Week 3

Writing, at its best, is a lonely life.  Organizations for writers palliate the writer's loneliness but I doubt if they improve his writing.  He grows in public stature as he sheds his loneliness and often his work deteriorates.  For he does his work alone and if he is a good enough writer he must face eternity, or the lack of it, each day.
                                                       –from Ernest Hemingway's Nobel Prize Acceptance Speech in 1954

Welcome back. Hope you've had a good week.  Today we will continue discussing Week 1 and 2 poetry selections, including "Sestina," by Swinburne, the short fable by American writer Kate Chopin (1860-1904), "The Ant and the Grasshopper," by Englishman Somerset Maugham (1874-1965) and perhaps the two by short stories by Ernest Hemingway (1899-1960).

I'll return  your homework, submitted last week, and see to your first response essay.  I've also a couple of extra pieces, just below, in honor of birds, the very creatures whose protection inspired early wildlife conservation efforts (the Audubon Society) and the beautifully composed and influential book by Rachel Carson entitled Silent Spring.  The beauty and delicacy of birds and birdsong have old poetic associations; even in their predatory aspect, the creatures of the air embody spiritual dimensions of human interest and value.

First, the song of the nightingale,  a bird not found in the Americas but whose song is accounted amongst the most beautiful of birds and to whom poets such as William Shakespeare and John Keats have paid tribute:  https://www.freesound.org/people/reinsamba/sounds/120226/

Next a Maya poem:

from Songs of Dzitbalche                     translated from the Mayan text (18^th century)

You are singing little dove,

on the branches of the silk-cotton tree

And there also is the cuckoo,

and many other little birds.

All are rejoicing,

The songbirds of our god, our Lord.

And our goddess

Has her little birds,

The turtledove, the redbird,

The black and yellow songbirds, and

            The hummingbird.

These are the birds of the beautiful

            Goddess, our Lady.

If there is such happiness

Among the creatures,

Why do our hearts not also rejoice?

At daybreak all is jubilant.

Let only joy, only songs,

enter our thoughts.

I found the poem above in a book called Earth Prayers From Around the World.  Clearly the Maya poet knew and loved the various birds, and indicates their association with what was believed holy, god and goddess. To make sacred daily life through recognition of divine essences and beings is something both poets and priests assume.
     Beginning in the 16th century, the Maya culture was largely destroyed and their lands colonized by the Spanish conquistadors, who then sought by force to convert them to Christianity.  The Mayas had the only fully developed writing system in the Pre-Columbian Americas but nearly all of the books in which they had recorded their history and thoughts were destroyed.

Birds have inspired many conservationists and writers.  Poets have traditionally identified with the beautiful song and flight of birds, poetry being seen as song, and winged by inspiration. Birds often personify freedom, and joy, the aspirations of the unbound soul. In the following ode "To A Skylark," the poet Percy Bysse Shelley emulates the songbird, as he praises it thus:

Better than all measures

                Of delightful sound,

         Better than all treasures

                That in books are found,

Thy skill to poet were, thou scorner of the ground!

         Teach me half the gladness

                That thy brain must know,

         Such harmonious madness

                From my lips would flow

The world should listen then, as I am listening now. (lines 95-105)

The form here is lyrical, musical and emotionally expressive, and the occasion finds the poet reminded of humanity, of how our joy and sorrow mingle:   

We look before and after,

    And pine for what is not:
   Our sincerest laughter
    With some pain is fraught;
Our sweetest songs are those that tell of saddest thought. (90-95)

In Swinburne's "Sestina," he represents his soul as a bird and proceeds to reflect upon its nature.  As you can readily see in the first stanza below, the six words used to form the representative pattern are day, night, way, light, may, and delight.  Each will reappear, circulate, in each of the six stanzas and in the final three line envoi in the characteristic sestina form. In addition, the words he chose rhyme:

