Levity on a Snow Day

This has nothing to do with American literature per se, but if you'd like to see the weather forecast in Baltimore, you should have a watch. It is not a spoof -- but a real broadcast.

Paraphrasing + Connotation & Denotation

Since we are in the midst of a two-day snow break, I think it is most efficient to simply pass on to you some of most salient points of the lecture notes I would have imparted to you through in-class song and dance.

Paraphrasing Poetry
When summarizing a poem, you are answering the question: What does the poem say? In order to summarize you must paraphrase -- put the poem into your own words. Here are a few rules-of-thumb:

1. Restate the poem in simple, prose language
2. Include all main ideas covered by the poet
3. Translate all figurative language into literal language

Refer to the sample explication for "Nothing Gold Can Stay," and the notes on Emily Dickinson's "There is no frigate like a book" on page 38 in Sound and Sense.

Identifying the Narrator
Always assume the narrator is not the poet and you will be correct 99.9% of the time. Remember that poetry is almost always a form of fiction. Just as in novels and short stories, the narrator is very, very rarely the author himself.

Identifying the Central Purpose of a Poem
Ask yourself what is it the poet is try to accomplish (in general terms) through the writing of the poem. For example, is the poem's purpose:

- to tell a story?
- to reveal human character?
- to impart a vivid impression (e.g., a lovely spring morning)?
- to express an emotion (e.g., fear of death)?
- to convey an attitude or idea (e.g., war is an ugly affair)?

Aspects of Words
All words have three basic components, as follows:

1. Sound -- obviously, how the word sounds when it is pronounced
2. Denotation -- the dictionary definitions of a word
3. Connotation -- what the word suggests beyond definition

Denotation
Poets rely on the multiplicity of meanings of words

1. To give added meaning, using a word to mean more than one thing at a time
2. To achieve purposeful ambiguity

Connotation
Connotation is very important to the poet, and consequently he chooses his words carefully. In doing so, he can:

1. Concentrate or enrich the meaning of a sentence or idea
2. Say more in fewer words

Example
Consider the two words "childlike" and "childish." They both literally mean "characteristic of a child" but they have very different, even opposite connotations. "Childlike" makes us think of the positive attributes of a child like meekness, innocence, wide-eyed; while "childish" makes us think of the negative attributes of a child, like pettiness, ill-temper, selfishness, and immaturity.

Consider the difference in connations between "simple" and "simplistic."

Reminder: 5-minute quick quiz on Chapters 1-3 in Sound and Sense on Thursday.

Dickinson Poem for Explication

"Horse-drawn cabs" by Frederick Childe Hassam

Here is the second poem for February 11 explication (see Auden's poem in previous post):

Because I could not stop for Death
by Emily Dickinson

Allen Tate (1899-1979) -- a distinguished American poet, teacher, and critic -– once observed that "Because I Could Not Stop for Death" is an extraordinary poem. In fact, he said, it deserves to be regarded as "one of the greatest in the English language; it is flawless to the last detail."

Because I could not stop for Death,
He kindly stopped for me;
The carriage held but just ourselves
And Immortality.

We slowly drove, he knew no haste,
And I had put away
My labor, and my leisure too,
For his civility.

We passed the school, where children strove
At recess, in the ring;
We passed the fields of gazing grain,
We passed the setting sun.

Or rather, he passed us;
The dews grew quivering and chill,
For only gossamer my gown,
My tippet only tulle.

We paused before a house that seemed
A swelling of the ground;
The roof was scarcely visible,
The cornice but a mound.

Since then 'tis centuries, and yet each
Feels shorter than the day
I first surmised the horses' heads
Were toward eternity.

Tip: Consider that Dickenson's poem has characters, just as in a short story. We have the narrator, Death, Immortality, and the children.

Auden Poem for Explication

Pieter Brueghel the Elder’s “The Census at Bethlehem"
-- referred to but unnamed in the first stanza
of Auden's "Musée des Beaux Arts"

Pieter Brueghel the Elder’s “Landscape with the Fall
of Icarus" -- mentioned in the second stanza
of Auden's "Musée des Beaux Arts"

In case you don't have your Sound and Sense book, here is the first of the two poems you are explicating for Thursday, February 11:

Musée des Beaux Arts
by W.H. Auden

Background note: In December 1938, on a visit to Brussels, W.H. Auden went to the Musées Royaux des Beaux-Arts de Belgique (The Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium), which furnished the inspiration for this poem, published in 1940. It was a tense time in Belgium and the world. Madness was afoot in Europe, and many, including Auden, sensed the imminent outbreak of a great conflagration. The culture that had existed in Europe up to that moment would perish and a new one would be born. Some elements of the past would be salvaged, of course. Some aspects of European culture have a knack for surviving conflagrations. (read more here, and about Brueghel's paintings).

