Three Inspirational Thoughts of Coming Spring on New Year's Day

Photo Copyright Janet Cameron

I So Liked Spring Last Year...

by Charlotte Mew (born in 1869)

I so liked Spring last year

Because you were here

The thrushes too-

Because it was these you so liked to hear-

I so liked you.

This year's a different thing-

I'll not think of you

But I'll like the Spring because it is simply spring

As thrushes do.

Quote by WWI Poet Wilfred Owen

A Poem does not grow by jerks. As trees in Spring produce a new ring of tissue, so does every poet put forth a fresh outlay of stuff at the same season. 

Anne Bradstreet: 1612-1672 - Early North American Poet

If we had no winter, the spring would not be so pleasant; if we did not sometimes taste of adversity, prosperity would not be so welcome. 

More to read:

What I Love and Hate About Poets

Seigfried Sassoon – The Rear-Guard

Siegfried Sassoon, Wikimedia, Public Domain

The poetry of the “war poets” communicates in words the full horror of the 1914-1918 First World War. Siegfried Sassoon was born in September 1886 of a Jewish father and Roman Catholic mother, and he died in September 1967 of tuberculosis. He was awarded the Military Cross during active duty for risking his life to rescue another soldier. His German first name does not indicate German ancestry; his mother chose it because she had a liking for Wagner operas!

Poetry of Direct, Personal Experience

Sassoon’s poems, like those of his fellow-poets, Wilfred Owen and Rupert Brooke, are touching accounts of very personal experience, yet at the same time, they are often uncomfortably direct and colloquial, so that they actually accuse those responsible for the carnage. The Rear Guard is one of his most haunting poems.

“Groping along the tunnel step by step, / He winked his prying torch with patching glare / From side to side, and sniffed the unwholesome air.”

In the above lines, Sassoon is trying to convey to us the reality of being a common soldier as he “gropes” his way along, winking his tiny torch, smelling the unpleasant smells – all of these are ordinary everyday things and yet, this is an ordinary, everyday man in an extraordinary situation. He personifies, as an enemy, “the unwholesome air” The use of the past continuous tense at the beginning of the poem invites us to accompany him on this horrific journey, as he is groping, prying, sniffing.

In the beginning of the next stanza, he contrasts his plight with that of the soldiers above ground:

“Tins, bottles, boxes, shapes too vague to know,- / A mirror smashed, the mattress from a bed; / And he, exploring, fifty feet below / The rose gloom of battle overhead.”

The use of the word “rose” is unexpected and gives a mystical, sinister image of the battle being waged overhead.

Dawn's Ghost

An horrific encounter begins in the second half of the second stanza, running over into the third.

“Tripping, he grabbed the wall; saw some one lie / Humped and asleep, half-hidden by a rug; / And stooped to give the sleeper's arm a tug. / "I'm looking for Headquarters." No reply..."

"God blast your neck" (for days he'd had no sleep), / "Get up and guide me through this stinking place." / Then, with a savage kick at the silent heap, / He flashed his beam across a livid face / Horribly glaring up; and the eyes yet wore / Agony dying hard ten days before; / And twisted fingers clutched a blackening wound.”

Using rough soldier’s language in his dialogue, and rough soldier’s behaviour, Sassoon involves us in the stress and frustration of men faced with the possibility of violent and sudden death: We sense the recoil in Sassoon’s description of the dead soldier with his livid face and whose eyes still betrayed the agony of an appalling death.

The imagery at the end of the poem is stunning, with its personification portraying what these men had become:

“Alone, he staggered on until he found / Dawn's ghost, that filtered down a shafted stair /

To the dazed, muttering creatures underground, / Who hear the boom of shells in muffled sound. / At last, with sweat of horror in his hair, / He climbed through darkness to the twilight air, / Unloading hell behind him, step by step.”

That dawn should be a ghost would seem, in an ordinary world, a contradiction. There is a sense of otherwordliness in the men in the fighting tunnels, a non-humanness in their being, as well as a sense of futility, for the soldier must go on in spite of his mental anguish.

