The Question that has been Posed: Why are poets so rarely happy?
This question intrigues me. I have come to the conclusion, after thinking about this during the past week, that poets may only appear to be this way (rarely happy) in their poems, when, in fact, they may be personally the most 'together' of those walking about the face of the earth. It is poets who have chosen, or felt compelled to use words to try to express often, 'the condition of man'. Life contains much loss and often much pain and then finally, death, unless another possibility is envisioned. It is the poet who tries to put words to these experiences, thoughts and feelings, if for no other reason than having a need to express their own subjectivity. Most people either have no desire, and/or else fear vulnerability to criticisms or critique by others, and therefore do not write (if they write at all) for public consumption.
Once words have been put to paper and delivered into the hands of another, the possibility then exists that the sometimes carefully or sometimes just painfully constructed personal work will be considered less than 'good'. The world judges all, and the judgements can sometimes destroy the delicate. On the other hand, the possibility exists that these words will touch the lives of many people in ways that the poet will rarely be aware of. Poets do something like scattering seeds along the way of their journey, but do not remain in that spot to see whether there is germination. Not only does the road beckon, but those words, once voiced, are already of the past, and there is still much to learn.
How poets express loss, has of course, been classified by definitions. I have been once again rummaging around in The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms, in the Norton, and also doing some preliminary reading on the "pastoral". To date, I am not yet prepared to write anything on the pastoral, but since much poetry includes this, and some overflows with the pastoral, it is an important theme and will be given more research by me, and then "blogged".
The Oxford lists at least 9 types of poetry of loss and as well, gives some suggestions as to where to begin reading examples that fall within the definitions.
These are as follows:
Complaint
A kind of Lyric poem common from the Middle Ages to the 17-century. Is is in the form of a Monologue in which the speaker bewails either the cruelty of a faithless lover, or some other misfortune. Poets who wrote "complaint" poems: Chaucer, Villon, Surrey and Spenser. Check out P54 Norton's - "Complaint to His Purse" (Chaucer).
Dirge
A song of lamentation mourning someone's death; a poem in the form of a song of lamentation. This is an ancient genre written by both Greek (Pindar) and Latin (Propertius) poets, although it also occurs in English. The most famous is Aerial's Song from "The Tempest".
Full Fathom Five
Full fathom five thy father lies;
__Of his bones are coral made;
Those are pearls that were his eyes:
__Nothing of him that doth fade,
But doth suffer a sea change
Into something rich and strange.
Sea nymphs hourly ring his knell:
__Ding-dong.
Hark! now I hear them - Ding-dong, bell.
___________William Shakespeare 1611
Graveyard poetry
Term applied to a minor but influential 18th-century tradition of meditative poems on mortality and immortality, often set in graveyards. The "graveyard school' of poets in England and Scotland was not an organized group. Best known examples: Thomas Parnell (Irish), "A Night-Piece on Death" (1721); Edward Young, "Night Thoughts" (1742-6); Robert Blair (Scottish), "The Grave" (1743) and Thomas Gray (English) "Elegy written in a Country Churchyard" (1751). The only one of these poets I could find in Norton's was Thomas Gray.
I would recommend this poem of Gray's. A few of my favourite verses:
"Perhaps in this neglected spot is laid (line 45)
__Some heart once pregnant with celestial fire;
Hands that the rod of empire might have swayed,
__Or waked to ecstasy the living lyre.
But Knowledge to their eyes her ample page
__Rich with the spoils of time did ne'er unroll;
Chill Penury repressed their noble rage,
__And froze the genial current of the soul.
Full many a gem of purest ray serene,
__The dark unfathomed caves of ocean bear:
Full many a flower is born to blush unseen,
__And waste its sweetness on the desert air." (line 56)
Lament
Any poem expressing profound grief or mournful regret.
Jeremiad
A prolonged lamentation or a prophetic warning aginst the evil habits of a nation, foretelling disaster.
In the first sense, it comes from the Hebrew prophet Jeremiah, contained in the Old Testament book, Jeremiah (52 chapters), and a rich book this is to read. The series of laments begin at 11:18. This book contains a wealth of detail concerning the spiritual struggle and various trials endured by this prophet throughout his lifetime.
In the second sense the term has been applied to some literary works that denounce the evils of a civilization: Check out Thomas Carlyle, H.D. Thoreau, or D.H. Lawrence.
Elegy
An elaborately formal Lyric poem lamenting the death of a friend or public figure, or reflecting seriously on a solemn subject.
In Greek and Latin verse, the metre was alternating dactylic hexameters and pentameters in couplets known as "elegiac distichs". The mood or content was not considered part of what denoted the elegy.
