The Human Seasons (John Keats)

Four Seasons fill the measure of the year;
There are four seasons in the mind of Man:
He has his lusty Spring, when fancy clear
Takes in all beauty with an easy span:

He has his Summer, when luxuriously
Spring’s honeyed cud of youthful thought he loves
To ruminate, and by such dreaming high
Is nearest unto heaven: quiet coves

His soul hath in its Autumn, when his wings
He furleth close; contented so to look
On mists in idleness—to let fair things
Pass by unheeded as a threshold brook:—

He has his Winter too of pale misfeature,
Or else he would forego his mortal nature.


Hi ladies! Sorry I've been gone for a while. I've been writing an article that has completely taken over my life; it's devouring me like an alien in a movie, I swear. But I'm almost done.

This poem is by John Keats. It is not in our short anthology. But I am including it here because we have been talking so much about seasons, and this is a classic poem about seasons. One of the best ways to build up your background knowledge about poetry is to study the most famous poems in English--not because famous poems are always the most important poems, or even the best poems, but because famous poems tend to be imitated a lot. If you understand famous poems and poets, you will be likely to understand and appreciate the way later poets borrow or steal from their predecessors. So today we will look at Keats, who is a widely imitated poet and one of our best. Then we will move on to talk about other poets, but we will come back to Keats later.

The other reason we are doing this poem is that the poems we have planned for the next few days are going to be sonnets (especially, I think, Renaissance sonnets). So this poem, a sonnet about seasons, provides the perfect transition.

We will begin like we always begin: by reading the poem with our imagination and our senses wide open. (I am using my teacherly "we" here because I am reading the poem right now, just as you are: I am about to go read the poem with as much imaginative commitment as I can. I'll be back.)

Okay, this time we will go line by line again, then we will make some general comments.

"Four Seasons fill the measure of the year;..."

What do you notice? Well, the word "Seasons" is capitalized; that's interesting.

When you try to visualize this line, what happens? What does it mean to "fill" a "measure"? When do we fill a measure? Usually when we are measuring out a substance: wheat, for instance, or flour, or coffee; something we can scoop. Otherwise, we probably wouldn't use the words "fill" and "measure" together, right?

So we know, now, that for Keats, the passage of the year is a "measure"--a predictable quantity--and also that it can be "filled" with Seasons, just as a container could be filled with a measure of wheat. That's a beautiful idea; that the year is filled with time just like a container can be filled. It creates a sense of abundance or sufficiency.

Now we go to line 2: 'There are four seasons in the mind of Man:..."

Well, the first thing, of course, is that lines 1 and 2 create a comparison. What's more, now that the idea of "seasons" has been loaded up with a sense of abundance or sufficiency, those feelings carry over into line 2. We might wonder something like this: "Is the mind of Man also a measure?" Elsewhere, Keats writes about it as if it is: he wrote another famous sonnet that begins,

"When I have fears that I may cease to be
Before my pen has glean'd my teeming brain..."

So, with lines 1 and 2, we definitely seem to be in Keats' territory: here, as elsewhere, he is picturing the mind of man as a "measure" full of ripe abundance.

Is your mind a measure full of ripe abundance?

Maybe it is and you just don't realize it yet.

Let's give Keats the benefit of the doubt and assume that your mind, and my mind too, are both measures full of ripe abundance.

Another thing to notice in these two lines is that Keats is making a very specific use of this famous set of images (the seasons of man/seasons of the year thing). He is not just telling us about the seasons of man; he is telling us about the seasons of a man's mind. So all of the images and metaphors that follow will apply specifically to the intellect and imagination. That's one way that Keats is making this ancient and famous idea his own.

Now we go on to line 3 and 4:

"He has his lusty Spring, when fancy clear
Takes in all beauty with an easy span:..."

A young man's mind, Keats suggests, is full of fancy. I think that's true. I think that you people are full of far more hopes and fantasies and dreams about the future than even most people my age.

Let's talk about the word "lusty." You know what it means: it's a word for erotic desire. But it's also a word for passion or desire in general. By choosing this word, Keats suggests that the desires of a young man's mind are as intense as the desires of his body; that the intellect and imagination, just like the body, are full of desire when we are young.

Can you think of anything that can be "clear" and that can take in "beauty" and that has a "span"? Maybe our vision. It seems to me that the action of mind suggested here is the action of a very wide gaze.

This first stanza is full of metaphors for abundance (and maybe even metaphors for satisfaction).

Now we have a line break. Sonnets don't always have line breaks: in fact, more often than not, don't. Why do we have a line break? Why does Keats want to create some space or silence? I don't know. My guess is that it will only be clear when we look at the whole poem.

Let's move on to the next stanza, which I find to be tricky!

We start off without trouble:

"He has his summer, when luxuriously..."

It seems that we are moving on, no problem, to a new topic. But wait!:

"Spring's honeyed cud of youthful thought..."

I thought Spring was "clear fancy"?

