Poem of the Week: 26 February
This is the last poem I shall post this week, again by Landor. The form is seductively sweet but rhyming triplets are not easy. The fourth line, of course, is only five syllables and ends with a weak or feminine ending. The rhyming of two consecutive each fourth lines has the effect of tying the stanzas together. I was perhaps 20 when I first read this and enjoyed it very much, obviously without really understanding the cruelty of the sentiments.
Yes; I write verses now and then,
But blunt and flaccid is my pen,
No longer talkt of by young men
As rather clever:
In the last quarter are my eyes,
You see it by their form and size;
Is it not time then to be wise?
Or now or never.
Fairest that ever sprang from Eve!
While Time allows the short reprieve,
Just look at me! would you believe
'Twas once a lover?
I cannot clear the five-bar gate,
But, trying first its timber's state,
Climb stiffly up, take breath, and wait
To trundle over.
Thro' gallopade I cannot swing
The entangling blooms of Beauty's spring:
I cannot say the tender thing,
Be 't true or false,
And am beginning to opine
Those girls are only half-divine
Whose waists yon wicked boys entwine
In giddy waltz.
I fear that arm above that shoulder,
I wish them wiser, graver, older,
Sedater, and no harm if colder
And panting less.
Ah! people were not half so wild
In former days, when, starchly mild,
Upon her high-heel'd Essex smiled
The brave Queen Bess.
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I am going to be posting a poem a week with a remark or two to invite our friends and colleagues to read and comment. Let us begin with something short and sweet and deceptively simple, a little poem of Walter Savage Landor.
Mother, I cannot mind my wheel;
My fingers ache, my lips are dry:
Oh! if you felt the pain I feel!
But Oh, who ever felt as I!
No longer could I doubt him true;
All other men may use deceit:
He always said my eyes were blue,
And often swore my lips were sweet.
Before talking about if or why the poem works, a word is in order about its origin. Landor had read a brief fragment of Sappho, which goes something like: "Mother I cannot work the loom, filled by Aphrodite with love of a slim boy." Not much to work with except a dramatic situation.
Formally the poem consists of two stanzas of four lines, each of them in 8 syllables, alternately stressed and unstressed, with the rhyme scheme abab. The rhythm is basically iambic: x-x- x-x-, and the lines are end-stopped, that is, the units of sense and syntax coincide with the lines and there is no enjambement, that is, run-over of meaning. Also note that in every line but 1 and 4, there is a sense break in the very middle of the line after the fourth syllable.
This is, in other words, a clean and simple construction, easy to set to music. Indeed, the same and similar patterns are found in songs and other hymns.
But while on this technical point, note the subtlety of the rhythm. The first stanza is an outburst of passion, the second a rueful reflection, thus it is perfectly right that the beginning of lines 1 and 3 have an inverted rhythm -xx- x-x-. Also note that 2 out of four lines (1 and 4) do not have word-break in the middle but in the following syllable. These are simple techniques that a master like Landor did not have to think about or want us to think about much, but they do affect our appreciation.
Finally, there is the dramatic/narrative content. What he has taken from Sappho is the effect of erotic passion on a young girl who thinks her mother cannot understand because she is suffering as no one in the history of the human race has suffered. In the second stanza, she is more reflective, detached, even ironic. Not the exquisitely delicate irony in her trust. "All other men may use deceit" and in the slight shift in tone in the verbs. He always said her eyes were blue and often swore her lips were sweet. The first verb is used to state a fact while the second is a passionate declaration of an opinion expressed, obviously, to gain a response, namely a kiss and very likely more.
This is not an important and significant meditation on the human condition. It is a lyric, a song that puts a passion in perspective by giving us distance--she tells her own story to her mother. I don't want to over-analyze it but give a hint at the kind of craft that goes into so simple a piece.
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i might add it has enough wisdom to be a bit of a significant meditation on the human condition. acknowledging pain at the same time admitting its uniqueness paradoxically makes it also ephemeral. then the joke again, the uniqeness of him loving her makes him and his different...of course! But that is Life as well, sacred too in its banality. ? am i reading too much into it. i only say this since it's how it instantaneously struck me. slap. humor: what's the contemporary version, how she learned to drive? ... slap. (sorry, having some fun with it.)
Just briefly reviewing a biography of Walter Savage Landor assured me that if he were living today, he would perhaps be writing poems and epigrams for Chronicles on a regular basis. He has all the character traits of a contributor -- mean, stubborn, flashes of brilliance, fiercely loyal, generous to a fault towards a few friends, latin lover, poet, excellent storyteller and fierce defender of the human art of writing verse. Thank you for the poem.
Only four lines in the poem contain concrete images - the first two and the last two lines. Some might argue that "Other men" in line 6 is concrete, but I respond that it is too generic, at least compared to the images we find in lines 1-2 (the wheel, her fingers and lips) and lines 7-8 (the physical description of the girl's features, her eyes and notably again her lips).
The pattern seems to suggest that her spinning wheel has taken on some of the tedious suffering assocaited with Ixion's wheel. Of course, Ixion was punished for murder and lack of hospitality, so I wouldn't push the suggested allusion too far - but at any rate it's clear the wheel takes on some metaphysical or even eschatological signficance. Let me explain:
By introducing the image of the wheel, Landor is insinuating the seemingly eternal suffering or undergoing of emotions which correspond to unrequited love - I guess what Eliot would call the poem's objective correlative.
At the end of the poem, the girl's memories of what put her on this wheel in the first place - the lover's false flattery - returns us to the beginning. In fact, it is in the act of wistfully recalling her lover's praise for her eyes and lips that we understand why her lips which once were full of kisses (one presumes) are now dry with the unquenchable thirst for an impossible love (and perhaps why her eyes which once were so blue are now blind to all but the selfish focus of her own broken heart).
And so the form of the poem itself takes on the characteristics of a fruitlessly unravelling quest for truth, ending and returning her to the lies that condemned her to the wheel in the first place. Thus, a tragedy in eight lyric lines. Well done.
Joseph O'Brien
I thank Mr. O'Brien for his appreciation and insights. We all can like the same poem for different reasons, much the way different friends appreciate us for different reasons. I have never actually known why I so liked this one, and supposed that it was because it was so clever a take on a few words of Sappho. You are quite right, though, that it is more touching than it first seems.
I would say, however, that I don't think many poets before the 20th century thought much about images, much less used the word as part of their critical vocabulary. It is not that they did not make use of what we call images and which they thought of as similes, metaphors, and the like, but that it was not part of their craft.
Since Landor borrows the spinning wheel from the Sappho fragment on which he has based his poem, I very much doubt we can milk it very much. I must confess, also, that I dislike Eliot's jargon. Of course, it does correspond to something we perceive about what poetry does, but it is, I believe, largely irrelevant to the way poets compose. If I were an image-hunter, I might be looking in the direction of what the Greeks called the iunx, a sort of magic wheel that could cause a person to fall in love. There is a fine poem of, as I recall, Theocritus.
