Recommended Reading: Poetry as Persuasion

Carl Dennis is a professor of English at The State University of New York at Buffalo, and he sometimes teaches students in the creative writing MFA program at Warren Wilson College. In 2001, his book Poetry as Persuasion was published by The University of Georgia Press.

I have a lengthy excerpt (pages 118 to 130) from that book here. The excerpt features extensive commentary on Horace's (Horace: 65 - 8 BC) poem about Cleopatra's defeat by the Romans. Horace's poem, one of many odes he wrote, is the 37th in his first book. The excerpt also includes comments on Robert Lowell's poem "For the Union Dead".

Dennis is interested here in talking about poems that begin one way and then turn and take another direction altogether. In this section of the book, Dennis talks about four such poems. I've included here only the first two of those.

[begin excerpt]
Horace's ode on Octavian's victory over Cleopatra fits what I call a poem of shifting direction because it seems to begin as a joyous public celebration of the triumph of the imperial order and ends in private brooding over the heroic death of Cleopatra:

Now we must drink, comrades,
Now with free steps we must strike the earth,
Now adorn the couch of the gods
With Salian banquets.

It would have been wrong before now
To bring out the Caecuban wine from the ancient storerooms
As long as the crazed queen was plotting the downfall
Of our temple of Jupiter and the end of order,

She with her polluted crowd of men disfigured
By vices, unrestrained in her hopes
And drunk with good fortune.
Bur her fury slackened

When scarcely one of her ships escaped the flames.
And her mind, unsettled by the wine of Egypt,
Was forced to turn to its true terrors
When Caesar, as she fled from Italy,

Pursued her with his galleys. Just as a hawk
Chases a gentle dove, or a swift hunter
Stalks a hare on the plains of snowy Thessaly,
So Caesar followed, eager to put in chain

The deadly monster. But she, seeking a nobler way
To die, neither was frightened, as women are,
By the sword nor made her escape
In a swift ship to hidden shores.

With a face serene she dared to see her palace
Lying in ruins. And, with a stout heart,
She fondled deadly snakes, eager to take
Black venom into her body.

Having resolved on death, she grew more fierce,
Hating, surely, the thought of being borne off,
Deprived of her royal place, on enemy galleys,
For a proud triumph. A woman not to be humbled.


Depiction of Octavius's triumph over Cleopatra at the Battle of Actium. (Getty Images)

The first four stanzas give expression to the poet's joyful relief that he believes all true Romans must share at the death of a dangerous enemy. The joy is especially intense because the enemy is presented as the demonic opposite of all that Rome stands for. Egyptian vice and fury have been vanquished by Roman probity and order. The poet underscores his identification with Roman decorum by insisting on the propriety of the celebration he calls for. What would have been out of place before the victory is now required by the occasion. The singing and dancing are not merely a natural release but a proper expression of gratitude to the gods that have protected Rome, and they are formally opposed to Cleopatra's drunken faith in fickle Fortuna. But in the last half of the poem, as the poet goes on to tell the story of Octavian's victory, the official dichotomies give way to a more personal response to Cleopatra's defeat and death. Though the description of her flight officially labels the queen as a "deadly monster" (fatale monstrum), it unofficially presents her as a pathetic victim, a gentle dove pursued by a hawk, a hare pursued by a hunter. These metaphors from the poet's sympathetic imagination have the effect of making the imperial terms sound crudely inappropriate. And sympathy triumphs in the conclusion as the poet openly admires Cleopatra for her resolute courage in facing death, her overcoming of fears natural to her situation and sex. The poet who began by rejoicing in the triumph of Rome over Egypt as the triumph of virtue over vice now praises Cleopatra for spoiling the final triumph of Octavian. The wild Egyptian escapes Roman humiliation by exercising the kind of proud determination typical of the Roman hero.

It would be a mistake, I think, to interpret the shift of subject and attitude enacted in the poem in subversive terms as an indirect attack on Roman ideals, in which the poet ironically pretends to civic feelings in order to reveal their falseness. One of the striking things about the poem is that whatever qualification it offers of traditional patriotism is made within the terms of Roman culture, not outside them. Praising an enemy of Rome for acting in ways a Roman audience can admire does not so much undermine Roman values as attempt to expand them, to redefine in larger ways what being Roman means. The best justification for the freedom from disorder won by the Roman imperium, the poem implies, will be its providing a safe haven for the exercise of a citizen's individual sympathies, even when this exercise means doing justice to those whom the state cannot afford to tolerate. In enacting this kind of liberal sympathy, Horace is doing here something analogous to what Virgil does in the Aeneid when he allows his narrator to feel far more sympathy with the victims of Rome's founders than his hero can allow himself, sympathizing with Dido as Aeneas hardens himself against her, admiring the pastoral and heroic qualities of Latinus's kingdom that will not survive the triumph of Roman order. Like Virgil's narrator, Horace's speaker, not Octavian or Cleopatra, embodies the highest values of the poem.

Horace's expression of a more liberal model for Roman sympathies involves a wish to liberalize aesthetic attitudes as well, for it joins together two different kinds of poetry, public celebration and private musing, that were traditionally confined to two separate genres. The first part of the poem recalls Pindar's celebration of aristocratic contest and ceremonial reworkings of myth, and in its confident appeal to the poet's comrades (sodales) suggests that the poet sees himself as a master of ceremonies at a public ritual. But how many of his comrades does he presume are still listening when he turns to admire Cleopatra's shaping of her own death? Somewhere between the beginning and the end, the audience may have drifted away. The poet may consider himself to be left with the single listener who is typically addressed in the Odes, the friend with whom the poet shares his observations on what promotes and undermines human happiness. What lies behind Horace's avoidance of the public, laudatory poem seems in part an Epicurean skepticism about the relation between public success and inner peace. The public realm for Horace, for whom the life of the Greek polis or the old Roman Republic is no longer available, is not the sphere in which character is likely to be fully defined or expressed. Its standards of virtue and happiness tend to be superficial. The poet's own attraction to the city of Rome, freely admitted in the Satires, is seen for the most part as an attraction for surfaces, not substance, while his Sabine farm comes to represent not merely a retreat from the pressures of town life but the home of the inner man, of that part of the self that lies deeper than the role assigned him as a citizen. In the ode on Cleopatra, Horace manages to enlarge the notion of citizen in a way that makes the development of private sensibility a crucial ingredient.

