Skelton on Phillip Sparrow, and on Chaucer. Potted history of English rhyme, and of rhyme in general. Rhyme and decorum: Cole Porter's listing songs. Wyatt's rhyming in the Petrarchan Sonnet "The long love that in my thought doth harbor." Quick reading of "Whoso list to hunt."
A discussion of lullabies in general, and the way that they aim at more than one audience: the child who shouldn't hear them, and us who do. A consideration, next, of the innocence version of Blake's Nurse's Song.
We rush through the rest of Auden's "Lullaby," with some attention to prosodic innovations and subtlety, but with every intention of moving on to other poems Wednesday.
We go over Wyatt's "The Flee From Me" again, and then do a close reading of Herbert's "Love" (III) as a descendant of Wyatt's poem. We pay special attention to the tenses of dialogue
Some more about the adjectives in Auden's "Lullaby." The transposition of the word "human" from her to him. A consideration of Yeats's "Cradle Song" as a sort of precursor.
Mainly on Wyatt's "The Flee from Me," as a poem of disillusion, wonder, and astonishing subtlety and depicting the psychology of love and disappointment. Here's the poem:
This is the first class of a course on the close reading of poetry. It will consist, at least for the first half, of intense reading of poems for as long as is necessary, with no time pressure. It's not a course designed to get you reading a lot; it's designed to get you thinking a lot. We start out with some lullabies, first with Auden's
Lullaby
Lay your sleeping head, my love,
Human on my faithless arm;
Time and fevers burn away
Individual beauty from
Thoughtful children, and the grave
Proves the child ephermeral:
But in my arms till break of day
Let the living creature lie,
Mortal, guilty, but to me
The entirely beautiful.
Soul and body have no bounds:
To lovers as they lie upon
Her tolerant enchanted slope
In their ordinary swoon,
Grave the vision Venus sends
Of supernatural sympathy,
Universal love and hope;
While an abstract insight wakes
Among the glaciers and the rocks
The hermit’s sensual ecstasy.
Certainty, fidelity
On the stroke of midnight pass
Like vibrations of a bell,
And fashionable madmen raise
Their pedantic boring cry:
Every farthing of the cost,
All the dreadful cards foretell,
Shall be paid, but from this night
Not a whisper, not a thought,
Not a kiss nor look be lost.
Beauty, midnight, vision dies:
Let the winds of dawn that blow
Softly round your dreaming head
Such a day of sweetness show
Eye and knocking heart may bless.
Find the mortal world enough;
Noons of dryness see you fed
By the involuntary powers,
Nights of insult let you pass
Watched by every human love.
A somewhat giddily desultory last class, mainly on Samson, though with some attention to Paradise Regained and much about patience and heroic martyrdom. What being patient means. Milton's amazing prosody in Sonnet 16: "They also serve who only stand and wait." Compared to Jesus standing in PR 4. Some biographical account of Milton's blindness. Milton and the Book of Job. Reading Samson instead of seeing it. What happens to the boy who guides him? Is Dalila morally reproachable? Is Samson ultimately a terrorist?
Considerations from Areopagitica for the understanding of Milton: knowing good only by means of evil. How you can only know one if you know the other. How then the double fall of Adam and Eve requires Adam to know evil (that Eve has fallen) before he's eaten the fruit because she has. After her fall, and before Adam's, humanity both has and hasn't eaten the fruit (they're one person as far as that goes), and so knows good and evil before knowing good and evil. Thus he is already ruined ("me with the hath ruined," even before he eats. He chooses with full knowledge, and (it seems to me) chooses rightly.
How it's only humans in the whole universe who thinks things through. And therefore who fall on behalf of those who think things through. They think silently, too, keep their thoughts from each other.
What kinds of judgments does God leave to us? Plot as typology: learning how to understand the climax. In Paradise Lost we learn to use our own judgment in deciding about God's. Faithfulness always a good. So when Adam judges that Eve is real and that he will stay with her, he is extending a test already given him by God, with respect to the creation of Eve. But this time God says he fails it. This lecture, alas, was cut off so the last ten minutes are missing (iPad fail). But this is essentially what it is about.
Dreams in Milton: the way dream figures are always for us and therefore allegorical, and not for themselves. But in Milton this isn't true: the point is to discover the extent to which we're dreams (like Orpheus and Calliope) and the way that beings with the ephemerality and fragility of dreams -- us -- can nevertheless suffer. All by way of reading the Invocation to Book 7.