This Summer stanza is deceiving! Not only does it describe Summer, it gives us a new image for Spring. Why does Keats revise his old image of Spring in the process of describing Summer?

I don't know. But it seems to me that one of the things Keats is getting done in this poem is not only to describe the seasons of man to us, but also to describe the relations of the seasons of man to each other. This poem is not only about the times of a human life; it is also, and perhaps especially, about the connections among times of human life. The image of Spring that Keats provides in the second stanza shows us how Spring and Summer relate to each other: when you are a young adult, you reflect on the sweet pleasures of your youth. So this image not only describes summer; it describes the transition and relation between spring and summer. It turns out that this pattern repeats in the next stanza: the first image, or metaphor, links Summer and Autumn (because the picture of a bird flying is used both at the end of the Summer stanza and the beginning of the Autumn stanza), while the second image, or metaphor, in the poem pertains only to Autumn.

This is another very interesting thing! Keats is going to some trouble to suggest that the times of our life do not simply pass--bump--from one to the next; the progression is gradual, and each season is related to the previous one. Maybe that's because this sonnet is about the mind of man. Our minds are always reflective, thinking about the past and connecting past and present.

So we will say that in lines 5-6 we have a transition image showing us the relation between Spring and Summer, and then in line 7 we have a new image for Summer:

"To ruminate, and by such dreaming high
Is nearest unto heaven..."

Now the image of the cow--which is a very grounded, earthy image--is replaced by an image of a soaring creature (most likely a bird, especially when you read it in the context of the following lines). Maybe we can read it like this: the relation between Spring (youth) and Summer (adulthood) is sweetly ruminative. More generally, however--independent of its relation to youth--the adult mind is characterized by lofty goals.

Why does Keats think that people are nearest unto heaven when they are in summer of their lives? I don't know.

But we did find something else exciting. Do you remember the first sentence of our Dylan Thomas poem, "Poem in October"? It began "It was my thirtieth year to heaven..."

Guess what?

Dylan Thomas is making a Keats reference. I did not know that until just now.

Look at line 8: Keats says that, when we are in the summer of our lives, we are "nearest unto heaven." Thomas recycles the phrase "to heaven" in the first line of his poem...about being in the summer of his life. He is borrowing this phrase on purpose to remind us of the Keats poem. If we know the Keats poem, we will experience the Thomas poem more deeply.

That's one reason we read famous poems.

Thomas doesn't use the phrase in exactly the same that Keats does (as you will see if you go back and reread). He makes it his own, just as Keats makes the idea of seasons his own.

Okay, now we are going to stop going line by line because I have to catch my bus. It would be much, much better if we could talk about how the poem works as a whole, but you guys can think about it on your own.

Here are some questions:

Why are there stanza breaks? How would the poem be different if it were just 14 lines with no spaces?
Where is the climax of the poem?
Why does Keats use the word "forego" in line 14? Look it up. What is Keats getting at? How on earth can one "forego" mortal nature? Mortal nature comes to you, whether you like it or not: you can't usually just say, "Oh, no, I don't think I will have any Death today. I'm all set, thanks." So we have to think about what Keats means.
In your (well-founded, rational) opinion, what crisis might have prompted him to write this sonnet?
Is there an important transition between lines 8 and 9? (Often, in a sonnet, there is an important transition between lines 8 and 9).
How would you describe the purpose of the couplet? What is its relation to the poem as a whole? How can we connect the couplet to the idea of "the mind of man"?

I think that the phrase "pale misfeature" is probably a description for a frozen brook, for the following reason: In between stanzas 1 and 2 and stanzas 2 and 3, a metaphor is carried across the stanza break. So I would expect it to happen again between stanza 3 and the couplet (or if it didn't happen, I would wonder why). The metaphor at the end of stanza 3 is a "brook." So I ask myself, does "pale misfeature" describe a brook in winter? I think so. Ice is pale and misfeatured.

But why is the mind of an aged man like a frozen brook?

And what does it mean to "forego" mortal nature?

And what is the connection between the answers to these two questions?

And how do these answers, and this connection, relate to the arc of the poem as a whole?

Hmmmmmm.

I might think some more about this poem, or look it up in some good books, and if I come up with some wonderful answers I will post them in the comments section. If you all come up with wonderful answers you should post them in the comments section, too.

Have good weeks, everybody!

An Email from My Poetry Teacher

Last semester, I was taking a wonderful poetry class from a wonderful teacher, and I sent her an email asking her how to approach a close reading of a poem because I was failing to notice some important features of the poems we were reading. Here is part of the email she sent back (I am not putting her name in this post because I didn't ask her whether I could post her email):

"[T]he big picture is the first one to get--what is this about, how does it begin, how does it end, how does it evolve to get from beginning to end, what is the form, why, and what is memorable about the whole, both in re-imagination of theme and in interesting use of form? ...[Y]our instinct to see the big picture first is right: and then your insights about particular passages will 'fit in' and confirm the big picture."

