Poems of the Week: March 4, 2012
Let us do some sonnets this week. We can start with what are called English sonnets, as opposed to Petrarchan. It is a simple form: three quatrains of 10-syllable "iambic" lines, alternately rhyming, and a final rhymed couplet. This is Shakespeare's Sonnet 98, not one of the most famous, but an old favorite of mine:
Sonnet 98, Shakespeare
From you have I been absent in the spring,
When proud-pied April dress'd in all his trim
Hath put a spirit of youth in every thing,
That heavy Saturn laugh'd and leap'd with him.
Yet nor the lays of birds nor the sweet smell
Of different flowers in odour and in hue
Could make me any summer's story tell,
Or from their proud lap pluck them where they grew;
Nor did I wonder at the lily's white,
Nor praise the deep vermilion in the rose;
They were but sweet, but figures of delight,
Drawn after you, you pattern of all those.
Yet seem'd it winter still, and, you away,
As with your shadow I with these did play.
Sonnet 73, Shakespeare
That time of year thou mayst in me behold
When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang
Upon those boughs which shake against the cold,
Bare ruin'd choirs, where late the sweet birds sang.
In me thou seest the twilight of such day
As after sunset fadeth in the west,
Which by and by black night doth take away,
Death's second self, that seals up all in rest.
In me thou see'st the glowing of such fire
That on the ashes of his youth doth lie,
As the death-bed whereon it must expire
Consumed with that which it was nourish'd by.
This thou perceivest, which makes thy love more strong,
To love that well which thou must leave ere long.
Sonnet 7, Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey
The soote season, that bud and bloom forth brings,
With green hath clad the hill, and eke the vale.
The nightingale with feathers new she sings ;
The turtle to her make hath told her tale.
Summer is come, for every spray now springs,
The hart hath hung his old head on the pale;
The buck in brake his winter coat he slings ;
The fishes flete with new repairèd scale ;
The adder all her slough away she slings ;
The swift swallow pursueth the fliës smale
The busy bee her honey now she mings ;
Winter is worn that was the flowers' bale.
And thus I see among these pleasant things
Each care decays, and yet my sorrow springs !
"The Yellow Hammer," by John Clare
When shall I see the white thorn leaves agen
And yellowhammers gath'ring the dry bents
By the dyke side on stilly moor or fen
Feathered wi love and natures good intents
Rude is the nest this Architect invents
Rural the place wi cart ruts by dyke side
Dead grass, horse hair and downy headed bents
Tied to dead thistles she doth well provide
Close to a hill o' ants where cowslips bloom
And shed o'er meadows far their sweet perfume
In early Spring when winds blow chilly cold
The yellowhammer trailing grass will come
To fix a place and choose an early home
With yellow breast and head of solid gold.
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Lovely choice, very well suited to showing the actual flexibility of "iambic pentameter", the fact that in this poem as throughout Shakespeare's verse, the speaking voice leads and the meter enables.
I'll take this opportunity to say I agree that The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance is a moral allegory, one complex enough to allow us to see Tom Doniphan as champion and derelict, a western-genre tragic hero.
Thanks for several of your recommendations that I've taken up since returning from Siracusa: Leonardo Sciascia, nine of whose novellas as well as the stories in The Wine Dark Sea and Sicilian Uncles I've read with great satisfaction; Seduced and Abandoned, a cinema masterpiece, indeed--richly new-comedic, profound but realistic about familial honor, brilliantly acted and directed; Four Faces West, a very fine western even if it is not as faithful to Rhodes' marvelous Pasó Por Aqui as I'd like (but then it had to be adapted to suit McCrea's maturity relative to Rhodes' young hero's youth).
I’d like to offer a few observations on the Sonnet, and I hope I don’t fall too wide of the mark.
The poem seems to start weakly, with no strong beats in the first line. Perhaps the “you” and the first syllable of “absent,” but for the most part it seems to run all together indistinctly. Then the “proud-pied April” leaps in with force. The lines come alive with strong rhythms and colors and smells. This continues through line 10. At the same time you have the poem go from Spring into Summer, and you have white leading into red. On line 11 the poem slows with the comma breaking the line in half. The same break appears in line 12, this time with “you” on both sides of the break (and the meaning of the line pointing to “you” as the pattern of all that has come before). In line 13, the poem practically comes to a halt with the three commas, while moving into Winter and ending on “you away.” And the final line seems lifeless with no strong beats, again, like the opening line.