I saw my soul at rest upon a day 

      As a bird sleeping in the nest of night, 

Among soft leaves that give the starlight way 

      To touch its wings but not its eyes with light; 

So that it knew as one in visions may, 

      And knew not as men waking, of delight. (lines 1-5)

This bird, this soul of the poet, is a dreaming being, sheltered, half hidden, half revealed, continuously nesting apart from the daily round of activity.  It is other-worldy, as befits the notion of a soul, but ensconced in green leaves and starlight,  so we can see it readily.  This bird-soul image represents the poet and his song, his poetry, which has been praised for its musicality,  lyricism.  Described as small and frail and given to "nervous gestures"  and ill health, the poet might well see his soul as a delicate bird, "a nursling of the large-eyed night" (line 26).  And by his description we feel a kind of pathos. Its way is "a lost star's way" (line 17).  Night and day, the bird-soul sleeps, taking pleasure or "faint delight" in a world apart, of sensations likened to the music of minstrels (lines 19-20), those poets of medieval Europe who sang poetry.  In the end, the poet-speaker exhorts his song/self to take the light for soon enough it will be extinguished, and all delight, too.  The poet reminds his readers that we are mortal, with no assurance that the soul or self/bird survives.

The following poem is a sonnet (little song) in which the poet, overlooking the sea, upbraids his readers for giving too much of their attention and time to worldly matters ("getting and spending"), and for being "out of tune" with Nature.  He takes his pleasure in the sensuous elements of sea, wind, and moon, and longs for the old pagan times, as the allusions to Proteus and Triton make clear.  

The World Is Too Much With Us                 by William Wordsworth  

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!

The Sea that bares her bosom to the moon;

The winds that will be howling at all hours,

And are up-gathered 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 wreathed horn.

*In Greek mythology, a sea god who could change his shape at will.

^Another ancient Greek sea god, represented as having the torso of a man and the tail of a fish.

Troubles With The Soul At Morning Calisthenics   Anna Swir (1909-1984), translation

Lying down I lift my legs,

my soul by mistake jumps into my legs.

This is not convenient for her,

besides, she must branch,

for the legs are two.

When I stand on my head

my soul sinks down to my head.

She is then in her place.

But how long can you stand on your head,

especially if you do not know

how to stand on your head.

I Starve My Belly For A Sublime Purpose

Three days

I starve my belly

so that it learns

to eat the sun.

I say to it:  Belly

I am ashamed of you.  You must

Spiritualize yourself.  You must 

eat the sun.

The belly keeps silent

for three days.  It’s not easy

to waken in it higher aspirations.

Yet I hope for the best.

This morning, tanning myself on the beach,

I noticed that, little by little,

it begins to shine.

As I stressed last week, in poetry and prose imagery– represented objects, feelings, and ideas– appeals to our senses–of sight, sound, movement inward and outward, scent, taste, touch, and mind or thought.  Poets and prose writers seek language to express experience in uncommon, extraordinary ways and their work, at its best, invites us to see what we might otherwise not. The language will often be concrete, denoting something that exists in the material world, and tied to the abstract, denoting something that exists conceptually, such as goodness, beauty, truth, freedom, power.  Good poems have extraordinary expressive force and enhance our appreciation of language. Language  literal and figurative– metaphor, simile, personification–and the elements of sound such as alliteration, consonance and assonance, speak to our senses and imagination and intellect. 

Writing Assignment #2

In “The Summer Day” on page 2 of the week one poetry handout, poet Mary Oliver draws the reader's attention to the natural world.  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. 

Week 2

"And some certain significance lurks in all things, else all things are little worth, and the round world itself but an empty cipher, except to sell by the cartload, as they do the hills about Boston, to fill up some morass in the Milky Way."

