WEBVTT 00:00:00.000 --> 00:00:01.390 align:middle line:90% 00:00:01.390 --> 00:00:04.390 align:middle line:84% I've cut this a little to keep myself to the allowed three 00:00:04.390 --> 00:00:08.800 align:middle line:84% hours that Bob tells me is the normal lecture time here. 00:00:08.800 --> 00:00:13.690 align:middle line:90% 00:00:13.690 --> 00:00:20.830 align:middle line:84% John Crowe Ransom, in speaking about Wallace Steven's poem 00:00:20.830 --> 00:00:24.550 align:middle line:84% Sea Surface Full of Clouds, describes it 00:00:24.550 --> 00:00:32.340 align:middle line:84% as having a remarkable complexity. 00:00:32.340 --> 00:00:37.680 align:middle line:84% And he says, to study it if you do that sort of thing 00:00:37.680 --> 00:00:40.050 align:middle line:90% is to be happy. 00:00:40.050 --> 00:00:45.000 align:middle line:84% And I'm assuming that you here like 00:00:45.000 --> 00:00:48.570 align:middle line:84% looking very closely at poems because that's 00:00:48.570 --> 00:00:52.260 align:middle line:84% what I'll be doing with some of the poems here. 00:00:52.260 --> 00:00:55.800 align:middle line:84% I hope that you'll find my talk dense 00:00:55.800 --> 00:00:57.390 align:middle line:90% in the good sense of the word. 00:00:57.390 --> 00:01:00.660 align:middle line:90% 00:01:00.660 --> 00:01:07.470 align:middle line:84% I'm interested in the voice effects of poetry, 00:01:07.470 --> 00:01:12.390 align:middle line:84% the sense you have of a speaker talking the poem 00:01:12.390 --> 00:01:15.750 align:middle line:90% or singing the poem. 00:01:15.750 --> 00:01:19.950 align:middle line:84% And I'm interested in the musical effects 00:01:19.950 --> 00:01:29.700 align:middle line:84% of the poetic voice, rhythmic effects, and above all 00:01:29.700 --> 00:01:34.380 align:middle line:84% for today, the way the voice pauses when we 00:01:34.380 --> 00:01:38.610 align:middle line:90% speak for expressive purposes. 00:01:38.610 --> 00:01:46.590 align:middle line:84% The talk is called Voice as Metaphor, Silences, Sighs, 00:01:46.590 --> 00:01:51.000 align:middle line:84% Ellipses, Oh's, and Ah's, to give you 00:01:51.000 --> 00:01:53.325 align:middle line:84% some sense of what I have in mind. 00:01:53.325 --> 00:01:59.140 align:middle line:90% 00:01:59.140 --> 00:02:06.850 align:middle line:84% In his line, "as if we saw our feeling the object seen," 00:02:06.850 --> 00:02:12.070 align:middle line:84% Wallace Stevens succinctly describes two essential aspects 00:02:12.070 --> 00:02:14.926 align:middle line:90% of metaphorical language-- 00:02:14.926 --> 00:02:15.790 align:middle line:90% [INAUDIBLE] wait. 00:02:15.790 --> 00:02:16.450 align:middle line:90% Start again. 00:02:16.450 --> 00:02:23.560 align:middle line:90% 00:02:23.560 --> 00:02:25.060 align:middle line:90% This is an important first line. 00:02:25.060 --> 00:02:28.570 align:middle line:90% So I'll read it again. 00:02:28.570 --> 00:02:35.950 align:middle line:84% In his line "as if we saw our feeling in the object seen", 00:02:35.950 --> 00:02:40.360 align:middle line:84% Wallace Stevens succinctly describes two essential aspects 00:02:40.360 --> 00:02:42.940 align:middle line:90% of metaphorical language. 00:02:42.940 --> 00:02:46.420 align:middle line:84% One, there is a perceived correspondence 00:02:46.420 --> 00:02:49.240 align:middle line:84% between an inner subjective feeling 00:02:49.240 --> 00:02:53.282 align:middle line:84% and an outer physical reality, an object. 00:02:53.282 --> 00:02:58.150 align:middle line:84% Two, the perceiver is aware that this correspondence does not 00:02:58.150 --> 00:03:04.300 align:middle line:84% exist except in his as if assertion of its existence. 00:03:04.300 --> 00:03:07.510 align:middle line:84% Metaphorical seeing always involves 00:03:07.510 --> 00:03:11.410 align:middle line:84% making believe and the awareness, somewhere 00:03:11.410 --> 00:03:13.930 align:middle line:84% on the fine line between consciousness 00:03:13.930 --> 00:03:16.540 align:middle line:84% and subconsciousness, that one is 00:03:16.540 --> 00:03:20.470 align:middle line:84% making believe so that the projection of the feeling 00:03:20.470 --> 00:03:24.700 align:middle line:90% onto an object can take place. 00:03:24.700 --> 00:03:26.830 align:middle line:84% When one sees a beautiful sunset, 00:03:26.830 --> 00:03:31.120 align:middle line:84% for example, one sees the beauty of the sunset 00:03:31.120 --> 00:03:35.650 align:middle line:84% as if the beauty were inherent in the sunset itself. 00:03:35.650 --> 00:03:38.740 align:middle line:84% Thus the phrase "a beautiful sunset" 00:03:38.740 --> 00:03:42.310 align:middle line:84% is in effect a metaphorical statement. 00:03:42.310 --> 00:03:46.960 align:middle line:84% Metaphorical language is so natural to ordinary speech 00:03:46.960 --> 00:03:50.500 align:middle line:84% that usually one is not aware of it as such. 00:03:50.500 --> 00:03:54.790 align:middle line:84% When one says "She is a cold woman." 00:03:54.790 --> 00:03:57.130 align:middle line:84% one does not expect that when you to touch her 00:03:57.130 --> 00:04:01.790 align:middle line:90% she's 36 degrees Fahrenheit. 00:04:01.790 --> 00:04:04.600 align:middle line:84% But when grandma says to grandson, 00:04:04.600 --> 00:04:07.690 align:middle line:84% "You were so sweet that I could eat you." 00:04:07.690 --> 00:04:13.420 align:middle line:84% we can trust that the grandson already has a sense of metaphor 00:04:13.420 --> 00:04:17.440 align:middle line:84% and knows not to take that literally. 00:04:17.440 --> 00:04:22.570 align:middle line:84% The listener knows without being warned that cold and sweet 00:04:22.570 --> 00:04:24.820 align:middle line:90% are not to be taken literally. 00:04:24.820 --> 00:04:26.980 align:middle line:84% They describe subjective feelings 00:04:26.980 --> 00:04:30.310 align:middle line:84% about people that are assumed to correspond 00:04:30.310 --> 00:04:32.890 align:middle line:90% to physical experience. 00:04:32.890 --> 00:04:36.160 align:middle line:84% Robert Frost's description of metaphor, 00:04:36.160 --> 00:04:40.420 align:middle line:84% like Stevens' description, emphasizes the connection 00:04:40.420 --> 00:04:42.310 align:middle line:90% of inner and outer. 00:04:42.310 --> 00:04:47.800 align:middle line:84% Frost says, it is just saying one thing in terms of another, 00:04:47.800 --> 00:04:52.510 align:middle line:84% matter in terms of spirit or spirit in terms of matter, 00:04:52.510 --> 00:04:55.210 align:middle line:90% to make the final unity. 00:04:55.210 --> 00:04:57.550 align:middle line:84% This unity may be further described 00:04:57.550 --> 00:05:01.660 align:middle line:84% as one a place [INAUDIBLE] or a world in mind. 00:05:01.660 --> 00:05:06.070 align:middle line:84% And it cannot exist without its expression and language so that 00:05:06.070 --> 00:05:10.300 align:middle line:84% the felt experience correspondence of feeling 00:05:10.300 --> 00:05:14.290 align:middle line:84% and object depends on the metaphor that brings the two 00:05:14.290 --> 00:05:15.730 align:middle line:90% together. 00:05:15.730 --> 00:05:20.230 align:middle line:84% Frost calls this unifying effect of language a gathering 00:05:20.230 --> 00:05:21.910 align:middle line:90% metaphor. 00:05:21.910 --> 00:05:25.810 align:middle line:84% The gathering power of a poem is its design 00:05:25.810 --> 00:05:28.810 align:middle line:84% which may be thought of as a metaphor 00:05:28.810 --> 00:05:32.890 align:middle line:84% since it holds together and extends in complexity 00:05:32.890 --> 00:05:38.110 align:middle line:84% and nuance the various metaphors that the poem contains. 00:05:38.110 --> 00:05:40.900 align:middle line:84% Yet as a structure of words the poem 00:05:40.900 --> 00:05:43.510 align:middle line:90% is metaphorical in another way. 00:05:43.510 --> 00:05:47.410 align:middle line:84% The words themselves on the page become an object. 00:05:47.410 --> 00:05:50.500 align:middle line:84% And to vary Stevens' line, it is this 00:05:50.500 --> 00:05:55.900 align:middle line:84% it is as if in reading them we hear our feelings in the sounds 00:05:55.900 --> 00:05:58.600 align:middle line:90% of a human voice that-- 00:05:58.600 --> 00:06:01.960 align:middle line:84% sounds a human voice would make in speaking them. 00:06:01.960 --> 00:06:06.520 align:middle line:84% Every poem creates the illusion of the speaking human voice. 00:06:06.520 --> 00:06:09.640 align:middle line:84% And the reader may choose to think of that voice 00:06:09.640 --> 00:06:13.450 align:middle line:84% as belonging to an invented character or to the poet 00:06:13.450 --> 00:06:15.160 align:middle line:90% himself. 00:06:15.160 --> 00:06:18.010 align:middle line:84% But even if the latter assumption is made, 00:06:18.010 --> 00:06:21.100 align:middle line:84% the poet, through selection, is represented 00:06:21.100 --> 00:06:24.940 align:middle line:84% only an aspect of himself, one mood among many, 00:06:24.940 --> 00:06:28.270 align:middle line:84% and thus has fictionalized themselves. 00:06:28.270 --> 00:06:30.970 align:middle line:84% The feelings that the poem as verbal structure 00:06:30.970 --> 00:06:34.300 align:middle line:84% invites the reader to project upon the poem 00:06:34.300 --> 00:06:37.570 align:middle line:84% are never only the feelings appropriate to the subject 00:06:37.570 --> 00:06:42.190 align:middle line:84% of the poem itself, feelings such as sorrow, regret, 00:06:42.190 --> 00:06:43.720 align:middle line:90% sympathy. 00:06:43.720 --> 00:06:47.170 align:middle line:84% Inseparable from such subjective emotions 00:06:47.170 --> 00:06:52.090 align:middle line:84% is the pleasure of the poem as poem, as object. 00:06:52.090 --> 00:06:55.930 align:middle line:84% No matter how sorrowful the subject matter of a poem, 00:06:55.930 --> 00:06:59.410 align:middle line:84% a good poem will not make a reader feel sad. 00:06:59.410 --> 00:07:04.360 align:middle line:84% The reader does not experience sorrow but the poem of sorrow. 00:07:04.360 --> 00:07:07.870 align:middle line:84% The poem of sorrow even though the reader 00:07:07.870 --> 00:07:13.390 align:middle line:84% is reminded that indeed real sorrow does exist in the world. 00:07:13.390 --> 00:07:17.860 align:middle line:84% As Auden expressed this paradox of pleasure and poetic sorrow 00:07:17.860 --> 00:07:23.910 align:middle line:84% he says, "Oh happy grief is all sad art can say." 00:07:23.910 --> 00:07:27.600 align:middle line:84% The reader experiences the illusion of the human voice 00:07:27.600 --> 00:07:29.730 align:middle line:90% knowing that it is an illusion. 00:07:29.730 --> 00:07:33.870 align:middle line:84% And therefore he experiences the voice as metaphor. 00:07:33.870 --> 00:07:39.150 align:middle line:84% the implied voice qualities of the written words tone, pitch, 00:07:39.150 --> 00:07:44.220 align:middle line:84% speed, roughness or melodic ease are an essential part 00:07:44.220 --> 00:07:47.010 align:middle line:84% of the poem's gathering design which 00:07:47.010 --> 00:07:50.340 align:middle line:84% can evoke the sense of human presence. 