A bit of a slow day today; only two oral presentations due to my interference. A fine suggestion was made that I purchase a timer and limit my comments to the absolute essentials.
I found in examining the listening exercises that the responses were generally quite brief, which may in part be due to poor listening skills, but may also be a necessary reaction to limited analysis. I don't know how useful the model I presented in class may have been, but I summarize here in writing what I presented in class this morning orally.
In making the oral presentations of poetry, show the ways in which the biography of your chosen poet relates to the poem. Also, in showing the subject, the speaker, the setting, the tone, and so on, make direct reference to the poem, quoting pertinent passages, to defend your analysis.
So, for example, I may give a recitation of a poem by a local poet who was active in environmental organizations, worked for a time as a naturalist, and was familiar with the nearby nature preserve (owned by PPL) called Shenk's Ferry Wildflower Preserve. The poem is entitled "From Shenk's Ferry".
This hidden folding of the land
where foxes ran beneath the grape
here the leaves mouldering lay
from soil into sky turning back
shake the bells upon the tree
like the wind of hallowtide
when the silver treehall shines
with slanting golden beams
this narrow passage of the stream
where hartstongue shoots between the stones
and rabbits bite the grass then go
beneath tanglewood to stay unseen
rise up in mists when you have passed
exhaled from loam that holds your form
you cannot last although you roar
it fades into the cries of ants
The subject or situation is the place, Shenk's Ferry, but there is also a kind of advice or command given in the second stanza: "shake the bells..." and another in the last stanza: "rise up in mists..."
The speaker would appear to be the poet, and the setting, again, is Shenk's Ferry, apparently in autumn. My argument for this is that hallowtide, referenced in the poem, is the period between Halloween and winter solstice (around Christmas): this is the second half of the autumn season. Also, the "silver treehall shines/ with slanting golden beams" suggests late autumn (and indeed this is merely defining "hallowtide", for this is "when the silver treehall shines...") because at this point in the year the leaves have fallen from the trees. At Shenk's Ferry is a great stand of Beeches, trees with silver-grey bark, and it seems likely that the poet refers to this; the "slanting golden beams" are presumably sun-beams, and the angle of the sun in late autumn is low.
However, the poem also refers to "hartstongue", which is a kind of fern which I think is not evergreen, so the poem may not be describing any particular time of year but a single place in several seasons.
The overall tone of the poem I would say is mostly descriptive, but includes some interesting commands. The first stanza does nothing more than describe the place, and the third stanza does the same. "The bells upon the tree" may be a reference to a kind of bell-shaped pod on trees growing along the path at Shenk's Ferry. I don't know what the name of that tree may be, but an observant person walking there would see them, especially after the leaves have fallen. Grapes are mentioned, and foxes, hartstongue, grass, and rabbits. It seems like a straightforward snapshot of a forest.
In the second stanza, we have the rather odd command to "shake the bells upon the tree/like the wind of hallowtide". Why would a tree have bells on it? It almost suggests some sort of decoration. But the shaking is supposed to be like the wind of hallowtide -- and what would that be? Wind is often associated with the spirit or soul (in fact, in their origins, both these words meant "wind" as well as "breath"), and All Hallow's is the Day of the Dead, so the shaking of the bells may be done by or like the spirits of the departed... and the association of the bell with the spirit is maybe pretty common.
But in the fourth stanza, the tone changes, and in light of this change the whole poem takes on a different quality: here, the listener or reader is told to "rise up in mists", which echoes the "from soil into sky turning back" of the first stanza. "You cannot last although you roar" -- so even if you do wonderful things, it is natural to die, to decay, and whatever spirit you may have will "rise up in mists", while the "loam" or soil "holds your form". The direct address of "you" engages the reader. The tone, I would say, becomes maybe a bit melancholic, or maybe stoic: we are called to accept nature as it is. We gain a different view, perhaps, of the place of the foxes which "ran beneath the grape" and the rabbits which "go beneath tanglewood to stay unseen" -- unseen from the fox? -- predator and prey, the natural cycle. And there is a larger cycle of decay and renewal in the leaves "from soil into sky turning back" and the mists "exhaled from loam" -- essentially the leaves of the first stanza are like the "form" or body (presumably human body) of the last stanza: all beings collapse, degrade, and become something new. The poet might also have noted that the sky becomes the soil as the leaves take in chemicals and radiation from the sun, and then fall to the ground.
The diction of the poem, characteristic of this poet, is limited almost entirely to words deriving from the Germanic roots of English. Only "exhale" comes from another source: Latin, in this case. English has three main elements: the base in Anglo-Saxon, a language closely related to Dutch, Frisian, Icelandic, German, Swedish, Danish, and Norwegian; a strong influence of the Romance language French (which is closely allied to Spanish, Portuguese, and Italian, all of which derive much from Latin -- hence "Roman-ish" or Romance); the third element of English is "other": words like moccasin, teepee, cannibal, tobacco, from native American languages, or algebra or alchemy, from Arabic, or geometry, logical, or synthesis, from Greek. And of course we have taken many words from Latin, like exhale or corrupt or degrade.
But this poem is mostly basic English words, although some are rare, like Hallowtide and Hartstongue, and one is a bit of poetic invention, tree-hall. Tanglewood is not particularly common, but all of these oddities are really pretty straightforward in their meaning (maybe Hallowtide not so much, and it may also be an invention of the poet, on the model of Christmastide or Eastertide).