I also confess to having no head (or taste) for literary hermeneutics. While I have always been interested in the craft itself, I have never troubled my head much about what poems mean. They mean, more or less, what they say. Still, I do think Mr. O'Brien has divined some of the poem's poignancy and there is, in a light-hearted way, a sense of tragedy here.
I also thank Mr. Reavis for spilling some of the beans--that is, that part of my affection for old Landor was his crusty loyalty and friendship. As I recall, he invites Tennyson to dinner with a bit of doggerel that goes something like: "Come though Alfred Tennyson and share my haunch of venison." A rhyme that raises a bit of a problem since the standard English pronunciation of venison is "venzon". Did he pronounce the poet laureate's name as Tennzon or pronounce the meat in the American fashion which may be borrowed from an English dialect. I've never taken the time to look it up.
Landor was best known for his pithy epigrams and for his prose Imaginary Conversations--dialogues of historical characters. Of the epigrams his most famous was written to commemorate his 75th birthday.
I strove with none for none was worth my strife.
Nature I loved and next to nature art
I warmed both hands before the fire of life
It sinks and I am ready to depart.
When I was a graduate student, I used to have an occasional drink with a suite-mate in the English department. When one of his fellow-students asked me my favorite poem, I said I had no favorite poem only many well-loved poems. Persisting, he asked me to name one, and I picked a longer poem of Landor. The bright boy dismissed the thought contemptuously. Landor, he's a nobody. When I asked for proof, he said he had not read him, because if he were any good he would have been included in the canon or in the textbooks he had read. Ah, I replied, and thanked my lucky stars and good sense that I had majored in Greek and French and only taken the bit of English literature that was required.
And since the subject of Landor has proved to be agreeable, next week's poem will be the one I recommended to the pretentious grad student.
This is wonderful! Thanks to all I am learning about poetry, one of the things of which I know the least.
I confess I can't see the "unrequited love" part that Mr. O'Brien mentions, her torments seeming to stem from impatient desire not regret, at least not yet, but I was struck by the "selfish focus" of the girl. Not only are there so many I's in the poem, but you also have her use herself as the reference point for determining all things (no one could have felt as she has felt because she is the one feeling this way, the young man must be in earnest because he praises her which means his praise must be true). What a great comment on youth and young love. Lord, what fools we mortals be!
I'm afraid I was a member of the pretentious grad student's party before, having never heard of Landor. So thank you, Dr. Fleming, for the welcome introduction.
I think poets echo each other from age to age and often describe the same or similar significant human thing in different ways and sometimes even steal lines from each other -- what the ancients referred to as "making the thoughts of another your own." It is a lost art when memory fades, there is nothing to remember and everyone believes he or she is nothing if not original, but for what it's worth to some poor reader who might happen to "think like me," The opening verse :
Mother, I cannot mind my wheel;
My fingers ache, my lips are dry:
Oh! if you felt the pain I feel!
But Oh, who ever felt as I!
reminded me of another opening verse from a poem written in 1912 called Renascence by Millay:
ALL I could see from where I stood
Was three long mountains and a wood;
While the most common verse line in English for more than 500 years has been the misnamed iambic pentameter, the equally misnamed tetrameter (perhaps better to call it the octosyllable) is not uncommon, either in rhyming stanzas of octosyllables or alternating with 6-syllable lines as in the Watts poem, "O God, our help in ages past/ Our hope in years to come. When used in couplets, it tends to have a comic effect if not handled very carefully, partly because the rhymes come so quickly and because it tends to break in equal halves. Nonetheless, Andrew Marvell, one of the finest poets in our language, makes effective use of it in his masterpiece, "The Garden," which we can talk about later.
By the way, here is another short Landor poem, delicately alluding to the indecency in some of Catullus's verse the way one friend can indulge another:
To Catullus
Tell me not what too well I know
About the bard of Sirmio.
Yes, in Thalia's son
Such stains there are as when a Grace
Sprinkles another's laughing face
With nectar and then runs on.
Note the beginning rhymed couplet in the same meter as the first poem, followed by an irregular couplet followed by a quatrain in alternate rhymes and with contrasting six and eight syllable lengths. Why did he do this, other than perhaps give it a song-like quality? Perhaps to suggest the more complicated stanza structures of the Latin poet. This is emphasized by the inversion of stress in the first line, which would be analyzed in Greek or Latin, if taken by itself, as a choriambic dimeter or choriamb plus iamb: /xx/ x/x/. This is a meter or metrical unit common in lyric verse.
Sirmio is, of course, Catullus' home, Thalia a muse of pastoral poetry--not really Catullus' genre but close enough. The three Graces--one of whom was also named Thalia (from a verb meaning "bloom" or "sprout")--presided and lent their charm to banquets and celebrations and festivals. Nectar is the drink of the gods and it can confer immortality. Note even the effectiveness of the verb "run". When I recalled the poem, I remembered "move" and typed it before checking my memory. Run is a bit more suggestive of girls at play.
Mr. Fleming, Mr. Cornell,
Let me qualify my understanding of unrequited love to fit with the prevailing sense that this poem is merely addressing an emotion of the moment. I do think it would be to sink the poem deeper than it goes to say that the poor girl is wasting away, Ophelia-like, to nothing, but I think it is one of the "little tragedies" of either a broken heart or an as yet unfulfilled heart.
The tragedy, then, is not that her heart is not yet fulfilled, but that she can't see beyond her emotions, can't see reality as anything but her emotional turmoil. But I fear pressing the point any harder or further....
I had a feeling, Dr. Fleming, that you'd have no truck with Eliot's terms, so I threw it in there only as an after thought. I'm not married to Eliot's terms on this score either - but I can see by your response that you comprehend my larger meaning. The iunx (classical op cits, please?) is an even more fitting image. Perhaps Ixion lives more in me than the poem, but I have to admit, mea culpa aut meus virtus, I am very much an image hunter and next to "thought" and scansion it is the next place I look for a poem's meaning.
I recall asking a tutor from college what for him was the epitome of the lyric genre (vs. tragedy/comedy/lyric). He replied that the Psalms are the sine qua non of lyric poetry's concerns. Thanksgiving, lament, praise, longing. It's all there, he said. I asked him why Shakespeare's sonnets didn't fit the bill. What he said next surprised me. He said Shakespeare's sonnets were irritating because they were full of frustration, and that the frustration (to be distinguished, I suppose, from David's longing to see the face of God, etc.) was too distracting. Being a lowly frosh, I didn't know what to say then; but this current conversation is providing me plenty of treppenwitz...
JOB
"When I recalled the poem, I remembered "move" and typed it before checking my memory. Run is a bit more suggestive of girls at play."
Yes, this is true especially of young girls at play. But as they grow into young ladies poets will often say things differnetly such as:
"O! she doth teach the torches to burn bright".
"It seems she hangs upon the cheek of night like a rich jewel in an Ethiope's ear" .
