begin this stanza, the writer himself is not fully convinced of it.
The best lack all conviction
There is a doubt growing in the writer.

I'm not sure about the missing question mark. A question mark would imply that Yeats is asking what kind of beast is slouching towards Bethlehem. But he has spent the stanza describing this beast. I see him as saying not "What rough beast?" but "What (a) rough beast." The 'a' being dropped to preserve rhythm.

Besides that though, it still confuses, hints at much unsaid, and beguiles me as much as it ever did.

[IrishCanadian]

Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born[/I]?
.
Well I missed the question mark. And to be honesnt I went to my Yeats anthology to see if it really is there. This makes sence to me now, what a depressing poem! And yet that makes perfect sence for him. The circle theme of the book this poem was published in dureing Yeat's life ("Micheal Robartes And The Dancer") would have hit on his fruitless love returning in its cirleing patterns as well as the wars in Europe that seemed to circle around him on the local and global levels. Almost every poem in that book is of political and violent strife. Perhaps then in this poem he is looking or waiting for the second comming to take place knowing that it is high time; but ther is nothing, not even a slouched beast.
Ireland at the time:
"A terrible Beauty is born."

[Virgil]

Oh, I almost forgot to add my thoughts on this poem.

First, my favorite lines are the openning lines: "Turning and turning in the widening gyre/The falcon cannot hear the falconer". What an incredible image for disintegration.

The first stanza sets the scene: society has reached a crises of unity, "anarchy" is abounding, some lack "conviction," the "worst are full of intensity." Conviction of what? Hold that thought.

"Surely some revelation is at hand": the "Second Coming is at hand" The collapse of society is linked to Christian ritual, the return of Christ. Society has lost conviction, 20 centuries of Christian faith but now in the 20th century following WWI and the Communist Revolution (there's a annotated note in Nortons that this is the portent that initiates the poem, but later in 1924 yeats generalized it to be all Fascism) a crises in belief in Christianity has occured. "The ceremony (another ritual) of innocence (Christ) is drowned" (perverse babtism).

Again Yeats repeats "The Second Coming", and if you include the title that's three times. Here's a strange line for a poem: "Hardly are those words out /when a vast image..." When does a poet tell you that words are out and that suddenly a new image "troubles" him? He's talking to you. he makes it so immediate, almost in front of your very eyes. "Spiritus Mundi" - the spirit of the universe is visiting him, sort of like the annunciation of Mary. But now it's not the Second Coming, or at least not in the traditional sense that will be born. It is the anti Christ, "the rough beast" who will bring "darkness" and "nightmare". And notice this:

somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again
Five lines enjambed as a single sentence. It flows as if it bursts out, and then the last five lines are a single sentence too. A shuddering horror!

[Petrarch's Love]

Hi, I just realized that no one's posted a poem yet, and I thought a love poem might be appropriate with Valentine's Day coming tomorrow. This is among my favorites and it's been in my mind a lot of late. I think it contains some of the most perfectly beautiful lines in the corpus of English love poetry.

THE GOOD MORROW

I WONDER by my troth, what thou and I
Did, till we loved ? were we not wean'd till then ?
But suck'd on country pleasures, childishly ?
Or snorted we in the Seven Sleepers' den ?
'Twas so ; but this, all pleasures fancies be ;
If ever any beauty I did see,
Which I desired, and got, 'twas but a dream of thee.

And now good-morrow to our waking souls,
Which watch not one another out of fear ;
For love all love of other sights controls,
And makes one little room an everywhere.
Let sea-discoverers to new worlds have gone ;
Let maps to other, worlds on worlds have shown ;
Let us possess one world ; each hath one, and is one.

My face in thine eye, thine in mine appears,
And true plain hearts do in the faces rest ;
Where can we find two better hemispheres
Without sharp north, without declining west ?
Whatever dies, was not mix'd equally ;
If our two loves be one, or thou and I
Love so alike that none can slacken, none can die.

--John Donne

[Petrarch's Love]

Oops..accidently posted twice but can't figure out how to delete this extra post. :rolleyes:

[Virgil]

Great pick Petrarch, and not only does it fit with Valentine's Day, but it fits with your reniassance persona!

Let me start. Three stanzas, and I always find that it helps to chart the progression of thought in a John Donne poem. First the setting: the narrator and his love awaken after of night of love.

Stanza 1: The narrator contemplates what life was like before his love.

Stanza 2: The morrow arrives and the narrator asserts that the world (as he now feels it) consists of only the two of them.

Stanza 3: The narrator concludes that the two of them are now one, two havles of a hemisphere.

Some structural observations: three stanzas of seven lines with the rhyme scheme A, B, A, B, C, C, C. Meter is iambic pentemeter, except that Donne is never strict with his iambs. Interestingly the last line of each stanza is 12 not 10 syllables.

I'll let others fill in and point out the internals of each stanza.

[Dry_Snail]

read the next post please .....

[Dry_Snail]

I am not familiar with Bukowski's works... I remember reading one of his poems somewhere here and liking it but... this one, I am afraid, does not do much for me... apart from getting an 'Ugh'. I am probably not deep/intelligent/learned/philosophical enough (delete as appropriate) to appreciate this. I don't mind raw writings but to me this is more than raw... a little unpalatable.

*edit*

Here is the other Bukowski thread (http://www.online-literature.com/forums/showthread.php?t=4151&highlight=bukowski)
you dont need to be a philospher to understand charles bukowski...you need to be sensitive and capable of realising and empathising to understand him. the etaphors used are way different than you might be used to ...the blue bedroom...green eyes....paperclip eyes....bright machine gun sun...these are the metaphores which bukowski use to intensify the effect of modernism on our sensitivities...read this :

"this whole thing is like a seal
caught on oily rocks
and circled by the Long Beach Marching Band
at 3:36 p.m."

the whole thing is like a seal caught on oily rock ....and da way he gives time "at 3.36 pm" the way we treat every creative aspect of life with the parameters of Time ....how ironically he puts his words to intensify the sarcasm whic is all around you ....

its easy to understand charles bukowski ...you just need to open your eyes ...you might be able relate it to ur life too...

No offense just wanted to clarify ....

[The Unnamable]

THE GOOD MORROW

I WONDER by my troth, what thou and I
Did, till we loved ? were we not wean'd till then ?
But suck'd on country pleasures, childishly ?
Or snorted we in the Seven Sleepers' den ?
'Twas so ; but this, all pleasures fancies be ;
If ever any beauty I did see,
Which I desired, and got, 'twas but a dream of thee.

And now good-morrow to our waking souls,
Which watch not one another out of fear ;
For love all love of other sights controls,
And makes one little room an everywhere.
Let sea-discoverers to new worlds have gone ;
Let maps to other, worlds on worlds have shown ;
Let us possess one world ; each hath one, and is one.

My face in thine eye, thine in mine appears,
And true plain hearts do in the faces rest ;
Where can we find two better hemispheres
Without sharp north, without declining west ?
Whatever dies, was not mix'd equally ;
If our two loves be one, or thou and I
Love so alike that none can slacken, none can die.

--John Donne


Look at the poem once more, remembering how it would have appeared in print in the seventeenth century.
http://i3.photobucket.com/albums/y73/stonemewhatalife/letters.jpg

Would anyone else agree that there is also a crude pun in the same line?


Enough of that – here is a fabulous description of what being in love does:

“And makes one little room an everywhere.”


Great stuff! But here’s my contribution to Valentine’s Day – from Tennyson:

“I ran upon life unknowing, without or science or art,
I found the first pretty maiden but she was a harlot at heart;
I wandered about the woodland after the melting of snow,
"Here is the first pretty snowdrop" - and it was the dung of a crow!”

[Petrarch's Love]

Yes, Unnamable, there probably is a little double entendre action going on in the third line (although I suppose it's really a double visable since the words don't actually sound the same). It's not an uncommon little pun for the period, although if this was intentional I think it must be there purely as a bit of titilation, since the alternate word you suggest doesn't really seem to make a lot of contextual sense at that point in the poem, at least to me--perhaps you can suggest a briliant new way to read the lines taking Donne's naughty sense of humor into account. :brow:

Thanks for the Tennyson Valentine's Day contribution, or should I say thanks for adding "dung" to the post on Donne (you've gotten me into a punning mood now). Your faith in women is truly touching. :rolleyes:

[Petrarch's Love]

Virgil--Thanks for pointing to the prosody of the verse. I suppose it's a bit like a rhyme royal with a Spenserian twist (sounds like some sort of chic literary cocktail), although rhyme royal would technically end bcc rather than ccc. The Spenserian twist being, of course, the alexandrine (12 sylllable) line at the end of each stanza. I've always thought this was one of the most inspired and eloquent ways of ending a line (metrically speaking that is), but then I work a fair amount with Spenser so I may be a bit biased.

It actually occured to me that two of my favorite lines in this poem happen to be these alexandrine endlines:


If ever any beauty I did see,
Which I desired, and got, 'twas but a dream of thee.
and

Let us possess one world ; each hath one, and is one.

especially the latter, with it's trinity of "one" and the way it plays with them being at once singular individuals and two who are one and the same.
I always thought these lines attracted me purely because of the sentiments expressed, but I wonder how much the scansion of the lines really played a role in making them stand out in my mind.

[Virgil]

Look at the poem once more, remembering how it would have appeared in print in the seventeenth century.
http://i3.photobucket.com/albums/y73/stonemewhatalife/letters.jpg

Would anyone else agree that there is also a crude pun in the same line?

I'm not sure I understand the image that you post. But there is sexual allusion throughout the poem: "sucked," "snorted", "slackened", "die" (in renaissance thought one died a little every time one had sex, or something like that), and of couse the two hiemisphere image is really an image of one body on top of another.

[Xamonas Chegwe]

Wasn't the 'f'-like 's' only used as the first of a double letter - eg. in succefs, abbefs, etc?

[Petrarch's Love]

Wasn't the 'f'-like 's' only used as the first of a double letter - eg. in succefs, abbefs, etc?

No, this wasn't necessarily the case, however I have seen some early books that do have the "f" look only for the first of a double "ss" as you describe. I'm not sure why this is so in some texts but not others, though I suspect it developed about the turn of the 17th century with some publishers slowly phasing in the modern "s" (don't quote me on this explanation however, I'll have to ask a paleographic aquaintance of mine about the history of the double ss). Also, the capital "S" is generally like our modern "s."

Anyway, I went ahead and looked on EEBO (Early English Books Online) at the 1633 edition of John Donne's poems in which "The Good Morrow" was first published, and the "s" Unnamable refers to has a definate "f" like appearance. For those wondering, EEBO is a site--unfortunately only accesible to the students and faculty of certain university libraries--which contains facsimile reproductions of nearly every book published in English between 1473 and 1700. I wanted to import a copy of the page with the poem to show--since it makes Unnamable's point pretty apparent--but there are unfortunately copyright restrictions on the reproductions, and I wouldn't want the archival police coming after me. ;) .

[Petrarch's Love]

(in renaissance thought one died a little every time one had sex, or something like that)

Of course all the sexual allusions Virgil points out are quite right. Just thought I'd elaborate, that the Renaissance association of death and sex comes from le petit mort, which literally means "the little death" but is also french for orgasm. :brow:

[Virgil]

Virgil--Thanks for pointing to the prosody of the verse. I suppose it's a bit like a rhyme royal with a Spenserian twist (sounds like some sort of chic literary cocktail), although rhyme royal would technically end bcc rather than ccc. The Spenserian twist being, of course, the alexandrine (12 sylllable) line at the end of each stanza. I've always thought this was one of the most inspired and eloquent ways of ending a line (metrically speaking that is), but then I work a fair amount with Spenser so I may be a bit biased.

It actually occured to me that two of my favorite lines in this poem happen to be these alexandrine endlines:

and
especially the latter, with it's trinity of "one" and the way it plays with them being at once singular individuals and two who are one and the same.
I always thought these lines attracted me purely because of the sentiments expressed, but I wonder how much the scansion of the lines really played a role in making them stand out in my mind.

You know, I first felt that the alexandrian lines were awkward, and I just attributed to Donne's unconventional metrics. But reading it again out loud, the last line of the stanzas really nails the meaning of the stanza down, and it is because of the extra syllables. That and the triplet rhyme. It really works very well.

[Virgil]

There are two things I can point out in "The Good-Morrow" that hasn't been discussed so far.

(1) The image of world and hemisphere that runs in the center of the poem is prominant and developed. It runs into several lines, a good portion of the poem:

Let sea-discoverers to new worlds have gone ;
Let maps to other, worlds on worlds have shown ;
Let us possess one world ; each hath one, and is one.
And then in the next stanza too. It emphazies the dichotome between the large world outside the "little room" where they wake and the world they've created in this little room with their love.