00:07:50.340 --> 00:07:53.880 align:middle line:84% The essence of metaphor then is not merely 00:07:53.880 --> 00:07:57.030 align:middle line:84% the correspondence between inner and outer, 00:07:57.030 --> 00:08:02.730 align:middle line:84% between subject and object, but rather the verbal design itself 00:08:02.730 --> 00:08:04.930 align:middle line:90% that holds the two together. 00:08:04.930 --> 00:08:07.230 align:middle line:84% For the design is always more than the 00:08:07.230 --> 00:08:09.150 align:middle line:90% [INAUDIBLE] that it makes. 00:08:09.150 --> 00:08:12.420 align:middle line:84% Metaphorical design always evokes 00:08:12.420 --> 00:08:18.240 align:middle line:84% a sense of mystery, a mystery of connectedness and connection. 00:08:18.240 --> 00:08:21.690 align:middle line:84% And in particular the mystery of language 00:08:21.690 --> 00:08:24.900 align:middle line:84% without which the connections of inner and outer 00:08:24.900 --> 00:08:27.400 align:middle line:90% do not exist at all. 00:08:27.400 --> 00:08:30.750 align:middle line:84% The essence of metaphor seen in this way 00:08:30.750 --> 00:08:37.770 align:middle line:84% is innuendo, implication, and the awareness of possibility. 00:08:37.770 --> 00:08:43.299 align:middle line:84% Preceding language and idea is the cry of the human body. 00:08:43.299 --> 00:08:46.980 align:middle line:84% The body's voice of sounds without words. 00:08:46.980 --> 00:08:51.630 align:middle line:84% And both our cries and words are preceded by silence 00:08:51.630 --> 00:08:54.000 align:middle line:90% and followed by silence. 00:08:54.000 --> 00:08:57.270 align:middle line:84% Its silence too become articulate 00:08:57.270 --> 00:09:00.660 align:middle line:84% because of the context in which it is placed, 00:09:00.660 --> 00:09:03.210 align:middle line:90% like a musical rest note. 00:09:03.210 --> 00:09:07.590 align:middle line:84% We hear the silence of a rest note because it is contained 00:09:07.590 --> 00:09:09.690 align:middle line:90% within the musical phrase. 00:09:09.690 --> 00:09:14.310 align:middle line:84% In this the mystery of the evocative power of metaphor 00:09:14.310 --> 00:09:18.840 align:middle line:84% may be compared to the delineated silences, the pauses 00:09:18.840 --> 00:09:23.370 align:middle line:84% within a poem, that are suggested by a shift in rhythm, 00:09:23.370 --> 00:09:27.630 align:middle line:84% for example, or a line break, or a stressed syllable 00:09:27.630 --> 00:09:32.370 align:middle line:84% when two syllables are expected to complete a metric foot. 00:09:32.370 --> 00:09:35.130 align:middle line:84% The metaphorical center of the poem 00:09:35.130 --> 00:09:41.880 align:middle line:84% may often be found in the implications of its silences. 00:09:41.880 --> 00:09:44.130 align:middle line:84% Now I want to begin to illustrate 00:09:44.130 --> 00:09:49.305 align:middle line:84% some of these general points by looking at Frost's poem 00:09:49.305 --> 00:09:51.750 align:middle line:84% Hyla Book, which I'll read to you. 00:09:51.750 --> 00:10:06.030 align:middle line:90% 00:10:06.030 --> 00:10:09.210 align:middle line:90% Hyla Brook. 00:10:09.210 --> 00:10:13.950 align:middle line:84% By June our brook's run out of song and speed. 00:10:13.950 --> 00:10:16.590 align:middle line:84% Sought for much after that, it will 00:10:16.590 --> 00:10:20.460 align:middle line:84% be found either to have gone groping underground-- 00:10:20.460 --> 00:10:24.620 align:middle line:84% and taken with it all the Hyla breed that shrouded in the mist 00:10:24.620 --> 00:10:26.130 align:middle line:90% to go-- 00:10:26.130 --> 00:10:30.780 align:middle line:84% that shouted in the mist a month ago, like ghost of sleigh bells 00:10:30.780 --> 00:10:32.880 align:middle line:90% and a ghost of snow. 00:10:32.880 --> 00:10:37.050 align:middle line:84% --or flourished and come up in jewel-weed, weak foliage that 00:10:37.050 --> 00:10:41.490 align:middle line:84% is blown upon and bent even against the way its waters 00:10:41.490 --> 00:10:42.900 align:middle line:90% went. 00:10:42.900 --> 00:10:47.760 align:middle line:84% Its bed is left a faded paper sheet of dead leaves stuck 00:10:47.760 --> 00:10:49.800 align:middle line:90% together by the heat. 00:10:49.800 --> 00:10:53.700 align:middle line:84% A brook to none but who remember long. 00:10:53.700 --> 00:10:57.690 align:middle line:84% This as it will be seen is other far than 00:10:57.690 --> 00:11:01.650 align:middle line:84% with brooks taken otherwhere in song. 00:11:01.650 --> 00:11:05.550 align:middle line:84% We love the things we love for what they are. 00:11:05.550 --> 00:11:08.140 align:middle line:90% 00:11:08.140 --> 00:11:11.600 align:middle line:84% In Robert Frost's Hyla Brook for example, 00:11:11.600 --> 00:11:15.790 align:middle line:84% we are listening to a brook that has lost its song. 00:11:15.790 --> 00:11:18.580 align:middle line:84% The poem, in effect, is a response 00:11:18.580 --> 00:11:22.390 align:middle line:84% to and the celebration of the silence of the brook. 00:11:22.390 --> 00:11:24.610 align:middle line:84% The poem opens with the implication 00:11:24.610 --> 00:11:28.030 align:middle line:84% that there is a specific listener for this poem 00:11:28.030 --> 00:11:31.060 align:middle line:84% since the speaker refers to our brook, 00:11:31.060 --> 00:11:36.700 align:middle line:84% And that intimate our suggests the auditor may be his wife. 00:11:36.700 --> 00:11:39.220 align:middle line:84% At the last line it becomes manifest 00:11:39.220 --> 00:11:42.670 align:middle line:84% that this is indeed a poem about the strengthening 00:11:42.670 --> 00:11:47.020 align:middle line:84% of the bond of love through the mutual metaphorical viewing 00:11:47.020 --> 00:11:49.000 align:middle line:90% of an object in nature. 00:11:49.000 --> 00:11:52.300 align:middle line:84% Just as the woman says, in another Frost poem 00:11:52.300 --> 00:11:55.930 align:middle line:84% "West-running Brook", "As you and I are married to each 00:11:55.930 --> 00:11:58.990 align:middle line:84% other, we'll both be married to the brook. 00:11:58.990 --> 00:12:01.840 align:middle line:84% We'll build our bridge across it and the bridge 00:12:01.840 --> 00:12:06.130 align:middle line:84% shall be our arm thrown over to sleep beside it." 00:12:06.130 --> 00:12:09.730 align:middle line:84% Hyla Brook too possesses two qualities which 00:12:09.730 --> 00:12:13.630 align:middle line:90% are named as song and speed. 00:12:13.630 --> 00:12:17.230 align:middle line:84% Its speed is literally a material quality 00:12:17.230 --> 00:12:21.160 align:middle line:84% but the quality of song is not inherent in the brook itself 00:12:21.160 --> 00:12:25.810 align:middle line:84% and thus necessarily implies the subjective beholder. 00:12:25.810 --> 00:12:28.450 align:middle line:90% Literally brooks do not sing. 00:12:28.450 --> 00:12:31.210 align:middle line:84% They are perceived as if they were singing 00:12:31.210 --> 00:12:35.710 align:middle line:84% by a beholder who projects the idea of song 00:12:35.710 --> 00:12:39.040 align:middle line:90% upon the brook's random sounds. 00:12:39.040 --> 00:12:42.070 align:middle line:84% The poem moves backwards in time for it 00:12:42.070 --> 00:12:46.090 align:middle line:84% is a poem about seeing the past, the signs of which 00:12:46.090 --> 00:12:49.330 align:middle line:84% have physically vanished so that absence 00:12:49.330 --> 00:12:54.190 align:middle line:84% comes to represent a past presence, the absence 00:12:54.190 --> 00:12:55.090 align:middle line:90% of the brook. 00:12:55.090 --> 00:12:59.710 align:middle line:84% Its invisible silence paradoxically is seen and heard 00:12:59.710 --> 00:13:03.370 align:middle line:84% in June and this absence evokes the brook 00:13:03.370 --> 00:13:08.540 align:middle line:84% as it was in early spring when the Hyla of frogs were there. 00:13:08.540 --> 00:13:11.680 align:middle line:84% And it also evokes further back in time 00:13:11.680 --> 00:13:15.820 align:middle line:84% the ghostly remembrance of winter, a ghost of sleigh bells 00:13:15.820 --> 00:13:18.550 align:middle line:90% and a ghost of snow. 00:13:18.550 --> 00:13:21.340 align:middle line:84% The brook moves one way in the weeds 00:13:21.340 --> 00:13:23.800 align:middle line:84% and [AUDIO OUT] just as the speaker's mind both 00:13:23.800 --> 00:13:27.550 align:middle line:84% remembers and looks ahead to the future. 00:13:27.550 --> 00:13:30.220 align:middle line:84% Again as in West-running Brook, love 00:13:30.220 --> 00:13:33.940 align:middle line:84% is defined as having the power to embody and affirm 00:13:33.940 --> 00:13:38.560 align:middle line:84% contraries, male and female, past and present. 00:13:38.560 --> 00:13:40.990 align:middle line:84% "It must be the brook can trust itself 00:13:40.990 --> 00:13:46.030 align:middle line:84% to go by contraries the way I can with you and you with me," 00:13:46.030 --> 00:13:49.150 align:middle line:84% Frost says again in West-running Brook. 00:13:49.150 --> 00:13:54.070 align:middle line:84% All the speaker actually sees in Hyla Brook from June 00:13:54.070 --> 00:13:57.550 align:middle line:90% on is a bed of dry leaves. 00:13:57.550 --> 00:14:00.400 align:middle line:84% Someone not familiar with this landscape 00:14:00.400 --> 00:14:02.710 align:middle line:90% would not see a brook at all. 00:14:02.710 --> 00:14:06.490 align:middle line:84% He would not know that the Hyla frog ever lived there. 00:14:06.490 --> 00:14:09.760 align:middle line:84% Only by virtue of memory, by cherishing 00:14:09.760 --> 00:14:13.000 align:middle line:84% what has been there before can the mind bring 00:14:13.000 --> 00:14:18.550 align:middle line:84% to the eye what is now gone and thus give body to absence. 00:14:18.550 --> 00:14:23.080 align:middle line:84% Frost says, "a brook to none but who remember long." 00:14:23.080 --> 00:14:24.340 align:middle line:90% Filling the silent-- 00:14:24.340 --> 00:14:27.400 align:middle line:84% Seeing into the past or then projected 00:14:27.400 --> 00:14:30.400 align:middle line:84% into the future as a bond of understanding 00:14:30.400 --> 00:14:33.040 align:middle line:84% between the speaker and his wife. 00:14:33.040 --> 00:14:35.500 align:middle line:84% Frost is giving the reader a lesson 00:14:35.500 --> 00:14:40.660 align:middle line:84% on how to surpass literal sight as he assures us "This as it 00:14:40.660 --> 00:14:45.160 align:middle line:84% will be seen is other far than with brooks taken otherwhere 00:14:45.160 --> 00:14:46.450 align:middle line:90% in song." 00:14:46.450 --> 00:14:49.660 align:middle line:84% For the bond between the man and the woman in this poem 00:14:49.660 --> 00:14:52.570 align:middle line:84% requires that the past be contained 00:14:52.570 --> 00:14:55.240 align:middle line:84% even in the radically changed present 00:14:55.240 --> 00:14:58.030 align:middle line:90% and continued into the future. 00:14:58.030 --> 00:15:02.830 align:middle line:84% This is precisely what ongoing love must accomplish. 