1 00:00:03,290 --> 00:00:15,670 [Auto-generated transcript. Edits may have been applied for clarity.] Some. Welcome. 2 00:00:18,230 --> 00:00:22,700 So I will be speaking today on upping the ante. 3 00:00:23,850 --> 00:00:27,450 A word choice, quotation and allusion in poems. Raise the stakes. 4 00:00:29,730 --> 00:00:39,210 It's a cliché of the poetry workshop to talk about what is at stake in the poem, whether anything is at risk. 5 00:00:39,870 --> 00:00:45,030 I don't know what is at stake here for the speaker as a common enough utterance, 6 00:00:45,900 --> 00:00:52,680 I suspect this language enters our poetic discussions largely from Robert Frost. 7 00:00:53,760 --> 00:00:59,640 Um, a poet who like to talk about poetry as performance and as competition. 8 00:00:59,670 --> 00:01:09,990 Think tennis without a net. Consider the end of his two tramps in mud time only where love and need are one. 9 00:01:10,410 --> 00:01:18,030 And the work is play for mortal stakes. Is the deed ever really done for heaven and the future's sakes? 10 00:01:19,110 --> 00:01:23,040 The speaker of the poem is splitting wood in his yard. 11 00:01:23,040 --> 00:01:29,549 In the uncertain weather of an April day. Mud time is an actual micro season. 12 00:01:29,550 --> 00:01:35,910 Or maybe a fifth season in Vermont. I suppose this is from a Vermont travel web page. 13 00:01:35,910 --> 00:01:39,120 Ten ways to Celebrate Mud Season in Vermont. 14 00:01:39,840 --> 00:01:51,270 Um, so it's an actual time and, uh, a place he's enjoying the physical work of splitting wood with the axe, the satisfaction of a job well done. 15 00:01:51,780 --> 00:02:01,439 Um, he says good blocks of oak. It was a split as large round as the chopping block, and every piece I squarely hit fell, splintered. 16 00:02:01,440 --> 00:02:09,900 This as a cloven rock. The blows that a life of self-control spares to strike for the common good that day. 17 00:02:10,110 --> 00:02:14,220 Giving a loose my soul I spent on the unimportant woods. 18 00:02:14,850 --> 00:02:18,960 This is an angry frost. And some barely controlled rage. 19 00:02:19,290 --> 00:02:22,260 But the tramps need the work to make a living. 20 00:02:22,560 --> 00:02:32,370 Their logic trumps the logic of a poet who is doing worth the work, partly to take out his fury or frost frustration on an inanimate object. 21 00:02:33,300 --> 00:02:41,790 Men of the woods and lumberjacks. They judged me by their appropriate tool, except as a fellow handled an axe. 22 00:02:42,030 --> 00:02:49,560 They had no way of knowing a fool. And in the end, it is their practical logic that wins out. 23 00:02:50,190 --> 00:02:57,930 And all their logic would fill my head as that I had no right to play with what was another man's work for gain. 24 00:02:58,230 --> 00:03:01,620 My right might be love, but theirs was need. 25 00:03:01,620 --> 00:03:05,489 And where the two exist in twain, theirs was the better. 26 00:03:05,490 --> 00:03:10,050 Right? Agreed. But yield who will to their separation? 27 00:03:10,060 --> 00:03:14,790 My object in living is to unite my avocation and my vocation. 28 00:03:15,090 --> 00:03:20,729 As my two eyes make one in sight. Only where love and need are one. 29 00:03:20,730 --> 00:03:25,799 And the work is play for mortal stakes. Is the deed ever really done for heaven? 30 00:03:25,800 --> 00:03:30,900 And the future seeks for us? Talk here of vocation and avocation. 31 00:03:30,900 --> 00:03:41,880 Work and play and then of play for mortal stakes makes for an hour's poetica, and in some ways resembles in its rhetoric Yates's Adams curse. 32 00:03:42,300 --> 00:03:48,990 Except here one does not labour to be beautiful, but plays on work at work, or works at play. 33 00:03:49,320 --> 00:03:54,120 I think Frost describes this poem somewhere as being against Hobbes. 34 00:03:58,470 --> 00:04:01,590 And this poem in some way is maybe not the best poem to start with. 35 00:04:01,590 --> 00:04:07,650 In a talk about upping the ante. It doesn't do that move which the other poems we're going to look at here do, 36 00:04:07,920 --> 00:04:16,500 where it suddenly pushes all of its chips into the middle of the table and hazard it all on the turn of a card or the role of a die. 37 00:04:17,010 --> 00:04:20,490 But it does introduce two ideas here that are important to me. 38 00:04:20,790 --> 00:04:23,970 The notion of risk and the notion of play. 39 00:04:24,570 --> 00:04:27,809 Art is play, but important. 40 00:04:27,810 --> 00:04:32,040 Art is where something and maybe everything is at risk. 41 00:04:33,100 --> 00:04:42,190 So this talk is also an excuse, um, to look at some of my favourite poems, poems that share a strategy of this bold move, 42 00:04:42,190 --> 00:04:47,710 this all in poems that know when to hold them, when to fold them, and when to walk away. 43 00:04:48,430 --> 00:04:55,420 There are poems that do something daring with a wild card register shift an allusion or a quotation. 44 00:04:55,810 --> 00:04:57,700 Um, and I'll start with register. 45 00:04:57,740 --> 00:05:05,470 I suppose our ideas of register in language maybe come to from music register as being the range of a musical instrument. 46 00:05:05,800 --> 00:05:11,230 Um, but I also think of registers in art where, um, on a Greek vase, for instance, 47 00:05:11,230 --> 00:05:14,170 there might be a band up here and a band up here and a band up here, 48 00:05:14,170 --> 00:05:20,920 and they're different registers, but something like Athena's Helmet, for instance, might pop out into another register. 49 00:05:20,920 --> 00:05:27,280 So these are about words that kind of poke out of the register and register shift. 50 00:05:27,640 --> 00:05:36,410 Oops. Yeah. The first poem that I'd like to look at is Robert Francis's Sheep. 51 00:05:37,280 --> 00:05:43,190 If, as Frost says, the ultimate goal of a poet is to lodge a few poems where they are hard to get rid of. 52 00:05:43,580 --> 00:05:50,930 I think Francis meets this criterion, even if he is only known today for a couple of poems, including this one and the picture. 53 00:05:51,200 --> 00:05:55,100 Um, but there are 5 or 6 of his poems that are well worth knowing. 54 00:05:55,490 --> 00:06:04,820 Um, he's a poet who lived his whole life pretty much in Amherst, a place which specialises in poets that lived their whole life in Amherst. 55 00:06:05,540 --> 00:06:09,680 Um, he had Frost for a mentor. Sheep. 56 00:06:11,200 --> 00:06:18,520 From where I stand the sheep stand still as stones against the stony hill. 57 00:06:18,940 --> 00:06:28,300 The stones are grey and so are they. And both are weathered, worn and round, leading the eye back to the ground. 58 00:06:28,900 --> 00:06:32,980 Two mingled flocks, the sheep, the rocks. 59 00:06:33,610 --> 00:06:40,210 And still no sheep stirs from its place, or lifts its Babylonian feet. 60 00:06:44,960 --> 00:06:51,590 This deceptively simple poem and it is a favourite of mine, seems perhaps to have a random assortment of long and short lines, 61 00:06:51,770 --> 00:06:58,130 some humorously pulled up short, but on inspection the pattern is more consistent than it would appear. 62 00:06:58,400 --> 00:07:04,520 We have rhymed couplets of iambic pentameter that alternate with couplets of iambic demeter. 63 00:07:04,970 --> 00:07:14,270 All of the rhymes are monosyllabic, although one notes there is sophisticated rhyming across parts of speech, and all but the last four lines, 64 00:07:14,540 --> 00:07:19,610 where the sheep and the rocks at first put into relation to one another as simile, 65 00:07:19,910 --> 00:07:26,390 come to resemble each other more and more, until they are indistinguishable and equivalents. 