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Comments (53)

Marshall Brown

Nov 01

Intriguing reading throughout. The OED rescues the poem by including "change for thine" in the "obsolete" reversed sense 1.3.c, where the object of "for" is the thing given in exchange rather than the thing received in exchange, a possibility not encompassed in your discussion. This sense is unambiguous in the other three OED instances, and certainly a possibility in Jonson, though certainly "only" a possibility.

There are surely many poems with such possible reversals of tone. My reading of the Nightingale Ode is one. Isn't reversal of tone a definition of irony? None of this invalidates your contribution in this reading of this poem, just contextualizes it.

So, here's another example, one of the most famous poems of Joseph von Eichendorff:

Der Abend

Schweigt der Menschen laute Lust:

Rauscht die Erde wie in Träumen

Wunderbar mit allen Bäumen,

Was dem Herzen kaum bewußt,

Alte Zeiten, linde Trauer,

Und es schweifen leise Schauer

Wetterleuchtend durch die Brust.

Trauer begins a possible undermining of wunderbar. "Und" has some of the same ambiguity as in the Keats: is it a completion of the wonder or is it a consequence of the Trauer? In other words, are the dreams that lie underneath the strenuous activity of the daytime hopeful or nightmarish? Are the leise Schauer soothing, gentle "showers" of rain? Or are they the grisly "shudders" that the word can also mean? Is the lightning distant and illuminating, or nearby and foreboding, threatening that the gentle showers will turn into floods?

Roman Sympos

Nov 03

Replying to

What a lovely example, Marshall! Thank you for calling it to our attention.

Before going any further, here's a translation for readers unversed in German. I found it in Marlboro Music: German Vocal Texts in Translation, An Anthology, edited and translated by Philipp O. Naegele, 2005 (https://www.marlboromusic.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/02/Naegele_Book_2008.pdf) (It's worth reading Naegele's preface and thumbnail biography in the introductory material--the preface for its intelligent reflections on the challenges of translating song lyrics to meet the needs of audiences listening to performances in the original, the biography for its gripping account of Naegele's experiences in the Second World War.)

EVENING

When men's loud delights fall silent:

Rustles then the earth as if in dreams

Wondrously with all its trees,

What to the heart is scarcely known,

Bygone ages, gentle sorrows,

And soft shudders sweep

Like summer lightning through the breast.

Naegele can't, of course, capture in English the ambiguity of the German original. "Schauer," for instance, has to be rendered in English as either "shudders" or "showers," and while their meanings are linked analogously or metaphorically, neither can be taken, lexically, to mean the other. "The weather forecast is for shudders this afternoon" would leave us scratching our heads.

I think "reversal of tone" is a good definition of irony, and clearly demonstrated in "To Celia." But what's missing from "Der Abend," I think, is mutual exclusivity, which I take to be an essential trait of the ambiguous visual figure: the old woman/rabbit, for instance, can't be perceived as both A (a rabbit) and B (an old woman) at the same time, nor can "To Celia" be read and experienced as both a hapless lover's complaint and a bitter insult simultaneously.

The emotional oppositions in "Der Abend," as in much of Romantic poetry generally, can, I believe. This is one of the great achievements of the Romantic lyric, the realization that human emotions are not mutuallly exclusive, but complex blends and contrasting shades of emotions that are typically understood to be opposites. The contrast or opposition, far from diluting or displacing the primary emotion, deepens it.

Wordsworth's poetry is full of examples. Take "The Two April Mornings," for instance. We'd expect that Matthew, standing forlornly beside the grave of his nine-year-old daugher, would, upon suddenly beholding a "blooming girl, whose hair was wet/ With points of morning dew" nearby, experience an intense longing for her, someone to take his dead daughter's place. A lesser poet than Wordsworth might even have Matthew, for a brief bewildered moment, mistaking her for the dead girl, as if she were her ghost. But Matthew feels exactly the opposite: "I looked at her, and looked again,/ And did not wish her mine!"

That exclamation point is so eloquent. It registers Matthew's own surprise at his indifference to this girl--after all, he tells us, "To see a child so very fair,/ It was a pure delight!" But Matthew's delight intensifies, rather than diminishes, his sense of loss and despair, along with our vicarious participation in his grief. His heart will accept no substitutes. His daughter, dead for some thirty years at the moment he tells the poet this tale, cannot, ever, be replaced.