It’s a poem with great joy and sadness. I understand what someone previously posted about the Sonnets being run through with frustration; although, I think it adds depth to the poem vice a simple celebration of spring or love all by itself. But then after a 100 such poems I might change my mind.
Am I on the right path? I know my analysis is not technical, but I didn’t want to make too big a fool of myself and try to start talking about meter and iambs and such. Also, does anyone know of any particular reason behind the White Lily and the Red Rose? My default thought for White Lily is the Blessed Virgin Mary, but I’m not sure if that’s what Shakespeare was aiming at, although I’ve noticed religious imagery in some of his writing in other places. And red I always think of blood and usually Christ, but, again, I don’t know if that’s relevant in this poem. Is it that red roses are usually associated with love, and at this point the poem moves from contemplating the joy of spring to the sadness at being separated from a love?
I'm glad you enjoyed all of them. I was surprised, actually, that Fur Faces West was anywhere near as faithful to Rhodes' story as it is. I'm very fond of Joel McCrea, despite the obvious fact that he is a lousy actor. Late in life, when he was asked if he had any regrets, McCrea replied that considering how much money he had made as an actor, he might have made a better stab at learning the craft. Amen. Still, he was the character he portrayed, the best kind of American, a little naive, a little optimistic, but resourceful and even determined. Of course, he actually did not want to be an actor and spent most of his time on the working ranch he bought with the money he made in Hollywood. Sciascia is one of those rare modernist writers who can turn a news story into a novella that turns reality upside down. He is the Sicilian Borghes, as Gadda--a more difficult but somehow more human writer--is the Lombard Borghes.
Now, for the poem.
First the big picture--the structure. The first stanza sets the scene. The friend or loved one is absent but the Spring is beautiful. In 2 and 3, the delights of Spring prove to be hollow in the absence of the the loved one, the concluding couplet sets it up. It is thus a mini-drama.
The verse is stricter than in S's plays, but conversational enough, as my friend Ray notes above. The lines are pretty much end-stopped, that is there is a marked break in syntax or phrasing at the end of each line. There is virtually no anaclasis, that is, inversion of stress.
The first line is quite conventional, not weak. Monosyllables, allow the poet to put stress where he wants--note the analysis below. There is a conversational quality, and even the inversion of I have is correct after an opening phrase, rather as in German, and it permits him better vocal melody, stressing the I and instead of two a's in a row.
Then how does he succeed in making the lines seem varied and alive, not wooden at all (as Wyatt, for example, and Surrey had been). First, even people who don't read much poetry can observe the comparative naturalness in the phrasing. No insignificant fluff words are used, no archaisms, unlike most earlier sonneteers. The word order is quite natural.
Even more obvious to the ear is the variation in quantity and weight that has an effect parallel to anaclasis. Look at these lines:
Yet nor the lays of birds nor the sweet smell
Of different flowers in odour and in hue
Here he does have a bit of enjambement--that is run-over of sense, and to highlight it and not make it wooden, he makes the first line a series of monosyllables of ambiguous stress. Any of the last four syllables could receive a stress, and the lightest of them--the--actually does, while sweet is quite heavy especially when the final consonant t is followed by sm. This causes the word smell to sort of hang in the air and scoop up the phrase that begins the next line, in which you will the liquid sounds--r and l and w in such contrast with the previous line. I do not say, emphatically do not say these touches mean anything, only that they are part of the poem's music.
Another thing to look at is the pattern of breaks within the line. These are often miscalled caesuras. At a minimum, one normally expects a word break at the fourth syllable (strong) or fifth syllable (weak). However they can be trumped by a stronger break later in the line, as in the first line here, where there are breaks at 4,5, and 7--of increasing strength. Line 2 is 5, line 3 is 4, line four is 5, six is four and so on. What is to be avoided is too many lines in sequence with the same break. It is monotonous. One can coordinate the pattern of breaks with both enjambement, syllable weight or length, and anaclasis to produce a wide range of effects that are both musical and rhetorical.
