Week 8

The Echo Elf Answers             By THOMAS HARDY (1840-1928)

How much shall I love her?

For life, or not long?

                “Not long.”

Alas! When forget her?

In years, or by June?

                “By June.”

And whom woo I after?

No one, or a throng?

                “A throng.”

Of these shall I wed one

Long hence, or quite soon?

                “Quite soon.”

And which will my bride be?

The right or the wrong?

                “The wrong.”

And my remedy – what kind?

Wealth-wove, or earth-hewn?

                “Earth-hewn.”

The Ruined Maid                    By THOMAS HARDY

"O 'Melia, my dear, this does everything crown!

Who could have supposed I should meet you in Town?

And whence such fair garments, such prosperi-ty?" —

"O didn't you know I'd been ruined?" said she.

— "You left us in tatters, without shoes or socks,

Tired of digging potatoes, and spudding up docks;

And now you've gay bracelets and bright feathers three!" —

"Yes: that's how we dress when we're ruined," said she.

— "At home in the barton you said thee' and thou,'

And thik oon,' and theäs oon,' and t'other'; but now

Your talking quite fits 'ee for high compa-ny!" —

"Some polish is gained with one's ruin," said she.

— "Your hands were like paws then, your face blue and bleak

But now I'm bewitched by your delicate cheek,

And your little gloves fit as on any la-dy!" —

"We never do work when we're ruined," said she.

— "You used to call home-life a hag-ridden dream,

And you'd sigh, and you'd sock; but at present you seem

To know not of megrims or melancho-ly!" — "True. One's pretty lively when ruined," said she.

— "I wish I had feathers, a fine sweeping gown,

And a delicate face, and could strut about Town!" —

"My dear — a raw country girl, such as you be,

Cannot quite expect that. You ain't ruined," said she.

Thomas Hardy is the author of Far From the Madding Crowd (one of 14 novels, three volumes of short stories, and over a thousand poems, among other writings).  The story is set in the southwest countryside of England, the county Dorset (which he calls Wessex, after a pre-Norman conquest kingdom of early England), near the ruins of Stonehenge and others of Roman antiquity, and features the rural people of that area, whose traditional lives he found profoundly interesting.  One of his recurrent themes is the tension between the traditional past and established faith and the modernizing world with its scientific developments and emphasis on evidence.  In the imaginative life of the poet, his art reflects the displacement and loss occasioned by historical developments, including Darwin's Origin of the Species and, later, the catastrophe of WWI. Hardy was fascinated by history, perhaps the more so as he lived through the modernizing period of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and the great event of WWI.

He's been accused of pessimism, of having a dark, fatalistic view of human prospects, and admitted that age did not dispose him to optimism.   This novel, despite dark currents, ends happily, and in the current film version by Thomas Vinterberg, as at least one critic has opined, much of what was unsettling in the novel and earlier film version, has been softened.  The heroine is Bathsheba Everdene, a powerful and beautiful young woman who inherits an estate and determines to run it herself. The pastoral form here belies the strange tensions and disconcerting passions that visit Hardy's characters.

Week 7

Rockwell Kent (1882-1971)

Out Beyond Ideas of Wrongdoing and Rightdoing    Jelaluddin Rumi (1207-1273)

Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing,

there is a field.  I’ll meet you there.

When the soul lies down in that grass,

the world is too full to talk about.

Ideas, language, even the phrase each other

doesn’t make any sense.   

In Praise of Self-Deprecation    by Wislawa Szymborska  (1923-2012)

The buzzard has nothing to fault himself with.

Scruples are alien to the black panther.

Piranhas do not doubt the rightness of their actions.

The rattlesnake approves of himself without reservations.

The self-critical jackal does not exist.

The locust, alligator, trichina, horsefly

live as they live and are glad of it.

The killer whale's heart weighs one hundred kilos

but in other respects it is light.

There is nothing more animal-like

than a clear conscience

on the third planet of the Sun.

The Three Oddest Words

When I pronounce the word Future,

the first syllable already belongs to the past.

When I pronounce the word Silence,

I destroy it.

When I pronounce the word Nothing,

I make something no non-being can hold.