Here, as in von Eichendorff's poem, the opposite emotions in play are not mutually exclusive, as in a tonally ambiguous poem like "To Celia," but mutually reinforcing--not contradictory or ironic (except superficially) but contrastive and complex and tightly integrated.

I could go on to provide a similar close reading of "Der Abend," but I've gone on long enough. In any case, I don't think the poem's contrastive and complex integration of quiet, wondrous rustling, shuddering showers, and gentle sorrows, on the one hand, and piercing, if distant, summer lightning, on the other, could survive the kind of mutually exclusive readings demanded by a poem like "To Celia."

Many thanks, again, for your contribution to the discussion--it was a real, undiluted pleasure for me to trace its implicaitions for our understanding of this poem, and poetry in general!

With warm regards,

Roman Sympos

marco

Sep 04

"letting your body think for you..." re learning languages. YES. NOTHING in the world, except the piano scales, as you offered,

is as boring as language lab exercises. Both in French and Russian. I learned enough to make my way through Paris and Moscow, but in no way would anyone imagine I was ever fluent. But I grew up with my grandparents' peasant versions of Emilian Italian, a "dialect" colloquially, but many now think of Italian dialects as individual languages because they are so disparate. Yet, never having studied Italian, just being exposed to it in dialectical form as a child, I can often read whole Italian passages, even if I cannot create them in my brain. I once saw an Italian grammar book called "Italian for Good Guessers" and my body does that very well apparently. Its not my intellectual understanding of Italian, but my gut making good guesses which are 99% right. I do follow Antonio Benina, an Italian teacher, on Social Media, which helps, (but, um, mostly because he is so darn adorable...its not like I use him as a language lab and repeat his exercises. ;-)

roman sympos

Sep 06

Replying to

Exactly, Marco! I knew you'd pick up on the language learning analogy instantly! Thanks for your contribution.

With warm regards,

Roman Sympos

Soxman

Jul 05

Dear Roman Sympos,

I enjoy reading your site, but I want to take issue with something you say in your most recent essay: "Poetry’s basic molecule is the line, fiction’s the sentence or sentence fragment. That’s why you can tell poetry from fiction just by looking at them."

Is this entirely true? The point, as I often tell my own students, is that the basic molecule of poetry is the sentence, just as it is in prose. The exchange goes like this, every time:

Q: "What is the basic syntactic unit of meaning in prose?

A: [after some coaching]: "the sentence."

Q: "What is the basic syntactic unit of meaning in poetry?

A: [inevitably]: "The line."

And I say, "No, though it seems that way. Poetry gets its force because its basic syntactic unit of meaning is the same as prose, but its presentation of that unit differs. That difference is the line. In poetry, the tension between sentence and line (or even sentence fragment, which evokes the sentence as it can in prose) is all." THAT is the reason "you can tell poetry from prose just by looking at them." I here am setting aside (again) prose poems, which are not poems according to my definition.

Yours,

Faithful reader

Roman Sympos

Jul 06

Replying to

Dear Faithful Reader,

First of all, thanks so much for your fidelity! It is most appreciated!

You have an excellent point here--it reminds me of Wordsworth insisting, in his "Preface" to Lyrical Ballads, that there's no essential difference between poetry and prose. I don't think he had syntactic units of meaning in mind, but rather topics, emotions, and ideas--content, in other words. He does spend a lot of time, however, on trying to justify poetry's (especially his poetry's) almost exclusive reliance on versification, after knocking the legs out from under the distinction.

But if the basic syntactic unit of meaning in the poem is the sentence, as it is in fiction, what do we do with poems that lack sentences entirely? For example:

In a Station of the Metro

The apparition of these faces in the crowd:

Petals, on a wet, black bough.

Pound has disguised the genre of his poem--it's a haiku--by separating the first line from the next two and making it look like the title. In fact, the juxtaposition of images without the use of sentences is common to haiku--that's why an Imagist like Pound was so drawn to the form.

