Links to hypertext Dickinson sources mentioned in lecture

Links to sites I showed in Monday's lecture can be accessed on the course webpage under Links (sorry, I haven't figured out how to hyperlink from here, but you can cut and paste this address:)
http://ic.ucsc.edu/%7Eksgruesz/ltel120c/links.html

Other Dickinson homages

From Sarah:

The Firmament - a Stage for Two -
The Sun and next the Star -
They make no Room - for Liminal -
Is where the Difference are -

The Diamond in His crystal Glow -
The Emerald in her Robe -
Dot softly - as the Night progress -
Opon Darkness - but a Glass -

And each Degree - with Gold Attar -
The Sun in His slow Arch -
Leaves seeming Sameness cross the Heav'ns -
Too bright for Eye to see -

Our "Dickinson" poem

Here's the current version...feel free to suggest edits or post earnest interpretations of this "masterpiece"!

A firmament - suppose a Star
Heaven - glow emerald -
Blaze - to Altar - permanent
Himself - opon the Gold -

Dickinson 706, from Kate Hochler

Our group discussed poem number 706, by Emily Dickinson, looking for many of her traditional poetic characteristics. First, we looked at slant rhyme, in which the poem is mostly written. There are 5 perfect rhymes and the rest of the 12 stanzas are slant rhyme. Some examples are: "life, shelf", "broke, crack", "freeze, privilege" ect. We felt that this poem especially contained a lot of normalizations, as well, the most obvious one being the word despair (the last word in the last stanza). It is capitalized and referred to in a very tangible, object like way. The capatalization also makes it more of a pronoun. The whole poem seems to be referring to this inevitable feeling of despair, really portraying it separate from its emotional state. Also, she uses a lot of idiosyncrasies, for example the capitalization of every "you", "New Grace", the word "Life" and other random words in the middle of a line etc. Her very common syntactic fracture is very apparent, in this poem. On lines 26-7 "Except that You than He/ Shown closer by-" could easily be written and understood "Except He shown closer by than you". Traditionally, Dickinson's poems have a drastically different last stanza. To me personally, the final stanza always seems like the grand finale, the structure, rhyme scheme,heavy usage of stressed syllables and dashes, makes you read it fast and powerful,and it ends with a single word in the last line, like an explosion.

Jimmy's Section
Group members: Kate Hochler, Kathleen Quinlan, Will Hurst, Stephanie Barrow

Dickinson #719

In our group discussion during section, my group (comprised of Keila Topete, Luke Church, Daniela Amodi, Ryan Kieffe, and myself) looked at Dickinson's poem #719. We identified the "He" as being either God (hence the capitalization throughout the poem), or more likely as Christ as the poem appears to tell the story of Christ's resurrection. We noticed a great deal of odd structure in sentences, such as in line 13, and the reification of "years" in line 6.

In reading over Emily Dickinson's #427, my group was able to put many of the terms from the Emily Dickinson reading strategies list into use. It was easy to see how un-conventional a poet Dickinson was. Other than random dashes, the poem had no punctuation whatsoever. It did not take away from the reading of the poem, however. There was also very little rhyme. The use of night and day, which is present throughout Dickinsons poetry did not fail to be included here. They became part of Dickinson's personal poetic lexicon. The technique we found to be used the most was the use of oxymorons. In line 2 she uses the phrase 'sunset at the dawn' while in line 4 we see 'midnights due at noon'. These were our most clear cut examples of poetic use of contradiction put down as only Dickinson could.

Mark, Edward, Hannah, Gregory, Rick

Ideas on Dickinson #336

In section last night, my small group discussed a few ideas we found interesting in Dickinson's poem #336 which starts "Before I got my eye put out-." A first glance through revealed that the poem quickly defeats the standard ballad rhyme scheme of abab or abcb. The first stanza's second and fourth lines do not rhyme, but the last line of the first stanza and the first line of the second do, which seemed noteworthy. Nor do the second and fourth lines of the second stanza rhyme; but they end in words which align with those in the first stanza's second and fourth lines, at least through slant rhyme. It seems like the poem's lines should end in rhymes like these:

out
see
eyes
me

Today
Sky
Heart
way

and instead it rhymes like this:

out
see
eyes
way

Today
Sky
Heart
me

The effect is to blend the first and the second stanza together, both visually and aurally. The topic of these stanzas is sight, hearing and imagination, and this structure creates a complication of the normal impressions created by the ballad rhyme scheme.

