Tag: Poetry

The devil you say

Hawthorne and Emerson did not see eye to eye when it came to “what evil lurks in the hearts of men.”

In one of his stories, [Hawthorne] has the devil say, “Evil is the nature of mankind.” [he] didn’t go that far, but argued time and again for the “evil impulse” in us all. “Oh, take my word for it,” his devil taunted reformers, “it will be the old world yet!”

Emerson, on the other hand, found The Scarlet Letter a “ghastly” book, apparently recognizing it as an attack on his feelings-based morality.

Read all about it in The Wednesday Journal of Oak Park & River Forest, out today, with special attention to “three discarded Oak Park school namesakes” — these two plus James Russell Lowell, whose paean to June — “what is so rare”? — gets special billing.

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Refreshing oratory, Word from pastor, Richard II, Doornails

* A few weeks ago, a revealing exchange: Rev. Jeremiah Wright, who gives jeremiads blaming whites for black problems, “gives voice to a common black experience . . . [employs] black oratory style . . . uses fiery, incendiary language,” said Deborah Douglas of S-T on the Ch. 11 Carol Marin show Chicago Tonight.

“It really is refreshing to have had that experience,” she also said.

“The malcontents and Obama-haters in the blogosphere will keep this [controversy] alive,” she said later in the show.

“And maybe reporter[s], too,” said Marin, which I first took as a woe-is-us comment but which I think now can be taken as a caution expressed to the somewhat naive Douglas.

* You know how the Sunday bulletin often has a ferverino from the pastor? (Or Saturday’s from the rabbi?) It takes off on Scripture or holy season to make a point that’s a sort of column. Like a sermon but not quite, often because it’s less formal.

It could be that Barack Obama’s church, Trinity UCC on 95th Street in Chi, often has such ferverinos too, though the smart money says it has a political, nay leftist tinge, based on its pastor’s inclination toward rousing rabble with slam-bang language and showmanship.

Well, smart money does it again with the July 22, 2007 inspirational tidbit, a manifesto by Mousa Marzook, “deputy of the political bureau of Hamas, the Islamic Resistance Movement.” that had run in the LA Times on July 10.  The bulletin item, on the “Pastor’s Page,” is headed “A fresh view of the Palestinian struggle.”   

It’s essentially a propaganda piece, crying for rebuttal from U.S. and Israeli sources, to name only two.  But that’s the shape the ferverino took at Trinity UCC on that July Sunday.

* Meanwhile, on the philosophical poetry front, we find the American poet, John Ashbery, featured in the 3/28/08 Times Literary Supplement as portraying “a sad decline” in his latest poems — a decline of life as it happens.  Ashbery is 81 and ripe for such considerations.

He gives us a sort of vanity of human wishes in verse, per reviewer Stephen Burt.  Paths of glory leading to the grave stuff.  Nothing so obvious (or so memorable) as Gray’s “Elegy,” Ashbery being of this century and the last.  The pertinent “Elegy” stanza:

The boast of heraldry, the pomp of power,
And all that beauty, all that wealth e’er gave,
Awaits alike th’ inevitable hour:-
The paths of glory lead but to the grave

Ashbery’s work demonstrates the “treasure of memory and bodily impoverishments of late life,” says Burt, a Harvard prof.  In this as I understand it, he manifests a sense of being not too much troubled by how the world turns, his world and others’, realizing that others will achieve what he didn’t:

“Those places left unplanted will be cultivated / by another, by others. Looking back it / will seem good”.

Not necessarily, though I have read and heard that Jesuits have plunged creatively and boldly into education of black boys on the West Side — with their new academy in the old Resurrection parish school buildings on Jackson Boulevard.  A long time ago, I contributed to this development by writing about and then directing a “summer enrichment program” for such boys at St. Ignatius High School.  Warm welcome, therefore, to Chicago Jesuit Academy.

* Staying with TLS, one notes the importance of letters to the editor, from which one can learn a lot.  They come bite-size but packed with allusions that tell you something or lead you to something very good.  It’s this way in most publications. 

In letters people are direct in expression and forthright in exposition.  They don’t mince words, or usually don’t or aren’t allowed to, they read well and are not too long.  Newspapers and magazines have to know the deal they have — readable stuff that’s free.

For instance, Michael Egan rebutting Bart Van Es in re: “Richard II, Part One” as Shakespeare’s and not someone else’s.  In a 2/15/08 essay, Egan had based his argument that Shakespeare wrote this play not “in large part on verbal and character analogues” but “principally, as it should, on the quality of the writing.”  He found this Shakespearean and quoted a marvelous speech by the Queen Anne character, beginning:

My sovereign lord, and you true
English peers,
Your all-accomplish’d honours have
so tied
My senses by a magical restraint
In the sweet spells of these your fair
demeanours,
That I am bound and charm’d from
what I was.

Egan also defends his “phrasal analogues,” citing one that’s familiar to most of us, that between a dead man and a doornail:

Lapoole: What, is he dead?
Murderer: As a door-nail, my lord.

– 1 Richard II, V.i.242–3

and

Falstaff: What, is the old king dead?
Pistol: As nail in door.

– 2 Henry IV, V.iii.120–1

How many of you knew the phrase came from William S.?

I learned long ago to look to him for household phrases, when as a Fenwick junior I saw Olivier’s “Hamlet” in a Loop movie house and realized I was hearing phrases I knew.  Shakespeare used hackneyed expressions, I thought, until I did the math and decided he’s the one that made them up.  Clever fellow.