Though in harmony with the Odes in general in its questioning of official attitudes, the ode on Cleopatra is atypical in its structure, in its risking disunity by juxtaposing public and private attitudes toward the same subject. Today we may have an easier time appreciating the poem than did Horace's contemporaries, accustomed as we are to much looser notions of poetic unity; and we might be tempted to regard it as an ancestor of the kind of poem in which the poet adopts a number of perspectives with which he may only provisionally identify. But Horace's two views of Cleopatra do not lead to Stevens's five views of November off Tehuantepec. His ode does not attempt to hold its different attitudes in a playful, timeless suspension but to move from one to the other, and in doing so it presumes a more stable notion of the speaking self and its commitments. Yet in its divided structure it reminds us that a single-voiced speaker, ancient or modern, need not be rigid and monolithic. Rather than defend entrenched positions, he may instead choose to explore shifting concerns. In this respect the ode can be seen as an ancestor of a mode of contemporary poetry more common than Stevens's relativistic juxtapositions. The three well-known poems I've chosen as representative of the midcourse correction - Lowell's "For the Union Dead", Bishop's "At the Fishhouses", and C.K. Williams's "From My Window" - are alike in enacting changes that may not be immediately apparent but which in fact involve shifts of perspective not only of subject or mood but of the kind of poem we are reading, of genre.

The speaker's change of direction is perhaps least obvious in "For the Union Dead", which may leave the reader with the impression of the single-minded outrage at the cultural decay of midcentury America. But much of the poem's power comes from its discovering its real purpose only after trial and error. The first five stanzas have little to do with the subject announced in the title. They are more personal than public, and deal with the poet's feelings of separation from nature, not with the relation of American society to its political past:

The old South Boston Aquarium stands
in a Sahara of snow now. Its broken windows are boarded.
The bronze weathervane cod has lost half its scales.
The airy tanks are dry.

Once my nose crawled like a snail on the glass;
ny hand tingled
to burst the bubbles
drifting from the noses of the cowed, compliant fish.

My hand draws back. I often sigh still
for the dark downward and vegetating kingdom
of the fish and reptile. One morning last March,
I pressed against the new barbed and galvanized

fence on the Boston Common. Behind their cage,
yellow dinosaur steamshovels were grunting
as they cropped up tons of mush and grass
to gouge their underworld garage.

Parking spaces luxuriate like civic
sandpiles in the heart of Boston.
A girdle of orange, Puritan - pumpkin colored girders
braces the tingling Statehouse[.]

The abandoned aquarium in South Boston that stirs the poet's recollections isn't presented as a symbol of the city's decline - for all we know the city had good reasons to abondaon it and has built a better one elsewhere - but more as a reservoir of personal associations with the poet's boyhood. Why the boy is fascinated by the "cowed, compliant fish" is left unclear, but we presume he sees aspects of their passive condition within himself. His wish to break their bubbles can be read as a protest against the kinds of civilized restraints he finds himself having to bear. Yet the snail-like crawling of his nose on the glass suggests that the likelihood of his own revolt is small. And the child proves the father of the man. The speaker is even less able as an adult to connect with nature in a positive way. His elegiac "sigh" for the "dark, downward, and vegetating kingdom/of the fish and reptile" is more of a regressive fantasy of self-extinction than a hope for real connection, a fantasy that is mocked by the poet even as he utters it. But besides sighing, no options are considered available. Even the cowed, compliant fish are gone from Boston, leaving in their place grotesque mechanical parodies of nature like the "yellow dinosaur steamshovels" digging a garage under the Common. The poet's alienation seems total, an aesthetic alienation more than a moral one, and taken with his emotional passivity and his self-critical irony, it helps define the speaker as a descendant of Eliot's Prufrock, a little less self-conscious and self-justifying but equally unable to confront the world he lives in.

Unless we can sense the limitations of the passive, ironic voice of the speaker in these opening five stanzas, we are likely to miss the striking transformation that takes place in the next five stanzas, where the poet discovers his true subject, not the estrangement of the city from nature but its estrangement from the best ideals of its own culture, those commemorated by the statue of Colonel Shaw leading his colored troops into battle:

[A girdle of orange, Puritan-pumpkin colored girders
braces the tingling Statehouse,]

shaking over the excavations, as it faces Colonel Shaw
and his bell-cheeked Negro infantry
on St. Gaudens' shaking Civil War relief,
propped by a plank splint against the garage's earthquake.

Two months after marching through Boston,
half the regiment was dead;
at the dedication,
William James could almost hear the bronze Negroes breathe.

Their monument sticks like a fishbone
in the city's throat.
Its Colonel is as lean
as a compass-needle.

He has an angry wrenlike vigilance,
a greyhound's gentle tautness;
he seems to wince at pleasure,
and suffocate for privacy.

He is out of bounds now. He rejoices in man's lovely,
peculiar power to choose life and die -
when he leads his black soldiers to death,
he cannot bend his back.

The sleight of hand here that shifts the focus of the poem from nature to culture is done so casually that we may miss the shift in tone that accompanies it. The theme seems to find the poet, rather than the poet finding his theme. The decay of the aquarium has led him by contrast to think of the building he saw last March on the Boston Common, and the description of the statehouse leads by mere physical contiguity to the statue, which the poet then seems to seize on as a way to move from one mode of discourse to another, from ironic complaint to direct attack. This movement seems much less inevitable than the movement made by Horace's poet from triumph to pity, but the change is just as radical. If the poet has participated in the estrangement of the city from nature, he refuses to participate in its estrangement from its own past. He knows what the statue was intended to commemorate and feels keenly how the idealism that led Shaw to his death has been abandoned by a city indifferent to any but commercial values. The deeper emotional engagement of the speaker's imagination, and the power that accompanies it, is signaled in part by his newfound ability to make use of images from nature to help define cultural values. The realm of nature, toward which he can muster only self-mocking sighing in the first five stanzas, now becomes available to him as a resource for figures to difine Shaw's moral superiority. The "fishbone" monument that the city can't swallow, the soldier's "wrenlike vigilance" and greyhound's "tautness" help define Shaw not as the product of a culture but as a model for the culture, outside its bounds in asserting the particularly human "power to chose life and die."