Note, by the way, that spirit is really spir't, and that figure means something like image.
Observe the contrast with this lovely but rather wooden sonnet by Surrey, replete with archaisms, inversions, rhythm-filling words, and monotonous breaks at syllable 4. It has that amateurish flavor of people writing their first metred verse.
THE soote season, that bud and bloom forth brings,
With green hath clad the hill, and eke the vale.
The nightingale with feathers new she sings ;
The turtle to her make hath told her tale.
Summer is come, for every spray now springs,
The hart hath hung his old head on the pale;
The buck in brake his winter coat he slings ;
The fishes flete with new repairèd scale ;
The adder all her slough away she slings ;
The swift swallow pursueth the fliës smale
The busy bee her honey now she mings ;
Winter is worn that was the flowers' bale.
And thus I see among these pleasant things
Each care decays, and yet my sorrow springs !
The OP of "spirit" in line 3 could also be "sprəit" ("sprite"). In that case, it would echo "pied" in line 2.
In either case, as Dr. Fleming points out, "spirit" is a monosyllable here, though interestingly enough, it ain't always in Shakespeare—spirit, spir't, sprite, depending on the context.
Aaron is absolutely correct. Perhaps I can ask Prof. Brownlow which pronunciation he thinks more likely. I can say that I prefer spir't for several reasons. Sprite's a bit heavy, while spir't sets up a pattern of assonance in the stressed vowels: u i ou e i. Note the alternation of short close vowels with broader vowels. If it were my poem--and here we go back to my confession about writing poems on vocalic patterns--I know I'd prefer this pattern.
When I read Surrey's sonnet I hear how stilted it sounds compared to Shakespeare's. I remember hearing that this was one of the reasons that the idea that Marlowe actually wrote Shakespeare's work was such bunk because Marlowe sounds so stiff compared to the variation found in Shakespeare's verse. I think it was on the "In Search of Shakespeare" documentary by Mike Woods.
I'm not quite sure what the ending of Surrey's sonnet means.
And thus I see among these pleasant things
Each care decays, and yet my sorrow springs
Is Surrey saying that he's depressed in spite of Spring's beauty? What's the source of his sorrow? Shakespeare makes it clear that his sorrow comes from the absence of his love, but I didn't see a reason for the sorrow in Surrey.
Incidentally, what does the minging of honey mean? I suppose it's making honey?
About Shakespeare's Sonnet - Dr. Fleming, I know you've said you don't cotton to the examination of images in poems, but I don't really know what this means. Is it that you don't support any attempt to find symbolic images (as in taking an image in the poem and trying to see it in a metaphysical light, like the "wheel" from Landor's first poem you posted last week)?
For example, it would make sense to consider the seasons (Spring - Summer - Winter) in the sonnet as contributing to the mood or atmosphere of the poem, but it would be wrong to try to examine the seasons as correlating to some sort of symbol of man's age (i.e. Spring = Youth, Winter = Old Age) because that's mox nix with this poem. Or trying to read some sort of deep meaning into the line about Saturn leaping & laughing. That's the sort of thing that's all bosh, right?
I don't know who Mike Wood is but if he said anything like what you attribute to him, he is an ignoramus. It was Marlowe who probably made the break-through in finding ways to adapt the verse-line to dialogue. There is absolutely no more reason to search for Shakespeare than to search for Milton, Dickens, or Bob Dylan.
The subject of imagery requires extended treatment which I have to postpone. What I am proposing to do is to expose readers to the art of poetry as it was understood. Poems are not sacred scriptures in which we search for the secret purposes of human existence. Metaphors, similes, and images, as we know very well, are not the defining core of poetry but the trimmings, something, perhaps, like the lights on a Christmas tree, as opposed to the tree itself. Hunting for images, in most cases, is at best distracting. More often this sort of thing prevents us from even beginning to understand how poems are written or what they are. If Shakespeare wants to write a poem on youth or old age, he does it. Yes, metaphors and images can reinforce a point and in some contexts can be quite important--in the Oresteia the procession of fire signals across the Aegean, ignited so to speak by the burning of Troy, is recapitulated in the procession at the end of the trilogy. The fact that a poet may avail himself of this sort of rhetoric does not justify us in assuming it is everywhere. As for Landor's wheel, how can it possibly be a significant image, since he borrows it from Sappho and does not develop it. Where there is a pattern of images, that pattern must be fairly obvious, consistent, and must reinforce the surface meaning of the poem.
