D.H. Lawrence's "Bavarian Gentians" and Dylan Thomas, Follow-up

Here is D.H. Lawrence’s poem, “Bavarian Gentians.” I think I know why it came to mind as I talked last time about Dylan Thomas and “The Force that through the Green Fuse Drives the Flower," but I'm not sure. Ideas?  Which of the two poems do you prefer, and of course, why?

http://allpoetry.com/poem/8510509-Bavarian-Gentians-by-D-H-Lawrence

I don't have a photo of a Bavarian Gentian, but I'm including some with important blues or purples and darkening and excess.



My posting twice about the same poem has never elicited much visitor interest, but sometimes I just can’t help myself. Here are some further questions and thoughts about Dylan Thomas’ “The Force That through the Green Fuse Drives the Flower.”

http://www.poets.org/poetsorg/poem/force-through-green-fuse-drives-flower

One word that might confuse or alienate readers is “the green fuse,” which I take to mean the flower’s stem. Does Thomas get enough bang for his buck with “fuse” as a metaphor? In exchange for potential confusion in some readers, what, if anything, does he gain by using “fuse”?

Same question for “dumb”?

Why is the poem so full of violence? About a hundred and fifty years before Dylan Thomas came along in Wales, the English Romantics, especially Wordsworth, had conceived of a dynamism in Nature—its potential for destructive activity along with its beauty and spirituality. But isn’t Thomas going further than the Romantics in seeing and insisting upon Nature’s fearsome extremes and thus complicating its beauty with its violence? Thomas’ Nature wreaks such havoc that he cannot express its extremes; he can only give examples and ask us to perceive natural presences as he does. 

Do you think a single force governs the life and death of humans, plants, and animals? Are we that much a part of nature?

Where in the human being would you locate that force? The heart? The brain? The mouth? The hand? The genitals? Or the mind or soul or spirit?—none of which can be located on an anatomical chart.

English teachers are sex-crazed nerds; that’s old news. Therefore, I ask if the poem has anything to do with sex—potency and lack of it, or Freud’s “libido” versus “thanatos.” I’m pretty sure I recall accurately that Freud expanded his concept of the libido from a specifically erotic drive to a broader meaning of life force, a quest for survival, which of course was in continuous conflict with “thanatos,” or death drive.

Thus, Freud, like the Romantics, saw the essential condition of humans as one of tumult,  inner turmoil, conflict, unlike Buddhism’s sense of a calm inner place, nirvana, which we should try to reach. Do you favor one of these views of human nature over the other? If the human is an onion and you keep peeling off layers, what’s at the center—a roiling ocean or a still pond?

Jane Hirshfield, Beings in the Holes

Golden Crowned Kinglet, a new life bird for me

 Do you remember Theodore Roethke’s villanelle, and hymn, “The Waking” in which he offers, “I hear my being dance from ear to ear”?  Jane Hirshfield’s “Like the Small Hole by the Path-Side Something Lives,” finds something similar, a somewhere within us, other than our conscious awareness, where there are small holes housing unknown critters. They live and die and  go extinct, but we can know they do live and have lived within us.

I wonder if someone will accuse the poem of being Buddhism 101, but I don’t care; I  find its imagery and its mind’s work very appealing. Click here:

Like the Small Hole by the Path-Side Something Lives in by Jane Hirshfield : Poetry Magazine

I like the quirky, homey, perhaps awkward phrasing of the important first and last lines, where I hear a lack of pretension, a kind of honesty, something like an inelegant elegance. Maybe Hirshfield had to work hard for that phrasing, but she’s made it convincing as a humble, likable, trustworthy statement.

Even the music in this realm is heard by something other than ears. Music as we know can be pretty good, but it would be too tangible, too logical and conventional for Hirshfield's realm. The music that matters is going down some stairs, to a place beyond understanding, maybe even beyond hearing—beyond science and knowing. Yet it’s music, and it’s there.

Kinglet, bowing, reveals his golden crown

The self is a “low field” with apples. If you’re not a politician or CEO, full of greedy ambition, that might be a pleasant and reasonable view of yourself. You’d rather be a quiet field than a king, or a gun, or other kinds of machines that are “like loud ideas with tungsten bits that grind the day.”