You can see from my earlier reading of "Poem in October"--if you read my post, then my comments--that I am prone to focus too much on details and not enough on the big picture. That is my weakness: I get sucked into the details that I love.

I wanted to share the email with you because it helped me learn how not to miss important details in poems.

Careful: make sure you can see the arc. If you don't see a skeleton, a climax, a pattern, you have to stay sitting down in your chair a while longer.

Reading Poems for Pleasure

When we read poems for pleasure, or for the first time, our job is frequently not to analyze but to imagine.

As I walked through that Hardy poem with you, I tried to help you envision the scene. Poems are special because they require one to use all of our five senses, in collaboration with one's imagination, to make something happen in one's mind. Reading poems well requires well-developed powers of imagination and also a commitment to imagining the poem as one reads.

That's why we read poems aloud before we begin to analyze them: because a poem belongs, not only to the world of facts and ideas, but to the world of sights and sounds. In order to experience a poem, we have to a) hear the poem and b) imagine everything it asks us to imagine. Then we can analyze it. So one of your jobs is to look for all of the sensory data in the poem and make it your own by reproducing it in your mind's eye (or your mind's ear, nose, etc. :) ).

Once we have reproduced these images in our minds, we need to understand the logical or intellectual relationships that govern the images and the ideas in the poem. In the case of the Hardy poem, for instance, the words "yet" and "only" are important.

So take it step by step! Read it once, aloud, and imagine all of the detail as you go. Then, go over it and figure out the words you don't know, and find the logical relationships. See if you can put it together in your head. Make sure you are really putting the poem under a microscope: be as careful and as thoughtful and as patient as you are learning to be at the lab. Okay?

Just like at the lab, we might get bored occasionally, but if we persevere, we will be rewarded by the pleasure of discovery.

In Time of "The Beaking of Nations" (Thomas Hardy)

.....I

Only a man harrowing clods
.....In a slow silent walk
With an old horse that stumbles and nods
.....Half asleep as they stalk.

.....II

Only thin smoke without flame
.....From the heaps of couch-grass;
Yet this will go onward the same
.....Though Dynasties pass.

III
Yonder a maid and her wight
.....Come whispering by:
War's annals will cloud into night
.....Ere their story die.


Okay. Let's start with the literal meaning of the text. If there are words in this poem that you don't know, you should look them up. Why don't you go look at a version of the poem with footnotes? We learn that "harrowing clods" means "breaking apart lumps of earth"; "couch-grass" is "a creeping weed," and a "wight" is a "man."

Let's think about the first sentence as if it were prose: "Only a man harrowing clods/In a slow silent walk/With an old horse that stumbles and nods/Half asleep as they stalk." Do you notice anything funny about the grammar here? This sentence is a fragment: it is made up of a bunch of phrases and clauses that describe the man, but there is no main clause because there is no main verb. Here is the sentence, broken down:

"Only a man..."
What kind of man?
"a man harrowing clods [breaking apart lumps of earth]..."
Harrowing clods, how?
"harrowing clods/In a slow silent walk/With an old horse that stumbles and nods"
How does the horse nod?
"an old horse...stumbles and nods/Half asleep"
When?
"as they stalk."

What kind of image does this sentence provide? Hardy uses mostly visual images. Take a moment now and really picture all the details in your mind. Envision a man walking slowly through a field breaking apart lumps of earth, and next to him an old, half-asleep horse, stumbling and nodding along. That's a lot of visual detail and you ought to be able to make some kind of clear picture in your mind's eye. How does the picture make you feel? If you were to set it to music, what kind of music might you hear? What kind of colors might we picture in the scene? Probably no neon purple, right? What do you think?

Okay, next sentence: "Only thin smoke without flame/From the heaps of couch-grass;/Yet this will go onward the same/Though Dynasties pass." Let's break it down:

"Only thin smoke..."
What kind of smoke?
"smoke without flame..."
That's odd, and interesting. How can one have smoke and no flame? Where is the smoke?
"smoke...from the heaps of couch-grass [creeping weeds]..."
And here the stanza shifts! No longer do we have images: instead the poet makes an assertion, "Yet this will go onward the same." Do you see how this line is not an image?
Before we continue to consider the poet's assertion, take a moment to visualize the first two lines of this stanza: we see grassy weeds all piled up, and from these piles of weeds we see just a thin line of smoke rising into the air. Since the setting of the poem is agricultural, the horse, the man, and the piles of weeds are probably all in a field. Make the scene in your mind. Make sure that you see it in a very detailed way: the horse is slow and old, the weeds are grasses, the smoke is rising from the piles.