Since Milton's "Lycidas" (1637), however, the term in English has usually denoted a Lament, and the adjective "elegiac" has come to reference the mournful mood of these poems.
Milton's "Lycidas" (1637) uses the pastoral and following Milton, both Shelley's "Adonais" (1821) on the death Keats, and Matthew Arnold's "Thyrsis" (1867) made use of the pastoral as well.
Pastoral elegies usually include many mythological figures such as the nymphs who are supposed to have guarded the dead shepherd, and the Muses invoked by the elegist.
In a broader sense, an elegy may be a poem of melancholy reflection upon life's transience or its sorrows. A prose work may be called an elegy if it deals with a vanished way of life or with the passing of youth.
Although I felt pressed with other reading and writing to be done for school, I treated myself to one whole morning this week doing nothing but reading in Norton. At the end of more than three hours, I can say that I felt as though I had been on a mini vacation. I felt energized and accomplished a lot of work for the balance of the day and evening. During this time, I read all three of these English elegies. "Lycidis" is filled with nature. Milton's elegy is referred to as a "Monody" (uttered by a single speaker), and in ancient Greek poetry, it reffered to an ode sung by a single performer as distinct from a choral ode. Milton's "Lycidis" (P354 Norton), he bewails the death of a friend, and he also attacks the clergy for being corrupt.
In line 125 "The hungry sheep look up, and are not fed,/But swoln with wind, and the rank mist they draw,/Rot inwardly, and foul contagion spread,/Besides what the grim wolf with privy paw/Daily devours apace, and nothing said."
In line 133, the Sicilian Muse is called upon to "call the vales, and bid them hither cast/Their bells and flowerets of a thousand hues." Following this, Milton names many kinds of flowers.
Matthew Arnold's "Thyrsis" (1866) is also a Monody and it was written to commemorate the death of a friend. In this, Arnold makes a return trip to Oxford where both he and his friend went to university. Arnold's friend had a fellowship at Oxford in 1848, but resigned this because he refused to subscribe to some Articles of the Anglican Church. There is a wonderful verse that describes his friend's frustration because, while he loved being at Oxford, he exiled himself from it.
Beginning Line 45:
"It irked him to be here, he could not rest.
___He loved each simple joy the country yields,
_____He loved his mates; but yet he could not keep,
___For that a shadow loured on the fields,
_____Here with the shepherds and the silly sheep,
_______Some life of men unblest
___He knew, which made him droop; and filled his head.
_____He went; his piping took a troubled sound
_____Of storms that rage outside our happy ground,
___He could not wait their passing, he is dead."
Percy Bysshe Shelley's "Adonais" (P807 Norton) for me, was one of the best pieces of poetry I have yet read in my lifetime. I'm not sure what this says about my idea of enjoyment - reading poems about people who have died. In any case, "Adonais" is an elegy written on the death of John Keats. This is one powerful piece of work! Although there is much to be enjoyed in this elegy Stanza 39 is one I have to blog.
Line 343:
"Peace, peace! he is not dead, he doth not sleep -
He hath awakened from the dream of life -
'Tis we, who lost in stormy visions, keep
With phantoms an unprofitable strife,
And in mad trance strike with our spirit's knife
Invulnerable nothings. - We decay
Like corpses in a charnel; fear and grief
Convulse us and consume us day by day,
And cold hopes swarm like worms within our living clay."
Stanzas 40, 41, 42, 43 and 44 are rich.
Stanza 52 is another one I have marked.
Line 460
"The One remains, the many change and pass;
Heaven's light forever shines, Earth's shadows fly,
Life, like a dome of many-colored glass,
Stains the white radiance of Eternity,
Until Death tramples it to fragments. - Die,
If thou wouldst be with that which thou does seek!
Follow where all is fled! - Rome's azure sky,
Flowers, ruins, statues, music, words, are weak
The glory they transfuse with fitting truth to speak."
Ode
The Ode is an elaborately formal lyric poem, often in the form of a lengthy ceremonious address to a person or abstract entity. It is always serious and elevated in tone.
1. Pindaric Ode: Pindar's Greek choral odes devoted to public praise of athletes (5th century BCE). Pindar composed his odes for performance by a Chorus, using lines of varying length in a complex three-part structure of:
Strophe - A Strophe is a stanza or a verse paragraph, and is used in a Pindaric
Ode in the first section, and every succeeding third section.
Antistrophe - The Antistrophe in a Pindaric Ode matches exactly the metre of
the Strophe.
Epode - The Epode differs in length and metre from the Strophe and
Antistrophe.
