This one was really beautiful. Too big to tackle in just one post, I think. Plus, tomorrow I get 110 rough drafts of critical analysis papers from my students that are probably going to eat up my entire life for the next few days ... so expect to see more on this one.
This was the first section of the "Tales from Ovid" where the metamorphosis part of the story was emotionally surprising. The first character to undergo a bodily change in the tale is Cyane, a nymph.
Cyane bewailed the rape of the goddess
And the violation of her fountain.
She wept over these wrongs
In secret, as if her heart
Were weeping its blood.
Nothing could comfort her.
Gradually, her sorrow
Melted her into the very waters
Of which she had been the goddess.
Her limbs thinned, her bones became pliant,
Her nails softened. Swiftly she vanished
Into flowing water ...
and at last
No longer blood but clear simple water
Flowed through her veins, and her whole body
Became clear simple water. Nothing remained
To hold or kiss but a twisting current of water.
To me, this is chilling, because it is (I think) the first time in the "Tales" that the metamorphosis is not brought upon the character by a god/goddess, but instead is self-imposed. Cyane's sorrow is so great that she voluntarily gives up her nymph form in order to become more united with the expression of her grief (her tears).
In addition, the water/blood imagery is full of possibilities. Water seems to have very heavy implications in Ovid (and in all cultures, actually) - it is necessary for life, but it is also used to eliminate life (the great flood) or to catalyze an erasure of memory (the Lethe). Here, the water also eliminates, but not life or memory exactly - simple all parts of Cyane that were not devoted solely to grieving. As a body of water, she is, in a sense, in a constant state of grief - she has literally drowned herself in tears, and in doing so, erased all parts of herself but the tears.
Her sense of responsibility, that she could not stop Pluto from using her fountain as a conduit to the Underworld, is full to brimming. Such an artful suicide is to be admired and mourned.
Tuesday, April 25, 2006
Monday, April 24, 2006
More Hughes/Ovid
I'm realizing that the myths themselves in this book are far more significant than the poetry, which is the point, of course. Although it is still a significant poetic achievement because the poetry is beautifully crafted to not overtake the power of the myth itself. And, in the best moments, it all aligns. For example, the description of Callisto (after she has been turned into a bear), seeing her son (Arcas) for the first time:
Out of the long grass his mother
Reared upright to face him,
Standing tall to see him better, fearless,
As if she recognised him. She recognised him.
Arcas backed slowly, mouth dry,
Terror, three parts wisdom, staring
Fixedly at the eyes that stared at him.
The fact that the mother is a bear here allows an expression of something that is not usually possible when mother and son are of the same species. Here, the always ultimate DIFFERENCE of a mother from her son, one which every mother tries (often in vain) to shed, is expressed physically. So the slowly-dawning recognition is chilling and touching in that it overcomes and sees through the obvious bodily divide. However, the reason this passage means something to the reader is that he can see in it a truth of every mother-son relationship: the point at which the mother and son realize they are different species, but finally understand the common bit of a soul that will always bind them.
But, as in life, the recognition is a threat as well - to both parties.
Does the line "Terror, three parts wisdom" mean that Arcas feels both terror AND three parts wisdom, or that Arcas feels pure terror, which is comprised of three parts wisdom? I think the latter makes the most sense - true terror is so heinous because it is laced with a truth that would have been better left uncovered.
Out of the long grass his mother
Reared upright to face him,
Standing tall to see him better, fearless,
As if she recognised him. She recognised him.
Arcas backed slowly, mouth dry,
Terror, three parts wisdom, staring
Fixedly at the eyes that stared at him.
The fact that the mother is a bear here allows an expression of something that is not usually possible when mother and son are of the same species. Here, the always ultimate DIFFERENCE of a mother from her son, one which every mother tries (often in vain) to shed, is expressed physically. So the slowly-dawning recognition is chilling and touching in that it overcomes and sees through the obvious bodily divide. However, the reason this passage means something to the reader is that he can see in it a truth of every mother-son relationship: the point at which the mother and son realize they are different species, but finally understand the common bit of a soul that will always bind them.
But, as in life, the recognition is a threat as well - to both parties.
Does the line "Terror, three parts wisdom" mean that Arcas feels both terror AND three parts wisdom, or that Arcas feels pure terror, which is comprised of three parts wisdom? I think the latter makes the most sense - true terror is so heinous because it is laced with a truth that would have been better left uncovered.