Now let's think about the assertion in the second half of the second stanza: "Yet this will go onward the same/Though Dynasties pass." What does it mean? What is "this"? The word "this" has no clear grammatical referent, so it must refer to the smoke over the piles of weeds, and maybe to the whole scene. What's a "dynasty"? It's the rule of a single family, of course, or a long period of history. Here's the sentence: "Yet this [the scene] will go onward the same,/Though Dynasties [long periods of history] pass." In other words, in spite of the long passage of history through the hands of different people and families, the habit of farmers in fields will be much the same. The habits of farmers are longer-lasting than the rule of emperors.

What do you think is the relationship between the "only" of lines 1 and 5 and the "yet" of line 7? Think about it.

In lines 9 and 10 we get a new image: "Yonder [over there] a maid [a young woman] and her wight [her young man]/Come whispering by..." Here, the word "whispering" is probably a sight image, not a sound image, because the phrase "yonder" (meaning "over there") suggests that the two people are too far away to be heard whispering. Can you envision two young, unmarried people walking through this picture, whispering to each other? How do people look when they whisper? How does the poet know they are whispering if he is far away? Probably they are leaning in toward each other; their physical posture must make it clear that they are whispering. They are probably not whispering bitterly to each other about the poor quality of the breakfast they just ate. The context of the poem suggests that they are whispering sweetly to each other. What is their relationship? They are probably in love. The use of the possessive pronoun "her" in line 9 suggests that they have a romantic relationship.

Now the poet gives us another assertion: "War's annals will cloud into night/Ere their story die." What does it mean? The word "annals," of course, refers to histories. "Ere" is an old-fashioned word meaning "before." Who does "their" refer to? To the woman and the man. What does the phrase "cloud into night" mean? How does history "cloud into night"? Can you picture something "clouding into night"? The preposition "into" here is used to suggest a process of becoming, as in the expression "turn into." This complex expression suggests that the history of war will gradually become cloudy. What does that metaphor suggest to you? As it becomes cloudy, it will somehow join the night or turn into night. What does that image suggest? In some drafts, Hardy used the word "fade" instead of "cloud," by the way. This phrase suggests that the history of war will fade out, will become dark or invisible at some point. The last two lines of the poem suggest that the history of war will fade out, will become dark or invisible, before the story of the two lovers dies out.

I want to suggest that there are two major groups, or sets of images, in this poem, and that they are contrasted with each other. One of them has to do with war and history; the other one has to do with farming and love. Reread the poem and look for those oppositions, and then analyze the poem again. Okay, young lady?

Fern Hill (Dylan Thomas)

Dylan Thomas is a Welsh poet who lived from 1914-1953. Since we are doing a few poems by Dylan Thomas in a row, I went to look up Dylan Thomas in a few books. My favorite introductory blurb is in The Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry (pp. 901-903), and I am going to type up some excerpts for you.

"Dylan Thomas used to say in his American readings that his poems had to be read either very soft or very loud...He liked to speak of his poems as narratives. Each poem, he said, was to be 'a formally watertight compartment of words, preferably with a main moving column (i.e. narrative) to hold a little of the real causes and forces of the creative brain and body.'

"At the root of his poetry is a sense of doubleness, of womb and tomb [that is, birth and death]...[A]s he wrote in a letter, "I make one image--though 'make' is not the word; I let, perhaps, an image be 'made' emotionally in me and then apply to it what intellectual and critical forces I possess--let it breed another, let that image contradict the first, make, of the third image bred of out of the other two together, a fourth contradictory image, and let them all, within my imposed formal limits, conflict."

I like that description. I know it is difficult to read; don't worry if you don't understand it completely. The biggest things I learned from it are that Thomas uses images that seem to contradict each other (maybe an image of life, then an image of death, for instance); and that sometimes, from two contradictory images, a third images emerges; and that the process may repeat. From now on, when I read Thomas, I will be looking for signs of that process.

Okay, go read "Fern Hill." If you like you can listen to the poet read it here.

The first thing: I want to make sure you notice the tone change at the end of the poem. What shifts toward the end of the fifth stanza (and especially in the sixth)?

What is the crisis in the poem? What kind of experience might have prompted a poet to write on this subject?

What phrases do you see repeated in the poem? How does the poet vary those phrases? How do these recurring, but varied, phrases contribute to the development of the poem?

Do you think this poem would have been read "very loud" or "very soft"?

Another thing I notice in the poem is called synaesthesia. That's a good word for the AP exam. Here's the definition, from somebody's English resource page:

SYNAESTHESIA (also spelled synesthesia, from Grk. "perceiving together"): A rhetorical trope involving shifts in imagery. It involves taking one type of sensory input (sight, sound, smell, touch, taste) and comingling it with another separate sense in an impossible way. In the resulting figure of speech, we end up talking about how a color sounds, or how a smell looks. When we say a musician hits a "blue note" while playing a sad song, we engage in synaesthesia. When we talk about a certain shade of color as a "cool green," we mix tactile or thermal imagery with visual imagery the same way. When we talk about a "heavy silence," we also use synaesthesia. Examples abound: "The scent of the rose rang like a bell through the garden." "I caressed the darkness with cool fingers." French poets, especially Baudelaire in Les fleurs du mal, have proven especially eager to use synaesthesia. The term itself is a fairly late addition to rhetoric and literary terminology, first coined in 1892, though examples of this figure of speech can be found in Homer, Aeschylus, Donne, Shelley, Crashaw, and scores of other writers and poets. See examples under tropes.