As for sentence fragments "evoking" sentences, I don't think it's fair to call phrases like these "sentence fragments" when there are no whole, intact specimens anywhere in sight. Sentence fragments appear in lots of fiction, in which the basic syntactic unit (or molecule) is in fact the sentence, but they serve only as momentary deviations from the norm. You can't write a entire story (let alone a novel) in nothing but nouns, prepositions, and modifiers, can you? I can't think of a single example that would work except as a prose poem, and that's off the table, as we both agree.

So, I'll stand by my "molecular" distinction.

Over to you!

With warm regards,

Roman Sympos

Lynn

Jun 04

Dear Sympos,

What a treat your View from the Precipice is this time. And timely. I'm putting together a UU service for our fellowship here in Brisbane for this Sunday and my topic is "Freedom and Commitment". I'll be using your quote and analysis from Pinocchio to introduce the Freedom section. Serendipitous, thank you.

Peace, Lynn

romansympos

Jun 06

Replying to

Hi, Lynn,

Thanks so much for that--glad to hear it will be useful. You're not the only one to have experienced serendipity. Adam contacted me with similar news--he's been writing up a paper proposal on a Renaissance psychomachia, using Inside Out as an example. Something's in the air!

Your humble servant,

Laura

May 01

I enjoyed Gut Feeling very much. Starts out innocently enough then, a twist, Agatha Christie-esque. Multiple twists, very effective! Could not put it down. I always love local references, too. Thank you, Professor.

ROMAN SYMPOS

May 02

Replying to

Thanks, Laura! So nice to hear that, and so nice of you to write. There's another story in the works, set on Cape Ann, which I'll post after all the parts of "The Flight" have been posted, so stay tuned!

marco

May 01

Love that poem! Got to me....

Roman Sympos

May 01

Replying to

Hi, Marco!

Loved that you loved that poem. Thanks so much for letting me know.

marco

Apr 22

"davy crockett and bonanza...our history channel" yes...with some of the same foolishness of the history channel showing Ancient Aliens reruns. Loved the poem. And as to the essay on pointing, and gestures etc....the Italian non grammatical gesture language has at least 50 forms of gestures which have multiple meanings depending on the context. Tie an Italian up and communication would be almost impossible, since they are linked to the grammatical language so its only possible to write Italian poetry ( Pozzi, Ungaretti, Montale, Quasimodo) without gestures, but not to speak without gestures.

Lynn Kelly

Mar 05

Excellent short story, Chuck. Gut Feeling. Just right.

roman sympos

Mar 05

Replying to

My editor kindly passed along your comment, Lynn. Thanks so much!! Glad you liked it!

Warm regards--

Professor Roman Sympos

Jon Millen

Feb 05

The January Anger Management and AI essay hits a few topics I often think about, such as strong AI and the Turing test. You might be interested in the 1993 review linked below, about the imitation game as implemented in the now-defunct Loebner Prize competition. One observation from it sticks in my mind: a human expert on Shakespeare was misidentified as a computer, because she knew too much! [cf. www.eecs.harvard.edu/~shieber/Biblio/Papers/loebner-rev-html/loebner-rev-html.html]

Roman Sympos

Feb 06

Replying to

Thanks so much for sharing this with us, Jon! I look forward to reading it in full, but from what I can see from a cursory glance, it looks like a lot of people are mistaking "knowing" for "intelligence," while the computers are erring in the opposite direction, reducing "intelligence" to "knowing."

All best,

Professor Roman Sympos

gvargo

Feb 05

Thank you for sharing this site with me! I was struck by your grandchild's animism vis a vis the Lego plane - it's something I think about in children and it's hard to get a handle on.

AI, though, drives me crazy - at least for my undergraduate papers! It's peculiar how run of the mill chess engines can now beat the greatest grandmaster and other programs have made major breakthroughs but the commercial AIs can't write a competent analysis of a poem. My understanding is that they are predictive algorithms and as such are excellent at certain functions but very bad at generating counterintuitive arguments or any arguments that aren't riddled with cliches and generalities.

Roman Sympos

Feb 06

Replying to

Absolutely, Greg! Until AI learns when and how to pick a fight (challenge someone else's thesis) or arrive at the solution to a problem that it hasn't been asked to solve, it will continue to be the best learner in class but the worst student. Thank you for your comment!

Sincerely,

Professor Sympos