A Dalliance (Or: A Random but Awesome Bunch of Sonnets)

Today's Notes from the Ivory Tower come straight out of general Poetry, with an emphasis on Sonnets.

For those of you who aren't fans of poetry or sonnets or Shakespeare, I'm just going to leave this here:

Why yes, yes that IS Professor Snape reading Shakespeare, and yes, we are going to look at that, and other sonnets more carefully.

Logistics first: What is a sonnet?

A Sonnet (Sonnetti, for "little song" in the original Italian) is 14 lines of poetry, with a rhyme scheme from either the first, second or third circle of hell, depending on whether you were English, Italian or Edmund Spenser. English sonneteers (Read: Shakespeare) wrote sonnets using 3 quatrains and a couplet. In plain English, that means the poem can be divided up into three sections of four lines, and one section of two lines. These sections are delineated by the rhyme scheme. Italian sonneteers (Read: Petrarch) wrote using an octave (eight lines) and a sestet (six lines). Edmund Spenser, being English, used three quatrains and a couplet, but if you look at the rhyme schemes of the three, you'll see the difference:

 

Sonnets were also written in iambic pentameter, which is a kind of metrical time. Basically, each "foot" of time has a stressed and an unstressed syllable in it. Aurally, this makes a heartbeat sound with the rhythm.

The next logical question is: Why were sonnets written? According to this article, sonnets were odes to beautiful women. This is true for Petrarch, and for Shakespeare and Spenser to some degree, but as time progresses, forward, we'll see that this does not necessarily continue to be true.

Ok, enough background details, let's look at some sonnets!

Starting, of course, with Shakespeare Sonnet 130:

My mistress' eyes are nothing like the sun;

Coral is far more red than her lips' red;

If snow be white, why then her breasts are dun;

If hairs be wires, black wires grow on her head.

I have seen roses damask'd, red and white,

But no such roses see I in her cheeks;

And in some perfumes is there more delight

Than in the breath that from my mistress reeks.

I love to hear her speak, yet well I know

That music hath a far more pleasing sound;

I grant I never saw a goddess go;

My mistress, when she walks, treads on the ground:

   And yet, by heaven, I think my love as rare

   As any she belied with false compare. 

This sonnet is an ode to a woman, certainly... but no gal is going to love being told that her hair is wiry, she's pale (before sparkly teenage vampires somehow made it cool?) and her breath stinks. What Shakespeare is doing here is reacting to the tradition of sonnets where the object of the poet's affection is held up as superhuman and therefore unattainable. An example of this kind of pedastaling of a woman is here is Petrarch's sonnet:

Sonnet 90
She used to let her golden hair fly free.

For the wind to toy and tangle and molest;

Her eyes were brighter than the radiant west.

(Seldom they shine so now.)  I used to see

Pity look out of those deep eyes on me.

("It was false pity," you would now protest.)

I had love's tinder heaped within my breast;

What wonder that the flame burnt furiously?

She did not walk in any mortal way,

But with angelic progress; when she spoke,

Unearthly voices sang in unison.

She seemed divine among the dreary folk

Of earth.  You say she is not so today?

Well, though the bow's unbent, the wound bleeds on.

 Petrarch is very much idealizing the woman in this sonnet, using adjectives associated with wealth as well as aesthetic beauty. For a Spenserian sonnet in this tradition (for those of you who want to dabble in some middle English; think Chaucer!), I'll leave this here:

Sonnet 64

Comming to kisse her lyps (such grace I found)

Me seemd I smelt a gardin of sweet flowres

That dainty odours from them three around

For damzels fit to decke their lovers bowres

Her lips did smell lyke unto gillyflowers

Her ruddy cheeks lyke unto roses red;

Her snowy browes lyke budded bellamoures,

Her lovely eyes lyke pincks but newly spred,

Her goodly bosome lyke a strawberrry bed,

Her neck lyke to a bounch of cullambynes;

Her brest lyke lillyes ere theyr leaves be shed,

Her nipples lyke yong blossomd jessemynes.

Such fragrant flowres doe give most odorous smell,

But her sweet odour did them all excel.

Basically, Spenser took a woman and compared her to a flower shop back before spelling counted.

You might be noticing a trend here: all the sonnets so far seem to cover similar ground. That was very much a think for great poets, and since sonnets were written in cycles, it's pretty easy to match up sonnets by subject.  The Spenser, Petrarch and Shakespeare sonnets above all focus on the love aspect of the sonnet.

