I've cut this a little to keep myself to the allowed three
hours that Bob tells me is the normal lecture time here.
John Crowe Ransom, in speaking about Wallace Steven's poem
Sea Surface Full of Clouds, describes it
as having a remarkable complexity.
And he says, to study it if you do that sort of thing
is to be happy.
And I'm assuming that you here like
looking very closely at poems because that's
what I'll be doing with some of the poems here.
I hope that you'll find my talk dense
in the good sense of the word.
I'm interested in the voice effects of poetry,
the sense you have of a speaker talking the poem
or singing the poem.
And I'm interested in the musical effects
of the poetic voice, rhythmic effects, and above all
for today, the way the voice pauses when we
speak for expressive purposes.
The talk is called Voice as Metaphor, Silences, Sighs,
Ellipses, Oh's, and Ah's, to give you
some sense of what I have in mind.
In his line, "as if we saw our feeling the object seen,"
Wallace Stevens succinctly describes two essential aspects
of metaphorical language--
[INAUDIBLE] wait.
Start again.
This is an important first line.
So I'll read it again.
In his line "as if we saw our feeling in the object seen",
Wallace Stevens succinctly describes two essential aspects
of metaphorical language.
One, there is a perceived correspondence
between an inner subjective feeling
and an outer physical reality, an object.
Two, the perceiver is aware that this correspondence does not
exist except in his as if assertion of its existence.
Metaphorical seeing always involves
making believe and the awareness, somewhere
on the fine line between consciousness
and subconsciousness, that one is
making believe so that the projection of the feeling
onto an object can take place.
When one sees a beautiful sunset,
for example, one sees the beauty of the sunset
as if the beauty were inherent in the sunset itself.
Thus the phrase "a beautiful sunset"
is in effect a metaphorical statement.
Metaphorical language is so natural to ordinary speech
that usually one is not aware of it as such.
When one says "She is a cold woman."
one does not expect that when you to touch her
she's 36 degrees Fahrenheit.
But when grandma says to grandson,
"You were so sweet that I could eat you."
we can trust that the grandson already has a sense of metaphor
and knows not to take that literally.
The listener knows without being warned that cold and sweet
are not to be taken literally.
They describe subjective feelings
about people that are assumed to correspond
to physical experience.
Robert Frost's description of metaphor,
like Stevens' description, emphasizes the connection
of inner and outer.
Frost says, it is just saying one thing in terms of another,
matter in terms of spirit or spirit in terms of matter,
to make the final unity.
This unity may be further described
as one a place [INAUDIBLE] or a world in mind.
And it cannot exist without its expression and language so that
the felt experience correspondence of feeling
and object depends on the metaphor that brings the two
together.
Frost calls this unifying effect of language a gathering
metaphor.
The gathering power of a poem is its design
which may be thought of as a metaphor
since it holds together and extends in complexity
and nuance the various metaphors that the poem contains.
Yet as a structure of words the poem
is metaphorical in another way.
The words themselves on the page become an object.
And to vary Stevens' line, it is this
it is as if in reading them we hear our feelings in the sounds
of a human voice that--
sounds a human voice would make in speaking them.
Every poem creates the illusion of the speaking human voice.
And the reader may choose to think of that voice
as belonging to an invented character or to the poet
himself.
But even if the latter assumption is made,
the poet, through selection, is represented
only an aspect of himself, one mood among many,
and thus has fictionalized themselves.
The feelings that the poem as verbal structure
invites the reader to project upon the poem
are never only the feelings appropriate to the subject
of the poem itself, feelings such as sorrow, regret,
sympathy.
Inseparable from such subjective emotions
is the pleasure of the poem as poem, as object.
No matter how sorrowful the subject matter of a poem,
a good poem will not make a reader feel sad.
The reader does not experience sorrow but the poem of sorrow.
The poem of sorrow even though the reader
is reminded that indeed real sorrow does exist in the world.
As Auden expressed this paradox of pleasure and poetic sorrow
he says, "Oh happy grief is all sad art can say."
The reader experiences the illusion of the human voice
knowing that it is an illusion.
And therefore he experiences the voice as metaphor.
the implied voice qualities of the written words tone, pitch,
speed, roughness or melodic ease are an essential part
of the poem's gathering design which
can evoke the sense of human presence.
The essence of metaphor then is not merely
the correspondence between inner and outer,
between subject and object, but rather the verbal design itself
that holds the two together.