These three parts corresponding to the chorus' dancing movements. The
dancers would dance in one direction for the Strophe, dance back in the other
direction for the Antistrophe, and remain standing still for the Epode.
Close English imitation of Pindar, such as Thomas Gray's "The Progress of Poesy"
(1754), are rare.
2. Horatian Ode: named after Horace's more privately reflective odes in Latin (c23-13 BCE).
When the stanza is repeated regularly in the same form it is called an Horatian odes: in English, these include the celebrated odes of John Keats,
"Ode on a Grecian Urn" and "Ode to a Nightingale" (both 1820).
3. Irregular Ode (sometimes called the Cowleyan ode): with varying lengths of strophes was introduced by Abraham Cowley's "Pindarique Odes (1656), and followed by John Dryden, William Collins, William Wordsworth (in 'Ode: Intimations of Immortality' (1807)), and S.T. Coleridge, among others.
In Wordsworth's "Ode: Intimations of Immortality", the 9th stanza has some beautiful lines:
Beginning at Line 140:
______"Not for these I raise
______ The song of thanks and praise;
_____But for those obstinate questionings
_____Of sense and outward htings,
_____Blank misgivings of a Creature
__Moving about in worlds not realized,
__High instincts before which our mortal Nature
__Did tremble like a guilty Thing surprised;
_______But for those first affections,
_______Those shadowy recollections,
_____Which, be they what they may,
__Are yet the fountain light of all our day,
__Are yet a master light of all our seeing;
_____Uphold us, cherish, and have power to make
__Our noisy years seem moments in the being
__Of the eternal Silence: truths that wake,
__________To perish never;
__Which neither listlessness, nor mad endeavor,
__________Nor Man nor Boy,
__Nor all that is at enmity with joy,
__Can utterly abolish or destroy!"
These words are, to me, filled with hope. To think that "listlessness, "mad endeavor", "Man nor Boy", "all that is at enmity with joy" - none of these "Can utterly abolish or destroy" - will "perish never". What a thought this is!
Also, in these lines above, there are 4 different physical settings of the lines within the poem. The emphasis of the spondees seem to drive his point home - that of refusal to buy into anything other than his belief in the imperishable. It's a beautiful piece of work.
Fallings from us, vanishings;
Once words have been put to paper and delivered into the hands of another, the possibility then exists that the sometimes carefully or sometimes just painfully constructed personal work will be considered less than 'good'. The world judges all, and the judgements can sometimes destroy the delicate. On the other hand, the possibility exists that these words will touch the lives of many people in ways that the poet will rarely be aware of. Poets do something like scattering seeds along the way of their journey, but do not remain in that spot to see whether there is germination. Not only does the road beckon, but those words, once voiced, are already of the past, and there is still much to learn.
How poets express loss, has of course, been classified by definitions. I have been once again rummaging around in The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms, in the Norton, and also doing some preliminary reading on the "pastoral". To date, I am not yet prepared to write anything on the pastoral, but since much poetry includes this, and some overflows with the pastoral, it is an important theme and will be given more research by me, and then "blogged".
The Oxford lists at least 9 types of poetry of loss and as well, gives some suggestions as to where to begin reading examples that fall within the definitions.
These are as follows:
Complaint
A kind of Lyric poem common from the Middle Ages to the 17-century. Is is in the form of a Monologue in which the speaker bewails either the cruelty of a faithless lover, or some other misfortune. Poets who wrote "complaint" poems: Chaucer, Villon, Surrey and Spenser. Check out P54 Norton's - "Complaint to His Purse" (Chaucer).
Dirge
A song of lamentation mourning someone's death; a poem in the form of a song of lamentation. This is an ancient genre written by both Greek (Pindar) and Latin (Propertius) poets, although it also occurs in English. The most famous is Aerial's Song from "The Tempest".
Full Fathom Five
Full fathom five thy father lies;
__Of his bones are coral made;
Those are pearls that were his eyes:
__Nothing of him that doth fade,
But doth suffer a sea change
Into something rich and strange.
Sea nymphs hourly ring his knell:
__Ding-dong.
Hark! now I hear them - Ding-dong, bell.
___________William Shakespeare 1611
Graveyard poetry
Term applied to a minor but influential 18th-century tradition of meditative poems on mortality and immortality, often set in graveyards. The "graveyard school' of poets in England and Scotland was not an organized group. Best known examples: Thomas Parnell (Irish), "A Night-Piece on Death" (1721); Edward Young, "Night Thoughts" (1742-6); Robert Blair (Scottish), "The Grave" (1743) and Thomas Gray (English) "Elegy written in a Country Churchyard" (1751). The only one of these poets I could find in Norton's was Thomas Gray.