(2) "Whatever dies was not mixed equally" (line 19) is a line to ponder and leads into the concluding metaphor. Norton's has an annotation on that line:

Scholastic philosophy taught that when the elements were imperfectly ("not equally") mixed, matter was mortal and mutable; but when they were perfectly mixed, it was undying and unchanging. The dividing line between these two natures was the sphere of the moon.
And then Donne conludes with "If our two loves be one, or thou and I/Love so alike that none can slacken, none can die." What he's saying is that despite their love making, which should be a little death, since their love is perfectly mixed, it is outside mortality and so not a death.

[Petrarch's Love]

Yes, the world imagery is one of the highlights in this poem and, as you probably know, crops up over and over again in Donne's verse. Another of my favorite "world contracted" moments is at the end of "The Sunne Rising" which ends with him addressing the sun by saying "This bed thy center is, these walls, thy spheare." Donne lived in the age of exploration when expeditions were setting out to "new worlds" by sea and land, and Donne does a beautiful job of using the terms of the cartographer and the adventurer to explore the uncharted territory of personal relationships.

By chance we happened to be discussing Donne in one of my courses this week and we had a bit of a debate in class centering around the lover's chamber figured as the world. Part of the class felt that this sort of imagery is too contrived and "intellectual," rather than the sort of thing inspired by personal feelings of love. I myself have always felt very much the opposite. While it is obviously a very skillful and carefully thought out presentation of the metaphor, I feel that it was very much inspired by personal emotion. I've always thought this metaphor really beautifully and intensly encapsulates something that has crossed the mind of every pair of lovers--the desire to create an entire world unto themselves.


And then Donne conludes with "If our two loves be one, or thou and I/Love so alike that none can slacken, none can die." What he's saying is that despite their love making, which should be a little death, since their love is perfectly mixed, it is outside mortality and so not a death.

Very nicely put--dying and so not dying--typical Donne.

[Virgil]

By chance we happened to be discussing Donne in one of my courses this week and we had a bit of a debate in class centering around the lover's chamber figured as the world. Part of the class felt that this sort of imagery is too contrived and "intellectual," rather than the sort of thing inspired by personal feelings of love. I myself have always felt very much the opposite. While it is obviously a very skillful and carefully thought out presentation of the metaphor, I feel that it was very much inspired by personal emotion. I've always thought this metaphor really beautifully and intensly encapsulates something that has crossed the mind of every pair of lovers--the desire to create an entire world unto themselves.

I'm with you Petrarch. It is accurate. Even beyond just metaphor. I've been married 14, closer to 15 years, now and this home we've built and live in is our little world. There is almost a psychic dichotome between the outside world and this home we share.

[Virgil]

No one has posted a poem for the week's discussion. I'll give this a bump. Someone who hasn't posted in a month can post one. I've posted already this month. Is anyone out there that wants to discuss a poem?

[The Unnamable]

Before you go any further, let me say that when I wrote, “Would anyone else agree that there is also a crude pun in the same line?”, I was referring to ‘country pleasures’ in addition to ‘suck’d’.

[Virgil]

You mean replace the s in sucked with an f? I don't know. It doesn't quite fit into the sentece. And how far back does that f- word go back? I don't have my Oxford dictionary handy.

[The Unnamable]

You mean replace the s in sucked with an f? I don't know. It doesn't quite fit into the sentece. And how far back does that f- word go back? I don't have my Oxford dictionary handy.
Yes. What do you mean that it doesn’t quite fit into the sentence? It looks fine on my screen. What I like about Donne is that he writes the kind of love poetry that I can enjoy without having to disengage my rational faculties. He is, as I see him, honest about love. It includes sex, you know, despite what Auntie Wordsworth might have us believe. So the allusion to what it is about her that he really likes doesn’t destroy the poem for me, it adds another dimension, if you like. Besides, I was not harping on about the ‘f’, ‘s’ pun but the ‘country’ pun as in Hamlet’s ‘country matters’. Please tell me that I don’t need to send you a diagram!

[Petrarch's Love]

Ok, I thought maybe a diagram wasn't such a bad idea given that this keeps cropping up. As I said before, I'm not able to import the image of the original text I'm working from, but I've used the seventeenth century "S" Unnamable provided to write the word as it appears in the first publication of the poem (for any concerned monitors, honestly no censoring is neccesary, this is really the way they made the "s" four hundred years ago and the way the word originally appeared).

The "F" word was very much alive during this period. The OED cites the first use as a verb in 1503, though it wasn't used as a noun until 1680 (there's your four letter word trivia for the day ;)).

As for the "country pleasures," I think you're right on Unnamable (for anyone who doesn't get this one, just say the "count" part of "country" and think of female anatomy--I don't think the site would let me write that word here). As a matter of fact I'm not the only one who agreees with you on this. I looked up the line in Hamlet you refer to, and the note to that line in the Arden 3 edition refers the reader to "The Good Morrow" as another bawdy use of the term "country."

[Petrarch's Love]

I'm with you Petrarch. It is accurate. Even beyond just metaphor. I've been married 14, closer to 15 years, now and this home we've built and live in is our little world. There is almost a psychic dichotome between the outside world and this home we share.

On a totally different topic, Virgil, I just wanted to say that is incredibly sweet. It gives a single girl something to look forward to.:)

Also, I'd like to add my echo to Virgil's question: Is there anyone else out there who wants to POST A POEM?

[Virgil]

Yes. What do you mean that it doesn’t quite fit into the sentence? It looks fine on my screen. What I like about Donne is that he writes the kind of love poetry that I can enjoy without having to disengage my rational faculties. He is, as I see him, honest about love. It includes sex, you know, despite what Auntie Wordsworth might have us believe. So the allusion to what it is about her that he really likes doesn’t destroy the poem for me, it adds another dimension, if you like. Besides, I was not harping on about the ‘f’, ‘s’ pun but the ‘country’ pun as in Hamlet’s ‘country matters’. Please tell me that I don’t need to send you a diagram!
OK, between your post here and Petrarch's post following, you've convinced me it is possible, and knowing Donne's personality, at least in his younger days, it's quite possible he did do it intentionally. Yes, the country pun fits better than the "f" substitution. I didn't catch the country pun.

Are we having fun with language, or what! :D

[blp]

Is now a good time to post a new poem? Or should I have waited until Monday? Perhaps, if I've jumped the gun, we can wait until Monday to start talking about it.

I'm posting a poem I like, but barely understand:

Sad Strains of a Gay Waltz
by Wallace Stevens

The truth is that there comes a time
When we can mourn no more over music
That is so much motionless sound.

There comes a time when the waltz
Is no longer a mode of desire, a mode
Of revealing desire and is empty of shadows.

Too many waltzes have ended. And then
There’s that mountain-minded Hoon,
For whom desire was never that of the waltz,

Who found all form and order in solitude,
For whom the shapes were never the figures of men.
Now, for him, his forms have vanished.

There is order in neither sea nor sun.
The shapes have lost their glistening.
There are these sudden mobs of men,

These sudden clouds of faces and arms,
An immense suppression, freed,
These voices crying without knowing for what,

Except to be happy, without knowing how,
Imposing forms they cannot describe,
Requiring order beyond their speech.

Too many waltzes have ended. Yet the shapes
For which the voices cry, these, too, may be
Modes of desire, modes of revealing desire.

Too many waltzes–The epic of disbelief
Blares oftener and soon, will soon be constant.
Some harmonious skeptic soon in a skeptical music

Will unite these figures of men and their shapes
Will glisten again with motion, the music
Will be motion and full of shadows.

[Virgil]

Great blp. I was hoping someone would post. I love Wallace Stevens. He's probably in the top 2 or 3 poets of the 20th century for me. Let me read through this, since I don't recognize it and have some comments tonight.

[rachel]

hi blp I hope your day is good.
I haven't really sunk myself deeply into it yet, but upon skimming it seems to be a rather even blend of french symbolism=music and imagism=sculpture. Very precise and beautiful, it gave me shivers and a dreamy feeling all at the same time. great choice.

[Xamonas Chegwe]

I'm posting a poem I like, but barely understand:

I can see exactly what you mean.

I know Wallace didn't write most of his poetry until later life and there seems to be a theme of looking backwards from age here, "Too many waltzes have ended" starts 2 stanzas and the first 3 words a third. That was my immediate reaction, but I can see that I'm going to have to read it a few more times before I can offer much more.

Thanks for posting it, I'm not familiar with his work so it's completely new to me - I may need to look up some more of his work to build an overview of his themes.

[blp]

>>>>>>>>>>>>>>

[blp]

Hi Rachel. My day was OK, thanks. I was a bit sleepy for a lot of it. Hope yours was good.
Can you say a bit more about these symbolism/music, imagism/sculpture relationships?

[Petrarch's Love]

Thanks for posting BLP. Well, I'll have to agree with you and some of the others who posted. I like the sound of this poem but I feel it is dancing around something I can't quite understand. For the moment a few disjointed impressions: Each of the stanzas has three lines, just like the three beat measure of a waltz. Despite this three beat form, the poem insistently, almost nihilistically seems to reject the notion of any form or stability. I find something profoundly chilling about a poem that can regard music as "so much motionless sound."

And a few questions: I know almost nothing about Steven's life and experiences, but this poem seems to refer to some great change (either personal or social) he experienced. Is it simply the experience of age? Could this poem have been written during the Depression era? Some of the images, such as the crowds of men,

There are these sudden mobs of men,
These sudden clouds of faces and arms,
An immense suppression, freed,
These voices crying without knowing for what,
make me think of the crowds of displaced and unemployed that must have suddenly arisen in this era just after the up times in the twenties. That sort of broad social change would certainly account for a sudden distrust in the power of art, music, dancing in the face of a harsh reality. Also, who or what is "Hoon"? I'd be interested to hear from anyone who knows more about the context of this poem or the life of its poet.

Just some thoughts. I'll sign off for now and maybe post something more coherent after additional thought.

[blp]

Thanks Petrarch's Love. Your thoughts are similar to some of the so far vague guesswork I've been doing. I was wondering if the three-line stanzas related to the structure of a waltz and was also thinking about how it might relate to history. Don't know exactly when Stevens was writing, but this poem seems to me to have a similar relationship to chaos to that of other works from the first half of the twentieth century, especially Yeats' 'The Second Coming' (things fall apart, the centre cannot hold etc.) Another Stevens poem is actually called Connoisseur of Chaos and begins, 'A. A violent order is disorder; and/B. a great disorder is an order. These/Two things are one. (Pages of illustrations)'. I wondered if this sort of tendency might be more to do with Einstein and the sudden, shocking modernity of the twentieth century. But the Depression theory works for me too, maybe better - that bit you quoted is my favourite part of the poem, by the way.

I wanted to discuss just impressions for a while, but I know, because I stumbled on it when looking for the text of the poem, that there's an essay about it on the web, which may clear a few things up eventually. Glancing at that I found out that Hoon was a philosopher. Other than that, I know that Stevens was an insurance man for a lot of his life - and is therefore known as 'The insurance man of American Letters'.

[Virgil]

I'll use this post to put out what I know of Stevens, and then perhaps tomorrow I'll tackle the poem itself.

Yes, he was an insurance man, and rose to be vice president of the company. He wrote in his spare time and really didn't publish first book until his forties. I had a teacher who told a story that after he had passed away and a biographer went to some of the people who he worked with and they were startled and said something to the effect, "You mean old Wally wrote poems?" There's also a story about him getting into a fight with Hemingway down in the Florida Keys, I think. He lived from 1879-1955. This poem, "Sad Strains of a Gay Waltz" was published in 1936 in a collection he called Ideas of Order. I think title of the book reflects a lot of the themes in the poems. The most famous and often anthologized poem from that collection is called "The Idea of Order at Key West." One other note, in terms of reputation, Wallace Stevens is among the top American poets of the 20th century, and in some critics estimation the top American poet, surpassing even T.S. Eliot. He is very conscious of his American language ("mountain-minded Hoon" for instance), and a friend to that other very American poet of his era, William Carlos Williams.

I must say that as much as I love Stevens, and no matter how often I read him and the same poem over and over, I can never fully grasp him. The posts above reacting in this way are common. It's almost like trying to grasp water; it just flows away. And yes, Rachel I believe he was infleuenced by the Symbolists, at least stylistically.

There are two extreme styles that Stevens uses. One is very sensual (not in the sexual sense, but in the use of tangible hard imagery), spilled over profusely. The other, which is the case with "Sad Strains" is the extreme opposite, sparseness of imagery, almost purely using abstractions. You have to be a great poet writing almost purely with abstract words and get away with it. You almost never see Stevens fail. Even when he does here use tangible nouns, look at how he pushes them away from feeling them: "motionless sound," "empty of shadows," "shapes were never the figures of men," "clouds of faces and arms". The great word in this poem that is so characteristic of Stevens (he just comes up with these things) is "Hoon" and I can't find what the word means. But what's key here is that it's "mountain-minded". I think this means (since I've come across similar in other Stevens poems) is that the poem (or at least part of the poem) is looking through the eyes and mind of Hoon.