Sunday, April 23, 2006
Just started
reading Ted Hughes' "Tales from Ovid." (Yesterday was a small poetry-buying spree - Ted Hughes, Seamus Heaney, and Paul Muldoon.) I'm fascinated by it. I should probably do a little more research on Ovid himself - but from all accounts, Ted Hughes' version is incredibly accurate, so maybe I can kind of cheat and not really read the original source material for now.
I got through the first section - "Creation; Four Ages; Flood; Lycaon." The description of the flood is beautiful - much better than anything you get in the Bible.
Men are rowing in circles aimlessly, crazed,
Where they ploughed straight furrows or steered wagons.
One pitches a sail over corn
Another steers his keel
Over his own chimney.
One catches a fish in the top of an elm.
Anchors drag over grazing
Or get a grip under vine roots.
Where lean goats craned for brown tufts
Fat seals gambol over and under each other.
The nereids roam astounded
Through submerged gardens,
Swim in silent wonder into kitchens,
Touch the eyes of marble busts that gaze
Down long halls, under the wavering light.
Dolphins churn through copses.
Hunting their prey into oak trees, they shake out acorns
That sink slowly.
There is a choatic beauty to the vision that somehow links so relevantly to the state of the world today. Sometimes I wish God WOULD just flood us and get it over with. If he did, though, would we get the message? Or would we be the marble busts, gazing silently and unfazed through the water, assuming that this is just another example of the oddities of life? Perhaps some would turn into busts, and the rest, realizing too late that they had abandoned their faith in God to worship
... the love of gain - a new god
Made out of the shadow
Of all the others. A god who peers
Grinning from the roots of the eye-teeth ...
would end up as Ovid's (and Hughes') humans do:
Drowned mankind, imploring limbs outspread,
Floats like a plague of dead frogs.
I got through the first section - "Creation; Four Ages; Flood; Lycaon." The description of the flood is beautiful - much better than anything you get in the Bible.
Men are rowing in circles aimlessly, crazed,
Where they ploughed straight furrows or steered wagons.
One pitches a sail over corn
Another steers his keel
Over his own chimney.
One catches a fish in the top of an elm.
Anchors drag over grazing
Or get a grip under vine roots.
Where lean goats craned for brown tufts
Fat seals gambol over and under each other.
The nereids roam astounded
Through submerged gardens,
Swim in silent wonder into kitchens,
Touch the eyes of marble busts that gaze
Down long halls, under the wavering light.
Dolphins churn through copses.
Hunting their prey into oak trees, they shake out acorns
That sink slowly.
There is a choatic beauty to the vision that somehow links so relevantly to the state of the world today. Sometimes I wish God WOULD just flood us and get it over with. If he did, though, would we get the message? Or would we be the marble busts, gazing silently and unfazed through the water, assuming that this is just another example of the oddities of life? Perhaps some would turn into busts, and the rest, realizing too late that they had abandoned their faith in God to worship
... the love of gain - a new god
Made out of the shadow
Of all the others. A god who peers
Grinning from the roots of the eye-teeth ...
would end up as Ovid's (and Hughes') humans do:
Drowned mankind, imploring limbs outspread,
Floats like a plague of dead frogs.
Saturday, April 22, 2006
WCW
Just reading through my copy of "The Collected Poems of William Carlos Williams," and ran across this one:
The New Cathedral Overlooking the Park
The new cathedral overlooking the park
looked down from its tower
with great eyes today and saw
by the decorative lake a group of people
staring curiously at the corpse
of a suicide - Peaceful dead young man
the money they have put into the stones
has been spent to teach men of
life's austerity. You died
and teach us the same lesson.
You seem a cathedral, celebrant of
the naked spring that shivers for me
among the long black trees
The first time I read through this I saw the suicide as a jump from the top of the actual cathedral. Re-reading it, that doesn't seem valid any more. But I like the idea anyway. The metaphor of the suicide as a cathedral obviously has troubling religious overtones - and the naked spring and the long black trees seem a reference to the Waste Land-infused society at the time (1923).
