When gray hours loom, I hide and write.
I trip all over unpoetic feet.
Craft metaphors arcane and recondite,
And bare my soul with candor indiscreet.
For poetry can quell the pensive mood.
My mind’s gross clutter yields forgotten toys.
Like mice, my furtive fancies oft intrude,
And measured syllables project their noise.
Then into spiral notebooks go these lines,
To lie forgotten on some dusty shelf,
But when in later years the sick soul whines
And burrows through these notes to seek itself,
Yes, then with joy of rediscovery
I find an offering from me to me.
Brian ran around the yard
Boy-buoyant,
First helium balloon
Streaming behind,
Its string tied round his wrist.
Red orb of joyous innocence
Tugging gently for release.
The sun was warm on my bare back
As futilely I battled spurgy growth;
And I was warmed within by son without.
Fair-haired three-year-old
Brown eyes laughing
Out of unfair lashes.
“Untie it, Daddy. It’s too
tight.”
(He’ll lose it sure. They always do.)
“Okay, I’ll wrap it round your hand.
But don’t let go.”
Sighing, I turned aside
And knelt in hopeless effort to expurge.
Then off it went, and there it came—
“Daddy, help! Catch my balloon!”
“I’m sorry, son. It’s
gone.
Too high for me to reach.”
And off my youngster scampered
Undeterred,
While I to weedy growth
Returned my gaze.
A moment passed, and then a gentle nudge.
“Here, Daddy. Now reach up and get it back.”
A three-step ladder wobbled near my knee.
And 'twixt my ribs I seemed to feel
A little hand reach in and tweak my heart.
Thank you, son, for flattering faith
That my poor power can touch the sky.
Thanks for the boost. But step by step
You’ll come to learn
That shattered things can’t always be repaired
With glue and tape.
And dimes and quarters skitter twinkling
'Neath gratings that I cannot lift
Not even with your help.
And every year I have you at my side,
I shall grow shorter.
My wife and I met John and Rita about 30 years ago.
John and I discovered that we both had been born on April 24, 1938.
Friendship developed. We played bridge nd tennis together and became
the nucleus of a biking group that, I am ashamed to say, I tagged with
the name The Awesomes: an acronym for Ageless Wonders Enjoying Sunshine,
the Outdoors, Merriment, and Exercise. John was an indefatigable biker.
(Indefatigable? I had to use that because if I said "tireless" it
would sound like he was riding on the rims.) On warm weather rides, he
always faded back to see how our wives were handling hills and heat,
while I was seeking shade and a place to buy a cold drink. I refused
to feel guilty because how much help can you give a struggling biker
when you are struggling on your own bike? John, motivated by his desire
to encourage the slower riders, ended up logging half again as much mileage
as the rest of us.
John got his golden handshake from Hewlett-Packard about the time I retired
from teaching. Not content with leisure, he started a new career as a
teacher of accounting. We talked about his experiences as a 60-year-old
first-year instructor. I noted that unlike so many in the profession,
John was fixated not on what sort of performance he put on at the lectern
but with whether or not his students were absorbing the knowledge and
skills he was imparting. He was troubled if individuals performed poorly
on tests, and he strove to clarify his presentations, to communicate
and to motivate. This trait—so laudable in a teacher—typified
John's concern for the happiness and well-being not just of students
but of all of his friends and acquaintances. He was unable to be perfunctory
in work or in personal relationships.
John and Rita left their Cupertino home to live in East San Jose and
bought a weekender in Aptos, adjacent to a fairway of the Seascape Golf
Course, to fix up in their spare time....which brings me to the start
of my anecdote.
Working on their Aptos house, John and Rita became acquainted with an
elderly next door neighbor. The woman (I'll call her Abby) had lived
there many years before her children departed and her husband died. It
was time for her to relocate to an assisted-living facility. John volunteered
to help her move. While packing and taking things to the dump, he discovered
an odd collection in the garage. He counted over a hundred egg cartons
filled with used golf balls. Abby and her husband used to walk the streets
and pathways near their home, built along a fairway of the Seascape Golf
Course. They would collect golf balls they found in the hillside undergrowth.
Abby would wash them and pouch them in the egg cartons.
John was not a golfer, but he offered to take Abby's collection and store the
cartons in his garage. Not long after, John and Rita met an aged man who walked
by their house once or twice a day. I'll call him Harold. He lived nearby with
his daughter, who looked after him while he eased into the shades of Alzheimer's.
Still spry, though mentally vague, Harold would walk the fairways near his home
keeping his eye out for lost golf balls. John observed that Harold grinned with
self-satisfaction and a sense of heroic achievement when he returned home from
is strolls with a pocketful of balls.
After learning about Harold and his recreational walks, John began taking his
own fairway strolls, his pockets filled with Abby's golf balls. He would strew
them where he knew Harold would be walking, in the obvious locations and in the
not so obvious ones. This act of secret charity and kindness reminded me of a
story by O. Henry, "The Last Leaf." It's about a woman dying of pneumonia,
watching the leaves of ivy blow off the vine on the wall across from her bedroom
window, knowing that when the last leaf falls she will die.
But she doesn't die. The last leaf refuses to fall because an elderly artist
who lived downstairs has raved winter weather to paint a last leaf on the wall
behind the vine. The old painter died of pneumonia brought on by damp clothing
and prolonged exposure to chilly temperatures. But what if it was planted golf
balls instead of a painted leaf that made someone wish to go on living.
I came home from walking the dog that evening ruminating over the short story
in my brain and intending to give John a call and ask some questions. What were
the people's names? How would the one I dubbed Abby have collected 100 empty
egg cartons to keep the golf balls in? Did Abby and her family consume eggs so
they could save the cartons, or did they just happen to find golf balls at the
same rate they ate eggs? Was Rita perhaps secretly sending the egg cartons John
was emptying to Harold's daughter, so that she or Harold could store his finds
in them? Would that be a neat fillip or a cheap plot contrivance? My story writer's
mind was seeking subtle ironies.
Sally greeted our dog and me at the front door. She was distraught. My wife was
distraught. She had just got off the phone with one of John's sisters. John had
been home alone while Rita was meeting with her book group. He developed a headache
that became so severe that he called 911. He was conscious when the paramedics
arrived, but he died in the ambulance on the way to the hospital. He had succumbed
to a massive stroke. John and I were 67 years and 260 days old.
Though his brain was no longer functioning, John was not finished with his acts
of generosity and good will. One valuable golf ball remained in the egg carton.
In accordance with a codicil in his will John's body was kept on a respirator.
Within three days doctors found a compatible recipient for one of John's kidneys.
I am silver and exact. I have no preconceptions.
Whatever I see, I swallow immediately.
Just as it is, unmisted by love or dislike
I am not cruel, only truthful –
The eye of a little god, four-cornered.
Most of the time I meditate on the opposite wall.
It is pink, with speckles. I have looked at it so long
I think it is a part of my heart. But it flickers.
Faces and darkness separate us over and over.
Now I am a lake. A woman bends over me.
Searching my reaches for what she really is.
Then she turns to those liars, the candles or the moon.
I see her back, and reflect it faithfully
She rewards me with tears and an agitation of hands.
I am important to her. She comes and goes.
Each morning it is her face that replaces the darkness.
In me she has drowned a young girl, and in me an old woman
Rises toward her day after day, like a terrible fish.
by Sylvia Plath
In Sylvia Plath's poem "Mirror," we are addressed by an inanimate
object, which sets out to define itself and its function and does so with
the exactitude that is a part of its nature. It has no preconceptions because
it is without memory or an ability to reason. It is omnivorous and swallows
everything it confronts without making judgments that might blur, mist
or distort. It is god-like in its objectivity and its incapability of emotional
response. Most of the time it meditates on the opposite wall faithfully
reproducing its colors and design until darkness supervenes or faces intrude.
and these happenstances recur with regularity.
In stanza two the mirror becomes a perfectly reflecting lake unruffled by any
disturbance. A woman bends over the lake like the mythological Narcissus, but
no matter how deeply she searches she sees only her actuality or surface truth.
Unlike Narcissus, the woman can not fall in love with what she sees. The candles
and moon to which the woman turns are liars capable of lending untruthful shadows
and romantic highlights, unlike the lake surface/mirror, which renders only
faithful images. Unhappy with what she sees, the woman weeps and wrings her
hands in agitation. The youth and beauty once reflected during the person's
morning visits are now swallowed and drowned in the metaphorical depths of
the lake, and what slowly surfaces from those depths is the terrifying fact
of aging, so graphically rendered by the simile of a fish.
Metaphors
I'm a riddle in nine syllables,
An elephant, a ponderous house,
A melon strolling on two tendrils.
O red fruit, ivory, fine timbers!
This loaf's big with its yeasty rising.
Money's new-minted in this fat purse.
I'm a means, a stage, a cow in calf.
I've eaten a bag of green apples,
Boarded the train there's no getting off.
by Sylvia Plath
In "Metaphors" the poet or speaker of the poem holds up a different
sort of mirror to herself—one that allows full-length representation
and subsurface penetration. Just as the mirror of the first poem becomes
metaphorically a lake, the speaker here becomes a series of objects or
creatures that reflect a pregnant woman. The term of a normal pregnancy
is repeatedly reflected in the number of lines in the poem and the number
of syllables in each line. It is no accident that the poem's title is a
nine-letter word as are the words "syllables" that concludes
line one and "ponderous" in line two. The riddle is easily solved.
Forgive me for stating the obvious. The woman feels elephantine because
of her increased weight and girth. She's as big as a clichéd house
and her body has become an object in which a separate being dwells. Her
melon-shaped gravidity makes her legs seem by comparison like slender tendrils.
The red fruit is the fetus, the ivory (reminiscent of the earlier elephant)
perhaps the child's skin or the child's precious bones which are also compared
to fine timbers. The yeasty rising loaf is the commonly referred to bun
in the oven. The fat purse is the woman's belly stuffed with the precious
cargo of newly minted and still uncirculated money. The woman feels she
has lost her own identity in becoming a means for reproduction or a stage
on which a dramatic production is about to debut. The bag of green apples
she ate have caused abdominal swelling demanding release. The train is
a metaphor for her pregnancy—a non-stop journey with a destination
bespeaking joy and relief.
I can never be a wine connoisseur. My sense of smell is not keen, and
a discriminating olfactory sense is a sine qua non for precise discernment
and evaluation. Yes, I know when a wine is downright awful, but given
a blind taste test comparing elegant vintage wines and their Two-Buck
Chuck counterparts, I'll choose the cheap stuff probably half the time.
