PoemoftheWeek

[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.

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.

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.