"See, how she leans her cheek upon her hand! O that I were a glove upon that hand, that I might touch that cheek!". -
and for those who were born after 1960, there is even, "something in the way she moves."
All saying much more about the feminine psyche than has ever been said by feminist. But I digress, enough!!
Your teacher sounds like a wise man. Let us put some definitional rigor into the conversation. Technically, a lyric poem is a melic poem (that is a song) sung to the accompaniment of one or another form of lyre, but the word came to cover all sung poetry (as in the choruses of tragedy mostly sung to the aulos, a reed instrument) or even poems written in some form traditionally used in melic poetry. There was a broad range of themes, but lyric poems are easily distinguishable from, for example, elegiac poems, which were typicall discursive, about sex or politics, as in the poems of Mimnermus and Theognis and Solon, though it is true that Alcaeus writes a great deal about his political battles, but even so his political odes--seething with hatred and revenge--are outpourings of the feeling of a moment, not an outline of or reflection on a program (as for example Solon's elegies are).
Lyric is a higher form, closer in tone to drama, which of course includes choral lyric songs. They are, as your teacher pointed out, used to celebrate the joys of life, e.g. wine, women, and song, and sung often at banquets. While they are not used for formal hymns, they can be written in praise of gods, as Saphho's great ode to Aphrodite is (a very personal ode, indeed).
I like to distinguish between poems that are about something and poems that are something. Poems about something, e.g. social and satire, philosophical reflection, can be quite beautiful but poems that are something exist on their own as works of art, whatever they may say about this or that. A poem that says it is good to drink when you are unhappy is about the importance of wine, while Alcaeus' Nun Chre methusthein/translated by Horace as Nunc est bibendum and Haggard as "I think I'll sit just here and drink" celebrates a dramatic moment of joy or relief or sadness. A poem about God is one thing, a psalm in praise of Him is another. As much as I admire the great satirists, it is clear which type I prefer. One thing is clear, that a lyric should truly be something, a cry of joy or sorrow, a dramatic moment, even a reflective meditation--so long as it has a dramatic setting, e.g. Marvell's Ode on Cromwell's Return.
Dr. Fleming,
Why, in your opinion, did Aristotle give so little space to the melic in his treatment of poetry? I've heard different reasons - everything from the notion that an extended treatment was found in the "lost" book of comedy to the idea that everything he wanted to say about lyric was already said in his treatment of the other three genres to the sense that the lyric, being of so little value as an imitation of an undergoing or emotion was beneath the scrutiny of philosophy.
JOB
Terrible not to remember much less not utilize image. Parhaps a legit contribution of the 20th Century, if also abused therein. Look at Plato, we have the word or name; then definition (now we're getting into some potential trouble a wider latitude of words which have their limitations), now we're at-or back to image...prior to our arriving at knowledge, before acknowledging all important [invisible-most] soul at a distance, and yet also so close to the bone, we can't shake it. Of all of them soul can best manipulate image. We need respect-spontaneous image (spontaneity), as well as humbly submit it to soul and God's review. I'm down for it, as we say on the street. Marx had his epicurus, Arendt her Aristotle. She was a sea going vessel; the former a ship in a bottle. Let's be busy about being born, while we're dying to the world in behalf of christ-god's truth. One reason why W. Savage Landor's poem works, chick was in the moment, and poetically if the image fits (soul's approval) the particular, voila becomes also appropriately universal. Being stuck though is hubristically confusing image with soul, blasphemy in other words, playing [at] soul or god. It's an eternal paradox moving while standing still; Aristotle's unmoved Mover. Otherwise it's merely irony, and God knows, we've had enough of that image.
"the lyric, being of so little value as an imitation of an undergoing or emotion was beneath the scrutiny of philosophy."
Mr. O"Brien,
I certainly do not want to enjoin your good question from a more scholarly reply but Aristotle taught poetry in the broadest sense as a first principle of philosophy and not something beneath it or oustide of it. He assumed, as Plato did, that students were already familiar with its purpose of awakening ones soul to all that is or might be, having memorized Homer by heart or assuming so many different references to the dramatic poets and even Aesop's fables, --- storytellers all. Poets call out from the abyss of inspiration, or the Muses, to the abyss of the philosopher's human heart and his sense of wonder. When Aristotle and St Thomas remark that poetic knowledge is defective they are saying so only in comparison to metaphysical knowledge, recognizing that the subject of the poets is wonder, just as it is for the lovers of wisdom. The higher and higher one goes in abstraction, the clearer and clearer the understanding grows (your intellectus), but the less and less your knowledge . Cognitio is a sense knowledge like poetry uses, it is not intellectus, there is also emotional knowledge used in poetry, such as what a mouse has for a cat or a cat for a mean dog ---they know what they fear without understanding it completly! In abstract knowledge one must always advert to the thing itself and that is what poetry does --- epic, dramatic, lyric and all the rest when it is good poetry. Even light verse is amusing and was once widely used for for a-muse-ment!
Moderns as we are, this of course is all backwards to how and what we are taught, to think, live and breath. But as St. Thomas reminded his own beginners in theology, the first few questions of the Summa may assist your understanding, but nothing of what you will arrive at by such understanding will ever be as rich as your devotion to Christ. That is, one must always advert from the abstract to the singular thing itself --- whether it is a bumble bee or a god. If the Incarnation,as the inspiration of the flesh or the incarnation of a spirit, has any meaning for moderns or post christians, it would be a minor miracle in these times without the help of Aristotle's understanding of poetry -- and not just his fragmented work in the Poetics.
I think the most obvious answer to this question will occur to you if you ask what Aristotle's basic approach was in the Poetics. He concentrated largely on the "interface" between plot and character. In other words, he was interested in a drama about ethically serious characters (Greek spoudaios) who have achieved some success that has egged them on to go too far--that is, they are afflicted with hybris that leads to ate (ruin) and along the way, in their vicissitudes, suffer reversal of fortune (peripeteia) and recognition/understanding of who others are and who and what they are. That is why the Oedipus is his model play.
What literary forms does this model apply to? Mainly, tragedy and epic, because they tell stories of noble men and women who come to grief. Lyric, by contrast, is as much music as poetry, and while some lyric poets are excellent narrators--Stesichorus, Bacchylides, and, of course, Pindar--narrative is a secondary feature. The Poetics and the Rhetoric are brilliant original books giving a philosophical basis for the Greek common-sense consensus, but they have little to do with music--a subject to which his student Aristoxenus devoted himself, perhaps because the master had said so little about it, though what little there is is precious.
If you were to ask a schoolmaster, between the time of Socrates and the time of Trajan, who the greatest poets were, the list would have included Homer, 3-5 writers of tragedy, but also Stesichorus, Alcaeus, Sappho, Pindar, Bacchylides. et al. They were taught in school, as tragedies were, and that is why some of them survived the seismic shift from papyrus scroll to folio books, why we have a good chunk of Pindar in many Byzantine mss.
