Felecia Hemans - Woman and Fame

Hemans was a gifted writer and was first published at 14, so no doubt one of her later poems would be about woman and fame, being as though she had been a famous poet for more than 20 years when this poem was published (1836).

Happy - happier far than thou,
With the laurel on thy brow;
She that makes the humblest hearth,
Lovely but to one on earth.

This is the epigraph of the poem and is actually a self quotation from another poem, maybe to help readers recognize who she is or see another one of her poems, like advertising in the 1800s. But I think really, she liked this line and it inspired her following poem.

Thou has a charmed cup, O Fame!
A draught that mantles high,
and seems to life this earthly frame
above mortality,
Away! to me - a woman- bring
sweet waters from affection's spring.

This second stanza of the poem describes how Hemans feels about fame, it is a "charmed cup" that drinks from a high mantle. I think she means, in common day language, that everyone puts fame on a pedistal and she, having had fame for 20 years, sees it as all smoke and mirrors, the fame she has, especially as a woman brings a lot of affection and adoration, but it has its own downfalls, no matter how charmed a life.

speaking of her fame, in line 19-23

A hollow sound is in thy song,
A mockery in thine eye,
To the sick heart that doth but long
For aid, for sympathy;
for kindly looks to cheer it on,
for tender accents that are gone

Fame has a "hollow sound" in its song, and seems to mock her even though she thinks that she has treated it well. Maybe the fame was blissful at first, but as she matured the "tender accents that are gone"; all the sparkle of fame has diminished. And on her last stanza, "Where must the lone one turn or flee? - not unto thee, oh! not to thee!", here she is saying that all she wants is some privacy, or maybe she likes the fame, but to anyone that would like privacy and a lonely hermits life, would not like fame in theirs.

I do not have any experience with a famed life or recognition, I was in the Macon Telegraph for winning a city tournament for wrestling, and even then I was bashful when people would bring me clippings from the paper. But I do watch a lot of E! news channel and see the famous people as they hide their faces from the demanding paparazzi. Some famous people, like Paris Hilton or Megan Fox, seem to like the fame and addoration, but they are young and will, as time goes on, see the fame is just another life that has its ups and downs. Others, like the late Kirk Cobain and Johnny Depp did not/do not like the fame. Kirk was a troubled artist with a lot of talent but saw his record label and peers try and turn him into something he was not, and that "charmed cup" was just that, a charm, not real, but an illusion. Johnny Depp dealt with the fame a little more securely, he went off to France where he would not be recognized or at the very least bothered as much, a lone person would not like fame at all.

John Keats - Ode to a Nightingale

Keats writes ode to a nightingale in 1819 with some other Ode's poems. I liked this one the best because it has a lot of symbolism and seems to be an inspiration from other poems and stories, but also he draws from within is own experiences at his own house!
In Nightingale, Keats draws upon the birds that have sung to anyone and everyone that have heard him. In stanza 7 it reads:

Thou wast not born for death, immortal Bird!
No hungry generations tread thee down;
The voice I hear this passing night was heard
In ancient days by emperor and clown.
Perhaps the self-same song that found a path
Through the sad heart of Ruth, when sick for home,
She stood in tears amid the alien corn.

I like the idea here that even though the same bird did not sing to clowns, Kings, Keats, or the biblical Ruth; but the same song they sing has been around that long. This is not possible for a human, since we are in touch with our own indivuality and thus our own eventual demise. Nightingales are the opposite to us in this respect, no matter what age, they sing to and inspire us no matter what bird is singing. As we have traced time and memory back to Ruth, biblically, and Kings and up to Keats, we have a change in culture and religion and ways of thought. But the nightingale has kept its same song all this time.

In stanza 8:

Forlorn! the very word is like a bell
To toll me back from thee to my sole self!
Adieu! the fancy cannot cheat so well
As she is fam'd to do, deceiving elf.
Adieu! adieu! thy plaintive anthem fades
Past the near meadows, over the still stream,
Up the hill-side; and now 'tis buried deep
In the next valley-glades:
Was it a vision, or a waking dream?
Fled is that music: - Do I wake or sleep?