Once we get to Milton though, we see things getting a little more weighty:

When I Consider How My Light Is Spent

When I consider how my light is spent,

   Ere half my days, in this dark world and wide,

   And that one Talent which is death to hide

   Lodged with me useless, though my Soul more bent

To serve therewith my Maker, and present

   My true account, lest he returning chide;

   “Doth God exact day-labour, light denied?”

   I fondly ask. But patience, to prevent

That murmur, soon replies, “God doth not need

   Either man’s work or his own gifts; who best

   Bear his mild yoke, they serve him best. His state

Is Kingly. Thousands at his bidding speed

   And post o’er Land and Ocean without rest:

   They also serve who only stand and wait.”

Milton is considering how time is spent, and since light is often a metaphor for sight, he is also considering how his time with his sight was spent (by the end of his life, Milton was blind). Compare that to John Keats's famous sonnet:

When I have Fears That I May Cease to Be

When I have fears that I may cease to be

   Before my pen has gleaned my teeming brain,

Before high-pilèd books, in charactery,

   Hold like rich garners the full ripened grain;

When I behold, upon the night’s starred face,

   Huge cloudy symbols of a high romance,

And think that I may never live to trace

   Their shadows with the magic hand of chance;

And when I feel, fair creature of an hour,

   That I shall never look upon thee more,

Never have relish in the faery power

   Of unreflecting love—then on the shore

Of the wide world I stand alone, and think

Till love and fame to nothingness do sink.

 Few things are weightier than considering one's own mortality, and here we have Keats's oft-assigned sonnet doing just that.

But, you may say, Keats and Milton are still old and stodgy, sonnets can't possibly be fun.

I'm just going to put this here:

Fairy-tale Logic

Fairy tales are full of impossible tasks:

Gather the chin hairs of a man-eating goat,

Or cross a sulphuric lake in a leaky boat,

Select the prince from a row of identical masks,

Tiptoe up to a dragon where it basks

And snatch its bone; count dust specks, mote by mote,

Or learn the phone directory by rote.

Always it’s impossible what someone asks—

You have to fight magic with magic. You have to believe

That you have something impossible up your sleeve,

The language of snakes, perhaps, an invisible cloak,

An army of ants at your beck, or a lethal joke,

The will to do whatever must be done:

Marry a monster. Hand over your firstborn son.

This sonnet was written by A.E. Stallings in 2010, and is possibly my favorite poem ever. It's modern enough to appeal to today's readers, is loyal to its poetic roots, and takes the genre in a new direction by flying into fancy.

Finally, I'm going to leave these here:

 

Why Petrarch Hates Shakespeare

 

Irreverent phrasing! Insouciance!

He writes to his Mister, his “Dark Lady”;

He takes this poetic form, makes it shady!

I’ll throw him into Mount Vesuvius!

He writes of love in a way most dubious,

No blondes, eyes of blue or matters weighty,

But dun breast and black wire; the “Bard” is crazy.

A young man clearly less than studious,

Mistaking sheer volume for quality,

To read his sonnets puts me in a malaise.

With brass, earth, sea, it speaks of frivolity

Which denies me give any sort of praise

To this man in his writer’s fantasy.

He should have stuck to simply writing plays.

This is an original piece by me, written for an intro to poetry class in 2011.

 

Shakespeare’s Zombie

 

Shall I compare thee to a zombie Hoard?

Wrinkled grey skin falling from rotten bones,

The entrapping scent and discordant chords.

Craven creatures munching children and crones.

Shrieked cries of hunger edge the northern wind,

While the south wind whispers “wherefore art brains?”

Beautifully bright blood bleaches snowy hill’s skin

While the lovely bones line the silent plains. 

But thou, my Zombie queen sublime surpass

Infrequent lovers, the dead mortals past. 

Your cries for brains intrigue and tease in blasts

I stumble close for true love at the last…

Entrapped in your arms, together at last

My brains ripped out, your final repast.

This is another (slightly better) original piece by me, for a mixed-genre creative writing class in 2010.

Hopefully you've enjoyed these Notes from the Ivory Tower! We'll be back next time!

Platonic Ideals and Audiences in The Seasons

Today's Notes from the Ivory Tower are getting pulled from 18th Century Poetry and College Composition Pedagogy. These notes are coming to you in direct preparation for a grad school essay,  so bear with me for some rambling thoughts through The Seasons with lightning bolts from Plato and pedagogical theory.