Dr. Fleming,
Given that "Poetry is what's lost in translation," are there any particular translations of the Greek poets you mentioned that you would recommend? Unfortuntaely, the odds of me learning Greek anytime during my life are very low.
Dr. Johnson once told Boswell that the only to make a successful poetic translation into English was to write a poem that had the same effect in English as the original had in Greek or Latin or French. This is obviously impossible, but there are a few successes, e.g. Johnson's own translation of Horace Odes IV.7 or the even better version of A.E. Housman. I don't know of a successful translation of a single Greek tragedy. Fitts and Fitzgerald did a powerful and playable Antigone but rather too loose and frequently departing--perhaps through mistake--from the sense. Dryden's Vergil and Juvenal translations are among the best in the language, though again, he took liberties though trying hard to convey the gist.
To make a rather long story short, I used to try to teach the great translations but when it comes to lyric poets in Greek and Latin, I was stymied. Imagine trying to perform a Brahms symphony transcribed for Jew's harp and kazoo. One can translate the sense of a long Pindaric ode, but the reader will wonder why he is reading this stuff.
When people tell me they don't have time to learn Latin or Greek or French, I wonder what they are doing with their time. In the past 20 years I learned enough Italian to read, write, and speak--though not perfectly--made a stab at improving my failing French, picked up a fair amount of Serbian--though that is fading from lack of use. And, to anticipate the question, no, I do not have any particular facility for languages and as I get older, my memory is not half so good as it once was. I sometimes point out to younger friends who seem to know so much about TV shows, that there is enough time wasted in every day to find an hour for learning a language. Throw in traffic jams, commuting, doctor's office, baby-sitting, and you will discover a lot of time in the day that could be put to better use than social networking. Once one has made a bit of progress, one can combine duty with pleasure by watching films, listening to music, and reading fiction in the language.
I have always taken the position that people do what they want which is not always the same as what they think they should want. I have been told countless times by friends that they would write a novel, but they are tied up at work. Then when they lose their job and have time on their hands, they cannot do it because they are too worried. Not too worried to eat and drink, watch movies, or cut the fool with friends. I am as bad in this respect as the rest of humanity. Every month or so I resolve to spend the first hour of the morning not in checking my email and listening to the news but in reading Greek or Latin poetry or philosophy. Last Summer I managed to read Plotinus in the morning about 10 times in a month before losing steam. Life, as I see it, is like housecleaning or bridge painting. The work never ends and though one always fails, it is important to keep on making the resolutions you will never really keep because even 25% success is better than nothing. Enough of the sermon!
Dr. Fleming,
Your sermon is timely, it's Lent. See you boys after Easter. I am going to try again to "keep on making resolutions I will never really keep."
Mr. Reavis thanks for sharing with us all your most recent above in reply to Mr. O'Brien. I just thought it was great, inspiring. And thanks as always to Dr. Fleming; there's so much as time permits to look into sir that you've prodvided and shared here. Last year and no doubt again soon, I had a book of ancient Latin Roman poets including some of those mentioned here. Now that I have a laptop with high speed instead of only an desktop which moves like a snail I may even "cheat" and google some of these old poets.
I'm reading online for example the elsewhere recommended Philostratus: The Life of Apollonius of Tyana, about half-way through, and as with all the ancients particularly of course the Greeks I'm promptly impressed by the nobility of the content. In terms of making one aware of all of the forces arrayed against or around us of a multiplicity of moral or amoral persuasions and postures including the immoral, and yet how also the best or better way might be arrived at and if possible imbibed as one's own way often.
Clearly our Christian Tradition rests squarely and most significantly on the ancient, spiritual foundation built by the classical Greeks and Romans. Who are a never ending source of fascination and instruction for anyone who reads and studies them.
Wish I could say more about poetry except that it contains some of our best thinking so I am not surprised Mr. Reavis as you indicated it was taught as a first principle of philosophy by Aristotle. 'Am I tree, cat or man I wonder as I stand tall in the sky limbs strong and green in the very same place many years that I've been...and a cat scratches my bark...' was more or less the start of a poem I wrote at 16 but haven't done much in the poetic vein except some prose fiction since. If this world is mostly a bear; understandably much time is spent in relation to that fact, as a good deal of mine has been. Knowing bears as I inevitably do by now--the bear in me included--perhaps there may God willing, be a little more honey along the way. -?- With some hindsight I can say I've always been disposed toward and perhaps too often standing within the question rather than more prudently battening down the hatches. A bit in the style of Apollinus, no doubt thanks to among other reasons my Catholic upbringing. It's one thing to take it all on the chin, then once youth's gone inevitably one learns it's best not to lead with it.
Most of philosophy, except for Machiavelli, and the religions of the world, at least to me seem to be a distortion of reality, which for the most part is disappointing, just pointless misery and boredom.
You have to be incredibly tough or a dumb beast to make it through life's constant battle.
Even as I read poetry, I have to be aware that hedonism and the pursuit of effeminate luxury and pleasure can be fatal when reality bites down. Better to have the essentials for life's battle, ready.
Dr. Fleming,
Thank you for the reproof. Honestly, when I weigh my priorities, it's just that learning Greek is not high on the long list. There are so many things in my native language that I've not read that I should have. There's poetry that I need to learn to appreciate, and my ear is, alas, as bad with poetry as it is with music. I'm working to correct both. There are great spiritual works that I've never delved into (and part of my Lenten reading is to work my way through both The Imitation of Christ and the Psalms). There's a prayer life that I keep trying to take off the shelf and dust. And my commute is usually spent trying to nap (sadly I have to be at work at an ungodly hour) or screening things to see if they're appropriate for the kids to watch with a history lecture every now and then.
And I've made it a priority to spend as much time with my four (so far) children as possible, mostly out of fondness but also partly out of the thought that the world is now such a place that the investment of a parent into a child must be triple what it once was if there's any hope for the child to survive the raging storm that is our current culture (c.f. your latest Daily Mail blog). I don't Facebook or Tweet - in fact, between here and your Daily Mail blog are the only real places I even interact with the comments section of a website (and it's purely self-serving - as I've confessed I'm here to drain as much knowledge out of everyone else as possible).
I'm paying the consequences now for a youth of television watching and sloth. I would say that I also neglected my studies, but looking back I realize that the studies being put in front of me in my youth were worth neglecting. Part of these consequences is realizing that I can't do everything I want or even should. So there's my list, and I have to confess learning Latin is above learning Greek. And surely writing a novel is on the list somewhere, but that's only because I want to achieve the American dream of being independently wealthy. Hopefully while the dollar is still worth something.
Not that I don't have sloth enough to spare. I'm simply too busy not reading my Shakespeare to get around to not learning my Greek! Enough of my feeling sorry for myself!