                                                                                  –Herman Melville, Moby Dick

We are led to Believe a Lie 

When we see not Thro the Eye 

Which was Born in a Night to perish in a Night 

When the Soul Slept in Beams of Light 

God Appears & God is Light 

To those poor Souls who dwell in Night 

But does a Human Form Display 

To those who Dwell in Realms of day    

                                       –William Blake, "Auguries of Innocence"

She should have died hereafter;
There would have been a time for such a word.
— To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,
To the last syllable of recorded time;
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!
Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage
And then is heard no more. It is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury
Signifying nothing.
— Macbeth, by William Shakespeare (Act 5, Scene 5, lines 17-28)

How Poetry Comes to Me       by Gary Snyder (b. 1930)
It comes blundering over the 
Boulders at night, it stays
Frightened outside the 
Range of my campfire
I go to meet it at the 
Edge of the light.

Song of Speaks-Fluently                             Anonymous, Native American (Osage)

To have to carry your own corn far — 


who likes it?


To follow the black bear through the thicket — 


who likes it?


To hunt without profit, to return without anything — 
who likes it?


You have to carry your own corn far.


You have to follow the black bear.


You have to hunt without profit.


If not, what will you tell the little ones? What
 

will you speak of?


For it is bad not to use the talk which God has sent us.


I am Speaks-Fluently. Of all the groups of symbols,


I am a symbol by myself.

 

Magnificent Peak                 by Muso Soseki (1275-1351)

By its own nature
     it towers above
        the tangle of rivers
Don't say
   it's a lot of dirt
      piled high
Without end the mist of dawn
    the evening cloud
      draw their shadows across it
From the four directions
    you can look up and see it
       green and steep and wild.

 Poetry and literature generally are rooted in human experience, private and public, ordinary and extraordinary.  Nature and Time are two large and old themes.   Our existence on earth, the natural elements that surround us, historical circumstance, the changes as we grow and age, the seasons of our life, as it were, inform the works of the human collective.   Art is a human record of awareness, belief, desire, knowledge, custom, and so on and calls upon us to consider, reflect, ask what is significant here. Is it intelligible?  Can meaning be discerned?  Why take a photo of a mountain? Why write a poem about a mountain? 

Look at the photo and the poem above.  How is each composed?  Does the poem, an old one, show something like the photo image?  What in each is emphasized? 

Look at the images in the photos below.  What impressions do they make?  What ideas do you associate with these images?

     

Angkor Wat, Cambodia    Photos by C. Houge

The photo above captures, for me, something of the emerald mystery of Nature and sacred space.  The temple of Angkor Wat (12 c.) is a part of the world's oldest and largest Hindu religious site and incorporates an architectural element called the Temple Mountain which represents Mount Meru, the home of the Gods.  The natural mountains of the world have inspired monumental architecture around the world.  But the snaking tree here in the center of the photo appears to threaten the  edifice, made fragile also by age.

In week one's set of stories and poems, the short fable by Leonardo Da Vinci called "The Nut and the Campanile" also, it seems to me,  articulates the dynamic of creation, growth, age, and eventual destruction:  a nut escapes being eaten by a crow and finds shelter in a crevice of a wall of the campanile.   The wall, an admirer of beauty and nobility, is moved by the nut's story of having lost its place beneath the "old Father" and its plea of "do you, at least, not abandon me." So the wall extends its compassion, happy to shelter one that acknowledges "the grace of God,"  Now the nut,  rooted in darkness, reaches for the light.  It grows to great height and in time displaces "the ancient stones."  The wall comes down. 

    Thus, perhaps, does each generation tread upon another, and civilization itself (symbolically the wall of the campanile) appear to be in Nature's grip.  We may see the theme of continual change here, Time that continually gives and yet takes or removes, creation in the process of transformation, a new manifestation.  As with us, each moment gives way to the next while the whole of life is nonetheless centered in the present moment.  .

    The campanile or belltower in the European tradition was most often a part of a church and was rung several times a day to call the faithful to prayer, to remind them of the incarnation of God.   In civic life, a belltower might warn, among other things, of natural disasters or danger.  Thus we may see in Da Vinci's story, an allegory of the fragility of human constructs in the face of nature's powers and, to my mind, the poignancy of the conflict between humans and nature, a source that giveth and taketh all, and that is loved and feared.