Other things about his work. A constant theme is music, as here. Another is understanding how we piece the outside world together in out minds. He shares that in common with Virginia Woolf, in that respect, but I don't know if he ever read her. There is a lot of color symbolism throughout his work, but none I think in this poem. He uses this three line iambic pentameter stanza (almost like an unrhymed terza rima) very frequently. I've never understood it. But there must be a reason for his format. He's constantly writing about aestheitics, so the shape of his works have to be thought through, but I get baffled by it. Plus he's too good a craftsman of poetry to not think that through.

As I look at this poem in my Stevens: Collected Poetry and Prose I notice that the next poem (I believe laid out in the sequence of the original printing) is a counter piece to "Sad Strains" in the opposing style I mentioned above. It's short enough for me to copy it for your pleasure:


Dance of the Macabre Mice

In the land of turkeys in turkey weather
At the base of the statue, we go round and round.
What a beautiful history, beautiful surprise!
Monsieur is on horseback. The horse is covered with mice.

This dance has no name. It is a hungry dance.
We dance it out to the tip of Monsieur's sword,
Reading the lordly language of the inscription,
Which is like zithers and tambourines combined:

The Founder of the State. Whoever founded
A state that was free, in the dead of winter, from mice?
What a beautiful tableau tinted and towering,
The arm of bronze outstretched against all evil!

[chmpman]

Thanks Virgil.

Another bit about Stevens I would like to add is his interest in different perspectives. I've read a couple Stevens poems that play with the idea of multiple viewpoints (I can't remember the names of two, something about a blackbird, and another about men crossing a bridge; but also The Man with the Blue Guitar).

A reply to Petrarch: Where he mentions "so much motionless sound" I get the impression that he is talking about the waltzes of the past, and so if they are not being played currently there is no motion. This scientific understanding of music interests me, and I always figured Stevens to be influenced by Einstein and modern science, but never really thought about the Depression era influence. Something to think about. In his poem The man with the Blue Guitar, supposedly inspired by a Picasso painting, he is concerned with artistic creation and how this relates to the general society in which the art is created. I think Stevens was influenced by the modern art movement, so much of his work is centered around aesthetics; but also the pre-Existential vein of philosphy.

Also, in The Man with the Blue Guitar Stevens employs the sun, sea, and shadow symbolism. I'll have to get back here with what that means in relation to this poem though.

[blp]

There's a trajectory to it that you can chart via 'shadows' and 'glistening'. We first learn that both have vanished. By the end, there's a promise that they will return. Shadows are seen as a good thing - perhaps because they provide definition, absent in the clouds, order required beyond speech etc. in the middle of the poem.

[The Unnamable]

This is extremely complicated and does leave me rather cold to be honest. It’s a bit like something that would have been written by a cross between Wittgenstein and TS Eliot. Still, it’s nice to see a clever American. :D
Here’s how I see it:


1. Music has (for a reason I don’t understand) lost some vital quality/purpose that Stevens ascribes to it. It appears that it has simply been reduced to sound, no longer generating the kinds of social interaction that it does when in the form of, say, a waltz. In this sense it is no longer dynamically generating something more than itself. By this, I mean that it isn't just noise/sound but has a social purpose/function. I am assuming that Stevens thinks music should not be ‘motionless’. This is, presumably, a sad state of affairs. However, there comes a time when we must stop lamenting this loss (I don’t mean as in an order – such as ‘You must stop doing that’ but more as in ‘we must simply get on with our lives). He suggests why later (I think).


2. Is he here expanding on the idea of music’s relegation to mere sound? What has been lost from music are those things it signifies beyond the level of mere sound. I assume that to be ‘empty of shadows’ is a negative thing. Shadows are good because they provide the possibility of nuance and uncertainty, which, as long as they don’t become anarchic, are positive things. They are representative of the mysteries that prevent life from being merely mechanical. If we reduce music to sound as a physical phenomenon, as a series of waves (which I suppose it is), then we are left with some impersonal, physical fact. We endow sound with meaning and significance.
Side note - Desire – a longing for something you don’t yet have and shadows are a sign of something that is there but not actually present in the shadow itself.


3 and 4. I have no idea who Hoon is. To me, ‘mountain-minded’ suggests something unchanging, heavy and solid to the point of being impenetrably dense. Hoon is certainly an unusual name (unfortunately, there is a British politician called Geoff Hoon but this is only the second time I’ve seen the name). It’s almost pseudo-biblical, like Onan, to whom he seems similar. The significant thing about Hoon is that he appears to be utterly self-contained, perhaps even solipsistic. He does seem to be taking part in some search for “form and order” but for him, “desire was never that of the waltz”, which I take to mean that his search for “form and order” doesn’t involve social interaction, i.e. other people. This is also why for Hoon, “the shapes were never the figures of men.” He doesn’t register them as an existent other. They are merely shapes in Hoon’s solipsistic world. The passing of waltzes doesn’t affect him. In the past (‘found’) Hoon was able to find order, presumably because his success relied on nothing but himself.
However, even for Hoon the ‘forms have vanished’. Again, I don’t know why. To gather that together, neither the narrator, who registers a world beyond the self, nor Hoon, who doesn’t, is able to find form and order any longer.


5, 6 and 7 The first two end-stopped lines reiterate the loss that has occurred but then he next seven lines are one long, clause-heavy sentence. This has the effect of accelerating our progress through a series of suddenly quite threatening images. It’s as if something has been unleashed. Form and order are fractured.


8. This is where it gets really hard to understand. I think he is being optimistic (no wonder I ‘m having trouble). I think he’s saying that even these “mobs of men” are searching for form and order and, although it’s difficult to see it amid the apparent chaos, they do so in a way that is possibly generative of new forms and orders.


9 and 10 Is the fact that “Too many waltzes -” is not appended by ‘have ended’ a suggestion that he is accepting that there have been too many waltzes and now it’s time for a different mode? The chaos is approaching ever nearer and will soon have dominion (“The epic of disbelief/Blares oftener and soon, will soon be constant”). However, there is hope. Someone who is aware of what’s at stake will find a method that enables the dynamic energies of the “mobs of men” to respond to and be channelled by a new mode of expression. Whether that “harmonious skeptic” is the poet and the “skeptical music” his poetry, I don’t know. I think I would favour more the idea that it’s someone or something else.

I take it as a poem about sadly acknowledging the passing of one kind of order for another. This doesn’t happen quietly and without alarm but Stevens nevertheless appears somehow reassured by the end.

As I say, it leaves me rather cold. I can admire it but I can’t warm to it. I have read a few of Stevens’ poems that I like but this was new to me.

[blp]

Good, yes. I think you're right about most of this, but it's funny how exegisis can kill things a bit. There's another Stevens poems that I'd still rank one of my favourites - The Emperor of Icecream, but it was spoiled just a little for both me and a friend when his college poetry tutor told him what it was about. We'd thought it was all just itself, somehow.

I think I'll get back to liking this one for its language too and maybe I'll even realise there's more to it than you say, but for the moment a lot of that seems right - and a bit banal. Out of order, chaos, out of chaos, order. Ho hum. Still, the sudden mobs of men take it out of abstraction. They work for me for every historical moment in which such mobs arise and brilliantly evoke something seismic and sublime - in the sense of overwhelming, awe-inspiring and frightening. The reminder of that very chaos' desire for order hits me too. The emotion of this - and that, in relation to the sadness and solitude evoked elsewhere - are what hook me and save the thing from being some humdrum discussion of some eternal cycle. It reminds me a lot of the sound of rioting at the beginning of The Smiths' Last Night I Dreamt that Somebody Loved Me and, I think, works in a very similar way to the way that plays off the sadness and longing of that song. And already I'm back to liking it.

Also, Unnamable, unless I've misunderstood you, I think you've missed a tiny bit at the beginning. Isn't the sound motionless simply because the waltzes have ended? As in All good things - love affairs, just politics etc. And, yes, at some point you get used to it - and become skeptical of the Waltz in general.

[Grumbleguts]

I found a reference to 'Hoon' as Stevens' personification of 'Man alone' in a search. But only in one site. I found another that says he is a philosopher, but I can't find a phiolosopher of that name.

Stevens wrote another poem called "Tea at the Palaz of Hoon", which is equally impenetrable.

I will keep digging. Who is Hoon really?

[The Unnamable]

Good, yes. I think you're right about most of this, but it's funny how exegisis can kill things a bit.
I really didn’t mean to kill it. I’d hoped people would offer different views and some possible answers to the bits I can’t get. Still, it’s early yet.

What you call exegesis is simply the way I try to make sense of a poem. I assume that it means something rather than anything and also assume that there is some kind of coherence there. Sometimes the poem tries to be anything rather than something and a lack of coherence is deliberate. You make it sound as if I’ve made a Papal pronouncement on what the poem ‘means’. I’ve just explained what I see it as ‘meaning’ (at least the bits of it that I understand).


There's another Stevens poems that I'd still rank one of my favourites - The Emperor of Icecream, but it was spoiled just a little for both me and a friend when his college poetry tutor told him what it was about. We'd thought it was all just itself, somehow.
I have really mixed feelings about this. Obviously I can sympathise with you. I like The Emperor of Ice-Cream because I know ‘what it’s about’. I don’t mean that I feel like one of the select few! I mean that only by knowing that there is reference to a funeral can I appreciate the absurd humour. There wasn’t much ice cream at most of the funerals I’ve attended. :lol: This raises a very difficult issue. Do you allow students to generate their own meanings or do you push them in a certain direction? If I don’t make them aware of the funeral, then they will miss something that Stevens presumably took the time and effort to include. I know that the author is dead and all but I tend to think that I am not doing justice to the person who wrote it if I allow something that is particularly clever/effective/evocative etc. to go unnoticed. My job as a teacher is to encourage an appreciation of Literature. To do this, I have to demonstrate why certain lines, say, are powerful/effective/clever and so on. My own enthusiasm for what I think is good certainly generates some appreciation. The problem for some people is that they think I am imposing my own readings and to an extent I am. I feel the years of study and reading have given me some degree of authority to do so. People tend to accept this idea when it comes to doctors, lawyers and even many teachers but when it comes to Literature, there is uneasiness.

Often, students will try to hide a lack of basic understanding by offering nebulous suggestions about what certain lines could ‘mean’. I’m not trying to suggest that you have done this, by the way. These suggestions can be imaginative but when you have a poet like Plath for instance, who writes with almost forensic precision at times, I think similar clarity and precision are needed in the response. You can’t appreciate a line of Plath’s like “the black amnesias of heaven” if you think the phrase refers to a dark-petalled flower.


I think I'll get back to liking this one for its language too and maybe I'll even realise there's more to it than you say,
Oh, dear! Of course there is! I haven’t produced the definitive reading! It hardly amounts to a reading at all. Crushing though it would be, I’d now like to see someone dispose of my reading and offer something totally different and far more convincing.

I’m not sure what you mean by “liking this one for its language too”. Do you mean as well as for its ‘meaning’? I’m sure that even if you are unable to forget my exegesis (not at all likely), you will still encounter the poem time and again with fresh insights. Have you really lost the ability to enjoy The Emperor of Ice-Cream? Can’t what you know now help you to enjoy it more? Perhaps it’s more a reflection of the context in which you first encountered it. The experience of discussing it with your friend is what made that particular encounter special in some way. It’s as if you’ve suddenly realised that the girl who was your first love was as ugly as sin and nowhere near as interesting. :D

Sometimes (actually, quite often) I remember lines that I have heard or read many times, in a particular context. I don’t know if you know Richard III but there is a scene when Buckingham asks Richard for the lands he had been promised as a reward for helping him to the throne. Richard is suspicious of Buckingham for responding coolly to a suggestion that the princes should be murdered. He delays giving him the land, as punishment. Buckingham pushes and Richard responds,

“I am not in the giving vein today”.

A student once asked me to buy some flower or something for charity. The line popped into my head and I delivered it.


but for the moment a lot of that seems right - and a bit banal.
What I wrote or the poem? If you mean the poem, I don’t think it’s banal and as I said, I can admire it. If you mean, what I wrote, I’m sorry.


some humdrum discussion of some eternal cycle.
I hope that’s not how you think I see the poem. You make me feel as if I’ve torn out a huge swathe of your childhood. “He took my childhood in his stride.” Look out, the Grim Reaper is coming!



It reminds me a lot of the sound of rioting at the beginning of The Smiths' Last Night I Dreamt that Somebody Loved Me and, I think, works in a very similar way to the way that plays off the sadness and longing of that song. And already I'm back to liking it.
:D ;) I knew you should have faith in Stevens. I don’t like a lot of his stuff but I don’t think it’s in any way bad – just a bit too cold – like Donne would be without the wit.