No reproof intended to Mr. Cornell only a reminder of how really trifling we all are. I don't watch television but I do watch movies, often with my eyes half or completely shut--I suffer from eye strain after spending a day reading and working on this computer. My remark was intended only to concentrate the mind a bit on the simple fact that we do have some (albeit limited) capacity for choosing what we wish to emphasize. We cannot do everything but only a few things, and spending time with one's children is almost as important as learning Greek.
I'm not sure I get the point of Mr. Aleksic's remarks. He seems to be saying that nothing is of value unless it contributes to the wealth and power of the individual or community in which he lives. To put it very mildly, this is an unexamined assumption that implies other assumptions about the nature of human happiness. I have known a lot of very rich and some powerful people, and they are pretty miserable. For his sake, I hope Mr. Aleksic is not unlucky enough to meet with what he apparently regards as good fortune. What any of this has to do with the pleasure or non-pleasures of reading a poem, I haven't a clue. Next we'll be hearing that no musicians but Elvis, no food-purveyors but Ray Krock, no women but the highest price hookers, etc. etc got anything right.
I am too ignorant to participate in the wide and deep comments about the life of poetry, so I don't mean to distract from them either.
As to the poem at hand, I had a slightly different read of it, perhaps a magnification of Dr. Fleming's final two descriptive paragraphs regarding time. For some reason, I read it as the girl is not a girl anymore, and she is lamenting to her mother who is not present or even dead. There seems enough depth of time in the changes and the description of the lost lover is personal enough to have happened already and passed -- she can't go now to find him. It just seems she is probably now closer to her mother's age when she outsmarted herself much earlier with the young man. Her fingers ache and lips are dry from the content of her loss and the spinning work wheel but also the passing of time -- she's much older now too and still clinging to her loss, perhaps also identifying with the mother from her memories.
I can still read it either way.
Great verse, and thanks for thinking of and doing this.
This is extraordinarily interesting. But I should like to ask Dr. Fleming to identify (if he has one) his favorite poet. For me, he is Alexander Pope, particularly his Essay on Man, but many others as well. I think that he was the most disciplined of all, both on form and substance.
This may be too crude but I read it at face value she's in love and thinking about getting laid again present time in the vein of love and sex when put together especially for a woman, can't, she feels possibly be 'wrong'. Although given the mores of that time she's probably thinking that, if not articulating it out loud to her mother (her conscience). Or heavy petting again (whatever has obviously floated her boat-her rising tide.) As for Mr. Aleksic's above although I hear him, I also can't help but pity him. That's rather too stark if seeking as is required in all things, approximate balance. Not having such might be therefore an inevitable part of any additional if unnecessary pain; if what was indicated was in earnest.
Yes, too crude by far. One has to accept the conventions the poet accepted and worked with and not read in our own habits. Landor was fond of women but could not speak in such a way nor would he have wanted to. The situation is pretty clear. It is definitely a young unmarried girl, not an older woman looking back. She is distressed and her passion distracts her from her work. Her fingers ache not only because it is hard work but because she is fussing, and the dry lips are a sign of someone parched by passion. Whether she has actually been seduced or only trifled with, we do not know. Part of the poem's charm is that we are left hanging. It is the merest vignette, a sketch that suggests but does not explicitly depict. It has a tact and discretion that is marred by coarse reduction.
As for a favorite poet, I have none. I could list dozens from Homer to Larkin. Some poets whom I have at different periods of of life found very empathetic in quite different ways are: Alcaeus, Pindar, Aeschylus, Vergil, Tibullus, Horace, Ben Jonson, Marvell, Leconte de Lisle, Baudelaire, Browning, Tennyson, Robinson Jeffers, Petrarch, Leopardi...but this only scratches the surface and leaves out well-loved poems by people like Edmund Waller, George Herbert, William Drummond, John Betjeman, Hart Crane....In my 20's I would have begun the list with Pindar and Mallarmé. I greatly admire Dryden and Pope, but admiration is not affection. In the case of Pope, his imitations of Horace may be his best, followed closely by The Rape of the Lock, a sublimely etherial work as the nutty Edith Sitwell argued in her charming book on Pope. I do enjoy the verse in Dryden's plays. Dante is too much work to be immediately enjoyable, though his greatness impresses itself upon me more and more as I grow older. Like any normal English-speaker I cannot escape Shakespeare, though only a few of the sonnets have attached themselves to me. My inclinations are in two directions, toward the austerely sublime (Pindar, Aeschylus) and the understated perfection of Anacreon or a song of Ben Jonson or Shakespeare. Few poets in English, however, can match the music of Baudelaire or Leopardi.
Perhaps we should retitle this feature "Poems of the Week" since I have already added more Landor. I'll post a longer poem of his tomorrow to close the week, then next week we'll switch gears.
An excellent and beautiful poem, but the danger is beginning to truly believe this is real life. We will end up suffering as the sensitive, idealistic Baptiste DeBureau suffered in the movie Children of Paradise.
Most of humanity is not as reflective and deep, as are the gentlemen responding here, I've long ago ended profound discussions with the people I meet or work with, because in the end it always comes down to money, how disappointing.
In the case of this poem, knowing the fickleness of most women, the ugly reality is that the girl would just go on to the next boy in her orbit that gave her attention, without batting an eye.
As I tell one of my idealistic friends, you need to get out more.
Very true, correction taken, apologies all around except to know in today's climate or context tame which of course is also a problem for today's for men and women. This site being a different more actually accurate context requiring the corresponding behavior and demeanor which is therefore herein *not hypocritical. I shall live by these preferable standards or refrain from posting. Thanks for your admonition. Regards,
I have added this at the top of the post, another late poem of W.S. Landor:
Yes; I write verses now and then,
But blunt and flaccid is my pen,
No longer talkt of by young men
As rather clever:
In the last quarter are my eyes,
You see it by their form and size;
Is it not time then to be wise?
Or now or never.
Fairest that ever sprang from Eve!
While Time allows the short reprieve,
Just look at me! would you believe
'Twas once a lover?
I cannot clear the five-bar gate,
But, trying first its timber's state,
Climb stiffly up, take breath, and wait
To trundle over.
Thro' gallopade I cannot swing
The entangling blooms of Beauty's spring:
I cannot say the tender thing,
Be 't true or false,
And am beginning to opine
Those girls are only half-divine
Whose waists yon wicked boys entwine
In giddy waltz.
I fear that arm above that shoulder,
I wish them wiser, graver, older,
Sedater, and no harm if colder
And panting less.
Ah! people were not half so wild
In former days, when, starchly mild,
Upon her high-heel'd Essex smiled
The brave Queen Bess.
Dr. Fleming,
I will try to make a longer response later, but for now, I note that, speaking of Dante, at the half way point through the poem, the tails on Landor's stanzas switch from feminine endings to masculine endings.
Taken together with the movement of thought in the poem, it seems the poet's soft regret ("blunt and flaccid" indeed!) for his youth becomes hardened into the firm conviction that youth is folly and only sexless old age has the firm command of wisdom necessary to understand the passions.