"Why endeavor after a long Poem?  To which I should answer—Do not the Lovers of Poetry like to have a little Region to wander in where they may pick and choose, and in which images are so numerous that many are forgotten and found new in a second Reading?"

                       - John Keats, on the Long Poem

Thomson's The Seasons is a very, very long poem.  It's around four thousand lines, in four sections. Obviously it's a bit much to focus on the entire poem, so we'll be focusing on the language that Thomson uses to speak to his audiences. I'll be using Ede and Lunsford's article discussing audiences, so for those of you who aren't familiar with the concepts of audience addressed/audience invoked, the article is linked here.

Thomson's Audiences

• Audience Addressed: In Thomson's case, the addressed audience is literally addressed in the poem. He names Frederic, Prince of Wales and numerous patrons and friends in the openings and bodies of the four sections. In the case of naming the Prince and his patrons, Thomson is making very obvious political moves. He's basically flagged the poem with big names, the way designer perfumes have names like Justin Beiber, Taylor Swift and Mark Jacobs on them. It's old-school poetic street cred for Thomson. That street cred comes with strings attached, however. You do not want to publish views with which your patron or, god forbid, the Heir Apparent disagrees with.
• Audience Invoked: The invoked audience is basically the audience that the writer (in this case, Thomson) had in their heads when they were writing. Thomson seems to have had everyone and no one in his head when he began writing. He is clearly drawing from Newton at times in the poem, and the body of the text is thick with classical allusions. This would suggest a wealthy, well-read audience. Thomson also (in keeping with the genre of Georgics) gives his readers extended images of swains going about their humble, rural lifestyle. That suggests an entirely different type of audience.

Once the question of Audience is thoroughly snarled, Thomson throws in these Personified Abstractions. And by that I mean we can finish a section of the poem where Thomson has just explained that light refracting through water causes rainbows, or a poet sits down by the fire in winter to think about heroes, and suddenly Anger or Melancholy walks in the room to vent.

Plato's hierarchy of Forms dictates that we have the single ideal form of something, and anything else in the world that we call, say, anger, is a mere shadow of the Ideal. Thomson would appear to have the Ideal walking into the room, which is of course going to affect the audience, be that audience addressed or invoked.

Let's look at some semi-problematic quotes now, shall we?

 

Assuming that's not too small to read, let's unpack that 13 or so lines. Thomson openly references Newton and the newly understood scientific theories of the time regarding the formation of a rainbow. Specifically, the words "Prism", "refracted" and "proportion" are used, which are all quite Latinate terms that would have been associated with an educated (read 'wealthy') audience.

 

In contrast to the science, however, we have the swain wandering in the field to find the end of the rainbow. This sections reads like a ekphrasis of  the scene in Fantasia after Zeus finishes playing darts with lighting bolts. Everyone is entwining with the rainbow in pure ecstasy.

 

So thus we have a tension in the poem in terms of the audience. The question must be asked: is Thomson being intentionally condescending to the swains among the readership? Or is he rebuking (however gently) the wealthy, educated readers for losing a sense of appreciation and wonder for the world? 

These aren't questions that get answered lightly, and the language is very carefully chosen so that it can be seen as innocuous. 'Swain', for instance, has no adjective attached to it, so the reader isn't being cued by Thomson one way or the other.

Here's the second quote to examine:

Oh good, that's a bit easier to read. This is one of Thomson's Personified Abstractions; Anger has just entered the building, folks.

It seems pretty simple at the outset. The highest Platonic Ideal of anger walks into a bar. So what's the punch line? Well, it would seem (if we follow Thomson's train of thought through the next 28 lines or so, which all readers might not have done, due to skip and dip reading habits in the 18th Century) to be... Something. You got me on this one, Thomson. Anger walks into a bar and then walks right back out again after 28 lines.

Contradictions and Personified abstractions are rife throughout The Seasons; the above quotes are simply two examples taken out of "Spring". The other three sections of the poem are filled with equally contradictory language and personifications, linked together by long list of everything in the world (If you think I'm exaggerating, by all means read the poem. If you get through all of it, good on you! You've read a list of everything in the world.).

Hopefully (although I'm not honestly holding out THAT much hope) you enjoyed these Notes from the Ivory Tower, and if not, we'll be back next time with something a little less dry and dusty. Maybe with more videos too!