Also, Unnamable, unless I've misunderstood you, I think you've missed a tiny bit at the beginning. Isn't the sound motionless simply because the waltzes have ended?
Yes, I agree. I think I dived straight into the bits I found more problematic.


As in All good things - love affairs, just politics etc. And, yes, at some point you get used to it - and become skeptical of the Waltz in general.
You make it sound much more like resignation than I think it is. In a way, I think Stevens is celebrating the new as well as lamenting the passing of the old.

PS Love affairs are not one of the "good things" on my list. ;)

[tn2743]

I think this poem is about a woman.

[The Unnamable]

I think this poem is about a woman.
Her name wouldn’t be Matilda, would it?

[blp]

Sorry, Unnamable, I had no intention of implying your reading was definitive, that you'd killed the poem, that what you'd said was banal, that you'd torn out etc. Gah. Oh well.

All I was trying to say was that I have mixed feelings about the process of interpretation. Sometimes it can be intriguing, sometimes your romantic analogy is more how it feels - but I'd say it's more like realising that someone who'd seemed fascinating is actually quite shallow. I did start to feel something like that (about the poem) reading your post, but that was up to me and it was because I agreed with what (I thought) you said. I didn't resent you for saying what you did. I wasn't saying you shouldn't have said it or accusing you of being dull or authoritarian, just commenting on the risk of let down when interpretation demystifies something - but I posted the poem and I knew the risk and I certainly didn't expect people to not interpret it. I was very curious to see what people would say about it. So thanks for your detailed input, honestly.

No, I still love The Emperor of Icecream. The disappointment was not in finding out that it was about a funeral, which seems clear from the 'spread it so as to cover her face' line, but that, specifically, it was about a Mexican funeral - where all the elements described - wenches in such dress as they are used to wear, concupiscent curds, and the emperor of icecream himself, were said by my friend's teacher to be traditional. What we'd thought was Stevens' brilliant invention turned out to be taken from real life. Well, nothing comes from nothing and it may have been naive of us to think it did.

The thing I said about coming back to the language - no, I don't mean separately from the meaning, but I think on the whole in poetry, the language is what makes the difference. The painter Willem de Kooning said, 'Content is small' and, while it's not a universally applicable statement, it often applies in poetry, where the content can be as small as 'I fancy you', 'I'm sorry you died', 'My dad screwed me up' etc. And the language is the first thing for me with the Waltz poem - as well as the thing that saved it for me when I started to doubt it. Part of that, unsurprisingly, is to do with the meaning it suggests, and in doubting it, I must admit, I started to wonder if it was a smoke and mirrors act - because the poem does a grand job of suggesting that its content might be fairly big and, unfortunately, I really do think now, for now, that it's describing a rather pat transition from order to chaos to order again. I can see there's more to it than that, but just the fact that it's there at all bothers me a little, especially as the thematic structure of the poem. Maybe it's a bit too optimistic for me too. That said, it leaves me with puzzles that are sort of pleasurably troubling.

Yes, I think there is some resignation in the beginning. It doesn't rule out what you say - the end does seem optimistic, but the hope is said to be in skepticism. Also, even at the beginning, there may be optimism: 'mourn no more' implies this, it's just that it sounds like a hope born out of some loss of illusion.


PS Love affairs are not one of the "good things" on my list.
Couldn't be because 'too many have ended' could it? ;) That's what I was driving at in describing a kind of resignation.



I can't find a philosopher of that name.

Mmm. At some point I'll crack and look this up too, but I'm still sticking to my impressions. But yeah, I've never heard of a philosopher called Hoon.


I think this poem is about a woman.
Why?

[tn2743]

Hi Unnamable. Why Matilda?

PS. Great analysis on post #179

I found it very interesting that you have analysed it by the construction of each verse. There are, or seem to be, a lot of changes in the tone and rhythm between each verse, which you have identified. I like your analysis of verses 5, 6, and 7 about how form and order are fractured by the change of pace and images.

"I take it as a poem about sadly acknowledging the passing of one kind of order for another. This doesn’t happen quietly and without alarm but Stevens nevertheless appears somehow reassured by the end." p#179

Maybe (it's a big maybe, I won't dare challenging you) this poem does not focus on the changes of form and order so much as focusing on the necessary processes that come with it, including mourning, remorse, and moving on. And maybe simply “change” isn’t enough, but loss, rejection may be more appropriate.

Hoon, I think, is the symbol of the ego, the internal perceptions. Hoon "found all form and order in solitude." But none was external; the orders and forms that Hoon found were never real, "for whom the shapes were never the figures of men." That’s why he is unhappy with the order that he found. Hoon, to me, is very lonely, almost imprisoned and tortured. For I can think of no worse torture than being able to find all form and order (meaning everything, or justice perhaps), but still be unsatisfied. What else can Hoon do? And vice versa. Hoon found the "mode of desire, a mode of revealing desire" of the real world through the waltz, only to find that it is not what he wants at all, and that for him "desire was never that of the waltz." Because he had found order and form in solitude before the waltz even started.

Hoon is torn between mourning an inevitable loss and pride. If he is fine in solitude, why should he mourn? But he does mourn, because Hoon is weaker than reality. Hoon is the embodiment of sorrow. Hoon himself is not sorrow, for he clings on to the waltz and doesn't want it to end. He's afraid of being forgotten when changes will be adapted to.

Loss, especially an inevitable loss, is unbearable by the lonely mind. But there comes a time when the mind must wake up and interact with the world, whose sceptics
"Will unite these figures of men and their shapes
Will glisten again with motion, the music
Will be motion and full of shadows."
Hoon is dead then, as is the sorrow of loss and being rejected. It will only happen when the waltz ends, but when it plays again, the inevitable process repeats itself.

Am I making any sense?

[Virgil]

Good observations above. Here are some of my observatuions, of which I can't still put together the overall theme.

The poem seems to be divided into four parts:

(1) Up through the first sentence of the third stanza, "...waltzes have ended." Here it there is a postive outlook by the narrator. Unpacked it could read as: The time for mourning over motionless sound is no longer possible; music/waltz is no longer in a mode of desire. Mode is a key word here, and I pun on key. Mode in music usually refers to being in a minor or major key. Another loaded word here is "truth." When a writer tells you "the truth" you better take notice.

(2) The second part starts with "And then..." And here the mode shifts to a minor key, a pessimistic outlook from the point of view of Hoon, all because of his solitude. Forms have vanished. A sort of chaos is percieved, no order in "sea or sun." Alone he cannot formulate the world.

(3) Suddenly, "mobs of men" show up, the opposite of Hoon's solitude, a third shift in point of view. And here it jumps back to a major key, "happy, without knowing how/Imposing forms they cannot describe/Requiring order beyond their speech," an abundance of positive associations. And he ties this back to the first section, "Too many waltzes have ended," linking the narrator with the mob or vice versa.

(4) "Yet..." a signal for another and final transition. Who's point of view here? I think it's back to the narrator. Here he glorifies the voices of the mob, equating it to the waltz ("too, may be/Modes of desire"). What is he doing here at the end? Bringing it back full circle? Ostracizing Hoon? He amputates the rondeau lyric, "Too many waltzes--" and then he starts the next sentence "The epic of disbelief." Disbelief? Who's? He then follows that up with the very unmusical "Blares oftener" (ugly and awkward) and repeats the word "soon" three times in two lines. Is "soon" an echo back to Hoon? And is Hoon the "harmonious skeptic"? I think so, but not sure. And he ends the last stanza with the affirmative "Will" three times, each at the beginning of each line. This fourth section seems to tie the themes together.


So, is Hoon, in his solitude, the creator of the poem? "Mountain-minded I think refers to being with a mind in the clouds, away from the mobs of men. Does it take the solitary mountain-minded Hoon, the one who doesn't feel desire in the waltz, to piece together "men and their shapes" and their happiness?

It's a reading.

[The Unnamable]

Hi Unnamable. Why Matilda?
I thought you were being humorous when you simply threw in your remark above without explanation. The only woman I could think of with a strong association to waltzes was ‘Waltzing Matilda’.


Maybe this poem does not focus on the changes of form and order so much as focusing on the necessary processes that come with it, including mourning, remorse, and moving on. And maybe simply “change” isn’t enough, but loss, rejection may be more appropriate.
I’d happily accept that. The bit of mine you quoted was just a tired attempt to summarise what I’d said before.

I’m not sure about your comments on Hoon. I don’t think he was unhappy or even unfulfilled in his self-contained world, at least not until the change that the narrator registers occurs.

[The Unnamable]

specifically, it was about a Mexican funeral.
I don’t see this.

“We cannot know what personal events prompted this 1922 poem, apparently set in Key West (so the poet Elizabeth Bishop conjectured, who knew Key West, where Cubans worked at the machines in cigar factories, where blacks always had ice cream at funerals),”
From The Columbia History of American Poetry Ed. Jay Parini and Brett C. Miller. New York: Columbia UP, 1993.


Couldn't be because 'too many have ended' could it? ;) That's what I was driving at in describing a kind of resignation.

No – it’s because ‘too many have started’. ;)

Thanks for clearing up the rest.

[tn2743]

Virgil,

I agree that the poem is divided into 4 parts and at the points that you suggested. I like the analysis of the word ‘mode’. I think you’re right, the reason that it is there is because the author was referring particularly to music. Maybe he is being very specific and does not want the reader to stray off this line of thinking. Maybe he repeats “too many waltzes have ended” for this purpose.

From your observation, I notice that the author puts a lot of weight on a few words. Besides, as you pointed out, ‘mode’ and ‘truth’ and, of course, ‘waltz’, I think the words ‘form’ and ‘order’ are also important; because they are the only link between Hoon and the mobs of men. Both seek form and order: Hoon “found all form and order in solitude” and the mobs were “Imposing forms they cannot describe/Requiring order beyond their speech.” But only Hoon found form and order, the mobs of men tried but in vain.

The difference between them is that Hoon is alone, and the mobs of men are many. I love the phrase “clouds of faces and arms.” It seems almost an inhuman description of something that is human. When I read it I imagine a cloud of heads and arms sticking out in random places (childish, I know). The mobs, made up of humans of perfect form and order like Hoon, are together mutated in form and order, which is why they cannot define exactly what they want: “These voices crying without know for what.”

I love that you have viewed the poem as a song: “…the mode shifts to a minor key” and “…it jumps back to a major key.” I also thought that the poem should be read in the time frame of the “gay waltz”. All of this happens during the waltz.

“And is Hoon the "harmonious skeptic"?” I don’t think that Hoon is the skeptic. I thought that it is the skeptic who will end Hoon (I think I explained it in my original poster). And the skeptic cannot be the mobs of men, because he “will unite these figures of men.” Maybe the skeptic is a third party, the musician perhaps. The musician plays another waltz, ending solitude and making sense of the mobs of men’s desire. …maybe

[blp]

“We cannot know what personal events prompted this 1922 poem, apparently set in Key West (so the poet Elizabeth Bishop conjectured, who knew Key West, where Cubans worked at the machines in cigar factories, where blacks always had ice cream at funerals),”
From The Columbia History of American Poetry Ed. Jay Parini and Brett C. Miller. New York: Columbia UP, 1993.

Seems to have been some Chinese whisper process going on between my friend's tutor, me and, perhaps, my memory of the whole thing. Presumably it was something more like a Cuban funeral.

I'll read over the rest of what's been going on when i have a bit of time. Looks interesting.

[Virgil]

“And is Hoon the "harmonious skeptic"?” I don’t think that Hoon is the skeptic. I thought that it is the skeptic who will end Hoon (I think I explained it in my original poster). And the skeptic cannot be the mobs of men, because he “will unite these figures of men.” Maybe the skeptic is a third party, the musician perhaps. The musician plays another waltz, ending solitude and making sense of the mobs of men’s desire. …maybe
Thank you for you comments. I think you're right on everything you say. Hoon may not be the skeptic. So let's count the characters: the narrator, the poet if he is different than the narrator (I'm not sure), Hoon, the mob, and the skeptic. So who is the skeptic? Is he the narrator, the poet, or a separate entity? Is the skeptic part of the mob? I also just noticed that the narrator in the second line positions himself as part of a group, "we can mourn..."

[The Unnamable]

“And is Hoon the "harmonious skeptic"?”
I don’t see how this can refer to Hoon, either. The phrase itself perhaps tells us enough. In stanza 8, Stevens uses ‘Yet’ and ‘may’ when considering the crowds. He is not certain that they are expressing a ‘rage for order’. They could simply be a destructive, anarchic force that cannot be channelled.