More on the quasi-invocation to Book IV, and about Miltonic ambiguity: two different ways of coming to the same end. Here either he or God could have produced the saving voice: it doesn't matter. But neither of them does, despite the fact that John of Patmos hears a voice from the future. Invocation and prayer are similar: the request is self-granting. But not in Book IV. We then consider Satan's use of necessity, the tyrant's plea, and compare it to God's.
We look at the quasi-invocation to Book IV and compare it to Raphael's failure to have such a warning voice for Adam and Even in Books 5 ff. What are the limits of his affability? This is a continuation of the question: who judges? and its answer: only humans. We broach the question then: fallen or unfallen humans? in parallel to the question: fallen or unfallen angels?
We consider the question who can be an adequate judge of God's ways, starting with the Invocation to Book 1, and then looking at the pusillanimity of the loyal angels in Book 3. We notice the way the Son manages God, but also that none of the other angels do. So it's not only the case that the rebel angels aren't able to judge God; the loyal angels aren't either. To be continued in the next class....
We finish up with the Invocation to Book III, and discuss Protestantism's (and particularly Milton's) view of Catholicism. Worshipping anything in the external world is worshipping an idol. Imagining that anything in the external world is magic, including the fruit of the tree of knowledge is idolatry. This means that knowledge of good and evil really does come out of a recognition of the fact that one has freely eaten of the tree: freedom and guilt are correlated. This also means that there's something you might call the converse of allegory going in in Paradise Lost. The fruit isn't allegorical; it's literal. Eating it forces you to recognize yourself as allegorizing your own guilt. You eat the fruit and feel rightly guilty, so that your own action is an allegory of your sin. I thought that I explained this fairly decently, and am sorry to say that once again a technical problem cut the class off half way through. No doubt I'll repeat myself next class.
We continue our consideration of the mind as its own place: the continuity between the lady and Satan. The relative unimportance of the outside world, therefore. We begin considering the Invocation to Book 3.
We consider freedom and fate in Paradise Lost, and the question of God vs. Satan; and talk about some of Milton's heresies, including his anti-Trinitarianism. NB: this recording ends abruptly half way through, because of a software glitch.
Comus vs. the lady. The moral asymmetry of rape: seduction is better with respect to the victim but worse with respect to devotion to abstract moral principle, because rape (as the Lady says) does not touch her mind, whereas seduction would. And yet rape is clearly a far worse crime than seduction, because it enslaves and does violence to the victim as seduction doesn't. So the moral quality of Comus is ambiguous as long as he remains a seducer. When he becomes a would-be rapist, he is clearly evil but also clearly impotent in his wish to do evil, since nothing he can do to the lady discredits her.
We conclude our discussion of Lycidas, by considering the austerity of its ending: the image of a world of absence in which all the false surmise that precedes it is gone. Then on to Comus, the subject of this and the next class.
We take a detour through a general account of how debate works in Milton - the way he presents both sides and his essentially dramatic structure, derived as much from Plato as from Shakespeare, and the way he thinks about the moral status of a dramatic structure, where each side seeks to convert the other. The various speakers in Lycidas, the happy fall in Paradise Lost: all are about seeing different routes to morality, including exposure to evil argument (as in Aeropagitica). Comedy vs. tragedy - is the fall is fortunate then comedy can go through error to truth. If the fall is tragic, then there is no hope. Comedy would allow for recovery of truth through different points of view.
We begin discussing Milton by starting out on Lycidas, and the nature of pastoral and pastoral elegy, as a segue from Book VI of The Faerie Queene. Lycidas as a poem in which Milton demonstrates his own power.
Last and I think BEST class on the Faerie Queene: scopophilia and narraive. Colin Clout and the Graces are present to the hidden Calidore, as Amoret has been present to Britomart in the house of Busirane. Voyeurism: they're present to us but we're not present to them. Kleinian reading of this scenario. Paradoxes of fiction and fictional interest. They'll reappear in Milton as well. Tomorrow: Lycidas!
Book Vi as pastoral. Native courtesy. Class distinction. Courtesy innate, but if it's innate it seems to indicate high class origins. Paradoxes of courtesy. Calidore and Colin Clout.
We continue considering the relation of difference and variety to uniformity, under the aspects of both justice and courtesy in Books V and VI. How can variety coexist with courtesy. A card trick (and much embarrassed silence) shows how the random can sync with the coordinated: the lesson of the Mutabilitie Cantos too.
| ||