I routinely get carried away with this or that idea, but how can anyone not love Hirshfield’s comparison of nasty ideas to cold, hard machines—metallic systems that make noise and break things up? Much better to be a field with apples.

But Hirshfield does not abandon or deny what we might call realism or rationality, if those are the words to describe ways of being that include matter and reason, but are not limited to them.

Nor are Hirshfield’s ways and perceptions a pie-in-the-sky, teddy-bear wonderfulness in our souls.  And they feel less bombastic, but no less important, than Wordsworth’s “one soul within us and abroad.”

No, Hirshfield includes predation and extinction, and her landscape is a “low field,” not a snow-capped mountain or a sunset ocean. Her field’s apples are “small and blemished.” Hirshfield is not sloppily sentimental about whatever’s out there, down there, around there, inside all those holes.

If you were a small, blemished apple in a low field, however, you’d see that “a few escape” predation and other bad outcomes. That’s what passes for “a mercy.” It’s a qualified, limited, realistic mercy; therefore, we might dare to hope for it.  

Are Hirshfield’s “self-map,” “self-clock,” and “self-scale” merely new, and New Age, takes on the familiar notion of a mysterious essence beyond physical forms? I don’t think so, but even if they are, the fact remains that she’s making us re-examine all that mystery, giving us new peeks at The Something, the whole possibility that there’s more to us, and everything, than we can understand or explain.

We can’t know if this approach is more valid than the old, hackneyed ways of labeling the streets that run within us, for we are only small holes by the roadside, small animals and blemished apples in a field. But why isn’t that enough?


Like the Small Hole by the Path-Side Something Lives in by Jane Hirshfield : Poetry Magazine

We also talked about such matters here in January 2011:

http://banjo52.blogspot.com/2011/01/wordsworth-world-is-too-much-with-us.html

Wordsworth, "Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood"

In my teens and twenties, William Wordsworth (1770-1850) might have been my main portal into the world of poetry, although in recent decades I’ve found him verbose, pompous and sententious. Even so, there are parts of The Prelude and the Intimations Ode (“Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood”) that still stir me and capture my own thoughts or impressions. 

I’m writing this in the wake of some country drives in the hilly parts of Ohio (south and east of Interstate 71), which—don’t laugh—are a little like Wordsworth’s Lake District in the north of England.

At about five pages, the entire Intimations Ode might be too long for those not inclined toward Wordsworth’s philosophizing, but here is the link for those who'd like it:
     Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood by William Wordsworth : The Poetry Foundation

And here are some parts of the ode that I still find relevant and important:

            There was a time when meadow, grove, and stream,

       The earth, and every common sight,

                              To me did seem

                      Apparelled in celestial light,

               The glory and the freshness of a dream.

It is not now as it hath been of yore;—

                      Turn wheresoe'er I may,

                              By night or day.

The things which I have seen I now can see no more.

                                                            I raise

                      The song of thanks and praise

               . . .  for those obstinate questionings

               Of sense and outward things,

               Fallings from us, vanishings;

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,

And of course there's the famous passage that provided the title for the 1961 movie Splendour in the Grass with Warren Beatty and Natalie Wood:

      Though nothing can bring back the hour

Of splendour in the grass, of glory in the flower;

                      We will grieve not, rather find

                      Strength in what remains behind;

                      In the primal sympathy

                      Which having been must ever be;

                      In the soothing thoughts that spring

                      Out of human suffering;

                      In the faith that looks through death,

In years that bring the philosophic mind.

I’m now aware that secluded woodlands and farms might be ideal places for odd, foul, or criminal human behaviors, as well as the worship of nature and deities. They are certainly places for working your ass off. Awareness of such realities is part of the sadness of growing up, which Wordsworth addresses in the Ode.

 

However, pastoral scenes still stir me more than art and architecture do. I’ve never lived on a farm or in a remote area and I know nothing firsthand about the details or hardships of such lives. But for me the best manmade sights, sites and occasions in city life have never matched nature’s offerings, where there seems to be plenty of green, open space, variety, peace and silence, until I really listen—at which time there’s a festival in every field, every woods. Or are those the sounds of tornadoes or species slaughtering each other, which is necessary, for them? 

Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood by William Wordsworth : The Poetry Foundation

Zapruder, Day Two. Windbag Alert. Teacher Instruction. Bed and Breakfasts, continued.

The Prelude by Matthew Zapruder : Poetry Magazine

From time to time, visitors’ comments get me all wound up, because they open new windows onto a poem, and I use those comments and my responses as a post unto themselves. This is such a day.  Lucky you.

I just said to a friend that sometimes I weary of blogging, but I realize that it leads me to new poems and poets, and it usually makes me like the poems better as I look at them more carefully. Zapruder’s “The Prelude” is a case in point.

Add to that the comments I get from readers—whole new humans opening up aspects of the poem that I hadn’t considered, and sometimes aspects of themselves—I tell you, it’s better than NASCAR, and I bet it’s better than crack.

Sidebar:           

Speaking of a need for artificial stimulation . . .

So many, many times I’ve heard teachers, parents and other putatively caring adults who need to tone down their advice-giving to young people who have stalled, or gotten into real trouble. Instead simply asking, then asking again, searching for specifics, “What do you like? What would you rather be doing? How can we work that into a course of study and, with some luck, a career? I don’t care if Mommy’s a CEO. If you like woodworking, let’s look into that.” 

But in a sad miracle, the talk—it’s not a conversation—stops at, “You have to do better . . .  because I said so.”

I predict the geezer will toss out 20 times as many words as the teen. What are the teen’s options, beyond being overwhelmed and probably resentful and maybe enraged? Oh, he may obey, but look it up:  obedience is not a synonym for cure.  

End of Sidebar.  Beginning of Comments, Yours and Mine.

 Brenda's Arizona said...

"...should the chosen guide
Be nothing better than a wandering cloud,
I cannot miss my way.” 
So did Wordsworth follow his desire whereas Coleridge couldn't? 

I have been told by B&B owners that the reason they have the business is to fulfill the need to follow a desire. You have come full circle, Banjo!
And I'd love to see more photos of the B&B where you stayed. These are inviting, but please - more coffee.

February 8, 2013 at 11:19 AM

 

 altadenahiker said...

Filled with self-deprecating humor, isn't it. And comparing himself, as a poet I think, with Wordsworth the nature boy and Coleridge the tortured soul, he comes up short in his own estimation. 

I find B&B's creepy, too. Especially when they've filled your room with stuffed animals. But maybe that's a Northern Calif thing.

B and AH, about the poem, what you say is the way I see it. I seem to remember that Wordsworth’s hikes were considerable. I followed one of his routes in the Lake District, and it was much more than a stroll in those almost-mountains. Maybe he really was more adventurous than Coleridge—or Zapruder.

I was at first curious that Coleridge’s “love of friends” wasn’t more comfort than it was, but Zapruder, ever the poet, adds more threatening stuff:  “love of friends and the wind.” Oh, that wind.

And there’s more. The wind is “taking his arrow away.”  Is it a phallic arrow? Whether or not, it’s his edge, and most of us would say, I think, that we want our edge (as well as our “ease”—face it, we want it all).

Do you think the last two lines hint at suicide? If so, is that too “big” for a  poem that opens with Diet Coke?

The more I read this thing, the more I like it. I’ve said umpteen times here (not that it’s original) that poems almost always need to offer surprises (sometimes “gifts”) along the way. In that context, compare the tone and mood of the first two lines with the last two lines. Talk about a journey! 

And that thorough analysis of chocolate, leading into vapor (“nothing”), then back to a field and finally to “ham and rustic chambered cheese”—I hear a dialectic between airy nothing and richly sensuous items, items of appetite and delight, culminating in chocolate.

I’m also drawn to the almost confessional mode of his wishing to be “at least a little more than intermittently/at ease with being loved. I am never at ease.”  That has a peculiar power for me.  Is it just me?

Even in terms of grammar and syntax, how does Zapruder get away with the gangly “at least a little more than intermittently”?  But the speaker is something of a brainiac, and brainiacs say stuff like that. Or at least they think it.

