Week three

Happy with yesterday evening's Wordsworth lecture for LTCM - I am getting a better handle on how to use the time (I only lecture once a week, for seventy-five minutes, and the other class meeting is in smaller-group seminars taught by advanced doctoral students). "Preface to Lyrical Ballads," a few pages of John Hollander's delightful discussion of accentual-syllabic verse in English from Rhyme's Reason, some thoughts on "The Idiot Boy" and a bit of Geoffrey Hartman at the end: it was fun.

Readings:

Wordsworth and Coleridge, Lyrical Ballads (1802): “Preface” (95-115), “The Thorn” (and Wordsworth’s note on 199-200), “We Are Seven,” “The Idiot Boy,” “Lines Written a few miles above Tintern Abbey,” “Hart-Leap Well,” “‘Strange fits of passion,’” “‘She dwelt among th’ untrodden ways,’” “‘A slumber did my spirit seal,” “Lucy Gray,” “‘Three years she grew in sun and shower’”

Geoffrey H. Hartman, Wordsworth’s Poetry, 1787-1814 (1964; Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 1987), 141-162
Paul De Man, “Time and History in Wordsworth,” Diacritics 17:4 (1987): 4-17

Here is the first assignment, due in seminar this week:

1. Choose a favorite stanza of “The Thorn” and type it up in your assignment. Then read it out loud and mark in boldface where you think the stresses fall in each line.

We will talk about this in lecture Tuesday, and I’ll give you a supplementary handout, but a good deal of English poetry doesn’t fall into clear and easy feet: you don’t need to identify a specific meter or mark iambs and trochees and spondees as per our Virgil/Milton discussion last week, just start to get the feel for the rhythm of the lines.

2. How many lines are in the stanza, and what is the pattern of the rhyme scheme?

Use letters A, B, etc.: a Shakespearean sonnet in this system would be ABAB CDCD EFEF GG, while a Petrarchan sonnet would be ABBA ABBA with the last six lines – the “sestet” following the “octave” – generally following the pattern either CDECDE or CDCCDC.

3. How would you describe the diction of the poem (vocabulary, turns of phrase, habits of speech and style)? How would you describe the voice of the poem’s speaker?

4. In Wordsworth’s own note to “The Thorn,” he gives a detailed description of the character who speaks the poem. How does this affect your reading of the poem? Would the poem stand more effectively on its own without it, or does the note augment and amplify aspects of the poem as we have it? What does Hartman say about this narrator, and do you agree with his assessment? If not, why not?

5. One stanza that provoked mirth in some readers is XVII (ll. 177-187). What is inappropriate or embarrassing about the language here? Why does Wordworth court the risk of becoming ludicrous here and elsewhere in the poem? How does this relate to the defense of repetition he offers in his note to the poem?

6. Why might Hartman call “The Thorn” “Wordsworth’s most experimental poem” (140) and “one of the strangest poems in Lyrical Ballads” (146)? You can give a few quotations from his discussion or offer your own thoughts and speculations; it will be valuable if you can step outside his terminology and argument and offer your own account of why this should be so.

7. Write three to five separate assertions about “The Thorn” that you are willing to stand by. They can range from description (the kind of thing you wrote in answer to the first question above) to argument (making a case about the effects or meaning of some choice Wordsworth has made, as Hartman and De Man often do). Mark each with an A or a D depending on where you see it falling – you can mark it D/A if you feel that it falls equally under the two headings.

Abundant recompense

It was a strange week.

I spent way too much time on the phone to my health insurance company trying to figure out things about sleep specialists and what would or wouldn't be covered depending on who I saw, and I also had my teeth cleaned at the dentist's, something that always causes me to contemplate the Francis-Bacon-like aspects of human embodiment!

Tuesday was ceremonially meaningful; I gave congratulations to graduating English majors and their families and handed out awards in the humanities at a college-wide event. I had meetings this week with a couple of my graduate students who have made the significant step forward from passing their orals (qualifying exams) and are beginning to work on dissertation prospectuses; on Wednesday I succumbed, horribly, to a sinus infection, but I also attended a very lovely party at the Century Associationin celebration of my emeritus colleague Martin Meisel's receiving an honorary doctorate from Columbia (and it was his eightieth birthday to boot!). These things caused me to reflect that I typically underrate the ceremonial; I am anti-ceremonial and something of a debunker in temperament, I much prefer to cut to the chase and I do not enjoy pomp and circumstance, and yet there is a place for them, there is some meaning in this sort of show of things...