When we look back at a past era, we tend to think of it as having been a more innocent time, a time when we could enjoy simpler pleasures. Today we think everyone is more knowing, less satisfied with the unsophisticated. Obviously each succession generation will come to feel this. (On a banal note, I can remember when I first saw the original Star Wars movie. I was amazed by the special effects. Yet when I watched it with my 12 year old niece last year, she said that she thought it was ‘okay’ but that some of the special effects were a bit ‘old-fashioned’.) I think there is something similar going on here – Stevens is positive and assumes that there is the same need for order in these mobs as that which exists in the rest of us. Therefore future harmony will be possible. What the mobs really want could be to kill and destroy but Stevens believes that what they really want is order. However, he is positive but not blindly optimistic - he is also aware that he could simply be underestimating the destructive force of the mobs so he will need to tread carefully. If we think of some of the mobs of twentieth century history, we can see why. Some of those mobs of men went on to be enlisted by Stalin and Hitler.

If the mob’s rage can be brought within some kind of artistic expression, then “their shapes/Will glisten again with motion, the music/Will be motion and full of shadows.” Stevens believes it can but that it will take someone more aware of the potential for evil than those who provided form and order in the past. They will need to be ‘skeptical’ in their attempt to restore harmony. It will take a “harmonious skeptic” producing “skeptical music”.

The reason I suggested earlier that Stevens might be the “harmonious skeptic” and his poetry the “skeptical music” was because of what the mobs are said to be lacking: “they cannot describe” and “order beyond their speech”. So the emphasis is on verbal expression.


Interestingly, you like Stevens’ use of a word that is part of the reason I don’t like the poem.

The definitions of ‘mode’ include usage in Music (as Virgil pointed out), Philosophy, Logic, Statistics, Mathematics, Geology, Physics and Grammar. It’s too impersonal for me – as are his uses of ‘form’ and ‘order’.

Donne does something similar with his uses of the language of Alchemy, Science, Cartography and Geometry to describe human emotions. However, Donne is clever and witty in a way that Stevens isn’t.

[Virgil]

Unnamable - You make some good points here, but there is one place where I think you're off target.


What the mobs really want could be to kill and destroy but Stevens believes that what they really want is order.

Where is that from? "Kill and destroy?" I don't see any suggestion of good/evil association. What I see are distictions of points of view. And the ability of a skeptic, outside the mob, to piece together order, form, and art, while the mob, in it's energy, lacks this ability.



However, Donne is clever and witty in a way that Stevens isn’t.
This poem perhaps. But you haven't read all of Stevens. The poem I typed out above that followed this in the collection is very funny. It's comically absurd.

[The Unnamable]

”Unnamable - You make some good points here, but there is one place where I think you're off target.
Managed to find one, then? ;)


Where is that from? "Kill and destroy?"
I didn’t say that it what they will do but what they could do. I base this on the fact that the word Stevens has used is ‘mob’. Does the word itself have any positive or negative connotations? Would you agree that mobs are threatening? Don’t you find the sudden appearance of these men also rather threatening? I do. What do you think might happen when “an immense suppression” is “freed”? You seem aware of this when you wrote, “He then follows that up with the very unmusical "Blares oftener" (ugly and awkward)”. It’s jarring, discordant – as they are. Think about the connotations of “Blares”.

I repeat what I said earlier about stanzas 5, 6 and 7: “The first two end-stopped lines reiterate the loss that has occurred but then he next seven lines are one long, clause-heavy sentence. This has the effect of accelerating our progress through a series of suddenly quite threatening images. It’s as if something has been unleashed. Form and order are fractured.”
The fact that it is the artist (in the form of Stevens the poet) ordering these lines indicates that artistic creation can tame chaos. The lines give the impression of encroaching disorder but he has done that through his use of rhyme, commas, etc. – in other words, through his artistry. The idea of Art’s capacity to produce order amid “slovenly wilderness” is explored in Anecdote of the Jar (which I do like). For Stevens, art is simply order.

I don't see any suggestion of good/evil association.
It doesn’t have to be expressed in those terms – order and disorder will do. However, I don’t think that Stevens suggests that the price of disorder is simply confusion. As I said, those lines are menacing. There is something ominous about the mob’s directionless energy. Even though I think the poem is unnecessarily cerebral, I don’t think it was merely an intellectual exercise (funnily enough, I do feel this with Donne at times). Whatever made Stevens include the mob, I think he perceived some genuine threat in the world around him.

What I see are distictions of points of view.
And the ability of a skeptic, outside the mob, to piece together order, form, and art, while the mob, in it's energy, lacks this ability.
But isn’t what the skeptic will do precisely what Stevens has done here? He has created order (a poem) out of his sense of fracture and loss. This is also consistent with the idea that “skeptical music” is poetry.


However, Donne is clever and witty in a way that Stevens isn’t.This poem perhaps. But you haven't read all of Stevens. The poem I typed out above that followed this in the collection is very funny. It's comically absurd.

Come on now, Virgil. I wasn’t trying to trash Stevens and enthrone a British poet in his place. :lol: I did make it perfectly clear that I was only referring to this particular poem. I also said that I like some of his stuff. For you he is one of the top poets of the twentieth century; for me, he isn’t. Does it matter? It’s not as if I’m trying to encourage people to dislike him. Be fair to me; if anything, I have tried hard to help people gain a better understanding of what he’s saying and how he’s saying it. Whether they then like him or not is up to them and the comments I made should help them have a better foundation on which to base their decision.

And no, I haven’t read every single Stevens poem. So you got me there! ;)

PS The Snowman also leaves me cold. :D

[tn2743]

I don't think that the music is referred to here simply as "some kind of artistic expression" (p#193) to describe the mob's rage. I think that the music is the focus of the poem; we shouldn't start to look at a broader meaning of the poem until we have found the very specific points that the author is trying to make.

I do agree that the words 'form' and 'order' may be too impersonal, or not as specific as I'd hope (They don’t just refer to music). But they make a solid point. Form and order surely are the essential means of existence. If something lacks either form or order, it will cease to shape (like the desires of the mob).

Virgil. I think you're right to make the skeptic the focus. The last two verses clearly state that the waltzes, "the epic of disbelief", will be made "constant" by the skeptic's skeptical music; so all will be solved by this character, making him a key character.

We are not told who the skeptic is, but we are told that the skeptic is the creator of the music: "Some harmonious skeptic soon in a skeptical music..." Perhaps, it was also the skeptic who played the waltz.

I think that, for that reason, the skeptic cannot be the author himself or the narrator, because the author (who I think is the same as the narrator) is passive in relation to the waltz. (unless the author himself was the creator of the music). I think, as you suggested, he is a separate entity. He must be a musician, for he creates music. And (perhaps I’m way off line here), because the author refers to him as “some …skeptic”, he is a stranger to the author.

[Petrarch's Love]

Wow, there's been a lot written here since I last checked in. I'm learning a lot about Stevens--super.

I agree with much in the analyses already provided. The thing that keeps bugging me in this poem is why exactly forms have vanished for the Hoon in the third stanza. I somehow feel that this is some key point I am missing. I understand how the passing of the waltz is in some ways the passing of one generation's music soon to be replaced by "some harmonius sceptic soon in some skeptical music" in an "epic of disbelief." But the fact that the forms of the Hoon have vanished as well as the form and order of those who relied on the company of others, seems to indicate not only the loss of the waltz as a social kind of music but the loss of the imagination, almost of music itself. The Hoon did not depend on people, so the loss of the waltz should not affect his forms, which one assumes are the forms created in his own mind. All the same "his forms have vanished." Everything is lost, even the music of the individual? Is this because he has been forced into the company of the mob searching for order? Is he a sort of solitary ivory tower poet whose inward forms have been shattered by the reality of the masses?

By the way, Unnamable, you've got the song "Waltzing Matilda" stuck in my head now. :lol: Oh well, before that it was the waltz from Lehar's "The Merry Widow." I'm obviously taking this poem way too literally.

[Virgil]

Managed to find one, then? ;)
Come on now, Virgil. I wasn’t trying to trash Stevens and enthrone a British poet in his place. :lol: I did make it perfectly clear that I was only referring to this particular poem. I also said that I like some of his stuff. For you he is one of the top poets of the twentieth century; for me, he isn’t. Does it matter? It’s not as if I’m trying to encourage people to dislike him. Be fair to me; if anything, I have tried hard to help people gain a better understanding of what he’s saying and how he’s saying it. Whether they then like him or not is up to them and the comments I made should help them have a better foundation on which to base their decision.

Sure, I'm not taking offense, and I certainly wasn't making it an American versus British thing. I understand how some don't take to Stevens. What I admire in Stevens the most is his originality of style. No one has written like him before him that I can think of. Perhaps some of the symbolists do have an echo (albeit a translated echo) in his poetic voice.

BTW, you're critical process of analyzing the poem, piecing together the stanzas and their transitions to arrive at a coherent meaning is very Aristitalian. The old man would be proud. ;)

[The Unnamable]

I don't think that the music is referred to here simply as "some kind of artistic expression" (p#193) to describe the mob's rage.
I don’t believe that’s what I said. I referred to it as "some kind of artistic expression" precisely because it needn’t be a waltz or even music. Nor did I say that the mob’s rage would be “described” by that art. I said, “brought within” (which is not very clear, I admit but this is a complex idea). I’ll attempt to explain what I mean.

The waltz is enjoyable, exhilarating, fun, etc. but it is also ‘valuable’ in that it provides extra layers to human experience, layers that are in addition to the merely factual. Its role is similar to a religion in this respect. It imbues existence with qualities that are absent from the merely physical, biological and chemical basis of our being. I am just a collection of atoms but that’s not the end of the story. The way that the waltz does this is what I was trying to explain in # 179 above – the bit about the first stanza.

What the artist must attempt to provide is some means for “the shapes For which the voices cry,” to serve as “Modes of desire, modes of revealing desire.” At they moment it's just a possibility.


I think that the music is the focus of the poem; we shouldn't start to look at a broader meaning of the poem until we have found the very specific points that the author is trying to make.
Could you explain what you mean by this? I assume you are suggesting this is what I have done.


I do agree that the words 'form' and 'order' may be too impersonal, or not as specific as I'd hope (They don’t just refer to music). But they make a solid point. Form and order surely are the essential means of existence. If something lacks either form or order, it will cease to shape (like the desires of the mob).
I don’t think I've said anything that contradicts that.


The last two verses clearly state that the waltzes, "the epic of disbelief", will be made "constant" by the skeptic's skeptical music; so all will be solved by this character, making him a key character.
You see "the epic of disbelief" as being the waltzes. Can you explain why?

Too many waltzes–The epic of disbelief
Blares oftener and soon, will soon be constant.

Is the hyphen here used as a sign that what follows is a description of the waltzes? It seems to me as if it’s more to denote a break– On the previous two occasions that the phrase was used, it was completed by ‘have ended.’ This does set up an expectation. My explanation for this is above in the bit about 9 and 10. As Virgil pointed out, “Blares oftener” is ugly and dissonant. Perhaps it does refer to the waltz as it sounds now that it is “empty of shadows” but I think it also refers to what has replaced the waltz. It’s the reason we need a new waltz.


This poem has reminded me of Yeats’s Easter 1916 and The Second Coming, especially the lines,

“The best lack all convictions, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.”

and

“A terrible beauty is born.”

I’ll try a comparison now, which might just be nonsense.

Let’s assume for a moment that the context of the poem is the 1930s and the mobs are those who will shortly be wearing swastikas (I know this isn’t the context of Stevens’ poem but I am trying to explain the idea of the “harmonious skeptic”). There is an increasing unease among some artists at the time about some emerging and ominous destructive force. (I think The Second Coming demonstrates this feeling) The world is rushing headlong into destruction and carnage (for a change :D ). Along comes Picasso and paints Guernica. The painting is not an exuberant waltz but a terrifying depiction of mechanised mass slaughter. But it’s a work of high art, a masterpiece that takes the disorder of mass killing and frames it within a form that enables us to see something beyond lumps of charred human flesh. In the act of confronting and giving shape to the horror, the artist has produced order. Picasso is just the sort of figure who could be called a “harmonious skeptic”. He brings order to disorder while retaining his sense of the darker side of human behaviour.

I know that Stevens’ poem doesn’t take us into the dark realm but neither “motion” nor “shadows” are unambiguously positive.

[tn2743]

When was the

[The Unnamable]

It’s Monday here! I knew Asia was a good choice. :D

Anyway, I wonder if anyone would like to discuss this poem by Philip Larkin? I’ve chosen it for a number of reasons:

1. Hardly anyone recognised him in the pictures of authors thread;
2. The poem is far more straightforward than a lot of the poems so far posted;
3. There has been a lot of discussion of faith on the board recently and I thought it might be interesting to read a poem about the contemplation of death by someone who had no faith.
4. I think it’s extremely well written;
5. It’s how I feel on a “true dark night of the soul”, which is about three times a week.