To see how Shakespeare treats old age with images, we have only to turn to one of his most famous sonnets: #73
That time of year thou mayst in me behold
When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang
Upon those boughs which shake against the cold,
Bare ruin'd choirs, where late the sweet birds sang.
In me thou seest the twilight of such day
As after sunset fadeth in the west,
Which by and by black night doth take away,
Death's second self, that seals up all in rest.
In me thou see'st the glowing of such fire
That on the ashes of his youth doth lie,
As the death-bed whereon it must expire
Consumed with that which it was nourish'd by.
This thou perceivest, which makes thy love more strong,
To love that well which thou must leave ere long.
In defense of Michael Woods, I don't think it was actually him but an actor he was interviewing (someone who staged a lot of Marlowe plays). The documentary was just a searching through historical records to reveal information about the world Shakespeare grew up & lived in (political, cultural, economic . . .etc.). I have to admit, it was nice seeing a lot of the locations Shakespeare lived in & worked at (no trip to England in my near future, alas). The one striking thing about the whole documentary was that it actually talked about the ongoing religious conflict and its relation to Shakespeare's life. They didn't play up the Catholic angle as much as some like to (see Joseph Pierce), but to honestly address it in fairly candid fashion was, I thought, impressive for PBS. And it was nice that it frankly said, from the beginning, that Shakespeare existed and wrote his poems & plays; conspiracy theories need not apply.
The only thing mentioned regarding the sonnets were some of the theories about who the subjects were (i.e. who were they actually written to, who was the "Dark Lady" . . . etc.). Mike Woods did say that he personally thought some of them must be addressed, more or less, to Shakespeare's recently drowned sun, Hamnet (he pointed in particular to Sonnet 33). It seems like this sort of idea would fall in line with the type of image hunting that is not helpful. Or worse yet, psycho-analyzing. I know I have no idea what Shakespeare may have been thinking when he wrote any of this, nor would I hazard a guess.
I looked up the show online. It does not appear to me to be very helpful. This sort of vulgarization of scholarly problems would be useful if the really clarified the milieu in which a writer worked. Most--this one included, from what I could see--are simply fluff that gets in the way of reading a text. As for sonnet 33, this is a perfect example of how bogus criticism works. First, you posit a psychological state, then you find an incident of the author's life that might produce such a state, then you read that event into the poem. Not only is there no evidence to justify this reasoning, but it gives the reader a false sense of "really" understanding the poem. In a famous exchange with Tillyard on the biographical heresy, C.S. Lewis talks about how much easier it is to focus on the details of an author's life that reduce him to our own low level rather than face those endless pages of prose and verse.
I am not saying the ignorance of the author's life and historical times is bliss, only that one has to distinguish historical scholarship from the process of importing pseudo-meaning into texts. To know, for example, something of the Elizabethan police state is helpful, both for assessing how frank a dramatist could be in making political and historical judgments and for interpreting, say, Shakespeare's or Jonson's view of the regime.
Certain forms of verse, particularly satire (Juvenal or Donne) and political comedy (Aristophanes, Shaw) are filled with contemporary allusions that make the works difficult to appreciate without a sound knowledge of the age. Sonnets about Spring, old age, the moon, and love, by contrast, often need only a sound knowledge of the language to be understood. Alas, today, there are nearly as many people who know Latin as there are who can read English.
Mr. Cornell re: Surrey's ending:
"And thus I see among these pleasant things
Each care decays, and yet my sorrow springs !"
