Blog deadline extended

The deadline for blog submissions has been extended to 12 noon on Tuesday 28 May. This is an absolute deadline – I will not be able to take into consideration any posts posted after that time.

Take-home paper deadline/Exam details

This is to confirm that I have extended the deadline for the submission of take-home papers to 8.55am on Saturday. Please note that papers should be submitted by that time in both electronic form, via email, and hard copy. Hard copies can be left in my pigeon-hole outside the secretary’s office if I am not in my own office.

Please note that I will NOT accept papers once the sit-down exam has started. If you are taking the sit-down exam, PLEASE ARRIVE PUNCTUALLY! You should be at the exam venue (H-332) at least 10 minutes before the start of the exam.

On the final exam, you may make use of notes and an anthology of your choice, as well as a dictionary and/or a thesaurus.

Good luck!

Seamus Heaney lecture slides

Here are the Seamus Heaney lecture slides – simply click on the link to download them. (If you have any problems, let me know.) If this works, I’ll also upload the lecture slides for previous classes to the blog, so that you can access them here.

 

‘Punishment’

For anyone who missed the class, or mislaid their handout, here’s the text of Seamus Heaney’s ‘Punishment’, which we’ll focus upon on Friday. You can add your thoughts and your answers to the questions I set you below, in the comments (don’t forget to identify yourself, either by name or student number).

Punishment

I can feel the tug
of the halter at the nape
of her neck, the wind
on her naked front.

It blows her nipples
to amber beads,
it shakes the frail rigging
of her ribs.

I can see her drowned
body in the bog,
the weighing stone,
the floating rods and boughs.

Under which at first
she was a barked sapling
that is dug up
oak-bone, brain-firkin:

her shaved head
like a stubble of black corn,
her blindfold a soiled bandage,
her noose a ring

to store
the memories of love.
Little adulteress,
before they punished you

you were flaxen-haired,
undernourished, and your
tar-black face was beautiful.
My poor scapegoat,

I almost love you
but would have cast, I know,
the stones of silence.
I am the artful voyeuur

of your brain’s exposed
and darkened combs,
your muscles’ webbing
and all your numbered bones:

I who have stood dumb
when your betraying sisters,
cauled in tar,
wept by the railings,

who would connive
in civilized outrage
yet understand the exact
and tribal, intimate revenge.

In an  interview with the Paris Review, Heaney reportedly said of ‘Punishment’,

It’s a poem about standing by as the IRA tar and feather these young women in Ulster. But it’s also about standing by as the British torture people in barracks and interrogation centers in Belfast. It’s about standing between those two forms of affront.

There’s a website here with a very useful introduction, written to be accessible for students whose first language is not English. You should be moving beyond it in your own readings of the poem, but it does give you the basics. You can also find links to the author’s introductions to Heaney’s other poems.

Seamus Heaney – ‘Digging’

On Tuesday we’ll be looking at the work of the Irish poet Seamus Heaney, the winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1995. On Tuesday I gave you a selection of his poems to read (if you weren’t in class, you can pick up a handout from my office). You should  read all these poems before we meet, but for now I’d especially like you to focus on ‘Digging’. Here it is:

                      ‘Digging’ 

Between my finger and my thumb
The squat pen rests; as snug as a gun.

Under my window a clean rasping sound
When the spade sinks into gravelly ground:
My father, digging. I look down

Till his straining rump among the flowerbeds
Bends low, comes up twenty years away
Stooping in rhythm through potato drills
Where he was digging.

The coarse boot nestled on the lug, the shaft
Against the inside knee was levered firmly.
He rooted out tall tops, buried the bright edge deep
To scatter new potatoes that we picked
Loving their cool hardness in our hands.

By God, the old man could handle a spade,
Just like his old man.

My grandfather could cut more turf in a day
Than any other man on Toner’s bog.
Once I carried him milk in a bottle
Corked sloppily with paper. He straightened up
To drink it, then fell to right away
Nicking and slicing neatly, heaving sods
Over his shoulder, digging down and down
For the good turf. Digging.

The cold smell of potato mold, the squelch and slap
Of soggy peat, the curt cuts of an edge
Through living roots awaken in my head.
But I’ve no spade to follow men like them.

Between my finger and my thumb
The squat pen rests.
I’ll dig with it.

As usual, please post your thoughts, comments and questions about the poem below.

‘Church Going’

Here’s a link to Philip Larkin reading his poem, ‘Church Going’, and here is a definition and a picture of a rood loft (but don’t worry about this too much, the speaker in the poem, like most of us, seems not to know what a rood loft is).

