LL307: ReadingInterpreting Poetry AngloSaxon Traditions to Modern Verse Epic PoetryBeowulf

1
LL307 Reading/Interpreting PoetryAnglo-Saxon
Traditions to Modern Verse (Epic Poetry-Beowulf)

• Beowulf is the longest Anglo-Saxon (Old English)
  poem to have survived to the present day. In
  brief, it is the tale of two heroic adventures
  one early in the titular hero's life one at the
  end.
• Although composed in England just before the
  Norman Conquest, it is set in Denmark and Sweden
  some centuries earlier, in a time of great
  migration and great dynastic struggle.
• Though many of the characters in the poem bear
  the names of historical figures, the main
  character, Beowulf, is a person with no
  background, either historical or fabulous.
• While his exploits are paralleled by other
  figures in literature such as Grettir, from
  Icelandic Saga, Beowulf enters world epic
  unheralded on a Danish shore, and leaves - in
  death - on a blood-soaked Swedish headland.
• Beowulf is preserved in a single manuscript,
  which is called Cotton Vitellius A XV in the
  British Library.
• The manuscript, which contains one other long
  poem - Judith - is written in two hands datable
  on the basis of palaeography to the 11th Century.
  
• This manuscript required two scribes to complete
  it the second scribe taking over from the first
  about two-thirds of the way through Beowulf and
  continued through Judith.

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LL307 Reading/Interpreting PoetryAnglo-Saxon
Traditions to Modern Verse (Epic Poetry-Beowulf)

• The Language and the Verse
• Oft Scyld Scefing sceaþena þreatum,
• monegum mægþum, meodosetla ofteah,
• egsode eorlas. Syððan ærest wearð
• feasceaft funden, he þæs frofre gebad,
• weox under wolcnum, weorðmyndum þah,
• oðþæt him æghwylc þara ymbsittendra
• ofer hronrade hyran scolde,
• gomban gyldan. þæt wæs god cyning!
• Beowulf, lines 4-11
• The Alliterative Style
• Anglo-Saxon verse is written in a form which
  seems very foreign to the modern reader of
  anything but Gerard Manley Hopkins. Anglo-Saxon
  verse is stress-timed, with four beats to the
  line, a pattern very similar to the 'sprung
  rhythm' of Hopkins.
• In the above passage from the opening of Beowulf,
  the alliteration may readily be seen monegum
  mægþum, meodosetla ofteah. The initial consonants
  of the two stressed words of the first half line
  alliterate with the first stressed word of the
  second half line. Very rarely is there only a
  single alliteration in the first half-line, but
  occasionally there is a second alliterating word
  in the second half-line.
• In the Old English alliterative styles,
  consonants are alliterated with themselves, but
  all vowels were taken as alliterating with each
  other. The break between half-lines marks the
  hemistich, a slight pause in the reading of the
  poem.
• Another element of the Anglo-Saxon poetic style
  is the use of metaphoric terms, such as hronrade
  ('whale road') to mean the sea, as in the above
  passage. These metaphoric terms are called
  'kennings', a word borrowed from Icelandic.
  Kennings are much more common in Icelandic
  literature than they are in Anglo-Saxon poetry.

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LL307 Reading/Interpreting PoetryAnglo-Saxon
Traditions to Modern Verse (Epic Poetry-Beowulf)

• Oral-formulaic Theory
• In the early part of the 20th Century, Milman
  Parry, and later, Albert B Lord, working with
  illiterate Serbian and Croatian singers of modern
  epic poetry, developed what had come to be known
  as 'the Oral-formulaic Theory of Composition.'
• Originally a description of the actual technique
  of composition used by Balkan oral-poets, Parry
  and Lord quickly tested the theory on the epic
  poetry of Homer and found that many aspects of
  those poems that had puzzled scholars for
  millennia could be explained by the new theory.
• During the 1950s, Francis P Magoun began testing
  the theory on Old English poetry and in the
  ensuing decades many other scholars have studied
  the Old English poems in the light of the
  oral-formulaic theory and have found it helpful.
  The theory does not, however, fit Old English as
  well as it does Ancient Greek.
• Old English poetry is highly formulaic - many
  half-lines from the passage above appear in many
  other poems, and many entire scenes are obviously
  frameworks into which details may be plugged. As
  it survivied Old English poetry, however, is a
  literary tradition, not an oral one while many
  aspects of the oral-formulaic theory fit Old
  English, many do not .
• Probably there was a time of purely oral
  composition, something hinted at in some scenes
  in Beowulf.
• This is of particular importance to our earlier
  studies of the oral tradition in poetry from the
  Pacific. Parry and Lords work becomes
  instrumental in ascribing these compositions are
  literary works with all the features of
  literature and thus not just part of the oral
  tradition.

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LL307 Reading/Interpreting PoetryAnglo-Saxon
Traditions to Modern Verse (Epic Poetry-Beowulf)

• The Story
• Beowulf begins with an exposition. Through
  genealogy we are introduced to the Spear-Danes,
  also called the Scyldings (the Sons of Shield) a
  tribe of warriors lead by their ageing king
  Hrothgar. The tribe has had a fortunate existence
  until the mysterious coming of a violent creature
  that, as the principal action of the poem begins,
  is in the 12th year of his reign of terror over
  the Scylding royal hall, Heorot. The creature's
  name is Grendel.
• Characters in Epic Poetry
• Grendel is of human stock, descended from Cain,
  the son of Adam and Eve and is described as a
  wretch and an outcast.
• Grendel's Mother
• Of course, every wretch, even the spawn of Cain,
  has a mother. Grendel's Mother is mad and is
  seeking revenge. She skulks to Heorot in the
  middle of the night, snatches Aeschere,
  Hrothgar's favourite retainer, and also her son's
  arm. Beowulf makes a ripping speech and dives in
  to wrestle another monster.
• After struggling past a number of venomous water
  creatures, Beowulf is grabbed by Grendel's Mother
  and is hauled into her lair. Another titanic
  wrestling match ensues and Beowulf is very nearly
  defeated. Just when all seems dark, Beowulf sees
  a mighty sword among the bones and booty in the
  cave. Taking up the sword made by giants, he runs
  Grendel's Mother through and cuts the head from
  Grendel's corpse and has victory.
• Beowulf returns home to Geatland with the
  gratitude of Hrothgar and the Spear-Danes
  (represented by large quantities of treasure,
  etc). He spends a huge amount of the poem telling
  his lord, Higelac, of his exploits among the
  Danes. Then, in a very brief bit of the poem,
  Higelac dies, Beowulf inherits the kingdom
  through a convoluted chain of succession, and a
  50 year Golden Age of the Geats ruled by Beowulf
  goes by.
• Beowulf is now an old man, but he is still
  vibrant. His people are prosperous and all is
  well in his kingdom, except...