00:15:02.830 --> 00:15:07.210 align:middle line:84% Frost is teasing his reader with a subtle boast saying 00:15:07.210 --> 00:15:09.970 align:middle line:84% in effect, that any other poet would write 00:15:09.970 --> 00:15:15.040 align:middle line:84% a poem about a brook that is a brook but I Robert Frost have 00:15:15.040 --> 00:15:17.800 align:middle line:84% the wit to write a poem about a brook that is not 00:15:17.800 --> 00:15:21.730 align:middle line:84% a brook, a brook that only can be seen by someone who 00:15:21.730 --> 00:15:27.070 align:middle line:84% knows the landscape well enough to remember its seasonal past. 00:15:27.070 --> 00:15:31.060 align:middle line:84% In order to love a brook that is no longer a brook, 00:15:31.060 --> 00:15:33.970 align:middle line:84% the speaker must incorporate the past 00:15:33.970 --> 00:15:36.820 align:middle line:84% as if it still existed into the way 00:15:36.820 --> 00:15:40.210 align:middle line:84% he sees the dead leaves stuck together in the heat 00:15:40.210 --> 00:15:44.350 align:middle line:84% so that the absent brook can become a metaphor evoking 00:15:44.350 --> 00:15:47.710 align:middle line:84% the hope for the continuity of love. 00:15:47.710 --> 00:15:51.820 align:middle line:84% The poem's final line, "We love the things 00:15:51.820 --> 00:15:54.250 align:middle line:84% we love for what they are," which 00:15:54.250 --> 00:15:59.560 align:middle line:84% seem so solidly committed to literal and factual reality 00:15:59.560 --> 00:16:02.920 align:middle line:84% now can be seen otherwise as reverberent 00:16:02.920 --> 00:16:06.100 align:middle line:90% with innuendo and implication. 00:16:06.100 --> 00:16:09.430 align:middle line:84% The brook is both what it once was, 00:16:09.430 --> 00:16:14.230 align:middle line:84% a brook, and what it is now, not a brook but dead leaves 00:16:14.230 --> 00:16:15.940 align:middle line:90% stuck together. 00:16:15.940 --> 00:16:19.000 align:middle line:84% Thus to love things for what they are 00:16:19.000 --> 00:16:23.000 align:middle line:84% must include loving them as well for what they are not, 00:16:23.000 --> 00:16:27.340 align:middle line:84% but what they once were, and for what they still may be. 00:16:27.340 --> 00:16:32.620 align:middle line:84% Reality cannot be fixed in a [INAUDIBLE] "they are." 00:16:32.620 --> 00:16:35.080 align:middle line:84% What things are for Frost is what 00:16:35.080 --> 00:16:41.110 align:middle line:84% the mind can make of them as if this sonnet's song itself were 00:16:41.110 --> 00:16:44.080 align:middle line:90% written on a faded paper sheet. 00:16:44.080 --> 00:16:47.830 align:middle line:84% The physical brook is transformed through the poet's 00:16:47.830 --> 00:16:51.550 align:middle line:84% singing voice into a metaphorical brook which 00:16:51.550 --> 00:16:55.510 align:middle line:84% continues to flow in the speaker's memory, the mind's 00:16:55.510 --> 00:17:00.160 align:middle line:84% underground, so that the last line may be read finally 00:17:00.160 --> 00:17:04.660 align:middle line:84% as a kind of promise the speaker makes to love his wife even 00:17:04.660 --> 00:17:08.890 align:middle line:84% when they are not physically together, even into the silence 00:17:08.890 --> 00:17:10.300 align:middle line:90% that follows their speech. 00:17:10.300 --> 00:17:18.500 align:middle line:90% 00:17:18.500 --> 00:17:21.800 align:middle line:84% Let me read Wallace Stevens "The Snow Man" to you 00:17:21.800 --> 00:17:27.170 align:middle line:84% and continue the discussion of silence and absence. 00:17:27.170 --> 00:17:30.140 align:middle line:90% The Snow Man. 00:17:30.140 --> 00:17:34.100 align:middle line:84% One must have a mind of winter to regard the frost 00:17:34.100 --> 00:17:38.030 align:middle line:84% in the boughs of the pine trees crusted with snow-- 00:17:38.030 --> 00:17:39.650 align:middle line:90% There's a typo there. 00:17:39.650 --> 00:17:42.350 align:middle line:84% --and have been cold a long time, 00:17:42.350 --> 00:17:45.440 align:middle line:84% to behold the junipers shagged with ice, 00:17:45.440 --> 00:17:50.870 align:middle line:84% the spruces rough in the distant glitter of the January sun, 00:17:50.870 --> 00:17:55.310 align:middle line:84% and not to think of any misery in the sound of the wind 00:17:55.310 --> 00:17:58.040 align:middle line:84% and the sound of a few leaves, which 00:17:58.040 --> 00:18:03.420 align:middle line:84% is the sound of the land full of the same wind that is blowing 00:18:03.420 --> 00:18:07.880 align:middle line:84% in the same bare place for the listener, who listens 00:18:07.880 --> 00:18:10.970 align:middle line:84% in the snow, and, nothing himself, 00:18:10.970 --> 00:18:16.535 align:middle line:84% beholds nothing that is not there and the nothing that is. 00:18:16.535 --> 00:18:19.400 align:middle line:90% 00:18:19.400 --> 00:18:21.950 align:middle line:84% Wallace Stevens' "The Snow Man" is also 00:18:21.950 --> 00:18:26.000 align:middle line:84% a poem about beholding what is not there. 00:18:26.000 --> 00:18:29.960 align:middle line:84% Yet unlike Frost's speaker who seeks to remember the spring 00:18:29.960 --> 00:18:33.170 align:middle line:84% season in June, Stevens' snow man 00:18:33.170 --> 00:18:37.820 align:middle line:84% attempts to see only winter image in the winter landscape. 00:18:37.820 --> 00:18:41.000 align:middle line:84% As if the world could be observed objectively 00:18:41.000 --> 00:18:43.940 align:middle line:84% like a physical fact, the snow man 00:18:43.940 --> 00:18:46.850 align:middle line:84% resists all metaphorical thinking. 00:18:46.850 --> 00:18:49.010 align:middle line:84% He will not allow himself to hear 00:18:49.010 --> 00:18:51.530 align:middle line:84% the wind as if it were expressing 00:18:51.530 --> 00:18:54.410 align:middle line:90% any human feeling like misery. 00:18:54.410 --> 00:18:58.580 align:middle line:84% He wishes to behold the landscape as it is, 00:18:58.580 --> 00:19:02.660 align:middle line:84% adding nothing of himself to what he sees. 00:19:02.660 --> 00:19:06.470 align:middle line:84% When Blake said, "We are led to believe a lie when 00:19:06.470 --> 00:19:09.440 align:middle line:84% we see with not through the eye," 00:19:09.440 --> 00:19:12.380 align:middle line:84% he defined in wholly negative terms 00:19:12.380 --> 00:19:17.990 align:middle line:84% the winter mind of Stevens' snow man who sees with the eye. 00:19:17.990 --> 00:19:22.760 align:middle line:84% For to see with the eye is to perceive the world as an object 00:19:22.760 --> 00:19:25.820 align:middle line:90% apart from the beholding self. 00:19:25.820 --> 00:19:28.610 align:middle line:84% To see through the eye, however, is 00:19:28.610 --> 00:19:31.340 align:middle line:84% to perceive the world with one's mind, 00:19:31.340 --> 00:19:35.330 align:middle line:84% to associate objects with feelings and ideas, 00:19:35.330 --> 00:19:38.270 align:middle line:84% to behold the landscape as metaphor. 00:19:38.270 --> 00:19:42.890 align:middle line:84% Stevens like Blake is a celebrator of the imagination, 00:19:42.890 --> 00:19:46.760 align:middle line:90% seeing through the eye. 00:19:46.760 --> 00:19:51.950 align:middle line:84% Yet Stevens is sharply aware of how easily metaphor passes over 00:19:51.950 --> 00:19:54.470 align:middle line:90% into fantasy or illusion. 00:19:54.470 --> 00:19:59.300 align:middle line:84% For this reason, seeing with the eye with a winter mind 00:19:59.300 --> 00:20:03.980 align:middle line:84% is a necessary corrective or balance for the imagination. 00:20:03.980 --> 00:20:08.270 align:middle line:84% To Stevens, the literal eye provides the mind 00:20:08.270 --> 00:20:12.890 align:middle line:84% with a constant reminder of external reality. 00:20:12.890 --> 00:20:16.160 align:middle line:84% Just as there are two ways of perceiving reality 00:20:16.160 --> 00:20:18.470 align:middle line:84% with and through the eye, there are 00:20:18.470 --> 00:20:23.420 align:middle line:84% two observers in Stevens' poem, a snow man who sees only 00:20:23.420 --> 00:20:28.190 align:middle line:84% what is objectively present and the narrator-observer who 00:20:28.190 --> 00:20:32.570 align:middle line:84% regards the snow man and is keenly aware of what the snow 00:20:32.570 --> 00:20:34.790 align:middle line:90% man is not thinking. 00:20:34.790 --> 00:20:37.580 align:middle line:84% This subjective narrator-observer 00:20:37.580 --> 00:20:42.020 align:middle line:84% beholds not only the visible but the invisible as well. 00:20:42.020 --> 00:20:47.030 align:middle line:84% For him, the idea of absence in silence as its own being 00:20:47.030 --> 00:20:51.080 align:middle line:84% and content so that his language approximates winter 00:20:51.080 --> 00:20:54.920 align:middle line:84% stillness in the steadily repeating syllabus 00:20:54.920 --> 00:20:59.810 align:middle line:84% that hits through the poem expressing silence of a sort 00:20:59.810 --> 00:21:02.450 align:middle line:90% that Stevens says elsewhere. 00:21:02.450 --> 00:21:06.560 align:middle line:84% Although "The Snow Man" seems to be a poem about total winter 00:21:06.560 --> 00:21:10.910 align:middle line:84% desolation, it is a particular significance 00:21:10.910 --> 00:21:14.150 align:middle line:84% that the scene is filled with evergreen trees 00:21:14.150 --> 00:21:18.260 align:middle line:84% and that it has its own pristine beauty free 00:21:18.260 --> 00:21:23.090 align:middle line:84% of the mind's association of misery with wind and coldness. 00:21:23.090 --> 00:21:26.120 align:middle line:84% Furthermore, the month is January, 00:21:26.120 --> 00:21:30.620 align:middle line:84% the commencement of a new year and the turning towards spring. 00:21:30.620 --> 00:21:33.980 align:middle line:84% In effect, Stevens suggests that this is not 00:21:33.980 --> 00:21:37.820 align:middle line:84% to be seen as a poem merely about the diminished mind 00:21:37.820 --> 00:21:40.640 align:middle line:84% of the snow man who can no longer make 00:21:40.640 --> 00:21:45.170 align:middle line:84% any human connections with the landscape but about a beginning 00:21:45.170 --> 00:21:46.460 align:middle line:90% as well. 00:21:46.460 --> 00:21:49.970 align:middle line:84% In order for the mind to begin again however, 00:21:49.970 --> 00:21:53.270 align:middle line:84% to perceive the landscape in a human way, 00:21:53.270 --> 00:21:56.750 align:middle line:84% it must imagine energetically the ending 00:21:56.750 --> 00:22:00.230 align:middle line:84% of the imaginative effort that preceded it. 00:22:00.230 --> 00:22:03.140 align:middle line:84% As Stevens says in his poem, "The Plain Sense 00:22:03.140 --> 00:22:07.280 align:middle line:84% of Things," "The absence of imagination 00:22:07.280 --> 00:22:10.580 align:middle line:90% had itself to be imagined." 00:22:10.580 --> 00:22:12.410 align:middle line:90% I'll repeat that. 00:22:12.410 --> 00:22:16.420 align:middle line:84% Stevens says, "The absence of imagination 00:22:16.420 --> 00:22:18.820 align:middle line:90% had itself to be imagined." 00:22:18.820 --> 00:22:23.400 align:middle line:90% 00:22:23.400 --> 00:22:27.450 align:middle line:84% For the poem's narrator, imagining the snow man's winter 00:22:27.450 --> 00:22:33.750 align:middle line:84% mind is the necessary imagining of the absence of imagination. 00:22:33.750 --> 00:22:37.350 align:middle line:84% The snow man hears monotonous sound almost 00:22:37.350 --> 00:22:39.480 align:middle line:90% like silence itself. 