---------------

     In Nature, Ralph Waldo Emerson writes: 

"The stars awaken a certain reverence, because though always present, they are inaccessible; but all natural objects make a kindred impression, when the mind is open to their influence. Nature never wears a mean appearance. Neither does the wisest man extort her secret, and lose his curiosity by finding out all her perfection. Nature never became a toy to a wise spirit. The flowers, the animals, the mountains, reflected the wisdom of his best hour, as much as they had delighted the simplicity of his childhood."

And further, " nature, in the common sense, refers to essences unchanged by man; space, the air, the river, the leaf.  Art is applied to the mixture of his will with the same things, as in a house, a canal, a statue, a picture.  But his operations taken together are so insignificant [. . . ] that in an impression so grand as that of the world on the human mind, they do not vary the result "("Introduction").  

The works or operations of humans in their totality cannot compare with those of nature, he claims, as all our arts and crafts are meagered by nature's grand show.   

     Later he speaks of an "occult relation" between man and nature, a sense of delight and wonder, a harmony, but warns that "nature is not always tricked in holiday attire" and what appears lovely today may tomorrow be "overspread with melancholy." He says, "Nature always wears the colors of the spirit."  And "Nature is the symbol of spirit."  

     He makes it clear that the inward, subjective human experience of nature shapes our views of nature;  we tend to humanize nature; and our experience and imagination clothe nature in various dress–boon companion, indifferent Other, enemy.  But, he urges higher, ideal conceptions:   "Nature stretches out her arms to embrace man, only let his thoughts be of equal greatness."  And, too, "Beauty is the mark God sets upon virtue," and "in art does Nature work through the will of a man filled with the beauty of her first works."  

Nature is the original by which all is measured, and he says, we must learn from nature first-hand, not take our truths second-hand, but have confidence in our own original powers:   "Why should not we also enjoy an original relation to the universe? Why should not we have a poetry and philosophy of insight and not of tradition, and a religion by revelation to us and not the history of theirs?”

    
     By contrast, we have culture, civilization, what we have made of the natural world, often at odds with and a defense against nature's givens.  What does the poet below suggest we understand about the intermingling presences of the natural and artificial?

The Geraniums                                           by Genevieve Taggard (1894-1948)

Even if the geraniums are artificial


Just the same,


In the rear of the Italian café


Under the nimbus of electric light


They are red; no less red


For how they were made. Above


The mirror and the napkins


In the little white pots . . .
. . . In the semi-clean cafe


Where they have good 
Lasagna . . . The red is a wonderful joy


Really, and so are the people


Who like and ignore it. In this place


They also have good bread.

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                                                                    Guido Cagnacci  Allegory of Human Life

The poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge  said that "poetry reveals itself in the balance or reconciliation of opposite or discordant qualities." Reading a poem, we note the ways words and related images and feelings are juxtaposed and the dynamic created. We  last week looked at the doubleness or duality of various familiar concepts, including  nature/art; heaven/hell/; order/disorder; temporal/eternal; mortal/immortal; mutable/immutable; one/many; yin/yang; black/white; good/evil.  If what Coleridge said applies, we might look for the patterns, the contrasting qualities and notes and the play to which they are put or how reconciled, if at all. 

In art we find representations of nature's creations, and of human creation–of course the art work is itself a human construct.  In the painting above, the artist has depicted a largely nude woman,  flowers in her right hand, an hourglass in the other, and a human skull supporting her arm.  Above her head is the image of an ourobouros, a snake swallowing its own tail, an ancient symbol of eternity, and of the natural cycle of continuous birth and death, creation, destruction, and recreation that is fundamental to life as we know it.