The bird has flown away, and Keats is upset, to say the least. The imagery of the bird flying away, deceiving a mythical creature, the elf, and going to the next person to inspire, yet not knowing he is going to be doing that or that he has just come from a place that will make his song immortal in poem. Keats asks himself if he is awake or asleep, dreaming about a message or vision, or if this is all real. the experience was very surreal for him and he has a hard time believing it was a coincidence.

I, myself, believe in divine intervention and that there is a master plan for all of us. But the nightingale in this poem, and in general, do not think of such things, they have a natural habit and kind of do the same thing over and over, unlike us, humans, that seem to want to be different, but yet have the same fate as the nightingale, death.

Lord Byron - Child Harold's Pilgrimage, Canto the Third

George Gordon, his father left him and his mother early and his great-uncle died childless Gordon inherited his estate, making him Lord Byron. He was one of the most popular poets of his time. Lord Byron's Child Harold's Pilgrimage had 2 other Cantos that are not mentioned in the reading but are semi-autobiographical. In stanza 94 Byron describes nature as a subliminal illusion to his own life and others lives. This particular stanza describes his separation from his wife. "Now, where the swift Rhone cleaves his way between heights which appear as lovers who have parted." His wife is one mountain and he is the other, the Rhone river which runs in between may symbolize the distance that is shared between them or more deeply the emotional difference they share, something that separates them. The sad part about this line is that Lord Byron sees the other mountain's top through the valley but cannot reach it, he thinks about his wife but cannot accompany her. In stanza 97 it reads:

Could I embody and unbosom now
That which is most within me,  --  could I wreak
My thoughts upon expression, and thus throw
Soul, heart, mind, passions, feelings, strong or weak,
All that I would have sought, and all I seek,
Bear, know, feel, and yet breathe -- into one word,   
And that one word were Lightning, I would speak;
But as it is, I live and die unheard,
With a most voiceless thought, sheathing it as a sword.

This stanza is very powerful and brings up a lot of emotional turmoil inside me, which comes from
my shear sympathy for Lord Byron's character, who presumably is himself in this poem. He throws
"soul, heart, mind, passions, feelings" into his writings and does a great job of telling us exactly how
he feels. But yet he cannot speak to which he is trying to say, he can only describe it by using one
word, "lightning", which if you have ever seen it, gives off a great and powerful light, that anyone can
see, but yet it is voiceless and "sheathing it as a sword", or hidden beneath a veil. The thunder which
follows lightning is always seconds later, but I think the writer feels the lightning is a good allusion to
how he feels in this poem and how, with all of his talent as a writer, cannot convey his feelings into
words.

Lord Byron had a lot of fame in his day, and to better or worse it stuck with him. In lines 1045-1057
of this poem:

Fame is the thirst of youth, -- but I am not
So young as to regard men's frown or smile,
As loss or guerdon of a glorious lot;
I stood and stand alone, -- remember'd or forgot.

I have not loved the world, nor the world me;
I have not flatter'd its rank breath, nor bow'd    
To its idolatries a patient knee, --
Nor coin'd my cheek to smiles, -- nor cried aloud
In worship of an echo; in the crowd
They could not deem me one of such; I stood
Among them, but not of them; in a shroud
Of thoughts which were not their thoughts, and still could,
Had I not filed my mind, which thus itself subdued.