Got it?

Okay, that's all I have time for tonight. :) CU l8er!

Poem in October (Dylan Thomas)

Okay, first of all, blogger is screwing up the formatting of this poem and the formatting is important, so I deleted it from the post. Go read it here.

Why don't you read it aloud to yourself once or twice? Then you can go listen to the poet himself read it if you like.

When I was your age, Dylan Thomas was one of my favorite poets. As I read his poems now, I remember how I felt when I was a little younger than you and reading them for the first time: I couldn't always understand the literal meaning of the poems, but I loved the sound of the language and especially the use of imagery, at once stark and opulent.

In one of my classes last week, one of my professors took a break from his lecture (on ritual and anthropology) to recite the first stanza of this poem, from memory, from the podium. It was a wonderful and unexpected moment because I could tell how much he loved it. (We are doing this poem today, not because I encountered it in lecture, but because we are working through a short paperback anthology.)

In some ways, this poem reminds me of "The Wild Swans at Coole," which we studied together when you were in tenth grade (Mr. Kerrick taught it to you). You might not remember. You can go look at that poem here if you like to jog your memory and see what I mean.

Let's start at the beginning of the poem: "It was my thirtieth year to heaven..." The beginning of the poem is straightforward: "It was my thirtieth year." We might expect a poem about aging, etc. But the phrase "to heaven" is somewhat less expected. Is "to heaven" an adverb or an adjective phrase here, and what on earth is it communicating? When do we normally use a pattern like this?

The phrase "to heaven" by itself suggests that heaven is a kind of destination: for the poet or, in this case, for the passage of time. When Thomas writes, "It was my thirtieth year to heaven," he suggests that his life has a trajectory which is carrying him closer and closer to his death, but also that he thinks of his death in an essentially optimistic way. In the opening line, he suggests to us: "This is going to be a poem about time. What's more, I am going to imagine time as something that will one day bring me, Dylan Thomas, to heaven." But his way of doing it is much more beautiful. Do you see how the compression and the oblique way of writing in this poem is actually purposeful?

Here are a few of the things I notice as I read this poem now:

a) The stanza form is lovely but I don't recognize it. One of the beautiful things that it does is to give certain individual phrases and words as much emphasis as entire clauses. Take a look at the beginning of the third stanza:

A springful of larks in a rolling

Cloud and the roadside bushes brimming with whistling

Blackbirds and the sun of October

Summery

On the hill’s shoulder...

Here, because of the highly irregular line length, Dylan is able to group "cloud and the roadside bushes brimming with whistling" into a single cluster of images, as if all these things are present all at once together in his field of vision. At the same time, the word "summery" gets an entire line all to itself. It's the first time in the poem that we've had a one-word line. In a way, the form here suggests that the word "summery" is as weighty or as deserving of our attention as the whole cluster of images in line two. That's interesting. Why should summer be so important?

Any time you see a poem that uses seasons or times of day in a really prominent way, you should stop and ask yourself how the poet's use of seasons or times is connected to the experience at the heart of the poem. That's especially true when you are reading a poem about aging or life passages. In this case, Thomas is 30--a little older than me :) , way older than you--still in his youth, but approaching middle age. In a sense, he is in the summer of his life. I guess I am in the summer of my life too. You are still in the spring of your life. :)

Here, summery is important partly because it's a word with such strong feelings attached to it, and partly (no doubt) because Thomas liked the word and wanted it to ring all through the stanza, but also partly because it has symbolic significance in this particular poem about aging. Thomas is in October, but it's a "summery" October, partly because the poet is in the summer of his life. "The Wild Swans at Coole" also takes place in autumn, and it feels like fall: the world of the poem is "dry" and "still." It's not a coincidence that, when he wrote the poem, Yeats was significantly older than thirty (and more importantly, he felt like he was getting old). But the world of Thomas' poem is wet and sunny. If you read the poem again, you can see that he really has to be inventive in order to write an October poem about summer. By the time you're done reading, the title of the poem has almost come to seem ironic. It's a poem "in October," but is it an "October poem"? I don't know.

