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Brad
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since 1999-08-20
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Jejudo, South Korea

0 posted 2008-01-11 05:00 PM


This month I knew I wanted to post a Wordsworth poem, but I hesitated. The obvious choice was "Abbey", but I  was worried about the length. Then, I stumbled across Longfellow's "Chaucer" and wondered if two poems might not be more interesting. And, as a curious coincidence, Sunshine's posts a poem about Chaucer this week.

Sometimes, these things are decided for you.

quote:
Chaucer

An old man in a lodge within a park;
The chamber walls depicted all around
With portraitures of huntsman, hawk, and hound,
And the hurt deer. He listeneth to the lark,
Whose song comes with the sunshine through the dark
Of painted glass in leaden lattice bound;
He listeneth and he laugheth at the sound,
Then writeth in a book like any clerk.
He is the poet of the dawn, who wrote
The Canterbury Tales, and his old age
Made beautiful with song; and as I read
I hear the crowing cock, I hear the note
Of lark and linnet, and from every page
Rise odours of ploughed field or flowery mead.


--Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

To be honest, there are many aspects of Sunshine's poem that I like more than this one. I find this competent but the tone is obsequious, the rhythms are predictable, the content is bland.

Sorry, this ain't what Chaucer's about.  

quote:
The World Is Too Much With Us; Late and Soon

The world is too much with us; late and soon,
Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers;
Little we see in Nature that is ours;
We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!
This Sea that bares her bosom to the moon,
The winds that will be howling at all hours,
And are up-gathered now like sleeping flowers,
For this, for everything, we are out of tune;
It moves us not. -Great God! I'd rather be
A Pagan suckled in a creed outworn;
So might I, standing on this pleasant lea,
Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn;
Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea;
Or hear old Triton blow his wreathed horn.


--William Wordsworth

Well, while 'hear old Triton' makes me cringe -- I don't think it matches the tone -- I like this poem much more. One of the things I like is the sense of possession and mystery or rather that somehow mystery or mythos creates a sense of possession. Actually, I think there's a lot more to talk about here, but I'll hold off.

I have often felt that the Japanese literary tradition is stronger at Nature poetry than the English tradition (but the English tradition is much better at portraying people -- certainly, Chaucer's strength is the characters who travel to Canterbury, not linnets and larks.)

Regardless, both poems deal with humanity's relationship to nature:

In Longellow, that relationship is intensified by literature.

In Wordsworth, that relationship is sundered by a lack of mystery.

Or am I just blowing Triton's horn here?

Both poems are in the PIP Classics section.

© Copyright 2008 Brad - All Rights Reserved
Sunshine
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1 posted 2008-01-12 08:51 AM


First of all, thank you for the continuing comments, Brad, about my Greensleeve's poem. There is a huge smiling playing my face.

quote:
Chaucer's strength is the characters who travel to Canterbury

I need to become a better chronologist in noting my poems as to why some thoughts come to me when they do. At this point, all I can recall at the time of writing my own poem is I had either read a book, or had seen some movie, where I sensed Chaucer had a great wit and sense of wry humor [or so it seemed to me] and was very likely to entertain himself humanely, i.e., he could poke fun at himself, and I feel he often did just that.

Sometimes I think we hold up our poets of the past in a light respective of some sort of religious aspect. I mean, WOW, their names live on! I wonder if it will continue to be so for the names of today, hundreds of years from now? Unfortunately, I will never know the answer to that. But the thought remains, what actually will live on through time?

Of course, whether we like their work, both Wordsworth and Longfellow are doing just that, as well. Makes me wonder at how they would take your critique, and I can only imagine that they would just nod, and say, "hey, I'm glad you pointed that out!"

My poem on Chaucer's Greensleeves was more of a tribute to the man than any sense of an attempt to compare my poetry to his. [Actually, I would never do that, i.e., attempt to sound like someone else, unless as a challenge]. But it also occurs to me that people have written me and said, "did you realize that this poem sounds just like "so and so's" and I learn that (1) it's always a dead poet; and (2) it's always a poet I've never read before, and I'm led onward to new discoveries.

They say that there is very little that can be written that is new. It's been my fortune to be told that I've reminded someone of a dead poet, one that I had never known of.

In comparing nature poems to poems on humanity, I don't think that I've yet been able to write one without encompassing the other...yet. So you have unwittingly set me on yet another challenge.  

Thanks!



chopsticks
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since 2007-10-02
Posts 888
The US,
2 posted 2008-01-12 09:49 AM


“ They say that there is very little that can be written that is new. It's been my fortune to be told that I've reminded someone of a dead poet, one that I had never known of. “

Sunshine, who say dat?