66 00:07:27,690 --> 00:07:31,080 The idea of sheep blending into the landscape is hardly new. 67 00:07:31,110 --> 00:07:34,259 Lucretius makes a point of it in dairy. I'm not natural. 68 00:07:34,260 --> 00:07:39,210 In his first century BC didactic epic on the atomic theory. 69 00:07:39,630 --> 00:07:45,540 Um, he's talking about what it looks like to see a flock of sheep moving but at a great distance, 70 00:07:45,900 --> 00:07:52,980 often a woolly flock of sheep upon a hillside, crops a verdant pasture, all a spangle with the dews, fresh drops. 71 00:07:53,310 --> 00:07:56,700 And where the grass entices them, they wander one by one. 72 00:07:57,030 --> 00:08:02,309 As the plump lambs skim. As the plump lambs gambol and kick up their heels in fun. 73 00:08:02,310 --> 00:08:09,810 But when we view them from afar, the distance blurs the scene until it's just a patch of white against a field of green. 74 00:08:10,620 --> 00:08:16,470 Lucretius point is about movement, while Francis's is about stillness. 75 00:08:16,920 --> 00:08:25,200 But both have to do with landscape and the human eye, and both hinge on sheep, which itself is telling about the timelessness of the scene. 76 00:08:26,120 --> 00:08:32,840 Before we get to that last explosive Babylonian, which to me just comes out of nowhere. 77 00:08:33,750 --> 00:08:42,000 We have a line that seems to prepare us for an upping of the ante, a slight raising of the stakes before the poem goes all in. 78 00:08:42,420 --> 00:08:44,520 And that word to me is weather worn. 79 00:08:45,060 --> 00:08:55,110 It takes up a full three syllables of octal syllabic real estate, and that second line of the couplet leading the eye back to the ground, 80 00:08:55,440 --> 00:09:05,010 is language from art history or art appreciation, the ground being literal ground, but perhaps also the ground of a painting. 81 00:09:05,310 --> 00:09:10,200 Leading the eye suggests painterly intent. So something enters. 82 00:09:10,620 --> 00:09:14,910 Something human enters the picture at that moment, a kind of time fullness. 83 00:09:15,450 --> 00:09:24,660 But Babylonian, this takes up at least four syllables, arguably five, even expanding the syllabic real estate to nine syllables. 84 00:09:24,990 --> 00:09:28,559 What to even say here? Nothing prepares us for it, and we are left dazed. 85 00:09:28,560 --> 00:09:32,200 Or I am left dazed. What register would you even call it? 86 00:09:32,220 --> 00:09:36,300 It's not Anglo-Saxon. Mesopotamian, Assyrian. 87 00:09:36,930 --> 00:09:41,790 Here I am reading a poem. I think I'm in Massachusetts, looking at some old dirty sheep. 88 00:09:41,790 --> 00:09:47,970 And whether worn rocks. We go from timelessness to deep historical time in an instant. 89 00:09:48,330 --> 00:09:57,330 And I can see those Babylonian faces stony, impassive, curled about with stylised wool and coiling horns. 90 00:09:57,630 --> 00:10:03,240 The end makes me want to just reread the poem and have the explosion again. 91 00:10:04,120 --> 00:10:10,630 It's the simplicity of a children's poem and the ancient wisdom of a cuneiform tablets. 92 00:10:13,640 --> 00:10:22,510 That's a nice sheep. Let's look at another poem that makes a similar move, if to a somewhat different effect. 93 00:10:24,420 --> 00:10:33,190 Michael Donaghy, an American born poet of Irish ancestry who lived much of his creative life in London, died at the age of 50. 94 00:10:33,210 --> 00:10:40,680 20 years ago this year. He is a poet whose every poem seems to approach its subject by a different strategy. 95 00:10:41,010 --> 00:10:49,380 They are each as strikingly different as poems with a family resemblance can possibly be, and this is a favourite of mine. 96 00:10:49,770 --> 00:10:53,650 The Buckeye. Look out, slim! 97 00:10:53,670 --> 00:10:58,770 These girls are trouble. You dance with them, they dance you back. 98 00:10:58,770 --> 00:11:03,660 They talk it broad, but they want it subtle. And you got too much mouth for that. 99 00:11:04,590 --> 00:11:10,020 Their secret grooves, their sacred grove. Not clever, not ever nor loud nor flaunt. 100 00:11:10,020 --> 00:11:13,380 I know you, slim. You're a jerk for love. 101 00:11:13,650 --> 00:11:16,650 The way you talk is the what you want. 102 00:11:17,220 --> 00:11:22,650 You want numbers, you want names. You want to cheat at Rouge and Noir. 103 00:11:22,650 --> 00:11:26,400 But these are initiated dames. 104 00:11:27,030 --> 00:11:30,360 The how they move is the what they are. 105 00:11:31,930 --> 00:11:38,620 The title efficiently tells us that we should be holding Euripides play about the arrival of Dionysus to Thebes in mind, 106 00:11:39,160 --> 00:11:49,060 with its prudish and narrow minded leader, pantheist Saruman, who is doomed to be ripped apart by raving meanies including his own mother. 107 00:11:50,010 --> 00:11:55,860 Already. There's a pleasing dissonance of the title and the insouciance of the first line, the Bacardi. 108 00:11:56,760 --> 00:12:00,810 Look out, slim! These girls are trouble, slim. 109 00:12:00,840 --> 00:12:07,260 Seems to me the right word for the kind of abstemious, thin skinned person. 110 00:12:07,260 --> 00:12:10,530 Pantheist is a guy unaware of his own naivety. 111 00:12:10,710 --> 00:12:13,710 Who will serve, who will learn to be sorry. All right. 112 00:12:14,400 --> 00:12:18,630 The poem's not even 14 lines long. It zips past. 113 00:12:18,900 --> 00:12:23,730 Slim thinks he knows a thing or two, and he even cheats at cards. 114 00:12:24,420 --> 00:12:34,770 Rouge noir. I had to look up. It's another name for patience or solitaire, although solitaire would fit the metre and the rhyme scheme. 115 00:12:35,800 --> 00:12:39,630 But perhaps it also, with its red and black, suggests roulette. 116 00:12:40,390 --> 00:12:46,630 The ruse suggests to me the sophistication of the women who aren't as innocent as they seem. 117 00:12:47,170 --> 00:12:50,590 And the noir brings in a whole genre of film. 118 00:12:50,950 --> 00:12:56,470 Indeed, this poem made me realise how brilliant it would be to do the Buckeye as film noir. 119 00:12:56,500 --> 00:13:03,940 It fits perfectly. Don't even get me started. So I think that rosy noir ups the ante a bit. 120 00:13:04,390 --> 00:13:09,610 The French presents a different, more sophisticated register to slim or jerk, 121 00:13:10,270 --> 00:13:17,920 as there is a dissonance between Secret Groove and Sacred Grove, where we have a sobering even of the vowels. 122 00:13:18,490 --> 00:13:23,230 But the word that says all in to me is initiated. 123 00:13:23,950 --> 00:13:29,680 Again, its expansion of syllabic real estate says something about its weight and importance. 124 00:13:30,070 --> 00:13:38,740 There is no other word in the poem longer than two syllables, and a preponderance of the words in the poem are monosyllables and sort of Anglo-Saxon. 125 00:13:39,190 --> 00:13:42,560 But this word makes my hairs stand on end. 126 00:13:42,580 --> 00:13:46,810 Dionysus is present. The situation is serious. 127 00:13:47,110 --> 00:13:52,390 It is real. And I like how this adjective is attached to Dean's. 128 00:13:52,900 --> 00:13:57,370 A hard bitten word right out of film noir like broad. 129 00:13:57,850 --> 00:14:04,660 But here that is elevated as the veil is dropped from our eyes without initiated to see an older meaning. 130 00:14:04,930 --> 00:14:08,350 Ladies of rank and station and power. 131 00:14:08,710 --> 00:14:12,310 Slim pantheist doesn't have chance. 132 00:14:15,000 --> 00:14:21,510 I'm going to move from Register to Illusion. And I would just like to point out that play is at the heart of illusion. 