For the design is always more than the
[INAUDIBLE] that it makes.
Metaphorical design always evokes
a sense of mystery, a mystery of connectedness and connection.
And in particular the mystery of language
without which the connections of inner and outer
do not exist at all.
The essence of metaphor seen in this way
is innuendo, implication, and the awareness of possibility.
Preceding language and idea is the cry of the human body.
The body's voice of sounds without words.
And both our cries and words are preceded by silence
and followed by silence.
Its silence too become articulate
because of the context in which it is placed,
like a musical rest note.
We hear the silence of a rest note because it is contained
within the musical phrase.
In this the mystery of the evocative power of metaphor
may be compared to the delineated silences, the pauses
within a poem, that are suggested by a shift in rhythm,
for example, or a line break, or a stressed syllable
when two syllables are expected to complete a metric foot.
The metaphorical center of the poem
may often be found in the implications of its silences.
Now I want to begin to illustrate
some of these general points by looking at Frost's poem
Hyla Book, which I'll read to you.
Hyla Brook.
By June our brook's run out of song and speed.
Sought for much after that, it will
be found either to have gone groping underground--
and taken with it all the Hyla breed that shrouded in the mist
to go--
that shouted in the mist a month ago, like ghost of sleigh bells
and a ghost of snow.
--or flourished and come up in jewel-weed, weak foliage that
is blown upon and bent even against the way its waters
went.
Its bed is left a faded paper sheet of dead leaves stuck
together by the heat.
A brook to none but who remember long.
This as it will be seen is other far than
with brooks taken otherwhere in song.
We love the things we love for what they are.
In Robert Frost's Hyla Brook for example,
we are listening to a brook that has lost its song.
The poem, in effect, is a response
to and the celebration of the silence of the brook.
The poem opens with the implication
that there is a specific listener for this poem
since the speaker refers to our brook,
And that intimate our suggests the auditor may be his wife.
At the last line it becomes manifest
that this is indeed a poem about the strengthening
of the bond of love through the mutual metaphorical viewing
of an object in nature.
Just as the woman says, in another Frost poem
"West-running Brook", "As you and I are married to each
other, we'll both be married to the brook.
We'll build our bridge across it and the bridge
shall be our arm thrown over to sleep beside it."
Hyla Brook too possesses two qualities which
are named as song and speed.
Its speed is literally a material quality
but the quality of song is not inherent in the brook itself
and thus necessarily implies the subjective beholder.
Literally brooks do not sing.
They are perceived as if they were singing
by a beholder who projects the idea of song
upon the brook's random sounds.
The poem moves backwards in time for it
is a poem about seeing the past, the signs of which
have physically vanished so that absence
comes to represent a past presence, the absence
of the brook.
Its invisible silence paradoxically is seen and heard
in June and this absence evokes the brook
as it was in early spring when the Hyla of frogs were there.
And it also evokes further back in time
the ghostly remembrance of winter, a ghost of sleigh bells
and a ghost of snow.
The brook moves one way in the weeds
and [AUDIO OUT] just as the speaker's mind both
remembers and looks ahead to the future.
Again as in West-running Brook, love
is defined as having the power to embody and affirm
contraries, male and female, past and present.
"It must be the brook can trust itself
to go by contraries the way I can with you and you with me,"
Frost says again in West-running Brook.
All the speaker actually sees in Hyla Brook from June
on is a bed of dry leaves.
Someone not familiar with this landscape
would not see a brook at all.
He would not know that the Hyla frog ever lived there.
Only by virtue of memory, by cherishing
what has been there before can the mind bring
to the eye what is now gone and thus give body to absence.
Frost says, "a brook to none but who remember long."
Filling the silent--
Seeing into the past or then projected
into the future as a bond of understanding
between the speaker and his wife.
Frost is giving the reader a lesson
on how to surpass literal sight as he assures us "This as it
will be seen is other far than with brooks taken otherwhere
in song."
For the bond between the man and the woman in this poem
requires that the past be contained
even in the radically changed present
and continued into the future.
This is precisely what ongoing love must accomplish.
Frost is teasing his reader with a subtle boast saying
in effect, that any other poet would write
a poem about a brook that is a brook but I Robert Frost have
the wit to write a poem about a brook that is not
a brook, a brook that only can be seen by someone who
knows the landscape well enough to remember its seasonal past.