The shift of subject and attitude from that of the first five stanzas to that of the second constitutes a shift of genre, a turn from a private poem that is elegiac in tone to a public poem that is essentially satiric. And if Lowell's self-mocking lament has no single model behind it, the satire seems to be directly inspired by Juvenal. Just as Juvenal regards the corruption of imperial Rome as a betrayal of the best ideals of the Republic, so the speaker of Lowell's poem regards contemporary Boston as a betrayal of the heroic possibilities Shaw embodies. But Lowell's speaker is more aware than Juvenal's of the dangers of idealizing historical epochs. He does not want his penchant for trying to escape the present, displayed in personal terms in the opening of the poem, to take political form. He knows that rather than withdrawing into a past that is safely remote he needs to use the past to illuminate the problems of the moment. This is the issue he explores in the next five stanzas:

On a thousand small New England greens,
the old white churches hold their air
of sparse, sincere rebellion; frayed flags
quilt the graveyards of the Grand Army of the Republic.

The stone statues of the abstract Union Soldier
grow slimmer and younger each year -
wasp-waisted, they doze over muskets
and muse through their sideburns . . .

Shaw's father wanted no monument
except the ditch,
where his son's body was thrown
and lost with his "nigger."

The ditch is nearer.
There are no statues for the last war here;
on Boylston Street, a commercial photograph
shows Hiroshima boiling

over a Mosler Safe, the "Rock of Ages"
that survived the blast. Space is nearer.
When I crouch to my television set,
the drained faces of Negro school-children rise like balloons.

The poet is not alone in appreciating the values that the statue embodies. At least in the small New England villages citizens make a genuine effort to keep the past alive, but their collective memory seems to grow increasingly removed from the bloody issues of the Civil War, so that the memorials grow irrelevant to the life of the moment. The danger of divorcing heroism from the ugliness of its context is presumably what prompts Shaw's father to think of the pit where Shaw and his men are buried as the best monument, a monument that would prevent the horrors of war from being forgotten. The kind of failure of historical memory that the wish anticipates is in fact borne out in contemporary Boston, where the men who died in even more brutal and more recent wars receive no monument and America's most indiscriminate wartime killing, the bombing of Hiroshima, is present only as an image in an advertisement for Mosler safes. In such a society all that the poet can do is record the triumph of everything that Shaw and his memorial try to resist. Crouched in front of the images of Negro children, he is a witness to the fact that the Civil War has yet to be won, that the slaves Shaw fought to free are still not citizens.

In his lack of power here, the poet may remind us of the speaker in the first part of the poem, and the image of the balloonlike faces of the children seems to recall the bubbles of the caged fish that fascinated the speaker when he was a boy. But the differences are more important than the likenesses. The fish in the glass case represent a pathetic attempt of the culture to maintain a connection with nature, but the faces on the television screen represent the culture's refusal to regard its own children as its members. The speaker in the first part of the poem daydreams of leaving behind a culture he can't connect to. The speaker of the last part builds in his satire a cultural monument that places idealism about a better order in the midst of the "pit" that denies it. At the end of the poem, the poet is as isolated as he was at the beginning, but now the isolation is not that of someone too delicate for the modern, industrial world but rather the kind that Juvenal enacts in his satires, that of a moral man who harbors no illusions about his power to arrest society's decline. The only companion for Lowell's poet at the end is the statue of Shaw itself, which seems to be endowed in the penultimate stanza with the power to feel its own irrelevance:

Colonel Shaw
is riding on his bubble,
he waits
for the blessed break.

Tired of riding the bubble of hope that his sacrifice might one day be embodied in social change, Shaw is ready to be released from the barren present. All that the speaker can do is remind himself what the statue should mean, to get beyond the idealizing of the past to a deeper awareness of beleaguered values, and to scorn a world that can't respond to them. In this project the poem is successful. It may be no more effective in correcting contemporary America than Juvenal's satire is in correcting Rome, but it does finally express the poet's power to name and condemn the tawdriness around him:

The Aquarium is gone. Everywhere,
giant finned cars nose forward like fish;
a savage servility
slides by on grease.

Against the savage servility of the culture, the poet, who begins his poem in nostalgic drift, affirms the force of savage indignation. And the power of his summation is underscored by the final use he makes of images from nature. The fish that he has associated in the opening with his own psychological passivity are now used as figures for the moral servility of the culture as a whole. Even as the poet describes the triumph of the less than human, his language enacts his authority to uphold countervailing human values.

"For the Union Dead" reverses the plot of Horace's ode by moving from the private realm to the public rather than from the public to the private. In both cases, however, the shift involves a critique of the social order, Horace's implied by his expansion of sympathy from Roman winners to foreign losers, Lowell's made directly as he attacks a society that has forgotten its ideals. ...
[end excerpt]

Poetry can help us understand ourselves in ways that history, for example, cannot.

The Captain and the Reader

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Lighthouse
by Jane Hirshfield

Its vision sweeps its one path
like an aged monk raking a garden,
his question long ago answered or moved on.
Far off, night-grazing horses,
breath scented with oat grass and fennel,
step through it, disappear, step through it, disappear.

The Captain and the Reader

by Andrew Christ

[submitted as partial fulfillment of the requirements of application to Warren Wilson College MFA, March 2009]

The effect of the poem “Lighthouse” by Jane Hirshfield is to create in the reader a sophisticated sense of friendship toward humanity. In this paper, I will show that, by focusing the reader's attention on the lighthouse, the poet expects the reader to figure out the extent to which the monk is similar to the lighthouse. I will also show that, by not mentioning the sea captain in the poem, the poet has deliberately attenuated the didactic tone of the poem. I will explain how the poet creates the complicated effect by asking the reader to take into account how the poet sets the scene of the poem.

With “Lighthouse,” Hirshfield puts her readers in a field with a lighthouse at night. There may be danger nearby – a cliff, a rocky coast. It is perhaps safer for the captains of the ships at sea than it is for us as we are in the dark and near the shore. The captains can benefit more easily from the lighthouse and its beam of light than we can. But this is a calm night – horses graze within sight on oats and fennel grass. The horses may be wild, but perhaps it is a domestic scene.

Hirshfield intends the poem to have an impersonal feel: it neither addresses the reader directly nor introduces a speaking “I”. The “night-grazing” horses are “far off”, but we know that their breath smells of “oat grass and fennel”. Do we know this because we have spent some time there and are familiar with the scene? Perhaps, but I don't think that's the likely interpretation. There is no person in the poem, only an imagined monk. A lighthouse, the cynosure of the poem, is built with the purpose of aiding anyone at sea in an impersonal, useful, responsible and perhaps generous way. From what we have in the poem, we don't know if any captain at sea is benefitting from the light from the lighthouse. In the last line, the poet returns the reader's attention to the light from the lighthouse. The horses “step through it, disappear, step through it, disappear.” where “it” is the light from the lighthouse. The reader is focused therefore on the lighthouse and on the light it casts out at night, not on anyone's familiarity or unfamiliarity with the scene.