Also, the third stanza has five lines instead of the normal four. The first line and the second line are almost identical:

The Meadows -mine -
The Mountains - mine -

It is as the poem is more concerned with the iteration of ideas, or perhaps images, than with lines, and since the first two lines of the third stanza contain almost the same image of possession, three more can fit in the same stanza. This feature of the stanza almost shadows over the fact that it too has an odd rhyme scheme. In fact, the only stanzas which fit the conventional ballad rhyme scheme are the fourth and the fifth stanzas. Rather than starting out by obeying convention, Dickinson has started out with a disruption of convention and then cleaned up her form as the poem closes - though it doesn't come all the way back into the fold, as it closes on a slant rhyme and a dash.

Dickinson and the image

I highly recommend the online essay, "'For flash and click and suddenness': Emily Dickinson and the Photography-Effect," by Marta Werner, a leading Dickinson scholar. It is hyperlinked with daguerrotype images of Dickinson's family and with typical examples of this short-lived photographic technology, making this a scholarly work genuinely OF the Web rather than just ON it.

See: http://www.classroomelectric.org/volume3/werner/
and click "Intro." (You can later return to this page and look at her related resources.)

Postmortem photography

Here's the website link I mentioned, on 19c post-mortem photography: http://ame2.asu.edu/projects/haunted/ISA%20index/book%20of%20the%20dead/book%20of%20the%20dead%20photos.htm
[If you can't get that link to cut and paste, google "haunted rains victorian photography".)

It would be useful to think about the extent to which an elegaic poem serves the same function as a memento mori (= memory of the dead). The photo offers a "realistic" portrait of the loved one, to aid in recalling what s/he looked like. Yet, as we discussed, the conventionality of photography itself imposes a reading, an interpretation, upon that vision (through devices like the frame, the vertical or horizontal aspect ratio, the way the face and body are aligned, the studio props). What are the conventions of elegy, and how do they push forward certain ways of understanding a particular loss?

Friday's Question of the Day

Sorry everyone, in my hurry to tie up Eternity into the Soul I forgot to announce Friday's Question of the Day. It is:
Find a line in one of Melville's war poems that resonates with your own feelings about the war in Iraq.

[The question is not as pre-programmed as it might seem.]

Halloween Section

Greetings all

This week's Wednesday section will be held right after lecture tomorrow. If it's not raining, we'll have section outside in the field next to Social Sciences 2. If the weather's bad, we'll meet in Porter 144. Those of you who can't make it should plan to meet during my office hours on Friday, Nov. 2 from 12:30-1:30 in the University Center.

à demain
Jimmy

Totally Out of Left Field, But...

I know this seems completely random, but we discussed seeing and hearing things in nature in class yesterday, and I recalled an instance in Poe's "The Bells" which reminded me of this. In it, he repeats the word bells seven times in quick succession, which (to me at least) is reminiscent of the movement and sound of bells; that is, their chiming.

Whitman driving on the open road...

Today in class, we spoke of D.H. Lawrence's image of Whitman driving in a car on the open road, as if it were a truly American thing to do. Whitman supposedly runs over anything and everything and goes forever in one direction.
This image reminds me of one of my favorite books, Into the Wild, by Jon Krakauer. This book was quite recently made into a movie, a big blockbuster. I read the book and loved its insight, detail, research, and story. The main storyline is a true account of a young man named Chris McCandless who gives up his belongings based on his ethical values and goes on a journey through the U.S. and into the wild.
I refuse to see the movie, but I have seen the previews showing several famous/big name cast members. Some people have told me it is a great movie, but from what I've seen from the preview's clips and dramatic overdubbing, this appropriation of the book seems like American proganda that sensationalizes rugged individualism and going out on the open road. Isn't this the epitomy of the "American spirit?" It's sure to bring in big bucks because don't Americans like to see the "American spirit" glorified?
This man's story is now broadcast on the big screen for anyone willing to pay $9.00. For me it is no longer Whitman's vision that no one and nothing can escape, it is now American consumer culture from which nothing can escape.
Sorry that this blog may depart in a somewhat cynical way from the main themes and concerns of this course. But I just thought of Whitman's all assimilating "I" and how this type of mentality has really been adopted into American culture. We will take anything and try to make a buck off of it, "oblivious of the corpses under the wheels" (D.H. Lawrence reading, 176).