Poets and other artists (scientists, too) invite us to look and to see more deeply into the nature of human experience and the cosmos, however small and close, however large and distant.   William Blake shows the power of attention and imaginative connection in a series of paradoxes in "Augeries of Innocence":  "To see a World in a Grain of Sand/And a Heaven in a Wild Flower" is one way he expresses this capacity for seeing beyond the thing at hand, to seeing the connections between life forms in an intuitive or "visionary" way. The emphasis on vision and imagination comes up over and over in poetry, as we shall see, and is often an aspect of what is called metapoetry, poetry that is about poetry or its making. An example is Billy Collins' "Sonnet," about, no surprise, how to make a sonnet. 

The following link provides an introduction to the topic of the sacred and associated religious and cultural history as well as symbols of sacredness such as water, mountains, caves, trees, stones, which often appear as symbols in poetry and story:  http://witcombe.sbc.edu/sacredplaces/sacredness.html   

We will look at Oscar Wilde's short story "The Artist"(http://www.literaturepage.com/read/wilde-essays-lectures-121.html);  in this story Wilde dramatizes the opposition between The Pleasure that Abideth for a Moment, and The Sorrow that Endureth for Ever.  In the story, the artist is an archetype of the creative human, one who will "fashion an image" from imagination and the stuff of experience to express something of what we feel in our life's journey.  The materials Wilde's artist uses have been used before, as is often the case in life, or can be found in raw natural form, for new-fashioned expression.

I reproduce here below definitions of Nature and Art:

 NATURE

1

a : the inherent character or basic constitution of a person or thing : essence 

b : disposition, temperament

2

a : a creative and controlling force in the universe

b : an inner force or the sum of such forces in an individual

3

: a kind or class usually distinguished by fundamental or essential characteristics <documents of a confidential nature> <acts of a ceremonial nature>

4

: the physical constitution or drives of an organism; especially : an excretory organ or function —used in phrases like the call of nature

5

: a spontaneous attitude (as of generosity)

6

: the external world in its entirety

7

a : humankind's original or natural condition

b : a simplified mode of life resembling this condition

8

: the genetically controlled qualities of an organism

9

: natural scenery

ART     A definition of  Art,  from Carl Jung's "The Poet":  Art is a kind of innate drive that seizes a human being and makes him its instrument.  The artist is not a person endowed with free will who seeks his own ends, but one who allows art to realize its purposes through him. . . .

     A great work of art is like a dream; for all its apparent obviousness it does not explain itself and is never unequivocal.  A dream never says:  "You ought," or:   "This is the Truth."  It presents an image in much the same way as nature allows a plant to grow, and we must draw our own conclusions.

And from Annie Dillard's "About Symbol": All art may be said to be symbolic in this sense:  it is a material mock-up of bright idea.  Any work of art symbolizes the process by which spirit generates matter, or materials generate idea.  Any work of art symbolizes juncture itself, the socking of eternity into time and energy into form.  

                                                                                                                                     Christian Houge

Homework:   Compose the first essay response (#1), typed and double-spaced and titled.  Read the Ernest Hemingway short stories "Three Shots" and "Indian Camp." In the coming weeks we'll look also at the bible stories "Cain and Abel"  and "The Prodigal Son" so that we can catch up on readings from week 1 not yet addressed.

Week 1

Poppies

The earth is rocky and full of roots; it's clay, and it seems doomed and polluted, but you dig little holes for the ugly shriveled bulbs, throw in a handful of poppy seeds, and cover it all over, and you know you'll never see it again - it's death and clay and shrivel, and your hands are nicked from the rocks, your nails black with soil. –Anne Lamott



                                     

Welcome to the Introduction to Literature (ENC1102) class here at the Art Institute.  As your instructor, I will post description of course material and assignments and discussion of key terms and selections presented in class (and additional material too, perhaps).  You should visit the site to stay abreast of material and apprised of any changes to assignments or selections to be covered.