Maybe the members of such a communication-poor society had to make an essential choice: be the onlookers, the detached impersonal "group of people / staring curiously," and have absolutely no understanding of the naked spring shivering around you or the eyes of the cathedral looking down at you; be the stoically and blinder-wearing religious men who build the cathedral, trying to teach humanity something abstractly and finding your relationships only with dead stones or an imagined God (one which may not be so imagined, since he may be the identity in the poem observing the scene); or be the suicide, the bearer of a lesson more vivid and horrible and visceral than an actual cathedral could ever be (and perhaps achieve true communication). But has the suicide actually communicated anything, or was it in vain? Who is the poet that understands the "peaceful dead young man['s]" intentions?
The "decorative lake" makes everything that follows seem even more unnecessarily tragic.
The New Cathedral Overlooking the Park
The new cathedral overlooking the park
looked down from its tower
with great eyes today and saw
by the decorative lake a group of people
staring curiously at the corpse
of a suicide - Peaceful dead young man
the money they have put into the stones
has been spent to teach men of
life's austerity. You died
and teach us the same lesson.
You seem a cathedral, celebrant of
the naked spring that shivers for me
among the long black trees
The first time I read through this I saw the suicide as a jump from the top of the actual cathedral. Re-reading it, that doesn't seem valid any more. But I like the idea anyway. The metaphor of the suicide as a cathedral obviously has troubling religious overtones - and the naked spring and the long black trees seem a reference to the Waste Land-infused society at the time (1923).
Maybe the members of such a communication-poor society had to make an essential choice: be the onlookers, the detached impersonal "group of people / staring curiously," and have absolutely no understanding of the naked spring shivering around you or the eyes of the cathedral looking down at you; be the stoically and blinder-wearing religious men who build the cathedral, trying to teach humanity something abstractly and finding your relationships only with dead stones or an imagined God (one which may not be so imagined, since he may be the identity in the poem observing the scene); or be the suicide, the bearer of a lesson more vivid and horrible and visceral than an actual cathedral could ever be (and perhaps achieve true communication). But has the suicide actually communicated anything, or was it in vain? Who is the poet that understands the "peaceful dead young man['s]" intentions?
The "decorative lake" makes everything that follows seem even more unnecessarily tragic.
Friday, April 21, 2006
A little Wallace Stevens to kick things off
Domination of Black
(Wallace Stevens)
At night, by the fire,
The colors of the bushes
And of the fallen leaves,
Repeating themselves,
Turned in the room,
Like the leaves themselves
Turning in the wind.
Yes: but the color of the heavy hemlocks
Came striding.
And I remembered the cry of the peacocks.
The colors of their tails
Were like the leaves themselves
Turning in the wind,
In the twilight wind.
They swept over the room,
Just as they flew from the boughs of the hemlocks
Down to the ground.
I heard them cry -- the peacocks.
Was it a cry against the twilight
Or against the leaves themselves
Turning in the wind,
Turning as the flames
Turned in the fire,
Turning as the tails of the peacocks
Turned in the loud fire,
Loud as the hemlocks
Full of the cry of the peacocks?
Or was it a cry against the hemlocks?
Out of the window,
I saw how the planets gathered
Like the leaves themselves
Turning in the wind.
I saw how the night came,
Came striding like the color of the heavy hemlocks
I felt afraid.
And I remembered the cry of the peacocks.
I figured I would start with something I know and like. And I know this and I like this, and I think it is beautiful in the way that loneliness is beautiful at night. The best part, for me, is "I felt afraid." So unassuming, and yet so powerful.
"The color of the heavy hemlocks / Came striding," is also so deliciously Macbeth of Stevens. There is a kind of otherworldly curse in the sound of a peacock's cry.
Starting Over
So the blog Brian and I were attempting to have together is now, I think, probably dead ... I'm leaving the ashes to him to stoke, and directing my attention towards something a little more focused. I don't consider myself a "blogger," in any sense - just a kind of lost academic who's unfortunately not in school at the moment and needs some forum to continue thinking about literature.
And, specifically, poetry, which I've ignored far too often. So my goal is to post a poem (or excerpt from a book or story) a day, think about it, look at it, and just have it up there in cyber space to go back to if I ever feel the urge.
And, specifically, poetry, which I've ignored far too often. So my goal is to post a poem (or excerpt from a book or story) a day, think about it, look at it, and just have it up there in cyber space to go back to if I ever feel the urge.
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