Whitman: empathy vs. appropriation

During the discussion today in class, a lot of people took the position that Whitman inhabited the position of the slave in the portion of "Song of Myself" we were discussing. This assumes that the "I" in "I am the hounded slave" is Whitman's persona or voice. We do not, and may never know who the "I" is. Bt when reading the "I" at times I can't help thinking of myself. After all that is how people refer to themselves, "I this...," "I that..." So the use of "I" forces the reader to appropriate/empathize with the feelings/experience in the poem. For me, Whitman was not the embodiment of the hounded slave, I was. Not that I felt anything a slave would have simply by reading those lines but my connection to the slave and the whole history was undeniable. It's like when people deny a bad thing because they don't feel like they are partaking in the bad action, "Slavery has nothing to do with me, I don't own slaves." The issue is that we are a production of the society in which we live and the history that comes with it, so we are a part of societal problems. This poem reminds me of the connections each person has with another. It's easy to forget that our actions affect a lot of things and are an effect of a lot of things. It's easy to forget how big the world is sometimes, but Whitman allows these connections to be made across space and time.

On D.H. Lawrence's Critique of Whitman

Lawrence calls Whitman mechanical because he gravitates towards everything: something he seems critical of at first, claiming Whitman lost his individuality and was like a tube open at both ends, letting everything in, but retaining nothing for—or of—himself, so that he was “empty”; but by the end it is clear that he was very much a fan of Whitman’s, claiming him to be a founder of a “great new doctrine of life,” which seems very much similar to some eastern philosophy that can be summarized with the clichéd phrase ‘going with the flow’. And that is exactly what Whitman did, says Lawrence (and should be obvious to anyone whose read Song of Myself), not by mediating, fasting, exploring heaven, etc.; but, rather, by taking to the open road, to where life led him, sympathizing with those he came across and taking everything in.
Reading this, hearing Lawrence talk about this doctrine, I believe Whitman, if not made, at least concretely romanticized The American Dream and the open road, so that he was probably, in my mind, the first great American poet, in that he seems to be the one who really defined the American spirit successfully, and forcefully, separating it from anything European for the first time—so that, according to Lawrence, if America was a poem, as Whitman said, it was he, Whitman, who was the rhythm.
The one thing I didn’t agree with Lawrence about was his claim that Whitman was a poet of “the end of life,” or “a post-mortem poet”; I think he was a poet of an ends to life, based on the eastern-like goal of recognizing unity in everything, including the self; so that, if anything, he was a poet of ‘the end of the self’, or something… Either way, the Eskimo section, the depiction of himself as a “fat old man full of a rather senile, self-conscious sensuosity,” the metaphor of Whiman’s camp at the end of the road--this was an amazing critique that made sense of Whitman and was quite entertaining to read.

Also, here’s a poem I finished today that, while having little to do with the class, is poetry nonetheless:

Ode to Squatting Hole
by Paul Tino

Many years have pas’t
since happened I was’t young
From humble beginnings
to that which I was brung
A land of great privilege
away from dirt and dung
A place of proper etiquette
which from me so did wrung
old mannerisms, thinking
and formalized my tongue
Until I stood before you all
a gentleman, fancy and well-sung

But today is quite different
For I am back in native lands!
I’ve found my old village
(though in quite different hands…)
Nobody doth recognize me
They laugh, and stare, and tease
But still managed I to unearth
My old hut among the trees!

Razed to the ground?
Doth nothing remain?
No relatives…
No pottery…
Not a simple window pane!
Alas, it had no windows…
But for something I did need
A simple thing I once touched
A plaything, berry, or bead…

But nothing was familiar!
So I sat and cried and cried
Why did not they keep me
all those many years ago
and prevent that fateful boat ride?
Alone in the World!
A creature whose origins erased
Nothing left now
but a bitter, lonely taste

--But wait, could it not be?
And then, with no warning
through my tears did I see…

Yes! yes! yes! A reminder of the past!
Something I could remember, feel, and see
Not merely something familiar…
But an ancient part of me!