A Challenge to the Assumptions of War

Siegfried Sassoon became a conscientious objector. Through his courageous, plain speaking, both in his personal life and in his poetry, he challenged the assumptions about war in a powerful way. Here is the first paragraph of a letter, as it appears in Pat Barker's Regeneration, entitled "Finished with the War, A Soldier's Declaration."

"I am making this statement as an act of wilful defiance of military authority, because I believe the war is being deliberately prolonged by those who have the power to end it." The letter is signed S. Sassoon and dated July 1917.

Sources:

Selected Poems, Siegfried Sassoon, Faber, 1968

The Poetry Foundation

Regeneration, Pat Barker, Viking, 1991 (Please note this is a biographical novel and based on both fact and speculation. The quotation used above is a factual one.)

Anna Laetitia Barbauld – To Mr. Coleridge on Romanticism

Romanticism idealised the pastoral. Image Copyright Janet Cameron

To Mr. Coleridge was written by Anna Laetitia Barbauld to Samuel Taylor Coleridge, after she met him in August 1797. She was deeply admiring of his work and character, although, sadly for her, Coleridge turned against her in 1812, together with many other poets and critics. Her crime? - she had criticised Britain's involvement in the Napoleonic Wars. 

Tragically, Barbauld was deeply hurt by the bad reviews and did not publish anything else from that time.

Romanticism - a Challenge to the Enlightenment

Samuel Taylor Coleridge was - with William Wordsworth - a central figure of the Romantic reaction against the the Enlightenment. The Enlightenment stressed the importance of reason. Romanticism, on the other hand, idealised the qualities of intuition and the pastoral. Other prominent Romantic poets were William Blake, Lord Byron, John Keats and Percy Bysse Shelley, whose second wife was the Romantic novelist of "Frankenstein",  Mary Shelley.

Barbauld's lyric poem to Coleridge, written in blank verse, is one of romantic ideals and sensibilities, which, although a personal message for an admired poet, was also intended for publication. Her poem begins with a long, convoluted sentences that stretches over nine lines, beginning: "Midway the hill of science, after steep" and ending "Before the cheated sense."

Barbauld's language is neo-classic, and uses many of the conventions of eighteenth century verse, for example, the reversal of the order of words for rhetorical effect (inversions) and heavy use of adjectives, although it is fair to say that it is a feature of the 18th century neo-classic style that virtually every noun has an adjective. But then again, this complexity of sentence structure may well be deliberate as much as it is conventional, and is suggesting the "tangled mazes" referred to by the poet.

Barbauld's Feminine Writing

The poem is in strict iambic pentameter. In the early days of Romanticism, metrical neatness, a regular rhyme scheme and polished language mirror feminine fashion. Of course, the poem is in blank verse although Barbauld's use of assonance and half-rhyme is striking: "steep / feet" and "shapes / chase", although the rhymes are not at regular intervals. She will personalise an abstract nown by the use of an initial capital letter, following by employing the pronoun "her" in relation to it: "Nor seldom Indolence / these lawns among, / Fixes her turf built seat..."

She makes use of literary allusion, ie: that of the Greek enchantress who changed those to drank from her cup into swine: "And be this Circe of the studious cells." Circe, of course, is a metaphor for the metaphysical that Barbauld is warning against.

The Dangers of Abandoning Rationality

The poem is expressive of a futuristic fear, as she warns the young poet, Coleridge, of the danger of abandoning the rationality of science for "the tangled mazes" and "strange enchantments" of mysticism. She speaks of dubious shapes, eager foot, youthful ardour and unearthly forms to explain her fear that a talented young poet might be tempted to explore beyond what is good for him.

From a description of the journey away from the rigours of science to the enchantments of the mystical, Barbauld becomes specific about the dangers: "...and mystic visions swim / Before the cheated sense." Gradually, the adjectives become stronger, emphasising the poet's reservations about the metaphysical, for example: "And fair ambition with the chilling touch / Of sickly hesitation and blank fear."

Barbauld's lyric poem acknowledges and describes in the first half of the poem, the susceptibility that may entrap the unwary poet. "In dreamy twilight of the vacant mind," and "With moonbeam rainbows tinted. Here each mind / Of finer mould, acute and delicate." Later, the poet speaks of "fairy bowers", where she "Looks down, indignant on the grosser world."