00:22:39.480 --> 00:22:42.060 align:middle line:84% But from the narrator's point of view, 00:22:42.060 --> 00:22:45.420 align:middle line:84% there is a paradoxical fullness to this description 00:22:45.420 --> 00:22:48.480 align:middle line:84% of emptiness which the winter scenes evoke 00:22:48.480 --> 00:22:52.470 align:middle line:90% as being full of the same wind. 00:22:52.470 --> 00:22:57.870 align:middle line:84% The snow man sees things as things, facts as facts, 00:22:57.870 --> 00:23:00.250 align:middle line:90% objects as objects. 00:23:00.250 --> 00:23:03.570 align:middle line:84% But to the more imaginative mind of the narrator, 00:23:03.570 --> 00:23:06.870 align:middle line:84% objects may also be seen as metaphors. 00:23:06.870 --> 00:23:09.930 align:middle line:84% And therefore for him to perceive winter 00:23:09.930 --> 00:23:14.590 align:middle line:84% as an objective physical fact, not as a symbol of misery 00:23:14.590 --> 00:23:17.850 align:middle line:84% but tokens of failure of the imagination. 00:23:17.850 --> 00:23:21.030 align:middle line:84% Yet the intractable sound of the wind, 00:23:21.030 --> 00:23:25.380 align:middle line:84% merely itself, only once removed from silence, 00:23:25.380 --> 00:23:27.870 align:middle line:90% must also be confronted. 00:23:27.870 --> 00:23:30.330 align:middle line:84% The snow man is the best perceiver 00:23:30.330 --> 00:23:33.360 align:middle line:84% of nothingness that does indeed exist 00:23:33.360 --> 00:23:36.420 align:middle line:90% as an aspect of physical being. 00:23:36.420 --> 00:23:39.930 align:middle line:84% As close as we can get to the sense of silence 00:23:39.930 --> 00:23:43.260 align:middle line:84% in the repetitions of the sounds of sameness 00:23:43.260 --> 00:23:48.450 align:middle line:84% and monotony, so too do we approach unmediated reality 00:23:48.450 --> 00:23:52.020 align:middle line:84% as we [AUDIO OUT] independent existence prior 00:23:52.020 --> 00:23:55.860 align:middle line:84% to any metaphorical imposition upon it. 00:23:55.860 --> 00:24:00.570 align:middle line:84% Nevertheless, Stevens' whole poem becomes a metaphor 00:24:00.570 --> 00:24:05.610 align:middle line:84% since absence when well imagined encompasses its opposite, 00:24:05.610 --> 00:24:12.090 align:middle line:84% the presence of the idea of absence, the idea of non-being. 00:24:12.090 --> 00:24:15.990 align:middle line:84% The poem's narrator that beholding the snowman 00:24:15.990 --> 00:24:21.600 align:middle line:84% realizes that by implication that perception is nothing, 00:24:21.600 --> 00:24:27.480 align:middle line:84% it is empty, until human associative thought transforms 00:24:27.480 --> 00:24:29.940 align:middle line:90% objects into metaphors. 00:24:29.940 --> 00:24:33.210 align:middle line:90% But this nothing does exist. 00:24:33.210 --> 00:24:37.500 align:middle line:84% It is as Stevens says the nothing that is. 00:24:37.500 --> 00:24:40.650 align:middle line:84% Though only the narrator, not the snow man, 00:24:40.650 --> 00:24:43.140 align:middle line:90% can possess this knowledge. 00:24:43.140 --> 00:24:46.350 align:middle line:84% What the snow man sees is what the narrator 00:24:46.350 --> 00:24:49.290 align:middle line:84% knows for the narrator encompasses 00:24:49.290 --> 00:24:51.450 align:middle line:90% the idea of nothing. 00:24:51.450 --> 00:24:53.670 align:middle line:84% And [AUDIO OUT] quickens his desire 00:24:53.670 --> 00:24:57.180 align:middle line:84% for the renewal of metaphorical perception. 00:24:57.180 --> 00:25:01.830 align:middle line:84% As Stevens says in a later poem, "and not to have 00:25:01.830 --> 00:25:05.220 align:middle line:90% is the beginning of desire." 00:25:05.220 --> 00:25:08.610 align:middle line:84% This renewal of desire for metaphor 00:25:08.610 --> 00:25:12.240 align:middle line:84% is suggested by the approach of the distant sun 00:25:12.240 --> 00:25:15.240 align:middle line:84% as the year turns towards spring. 00:25:15.240 --> 00:25:19.500 align:middle line:84% With the realization that nothing must be confronted, 00:25:19.500 --> 00:25:24.900 align:middle line:84% we hear a kind of gasp, the flash of silence one might say, 00:25:24.900 --> 00:25:28.620 align:middle line:84% in the penultimate line, the only line in the poem that 00:25:28.620 --> 00:25:30.870 align:middle line:90% ends with an enjambment. 00:25:30.870 --> 00:25:34.980 align:middle line:84% Only through metaphor can the absence of metaphor 00:25:34.980 --> 00:25:36.480 align:middle line:90% be imagined. 00:25:36.480 --> 00:25:39.690 align:middle line:84% A world without metaphor is nothing. 00:25:39.690 --> 00:25:42.780 align:middle line:84% Yet this is true for Stevens in both a literal 00:25:42.780 --> 00:25:46.200 align:middle line:84% and a metaphorical sense and thus the poem 00:25:46.200 --> 00:25:50.790 align:middle line:84% both partakes of silence and is about silence. 00:25:50.790 --> 00:25:54.450 align:middle line:84% Silence as natural fact and silence 00:25:54.450 --> 00:25:56.520 align:middle line:90% as possible [AUDIO OUT]. 00:25:56.520 --> 00:26:03.000 align:middle line:84% Human reality, emotion, mood, need cannot be expressed 00:26:03.000 --> 00:26:08.880 align:middle line:84% denotedly as fact because it always is changing, fluid, 00:26:08.880 --> 00:26:11.310 align:middle line:90% open to further possibility. 00:26:11.310 --> 00:26:14.220 align:middle line:84% Human love for example is composed 00:26:14.220 --> 00:26:18.690 align:middle line:84% as much of memory and hope as it is of physical desire. 00:26:18.690 --> 00:26:23.880 align:middle line:84% Love is an idea of obligation and responsibility wedded 00:26:23.880 --> 00:26:29.070 align:middle line:84% to, inseparable from, a bodily need for touch. 00:26:29.070 --> 00:26:33.750 align:middle line:84% As Yates said, "Love would be no more than an animal hunger 00:26:33.750 --> 00:26:34.695 align:middle line:90% but for the poet." 00:26:34.695 --> 00:26:38.880 align:middle line:90% 00:26:38.880 --> 00:26:42.570 align:middle line:84% We read William Blake's "Never Seek to Tell Our Love." 00:26:42.570 --> 00:26:45.670 align:middle line:90% 00:26:45.670 --> 00:26:49.480 align:middle line:84% Never seek to tell thy love, love 00:26:49.480 --> 00:26:52.960 align:middle line:84% that never told can be for the gentle wind 00:26:52.960 --> 00:26:56.320 align:middle line:90% does move silently invisibly. 00:26:56.320 --> 00:26:57.660 align:middle line:90% I told my love. 00:26:57.660 --> 00:26:59.620 align:middle line:90% I told my love. 00:26:59.620 --> 00:27:02.800 align:middle line:84% I told her all my heart, trembling 00:27:02.800 --> 00:27:05.680 align:middle line:90% cold and ghastly fears. 00:27:05.680 --> 00:27:08.740 align:middle line:90% Ah she doth depart. 00:27:08.740 --> 00:27:11.980 align:middle line:84% Soon after she was gone from me a traveler 00:27:11.980 --> 00:27:16.090 align:middle line:90% came by silently, invisibly. 00:27:16.090 --> 00:27:17.845 align:middle line:90% He took her with a sigh. 00:27:17.845 --> 00:27:23.730 align:middle line:90% 00:27:23.730 --> 00:27:28.140 align:middle line:84% William Blake's poem "Never Seek to Tell Our Love" 00:27:28.140 --> 00:27:32.910 align:middle line:84% relates a story about a traveler's amorous wooing sigh 00:27:32.910 --> 00:27:36.900 align:middle line:84% and is itself the sigh of the rejected narrator 00:27:36.900 --> 00:27:39.180 align:middle line:84% after he has failed to win the lady 00:27:39.180 --> 00:27:42.600 align:middle line:84% with the direct declaration of his love. 00:27:42.600 --> 00:27:46.440 align:middle line:84% In contrast to the blunt and forthright narrator, 00:27:46.440 --> 00:27:50.040 align:middle line:84% the traveler's sigh is the epitome of language 00:27:50.040 --> 00:27:52.860 align:middle line:90% as suggestion and connotation. 00:27:52.860 --> 00:27:55.950 align:middle line:84% Blake implicitly compares human breathing 00:27:55.950 --> 00:27:59.340 align:middle line:84% with nature's breathing, the gentle wind, 00:27:59.340 --> 00:28:03.000 align:middle line:84% and thus conveys either the emotions of the narrator 00:28:03.000 --> 00:28:06.720 align:middle line:84% and the traveler in terms of how the poem breathes 00:28:06.720 --> 00:28:11.520 align:middle line:84% evenly or catches its breath through rhythmical shifts. 00:28:11.520 --> 00:28:13.800 align:middle line:84% The radical metrical interruption 00:28:13.800 --> 00:28:19.440 align:middle line:84% in the refrain line "silently invisibly" for example 00:28:19.440 --> 00:28:23.970 align:middle line:84% characterizes the interrupted breathing, the sigh, 00:28:23.970 --> 00:28:29.100 align:middle line:84% the anxiety of the narrator and also suggests his subconscious 00:28:29.100 --> 00:28:32.250 align:middle line:84% identification with the traveler. 00:28:32.250 --> 00:28:34.650 align:middle line:90% The narrator begins urgently. 00:28:34.650 --> 00:28:38.820 align:middle line:84% Almost all his lines start with stressed syllables, 00:28:38.820 --> 00:28:43.200 align:middle line:84% "Never seek to tell thy love", and a strong rhythmic pattern 00:28:43.200 --> 00:28:45.270 align:middle line:90% quickly is established. 00:28:45.270 --> 00:28:49.020 align:middle line:84% But that pattern breaks abruptly in the fourth line, 00:28:49.020 --> 00:28:53.700 align:middle line:90% silently sigh invisibly. 00:28:53.700 --> 00:28:58.170 align:middle line:84% The two missing stresses in this poem of four beats per line 00:28:58.170 --> 00:29:02.040 align:middle line:84% must be read into the caesura in the middle of the line. 00:29:02.040 --> 00:29:05.190 align:middle line:84% In the comma musical rest note, we 00:29:05.190 --> 00:29:10.080 align:middle line:84% hear a doubly stressed pause, a sigh, an intake, 00:29:10.080 --> 00:29:13.980 align:middle line:84% an exhalation of breath, an invisible and approaching 00:29:13.980 --> 00:29:15.930 align:middle line:90% silence. 00:29:15.930 --> 00:29:20.460 align:middle line:84% The narrator is compared to the easy movement of nature itself 00:29:20.460 --> 00:29:23.760 align:middle line:84% in the figure of the gentle wind which provides us 00:29:23.760 --> 00:29:26.100 align:middle line:84% with an image of nature's breathing, 00:29:26.100 --> 00:29:29.940 align:middle line:84% open and ongoing in contrast to the narrator who 00:29:29.940 --> 00:29:33.270 align:middle line:84% seeks to limit love and definitively telling 00:29:33.270 --> 00:29:35.550 align:middle line:90% all his heart. 00:29:35.550 --> 00:29:38.160 align:middle line:84% Love is destroyed, Blake implies, 00:29:38.160 --> 00:29:41.070 align:middle line:84% by placing it within mental boundaries, 00:29:41.070 --> 00:29:43.170 align:middle line:90% by trying to capture it. 00:29:43.170 --> 00:29:49.020 align:middle line:84% As Blake says elsewhere, "he who bends to himself a joy 00:29:49.020 --> 00:29:52.920 align:middle line:84% does the winged life destroy but he who kisses the joy 00:29:52.920 --> 00:29:57.390 align:middle line:84% as it flies lives in eternity's sunrise." 00:29:57.390 --> 00:30:01.410 align:middle line:84% The woman who hears the narrator's declaration of love 00:30:01.410 --> 00:30:05.670 align:middle line:84% is aghast because love has been limited in its unmetaphorical 00:30:05.670 --> 00:30:07.170 align:middle line:90% [AUDIO OUT]. 00:30:07.170 --> 00:30:11.760 align:middle line:84% And we hear her dismay echoed in the extended sigh 00:30:11.760 --> 00:30:16.830 align:middle line:84% the outcry of the narrator "Ah she doth depart." 