The same goes for my appreciation of pictorial art. I skipped the college
course in art appreciation. I recognize the beauty of the classics and
have my own unschooled preferences, but that's about it. When my wife
thinks about foreign travel, she focuses on museums and art galleries.
I think about wandering through exotic cities or quaint neighborhoods,
trying new cuisines and quaffing brews with the locals. Sally can sit
and revel in a single painting for the same amount of time it takes me
to stroll the entire Louvre.
I am led to this musing by contemplation of Emily Dickinson's "I
taste a liquor never brewed," wherein the poet celebrates her enchantment
with nature in a playful extended metaphor.
I TASTE A LIQUOR NEVER BREWED
Emily Dickinson
I taste a liquor never brewed,
From Tankards scooped in Pearl;
Not all the Vats upon the Rhine
Yield such an Alcohol!
Inebriate of air am I,
And debauchee of dew,
Reeling thro endless summer days,
From inns of molten blue.
When landlords turn the drunken bee
Out of the foxglove's door,
When butterflies renounce their drams,
I shall but drink the more!
Till seraphs swing their snowy hats,
And saints to windows run,
To see the little tippler
Leaning against the Sun!
The poem makes me aware that words and language delight
and intoxicate me the way a Chateau Lafitte Rothschild pleases an oenophile,
the Uffizi gallery excites an art buff, and Emily gets drunk on warmth,
sunshine and clouds.
Savoring Emily's four quatrains—rolling them about on my tongue
and ear—gives me the heady satisfaction that the little lady from
Amherst gets from air. Her poem is a synergy of ingredients that gives
me a Massachusetts variation of a Rocky Mountain High.
Line one with its direct statement of the metaphor is like the first
sip of a perfect martini—stirred, not shaken—sipped from
a chilled glass of finest crystal. Her "tankards of pearl" with
that key word "scooped" trigger an image of fluffy white clouds,
due perhaps to my fondness for ice cream and not to any intention of
the poet. Others will respond with their own images. "Vats upon
the Rhine" generates vowel music that tickles palate and ear and
transports me to Burton-on-Trent and the lively liquor of A. E. Housman's "Terence,
this is stupid stuff," a favorite poem from my teaching days. Housman
was writing about beer, not liquor; still, an intoxicant's an intoxicant.
The first quatrain's half-rhyme of "pearl" with "alcohol" produces
a tang that a perfect rhyme would not convey.
Lines 5 and 6 are my favorites, the olive or lemon twist in the cocktail
of my own metaphor. The vowel alliteration of "Inebriate of air
am I" enriches the dictionary meaning, an example of sound's interplay
with sense that epitomizes poetry. The first word can be construed as
a past participle lacking the concluding "d," or as a noun.
Thus, the line could be paraphrased either as "I am inebriated by
or with air" or "I am an inebriate or habitual drunkard whose
intoxicant is air." Both ideas are implicit in Dickinson's shaping
of the sentence, and the duality imports a tinge of drunken confusion
and stagger. The exquisite word choice "debauchee" reinforces
the long “e” assonance of "Inebriate" and alliterates
with "dew" to underline the humorous hyperbole that the poet
is an orgiast, in danger of overdosing on dewdrops. "Reeling" begins
line 7 with a metrical variation, a trochaic substitution in the established
iambic metrical pattern. (Remember your high school English class? An
iambic foot is an unstressed syllable followed by one that is stressed,
as in "vermouth;" a trochaic foot is the opposite or reverse,
as in "Boodles.") My head reels, as does the poetic line. The
adjective "molten" is arresting in "Inns of molten blue." I
discard the image of inns created by a process of heating something blue
until it was liquefied and then pouring it into a mold, and I settle
for summer skies that are molten in the sense of being heated so that
they glow.
Stanza three makes me giggle tipsily. Bees getting drunk on nectar and
being cut off and tossed out of the Foxglove Pub; butterflies swearing
off spirituous pollen; and a snockered Belle of Amherst-- all are images
that strike my funny bone. A happy drunk am I!
I have a wee problem with the concluding stanza. I see seraphs and saints—regular
inhabitants of those heavenly inns but free from problems of overindulgence
or addiction, hustling to the window to watch Emily stumble out and lean
against the sun for balance. "Little tippler" is another epitome
of sound supporting sense, the short i's and consonant l's (I'm using
consonant as an adjective, not a noun) sound like someone taking repetitive
sips of liquid. I suck on the pastille trochee "Leaning" in
the poem's concluding line, and taste the giddiness introduced earlier
by "Reeling." (Pastilles in a martini? Metaphorically the spritz
of vermouth tempering the icy gin--Noilly Prat befitting Beefeater.)
I have to hiccup when I swallow "seraphs swing their snowy hats." I've
never pictured a seraph wearing a hat, snowy or otherwise. Maybe a halo,
but I usually reserve those for saints, not angels with six sets of wings.
Is it another cloud image? I'm not sure.
Is that lack of surety the poem's problem? Is that something black floating
in my cocktail? Ah, it's just an eyelash, one of my own. My fault, not
the author/bartender's. I fish it out and finish the drink. Good! I'll
have another.
Artifacts adumbrate ancient amenities
(All items backwardly anapestiferous.)
Brass-handled bureaus of burnished brown brilliance
Crystal carafes, a cello, a chafing dish
Delicate doilies in Damascene doubleness
Ermine-lined uniforms, elegant epaulets
Fine-feathered, filigreed, fragile French furniture
Gewgaws and gargoyles griMACing on gravy boats
Heavy-hooved horses and hunters in hall hangings
Ivory idols and imports from Ireland
Juxtaposed jewelry near jasper jade jardiniere
Kitchenware, kitsch, knickknackery, knobkerries
Lorgnettes, and lockets, and lithogravure.
Mantuan mandolins, monogrammed mustache cups
Napery nestled 'neath needlepoint neckerchiefs
Oyster tongs, Oscar Wilde’s opera omnia
Petit point printings of prim, prosy platitudes
Quilts quintessentially queenly in quality
Reams of rhymes roaring in rodomontade.
Scintillant scimitars, sconces, soap sculpturings
Teapots and trumpets, trivets, a tambourine
Upleaping unicorns in ultra-ubiquity
Volumes Victorian, violas, velocipedes
Whatnots for bricabrac, watchcases, wardrobe trunks
Xanthic wood xylophone bars tuned chromatically
Yarn yardage, youth portraits yellowed with age.
Zodiac symbols, detritus from falling star
(One fell on Zurich, the other hit Zanzibar.)
Objects bespeaking refined domesticity
Ranged in alliterate alphabeticity.
an imagined letter accompanying a fictional application for an English
teaching position, written by a persona with problems all too real
Dear Sir or Madame:
Early on I decided that the career of an English teacher was the vocation
for which I was best suited. I read and studied voraciously and tried
hard to build my vocabulary and render my grammar impeccable.
In college I was overwhelmed with assigned reading and had to speed through
books so fast that I couldn't really enjoy them. They got mixed up because
of being read simultaneously. In a course called The Picturesque Novel,
I read how Oliver Gulliver travels on the road with friends named Tom
Jones and Tristram Shandy, shouts Yahoo after he nibbles a huckleberrry,
then recaptures a fugitive black man named Lord Jim, who's afraid of
Virginia Woolf and is rooming with Roderick at Random House.
The next year I read about a couple of brothers named Karamazov and their
sister Carrie acting in The American Tragedy, the men contracting a disease
called Moby-Dick. They all write pustulary scarlet letters to women named
Pamela and Clarissa. A Frenchman named A. Tranjé falls asleep
in his mother's coffin and dreams of being a catcher in the rye, protecting
children from a drunken overeaters named Gargantua N. Pantagruel,. The
sun also rose on Madame Bovary committing crimes and suffering punishment
for pulling the wings off doves (one flew over the cuckoo's nest anyway),
for which she was stripped of her red badge of courage and left naked
and dead. Marcel Proust tossed his cookies when he got a whiff of someone
named Madeleine. The hallucinogenic prose/poem "Rhyme of Silas Mariner" by
Samuel Eliot Coleridge resonated with memorable lines such as "Water,
water everywhere/ Where are my buckets, my buckets!" Coleridge
was actually a pen name of Marianne Evans, who was having an affair with
Kate Chopin while her French alter ego(s) George(s) Sand engaged in a
menage a toit with composer Franz Schindler Liszt and Amandine Aurore
Lucie
Dupin, who was literature's first lady detective and
solved the mysteries of Edgar Allan Poe. See Murders@droom.org.
On my comprehensive exam, responding to a question about archetypal heroes
thwarted in their desire for power, and rotating from wheel to whoa,
I wrote of Augie's march through a bleak house of seven gables bellowing
from there to eternity in a rant filled with sound and fury signifying
pride and prejudice, and demanding the return of his native son.
The examiners passed me with high honors and I graduated with great expectorations.
I looked forward eagerly to the task of awakening and molding young minds
to the treasures of whirled literature. Transcripts and completed employment
application will follow.
Hoping to join your English faculty, I remain
TIMEX WRISTWATCH MANUFACTURERS Little Rock, Arkansas
Dear Timex,
May I take the liberty of addressing you as Tim for
short? Well, Tim, I bought one of your wristwatches at Long's Drugstore
yesterday and I must say I am not entirely happy with the object. I
suppose I should have been prepared for some difficulty in its settings
and operation since it is just about the least expensive of your chronograph
products. I didn't want to spend a lot because I still hope to find
the old Seiko watch that I have somehow mislaid. I keep thinking it
will turn up tucked into the sheets and blankets on my bed, but it
hasn't.
According to the instruction sheet that accompanies the watch,
it features time and date display, daily alarm, chronograph, and hourly
chime. But next it says il est possible que ce modele ne présente
pas toutes les fonctions décrites dans le dépliant. Well,
Tim, I have to say that during the12 hours I have been wearing it,
it has not chimed even once, for which I am thankful. I guess the alarme
quotidienne is one of the fonctions which is pas presente dans ce modele.
Around
the watch, as you know, Tim, there are buttons I can push. One is labeled
Mode (or do I pronounce that mud), another is designated Start/Stop,
a third Adjust, and the last is called Indiglo. Tim, I think you must
have ignored your spell checker on that last one.
Anyhow, your instructions said to hold Mode until HOURS digits flash.
I did that. Then press Mode again to enter time Mode and seconds digits
will flash. Then I'm told to press Adjust to set seconds to zero. I
did that, but the zero was only there for a second and then it started
counting upward. Next your instructions say set Hours Month Date And
Day of Week. and go through 12 hours to set AM or PM. Well, Tim, I'm
sorry but I don't have twelve hours to spend setting some silly watch.