Lord Byron seems to detest his fame, but not denounce it. He accepts that he is in the public eye
and is loved by a lot of his countrymen. But as he says, "Fame is the thirst of youth, -But I am not" and
here you can see Byron's realization that some would kill for his kind of fame, the youth of his time, but
he is not young, or so he thinks, and does not thirst for such a status. In the lines, "In worship of an echo;
in the crowd, They could not deem me one of such; I stood Among them, but not of them; in a shroud."
Here Lord Byron is accepting that he is worshiped for his prose, but in a crowd he stands among them, but
he cannot relate to all of them, or any of them. He stands in a "shroud o thoughts which were not their thoughts"
so he sees that people worship him for what he has said, the thoughts he has given off, that they take
into their own lives and try to make their own experiences relevant. He seems to detest this fame and then
goes straight from detesting it into a self-gloating phase, "I stood and stand alone, -remember'd or forgot"
I think Byron wants to be remembered by his readers, but he realizes that he is alone, no matter how
many people would remember his poems.

I cannot relate to such fame and heartbreak that Lord Byron has experienced, I am only 21 years old with
no fame to speak of. But I can see many celebrities of today, who wish for fame all their lives, then detest
it as they have received the love and adoration of their fans. Lady Gaga has been in the news recently,
she was seen at a Met's game wearing a bra and a jacket, and then she gets upset when she gets
attention. Some people seem to ask for the attention and then renounce it when they have received it. I see
a little Lord Byron in a lot of celebrities on TV and Movies. Maybe they should read some of his writings and
see how thankful they should be and either choose to gloat or feel sorry for themselves, doing both
seems a little childish.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Kubla Khan

This blog post will be about my readings of Samuel Taylor Coleridge who is known for writing The rime of the ancient mariner, but I found this poem to be much more interesting easier to grasp, probably because of its short nature and vivid imagination.
This poem was written while the author was enduced with opium soaked in alcohol, a remedy made to decrease pain, the pschological effects and the subquential dreams to follow are what inspires this poem and the reason it is not finished. The author says it should have been 300 lines, but someone interrupted him while he was writing it and he forgot the rest of what he was going to say!
The poem begins with:

In Xanadu did Kubla Khan

A stately pleasure-dome decree :

Where Alph, the sacred river, ran

Through caverns measureless to man

Down to a sunless sea. (lines 1-5)

Which tells us we are reading about Kubla Khan the grandson of Ghangas Khan, who ruled 1/5 of the known world in his time. Kubla lived in what is today known as Mongolia and the rest of the poem describes the scenery and what goes on in it. Alph, the river, is measureless as well as the caves and sunless sea, which all give a vivid imagination of what the author is seeing in his dream.
It goes on to read:

So twice five miles of fertile ground

With walls and towers were girdled round:

And there were gardens bright with sinuous rills,

Where blossomed many an incense-bearing tree;

And here were forests ancient as the hills,

Enfolding sunny spots of greenery (line 6-11)

This describes the river which stretches five miles and has a tower and walls surrounding it. This is in contrast to the "measureless" river and caves that it is made up of. Which shows me the author sees a man made entity, the walls as being an influence on the environment, but does not totally encompass it. It is mankind way of blocking themselves off from the unknown. He says there "were gardens" and "were forests ancient as the hills", which says the walls, in the process of man enforcing themselves with some security and shelter managed to destroy something ancient and important.

The next part, which is what made me decide to write about this poem, is moving and makes ourselves question the infinite's of nature and finite time which we are on this earth:

And from this chasm, with ceaseless turmoil seething,

As if this earth in fast thick pants were breathing,

A mighty fountain momently was forced:

Amid whose swift half-intermitted burst

Huge fragments vaulted like rebounding hail,

Or chaffy grain beneath the thresher's flail: (line 17-22)

This part seems to tell of a fountain or geyser with force to contradict the surroundings, peaceful and tranquil; much like our own inhabitants of the Earth. This fountain goes on for a little while with "swift bursts" that add some kind of new aura to the surrounding area.

But as irony would have it, the poem goes on to say:

And 'mid these dancing rocks at once and ever

It flung up momently the sacred river.