(Translated by S. Baranczak & C. Cavanagh)  

See  also "The Joy of Writing, " by Polish poet Wislawa Szymborska:

http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/1996/szymborska-poems-5_en.html

The Author of American Ornithology Sketches a Bird, Now Extinct   David Wagoner

When he walked through town, the wing-shot bird he'd hidden

Inside his coat began to cry like a baby,

High and plaintive and loud as the calls he'd heard

While hunting it in the woods, and goodwives stared

And scurried indoors to guard their own from harm.

And the innkeeper and the goodmen in the tavern

Asked him whether his child was sick, then laughed.

Slapped knees, and laughed as he unswaddled his prize,

His pride and burden: an ivory-billed woodpecker

As big as a crow, still wailing and squealing.

Upstairs, when he let it go in his workroom,

it fell silent at last. He told at dinner

How devoted masters of birds drawn from the life

Must gather their flocks around them with a rifle

And make them live forever inside books.

Later, he found his bedspread covered with plaster

And the bird clinging beside a hole in the wall

Clear through to already-splintered weatherboards

And the sky beyond. While he tied one of its legs

To a table leg, it started wailing again.

And went on wailing as if toward cypress groves

While the artist dew and tinted on fine vellum

Its red cockade, gray claws, and sepia eyes

From which a white edge flowed to the lame wing

Like light flying and ended there in blackness.

He drew and studied for days, eating and dreaming

Fitfully through the dancing and loud drumming

Of an ivory bill that refused pecans and beetles,

Chestnuts and sweet-sour fruit of magnolias,

Riddling his table, slashing his fingers, wailing.

He watched it die, he said, with great regret.

Good afternoon!

Today we will review the pieces assigned last week, including "The White Heron," and review the quizzes. I will return essay 2, graded.  Not a very recent story here (2014), but an ironic one, about a former teacher and his friend whose argument over the relative merits of prose and poetry grew murderous.  We cannot assume that literature makes us better people, I guess!

Famous Ballads:  http://poetry.about.com/od/poemtypes/a/Ballads.htm

Camille Paglia on "Cults and Cosmic Consciousness" in the 1960's: http://www.bu.edu/arion/files/2010/03/paglia_cults-1.pdf

Note:  If you have selected the piece for recitation you can earn extra credit points by giving it a practice run before the class and calling for feedback. *-*

Week 5

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

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

     Today we pick up where we left off last week, reviewing the poem written about last week  ("The Summer Day"), Emily Dickinson's pieces, and on to ("nothing," by e.e.cummings) among others.  We will get to Hemingway's safari set piece, too.    For next week we'll cover Sarah Orne Jewett's "The White Heron." We will discuss  similarities and differences in these stories, but here I will indicate some of the similarities in theme that I have noted:

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

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

Reconciliation

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

A White Heron

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How the Animal World Lost Its License to Teach

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

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Native American literature offers some interesting testimonials of tribal life and thought and the confrontation with European settlers.   Gertrude Bonnin (Zitkala Sa) was a Native American writer who recorded her memories of Sioux life in South Dakota, including the influence of her mother, the natural world around them, the legends and rituals of her tribe, and her meeting with white missionaries.  In addition, "The Navaho Night Chant," a piece still performed today by the Navaho, offers a look into the way that poetry and chanting come together in a ritual of healing and transformation intended to return its participants to a renewed sense of vitality and wholeness.

                                                      Tintern Abbey (12th Century)

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

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

Week 4

Hubble Image:  a giant cluster of about 3,000 stars called Westerlund 2, named for Swedish astronomer Bengt Westerlund who discovered the grouping in the 1960s. The cluster resides in a raucous stellar breeding ground known as Gum 29, located 20,000 light-years away from Earth in the constellation Carina. (NASA.gov)

One Day I Wrote her Name                                    Edmund Spenser (1553-1599)

One day I wrote her name upon the strand,

But came the waves and washed it away:

Again I wrote it with a second hand,

But came the tide, and made my pains his prey.

"Vain man," said she, "that dost in vain assay,

A mortal thing so to immortalize;

For I myself shall like to this decay,

And eke my name be wiped out likewise."

"Not so," (quod I) "let baser things devise

To die in dust, but you shall live by fame:

My verse your vertues rare shall eternize,

And in the heavens write your glorious name:

Where whenas death shall all the world subdue,

Our love shall live, and later life renew."

This World is not Conclusion             Emily Dickinson (1830-1886)

This World is not Conclusion.