Ah, the old squatting hole,
T’was a place of great mystery
and even greater sorrow…
How I miss the old squatting hole!

Poe's "perfect woman" in "Stanzas" (Melanie C.)

Melanie C. writes:
"I studied POE's poem 'Stanzas'. This poem is addressed to a lady whom the poet encourages to become perfect. Poe mirrors this idea in the perfect construction of his poem. . . ." (rest in Comments)

More on "Dream within a Dream" (Robert)

*Although Poe wields the same tools as other writers of his era and before--deliberate use of meter and a use of rhyme that appears strictly regulated from its exterior--the personality of his work arises from those instances in which he reshapes these materials to enforce attentiveness to the subject matter.Classic writers like Shakespeare have often added a foot or two to otherwise perfectly scanning forms such as the sonnet, with the intention of bringing the reader's eye to those words in the odd line. Poems such as Poe's "A Dream Within a Dream," however, lure the reader into making the false assumption that a strict pattern is impending, then give rise to a whole stanza in need of rereading.. . . " (rest in Comments)

Poe's "Dream"--why does it seem so awkward? (Katie)

Katie Goldberg writes:
I really like rhyming couplets and Poe's "Dreams" is composed of them. The only problems I have with the poem are the amount of syllables he squeezes into each line and I also have one qualm with his word choice. . . (rest in Comments)

Poe's "Valentine" (Kate)

Katelyn writes:
Poe's "A Valentine" is very interesting because not only do I find aspects of meter or rhyme as enhancements to the meaning, but the context itself. The whole poem at first makes little sense until you read the very end . . ." (read the rest in Comments)

"Dream within a Dream" and music (Maria)

Maria writes:
"I found Poe's "A Dream Within a Dream" to have a very musical quality. The Rhyme scheme is very overpowering when reading the poem. Though the scheme is common, it has a much more "sing-song" quality than do other poems written by Poe. I think that this is because of the very short lines, alternating between six and seven syllables. The rhyming words occur very close together and, when spoken outloud, it is difficult to hear a poem as opposed to a song being spoken."

"To Science" (Blythe)

Blythe writes:
"I think I see two interesting technical moves in Poe's "Sonnet: To Science." In the first quatrain the expected rhyme scheme is disrupted by the final line about the vulture. This produces a jarring that emphasizes that line.. . " (read the rest on Comments)

"Invisible woe" in "The Conqueror Worm" (Alex)

Alex writes:
"In "The Conqueror Worm," by Edgar Allen Poe, the second stanza uses several metrical details to carry forth the message of the piece.. . . " (rest is in the Comments section, to keep this page from getting too hard to navigate)

'To one in Paradise' (Joanna)

Joanna writes:

In the poem, “To One In Paradise” the structure and rhyme scheme seems to be essential to the poem. The poem is basically about a love that is over, and Poe is able to create a sense of anguish in the reader. He builds up a longing and morose feeling and finally at the end he writes:

And all my days are trances,
And all my nightly dreams
Are where thy dark eye glances,
And where thy footstep gleams,
In what ethereal dances,
By what eternal streams.

The four repeating “And”‘s really emphasize the speaker’s life of drudgery without his lover. The repetition gives the reader a sense of no way out, and that the pattern (of life without love) will continue endlessly. The feelings evoked by the words and the way the words are placed help give the poem life.

[The repetition of the initial "and" is certainly striking here. See if you feel, after reading Whitman, that this rhetorical device always or inevitably leads one to "a sense of no way out."

[The 6 lines here are beautifully paired in twos, rhyming ABABAB, in this metrical symmetry:
and ALL my DAYS are TRAN-ces
and ALL my NIGHTly DREAMS
are WHERE thy DARK eye GLAN-ces
and WHERE thy FOOTstep GLEAMS,
in WHAT ethERyal DAN-ces
by WHAT eTERnal STREAMS.

Unvaried iambic tetrameter/ trimeter alternating, but with the tetrameter (4-foot) lines having an unvoiced syllable ("-ces"), as in a thought falling off. Don't you get a sense of closure as that neat pattern ends? And at the same time, there's a haunting question out there--by what eternal streams? Where DOES love go??