A Warning against Abstract Philosophy

The poem laments a world that is lacking, and Barbauld's moralising, feminine writing is subtle, optimistic and persuasive as she warns Coleridge, not only against the mystical, but also against abstract philosophy:

"Nor seldom Indolence these lawns among / Fixes her turf-built seat, and wears the garb / Of deep philosophy, and museful sits, / In dreamy twilight of the vacant mind..."

Her warning to Mr. Coleridge is found in the final lines: "Not in the maze of metaphysic lore / Build thou thy place of resting! Lightly tread." She urges that the metaphhysical should be "Enjoyed but still subservient." The warning is followed by an attempt at reassurance: "Active scenes / Shall soon with healthful spirit brace thy mind," and then, in the final line, she ends on a note of optimism: "Now heaven conduct thee with a parent's love."

Through her implicit advice to deal with everyday reality, Barbauld seeks an ideal and, in this lyric poem, expresses her fear for the future loss of that ideal.

Sources:
"To Mr. Coleridge," Anna Laetitia Barbauld, Romanticism, an Anthology, Ed: Stephen Bygrave, Open University Press, N.Y., U.S. 1996.
"Women Poets 1780-1930" Romantic Writings, Ed: Stephen Bygraves, Open University Press, N.Y., U.S. 1996.

Exercises to Get You Writing Brilliant Poems

Copyright Janet Cameron

The following exercises are intended to help people just starting to write poetry by giving them an idea and a specific procedure to focus upon. A procedure that includes a few small steps, or objectives, can make the process easier to address. It's worth remembering that every sentence starts with just one word and every paragraph begins with a single sentence.

Choose one thing

It doesn't matter what subject you choose, so long as it appeals to you. It could be the sea, a cabbage, a cottage, a woodland glade, an animal or a fish. Then write a few descriptive sentences about that one thing, using all the senses, sight, hearing, smell, taste and touch.

When you have written your piece, see how many words you can remove without spoiling the prose or changing the meaning. (This part of the exercise is useful to share with a partner if you have one, so that each of you can make suggestions about how to tighten up the other's work.)

Now see if you can find more interesting words for those you have chosen. For example, "sycamore" is more specific than "tree," and "hyacinth" more specific than "flower." Now see if you can arrange your sentences into lines, making them as rhythmic as possible. You do not need to make them rhyme if you don't want to.

Write an acrostic poem

Take an interesting word: an abstract noun that denotes a quality or condition works well, for example: contemplation, reflection, or anticipation. (If you want to rhyme your poem, you might prefer to choose a word with an even number of letters.) Write the word vertically down the left hand side of your page. Each letter starts the first word of a sentence.

The final poem should, of course, relate in meaning to the abstract noun you have chosen.

Write a poem using only four senses

Choose a subject, and start off in prose. Use only the senses of hearing, smell, taste and touch. Do not use the sense of sight. This will stretch you and help you to make good use of the other four senses, which are sometime neglected if you tend to focus on sight alone.

Remove superfluous words, and again, try to find more interesting words for the ones you have. (Using a thesaurus to write poetry is frowned on in some circles, but I think it's okay when you're just starting.)

Put the prose into rhythmical lines. At this stage you can include one or two sight observations if it helps enhance your poem.

Write a haiku

A haiku is a Japanese poem of 17 syllables, in three lines, of 5-7-5 syllables. Traditionally, haiku are about nature, seasons and perception, although many poets break this rule, sometimes very effectively. Try to write with wit, close observation and poignant detail. haiku is about personal and immediate experience.

There must be a contrasting or surprising last line. No title or capital letters are needed, but you can put in a dash if you want to.

If you are not familiar with haiku, you can find many good examples on the Internet.

Try using simile or metaphor

A simile is when you say something is like something else: "She is pale like a ghost," or "He is as angry as a raging bull." A metaphor is when you say something is something else: "She is a ghost," or "He is a raging bull." Write a few sentences about how you feel about someone you know, or who is close to you.

Discard what doesn't work and try to find fresher ways of describing your feelings for that person in simile and/or metaphor. (But don't overdo it. One good metaphor is better than six poor ones in a short poem.)