Hirshfield further focues the reader's attention by using a similie to compare the lighthouse to an imagined monk. The monk is not raking in a garden near the base of the lighthouse. He is raking in a garden, and he may be at home; he is probably feeling comfortable and secure, but from what we have in the poem the monk's life doesn't have anything to do with the lighthouse mentioned in the poem. The comparison is purposeful: the reader is given to understand that a monk can be to an intelligent, imaginative reader what a lighthouse can be to a sea captain.

The extent to which the monk and the lighthouse are similar is left for readers to decide. The light – extended, constant, circling, in the dark, a guide to safety – is like an elderly monk who works in a garden with a rake, “his question long ago answered or moved on.” The monk has practiced his discipline for years. He found his question and learned how to deal with it. He sometimes works in a garden with a rake. Because Buddhist monks are known to work in gardens and to work with a rake in gardens, it is likely that the monk in this poem is a Buddhist monk. Because he is Buddhist, the monk believes in reincarnation. Buddhists speak of living life after life as a series of cyclical experiences. The Buddhist's goal however is not to adjust to the repetition of living but to attain enlightenment and thereby to stop the cycle of rebirth. To not attain enlightenment means to continue being reborn, living and dying just as the light in the lighthouse continues to beam out so reliably as it circles through its one path. Because he has accepted his life in Buddhism, the monk is committed to one way of living – of responding to experience, just as the lighthouse is fixed in its activity.

The consistency and the intensity of the beam of light is only part of what makes the lighthouse a reliable aid. If captains did not have training in navigation and failed to pay attention to the tides and other current conditions, the benefit of the lighthouse would be lost. By engaging their discipline and by using the information available from various sources including the lighthouse, the captains can avoid hazards and find instead safe harbor. Likewise the reader, to make much sense of the poem, must bring to the poem some knowledge of lighthouses, monks, Buddhism and sailing, and must pay attention to how the lighthouse and the monk are depicted.

The poem's created effect on the reader of a sophisticated sense of friendship toward humanity is achieved when one makes the inference that a reader of this poem stands in relation to a monk in the same way a sea captain stands in relation to a lighthouse. It is important that a reader not infer that one stands in relation to this poem as a captain stands in relation to a lighthouse. The poet is not saying anything like, “I am a monk.” or “Be my disciple.” Because the monk is an imagined monk who doesn't speak in the poem and because the sea captain is not mentioned in the poem, one can conclude that Hirshfield intends for the didactic tone of this poem to be an attenuated one. There is nothing like the message, “You should study with a Buddhist monk.” in these lines. Nevertheless, the poet has implied that any reader of “Lighthouse” may benefit by having a relationship with an experienced monk in which one regards the monk as a lighthouse and one regards oneself as the captain of a ship at night. To make such a deliberate and generous, if oblique, suggestion can only inspire a sense of friendship toward humanity in one who receives that suggestion.

Follow-up: The folks at Warren Wilson selected other applicants for the few seats they have for students. Subsequently, I learned that there was a problem with my FAFSA which is another requirement for application to the Warren Wilson MFA. Whether the FAFSA had anything to do with me not being selected, I don't know. Warren Wilson doesn't comment on rejections.

Humor, Satire and Criticism

At Suite 101, an article by Cicely A. Richard explains satire as a literary device capable of enriching readers' understanding of the foibles inherent in the prevailing views of their time:

In the poem "Don Juan," George Gordon Lord Byron deviated from the common perception of the notorious lover, Don Juan, and paints him as a man on whom women prey. Additionally, he takes a satiric look at politics and the arts of his time. In this poem, Byron illustrates the effectiveness of satire as a literary device.

...

Satire is an effective way to enlighten people about things that may otherwise be taken for granted. It is successful because the humor makes people take a lighter look at serious matters. So, when others finish absorbing the words of the satirist, they begin to think about the information presented to them. For that reason, Byron's use of satire is instrumental the success of "Don Juan."

Read more: "George Gordon Lord Byron's "Don Juan": Byron's Use of Satire and Political Commentary" - http://british-poetry.suite101.com/article.cfm/don_juan_by_george_gordon_lord_byron#ixzz0ES2xWBUP&A

Popular contemporary examples of satire include the TV shows "The Simpsons", "South Park" and "The Daily Show" which is actually more of a parody of TV news that includes satirical bits now and then.

Another example of satire in British poetry comes to us by way of John Dryden in his poem "Mac Flecknoe". Flecknoe, a fictional ruler whose kingdom enjoyed many years of peace, now must choose from among his many sons one to succeed him. He decides upon Shadwell:

And pond'ring which of all his sons was fit
To reign, and wage immortal war with wit;
Cry'd, 'tis resolv'd; for nature pleads that he
Should only rule, who most resembles me:
Shadwell alone my perfect image bears,
Mature in dullness from his tender years.
Shadwell alone, of all my sons, is he
Who stands confirm'd in full stupidity.
The rest to some faint meaning make pretence,
But Shadwell never deviates into sense.
Some beams of wit on other souls may fall,
Strike through and make a lucid interval;
But Shadwell's genuine night admits no ray,
His rising fogs prevail upon the day:
Besides his goodly fabric fills the eye,
And seems design'd for thoughtless majesty:
Thoughtless as monarch oaks, that shade the plain,
And, spread in solemn state, supinely reign.

from http://www.emule.com/poetry/?page=poem&poem=649 accessed 3 May 2009

The satire appears when the reader realizes Mac Flecknoe is John Dryden and Shadwell is Thomas Shadwell, the poet who succeeded Dryden as Britain's Poet Laureate.

Eye of the Beholder

I'm sure you've heard the expression "Beauty is in the eye of the beholder." Beauty, yes. And so much more. I think meaning is in the eye of the beholder. Nowadays, poets such as Ted Kooser, Billy Collins, Mary Oliver and others prefer to consider and portray ordinary experiences and ordinary things in their poems in extraordinary ways. For instance, here is a poem by Ted Kooser titled "Tattoo":

TATTOO

What once was meant to be a statement—
a dripping dagger held in the fist
of a shuddering heart—is now just a bruise
on a bony old shoulder, the spot
where vanity once punched him hard
and the ache lingered on. He looks like
someone you had to reckon with,
strong as a stallion, fast and ornery,
but on this chilly morning, as he walks
between the tables at a yard sale
with the sleeves of his tight black T-shirt
rolled up to show us who he was,
he is only another old man, picking up
broken tools and putting them back,
his heart gone soft and blue with stories.