Five miles meandering with a mazy motion

Through wood and dale the sacred river ran,

Then reached the caverns measureless to man,

And sank in tumult to a lifeless ocean: (lines 23-28)

The momentary flash of the fountain is stopped as sudden as it starts and though it started differently than all the other bits of water it had left behind, it has the same fate, to go through the "maze" of a river, through the "measureless" caves and then finally to the "lifeless" ocean. So no matter how much of an impact we make, we will still have the same fate as everyone else, to be lifeless, or death, as i interpret it.

The author goes on to write:

A damsel with a dulcimer

In a vision once I saw:

It was an Abyssinian maid,

And on her dulcimer she played,

Singing of Mount Abora.

Could I revive within me

Her symphony and song,

To such a deep delight 'twould win me,

That with music loud and long,

I would build that dome in air,

That sunny dome! those caves of ice! (lines 37-47)

This part seems to, for the first time, insert the author into the poem and as he hears the Abyssian maid and with "Her symphony and song" she gives him a "deep delight" that makes him happy and he is able to "build a that dome in air", her song let him create something, like she was his muse and with that gave him inspiration to create, just as the fountain sprang up and created a disturbance in the tranquil environment.
The end of the poem adds that anyone who heard her will see the same thing he has seen, "And all who heard should see them there, and all should cry, Beware! Beware!" So he is not the only one, he thinks, will see this place or hear this lady. I have read on Wikipedia.org that some will think the women to be the sun, the creator and nurturer of our Earth, and I agree. But she is not just singing to the author or to just us, but to the whole solar system, all that will hear (or feel) her.

My own experience with this poem is not the exact images or visuals that the author has seen and I have never dreamed about hearing the sun sing to me and let me create rivers and caves. But dreaming while on a drug or under the influence of something is an experience we (the author and I) share. My drug was not as intense and opium doused in alcohol, but I had my wisdom teeth taken out and I was on some strong pain relievers that put me to sleep almost as immediately as I took them. They gave me weird dreams that I would remember vividly after I woke up, but after a short time of being awake, with any of my dreams, I forget about them and even if I try, they go away forever. I think he would have written more about Kubla Khan and his land with "measureless" caves and man made walls, even more if we as not interrupted. And I may start doing that, keeping a writing pad next to my bed, so whenever I have an interesting dream, I could write down what it was and try and make sense of it later.

William Wordsworth - Lines Written a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey

William Wordsworth wrote Tintern Abbey after his second visit, five years after his first, to Tintern Abbey, as said: " Five years have passed; five summers, with the length of five long winters!". By this quote you can tell he missed the visits and enjoyed his time there. But to say he enjoys nature will grossly under appreciate the vastness of emphasis that Wordsworth puts on nature, as keeping himself both spiritually and mentally sound. This soundness can be seen by the lines (25-33):

"Though absent long,
these forms of beauty have not been to me,
As is a landscape to a blind man's eye:
But oft in lonely rooms, and mid the din
Of towns and cities, I have owed to them,
In hours of weariness, sensations sweet,
Felt in the blood, and felt along the heart,
And passing even into my purer mind
With tranquil restoration:"

This quote shows us a metaphor, even when he is absent and away from nature he uses the images as "a landscape to a blind man's eye" to keep himself sane and to counter the weariness of a city life. Another metaphor used later in the poem is "My former pleasures in the shootings lights of thy wild eyes. (117)" Describing is "Dear friend," who we know to be his sister (Dorothy Wordsworth), looking in amazement at the scenery, her eyes are not actually shooting light, but rather a metaphor to describe her intense gaze upon something she holds incredibly dear.

Talking again about how nature gives him something beyond what an ordinary city can give is this quote "And I have felt a presence that disturbs me with joy of elated thoughts, a sense sublime of something far more deeply interfused," As he has this sublime feeling about nature, we need to ask the question of how does nature affect someone. When you first look at it, a person experiences nature and sees the vastness and huge phenomenon that is seemingly more important than any individual person and will outlive them as well! Asking this question would give most people a sense of ease, and bring people back to earth, so to speak. But I see this as a question of fate and faith. Why am I so insignificant and no way do I have the possibility of ever being or considered to be of great importance, as compared to nature. But that is the ego of man talking and in the paradoxical catch-22 of life, nature will scare us and leave us feeling insignificant but then when you are away from it you can go back to that place, that sublime image in your head, and all the frustration of life will go away, because of nature.