I think we are meant to take the final line, in fact, as not only ending on a masculine beat, but also a rather fanfare finale of bass drum beats provided by an iamb coupled to a spondee to punctuate the point (doubly so, with the mildly ironic use of a regina to crown the poem).
Joseph O'Brien
I should have explicitly noted the shift from weak to strong endings. I would add, however, that the sound-and-sense tricks you are attributing to Landor are more likely to be the invention of 20th century literary critics than weapons in the arsenal of a competent poet. As a professor, I never permitted my students this sort of analysis, and as a student in a required English lit class, I gave my professor Hell if he pulled it. The justification for it is that it may help a young poet to master technique, though even that I doubt. In my far-off youth, I spent hours detecting and analyzing sound-patterns, especially in French and Greek verse, not only of rhythms but also of assonance. In my utter and completely folly, I would draw up schemes of what seemed to me ideally musical vowel patterns, and then construct a poem on that basis. It should come as no surprise that none were any good, though the tricks I learned stuck with me. There is an interesting old monograph in French by a Romanian named, I believe, Herescu, who analyzed Latin poetry in such terms. On a saner level, Wilkinson's Golden Latin artistry has something to say as does Dionysius of Halicarnassus, whose De Compositione verborum--on the putting together of words--is fundamental to this sort of thing. Even the otherwise sensible rhetor Dionysius has some nonsense about a heavy spondaic line imitating some difficult action.
This sort of thing is very occasionally rewarding, but when poets do make use of such devices, it is quite haphazard and usually unconscious. That is because they are obeying two sets of rules, one having to do with the language expressing their thought, the other with the formal requirements of verse. Since we know a good deal about verse composition, and what is conducive to beauty and what not, I rather think it is better to stick to what can be known rather than speculate on what might be, because even if that might be proved to be correct, it is, well, not very helpful.
I should add that I do not wish to hurt anyone's feelings. But I routinely cut English classes at the risk of a bad grade because as lover of literature I could not endure lit crit. 20th criticism, as much as the difficulty and (often) ugliness of modern verse, is a major reason why people do not read poetry any more. It's a bit like listening to someone talking about their sex life or, worse, analyzing how and why they are in love. A major reason I only took literature classes in foreign languages is that we had to spend so much time and effort on learning the language and reading it, there was no time left over for the modern obsession with hermeneutics. Besides, it would have been the rare classics professor in those days who would have tolerated a litsy discussion. Those were the days, my friends.
I should add that I do not wish to hurt anyone's feelings. But I routinely cut English classes at the risk of a bad grade because as lover of literature I could not endure lit crit. 20th criticism, as much as the difficulty and (often) ugliness of modern verse, is a major reason why people do not read poetry any more. It's a bit like listening to someone talking about their sex life or, worse, analyzing how and why they are in love. A major reason I only took literature classes in foreign languages is that we had to spend so much time and effort on learning the language and reading it, there was no time left over for the modern obsession with hermeneutics.
It is amazing to compare the above experience to my own and to see how little anything changed over the thirty years from your Uni stint to my own. It illustrates how modern literature and literary criticism are by and large sterile and thus incapable of evolution. I have always myself, by and large, hated English literature and loved French, Latin and Greek literature (though I am incapable of reading these last two in their original languages, and I confess I haven't read a very large volume of anything mostly due to time and neurosis).
Besides, it would have been the rare classics professor in those days who would have tolerated a litsy discussion. Those were the days, my friends.
Looking back at my Uni experience, I guess that's one thing that HAS changed: they got ahold of the classics since your day.
Dr. Fleming,
I don't know if I was trying to fit Landor's square peg into the 20th century's round hole so much as take a cue from Horace:
Res gestae regumque ducumque et tristia bella
quo scribi possent numero, monstrauit Homerus.
Versibus impariter iunctis querimonia primum,
post etiam inclusa est uoti sententia compos;
quis tamen exiguos elegos emiserit auctor,
grammatici certant et adhuc sub iudice lis est.
Archilochum proprio rabies armauit iambo;
hunc socci cepere pedem grandesque coturni,
alternis aptum sermonibus et popularis
uincentem strepitus et natum rebus agendis.
Musa dedit fidibus diuos puerosque deorum
et pugilem uictorem et equom certamine primum
et iuuenum curas et libera uina referre. (Ars Poetica, 73-85)
If Horace (and Archilocus) saw certain metrical feet befitting particular forms of poetry, cannot we claim as much for English meter?
JOB
I enjoyed the fourth stanza with the line "Climb stiffly up, take breath, and wait." I feel like, with all the pauses in the line, I can hear him trying to catch his breath!
The last stanza, I presume, is Landor lamenting that "back in day" folks were more civilized, and he uses Queen Elizabeth as a sort of example/symbol of that civility. Is that correct? Does it have anything to do with the idea that she was the Virgin Queen? Or just because she was a good public example of manners? I guess I have such a dislike of Queen Elizabeth from various histories I've read that my prejudice is confusing me.
With all the poetic talent on this site, I could no longer resist putting up a link to my own, "The Proof of God's Existence and Other Verses on Reason and Faith", five epistles of heroic couplets in iambic pentameter, four of which were published in the New Oxford Review. To see, click on "Judge Bartley".
Sic it all ye critics.
Dallience Of Old Widowers
(for humor's sake, about how sexual mores change in a single lifetime)
Me thinks I shall not date a while
The changes in sweet etiquette's style
Have left me baffled, a strange smile
Of condecension on her face
Had I known to act a cad
For to wait would make her mad
To feel a fool is truly sad
It visits as my disgrace
Don't I need to pay our bill
She shouldn't have to take a pill
Whence did it all become so shrill
As if in an alien race
Well she's the keeper to consult
What's the norm hers the vote
And I to serenade on note
We've gone to outer space
Shoot straight my friend not too soon
Dispense at once with pantaloon
But hit the mark if that's her tune
The swift will take first place
Say goodbye to lonely days
Don't strive for love or lofty ways
Let Eros shine like the sun's rays
Love lavender, love lace
Wrote this in 15-20 minutes since I got home (not very competent, anything worth doing is worth doing poorly)...I'm in my 50's and typical, but I know a square in his upper sixties whose wife passed away. He finally got over it and now he's dating, and younger women like him and quickly...so he was telling me the other day how at first awkward with everything he felt; he'd actually never before slept with anyone in his whole life but his wife. But now girls in their twenties and thirties like him, he's fit, athletic, handsome, smart, and nice. And the females have much different expectations than how it was in his day. I'll have to email him and see if this little ditty even got close to what he was trying to talk about. Sorry if besides being of poor quality this was offensive. If so just delete it.
"Mother, I cannot mind my wheel;
My fingers ache, my lips are dry:
Oh! if you felt the pain I feel!
But Oh, who ever felt as I!
No longer could I doubt him true;
All other men may use deceit:
He always said my eyes were blue,
And often swore my lips were sweet."