I think "From soil into sky turning back" and "exhaled from loam that holds your form" are notable phrases, as is "it fades into the cries of ants" -- these peculiar phrases also are central to the purpose of the poem (as I understand it): things changing into others through decay. The most mysterious to me is the fading "into the cries of ants", because grammatically what is fading is either the "roar" or the "form" (strictly grammatically, it must be the form) -- since the cries of ants are pretty darn faint, that a roar would fade into them seems a sensible reduction, a deflation of ego... but for the form or body to fade into the cries of ants argues for a more complex process of change, especially since ant cries are basically chemical signals... I guess that the poet was aware of this and intended to say that the chemicals in a body break down and float around and are taken up into the ants and then sent out again in their communications -- a kind of reincarnation, I suppose one might say.
The poet uses the word "this" to introduce the first and third stanzas, which in effect divides the poem into two units. "This" also gives a precision and nearness to the poem. We may ask, as listeners or readers: "This? Which?" Since "this" is the first word, it must refer to something later, or outside of the poem -- either way we are drawn into the mystery: to what does "this" refer?
As for sound, the poem does not use rhyme, but an assonance structure based on the vowels of the final words in each line, with the pattern ABBA CDDC CEEC AFFA (this also is part of the structure of the poem, obviously). The poet has repeated sounds, not necessarily in any particular order, throughout:
this/hidden; folding/foxes; land/ran; folding/mouldering; leaves/lay; soil/sky; back/bells; bells/wind; bell/hallowtide/treehall; shake/shines; silver/slanting; wind/when/with, and so on.
A good bit of this is alliteration or "head rhyme", but again, it seems not to be in any strict pattern. It's not quite a tongue-twister, but "stream/ where hartstongue shoots between the stones" comes awfully close.
The rhythm of the piece is not strictly patterned, either, but seems just to be a natural flow, although there are some strong parallels (and here I pass over into the structure of the poem).
As for musicality, the rising and falling tones of the first line, for example "this hidden folding of the land" has a progression of rising tones in the accented syllables: this and hidden are essentially the same tone, but folding rises; the unstressed syllables are lower tones, and so the whole line together has a kind of rising and falling which creates an auditory picture of the folding land which is described.
"Narrow passage" also, because of the doubled consonants, expresses a kind of constriction (one could lengthen the words, too, but this would seem unnatural; try it both ways to confirm for yourself); here there is a quick rising and falling pattern which again suggests in a way a rocky valley with tall and close sides. Perhaps this is just my own impression of the poem, but I find that it describes not only in the meaning of the words, but in the sound of the words. I don't think it would be as effective in translation into, say, French:
Ce passage étroit du jet
où pousse la langue du cerf entre les pierres
et les lapins mordent l'herbe et alors vont
sous le bois embrouillé rester invisibles
Sure, it sounds "nice" (and French), but one could not readily force this into the structure of about seven syllables, with about four stressed syllables, per line, as in English. And of course, the assonance scheme is totally lost. And speaking of syllables, here is the way the structure of this poem breaks down.
Take x as an accented syllable and - as an unaccented syllable, and the poem has a form like this:
x x- x- - - x
x x- x -x - x
x - x x- x
- x -- x x- x
x - x -x - x
x - x - x- x
x - x- x- x
- x- x- x
x x- x- - - x
x x- x -x - x
- x- x - x - x
-x x-x - x x-
x x - x - x - x
-x - x - x - x
x x- x -x - x
- x -x - x - x
The first two lines of the first and third stanzas have identical rhythms. Other than that, the structure is not exact, but no line has more than five stressed syllables, and only one has fewer than four ("with slanting golden beams" has three, which then to keep pace with the rest of the stanza demands a lengthening of the vowels, which perhaps emphasizes the "slanting").
The overall structure of the poem is that it is has four stanzas, each of four lines, all fairly compact, ten of the sixteen lines having four stressed syllables, five having five, and one having three stressed syllables. There are 7 5/8 (7.625) syllables in each line, on average, which probably has no cosmic significance at all. But poets are sometimes peculiar about hidden messages. As noted above, the first and third stanzas are descriptive, the first including a predatory animal and the third including a prey animal; the second and fourth stanzas include commands. The assonance scheme of ABBA CDDC CEEC AFFA suggests an arc or an interlacing; it may be that a longer poem would continue with BCCB DEED DFFD BAAB, CDDC EFFE EAAE CBBC, and so on, something like a pantoum. But as it stands, we have only the four stanzas, so this is mere speculation on my part. This scheme is the invention of the poet, rather than an existing external form.
The theme of the poem, I would summarize in a single word as "recycling" or "reincarnation".
From Shenk's Ferry
This hidden folding of the land
where foxes ran beneath the grape
here the leaves mouldering lay
from soil into sky turning back
shake the bells upon the tree
like the wind of hallowtide
when the silver treehall shines
with slanting golden beams
this narrow passage of the stream
where hartstongue shoots between the stones
and rabbits bite the grass then go
beneath tanglewood to stay unseen
rise up in mists when you have passed
exhaled from loam that holds your form
you cannot last although you roar
it fades into the cries of ants
MEA.
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