Another thing to notice: the line breaks in this stanza make it seem for a split second as if "whistling" and "rolling" were gerunds. That's most evident in the line we just looked at: "Cloud and the roadside bushes brimming with whistling." It's possible for a bush to be brimming with whistling in a certain way, right? A bush could be full of sound. So for just a moment, as we are moving on to the next line, we have a picture in our heads of a bush full of whistling--and then we discover that in fact the bush is full of whistling blackbirds. But the suspension caused by the line break here creates an image all its own. Do you see what I mean?

b) The poem is full of first-person pronouns. Why is that? Why does the poet choose to talk directly about himself so much? How would the poem be different if he communicated his feelings indirectly?

c) The first part of the poem says nothing about stories or narrative, but the second part of the poem has lots of narrative. What's more, this use of narrative seems to provoke the emotional crisis on the part of the speaker: when the speaker starts to talk about all of the listening and telling that he did in his youth, that's when he connects to his own past and begins to cry (in the sixth stanza). Somehow, even the sunlight is connected to "parables." In fact, the idea of storytelling/listening is connected to summer at other points in the second part of the poem: we have "the parables/Of sun light" and "listening/Summertime." It seems that, for Thomas, the idea of getting older is connected to the idea of telling stories (maybe to the idea of having a personal history).

Another cool thing is how individual words are repeated a lot, even with the same line or two. Can you find any? Why do you think Thomas recycles?

I'm sure I'm missing lots of stuff, but that's fine. :)

If I were writing an AP essay about this, I'd personally hit the following topics:

a) the relation between the poet's age and the season/hour of day (anytime you have a poem about aging, this is almost a giveaway; or if it's not there you should ask yourself why)

b) the essentially optimistic tone of the poem, even through its central crisis

c) the use of form (particularly with respect to how it emphasizes the short lines).

That would give me a solid forty-minute essay, I think. If you can deal with the arc of the poem, you should; but if you can't handle it adequately in the time you've got, forget about it and hit the giveaways.

I think one could almost map out the arc of this poem by looking at the shortest lines in each stanza. Here they are:

Priested shore
That second (i.e., that moment)

And I rose
And the gates

Summery
Wind blow cold

Brown as owls
My birthday

With apples
Of sun light

Where a boy
Sang alive

In the sun.
Still be sung

What kind of impression do you get just from looking at those fragments?

Don't take anything I've written here as an absolute truth; I'm just thinking aloud. :) But these are the kind of questions that the poem raises for me as I read it for the first time (or the first time in years).

Geoffrey Chaucer @ Harvard

Since we are talking about Chaucer, here is another link you could check out if you are curious. It's the Harvard Chaucer page.

You don't have to study any of these things! You are just supposed to be reading them and thinking about them as you go and responding to them. It's a conversation. I am trying to show you how I would begin to think about some of these poems; that's the only reason I'm giving you background information and analysis. The last thing I want is for you to feel pressure to study my comments. Okay?

TTYL. :)

The Complaint of Chaucer to His Purse (Chaucer)

To yow, my purs, and to noon other wyght

Complayne I, for ye be my lady dere!
I am so sory, now that ye been lyght;
For certes but yf ye make me hevy chere,
Me were as leef be leyd upon my bere;
For which unto your mercy thus I crye,
Beth hevy ayeyn, or elles mot I dye!

Now voucheth sauf this day or hyt be nyght,
That I of yow the blisful soun may here,
Or se your colour lyk the sonne bryght
That of yelownesse had never pere.
Ye be my lyf, ye be myne hertes stere,
Quene of comfort and of gode companye;
Beth hevy ayeyn, or elles mot I dye!

Now purs that ben to me my lyves lyght
And saveour as doun in this worlde here,
Out of this toune helpe me thurgh your myght,
Syn that ye wole nat ben my tresorere;
For I am shave as nye as any frere.
But yet I prey unto youre curtesye,
Beth heavy ayeyn, or elles mot I dye!

Lenvoy de Chaucer

O conqueror of Brutes Albyon,
Which that by lyne and fre eleccion
Ben verray kyng, this song to yow I sende;
And ye, that mowen alle oure harmes amende,
Have mynde upon my supplicacioun.

Here are the Riverside notes:

lyght: light in weight, merry, wanton
but yf ye make me hevy chere: unless you look gravely at me, take me seriously
hevy: heavy in weight, serious, pregnant
stere: rudder, guide
shave as nye as any frere: as bare of money as a friar's tonsure is of hair
conquerour: Henry IV
Brutes Albyon: the Albion (Britain) of Brutus
lyne: lineage, descent
Have mynde upon: be mindful of

And here is the Riverside critical introduction (such as it is; it's only a blurb):

Here Chaucer observes the classic ballade form, in rime royal, with the same rhymes throughout and with a refrain that plays upon the broad range of meanings of the words hevy (heavy, sad, pregnant, etc.) and light (light, cheerful, wanton, etc.) The conventions of the love complaints are playfully employed to turn the mundane need for cash into an appeal for pity from his new lady, his purse. The envoy [a typical formal feature of the ballade], clearly addressed to Henry IV, differs in tone, language, and versification from the body of the ballade, and it may be a later addition. However, the poem as we have it, addressed to Henry, must date after his coronation in October of 1399; it is therefore the last work known to have come from Chaucer's hand.

Well, that's interesting: so far as we know, this is the last poem Chaucer ever wrote.