I have heard that all the things ever written are only a microscopic part of what could be written. That there are billions and billions of things that have not been written yet.

Sunshine
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3 posted 2008-01-12 11:49 AM


Chops,

It was a long time ago, in an English class, by a teacher whose name I do not recall at this time. I wanted to prove him wrong.

I like your saying much better!


TomMark
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4 posted 2008-01-12 12:32 PM


http://www.luminarium.org/medlit/chaubib.htm

I can't understand much and look at all those TYPOs.  

Sir Brad must likes him exclusively...his semi-clear poems.

Chauser wrote poem in vernacular language...then to me, he was more like a person of rebel or lived a life of hard struggle against the mainstream, or unsatisfied treatment from the general upper class, or simply disdained the common non-honesty world.

Then I will go read Henry Wadsworth Longfellow...The sentimental one. Then I try to understand  his poem you posted


Brad
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Jejudo, South Korea
5 posted 2008-01-14 04:58 PM


Thanks for commenting.

I don't know. Wordsworth and Longfellow don't seem to spark the fire that other poets do.

What is it? Are they still close enough to our language that we can't put them on a pedestal (as Sunshine rightly points out) or are they too far away? Are they in the gray no-man's land in between?

Whether or not you believe in paradigm shifts or whatever, it does seem the case that people want to believe that they are on the cutting edge of something. It is a kind of willfull forgetting perhaps or even a lack of interest in finding out. Bloom says somewhere that the Modern age of poetry doesn't really begin with Whitman, it begins with Wordsworth and, even if you haven't read Wordsworth, you are, in fact, Wordsworthian.

I think there's a lot of truth to that statement. Look at the feeling presented in the above two poems. There is a difference though both are or can be read as nostalgic.

Yet, one is about the exhileration of reading and one is the yearning for that exhileration -- from anything.

Or did I just choose the wrong poems?

Wordsworth works for me, Longfellow doesn't (though, of course, I still have lines from "The Midnight Ride of Paul Revere" in my head.).

Chaucer is another whole bag of worms.

But I am curious what others think?

jbouder
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6 posted 2008-01-14 06:57 PM


Brad:

If I had to choose, I'd have so say I'd prefer to listeneth to the lark.   I agree with you that Longfellow's "Chaucer" seems a little dull.  But, to be fair, I don't think it is Longfellow's fault as much as it is the fact that many of his words don't bring sharp images or sounds to my mind.  Honestly, I couldn't tell you the difference between the sound of a lark and a linnet.  If I wrote "the newborn robin's song" in a sonnet, how many of you would know what that sounded like?  I didn't know myself until last summer when a robin made a nest in my one of my trees.

But Longfellow's greatest sin ... ~gasp~ ... he has 11 syllables in the last line!

Seriously, I must admit, he did make me want to pick up my old "Canterbury Tales."  My guess is that this is the effect Longfellow was going for.

Now to Wordsworth - the poem was more colorful it has the moon, the sea, and even the baring of bosoms (only once a briefly ... definely PG-13 material - but it still got my attention).  With Wordsworth, I'm not sure the relationship is sundered by lack of mystery as much as it is by misplaced priority.  The majesty is there to be apprehended, but we miss it by obsessing on time (late and soon) and stuff (getting and spending).

Interesting point you raise regarding the facility of the Japanese and English traditions at being better at describing nature and people, respectively.  I think the sonnet form hurts the reading, as Wordsworth's poem about the daffodils isn't nearly so constrained.  When I think of nature, the ba-BUM ba-BUM b-BUM etc. doesn't come to mind.

Interesting post.  Unfortunately, I don't know much more about either Longfellow or Wordsworth to contribute much more to the conversation at this point.  Maybe in the next few days I'll do some more digging.

Jim

Sunshine
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7 posted 2008-01-14 07:09 PM


Brad,

If this is all it takes for us to unearth the old classics, then so be it. I need to do a bit of dusting, myself, because poetry came to me as an art that lyrics were born of. And then I heard a voice, [some of you know whose voice] and I was hooked. Esp. free verse.

Wouldn't it be interesting, though, to imagine a moment of Wordsworth and Longfellow coming into our time, and picking up some of the better forms of today's poetry, and get into a discussion of it all?

I wonder what they would say...




