Because I could not stop for Death —
He kindly stopped for me —
The Carriage held but just Ourselves —
And Immortality.
We slowly drove — He knew no haste
And I had put away
My labor and my leisure too,
For His Civility —
We passed the School, where Children strove
At Recess — in the Ring —
We passed the Fields of Gazing Grain —
We passed the Setting Sun —
Or rather — He passed Us —
The Dews drew quivering and chill —
For only Gossamer, my Gown —
My Tippet — only Tulle —
We paused before a House that seemed
A Swelling of the Ground —
The Roof was scarcely visible —
The Cornice — in the Ground —
Since then — 'tis Centuries — and yet
Feels shorter than the Day
I first surmised the Horses' Heads
Were toward Eternity —
*
We've set this for the 10th Grade exam poem and I'm anticipating a rather predictable set of essays all regurgitating (with greater or lesser degrees of accuracy) material obtained from the first Googled page or so. Maybe I'll be pleasantly surprised.
So ... what would I want to write about? What touches me reading this poem? What would make me jump for joy seeing in a student's response?
OK ...
First, some thought about the word "surmised" ("to form a notion that the thing in question may be so, on slight grounds or without proof; to infer conjecturally" OED). The "civility" and poise of the word itself - as if said with a slight hauteur (contrast the effect of "guessed").
Second, the sequence of corrections and qualifications running through the poem:
verse 1: lines 1-2
verse 2: line 1
verse 3 to 4: "Or rather ..."
verse 4: implicit apologies for running against expectations - lines 3 and 4.
verse 5: the House and the Roof ("seemed" and "scarcely")
verse 6: line 1 "and yet"
No sooner has an assumption been made than the next phrase or line undermines.
Third, how this can relate to ED's famously idiosyncratic punctuation. The dash - for me - reading like a little intake of breath, a hesitation, a wince. A punctuation mark equivalent of ambivalence. "I was about to say but ...". Going on to say while simultaneously pausing. A stitch (in the sense of a thread connecting and the muscular tightening which arrests movement).
Fourth, what I hear as beautfully judged deliberate and delicate equivocations of sound.
knew / no ; labor / leisure ; passed / paused ; gazing / grain ; setting / sun ; dews / drew ; chill / tulle ...
It's as if ED is working through sound a similar uncertainty. The nearness unsettles the 'ground' beneath your reading. Words tremble in the saying. Frequencies.
And what about this line (I'm thinking how Alice Notley might seize upon it):
We slowly drove - He knew no haste
how the long 'e' and 'o' vowels literally move. How ED 'bends' (think Miles Davis) the notes through 'knew' back to 'no', 'he' to 'haste'.
And then what about those short clipped 'i' meticulous items:
immortality - his civility - tippet - visible
This is where a reading might begin. Reading as listening.
And would this poem be in Duncan's mind in The Opening of the Field?
("We passed the School, where Children strove
At Recess - in the Ring - ... ,")
as he writes:
"It is only a dream of the grass blowing
east against the source of the sun
in an hour before the sun's going down
whose secret we see in a children's game
of ring a round of roses told"
('Often I Am Permitted To Return To A Meadow')
and chooses Jess' title page with the collaged fragment of dancing children?
*
May 2006 was when I 'rediscovered' Emily Dickinson - another of those poets I had to rescue from my own schooldays, university tutorials, media misrepresentations, Dickinson obsessives - and June 2006 was when I was copying out favourite lines and resonant phrases. I'm amused at how threads weave themselves through the Blog (is this the fabric itself?) through my daily teaching, into daily life, into reading, into writing. Finding just now that Julia Carpenter is Arachne and formerly known as Spider-Woman.
How words speak before they're spoken to. And answer back continually.
Save the backgammon for another day. The Carpenter is back with his saws.
-
Today, boys and girls, we’re going to look at ‘Song of the Chinchilla’ by Lisa Jarnot*. I liked the poem immediately – and I’ve given it to ...
4 comments:
Hello Carpenter, old chap. Go summer, I say.
That's a great close reading (am I allowed to call it that?) of the ED poem, esp. the attention to the sounds shifting and balancing.
