G. Thompson
Informal writing #3
Writing about these poems, I think there are two perspectives that have to register:
"Dulce et Decorum Est"--whatever you do with this poem, it should reflect the overall point that Owen is denying the patriotic BS people were getting back home about the glories of war, what he calls the Old Lie. A general, more realistic appraisal of war (exhausting and brutal) is certainly true, but not specific enough.
"Diving into the Wreck"--here, whatever you do with the poem, there needs to be recognition that it works as a kind of allegory or extended metaphor, and that Rich is talking about more than exploring a shipwreck. The shipwreck represents her take on contemporary society, which is underwater and decrepit, and she (through her persona) says that it has to be reconstructed from scratch, drawing on the "book of myths," but in a thorough and individualistic perspective. Noting details from the poem without the figurative application is seeing individual trees but not the forest.
For Thursday's informal writing, choose either carpe diem or discovery / insight. For the first, choose either "Dover Beach" or "To His Coy Mistress"; what else, beyond just seizing the day / body, is of concern to the persona? For the second, choose either "Morning Song" or "God's Grandeur," and tell what the discovery is and why it matters.
These are more challenging poems, and you need to think about their figurative aspects as well as the announced theme. It can be a challenge, and you should feel free to look for further information about the poem or poet to get on the right track.
Today's theme is pastoral.
Marlowe and Raleigh as paired poems: Marlowe's is in "stylized, idealized terms"--discuss?
These are not especially deep poems . . .
Group discussions: Marlowe groups, summarize the appeal made by the Passionate Shepherd; Raleigh groups, voice the nymph's counter-statement.
Marlowe was an educated man who had dealings in court, allegedly serving as a spy, as well as the primary tragedian before Shakespeare. He was certainly not a shepherd, and had no real interest in the pastoral life spoken here. In other words, the idea of lying under the trees and picking flowers and listening to the birds singing is a literary conceit, along the lines of things we might idealize.
Perhaps the gangsta life? It's an imagined world with its own attractions, in a different key from the pastoral here. Science-fiction? Ours may be more likely to be tinged with irony. Woody Allen, Midnight in Paris, escape into the past. Pastoral is escapism, and much escapism follows loosely pastoral expectations.
Raleigh gives voice to the nymph's concerns--distrust of shepherds (of men), who may be liars and seducers, and attention to the passing of time, which undercuts the pastoral appeal.
"Kubla Khan"--Coleridge calls this a fragment: there's something of a tradition of writers producing fragmentary works, either because personal circumstances intervened (Kafka's unfinished novels), or to suggest that the inspiration had passed. In this case, perhaps both apply. Coleridge's account, from nearly 20 years later:
In consequence of a slight indisposition, an anodyne had been prescribed, from the effects of which he fell asleep in his chair at the moment that he was reading the following sentence, or words of the same substance, in 'Purchas's Pilgrimes:' 'Here the Khan Kubla commanded a palace to be built, and a stately garden thereunto: and thus ten miles of fertile ground were inclosed with a wall.'
The Author continued for about three hours in a profound sleep, at least of the external senses, during which time he has the most vivid confidence, that he could not have composed less than from two to three hundred lines; if that indeed can be called composition in which all the images rose up before him as things, with a parallel production of the correspondent expressions, without any sensation or consciousness of effort. On awakening he appeared to himself to have a distinct recollection of the whole, and taking his pen, ink, and paper, instantly and eagerly wrote down the lines that are here preserved. At this moment he was unfortunately called out by a person on business from Porlock, and detained by him above an hour, and on his return to his room, found, to his no small surprise and mortification, that though he still retained some vague and dim recollection of the general purport of the vision, yet, with the exception of some eight or ten scattered lines and images, all the rest had passed away like the images on the surface of a stream into which a stone had been cast, but, alas! without the after restoration of the latter:
. . . was that the evening before, he had been reading an account of the fabulous palace of the Mongol lord Kubla Khan (son of Genghis Khan), and fell asleep after smoking opium. (In the 19th-c. opium was more widely available, and it and other stimulants were highly prized by Romantic writers such as Coleridge and De Quincey, and allegedly Poe, as a means of inducing visions which could be brought into their poetry.) When he woke, he felt himself in possession of a visionary poem of 200 lines or so and began writing them down as quickly as he could, until a knocking on the door and an interruption by "a person from Porlock," whereupon the frenzy had passed.
The dream vision offers a kind of pastoral, stylized in a different way from the Marlowe and Raleigh pastorals. It's an imagined world, far apart as well from the day to day; the speaker of the poem recalls being transported by poetic inspiration, and the poem's meter works as a kind of incantation.
Don't worry about the place names--they are there to sound exotic rather than to evoke real places. Abyssinia is present-day Ethiopia, exotic to English. Mount Abora doesn't exist; the ms. has Mount Amara, which does, and is in Ethiopia. There is an Alph river, now--it is in Antarctica, named after the mythical river in Coleridge's poem.
Form is that of an ode--lines of varying length with no specific pattern, in imitation of verse form from Greek tragedy. Greek things had a vogue in early 19th-c. Britain, thanks in part to antiquities brought by Lord Elgin from Greece, to protect them from destruction in the Greek-Turkish war. (Greece would like them back now, thank you very much.)
Much of "Kubla Khan" is there as rhythmic, hypnotic sounds rather than anything we need to probe for deep, philosophic meaning.