133 00:14:21,510 --> 00:14:29,579 Illusion, after all, has the word play inside of it and lootera um, to play towards or at to wink at. 134 00:14:29,580 --> 00:14:34,470 Maybe we might say illusion is playful and it is a pleasure. 135 00:14:35,010 --> 00:14:41,430 I think this would be clearer if we literary types were referred to illusions as Easter eggs, 136 00:14:41,790 --> 00:14:45,059 the way people who consume popular culture and video games refer to those 137 00:14:45,060 --> 00:14:50,550 inside jokes that reveal another level of the game the pleasure of recognition, 138 00:14:50,730 --> 00:14:55,860 the reward of paid attention, the wink and elbow language of delight. 139 00:14:56,520 --> 00:15:04,050 Illusion is often not pivotal to the comprehension of a work, but it is pivotal to the full enjoyment of it. 140 00:15:04,410 --> 00:15:09,450 And, um, I'm going to take this opportunity to look at another favourite poem of mine. 141 00:15:09,570 --> 00:15:16,200 Just a whole anthology of favourite poems, um, in a skiing road July evening by Patrick Kavanagh. 142 00:15:17,760 --> 00:15:24,450 The bicycles go by in twos and threes, there's a dance and Billy Brennan's barn tonight. 143 00:15:24,750 --> 00:15:30,360 And there's the half talk, Code of Mysteries and the wink and elbow language of delight. 144 00:15:31,020 --> 00:15:34,679 8:30. And there is not a spot upon a mile of road. 145 00:15:34,680 --> 00:15:38,340 No shadow thrown that might turn out a man or woman. 146 00:15:38,670 --> 00:15:42,750 Not a foot for tapping sequences of stone. 147 00:15:43,590 --> 00:15:49,830 I have what every poet hates. In spite of all the solemn talk of contemplation. 148 00:15:50,370 --> 00:15:59,220 Oh, Alexander Selkirk knew the plight of being king and government, a nation, a road, a mile of kingdom. 149 00:15:59,670 --> 00:16:03,120 I am king of banks and stones. 150 00:16:03,120 --> 00:16:14,170 And every blooming thing. I hardly know of a more charming sonnet, and its use of proper nouns is unparalleled, 151 00:16:14,470 --> 00:16:22,660 from the date line of the title to the inclusive familiarity of Billy Brennan, someone whom, it seems it feels like we ought to know. 152 00:16:23,080 --> 00:16:30,100 But you will see where I'm going here and where. For me, the poem lets me know this poem is playing for higher stakes. 153 00:16:31,970 --> 00:16:37,650 When I share this poem in workshops or seminars, I always wait a while before glossing. 154 00:16:37,670 --> 00:16:43,760 Alexander Selkirk. I think the poem works without our knowing exactly who he is. 155 00:16:44,510 --> 00:16:50,120 The name has a formality and grandeur in which Billy Brandon is entirely lacking. 156 00:16:51,050 --> 00:16:54,620 Alexander, after all, is the name of a conquering emperor. 157 00:16:54,980 --> 00:17:03,460 It's registered as Greek and ancient. Selkirk also feels to me hard and exotic, and shares with Alexander those hard choices. 158 00:17:03,920 --> 00:17:10,610 Um, it means a whole church. But as far as, uh, an American reader like me is concerned, it might be Seleucid. 159 00:17:11,300 --> 00:17:19,100 Um, Kavanagh could have written Robinson Crusoe here, and it would just about fit and scan the same just about. 160 00:17:19,340 --> 00:17:25,100 Anyway, it could be slotted in here and it would be a much more obvious and accessible allusion. 161 00:17:25,790 --> 00:17:30,080 But Alexander Selkirk goes beyond allusion to Easter egg. 162 00:17:30,110 --> 00:17:38,240 Statius Robinson Crusoe is based on the real life misadventures of the Scottish privateer and casts castaway Alexander Selkirk, 163 00:17:38,690 --> 00:17:46,970 but somehow having the real life person with his less well-known name and certainly his less English sounding name to me, 164 00:17:47,330 --> 00:17:56,130 both seems to call on a more private myth, and seems to place Billy Brannan and the speaker in that world as much as vice versa. 165 00:17:56,150 --> 00:17:58,370 He might be someone the speaker knew as well. 166 00:17:59,350 --> 00:18:09,670 The poem's earlier readers might have known about Selkirk from another poem, which was available in the widely popular Palgrave Golden Treasury. 167 00:18:10,030 --> 00:18:19,210 William Cooper's 1780 To the Solitude of Alexander Selkirk, which begins I am monarch of all I surveyed. 168 00:18:19,450 --> 00:18:24,700 My right there is none to dispute. From the centre all round to the sea I am Lord of the thousand. 169 00:18:24,700 --> 00:18:28,450 The brute of solitude. Where are they charms that sages have seen. 170 00:18:28,450 --> 00:18:33,430 And they face, but are dwell in the midst of alarms. Then rain in this horrible place. 171 00:18:33,820 --> 00:18:37,420 Um. This is where the phrase monarch of all I survey comes from. 172 00:18:38,020 --> 00:18:45,610 Um. It's a case where the reference of the poem has probably become more exotic and strange with time. 173 00:18:46,090 --> 00:18:54,129 Um, but I think the move of invoking Selkirk is a bold play nonetheless, and the whole poem lands on that splendid, 174 00:18:54,130 --> 00:19:01,000 shimmering pun, every blooming thing, as the rather strange raising of the stakes beautifully pays off. 175 00:19:01,240 --> 00:19:07,479 So Kavanagh does something similar, although to different effects, with proper names in his powerful sonnet epic. 176 00:19:07,480 --> 00:19:18,400 But I'm not going to look at that one today. Dreams on 14. 177 00:19:19,770 --> 00:19:24,780 Is the most famous or anyway the most anthologised of Bergmans dream songs. 178 00:19:25,170 --> 00:19:33,090 Um, something about it being 14 and having a kind of strong vault into it makes me think of it as sonnet like, even though it's not 14 lines. 179 00:19:33,980 --> 00:19:43,010 The Dream songs feature John Berman's alter ego Henry, of whom he says he is an imaginary character, 180 00:19:43,340 --> 00:19:48,169 not the poet, not me, a white American in early middle age, 181 00:19:48,170 --> 00:19:53,950 sometimes in blackface that has proved problematic, who has suffered an irreversible loss, 182 00:19:53,960 --> 00:19:58,850 and later in an interview, he says, Henry does resemble me and I resemble Henry. 183 00:19:59,150 --> 00:20:01,220 But on the other hand, I am not Henry. 184 00:20:01,250 --> 00:20:08,989 You know, I pay income tax, Henry pays no income tax, and bats come over and stall in my hair and [INAUDIBLE] them. 185 00:20:08,990 --> 00:20:12,530 I'm not Henry. Henry doesn't have any bats. 186 00:20:13,970 --> 00:20:20,780 So there are some bats in the belfry here. You will guess. Probably where I am going in this poem and where my attention falls. 187 00:20:21,560 --> 00:20:25,280 Life, friends, is boring. We must not say so. 188 00:20:25,610 --> 00:20:29,740 After all the sky flashes the great seasons. 189 00:20:29,750 --> 00:20:42,080 We ourselves flash and yearn. And moreover, my mother told me as a boy repeatedly ever to confess you're bored means you have no inner resources. 190 00:20:42,830 --> 00:20:49,520 I conclude now I have no inner resources because I am heavy, bored people's bore me. 191 00:20:49,850 --> 00:20:54,260 Literature bores me, especially great literature. 192 00:20:54,710 --> 00:21:03,200 Henry bores me with his plights and gripes as bad as Achilles, who loves people and valiant art, which bores me. 193 00:21:03,500 --> 00:21:07,610 And the tranquil hills and gin look like a drag. 194 00:21:07,610 --> 00:21:18,950 And somehow a dog has taken itself and its tail considerably away into mountains where sea or sky leaving behind me wag. 195 00:21:21,080 --> 00:21:27,410 We have two proper names in the poem Henry capitalised and Achilles not capitalised. 