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LL307 Reading/Interpreting PoetryAnglo-Saxon
Traditions to Modern Verse (Epic Poetry-Beowulf)

• The Dragon
• In an old tomb inside an earthen mound a dragon
  rests on his hoard of gold. As long as he is not
  disturbed, there can be no danger. But an unnamed
  thief comes into the dragon's lair. There the
  thief (perhaps his name is Bilbo) finds a cup and
  takes it from the hoard. Of course, the dragon
  notices and lays Beowulf's kingdom waste.
• Beowulf, ever the hero, despite his advanced
  years, sets out with a small band of cowardly
  retainers (and one good man) to face the dragon.
  To ward off the dragon's breath, Beowulf has a
  massive iron shield constructed for himself.
  Before the fight, Beowulf gives another ripping
  speech, then calls the dragon out.
• The dragon turns out to be nastier than anyone
  expected. Beowulf's men run away in fright except
  for one, Wiglaf, who runs toward the fight.
  Hiding behind the massive shield, Wiglaf slashes
  low (Merry-like) on the dragon, causing enough
  distraction that Beowulf can dispatch the beast
  with a blow so great the dragon is left in two
  pieces.
• But Beowulf has received a mortal wound.
  Commanding Wiglaf to remove the treasure from the
  barrow, and to construct a great mound as his
  memorial, Beowulf passes out of the poem which
  still is not quite done. Wiglaf carries out his
  lord's orders, rebuking the cowards for running
  away. The men carry out the gold, consign the
  dragon's corpse to the sea, and cremate Beowulf.
  Over Beowulf's ashes they build the great mound
  he had ordered and in it they place the dragon's
  gold, praising Beowulf as a good king.
• The 'Digressions'
• Interspersed throughout the poem are a number of
  smaller stories and vignettes which are generally
  referred to as 'digressions.' Most are brief
  histories of dynastic struggles among the various
  Germanic tribes. These stories usually are tragic
  and usually parallel the events of the main story
  in some way. This paralleling casts a pall of
  doom over the already gloomy poem.
• The Meaning
• Any meaning the poem may have, of course, is a
  product of its meeting with the mind of a reader,
  and so, there have been a multitude of
  interpretations of the whole point of the poem.
  Some would argue that Beowulf is a tragic figure
  that ends his life in futility, chasing gold that
  no one lives to enjoy, and fame that will soon be
  forgotten. Those with an existentialist bent
  would see Beowulf as a great hero, thumbing his
  nose at the futility we all know is underlying
  human life. Many see the poem as a true song of
  praise of a hero who lived his life well and died
  a noble death. Most who know it think that
  Beowulf is a great story, if nothing else.

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LL307 Reading/Interpreting PoetryAnglo-Saxon
Traditions to Modern Verse (Epic Poetry-Beowulf)

• The Rediscovery of Beowulf
• The Critics
• The modern study of Anglo-Saxon literature began
  in the 16th Century, but the first published
  mention of the manuscript containing Beowulf was
  not until 1705.
• Under the influence of JRR Tolkiens seminal
  paper 'Beowulf - the Monsters and the Critics',
  scholars began to turn more toward reading the
  literature as literature rather than as
  historical artefact.
• Some Modern Takes on Beowulf
• The film The 13th Warrior (1999) with Antonio
  Banderas is based on Michael Crichton's novel The
  Eaters of the Dead (1977). The film Beowulf
  (1999) with Christopher Lambert owes any quality
  it might have (which is little) to the Old
  English poem.
• John Gardner's novel Grendel (1971) is based on
  the events of the first third of the Old English
  poem, up to the death of Grendel. In a nutshell,
  Gardner tells the story through the eyes of the
  monster (who, anachronistically, has a penchant
  for quoting George W Bush 'Make no mistake,' he
  says over and over).
• JRR Tolkien, of course, used portions of
  Beowulf's dragon episode in a skeletal way in
  both The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings.
• Translations
• Seamus Heaney's is a recent one which succeeds
  wonderfully as poetry in its own right. It should
  be remembered when reading a translation that one
  is reading an interpretation of a work, not the
  work itself.

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LL307 Reading/Interpreting PoetryAnglo-Saxon
Traditions to Modern Verse (Epic Poetry-Beowulf)

• Seamus Heaney Beowulf A New Verse Translation
• Monsters can be real enough even to the modern
  mind, a point Heaney makes in the introduction
• "Grendel comes alive in the readers imagination
  as a kind of dog-breath in the dark, a fear of
  collision with some hard-boned and immensely
  strong android frame...."
• The word "android" makes the connection that the
  direct descendants of these ancient monsters
  still have in the modern imagination -- shifted
  now to science fiction Terminator Series etc
  and brought a freshness to lines like the
  following
• "A wildness rosein the dragon again and drove it
  to attack,... hunting for enemies,the humans it
  loathed. 2669-72
• As always it is the words of the poem itself and
  the emotions they evoke which serves as the
  criteria by which any work of poetry has to be
  judged. Here, for example, is how Heaney renders
  in translation from the original Anglo-Saxon the
  mental state of Grendel's mother ("that
  swamp-thing from hell") after Beowulf has slain
  her offspring
• "Grendel's mother,monstrous hell-bride, brooded
  on her wrongs." 1259-60
• Only a mother can truly "brood" on her wrongs,
  and even on a first reading of Heaney's Beowulf.
  A New Translation, such words detonate in the
  mind like firecrackers.
• Heaney also helps us appreciate the ancient roots
  of Beowulf , since onomatopoeia is much closer to
  the oral tradition from which the original
  written work derives.
• Here Beowulf speaks of his wounding of the
  monster Grendel
• He has done his worst but the wound will end
  him.He is hasped and hooped and hirpling with
  pain,

