Poetry Bookclub 2

[quasimodo1]

Virgil: Not a problem. While awaiting a response from the next person to choose a poem... I'd like to put one up for consideration. Let this one have at least a day or two. It surely is dense enough. See next posting.

[quasimodo1]

From The Collected Poems of Theodore Roethke
pp 13-14

THE COMING OF THE COLD

I

The late peach yields a subtle musk,
The arbor is alive with fume
More heady than a field at dusk
When clover scents diminished wind.
The walker's foot has scarcely room
Upon the orchard path, for skinned
And battered fruit has choked the grass.
The yield's half down and half in air,
The plum drops pitch upon the ground,
And nostrils widen as they pass
The place where butternuts are found.
The wind shakes out the scent of pear.
Upon the field the scent is dry:
The dill bears up it acrid crown;
The dock, so garish to the eye,
Distills a pungence of its own;
And pumpkins sweat a bitter oil.
But soon cold rain and frost come in
To press pure fragrance to the soil;
The loose vine droops with hoar at dawn,
The riches of the air blow thin.

II

The ribs of leaves lie in the dust,
The beak of frost has picked the bough,
The briar bears its thorn, and drought
Has left its ravage on the field.
The season's wreckage lies about,
Late autumn fruit is rotted now.
All shade is lean, the antic branch
Jerks skyward at the touch of wind,
Dense trees no longer hold the light,
The hedge and orchard grove are thinned.
The dank bark dries beneath the sun,
The last of harvesting is done.
All things are brought to barn and fold.
The oak leaves strain to be unbound,
The sky turns dark, the year grows old,
The buds draw in before the cold. ... {2 of 3 parts}

[stlukesguild]

Quasi has asked that I select the next Roethke poem and so I have done so... choosing Four For Sir John Davies:

1. The Dance

Is that dance slowing in the mind of man
That made him think the universe could hum?
The great wheel turns its axle when it can;
I need a place to sing, and dancing-room,
And I have made a promise to my ears
I'll sing and whistle romping with the bears.

For they are all my friends: I saw one slide
Down a steep hillside on a cake of ice-
Or was that in a book? I think with pride:
A caged bear rarely does the same thing twice
In the same way: O watch his body sway!
This animal remembering to be gay.

I tried to fling my shadow at the moon,
The while my blood leaped with a wordless song.
Though dancing needs a master, I had none
To teach my toes to listen to my tongue.
But what I learned there, dancing all alone,
Was not the joyless motion of a stone.

I take this cadence from a man named Yeats;
I take it, and I give it back again:
For other tunes and other wanton beats
Have tossed my heart and fiddle through my brain,
Yes, I was dancing-mad, and how
That came to be the bears and Yeats would know.

This first section can be heard read by Roethke himself:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wKaoXy2KaJU

Stanley Kunitz... poet and friend of Roethke writes the following of the genesis of this poem:

On another country visit, in the following decade, he asked me long after midnight to read something choice to him. I picked up Sir John Davies' neglected Elizabethan masterpiece, "Orchestra," a poem that he had somehow never chanced on despite his omnivorous appetite for verse, and I can still recall the excitement with which he responded to the clear-voiced music.

From that encounter, combined with his deep attachment to the poetry of Yeats—it was beat, above all, that enchanted him—he composed the eloquent sequence, "Four for Sir John Davies," which was to set the cadence for a whole new cycle of later poems.

The text of Sir John Davies' Orchestra can be found here:

http://www.uoregon.edu/~rbear/davies1.html

Hopefully Petrarch's Love will drop by and enlighten us with her knowledge of Davies' poem and perhaps offer up some insights into it's relationship with Roethke's work. I have been unable to find the entire poem on the net (anyone else have any luck? please post a link). It is included in my volume of Roethke's Words for the Wind as well as his Collected Poems. I'll PM the text to anyone needing it.

[Petrarch's Love]

Oh, I love that recording of Roethke reading the poem you posted, St. Luke's! Great youtube find. I'll be glad to join in the discussion, but it'll have to be tomorrow night, since I have to spend this evening finishing my class prep. for the first day tomorrow rather than get lured into the dance (though perhaps my students would rather we dance than have me get up and lecture on portraits of Elizabeth I and Shakespeare's Richard II ). The Renascence text of the Davies is the one in my bookmarks, so I'm assuming that's the most complete version I could find on the web.

[quasimodo1]

"No poet, no artist of any art, has his

complete meaning alone. His signigicance, his appreciation, is the appreciation of his relation to the dead poets and artists.