Aubade

I work all day, and get half-drunk at night.
Waking at four to soundless dark, I stare.
In time the curtain-edges will grow light.
Till then I see what's really always there:
Unresting death, a whole day nearer now,
Making all thought impossible but how
And where and when I shall myself die.
Arid interrogation: yet the dread
Of dying, and being dead,
Flashes afresh to hold and horrify.

The mind blanks at the glare. Not in remorse
-- The good not done, the love not given, time
Torn off unused -- nor wretchedly because
An only life can take so long to climb
Clear of its wrong beginnings, and may never;
But at the total emptiness for ever,
The sure extinction that we travel to
And shall be lost in always. Not to be here,
Not to be anywhere,
And soon; nothing more terrible, nothing more true.

This is a special way of being afraid
No trick dispels. Religion used to try,
That vast moth-eaten musical brocade
Created to pretend we never die,
And specious stuff that says No rational being
Can fear a thing it will not feel, not seeing
That this is what we fear -- no sight, no sound,
No touch or taste or smell, nothing to think with,
Nothing to love or link with,
The anaesthetic from which none come round.

And so it stays just on the edge of vision,
A small unfocused blur, a standing chill
That slows each impulse down to indecision.
Most things may never happen: this one will,
And realisation of it rages out
In furnace-fear when we are caught without
People or drink. Courage is no good:
It means not scaring others. Being brave
Lets no one off the grave.
Death is no different whined at than withstood.

Slowly light strengthens, and the room takes shape.
It stands plain as a wardrobe, what we know,
Have always known, know that we can't escape,
Yet can't accept. One side will have to go.
Meanwhile telephones crouch, getting ready to ring
In locked-up offices, and all the uncaring
Intricate rented world begins to rouse.
The sky is white as clay, with no sun.
Work has to be done.
Postmen like doctors go from house to house.

Philip Larkin


The thing that keeps bugging me in this poem is why exactly forms have vanished for the Hoon in the third stanza. I somehow feel that this is some key point I am missing.
I don’t think the explanation can be found in the poem itself.


By the way, Unnamable, you've got the song "Waltzing Matilda" stuck in my head now. :lol: Oh well, before that it was the waltz from Lehar's "The Merry Widow." I'm obviously taking this poem way too literally.
This highlights our different cultures. My other possible choice was The Band’s The Last Waltz. :D

[Petrarch's Love]

I don’t think the explanation can be found in the poem itself.

I'm inclined to agree with you.

So, Unnamable, I thought you were in England somewhere. Since when have you made the timezone switch to Asia? (Or are you just hoping to get by with this so you can get an early start discussing your poem ;) ).

Seriously, though, I'm glad you posted the Larkin. It's a good poem, if a wee bit depressing, and I think most of us have probably experienced those dark, doubting, realizing moments "when we are caught without/ People or drink." I had a night like that a few nights back. Luckily I'm agnostic not atheist, so I was able to give myself a little more hope to lean on than poor Larkin here ;). That last line is really a great one. I'll have to mull this one over a bit and maybe make some more constructive comments later (like maybe when it's actually Monday here :lol: ).

[TodHackett]

...of Wilfred Owen's poem, "Awake". A lot of the same images occur in that poem.

Wow. I'll have to spend time with this. Thanks for posting it, Unnamable... I don't know that I've read any of Larkin's work.

[Xamonas Chegwe]

...of Wilfred Owen's poem, "Awake". A lot of the same images occur in that poem.

Wow. I'll have to spend time with this. Thanks for posting it, Unnamable... I don't know that I've read any of Larkin's work.

Me neither. Didn't he write the one that begins - "They tuck you up, your Mum & Dad"? - something like that anyway. ;)

I like this one very much though. It's as plain as the Stevens was cryptic. But just as good.

[Virgil]

I know that Stevens’ poem doesn’t take us into the dark realm but neither “motion” nor “shadows” are unambiguously positive.
Good stuff Unnamable. With this qualification I leave quoted I can accept your understanding of Steven's use of "mob." My initial reading of "mob" was in the sense that democracy has sometime been referred to as mob rule. Stevens even uses the word "freed" and I felt that he was after a distinction between those within a social group and those who stand apart from it as artists. I think there is still room in your reading for this too.

Before we leave Stevens, I hope readers here can appreciate his skill as a poet, even from this minor poem: his structuring of complex ideas, their transitions, the repetitions, concentrated images, symbols/emblems to arrive at a higher level of abstraction, word sounds. He's more of a poet's poet, very infleuencial to American poets that followed him (Roethke, A.R. Ammons, others). Appreciating him is like appreciating modern classical atonal music, it's an acquired taste mostly acquired by specialists. There has only been one person I've personally met that was passionate about Stevens, and she was a college professor who specialized in his work. Other professors who I have had that have taught him, never seemed to project passionate appreciation. One famous (famous at least in his mind ;) ) critic who stands out that does love Stevens' work is Harold Bloom, of all people. If I were to recommend a truely great poem (a little long to post here) of Stevens it would be "The Auroras of Autumn." Perhaps one day I will post the final canto of the poem (Canto X) which to me is sublime.

As to the new poem, fine with me. I do think Scher has some crazy rules about time change and Monday posting. She slapped my hand a few weeks ago. But, at the risk of ticking her off, who cares. :D

[Whifflingpin]

"If we are really dying, let us hear the rattle in our in our throats and feel cold in our extremities; if we are alive, let us go about our business." H.D.T.

I think Larkin has really caught the feeling of cold in our extremities, but, am I wrong to feel that the last verse is a bit of a cheat? We've felt the cold, now let us go about our business? I'd have preferred it if he'd stopped on the line "Death is no different whined at than withstood."

But I'm willing to be convinced.

.

[blp]

"If we are really dying, let us hear the rattle in our in our throats and feel cold in our extremities; if we are alive, let us go about our business." H.D.T.

I think Larkin has really caught the feeling of cold in our extremities, but, am I wrong to feel that the last verse is a bit of a cheat? We've felt the cold, now let us go about our business? I'd have preferred it if he'd stopped on the line "Death is no different whined at than withstood."

But I'm willing to be convinced.

The last stanza is my favourite, especially the postmen like doctors. I think you're reading something as general and philosophical - we'll die, but in the meantime let's get on with it - when actually it's specific and a bit narrativey - this is what keeps me up at night, or what I think about when I can't sleep; in some ways, these thoughts are associated with this still, empty time of the morning for me; then the day starts again. This seems necessary to me. It certainly makes the whole thing less abstract.

[The Unnamable]

Xamonas,

You can see Larkin’s original here: http://www.artofeurope.com/larkin/lar2.htm
but your version does actually exist. It was written by Adrian Mitchell after he was told that someone had thought your version of the first line was the correct one:

This Be The Worst

They tuck you up, your Mum and Dad
They read you Peter Rabbit, too.
They give you all the treats they had
And add some extra, just for you.

They were tucked up when they were small,
(Pink perfume, blue tobacco-smoke),
By those whose kiss healed any fall,
Whose laughter doubled any joke.

Man hands on happiness to man.
It deepens like a coastal shelf.
So love your parents all you can
And have some cheerful kids yourself.

Adrian Mitchell


Petrarch’s Love,
I am from the UK but I live and work in Asia. I was back in the UK at Christmas. When I posted the Larkin it really was after midnight here and in one of Scher’s posts she said ‘Monday in your part of the world’, which it was.

[Petrarch's Love]

I am from the UK but I live and work in Asia. I was back in the UK at Christmas. When I posted the Larkin it really was after midnight here and in one of Scher’s posts she said ‘Monday in your part of the world’, which it was.

Ah, I should have known you would really be playing by the rules. I was a tad confused since I didn't know you were writing from Asia--may I ask which country you're in?

[chmpman]

A professor of mine has us reading "This be the verse" for my Brit. Lit. class. The first day of class he read the first line, to give us a taste of what to expect.

[Xamonas Chegwe]

your version does actually exist. It was written by Adrian Mitchell after he was told that someone had thought your version of the first line was the correct one:

This Be The Worst

They tuck you up, your Mum and Dad
They read you Peter Rabbit, too.
They give you all the treats they had
And add some extra, just for you.

They were tucked up when they were small,
(Pink perfume, blue tobacco-smoke),
By those whose kiss healed any fall,
Whose laughter doubled any joke.

Man hands on happiness to man.
It deepens like a coastal shelf.
So love your parents all you can
And have some cheerful kids yourself.

Adrian Mitchell

:lol: :lol: :lol:

A very good pastiche.

I remembered the 'tuck you up' line from a cartoon in the Guardian on the day Larkin died. Funny the things that stick.

[The Unnamable]

Anyone torn off a bit of time, unused? Does anyone else feel that this isn’t just a poem about a moment of depression that seizes us all now and again but a moment of absolute clarity replete with truth?

I don’t think Larkin is in any way reassuring us in that last stanza. The image of the crouching telephones in “locked-up offices” is stark. “Work has to be done” does not register any sudden positive feeling on Larkin’s behalf – simply a reminder of how we are able to ignore that truth until the next moment of clarity. We surrender to the habitual. As Beckett says in Waiting for Godot, “habit is a great deadener”, which is probably just as well.

[blp]

It seems clear it's not just a moment of depression (or not intended that way - moments of depression are sometimes given spurious philosophical weight by their sufferers). Early in the poem, he talks about seeing 'what's really always there.'

[Petrarch's Love]

I don’t think Larkin is in any way reassuring us in that last stanza. The image of the crouching telephones in “locked-up offices” is stark. “Work has to be done” does not register any sudden positive feeling on Larkin’s behalf – simply a reminder of how we are able to ignore that truth until the next moment of clarity. We surrender to the habitual. As Beckett says in Waiting for Godot, “habit is a great deadener”, which is probably just as well.

I agree. I don't find anything at all upbeat about the final stanza. There is the definate feeling that there has somehow been, as you say, a "moment of clarity" when we realise that "Most things may never happen: this one will." What is brilliant about the final stanza is that all the things that should seem very real, concrete, and comforting seem sadly ineffectual to dispel the unease awakened by this realization of certain death. The jusxtoposition of the doctors and postmen in the final line brings home the idea of death as the one constant reality in the workings of everyday life. I also like the line "plain as a wardrobe, what we know." It again juxoposes the wardrobe, which we know to be solid and tangible with the idea of death, which the previous lines in the poem have shown to be as real (or possibly even more real than) the familiar wardrobe.

I also thought I'd bring up the title of the poem, "Aubade." As many of you probably know, an aubade is a specific genre of poetry referring both to poems in general written about the dawn, and to poems about two lovers parting at dawn (a classic example of the Aubade is the exchange between Romeo and Juliet in act 3 scene 5). I wondered if there were any thoughts about the implications of choosing this for a title. Obviously the poem is about a time around dawn. The topic is far from being love. In fact it emphasizes the degree to which the writer is alone, making it somewhat ironic as a title. All the same, the traditional aubade describing the lovers parting also sometimes touches on death. In the Romeo and Juliet passage just mentioned, Juliet prophetically sees Romeo at their parting "As one dead at the bottom of a tomb." Do you think Larkin is trying to make a point by playing with this convention?

[Virgil]

All the same, the traditional aubade describing the lovers parting also sometimes touches on death. In the Romeo and Juliet passage just mentioned, Juliet prophetically sees Romeo at their parting "As one dead at the bottom of a tomb." Do you think Larkin is trying to make a point by playing with this convention?
I've only just glanced at the poem, so I'm not ready to really comment, but I instantaneously came to the conclusion that the title was in irony. I could be wrong, but I can't imagine how.

[Virgil]

OK, let me start understanding Larkin's "Aubade." Let me first say that I may have read a Larkin poem in the past, but I can't recall. This is a nice intoduction for me to him. I liked it.

First the mechanics of the poem: five stanzas of ten lines each in roughly iambic pentameter with a rhyme scheme of A-B-A-B-C-C-D-E-E-D. I don't recognize the form, but it's sort of a heroic sestet (the first six lines) with an Italian quatrain as the final four lines. It seems a bit odd, having the couplet in the middle. Has anyone seen this elsewhere? Larkin doesn't seem to use the structure to section off sub-ideas within each stanza. Other than just presenting form, I'm not sure the stanza structure adds anything.

What does add is the way he handles the last two lines of each stanza. The 9th line is shortened to 6 or 7 syllables and the 10th is lengthened to compensate. It seems to have the affect of a stutter step, which seems to emphasize the meaning of the last line and nail down the idea of the stanza.

Each stanza seems to come to a particular realization. He even uses the word "realisation" (Is that a British spelling, with a s instead of a z?). I break the flow of the stanzas down this way:

Stanza 1/realization 1: A new day means one day closer to death.
Stanza 2/realization 2: Death is complete and final extinction.
Stanza 3/realization 3: Complete extinction brings fear.
Stanza 4/realization 4: Death is inevitable.
Stanza 5/realization 5: Each new day requires us to go on.

I'll stop for now and let others point out stuff.