He lacks the sharper, more focused and case specific double-edge of Shakespeare. He's depressed in a nebulous way neither placing his finger on the pulse of it (for us the reader), nor able to shake it. So he gets really down in the mouth at the end essentially averring there's no help either for him from mother Nature, in that even though care or pain too is ephemeral i.e. 'this too shall pass' (each care decays) is yet only more cause for his depression; and sorrow then increases or springs ! I guess in the vein of T.S. Eliot's 'April is the cruelest month, etc.' For me it's too vague, at least get more specific if a poet wants to cry in their beer that way, more real. If you ask a friend what's wrong, do they ever say to you, my pain goes away, but it just makes me more sorrowful ! -?- ... Then my next thought would be he must be on some of BigPharma's meds, since that makes no sense at all. (humor at the end, sorry.) Been a long day working, I hope this doesn't seem to me too inaccurate early tomorrow after coffee.
I have often heard it said that sonnets always have a "turn." I understood this to be a point in the poem where the theme takes a different tack. The example I've always seen used is Sonnet 18 and the line "But thy eternal summer shall not fade." The point being that the poem focuses on how all beauty fades until that line in which it shifts gears and says the poet's love's beauty will live on through the poem itself.
Is this a valid thing to consider when looking at the structure of a sonnet? Or is "turn hunting" akin to "image hunting"? It would seem that the final couplet in all three sonnets here would be the "turn," although Shakespeare's sonnets seem to be very unified, thematically, throughout. I mean, Sonnet 98, from the beginning, talks about the absence of the love and then comes back to it at the end.
And, Mr. Yurick, that's more or less what I was thinking. That it's just some nebulous grief in Surrey's sonnet. Perhaps a comment that, in general, one who is depressed or sorrowful cannot enjoy beautiful things because of the state of his soul?
Incidentally, Ming Honey sounds like a Chinese delicacy, no?
Mr. Cornell, suppose it were true that nearly every sonnet has a turn. What then? What use does a reader derive from this generalization? You ask, quite properly, if such a notion would help us to understand the structure of the sonnet. Clearly not. The structure of the English sonnet is defined by the "pentameter" verse line, the quatrains of alternate rhymes, and the concluding couplet. That is the formal structure. As for the rhetorical arrangement, there, obviously, the principle of a dramatic turn will break down because everything depends upon what the poet has to say. These sorts of notions are mainly put forward by people who do not write sonnets.
The Italian sonnet, which we shall take up later, has a structure that invites dramatic shifts, and we'll take that up next.
Does anyone wish to recommend another English sonnet?
Here is a sonnet by John Clare I wish I'd written. I came across it very recently, though I must have read it in my 20's when was reading a bit of Clare.
The Yellow Hammer
When shall I see the white thorn leaves agen
And yellowhammers gath'ring the dry bents
By the dyke side on stilly moor or fen
Feathered wi love and natures good intents
Rude is the nest this Architect invents
Rural the place wi cart ruts by dyke side
Dead grass, horse hair and downy headed bents
Tied to dead thistles she doth well provide
Close to a hill o' ants where cowslips bloom
And shed o'er meadows far their sweet perfume
In early Spring when winds blow chilly cold
The yellowhammer trailing grass will come
To fix a place and choose an early home
With yellow breast and head of solid gold.
I am struck by two qualities.
Most obviously Clare is perhaps our greatest naturalist-poet, that is, he is a great observer of flora and fauna. The Yellow Hammer is a charming bird in the Bunting clan, with yellow, striped back and streaked breast.
Secondly, and I had forgotten this if I had ever noted it, Clare is very adept at modulating his rhythm both by playing with the weights of his words and by using tricks that we associate more with drama and dialogue, namely, inversions of the beat.
I don't tend to enjoy naturalist poetry or prose in that I think it attempts to find erasure of the human soul in nature resulting in a feeling of flatness perhaps on a premature level or plateau as if, if we only stopped in our ambitions at the flat line of death as the soul's true end, we'd find more balance and peace while living. I perecieve there's little or no truth in that in the longer run of life except as a respite through well crafted distraction, and may not be the purpose of Nature assuming she has one. Although it can also be beautiful as in the above poem by Clare or in the beautiful blur of a captured impression in a Monet painting, which I think also explores momentary escape from the soul or as you put it above Mr. Cornell escape from the state of the artist's soul. Then writ large in terms of the similar state of many souls who relate to the work as if defining truth and beauty. As well as those like myself who only relate to or appreciate it when sufficiently contrived, as a beautiful pause or respite alone, an image, though yet incomplete to my knowledge.