Course Description:  The course is designed as a study of some of the various genres of literature–lyric and narrative poetry, fictional and non-fictional narratives, and dramatic works in performance.  The themes, forms and conventions of the various works we read will provide means of discussion, and written and oral performance.

Themes:  

Nature:   perhaps the primary thematic focus, and a wide field of play, for there is no escaping Nature, the ultimate source and end of all things human and non-human.  What is Nature actually, and what is not?  We look at nature through the lens of "Art," an entirely human construct, one which here includes philosophy, religion, history, science and, importantly, language.   We humans are nature’s creatures, however distinct, highly evolved, and seemingly "superior" to other species.  Whether little or much our awareness of the physical universe–Earth, Sun, Moon, Stars, and all the world's “creatures great and small,” etcetera– we are defined and bound by our relationship to the natural world, the Cosmos, out of which we emerged, as did all things, some 13 billion years ago, when the Big Bang occurred, according to scientific claims and calculations. The tree of life is an old and apt symbol of this connectedness, mythological and scientific.

       

The Human Experience and Journey (Individual/Society):  We are born, grow to youth and maturity, age, and then die . . . and in this our lives, individually and collectively, reflect the age-old succession of the seasons and organic life.  A continual process of creation and destruction, as the old gives way before the new, and what is past becomes an archive of artifacts, memories and stories, whereby we can trace our origins, and wonder and speculate about the mysteries of Time.  In fact, As William Faulkner wrote, the past is never dead. The vital function that artists perform in creating art works, their evocations and explorations of the material and spiritual realms, of human growth and identity, the conflicts between individuals and societal groups, provide an endless source of insight, inspiration, and wonder.  I am hoping you find it so, at any rate.

Religion/God/ Spirituality:  The course material invites you to consider representations of nature, of the human and what we have made of things, the phenomena,  and the noumena of the world.   What to think of nature, our origins, the Creation,  each other, family, society, culture?  Indeed, we may see nature, including humans and their constructs, an antagonist, an ally, a morally neutral, even amoral force, reflective of forces and processes far beyond our ability to comprehend, in which savagery, destruction, suffering and death stand equally with kindness, creation, joy, and life.  Life comprises a great many conceptual opposites and their reconciliation is a life's work.  The poems and stories illustrate just such work. We think in categories of opposition: life/death; light/dark; good/evil; finite/infinite; material/immaterial; mutable/immutable; temporal/eternal; transcendence/immanence; the One/the Many, holy/unholy.  We have the given and what we make of it verbally or linguistically, conceptually.  Art manifests the human imagination and spirit in its attempt to recreate, name, and understand life.

To summarize, we live in time, and in space, and the cycles of nature and stages of life provide rich subject matter for writers reflecting on the experience of living.  Nature, in fact, appears a mirror and a touchstone of the Self and human experience.  We are part of universal nature, and we bring our particular human nature to it, with our griefs, our joys, our forebodings, aspirations, and imaginings.  The Book of Nature informs us to the extent we take the time to read it and to acknowledge how it shapes us. A falling leaf, a sudden snowfall, the stars shining in the blackness of space–these speak to us.  Indeed, it is a story of "supernatural" dimensions in human imagination, and thus the religious and spiritual experience is necessarily a theme we will address. Consider the following the following two poems, the first concerned with states of consciousness that arise in groundless, in-between moments, nothing doing but aware above all, when we are face to face with the unknowable, or what is behind the veil of the familiar, the matter behind all matter, invisible, "ungraspable"(Strand line 3). And the second, the endless demands that so fill the daily life that Nature's respite appears the speaker's salvation.

The Night, The Porch                          by Mark Strand

To stare at nothing is to learn by heart

What all of us will be swept into, and baring oneself

To the wind is feeling the ungraspable somewhere close by.

Trees can sway or be still.  Day or night can be what they wish.