I skipped to where the instructions say Press
Mode when done. I did that. Then I was very confused by the instructions "To
display DATE from TIME display, press Start/Stop. With DATE displayed,
press and hold START/STOP, then press ADJUST to change display between
DATE-MONTH and MONTH-DATE. Huh?
Well to make a long story short, Tim, I have the watch running and
the digital readout has stopped its infernal blinking and is holding
steady. I realized last evening that I could tell what time it was
by looking at the readout and adding the number 6 to the number of
minutes that were showing. I can handle that. As for DATE-Month and
MONTH-DATE,
all I see is seven little boxes on the watch face running from where
the number 10 would be on an old-fashioned watch to where number two
would be. The third box from the end has the letter T in it and all
the other boxes are empty. I think that T is supposed to stand for
Thursday, but since I am writing this on a Monday, I'll just say that
the T stands for Tonight.
Tim, it's now the next morning. My computer's clock says it's Tuesday:
7:40 AM. Your wristwatch says it 19:34. The T is still there and stands
now for Today or perhaps This Morning or maybe even Tuesday. I hope
it's not Tomorrow already.
I sure hope I find my Seiko. If not, I'm going to exchange this digital
thing for one of those where Mickey Mouse points at numbers.
Not long ago I took a substitute teaching job at Pacific Grove High.
Ordinarily I restrict my substituting to English department jobs, but
when I got to the school the secretary told me I was going to be replacing
a science teacher. What I remember about science classes from my own
high school days is not a matter of great volume, exerts little in the
way of intellectual pressure and is low in temperature.
No problem. As with most substitute teaching jobs, the main function
of the substitute is to take roll, make out bathroom passes, turn the
TV and VCR on and off, and be on the lookout for skulduggery, mayhem
and violence.
The AP Science class that opened my day involved bright senior students
who had been assigned various presentations to make before the class.
One early presentation was an explanation of something called Avogadro’s
Law.
From some remote crevice in my memory I called up the fact that Avogadro
was not the main ingredient in guacamole but an Italian physicist of
the late 18th and early 19th centuries whose first name was Amedeo.
The student proceeded to inform me and the class of what the class already
knew and I had forgotten. That is that equal volumes of all gases, under
the same pressure and temperature conditions, contain the same number
of molecules. Furthermore, I rediscovered that 6 x 10 to the 23rd power
(something known as Avogadro’s number) is the number of atoms in
a gram atom or of molecules in a gram molecule of a substance. I ruminated
briefly on how I have been able to manage the quotidian exigencies of
modern life in total ignorance of this fully proven hypothesis.
Imagine my glee and excitement when, after having
completed my teaching day, I returned home to my newly purchased book
by one of my favorite authors of mystery and suspense to find that
the main character, a scientist, was the founder of an organization
known as Amedeo Technologies. How thrilling it was to know even before
the company name was explained in the book that it was a reference
to Count Amedeo Avogadro. I was even able to intuit that since Count
Amedeo’s proclamation about the
difference between molecules and atoms was not taken seriously until
long after his death, he was considered a man “ahead of his time.” Thus
the selection of the company name.
Later on in the book there is another mention of the serendipitous. A
character brought up the true or imagined legend of a scientist who was
experimenting with rubber tire material and totally by accident came
up with a super strong material. He sold it to a tire company so that
the world would have tires that never wore out. The tire company took
the formula and put it in a safe so as to protect the industry, the future
of which depends on planned obsolescence. So there can be a down side
to serendipity.
That’s nearly all I have to say on the subject other than that
this morning, weeks after my posing as a science teacher, my wife and
I made a horrible discovery related to gases, pressures, temperatures,
atoms, and cute little moles. She had been out last night to a church
discussion group and she had driven my car, a Toyota Prius. When she
arrived home shortly before ten pm she read me the riot act for having
fallen asleep over the aforementioned book while sitting in my big chair
and having left the door to the back patio open. She summoned our dog,
who had been patrolling the back yard, and berated me for allowing our
precious pet to be exposed to the dangers of the vicious Pacific Grove
raccoon population. She even went so far as to suggest that such raccoons
might well enter our house during my seated slumber and ravage the furniture
and help themselves to the refrigerator’s contents. I humbly apologized
for my carelessness.
It was ironic, if not totally serendipitous, that as my wife left this
morning for a game of golf while I was at the computer composing this
bagatelle, she discovered that she had left my car in the garage all
night with its motor running! Eleven hours of car engine running in a
closed room! Since the car is a hybrid, I didn’t know for sure
if the garage was filled with lethal exhaust fumes from the gas engine,
or whether it had been functioning exclusively on its battery. “Holy
Avogadro!” I said to myself as I rushed into the garage to shut
off the ignition holding my breath so as not to inhale 6 times 10 to
the 23rd power molecules of carbon monoxide.
But returning to serendipity-- I now fully understand the term’s
meaning. I really had no idea what to write about on this topic and was
even considering skipping class. But now, through a truly serendipitous
chain of circumstances, I have merely to print this out for your delectation
or your boredom and then to see if my car will start up and take me to
class.
Aged like my grandfather's wind-up Victrola,
I love the scent of a fine Gorgonzola.
Velveeta's cheap and tastes much cruder.
Substitute a wedge of Gouda.
Cheddar's sharp but eggs taste better
Mixed with salty cheese like Feta;
Add a chunk of warm bologna
Topped with shredded provolone.
Eyes like pearls-- some large, some smaller--
Wink in wheels of Emmentaler.
"Paradise is lost," wrote Milton,
"If you've used up all your Stilton."
Though I'd never go for broke f’r it,
I'd invest in caves of Roquefort;
And if I had euros to spare,
Some shares of Brie or Camembert.
Cheeses love me, yes I know.
For my tummy tells me so.
I planned a feast day in Chicago
While I nibbled Asiago.
When compiling shopping’s roster,
Added in some of Double Gloucester.
Chilled six packs of Danish Carlsberg
Taste just great with bites of Jarlsberg.
To make my hors d’oeuvres extra hearty –
Chip dip made from Cream Havarti.
Boursin and brie don’t work with wieners
Top hot dogs with plain Fontinas
Pizza’s fine with Mozzareella.
Makes a man a happy fella.
Taco tasteless? Man, just say so.
Order everything con queso.
Sweets to follow abalone --
Tir’misu con Mascarpone!
Cap the ev’ning’s luscious fare
With port wine, pears and sliced Gruyére.*
Appetite such fare appeases --
What a friend we have in cheeses.
‘Cause rotting in the sun, fish smelt so bad
I plaiced a tarpon a dead dogfish.
Don’t like to give my cat fish.
But since she was sniffin’ round,
I tossed a chunk of haddock to Puss.
When I had time to mullet Dover,
I snook a look, just for the halibut.
My guts began to flounder.
Never sawfish look so crappie!
Since I was near a bar ah coulda,
Put t’ rout my heaving gorge.,
Drinkin’ beer til ah pee a bit..
Such was my strongest urgin’.
Didn’t do it on porpoise.
I’m hard of herring, atrophied of mussel,
And as Cod’s my wetness,
Blind as a small-mouth bass turd.
Got a sculpin stuck in my head
For calling Phil A. Aswhole
At school with some grouper other.
Had Paul Lock fish it out,
With his orca straw’s pike.
The one he waves to conduct
“I’ll Take Menhaden.”
“Bream When You’re Feeling Bluefish.”
“Blennies from Heaven,”
“\Salmon Chanted Evening,”
“Me and My Shad Roe” and
“The Boogie Woogie Bluegill Boy.”
O No! Nearly forgot “Tuna yet? Tuna Yet?”
From “The Wet Side’s Dory”
Sung by Lou.Trawls,
His biggest char buster since
“Trolling Down the Reefer.”
When I graduated from high school in Spain,
We marched to Lock’s
Orcastral recording of
“Pompano Circumstance,”
By Eduardo El Gar.
Lock’s a little shrimp
Just sardine out in podnership with
Ann Jovi, Finn & Haddy.
Billed me six quid.
But…Aw, he’s to me the Manatee Hour!
No taxis in the cabby zone
So we hadda limpet home,
But nautilus’d been shad on
By a gull, my mortal anemone.
Tried to spear ‘im but he
Went off at a scallop.
“Wahoo!” Mm my w-w-w-wife like to
Laugh turbot off.
(Excuse me, I tender stotter a tad,
Polish being my first lingo.)
Threatened to croaker—
I only manta rays
A noise ter clam her up.—
Not into spousal mollusk station.
If you see any more res absurdis,
With which this crock abalone
Could congergate,
Let minnow.
WalIeye think it’s time to reel ‘em up.
Snagged a few keepers;
Thresher otter be scuttled!
Mus’ key off now.
Sky’s misting gray.
Betta quit,
If you’ll permit.
I gotta guppy.
I knew a woman, lovely in her bones,
When small birds sighed, she would sigh back at them;
Ah, when she moved, she moved more ways than one:
The shapes a bright container can contain!
Of her choice virtues only gods should speak,
Or English poets who grew up on Greek
(I’d have them sing in chorus, cheek to cheek).
How well her wishes went! She stroked my chin,
She taught me Turn, and Counter-turn, and Stand;
She taught me Touch, that undulant white skin;
I nibbled, meekly from her proffered hand;
She was the sickle; I, poor I, the rake,
Coming behind her for her pretty sake
(But what prodigious mowing we did make).
Love likes a gander, and ignores a goose:
Her full lips pursed, the errant note to seize;
She played it quick, she played it light and loose;
My eyes, they dazzled at her flowing knees;
Her several parts could keep a pure repose,
Or one hip quiver with a mobile nose
(She moved in circles, and those circles moved).
Let seed be grass, and grass turn into hay:
I’m martyr to a motion not my own;
What’s freedom for? To know eternity.
I swear she cast a shadow white as stone.
But who could count eternity in days?
These old bones live to learn her wanton ways:
(I measure time by how a body sways).
The beauty of the female body has generated lyrical outpourings from
poets and songwriters since language began. My favorite poet of the
joyous and playful appreciation of female charm and sexual attraction
is Theodore Roethke, an American poet who died in 1963. Harold Bloom
wrote of him: "There is no poetry anywhere that is so valuably
conscious of the human body as Roethke’s . . . . He more than
any other is a poet of pure being . . . . When you read him, you realize
with a great surge of astonishment and joy that, truly, you are not
yet dead" (Bloom 117-118).
His “Elegy to Jane (My student thrown by a horse)” mournfully
expresses avuncular affection for a dead girl, recalling “her sidelong
pickerel smile,” comparing her to “A wren, happy, tail into
the wind,” and calling her “my skittery pigeon.” While
not the language of sexual attraction, it nevertheless captures “the
words of my love:/
I, with no rights in this matter, /
Neither father nor lover.”