[genoveva]

Aubade

I work all day, and get half-drunk at night.
Waking at four to soundless dark, I stare.
In time the curtain-edges will grow light.
Till then I see what's really always there:
Unresting death, a whole day nearer now,
Making all thought impossible but how
And where and when I shall myself die.
Arid interrogation: yet the dread
Of dying, and being dead,
Flashes afresh to hold and horrify.

The mind blanks at the glare. Not in remorse
-- The good not done, the love not given, time
Torn off unused -- nor wretchedly because
An only life can take so long to climb
Clear of its wrong beginnings, and may never;
But at the total emptiness for ever,
The sure extinction that we travel to
And shall be lost in always. Not to be here,
Not to be anywhere,
And soon; nothing more terrible, nothing more true.

This is a special way of being afraid
No trick dispels. Religion used to try,
That vast moth-eaten musical brocade
Created to pretend we never die,
And specious stuff that says No rational being
Can fear a thing it will not feel, not seeing
That this is what we fear -- no sight, no sound,
No touch or taste or smell, nothing to think with,
Nothing to love or link with,
The anaesthetic from which none come round.

And so it stays just on the edge of vision,
A small unfocused blur, a standing chill
That slows each impulse down to indecision.
Most things may never happen: this one will,
And realisation of it rages out
In furnace-fear when we are caught without
People or drink. Courage is no good:
It means not scaring others. Being brave
Lets no one off the grave.
Death is no different whined at than withstood.

Slowly light strengthens, and the room takes shape.
It stands plain as a wardrobe, what we know,
Have always known, know that we can't escape,
Yet can't accept. One side will have to go.
Meanwhile telephones crouch, getting ready to ring
In locked-up offices, and all the uncaring
Intricate rented world begins to rouse.
The sky is white as clay, with no sun.
Work has to be done.
Postmen like doctors go from house to house.

Philip Larkin

This is a great poem, the first I've read of Larkin. From what little I have researched about him, I guess this is the last poem he ever wrote!? This definately adds to the moment and theme. Seems like he is sitting in his room/house, maybe been up all night (drinking?), depressed, thinking about his inevitable, future death. The poem literally begins in darkness, and literally, gradually begins to get lighter. He observes the sun rising, and it getting lighter- until it gets light enough to actually see. This literal event is nicely woven into the poem and is likewise symbolic of his dread (realization of? Acceptance of?) of death. At the beginning of the poem he dreads death. And, perhaps in the earlier part of his life too. As the poem progresses (like his life), he accepts and declares (basically) that there's nothing you can do to avoid death. You will die, and as described in the last stanza, life will go on. After he dies, people will still have to get up and go to work! "Work has to be done". The world will not stop when you die.

[genoveva]

[QUOTE]=The Unnamable
"But at the total emptiness for ever,
The sure extinction that we travel to
And shall be lost in always. Not to be here,
Not to be anywhere,
And soon; nothing more terrible, nothing more true."

Oh yeah, and this part is the crux of what he believes happens to him (us?) when he dies- he goes to "emptiness" to "extinction", "lost in always", "not to be here/Not to be anywhere". *sigh* *agnst*

He doesn't go to heaven or hell. He doesn't get reborn into another life. He's gone. Dead. Nothing, nowhere. He know this is a "terrible" thing, but, he believes, nonetheless, that it's "true".

[Nightshade]

TYpical Larkin I had to do his poetryfor A level :sick:
Oh well actually I love the rhyme scheme really.
"Postmen like doctors" Im sure I think he uses doctors and priests alot. I think Im going to go away and think about it, I just wanted to say I want to be part of this discussion

:D

[genoveva]

I also thought I'd bring up the title of the poem, "Aubade." As many of you probably know, an aubade is a specific genre of poetry referring both to poems in general written about the dawn, and to poems about two lovers parting at dawn (a classic example of the Aubade is the exchange between Romeo and Juliet in act 3 scene 5). I wondered if there were any thoughts about the implications of choosing this for a title. Obviously the poem is about a time around dawn. The topic is far from being love. In fact it emphasizes the degree to which the writer is alone, making it somewhat ironic as a title. All the same, the traditional aubade describing the lovers parting also sometimes touches on death. In the Romeo and Juliet passage just mentioned, Juliet prophetically sees Romeo at their parting "As one dead at the bottom of a tomb." Do you think Larkin is trying to make a point by playing with this convention?

Hey, thanks for the insight- I never knew that about the word "aubade". It totally fits, then, by your description. Yes, the timing of the poem takes place in relation to a dawning. Maybe it is also about two lovers: The author and life. The author is parting from this life.

[rachel]

I very much admire Philip L. I love that bit he wrote about the black ship I think, it gave me shivers.
I think every human that lives has at least one moment in time realizing that the reality of our fragile mortal selves is going to hit that bleak and hideous concrete wall called death.
And all those emotions are absolutely true. I have felt it, especially when I was given only a month to get my affairs in order because even the famous surgeon that was to do my emergency surgery was only going thru the motions on behalf of me and my children. I had to sign them over to others, my pastor, my friends and my doctor all said their goodbyes to me. So the day before I had the'leisure' ( I call it terror and hysteria, I am not a brave person) I lay there weak and thought about things.The nurse came in a gave me a book to look at with a real patient that goes thru all the stages of preop, operation and after. It was worse than a Stephen King thriller. If ever I wasn't scared before I was then!
And the pretending to be calm and brave part, I did that. I mean what was I supposed to do scream until they sedated me? I totally believe in God and something after. That was not a comfort in the least. I did not wish to stop breathing. I told God that "no offence but I didn't know Him very well and would rather stay here until I did."

I love the scene in "what about Bob" where Bob Wiley, a muli phobic, paralyzed personality has managed to take a bus from New York to New Hampshire to be close to his pyschiatrist Dr. Leo Marvin.
He now is in the shrinks house , in the shrink's son Zigfrieds bedroom, in one of his beds. Ziggie has a morbid fascination and terror of death. they both lie there in the dark and Ziggy says' I am going to die. You are going to die, only in your case a lot sooner. there is no way out of it, after that what more is there to be afraid of?"
Bob looks scared and then smiles. " well there is tourets" he answers. :D

[The Unnamable]

I very much admire Philip L. I love that bit he wrote about the black ship I think, it gave me shivers.
"Only one ship is seeking us, a black-
Sailed unfamiliar, towing at her back
A huge and birdless silence. In her wake
No waters breed or break."
Next, Please

[rachel]

thank dear, I forgot.
Did you happen to read Jill?

[Virgil]

Well, let's get back to the poem at hand. No one is adding anything so I'll finish off my thoughts on it.

Three things to note.

First the diction: extinction (cold scientific term), "rational being," anaesthetic (euphomism for death), interrogation (instead of soliloquy), rented world (with a pun on rent as a)we only rent the world while we're alive and b)past participle of rend, meaning we are rended, violently removed from the world).

Second, some really good metaphors:
"The sure extinction that we travel to/And shall be lost in always." To be lost forever, "in always."
"Unresting death" - an odd play of the final rest.
"And so it stays just on the edge of vision,/A small unfocused blur" - referring to the abstract thought of his extinction as being almost visual.
"It [the room] stands plain as a wardrobe" - the room as common as clothing as common as death and as common as the knowledge that we will all die some day.

An aside here, it reminds me of a quote, I believe it's from Churchill, but I could be wrong, that goes to the effect, we all know that everyone has to die someday, but we all secretly hope that God has made one exception, and that it's yourself.

Finally the texture of the poem:
It's a grimy, sad, unheroic, almost claustrophobic feel: Getting "half-drunk at night," not just that particular evening but all evenings; "the mind blanks," "moth-eaten musical bracade," "unfocused blur," "standing chill," "telephones crouch," "locked-up offices," "uncaring...world," "the sky as white as clay, with no sun." He says that he doesn't have remorse, but then he immediately rattles off three things he's remorseful of. He says he's not wretched, but everything in all five stanzas is wretchedness. In the very center of the poem he brings up religion, something that could have alleviated his wretchedness. He can't bring himself to believe. This is no celebration of life, nor of his "rational" realizations. It's a dirty existence. And so obviously the title, "Aubade," is ironic.

[The Unnamable]

What I find interesting about the analyses of this poem is the way they contrast with the blunt, unembellished starkness of Larkin. Perhaps we can deal more easily with what the poem reveals to us if we focus more on how he’s saying it? Everything about it says, this is the truth and there’s nothing more to be said. In the end, we all die and, in the profoundest sense, we die alone.

PS Rachel, I haven’t read Jill but I have read every one of his poems. He was an obnoxious man whose personal letters caused quite a stir when they were published after his death. Fabulous poet, though. He has certainly helped me “down Cemetery Road.”

What do people think of his dismissal of religion as “That vast moth-eaten musical brocade/Created to pretend we never die,”?

[rachel]

I like his taking apart things like a seamstress does, stitch by stitch and then putting it back again to look somehow different.
Personally for me even if I believed this was all there is I would still love my Lord and want to be with him all I could.
But I had to come to that thru a lot of what Larkin says. I admire him and thank him for being a water troubler. I CANNOT stand it when someone cheerily spouts off stuff-the name it and claim it stuff and then has not a solid thing to say about it. That kind of junk just kills the heart and mind.

[genoveva]

He says that he doesn't have remorse, but then he immediately rattles off three things he's remorseful of.

Actually, the way I interpretted it was that he is listing three things that *some* people are remorseful of and these are reasons why some people's minds "blank in the glare". But this is not the reason for him.

[genoveva]

This is a special way of being afraid
No trick dispels. Religion used to try,
That vast moth-eaten musical brocade
Created to pretend we never die,
And specious stuff that says No rational being
Can fear a thing it will not feel, not seeing
That this is what we fear -- no sight, no sound,
No touch or taste or smell, nothing to think with,
Nothing to love or link with,
The anaesthetic from which none come round.

[/B]

Yes, the religion thing...
This was one of the most powerful messages in his poem, to me.
When we are confronted with the "Nothingness" after death, it is a "special way of being afraid". Why are we afraid of nothing? It's not "hell" we are afraid of, in this case, but nothing. Larkin is bashing religion here (my take) saying that religion tries to comfort us when we are faced with death. Don't be afraid, you will go to heaven and be with God and all the angels in this wonderful kingdom and live happily ever after... Or, it tries to instill even more fear in us: Obey this law/rule, behave like we tell you or when you die you will go to hell- woooo, scarey place, you better believe what we say and listen to us or be punished forever! Perhaps Larkin uses the past tense "Religion used to try" to suggest that he gave religion a try, and it didn't work for his needs?

[Virgil]

Actually, the way I interpretted it was that he is listing three things that *some* people are remorseful of and these are reasons why some people's minds "blank in the glare". But this is not the reason for him.
But if there is no remorse, why mention anything. A poem is a condensation of thought. It's only got a few hundred words. Every word has to count. If there is any elaboration, it is open to scrutny. Larkin as an experienced poet knows this.

[Virgil]

What do people think of his dismissal of religion as “That vast moth-eaten musical brocade/Created to pretend we never die,”?
I take it as his true feelings toward it. "created to pretend" obviously shows his disbelief. "musical brocade" suggests an elaborate past tradition, of some wonderment and culture. "vast moth-eaten" suggests it has passed its time and no longer applies. I take his tone as he cannot believe in religion, but he's not happy in his disbelief. Like I said, every stanza is a statement of his wretchedness. I keep returning to that first line (which sets the tone) where he's half-drunk every night, and the last stanza where the sky is like clay.

[Petrarch's Love]

What I find interesting about the analyses of this poem is the way they contrast with the blunt, unembellished starkness of Larkin. Perhaps we can deal more easily with what the poem reveals to us if we focus more on how he’s saying it? Everything about it says, this is the truth and there’s nothing more to be said. In the end, we all die and, in the profoundest sense, we die alone.

It occured to me on reading this, that one reason I've had relatively little to say on this poem is that it is so "blunt" and "unembellished." I feel as though he's said everything so perfectly and simply in the lines that they speak for themselves in a way I could never speak for them. Of course, isn't that always the way we feel when analyzing really good poems?


What do people think of his dismissal of religion as “That vast moth-eaten musical brocade/Created to pretend we never die,”?


It's funny because that line brings up a very literal image for me of a room in the Museo del'Opera del Duomo in Siena (where I lived for a few months) where they have old antiphonals on display near to elaborately embroidered priestly vestments, hundreds of years old, in glass cases. The old fabric is worn and moth-eaten in many places (though still quite beautiful in its antique way). I used to go there often and it always struck me, the strangeness of this sacred clothing and sacred music preserved in the secular space of a museum (with a three euro charge at the door). It's interesting the way taking these things out of a sacramental context very forcibly makes the point that they are things "Created to pretend" on a certain level.