After reading this poem I have realized why so many people keep pictures of the Grand Canyon, or Alaska, or some huge natural wonder at their desk or in their car. It is because that is their sublime "happy" place that Wordsworth is talking about. Wordsworth believed this to be true and even directly says this about the sublimity of nature in his quote from the poem, "that blessed mood, In which the burden of the mystery, In which the heavy and the weary weight/Of all this unintelligible world, Is lightened." The feeling he has of the heavy, weary, and unintelligible world is lifted and lightened. The thing that strikes me as odd about this quote is the mystery and unintelligible description of the world. And that something as unexplainable as nature, especially for the time, could send someone to a more calming place.

So, the first theme mentioned above was the Sublime nature of.. well nature. The second theme seems to be a Spiritual and more so the passage of time and life and death. In the quote, “almost suspended, we are laid asleep in body, and become a living soul” (Lines 46-47) This passage draws to mind the christian idea of heaven and our soul leaving our body to go there. This is added by the poems reference to the "hermit sitting alone" (line 22) as a hermit is a religous recluse, the poem has religious undertones. The attention Wordsworth puts on time, like in the quote, "These waters, rolling from their mountain-springs " (Line 3), the water rolling is like the passage of time and it has been five years since his last visit to the Abbey. I wonder if saw that it had not changed at all, untouched by man-made "progress." But how much had he changed? Did he feel older and in turn feel the inevitable truth of human existence, that we are all going to die and this place, The Abbey, will still be here.

The old proverb, "The grass is greener on the other side" comes to my mind when I read this poem, because I find myself let down by a vacation away from home, when I go somewhere I have been before; Like going to the beach at St. Augustine; but yet when I think about it a year later or even months later, I find that time to be not just comparable to the previous vacation, but somewhere I would much rather be than my current situation (which right now is at my computer catching up on blogs). At the time I do not consider the situation to be sublime and life-changing but as it is Wordsworth's second time in Tintern Abbey, he will pay attention to his experiences a little more closely than the last, which in turn led him to write this poem.

I liked this poem a lot and could relate to it very well, sitting on my computer just past midnight, having to go to work at 6 AM, I have the questions in my head, "Will I wake up early enough to not be late?" "Will I have enough time to finish all 20 of my blogs by next week?" then deeper and farther in the future thoughts pop into my head, "What will I do after this class ends, after college.. what then?" And I know I can always look to my vacation in St. Augustine and watching the waves crash over the rocks, and all the questions do not seem to require any stress, in the grand scheme of things.

William Blake - The Lamb and The Tyger

I will be discussing Blake's The Lamb (p.g 79) and The Tyger (p.g 88-89) and comparing them to each other and my analysis. Blake has two very different poems parallel each other with an amazing fluid tone. The Lamb has an innocent tone and The Tyger with the uncertain reality.

In, The Lamb, Blake asks the "little lamb" who made thee and gave him his "tender voice" and "clothing wooly bright". Then in the second paragraph he answers the question posed earlier, It is God, or if you look at the line "He is called by thy name, For he calls himself a Lamb", "he is meek and he is mild, he became like a child"; you can see this is Jesus, as he was known as the Lamb of God in the New Testament, and came to Earth as a child. So Jesus is the Lamb who represents the innocence with that the faith, hope, and love of God. Jesus is just like a lamb, which in ancient times was used as a sacrifice to their Gods, just as Jesus sacrificed himself to let humans have a second chance with God. This poem is very joyous with lines such as "bless thee", "clothing wooly bright" and "Making all the vales rejoice".