Three Henrys

Today's notes from the Ivory Tower are being pulled from two sections: Shakespeare and Film.

Specifically, the three "Big" film adaptations of Shakespeare's Henry V. The history plays are generally less well known than other works, but once it gets out that Loki plays Henry in the newest film adaptation, I rather expect that to change. Henry V... There are some phenomenal speeches for a king in that Play, ranging from Henry's first monologue, declaring hideous war on the French because the Dauphin was a bit of an ass, to "Once More unto the Breach, dear friends", to the speech to the mayor of Harfleur. The big speech for Henry, though, the one where you want to have the audience rising up out of their seats by the end of, is the St. Crispin's Day speech.

The Riverside full text of that speech looks like this:

King: What’s he that wishes so?
My cousin Westmoreland? No, my fair cousin;
If we are mark’d to die, we are enow
To do our country loss; and if to live,
The fewer men, the greater share of honour.
God’s will! I pray thee, wish not one man more.
By Jove, I am not covetous for gold,
Nor care I who doth feed upon my cost;
It yearns me not if men my garments wear;
Such outward things dwell not in my desires.
But if it be a sin to covet honour,
I am the most offending soul alive.
No, faith, my coz, wish not a man from England.
God’s peace! I would not lose so great an honour
As one man more methinks would share from me
For the best hope I have. O, do not wish one more!
Rather proclaim it, Westmoreland, through my host,
That he which hath no stomach to this fight,
Let him depart; his passport shall be made,
And crowns for convoy put into his purse;
We would not die in that man’s company
That fears his fellowship to die with us.
This day is call’d the feast of Crispian.
He that outlives this day, and comes safe home,
Will stand a tip-toe when this day is nam’d,
And rouse him at the name of Crispian.
He that shall live this day, and see old age,
Will yearly on the vigil feast his neighbours,
And say “To-morrow is Saint Crispian.”
Then will he strip his sleeve and show his scars,
And say “These wounds I had on Crispian’s day.”
Old men forget; yet all shall be forgot,
But he’ll remember, with advantages,
What feats he did that day. Then shall our names,
Familiar in his mouth as household words-
Harry the King, Bedford and Exeter,
Warwick and Talbot, Salisbury and Gloucester-
Be in their flowing cups freshly rememb’red.
This story shall the good man teach his son;
And Crispin Crispian shall ne’er go by,
From this day to the ending of the world,
But we in it shall be remembered-
We few, we happy few, we band of brothers;
For he to-day that sheds his blood with me
Shall be my brother; be he ne’er so vile,
This day shall gentle his condition;
And gentlemen in England now-a-bed
Shall think themselves accurs’d they were not here,
And hold their manhoods cheap whiles any speaks
That fought with us upon Saint Crispin’s day.
           -Henry 4.3.18-67

For those of you who didn't read that too closely, you'll be happy to know that Olivier, Branagh and Hiddleston all have relatively uncut film versions of this speech that I'm going to spend some time on here.

First, the one, the only, the terribly done: Laurence Olivier (1944)

I've never understood all the hype that surrounds Laurence Olivier. He's making the classic blunder of using 1930's stage acting techniques on camera in the 1940's during a war. (Incidentally, Henry V is England's premier war play. Whenever they trot out Henry V, something is going down! Although in the case of WWII, they had to REALLY tone down all the slurs about the French. That really wouldn't have been cricket during WWII.) Everything from his stance to the modulation of his pitch and volume to his declaiming hand gestures/poses just screams "my audience is sitting between fifteen and fifty feet away in the same room...better telegraph the hell outta this". This film was meant to be propaganda though- the speech itself is meant to raise the blood of a hopelessly outnumbered army. Can't imagine why that would have gone over well in 1940's England...

Next we have the also one, also only, known for being in a Harry Potter Movie: Kenneth Branagh* (1989)

Here we see a young (and entirely lipless; does that bother anyone else???) Kenneth Branagh rousing his breathtakingly outnumbered army to the twin tunes of Shakespeare's verse and Patrick Doyle's score. The music really helps make this one great, but let's give credit where credit is due: Branagh is moving effortlessly from tactic to tactic, engaging not only his soldiers, but the viewers. You want to go fight the French for him when he's done, although you can see the clear allusions to Olivier's film... right down to the supply wagon from which Henry gives us the final few lines.