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LL307 Reading/Interpreting PoetryAnglo-Saxon
Traditions to Modern Verse (Lyrical Poetry WB
Yeats)

• William Butler Yeats (1865-1939) Poetry
• Yeatss origins wandering between two worlds
  Anglo-Irish Protestants but Yeats identified with
  with the Catholic majority, whose
  folklore/mythology he identified.
• Yeatss split allegiances detached him from both
  traditions - the Catholics because he
• didnt share their religion and the Protestants
  because he rejected their prosperity.
• Yeats's best hope, he felt, was to cultivate a
  tradition more profound than either the
• Catholic or the Protestant--the tradition of a
  hidden Ireland that existed largely in the
• anthropological evidence of its surviving
  customs, beliefs, and holy places, more pagan
• than Christian.
• Born in Dublin and moved at young age to London.
  His parents returned to Ireland in 1867 and he
  spent the equivalent of high school and
  university in Dublin, where school itself was
  less important to him than the circle of artists
  and thinkers he associated with there.
• Returned to London with his parents after
  graduating from University. Became
• interested in Theosophy and spiritualism (like
  many other artists and writers of his
• generation and before, including William Blake),
  rejecting traditional religions and
• researching the cosmology of several visionary
  traditions, including Platonism, alchemy, and
  ancient Irish myth.

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LL307 Reading/Interpreting PoetryAnglo-Saxon
Traditions to Modern Verse (Lyrical Poetry WB
Yeats)

• First volume of poems, collected in The
  Wanderings of Oisin and Other Poems (1889)
• was highly mythologized and aesthetic, in keeping
  with the aesthetic movement already
• in full swing in Britain and France.
• Involved with the artist, poet, and designer
  William Morris and W.E. Henley, author of
• Invictus. Yeats co-founded the Rhymers' Club,
  whose members included his friends
• Lionel Johnson and Arthur Symons.
• Yeatss Early Period Irish Nationalism, the
  Celtic Twilight, Irish mythology elaborate
  allusive lyrical poetry.
• In 1889 Yeats met Maud Gonne, and from that
  defining moment, he wrote, "the
• troubling of my life began." He fell in love with
  her, but his love was hopeless, though he
• continued to pursue it throughout his life, at
  one point actually proposing to her
• daughter.
• Yeats published several volumes of poetry during
  this period, notably Poems (1895) and
• The Wind Among the Reeds (1899), which are
  typical of his early verse in their dreamlike
• atmosphere and their use of Irish folklore and
  legend.

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LL307 Reading/Interpreting PoetryAnglo-Saxon
Traditions to Modern Verse (Lyrical Poetry WB
Yeats)

• Yeatss middle period Irish nationalism and
  politics poems topical or influenced by his
  sense that he was losing his youth influenced by
  imagism, symbolist movement. Yeats said, at age
  52
• A poet, when he is growing old, will ask himself
  if he cannot keep his mask and his vision without
  new bitterness, new disappointment. . . . Surely,
  he may think, now that I have found vision and
  mask I need not suffer any longer. Then he will
  remember Wordsworth, withering into eighty years,
  honored and empty-witted, and climb to some waste
  room, and find, forgotten there by youth, some
  bitter crust.
• The years from 1909 to 1917 mark a decisive
  change in his poetry.
• The otherworldly, ecstatic atmosphere of the
  early lyrics has cleared, and the poems in
  Responsibilities Poems and a Play (1914) show a
  tightening and hardening of his verse line, a
  more sparse and resonant imagery, and a new
  directness with which Yeats confronts reality and
  its imperfections.
• Yeats begins raging against the dying of the
  light, as Dylan Thomas would later put it the
  theme persists into his late verse.
• Yeatss late period (about 1917 to 1939)
  mysticism and occult, interested in symbolism,
  occult, unseen, unconscious processes of thought
  and society language plain and forms lyrical.

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LL307 Reading/Interpreting PoetryAnglo-Saxon
Traditions to Modern Verse (Lyrical Poetry WB
Yeats)

• Yeats not only held his imaginative strength into
  old age, but became stronger soul clap its
  hands and sing, and louder sing, for every tatter
  in its mortal dress.
• In 1917, with The Wild Swans at Coole, Yeats
  reached and maintained the height of his
• achievement--a renewal of inspiration and a
  perfecting of technique that are almost
• without parallel in the history of English
  poetry.
• Still, some of Yeats's greatest verse was written
  subsequently, appearing in The Winding Stair
  (1929). The poems in both of these works use, as
  their dominant subjects and symbols, the Easter
  Rising and the Irish civil war Yeats's own
  tower the Byzantine
• Empire and its mosaics Plato, Plotinus, and
  Porphyry and the author's interest in the
• philosophy of G.E. Moore and in contemporary
  psychical research.
• Yeats explained his own philosophy in the prose
  work A Vision (1925, revised version
• 1937) this meditation upon the relation between
  imagination, history, and the occult
• remains indispensable to serious students of
  Yeats despite its obscurities.
• The fundamental difference between rhetoric and
  poetry, according to Yeats, is that rhetoric is
  the expression of one's quarrels with others
  while poetry is the expression (and sometimes the
  resolution) of one's quarrel with oneself. This
  becomes the mainstay of his lyrical
  poetry-whether romantic lyric poetry or lyric
  poetry that dealt with wider issues on existence
  and the meaning of life. His contemplation of
  issues of the heart or the head or both sometimes
  forms the basis of this questioning and
  resolutions.