196 00:21:27,950 --> 00:21:34,460 Achilles is, for me the poem's hinge, the poem's joint, the poem's heel. 197 00:21:35,210 --> 00:21:38,840 It changes everything before it, and it changes everything after it. 198 00:21:38,870 --> 00:21:47,090 It seems to come out of nowhere. Henry is as bad as Achilles, whose plights and gripes make up the kernel of the West's fundamental epic. 199 00:21:48,120 --> 00:21:57,390 Achilles is the point at which the speaker's boredom and irritation climaxes, but it also changes what went before. 200 00:21:58,110 --> 00:22:02,100 Achilles is himself a figure of rage and boredom and irritation. 201 00:22:02,370 --> 00:22:07,320 Staying out of battle and sullenly and sulkily strumming his lyre by the sea. 202 00:22:08,130 --> 00:22:13,800 But even before that, almost his first conversation in the poem is with whom? 203 00:22:14,100 --> 00:22:23,730 It's with his mother, a sea goddess who listens to his plights and gripes and promises to take them to Zeus, the flashing sky god. 204 00:22:24,390 --> 00:22:31,410 So Achilles takes us back to that conversation of mother and son, and to the sea and the sky at the beginning of the poem. 205 00:22:31,890 --> 00:22:38,340 Um, and after the poem it is enlarged, um, by this crisis. 206 00:22:38,430 --> 00:22:48,180 We have tranquil hills, which contains all of the sounds of Achilles and the eye, and the double L connects them visually. 207 00:22:48,420 --> 00:22:53,490 So Achilles almost dissolves and becomes tranquil hills and gin. 208 00:22:54,150 --> 00:23:01,980 The poem is enlarged by the crisis, but unlike Achilles in great literature, and ends on what I think of as a celestial dog, 209 00:23:02,310 --> 00:23:10,020 considerably for me, always contains stars disappearing into mountains or sea or sky. 210 00:23:10,230 --> 00:23:19,320 A relief from Henry and the self. It's a short poem of huge shifts and scope, ending on a pun of a monosyllable. 211 00:23:19,590 --> 00:23:23,910 The wag of the dog. The speaker as wag. 212 00:23:25,980 --> 00:23:31,290 Now you may be saying at this point, Alicia, aren't you really just talking about the kitty? 213 00:23:33,050 --> 00:23:37,780 Many of my examples are classical allusions, and I had better lay my cards on the table. 214 00:23:37,790 --> 00:23:45,800 Here is what I am talking about Philip Larkin's dismissive the common myth Kitty a figure of speech itself arguably from cards, 215 00:23:46,160 --> 00:23:51,170 the kiddie being the common fund of money, um, at stake in the middle of the table. 216 00:23:51,650 --> 00:23:54,470 And maybe what I am talking about is the myth kiddie. 217 00:23:54,740 --> 00:24:02,540 Classical references do tend to leap out to me, and it is possible that these are quite personal reactions, not readily transferable. 218 00:24:02,540 --> 00:24:10,699 Results may vary. Um, if we look at his statement as a guiding principle, I believe that every poem must be its own, 219 00:24:10,700 --> 00:24:17,479 solely so freshly created universe, and therefore have no belief in tradition or a common myth, 220 00:24:17,480 --> 00:24:22,850 kiddie or casual allusions in poems to other poems or poets, which last, 221 00:24:22,850 --> 00:24:29,450 I find unpleasantly like the talk of literary unders, trappers letting you see they know the right people. 222 00:24:30,170 --> 00:24:35,990 Yes. So, um, the statement, uh actually comes with a footnote. 223 00:24:36,440 --> 00:24:44,059 When de J. Enright was compiling poets of the 1950s, he wrote to his contributors asking for a brief statement of their views on poetry. 224 00:24:44,060 --> 00:24:47,600 I assumed he would use their replies as raw material for an introduction. 225 00:24:47,810 --> 00:24:55,320 I was rather dashed to find them printed verbatim. So it's a curiously snobbish, anti snobbish statement. 226 00:24:55,380 --> 00:25:05,370 People, though people tend to know when they read poets writing about poetry and about in about what put say about themselves in their poems. 227 00:25:05,640 --> 00:25:07,150 People take that with a grain of salt. 228 00:25:07,170 --> 00:25:13,590 But what I have noticed is people do not lend that great of thought to what poem poets write about in prose, about their poetry. 229 00:25:13,740 --> 00:25:23,610 But let me tell you, that is just as suspect. After all, this is a poet whose most famous poem takes its somewhat inscrutable title. 230 00:25:23,610 --> 00:25:30,780 This be the verse from Robert Louis Stevenson s Requiem and his poem A grep out groping back to bed after 231 00:25:30,780 --> 00:25:37,560 a [INAUDIBLE] takes for its title the sad steps of Sydney's sublime sonnet from masterful and stellar, 232 00:25:37,860 --> 00:25:41,370 with how sad steps O moon that climb us the skies. 233 00:25:41,640 --> 00:25:45,540 It would be hard to be more obliquely name dropping than that. 234 00:25:46,750 --> 00:25:52,900 Miss Kitty intrigues me again, because it's the part in a card game where all the money is gathered. 235 00:25:53,230 --> 00:25:59,860 But I should just say I am fond of tradition and the common miss Kitty, and casual allusions in poems to other poems or poets, 236 00:26:00,310 --> 00:26:05,050 but done in such a way as to surprise and enlarge the scope of the poem. 237 00:26:05,320 --> 00:26:10,750 And I note just a few sentences before this famous abjuration, Larkin remarks. 238 00:26:11,200 --> 00:26:19,840 In fact, it would be true to say that I make a point of not knowing what poetry is, or how to read a page, or about the function of myth. 239 00:26:21,450 --> 00:26:30,360 I was thinking of an example. Maybe, um, where just invoking classical references does not, I think, raise the ante. 240 00:26:30,660 --> 00:26:37,290 And my view would be the world is too much with this, um, where we end with Proteus and Triton, 241 00:26:37,650 --> 00:26:42,330 um, a kind of winding up of the poem there in a counterfactual statement. 242 00:26:42,660 --> 00:26:50,460 Um, they are beautiful, but rather melancholy and ornamental, and I almost feel like they're coming out of a painting or something. 243 00:26:50,850 --> 00:26:59,610 Um, Ozymandias, though I will say, I think is making that move partly because of what seems to be the low stakes of the beginning of the poem. 244 00:26:59,880 --> 00:27:05,370 I met a traveller from an antique land who said, and although he has, um, 245 00:27:05,370 --> 00:27:11,340 shown his tipped his hand a little bit with the title Ozymandias takes up enormous real estate. 246 00:27:11,760 --> 00:27:15,850 It is an exotic Greek version of Ramses the Second. 247 00:27:15,870 --> 00:27:22,290 So it's already slightly distance to us. It's the biggest word, but the second biggest, I think, is pedestal. 248 00:27:22,800 --> 00:27:29,030 And it's interesting to me. Or that's one of the second biggest words. Um, how pedestal and aussi mandalas are inverted. 249 00:27:29,040 --> 00:27:32,069 It's almost as if, um, Ozzy man is just upside down. 250 00:27:32,070 --> 00:27:35,490 So I think one of these works this way and one of these doesn't. 251 00:27:37,060 --> 00:27:45,140 Um. In terms of non-classical examples, 252 00:27:45,410 --> 00:27:53,989 I think generally my examples of this upping the ante come where you would expect a poem to raise the stakes three quarters through the poem, 253 00:27:53,990 --> 00:28:01,760 as in Ozymandias, or right at the very end. Occasionally the upping upped the ante is, though, from the get go or the first stanza, 254 00:28:02,120 --> 00:28:08,270 keeping the poem in a high state of tension from the beginning, as the reader wonders how the bets going to pay off. 255 00:28:08,630 --> 00:28:15,800 Um, two examples of this spring to mind Elizabeth Bishop Sandpiper and Robert Frost provide provide, which we will also look at. 256 00:28:18,140 --> 00:28:24,710 The roaring alongside he takes for granted. And then every so often the world is bound to shake. 