I would recommend this poem of Gray's. A few of my favourite verses:
"Perhaps in this neglected spot is laid (line 45)
__Some heart once pregnant with celestial fire;
Hands that the rod of empire might have swayed,
__Or waked to ecstasy the living lyre.
But Knowledge to their eyes her ample page
__Rich with the spoils of time did ne'er unroll;
Chill Penury repressed their noble rage,
__And froze the genial current of the soul.
Full many a gem of purest ray serene,
__The dark unfathomed caves of ocean bear:
Full many a flower is born to blush unseen,
__And waste its sweetness on the desert air." (line 56)
Lament
Any poem expressing profound grief or mournful regret.
Jeremiad
A prolonged lamentation or a prophetic warning aginst the evil habits of a nation, foretelling disaster.
In the first sense, it comes from the Hebrew prophet Jeremiah, contained in the Old Testament book, Jeremiah (52 chapters), and a rich book this is to read. The series of laments begin at 11:18. This book contains a wealth of detail concerning the spiritual struggle and various trials endured by this prophet throughout his lifetime.
In the second sense the term has been applied to some literary works that denounce the evils of a civilization: Check out Thomas Carlyle, H.D. Thoreau, or D.H. Lawrence.
Elegy
An elaborately formal Lyric poem lamenting the death of a friend or public figure, or reflecting seriously on a solemn subject.
In Greek and Latin verse, the metre was alternating dactylic hexameters and pentameters in couplets known as "elegiac distichs". The mood or content was not considered part of what denoted the elegy.
Since Milton's "Lycidas" (1637), however, the term in English has usually denoted a Lament, and the adjective "elegiac" has come to reference the mournful mood of these poems.
Milton's "Lycidas" (1637) uses the pastoral and following Milton, both Shelley's "Adonais" (1821) on the death Keats, and Matthew Arnold's "Thyrsis" (1867) made use of the pastoral as well.
Pastoral elegies usually include many mythological figures such as the nymphs who are supposed to have guarded the dead shepherd, and the Muses invoked by the elegist.
In a broader sense, an elegy may be a poem of melancholy reflection upon life's transience or its sorrows. A prose work may be called an elegy if it deals with a vanished way of life or with the passing of youth.
Although I felt pressed with other reading and writing to be done for school, I treated myself to one whole morning this week doing nothing but reading in Norton. At the end of more than three hours, I can say that I felt as though I had been on a mini vacation. I felt energized and accomplished a lot of work for the balance of the day and evening. During this time, I read all three of these English elegies. "Lycidis" is filled with nature. Milton's elegy is referred to as a "Monody" (uttered by a single speaker), and in ancient Greek poetry, it reffered to an ode sung by a single performer as distinct from a choral ode. Milton's "Lycidis" (P354 Norton), he bewails the death of a friend, and he also attacks the clergy for being corrupt.
In line 125 "The hungry sheep look up, and are not fed,/But swoln with wind, and the rank mist they draw,/Rot inwardly, and foul contagion spread,/Besides what the grim wolf with privy paw/Daily devours apace, and nothing said."
In line 133, the Sicilian Muse is called upon to "call the vales, and bid them hither cast/Their bells and flowerets of a thousand hues." Following this, Milton names many kinds of flowers.
Matthew Arnold's "Thyrsis" (1866) is also a Monody and it was written to commemorate the death of a friend. In this, Arnold makes a return trip to Oxford where both he and his friend went to university. Arnold's friend had a fellowship at Oxford in 1848, but resigned this because he refused to subscribe to some Articles of the Anglican Church. There is a wonderful verse that describes his friend's frustration because, while he loved being at Oxford, he exiled himself from it.
Beginning Line 45:
"It irked him to be here, he could not rest.
___He loved each simple joy the country yields,
_____He loved his mates; but yet he could not keep,
___For that a shadow loured on the fields,
_____Here with the shepherds and the silly sheep,
_______Some life of men unblest
___He knew, which made him droop; and filled his head.
_____He went; his piping took a troubled sound
_____Of storms that rage outside our happy ground,
___He could not wait their passing, he is dead."
Percy Bysshe Shelley's "Adonais" (P807 Norton) for me, was one of the best pieces of poetry I have yet read in my lifetime. I'm not sure what this says about my idea of enjoyment - reading poems about people who have died. In any case, "Adonais" is an elegy written on the death of John Keats. This is one powerful piece of work! Although there is much to be enjoyed in this elegy Stanza 39 is one I have to blog.