The same playfulness displayed in his elegy for a student appears in
his poem about sexual attraction “I Knew a Woman.” The verb
of the title indicates that the relationship, vital earlier, no longer
exists. Roethke’s opening line is arresting in its artful refutation
of the cliché about beauty being “only skin deep.”
I knew a woman, lovely in her bones,
When small birds sighed, she would sigh back at them;
Ah, when she moved, she moved more ways than one:
The shapes a bright container can contain!
Of her choice virtues only gods should speak,
Or English poets who grew up on Greek
(I’d have them sing in chorus, cheek to cheek).
Certainly the verb of line one is intended to be interpreted in the
biblical sense of carnal knowledge as well as simple acquaintance. “Lovely
in her bones” is a phrase so compressed that it beggars extended
translation. Suffice it to say that her loveliness was both exterior
and interior, a structural quality rather than a façade. Line
2 indicates her empathic relationship with nature. It is a mere pause
before the mind-stopping line describing her movements. Various denotations
of movement are soon to be played upon, but the first suggestion is that
her lovely bones in motion are an emotionally moving sight to behold.
I sense a smile when the poet writes of the “shapes a bright container
can contain.” The verb “can” is also a noun describing
a container of light-reflecting metal but one that cannot change shape.
At another level of meaning the container is the woman’s flesh
within which her bones are located and which is capable of graceful movement
and shape change. The ensuing mention of gods and English poets learned
in Greek lends an elevation that prevents a reader’s attaching
slang meanings to “can” and “cheek to cheek.” Almost.
How well her wishes went! She stroked my chin,
She taught me Turn, and Counter-turn, and Stand;
She taught me Touch, that undulant white skin;
I nibbled, meekly from her proffered hand;
She was the sickle; I, poor I, the rake,
Coming behind her for her pretty sake
(But what prodigious mowing we did make).
Earlier mention of poets learned in Greek and the word chorus direct
those knowledgeable in ancient drama to interpret Turn, Counter-turn,
and Stand as translations of strophe, antistrophe, and epode – the
movements of the chorus in ancient Greek drama. Others may be satisfied
with a suggestion of dance movements, lovemaking, and sexual interpretation
of the verb “stand.” “Touch” gathers meaning
beyond the reference to one of the five senses. It includes the denotation
of skill and mastery as in the touch of a musician, artist, billiard
player, etc. However, “undulant” skin seems more associative
with breasts than any other body part, and sexual foreplay is strongly
suggested. In this context of double entendres, the word “behind” is
simultaneously an adverb of both time and location and its nominal reference
to a body part cannot be ignored.
Repeated images of curvature, circularity and straightness receive emphasis
in the metaphorical comparison to the female curved sickle and the male
straight rake that act together to produce a “prodigious mowing.” A
rake, needless to say, is not just a garden tool but also a licentious
male. The rake progresses.
Love likes a gander, and ignores a goose:
Her full lips pursed, the errant note to seize;
She played it quick, she played it light and loose;
My eyes, they dazzled at her flowing knees;
Her several parts could keep a pure repose,
Or one hip quiver with a mobile nose
(She moved in circles, and those circles moved).
Clearly “gander” and “goose” are not restricted
to avian denotations, and the “full lips” of the stanza’s
second line pucker with ambiguity. The musical references of the earlier “sing
in chorus” and “Touch” are reinforced by “played,” “quick,” “light,” and “loose,” but
those words are not restricted to a single area of meaning. The sexuality
of the final four lines is an area I wouldn’t touch with a ten-foot
rake. The woman was an instructress skilled in the art of lovemaking,
blessed with beautiful legs, rabbit-like in her enthusiasm and other “-asms.” The
parentheses that conclude this and other stanzas are reminiscent of E.
E. Cummings’ poetry in their visual demonstration of curvature.
They are sickles and they cycle. And within those parts of circles are
moving “circles” harking back to the earlier turn and counter-turn
as well as the wordplay in which the speaker/poet is demonstrating his
own virtuosity, of which only gods should speak.
Let seed be grass, and grass turn into hay:
I’m martyr to a motion not my own;
What’s freedom for? To know eternity.
I swear she cast a shadow white as stone.
But who could count eternity in days?
These old bones live to learn her wanton ways:
(I measure time by how a body sways).
The concluding stanza is dizzily and dizzyingly philosophical and fittingly
so, after all of the turning, whirling, and circling motions of the previous
verses. Note the musicality of the alliterative “martyr . . . motion
. . . my,” “freedom . . . for,” live . . .learn,” “wanton
ways” – ear-pleasing aspects not mentioned in the examination
of preceding stanzas. Reminders that this relationship took place long
ago and that the speaker is advanced in age rise with “These old
bones,” seed becoming grass and turning into hay, eternity and
time.” Ironically, the final stanza is in present tense whereas
the previous three were past tense. The woman is gone, perhaps dead if
one chooses to see a tombstone in the fourth line. The speaker has been
martyred but is still alive, perhaps a reference “la petite mort” or
the “little death” of orgasm. The woman will live on in the
speaker’s memory, and her lessons have been well learned. The musical
thread continues to click with the metronome heard in “I measure
time by how a body sways.”
The poem is a complex, lilting, playful and joyous celebration of a
woman deserving of those same adjectives.
Work Cited: Bloom, Harold, ed. Modern Critical Views: Theodore Roethke.
New York: Chelsea House Publishers, 1988. Bloom, Harold, ed. Modern Critical
Views: Theodore Roethke. New York: Chelsea House Publishers, 1988.
From my mother’s sleep I fell into the State
And I hunched in its belly till my wet fur froze.
Six miles from earth, loosed from its dream of life,
I woke to black flak and the nightmare fighters.
When I died they washed me out of the turret with a hose.
Randall Jarrell
The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner
From my mother’s sleep I fell into the State
And I hunched in its belly till my wet fur froze.
Six miles from earth, loosed from its dream of life,
I woke to black flak and the nightmare fighters.
When I died they washed me out of the turret with a hose.
Randall Jarrell
The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner
From my mother’s sleep I fell into the State
And I hunched in its belly till my wet fur froze.
Six miles from earth, loosed from its dream of life,
I woke to black flak and the nightmare fighters.
When I died they washed me out of the turret with a hose.
To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,
To the last syllable of recorded time;
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!
Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player,
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,
And then is heard no more. It is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.
Macbeth’s lines, spoken in Act 5 after being informed or his wife’s
death by suicide, are a profound statement of life’s meaninglessness.
Such nihilism and resignation have been so forcefully expressed only
by another Shakespeare character in a different tragedy.
In Act 4 of King Lear, Gloucester -- wandering the heath, blood dripping
from sightless eyes -- expresses similar despair in the play’s
most famous and disturbing lines: “As flies to wanton boys are
we to the gods; / They kill us for their sport.”
Both quotes present nihilism in its starkest form: the idea that there
is no order, no goodness in the universe, only caprice and cruelty. TThe
theme of despair in the face of an uncaring universe makes King Lear
one of Shakespeare’s darkest plays. For Gloucester, as for Lear
, there is no possibility of redemption or happiness in the world—there
is only the “sport” of vicious, inscrutable gods.
Although both plays tug on my emotions and make me question the purpose
and significance of human existence, Macbeth’s brooding speculations
are even more poignant than those of Gloucester. The latter suggests
that human life is a thoughtless, idle creation of a divinity (or of
divinities) that care(s) not at all for what we -– the creation
-- find all-important. Though we labor to establish integrity, self-worth
and a reason for our existence; to our creator we are like flies, indistinguishable
one from another,and susceptible at any moment to reasonless extermination.
In the mind of Macbeth – a heroic, tortured, super-intellectual
and fatally ambitious warrior poet – there are no divinities on
whom to place the blame. The world and the passage of time are merely “given” circumstances.
All our attempts to proclaim our significance are “a tale told
by an idiot.”
Macbeth’s reiterated word “tomorrow” is an empty and
nonspecific reference to units of futurity just as “yesterdays” denotes
that which has already taken place. Had Shakespeare been a less gifted
thinker/poet, he might instead have written “Mondays, Tuesdays,
and Wednesdays.” Fortunately he didn’t. The named days of
the week have specific and distinct identities involving, among other
things, the etymologies of those names. Thank God it’s Tuesday
(or Wednesday, or Thursday) ain’t gonna happen. Blue goes with
Monday only.
The word “tomorrow” fortuitously rhymes with “sorrow,” and
its middle syllable is accented. Iambic pentameter along with the commas
cause the repeated “and” to become accented in contrast to
the usual unimportance attached to our most common conjunction. If that
is unclear, the opening line as read by most who play the part is: ToMORrow,
AND to MORrow, AND toMORrow.
The idea of meaningless futurity is reinforced by the repetition and
the accented “and’s” underscore the idea of insignificant
sameness. The verb “creeps” is singular since the apparently
compound subject is actually a singular concept.
“Petty pace” Shakespeare’s
instinctively perfect choice to express movement in small increments.
The “p” in “petty” is consonant with the same
letter in “creeps” and alliterates with “pace.” The
usual romantic notion of Armageddon or the Day of Judgment is for the
despondent Macbeth a suffix: “the last syllable of recorded time.”
“And all our yesterdays have lighted fools the way to dusty death.”
Remember this line when you hear people say that it is improper to begin
a sentence with a conjunction such as “and” or “but.” The
introductory “And” still carries some of the special significance
it accumulated in the opening line of the soliloquy. Shakespeare drops
the preposition “for” between “lighted fools” not
only to preserve his iambic pentameter but because he intuits we will
interpret “fools” as an indirect object.
“Dusty death” is not an original concept. Dust, thou art,
and unto dust thou shalt return. In context the term “dusty” reinforces
a concomitant of purposeless travel made by all of us fools. It’s
dusty along the way from birth to death.
The insignificance of an individual life is captured in the metaphor
of a brief candle. It resonates with the earlier “lighted” and
the coming “shadow.
“Life is but a walking shadow.” What marvelous compression
of ideas and images! All of us who make our way at petty pace from birth
to death are substantial only in our ability to cast a brief shadow.
Noble Macbeth, Bellona’s bridegroom, now pictures himself as an
actor on life’s stage – one who is poor both in wealth and
in dramatic talent. Individual humans are allowed an hour on the stage
before exiting to oblivion. The compound verbs “struts and frets” monosyllabically
convey a person’s gamut of histrionic posturing from vainglorious
rodomontade to petty irritability or whining complaint.
Life is not merely meaningless but a “tale told by an idiot.” The
phrase is unforgettable because of the subtle magic of the alliterative
letter “t” and its consonantal resonance at the end of “idiot.”