257 00:28:25,340 --> 00:28:31,610 He runs, he runs to the south, cynical, awkward, in a state of controlled panic. 258 00:28:32,000 --> 00:28:36,880 A student of Blake. The beats, hisses like fat. 259 00:28:37,480 --> 00:28:45,280 On his left. A sheet of interrupting water comes and goes and glazes over his dark and brittle feet. 260 00:28:46,060 --> 00:28:58,330 He runs. He runs straight through it, watching his toes, watching rather the spaces of sand between them, where no detail too small. 261 00:28:58,660 --> 00:29:04,210 The Atlantic drains rapidly backwards and downwards as he runs. 262 00:29:04,450 --> 00:29:08,980 He stares at the dragon grains. The world is a mist. 263 00:29:09,460 --> 00:29:14,780 And then the world is minute and vast and clear. 264 00:29:14,800 --> 00:29:18,580 The tide is higher or lower. He couldn't tell you which. 265 00:29:18,940 --> 00:29:22,540 His beak is focussed. He is preoccupied. 266 00:29:22,540 --> 00:29:26,110 Looking for something. Something. Something. 267 00:29:26,680 --> 00:29:29,680 Poor bird. He is obsessed. 268 00:29:30,130 --> 00:29:36,520 The millions of grains are black, white, tan and grey mixed with quartz grains. 269 00:29:36,790 --> 00:29:46,460 Rose and amethyst. In this playful poem, a precise observation, um, and of course, thus making it also an artist poetica. 270 00:29:46,850 --> 00:29:51,440 And if there is a better sound description than the beach hisses like fat, I do not know it. 271 00:29:51,440 --> 00:29:59,200 And I always think of this poem when cooking bacon. I'm always tickled at the point where Bishop calls the sandpaper. 272 00:29:59,200 --> 00:30:07,960 The sandpaper. A student of Blake. For me, this deliberately literary allusion is almost a breaking of the fourth wall of the poem, 273 00:30:08,440 --> 00:30:12,280 which on one level purports to simply describe the actions of the sandpaper. 274 00:30:12,280 --> 00:30:20,380 But no. Here is a poem. Pay attention to its poem. This, um, sets out in the very first stanza, but then drops it entirely. 275 00:30:21,130 --> 00:30:27,700 Blake rhymes conveniently with shake, but then so would a weight, which might work just as well. 276 00:30:28,240 --> 00:30:33,340 Almost just as well. Indeed, Bishop could have tucked Blake safely into an epigraph, 277 00:30:33,760 --> 00:30:38,680 and even given us the reference directly from Auguries of innocence to see a world in a 278 00:30:38,680 --> 00:30:45,280 grain of sand and a heaven in a wild flower holds infinity in the palm of your hand, 279 00:30:45,550 --> 00:30:49,150 and eternity in an hour. But she doesn't. 280 00:30:49,960 --> 00:30:57,970 She makes the sandpiper a student of Blake, and I have an image of a student flipping through pages in a controlled panic before an exam. 281 00:30:58,750 --> 00:31:05,139 We don't need to know the line from Blake to enjoy or appreciate the poem, but I think it does up the ante, 282 00:31:05,140 --> 00:31:09,700 I think, to connect the poem in this way to auguries of innocence and to the world. 283 00:31:09,970 --> 00:31:14,260 Heaven, infinity and eternity does something to stand. 284 00:31:14,260 --> 00:31:24,160 Paper is a failed student of Blake, not seeing the world in a grain of sand, but seeing the grains of sand in the world, seeing things as they are. 285 00:31:24,760 --> 00:31:30,309 I would also say that Amethyst. Um, if not, maybe a upping of the stakes here. 286 00:31:30,310 --> 00:31:39,840 Is it paying off? Um, there at the very end, in its jewelled Greek register, um, and amethyst means sober or, um, drunk. 287 00:31:39,850 --> 00:31:44,499 So there's a kind of wakefulness, I think. And amethyst kissing at the ends. 288 00:31:44,500 --> 00:31:48,040 Like fact. Like the withdrawal of the tide. 289 00:31:53,230 --> 00:32:02,059 France. Provide. Provide. Is the subject of an anecdote of Robert Fitzgerald, um, 290 00:32:02,060 --> 00:32:08,930 that he and Robert Gerald and Randall Gerald were floating in a quarry pool in Ohio when they were at Kenyon, 291 00:32:09,470 --> 00:32:16,190 when Gerald suddenly realised he knew, without having made any conscious effort, the entire poem by heart. 292 00:32:16,460 --> 00:32:20,660 He started quoting it and realised he had effortlessly memorised this poem, 293 00:32:20,960 --> 00:32:25,700 the strong beginning, perhaps as a way of imprinting on the memory all that follows. 294 00:32:26,540 --> 00:32:31,249 Um, so the poem makes a move now familiar to us, although extremely rare, 295 00:32:31,250 --> 00:32:39,410 and Frost himself and Frost is much better at adhering to Larkin's stewing of allusion and name dropping um, than Larkin. 296 00:32:39,950 --> 00:32:42,440 Um, but here is the exception to prove the rule. 297 00:32:44,070 --> 00:32:54,840 Provides provide the witch that came, that withered hag to wash the steps with pale and rag was once the beauty of a shack. 298 00:32:55,200 --> 00:33:05,520 The picture pride of Hollywood. Too many and too many fall from great and good for you to doubt the livelihood. 299 00:33:07,590 --> 00:33:11,940 Die early and avoid the fate. Or, if predestined to die late. 300 00:33:12,180 --> 00:33:18,810 Make up your mind to die and state. Make the whole stock exchange your own. 301 00:33:19,200 --> 00:33:23,760 If need be. Occupy a throne where nobody can call you crone. 302 00:33:24,420 --> 00:33:29,400 Some have relied on what they knew, others on simply being true. 303 00:33:29,790 --> 00:33:39,720 What works for them might work for you. No memory of having starred atones for later disregard or keeps the end from being hard. 304 00:33:40,110 --> 00:33:46,290 Better to go down dignified with button friendship at your side than none at all. 305 00:33:46,560 --> 00:33:51,550 Provide. Provide. By now you are all ahead of me. 306 00:33:52,390 --> 00:33:57,370 Hollywood in a Frost poem is pretty surprising, but my goodness, what is going on with Abhishek? 307 00:33:58,360 --> 00:34:01,149 Um, trios of rhymes are hard to pull off in English. 308 00:34:01,150 --> 00:34:07,600 Um, we have, since many of the rhymes here are monosyllables with occasional splashes out into two and three syllable words. 309 00:34:07,930 --> 00:34:11,079 Fate, late state, um, thrown. 310 00:34:11,080 --> 00:34:21,760 Crown. New. True. You start hard, but we have some longer words in the rhyme position Hollywood and likelihood disregard dignified and provide. 311 00:34:22,880 --> 00:34:28,070 Abhishek, however, is of another order, less a rhyme than a conjuring. 312 00:34:28,550 --> 00:34:34,220 Hag, peel and rag seem to recombine in their letters and sounds to form the name, 313 00:34:34,490 --> 00:34:41,810 as if the speaker suddenly recognises the old lady before him from a silent film of an earlier era. 314 00:34:42,720 --> 00:34:46,200 We might and we might not know who Abhishek is. 315 00:34:47,010 --> 00:34:53,190 In an anthology or a textbook. There will be a footnote, but this is not how the poem was intended to appear. 316 00:34:53,430 --> 00:34:56,820 And I think, um, this kind of obscurity is the point. 317 00:34:57,090 --> 00:35:04,500 He could have made the same point with a more recognisable name, Cleopatra, say, or the Queen of Sheba. 318 00:35:04,830 --> 00:35:11,909 Um, someone beautiful and exotic. Um, but part of this, of course, is it's easier to rhyme. 319 00:35:11,910 --> 00:35:18,350 ABBA Chag Sheba doesn't rhyme with very much, so it has several advantages, being more vaguely exotic. 