Or consider this splendid little gem by Billy Collins:

Some Days
Some days I put the people in their places at the table, bend their legs at the knees, if they come with that feature, and fix them into the tiny wooden chairs. All afternoon they face one another, the man in the brown suit, the woman in the blue dress, perfectly motionless, perfectly behaved. But other days, I am the one who is lifted up by the ribs, then lowered into the dining room of a dollhouse to sit with the others at the long table. Very funny, but how would you like it if you never knew from one day to the next if you were going to spend it striding around like a vivid god, your shoulders in the clouds, or sitting down there amidst the wallpaper, staring straight ahead with your little plastic face?

Poetry is so great, isn't it? Here's one more. This one's by Mary Oliver:

Breakage

I go down to the edge of the sea.

How everything shines in the morning light!

The cusp of the whelk,

the broken cupboard of the clam,

the opened, blue mussels,

moon snails, pale pink and barnacle scarred—

and nothing at all whole or shut, but tattered, split,

dropped by the gulls onto the gray rocks and all the moisture gone.

It's like a schoolhouse

of little words,

thousands of words.

First you figure out what each one means by itself,

the jingle, the periwinkle, the scallop

full of moonlight.

Then you begin, slowly, to read the whole story.

Such eyes they have. Such capacity to see beauty. And how nice of them to take the time to put their vision into such clever little things for us.

Of course, beauty may be other than what is easy to observe. For instance, the 1980 U.S. Olympic hockey team. It's been nearly 30 years since they've been on TV. But, if you watch the 2004 Disney production titled "Miracle", you may see beauty in the determination of the coach to prepare the team to beat the Soviets who had dominated Olympic hockey since the 60s.

Or consider the justices of the Supreme Court of the United States. Initially, the Court was weak when compared to Congress and the President. The Justices first met in an official capacity early in 1790, and it wasn't until 1792 that they heard and decided their first case. Until 1801 or so, Congress and the President had nothing to fear when it came to having limits imposed on their powers by the judicial branch. That changed after President John Adams appointed John Marshall to the position of Chief Justice in 1801. At least one judicial scholar regards Marshall as the Babe Ruth of Supreme Court justices. No other Chief Justice has served longer than Marshall's 34 years. During his tenure, the U.S. Supreme Court became much stronger than it had been - some would even say that today it is the strongest branch of U.S. government - chiefly by claiming for itself the powers to A) interpret the Constitution and B) determine the constitutionality of laws passed by the U.S. Congress and by the state legislatures. I think there is great beauty in the growth of power seen in the history of the U.S. Supreme Court. I think this beauty constitutes reason for existentialists, among others, to rejoice: men are capable of living within legal limits imposed by themselves.
I've got to change the subject a bit before I begin to sound too naive or optimistic. Who trusts an optimist? Anyway, in recent decades, some people regard the American experiment to be in its death throes. Men seek office not to serve a constituency but to see if they can achieve their vision or some portion of it. Such men want to win at any cost. Of course, when they embrace such an ambition they have already lost themselves. They are then in the service of an ideal they neither created nor control, perhaps confusing their commitment with that of a happy, successful marriage. In addition, some people regard the so-called "fourth estate" - the media - as impotent, toothless, incapable of effecting any meaningful change. I beg to differ.
The way I see it, the media create for citizens something like George Orwell's "Big Brother"; however, the ones being monitored are not the general population but the people elected and appointed to office. I mean, people in Czechoslovakia, for instance, could not believe it when "Dr. Strangelove" was produced and shown in the U.S. Likewise, what a tribute to the media that A) the Watergate break-in could be exposed and that B) David Frost could interview President Nixon and ascertain for viewers everywhere the arrogance that otherwise may have escaped history books. Fast-forward to 16 October 2007 when the PBS series "Frontline" aired an episode titled "Cheney's Law" and featured the Vice-President's collusion with attorneys. According to the program, Cheney wanted to restore to the Presidency what he saw as the beautiful, dignified importance of the power of the office of the President of the United States which, according to Cheney, had been lost after Nixon's resignation. Viewers need not have a law degree or pass the bar exam to recognize arrogance.
By keeping your heart and mind open, you can find beauty all around you.

Simic and Sudoku

Sometime in the mid 90s, my friend Al Hellus - God rest his soul - told me about Charles Simic. On Al's recommendation, I read Simic's Pulitzer Prize-winning (prose) poems in The World Doesn't End. I was blown away. I thought they were great. I'd never read poems that twisted logic to its own ends like that before.

Since then, I've talked to other poets who say of these poems that they "don't get them". I understand that because, the first time - at least the first time - I read the poems, I often didn't know what to make of them either. More than half of the poems are untitled. Clearly though, the poems feature recurring atmospheric elements such as life after wartime, barking dogs, poverty and an overhanging sense of a distant governing authority that may use force to obtain the cooperation of the governed. Occasionally a poem will allude somehow to art and/or literature.

More recently I read the 51 poems in Simic's book of poems (2005, Harcourt) titled my noiseless entourage. In these poems, Simic continues to twist logic according to the needs of his poems. Gone, however, are the atmospheric elements of life after wartime, barking dogs, poverty and the sense of a ruling stultifying political power. And each poem has a title.

To Simic's would-be readers who "don't get" his poems, I recommend reading my noiseless entourage before The World Doesn't End. Here is the initial poem of my noiseless entourage:

Description of a Lost Thing
by Charles Simic

It never had a name,
Nor do I remember how I found it.
I carried it in my pocket
Like a lost button
Except it wasn't a button.

Horror movies,
All-night cafeterias,
Dark barrooms
And poolhalls,
On rain-slicked streets.

It led a quiet, unremarkable existence
Like a shadow in a dream,
An angel on a pin,
And then it vanished.
The years passed with their row

Of nameless stations,
Till somebody told me this is it!
And fool that I was,
I got off on an empty platform
With no town in sight.