Q: Do you get the joke?

A: I hope so! Chaucer is mournfully talking to his purse (essentially his wallet; not a handbag) as if it were his lover, begging it to have mercy on him and become "hevy." The word "hevy" can mean "serious," but, of course, it can also mean "heavy." In this case, Chaucer is imploring the purse to fill up with money again. The humor in the poem comes from the way that Chaucer creates all these double meanings: every line in the poem might apply either to a moneybag or to a girlfriend.

This poem, like the previous one, is written in rhyme royal. Moreover, both of these poems are ballades. Let's learn a little bit about the ballade:

˚The ballade is originally a French form.
˚Classically, it has three eight-line stanzas, "each using the same set of rhymes throughout and ending with a refrain, usually with a brief envoy addressing either a lady, Madame, or, more often, a Prince" (Riverside Chaucer, 632).
˚The ballade might contain elaborate symbolism or classical references.
˚It could be used for a solemn or ceremonial song.

You can see that, in both of the poems you have read, Chaucer has replaced the eight-line French stanza with his new Engish form, the rhyme royal. In making this change, he is making the form his own. He is also taking a French form and making it more English.

In both of these poems, Chaucer is making use of the conventions of the courtly love poem, but in a lightly ironic way. His goal is not to please a real girlfriend or lover, but to please a patron or powerful person. Do you see how humor and the consideration of power lie behind both of these poems, even though they both claim to be about love? Do you see how Chaucer takes the conventions of the form, such as the use of elaborate symbolism, and puts it to a satirical use, as when he compares his purse to a lover?

The refrain of this poem ("Beth hevy ayeyn, or elles mot I dye!") contains a conventional lover's plea. Often, a courtly lover would beg his beloved to have pity on him (usually by sleeping with him, actually), and he would say, "If you don't have pity on me, I am sure I will die!" Here Chaucer is making the same plea, but he is making it to his purse, which gives it a different meaning: he is saying, "If I continue to be this broke, I won't be able to survive!" He is using sophisticated humor to make an important request.

Balade (Chaucer)

Hyd, Absolon, thy gilte tresses clere;
Ester, ley thou thy mekness al a-doun;
Hyd, Jonathas, al thy frendly manere;
Penalopee, and Marcia Cacoun,
Mak of your wyfhod no comparisoun;
Hyde ye your beautes, Isoude and Eleyne,
Alceste is here, that al that may desteyne.

Thy faire bodye, lat hit nat appere,
Lavyne; and thou, Lucresse of Rome toun,
And Polixene, that boghte love so dere,
Eek Cleopatre, with al thy passioun,
Hyde ye your trouthe in love and your renoun;
And thou, Tisbe, that hast for love swich peyne:
Alceste is here, that al that may desteyne.

Herro, Dido, Laudomia, alle in-fere,
Eek Phyllis, hanging for thy Demophoun,
And Canace, espyed by thy chere,
Ysiphile, betrayed with Jasoun,
Mak of your trouthe in love no bost ne soun;
Nor Ypermistre or Adriane, ne pleyne;
Alceste is here, that al that may desteyne.

Let's talk about what the words mean. Here are the notes on the poem in the Riverside edition (the Riverside is the best and most important version of Chaucer's poems):

Absolon: Absolom, son of David, noted for his beauty
Ester: Esther, a Biblical model of meekness
Penalopee: Penelope, faithful wife of Ulysses
Marcia Catoun: a faithful Roman wife
Ysoude: the celebrated lover of Tristan

Are you noticing a pattern? Who are all these people? They are faithful or beautiful heroes and heroines. Let's keep going:

disteyne: make pale (by comparison)
Lavyne: Lavinia, wife of Aeneas
Lucress: Lucretia
Polixene: Polyxena, famous lover of Achilles
Cleopatre: Cleopatra's legend...[is] told below. [Cleopatra's legend comes later in a long poem.]
Herro: hero, beloved of Leander
Laudomia: Laodamia, faithful wife of Protesilaus
Canace: Canacee, the incestuous lover of her brother (ewww).
espied by they chere: disclosed by your demeanor
apperen: be equal to

Okay. This poem is by Geoffrey Chaucer. You remember Chaucer! :) You also know how this poem should sound. Why don't you take a moment and read it aloud?

Did you learn the name of this metrical scheme? It's called "rhyme royale." It has seven lines of iambic pentameter (you remember iambic pentameter, yes?) rhyming ababbcc. Chaucer made it up, and he used it throughout a number of his poems, including The Canterbury Tales. During the century after he died, lots of other people in England also used it in imitation of him. Many years later, Shakespeare wrote a long poem using this scheme. Any time you see a seven-line stanza rhyming ababbcc, you should think of Chaucer. But it's not a very common rhyme scheme anymore.

