Wordsworth's "I Wandered Lonely As a Cloud"

William Wordsworth's famous poem may speak to us these days.

A quintessential English Romantic poem:
Nature, vivid description, musical patterning, individual subjectivity for the sake of universal feeling, memory and its healing power when harnessed with nature, and art for the sake of the soul.

(I disliked the poem as an undergraduate, but have come to appreciate its artful simplicity and application. I have a greater appreciation for thousands of flowers dancing in the sun and breeze too.)


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.

--William Wordsworth

Body Language

Captain:
sending me signals.
Those ears back, and that tail like a metronome.

Play-Time: From the Medieval to the Renaissance

The manuscript poster--
Spring 2017:
English 46A
Come join the fun!
I'll make it as memorable as I can.

Louise Gluck's "Dawn"

DAWN

1

Child waking up in a dark room
screaming I want my duck back, I want my duck back

in a language nobody understands in the least —

There is no duck.

But the dog, all upholstered in white plush —
the dog is right there in the crib next to him.

Years and years — that’s how much time passes.
All in a dream. But the duck —
no one knows what happened to that.

2

They’ve  just met, now
they’re sleeping near an open window.

Partly to wake them, to assure them
that what they remember of  the night is correct,
now light needs to enter the room,

also to show them the context in which this occurred:
socks half  hidden under a dirty mat,
quilt decorated with green leaves —

the sunlight specifying
these but not other objects,
setting boundaries, sure of  itself, not arbitrary,

then lingering, describing
each thing in detail,
fastidious, like a composition in English,
even a little blood on the sheets —

3

Afterward, they separate for the day.
Even later, at a desk, in the market,
the manager not satisfied with the figures he’s given,
the berries moldy under the topmost layer —

so that one withdraws from the world
even as one continues to take action in it —

You get home, that’s when you notice the mold.
Too late, in other words.

As though the sun blinded you for a moment.

--LOUISE GLUCK


(Thank you, AB, for the gift of the collected works!)

Body English: Musings on the Beautiful and Sublime

Let's quote Edmund Burke on "Gradual Variation":

BUT as perfectly beautiful bodies are not composed of angular parts, so their parts never continue long in the same right line.  They vary their direction every moment, and they change under the eye by a deviation continually carrying on, but for whose beginning or end you will find it difficult to ascertain a point. The view of a beautiful bird will illustrate this observation. Here we see the head increasing insensibly to the middle, from whence it lessens gradually until it mixes with the neck; the neck loses itself in larger swell, which continues to the middle of the body, when the whole decreases again to the tail; the tail takes a new direction; but it soon varies its new course: it blends again with the other parts; and the line is perpetually changing, above, below, upon every side.  In this description I have before me the idea of a dove; it agrees very well with most of the conditions of beauty. It is smooth and downy; its parts are (to use that expression) melted into one another; you are presented with no sudden protuberance through the whole, and yet the whole is continually changing. 

Observe that part of a beautiful woman where she is perhaps the most beautiful, about the neck and breasts; the smoothness; the softness; the easy and insensible swell; the variety of the surface, which is never for the smallest space the same; the deceitful maze, through which the unsteady eye slides giddily, without knowing where to fix or whither it is carried. Is not this a demonstration of that change of surface, continual, and yet hardly perceptible at any point, which forms one of the great constituents of beauty? 


Selections from A Philosophical Inquiry into the Origin of Our ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful.
-- from Part II: Section XV, in particular

Edmund Burke, 1757.

Body English in Green

Clay: soldate;
glaze: oribe.

Giving Voice To John Keats

Keats! Yesterday I had planned to lecture on John Keats and his poetry,
reading aloud the following poems
in full in the following order:

"To One Who Has Been Long In City Pent" (sonnet)
"On First Looking Into Chapman's Homer" (sonnet)
"La Belle Dame Sans Merci" (ballad)
"Ode on Melancholy" (ode)
"Ode to a Nightingale" (ode)
and
"The Eve of St. Agnes" (narrative verse poem, gothic trappings).

And in the 50 minutes available, well, I almost made it.  I lost a little time when I decided to chart the frame narration of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, our next book, but everything takes a bit longer than I tend to expect.  I had to summarize what I wanted to walk through with "The Eve of St. Agnes"--though I wish I'd had the time to read that long tale aloud.  That's what the poem deserves.

Next time.

Recommended for the Literary Reader

Clay Dreams: Torso

Body English:

sculpture mix; transparent brown and shino glazing.