Now, what if, instead of going after the meaning of this poem with hammer and tongs, we use instead our powers of inference, conjecture and surmise? Our initial inference is likely to be that the lost thing is small enough to fit in his pocket. Because I've read enough poems by Simic, my conjecture at the end of the first stanza is that the poem is not going to tell me what the lost thing is. But I see at that point that three stanzas remain. As I continue reading, I keep an eye open for what else might be going on, since the lost thing is probably not going to matter much to this poem. Immediately (2nd stanza) the reader is given several places where the lost thing was taken as a matter of course, being part or parcel of the speaker. Then (3rd stanza) we learn that the lost thing did not draw attention to itself but was small and quiet. The poem ends (4th stanza) by telling how life has been for the one who lost the thing and does not mention any more the lost thing.

We can surmise a generosity on the part of the speaker of the poem. At some point, the speaker took the time to notice a seemingly insignificant thing which was then kept for some time in a pocket. Although the thing was small and quiet, the speaker remembers it and composes this poem on its behalf. We can also surmise a sense of humility on the part of the speaker. When "somebody" tells him "this is it!" he disembarks onto "an empty platform/With no town in sight." Because of this, he regards himself as foolish. But we know he isn't stupid by the way he talks about the years passing as a ride on a train. It is neither similie nor metaphor. We might call it surrealism. In Simic's poetry, there's a lot more where that came from.

If you enjoy solving Sudoku puzzles, I'm sure you've noticed that inference, conjecture and surmise are also useful for solving those puzzles. In my writing here, I haven't included any wrong inferences, conjectures or surmises I made while reading "Description of a Lost Thing". That doesn't mean I didn't make any. Part of the fun of reading Simic's poems is figuring out what's important and what isn't so important. As with Sudoku, sometimes one has to erase incorrect interpretations of Simic poems before arriving at a satisfying understanding.

What is Poetry?

I didn't think anyone else could be more enthused for poetry than I am, but I may have met my match in Charles Ghigna. He teaches kids how to understand and write poems. A brief introduction to poetry that Charles wrote is online at the Poetry Teachers website. Here is an excerpt from that introduction - which he titled "What Is Poetry?":

Poetry is a natural part of our lives. It's not just something we have to memorize and recite in front of the class. Losing ourselves in a poem is one of the best ways of finding out who we are. The act of writing brings us to that point of discovery, of discovering on the page something we didn't know we knew until we wrote it.

Read the full introduction at the Poetry Teachers website.

Toward the end of his introduction, Charles included a few poems of his own to illustrate ballad stanzas. Here is one of them:

A POEM IS A LITTLE PATH

A poem is a little path
That leads you through the trees.
It takes you to the cliffs and shores,
To anywhere you please.

Follow it and trust your way
With mind and heart as one,
And when the journey's over,
You'll find you've just begun.

Find out more about Charles Ghigna at his website.

In your poetry reading, I wish you A) happy trails and B) many happy returns!

Coffee at Home

One of my favorite poets, William Stafford, wrote a poem called "A Day at Home". Here it is:

A Day at Home
by William Stafford

On the near pine rain hangs
the way I suppose it hangs
on the far.

Being yourself, you are always
on time - right where your kind
of person should be.

Why not wait here while the rest
of the world happens? It is better as
history than it is as news.

The dog, his head on the coffee table,
gazes tranquilly, resting his chin
on a volume of Martin Buber.


I especially like the rhetorical question - "Why not wait here while the rest/of the world happens?" and then what seems like an offhand remark: "It is better as/history than it is as news." And perhaps it is meant to be taken as a casual, offhand remark. Off course, in poetry, what seems like an offhand remark makes our ears perk up.

If you are willing to wait "while the rest of the world happens", consider what that reveals about you. It means you are willing to take yourself out of the picture, so to speak. It means that you are willing to consider whether the world is better as history or as news.

The rhetorical question and the offhand remark constitute nothing less than an invitation to an intellectual discussion. But there's more: the last stanza illustrates animal nature at ease with profundities such as those available in the writings of Martin Buber (1878 - 1965), a Jew so highly respected that the Nazis did not kill him - a fact that becomes especially interesting when you consider that Buber was known for his "philosophical dialogue". He believed in an apolitical Zionism. Even more, he believed in Hasidism.

I prefer here to focus on Stafford's poetics rather than on issues we may or may not be able to find in Stafford's poems. Consider, in contrast to the hospitality of "A Day at Home", the fiercely private posturing in the often-anthologized "Ask Me":

Ask Me
by William Stafford

Some time when the river is ice ask me
mistakes I have made. Ask me whether
what I have done is my life. Others
have come in their slow way into
my thought, and some have tried to help
or to hurt: ask me what difference
their strongest love or hate has made.
I will listen to what you say.
You and I can turn and look
at the silent river and wait. We know
the current is there, hidden; and there
are comings and goings from miles away
that hold the stillness exactly before us.
What the river says, that is what I say.

What seems at first an entirely cold facade turns out to be a very nice (i.e., thoughtful and engaging) way of saying "wait and see".

In the spirit of hospitality, I offer the reader the following poem by Derek Walcott and also a series of pictures I took at home the other day.

Love After Love
by Derek Walcott

The time will come
when, with elation
you will greet yourself arriving
at your own door, in your own mirror
and each will smile at the other's welcome,

and say, sit here. Eat.
You will love again the stranger who was your self.
Give wine. Give bread. Give back your heart
to itself, to the stranger who has loved you

all your life, whom you ignored
for another, who knows you by heart.
Take down the love letters from the bookshelf,

the photographs, the desperate notes,
peel your own image from the mirror.
Sit. Feast on your life.

"It is our goal to appreciate and improve our talents, to share our own work and to communicate the joys of poetry with others. Everyone's poetry is valued."
River Junction Poets Mission Statement