 

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Snowbound but unbowed

In today’s Wednesday Journal of OP & RF:

Do Whittier students know he crusaded against slavery? John Greenleaf Whittier, that is, namesake of the Oak Park school across from the Dole Branch? He was a friend of the abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison, who published him for the first time, in 1826, when Whittier was 19.

Do they know he wrote “Snowbound,” his 1860s poem featuring his parents, his brother and two sisters, bachelor uncle and unmarried aunt, and the local school teacher, who boarded with them?

I hope so. I hope they memorize it or some of its 759 lines, for reciting in February, especially this one, when it is specially appropriate.

And more more more about poetry as

what we want for our boys and girls, what fires the imagination, insulates them against the brittle plasticity of popular culture.  . . .  a firewall of the poetic.  None should leave school without one.

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UPDATE:  Reader Who Remembers has this to say in an email:

You bring back memories of 1st year at Mercy High School and Sister Hyacinth (6 feet tall with a face like Lewis Stone [Judge Hardy, Andy’s pere]). On the occasion of the first snowfall of the year, she brought out this poem by James Russell Lowell, and we were told to memorize it and recite it — we went over it that day — I memorized it and can recite most of it by memory still today — phrases like “Came Chanticleer‘s muffled crow” we learned a different name for rooster! And I probably had never known what “Carrara” was, before this poem. The beauty of language: snow as “ermine.” And every first snowfall, the poem comes to mind, and I see that classroom on Prairie Avenue, with all the girls in their navy blue uniforms, moaning silently because of the assignment.

The complete Lowell poem:

“The First Snowfall” by James Russell Lowell

The snow had begun in the gloaming,
And busily all the night
Had been heaping field and highway
With a silence deep and white.

Every pine and fir and hemlock
Wore ermine too dear for an earl,
And the poorest twig on the elm-tree
Was ridged inch deep with pearl.

From sheds new-roofed with Carrara
Came Chanticleer‘s muffled crow,
The stiff rails were softened to swan’s-down,
And still fluttered down the snow.

I stood and watched by the window
The noiseless work of the sky,
And the sudden flurries of snow-birds,
Like brown leaves whirling by.

I thought of a mound in sweet Auburn
Where a little headstone stood;
How the flakes were folding it gently,
As did robins the babes in the wood.

Up spoke our own little Mabel,
Saying, “Father, who makes it snow?”
And I told of the good All-father
Who cares for us here below.

Again I looked at the snow-fall,
And thought of the leaden sky
That arched o’er our first great sorrow,
When that mound was heaped so high.

I remembered the gradual patience
That fell from that cloud-like snow,
Flake by flake, healing and hiding
The scar of our deep-plunged woe.

And again to the child I whispered,
“The snow that husheth all,
Darling, the merciful Father
Alone can make it fall!”

Then, with eyes that saw not, I kissed her;
And she, kissing back, could not know
That my kiss was given to her sister,
Folded close under deepening snow.

UPDATE 2:  The Whittier and Lowell snow poems are paired in a McDougal Littell textbook, in a section on “the Fireside Poets.”  From an ML editor:

The latter poem describes the first snowfall on the grave of a child taken by illness. The pairing offers nice opportunity for comparison and contrast of snow imagery, as you might imagine. Nice poems, both.

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Poets speak truth to reader . . .

* Sir John Suckling had a way with words. In “Loving and Beloved,” in the 1646 collection of his poems, Fragmenta Aurea – “incomparable peeces [sic],” reads the title page – he has this about romantic love:

Love is the fart/ Of every heart;/ It pains a man when ‘tis kept close/ And others doth offend when ‘tis let loose.

* Robert Herrick, “On a Perfum’d Lady”:

You say y’are sweet: how sho’d we know/ Whether you be sweet or no/  From Powders and Perfumes keep free;/ Then we shall smell how sweet you be.

Say that to a woman (or man) trailing clouds, not of glory like Wordsworth, but of perfume or cologne.

* Herrick again, in “Upon Himselfe”:  He is not sure if getting married would reverse his “mop-ey’d” ( as in “mope”) condition,” says it might “put out the light,” presumably in his eye (and spirit).


This I read as one whom getting married helped immeasurably but who allows the other possibility and holds in due respect the other choice. The poem in question:



Mop-ey’d I am, as some have said,/ Because I’ve liv’d so long a maid [unmarried]:/ But grant that I sho’d [should] wedded be,/ Sho’d I a jot the better see?/ No, I sho’d think, that Marriage might,/ Rather [than] mend, put out the light.

Great thoughts from far and near

* Christopher Smart, in his 1751 poem, “An epigram of Sir Thomas More, imitated,” has a man kissing Dorinda, whom he playfully tells her nose is too big.

At which Dorinda, “equally to fun inclined,” placed “her lovely Lily hand behind./ ‘Here, Swain,’ she cried; ‘Mayst thou securely kiss,/ Where there’s no nose to interrupt thy bliss.’”


Right here, Bud.


* The academic (not athletic) racial achievement gap at one Oak Park K-6 school was said to be “more unique” than at other schools — by its principal.


Is she more unique than other principals?


* A book I am working through is The Roots of National Socialism, by Rohan D’O. Butler (Dutton, 1942). It would be good reading for others, I think, especially by young folks who do not know Naziism was socialism — national socialism, as opposed to the international version run out of a building in Moscow.


The roots in question are heavily philosophical. The book is a tour de force showing the consequences had by ideas.


* We routinely object to senseless violence (it’s a consecrated phrase), but when do we hear praise for sensible violence?


On the football field is one place, but no guns allowed.  The Bears’ Tank Johnson has done his time for gun violations and is suspended for several games at considerable monetary loss. I am assuming he had to promise not to go armed onto the field.

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