320 00:35:18,360 --> 00:35:24,300 One of them, and as we have seen with these episodes of the antes, um, it really sticks out. 321 00:35:24,510 --> 00:35:30,930 But there's often a second word that reinforces the bold choice as a deliberate rather than a random move. 322 00:35:31,260 --> 00:35:38,579 And here I think we have that secondary surprise of Hollywood, a glamorous place we do not expect, 323 00:35:38,580 --> 00:35:45,540 and a Frost poem, although we might have forgotten that for all his Vermont business, he was born in California. 324 00:35:46,600 --> 00:35:51,210 I might put us in mind, vaguely, of sword and sandal movies about the Old Testament. 325 00:35:51,220 --> 00:36:01,240 We might or might not associate her with the last days of King David, when she has brought a young virgin to his bed as a literal bed warmer. 326 00:36:01,810 --> 00:36:06,639 Um, now, King David was old and stricken in years, and they covered him with clothes, but he got no heat. 327 00:36:06,640 --> 00:36:12,670 Wherefore his servant said unto him. Let there be sort for my lord the king a young virgin, and let her stand before the king, 328 00:36:12,880 --> 00:36:17,830 and let her cherish him, and let her lie in thy bosom, that my lord the king may get heat. 329 00:36:18,220 --> 00:36:26,260 So they brought sort for a fair damsel throughout all the coasts of Israel, and found Abhishek Asuna, mite, and brought her to the king. 330 00:36:26,260 --> 00:36:30,810 And the damsel was very fair and cherished the king and ministered to him. 331 00:36:30,850 --> 00:36:37,360 But the king knew her not. So. This is, uh, besides, um, cameo moment in the Old Testament. 332 00:36:38,900 --> 00:36:43,390 Um. So. If we know the story. 333 00:36:43,410 --> 00:36:49,920 The name conjures up innocence, youth, and the possibility of sex. 334 00:36:50,250 --> 00:36:54,990 In other words, the perfect role for a Hollywood starlet discovered on the casting couch. 335 00:36:55,500 --> 00:36:58,770 Um, I know that there's a great danger of being reductive here. 336 00:36:59,100 --> 00:37:02,670 Uh, but I do have a theory that Frost may be thinking of a literal instance. 337 00:37:03,030 --> 00:37:12,690 Um, the case of Betty Blythe, whom you see pictured, um, a sex symbol of the silent film era, known for exotic roles such as her 1921 Queen of Sheba, 338 00:37:13,080 --> 00:37:20,910 of whose elaborately skimpy costumes she remarked, I wear 28 costumes, and if I put them on all at once, I couldn't keep warm. 339 00:37:22,920 --> 00:37:28,290 Um, a movie that if it doesn't have an ABBA shag the film itself has now lost does 340 00:37:28,290 --> 00:37:32,690 include King Solomon and King David and other characters that intersect with ABBA. 341 00:37:32,700 --> 00:37:33,960 Sex brief narrative. 342 00:37:34,380 --> 00:37:43,140 Um Blythe made a fortune selling the land that would become the Sunset Strip and lost everything in the stock market crash of 1929, 343 00:37:43,140 --> 00:37:47,490 and lived to a ripe old age in poverty. But I digress. 344 00:37:48,270 --> 00:37:53,190 One of the things Abersoch does here, in combination with Hollywood, is to make the poem top heavy, 345 00:37:53,550 --> 00:37:59,340 a bit unstable, and there is a certain nervousness with which the reader rolls down the rest of the poem. 346 00:37:59,850 --> 00:38:04,650 Having invoked these specificities, frost and obscures any kind of development of the reference. 347 00:38:05,040 --> 00:38:11,430 The unnamed starlet who once played Abhishek and has fallen on hard times, is a parable of hard bitten capitalism. 348 00:38:11,760 --> 00:38:14,850 The stakes are already high at the beginning of the poem. 349 00:38:15,060 --> 00:38:18,990 Total financial ruin, along with the loss of youth and beauty, 350 00:38:19,530 --> 00:38:27,809 the only further intensification we have a fairly flat diction and straightforward American speech is the hard one. 351 00:38:27,810 --> 00:38:39,120 Barton, which has an old fashioned hand spun texture and the repetition of the terrifying exhortation at the end provide, provide. 352 00:38:42,320 --> 00:38:46,550 Skipping along to quotation, which is another breaking of the fourth wall. 353 00:38:47,740 --> 00:38:54,160 Proper names are one kind of illusion. Quotation is maybe a different kind of intersection with one work in another. 354 00:38:54,530 --> 00:39:01,090 Um, but it can be a kind of extreme registers, registers, shift breaking of the fourth wall to a certain extent. 355 00:39:01,120 --> 00:39:04,090 Bishop did that with the deliberate, not quotation of Blake. 356 00:39:04,450 --> 00:39:09,430 But here is another favourite poem of mine, and my favourite example of this kind of bold play. 357 00:39:09,640 --> 00:39:15,700 Sunlight on the garden. The sunlight on the garden hardens and grows cold. 358 00:39:16,000 --> 00:39:19,900 We cannot cage the minute within its nets of gold. 359 00:39:20,290 --> 00:39:23,860 When all is told we cannot beg for pardon. 360 00:39:24,490 --> 00:39:28,390 Our freedom as freelances advances towards its end. 361 00:39:28,750 --> 00:39:33,490 The earth compels upon it. Sonnets and birds descend. 362 00:39:33,850 --> 00:39:37,660 And soon, my friend, we shall have no time for dances. 363 00:39:38,140 --> 00:39:42,340 The sky was good for flying. Defying the church bells. 364 00:39:42,610 --> 00:39:48,400 And every evil iron siren. And what it tells the earth compels. 365 00:39:48,820 --> 00:39:53,980 We are dying, Egypt. Dying and not expecting pardon. 366 00:39:54,490 --> 00:40:00,850 Hardened in heart anew. But glad to have sat under thunder and rain with you. 367 00:40:01,150 --> 00:40:04,630 And grateful to for sunlight on the garden. 368 00:40:07,000 --> 00:40:14,050 Written in the aftermath of Magnus's devastating divorce from his first wife, Mary Ezra, and written in Hampstead. 369 00:40:14,200 --> 00:40:22,030 At this address, only yards away, perhaps from where Keats wrote ode to a Nightingale and originally titled simply song. 370 00:40:22,690 --> 00:40:33,740 This poem is one of the most intricately and ingeniously wrought music boxes in the language not only end rhymed ABBA Baba. 371 00:40:33,760 --> 00:40:39,880 So again, trios of rhymes, which is not easy, with the a rhyme returning at the end, and a ring structure. 372 00:40:40,270 --> 00:40:43,719 But there are those nose to tail cornering rhymes. 373 00:40:43,720 --> 00:40:48,129 Garden hardens minute within it. Lances advance a sonnet upon it. 374 00:40:48,130 --> 00:40:51,970 Flying defying iron siren pardoned hardened under thunder. 375 00:40:52,540 --> 00:40:58,360 If you want to challenge yourself, why don't you write a poem imitating this rhyme scheme and see how that goes. 376 00:40:59,580 --> 00:41:04,110 Um, even without the quotation, this would be a beautiful poem. 377 00:41:04,110 --> 00:41:09,570 But to me, the quotation takes this poem from a perfect poem to a great one. 378 00:41:10,290 --> 00:41:18,480 Tightly controlled, the poem suddenly throws up its hands, goes off the rail, pushes all of its chips into the middle of the table. 379 00:41:18,990 --> 00:41:21,750 What the [INAUDIBLE] is Egypt doing in Hampstead? 380 00:41:22,920 --> 00:41:29,880 Most of you will correctly place this quotation from Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra, but I don't think it's necessary to know it. 381 00:41:30,240 --> 00:41:34,890 And if we go look at the the original, it's not super helpful. 382 00:41:35,160 --> 00:41:44,280 Antony has been, um, mortally wounded, and he's lifted up, uh, in this kind of aria, um, you know, to Cleopatra where he's going to die in her arms. 383 00:41:44,280 --> 00:41:49,620 And he says, I am dying, Egypt dying. Give me some wine and let me speak a little. 