00:30:16.830 --> 00:30:19.590 align:middle line:84% The lover-traveler like nature's wind 00:30:19.590 --> 00:30:24.100 align:middle line:84% does not speak in the language of denotation and definition 00:30:24.100 --> 00:30:28.050 align:middle line:84% but in the language of innuendo and suggestion. 00:30:28.050 --> 00:30:32.280 align:middle line:84% Unlike the narrator's sigh of despair and defeat, 00:30:32.280 --> 00:30:34.800 align:middle line:84% the travelers sigh is one of pleasure 00:30:34.800 --> 00:30:39.000 align:middle line:84% and of promise which for Blake is the essence of love 00:30:39.000 --> 00:30:43.620 align:middle line:84% since love opens the senses and the mind to the infinite. 00:30:43.620 --> 00:30:46.200 align:middle line:84% If the travelers sigh corresponds 00:30:46.200 --> 00:30:50.130 align:middle line:84% to the gentle wind, nature's benevolent power, 00:30:50.130 --> 00:30:53.520 align:middle line:84% then the gasping anxious sigh of the narrator 00:30:53.520 --> 00:30:57.210 align:middle line:84% corresponds to a failed imagining of nature 00:30:57.210 --> 00:31:01.650 align:middle line:84% and thus a constricted sense of bodily desire and love. 00:31:01.650 --> 00:31:05.880 align:middle line:84% These opposing sides constitute the central metaphor 00:31:05.880 --> 00:31:07.350 align:middle line:90% of Blake's poem. 00:31:07.350 --> 00:31:09.450 align:middle line:84% And they remind us of [AUDIO OUT] metaphor 00:31:09.450 --> 00:31:13.980 align:middle line:84% itself, which is the language that enables us to see things 00:31:13.980 --> 00:31:17.160 align:middle line:84% not merely as they are but in the fullness 00:31:17.160 --> 00:31:20.310 align:middle line:84% of their open possibilities always there 00:31:20.310 --> 00:31:24.330 align:middle line:84% to be realized that the marriage of inner and outer, 00:31:24.330 --> 00:31:26.070 align:middle line:90% mind and nature. 00:31:26.070 --> 00:31:29.040 align:middle line:84% As Blake says in "The Marriage of Heaven and Hell", 00:31:29.040 --> 00:31:31.920 align:middle line:84% "If the doors of perception were cleansed, 00:31:31.920 --> 00:31:36.270 align:middle line:84% everything would appear to man as it is, infinite." 00:31:36.270 --> 00:31:39.830 align:middle line:90% 00:31:39.830 --> 00:31:41.225 align:middle line:90% Frost, "The Road Not Taken." 00:31:41.225 --> 00:31:48.690 align:middle line:90% 00:31:48.690 --> 00:31:52.170 align:middle line:84% Two roads diverged in a yellow wood, 00:31:52.170 --> 00:31:57.210 align:middle line:84% and sorry I could not travel both, and be one traveler, long 00:31:57.210 --> 00:32:01.140 align:middle line:84% I stood and looked down one as far as I could to where it 00:32:01.140 --> 00:32:06.090 align:middle line:84% bent in the undergrowth and took the other as just as fair 00:32:06.090 --> 00:32:08.610 align:middle line:84% and having perhaps the better claim, because it 00:32:08.610 --> 00:32:11.610 align:middle line:84% was grassy and wanted wear though 00:32:11.610 --> 00:32:15.090 align:middle line:84% as for that the passing there had worn them really 00:32:15.090 --> 00:32:20.400 align:middle line:84% about the same and both that morning equally lay in 00:32:20.400 --> 00:32:23.350 align:middle line:84% leaves no step had trodden black. 00:32:23.350 --> 00:32:26.670 align:middle line:84% Oh I kept the first for another day! 00:32:26.670 --> 00:32:29.550 align:middle line:84% Yet knowing how way leads on to way 00:32:29.550 --> 00:32:33.060 align:middle line:84% I doubted if I should ever come back. 00:32:33.060 --> 00:32:37.410 align:middle line:84% I shall be telling this with a sigh somewhere ages and ages 00:32:37.410 --> 00:32:43.098 align:middle line:84% hence, two roads diverged in the wood and I, 00:32:43.098 --> 00:32:47.250 align:middle line:84% I took the one less traveled by and that 00:32:47.250 --> 00:32:48.870 align:middle line:90% has made all the difference. 00:32:48.870 --> 00:32:52.560 align:middle line:90% 00:32:52.560 --> 00:32:54.570 align:middle line:84% Robert Frost, "The Road Not Taken" 00:32:54.570 --> 00:32:57.900 align:middle line:84% I believe may be read as a series of sighs 00:32:57.900 --> 00:33:01.440 align:middle line:84% by the poem's speaker for his divided selves, 00:33:01.440 --> 00:33:04.830 align:middle line:84% the life he lived and the life he might have lived. 00:33:04.830 --> 00:33:08.340 align:middle line:84% The impossible wish for more than one life 00:33:08.340 --> 00:33:11.610 align:middle line:84% leads the speaker to seek consolation in the belief 00:33:11.610 --> 00:33:14.430 align:middle line:84% that the choice of his actual life 00:33:14.430 --> 00:33:16.890 align:middle line:90% has had positive significance. 00:33:16.890 --> 00:33:19.170 align:middle line:84% The speaker's first palpable sigh 00:33:19.170 --> 00:33:22.080 align:middle line:84% for the recognition of mortal limitation 00:33:22.080 --> 00:33:26.790 align:middle line:84% can be heard in the line, and be one traveler pause 00:33:26.790 --> 00:33:28.800 align:middle line:90% long I stood. 00:33:28.800 --> 00:33:32.580 align:middle line:84% In that heavy pause given to the comma which carries over 00:33:32.580 --> 00:33:36.900 align:middle line:84% into distress on the word long, a sigh of regret 00:33:36.900 --> 00:33:40.290 align:middle line:84% is unmistakable in the speaker's voice whose 00:33:40.290 --> 00:33:44.610 align:middle line:84% varying intonations constitute the fundamental metaphor 00:33:44.610 --> 00:33:46.080 align:middle line:90% of the poem. 00:33:46.080 --> 00:33:49.620 align:middle line:84% That voice is more complex and revealing 00:33:49.620 --> 00:33:52.620 align:middle line:84% in the relatively simple allegorical image 00:33:52.620 --> 00:33:54.480 align:middle line:90% of the two roads. 00:33:54.480 --> 00:33:57.390 align:middle line:84% The speaker attempts to persuade himself 00:33:57.390 --> 00:34:00.120 align:middle line:84% that the two roads can be distinguished, 00:34:00.120 --> 00:34:03.840 align:middle line:84% that a real choice can be made, but he catches himself 00:34:03.840 --> 00:34:06.660 align:middle line:84% and correct that rationalization. 00:34:06.660 --> 00:34:09.840 align:middle line:84% Actually both roads were the same, 00:34:09.840 --> 00:34:13.860 align:middle line:84% "and both that morning equally lay in leaves no step 00:34:13.860 --> 00:34:15.690 align:middle line:90% had trodden black." 00:34:15.690 --> 00:34:19.620 align:middle line:84% The speaker cannot convince him that a meaningful choice took 00:34:19.620 --> 00:34:20.489 align:middle line:90% place. 00:34:20.489 --> 00:34:23.820 align:middle line:84% And there is an extended sigh in that recognition, 00:34:23.820 --> 00:34:27.900 align:middle line:84% in the stressed oh that opens the subsequent line 00:34:27.900 --> 00:34:30.900 align:middle line:84% against the flow of the iambic meter, 00:34:30.900 --> 00:34:34.570 align:middle line:84% "Oh I kept the first for another day!" 00:34:34.570 --> 00:34:38.850 align:middle line:84% The first road is kept open by the poem itself surprisingly 00:34:38.850 --> 00:34:43.230 align:middle line:84% in its title, despite the later claim that the road he did take 00:34:43.230 --> 00:34:45.420 align:middle line:90% has made all the difference. 00:34:45.420 --> 00:34:49.139 align:middle line:84% The poem itself is what he will sigh for in the future when 00:34:49.139 --> 00:34:50.880 align:middle line:90% he will again look back. 00:34:50.880 --> 00:34:55.679 align:middle line:84% For he predicts that I shall be telling this with his sigh. 00:34:55.679 --> 00:34:59.220 align:middle line:84% In effect, the telling is already told. 00:34:59.220 --> 00:35:03.720 align:middle line:84% But here the poem is projected into an indefinite future. 00:35:03.720 --> 00:35:08.340 align:middle line:84% When and where is somewhere ages and ages hence? 00:35:08.340 --> 00:35:12.360 align:middle line:84% Is the speaker imagining that he might be reciting this poem 00:35:12.360 --> 00:35:17.010 align:middle line:84% perhaps to his grandchildren as an intentionally misleading 00:35:17.010 --> 00:35:21.540 align:middle line:84% and therefore subtly comic parable about meaning in life 00:35:21.540 --> 00:35:24.090 align:middle line:90% when none is to be found? 00:35:24.090 --> 00:35:27.180 align:middle line:84% Or is the speaker imagining an afterlife 00:35:27.180 --> 00:35:29.670 align:middle line:84% in which the purpose of the journey of life 00:35:29.670 --> 00:35:32.040 align:middle line:90% is still obscured to him? 00:35:32.040 --> 00:35:37.680 align:middle line:84% If so will his sigh then express eternal uncertainty? 00:35:37.680 --> 00:35:40.680 align:middle line:84% The reader only can follow the speaker's meaning 00:35:40.680 --> 00:35:43.350 align:middle line:90% here in speculation. 00:35:43.350 --> 00:35:47.520 align:middle line:84% The speaker however returns to the objective fact, 00:35:47.520 --> 00:35:52.080 align:middle line:84% two roads diverged in a wood, though the detail yellow has 00:35:52.080 --> 00:35:54.960 align:middle line:84% dropped away suggesting the increased 00:35:54.960 --> 00:35:57.300 align:middle line:90% remoteness of the perspective. 00:35:57.300 --> 00:36:00.150 align:middle line:84% The line break places another pause, 00:36:00.150 --> 00:36:06.450 align:middle line:84% another sigh between the double self, "and I, I took", 00:36:06.450 --> 00:36:10.410 align:middle line:84% separating one I from the other, reinforcing 00:36:10.410 --> 00:36:14.250 align:middle line:84% the reader's sense of the sorrow of the speaker's divided 00:36:14.250 --> 00:36:15.750 align:middle line:90% consciousness. 00:36:15.750 --> 00:36:18.450 align:middle line:84% We hear his melancholy tone for being 00:36:18.450 --> 00:36:22.530 align:middle line:84% limited to one life in the breaking of his voice. 00:36:22.530 --> 00:36:25.050 align:middle line:84% His [AUDIO OUT] his troubled breathing, 00:36:25.050 --> 00:36:27.540 align:middle line:84% however we interpret them, are more 00:36:27.540 --> 00:36:30.630 align:middle line:84% concrete than any meaning the speaker can 00:36:30.630 --> 00:36:34.500 align:middle line:90% impose upon his experience. 00:36:34.500 --> 00:36:38.700 align:middle line:84% The apparently affirmative and individualistic claim, 00:36:38.700 --> 00:36:41.910 align:middle line:84% "I took the road less traveled by" 00:36:41.910 --> 00:36:46.710 align:middle line:84% clearly is contradicted by the facts presented in the poem. 00:36:46.710 --> 00:36:49.470 align:middle line:90% The two roads equally lay. 00:36:49.470 --> 00:36:53.850 align:middle line:84% They were indistinguishable except for the historical fact 00:36:53.850 --> 00:36:56.430 align:middle line:84% that he took one and not the other. 00:36:56.430 --> 00:37:00.900 align:middle line:84% He cannot know what another life might have been nor can he make 00:37:00.900 --> 00:37:02.760 align:middle line:90% a useful comparison. 00:37:02.760 --> 00:37:07.290 align:middle line:84% His statement as he fully recognizes is ironic 00:37:07.290 --> 00:37:11.610 align:middle line:84% and that perhaps accounts for the prolonged sigh which 00:37:11.610 --> 00:37:14.050 align:middle line:84% is the very telling of this poem, 00:37:14.050 --> 00:37:17.100 align:middle line:84% for it is a sigh which may go unrelieved 00:37:17.100 --> 00:37:21.780 align:middle line:84% in any future retellings wherever ages hence they 00:37:21.780 --> 00:37:23.850 align:middle line:90% may take place. 