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LL307 Reading/Interpreting PoetryAnglo-Saxon
Traditions to Modern Verse (Lyrical Poetry WB
Yeats)

• "Does the imagination dwell the most/Upon a woman
  won or woman lost?" - The Tower
• Yeats often enough in his lyrical/love poetry
  illustrated that the answer lay in the latter.
• In striving to give effect to this viewpoint,
  Yeats Lyrical/Love Poetry reflects not only the
  women they address, but also the ways and means
  through which they are addressed.
• Consequently at a deeper level we can appreciate
  Yeats Lyrical/Love Poetry as being largely about
  the poetic construct itself within which even the
  subject, the beloved, is subsumed as a side plot.
  
• Yeats Love Poetry is not merely a personal voyage
  showcasing his romantic experiences with the
  fairer sex, its objective was also to show love
  as a theme in itself, as the genre fundamental to
  the creative base of the entire poetic process.
• This all-embracing nature of Yeats lyrical poems
  is an inevitable conclusion you arrive at in
  delving into them. Kerry Fried agrees with this
  assessment... "At his best, Yeats extends the
  meaning of love poetry beyond the obviously
  romantic love becomes a revolutionary emotion,
  attaching the poet to friends, history, and the
  passionate life of the mind."
• The female principle for Yeats Love Poetry often
  takes two forms The absent beloved who only
  becomes attainable after the catharsis of some
  cataclysm or quest attained, or a mournful dirge.
  Some elegy wherein the poet mourns his aching
  loss as an epitaph for lost love.

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LL307 Reading/Interpreting PoetryAnglo-Saxon
Traditions to Modern Verse (Lyrical Poetry WB
Yeats)

• The Secret Rose - William Butler Yeats
• Far-off, most secret, and inviolate Rose,Enfold
  me in my hour of hours where thoseWho sought
  thee in the Holy Sepulchre,Or in the wine-vat,
  dwell beyond the stirAnd tumult of defeated
  dreams and deepAmong pale eyelids, heavy with
  the sleepMen have named beauty. Thy great leaves
  enfoldThe ancient beards, the helms of ruby and
  goldOf the crowned Magi and the king whose
  eyesSaw the pierced Hands and Rood of elder
  riseIn Druid vapour and make the torches
  dimTill vain frenzy awoke and he died and
  himWho met Fand walking among flaming dewBy a
  grey shore where the wind never blew,And lost
  the world and Emer for a kissAnd him who drove
  the gods out of their liss,And till a hundred
  moms had flowered redFeasted, and wept the
  barrows of his deadAnd the proud dreaming king
  who flung the crownAnd sorrow away, and calling
  bard and clownDwelt among wine-stained wanderers
  in deep woodsAnd him who sold tillage, and
  house, and goods,And sought through lands and
  islands numberless years,Until he found, with
  laughter and with tears,A woman of so shining
  lovelinessThat men threshed corn at midnight by
  a tress,A little stolen tress. I, too, awaitThe
  hour of thy great wind of love and hate.When
  shall the stars be blown about the sky,Like the
  sparks blown out of a smithy, and die?Surely
  thine hour has come, thy great wind
  blows,Far-off, most secret, and inviolate Rose?
  

           THE SECOND COMING     Turning and
turning in the widening gyre     The falcon
cannot hear the falconer     Things fall apart
the centre cannot hold     Mere anarchy is
loosed upon the world,     The blood-dimmed tide
is loosed, and everywhere     The ceremony of
innocence is drowned     The best lack all
conviction, while the worst     Are full of
passionate intensity.     Surely some
revelation is at hand     Surely the Second
Coming is at hand.     The Second Coming! Hardly
are those words out     When a vast image out of
Spiritus Mundi     Troubles my sight a waste of
desert sand     A shape with lion body and the
head of a man,     A gaze blank and pitiless as
the sun,     Is moving its slow thighs, while
all about it     Wind shadows of the indignant
desert birds.     The darkness drops again but
now I know     That twenty centuries of stony
sleep     Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking
cradle,     And what rough beast, its hour come
round at last,     Slouches towards Bethlehem to
be born?
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LL307 Reading/Interpreting PoetryAnglo-Saxon
Traditions to Modern Verse

• A sonnet is fundamentally a dialectical construct
  which allows the poet to examine the nature and
  ramifications of two usually contrastive ideas,
  emotions, states of mind, beliefs, actions,
  events, images, etc., by juxtaposing the two
  against each other, and possibly resolving or
  just revealing the tensions created and operative
  between the two.
• A sonnet is fundamentally a dialectical construct
  which allows the poet to examine the nature and
  ramifications of two usually contrastive ideas,
  emotions, states of mind, beliefs, actions,
  events, images, etc., by juxtaposing the two
  against each other, and possibly resolving or
  just revealing the tensions created and operative
  between the two.
• In a sonnet, you show two related but differing
  things to the reader in order to communicate
  something about them. Each of the three major
  types (Italian, Spenserian, English), as well the
  non-standard sonnets achieve this.
• I. The Italian (or Petrarchan) Sonnet
• The Italian sonnet is divided into two sections
  by two different groups of rhyming sounds.
• The first 8 lines is called the octave and
  rhymes
• a b b a a b b a
• The remaining 6 lines is called the sestet and
  can have either two or three rhyming sounds,
  arranged in a variety of ways
• c d c d c dc d d c d cc d e c d ec d e c e dc
  d c e d c

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LL307 Reading/Interpreting PoetryAnglo-Saxon
Traditions to Modern Verse

• The exact pattern of sestet rhymes (unlike the
  octave pattern) is flexible. In strict practice,
  the one thing that is to be avoided in the sestet
  is ending with a couplet (dd or ee), as this was
  never permitted in Italy, and Petrarch himself
  (supposedly) never used a couplet ending in
  actual practice, sestets are sometimes ended with
  couplets (Sidney's "Sonnet LXXI given below is an
  example of such a terminal couplet in an Italian
  sonnet).
• The point here is that the poem is divided into
  two sections by the two differing rhyme groups.
  In accordance with the principle (which
  supposedly applies to all rhymed poetry but often
  doesn't), a change from one rhyme group to
  another signifies a change in subject matter.
• This change occurs at the beginning of L9 in the
  Italian sonnet and is called the volta, or
  "turn" the turn is an essential element of the
  sonnet form, perhaps the essential element.
• Here, the octave develops the idea of the decline
  and corruption of the English race, while the
  sestet opposes to that loss the qualities Milton
  possessed which the race now desperately needs.