Reading writing ... equals literacy

The recent article I wrote on my blog, Our Educational System, spurred me on to re-examine how this system affects our young students and their skills. As a social worker who worked in our system in public high schools with teens from 13 to 21 years old for 16 years and then worked with pre-k children for another 5 years, I’d like to share what I learned about our children and their skills. This necessitates a comparison.
Back when I was in school we had five classes per grade, beginning with the number 1 class and proceeding to the number 5 class. Thus, there was 1-1, 2-1 etc. Logically speaking one would have thought that the 5 class would have been the slowest and the number 1 would have been the fast learners, however in my school, the 1 class was the “quick learners” and the number 2 class was the "health education class," which included wheelchair bound children and very slow learners. What really was strange was that everyone knew how to read albeit some read more slowly than others. Also everyone eventually learned to write as well. The slower learners weren’t as good with grammar and spelling and for many of the slower learners, spelling and grammar problems remained. I was always in the number 1 class as I was very precocious and generally learned anything to do with reading or writing very fast. My deficits were about where things are, so maps and map memorization was a problem for me. There were always more than 30 children in each class. In those days, my neighborhood, Washington Heights, (now called Hudson Heights by all the realtors) had many foreigners.
The difference is that they were from many places, not like now when there are a handful of Russians and mostly Dominicans. There was a great influx of Puerto Ricans and Greeks to my area, and people from Russia and other Slavic nations (the nations now have since changed names). From the time when I was very young, all my teachers complained that I couldn’t keep quiet. Any foreigner was seated next to me and usually learned English quickly as I would share my notes and help them. This situation also seems unique now.
The first 5 years I worked with pregnant teens in high schools, I learned that over half of our students could not write a proper sentence. About half could write within two years of their grade level. About another quarter could write with many spelling and grammatical errors but the words would make sense. And the last quarter or 20% could not logically string one sentence to the next to write a cohesive paragraph on any given subject matter – even on one they know about. For example, if they were asked to write a paragraph on who is their favorite rapper and why, only half of them could do this successfully.
I was dismayed to observe how poor their writing, reading and comprehension skills were. Teenagers 15 years old were writing at what I judged to be a second or third grade level. At this time, some of the high schools I worked at tried to get around this issue by teaching their youngsters to think and to argue out a point verbally. The principals applied for waivers from the state so the children could do a series of oral defenses and speeches instead of taking regents, where they learned to argue a thesis from beginning to end. I was impressed by what I saw but still, again, there was at least 40% who could not keep up to the regiment or structure and this was in spite of the judges trying hard to be very lenient. I wondered why our society had changed this much from the time I was a teen to now and I still don’t have an answer.
I have met writers too who are good writers, and they cannot spell and don’t know proper grammar. Professional agents and book companies have told me, that they feel basic academic writing skill is unnecessary and unimportant. They say, what is important is that the person write well or rhyme well. I can round this out by adding that they will further say that's why they hire someone like me to do the editing and clean it up. And the weird thing here is that I know how to make street lit sound street lit enough and put in enough modernisms to make it a go on both sides too. White people and everyone else in the public schools now write Ebonics if they write at all. Proper writing is a dying skill today.
A few years back, a young man was sent to me from 9th grade. I was told to find out how he had gotten to this grade and couldn’t read or write at all. I did as I was told and apparently, he was such a sweet personality, that no one had paid attention to the fact that he couldn’t read an entire sentence. Even when given a children’s book for 5 to 7 year olds, he could barely read any of the words. OK, I admit this is unusual, but not as unusual as it seems. I have also met special education students who could barely write, but who could spout beautiful rhymes instantaneously apparently effortlessly as well.
I grew up without a television. Our radio broke when I was about 6 and wasn’t replaced for a few years. Books was my only entertainment, without which, I would have suffered even more than I did. As I tell everyone, my childhood was fraught with anxiety and despair. My mother was diagnosed with cancer when I was a few months old and the first year of my life welfare sent a series of caregivers to care for us so my dad could go to work. My mom was in hospital for about 6 months. We were have-nots in every way. I had two dolls which I had been given after I’d turned 6. I washed my own clothes and ironed them at 7 years old. Sorry, I wish I knew what childhood meant. One sister liked to play teacher and I learned to read and write to please her originally. I was reading and writing at 4 years old. I read and wrote for love.
Obviously I have no idea where this dilemma of our literacy is headed but one place it is headed is to put the entire onus for literacy on the teachers in the way of statistics like I described in the previous article. I also think that perhaps our society is going to return to a previous age when letter writers got paid and people got paid to read to others too. In the middle ages there was a particular class of people that were paid to perform this service for the general populace. Hey if I live long enough I can be one of those people. I urge you to talk to our teachers about this, talk to each other – you’ll see I’m not exaggerating.

Also check out this fascinating stuff:
John Taylor Gatto and his official website


"It is our goal to appreciate and improve our talents, to share our own work and to communicate the joys of poetry with others. Everyone's poetry is valued."
River Junction Poets Mission Statement

William Wordsworth Study Questions

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Penguin Editions has a nice volume of Wordsworth's Selected Poems that includes a twenty-page introduction, notes to poems and an index. I didn't know how important Plato's idea of pre-existence was to Wordsworth until I read about him and his poetry. I also didn't know about his skill with linguistics and rhetoric until I read about him and his poetry. Here is a brief selection of his most-anthologized poems along with a few questions to help get discussion started. We used some of this in our meeting last night.

I WANDERED LONELY AS A CLOUD

I wandered lonely as a cloud
That floats on high o'er vales and hills,
When all at once I saw a crowd,
A host of golden daffodils;
Beside the lake, beneath the trees,
Fluttering and dancing in the breeze.

Continuous as the stars that shine
and twinkle on the Milky Way,
They stretched in never-ending line
along the margin of a bay:
Ten thousand saw I at a glance,
tossing their heads in sprightly dance.

The waves beside them danced; but they
Out-did the sparkling waves in glee:
A poet could not but be gay,
in such a jocund company:
I gazed - and gazed - but little thought
what wealth the show to me had brought:

For oft, when on my couch I lie
In vacant or in pensive mood,
They flash upon that inward eye
Which is the bliss of solitude;
And then my heart with pleasure fills,
And dances with the daffodils.

• What role, if any, does memory play in this poem?
• How does Wordsworth's "poetry of nature" in this poem transform itself into the "poetry of self-consciousness"?

The following is excerpted from Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lucy_Gray

Lucy Gray is not one of Wordsworth's “Lucy” poems, even though it is a poem that mentions a character named Lucy. The poem is excluded from the series because the traditional "Lucy" poems are uncertain about the age of Lucy and her actual relationship with the narrator, and Lucy Gray provides exact details on both. Furthermore, the poem is different than the "Lucy" poems in that it relies on narrative storytelling and is a direct imitation of the traditional 18th century ballad form.

The narrator begins the poem by stating:

Oft I had heard of Lucy Gray:

And, when I crossed the wild,

I chanced to see at break of day

The solitary child. (lines 1–4)

She may be, as the narrator claims, the "sweetest thing that ever grew" (line 6), but she is dead, as the narrator explains:

But the sweet face of Lucy Gray

Will never more be seen. (lines 11–12)

The narrator transitions to say that she was told to "take a lantern, Child, to light/Your mother through the snow" (lines 15–16), to which she agrees. She left, and

The storm came on before its time:

She wandered up and down;

And many a hill did Lucy climb:

But never reached the town. (lines 29–32)

Her parents attempted to search for her, and

At day-break on a hill they stood

That overlooked the moor;

And thence they saw the bridge of wood,

A furlong from their door.