20-minute exercise.

Surrey's "Green Waves"

COMPLAINT OF THE ABSENCE OF HER LOVER BEING UPON THE SEA

O happy dames! that may embrace
The fruit of your delight,
Help to bewail the woful case
And eke the heavy plight
Of me, that wonted to rejoice
The fortune of my pleasant choice:
Good ladies, help to fill my mourning voice.

In ship, freight with rememberance
Of thoughts and pleasures past,
He sails that hath in governance
My life while it will last:
With scalding sighs, for lack of gale,
Furthering his hope, that is his sail,
Toward me, the sweet port of his avail.

Alas! how oft in dreams I see
Those eyes that were my food;
Which sometime so delighted me,
That yet they do me good:
Wherewith I wake with his return
Whose absent flame did make me burn:
But when I find the lack, Lord! how I mourn!

When other lovers in arms across
Rejoice their chief delight,
Drowned in tears, to mourn my loss
I stand the bitter night
In my window where I may see
Before the winds how the clouds flee:
Lo! what a mariner love hath made me!

And in green waves when the salt flood
Doth rise by rage of wind,
A thousand fancies in that mood
Assail my restless mind.
Alas! now drencheth my sweet foe,
That with the spoil of my heart did go,
And left me; but alas! why did he so?

And when the seas wax calm again
To chase fro me annoy,
My doubtful hope doth cause me plain;
So dread cuts off my joy.
Thus is my wealth mingled with woe
And of each thought a doubt doth grow;
—Now he comes! Will he come? Alas! no, no. 

--Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey

Catching the Tide

Here's the booklist for next semester's English 1A:

Daniel Duane's Caught Inside;
Curtis Ebbesmeyer & Eric Scigliano's Flotsametrics and the Floating World;
Laurence Gonzales' Deep Survival;
William Langewiesche's The Outlaw Sea;
Jack London's The Sea-Wolf;
and John McPhee's The Control of Nature.

Of course, there will be additional readings to set the tone and direct the pace of things.  Handouts!

(Also: selected videos on surfing, sharks, marine mammals, ships and shipping, the Mississippi River Delta, storms, volcanoes, disasters, and so forth.)

Marching Orders

William Shakespeare's Macbeth;
Mary Shelley's Frankenstein;
Oscar Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest;
Guy de Maupassant's The Necklace and Other Short Stories;
Mark Strand and Eavan Boland's The Making of a Poem;
E. Annie Proulx's The Shipping News;
assorted stories and poems via handouts;
and some appropriate film clips.

English 1B: Spring 2013

Gate of Ivory, Gate of Horn?

I love my alma mater, warts and all.  And, to keep with that metaphor, she'll bewitch you if you give her half a chance.  Half-Circe, half-Sibyl of Cumae?

Whenever I approach that gate, I hear Virgilian echoes; I just do.

(Homeric resonances too: Holy moly, Hermes!)


Let's hear it, especially, for Latin Summer Workshop '88!
"O passi graviora, dabit deus his quoque finem."  --Virgil, The Aeneid, from Book I.

Test Prompt: Is Roxane Worth The Trouble?

When I teach Edmond Rostand's Cyrano de Bergerac, I end up wanting to write lots of letters.  I also always assign the following topics--or roughly similar ones--for in-class or take-home writing:

Is Roxane really worth the trouble?

Is Cyrano just a fool?  (Use evidence from all parts of the play to support your position.)

Does the Comte de Guiche have any redeeming qualities?  And if so, are they enough, really, to redeem him?

Stuff like that.

The first is a particular favorite, and those of you who know the play understand that in the beginning, Roxane, aside from her beauty and liveliness, doesn't seem to merit such devotion from Cyrano and Christian.  In fact, in the second and third acts, she can seem petty and hurtful.  And yet if you keep reading . . . .

I also like to direct students to the balcony scene as a crescendo in the arc of the play.  What really happens amidst all those words back and forth?  Is it all just the "pretty nothings that are everything," as Roxane claims earlier, or is there something of greater depth at work?

Oh, Roxane--


I've also found the following quotation helpful in considering the overall arc of the play:


"The world is a comedy to those who think, a tragedy to those who feel."
--Horace Walpole (1717-1797)


--a handful of thoughts at the end of a long day.

Totem Pool

Study session in progress.

(And what did Melville's Ishmael claim?  "I have swam through libraries . . . .")