It is at the volta that the second idea is
introduced, as in this sonnet by W. Wordsworth
"London, 1802" Milton! thou shouldst be living
at this hour England hath need of thee she is
a fen Of stagnant waters altar, sword, and pen,
Fireside, the heroic wealth of hall and bower,
Have forfeited their ancient English dower Of
inward happiness. We are selfish men Oh! raise
us up, return to us again And give us manners,
virtue, freedom, power. Thy soul was like a
Star, and dwelt apart Thou hadst a voice whose
sound was like the sea Pure as the naked
heavens, majestic, free, So didst thou travel on
life's common way, In cheerful godliness and
yet thy heart The lowliest duties on herself did
lay.
16
LL307 Reading/Interpreting PoetryAnglo-Saxon
Traditions to Modern Verse

• "Sonnet LXXI"
• Who will in fairest book of Nature know
• How Virtue may best lodged in Beauty be,
• Let him but learn of Love to read in thee,
• Stella, those fair lines, which true goodness
  show.
• There shall he find all vices' overthrow,
• Not by rude force, but sweetest sovereignty
• Of reason, from whose light those night-birds
  fly
• That inward sun in thine eyes shineth so.
• And not content to be Perfection's heir
• Thyself, dost strive all minds that way to move,
• Who mark in thee what is in thee most fair.
• So while thy beauty draws the heart to love,
• As fast thy Virtue bends that love to good.
• "But, ah," Desire still cries, "give me some
  food."
• Here, in giving 13 lines to arguing why Reason
  makes clear to him that following Virtue is the
  course he should take, he seems to be heavily
  biassing the argument in Virtue's favor.
• But the volta powerfully undercuts the arguments
  of Reason in favor of Virtue by revealing that
  Desire isn't amenable to Reason.

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LL307 Reading/Interpreting PoetryAnglo-Saxon
Traditions to Modern Verse

• II. The Spenserian Sonnet
• The Spenserian sonnet, invented by Edmund Spenser
  as an outgrowth of the stanza pattern he used in
  The Faerie Queene (a b a b b c b c c), has the
  pattern
• a b a b b c b c c d c d e e
• Here, the "abab" pattern sets up distinct
  four-line groups, each of which develops a
  specific idea however, the overlapping a, b, c,
  and d rhymes form the first 12 lines into a
  single unit with a separated final couplet.
• The three quatrains then develop three distinct
  but closely related ideas, with a different idea
  (or commentary) in the couplet. Interestingly,
  Spenser often begins L9 of his sonnets with "But"
  or "Yet," indicating a volta exactly where it
  would occur in the Italian sonnet however, if
  one looks closely, one often finds that the
  "turn" here really isn't one at all, that the
  actual turn occurs where the rhyme pattern
  changes, with the couplet, thus giving a 12 and 2
  line pattern very different from the Italian 8
  and 6 line pattern (actual volta marked by
  italics)

"Sonnet LIV" Of this World's theatre in which
we stay, My love like the Spectator idly sits,
Beholding me, that all the pageants play,
Disguising diversely my troubled wits.
Sometimes I joy when glad occasion fits, And
mask in mirth like to a Comedy Soon after when
my joy to sorrow flits, I wail and make my woes
a Tragedy. Yet she, beholding me with constant
eye, Delights not in my mirth nor rues my
smart But when I laugh, she mocks and when I
cry She laughs and hardens evermore her heart.
What then can move her? If nor mirth nor moan,
She is no woman, but a senseless stone.
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LL307 Reading/Interpreting PoetryAnglo-Saxon
Traditions to Modern Verse

• .
• III. The English (or Shakespearian) Sonnet
• The English sonnet has the simplest and most
  flexible pattern of all sonnets, consisting of 3
  quatrains of alternating rhyme and a couplet
• a b a bc d c de f e fg g As in the
  Spenserian, each quatrain develops a specific
  idea, but one closely related to the ideas in the
  other quatrains.
• Not only is the English sonnet the easiest in
  terms of its rhyme scheme, calling for only pairs
  of rhyming words rather than groups of 4, but it
  is the most flexible in terms of the placement of
  the volta. Shakespeare often places the "turn,"
  as in the Italian, at L9
• "Sonnet XXIX"
• When in disgrace with Fortune and men's eyes,
• I all alone beweep my outcast state,
• And trouble deaf heaven with my bootless cries,
• And look upon myself and curse my fate,
• Wishing me like to one more rich in hope,
• Featured like him, like him with friends
  possessed,
• Desiring this man's art and that man's scope,
• With what I most enjoy contented least,
• Yet in these thoughts my self almost despising,
• Haply I think on thee, and then my state,
• (Like to the lark at break of day arising
• From sullen earth) sings hymns at heaven's gate,
• For thy sweet love remembered such wealth brings,
  

19
LL307 Reading/Interpreting PoetryAnglo-Saxon
Traditions to Modern Verse

• Dramatic poetry is any poetry that uses the
  discourse of the characters involved to tell a
  story or portray a situation. Dramatic verse is
  used in theatre such as in Shakespeares plays.
• Dramatic verse occurs in a dramatic work, such as
  a play, composed in poetic form.
• The major types of dramatic poetry are found in
  plays written for the theatre, and libretto.
  Poetic form allowed for more distilled narratives
  but also provided a practical reason in that it
  aided memorization of lines.
• There are further dramatic verse forms these
  include dramatic monologues, such as those
  written by Robert Browning and Alfred Tennyson.
  Dramatic monologues are also a convention in
  theatre that makes use of the verse form, such as
  Shakespeares To be or Not to Be DM from
  Hamlet.