And here is a link to the poem, and that final stanza again:

A serious house on serious earth it is,
In whose blent air all our compulsions meet,
Are recognised, and robed as destinies.
And that much never can be obsolete,
Since someone will forever be surprising
A hunger in himself to be more serious,
And gravitating with it to this ground,
Which, he once heard, was proper to grow wise in,
If only that so many dead lie round.

Please post your comments on the poem below, in the ‘comments’ section. I’m curious to read your responses. If you have any questions about the poem, about any aspect of it you don’t understand, or about any of Larkin’s other work, you can also post them here.

Two poems by Philip Larkin

Firstly, an apology. I promised to post a couple of Larkin poems here that aren’t included in the selection I gave you in class. I’m sorry not to have posted them before now.

So, without more ado, here they are. First of all, ‘Talking in Bed’:

                                         Talking in Bed

Talking in bed ought to be easiest,
Lying together there goes back so far,
An emblem of two people being honest.

Yet more and more time passes silently.
Outside, the wind’s incomplete unrest
Builds and disperses clouds in the sky,

And dark towns heap up on the horizon.
None of this cares for us. Nothing shows why
At this unique distance from isolation

It becomes still more difficult to find
Words at once true and kind,
Or not untrue and not unkind.

There’s a VERY close reading of the poem online, here, for anyone who is interested.

The second poem, ‘Aubade’ is one of Larkin’s last, published in 1977 in the Times Literary Supplement.  An aubade is a dawn love-song, often from sung from a door or a window as a lover leaves his (or, more rarely, her) sleeping beloved. We find them in Chaucer and in John Donne (for example, ‘The Sun Rising‘). Larkin’s ‘Aubade’ plays on our expectations of the genre. The critic A.N. Wilson describes ‘Aubade’ as the one poem written in his lifetime of ‘unquestionable greatness’. You can read his essay, which in fact is critical of Larkin’s aesthetic, here, but first read Larkin’s poem:

                                               Aubade

I work all day, and get half-drunk at night.

Waking at four to soundless dark, I stare.

In time the curtain-edges will grow light.

Till then I see what’s really always there:

Unresting death, a whole day nearer now,

Making all thought impossible but how

And where and when I shall myself die.

Arid interrogation: yet the dread

Of dying, and being dead,

Flashes afresh to hold and horrify.

 

The mind blanks at the glare. Not in remorse

—The good not done, the love not given, time

Torn off unused—nor wretchedly because

An only life can take so long to climb

Clear of its wrong beginnings, and may never;

But at the total emptiness for ever,

The sure extinction that we travel to

And shall be lost in always. Not to be here,

Not to be anywhere,

And soon; nothing more terrible, nothing more true.

 

This is a special way of being afraid

No trick dispels. Religion used to try,

That vast moth-eaten musical brocade

Created to pretend we never die,

And specious stuff that says No rational being

Can fear a thing it will not feel, not seeing

That this is what we fear—no sight, no sound,

No touch or taste or smell, nothing to think with,

Nothing to love or link with,

The anaesthetic from which none come round.

 

And so it stays just on the edge of vision,

A small unfocused blur, a standing chill

That slows each impulse down to indecision.

Most things may never happen: this one will,

And realisation of it rages out

In furnace-fear when we are caught without

People or drink. Courage is no good:

It means not scaring others. Being brave

Lets no one off the grave.

Death is no different whined at than withstood.

 

Slowly light strengthens, and the room takes shape.

It stands plain as a wardrobe, what we know,

Have always known, know that we can’t escape,

Yet can’t accept. One side will have to go.

Meanwhile telephones crouch, getting ready to ring

In locked-up offices, and all the uncaring

Intricate rented world begins to rouse.

The sky is white as clay, with no sun.

Work has to be done.

Postmen like doctors go from house to house.

“a demagogic Welsh masturbator who failed to pay his bills”

So Robert Graves, one of Dylan Thomas’s contemporaries, described him. But what do you think? In a letter to a friend, Thomas himself wrote that the difficulty, or “obscurity”, of his poetry was based “on a preconceived symbolism derived (I’m afraid all this sounds wooly and pretentious) from the cosmic significance of the human anatomy.” He also identified in his poetry an “immature violence, rhythmic monotony, frequent muddle-headedness, and a very much overweighted imagery that leads often to incoherence.” Would you agree with Thomas’s own negative estimate of his own work here? Or with those critics who argue that Thomas has been over-rated? Or, having heard Thomas read, do you find his poems powerful and moving? Do they operate at a level very different to that of the rational, logical mind? Or do you have different feelings about different poems of his?