The Lamb was written first, by Blake, and shows the more innocent side of God and what he has created. By contrast, in The Tyger, Blake writes about a darker form of creation, in a pessimistic, uncertain and urgent questioning of how can God create the tiger?

"Tyger Tyger, burning bright.
In the forest of the night;
What immortal hand or eye,
Could frame thy fearful symmetry?"

This stanza seems to admire and dread the question of who could create something with such "fearful symmetry?" He goes on to ask who created this animal, just as The Lamb asked the same question. But the words he uses such as "dread hand and what dread feet", "What the hammer? what the chain," and "In what furnace was thy brain? What the anvil", all give off a symbolism of the times, the industrial revolution. It is pretty obvious by these specifically chosen words that Blake knew the Industrial revolution was part of a bigger plan and would change the world as he knew it for better and for worse. The pessimistic and dreading idea of the inevitable answer that the one that made the Lamb also made the Tiger is questioned in this poem, "Did he who made the Lamb make thee?"

The Tyger poem was written after The Lamb, as said before, and to comapre the two; The Lamb has all of its questions answered, even though they were rhetorical. The innocent tone and wording of The Lamb makes it easy for a child to understand, just as the church does in Sunday school when I would go and they would make everything so clear cut, everything was so Black and white. But as seen in The Tyger, life is not Black and white, there are a lot of Grey areas and a simple wish of faith may be sustainable for some people, but Blake did not answer his questions posed in The Tyger, even his last sentence of the poem is the same question asked in the first stanza. Really God (or whatever deity you desire) created both the lamb and the tiger and did so with a purpose, to counter balance each other and keep the world in harmony, just like everything else in nature.

French Revolution: Edmund Burke

My first Blog entry will be about Edmund Burke. He wrote some of the letters read about in the French Revolution readings (36-73). Edmund Burke was born in Ireland and is a political writer and member of the Irish Parliament for 30 years, he went to Trinity University and went to Law school but dropped out to pursue his writing career. His opposition of the French Revolution is apparent in his writings and he also was in favor of the better treatment of the American colonies, but did support the British right to tax the colonies (47). He dignified and made a heroine out of the queen of England in His paper, Reflections on the Revolution in France. He did not support the violent overthrow and eludes to the Magna Carta and Declaration of Right of the British, which shows that peaceful command of power is possible and works, as shown by the continued success of the Parliament in Britain enforcing anti-Tyranny and limited taxation by the monarchy and nobles.

In his work, Reflections on the Revolution in France, Burke goes on to say that "Levellers can never Equalize." This and the subsequent paragraph describing this idea, describes that men have equal rights, but not to the right of equal things. By things he means that a man with only a tiny amount of stock in a property or power, cannot make the rules and will have to let the management of the state go to the ones with the most power. The Levellers are the people that try to change society for the better, but end up perverting the natural order and making things worse, as apparent by the French Revolution. (50-51). He describes the arrest and imprisonement of the King and Queen of France and tells of the brutal massacre the "thieves and cruel ruffians" descended upon the holy sanctuary of a once revered symbol of monarchy in France. The desicration of this place cannot bring anykind of peaceful ruling and legislation or be accepted by the people as a whole. Years and years of monarchy crumbled in a few hours will not bode well with the rest of Europe and send a bad message of France's stability.

He describes the barbaric philosophy of the French Revolutionaries, the life of the King and Queen are nothing more than any other person and their sacrifice will bring peace to France. He thinks this philosophy is founded by terror and lacks "solid wisdom". He goes on to describe how in ancient Greece if a writer/poet had brought this story of the French Revolution to the stage and tried to act it out, it would be thrown out by the pure "hypothetical principles" of horrible crimes and treachery. (55)

These writings tell me that Burke believed the French Revolution would not end well for France and any kind of violent overthrow with no respect for human life, even a King's, would "resort to anarchy and uncivil ruling." The power that the King had will only go to someone else, maybe with even worse morals and intentions.