BY DEREK WALCOTT BOOK SIX Chapter XLIV I In
hill-towns, from San Fernando to Mayagüez, the
same sunrise stirred the feathered lances of cane
down the archipelagos highways. The first
breeze rattled the spears and their noise was
like distant rain marching down from the hills,
like a shell at your ears. In the cool asphalt
Sundays of the Antilles the light brought the
bitter history of sugar across the squared
fields, heightening towards harvest, to the
bleached flags of the Indian diaspora. The
drizzling light blew across the savannah
darkening the racehorses hides mist slowly
erased the royal palms on the crests of the
hills and the hills themselves. The brown
patches the horses had grazed shone as wet as
their hides. A skittish stallion jerked at his
bridle, marble-eyed at the thunder
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LL307 Reading/Interpreting PoetryAnglo-Saxon
Traditions to Modern Verse
muffling the hills, but the groom was drawing him
in like a fisherman, wrapping the slack line
under one fist, then with the other tightening
the rein and narrowing the circle. The sky
cracked asunder and a forked tree flashed, and
suddenly that black rain which can lose an
entire archipelago in broad daylight was
pouring tin nails on the roof, hammering the
balcony. I closed the French window, and thought
of the horses in their stalls with one hoof
tilted, watching the ropes of rain. I lay in
bed with current gone from the bed-lamp and
heard the roar of wind shaking the windows, and
I remembered Achille on his own mattress and
desperate Hector trying to save his canoe, I
thought of Helen as my island lost in the haze,
and I was sure Id never see her again. All of
a sudden the rain stopped and I heard the
sluicing of water down the guttering. I opened
the window when
the sun came out. It replaced the tiny brooms
of palms on the ridges. On the red galvanized
roof of the paddock, the wet sparkled, then the
grooms led the horses over the new grass and
exercised them again, and there was a different
brightness in everything, in the leaves, in the
horses eyes. II I smelt the leaves threshing at
the top of the year in green January over the
orange villas and military barracks where the
Plunketts were, the harbour flecked by the wind
that comes with Christmas, edged with the
Arctic, that was christened Vent Noël it stayed
until March and, with luck, until Easter. It
freshened the cedars, waxed the laurier-cannelle,
and hid the African swift. I smelt the drizzle
on the asphalt leaving the Morne, it was the
smell of an iron on damp cloth I heard the
sizzle of fried jackfish in oil with their
coppery skin I smelt ham studded with cloves,
the crusted accra,
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LL307 Reading/Interpreting PoetryAnglo-Saxon
Traditions to Modern Verse
the wax in the varnished parlour Come in. Come
in, the arm of the Morris chair sticky with
lacquer I saw a sail going out and a sail
coming in, and a breeze so fresh it lifted the
lace curtains like a petticoat, like a sail
towards Ithaca I smelt a dead rivulet in the
clogged drains. III Ah, twin-headed January,
seeing either tense a past, they assured us,
born in degradation, and a present that lifted
us up with the winds noise in the breadfruit
leaves with such an elation that it contradicts
what is past! The cannonballs of rotting
breadfruit from the Battle of the Saints, the
asterisks of bulletholes in the brick walls of
the redoubt. I lived there with every sense. I
smelt with my eyes, I could see with my nostrils.

22
LL307 Reading/Interpreting Poetry Anglo-Saxon
Traditions to Modern Verse

• In Memory of W.B Yeats
• He disappeared in the dead of winter
• The brooks were frozen, the airports almost
  deserted,
• The snow disfigured the public statues
• The mercury sank in the mouth of the dying day.
• What instruments we have agree
• The day of his death was a dark cold day.
• Far from his illness
• The wolves ran on through the evergreen forests,
• The peasant river was untempted by the
  fashionable quays
• By mourning tongues
• The death of the poet was kept from his poems.
• But for him it was his last afternoon as himself,
  
• An afternoon of nurses and rumours
• The provinces of his body revolted,
• The squares of his mind were empty,
• Silence invaded the suburbs,

Elegy as a meditative, often lyric poetry that
mourns the death of a loved one, an important
public figure, or a group of people. The elegy
began as an ancient Greek metrical form and is
traditionally written in response to the death of
a person or group. Though similar in function,
the elegy is distinct from the epitaph, ode, and
eulogy the epitaph is very brief the ode solely
exalts and the eulogy is most often written in
formal prose. The elements of a traditional
elegy mirror three stages of loss. First, there
is a lament, where the speaker expresses grief
and sorrow, then praise and admiration of the
idealized dead, and finally consolation and
solace

23
LL307 Reading/Interpreting PoetryAnglo-Saxon
Traditions to Modern Verse

• As one thinks of a day when one did something
  slightly unusual.
• What instruments we have agree
• The day of his death was a dark cold day.
• II
• You were silly like us your gift survived it
  all
• The parish of rich women, physical decay,
  Yourself.
• Mad Ireland hurt you into poetry.
• Now Ireland has her madness and her weather
  still,
• For poetry makes nothing happen it survives
• In the valley of its making where executives
• Would never want to tamper, flows on south
• From ranches of isolation and the busy griefs,
• Raw towns that we believe and die in it
  survives,
• A way of happening, a mouth.
• III
• Earth, receive an honoured guest