I was compelled to copy the poem into the my response because my mind's eye needs to register it directly. What this poem imparts to me I know but cannot say; for I could "say it out" only if I were myself a poet; and a poet I am not.
Few young girls across the ages who have fallen in love would miss and not identify with the sentiments and feelings of the young lady who is the voice of this poem; and few mothers who had listened to and endured the naive certainty that said young ladies had had about the nature of their love and lover would not identify with the off verse mother of this poem, a mother who perhaps on the one hand delights in her daughter's discovery of love and on the other feels the shadow in the daughter's delight, likely out of experience.
Reading the comments has been better than a series of university lectures.
"JOB" makes an excellent objection, and to rebut it requires a bit of explanation. His point, via Horace, is that Greek (and thus) Latin poets associated certain meters with certain types of verse, each with its own affect. Archilochus, for example, employed iambics for the scathing personal attacks he directed against his enemies, and this same meter was employed for dramatic dialogue, while heroic narrative was composed in hexameters, erotic and reflective poetry in elegiac couplets, and so on.
This is all part of a more general theory--though that is a misleading word to describe a traditional point of view--of poetic genres. One did not, for example, insert comic passages into tragedy or get too serious in a comedy--Aristotle and Horace would have been horrified by the grave-digger scene in Hamlet, and I don't know what they would have made of his serious comedies, like Measure for Measure or the Tempest.
A tragedy would be composed in several forms: iambic trimeters (or in early and late plays trochaic tetrameters) for dialogue and speeches, anapaests chanted though not sung by the chorus as they marched onto the orchestra (dancing floor), and various lyric forms sung by the chorus and, occasionally, by solo actors. To keep a very complicated matter simple, a choral lyric stanza (a strophe and antistrophe in responsion, that is line 1 of the strophe the same or very nearly so as line 1 of the antistrophe and so on) was broken into verses (what many modern classical philologists incorrectly call periods). These verses were roughly the same size as their spoken or stichic counterparts (poetry written line after line in the same meter), that is dimeters, trimeters, tetrameters. In iambs, since the unit is u-u-, one has to double everything. In other words, a dimeter consists of what we would call four iambs.
Stop me if this is too boring. And feel free to skip down to the "Enough of this"
A verse usually consists of two or more cola, colon meaning limb. It is not always possible to determine where a period ends, though ancient theory set limits on the length, but nearly always (as opposed to always always), period end is shown by the toleration of hiatus (a word ending with a vowel followed by a word beginning with a vowel) and brevis in longo, that is a short syllable standing in for a long. In the sample below, I have marked the brevis in longo incorrectly as x because on this computer I don't have the font that allows me to put the u on top of the -. Period change is also generally understood when rhythms change, e.g. from iambic to dactylic.
Because these lines are sung, these lines are often syncopated, that is, one or more syllables are left out, often the shorts. A verse is written in one metrical type, though a strophe/antistrophe combination with several periods may change meters, Let me give a very simple illustration from Aeschylus' Persians, vv. 126-39
-u- -u-
-u- u-u-
-u- -u-
-u- -u- u-ux
u-- -u- u--
-uu -uu -
-u- u--
The common analysis of this would go something like this:
2 cretics (a cretic is -u-_
cretic plus iamb
2 cretics
2 cretics plus iamb
bacchius (u--) cretic bacchius
hemiepes
cretic plus bacchius.
This, I have argued is not only nonsense but confusing nonsense. Except for one line, the prevailing rhythm is iambic, usually syncopated as ^-u- or u-^-. The so-called hemiepes is merely a section of a dactylic hexameter, cut off at the masculine caesura.
Enough of this.
In lyric poetry, the question is complicated by music. First of all, different instruments were used to accompany different sorts of lyric--the aulos, as I said above, for tragedy, and different types of lyre for other forms, e.g., the kithara--a sort of concert-lyre, for the kitharodic nomos. We do know, however, that lyres could be used in a tragedy, e.g. when Sophocles played the lyre himself in his play Thamyris, but that does not mean that one expected a lyre to accompany the chorus, though we know too little to make a definite pronouncement.
Greek music, as everyone knows, did not employ harmony and was written in what we call modes and they called, typically, harmoniai. What we call modes are scales, that is, a fixed sequence of intervals, whole tones and half tones, the major scale and the at least three minor scales in common use, as well as the modes used in Church music. The Greek harmoniai were modes in this sense, but also something more, because they were burdened with traditions of performance and feeling. In Plato's well-known version of Damon's musical theory, the harmoniai are credited with ethical influence, thus the Dorian mode is martial, the Lydian mode soft and even effeminate and so on.
Plato, remember, did know what he was talking about, since we know he aspired to write tragedies. Nonetheless, his and Damon's theory are probably a bit too explicit--more an ideal than reality, perhaps. Rhythms, too, had ethical associations, thus-and I'm finally getting to the point--Job's objection is rooted in a reality that Aristotle, for example, perceived.
One question never answered so far as I know--my expertise is getting a bit dated, since the last time I checked over the bibliography was 2006, though I have read articles in several mostly Italian journals--is whether specific rhythms were associated with specific harmoniai. A long time ago, I published an article in Classical Journal, in which I argued that Aeschylus, throughout the Oresteia but especially in the parodos of the Agamemnon, effectively parodied the mode and rhythm of a traditional almost liturgical form known as the kitharodic nomos. Aristophanes accuses him of doing this, and his mixture of dactyls and iambs does correspond to what we know of the form. I conjectured, somewhat along the lines of what might interest JOB, that he was often making a verbal play, because nomos also means law or tradition, thus a reference to nomoi anomoi, could mean both something like tunes out of tune and lawless laws, which is rather fitting for a world out of joint.
Now that I have bored you all to tears--those who have time to waste and read this far--I have to say it is all for nothing. All this refers to genre and the baggage of genres, forms, meters, rhythms, modes. While metrists like to conjecture about what more or less syncopation might mean or on the effect of a change in meter, we can almost never speak with certainty, though I do think that the use of the ionicus a minore:
uu-- uu-- often signifies, as some ancient commentators point out, either oriental or mourning themes, hence its use in the Persians. (It is also true that Anacreon liked a funny form of the ionic, which bears his name, and he is known to have spent time in Athens. Aeschylus is explicity said to have imitated this, so it may mean nothing more than an homage in many places).
In English iambic verse, we are not at all justified in attributing ethical weight to different lengths of iambic lines, though I did point out that it was harder to be serious in an 8 syllable line than with one of 10. I might have added that repeated use of feminine rhymes is more typical of light verse. Put these two facts together and you can see, indeed, that Landor's poem begins on a very light-hearted note, and I will so far, in eagerness to agree with JOB, that the switch to masculine rhymes does impart, a bit, a more serious note.