You cannot value him alone; you must set him for contrast and comparison, among the dead. I mean this as a principle of

aesthetic, not merely historical criticism. The necessity that he shall conform, that he shall cohere, is not one-sided; what

happens simultaneously to all the works of art which preceded it. The existing monuments form an ideal order among themselves,

which is modified by the introduction of the new (the really new) work of art among them." T.S.Eliot

[stlukesguild]

That bit (and a little more) from Eliot's great essay, Tradition and the Individual Talent from The Sacred Wood has long been etched upon my mind. Art is as much a dialog with art and other artists as it is a dialog with the present.

Looking at the first section here of Roethke's poem it is clear that he builds upon Davies exploration of the idea of all the cosmos involved in a grand dance... or the Musica Universalis or the Music of the Spheres a concept often credited to Pythagoras, who is quoted as having suggested that "there is geometry in the humming of the strings; there is music in the spacing of the spheres." This concept was further echoed in Dante's Divine Comedy and the theory remained popular into the Renaissane and was even put forth in Johannes Kepler's Harmonice Mundi (1619) in which Kepler suggested a connection between geometry, astronomy, harmonics, and music... a universal music (musica universalis).

It is immediately intriguing to consider Roethke's use of the word "humming" in this context.

Is that dance slowing in the mind of man
That made him think the universe could hum?

It also leads me to think that the dancing bears to which Roethke speaks are none other than Ursa Major and Minor.

[quasimodo1]

According to some academic critics of Sir John Davies and other more recent critiques of Roethke's poems, in the past the mind and the universe (taking up stlukes. mention of constellations) were said to be somehow syncopated and/or humming in unison. "But what I learned there, dancing all alone,/ Was not the joyless motion of a stone" These lines indicate to me a harmony percieved of the planet (a stone) and the universe also in harmony with the dancing mind.

[Virgil]

Hmm, my Roethke collection doesn't contain this poem nor was I able to find it on line. Does anyone have a link to "The Dance"?

[stlukesguild]

Is that dance slowing in the mind of man
That made him think the universe could hum?
The great wheel turns its axle when it can

I ponder at the opening lines. Is Roethke asking merely whether we have lost faith in that old concept of the Musica Universalis... or have we lost something larger... a faith in an actual Universal Harmony... and order or meaning to the universe... God?

I need a place to sing, and dancing-room,
And I have made a promise to my ears
I'll sing and whistle romping with the bears.

For they are all my friends: I saw one slide
Down a steep hillside on a cake of ice-
Or was that in a book? I think with pride:
A caged bear rarely does the same thing twice
In the same way: O watch his body sway!
This animal remembering to be gay.

And then he turns to the dancing bears... and I wonder whether he is speaking of the celestial bears (Ursa Major/Minor)... and the image of the bear sliding on a cake of ice calls to mind the image of these constellations or a snowy horizon... or was it something read in a book?

...As the two bears, whom the First Mover flings
With a short turn around heaven's axeltree,
In a round dance forever wheeling be."

from Orchestra, Sir John Davies

And the caged animal is seen dancing with a joy that immediately calls to mind (especially in response to Roethke's choice of that word "gay") his beloved Yeats:

I have heard that hysterical women say
They are sick of the palette and fiddle-bow.
Of poets that are always gay...

On all the tragic scene they stare.
One asks for mournful melodies;
Accomplished fingers begin to play.
Their eyes mid many wrinkles, their eyes,
Their ancient, glittering eyes, are gay.

from Lapis Lazuli

The last two stanzas reinforce this connection with Yeats and make me suspect that Roethke speaks of the dance of poetry... and certainly not the "joyless motion of a stone"... the "dance" of the dead planets throughout the celestial spheres:

I tried to fling my shadow at the moon,
The while my blood leaped with a wordless song.
Though dancing needs a master, I had none
To teach my toes to listen to my tongue.
But what I learned there, dancing all alone,
Was not the joyless motion of a stone.

I take this cadence from a man named Yeats;
I take it, and I give it back again:
For other tunes and other wanton beats
Have tossed my heart and fiddle through my brain,
Yes, I was dancing-mad, and how
That came to be the bears and Yeats would know.

Again I find myself thinking on Kunitz' description of Roethke's response to Davies' Orchestra:

it was beat, above all, that enchanted him—

There is an intriguing section of Davies Orchestra in which he discusses the music of poetry... its rhythm... as a dance:

70 (67)

But for more diuers and more pleasing show,
A swift and wandring daunce she did inuent,
VVith passages vncertaine to and fro,
Yet with a certaine aunswere and consent
To the quick musick of the Instrument.
Fiue was the number of the Musicks feete,
Which still the daunce did with fiue paces meete...