What we desire, more than a season or weather, is the comfort

Of being strangers, at least to ourselves.  This is the crux

Of the matter, which is why even now we seem to be waiting

For Something whose appearance would be its vanishing–

The sound, say, of a few leaves falling, or just one leaf,

Or less.  There is no end to what we can learn.  The book out there

Tells us as much, and was never written with us in mind.

Woman Work                                                       by Maya Angelou

I’ve got the children to tend

The clothes to mend

The floor to mop

The food to shop

Then the chicken to fry

The baby to dry

I got company to feed

The garden to weed

I’ve got shirts to press

The tots to dress

The can to be cut

I gotta cleanup this hut

Then see about the sick

And the cotton to pick.

Shine on me, sunshine

Rain on me, rain

Fall softly, dewdrops

And cool my brow again.

Storm blow me from here

With your fiercest wind

Let me float across the sky

‘Til I can rest again.

Fall gently, snowflakes

Cover me with white

Cold icy kisses and

Let me rest tonight.

Sun, rain, curving sky

Mountain, oceans, leaf, and stone

Star shine, moon glow

You’re all that I can call my own


----------------------

-----------------------------

I must down to the seas again, to the lonely sea and the sky,
And all I ask is a tall ship and a star to steer her by.   –John Masefield (1878-1967), British poet

                      

      Eternal, Infinite, Immutable, Immortal, God, the One, and their polar opposites–the temporal, finite, mutable, mortal, human, the many–we shall see how these concepts are embodied, literally and/or figuratively in various works.  We shall see how some artists have articulated the search for Truth, God, the impact of Beauty, the experience of the Sublime.  Literature gives us a window into the human experience that is not to be missed.  

As regards the symbols of stories, myths and legends, whether of ancient Babylon, Egypt, Greece, India  the Judeo-Christian world, Native America, or the contemporary U.S., Joseph Campbell, a scholar in comparative literature, wrote that they refer “primarily to our inner selves” and not to “outer historical events” (Thou Art That 28), that they are psychological archetypes known to all mythologies.”  Beyond the necessities imposed by our animal nature, he writes, is “another order of living, which the animals do not know, that of awe before the mystery of being, the mysterium tremendum et fascinans, that can be the root and branch of the spiritual sense of one’s days” (29).

When we read  the lines “To see a World in a Grain of Sand/ And a Heaven in a Wild Flower,” by William Blake, we may sense the great mystery of the heavenly, infinite realms evoked by his focus on the familiar, small by comparison, microcosm of sand particle and wild flower. By metaphor and symbol we bridge in language inner and outer worlds, subject and object, the personal and the cosmic.  Blake wrote, "The ancient Poets animated all sensible objects with Gods or Geniuses, calling them by the names and adorning them with the properties of woods, rivers, mountains, lakes, cities, nations, and whatever their enlarged & Numerous senses could perceive." In this way, they acknowledged a living spiritual connection with the world around, saw in it divinity.  

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In writing about literature, you will reproduce in summary or direct quotation lines of text to illustrate and to ground your descriptions and interpretations in the precise language used by the poet.  You will want to show readers how you have arrived at your conclusions about its construction and meaning.  Use quotation marks around the word-for-word phrasings and lines and a slash or virgule to separate lines of text that run no more than three successive lines. Blocks of text four or more lines in length should be indented or offset 10 spaces, without use of quotation marks.  The example below illustrates the block format:

Example presentation:  summary description, block formatted quotation, and response to a poem:

      In "Snow Toward Evening," Melville Cane shows the surprise and delight of an unexpected turn in the weather.  The poem begins thus:

         

                      Suddenly the sky turned grey.