Did anyone see baseball on the horizon?  But it fits. It’s the more common pleasure to accompany his more “poetic” and neurotic items like the hallway and time?  What’s bigger than time? What’s more ordinary than baseball? How do we get them into the same poem? Zapruder does, and for me that’s a happy surprise, a gift. 

The Prelude by Matthew Zapruder : Poetry Magazine

Wordsworth, "The World Is Too Much With Us," More on Hirshfield and Romanticism

The World Is Too Much With Us by William Wordsworth : The Poetry Foundation [poem] : Find Poems and Poets. Discover Poetry.



“Most wild American Crows live for about 7–8 years. Captive birds are known to have lived up to 30 years.” (Wikipedia)

Jane Hirshfield’s “The Woodpecker Keeps Returning” has me thinking once again that seemingly over-simplified writing and/or flat language can be deceptive. There is an important difference between the merely descriptive word, “simple,” and “simplistic,” which judges something as over-simplified or simple-minded.

I’m not sure which word or concept describes Hirshfield in “Woodpecker” or elsewhere. I've also felt that the simplicity of Ernest Hemingway and Raymond Carver, for example, shifts from profundity and power in one passage to puerile self-parody in the next. Ditto the quality of their work from story to story.

I've often wondered about this business of simplicity as it relates to the ancient Eastern forms and the West's enchantment with them since about 1920 (William Carlos Williams and James Wright, to name two, and now Jane Hirshfield; but the list is much longer than that and includes some of nineteenth-century American transcendentalists.).

Some people say that to understand Nirvana we should think of still water and silence. OK. I kind of get that—the absence of conflict and complexity as a sublime. But if that's paradise or some such perfection, how is a writer supposed to convey it and make it feel desirable as an ideal rather than boring or dead?

Ditto, for me at least, Classicism’s ideals like order, symmetry, balance, rationality, restraint. That's why I've always been drawn to the Romantics and their passion for dynamism, tumult, eerie, scary mysticism, “the one soul within us and abroad.” That seems so much more alive than pale reason and order. But then I’ve never lived or taken part in a revolution. America’s mini-revolution that we call The Sixties had some admirable purposes, but also a lot of phony bullshit, as the advent of Yuppiedom has verified.

Similarly, those old English Romantics proved to be only a short step from Wordsworth's wind-baggery and others' emotional, spiritual quackery in general. Just around the corner was the late Romantic oozing into Gothicism, which could get downright silly. And what about our squeamishness over the question of just how noble the Noble Savage is? I think it was Joan Baez who wrote, “A hero’s a nuisance to live with at home.”

In any case we're back to Classicism and Romanticism—and that icky business of one’s way of being in the world. Once again, it’s not either-or, but in which ways is this or that person or characteristic Romantic and in which ways Classical? For example, most think of Keats as the most classically inclined of the major Romantic poets. Or maybe Picasso as cubist is Romantic in his revolutionary, individualistic new way of seeing the world, but in the geometric shapes he uses to portray what he sees, he is mathematical, precise, drawing between the lines—that is, Classical.

With that to chew on, I offer Wordsworth’s “The World Is Too Much with Us,” an orderly poem inasmuch as it’s a sonnet, with classical allusions, but a very Romantic celebration of the Natural, the definition of which might require a tome.


The World Is Too Much With Us by William Wordsworth : The Poetry Foundation [poem] : Find Poems and Poets. Discover Poetry.

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Individualism: Glenn Gould and Other Heroes

Individualism?


For context, you might need to look at Hardsleeper43.blogspot.com, Saturday, Nov. 14, in order for my comments today to make more sense. But I’m in the midst of paper-grading again, so I’m going to use my long-winded comment to him as the core for my post today. It makes for something like a follow-up to my Sunday thoughts about Maurice Manning’s poems in Bucolics.

Among many other intriguing comments about pianist Glenn Gould, Barbaro (at HardSleeper43.blogspot.com) says, " . . . after a few minutes you begin to wonder if everyone else is playing them 'wrong.'"

Here’s my reply, plus a bit more.

That's a great line and thought. I wonder if you've hit on the measuring stick for all greatness in the arts. There's only one Gould, one Mozart, and so forth. I don’t know if that’s true, but it sounds good.