Intellectual disgrace Stares from every human
face, And the seas of pity lie Locked and
frozen in each eye. Follow, poet, follow right
To the bottom of the night, With your
unconstraining voice Still persuade us to
rejoice. With the farming of a verse Make a
vineyard of the curse, Sing of human unsuccess
In a rapture of distress. In the deserts of
the heart Let the healing fountains start, In
the prison of his days Teach the free man how to
praise. -- W.H. Auden
24
LL307 Reading/Interpreting PoetryAnglo-Saxon
Traditions to Modern Verse (Prose Poetry)
Prose Poetry Though the name of the form may
appear to be a contradiction, the prose poem
essentially appears as prose, but reads like
poetry. While it lacks the line breaks
associated with poetry, the prose poem maintains
a poetic quality, often utilizing techniques
common to poetry, such as fragmentation,
compression, repetition, and rhyme. The prose
poem can range in length from a few lines to
several pages long, and it may explore a
limitless array of styles and subjects. Though
examples of prose passages in poetic texts can be
found in early Bible translations and the Lyrical
Ballads of Wordsworth. The form is most often
traced to nineteenth-century French symbolists
writers. The work of Aloysius Bertrand and
Charles Baudelaire marked a significant departure
from the strict separation between the genres of
prose and poetry at the time.
A Supermarket in California   by Allen Ginsberg
What thoughts I have of you tonight, Walt
Whitman, for I walked down the sidestreets under
the trees with a headache self-conscious looking
at the full moon. In my hungry fatigue, and
shopping for images, I went into the neon fruit
supermarket, dreaming of your enumerations! What
peaches and what penumbras! Whole families
shopping at night! Aisles full of husbands! Wives
in the avocados, babies in the tomatoes! --and
you, García Lorca, what were you doing down by
the watermelons? I saw you, Walt Whitman,
childless, lonely old grubber, poking among the
meats in the refrigerator and eyeing the grocery
boys. I heard you asking questions of each Who
killed the pork chops? What price bananas? Are
you my Angel? I wandered in and out of the
brilliant stacks of cans following you, and
followed in my imagination by the store
detective. We strode down the open corridors
together in our solitary fancy tasting
artichokes, possessing every frozen delicacy, and
never passing the cashier. Where are we going,
Walt Whitman? The doors close in a hour. Which
way does your beard point tonight? (I touch your
book and dream of our odyssey in the supermarket
and feel absurd.) Will we walk all night through
solitary streets? The trees add shade to shade,
lights out in the houses, we'll both be lonely.
Will we stroll dreaming of the lost America of
love past blue automo- biles in driveways, home
to our silent cottage? Ah, dear father,
graybeard, lonely old courage-teacher, what
America did you have when Charon quit poling his
ferry and you got out on a smoking bank and stood
watching the boat disappear on the black waters
of Lethe? --Berkeley, 1955
25
LL307 Reading/Interpreting PoetryAnglo-Saxon
Traditions to Modern Verse (Prose Poetry)
A Supermarket in California   by Allen Ginsberg
(1926-1997) What thoughts I have of you
tonight, Walt Whitman, for I walked down the
sidestreets under the trees with a headache
self-conscious looking at the full moon. In my
hungry fatigue, and shopping for images, I went
into the neon fruit supermarket, dreaming of
your enumerations! What peaches and what
penumbras! Whole families shopping at night!
Aisles full of husbands! Wives in the avocados,
babies in the tomatoes! --and you, García Lorca,
what were you doing down by the watermelons? I
saw you, Walt Whitman, childless, lonely old
grubber, poking among the meats in the
refrigerator and eyeing the grocery boys. I
heard you asking questions of each Who killed
the pork chops? What price bananas? Are you my
Angel? I wandered in and out of the brilliant
stacks of cans following you, and followed in my
imagination by the store detective. We strode
down the open corridors together in our solitary
fancy tasting artichokes, possessing every
frozen delicacy, and never passing the cashier.
26
LL307 Reading/Interpreting PoetryAnglo-Saxon
Traditions to Modern Verse (Prose Poetry)

• A Supermarket in California   by Allen Ginsberg
  
• Where are we going, Walt Whitman? The doors close
  in a hour.
• Which way does your beard point tonight?
• (I touch your book and dream of our odyssey in
  the supermarket
• and feel absurd.)
• Will we walk all night through solitary streets?
  The trees add shade
• to shade, lights out in the houses, we'll both be
  lonely.
• Will we stroll dreaming of the lost America of
  love past blue automo
• biles in driveways, home to our silent cottage?
• Ah, dear father, graybeard, lonely old
  courage-teacher, what America
• did you have when Charon quit poling his ferry
  and you got out
• on a smoking bank and stood watching the boat
  disappear on the black waters of
• Lethe?
• --Berkeley, 1955