The idiot tale makes no sense. It is “sound and fury” and
signifies nothing. Never before or since has the common word “nothing” thrummed
with the meaning of meaninglessness and the inscape of its components “no
and “ thing.
In Pa’s tents,
Met Trix, dependent
On stem-affixed roots.
Quaking vowels prefixed,
Restrict if in one’s colon.
Get Anna Paugh’s trophy.
My non-essential claws
Possessively apostrophizing,
Directly addressing,
Imperative in mood,
I parsed my relative
Pronouncing a position
Understood, as ellipsis
Chops and splices
My dangling comma toes.
If Gramma and a pest tick
Sponge errand agree
To verbal copulation.,
They split infinitively.
Oh what a parent this is!
“Condition’ll be dire,” he says.
A sigh lent he.
Second dairy axe
Sent Ed’s silly bull.
Says you’re
On a solar schism.
“Ah seen dat on TV.
Infinite if rays precede
Ms. Placed Maude if fires
Frag meant run on.
Dip thong and ass
So nuns in
Pair o’ taxis
Passed the sub,
Junked, if Rhett or Rick’ll
Die a gram or less in
Few sure.
Subject understood?”
“A frayed knot!”
“When you come to a fork in the road,
take it.” That remark was made by one of the few Americans who
is quoted more often than Robert Frost — an unconscious poet of
one-liners – Yogi Berra. The New York Yankee catcher was giving
directions to his home. What he said made sense because both roads ended
up converging near his home.
That Yogi-ism (collected in his book “I Really Didn’t Say
All the Things I Said”) could serve as a Shrink Lit version of
Frost’s “The Road Not Taken,” which competes with “Stopping
by Woods on a Snowy Evening” for the title of most over-analyzed
poem in modern American literature.
If we stick to the words on the page, the dramatic situation is clear.
The speaker of the four stanzas of iambic tetrameter describes walking
on a path in the woods and arriving at a fork in the road. Presumably
it is autumn since the wood is yellow, and there are fallen leaves blanketing
the two roads. The time is morning and the speaker is afoot rather than
in an automobile. He speaks of how “no step had trodden black” the
leaves that cover both roads.
Since he cannot travel both roads, he makes a choice. The road he chooses
is “grassy and wanted wear:” and it leads on to other intersections.
Works of literature are for me like buildings.
Some are elegant edifices of dizzying height and rococo embellishment;
others are simple A-frames or lean-tos with welcome mats. Some are easy
to enter; others have sealed doors that frustrate my tool kit of intellectual
lock picks and present no interstices into which to pry with my crowbar.
Most of E. E. Cummings' poems have been for me curious and playful structures
that have left me on their porches, searching for the doorbell. Occasionally
one of his poem's doors pops open and the lights blink on. His poem that
most refer to by the opening line "l(a" is one such example
of which I dare to hazard an analysis.
l(a
le
af
fa
ll
s)
one
l
iness
This particular building is a structure of concrete; that is to say
a concrete poem. The shape of the poem is actually its subject. The poem
is shaped like the first letter of the first line - letter, which in
old-fashioned typography, was not only a lower-case ell but also the
digit representing the number one.
A commonplace notion of poetry is that it is meant to be read aloud.
Cummings throws that idea out the door. This and many other of his poems
cannot be read aloud. The key word "loneliness" is broken by
a parenthesis containing fragments which, when assembled, read "a
leaf falls." There is something lonely about the image of a single
falling leaf. Archibald MacLeish, in "Ars Poetica," created
the image of "an empty doorway and a fallen leaf" and made
of it an objective correlative for all the history of grief." But
instead of trying to evoke sadness or sympathy, Cummings is playing with
us and making his poem an elaborate typographical pun. The entire poem
looks like the number one - the loneliest of numbers.
Notice the number of times that the letter "l" (simultaneously
the digit one) appears in the poem. The number is spelled out in the
seventh line. The narrowness of the poem and its spacing support the
downward motion of the falling leaf until it comes to rest in the climactic
and longest line "iness" which conveys the state of being first
person singular, with the lower-case "i" suggesting the sense
of insignificance of a lonely person. But there is more.
Taking it from the top: line one begins with the number one, a parenthesis
mark that, I suggest, looks like a side view of a falling leaf. Next
to my leaf is the letter a - the indefinite singular article in English.
Also, ignoring the leaf for a moment, "la" is the feminine
singular definite article in French. The next line "le" is
the masculine singular article, perhaps conveying the idea that loneliness
is not gender-specific. The next two lines af and fa are like the leaf
spinning around in its descent.9No, they aren't mirror images, but conventional
typography has its limitations.) If you want to argue that fa like la
represent single notes in the musical scale, I would not argue, (but
don't accuse ME of superingenuity.) But doesn't the next line blow the
whole singleness thing to smithereens? Back to back ells make eleven!
A whole football team! Yes, but etymologically "eleven" means
something like "one left over" in our decimal-oriented numbering
or counting system. What is lonelier than being the one excluded from
the group?
Then comes s). The closing parenthesis in my scheme is the falling leaf
of line one which has turned around in flight. The last three lines speak
for themselves: the spelled-out number; the numerical digit; then iness
or the state of being first person singular.
Cummings (Forgive me, Edward Estlin. My computer will not allow me to
start the line without a capital C.) is the only poet I know that looked
at the shape of letters and punctuation marks so that capital O's can
become balloons or bubbles and capital B's, overhead views of female
breasts or buttocks.. He must have looked at the word loneliness and
seen the number one (try it in American Typewriter font) then the spelled
out word followed by another number and then iness and thought to himself
how the shape of the letters reinforced the word's connotative and denotative
meaning. Cummings writes poetry that fascinates and delights.
Another Cummings gem that I feel I understand (and that should survive
translation from Word into Helium format without trouble) shares with “l(a” the
fact that it can’t be read aloud. When I refer to it in speech,
I call it “IM CAT MO) because it is tough to pronounce dashes and
parentheses. This is how it looks on the page.
(IM)C-A-T(MO)
(im)c-a-t(mo)
b,I;l:e
FallleA
ps!fl
OattumblI
sh?dr
IftwhirlF
(Ul)(lY)
&&&
away wanders:exact
ly;as if
not
hing had,ever happ
ene
D
Let us now see what kind of a concrete poem we are presented with and
try to figure out what the poem intended with his strange punctuation
and capitalization.
In the poem discussed previously, the word “loneliness) surrounded
the clause “a leaf falls.” Now we have another falling body,
but this one is animate.
The first pair of lines present the word “immobile” within
which we find the word ‘cat.” The word is presented with
hyphens -– c-a-t -- because the animal is stretched out asleep.
The abstraction of immobility is rendered visual by having the sleeping
animal be part of the adjective. When I picture this sleeping feline,
perhaps stretched out on a shelf or some other elevated object, the notion
of absolute stillness and state of being a cat are commingled.
Furthermore, the pairs of parentheses with the aid of active imagination
become the recumbent animal’s head, the c-a-t its body and the
next set of parentheses suggest its flank and tail.
In the second line the progression of comma, semicolon, and colon are
a punctuational progression of stillness. The comma pause is more brief
than the semicolon, which ismore brief than the colon.
In the second stanza our concrete poem becomes dynamic. We all know
that cats always land on their feet. This one perhaps rolls over in its
slumber and falls from whatever elevated object it had lain on. The accidental
fall turns immediately into a volitional leap. The succession of l’s
in FallleA become the cats extended legs ready to absorb the impact of
landing and the capitalized A suggests an arched back.
I’m not sure what to say about ps!fl other than to say the exclamation
point is surely the cat’s upraised tail and the dot is anatomically
verisimilitudinous. I’m not totally clear on
OatumblII
Sh?dr
IftwhirlF
(Ul)(lY)
but the conjoined words seem to effect the same transference from unintentional
to intentional that we saw in FallleA. The upright tail has relaxed into
a question mark shape. I also sense a lateral or spinning movement of
our feline in the word whirlfully, which I have stripped of its capitals
and punctuational baggage.
The three ampersands look like three seated cats. The poem was about
a single cat, but perhaps once the animal has made his successful landing
on the floor, it might tremble momentarily.
Then, the incident having caused no harm or injury, our pussycat
Away wanders:exact
ly;as if
not
hing had, ever happ
ene
D
The pausal punctuation is now in reverse order to suggest acceleration.
It’s unfortunate that you are likely reading this on your monitor’s
screen. However if you scroll back to the first printing of the total
poem, lift up your monitor and turn it clockwise 90 degrees, doesn’t
the poem have a slight resemblance to the shape of a standing cat: the
concluding capital D being its head or nose, those long lines its legs,
the title its tail?
No? Oh well. I need no punctuational emoticon to indicate that
I’ve been having fun, which is what the poem is all about.
If you are fascinated by language – by the strange circumstances that cause random combinations of consonants and vowels to have not just denotative meaning but also connotative suggestion – you need to read this book. Roy Blount Jr. has written a reference work that may have the longest title ever. To avoid an overly lengthy sentence and paragraph, I shall hit Restart on my computer to accommodate the title, colon, and subtitle that occupy the total length of the spine of the book jacket in small print.
“Alphabet Juice: The Energies, Gists, and Spirits of Letters, Words, and Combinations Thereof; Their Roots, Bones, Innards, Piths, Pips, and Secret Parts, Tinctures, Tonics, and Essences; With Examples of their Usage Foul and Savory” and, no, I’m not kidding.
The author is an American who is proud and defensive of his southern accent. He has written 20 previous books “covering subjects from the Pittsburgh Steelers to Robert E. Lee to what dogs are thinking.” He is often heard on National Public Radio’s “Wait, Wait . . . Don’t Tell Me!” and is a member of the American Heritage Dictionary Usage Panel.
Have you ever gone to the dictionary to check the meaning or spelling of a word, then been distracted by nearby words that look interesting and gotten so involved that you end up forgetting the original meaning or spelling that you started looking for? If so, this book will add an extra distraction. You may find yourself convulsed with crippling laughter. Others in the room will demand to know what is so funny, and you will be unable to explain because reading the passage that originally cracked you up will bring on a repeat laughing fit that will infect your listeners, and their laughter at your laughter will prevent or delay your getting to the end of the sentence or passage you are trying to read.
Before you criticize the length and complexity of the previous sentence, be aware that author Blount in his prologue has infected his readers with remarks such as “I hope this book will be useful to anyone who wants to write better, including me. I have written some of the clumsiest, most clogged-yet-vagrant, hobbledehoyish, hitch-slipping sentences ever conceived by the human mind.” It’s contagious.
Also, it’s a reference work but it begs to be read as though it were a work of fiction or non-fiction that starts on page one and proceeds in the usual manner to the conclusion.