In order to love a brook that is no longer a brook,
the speaker must incorporate the past
as if it still existed into the way
he sees the dead leaves stuck together in the heat
so that the absent brook can become a metaphor evoking
the hope for the continuity of love.
The poem's final line, "We love the things
we love for what they are," which
seem so solidly committed to literal and factual reality
now can be seen otherwise as reverberent
with innuendo and implication.
The brook is both what it once was,
a brook, and what it is now, not a brook but dead leaves
stuck together.
Thus to love things for what they are
must include loving them as well for what they are not,
but what they once were, and for what they still may be.
Reality cannot be fixed in a [INAUDIBLE] "they are."
What things are for Frost is what
the mind can make of them as if this sonnet's song itself were
written on a faded paper sheet.
The physical brook is transformed through the poet's
singing voice into a metaphorical brook which
continues to flow in the speaker's memory, the mind's
underground, so that the last line may be read finally
as a kind of promise the speaker makes to love his wife even
when they are not physically together, even into the silence
that follows their speech.
Let me read Wallace Stevens "The Snow Man" to you
and continue the discussion of silence and absence.
The Snow Man.
One must have a mind of winter to regard the frost
in the boughs of the pine trees crusted with snow--
There's a typo there.
--and have been cold a long time,
to behold the junipers shagged with ice,
the spruces rough in the distant glitter of the January sun,
and not to think of any misery in the sound of the wind
and the sound of a few leaves, which
is the sound of the land full of the same wind that is blowing
in the same bare place for the listener, who listens
in the snow, and, nothing himself,
beholds nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.
Wallace Stevens' "The Snow Man" is also
a poem about beholding what is not there.
Yet unlike Frost's speaker who seeks to remember the spring
season in June, Stevens' snow man
attempts to see only winter image in the winter landscape.
As if the world could be observed objectively
like a physical fact, the snow man
resists all metaphorical thinking.
He will not allow himself to hear
the wind as if it were expressing
any human feeling like misery.
He wishes to behold the landscape as it is,
adding nothing of himself to what he sees.
When Blake said, "We are led to believe a lie when
we see with not through the eye,"
he defined in wholly negative terms
the winter mind of Stevens' snow man who sees with the eye.
For to see with the eye is to perceive the world as an object
apart from the beholding self.
To see through the eye, however, is
to perceive the world with one's mind,
to associate objects with feelings and ideas,
to behold the landscape as metaphor.
Stevens like Blake is a celebrator of the imagination,
seeing through the eye.
Yet Stevens is sharply aware of how easily metaphor passes over
into fantasy or illusion.
For this reason, seeing with the eye with a winter mind
is a necessary corrective or balance for the imagination.
To Stevens, the literal eye provides the mind
with a constant reminder of external reality.
Just as there are two ways of perceiving reality
with and through the eye, there are
two observers in Stevens' poem, a snow man who sees only
what is objectively present and the narrator-observer who
regards the snow man and is keenly aware of what the snow
man is not thinking.
This subjective narrator-observer
beholds not only the visible but the invisible as well.
For him, the idea of absence in silence as its own being
and content so that his language approximates winter
stillness in the steadily repeating syllabus
that hits through the poem expressing silence of a sort
that Stevens says elsewhere.
Although "The Snow Man" seems to be a poem about total winter
desolation, it is a particular significance
that the scene is filled with evergreen trees
and that it has its own pristine beauty free
of the mind's association of misery with wind and coldness.
Furthermore, the month is January,
the commencement of a new year and the turning towards spring.
In effect, Stevens suggests that this is not
to be seen as a poem merely about the diminished mind
of the snow man who can no longer make
any human connections with the landscape but about a beginning
as well.
In order for the mind to begin again however,
to perceive the landscape in a human way,
it must imagine energetically the ending
of the imaginative effort that preceded it.
As Stevens says in his poem, "The Plain Sense
of Things," "The absence of imagination
had itself to be imagined."
I'll repeat that.
Stevens says, "The absence of imagination
had itself to be imagined."
For the poem's narrator, imagining the snow man's winter
mind is the necessary imagining of the absence of imagination.
The snow man hears monotonous sound almost
like silence itself.
But from the narrator's point of view,
there is a paradoxical fullness to this description
of emptiness which the winter scenes evoke
as being full of the same wind.
The snow man sees things as things, facts as facts,
objects as objects.