About suffering they were never wrong,
The Old Masters; how well, they understood
Its human position; how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along;
How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting
For the miraculous birth, there always must be
Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating
On a pond at the edge of the wood:
They never forgot
That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course
Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot
Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer's horse
Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.

In Breughel's Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away
Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may
Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,
But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone
As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green
Water; and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen
Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,
had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.

Tip: Consider what the poem says about individual human suffering and the effect (or lack of effect) it has on others or on society. What might the poem suggest a religious acceptance of suffering?

Sample Poetry Explication

I am making available by PDF a sample poetry explication that provides an illustration of what I expect from your six poem explications that are due over the next three weeks. This explication pertains to "Nothing Gold Can Stay" by Robert Frost:

Nature's first green is gold
Her hardest hue to hold.
Her early leaf's a flower;
But only so an hour.
Then leaf subsides to leaf.
So Eden sank to grief,
So dawn goes down to day.
Nothing gold can stay.

Download the PDF explication

The Snowstorm

In honor of the snowstorm out the window, I am posting Ralph Waldo Emerson's "The Snowstorm" -- it is one of Larry's assigned poems. It is also one of four that do not appear in Sound and Sense.

But before the poem, an important announcement: Although there is no school today and although there may be no school tomorrow, your first two explications are due as scheduled on Thursday at 8:30 a.m. Please type them if possible. If you forgot to bring your poetry papers home, please note that the PDFs are available at the website. [ Assignments here and Explication here ] Read carefully through the "How to Write an Explication" hand-out. This explains how I expect the assignment to be completed. We will then discuss these two poems on Thursday. If you have any questions, please email me -- or use the comment box here.

Also, please remember you are responsible for reading Chapters 1-3 in Sound and Sense. We will still be having a "5-Minute Quiz" on this material on Thursday.

The Snowstorm
by Ralph Waldo Emerson

Announced by all the trumpets of the sky,
Arrives the snow, and, driving o'er the fields,
Seems nowhere to alight: the whited air
Hides hill and woods, the river, and the heaven,
And veils the farmhouse at the garden's end.
The sled and traveller stopped, the courier's feet
Delated, all friends shut out, the housemates sit
Around the radiant fireplace, enclosed
In a tumultuous privacy of storm.

Come see the north wind's masonry.
Out of an unseen quarry evermore
Furnished with tile, the fierce artificer
Curves his white bastions with projected roof
Round every windward stake, or tree, or door.
Speeding, the myriad-handed, his wild work
So fanciful, so savage, nought cares he
For number or proportion. Mockingly,
On coop or kennel he hangs Parian wreaths;
A swan-like form invests the hiddden thorn;
Fills up the famer's lane from wall to wall,
Maugre the farmer's sighs; and at the gate
A tapering turret overtops the work.
And when his hours are numbered, and the world
Is all his own, retiring, as he were not,
Leaves, when the sun appears, astonished Art
To mimic in slow structures, stone by stone,
Built in an age, the mad wind's night-work,
The frolic architecture of the snow.

The Case For Memorizing Poetry

Jim Holt, author of Stop Me if You’ve Heard This: A History and Philosophy of Jokes, wrote an essay that appeared in The New York Times last year that is worth reading.

Let's start with his myth-busting:

Myth No. 1: Poetry is painful to memorize.
It is not at all painful. Just do a line or two a day.

Myth No. 2: There isn’t enough room in your memory to store a lot of poetry.
Bad analogy. Memory is a muscle, not a quart jar.

Myth No. 3: Everyone needs an iPod.
You do not need an iPod. Memorize poetry instead.

...and here are a few excerpts from his essay "Got Poetry":

A few years ago, I started learning poetry by heart on a daily basis. I’ve now memorized about a hundred poems, some of them quite long — more than 2,000 lines in all, not including limericks and Bob Dylan lyrics. I recite them to myself while jogging along the Hudson River, quite loudly if no other joggers are within earshot. I do the same, but more quietly, while walking around Manhattan on errands — just another guy on an invisible cellphone...