00:37:23.850 --> 00:37:26.850 align:middle line:84% As in many Frost's poems, [AUDIO OUT] experience 00:37:26.850 --> 00:37:31.350 align:middle line:84% presented here is one of non-revelation. 00:37:31.350 --> 00:37:35.550 align:middle line:84% The wish for a revealed meaning or a proven significance 00:37:35.550 --> 00:37:39.390 align:middle line:84% as in the making of a choice is disappointed. 00:37:39.390 --> 00:37:43.170 align:middle line:84% And the reader can hear that disappointment in the speaker's 00:37:43.170 --> 00:37:48.510 align:middle line:84% voice, in the constrained ironic bitterness of the last line. 00:37:48.510 --> 00:37:51.960 align:middle line:84% As Frost said in a letter to John Freeman, 00:37:51.960 --> 00:37:54.870 align:middle line:84% "A good sentence does double duty. 00:37:54.870 --> 00:37:59.520 align:middle line:84% It conveys one meaning by word and syntax and another 00:37:59.520 --> 00:38:02.820 align:middle line:84% by the tone of voice it indicates." 00:38:02.820 --> 00:38:05.400 align:middle line:84% The words of the final line, "and that 00:38:05.400 --> 00:38:07.320 align:middle line:90% has made all the difference." 00:38:07.320 --> 00:38:11.950 align:middle line:84% denote that a meaningful and positive choice has been made. 00:38:11.950 --> 00:38:17.760 align:middle line:84% But the tone of voice undermines and reverses that assertion. 00:38:17.760 --> 00:38:22.650 align:middle line:84% In this steadily iambic poem with only a few variations, 00:38:22.650 --> 00:38:26.730 align:middle line:84% the final two metrical feet are reversed. 00:38:26.730 --> 00:38:28.940 align:middle line:84% They are trochees which give a [AUDIO OUT] 00:38:28.940 --> 00:38:33.030 align:middle line:90% effect "all the difference." 00:38:33.030 --> 00:38:36.600 align:middle line:84% And in then the reader can hear the diminishing 00:38:36.600 --> 00:38:38.970 align:middle line:90% of the speaker's voice. 00:38:38.970 --> 00:38:42.180 align:middle line:84% The last line is the only one in the poem that 00:38:42.180 --> 00:38:48.420 align:middle line:84% ends on an unstressed syllable, an exhalation of breath, a sigh 00:38:48.420 --> 00:38:50.910 align:middle line:90% fading into silence. 00:38:50.910 --> 00:38:54.000 align:middle line:84% The voice that speaks this poem filled 00:38:54.000 --> 00:38:57.330 align:middle line:84% with the mysterious inflections of a sigh 00:38:57.330 --> 00:39:00.780 align:middle line:84% is the accurate metaphor that corresponds 00:39:00.780 --> 00:39:04.320 align:middle line:84% to the narrator's experience of nostalgia 00:39:04.320 --> 00:39:07.095 align:middle line:84% for a revelation that never took place. 00:39:07.095 --> 00:39:11.730 align:middle line:90% 00:39:11.730 --> 00:39:16.500 align:middle line:84% The voice that speaks a tone as implied by the written word 00:39:16.500 --> 00:39:18.360 align:middle line:90% is itself a metaphor. 00:39:18.360 --> 00:39:23.490 align:middle line:84% And as in Frost's poem, what the reader learns or surmises 00:39:23.490 --> 00:39:27.990 align:middle line:84% from that voice may provide the crucial information 00:39:27.990 --> 00:39:32.280 align:middle line:84% of the poem, voice inflections, pitch, 00:39:32.280 --> 00:39:37.080 align:middle line:84% and speed, and voice qualities, such as harshness 00:39:37.080 --> 00:39:41.250 align:middle line:84% or mellifluousness may be suggested, for example, 00:39:41.250 --> 00:39:45.210 align:middle line:84% by rhythm, rhyme, with the emphasis on vowel 00:39:45.210 --> 00:39:47.520 align:middle line:90% or consonantal patterns. 00:39:47.520 --> 00:39:50.640 align:middle line:84% Yet there is nothing more expressive in a poem 00:39:50.640 --> 00:39:53.940 align:middle line:90% than its pauses, its silences. 00:39:53.940 --> 00:39:59.130 align:middle line:84% But they evoke the bodily sense of breathing, easy or hard, 00:39:59.130 --> 00:40:03.990 align:middle line:84% and they may correspond to the idea of silence as absence 00:40:03.990 --> 00:40:08.190 align:middle line:84% or at the other extreme to an idea of silence 00:40:08.190 --> 00:40:11.250 align:middle line:84% as mental or spiritual inwardness. 00:40:11.250 --> 00:40:13.760 align:middle line:90% 00:40:13.760 --> 00:40:17.345 align:middle line:84% Look at Steven's little poem now "Life is Motion." 00:40:17.345 --> 00:40:24.510 align:middle line:90% 00:40:24.510 --> 00:40:30.330 align:middle line:84% In Oklahoma, Bonnie and Josie, dressed in calico, 00:40:30.330 --> 00:40:32.730 align:middle line:90% danced around a stump. 00:40:32.730 --> 00:40:36.540 align:middle line:90% They cried, "Ohoyaho, ohoo." 00:40:36.540 --> 00:40:42.450 align:middle line:84% celebrating the marriage of flesh and air. 00:40:42.450 --> 00:40:48.030 align:middle line:84% Life emerges from silence and stillness and returns to them. 00:40:48.030 --> 00:40:52.710 align:middle line:84% The connecting interim is composed of sound and movement. 00:40:52.710 --> 00:40:54.990 align:middle line:84% Stevens' "Life is Motion" may be read 00:40:54.990 --> 00:40:58.020 align:middle line:84% as a little parable on this theme. 00:40:58.020 --> 00:41:01.260 align:middle line:84% In this poem, Stevens employs and distinguishes 00:41:01.260 --> 00:41:06.250 align:middle line:84% two aspects of language, imagistic and abstract, 00:41:06.250 --> 00:41:08.700 align:middle line:84% which correspond to physical presence 00:41:08.700 --> 00:41:15.510 align:middle line:84% and conceptual thought, voice as sound object and word as idea. 00:41:15.510 --> 00:41:19.680 align:middle line:84% The letter O and the sound oh are introduced 00:41:19.680 --> 00:41:22.260 align:middle line:90% doubled in the word motion. 00:41:22.260 --> 00:41:25.650 align:middle line:84% Person, dress, and place are related 00:41:25.650 --> 00:41:30.720 align:middle line:84% by having a prominent O letter and their implied sounds. 00:41:30.720 --> 00:41:34.020 align:middle line:84% Bonnie's and Josie's names have their O. 00:41:34.020 --> 00:41:37.350 align:middle line:84% Their state Oklahoma is filled with O. 00:41:37.350 --> 00:41:39.660 align:middle line:90% They are dressed in calico. 00:41:39.660 --> 00:41:44.370 align:middle line:84% And their cry "Ohoyaho", which sounds like a caveman's version 00:41:44.370 --> 00:41:47.430 align:middle line:84% of Oklahoma, is a primitive warbling 00:41:47.430 --> 00:41:50.910 align:middle line:90% on the variance of the vowel O. 00:41:50.910 --> 00:41:54.270 align:middle line:84% The first two words of the title, "Life is", 00:41:54.270 --> 00:41:57.210 align:middle line:84% prepare the reader for an abstract and general 00:41:57.210 --> 00:41:58.590 align:middle line:90% proposition. 00:41:58.590 --> 00:42:02.190 align:middle line:84% And the word motion completes the concept. 00:42:02.190 --> 00:42:07.110 align:middle line:84% Although motion as a word evokes only an idea, not an image. 00:42:07.110 --> 00:42:09.090 align:middle line:84% It directs the reader's attention 00:42:09.090 --> 00:42:12.930 align:middle line:84% to the physical world of concrete moving things 00:42:12.930 --> 00:42:16.500 align:middle line:84% and Stevens will not return to abstract language 00:42:16.500 --> 00:42:19.140 align:middle line:84% until the poem's concluding two lines, 00:42:19.140 --> 00:42:22.500 align:middle line:84% "celebrating the marriage of flesh and air." 00:42:22.500 --> 00:42:26.820 align:middle line:84% For Stevens, every poem contains by implication 00:42:26.820 --> 00:42:31.050 align:middle line:84% the origin of language itself, the physical cry 00:42:31.050 --> 00:42:35.280 align:middle line:84% of the human voice not yet shaped into a word. 00:42:35.280 --> 00:42:38.610 align:middle line:84% As Stephen says in "The Man with the Blue Guitar", 00:42:38.610 --> 00:42:41.910 align:middle line:84% the poem is [AUDIO OUT] of its occasion. 00:42:41.910 --> 00:42:45.270 align:middle line:84% Inherent in the words and the design of the poem 00:42:45.270 --> 00:42:50.010 align:middle line:84% is the sound made by the rush of breath from the lungs 00:42:50.010 --> 00:42:53.160 align:middle line:84% through the throat directed by the tone 00:42:53.160 --> 00:42:55.680 align:middle line:90% against the teeth or the lips. 00:42:55.680 --> 00:42:59.820 align:middle line:84% This is the breathing voice that cries out "Oh!" 00:42:59.820 --> 00:43:04.350 align:middle line:84% in creaturely passion either in pleasure or in pain. 00:43:04.350 --> 00:43:08.580 align:middle line:84% The letter O presents the idea of this sound 00:43:08.580 --> 00:43:10.980 align:middle line:84% and in essence makes manifest what 00:43:10.980 --> 00:43:17.460 align:middle line:84% Stevens calls the poem of the idea within the poem of words. 00:43:17.460 --> 00:43:20.880 align:middle line:84% To which we should add in Stevens' behalf 00:43:20.880 --> 00:43:25.710 align:middle line:84% the poem of the idea within the poem of sounds. 00:43:25.710 --> 00:43:29.250 align:middle line:84% For as Stevens says in his essay, "The Noble 00:43:29.250 --> 00:43:33.420 align:middle line:84% Writer and the Sound of Words," "Above everything else, 00:43:33.420 --> 00:43:37.920 align:middle line:84% poetry is words and words above everything else 00:43:37.920 --> 00:43:41.430 align:middle line:90% are in poetry sounds." 00:43:41.430 --> 00:43:43.020 align:middle line:84% The setting of the poems [AUDIO OUT] 00:43:43.020 --> 00:43:48.810 align:middle line:84% by the calico clothing is the 19th century American frontier. 00:43:48.810 --> 00:43:51.420 align:middle line:84% A farming family has taken time out 00:43:51.420 --> 00:43:55.710 align:middle line:84% from work for a celebration, probably a wedding. 00:43:55.710 --> 00:43:58.050 align:middle line:84% The expansion of the country westward 00:43:58.050 --> 00:44:00.600 align:middle line:84% and the clearing of the land for farming 00:44:00.600 --> 00:44:04.350 align:middle line:84% suggest life-affirming activity and energy. 00:44:04.350 --> 00:44:08.070 align:middle line:84% Yet the image of the stump which appears literally 00:44:08.070 --> 00:44:12.210 align:middle line:84% at the dead center of the poem, 11 words before and after-- 00:44:12.210 --> 00:44:13.980 align:middle line:90% Count them if you like. 00:44:13.980 --> 00:44:16.320 align:middle line:90% --produces a countereffect. 00:44:16.320 --> 00:44:20.220 align:middle line:84% The reader hears and witnesses a physical dance 00:44:20.220 --> 00:44:23.070 align:middle line:84% accompanied by a primal incantatory 00:44:23.070 --> 00:44:27.690 align:middle line:84% poetry around the central stump of death. 00:44:27.690 --> 00:44:32.010 align:middle line:84% Creation and destruction are thus seen as inseparable. 00:44:32.010 --> 00:44:37.770 align:middle line:84% The cry "Ohoyaho, ohoo" virtually is breath itself, 00:44:37.770 --> 00:44:41.940 align:middle line:84% pure voice unmediated by linguistic meaning. 