But to the more imaginative mind of the narrator,
objects may also be seen as metaphors.
And therefore for him to perceive winter
as an objective physical fact, not as a symbol of misery
but tokens of failure of the imagination.
Yet the intractable sound of the wind,
merely itself, only once removed from silence,
must also be confronted.
The snow man is the best perceiver
of nothingness that does indeed exist
as an aspect of physical being.
As close as we can get to the sense of silence
in the repetitions of the sounds of sameness
and monotony, so too do we approach unmediated reality
as we [AUDIO OUT] independent existence prior
to any metaphorical imposition upon it.
Nevertheless, Stevens' whole poem becomes a metaphor
since absence when well imagined encompasses its opposite,
the presence of the idea of absence, the idea of non-being.
The poem's narrator that beholding the snowman
realizes that by implication that perception is nothing,
it is empty, until human associative thought transforms
objects into metaphors.
But this nothing does exist.
It is as Stevens says the nothing that is.
Though only the narrator, not the snow man,
can possess this knowledge.
What the snow man sees is what the narrator
knows for the narrator encompasses
the idea of nothing.
And [AUDIO OUT] quickens his desire
for the renewal of metaphorical perception.
As Stevens says in a later poem, "and not to have
is the beginning of desire."
This renewal of desire for metaphor
is suggested by the approach of the distant sun
as the year turns towards spring.
With the realization that nothing must be confronted,
we hear a kind of gasp, the flash of silence one might say,
in the penultimate line, the only line in the poem that
ends with an enjambment.
Only through metaphor can the absence of metaphor
be imagined.
A world without metaphor is nothing.
Yet this is true for Stevens in both a literal
and a metaphorical sense and thus the poem
both partakes of silence and is about silence.
Silence as natural fact and silence
as possible [AUDIO OUT].
Human reality, emotion, mood, need cannot be expressed
denotedly as fact because it always is changing, fluid,
open to further possibility.
Human love for example is composed
as much of memory and hope as it is of physical desire.
Love is an idea of obligation and responsibility wedded
to, inseparable from, a bodily need for touch.
As Yates said, "Love would be no more than an animal hunger
but for the poet."
We read William Blake's "Never Seek to Tell Our Love."
Never seek to tell thy love, love
that never told can be for the gentle wind
does move silently invisibly.
I told my love.
I told her all my heart, trembling
cold and ghastly fears.
Ah she doth depart.
Soon after she was gone from me a traveler
came by silently, invisibly.
He took her with a sigh.
William Blake's poem "Never Seek to Tell Our Love"
relates a story about a traveler's amorous wooing sigh
and is itself the sigh of the rejected narrator
after he has failed to win the lady
with the direct declaration of his love.
In contrast to the blunt and forthright narrator,
the traveler's sigh is the epitome of language
as suggestion and connotation.
Blake implicitly compares human breathing
with nature's breathing, the gentle wind,
and thus conveys either the emotions of the narrator
and the traveler in terms of how the poem breathes
evenly or catches its breath through rhythmical shifts.
The radical metrical interruption
in the refrain line "silently invisibly" for example
characterizes the interrupted breathing, the sigh,
the anxiety of the narrator and also suggests his subconscious
identification with the traveler.
The narrator begins urgently.
Almost all his lines start with stressed syllables,
"Never seek to tell thy love", and a strong rhythmic pattern
quickly is established.
But that pattern breaks abruptly in the fourth line,
silently sigh invisibly.
The two missing stresses in this poem of four beats per line
must be read into the caesura in the middle of the line.
In the comma musical rest note, we
hear a doubly stressed pause, a sigh, an intake,
an exhalation of breath, an invisible and approaching
silence.
The narrator is compared to the easy movement of nature itself
in the figure of the gentle wind which provides us
with an image of nature's breathing,
open and ongoing in contrast to the narrator who
seeks to limit love and definitively telling
all his heart.
Love is destroyed, Blake implies,
by placing it within mental boundaries,
by trying to capture it.
As Blake says elsewhere, "he who bends to himself a joy
does the winged life destroy but he who kisses the joy
as it flies lives in eternity's sunrise."
The woman who hears the narrator's declaration of love
is aghast because love has been limited in its unmetaphorical
[AUDIO OUT].
And we hear her dismay echoed in the extended sigh
the outcry of the narrator "Ah she doth depart."