However, he often puts words or phrases in boldface, signaling that you may wish to consult his disquisition on that word or term where it appears in his alphabetical chapter listing. In Blount’s words, “If you read the book the way I would read it and the way I’ve written it, you will wear it out thumbing back and forth, without ever being sure you’ve read it all.” I would counter that by the time I read from chapter A to chapter Z, I will have read large sections of the book 3 or 4 times.
A particular delight for me is that Blount discusses all 26 letters, their shapes and sounds and the effects achieved by their placement in words. What the heck am I talking about?
Consider the letter B. “It sort of looks like two lips pressed together, waiting for a vowel to give them voice, and that is bilabial b all over. It’s basic, b is. We make boo-boo sounds to babies. A hurt of mistake is a boo-boo. Bubuleh, baby, bimbo, bum, banana, burp...Boobs...” I understand what he’s saying. E. E. Cummings would probably, were he still alive, extend the visual suggestion of the capital B to include not just lips but Breasts and Buttocks.
How does this book make one a better writer? Here’s another “for instance.” All of us writer types know that we’re supposed to generate images and meaning with active verbs and well-selected nouns and gerunds. Adjectives are to be used sparingly, and adverbs like “sparingly” even more sparingly. “This advice is so very thoroughly, almost invariably, sound, generally speaking, that to take exception to it, briefly, can’t hurt.”
Getting back briefly to Chapter B, I thought I had heard or read all the Yogi Berraisms like “Half of the things they say I said I never said.” Blount, comparing Berraisms to Bushisms, relates how Yogi, while watching an old Steve McQueen movie, said, “He must have made that before he died.”
Especially if you’re a word person, read this book from aardvark to zyzzva, but don’t read it at the library where uproarious laughter is frowned upon.
(Alternate title: Gnu Clear Fission)
WOULD JEWFISH WITH ME?
‘Cause rotting in the sun, fish smelt so bad
I plaiced a tarpon a dead dogfish.
Don’t like to give my cat fish.
But since she was sniffin’ round,
I tossed a chunk of haddock to Puss.
When I had time to mullet Dover,
I snook a look, just for the halibut.
My guts began to flounder.
Never sawfish look so crappie!
Since I was near a bar ah coulda,
Put t’ rout my heaving gorge,
Drinkin’ beer til ah pee a bit.
Such was my strongest urgin’.
Didn’t do it on porpoise.
I’m hard of herring, atrophied of mussel,
And as Cod’s my wetness,
Blind as a small-mouth bass turd.
For calling Phil A. Aswhole.
Tried to buy some coke ‘n he
Had some shnook gimme a sock I
Didn’t see comin’. Woke up in
Some dungeon as I felt
A sculpin stuck in my head.
Had Paul Lock fish it out,
With his orca straw’s pike.
The one he waves to conduct
“I’ll Take Menhaden.”
“Bream When You’re Feeling Bluefish.”
“Blennies from Heaven,”
“Salmon Chanted Evening,”
“Me and My Shad Roe” and
“The Boogie Woogie Bluegill Boy.”
O No! Nearly forgot “Tuna yet? Tuna Yet?”
From “The Wet Side’s Dory”
Sung by Lou Trawls, with some grouper other.
His biggest char buster since
“Trolling Down the Reefer.”
When I graduated from high school in Spain,
We marched to Lock’s
Orcastral recording of
“Pompano Circumstance,”
By Eduardo El Gar.
Lock’s a little shrimp
Just sardine out in podnership with
Ann Jovi, Finn & Haddy.
Billed me six quid.
But…Aw, he’s to me the Manatee Hour!
No taxis in the cabby zone
So we hadda limpet home,
But nautilus’d been shad on
By a gull, my mortal anemone.
Tried to spear ‘im but he
Went off at a scallop.
“Wahoo!” Mm my w-w-w-wife like to
Laugh turbot off.
(Excuse me, I tender st-st-otter a tad,
Polish being my first lingo.)
Threatened to croaker—
I only manta rays
A noise ter clam her up.
If I smack ‘er I’ll be guilty
Of spousal mollusk station.
If you see any more res absurdis,
With which this crock abalone
Could congergate,
Let minnow.
Walleye think it’s time to reel ‘em up.
Snagged a few keepers;
Thresher otter be scuttled!
Mus’ key off now.
Sky’s misting gray.
Betta quit,
If you’ll permit.
In America we have been gifted with marvelous female stand
In America we are gifted with marvelous female stand-up comedians and columnists. Erma Bombeck comes close to being a female Dave Barry. Phyllis Diller and Joan Rivers can be rib-splittingly humorous.
The New York Times Magazine’s Questions For feature of last Sunday was an interview of Joan Rivers about her recent book “Men are Stupid . . . and They Like Big Boobs.” Asked about her eye lifts, tummy tucks, and other plastic surgery, Rivers quipped, “I’ve had so much plastic surgery, when I die they will donate my body to Tupperware.” Asked about her daughter Melissa, she responded, “The only time she really cried is when I sat her down and told her she was not adopted.”
I suspect both remarks were parts f previous comedy routines and not just off-the-cuff humor. I don’t see any woman with the constant and dependable cleverness of Dorothy Parker, journalist, light verse poet, short story writer, and Algonquin Round Table wit.
Describing her favorite cocktail, she delivered the following quatrain:
I really love my martinis,
But two at the very most.
After three I am under the table.
After four I am under the host.
To sum up her cynical view of the world, she wrote in 1937:
Oh life is a glamorous cycle of song,
A medley of extemporanea;
And love is a thing that can never go wrong;
And I am Marie of Romania.
Assigned by Vogue to write an article about the Yale Junior-Senior Prom, she was overheard to murmur as she looked at the tuxedoed Yale students and their glamorously attired dates, “If all the sweet young things here tonight were laid end to end, I wouldn’t be a bit surprised.” And why wouldn’t she deliver this in a low voice? She always said, “A girl’s best friend is her murmur.”
Some of her best known quips are “Men seldom make passes/At girls who wear glasses.”
And when asked to use a certain lengthy scientific term in a sentence, she said, “You can lead a horticulture, but you can’t make her think.” About her living quarters she said, “It's a small apartment, I've barely enough room to lay my hat and a few friends.”
Dorothy Rothschild Parker did wear glasses but not when she was out in public. Born in 1893 in New Jersey, and raised in a luxurious West 72nd Street home in New York City, she went to work for Vogue at the age of 21 writing captions for women’s undergarments. Her ability to turn a phrase showed itself early. “Brevity is the soul of lingerie, as the Petticoat said to the Chemise.” appeared in the magazine in 1916. Her obvious talent allowed her to succeed drama reviewer P. G. Wodehouse a year later. This career did not last long because she could not refrain from criticizing bad drama and poor acting. It was Katherine Hepburn in “The Lake” about whom Dorothy made the immortal wisecrack, “She ran the whole gamut of emotions from A to B.” Parker is also credited with having originated the term “wisecrack.”
About a play titled “House Beautiful” Dorothy made the two-word review “play lousy.”
We hear an echo in her review of “Winnie the Pooh,” which was too mawkishly sentimental for this woman of the world. She wrote “Gentle reader fwow up.”
There was a dark side to her humor, attributable to early death of her mother and father, shame that her father made his fortune via sweatshop labor, a dead stepmother, a brother who disappeared, an uncle who went down with the Titanic, troubled marriages and affairs. When told that taciturn president Calvin Coolidge had died, she said, “How could they tell? One biographer quotes her remarking about an abortion, “It serves me right for putting all my eggs in one bastard.” When her second husband died of suicide involving a barbiturate overdose, a disliked, super-solicitous neighbor asked Parker if there was something she could do to console her. “Get me a new husband,” Dorothy said. The neighbor expressed horrified disbelief at the tasteless remark. Dorothy countered with, “Then run down to the corner and get me a ham and cheese on rye. And tell them to hold the mayo.”
Death figured into much of her humor. She attempted suicide four times. In the 1937 poem “Resume” we find
Guns aren’t lawful
Nooses give;
Gas smells awful;
You might as well live.
She died of a heart attack in 1967. She had suggested two possible epitaphs for her gravestone. One was “Excuse My Dust,” the other, “This Is On Me.” You’ve got to love her.
Of course, free verse is poetry. As a debate topic, this rates right up there with Does Macy’s Sell Pantyhose, or Is the Pope a Catholic. To say that free verse is not poetry is to say that Walt Whitman, the father of American free verse, was not a poet at all but just wrote prose with odd line breaks and lots of repetition.
I choose to argue against what I deem mistaken notions about free verse and blank verse by writers on the affirmative side of the Is Free Verse poetry question. First of all, the terms verse and poetry are synonymous, as seen in definition 3 of that noun in the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary (OED). “Metrical composition, form, or structure; metrical language or speech, poetry.” The term may refer to a single line of a longer poem, a number of lines or a stanza of a poem or song. or a sequence of lines in music leading to a chorus or separating one chorus from another. Therefore, to say “no verse, no poetry” is equivalent to saying “no wiener, no hotdog.”
Blank verse is distinct from free verse. The two terms are not interchangeable. In modern usage, blank verse is defined as unrhymed iambic pentameter or the unrhymed heroic or alexandrine. An alexandine line differs from pentameter by having 6 rather than five feet or accented syllables.
Free verse has irregular cadence and lacks traditional stanzaic form or tradition. The French term vers libre is defined in OED as “Unrhymed verse which disregards the traditional rules of prosody.” The French did not use the term (again, according to OED) until 1900. Just as blank verse has variations and substitution of non iambic feet to lend emphasis or prevent singsong regularity, free verse often has interior rime, fortuitous end-rhyme, alliteration, and all the other terms of figurative language. Perhaps the earliest free verse, appearing before the term was invented, was the earliest English translation of the Bible.
It has also been written that vers libre was invented as a replacement of or substitution for alexandrine verse, so called because it was employed in an Old French romance about Alexander the Great. at the end of the 16th century. This is, I feel, too strict a definition of free verse, whether the term is written in English or French. Walt Whitman was not consciously rebelling against a French tradition he had never heard about. Neoclassicist Englishman Alexander Pope spoofed the 12-syllable line thus in An Essay on /Criticism in 1711:
A needless Alexandrine ends the song
That like a wounded snake, drags it slow length along.
Finally, the statement that all poetry must have meter is to exclude all concrete poetry and the innovations of literary figures like Wallace Stevens, William Carlos Williams, T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, and H.D., all of whom found the formal verse of the Victorian period stilted and employed the tones and cadences of spoken language. I would revise the opening statement of this paragraph to all poetry must have structure. Line breaks evoke voice and tone. Writers of free verse are conscious of the cadences and rhythms, and precise word selection
Alice Walker’s short story “Everyday Use” first appeared in 1973. Many things have changed since then. Afro (or ‘fro) hairdos are no longer popular and commonplace. Thirty-five years ago they were as common as the shaved heads of today’s males, both Afro-American and caucasian.