[Petrarch's Love]

But if there is no remorse, why mention anything. A poem is a condensation of thought. It's only got a few hundred words. Every word has to count. If there is any elaboration, it is open to scrutny. Larkin as an experienced poet knows this.

Virgil, I agree with you about the regrets. It seems to me too that there is some irony in his denial of any regret and his immediate listing of potential regrets. It shows that they are certainly on his mind. At the same time, I think his point is that, terrible though such regrets might be, they don't really matter at all because nothing matters because all will be nothing in the end. Ultimately even terrible regrets look comforting next to the realization that we "shall be lost in always. Not to be here,/Not to be anywhere,/And soon; nothing more terrible, nothing more true." Cheery stuff that.

[The Unnamable]

But if there is no remorse, why mention anything. A poem is a condensation of thought. It's only got a few hundred words. Every word has to count. If there is any elaboration, it is open to scrutny. Larkin as an experienced poet knows this.
I think this fits with my earlier comment. Perhaps this is an example of the art that conceals itself but I see Larkin (or the narrator, if you prefer) in that poem as a man first and a poet later. It’s the experienced man and not the experienced poet that I hear first and foremost.

[The Unnamable]

I feel as though he's said everything so perfectly and simply in the lines that they speak for themselves in a way I could never speak for them. Of course, isn't that always the way we feel when analyzing really good poems?
I’d agree up to a point but then I also agree with your observation that “It seems to me too that there is some irony in his denial of any regret and his immediate listing of potential regrets. It shows that they are certainly on his mind. At the same time, I think his point is that, terrible though such regrets might be, they don't really matter at all because nothing matters because all will be nothing in the end. Ultimately even terrible regrets look comforting next to the realization that we "shall be lost in always. Not to be here,/Not to be anywhere,/And soon; nothing more terrible, nothing more true." Cheery stuff that.”

So your analysis has helped reinforce something important. Instead of taking us away from the starkness of the poem, you make us more aware of it. It reminds me of the scene in Measure for Measure between Isabella and Claudio. Claudio is facing execution. The Duke has just tried to prepare Claudio to face his death with a fairly long speech beginning,

DUKE:
Be absolute for death; either death or life
Shall thereby be the sweeter. Reason thus with life:
If I do lose thee, I do lose a thing
That none but fools would keep: a breath thou art,
Servile to all the skyey influences,
That dost this habitation, where thou keep'st,
Hourly afflict: merely, thou art death's fool;

These are fine words, in theory but Claudio’s own apprehension of death is far more immediate and ‘human’:

CLAUDIO:
Ay, but to die, and go we know not where;
To lie in cold obstruction and to rot;
This sensible warm motion to become
A kneaded clod; and the delighted spirit
To bathe in fiery floods, or to reside
In thrilling region of thick-ribbed ice;
To be imprison'd in the viewless winds,
And blown with restless violence round about
The pendent world; or to be worse than worst
Of those that lawless and incertain thought
Imagine howling: 'tis too horrible!
The weariest and most loathed worldly life
That age, ache, penury and imprisonment
Can lay on nature is a paradise
To what we fear of death.

Look at the finality of that second line. That’s what happens to us when we die – we rot. It’s worth looking more closely at the differences in the two speeches.

[Virgil]

Funny you should mention that scene from Measure for Measure: I was thinking of the same thing on Thursday and meant to paste it here and forgot. Thanks.

There are three things Larkin brings up that he dispells, unconvincingly to me: remorse, wretchedness, religion. As to religion, if he doesn't feel something towards it, why bring it up? The tone of the poem suggests to me that it could have changed his life, but he's too rational in this modern age to accept it. But he does bring it up and one must take note of that.

[Riesa]

Monday, time for a new poem:

Between Going And Staying
Octavio Paz

Between going and staying the day wavers,
in love with its own transparency.

The circular afternoon is now a bay
where the world in stillness rocks.

All is visible and all elusive,
all is near and can't be touched.

Paper, book, pencil, glass,
rest in the shade of their names.

Time throbbing in my temples repeats
the same unchanging syllable of blood.

The light turns the indifferent wall
into a ghostly theater of reflections.

I find myself in the middle of an eye,
watching myself in its blank stare.

The moment scatters. Motionless,
I stay and go: I am a pause.

[blp]

Lovely choice, Riesa.

[Petrarch's Love]

I like this poem, Riesa. I'm not familiar with Paz's work, but I like the richness of the imagery here. I think I like these lines best:


The circular afternoon is now a bay
where the world in stillness rocks.

The idea of it is very simple but effective, and affecting. I think it's very difficult to write about these sorts of still moments well, but this poem glows.

[genoveva]

Paper, book, pencil, glass,
rest in the shade of their names.



*sigh* He is such an artist! Thank you for this! I especially love the above two lines. And, the last "I stay and go: I am a pause." :thumbs_up

[Virgil]

Seems like an interesting poem. I'm always a little wary of diving into a translation. So much depends on the translator. I'm not familiar with Paz, but i'll explore his background and then I'll take a crack at this.

[Petrarch's Love]

I absentmindedly didn't even take into consideration that this was a translation when I first commented (rolls eyes and hits head in amazement at missing obvious :lol: ). That explains a lot about my initial reaction to the form and sound of the poem. I thought it was enjoyable even translated though, which is a compliment to the translator, and also to the power of the imagery in any language. Could you tell us who the translator was Riesa? For those who know the language (or, like me, have enough of another romance language to get the sense of it), here's the Spanish version.

Entre irse y quedarse

Entre irse y quedarse duda el día,
enamorado de su transparencia.
La tarde circular es ya bahía:
en su quieto vaivén se mece el mundo.
Todo es visible y todo es elusivo,
todo está cerca y todo es intocable.
Los papeles, el libro, el vaso, el lápiz
reposan a la sombra de sus nombres.
Latir del tiempo que en mi sien repite
la misma terca sílaba de sangre.
La luz hace del muro indiferente
un espectral teatro de reflejos.
En el centro de un ojo me descubro;
no me mira, me miro en su mirada.
Se disipa el instante. Sin moverme,
yo me quedo y me voy: soy una pausa.

Octavio Paz

[Virgil]

Well, you see a difference without even reading it. There's no spacing between the couplets. Unless that's an artifact of the cut and paste.

[Riesa]

I was wondering if I should post it in Spanish too. It's Eliot Weinberger.

[Riesa]

No, the couplets are spaced in my Spanish version.

[Intellectual]

you guys know spanish?Cool...so im not alone





:p

[The Unnamable]

There are three things Larkin brings up that he dispells, unconvincingly to me: remorse, wretchedness, religion. As to religion, if he doesn't feel something towards it, why bring it up?
What are you talking about, Virgil? He does feel something ‘towards’ religion. He feels that it's an overblown, worn out piece of useless nonsense.


The tone of the poem suggests to me that it could have changed his life,
How on earth you can read that from his ‘tone’ is beyond me. Perhaps you want to believe something more positive, which is fine - but perhaps Larkin didn’t.


but he's too rational in this modern age to accept it. But he does bring it up and one must take note of that.
Evidence?
Larkin has long ceased looking for answers but you try to find some for him. Why do you assume that he wanted to change his life?

[Virgil]

What are you talking about, Virgil? He does feel something ‘towards’ religion. He feels that it's an overblown, worn out piece of useless nonsense.


How on earth you can read that from his ‘tone’ is beyond me. Perhaps you want to believe something more positive, which is fine - but perhaps Larkin didn’t.


Evidence?
Larkin has long ceased looking for answers but you try to find some for him. Why do you assume that he wanted to change his life?
Why does he get drunk every night (the very first line), why is wretched, why is he in fear of the end. Why does he even mention religion if it is so meanless? This could have been written as a celebration of a life lived, even as an atheist, but he doesn't. To bring something up is not to dispell it in a poem of fifty lines. Just the opposite. It has nothing to do with my beliefs.

bro·cade (br½-k³d“) n. A heavy fabric interwoven with a rich, raised design.

Does not "musical brocade" suggest it has an element of beauty and culture. Yes it is "moth-eaten" but he didn't have to call it a musical bracade. He could have said what you just said. But he didn't. I think you're the one projecting your views into the poem.

[The Unnamable]

Why does he get drunk every night (the very first line),
Are you serious? What difference does that make? Are you trying to reduce the poem to a nice, neat little morality tale, where the imbiber of the demon drink is punished for his own self-destructive foolishness? I’m sure the speaker, like the rest of us, has his reasons.


why is wretched, why is he in fear of the end.
Because that’s what life is to him. He doesn’t see things the way you do.


Why does he even mention religion if it is so meanless?
Come on, Virgil - he mentions it because it’s relevant to the poem he’s written. It’s a poem, not a philosophical tract.


This could have been written as a celebration of a life lived, even as an atheist, but he doesn't.
So what? That’s his right. He tells us how he feels. To criticise him for not having been more positive is to ask him to forget the reality of what he’s feeling and replace it with something you’d prefer. Do we have the right to ask that of any poet? I prefer authenticity and honesty in my poets, not a recital of John Boy Walton’s edifying philosophy. The fact that you write ‘even as an atheist’ implies that it would be unusual for an atheist to celebrate life. There’s that assumption again.


To bring something up is not to dispell it in a poem of fifty lines. Just the opposite.
What are you saying here? My take is that he ‘brought it up’ (if by ‘it’ you mean religion) to condemn it for what it is. He is considering death and one of the ways human beings come to terms with death is through religion. Surely, it’s only to be expected that he would consider the religious take on things? Are you suggesting that he did it to offer us the comfort and reassurance it was unable to provide him?


bro·cade (br½-k³d“) n. A heavy fabric interwoven with a rich, raised design.

Does not "musical brocade" suggest it has an element of beauty and culture. Yes it is "moth-eaten" but he didn't have to call it a musical bracade. He could have said what you just said. But he didn't. I think you're the one projecting your views into the poem.
Absolutely, Virgil – this poem is a celebration of the beauty of religion, a religion which is "created to pretend we never die." Pretence is a vital quality in any religion.

[Virgil]

[QUOTE]Are you serious? What difference does that make? Are you trying to reduce the poem to a nice, neat little morality tale, where the imbiber of the demon drink is punished for his own self-destructive foolishness? I’m sure the speaker, like the rest of us, has his reasons.


Because that’s what life is to him. He doesn’t see things the way you do.


Come on, Virgil - he mentions it because it’s relevant to the poem he’s written. It’s a poem, not a philosophical tract.


So what? That’s his right. He tells us how he feels. To criticise him for not having been more positive is to ask him to forget the reality of what he’s feeling and replace it with something you’d prefer. Do we have the right to ask that of any poet? I prefer authenticity and honesty in my poets, not a recital of John Boy Walton’s edifying philosophy. The fact that you write ‘even as an atheist’ implies that it would be unusual for an atheist to celebrate life. There’s that assumption again.

All your statements above are rediculous. Learn to read poetry. Not philosophical nonsense. Larkin is a poet, and I'm sure he's thinking like a poet. He's not a philosopher.



Pretence is a vital quality in any religion.

I would agree that Larkin is stating this. But good art has many layers. You don't address why Larkin calls religion a brocade, and then he doubles up on it as adds the adjetive "musical" brocade. Why?

[blp]

It seems obvious that the phrase 'moth eaten musical brocade' is meant negatively. The sense of it as musical could be a way of referring to its non-rational mysticism, a pleasing rhythm that carries you along and overrides questions. It could be rather mocking.

[The Unnamable]

All your statements above are rediculous. Learn to read poetry.
I will try harder, oh master.


Larkin is a poet, and I'm sure he's thinking like a poet. He's not a philosopher.
Isn’t that the point I was making? :confused: I'm not quite sure what "thinking like a poet" means here.

Could you explain any of this, please? Why are all my comments ridiculous? I state that a poet is under no obligation to be positive (as you see it). Am I wrong?

You don't address why Larkin calls religion a brocade,
He didn’t call it ‘a brocade’; he called it “That vast moth-eaten musical brocade/ Created to pretend we never die,”. It seems obvious to me that he is being negative (even in his use of the demonstrative adjective) but he is also being fair. Brocade is not at all common in recent usage; Larkin has chosen a rather old-fashioned word to describe an institution that belongs in the past. Its primary purpose is decorative. It looks and sounds nice. He presents religion in a way that is consistent with poems like Church Going and his comment, "The Bible is a load of balls of course - but very beautiful." He can recognise its fading splendour but still dismisses it as offering nothing more than a delusion. He is no less dismissive of rationalism. There was once and might still be a grandeur about religion but the force of the comment comes from Created and pretend. 'Created' does carry positive connotations but the blatant suggestion is that man, not God, has created religion. As for the music, it’s pretty much what blp suggests –it’s the seductive organ swell of hymns, carrying us along on a tide of religious sentiment.

The title of one of his anthologies is The Less Deceived. Time and again, this idea crops up in his poetry. The truth in this poem might be terrifying but it’s one he faces squarely.