They wept—and, turning homeward, cried,

"In heaven we all shall meet;"

—When in the snow the mother spied

The print of Lucy's feet. (lines 37–44)

They followed the footprints throughout the area,

And to the bridge they came.

They followed from the snowy bank

Those footmarks, one by one,

Into the middle of the plank;

And further there were none! (lines 52–56)

Although she is probably dead, the narrator explains that her spirit, according to superstition, can still be seen:

—Yet some maintain that to this day

She is a living child;

That you may see sweet Lucy Gray

Upon the lonesome wild.

O'er rough and smooth she trips along,

And never looks behind;

And sings a solitary song

That whistles in the wind. (lines 57–64)

• What role, if any, does memory play in this poem? Compare to “I Wandered...”
• Why is it important to Wordsworth's speaker that Lucy is solitary? What is the value of solitariness?

Questions for discussion of “A Few Lines Composed above Tintern Abbey”

• See line 40 - why has the world become "unintelligible" to the speaker? What has happened to him over time?
• What is the difference between the pleasure the speaker took in nature as a child and the pleasure he draws from it now? What does the poet gain from his reflections on the past?
• What is the role of "affective memory" in "Tintern Abbey"? How, in other words, does this kind of memory help Wordsworth's lyric speaker first to recognize his problem and then to resolve it?

The following is excerpted from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intimations_of_immortality_from_recollections_of_early_childhood

"Ode: Intimations of Immortality From Recollections of Early Childhood" is a long ode in eleven sections by the English Romantic poet William Wordsworth. It is a deeply philosophical work, with themes ranging from the Platonic belief in pre-existence, to Wordsworth's belief that children have an instinctive wisdom that adults lack. Composed at Grasmere, in the English Lake District, between 1802 and 1804, "Intimations of Immortality" was first published in Poems, in Two Volumes (1807). Arranged in eleven stanzas of anywhere from eight to forty lines each, the poem is written in anisometric verse, with lines of varied iambic stresses.

Wordsworth applies memories of his early childhood to his adult philosophy of life. According to the author's prose introduction, "Intimations of Immortality" was inspired in part by Platonic philosophy. Plato taught pre-existence, meaning that the soul dwelled in an ideal alternate state prior to its present occupation of the body, and the soul will return to that ideal previous state after the body's death. The immortality the title refers to is the immortality of the soul, which Wordsworth maintains is felt or intimated during early childhood. Hence Wordsworth's famous line: "The Child is Father of the Man."

"Intimations of Immortality" begins with the speaker recalling how nature and "every common sight" once seemed divine to him. In Stanza II, he reminds himself that rainbows and the like are still "beautiful and fair" to him, but nevertheless he feels "there hath past [passed] away a glory from the earth." In Stanza III, he feels that no private grief can diminish the joyous quality of nature. He feels nature's joy in the fourth stanza, but the feeling quickly fades.

In Stanza V, Wordsworth begins to philosophize in earnest. "Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting," he says, for our souls originate in a purer, more glorious realm: heaven itself. Small children retain some memory of paradise, which glorifies their experiences on earth, but youths begin to lose it, and adults, distracted by earthly concerns, entirely forget it (Stanza VI).

Next, the speaker observes a six-year-old boy mimicking adult behavior in his play, "as if his whole vocation / Were endless imitation." In Stanza VIII, the speaker addresses the child, wondering why he, "thou best Philosopher" and "Mighty Prophet," imitates adult behavior as though he were eager to hasten "the inevitable yoke" of earthly cares and customs ("freight").

In the ninth stanza, the speaker rejoices that his memories of childhood ("those shadowy recollections" that "are yet a master light of all our seeing") remain to inspire him. In the tenth stanza, he calls on the birds to sing and the lambs to bound, to share his joy. Instead of mourning the loss of childhood innocence and wisdom, the speaker vows to "find / Strength in what remains behind" and to develop a mature "philosophic mind", 'which stems from a consciousness of mortality, as opposed to the child's feeling of immortality.'

Wordsworth sums up his philosophy in the final stanza (XI). His mature mind, he says, 'enables him to love nature and natural beauty all the more, for each of nature's objects can stir him to thought, and even the simplest flower blowing in the wind can raise in him "thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears."'

Stirringly written with 'linguistic strategies [that] are extraordinarily sophisticated and complex', "Intimations of Immortality" is Wordsworth's 'mature masterpiece' reflecting his belief that 'life on earth is a dim shadow of an earlier, purer existence, dimly recalled in childhood and then forgotten in the process of growing up.'

• What two kinds of self-consciousness are described in "Intimations of Immortality"? Which type is more desirable? Why?
  
• What differences, if any, do you find in this ode's "affective resolution" compared to the one in "Tintern Abbey"?
  

Three Years She Grew

Three years she grew in sun and shower,

Then Nature said, "A lovelier flower

On earth was never sown;

This Child I to myself will take;

She shall be mine, and I will make

A Lady of my own.

"Myself will to my darling be

Both law and impulse: and with me

The Girl, in rock and plain,

In earth and heaven, in glade and bower,

Shall feel an overseeing power

To kindle or restrain.

"She shall be sportive as the fawn

That wild with glee across the lawn

Or up the mountain springs;

And hers shall be the breathing balm,

And hers the silence and the calm

Of mute insensate things.

"The floating clouds their state shall lend

To her; for her the willow bend;

Nor shall she fail to see

Even in the motions of the Storm

Grace that shall mould the Maiden's form

By silent sympathy.

"The stars of midnight shall be dear

To her; and she shall lean her ear

In many a secret place

Where rivulets dance their wayward round,

And beauty born of murmuring sound

Shall pass into her face.

"And vital feelings of delight

Shall rear her form to stately height,

Her virgin bosom swell;

Such thoughts to Lucy I will give

While she and I together live

Here in this happy dell."

Thus Nature spake—The work was done—

How soon my Lucy's race was run!

She died, and left to me

This heath, this calm and quiet scene;

The memory of what has been,

And never more will be.

• What will be the relationship between the child and nature? Is it a different one than is posited for the speaker? If so, how?
  

Questions from http://www.ajdrake.com/e212_spr_05/materials/authors/wordsworth_w_sq.htm accessed 1 April 2009.