00:44:41.940 --> 00:44:45.720 align:middle line:84% An emphatic breath pause is indicated by the ellipsis 00:44:45.720 --> 00:44:48.720 align:middle line:84% and in that moment as the cry trails off 00:44:48.720 --> 00:44:52.470 align:middle line:84% into silence the reader listener is invited 00:44:52.470 --> 00:44:55.470 align:middle line:84% to make the connection between the expressiveness 00:44:55.470 --> 00:44:58.830 align:middle line:84% of bodily voice sounds and the mind's power 00:44:58.830 --> 00:45:02.850 align:middle line:84% to conceptualize, to articulate ideas, 00:45:02.850 --> 00:45:05.830 align:middle line:90% such as the idea of marriage. 00:45:05.830 --> 00:45:09.360 align:middle line:84% The poem thus presents the idea of celebration 00:45:09.360 --> 00:45:14.200 align:middle line:84% and is itself a celebration of the idea of marriage, 00:45:14.200 --> 00:45:16.110 align:middle line:84% the marriage of person and place, 00:45:16.110 --> 00:45:19.770 align:middle line:84% life and death, body and mind, and, above all, 00:45:19.770 --> 00:45:22.260 align:middle line:90% of sound and poem. 00:45:22.260 --> 00:45:25.790 align:middle line:84% The home is a metaphor for itself, 00:45:25.790 --> 00:45:30.350 align:middle line:84% celebrating itself, wetting the body's cry with the mind's 00:45:30.350 --> 00:45:32.300 align:middle line:90% linguistic design. 00:45:32.300 --> 00:45:36.770 align:middle line:84% It is a metaphor of the literal human voice transformed 00:45:36.770 --> 00:45:38.660 align:middle line:90% into poetic speech. 00:45:38.660 --> 00:45:43.820 align:middle line:84% According to Stevens' "Faith", "Poetry, exceeding music, 00:45:43.820 --> 00:45:48.080 align:middle line:84% must take the place of empty Heaven and its hymns." 00:45:48.080 --> 00:45:49.554 align:middle line:90% That is [AUDIO OUT]. 00:45:49.554 --> 00:45:55.340 align:middle line:90% 00:45:55.340 --> 00:45:59.600 align:middle line:84% "The world is charged with the grandeur of God. 00:45:59.600 --> 00:46:04.250 align:middle line:84% It will flame out, like shining from shook foil. 00:46:04.250 --> 00:46:09.140 align:middle line:84% It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil crushed. 00:46:09.140 --> 00:46:13.670 align:middle line:84% Why do men then now not reck his rod? 00:46:13.670 --> 00:46:18.680 align:middle line:84% Generations have trod, have trod, have trod. 00:46:18.680 --> 00:46:23.330 align:middle line:84% And all is seared with trade, bleared, smeared with toil. 00:46:23.330 --> 00:46:27.860 align:middle line:84% And wears man's smudge and shares man's smell. 00:46:27.860 --> 00:46:33.590 align:middle line:84% The soil is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod. 00:46:33.590 --> 00:46:37.370 align:middle line:84% And for all this, nature is never spent. 00:46:37.370 --> 00:46:41.520 align:middle line:84% There lives, the dearest freshness deep down things. 00:46:41.520 --> 00:46:45.680 align:middle line:84% And though the last lights of the black West went oh, 00:46:45.680 --> 00:46:49.850 align:middle line:84% morning, at the brown brink eastwood springs-- 00:46:49.850 --> 00:46:52.640 align:middle line:84% because the Holy Ghost over the bent 00:46:52.640 --> 00:46:58.355 align:middle line:84% world broods with warm breast and with, ah, bright wings." 00:46:58.355 --> 00:47:01.820 align:middle line:90% 00:47:01.820 --> 00:47:05.840 align:middle line:84% The marriage of spirit and matter, word and sound 00:47:05.840 --> 00:47:09.530 align:middle line:84% also constitutes the central gathering metaphor 00:47:09.530 --> 00:47:12.530 align:middle line:84% of Hopkins' poem "God's Grandeur." 00:47:12.530 --> 00:47:15.230 align:middle line:84% God's moral law is given to a man 00:47:15.230 --> 00:47:18.110 align:middle line:84% as a charge which also may be seen 00:47:18.110 --> 00:47:21.050 align:middle line:84% as a charge of physical energy and light 00:47:21.050 --> 00:47:23.660 align:middle line:84% as in the "shining of shook foil." 00:47:23.660 --> 00:47:27.230 align:middle line:84% And the justification of God's divine authority 00:47:27.230 --> 00:47:31.700 align:middle line:84% is seen likewise as the creative manifestation of his power 00:47:31.700 --> 00:47:35.000 align:middle line:84% in nature's ability to refresh itself. 00:47:35.000 --> 00:47:38.210 align:middle line:84% The culminating image of the approaching dawn 00:47:38.210 --> 00:47:41.210 align:middle line:84% transformed into a vision of the Holy [AUDIO OUT] 00:47:41.210 --> 00:47:44.210 align:middle line:84% as a descending dove brings together 00:47:44.210 --> 00:47:47.480 align:middle line:84% a physical event and a spiritually enlightened 00:47:47.480 --> 00:47:51.620 align:middle line:84% understanding of that event, uniting the visible and the 00:47:51.620 --> 00:47:53.030 align:middle line:90% invisible. 00:47:53.030 --> 00:47:55.850 align:middle line:84% The speaker comprehends that human work is not 00:47:55.850 --> 00:47:58.250 align:middle line:90% sufficient unto itself. 00:47:58.250 --> 00:48:01.940 align:middle line:84% If not in the service of God and respectful of nature, 00:48:01.940 --> 00:48:07.040 align:middle line:84% God's creation, human activity obscures God's light 00:48:07.040 --> 00:48:10.700 align:middle line:84% and the world becomes bleared, smeared with trade. 00:48:10.700 --> 00:48:13.280 align:middle line:84% For Hopkins, the primary function 00:48:13.280 --> 00:48:16.910 align:middle line:84% of both work and language is to serve and praise God. 00:48:16.910 --> 00:48:19.400 align:middle line:84% And this obligation must be felt as well as 00:48:19.400 --> 00:48:24.650 align:middle line:84% understood so that giving praise becomes human choice not merely 00:48:24.650 --> 00:48:27.230 align:middle line:90% a duty performed out of fear. 00:48:27.230 --> 00:48:29.660 align:middle line:84% Seeing and understanding God's light 00:48:29.660 --> 00:48:32.150 align:middle line:90% therefore is not sufficient. 00:48:32.150 --> 00:48:35.420 align:middle line:84% Another aspect of light must be experienced, 00:48:35.420 --> 00:48:36.980 align:middle line:90% the warmth of light. 00:48:36.980 --> 00:48:39.530 align:middle line:84% And indeed the speaker feels this warmth 00:48:39.530 --> 00:48:42.830 align:middle line:84% in the dawn as the warm breast of the dove 00:48:42.830 --> 00:48:45.440 align:middle line:84% which [AUDIO OUT] Holy Ghost received 00:48:45.440 --> 00:48:48.050 align:middle line:84% by the light of its bright wings. 00:48:48.050 --> 00:48:50.900 align:middle line:84% Light experienced visually is given 00:48:50.900 --> 00:48:53.930 align:middle line:84% to the metaphorical perception of physical images 00:48:53.930 --> 00:48:55.100 align:middle line:90% in this poem. 00:48:55.100 --> 00:48:58.310 align:middle line:84% But light experienced as warmth also 00:48:58.310 --> 00:49:00.980 align:middle line:84% requires its subjective response, 00:49:00.980 --> 00:49:03.320 align:middle line:90% its corresponding metaphor. 00:49:03.320 --> 00:49:07.190 align:middle line:84% Hopkins provides this metaphor in the bodily voice 00:49:07.190 --> 00:49:11.210 align:middle line:84% of the speaker, his cry of recognition and approval, 00:49:11.210 --> 00:49:13.460 align:middle line:84% the opening of the lips, from their 00:49:13.460 --> 00:49:17.510 align:middle line:90% pursed "Oh" to the wider "Ah". 00:49:17.510 --> 00:49:22.280 align:middle line:84% The human voice at its wordless or pre-verbal center, 00:49:22.280 --> 00:49:25.970 align:middle line:84% when given shape and meaning by the linguistic context in which 00:49:25.970 --> 00:49:30.020 align:middle line:84% it is placed, contains a responsive power 00:49:30.020 --> 00:49:33.590 align:middle line:84% capable of giving praise to God's initiating 00:49:33.590 --> 00:49:36.290 align:middle line:90% and creative work. 00:49:36.290 --> 00:49:40.160 align:middle line:84% In addition to visual illumination and felt warmth, 00:49:40.160 --> 00:49:44.540 align:middle line:84% light takes on as well the attribute of lightness, 00:49:44.540 --> 00:49:48.680 align:middle line:84% the body's divinely given [AUDIO OUT] power to rise. 00:49:48.680 --> 00:49:52.070 align:middle line:84% When the Holy Ghost descends to the bent world 00:49:52.070 --> 00:49:54.560 align:middle line:84% and the speaker feels its warmth, 00:49:54.560 --> 00:49:57.770 align:middle line:84% the speaker's earthbound spirit unbends 00:49:57.770 --> 00:50:00.110 align:middle line:84% and with a visionary leap, ascends 00:50:00.110 --> 00:50:02.930 align:middle line:84% heavenward with the dove prefiguring 00:50:02.930 --> 00:50:06.890 align:middle line:84% the body's literal resurrection after death. 00:50:06.890 --> 00:50:10.400 align:middle line:84% Having been created from the dust by God's breath, 00:50:10.400 --> 00:50:15.170 align:middle line:84% man, "the heir to his own self bent", as Hopkins says, 00:50:15.170 --> 00:50:18.260 align:middle line:84% becomes unbound in giving himself over 00:50:18.260 --> 00:50:23.330 align:middle line:84% to God's will in the model of Christ's incarnation and death. 00:50:23.330 --> 00:50:27.080 align:middle line:84% As Jesus Christ's life and death for Hopkins 00:50:27.080 --> 00:50:31.340 align:middle line:84% is God's metaphor to inspire human understanding to give 00:50:31.340 --> 00:50:36.230 align:middle line:84% the breath of faith to thought, "God's Grandeur", the poem 00:50:36.230 --> 00:50:40.100 align:middle line:84% itself is Hopkins' metaphor in response, 00:50:40.100 --> 00:50:44.930 align:middle line:84% from his own body and mind, his literal breath rising lightly 00:50:44.930 --> 00:50:50.171 align:middle line:84% in the word "Ah", speaking the language of his soul. 00:50:50.171 --> 00:50:53.590 align:middle line:84% The last poem I'd like to say a few words about. 00:50:53.590 --> 00:51:02.482 align:middle line:90% 00:51:02.482 --> 00:51:05.530 align:middle line:90% The Sea-Elephant. 00:51:05.530 --> 00:51:10.750 align:middle line:84% Trundled from the strangeness of the sea a kind of heaven. 00:51:10.750 --> 00:51:13.180 align:middle line:90% Ladies and gentlemen! 00:51:13.180 --> 00:51:17.440 align:middle line:84% The greatest sea-monster ever exhibited alive, 00:51:17.440 --> 00:51:20.260 align:middle line:90% the gigantic sea-elephant! 00:51:20.260 --> 00:51:25.120 align:middle line:84% Oh wallow of flesh, where are there fish enough for that 00:51:25.120 --> 00:51:29.020 align:middle line:84% appetite stupidity cannot lessen? 00:51:29.020 --> 00:51:33.550 align:middle line:84% Sick of April's smallness, the little leaves. 00:51:33.550 --> 00:51:36.850 align:middle line:84% Flesh has lief of you enormous sea. 00:51:36.850 --> 00:51:38.110 align:middle line:90% Speak! 00:51:38.110 --> 00:51:40.270 align:middle line:90% Blouaugh! 00:51:40.270 --> 00:51:41.570 align:middle line:90% Feed me. 00:51:41.570 --> 00:51:43.330 align:middle line:90% My flesh is riven. 