I haven't much to add, only to note something that hadn't properly occurred to me until I came across the following in TWENTIETH CENTURY PLEASURES by Robert Hass. It's an essay called "One Body: Some Notes on Form" and Hass is trying to explain "the form of the poem, the shape of its understanding. The presence of that shaping constitutes the presence of poetry. Not tone, not imagery, however deep or subtle, not particular qualities of content."
He then turns to Randall Jarrell's "The Sphinx's Riddle to Oedipus" as an eg of a poem that doesn't have form. "The poem never quite occurs," he says. "It can't find it's way to its rhythm . . . he last stanza, in his craftsman's hands, gives the poem a structure, but I do not feel the presence of form . . . He has not found for himself the form of being in the idea."
He then goes on to say that "Criticism is not especially alert to this matter. It talks about a poet's ideas or themes or imagery and so it treats all the poems of Stevens or Williams equally when they are not equally poems. The result is the curiosity of a huge body of commentary which has very little to do with the art of poetry. And this spills over into university instruction -- where, whether we like it or not, an awful lot of the reading and buying of poetry goes on. Students are trained to come away from that poem of Jarrell's thinking they have had an experience of poetry if they can write a four-page essay answering the question, 'What has a woman's breasts, a lions paws?' What gets lost is just the thing that makes art as humanly necessary as bread. Art is an activity of the spirit and when we lose track of what makes an art an art, we lose track of the spirit."
Sorry for the long quotation, but it struck me as pertinent to the teaching of this ED poem, the fact that you expect rather predictable essays. It seems that the setting of questions won't ever address the issue of the form of the poem (& it certainly has form, I think, as Hass wd define it). Also, the realisation that so much poetry is dependent on the educational system to perpetuate it, as after leaving school/college, how many students will ever read it again? A strange dependency of poetry (& not even modern poetry) on education.
W
PS I have never seen O Lucky Man -- you've persuaded me I should...
Hi
A welcome excuse to postpone grading yet another slab of essays.
I cannot agree with you more - and the quotation is very useful. Last night, listening to 'Filles de Kilimanjaro' I was thinking along the same lines: i.e. how a piece such as 'Frelon Brun' has a form and yet each time I listen to it something disappears, something else comes forward. Organic form, I suppose we could call it. And I was then thinking across to the poem as structure. How mechanical the typical approaches are - just Google that Dickinson poem and you'll see such blunt tools.
I've said it before on the Blog - and I'll say it again - much of my poetry reading depends upon UN-learning so many habits of thought. My exchanges with Lisa J were great in unsettling many of my knee-jerk reactions. She said that when confronted with some especially 'impenetrable' text she'd simply zoom in on a feature and let the reading 'grow' out of this. One of the student's exam paper had an intriguing diagram of earth and sun and other orbits - none of which translated into the analysis. What a pity! If only they could have this confidence to write according to what they are really responding to rather than an 'assumed' set of principles.
That said, 99 per cent want a 'tool kit' to crack, solve, kill the living organism of language.
I really like the play of sounds - and, obviously, there's more still to detect sonically. And I'm intrigued by the 'perverted etymology' of that OED entry - more etymological perversion I say! 'Gossamer' seems to exist filmily present-absent in ED's text - a kind of word ghost all in itself.
I am even toying with the idea of writing an 'alternative' 'What Is Poetry' for schools - ignoring all the susual stuff and putting together chapters on Form: bird migration patterns, ripples from water droplets, leaf skeletons, Miles Davis drum & bass motifs, iron filings around a magnet, choreography ... you get the idea. I think this might teach some kids far more about what poetry Is - of Does - than dry lists of metaphor, simile, alliteration, blah, blah, blah. Sort of John Beger's 'Ways of Seeing' for poetry - 'Ways of Hearing'? 'Ways of Thinking'? 'Waves of Thinking'? (Or has it already been done by Thomas Browne - The Garden of Cyrus?)
There's also a great set of quotations from Rilke's Florence Diary which I was reading early this morning which I'll put up for the 'public'. (hem-hem)
Cheers
The C.
PS - apologies for all the typos in that post.
You really must write that alternative WHAT IS POETRY? -- not just for students but for everyone. There are a lot of books on poetry in the mainstream (Ruth Padel's, James Fenton's, even Stephen Fry's) but it's often occurred to me that a good intro to a more postmodern approach (for want of a better word) to poetry is sorely lacking. Go for it, Carpenter!
W
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