The lover-traveler like nature's wind
does not speak in the language of denotation and definition
but in the language of innuendo and suggestion.
Unlike the narrator's sigh of despair and defeat,
the travelers sigh is one of pleasure
and of promise which for Blake is the essence of love
since love opens the senses and the mind to the infinite.
If the travelers sigh corresponds
to the gentle wind, nature's benevolent power,
then the gasping anxious sigh of the narrator
corresponds to a failed imagining of nature
and thus a constricted sense of bodily desire and love.
These opposing sides constitute the central metaphor
of Blake's poem.
And they remind us of [AUDIO OUT] metaphor
itself, which is the language that enables us to see things
not merely as they are but in the fullness
of their open possibilities always there
to be realized that the marriage of inner and outer,
mind and nature.
As Blake says in "The Marriage of Heaven and Hell",
"If the doors of perception were cleansed,
everything would appear to man as it is, infinite."
Frost, "The Road Not Taken."
Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
and sorry I could not travel both, and be one traveler, long
I stood and looked down one as far as I could to where it
bent in the undergrowth and took the other as just as fair
and having perhaps the better claim, because it
was grassy and wanted wear though
as for that the passing there had worn them really
about the same and both that morning equally lay in
leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way
I doubted if I should ever come back.
I shall be telling this with a sigh somewhere ages and ages
hence, two roads diverged in the wood and I,
I took the one less traveled by and that
has made all the difference.
Robert Frost, "The Road Not Taken"
I believe may be read as a series of sighs
by the poem's speaker for his divided selves,
the life he lived and the life he might have lived.
The impossible wish for more than one life
leads the speaker to seek consolation in the belief
that the choice of his actual life
has had positive significance.
The speaker's first palpable sigh
for the recognition of mortal limitation
can be heard in the line, and be one traveler pause
long I stood.
In that heavy pause given to the comma which carries over
into distress on the word long, a sigh of regret
is unmistakable in the speaker's voice whose
varying intonations constitute the fundamental metaphor
of the poem.
That voice is more complex and revealing
in the relatively simple allegorical image
of the two roads.
The speaker attempts to persuade himself
that the two roads can be distinguished,
that a real choice can be made, but he catches himself
and correct that rationalization.
Actually both roads were the same,
"and both that morning equally lay in leaves no step
had trodden black."
The speaker cannot convince him that a meaningful choice took
place.
And there is an extended sigh in that recognition,
in the stressed oh that opens the subsequent line
against the flow of the iambic meter,
"Oh I kept the first for another day!"
The first road is kept open by the poem itself surprisingly
in its title, despite the later claim that the road he did take
has made all the difference.
The poem itself is what he will sigh for in the future when
he will again look back.
For he predicts that I shall be telling this with his sigh.
In effect, the telling is already told.
But here the poem is projected into an indefinite future.
When and where is somewhere ages and ages hence?
Is the speaker imagining that he might be reciting this poem
perhaps to his grandchildren as an intentionally misleading
and therefore subtly comic parable about meaning in life
when none is to be found?
Or is the speaker imagining an afterlife
in which the purpose of the journey of life
is still obscured to him?
If so will his sigh then express eternal uncertainty?
The reader only can follow the speaker's meaning
here in speculation.
The speaker however returns to the objective fact,
two roads diverged in a wood, though the detail yellow has
dropped away suggesting the increased
remoteness of the perspective.
The line break places another pause,
another sigh between the double self, "and I, I took",
separating one I from the other, reinforcing
the reader's sense of the sorrow of the speaker's divided
consciousness.
We hear his melancholy tone for being
limited to one life in the breaking of his voice.
His [AUDIO OUT] his troubled breathing,
however we interpret them, are more
concrete than any meaning the speaker can
impose upon his experience.
The apparently affirmative and individualistic claim,
"I took the road less traveled by"
clearly is contradicted by the facts presented in the poem.
The two roads equally lay.
They were indistinguishable except for the historical fact
that he took one and not the other.
He cannot know what another life might have been nor can he make
a useful comparison.
His statement as he fully recognizes is ironic
and that perhaps accounts for the prolonged sigh which
is the very telling of this poem,
for it is a sigh which may go unrelieved
in any future retellings wherever ages hence they
may take place.
As in many Frost's poems, [AUDIO OUT] experience
presented here is one of non-revelation.
The wish for a revealed meaning or a proven significance
as in the making of a choice is disappointed.