I like all of Shakespeare's sonnets. Here's one we might dissect--in your inviting us to supply a sonnet Dr. Fleming--cogent as it is:
That you were once unkind befriends me now,
And for that sorrow which I then did feel
Needs must I under my transgressions bow,
Unless my nerves were brass or hammered steel.
For if you were by my unkindness shaken
As I by yours, you've past a hell of time,
And I, a tyrant, have no leisure taken
To weigh how once I suffered in your crime.
O that our night of woe might have remembered
My deepest sense how hard true sorrow hits,
And soon to you as you to me then tendered
The humble slave which wounded bosoms fits!
But that your trespass now becomes a fee;
Mine ransoms yours, and yours must ransom me.
Note: There's 154 to my knowledge of Shakespeare's sonnets and they're all terrific in that I think they're the best of anything we have that I'm aware of in English literature including his great plays. The above is Sonnet 120. I would like a recommendation from anyone here reading this, of works in English language prose especially, and some poetry on a comparable level with W.S. In other words in case I've missed them I can go read them. And I'm sure, happily I must have missed a lot so I now can look forward to being alerted to it and reading it.
If one's first response is "I don't tend to like....", it is the beginning of the closing of mind and heart to something that might be wholesome. I put the poem up for two reasons: first, because it gives readers a chance to see how a poet can effectively use birds and trees without sentimentalizing them a la Shelley and Keats, and second, because Clare's versification is worth looking at.
Clare is a tragic case who might have served as a model for Hardy's Jude: son of a rural laboring family, he took to literature but even with patronage could not quite make a go of it. He sank into melancholia in his 30's and grew increasingly eccentric until he was put into an asylum for most of the rest of his life. Perhaps he was born to go crazy, but perhaps his gifts drove him mad. He was rediscovered in the 20th century both by Leftists and sentimentalists, but it is his work that deserves attention. Still, I think one might give the guy a break. As an equally tragic American poet would write much later, in an elegiac vein, of human frailty.
The poets tell how Pancho fell
Lefty's livin' in a cheap hotel
The desert's quiet and Cleveland's cold
So the story ends we're told
Pancho needs your prayers it's true,
But save a few for Lefty too
He just did what he had to do
Now he's growing old.
I welcome naturalists but don't personally find them wholesome in that I don't experience even the best of them as whole. They're sentimental in their attempt at being the impossible, *completely natural. But they provide a snap shot of a part of the world and themselves, sometimes beautiful, that's wholesome as a respite like looking at and learning from a flower. One cannot close the mind successfully to a part of what exists, nor do I wish to. Why would you imagine that? 'I tend not to enjoy...' I thought, I went on to qualify as meaning only the best naturalists make the representation of the part as if the whole, sufficiently dimensional-it's enjoyable [to me], like a flower outside of a photo, painting, or book. Right? There's on the other hand I agree nothing worse, especially not naturalists than spiritual pride and its misguided ambitions which one cannot help but notice either; how does one close the mind? Let me know I'll be open to it.
There is a danger in thinking in terms of categories--nature-poets, love poets, war poets--and an even greater danger in having ready-made opinions. I have a granddaughter, a good girl and not really a picky eater, except that, like most children, she doesn't want to eat something she hasn't eaten before. "I don't eat kidneys," she'll say and she might just as well say "I don't read John Clare. Then she would miss this naturalist poem that includes a reference to grass:
I am: yet what I am none cares or knows,
My friends forsake me like a memory lost;
I am the self-consumer of my woes,
They rise and vanish in oblivious host,
Like shades in love and death's oblivion lost;
And yet I am! and live with shadows tost
Into the nothingness of scorn and noise,
Into the living sea of waking dreams,
Where there is neither sense of life nor joys,
But the vast shipwreck of my life's esteems;
And e'en the dearest--that I loved the best--
Are strange--nay, rather stranger than the rest.
I long for scenes where man has never trod;
A place where woman never smil'd or wept;
There to abide with my creator, God,
And sleep as I in childhood sweetly slept:
Untroubling and untroubled where I lie;
The grass below--above the vaulted sky.
John Clare was a bandit boy his horse was fast as polished steel
He wore his poems outside his vest for all the honest world to feel
John Clare met his match you know on the deserts down in Mexico
Nobody heard his dying words ah but that's the way poems goes ...