384 00:41:49,620 --> 00:41:57,390 And Cleopatra says, no, let me speak, and let me rail so high that the false housewife fortune breaker wheel provoked by my offence. 385 00:41:58,920 --> 00:42:02,489 And McNeice. We. No changes. I am dying, Egypt. 386 00:42:02,490 --> 00:42:06,510 Dying too. We are dying, which is much more suited. 387 00:42:06,750 --> 00:42:10,080 Suitable to a divorce and less suitable to a play. 388 00:42:10,590 --> 00:42:16,530 Egypt. The illusion and the quotation appear to be entirely out of proportion to the situation of the poem. 389 00:42:17,160 --> 00:42:22,170 A domestic dissolution that is not a tragedy. Indeed, the note of the poem is one of forgiveness. 390 00:42:23,040 --> 00:42:28,710 For me, the effect is of someone so overwhelmed with the emotion that they lack their own words. 391 00:42:29,010 --> 00:42:37,320 Words fail and memory and quotation invited perhaps by the rhyme, rush into the vacuum to the poet's aid. 392 00:42:37,350 --> 00:42:45,330 The poem becomes entangled with ancient tragedy. A wormhole opens up and cosmic winds blow through the vast emptiness between them. 393 00:42:45,660 --> 00:42:50,880 It is terrifying as well as tender, and it brings to my mind a quotation from another song. 394 00:42:51,120 --> 00:42:57,629 Paul Simon's Graceland. Graceland. And I see losing love is like a window in your heart. 395 00:42:57,630 --> 00:43:03,240 Will everybody sees you're blown apart. Everybody feels the winds blow. 396 00:43:03,900 --> 00:43:12,160 Just how I feel about that poem. Then why is it not moving forward? 397 00:43:15,120 --> 00:43:26,879 There we go. I was going to look at another example of where I think the classical allusions or the elusiveness or quotations do not up the ante. 398 00:43:26,880 --> 00:43:29,700 And one of these examples, I think, because I was thinking of Hampstead, 399 00:43:29,700 --> 00:43:36,330 is ode to a Nightingale, um, where it's just part of the poem's brocaded texture. 400 00:43:36,750 --> 00:43:40,979 Um, my heart aches and and drowsy numbness pains my senses. 401 00:43:40,980 --> 00:43:45,870 The hemlock I had drunk or empty. Some dumb dull opiate to the drains. 402 00:43:45,870 --> 00:43:50,370 One minute passed and Lethe words and sunk. It is not through empty of thy happy lots. 403 00:43:50,370 --> 00:43:58,469 But being too happy in thy happiness. That thou light winged dryad of the trees, and some melodious plots of beach and green and shadows, 404 00:43:58,470 --> 00:44:01,830 numberless singers of summer and full throated ease. 405 00:44:02,280 --> 00:44:06,209 O for a draught of vintage that hath been cooled along age. 406 00:44:06,210 --> 00:44:10,230 And the deep delve and earth tasting of flora, flora and the country. 407 00:44:10,230 --> 00:44:14,370 Song. Blessed flows keep a green and all this hemlock. 408 00:44:14,370 --> 00:44:18,840 Lethe words Dryad, flora, hypocretin are all classical, more or less. 409 00:44:19,350 --> 00:44:27,600 But they're part of the ornamental surface and the loading every rift with or beautiful, but not for the most part, intensifiers. 410 00:44:28,050 --> 00:44:33,150 Keats's classical learning here is worn superficially, and, as Byron remarks, 411 00:44:33,150 --> 00:44:37,860 reminds us snarkily um, he did not have Greek, just as he really promised. 412 00:44:37,860 --> 00:44:46,200 Something great, if not intelligible, without Greeks contrived to talk about the gods of late, much as they might have been supposed to speak. 413 00:44:46,560 --> 00:44:53,250 So that's a very snarky remark on Mark on Keats. If anything, one of the startling, um, 414 00:44:53,430 --> 00:44:59,129 curiosities of this poem is that it manages to avoid checking the box of the one 415 00:44:59,130 --> 00:45:04,050 classical allusion every poet is bound to check with Nightingale's prophecy. 416 00:45:04,050 --> 00:45:08,520 And Filomena are nowhere in this poem. And if you think about it, that is strange. 417 00:45:08,520 --> 00:45:15,210 There is no chug jug here. But then I realised that maybe I was wrong and there was a bold move after all, 418 00:45:15,540 --> 00:45:22,259 an upping of the ante, um, by a dramatic downshift in register about three quarters of the poem. 419 00:45:22,260 --> 00:45:31,830 In stanza seven of eight stanzas, Keats suddenly shakes off the ornamental classical references Bacchus and his pards and goes for something 420 00:45:32,010 --> 00:45:39,879 one suspects he has a deeper intimacy with the biblical story of Ruth that was not born for death. 421 00:45:39,880 --> 00:45:43,440 The mortal bird. No hungry generations tread thee down. 422 00:45:43,770 --> 00:45:49,170 The voice I hear this passing night was heard in ancient days by Emperor and Clown. 423 00:45:49,650 --> 00:46:00,300 Perhaps the selfsame song that found a path through the sad heart of Ruth when sick, for whom she she stood in tears amid the alien corn. 424 00:46:01,200 --> 00:46:09,450 I think there's something about the biblical reference amidst the nest of classical references and the kind of plainness of Ruth, 425 00:46:09,450 --> 00:46:13,650 which is this monosyllable? Um, it could be an English name. 426 00:46:14,010 --> 00:46:22,979 Um, it has its own meaning in English. And he envisions, um, her homesickness as she's with the gleaners gathering the corn, 427 00:46:22,980 --> 00:46:28,230 and she's had to leave her homeland hearing a nightingale and thinking back to her homeland, 428 00:46:28,230 --> 00:46:31,709 where she heard a nightingale, which is not in the Bible at all. 429 00:46:31,710 --> 00:46:35,790 But it's this wonderful, um, imagining that he does. 430 00:46:35,790 --> 00:46:41,280 And for me, perhaps, um, that is, after all, that upping of the ante moment. 431 00:46:45,200 --> 00:46:51,440 So I thought I would close with this poem, I believe somewhere recently, um, 432 00:46:52,010 --> 00:47:00,110 someone remarked in a newspaper that this is the poem for our time, and I think, um, much, much could be said for that being the case. 433 00:47:01,340 --> 00:47:05,360 A disused shed in County Wexford by Derek Mann. 434 00:47:06,050 --> 00:47:12,080 Let them not forget us. The weak souls among the US fiddles from safaris with the story. 435 00:47:12,950 --> 00:47:22,010 It's for j G Farrow. Even now, there are places where I thought might grow. 436 00:47:22,730 --> 00:47:35,330 Peruvian mines worked out and abandoned to a slow clock of condensation and echo trapped forever, and a flutter of wildflowers in the lift shaft. 437 00:47:35,870 --> 00:47:41,600 Indian compounds where the wind dances and the door bangs with diminished confidence. 438 00:47:42,050 --> 00:47:45,470 Lime crevices behind rippling rain barrels. 439 00:47:45,920 --> 00:47:54,680 Dog corners for bone burials, and in a disused shed in County Wexford, deep in the grounds of a burnt out hotel. 440 00:47:55,040 --> 00:48:00,920 Among the bathtubs and the wash basins, a thousand mushrooms crowded with keyhole. 441 00:48:01,550 --> 00:48:06,350 This is the one star in their firmament, or frames a star within a star. 442 00:48:06,980 --> 00:48:12,170 What should they do there but desire so many days beyond the rhododendrons. 443 00:48:12,380 --> 00:48:18,050 With the world waltzing in its bowl of cloud. They have learnt patience and silence. 444 00:48:18,350 --> 00:48:21,650 Listening to the rooks querulous in the high woods. 445 00:48:22,490 --> 00:48:28,640 They have been waiting for us in a fight or a vegetable sweat since Civil War days, 446 00:48:29,060 --> 00:48:35,360 since the gravel crunching, interminable departure of the expropriated mycologist. 