And the reader can hear that disappointment in the speaker's
voice, in the constrained ironic bitterness of the last line.
As Frost said in a letter to John Freeman,
"A good sentence does double duty.
It conveys one meaning by word and syntax and another
by the tone of voice it indicates."
The words of the final line, "and that
has made all the difference."
denote that a meaningful and positive choice has been made.
But the tone of voice undermines and reverses that assertion.
In this steadily iambic poem with only a few variations,
the final two metrical feet are reversed.
They are trochees which give a [AUDIO OUT]
effect "all the difference."
And in then the reader can hear the diminishing
of the speaker's voice.
The last line is the only one in the poem that
ends on an unstressed syllable, an exhalation of breath, a sigh
fading into silence.
The voice that speaks this poem filled
with the mysterious inflections of a sigh
is the accurate metaphor that corresponds
to the narrator's experience of nostalgia
for a revelation that never took place.
The voice that speaks a tone as implied by the written word
is itself a metaphor.
And as in Frost's poem, what the reader learns or surmises
from that voice may provide the crucial information
of the poem, voice inflections, pitch,
and speed, and voice qualities, such as harshness
or mellifluousness may be suggested, for example,
by rhythm, rhyme, with the emphasis on vowel
or consonantal patterns.
Yet there is nothing more expressive in a poem
than its pauses, its silences.
But they evoke the bodily sense of breathing, easy or hard,
and they may correspond to the idea of silence as absence
or at the other extreme to an idea of silence
as mental or spiritual inwardness.
Look at Steven's little poem now "Life is Motion."
In Oklahoma, Bonnie and Josie, dressed in calico,
danced around a stump.
They cried, "Ohoyaho, ohoo."
celebrating the marriage of flesh and air.
Life emerges from silence and stillness and returns to them.
The connecting interim is composed of sound and movement.
Stevens' "Life is Motion" may be read
as a little parable on this theme.
In this poem, Stevens employs and distinguishes
two aspects of language, imagistic and abstract,
which correspond to physical presence
and conceptual thought, voice as sound object and word as idea.
The letter O and the sound oh are introduced
doubled in the word motion.
Person, dress, and place are related
by having a prominent O letter and their implied sounds.
Bonnie's and Josie's names have their O.
Their state Oklahoma is filled with O.
They are dressed in calico.
And their cry "Ohoyaho", which sounds like a caveman's version
of Oklahoma, is a primitive warbling
on the variance of the vowel O.
The first two words of the title, "Life is",
prepare the reader for an abstract and general
proposition.
And the word motion completes the concept.
Although motion as a word evokes only an idea, not an image.
It directs the reader's attention
to the physical world of concrete moving things
and Stevens will not return to abstract language
until the poem's concluding two lines,
"celebrating the marriage of flesh and air."
For Stevens, every poem contains by implication
the origin of language itself, the physical cry
of the human voice not yet shaped into a word.
As Stephen says in "The Man with the Blue Guitar",
the poem is [AUDIO OUT] of its occasion.
Inherent in the words and the design of the poem
is the sound made by the rush of breath from the lungs
through the throat directed by the tone
against the teeth or the lips.
This is the breathing voice that cries out "Oh!"
in creaturely passion either in pleasure or in pain.
The letter O presents the idea of this sound
and in essence makes manifest what
Stevens calls the poem of the idea within the poem of words.
To which we should add in Stevens' behalf
the poem of the idea within the poem of sounds.
For as Stevens says in his essay, "The Noble
Writer and the Sound of Words," "Above everything else,
poetry is words and words above everything else
are in poetry sounds."
The setting of the poems [AUDIO OUT]
by the calico clothing is the 19th century American frontier.
A farming family has taken time out
from work for a celebration, probably a wedding.
The expansion of the country westward
and the clearing of the land for farming
suggest life-affirming activity and energy.
Yet the image of the stump which appears literally
at the dead center of the poem, 11 words before and after--
Count them if you like.
--produces a countereffect.
The reader hears and witnesses a physical dance
accompanied by a primal incantatory
poetry around the central stump of death.
Creation and destruction are thus seen as inseparable.
The cry "Ohoyaho, ohoo" virtually is breath itself,
pure voice unmediated by linguistic meaning.