My relatively current unabridged dictionary does not have an entry for “dashiki,” the once very popular male shirt and female dress style that Walker refers to in her story -- a style that had brief popularity with caucasian purchasers as well as ethnically diverse contemporaries.
Although Arabic- or African-sounding names remain commonplace among those we today refer to as African-Americans, I have not recently heard the foreign greetings Asalamalakim and Was-su-zo-Tean-o that Walker employed with her characters Wangero and Hakim. Their use makes the story seem “dated.” Styles and haircuts change. Look at the haircuts and flared trousers worn by professional golfers in replays of tournaments in the mid-70’s and try to repress your giggles.
All of that set aside, Walker’s story addresses real human concerns that are timeless and universal. The theme or unifying concept of the story is that a mother ingrained with tolerance of a willful and demanding child will take a stand in defense of justice and fairness when a weaker and more timid offspring is about to be victimized.
The narrator and hero of the story is an uneducated black woman, Mama Johnson. There is no appearance or reference to the sire of Mamma’s grown daughters, Maggie and Dee, who has adopted the name Wangero Leewanika Kemanjo.
Mama describes herself with simply worded accuracy. She had no education after second grade when her school closed down. “I am a large, big-boned woman with rough, man-working hands. . . . I wear flannel nightgowns to bed and overalls during the day. I can kill a hog as mercilessly as a man. My fat keeps me hot in zero weather. I can work outside all day, breaking ice to get water for washing; I can eat pork liver cooked over the open fire minutes after it comes steaming from the hog. One winter I knocked a bull calf straight in the brain between the eyes with a sledge hammer and had the meat hung up to chill before nightfall.”
Not a demonstratively affectionate mother, Mama is accurately perceptive about her two daughters. Maggie is “homely and ashamed of the burn scars down her arms and legs.” She is like a “lame animal, perhaps a dog run over by some careless person rich enough to own a car.” She walks “chin on chest, eyes on ground, feet in shuffle,” painfully shy and non-assertive.
In startling contrast to both mother and sister, Dee (Wangero) “is lighter than Maggie, with nicer hair and a fuller figure.” With help from the church, Mama raised the money to send Dee to school in Augusta. “At sixteen she had a style of her own: and knew what style was.” Dee was ashamed of the family home, and there is a suggestion that she may have caused the first house to burn down, badly injuring her sister. She lives elsewhere and comes occasionally to visit.
Though she once said she would never bring her friends to the reconstructed three-room
house in the pasture, she arrives this time with a male companion whose name Mama finds unpronounceable. He suggests they call him Hakim-a-barber, but Mama refers to him by his Arabic greeting Asalamalakim. “Hair is all over his head a foot long and hanging from his chin like a kinky mule tail.” After Maggie recoils from his attempted hug of greeting, he attempts a fancy handshake that is also a failure. We never learn whether he is married to Dee or merely an acquaintance. He is a Muslim and has adopted the religion’s dietary restrictions.
Dee is wearing what Mama describes as “A dress down to the ground. . . so loud it hurt my eyes. There are yellows and oranges enough to throw back the light of the sun. . . . Earrings gold, too, and hanging down to her shoulders. Bracelets dangling and making noises. . .The dress is loose and flows. . . I like it.” Maggie is astonished at her sister’s hair, which “stand straight up like the wool on a sheep. It is black as night and around the edges are two long pigtails that rope about like small lizards disappearing behind her ears.”
Mama understands what Dee is doing with her Polaroid camera shots of mother and cowering sister, all of which include the house as well. In youth she had been ashamed of her home, her illiterate mother and homely sister. Now she seems bent on assembling a pictorial record of the origins she has transcended to become her stylish and glamorous self. She lays claim to the churn top whittled by a tree by Uncle Buddy. She will display it as a centerpiece on her alcove table. She also takes the churn dasher for which she will find some artistic use. It was whittled, Maggie recalls, by Aunt Dee’s first husband. On the handle are sunken depressions caused by thumbs and fingers using the dasher to make butter.
The climax of the story comes as she tries to add to her plunder two handmade quilts made by her ancestors from scraps of dresses, pieces of Grandpa’s shirt and Great Grandpa’s Civil War uniform. Mama remembers that Dee refused to take one of the quilts with her when she went off to college, saying they were old-fashioned. But Mama puts her foot down. Those quilts have been promised to Maggie as hope chest items for her scheduled marriage to a local man.
Dee protests, “Maggie can’t appreciate these quilts. . . . She’d probably be backward enough to put them to everyday use.” Dee’s plans are to hang them as art objects; certainly not to put them on beds for warmth. We know Maggie is upset by her sister’s presumptuous demands. She makes no verbal protest but we hear something fall in the kitchen and a door slam. To Maggie the quilts are reminders of grandparents and great grandparents. Still she is willing to part with them.
When Mama sees her homely, scarred daughter’s resigned acceptance of the divinely ordained precept that Dee always gets whatever she wants, she did “something [she] never had done before: hugged Maggie. . . , then dragged her on into the room, snatched the quilts out of Miss Wangero’s hands and dumped them into Maggie’s lap.”
Dee protests that Mama and Maggie don’t understand their “heritage.” She gives Maggie a farewell kiss, dons a pair of stylish sunglasses and drives off with Hakim. As their car disappears, Maggie smiles her first real smile, and she and Mama together enjoy a dip of snuff.
That summary fails to include aspects of Mama’s humorous self-characterization. While awaiting Dee’s arrival, she relates her dream of appearing on a televised “This Is Your Life Show” to shake hands with a Johnny Carson-type and be introduced to her svelte, stylish, successful daughter. In her fantasy Mama is “the way my daughter would want me to be: a hundred pounds lighter, my skin like an uncooked barley pancake.” Her hair would glisten in the lights and she would exchange witty remarks with the suave TV host. Returning to reality, she realizes she’s never been able to look a white man in the eye much less trade clever conversation. Such confidence belongs to daughter Dee, not to Mama Johnson.
Illiterate Mama reads people as well as a trained psychologist. She sees the artificiality of Dee’s trendy adoption of African heritage. She still has a mother’s love for this daughter whose visit proves to be motivated by little more than antique-gathering. Those hand-pieces quilts are to Mama significant and valuable in ancestral connections dating to the Civil War (not to Africa) and craftsmanship and usefulness beyond anything imaginable by her sophisticated daughter, who speaks of them as “priceless.” Let Dee Wangero impress her upscale acquaintances with the quaint churn top and dasher. For Mama and Maggie, satisfaction resides in the raked clay of her yard, lips packed inelegantly with checkerberry snuff, and secure knowledge of justice and fair treatment of family.
I rap with sod rhapsodically
I raise both hues and cries.
My posies blend melodically
In rants and lullabies.
Prim pansies ponder pensively,
In phrases frankly French,
They blush at fennel's flattery--
That seedy, seasoned wench.
Sweet violets nonviolently
Surround some sheepish phlox.
Remembrance bides in rosemary
Bedecked in lady smocks.
Bright daisies are the day's eyes
Assuring columbines:
No aphids, thrips or mayflies;
Just honeysuckle vines.
Should slugs or snails there congregate
To blight this blessed bower,
I hasten to ranunculate*
With counteractive power.
*For black-thumbs lacking Latin, the ranunculus is derived from the Latin word for small (leaping) frog. For further information on the language of flowers, consult Shakespeare's mad Ophelia in re pansies, fennel and rose
In “The Cask of Amontillado,” Edgar Allan Poe seems bent not only to the task of creating a chilling tale of a man being chained, immured and left to die in a catacomb but also to demonstrate every possible variation on the literary device of irony.
THE THREE TYPES OF IRONY
1. Verbal irony involves saying one thing but meaning the opposite. When a person caught in a violent rainstorm says, “Glorious weather for a stroll!” we know that he intends to convey the opposite idea about the climatic conditions.
2. Irony of situation occurs when events turn out the opposite of what would ordinarily be expected. It is ironic that a character who is handsome, wealthy, noble and respected should commit suicide, as does the eponymous character in E. A. Robinson’s poem “Richard Cory.”
3. Dramatic irony is what we feel when we as readers or viewers of a drama or motion picture know more than the characters. We are amused when we see the policeman leap into his car and roar off unaware of what we know -- that the car’s rear bumper is chained to a tree.
THE STORY
“The thousand injuries of Fortunato I had borne as I best could; but when he ventured upon insult, I vowed revenge.” The opening line of the story presents irony of situation.
How often have we heard: Sticks and stones may break my bones, but names will never hurt me? Poe’s speaker says the opposite. He bore injuries without complaint, but insults he will not abide. Note also the irony of the character’s name. Fortunato is about to suffer grave misfortune. The protagonist Montresor has a name that means “my treasure.” He declares his intention to wreak vengeance on the man defamed his good name.
We know that Montresor hates Fortunato, but Fortunato is unaware of this We know what the doomed character does not know – that Montresor’s friendly attitude is a fabrication of good will, that his smile is at the thought of Fortunato’s immolation. This dramatic irony will continue till the last until the final page when Fortunato becomes an initiate.
Ironically, the story takes place during the carnival season of madness and merrymaking.
The drunken Fortunato is wearing motley and the cap and bells of a jester, but a wise fool he is not. Montresor plays on Fortunato’s pride in his wine connoisseurship, asking him to verify whether or not Montresor’s recent bargain-price wine purchase is expensive amontillado or ordinary sherry. Fortunato agrees over Montresor’s protests that it would be an imposition and a health danger, since the vaults where the wine is stored are cold, damp and “encrusted with nitre.” Montresor’s expressed concern for the other man’s well-being is at odds with his true intentions.
How did M. know that no servants would be present? He had informed them that he would be gone all night and “given them explicit orders not to stir from the house.” That, he knew, would be enough “to insure their immediate disappearance” as soon as he left.
The two descend into the catacombs, Montresor repeatedly expressing worry about the nitre-covered walls and exacerbation of Fortunato’s cough. The unfortunate victim-to-be says, “the cough is a mere nothing; it will not kill me. I shall not die of a cough.” True.
Accepting a bottle of Medoc that Montresor has chosen from the many wines lying in the mould, Fortunato toasts “to the buried that repose around us,” unaware that he will soon join them. “And I to your long life,” responds Montresor.
