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Close reading: the Nurse's Song from Songs of Experience 1-26-12

How the Nurse's Song differs in the Songs of Experience.  Polyphanic voices.  Who the real speakers are, in both versions.

Skelton's rhymes, Cole Porter's, Wyatt's

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."

Tripartite relations in lullabies

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.

Last class on Lullaby 1-23-12

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.

Love (III) as a version of They Flee From Me 1-23-12

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

Close reading 1-19-11 Auden and Yeats

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.

Renaissance Poetry - First Class: Wyatt

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:

They flee from me that sometime did me seek

With naked foot, stalking in my chamber.

I have seen them gentle, tame, and meek,

That now are wild and do not remember

That sometime they put themself in danger

To take bread at my hand; and now they range,

Busily seeking with a continual change.

Thanked be fortune it hath been otherwise

Twenty times better; but once in special,

In thin array after a pleasant guise,

When her loose gown from her shoulders did fall,

And she me caught in her arms long and small;

Therewithall sweetly did me kiss

And softly said, “Dear heart, how like you this?”

It was no dream: I lay broad waking.

But all is turned thorough my gentleness

Into a strange fashion of forsaking;

And I have leave to go of her goodness,

And she also, to use newfangleness.

But since that I so kindly am served

I would fain know what she hath deserved.

Close reading: lullabies

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.