TomMark
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8 posted 2008-01-21 02:11 PM


Just let you know that I am still reading this.   It was Sir Balladeer who distracted me.
Sunshine
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9 posted 2008-01-21 02:37 PM


As I read this over again, Brad, I'm now seeing Longfellow's [1807-1882] poem on Chaucer more as a poke in the jongleur's vein. [ ]

Whereas Wordsworth [1770-1850] quite possibly hadn't had an opportunity to "know" the type of fellow Chaucer was, ergo, didn't read nor write of him, so rather than write of someone he doesn't know, he sticks to what he knows best: his surroundings.

Now, I'm not saying that I knew what was in either man's library, and I've not gone through all of their poetry to see if Wordsworth ever did favor Chaucer with a stylized poem, but it does make one think as to the two poems you've put against one another.

It keeps me thinking.




TomMark
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10 posted 2008-01-23 07:43 PM


“Chaucer made a crucial contribution to English literature in writing in English at a time when much court poetry was still composed in Anglo-Norman or Latin. Although he spent one of two brief periods of disfavor, Chaucer lived the whole of his life close the centers of English power.

It must be remembered, that Chaucer himself did not belong even the minor nobility, but from his youth he was used to associate with highly influential people.”  http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/chaucer.htm


But the characters  in his Canterbury Tale were all ordinary people. So he was like sitting in a golden chair and observe his surroundings with keen eyes and a extraordinary "pen".

Chaucer

An old man in a lodge within a park;
lodge: a simple plain hut
Park: in my mind it shall be a well designed English Garden.

To say that Chaucer was a man like a hut in a Garden. In the upper society but not belong to there.

The chamber walls depicted all around
With portraitures of huntsman, hawk, and hound,
And the hurt deer.

The love of the original world.  
He listeneth to the lark,
the true, innocent voice of human being.
Whose song comes with the sunshine through the dark
Of painted glass in leaden lattice bound;

the social class
He listeneth and he laugheth at the sound,
He loved it.
Then writeth in a book like any clerk.
He is the poet of the dawn

Dawn, everyone was sleeping but not he.  , who wrote
The Canterbury Tales,

ordinary people
and his old age
Made beautiful with song;

? Sir Brad, what song? his own song or bird's song or his poem
and as I read
I hear the crowing cock, I hear the note
Of lark and linnet, and from every page
Rise odours of ploughed field or flowery mead


His poem was about life, innocence, purity and original and ordinary people.  
The odours of ploughed field....only farmer can understand this..the joyful smell of future planting and harvest.  

I love this one and the old man looked like Chaucer.


The World Is Too Much With Us; Late and Soon

The world is too much with us; late and soon,
Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers;
Little we see in Nature that is ours;
We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!
This Sea that bares her bosom to the moon,
The winds that will be howling at all hours,
And are up-gathered now like sleeping flowers,
For this, for everything, we are out of tune;
It moves us not. -Great God! I'd rather be
A Pagan suckled in a creed outworn;
So might I, standing on this pleasant lea,
Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn;
Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea;
Or hear old Triton blow his wreathed horn.

This poem is not pleasant and negative.

[This message has been edited by TomMark (01-24-2008 05:06 PM).]

Brad
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since 1999-08-20
Posts 5705
Jejudo, South Korea
11 posted 2008-01-24 04:51 PM


quote:
His poem was about life, innocence, purity and original and ordinary people.  
The odours of ploughed field....only farm can understand this..the joyful smell of future planting and harvest.


'His' being Chaucer?

Hmmm, when you start to read the Tales, you're going to be a bit surprised.

L. finds a moment of unity in Nature -- by reading someone's depiction of it.

W. deplores the lack of unity.

I think one can argue that both poems are exercises in nostalgia. Nostalgia means a yearning for something, an imagined time, that never existed.

Another example in a different context: have you seen "Kiss of the Spider Woman"?

TomMark
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12 posted 2008-01-24 05:07 PM


Dear Brad "Actually, I think there's a lot more to talk about here, but I'll hold off."

Say it

I have not seen "Kiss of the Spider Woman". Why it helps understand the poem? I googled it. I did not get it.

You leave me hanging somewhere

Chaucer had a quiet heart. did he? Sire Brad?

Brad
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since 1999-08-20
Posts 5705
Jejudo, South Korea
13 posted 2008-01-31 03:33 PM


The reason I brought up the movie:

Wordsworth talks about a return to paganism, I am not convinced that pagans have a better or closer relationship to Nature. W.'s lament reminds me of William Hurt's character in the movie. He goes on and on about a man in a movie he saw, about how beautiful he was, and about how he fell in love almost immediately.

The man was an actor in a nazi propaganda film.


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