Yesterday I had a really lovely lunch with someone I admire greatly and am hugely grateful to for what I've learned from him over the years, my dissertation advisor Claude Rawson; he was doing some work in the Berg Collection at the NYPL, and we had an altogether decadent and delightful lunch at Aureole (we both had the same very delicious selections from the prix fixe lunch menu: fluke ceviche with citrus, endive, avocado and shallots, roasted skate with pureed potato, spinach and capers and a strawberry macaron with lavender lemon sorbet and perfect little freshly baked thumbnail-sized madeleines).

Last night I started going crazy when I realized I was still getting, as it were, more sick and that I would be an idiot to do the triathlon this weekend that I've been so much looking forward to (I am looking to a longer-term goal of a race about five weeks away and cannot afford the bout of bronchitis that I risk by pushing myself under such circumstances); it was a bitter pill to swallow, that I really shouldn't do it, something that my state of health when I woke up this morning made very clear, and I was languishing in self-pity all morning despite having had what otherwise would be described as a very nice week...

It was clear, really, that literature was going to be the best remedy for mental insanity: the intolerable noise of the facade cleaning they're currently doing on my building finally drove me out of the apartment, and I hit the public library and got a good haul of crime novels, came home and devoured Karin Slaughter's Broken, which I thought was very good.

Casting around for what to read after this, I was saved from less good crime novels by the arrival from Amazon of my graduate school colleague Priscilla Gilman's The Anti-Romantic Child: A Story of Unexpected Joy. I started reading, and I really and truly couldn't put it down; it's a pretty extraordinary book, I kind of think everyone should read it!

Like Oliver Sacks, Priscilla manages to write about a life of deficits and losses in a way that shows, without minimizing the associated difficulties and costs, the magical forms of recompense that come along with them; she also manages to pull off something that often makes me cringe, the attempt to articulate (as opposed to taking as given, which is what I do) that literature is meaningful in some large part because of what it tells us about life. "As someone who has lived to learn," Priscilla writes of herself (she is a Yale graduate and taught at Yale and at Vassar before becoming a literary agent), she found in her son Benj, who has never been diagnosed with a specific label but who has battled a wide range of motor and social deficits that leave him perhaps best described as 'borderline Asperger's,' her "greatest and most meaningful coursework": and the book is an emotionally authentic and intellectually illuminating account of what she learned as Benj's mother and how it changed her.

Really I probably have time to read one more book before I go to sleep, but it is going to be difficult to top that one!...

The poison-dart frog, the three-toed sloth

Spent the evening finishing reading a dissertation that's being defended tomorrow. Encountered, for what I believe may be the first time, Wordsworth's draft epitaph for Charles Lamb: I am not sure I can find it online, but it includes the wonderfully awful lines "From the most gentle creature nursed in fields / Had been derived the name he bore" (it also was much too long to be inscribed on an actual tombstone, which bespeaks a certain self-involvement inappropriate to the occasion!).

It is a commonplace to say of Wordsworth's style that his strengths are also, often, his very great weaknesses. Here is another sentiment that caught my eye as I read, this one from a much better-known poem, and that makes me laugh and cringe: "I’d rather be / A Pagan suckled in a creed outworn." There is considerable evidence to show that Wordsworth himself was aware of this effect of risibility and sometimes mobilized it deliberately; nonetheless, I cannot feel I am an ideal reader for this particular poet...

Saw a very good theater piece last night, Future Anxiety at the Flea. From the description, it sounded as though it might be moralizing or preachy (a play about extinction and climate change!), but it is actually incredibly funny and also dementedly science-fictional in a way I very much enjoy; the dialogue is hilarious and sometimes quite moving also, and the performances, too, were excellent. Strongly recommended. (7pm curtain, eighty minutes running time!)

We were two for two, it turned out (too often dinner is better than the play): dinner at Petrarca was also excellent. We shared the piatto rustico, which basically should make that restaurant a destination for anyone who likes cured products of the pig (go there in the early evening, order that platter and a bottle of wine, you and a companion will basically have your whole dinner off it); then I had a Caesar salad with grilled shrimp and fresh berries with zabaglione for dessert.

Have only had time for some small bits and bobs of light reading on the side, and am too lazy to sum it up now; I think I must go now and read a serial-killer thriller to wind down...