Fortunato inquires about the Montresor coat of arms. “A huge human foot d’or, in a field of azure; the foot crushes a serpant rampant whose fangs are imbedded in the heel.” The motto is Nemo me impune lacessit -- No one can harm me unpunished. The reader again recognizes the relationship of arms and inscription to what is happening. Not so the unfortunate one.
More wine is consumed. This second bottle is a flagon of De Grave -- another turn of the ironic screw. Montresor makes sure Fortunato will continue by suggesting that they instead turn back to escape the bad air, A scene worthy of vaudevillean comedy ensues as Fortunato asks whether Montresor is a member of the masons. Montresor produces a mason’s trowel from under his cloak. Fortunato thinks it a joke, unaware that he is seeing a tool to be used in his entombment. The brotherhood of Free and accepted Masons is far removed from what has brought these two men together.
They proceed through the charnel house, passing the remains of generations of Montresors, to an interior recess. Finding the opening of the 4 by three by 6 foot chamber requires displacement of piled bones. They penetrate to a granite wall accessorized with iron staples, one holding a short chain, the other a padlock. Seconds later Montresor has his drunken dupe in chains.
Fortunato is an ignoramus – the term he uses to insult Luchesi, whom Montresor has several times suggested as a connoisseur who could substitute for Fortunato. Such name-calling may be the propensity for insult that has prompted Montresor’s deadly revenge. Even chained to the wall, Fortunato thinks it’s all a big joke and asks the amontillado. Building stone and mortar readily at hand, Montresor uses his trowel and begins walling up the niche.
As the aperture closes with each row of masonry, realization begins to penetrate Fortunato’s drunkenness. He screams and struggles. As the final stone is about to be inserted, Fortunato laughs again saying it’s all been a joke they can they can share with the revelers at the palazzo. But it’s after midnight; shouldn’t we call it quits? My wife will be wondering where I am. “Let us be gone.”
When Montresor repeats that line, “be gone” has a different meaning. Fortunato has uttered his last words. Montresor hears only the jingling of the bells on his victim’s cap. “My heart grew sick” he says. Remorse? No. Montresor blames his illness on the dampness. Shaking off his malaise, he inserts the last stone, plasters it, returns the displaced bones.
“For the half of a century no mortal has disturbed them.” Montresor has been relating a grisly event of long ago. He has indeed punished with impunity, giving new meaning to the motto on his coat of arms. The final sentence echoes the Latin of the requiem mass. In pace requiescat – May he rest in peace.
A final irony presents itself. Poe’s story “The Black Cat” is about a black cat. There is both a pit and a pendulum in “The Pit and the Pendulum.” But there never was a cask of amontillado. Is there another literary work named for a non-existent object?
A LAST TURN OF THE SCREW
One more unexpected twist came to me dozens of years after my first boyhood reading of the tale and numerous rereadings for personal enjoyment and as a teaching material to exemplify and illustrate all varieties of irony and their interplay, I had always considered “The Cask of Amontillado”a purely fictional outgrowth of Poe’s fevered imagination. Such people as Montresor aren’t realistic. Events like this don’t happen in the world we live in.
Then, curious about the life of the most bizarre person in the pantheon of American Literature, I did some biographical research. I learned that during his ill-starred career in the Army, Private Poe had been stationed at Fort Independence on an island in Boston Harbor. He became fascinated with the inscription on a gravestone just outside the fort.
He learned that the entombed soldier died ten years earlier near the spot of the grave.
Knowing there had been no military combat in 1817, Poe began interviewing officers about what had happened. He learned that a popular lieutenant had been involved in a card game with captain reputed to be a bully. An accusation of cheating led to a duel and the death of the lieutenant. The captain vanished soon after and was written off as a deserter.
Friends of the fallen lieutenant had plied the captain with liquor, carried his unconscious body into a dungeon, shackled him, sealed up the vault where he lay and left him to die a horrible death.
Hearing about Poe’s investigations, the post commander summoned him and swore him to secrecy about the scandalous affair. This took place years before Poe penned a similar story set in Italy. In 1905, workers doing repairs on the old fort, came across a walled section that didn’t appear on their plans, They chiseled an opening in the wall that wasn’t supposed to be where it was and found a skeleton in fragments of an old army uniform and shackled to the floor.
Since both childbirth and a mirror occur in Plath’s “Morning Song.” it seems natural to include this post-partum poem into the discussion of Plath’s use of metaphor.
The opening line of Sylvia Plath’s “Morning Song” combines personification, metaphor and simile in a nine words sentence. The opening word “Love,” the sentence’s subject, is a personification. The noun “love” is an abstraction. No abstraction can activate a timepiece. But the watch is not the direct object of the verb “set.” That grammatical function is filled by the pronoun “you,” which refers to a newborn infant.
The infant created by the couple and their intercourse is then compared in a simile to a “fat gold watch.” Love may be interpreted either as the act of coition or the emotional involvement of husband and wife. Whether one wants to interpret “set you going” as in utero zygotaxis or parturition lies with the individual reader. The poem is not taking a position on whether life begins at conception, fetation or birth.
In any case, the metaphorical comparison of the offspring to “a fat gold watch”
mingles concepts of plumpness and precious metal. I read the first-stanza-concluding phrase “among the elements” as a reference to the Periodic Table, where the element gold (symbol: Au) occupies place number 79. The activated timepiece is metaphorically the heartbeat and respiration of the new-born, activated by the midwife’s slap.
In the second stanza, the new baby is a nude statue newly installed in the world (a drafty place compared to the womb). Adult observers oohing and ahhing at the new arrival are garmented, safe in their immediate continual existence, and they stand like walls, not knowing what to say, though like shadows of this infant, they have all “been there before.”
Stanza three contains another simile that demands contemplation and will be interpreted differently by different readers. The speaker who has just given birth feels herself no more the child’s mother “Than the cloud that distills a mirror to reflect its own slow/ Effacement at the wind’s hand.” I read the verb “distills” not in its ordinary meaning of chemical change but as a disturbing of stillness. A child is a mirror image of its mother, but not a permanent one. As a cloud is slowly changed in shape by the wind, so also mother and child gradually alter and lose their mirror reflection moment by moment. The child begins to establish independent personhood.
During the night the respiration of infant lungs is so tiny in volume that it seems “moth-breath.” I’m unsure how to paraphrase “flat pink roses” nor the “far sea” moving in the ear of the mother. Perhaps the roses, being flat, are decorations on the bedding of the crib or the rosy cheeks from which the moth-breath flickers. My notions of that far sea sound likewise flicker between the sounds I used to hear when placing a seashell to my ear and vague notions of the timelessness of motherhood and its responsibilities. (I also recall all the sea references in Arnold’s “Dover Beach”: the grating roar, the tremulous cadence, the eternal note of sadness, heard long ago on the Aegean as it is centuries later on the English Channel. But that’s just this reader’s problem.)
Stanza five is less perplexing. The listening mother responds to the baby’s cry, stumbles heavy-breasted in her floral nightgown that influenced my earlier perception of those flat pink roses, and presumably breast feeds the infant.
Dawn’s brightness drives the stars from the window square where the speaker/mother had been sleeplessly watching and waiting. The happy infant now choruses with its “handful of notes;/ The clear vowels rise like balloons.” How can rising balloons suggest anything other than joy and contentment?
This provocative poem presents free verse as poetry packed with both clear meaning and vague suggestion to tease us into thought. Every sentence contains figurative language requiring interpretation, which will vary from reader to reader. Even the clear language of line two: “The midwife slapped your footsoles” is completed with the synesthesia of “your bald cry.” Most infants are nearly bald. All infants cry. But what is a bald cry?
The poem‘s title is also a subject for interpretation. The poetic term aubade usually refers to a morning song in which lovers wish that the “busy old fool, unruly sun” should go away and allow for further lovemaking. This is not an aubade. It is a morning love song of mother to new-born infant. The music is reserved for the final stanza where the minor-chord suggestions of post-partum depression modulate and resolve into a balloon ride.
Wordsworth’s sonnet Composed upon Westminster Bridge
Wordsworth’s sonnet Composed upon Westminster Bridge, September 3, 1802 falls into the category of Momentary Poems. The poet is describing what he sees, thinks and feels on a specific day at a specific moment. Had September 3, 1802, been a dismal day of rain, fog or overcast skies, we would not have this lyric to enjoy. Fair weather is often an inspirational awakening to the muse of poetry. Note the specific temporal and seasonal references in the following lyric of Robert Browning with its memorable final lines.
The year’s at the spring
And the day’s at the morn;
Morning’s at seven;
The hillside’s dew-pearled;
The lark’s on the wing;
The snail’s on the thorn:
God’s in his heaven –
All’s right with the world!
Though the fact has little bearing on the poem, Wordsworth and his sister Dorothy had traveled to London to take a ship to France, where Wordsworth mistress Annette Vallon was living with the ten-year-old Caroline, whom Wordsworth had sired but had never seen. The coach taking him and his sister to the seaside dock paused on the Westminster Bridge that crosses the Thames. Looking back in the brilliant morning sunlight at the sleeping city of London, the poet composed his Petrarchan sonnet in a tone peaceful and serene.
He presents a panorama of London, commencing with two metrically irregular lines of 5 accents. I will convey my scansion by placing the stressed syllables in capitals.
EARTH HAS not ANYthing to SHOW more FAIR:
DULL would he BE of SOUL who could PASS BY
(And then lines of regular iambic pentameter:)
A SIGHT so TOUCHing IN its MASterY;
This CIty NOW doth, LIKE a GARment, WEAR
The BEAUty OF the MORning: SIlent, BARE,
The spondaic substitution or successive accented syllables lends emphasis to the emotional feeling that strikes the poet. Here is a romantic who spends most of his time in the Lake Country, in fields of daffodils, exulting in an urban morning cityscape, unconcerned with the getting and spending, buying and lending that he decries elsewhere.
The second quatrain generalizes about the skyline shapes without detailing them. (And I shall abandon my scansion so as not to insult the reader’s intelligence and sense.) The poet has personified London through his use of the simile “like a garment” and the verb “wear.” The catalogue of manmade structures includes “Ships, towers, domes, theaters, and temples.” Paradox intrudes as the garment worn by the city is bright and glittering sunshine that does not conceal, clothe, or protect but emphasizes bare beauty.
The next personifications are of the sun and the river. The verb “steep” in the opening of the sestet can support a variety of definitions including cleansing, softening, bleaching, bathing, imbuing. The personified morning sun performs these actions on “valley, rock, or hill.”
The magic performed by the sun on the City, while the Thames “glideth at his own sweet will,” induces in the poet a feeling of calm, as though the personified houses were peacefully asleep, and the mighty, throbbing heart of the metropolis is wrapped in stillness.
“Dull would [they} be of soul” who do not feel the power and excitement of this lyric.