00:51:43.330 --> 00:51:46.930 align:middle line:84% Fish after fish into his maw unswallowing, 00:51:46.930 --> 00:51:49.360 align:middle line:84% to let them glide down gulching back, 00:51:49.360 --> 00:51:52.780 align:middle line:84% half spittle half brine [AUDIO OUT] eyes 00:51:52.780 --> 00:51:54.700 align:middle line:90% torn from the sea. 00:51:54.700 --> 00:51:58.330 align:middle line:84% In a practical voice, they ought to put it back 00:51:58.330 --> 00:52:00.340 align:middle line:90% where it came from. 00:52:00.340 --> 00:52:01.630 align:middle line:90% Gape. 00:52:01.630 --> 00:52:04.660 align:middle line:84% Strange head, told by old sailors, 00:52:04.660 --> 00:52:09.400 align:middle line:84% rising bearded to the surface, and the only sense out of them 00:52:09.400 --> 00:52:10.780 align:middle line:90% is that woman's. 00:52:10.780 --> 00:52:14.620 align:middle line:84% Yes, it's wonderful but they ought to put it back 00:52:14.620 --> 00:52:17.680 align:middle line:90% in the sea where it came from. 00:52:17.680 --> 00:52:19.390 align:middle line:90% Blouaugh! 00:52:19.390 --> 00:52:24.700 align:middle line:84% Swing, ride, walk on wires, toss balls, stoop and contort 00:52:24.700 --> 00:52:25.760 align:middle line:90% yourselves. 00:52:25.760 --> 00:52:28.190 align:middle line:90% But I am love. 00:52:28.190 --> 00:52:30.640 align:middle line:90% I am from the sea. 00:52:30.640 --> 00:52:32.380 align:middle line:90% Blouaugh! 00:52:32.380 --> 00:52:37.450 align:middle line:84% There is no cry save the too heavy body. 00:52:37.450 --> 00:52:42.610 align:middle line:84% The sea held playfully comes to the surface, the water boiling 00:52:42.610 --> 00:52:46.120 align:middle line:84% about the head, the cows scattering, fish 00:52:46.120 --> 00:52:49.150 align:middle line:90% dripping from the bounty of-- 00:52:49.150 --> 00:52:51.460 align:middle line:90% and spring they say. 00:52:51.460 --> 00:52:53.410 align:middle line:90% Spring is icummen in. 00:52:53.410 --> 00:52:59.100 align:middle line:90% 00:52:59.100 --> 00:53:02.490 align:middle line:84% William Carlos Williams' "The Sea-Elephant" 00:53:02.490 --> 00:53:06.270 align:middle line:84% is a poem spoken by a variety of voices. 00:53:06.270 --> 00:53:10.650 align:middle line:84% We hear the voice of the circus barker, an animal trainer, 00:53:10.650 --> 00:53:14.610 align:middle line:84% a lady at the circus, the sea-elephant, the poet 00:53:14.610 --> 00:53:17.790 align:middle line:84% narrator, and the partially remembered voice 00:53:17.790 --> 00:53:22.170 align:middle line:84% of anonymous poet returning from the distant past. 00:53:22.170 --> 00:53:24.810 align:middle line:84% The two primary voices however are 00:53:24.810 --> 00:53:27.030 align:middle line:84% those of the sea-elephant who cries out 00:53:27.030 --> 00:53:30.630 align:middle line:84% in frustration, hunger, and desire and the poet 00:53:30.630 --> 00:53:33.480 align:middle line:84% narrator who in effect translates 00:53:33.480 --> 00:53:35.970 align:middle line:84% the sea-elephant's expressive sounds 00:53:35.970 --> 00:53:38.790 align:middle line:84% into the language of conceptual speech 00:53:38.790 --> 00:53:42.450 align:middle line:84% as when the poet as circus trainer says speak 00:53:42.450 --> 00:53:45.630 align:middle line:84% and the sea elephant replies "Blouaugh!" 00:53:45.630 --> 00:53:50.310 align:middle line:84% And then the poet interprets "blouaugh" as feed me. 00:53:50.310 --> 00:53:52.902 align:middle line:90% The sea-elephant's "blouaugh"-- 00:53:52.902 --> 00:53:54.610 align:middle line:84% There are many ways you can pronounce it. 00:53:54.610 --> 00:53:56.580 align:middle line:90% You can take your choice. 00:53:56.580 --> 00:53:58.770 align:middle line:84% The sea elephant's [AUDIO OUT] suggests 00:53:58.770 --> 00:54:02.910 align:middle line:84% the primal cries out of which eventually all speech will 00:54:02.910 --> 00:54:03.930 align:middle line:90% come. 00:54:03.930 --> 00:54:07.410 align:middle line:84% We hear an echoing resemblance of its sliding vowel 00:54:07.410 --> 00:54:12.450 align:middle line:84% O in the poet's exclamation "Oh wallow of flesh!" 00:54:12.450 --> 00:54:15.810 align:middle line:84% Even before the sea-elephant speaks in the poem, 00:54:15.810 --> 00:54:19.020 align:middle line:84% the sea-elephant is on show but so too is 00:54:19.020 --> 00:54:21.930 align:middle line:90% Williams in composing his poem. 00:54:21.930 --> 00:54:24.360 align:middle line:84% Both in a sense are out of their element 00:54:24.360 --> 00:54:27.840 align:middle line:84% and have to struggle to perform in a new medium, 00:54:27.840 --> 00:54:31.590 align:middle line:84% the sea-elephant on land, the poet in language. 00:54:31.590 --> 00:54:34.140 align:middle line:84% For the poet, identifying himself 00:54:34.140 --> 00:54:36.990 align:middle line:84% with the sea-elephant as a fellow creature, 00:54:36.990 --> 00:54:40.290 align:middle line:84% only language heightened into poetic design 00:54:40.290 --> 00:54:43.230 align:middle line:84% can lighten the weight of the too heavy body. 00:54:43.230 --> 00:54:46.830 align:middle line:84% The crime of flesh, his voracious hungers, 00:54:46.830 --> 00:54:51.210 align:middle line:84% requires relief through the expression of itself in voice 00:54:51.210 --> 00:54:53.430 align:middle line:90% and finally in poetry. 00:54:53.430 --> 00:54:55.800 align:middle line:84% Like the sea-elephant out of the sea which 00:54:55.800 --> 00:54:58.050 align:middle line:84% has been for him a kind of heaven 00:54:58.050 --> 00:55:00.480 align:middle line:84% since it gives buoyancy to his body, 00:55:00.480 --> 00:55:05.100 align:middle line:84% human consciousness alienates us from the demands of our bodies, 00:55:05.100 --> 00:55:07.560 align:middle line:90% our on a peaceable appetite. 00:55:07.560 --> 00:55:09.540 align:middle line:84% For the poet, that alienation may 00:55:09.540 --> 00:55:12.810 align:middle line:84% be overcome through his sympathetic and accepting 00:55:12.810 --> 00:55:16.200 align:middle line:84% identification with the sea-elephant, an emblem 00:55:16.200 --> 00:55:18.360 align:middle line:90% of his bodily desires. 00:55:18.360 --> 00:55:23.070 align:middle line:84% So too their language must merge into one language equally 00:55:23.070 --> 00:55:25.770 align:middle line:90% concrete and abstract. 00:55:25.770 --> 00:55:28.920 align:middle line:84% The poet's conceptual declarative statement 00:55:28.920 --> 00:55:34.170 align:middle line:84% "but I am love" speaks for both himself and the sea-elephant. 00:55:34.170 --> 00:55:38.460 align:middle line:84% This identification becomes explicit in the following line 00:55:38.460 --> 00:55:41.970 align:middle line:84% "I am from the sea" and reminds the reader 00:55:41.970 --> 00:55:46.200 align:middle line:84% of the common evolutionary heritage of all creatures. 00:55:46.200 --> 00:55:50.160 align:middle line:84% Thus the repeated cry "blouaugh" also belongs 00:55:50.160 --> 00:55:53.010 align:middle line:84% to both the sea-elephant and the poet 00:55:53.010 --> 00:55:56.730 align:middle line:84% as it exists simultaneously as bodily cry 00:55:56.730 --> 00:55:59.940 align:middle line:84% and metaphorical word, expressing 00:55:59.940 --> 00:56:03.720 align:middle line:84% the carnal and the mental need for satisfaction. 00:56:03.720 --> 00:56:07.390 align:middle line:84% The human language is both voice and meaning, 00:56:07.390 --> 00:56:11.010 align:middle line:90% both physical gesture and idea. 00:56:11.010 --> 00:56:13.830 align:middle line:84% At the end of the poem, the poet narrator 00:56:13.830 --> 00:56:18.360 align:middle line:84% describes the sea-elephant in his natural element, water, 00:56:18.360 --> 00:56:21.600 align:middle line:84% evoking again the imagery of his appetite for food 00:56:21.600 --> 00:56:25.170 align:middle line:84% and love as he comes to the surface. 00:56:25.170 --> 00:56:27.840 align:middle line:84% This power of appetite and desire 00:56:27.840 --> 00:56:30.990 align:middle line:84% is the creature's bounty as the variety 00:56:30.990 --> 00:56:35.070 align:middle line:84% of conjured voices gathered together by the poem 00:56:35.070 --> 00:56:38.730 align:middle line:84% have been the poet's bounty, his circus performance 00:56:38.730 --> 00:56:42.690 align:middle line:84% of verbal images as if he were balancing on wires 00:56:42.690 --> 00:56:44.610 align:middle line:90% or tossing balls. 00:56:44.610 --> 00:56:48.660 align:middle line:84% His final description "fish dripping from the bounty of" 00:56:48.660 --> 00:56:53.520 align:middle line:84% slows down and breaks off into perhaps a sigh, 00:56:53.520 --> 00:56:56.340 align:middle line:90% a deep pause, a silence. 00:56:56.340 --> 00:56:59.910 align:middle line:84% At that moment, the past, the cultural past 00:56:59.910 --> 00:57:03.780 align:middle line:84% of poetic tradition, floods back into his mind 00:57:03.780 --> 00:57:06.900 align:middle line:84% so that the poet speaks not only in a [AUDIO OUT] voice, 00:57:06.900 --> 00:57:09.930 align:middle line:84% not only in his own voice, but in the voice 00:57:09.930 --> 00:57:12.090 align:middle line:90% of the history of poetry. 00:57:12.090 --> 00:57:16.020 align:middle line:84% The poem cannot end by drifting off into silence 00:57:16.020 --> 00:57:21.090 align:middle line:84% as the ellipses suggests for as Williams says in another poem, 00:57:21.090 --> 00:57:25.920 align:middle line:84% "Silence can be complex too but you do not get far with 00:57:25.920 --> 00:57:27.210 align:middle line:90% silence. 00:57:27.210 --> 00:57:29.010 align:middle line:90% Begin again." 00:57:29.010 --> 00:57:33.570 align:middle line:84% Williams' poem begins again at the end out of silence, 00:57:33.570 --> 00:57:35.910 align:middle line:84% returning to the thought of spring 00:57:35.910 --> 00:57:40.050 align:middle line:84% and an early memory of the tradition of poetry in English. 00:57:40.050 --> 00:57:42.600 align:middle line:84% His own contemporary voice merges 00:57:42.600 --> 00:57:46.530 align:middle line:84% with the voice from the past just as his human voice 00:57:46.530 --> 00:57:49.950 align:middle line:84% merged with the animal voice of the sea-elephant. 00:57:49.950 --> 00:57:53.910 align:middle line:84% The design of the poem, gathering the separate voices 00:57:53.910 --> 00:57:57.570 align:middle line:84% together, is itself a single metaphor 00:57:57.570 --> 00:58:00.420 align:middle line:84% both making connections and expressing 00:58:00.420 --> 00:58:04.590 align:middle line:84% the idea of connectedness and continuity. 00:58:04.590 --> 00:58:07.620 align:middle line:84% The human voice of words and sounds, 00:58:07.620 --> 00:58:11.970 align:middle line:84% surrounding and shaped to silence, fixed in the poem's 00:58:11.970 --> 00:58:15.240 align:middle line:84% design, is the metaphor that also that 00:58:15.240 --> 00:58:19.620 align:middle line:84% creates the continuity between nature and art, 00:58:19.620 --> 00:58:22.860 align:middle line:84% as if nature had found the voice in which she 00:58:22.860 --> 00:58:25.560 align:middle line:90% could express of herself. 00:58:25.560 --> 00:58:29.160 align:middle line:84% Although the restive silence into which our lives will 00:58:29.160 --> 00:58:33.450 align:middle line:84% vanish, the moment of art may realize and thus 00:58:33.450 --> 00:58:39.120 align:middle line:84% make real the illusion of life as extended and intensified, 00:58:39.120 --> 00:58:41.940 align:middle line:84% an illusion in which we see ourselves 00:58:41.940 --> 00:58:47.100 align:middle line:84% truly as our own metaphorical creations. 00:58:47.100 --> 00:58:47.640 align:middle line:90% Thank you. 00:58:47.640 --> 00:58:50.690 align:middle line:90% [APPLAUSE] 00:58:50.690 --> 00:59:19.000 align:middle line:90%