Try the "13 ways of looking" exercise

The American poet, Wallace Stevens, wrote a poem called "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird." Choose a subject, anything that appeals to you, so long as it's not a blackbird. Write about it in thirteen different ways in the style of Wallace Stevens.

It might be a good idea to change your title after you have written your poem, to make it entirely your own.

Write a poem using prepositions as a springboard

Prepositions are those little words that express a relationship to another word, for example: before, after, behind, below, under, on, to, for, etc. Write a poem where each line begins with a preposition. Wendy Cope wrote a whole poem called "My Lover" using the word "For" to begin each line.

Use the same preposition for each line, or vary them if you want to. You could just write a number of different prepositions down your page, on the left hand side, and see where it takes you. You can be flexible and change them as you go along, if it helps the poem.

The best way to enhance your sense of rhythm (or pitch) is to read as much contemporary poetry as you can, and always, always, to write about what matters to you.

The Gentleman of Shalott - Ironic Poem by Elizabeth Bishop

Public Domain Cartoon

In her poem 'The Gentleman of Shalott', Elizabeth Bishop parodies Tennyson's 'Lady of Shalott' with its message of female weakness and passivity.

Influences

Among those who influenced Elizabeth Bishop were many outstanding male poets, for example, George Herbert, Gerald Manley Hopkins and the modernists, T.S. Eliot, W.H. Auden and Wallace Stevens. The poet, Marianne Moore, who was Bishop's close friend and mentor, also had a strong effect on her life. Bishop opposed the idea of a female tradition of poetry and objected to being praised as a 'woman'poet'.

A Voice of Dissent

Bishop provided a voice of dissent by challenging the patriarchal conventions of Tennyson's 'Lady of Shalott'. Tennyson's poem is well-known for its primary message of feminine weakness and male power. This destructive male power is symbolised by flamboyant Lancelot's flaming armour, while the Lady is remote, passive and unable to influence events around her. The Lady weaves a tapestry depicting nature; she does not experience nature directly. Her decision to live in the real world is not fitting for a Lady and she is, therefore, punished with death.

Bishop's 'Mirror Poem' Mocks Male Vanity  

The Gentleman of Shalott  was published in 1936. It is described by Angus Calder with Lizbeth Goodman, as Elizabeth Bishop's 'Mirror Poem', and parodies Tennyson, mocking the male sex for its self-absorption and vanity. This self-reflecting state is a fundamental condition of the gentleman's being. A useful word here is 'solipsim' which applies to the condition of people who relate everything in the world to themselves, whether joyously (manic) or gloomily (depressive). The Gentleman believes himself to be the very centre of the universe. (One might compare this to a small child buying a toy car as a present for his grandmother. He likes it, and therefore believes that she must like it too. Most children grow out of this solipsistic phase by the age of seven.)

Anti-Democratic Standards

In the poem, the Gentleman gazes, fascinated, into his mirror. The shortness and sharpness of the lines gives the poem pace and enhances the quickness of the poet's wit, for example: 'But he's in doubt / as to which side's in or out / of the mirror.' The shifting tone of these lines is echoed towards the end of the poem: '...The uncertainty / he says he / finds exhilarating.' Bishop's use of the term 'Gentleman' is deliberate and loaded with meaning within its social context, for it implies: '...an archaic, anti-democratic standard of social values,' says Angus Calder.

An Unstable Gender-Bias

There are other ways of interpreting the poem, among them, the assertion that its gender-bias is unstable. Even the shape of the poem has been remarked upon as an indication of this trend. There is a loose arrangement of rhyme. In the first and last stanzas there are half-rhyming couplets, but the middle has a more irregular rhyming scheme that led one critic, B. Costello, to comment: '...too many lines in the middle of the poem suggest Bishop's positive identification with the Gentleman.' Maybe Costello is suggesting that a certain fascination with one's own appearance is not exclusively a male prerogative and that Elizabeth Bishop, in her attention to detail, betrays her own weakness while she makes fun of the Gentleman. The jerkiness of the poem adds to its comic effect and some of the lines are farcical. 'If the glass slips / he's in a fix - only one leg...' This line also suggests a split between subject and object.