I don't avoid Clare or Hardy have read some of theirs and now I suppose I have been answered in what to read again next - theirs I'll pick up from the library. Great next poem of Clare's above thanks. Mr. Reavis enjoyed yours above. I thought we were going to tear apart another sonnet, Grrr. For technical advancement I need my red meat Grrr. -?-
So many fine sonnets. I want to offer an American example by one of our most musical poets. It is very personal, it is very simply worded (just one demi-neologism, easily understood), appropriately full of echoes, moving but not, I think, at all mawkish. And it has a "turn", doesn't it?
In the long, sleepless watches of the night,
A gentle face--the face of one long dead--
Looks at me from the wall, where round its head
The night-lamp casts a halo of pale light.
Here in this room she died; and soul more white
Never through martyrdom of fire was led
To its repose; nor can in books be read
The legend of a life more benedight.
There is a mountain in the distant West
That, sun-defying, in its deep ravines
Displays a cross of snow upon its side.
Such is the cross I wear upon my breast
These eighteen years, through all the changing scenes
And seasons, changeless since the day she died.
It's by Longfellow, remembering his second wife, the mother of his children, who was mortally burned when her dress caught fire.
I would say the banal is sacred too. I would leave it there but we are the chattering classes. Leaves, by chance or will or divine design yet attached to branches [of the tree] and not yet separated, played with by the wind, or if separated, strong enough it doesn't much affect our opinions we chatter on, it's mediocre. The turn as it were is for the pathetic worse, blahh, what else is new? Hit me with a lightning bolt as preferable er, but tomorrow, not necessarily today. If it happened today, would I know it? Stick with Shakespeare and Clare and continuing to comment yourself-loved this one myself, better than TV. By the way was her dress hit by a lightning bolt? As for tearing the sonnet apart appropriately in a technical manner, which being part animal I love, I wish Doc Fleming would do that. For all of us would be Sonneteers. Doesn't anyone around here have a sense of humor or yet love a fist fight, a good old barroom brawll?!!!!! Jesus Christ are we all walking on freaking eggshells?!!
I very much enjoyed the poems by Clare of whom I’d never heard. For one, having grown up in the South, it’s nice to finally have something other than a ridiculous college football chant in my head when I hear “Yellow Hammer.” The second Clare poem hits me hard – while I am thankful that I do not suffer from depression or any such awful maladies, I know I have a tendency towards them. The modern world, I think, encourages such problems. The middle stanza, with the living sea & shipwreck & lifelessness I found very haunting. Had Mr. Clare lived in the 21st century he could have fit right in and found a nice job in the Federal Government somewhere.
The Longfellow sonnet I found interesting, it being very different from any other Longfellow poem I’ve ever read (and by that, of course, I mean “The Midnight Ride of Paul Revere”). The change in the rhyme scheme in the 3rd stanza & couplet took me by surprise. And while I manifestly and unhesitatingly state that I am NOT looking for a turn in this sonnet, I have to admit if I were to look for one I wouldn’t see it. Again, like Shakespeare’s Sonnets & Clare’s Sonnet above the poem seems dramatically unified. I’m curious about next week & the Italian sonnets and the dramatic requirements thereof.
I feel like there are plenty of poems here to mull over, but I did want to ask about Hopkins’ “God’s Grandeur.” Technically it’s a sonnet, no? Although it’s not like any sonnet I’ve ever read. Dr. Fleming, are you saving Hopkins for a later week, or would it be appropriate to consider that poem now?
Finally, is there anywhere else on the Internet one can find Shakespeare’s, Longfellow’s, & Clare’s sonnets next to lyrics to a Merle Haggard song? Talk about strange bedfellows!