69

What shall I name those currant trauases
That on a triple Dactyle foote doe run
Close by the ground with slyding passages,
VVherein that Dauncer greatest prayse hath won
Which with best order can all orders shun:
For euery where he wantonly must range,
And turne and wind, with vnexpected change.

70

Yet is ther one the most delightfull kind,
A lofty iumping, or a leaping round,
VVhere arme in arme, two Dauncers are entwind,
And whirle themselues with strict embracements bound,
And still their feet an Anapest do sound:
An Anapest is all theyr musicks song,
Whose first two feet are short, & third is long.

92

And those great Maisters of the liberall Arts
In all their seuerall Schooles doe Dauncing teach:
For humble Grammer first doth set the parts
Of congruent and well-according speach:
Which Rhetorick whose state ye clouds doth reach,
And heau'nly Poetry doe forward lead,
And diuers Measures, diuersly doe tread.

93

For Rhetorick clothing speech in rich aray
In looser numbers teacheth her to range,
VVith twentie tropes, and turning euery way,
And various figures, and licentious change:
But Poetry with rule and order strange
So curiously doth moue each single pace,
As all is mard if she one foote misplace.

I'll wait for Petrarch to comment here...

[Virgil]

My Roethke collection contains this after all. I was looking under the wrong title. I was reading this last night and this is another outstanding poem. I don't have time to comment right now, but I will by tonight.

[Jozanny]

Will someone be kind enough to pm me the poem? I have not made it to the library yet because my Quickie and I are in a dark comedy of discovery as to which of us will kill the other first.

It is hard to digest Roethke from this angle, but what I have digested leaves me conflicted.

Thanks to those who helped. Hard day, bbl.

[quasimodo1]

STEPHEN SPENDER ON ROETHKE'S DANCING: "In his poems, Roethke seems often to be dancing. This is not the dance transcended and purified in the poetry; the entry into a metaphysical pattern of theological joy of Auden or Eliot, nor is it the tragic dancing on the graves of the dead of Yeats-- it is simply Roethke incredibly and almost against his will dancing. He is the boy who is waltzed round by his father of the whiskeyed breath; the sensual man swaying toward the woman swaying toward him; the dying man dancing his way out of his body toward God. There was never, one might say, such ungainly yet compulsive dancing, as in Roethke." Stephen Spender

[Virgil]

Two things strike me from this poem. First the number of questions throughout the poem. I count seventeen questions the narrator asks. He opens the poem with a question: "Is that dance slowing in the mind of man/That made him think the universe could hum?" That openning question is quite paradoxical, actually quite metaphysical. A dance in the mind is quite an image. It's not physically real and it leads to another metaphysical concept, the universe portrayed as a machine. How about some other questions: "What is desire?--/The impulse to make someone else complete?" "Who can embrace the body of his fate?" "Who's whistling up my sleeve?" "Things loll and loiter. Who condones the lost?/This joy outleaps the dog. Who cares? Who cares?" "What shape leaped forward at the sensual cry?--" "Did space shake off an angel with a sigh?" "Did Beatrice deny what Dante saw?" "Who leaps to heaven at a single bound?" "The visible obscures. But who knows when?" "The world is for the living. Who are they?"

All of these questions are paradoxical, disjointed, and realtively unanaswerable. Some are even outright absurd. From a poetic craft point of view, these questions creates a constant stress through out the poem. There is never a moment of relaxation.

The other thing that I observe is the constant contrast of opposites: light versus dark, ground versus universe or heavens, down versus up, mind versus body, spirit versus flesh, ice versus fire, animal versus human.

I should have more to say on the poem later.

[quasimodo1]

Was I the servant of a sovereign wish,
Or ladle rattling in an empty dish?
One of Virgil's questions quoted here, may seem absurd but my view is that it's rhetorical. The given answer is that Roethke sees himself as voicing or re-voicing the dead poets theme. He indeed was or wanted to be the "servant of a sovereign wish" almost as historical fiction when done correctly recaptures the past.

[Virgil]

Was I the servant of a sovereign wish,
Or ladle rattling in an empty dish?
One of Virgil's questions quoted here, may seem absurd but my view is that it's rhetorical. The given answer is that Roethke sees himself as voicing or re-voicing the dead poets theme. He indeed was or wanted to be the "servant of a sovereign wish" almost as historical fiction when done correctly recaptures the past.

Actually Quasi I missed that question entirely. So eighteen questions, unless I missed others. I'm not familiar with this dead poet's theme. Can you elaborate? I'm curious and interested.