Vintage: "To His Lady"

Here's a decidedly vintage sonnet: October 6, 1983
          First Assignment: Sonnet
          Prof. Richmond's English 117S: Shakespeare

TO HIS LADY

I shall not wander in twisted conceits,
Nor cultivate crazes best left behind,
Nor waste vain efforts procuring young sweets,
When virtuous love composes my mind.
Good thoughts, better words, most excellent verse--
All features to furnish (with wit, with tact)
Fond feelings that now I merely rehearse,
Motions I go through, scenes I enact.
My stage-craft flourishes, though plotting's a ruse:
"Love is a masque where we all play our part."
What use for the scenery, when lacking a muse?
What use for the masque when the muse lacks a heart?
You'll grant I never saw a goddess go:
Down with the masque, my dear--on with the show.

--Matthew Duckworth


(I was cleaning out some boxes in the garage this afternoon when I happened upon a very old box filled with very old assignments--oh beloved undergraduate days.   Prof. Richmond actually read my sonnet aloud in class, which pleased and embarrassed me to no end.)

Tennyson: "The Kraken" and "Sonnet"

Two sonnets from Tennyson:

THE KRAKEN
Below the thunders of the upper deep;
Far, far beneath in the abysmal sea,
His ancient, dreamless, uninvaded sleep
The Kraken sleepeth: faintest sunlights flee
About his shadowy sides: above him swell
Huge sponges of millennial growth and height;
And far away into the sickly light,
From many a wondrous grot and secret cell
Unnumbered and enormous polypi
Winnow with giant arms the slumbering green.
There hath he lain for ages and will lie
Battening upon huge sea-worms in his sleep,
Until the latter fire shall heat the deep;
Then once by man and angels to be seen,
In roaring he shall rise and on the surface die.
          --Tennyson



SONNET
She took the dappled partridge flecked with blood,
And in her hand the drooping pheasant bare,
And by his feet she held the woolly hare,
And like a master painting where she stood,
Looked some new goddess of an English wood.
Nor could I find an imperfection there,
Nor blame the wanton act that showed so fair--
To me whatever freak she plays is good.
Hers is the fairest Life that breathes with breath,
And their still plumes and azure eyelids closed
Made quiet Death so beautiful to see
That Death lent grace to Life and Life to Death
And in one image Life and Death reposed,
To make my love an Immortality.
          --Tennyson

I've always been intrigued by these two poems.   The first offers an apocalyptic vision of a mythic undersea beast that ends only in destruction.  A poem of natural wonder, of marine sublimity, ends in an expression of revelatory faith at the end of times.  Rapturous, for sure.  The second is, to my mind, a moving still-life, intriguing in itself, and yet the title emphasizes form, emphasizes the dynamic relationship of a very English, very constrained poetic structure and the seemingly unpoetic (that is, seemingly unself-conscious) scene it describes via that structure.  

I mean, "Sonnet" is obviously self-conscious, but not obviously self-conscious about its own structure.  What do I mean?  I may be making too much of the title being poetically self-reflexive.  

What would Emily Bronte or her Heathcliff say about such a poem?

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.

Practical Reading: Poetry in Motion -- McKay, Teasdale, and Wroth

Poetry Study Notes

--1.  Turn to Claude McKay’s “The Tropics in New York”:
What’s the story?
Who are the characters that we get?
What’s the scene, the physical scene?
What happens?  Is there action? Interior or exterior action?
What’s the mood? How can you tell?
What questions do you have about this poem?  Ask me.
There are three stanzas here: what should we notice about that?
How many sentences are there in this poem?
How do the number of sentences relate to the flow of the poem?
What would happen to the poem if we just had the last stanza?
Or, what if we had stanzas 1 & 2, but not 3?
Do you like this poem? Does it work for you?  Why or why not?


--2.  Turn to Sara Teasdale’s “Night Song at Amalfi”:
How does this poem feel different from McKay’s poem?
What or where is “Amalfi”? Do you know? Can you guess? Does it matter?
What’s the story?
Characters? Scene? Action?
What’s the mood? How can you tell?
What questions do you have about this poem? Ask me.
There are three stanzas in this poem: what should we notice about that?
Do the sentences end with each stanza or flow into the next stanza?
What would happen if we changed all the “night” and “dark” references to “day” and “light” references?
What would happen if we changed all the “I” references to “he” or “she” or even “they”?  What about “we”?  How would this be a different poem?

--3.  Turn to Mary Wroth’s  Sonnet # 1 from Pamphilia to Amphilanthus:
What’s the story?
Who are the characters that we get?
Who is the son of Venus?  Who or what is Venus, by the way?
What seems to be motivating Venus?
Or, what's with all the burning ?  What burns? What does this burning mean?
What’s the situation?  The physical scene if we were making a video?
What questions do you have about the poem?  Ask me.
A sonnet is a poem of 14 lines, but notice how the units of the poem work:  1-4; 5-8; 9-14.
          How can I tell that these are the units here?
Does it help to read the poem in those units, pausing after each part to check what it seems to mean?  (I hope so.)
What is a “martyr”?  How is the speaker’s heart “martyred”?
What is the tone of the last three lines?  How can we tell?
Is this love, this being a lover a good thing to the speaker?
We have a dream vision in the poem: why use a dream to express what’s going on?

Boland: "Atlantis -- A Lost Sonnet"

ATLANTIS -- A LOST SONNET

How on earth did it happen, I used to wonder
that a whole city—arches, pillars, colonnades, 
not to mention vehicles and animals—had all 
one fine day gone under?

I mean, I said to myself, the world was small then.
Surely a great city must have been missed?
I miss our old city —

white pepper, white pudding, you and I meeting 
under fanlights and low skies to go home in it. Maybe 
what really happened is 

this: the old fable-makers searched hard for a word
to convey that what is gone is gone forever and 
never found it. And so, in the best traditions of 

where we come from, they gave their sorrow a name
and drowned it.

--Eavan Boland

Thanks, EHS, for sharing.

Shakespeare's Sonnet 122: "Thy Gift, Thy Tables"

Thy gift, thy tables, are within my brain
Full character'd with lasting memory,
Which shall above that idle rank remain
Beyond all date, even to eternity; 
Or at the least, so long as brain and heart 
Have faculty by nature to subsist;
Till each to razed oblivion yield his part
Of thee, thy record never can be miss'd. 
That poor retention could not so much hold, 
Nor need I tallies thy dear love to score; 
Therefore to give them from me was I bold, 
To trust those tables that receive thee more: 
   To keep an adjunct to remember thee 
   Were to import forgetfulness in me.

         --William Shakespeare