                      The day,

                      Which had been bitter and chill,

                      Grew soft and still.     (1-4)

                                         

The lines above, by virtue of end rhyme, appear as couplets of uneven length that come to a hushed, extended close with the words "soft and still."  Notice the first couplet constitutes one simple sentence (line 1) and the brief start, the subject alone–"The day" (line 2) of the next sentence, which takes three lines to complete. So though we have exact end rhyme on both couplets, the rhythm changes by virtue of line length and sentence pattern.  The particular arrangement of words within lines, the breaks between lines, presence or absence of rhyme and the weight of accents or beats shape the sense and potential meaning of the text.
       The next line is a single word, "Quietly," from which the remainder of the poem hangs, as if suspended, like the "petals cool and white," the snow that falls "from some invisible blossoming tree" (lines 7, 6).   The airy dance of flakes is wonderful, a kind of epiphany, a manifestation of divine grace.

The following poem builds on the biblical story of Adam and Eve, personalizing the voice of Eve in a way the foundation text, of course, does not:

Eve Recollecting the Garden                                  by Grace Bauer

Was it your nakedness

or the knack you had

for naming I learned

to love?  Crow, you whispered

and wings flapped black

as satin in the sky

Bee, and sweetness thickened

on my tongue, Lion

And something roared beneath

the ribs you claimed

you sacrificed.  Our first quarrel

arose about the beast

I thought deserved a nobler tag

Than dog.  And Orchid–­

a sound more delicate.  Admit it!

Dolphin.  Starling.  Antelope

were syllables you stole

from me, and you

were the one who swore

we’d have to taste those blood

red globes of fruit

before we’d find the right word

for that god-forsaken tree.

HOMEWORK:  For homework please read the poem "Sestina," by Elizabeth Bishop and the first several pages of selections in the packets distributed week one, beginning with the first entries and working forward.  Dip into the introduction and "Nature" section of Ralph Waldo Emerson's essay Nature  for some background understanding of nineteenth century romantic views (a very influential writer's work here, but not altogether clear at times, rather difficult, in fact).  Next week we'll look at another sestina called "Sestina," by Algernon C. Swinburne.

The following questions should serve as a guide and will be useful when you start writing in response to the texts: 

1.  What does the title indicate? How does it frame or shape our understanding of the poem body?

2.  Who is speaking and why, or to what purpose?  What tone(s) of voice do you hear and where?

3.  What is the situation? What's the poem about?  Is a story being told?  What's the conflict or at stake   for the speaker or central character?

4. What image(s) do you find most attractive or arresting?

5. Which words, phrases, lines or images present difficulties of interpretation?

6. What is the climax of the poem or story and its apparent theme(s)?

Essay 1 is to be a short response (350-500 words) to any one or two of the texts supplied.  In class next week we will cover the first of the two  sestinas and I will be checking to see if you have provided notes to the texts, and giving points for the discussion that your notes contribute to the class (out of the 10 possible participation points).

Note:  the following site, which I have permission to use from the author, contains much helpful background information on reading poetry, the formal elements of poetry, key themes of English Romanticism, readings (interpretative presentations/essays) of selections, etcetera. It appears as a link on the upper right pullout drawer of the blog page, A Guide to the Study of Literature.

http://academic.brooklyn.cuny.edu/english/melani/cs6/read_lyr.html

You might also look at the some of recitations collected at poetryoutloud.org to get a sense of the range of material and approaches possible in reciting poetry, whether familiar or wholly new to you.  Here for instance, is one young lady's reading of  e.e. cummings'  free verse poem "i carry your heart": http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p-nymX7IIWM

This first page may be updated to cover week one's lecture and discussion before we meet again for class week 2.  Until then  . . . I leave you with one more poem, a famous one, too!

The Panther                        Rainer Maria Rilke ( 1875-1926 )

His vision, from the constantly passing bars,

has grown so weary that it cannot hold

anything else.  It seems to him there are

a thousand bars, and behind the bars, no world.

As he paces in cramped circles, over and over,

the movement of his powerful soft strides

is like a ritual dance around a center

in which a mighty will stands paralyzed.

Only at times, the curtain of the pupils

lifts, quietly.  An image enters in,

rushes down through the tense, arrested muscles,

plunges into the heart and is gone.