Line 343:
"Peace, peace! he is not dead, he doth not sleep -
He hath awakened from the dream of life -
'Tis we, who lost in stormy visions, keep
With phantoms an unprofitable strife,
And in mad trance strike with our spirit's knife
Invulnerable nothings. - We decay
Like corpses in a charnel; fear and grief
Convulse us and consume us day by day,
And cold hopes swarm like worms within our living clay."
Stanzas 40, 41, 42, 43 and 44 are rich.
Stanza 52 is another one I have marked.
Line 460
"The One remains, the many change and pass;
Heaven's light forever shines, Earth's shadows fly,
Life, like a dome of many-colored glass,
Stains the white radiance of Eternity,
Until Death tramples it to fragments. - Die,
If thou wouldst be with that which thou does seek!
Follow where all is fled! - Rome's azure sky,
Flowers, ruins, statues, music, words, are weak
The glory they transfuse with fitting truth to speak."
Ode
The Ode is an elaborately formal lyric poem, often in the form of a lengthy ceremonious address to a person or abstract entity. It is always serious and elevated in tone.
1. Pindaric Ode: Pindar's Greek choral odes devoted to public praise of athletes (5th century BCE). Pindar composed his odes for performance by a Chorus, using lines of varying length in a complex three-part structure of:
Strophe - A Strophe is a stanza or a verse paragraph, and is used in a Pindaric
Ode in the first section, and every succeeding third section.
Antistrophe - The Antistrophe in a Pindaric Ode matches exactly the metre of
the Strophe.
Epode - The Epode differs in length and metre from the Strophe and
Antistrophe.
These three parts corresponding to the chorus' dancing movements. The
dancers would dance in one direction for the Strophe, dance back in the other
direction for the Antistrophe, and remain standing still for the Epode.
Close English imitation of Pindar, such as Thomas Gray's "The Progress of Poesy"
(1754), are rare.
2. Horatian Ode: named after Horace's more privately reflective odes in Latin (c23-13 BCE).
When the stanza is repeated regularly in the same form it is called an Horatian odes: in English, these include the celebrated odes of John Keats,
"Ode on a Grecian Urn" and "Ode to a Nightingale" (both 1820).
3. Irregular Ode (sometimes called the Cowleyan ode): with varying lengths of strophes was introduced by Abraham Cowley's "Pindarique Odes (1656), and followed by John Dryden, William Collins, William Wordsworth (in 'Ode: Intimations of Immortality' (1807)), and S.T. Coleridge, among others.
In Wordsworth's "Ode: Intimations of Immortality", the 9th stanza has some beautiful lines:
Beginning at Line 140:
______"Not for these I raise
______ The song of thanks and praise;
_____But for those obstinate questionings
_____Of sense and outward htings,
_____Blank misgivings of a Creature
__Moving about in worlds not realized,
__High instincts before which our mortal Nature
__Did tremble like a guilty Thing surprised;
_______But for those first affections,
_______Those shadowy recollections,
_____Which, be they what they may,
__Are yet the fountain light of all our day,
__Are yet a master light of all our seeing;
_____Uphold us, cherish, and have power to make
__Our noisy years seem moments in the being
__Of the eternal Silence: truths that wake,
__________To perish never;
__Which neither listlessness, nor mad endeavor,
__________Nor Man nor Boy,
__Nor all that is at enmity with joy,
__Can utterly abolish or destroy!"
These words are, to me, filled with hope. To think that "listlessness, "mad endeavor", "Man nor Boy", "all that is at enmity with joy" - none of these "Can utterly abolish or destroy" - will "perish never". What a thought this is!
Also, in these lines above, there are 4 different physical settings of the lines within the poem. The emphasis of the spondees seem to drive his point home - that of refusal to buy into anything other than his belief in the imperishable. It's a beautiful piece of work.
Fallings from us, vanishings;
posted by maggiesong at 6:56 PM
3 Comments:
Now, Maggie, you can see why I am so well-named. ;-)
here another, why are poets always so in love?
Now that I finally appear to have my computer problems sorted out and after many hours of work discovered the root of my problem, I am able to comment on the comments left on this blog.
To Prof. Kuin: thank you for pointing out the error. I have corrected the date. I have no idea what happened - eyes play tricks when tired.
To Dr. J.: yes, I can see, judging by your blogs, that you were very well named indeed! (Your blogs just amaze me because it is obvious that your mind engages with many different and interesting ideas.) With regard to laments and warnings of impending disaster upon the world Jeremy, the good news is that your name means "exalted of God". The world needs ya eh? Carry on!
To Annie: I wonder if the reason poets appear to write so much about love is because it has been identified for allowing some respite from this vale of tears?
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