This short poem is part of a long poem called "The Legend of Good Women." The long poem has kind of a funny story behind it. Earlier, Chaucer had written a wonderful long narrative poem about two lovers called Troilus and Criseyde. In that long poem, the woman (Criseyde) betrayed the man (Troilus). But then, Chaucer claims, Queen Alceste got angry with him for writing a poem that made women look bad. So now he is going to write a new long poem about how wonderful women are in order to make Queen Alceste forgive him. "The Legend of Good Women" is that poem.

The funny thing about the short poem you and I have just read together, of course, is that it's written in praise of the Queen whom Chaucer is trying to placate (or so he says). So there's a little bit of humor behind it: one of its functions is to suck up to someone important.

Q: What do you call the figure of speech that begins the poem? Do you remember?

A: It's an apostrophe. The first stanza is full of apostrophes.

Q: Why does Chaucer list all these famous women?

A: To make Alceste seem more wonderful by comparison. This device--comparing one's love to something splendid, worthy, or beautiful--shows up very often in love poems. There might be other answers to the question too.

Q: What kind of person is Alceste?

A: She is supposed to be beautiful, to have "mekness," to be "frendly," to have "passioun," and so on. Do you see how all of the comparison are accumulating into a single praise-portrait of Alceste?

Q: What in the poem is unexpected? Are there any features that are something other than we would expect?

A: You may have your own answer to this question! But I find it initially surprising that the first person in this long list of desirable people is a man, not a woman. There's another man in this list: Jonathas. (I think Jonathas is "Jonathan" from the Bible, but I'm guessing, because he's not in the Riverside notes.) It seems odd to me that we would have two men in a long list of beautiful women. Also, they are both in the first stanza. I wonder why? They are both from the BIble, and Esther (in line 3) is from the Bible, too. Maybe Chaucer wants to start his poem with three BIblical figures. He puts all of the BIblical figures at the very beginning.

I don't know why he does this. I would have to think some more about it, and I would try to look it up. But it's interesting!

The basic pattern of development of all three stanzas is the same: Chaucer begins by apostrophizing famous people, primarily women, then he warns them not to bother competing with Alceste. But Chaucer varies the pattern sometimes by grouping the people: in line 4, for instance, he refers to "Penelope and Marcia Catoun" in one line, then gives a warning to both of them in the next line. Do you see how that creates some suspension? It makes us a little curious. It also creates a little more drama that he addresses both of them at once. Lastly, it unifies that couplet.

This pattern grows, becoming most dramatic in the third stanza: we get a pile-up of six women in a row, all listed one after the other, and only after Chaucer has created this long, dramatic list does he address them all at once: "Maketh of your trouthe neither boost ne soun" (Don't brag!) By first addressing only heroines one and two at a time, then addressing a whole host of them altogether, Chaucer introduces a little bit of climax into his poem. It's almost as if he is saying, "All of you all together are still not as impressive as Queen Alceste."

Another thing to notice (if you have the background knowledge) is that all of the qualities which Chaucer praises here belong to the tradition of courtly love, which you have already encountered in The Canterbury Tales and in the lays of Marie de France. Chaucer's inclusion of wives and wifehood in the tradition of courtly love is kind of unique, but that's a topic for another day.

This type of splendid list is sometimes called a "catalog," and it is often found in medieval poetry. If we want to think more deeply about the poem, we might think more deeply about the catalog: who did Chaucer choose to include? Why? What order did he put them in? Why?

I notice that a lot of the people throughout the poem suffered horribly for love. This is especially true in the final stanza. The people in the first stanza are identified by their attractive features ("meknesse, frendly manere," etc.) but the people in the final stanza are identified by their suffering. Do you see how Chaucer's use of adjective phrases has changed? He writes "Phillis, hanging for thy Demophoun,/...Ysiphile, betrayed with Jasoun." Instead of talking about beauty and charm, he talks about violence and harm. It's also worth noticing that Hero, Dido, and Laodamia all committed suicide because of a tragic love. When Chaucer writes, "Herro, Dido, Laudomia, alle yfere," putting these women in an explicit group, he is bringing to his reader's mind the idea of the love suicide. So we could say that another source of poetic climax is the gradual placement of violence at the foreground of these heroic descriptions. It's also true that Chaucer is writing about the "legends" of good women--about the famous stories of good women. Usually, you don't become famous as a faithful lover by living a quiet life in the suburbs. You have to do something really dramatic for love, as all of the women in the third stanza did.

To notice these patterns, you would have to take the time to look up the women in the poem. But if you were writing about this poem for a class, that would be the appropriate step to take.

Okay! Those are some of my thoughts. They are not necessarily the most important things about this poem; just what I notice this afternoon. As you can tell, I am not finished interpreting the poem: if I wanted to understand it fully, I would have to look it up in other places, figure out for sure who "Jonathas" is, and decide why on earth there are men in this catalog, among other things. What are your thoughts? Do you have questions or ideas about my thoughts?

Illustration of Canace from the William Morris edition of The Canterbury Tales at Yale's Beinecke Library.