27
LL307 Reading/Interpreting PoetryAnglo-Saxon
Traditions to Modern Verse (Free Verse)
Poetry that is based on the irregular rhythmic
cadence or the recurrence, with variations, of
phrases, images, and syntactical patterns rather
than the conventional use of meter. Rhyme may
or may not be present in free verse, but when it
is, it is used with great freedom. In
conventional verse the unit is the foot, or the
line in free verse the units are larger,
sometimes being paragraphs or strophes. If the
free verse unit is the line, as it is in Whitman,
the line is determined by qualities of rhythm and
thought rather than feet or syllabic count. We
should not confuse free verse as being a recent
invention as the basis is very old. The poetry of
the Bible, particularly in the King James
Version, makes use of free verse with emphasis on
cadence and parallelism. Walt Whitman's Leaves
of Grass was a major experiment in cadenced
rather than metrical VERSIFICATION. The
following lines are typical All truths wait in
all things They neither hasten their own
delivery nor resist it, They do not need the
obstetric forceps of the surgeon. It was the
French poets of the late nineteenth century
--Rimbaud, Laforgue, Viele-Griffln, and
others--who, in their revolt against the tyranny
of strict French VERSIFICATION, established the
Vers libre movement, from which the name free
verse comes. In the twentieth century free
verse has had widespread usage by most poets, of
whom Rilke, St.-John Perse, T. S. Eliot, Ezra
Pound, Carl Sandburg, and William Carlos Williams
are representative. Such a list indicates the
great variety of subject matter, effect and TONE
that is possible in free verse, and shows that it
is much less a rebellion against traditional
English METRICS than a modification and extension
of the resources of our language.
28
LL307 Reading/Interpreting PoetryAnglo-Saxon
Traditions to Modern Verse (Free Verse)
Because of its hidden discipline, free verse
often surprises those who expect a verbal
free-for-all. While line and stanza counts,
syllables, and rhyme schemes may seem random, the
beat of the poem is not its a variation of
natural speech patterns. Free verse maintains a
metrical and rhythmic precision. This is
exemplified by its first universally recognized
master, Walt Whitman.
After the Sea-Ship Walt Whitman (1819-92)
After the Sea-Shipafter the whistling winds
After the white-gray sails, taut to their spars
and ropes,Below, a myriad, myriad waves,
hastening, lifting up their necks, Tending in
ceaseless flow toward the track of the ship
Waves of the ocean, bubbling and gurgling,
blithely prying,Waves, undulating wavesliquid,
uneven, emulous waves, Toward that whirling
current, laughing and buoyant, with curves,
Where the great Vessel, sailing and tacking,
displaced the surface Larger and smaller
waves, in the spread of the ocean, yearnfully
flowing The wake of the Sea-Ship, after she
passes flashing and frolicsome, under the sun,A
motley procession, with many a fleck of foam,
and many fragments,Following the stately and
rapid Shipin the wake following.
29
LL307 Reading/Interpreting PoetryAnglo-Saxon
Traditions to Modern Verse (Performance/Beat/SLAM
Poetry)
Beat poetry evolved during the 1940s in both New
York City and on the west coast, although San
Francisco became the heart of the movement in the
early 1950s. The end of World War II left poets
like Allen Ginsberg, Gary Snyder, Lawrence
Ferlinghetti and Gregory Corso questioning
mainstream politics and culture. These poets
would become known as the Beat generation, a
group of writers interested in changing
consciousness and defying conventional writing.
The battle against social conformity and
literary tradition was central to the work of the
Beats. Among this group of poets, hallucinogenic
drugs were used to achieve higher consciousness,
as was meditation and Eastern religion.
Buddhism especially was important to many of the
Beat poets Gary Snyder and Allen Ginsberg both
intensely studied this religion and it figured
into much of their work. Allen Ginsberg's first
book, Howl and Other Poems, is often considered
representative of the Beat poets. In 1956
Lawrence Ferlinghetti's press City Lights
published Howl and Ferlinghetti was brought to
trial the next year on charges of obscenity.
Other Beat poets included Diane di Prima, Neal
Cassady, Anne Waldman and Michael McClure.
Although William S. Burroughs and Jack Kerouac
are often best remembered for works of fiction
such as Naked Lunch and On the Road,
respectively, they also wrote poetry and were
very much part of the Beats as well Kerouac is
said to have coined the term "Beat generation,"
describing the down-and-out status of himself and
his peers during the post-war years.
30
LL307 Reading/Interpreting PoetryAnglo-Saxon
Traditions to Modern Verse (Performance/Beat/SLAM
Poetry)
Allen Ginsberg was born in Newark, New Jersey, on
June 3, 1926. The son of Louis and Naomi
Ginsberg, two Jewish members of the New York
literary counter-culture of the 1920s, Ginsberg
was raised among several progressive political
perspectives. As an adolescent, Ginsberg liked
Walt Whitman and Edgar Allan Poe as favorite
poets. His influence on the beat poets and in
raising political consciousness through his
poetry remains among the landmarks in poetry.
He was part of events like the "The '6' Gallery
Reading" which took place on October 7, 1955. The
event has been hailed as the birth of the Beat
Generation, in no small part because it was also
the first public reading of Ginsberg's "Howl," a
poem which garnered world-wide attention for him
and the poets he associated with. In Shortly
after Howl and Other Poems was published in 1956
by City Lights Bookstore and became one of the
most widely read poems of the century, translated
into more than twenty-two languages. In his later
years, Ginsberg became a Distinguished Professor
at Brooklyn College. He died on April 5, 1997, in
New York
I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed
by madness, starving hysterical     naked,dragg
ing themselves through the negro streets at dawn
looking for an angry fix,angel headed hipsters
burning for the ancient heavenly connection to
the starry     dynamo in the machinery of night
. . .     --Allen Ginsberg, "Howl"
31
LL307 Reading/Interpreting PoetryAnglo-Saxon
Traditions to Modern Verse (Performance/Beat/SLAM
Poetry)
Performance Poetry Poetry specially written to be
performed, with an emphasis on the energy, voice,
gestures and movements of the poet to enhance the
performance. In its true sense it is performed
without other accompaniments, but sometimes
music, sounds or props are included. This is a
very oral form of poetry with an immediate
audience reaction and response. SLAM
Poetry Poetry slam is the competitive art of
performance poetry. It puts a dual emphasis on
writing and performance, encouraging poets to
focus on what they're saying and how they're
saying it. A poetry slam is a competitive event
in which poets perform their work and are judged
by members of the audience. The vast majority of
slam series are open to everyone who wishes to
sign up and can get into the venue. Though
everyone who signs up has the opportunity to read
in the first round, the lineup for subsequent
rounds is determined by the judges' scores. In
other words, the judges vote for which poets they
want to see more work from. The basic rules
are Each poem must be of the poet's own
construction Each poet gets three minutes (plus
a ten-second grace period) to read one poem. If
the poet goes over time, points will be deducted
from the total score. The poet may not use
props, costumes or musical instruments Of the
scores the poet received from the five judges,
the high and low scores are dropped and the
middle three are added together, giving the poet
a total score of 0-30.
32

• Tiare - Second Hand Sonata
• For Konai again.
• Is a wisp of white wave
• breaks like Sudso upon surf
• Held in that shadow
• Of lip and chin of ocean
• And bad mouths mountains
• Under whose shade its tree
• Fragrances creek stones.
• Tiare is imprint design
• Of a car seat cover crushed
• In a second hand Honda
• underneath a large Polynesian
• woman driving to Mt Eden
• feeling for the absent flower
• over her not so virginal ear.