An emphatic breath pause is indicated by the ellipsis
and in that moment as the cry trails off
into silence the reader listener is invited
to make the connection between the expressiveness
of bodily voice sounds and the mind's power
to conceptualize, to articulate ideas,
such as the idea of marriage.
The poem thus presents the idea of celebration
and is itself a celebration of the idea of marriage,
the marriage of person and place,
life and death, body and mind, and, above all,
of sound and poem.
The home is a metaphor for itself,
celebrating itself, wetting the body's cry with the mind's
linguistic design.
It is a metaphor of the literal human voice transformed
into poetic speech.
According to Stevens' "Faith", "Poetry, exceeding music,
must take the place of empty Heaven and its hymns."
That is [AUDIO OUT].
"The world is charged with the grandeur of God.
It will flame out, like shining from shook foil.
It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil crushed.
Why do men then now not reck his rod?
Generations have trod, have trod, have trod.
And all is seared with trade, bleared, smeared with toil.
And wears man's smudge and shares man's smell.
The soil is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.
And for all this, nature is never spent.
There lives, the dearest freshness deep down things.
And though the last lights of the black West went oh,
morning, at the brown brink eastwood springs--
because the Holy Ghost over the bent
world broods with warm breast and with, ah, bright wings."
The marriage of spirit and matter, word and sound
also constitutes the central gathering metaphor
of Hopkins' poem "God's Grandeur."
God's moral law is given to a man
as a charge which also may be seen
as a charge of physical energy and light
as in the "shining of shook foil."
And the justification of God's divine authority
is seen likewise as the creative manifestation of his power
in nature's ability to refresh itself.
The culminating image of the approaching dawn
transformed into a vision of the Holy [AUDIO OUT]
as a descending dove brings together
a physical event and a spiritually enlightened
understanding of that event, uniting the visible and the
invisible.
The speaker comprehends that human work is not
sufficient unto itself.
If not in the service of God and respectful of nature,
God's creation, human activity obscures God's light
and the world becomes bleared, smeared with trade.
For Hopkins, the primary function
of both work and language is to serve and praise God.
And this obligation must be felt as well as
understood so that giving praise becomes human choice not merely
a duty performed out of fear.
Seeing and understanding God's light
therefore is not sufficient.
Another aspect of light must be experienced,
the warmth of light.
And indeed the speaker feels this warmth
in the dawn as the warm breast of the dove
which [AUDIO OUT] Holy Ghost received
by the light of its bright wings.
Light experienced visually is given
to the metaphorical perception of physical images
in this poem.
But light experienced as warmth also
requires its subjective response,
its corresponding metaphor.
Hopkins provides this metaphor in the bodily voice
of the speaker, his cry of recognition and approval,
the opening of the lips, from their
pursed "Oh" to the wider "Ah".
The human voice at its wordless or pre-verbal center,
when given shape and meaning by the linguistic context in which
it is placed, contains a responsive power
capable of giving praise to God's initiating
and creative work.
In addition to visual illumination and felt warmth,
light takes on as well the attribute of lightness,
the body's divinely given [AUDIO OUT] power to rise.
When the Holy Ghost descends to the bent world
and the speaker feels its warmth,
the speaker's earthbound spirit unbends
and with a visionary leap, ascends
heavenward with the dove prefiguring
the body's literal resurrection after death.
Having been created from the dust by God's breath,
man, "the heir to his own self bent", as Hopkins says,
becomes unbound in giving himself over
to God's will in the model of Christ's incarnation and death.
As Jesus Christ's life and death for Hopkins
is God's metaphor to inspire human understanding to give
the breath of faith to thought, "God's Grandeur", the poem
itself is Hopkins' metaphor in response,
from his own body and mind, his literal breath rising lightly
in the word "Ah", speaking the language of his soul.
The last poem I'd like to say a few words about.
The Sea-Elephant.
Trundled from the strangeness of the sea a kind of heaven.
Ladies and gentlemen!
The greatest sea-monster ever exhibited alive,
the gigantic sea-elephant!
Oh wallow of flesh, where are there fish enough for that
appetite stupidity cannot lessen?
Sick of April's smallness, the little leaves.
Flesh has lief of you enormous sea.
Speak!
Blouaugh!
Feed me.
My flesh is riven.
Fish after fish into his maw unswallowing,
to let them glide down gulching back,
half spittle half brine [AUDIO OUT] eyes
torn from the sea.
In a practical voice, they ought to put it back
where it came from.