'Annabel Lee' (Stacy)

Stacy writes:
I was wondering if Poe was so into taking the traditional framework of a poem and making it UNIQUE, why is his poem "Annabel Lee" in such a usual ballad form? What is that significance?

There are 2 things to consider here: ballad meter (iambic tetrameter, or iambic tetrameter alternating with trimeter, 4-3) and ballad stanza. Poe writes it in ballad meter, but his stanzas--if you count the number of lines per stanza--are totally whacked. 4 lines per stanza is the norm; or maybe 6--it's almost always an even number.

But whatever stanza length you choose for a ballad, the stanzas are usually equal in size. Not so here. And the poem is end-rhymed, like most ballads, but the stanzas each have their own individual rhyme schemes.

When people talk about the "eerie feeling" they have in reading Annabel Lee, that feeling is created in part by the sense that there's something familiar and yet something "off" happening at the same time.

Scanning Poe's "Romance" (Catherine)

Catherine writes (in part--the rest of her response is under "comments" to "Greetings from Poe-sylvania"):
I think the poem that I scanned .. . .(“Romance” by Edgar Allan Poe has a meter that, I think, is mostly iambic tetrameter.
[Yes!]
However, Poe deviates from this meter, most likely, to emphasize certain words. The word “Romance” in the first line is a trochee and therefore is emphasized as it is the subject of the poem.
[Yes!]
In line four, the last two syllables of “shadowy” and “lake” make an anapest. I’m not clear as to why Poe emphasizes “shadowy lake” however.
[This deviation--it could be an anapest, or it could just be an elision of shad'wy--isn't necessarily emphasized. Remember, some deviations from the "backbeat" of the overall metrical pattern may be meaningful, and others may not be. ]

In line eight “ear/liest word/” is another anapest which draws attention to the speaker’s early love for, presumably, romantic poetry and its enriching influence on his vocabulary as a boy.
[Yes, and I'd add to this that there's an internal assonance, a sound resemblance, here too: ear-ly wor-d. [early bird?!] Here is a good place to add to metrical analysis the MEANING CLUSTER attached to this moment in the poem. It's about being a poet, being someone who loves to handle words, who longs to "whittle away" time with "lyre and rhyme." A paroquet/parakeet taught him words as a child (now that's suggestive! trained birds just repeat monotonous sounds, don't they?).]

In line twelve, the words “ver/ry heaven/” seems to form an amphibrach with the “ry” in “very” is an unstressed syllable, the “hea” in heaven is stressed, and the “ven” at the end of heaven is unstressed. I’m not sure about the amphibrach though, because this kind of meter is supposed to be rare, I might not be scanning it correctly.
[Again, probably more likely an elision--"Heavn" as one syllable--to the 19c ear.]

However, the emphasis on heaven draws attention to the power and the influence that the “condor years” have on the speaker, because they can “shake the very heaven on high.” The “condor years” could possibly be a metonymy for the serious and even stressful wearing on of the speaker’s life. In addition, Poe seems to use the parakeet as a metonymy for the idea of romantic poetry.
["Condor years" is really the most striking figure here. There's some contrast going on with parakeet vs. condor, childhood vs. "tumultuous" adulthood. Presumably it has something to do with the contrasting size of the two birds suggesting the magnitude of childhood's cares vs. adulthood's cares.]

Finally, in line sixteen, “an hour” might be another example of an amphibrach with “an” as an unstressed syllable, “hou” in the word hour is stressed, and the last “r” syllable of “hour” is unstressed.
["hour" is only one syllable long, technically]
This draws attention to “hour” as a short period of time that has “calmer wings” as opposed to the “condor years,” in lines 11-12, characterized as birds of prey that shake the heavens “With tumult as they thunder by.” An hour is less harshly depicted than a year and an hour is emphasized because it is during this time that Poe’s speaker is allowed to spend “That little time with lyre and rhyme” and allow his heart to “tremble with the strings” of what I interpret to be the composition of romantic poetry (lines 18 and 21). Poe clearly constructed the meter, appearance, and imagery of this poem to emphasize certain important aspects of his poem.
[OK, and here's when--in a longer paper--you'd float up from these relatively small details into the skies of Why It All Matters: the two time-frames, the two emblematic birds, the two different ways of living one's life, in leisure or in stress. Do you sense loss here, or anger? Why should it be a "crime" to spend one's time with words and rhymes?]