A Species stands beyond—

Invisible, as Music—

But positive, as Sound—

It beckons, and it baffles—

Philosophy—don't know—

And through a Riddle, at the last—

Sagacity, must go—

To guess it, puzzles scholars—

To gain it, Men have borne

Contempt of Generations

And Crucifixion, shown—

Faith slips—and laughs, and rallies—

Blushes, if any see—

Plucks at a twig of Evidence—

And asks a Vane, the way—

Much Gesture, from the Pulpit—

Strong Hallelujahs roll—

Narcotics cannot still the Tooth

That nibbles at the soul—

"The Ballad of Reading Gaol," by Oscar Wilde.

Six Elements of the Human Condition ( from author Paul Ricouer)

1.     Finitude  (our sense of limitation, mortality)

2.     Estrangement from God or the Divine, the numinous

3.     All is in process, we are all becoming, too, and transcendence is part of this process; the truth is never whole and complete, we see in part.

4.     The paradox of the freedom and burden of human choice.  The give and take tension of every moment’s choice.

5.     Our existence lies within and through others, people primarily, sociality being a primary aspect of human nature.

6.     Our identity is linked to our origins and participation in the universe or cosmos.

We can talk about the ideas listed above, those associated with the human condition, in relation to the stories and poems we read, including the Christian texts, Old and New Testaments, which depict the creation as the work of an all-knowing, all-powerful father figure to whom we owe obedience, respect, and gratitude, and whose judgment we may fear, mercy desire.  The first book, Genesis, is here:  http://www.kingjamesbibleonline.org/Genesis-Chapter-1/ and tells the story of Creation by word (and act) from a formless void, into the familiar world of living forms, including that of man and woman.  It is a very old story, Bronze Age, written sometime between 1100 to 1400 B.C.E., but describing events from a much earlier period before the invention of writing (cuneiform and hieroglyphics) when rule by kings and priests, an elite class, had grown up in the ancient Middle East.

-------------------The Romantic poets such as William Wordworth and others who followed ( and the later modernists, too, such as William Carlos Williams) sought an aesthetic rooted in common experience, that of ordinary people, the natural and urban world and our relationships to all. The early 20th century movement known as Imagism in fact made it practice to strip poetry to clear concrete physical details, as clear and solid as a piece of sculpture; the details of the image were to "speak for themselves," so as to free the poem from sentimentality, ideology, dogma, doctrine, stale language, what have you.  The imagists were influenced by Asian poetry, haiku and tanka, which you probably remember from grade school.  Haiku is unrhymed and typically limited to three lines of 5, 7, and 5 syllables, and expressive of some aspect of Nature's seasonal show, and our perceptions of the simultaneous arising of phenomenon.  I reproduce some here below:

Haiku   (lines of 5, 7, and 5 syllables, considered a closed form)

After spring sunset

Mist rises from the river

Spreading like a flood.

                                                Chora

A bare pecan tree

slips a pencil shadow down

a moonlit snow slope.

                                                Etheridge Knight

From the bough

floating down river,

insect song.

                                    Issa (1763-1827)

The bougainvillea

Beckons with its flowered stem

Of sunlit fuschia

Yellow butterfly

Fluttering over the roof

Against the blue sky

                        --Vincent Bellito, student

the dalai lama

sitting lotus on the floor

on my girlfriend’s shirt

                        --Matt Dee, student

Rain kicks down my door

Like quarterbacks settle scores

Tougher than ever before

                        --Michelle Rodriguez, student

In a Station of the Metro         by Ezra Pound  (1885-1972)

The apparition of these faces in the crowd;

Petals on a wet black bough.

                                                       Prothontary Warbler (Audubon Society) 

The modernists experimented with free verse, often focusing on the things, the concrete particulars of perceptions, natural or manufactured, at times atomized, shown in relative isolation, their meaning and apparently random or fragmentary quality suggestive of the greater whole.  The following is a very famous poem  reflective of the imagist movement:

The Red Wheelbarrow                                 William Carlos Williams (1883-1963)

so much depends

upon

a red wheel

barrow

glazed with rain

water

beside the white 

chickens

And here is another by Williams:

Young Woman At A Window

She sits with

tears on

her cheek


her cheek on

her hand


the child

in her lap


his nose 

pressed

to the glass

At Harper's you may read an excellent little piece by an accomplished American poet named Tony Hoagland on why poetry matters and the 20 he offers as instructive:  http://harpers.org/blog/2013/04/twenty-little-poems-that-could-save-america/3/

from Ralph Waldo Emerson's essay Self-Reliance       

       There is a time in every man's education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide; that he must take himself for better, for worse, as his portion; that though the wide universe is full of good, no kernel of nourishing corn can come to him but through his toil bestowed on that plot of ground which is given to him to till. The power which resides in him is new in nature, and none but he knows what that is which he can do, nor does he know until he has tried. Not for nothing one face, one character, one fact, makes much impression on him, and another none. This sculpture in the memory is not without preestablished harmony. The eye was placed where one ray should fall, that it might testify of that particular ray. We but half express ourselves, and are ashamed of that divine idea which each of us represents. It may be safely trusted as proportionate and of good issues, so it be faithfully imparted, but God will not have his work made manifest by cowards. A man is relieved and gay when he has put his heart into his work and done his best; but what he has said or done otherwise, shall give him no peace. It is a deliverance which does not deliver. In the attempt his genius deserts him; no muse befriends; no invention, no hope.

        Trust thyself: every heart vibrates to that iron string. Accept the place the divine providence has found for you, the society of your contemporaries, the connection of events. Great men have always done so, and confided themselves childlike to the genius of their age, betraying their perception that the absolutely trustworthy was seated at their heart, working through their hands, predominating in all their being.

-----------------------------   So-called nonsense literature, like the prose novel Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, by Lewis Carroll, or "The Walrus and the Carpenter," is typically set in places where strange things occur and features extraordinary characters and creatures.  Often the plot events and speech are equally mystifying or silly but the premium seems to be on defying what is strictly logical or plausible, the conventional, the everyday, in favor of wordplay, fantasy, and fun.  We have to let go for a time, to sing, dance, play, and love.   Nonsense works appeal to children and to the child in us all. And perhaps in them we may find something beyond age.

The poem below, in the form of a ballad, has always been a favorite of mine, and one easily memorized.  It is by a poet much admired by the late Beatle John Lennon, who wrote some nonsense verse himself.

The Owl and the Pussycat               by Edmund Lear (1812-1888)

The Owl and the Pussy-cat went to sea 

   In a beautiful pea green boat,

They took some honey, and plenty of money,   

  Wrapped up in a five pound note.

The Owl looked up to the stars above,   

  And sang to a small guitar,’

O lovely Pussy! O Pussy my love,     

  What a beautiful Pussy you are, 

      You are,       

      You are!

What a beautiful Pussy you are!’

Pussy said to the Owl, ‘You elegant fowl!   

   How charmingly sweet you sing!

O let us be married! too long we have tarried:   

   But what shall we do for a ring?’

They sailed away, for a year and a day,   

  To the land where the Bong-tree grows

And there in a wood a Piggy-wig stood   

   With a ring at the end of his nose,         

       His nose,         

       His nose,

With a ring at the end of his nose.

‘Dear pig, are you willing to sell for one shilling

    Your ring?’ Said the Piggy, ‘I will.’

So they took it away, and were married next day   

    By the Turkey who lives on the hill.

They dined on mince, and slices of quince,   

    Which they ate with a runcible spoon;

And hand in hand, on the edge of the sand,   

    They danced by the light of the moon,         

        The moon,         

        The moon,

They danced by the light of the moon.

Here, too, a short commentary on nonsense lyrics by George Orwell:  http://www.nonsenselit.org/Lear/essays/orwell_1.html
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Writing Assignment #2 (Due week 5)

In “The Summer Day” on page 2 of the week one poetry handout, poet Mary Oliver speaks from a field where she muses upon what is before her, and asks readers to do the same.   She is in the habit of paying attention, bearing witness, and in an assuming, almost childlike way poses several questions.  Provide a 300-350 word reading of the poem (an essay description and interpretative response) that identifies how she puts the lines together, how she begins, the tenor of the questions she asks and the responses she gives, her use of imagery, setting and action, and the points she derives as she moves from beginning to end.  If you have already written about this one, choose another for an explication in short essay form. Warning:  Do not plagiarize any part of the response.  If you borrow from outside critical analysis, acknowledge the borrowing as such and use your own words or direct quotation.