447 00:48:36,020 --> 00:48:41,660 He never came back. And light since then is a keyhole resting gently after rain. 448 00:48:42,140 --> 00:48:51,200 Spiders have spun, flies dusted to mildew, and once a day, perhaps, they have heard something a trickle of masonry, 449 00:48:51,500 --> 00:48:56,570 a shout from the blue, or a lorry changing gear at the end of the lane. 450 00:48:57,580 --> 00:49:02,530 There have been deaths. The pale flesh flaking into the earth that nourished it. 451 00:49:02,890 --> 00:49:08,050 And nightmares born of these. And the grim dominion of stale air and rank moisture. 452 00:49:08,650 --> 00:49:12,670 Those nearest the door grow strong. Elbow room. 453 00:49:12,670 --> 00:49:17,889 Elbow room. The rest dim in a twilight of crumbling utensils. 454 00:49:17,890 --> 00:49:25,750 And broken pitchers groaning for their deliverance have been so long expectant that there is left only the posture. 455 00:49:26,670 --> 00:49:29,670 A half century without visitors in the dark. 456 00:49:29,940 --> 00:49:33,810 Poor preparation for the cracking lock and creak of hinges. 457 00:49:34,140 --> 00:49:38,940 Magi moon men powdery prisoners of the Old Regime. 458 00:49:39,180 --> 00:49:45,180 Webb throated, stalked like triffids, wracked by drought and insomnia. 459 00:49:45,720 --> 00:49:49,740 Only the ghost of a scream at the flashbulb firing squad. 460 00:49:49,740 --> 00:49:54,210 We wake them with shows there is life. Yet in their feverish forms. 461 00:49:54,630 --> 00:49:58,230 Grown beyond nature now. Soft food for worms. 462 00:49:58,530 --> 00:50:01,950 They lift frail heads and gravity and good faith. 463 00:50:03,410 --> 00:50:09,800 They are begging us. You see in their world this way to do something, to speak on their behalf. 464 00:50:10,730 --> 00:50:16,640 Or at least not to close the door again. Lost people of Treblinka and Pompeii. 465 00:50:18,200 --> 00:50:29,150 Save us. Save us. They seem to say, let the God not abandon us who have come so far in darkness and in pain. 466 00:50:30,020 --> 00:50:36,430 We too had our lives to live. You with your light metre and relaxed itinerary. 467 00:50:36,670 --> 00:50:40,030 Let not our naive labours have been in vain. 468 00:50:42,690 --> 00:50:48,450 At first, there's no rhyme in these attractive ten line stanzas, um, 469 00:50:48,510 --> 00:50:54,300 which I would put in the category of prior Spencer in stanzas which have their own history. 470 00:50:55,320 --> 00:51:00,120 The second stanza has a plausible slant rhyme on Cloud and Woods. 471 00:51:00,600 --> 00:51:10,499 The third feature, a departure, is suggestive, but then there's a full rhyme on Rain and Lane, and a skewed one on mildew and blue rhymes. 472 00:51:10,500 --> 00:51:18,120 Slant and fall start to multiply until the penultimate and the ultimate stanzas, where it starts to almost dominate. 473 00:51:18,420 --> 00:51:22,140 They feel sonically more inevitable and locked into place. 474 00:51:23,620 --> 00:51:29,650 This poem is dense in its textures, inclusively, sonically and in its imagery. 475 00:51:30,160 --> 00:51:38,290 Um, written in 1972, shortly after Bloody Sunday on January 30th, and published in 1973. 476 00:51:39,190 --> 00:51:45,280 The poem's title for me, partly evokes and its specific and yet obscure locality. 477 00:51:45,580 --> 00:51:51,220 James writes 1961 lying in a hammock at William Duffy's farm. 478 00:51:51,790 --> 00:51:56,860 Um, and we might remember that the last line of that poem is I have wasted my life. 479 00:51:57,910 --> 00:52:04,690 The dedication to J.G. Farrell, um, calls to mind the writer's novel troubles. 480 00:52:05,530 --> 00:52:17,860 And the epigraph from George, the Ferris's story might remind us of what would at the time been the recent death of the Nobel laureate poet in Athens. 481 00:52:18,400 --> 00:52:26,740 Um, in 1971, his funeral turned into a massive protest against the oppressive military junta in Greece. 482 00:52:27,100 --> 00:52:34,270 Um, so that quotation, I think, brings not just ancient Greek mythology, but perhaps an idea of modern politics and strife. 483 00:52:34,870 --> 00:52:44,680 Within the poem, the crowd of mushrooms likened variously to moon men, magi, powdery prisoners of the old regime, and wonderfully, triffids. 484 00:52:45,520 --> 00:52:53,080 Each of these giving us fresh visual takes on the fungus, sometimes speak or seem to speak in the first person plural. 485 00:52:53,680 --> 00:52:58,569 And I think this connects them with their cries for elbow room. 486 00:52:58,570 --> 00:53:04,270 Elbow room with Sylvia Plath chorus of meek edible mushrooms. 487 00:53:04,450 --> 00:53:08,050 So many of us, so many of us. 488 00:53:09,000 --> 00:53:20,310 The flashbulb firing squad sets us up for the Mortal Stakes raising of the last stanza with its line lost people of Treblinka and Pompeii. 489 00:53:21,450 --> 00:53:31,200 I think it is important that we have both Treblinka and Pompeii, which is a triangulation of place names with Wexford in the title. 490 00:53:31,740 --> 00:53:40,680 I think we also saw that triangulation of um, uh, very specific, um, nouns in, um, the Kavanagh poem. 491 00:53:41,220 --> 00:53:47,430 Um, so you have this triangulation of place names, things where bad things, 492 00:53:47,460 --> 00:53:52,860 places where bad things have happened through human evil and natural disaster. 493 00:53:53,550 --> 00:54:00,510 Things have happened to crowds of the named and the anonymous, the unremembered, weak souls among the asphodel. 494 00:54:01,020 --> 00:54:06,030 Neither Treblinka nor Pompei would work quite so well by themselves. 495 00:54:06,630 --> 00:54:14,460 Name checking and extermination camp from the Holocaust by itself risks an inappropriate disproportionality. 496 00:54:14,670 --> 00:54:20,639 A frivolous ness, perhaps, but the triangulation with Pompeii for historical distance, 497 00:54:20,640 --> 00:54:25,590 and where rhyme gives it an inevitability, and with Wexford for the presence, 498 00:54:25,590 --> 00:54:30,360 topicality expand the poem's vast scope through its narrow aperture, 499 00:54:30,630 --> 00:54:38,970 and the poignant pun of light metre reminds us of the poet's place as photographer and witness. 500 00:54:39,810 --> 00:54:49,530 There is a further nod to Greek poetry and the Cavafy, an echo of let not the God abandon us, which I think will remind us of the God abandons Antony. 501 00:54:49,980 --> 00:54:58,470 He is the supreme poet of historical irony. Once man raises the stakes, he keeps them raised. 502 00:54:59,810 --> 00:55:04,520 Man came to resent the popularity and staying power of this poem, as Yeats did. 503 00:55:04,570 --> 00:55:12,260 Um, the lake Isle of Innisfree or Larkin, this be the verse poets don't control what poems are enshrined by the public. 504 00:55:12,620 --> 00:55:18,320 Um, and recently, um, someone, uh, said in an English paper, um, it is the poem for our time. 505 00:55:19,160 --> 00:55:27,920 It's a poem that could speak for the drowned refugees in the Mediterranean, or those buried under the rubble of Gaza and mass graves in butcher, 506 00:55:28,340 --> 00:55:32,600 those washed away in the floods of climate change or starved and manmade famines. 507 00:55:32,960 --> 00:55:36,140 It speaks not only of the troubles, but of trouble. 508 00:55:36,860 --> 00:55:39,919 While the sun and moon endure elects a chance. 509 00:55:39,920 --> 00:55:43,130 But troubles, sure it ups the ante. 510 00:55:43,400 --> 00:55:48,500 It plays for mortal stakes, and the risk pays off in spades. 511 00:55:49,350 --> 00:55:49,690 People.