As for Elizabeth the Terrible, we have to reenter the English mythical imagination in which she was all things good, the Virgin Queen and the Faery Queen, the majestic figure who saved England from the Catholic savages. What is certainly true is that she presided over a culture that produced Shakespeare, Jonson, Marlowe, Beaumont and Fletcher--truly a Golden Age for English literature. The marvelous way Landor rounds off with this myth captured my imagination on first reading and it has never let go. Only Pindar and Horace have handled historical myths with such brilliance.
One could go on... For example, it is an old man's habit to glorify antiquity--he has caught the psychology perfectly, and ending on this mythical note, the poem seems to hang in their air for minutes after the reader has finished it, something like a mirage. When Yeats compared the feeling of completing a poem with closing the lid on a box, he was describing something that non-poets rarely get out of poetry, but even the dullest reader ought to be able to sense this here.
Sorry to have gone on so long.
No one willing to tackle the 1000 word epistles I posted? If you don't like the writing, you can find solace that there are many paintings to see, especially from the very-talented Hudson River School. To see the poem, click on "Judge Bartley" above.
Dr. Fleming,
I know I really shouldn't, but I just can't resist. So, the whole first half of your post? It's all Greek to me! [cue rimshot]
Truly horrible jokes aside, can you recommend any books on the basic mechanics of poetry (i.e. how to learn about different meters, rhythms, iambs . . . etc.) that are not tainted by modern poetic criticism? Aside from the occasional limerick, I'm no poet, but I would like to learn enough to be able to appreciate what I read.
Incidentally, I did enjoy your poetry in the last issue of Chronicles. Especially the one in praise of shabby things. It reminded me of the Hopkins poem you quoted a while back on the Daily Mail blog. Do you have any volumes of poetry available? (alas, there's another Thomas Fleming out there somewhere writing books, so Amazon searches return a great deal of things that have nothing to do with you, unless you've lost the beard and I don't know about it)
Not a book, but may I suggest taking some serious lessons on Gregorian plainsong? I've spent a total of two weeks of my life in a monastery down in Berry learning the chant and after a while you start to see the connection not simply between Latin phonetics and the song rhythm, but the emphatic and emotional nature of the music as a parallel to the words.
Remember that spoken language is but a restricted tonal set of the musical gamut of sound, and that although in the modern era poetry is often thought of as a type of lyric not intended to be sung, this was not the case in earlier times. Lyrics are musical in origin, and the rhythm is a part of this music, a part of what helps provide the emphatic meaning to the lyrics.
Indeed, symbol and representation are part and parcel of the human experience. There are theories that all language has its prototypical roots in onomatopoeia, and I wouldn't doubt it.
"Not a book, but may I suggest taking some serious lessons on Gregorian plainsong? I've spent a total of two weeks of my life in a monastery down in Berry learning the chant and after a while you start to see the connection not simply between Latin phonetics and the song rhythm, but the emphatic and emotional nature of the music as a parallel to the words." -end quote N. Moses
Too bad not a single simple book of basic mechanics on the different forms of poetry. Your endeavors though Mr. Moses make sense to me since the simple too often eludes. In the vein of peace can only eventuate in the body, and never with the body. As while we are in the world we don't 'have' a body, we are a body and only in that regard is it by design instructive toward what else we may be. Cudos, perfect you're on the right track.
Too bad not a single simple book of basic mechanics on the different forms of poetry. Your endeavors though Mr. Moses make sense to me since the simple too often eludes. In the vein of peace can only eventuate in the body, and never with the body. As while we are in the world we don't 'have' a body, we are a body and only in that regard is it by design instructive toward what else we may be.
No, you are correct. I'm sure there is indeed such a book but I have no doubt that on its own it would be insufficient without concurrent acculturation in various examples of *good* poetry. It's about an intellectual lifestyle and a way of thinking. After growing up in the suburban Rust Belt/midwest, the first time I visited Europe and saw the intricate aesthetic details on every residential building erected before World War I, I realized we had lost a LOT more since that time than I had imagined and that constant, deliberate, holistic immersion in *good* culture is the only cure for bad culture.
(Of course, one must also be realistic and down-to-Earth: I grew up with 1990s and 2000s pop music and had to learn to like old folk music [much easier] before I was ready to appreciate the classical stuff.)
Cudos, perfect you're on the right track.
I appreciate your compliments, as well as those of you and Dr. Pavlovich from the other thread, where I did not have time to respond.
It is -yes- about an intellectual lifestyle and way of thinking, *good* poetry, *good* culture all akin to Aristotle's for example understanding of 'the good life' inevitably inclusive of morality and rationality since as that philosopher pointed out we human beings are *already (one way or another, for better or worse) moral and rational creatures as the given.
I would submit a definition for the 'good' is that which a.) functions well and b.) is inclusive of Traditional morality. Since those two qualifiers for defining good are neither always simpatico nor are they mutually exclusive...We can find justice for ourselves and our own first (and subsequently including others), in the mean or middle ground when efficient function and Traditional morality may be causing friction. ... Fortunately they are usually in unicent or even harmonious, unless their *image has been badly altered, leaving knowledge unaffected, though changing perception/behavior/standards for the worse, and I would agree with you this bad turn arriving after the very sad and silly World War I.
The gap isn't so wide between the two halfs of the good when friction is in fact present and they draw apart, unless we *assume one or the other half is 'the' only good. Instead of being conscious of both separated halfs and so the possibility of the mean or middle ground.
Remebering as well that even such friction is *also a part of the good. Since a dynamic tension between each half "as if" opposite to the other, when they do manifest that way too, lends itself to the expansion of consciousness.
Anyway that's why the art of casuistry came about to look for the mean or middle ground when necessary. By *seeing both halfs if a gap between them should emerge. Rather than imbalancing exclusively in either singular direction as if one half alone were the whole reality.
You ask: What is a good basic book on meter? I don't know. First off, you must realize that nearly every scholar who devotes himself to poetic meter is crazy. When I was one of them, I was tormented by the absolutely silly books and articles I had to read and footnote. Even otherwise sane people and fine scholars go mad when they study meter. M.L. West, a fine and disciplined scholar, wrote what I regard as the single craziest academic article published in a prestigious journal. He thought he had discovered 7 levels of quantity in Greek, despite the obvious fact that all systems of rhythm--poetic, musical, the rhythm of blinking lights--rely on a basic alternation of strong and weak, light and dark, loud and soft, long and short.
In English, there is less room for such insanity, but English "scholars" rarely understand the classical tradition and transfer wholesale ancient terminology that is really not appropriate to English. One exception to the principle that writers on English meter are not crazy is Nabokov's genuinely crack-brained Note on Prosody that he composed to explain his English translation of Puskhin. He invents his own terminology for a language he had not entirely mastered--particularly the music.
On books.google there is a piece of drudgery called A Handbook of English Metre by Joseph B. Mayor. The bits I read were potty--but that is inevitable. At least you can get a handle on terminology. Metrical terminology is a foreign language that corresponds to little that is real, but if it is the language being spoken, it has to be learned.
Let us try to remember that this little corner is devoted to other people's poetry.