Only the Mirror Holds the Gentleman Together

Like Tennyson's Lady, the Gentleman looks at himself through a mirror, but unlike her, he is active, in control, and he can make choices. A Lady would be expected to sit passively. Nevertheless, Bishop  insists that he is dependent on his mirror. '...[T]he artist cannot by virtue of her or his occupation participate fully in the life which she or he reflects and reflects upon. Only the mirror holds the Gentleman together,' says Angus Calder. This poem is either Elizabeth Bishop's answer to the male sex, or an attempt at retaliation for the broken mirror of Tennyson's Lady and her shattered dreams. It challenges the Lady's passivity, for Bishop herself renounces, as always, the concept of 'a woman's poetry', preferring to challenge the patricarchy on her own terms and to demand inclusion as a poet whose gender is immaterial.

In 1955 Bishop won the Pulitzer Prize for her volume (containing two collections) Poems: North and South - A Cold Spring. Her Complete Poems won the National Book Award in 1969 and her fourth and final collection, Geography III, won the National Book Critics Circle Award in 1976.

Sources:

'The Gentleman of Shalott', Elizabeth Bishop, Elizabeth Bishop, Complete Poems, Chatto & Windus Ltd., London, 1991.

'Gender and Poetry' by Angus Calder with Lizbeth Goodman, Literature and Gender, ed. Lizbeth Goodman, Routledge in Association with The Open University, London, 1996.

Elizabeth Bishop: Questions of Mastery, B. Costello, Harvard University Press, 1991.

Copyright Janet Cameron. Contact the author to obtain permission for republication.

William Blake, Ignored Mystic and Visionary who Spoke with Angels

William Blake by Thomas Phillips, Public Domain

How could it happen that one of our best-loved existentialist poets should die unrecognised for his great genius - and then be declared insane?

    

William Blake, (1757-1827) was a gifted graphic artist and a literary genius who produced visionary poetry of remarkable depth and originality. Third son of a hosier, he never went to school but was apprenticed to James Basire, who was an engraver to the Society of Antiquaries.

Blake became a Royal Academy student and In 1779, the bookseller J. Johnson employed him. A year later, Blake met sculptor, John Flaxman, a man who was to become a major influence in his life introducing him to mysticism and to several other intellectuals of that time. His marriage in 1782 to Catherine Boucher, a market-gardener's daughter, was a lasting relationship, although childless.

Flaxman helped Blake financially in the publication of his Poetical Sketches in 1783. More help was given by a Mrs. Mathew to set up a print shop at 27 Broad Street in London. By 1789, Blake had published his Songs of Innocence, as well as The Book of Thel. According to The Oxford Companion to English Literature: "both works... manifest the early phases of his highly distinctive mystic vision, and... he embarks on the evolution of his personal mythology." The Book of Thel is about sexual experience and sexual initiation and introduces a parallel world. Blake was railing against the hypocrisy and restraint of the time.

William Blake the Existentialist versus the Enlightenment

Blake was much against the Enlightenment - indeed he felt it a necessity to try to escape its constrictions. He considered it a materialist philosophy with its Puritanical interpretation of Christianity. Unsurprisingly, his own philosophy was directly opposed to that of the essentialist Plato. For Plato, reason controls energy and desire. Blake, however, favours desire and energy over reason. As stated in The Oxford Companion: "Blake turns conventional morality on its head claiming that man does not consist of the duality of Soul = Reason and Body = Evil, but that "Man has no Body distinct from his Soul... Energy is the only life, and is from the Body... Energy is Eternal Delight."

William Blake the Visionary who Talks with Angels

Blake believes himself to be a true visionary, claiming to have seen angels and prophets. Yet his view of Jesus is uncompromisingly rebellious, openly expressed in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, his first actual Romantic work. This work, published 1790-3, is considered to be his principle work of prose with its paradoxical aphorisms. Among other works, his Songs of Experience followed in 1794, including the well-known "Tyger! Tyger" burning bright" and "Oh Rose thou are sick."

The imagination, Blake believes, aims at a higher reality. An extract from "William Blake," Romanticism, An Anthology claims: "For Blake the imagination is both creative and perceptive, and instrumental in the fulfilment of his revolutionary aims."