Gape.
Strange head, told by old sailors,
rising bearded to the surface, and the only sense out of them
is that woman's.
Yes, it's wonderful but they ought to put it back
in the sea where it came from.
Blouaugh!
Swing, ride, walk on wires, toss balls, stoop and contort
yourselves.
But I am love.
I am from the sea.
Blouaugh!
There is no cry save the too heavy body.
The sea held playfully comes to the surface, the water boiling
about the head, the cows scattering, fish
dripping from the bounty of--
and spring they say.
Spring is icummen in.
William Carlos Williams' "The Sea-Elephant"
is a poem spoken by a variety of voices.
We hear the voice of the circus barker, an animal trainer,
a lady at the circus, the sea-elephant, the poet
narrator, and the partially remembered voice
of anonymous poet returning from the distant past.
The two primary voices however are
those of the sea-elephant who cries out
in frustration, hunger, and desire and the poet
narrator who in effect translates
the sea-elephant's expressive sounds
into the language of conceptual speech
as when the poet as circus trainer says speak
and the sea elephant replies "Blouaugh!"
And then the poet interprets "blouaugh" as feed me.
The sea-elephant's "blouaugh"--
There are many ways you can pronounce it.
You can take your choice.
The sea elephant's [AUDIO OUT] suggests
the primal cries out of which eventually all speech will
come.
We hear an echoing resemblance of its sliding vowel
O in the poet's exclamation "Oh wallow of flesh!"
Even before the sea-elephant speaks in the poem,
the sea-elephant is on show but so too is
Williams in composing his poem.
Both in a sense are out of their element
and have to struggle to perform in a new medium,
the sea-elephant on land, the poet in language.
For the poet, identifying himself
with the sea-elephant as a fellow creature,
only language heightened into poetic design
can lighten the weight of the too heavy body.
The crime of flesh, his voracious hungers,
requires relief through the expression of itself in voice
and finally in poetry.
Like the sea-elephant out of the sea which
has been for him a kind of heaven
since it gives buoyancy to his body,
human consciousness alienates us from the demands of our bodies,
our on a peaceable appetite.
For the poet, that alienation may
be overcome through his sympathetic and accepting
identification with the sea-elephant, an emblem
of his bodily desires.
So too their language must merge into one language equally
concrete and abstract.
The poet's conceptual declarative statement
"but I am love" speaks for both himself and the sea-elephant.
This identification becomes explicit in the following line
"I am from the sea" and reminds the reader
of the common evolutionary heritage of all creatures.
Thus the repeated cry "blouaugh" also belongs
to both the sea-elephant and the poet
as it exists simultaneously as bodily cry
and metaphorical word, expressing
the carnal and the mental need for satisfaction.
The human language is both voice and meaning,
both physical gesture and idea.
At the end of the poem, the poet narrator
describes the sea-elephant in his natural element, water,
evoking again the imagery of his appetite for food
and love as he comes to the surface.
This power of appetite and desire
is the creature's bounty as the variety
of conjured voices gathered together by the poem
have been the poet's bounty, his circus performance
of verbal images as if he were balancing on wires
or tossing balls.
His final description "fish dripping from the bounty of"
slows down and breaks off into perhaps a sigh,
a deep pause, a silence.
At that moment, the past, the cultural past
of poetic tradition, floods back into his mind
so that the poet speaks not only in a [AUDIO OUT] voice,
not only in his own voice, but in the voice
of the history of poetry.
The poem cannot end by drifting off into silence
as the ellipses suggests for as Williams says in another poem,
"Silence can be complex too but you do not get far with
silence.
Begin again."
Williams' poem begins again at the end out of silence,
returning to the thought of spring
and an early memory of the tradition of poetry in English.
His own contemporary voice merges
with the voice from the past just as his human voice
merged with the animal voice of the sea-elephant.
The design of the poem, gathering the separate voices
together, is itself a single metaphor
both making connections and expressing
the idea of connectedness and continuity.
The human voice of words and sounds,
surrounding and shaped to silence, fixed in the poem's
design, is the metaphor that also that
creates the continuity between nature and art,
as if nature had found the voice in which she
could express of herself.
Although the restive silence into which our lives will
vanish, the moment of art may realize and thus
make real the illusion of life as extended and intensified,
an illusion in which we see ourselves
truly as our own metaphorical creations.
Thank you.
[APPLAUSE]