A few lucky types seem to memorize great swaths of poetry without even trying. George Orwell said that when a verse passage “has really rung the bell” — as the early T. S. Eliot invariably did for him — he could remember 20 or 30 lines after a single reading. Samuel Johnson, according to Boswell, had a similar mnemonic gift. Christopher Hitchens — who carries around in his head a small anthology of verse, all of which, as his friend Ian McEwan says, is “instantly neurologically available” — also seems to absorb poems by osmosis. (Or maybe he swots them up late at night after his dinner-party guests have all passed out.) Richard Howard once told me that he eased into the memorization habit as a child, when his parents rewarded him with a dime for each poem he learned.

For the rest of us, the key to memorizing a poem painlessly is to do it incrementally, in tiny bits. I knock a couple of new lines into my head each morning before breakfast, hooking them onto what I’ve already got. At the moment, I’m 22 lines into Tennyson’s “Ulysses,” with 48 lines to go. It will take me about a month to learn the whole thing at this leisurely pace, but in the end I’ll be the possessor of a nice big piece of poetical real estate, one that I will always be able to revisit and roam about in.

The process of memorizing a poem is fairly mechanical at first. You cling to the meter and rhyme scheme (if there is one), declaiming the lines in a sort of sing-songy way without worrying too much about what they mean. But then something organic starts to happen. Mere memorization gives way to performance. You begin to feel the tension between the abstract meter of the poem — the “duh DA duh DA duh DA duh DA duh DA” of iambic pentameter, say — and the rhythms arising from the actual sense of the words. (Part of the genius of Yeats or Pope is the way they intensify meaning by bucking against the meter.) It’s a physical feeling, and it’s a deeply pleasurable one. You can get something like it by reading the poem out loud off the page, but the sensation is far more powerful when the words come from within. (The act of reading tends to spoil physical pleasure.) It’s the difference between sight-reading a Beethoven piano sonata and playing it from memory — doing the latter, you somehow feel you come closer to channeling the composer’s emotions. And with poetry you don’t need a piano.

Read the whole article...

Multiplicity of meanings in poetry

Dead Sea coastline

Connotation and denotation are both important for the poet -- and important to understand for the read who seeks to understand and appreciate poetry. Connotation is what a word suggests beyond its dictionary definition. For example, "home" by connotation suggests something different that "abode." When we hear home, we think: security, love, comfort, family.

Denotation is just as important as connotation, especially considering the multiplicity of meanings of so many words. As the authors of Sound and Sense write, "The ambiguity and multiplicity of meanings possessed by words are an obstacle to the scientist but a resource to the poet" (42). Consider the word dead. We know it means something that is not alive. True, but it means a whole lot more. How many senses (different definitions) can you think of pertaining to "dead"?

Dictionary.com identifies 40 definitions (senses) for the word dead:

1. no longer living; deprived of life.
2. brain-dead.
3. not endowed with life; inanimate
4. resembling death; deathlike
5. bereft of sensation; numb
6. lacking sensitivity of feeling; insensitive
7. incapable of being emotionally moved; unresponsive
8. (of an emotion) no longer felt; ended; extinguished
9. no longer current or prevalent, obsolete
10. no longer functioning, operating, or productive
11. not moving or circulating; stagnant; stale
12. utterly tired; exhausted
13. (of a language) no longer in use
14. without vitality, spirit, enthusiasm, or the like
15. lacking the customary activity; dull; inactive
16. complete; absolute: dead silence
17. sudden or abrupt, as the complete stoppage of an action
18. put out; extinguished
19. without resilience or bounce
20. infertile; barren
21. exact; precise
22. accurate; sure; unerring
23. direct; straight
24. tasteless or flat, as a beverage
25. flat rather than glossy, bright, or brilliant
26. without resonance; anechoic
27. not fruitful; unproductive
28. deprived of civil rights
29. Sports. out of play
30. (of a golf ball) lying so close to the hole...
31. (of type or copy) having been used or rejected
32. Electricity. free from any electric connection
33. Metallurgy. (of steel) fully killed, unresponsive to heat treatment.
34. (of the mouth of a horse) no longer sensitive to the pressure of a bit.
35. noting any rope in a tackle that does not pass over a pulley
36. the period of greatest darkness, coldness
37. the dead, dead persons collectively
38. absolutely; completely: dead right; dead tired
39. with sudden and total stoppage of motion
40. directly; exactly; straight: dead ahead

Challenge: Can you find a word that has more than 42 senses? If so, pray tell.