A little help from friends combined with his undeniable great genius should have brought William Blake fame and fortune. It did not. The tragedy of William Blake is that his contribution to English literature remained virtually unrecognised.

Throughout his life, Blake's work only received a limited circulation, and this was partly due to the fact that his books were all hand-printed and hand-illuminated. Charles Lambis said to have remarked to Bernard Barton in 1824 that Blake was living in poverty and obscurity.

Interest in the poet was rekindled in the late nineteenth century after a biography by Alexander Gilchrist in 1863.

Sources:

• Blake, William, Selected Poems: Blake, Penguins Classics, 2006.
• The Oxford Companion to English Literature, Edited by Margaret Drabble, Multiple, Unspecified Contributors, Book Club Associates by arrangement with Oxford University Press, 1985.
• Romanticsim, An Anthology, Edited by Duncan Wu, Mutliple, Unspecified Contributors, Blackwell Publishers Ltd. 1994.

Emily Dickinson, Poem 1737 - Rearrange a Wife's Affection

American poet, Emily Dickinson (1830-1886) was one of three children of a loving family who came to prefer her privacy and lived a solitary existence as an adult. Only seven poems were published in her lifetime although these were well-received, but her sister discovered over one thousand poems hidden away in her room after her death, mostly untitled and undated.

Her poetry has a Puritanical slant and is about love, nature and mortality. She is religious and yet often stricken by doubt, which instils dramatic tension into her poetry. Generally, the poems are fairly short and it is a challenge for a poet to establish meaning in so few words, but Dickinson's work contains multi-layered meanings.

In 1955, Thomas H. Johnson produced a three volume edition: The Poems of Emily Dickinson, containing all 1775 poems. The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson appeared in 1970.

Stanza 1

Rearrange a 'Wife's' affection!

When they dislocate my Brain!

Amputate my freckled Bosom!

Make me bearded like a man!

Stanza 2

Blush, my spirit, in thy Fastness -

Blush, my unacknowledged clay -

Seven years of troth have taught thee

More than any Wifehood may!

In this poem, the first three lines of the first stanza end in an exclamation mark, adding a keen sense of outrage to their delivery, further enhanced by the strong verbs Dickinson uses to convey the depth of her feelings. The poet's brain is 'dislocated' and the verb 'Amputate' in the next line is shocking in its implication of female vulnerability to the insensitive male. In the second stanza, it seems the poet has learned through her betrothal that marriage promises little of any value for a woman.

Stanza 3

Love that never leaped its socket -

Trust entrenched in narrow pain -

Constancy thro' fire - awarded -

Anguish - bare of anodyne!

Stanza 4

Burden - borne so far triumphant -

None suspect me of the crown,

For I wear the 'Thorns' till Sunset -Then my Diadem put on.

In stanza 4, Dickinson is comparing her suffering to to that of Jesus Christ, adorned with a crown of thorns as he died on the cross. It is a burden that she, like Jesus, is forced to endure. However, the poet hides her real anguish from the world, as expressed in Stanza 5:

Stanza 5

Big my Secret but it's bandaged -

It will never get away

Till the Day its Weary Keeper

Leads it through the Grave to thee.

Dickinson's special achievement

Dickinson's independence of spirit and the links she makes between personal experience and the universal, reveal a strongly individualistic poet. This uncompromising individualism becomes more compelling when we consider the difficulties she encountered. Clayton Eshleman, in response to the questionnaire: 'What is American about American Poetry?' says: 'At the turn of the century, American poetry, with the compelling exceptions of Whitman and Emily Dickinson, was still filled with Victorian decorum, and was a poetry of taste, on extremely restricted subjects, written almost exclusively by white males.'

To have earned the honour of being separated from this restrictive Victorian decorum and taste, and to do so as a woman before the onset of feminism, is clearly Dickinson's special achievement.

The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson, ed. Thomas H. Johnson, Faber and Faber, London, 1970.

'What is American about American Poetry?', Companion Spider by Clayton Eshleman, Wesleyan University Press, CT, U.S.A. 2001

Emily Dickinson, by Helen MacNeil, Virago, London, 1984

Emily Dickinson - Poems 108 and 303