And finally, we have the new, the young, the possibly Asgardian: Tom Hiddleston (2012)

 

Ahhh Loki... it's so much easier to be awesome without the Hulk using you as a rag doll, isn't it? In all seriousness though, this performance is intriguing for a couple of reasons. First of all, where the Branagh performance was a clear homage to the Olivier performance, Hiddleston (and of course, director Thea Sharrock; Branagh and Olivier directed their own Henrys) stepped away from the supply wagon. That's fine, the bridge and field in the background are visually pleasing and effective. Where I take issue is in Hiddleston's stepping away from the whole damn army! He is giving this speech on a bridge in front of eight noblemen. These are not the guys you have to have raring to fight right before a battle. They're commanding the field and they can be ransomed safely should the French kick the asses of the English force. The guys you have to be worried about are the foot soldiers. In other words, the guys who are outnumbered five to one, sick, desperate to go home, and the ones who would really cock up a battle if they broke and deserted en masse when the French cavalry start charging.

 

More than that, the text of the speech is referring to a band of brothers. Specifically:

 

"For he to-day that sheds his blood with me
Shall be my brother; be he ne’er so vile,
This day shall gentle his condition;"

 

Henry is talking about the dirt-poor peasants here. He isn't talking about gentling the condition of his nobles, they were born gentle. He is promising (falsely, I might add, Henry is talking out of his nether regions at this point) the peasants that they will be his, as in THE KING'S equal if they stand and fight...and somehow magically live.

 

Henry V is a phenomenal play, one of my favorites. And while I do really dislike Olivier and Branagh is my favorite, bear in mind that Hiddleston's acting is top notch. The choice to make the speech to eight nobles is a directorial choice, so don't toss Loki out of Asgard for it.

 

Hopefully you enjoyed these Notes from the Ivory Tower! Stay tuned for more.

 

*For those of you who are interested in more Branagh acting, a couple of my favorite scenes of his from Much Ado about Nothing are linked here and here.



Spider-speare

After a truly infuriating day at grad school, I'm going to go ahead and write something fun. In this instance, the notes getting pulled from the Ivory Tower are about... Spiderman. And Shakespeare. With a small detour into Carl Jung!

So: your basic Spiderman origin story has a teenage whiz-kid getting bitten by a radioactive spider and somehow getting both great power and great responsibility. Comic Book fans will know this schtick. What interests me, however, is not the origin of a super hero, but the origin of the origin story.

And now for a brief detour to Jung's philosophy on the way myth is translated!

Carl Jung believed that humanity shares a collective unconscious, and a history. It is these two ways that myths, particularly (for this blog) creation myths. A core essence of a creation myth would get passed from people to people, like a massive game of telephone, complete with the hilarious distortions. Except in the case of creation myth telephone, if you miss a detail you fill it in with a cultural value and belief of yours instead of the giant blue doink from Watchmen.

This eventually leads to what we call Universal Archetypes. A Universal Archetype is basically (according to Jung) the collective experiences of humankind, all put into a giant crucible, from which the crap is burned off and the dross comes out as the collective unconscious from which we build archetypes. A good example of this is the Peter Pan complex, which we all know from our various childhoods of either Classic Disney or Spielberg's Hook, depending on how much your parents loved you.

How does this tie into Spiderman and Shakespeare? I'm about to get there.

In Shakespeare's little known Romance (and trust me, I use this word in its loosest possible sense!) "The Winter's Tale", the lunatic king of Sicilia (with whom we shall never go in against when DEATH is on the line!) has a speech in which he... Well, let me let him speak for himself:

There may be in the cup
A spider steep'd, and one may drink; depart,
And yet partake no venom (for his knowledge
Is not infected), but if one present
Th' abhorr'd ingredient to his eye, make known
How he hath drunk, he cracks his gorge, his sides,
With violent hefts. I have drunk, and seen the spider.
                             - Leontes 2.1.39-45

Given 400-ish years of time for this to make its way into the world's collective unconscious, it's clear to see: Leontes drank out of a cup with spidery fluids inside and went off his nut. Peter Parker got bitten by a radioactive spider and got Spidey-sense. Clearly humanity has gotten much nicer in 400 years...At least about spiders driving you insane anyways. Peter Parker gets to defeat bad guys, but Leontes had to watch his wife and son die, plus he had his henchman leave his infant daughter out for the bears. I know which spider I'd rather come into contact with!

Hopefully you enjoyed this set of Notes from the Ivory Tower, next time should be equally as random!