Of all the significant writers in the canon, how many sound exactly like a predecessor or contemporary? I haven't done my research, and this is not an objective test, but I bet the answer is "none." Apparently we value the new, the individual, or the unique that much. I’ve always thought something along these lines—haven’t we all, including authorities on the subject of art?—but saying it just then felt like a splash of cool water in the face. Refreshing cool or icy? Not sure--it does raise the bar, doesn't it.

Then, of course, there's a companion issue, one that's contextual and therefore bothers that quasi- and half-assed-New Critic in me: as the saying goes, "You have to get here to get there." Maybe this: could there be Whitman if there hadn't been Wordsworth? Academic scholarship might over-do the search for influences on any given artist, but exploring the question somewhat seems reasonable (or necessary?).

Don't people say we had to have Mozart before we could have Beethoven? So, in a related field, I wonder who had to come first in order to open the door to Gould. Or Coltrane. Or Willie Nelson.

I think it's widely accepted that bluegrass grew from Scots-Irish music in order to be re-born as Appalachian music. Yet the banjo itself was born in Africa, or so I read somewhere.

So when students or friends insist upon their free will or individualism, I think, and sometimes say, “Really?”

Poetry: Maurice Manning's book, Bucolics

With two confessed Wordsworth lovers being good enough to offer comments recently, I tried to find a suitable poem of his to post and talk about. But the best Wordsworth is too long, and to my ear, his shorter poems are just too reminiscent of Hickory Dickory Dock, on top of didactic content, even when I try to allow for two hundred years of changing tastes and the fact that Wordsworth’s "language of the common man" was a breakthrough in its time.

But I do like a lot of his more ambitious thinking about nature (The Prelude, “The Intimations Ode,” and “Tintern Abbey”), and as I’ve said before, I feel some attachment to the old guy as one of my first icons when college days dropped the poetry balloon on my head.

So out of regard for both Wordsworth and nature, here’s a compromise. I’ve been posting poems I like or admire, but they’re also pretty famous, safe, mainstream work. For a change of pace, here is Kentucky’s Maurice Manning, a contemporary and unique voice as far as I know, in nature poetry and poetry in general.

Believe me, my skepticism goes on red alert when a poet experiments as much as Manning does. My first question: Does the material need to be presented this way, or is it an affectation, a choice to seem rather than be a new perspective or a new style?

The poems I’ve read in Bucolics strike me as accessible, authentic, and compelling. Of course, I don’t mean that Manning is the primitive, eccentric persona speaking the poems (by the way, his other books don’t bear much resemblance). But the voice he’s found and exploited in Bucolics seems earned and urgent, not some empty or faked gesture at an Appalachian pastoral.

As for form, at first I chose just to accept Manning’s decisions about line breaks as unconventional and arbitrary; I've thought that about plenty of other contemporary verse. Then I looked more closely and discovered a fairly regular iambic tetrameter in poem after poem. So there’s a more traditional music here than we might have expected, a logic governing line structures that might have seemed a chaotic ramble. To my ear and brain, the rhythms help to create in the speaker an actual character, a developed sensibility. It seems right that in his theological conversations, his queries, his wonder, there's a sense of music—maybe country gospel harmonies, maybe mountain music.

Theological? Yes, I think most readers will find themselves seeing the poems' recurring “Boss” as a god, and the poems become a rustic speaker’s questions and monologues directed at his deity.

If you don’t like the poems, you might yell “Fraud!” If you approve, you might whisper, “Magic.” Or, “Holy cow. That took guts.” Or, “How did he do that?” Literally, holy cow. Holy horse, holy pasture, holy rock and stream.

These selections come from the online Virginia Quarterly Review. Whatever else you choose, please try Numbers 1, 5, and 6. I’m really eager to hear reactions—agreement or disagreement. For better or worse, you won’t hear anything like these poems anywhere else anytime soon.

Here’s the link to copy and paste in your browser:

<"http://www.vqronline.org/articles/2004/winter/manning-eight-bucolics/">


<"http://www.vqronline.org/articles/2004/winter/manning-eight-bucolics/">








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