Actually, the song is written by Townes van Zandt. There is a method in the apparently silly incongruity. First off, I simply like Townes's songs, and secondly, one way of finding out what poetry is is to realize that Cole Porter and Hank Williams were poets. One can argue about how good they were, of course, and distinguish between serious and frivolous poetry, well-crafted and clumsy. But good old Americans who claim to take no interest in poetry spend huge amounts of money every year on various kinds of pop music, much of whose appeal lies in the lyrics. These lyrics are poems. One big problem with pop music lyrics, though, is that the music allows the lyricist to cheat a great deal, which then makes the lyrics seem crude when printed on the page. However, that is not always the case. Aaron Wolf and I were talking about this earlier this week and we agreed that "I'm So Lonesome I Could Cry" and "Cold Cold Heart" have moving and competent lyrics, but so does "He Stopped Lovin' Her Today," with the grisliest line in pop music: "I hadn't seen him smile in years."
Yes, "God's Grandeur" has the structure, though not the meter of a sonnet. I don't want to talk about Hopkins until people begin to have some understanding of how traditional English verse is constructed, what the range of possibilities was in Hopkins' day, and why the merits of his revolution are outweighed by the demerits.
Something related to the idea that Hank Williams was a poet -- pop culture today, as rotten as it is, has left few avenues for bright young poets to pursue. I have noticed an interesting trend. Many bright young men are taking to Rap as a form of poetic expression. For the youth, the printed word is all but dead. Even worse, written poetry, today, has been given a feminine connotation. Many young men wouldn't be caught dead asking their friends to read their sonnets. So, for much of the youth, Rap is, sadly, among the most dominate & socially accepted "art" (if you can call it that) forms.
I'm not talking about the normal run-of-the-mill gangsta rappers that litter MTV and put out albums. Most if not all of them are thugs. Period. But on YouTube and other non-traditional watering holes one can find young men attempting to express themselves poetically through Rap. Unfortunately, because of the flimsiness of the vehicle they mostly get caught simply expressing verbal dexterity and wordplay with no real idea of beauty or contemplation or even simple use of surface images. But they are trying to tackle complex ideas, such as faith, community, politics, love, the human condition . . .etc.
It's an odd and not terribly reassuring phenomenon, and it's completely off topic. I only bring it up as a side note to the idea that Americans, especially the young and "bright" (I'm speaking relatively - as in they have potential faculties larded over with immature thought & brain-numbing "education"), are seeking poetry still, and the only thing many find is Rap.
Not hearing much about the Clare sonnet, I thought I would at least tell you some of what you can learn about the first half dozen lines:
When shall I see the white thorn leaves agen
And yellowhammers gath'ring the dry bents
By the dyke side on stilly moor or fen
Feathered wi love and natures good intents
Rude is the nest this Architect invents
Rural the place wi cart ruts by dyke side
Dead grass, horse hair and downy headed bents
Note number of lines beginning with a stressed syllable--1,5,6.
Note the rhetorical phrasing of the first three lines. The first is end-end-stopped, the second runs over the sense, and this is accomodated by ending two with two strong monosyllables and beginning three with what in spoken English would be two shorts.
I’ve been studying the Clare Sonnet. I offer the following for review and correction (please forgive the untechnical language and my often stating of the obvious):
Line 6 starts with a stressed syllable and with “Cart ruts” and “dyke side” sandwiches two double-stress syllables around a short at the end of the line. The way “dyke side” is placed in the line makes the accents different form the “dyke side” in Line 3. Line 7 follows with more monosyllables with pauses to accent the iambic pentameter (dead GRASS, horse HAIR) but then uses “downy headed” to vary the rhythm – it makes the end of the line run much faster than the beginning. is the "Tied" at the beginning of Line 8 supposed to be stressed? Or does Line 7 run over into Line 8? In line 8 there's also a stress on “dead” and the first part of "thistles."
The rhyme scheme for the last stanza changes so that it crosses over into the couplet so that the six lines go A-A-B-C-C-B. Line 9 starts with a stressed syllable, but after that the stresses all follow iambic pentameter. However, the “pauses” or breaks in the lines shift. In Lines 9 & 10 the pause is at the 6th syllable, line 11 at 4th, line 12 at 5th, Lines 13 & 14 back at the 4th. Also, the mix between monosyllables and multisyllabic words keeps the rhythm from feeling stilted.
With the exception of Line 2 to 3, which Dr. Fleming pointed out as a run-over, and possibly line 7 to 8, all the other lines are end-stopped.
I’m just trying to get some of the basics down – please let me know what I’ve flubbed or missed.