What is "strict meter"?

Daniella writes:
"I was wondering if there are any specific instances where Poe uses a foot like a dactyl or a trochee to place certain emphasis on a word or phrase, or does he usually stick to extremely strict meter with no exceptions?"

Any poet who stuck to the exact same metrical scheme for more than four or five lines at a time would risk sounding too monotonous, like a metronome (remember the insidious "tick-tock" of the metronome keeping perfect time during your piano lessons?). Every singer knows that you can have a basic beat going in the background, but that your performance in the foreground had better come up with some variations. That might be another way to think about meter: it's the "background beat" to a musical performance that is going to have to make a few deviations from being exactly "on" if it hopes to be listenable.

Just as with a poem, the moments where the singer draws a note out---aaaaah--or lumps a bunch of words together quickly, or otherwise makes something interesting happen in the melody line, call our attention.

Greetings from Poe-sylvania

Hello everyone: I'm looking out at Philadelphia's City Hall, all lit up for the night, waiting hopefully for your questions/comments about a poem in which music/meter seems to be important.

Poe lived in Philadelphia for a short while. He tried to start a literary review here, to be called--ta-dah--The Penn. Gotta love it.

Scanning pop songs

As I mentioned in class, I was trying to find some instances of contemporary songwriters who wrote longer lines. The ballad stanza reeks so much of "tradition," as I mentioned, that a songwriter takes it on at her/his own risk (my Leonard Cohen example of a ballad about a balladeer also had those notable variant lines). I did find it possible to read Wilco's "I Am Trying To Break Your Heart" (from the album "Yankee Hotel Foxtrot") as a mostly iambic pentameter poem:

6 I am an Am-e rican aqua- rium drinker
5 I as- sassin down the avenue
5 I'm hi- ding out in the big city blinking
5 What was I thin- king when I let go of you?

5 Let's for- get a- bout the tongue-tied lightning
5 Let's un- dress just like cross- eyeeeed strangers
5 This is not a joke, so please stop smiling
6 What was I thin- king when I said it did n't hurt?

5 I want to glide through those brown eyes dreaming
5 Take it from the inside, baby hold on tight
5 You were so right when you said I've been drinking
5 What was I think- ing when I said good night?

But here's the rub: when you actually listen to the song, Jeff Tweedy heavily accents only FOUR beats per line. It's almost as if the ballad tradition reasserts itself in spite of the way the lines split up on paper. Thus is my transcription of the performance I hear on the album:
4 I am an American aquarium drinker
4 I as- -sassin down the av- e-nue
4 I'm hiding out in the big city blinking
4 What-was I thinking when I let go of you?

Lecture leftovers: Dickinson and lyric

Sorry I didn't get to the Dickinson poems in Monday's lecture. Since Jackson's argument about un-thinking the "naturalness" of lyric emerges from her reading of Dickinson, it would have made perfect sense. (You'll be getting more of Jackson later.) We had the two examples of a piece of writing that "becomes" a poem when it is read as a lyric poem: Thoreau's "my life has been the poem," which started as a "found" manuscript fragment; and Dickinson's letter to her brother.

You'll remember our working definition of "lyric ideology": the conviction that the poem is coming directly from a single and singular voice, describing an experience that occurred during a specific moment in time but transcending time to describe a universal experience. The poem seems directed to a solitary listener/reader (as if you're eavesdropping on the private confessions of the speaker--recall Mill's definition from the 1830s).

The early poem of Dickinson's, #64 (Heart! We will forget him!) is very readily understood within those lyric assumptions. The very subject matter touches on privacy and confession--forgetting a love who must be forsworn, for reasons we're not privy to. What I wanted to point out here is the typical (for Dickinson) splitting of the lyric "I" into two "characters": "You" (the heart) and "I" (not specified--what do you think, the head? or the eye, since the task of "I" is to "forget the light")? Like Thoreau's poem, this one ends by doing the very thing the whole poem says it is trying not to do: the last line is "I remember him!" which, on its own, is the result that supposedly must be avoided. Self-splitting and contradiction: look for these in Dickinson.