Below are some links related to Dylan Thomas that you may find interesting, useful or amusing. If you find any others, do please add them below. Of course, the library remains your best resource!

You can hear the original broadcast of Under Milk Wood, Thomas’s radio play,  here. The first voice you hear is that of Richard Burton, another great Welshman.

I mentioned in class the great Welsh tradition of singing: here’s Dunvant Male Voice Choir performing one of the poems from Under Milk Wood on the Welsh coast.

A useful, short critical biography of Thomas on the Poetry Foundation website.

A review of three books on Dylan Thomas that discusses the critical debate over the value of Dylan Thomas’s poetry.

More villanelles

The villanelle is a form associated with pastoral song in the Renaissance, but adopted by many poets working in English in the mid twentieth century. In James Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Stephen Dedalus writes a villanelle, ‘Are you not weary of ardent ways‘. We looked at perhaps the most famous of twentieth-century villanelles in class together, Dylan Thomas’s ‘Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night’. There’s much more about Thomas’s poem here, part of a whole doctoral thesis on the villanelle form. Another example is Sylvia Plath’s ‘Mad Girl’s Love Song’:

I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead;
I lift my lids and all is born again.
(I think I made you up inside my head.)

The stars go waltzing out in blue and red,
And arbitrary blackness gallops in:
I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead.

I dreamed that you bewitched me into bed
And sung me moon-struck, kissed me quite insane.
(I think I made you up inside my head.)

God topples from the sky, hell’s fires fade:
Exit seraphim and Satan’s men:
I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead.

I fancied you’d return the way you said,
But I grow old and I forget your name.
(I think I made you up inside my head.)

I should have loved a thunderbird instead;
At least when spring comes they roar back again.
I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead.
(I think I made you up inside my head.)

Plath, as you’ll see, uses half-rhymes in places here. Anther well-known example of the modern villanelle is William Empson’s ‘It is the pain endures’, which Dylan Thomas apparently described as ‘Empson’s good poem’. In fact, Empson’s poetry is well worth reading. He’s better known as a literary critic, but critical respect for his poetry is steadily growing. Here’s his villanelle – you can find more information about it, and a reading by Empson himself, here.

It is the pain, it is the pain endures.
Your chemic beauty burned my muscles through.
Poise of my hands reminded me of yours.

What later purge from this deep toxin cures?
What kindness now could the old salve renew?
It is the pain, it is the pain endures.

The infection slept (custom or change inures);
And when pain’s secondary phase was due,
Poise of my hands reminded me of yours.

How safe I felt, whom memory assures —
Rich that your grace safely by heart I knew.
It is the pain, it is the pain endures.

My stare drank deep beauty that still allures.
My heart pumps yet the poison draught of you.
Poise of my hands reminded me of yours.

You are still kind whom the same shape immures.
Kind and beyond adieu. We miss our cue.
It is the pain, it is the pain endures.
Poise of my hands reminded me of yours.

W. H. Auden, too, tried his hand at the villanelle. Here’s his poem, ‘If I could tell you’:

Time will say nothing but I told you so
Time only knows the price we have to pay;
If I could tell you I would let you know.

If we should weep when clowns put on their show,
If we should stumble when musicians play,
Time will say nothing but I told you so.

There are no fortunes to be sold, although,
Because I love you more than I can say,
If I could tell you I would let you know.

The winds must come from somewhere when they blow,
There must be reason why the leaves decay;
Time will say nothing but I told you so.

Perhaps the roses really want to grow,
The vision seriously intends to stay;
If I could tell you I would let you know.

Suppose the lions all get up and go,
And the brooks and soldiers run away;
Will Time say nothing but I told you so?
If I could tell you I would let you know.

Villanelle

LIFE IS A PLAY AND YOU SHOULD LIVE IT FAST

Life is a play and you should live it fast.
Get rid of your pains and have so much fun.
Direct your own play and choose your own cast.

Shape your future; do not stick to your past.
You can get whatever you want under the sun.
Life is a play and you should live it fast.

There will be some people that want your trust.
If they try to hurt you, leave them one by one.
Direct your own play and choose your own cast.

Do not stop learning; your lack of knowledge is vast;
Moreover, there will be a lot of things to be done.
Life is a play and you should live it fast.

Time is passing; you should live at full blast.
Your pains will follow you, but you must shun.
Direct your own play and choose your own cast.

Nothing is permanent; death will come at last.
Walking is not for you, you must always run.
Life is a play and you should live it fast.
Direct your own play and choose your own cast.