The Eolian Harp

            On Wednesday morning, all through yoga there was a guy shouting and banging loudly on the window of the donut shop downstairs. After yoga I wanted to put the finishing touches on my essay and so I made breakfast early. The guy was still shouting but when I stuck my head out the window I couldn’t see anyone, though I could hear him just inside the doors of the Coffeetime. A few minutes later he was sitting outside the doors on the sidewalk. He was talking to someone at the door and holding out his open palm, which had a few coins in it.

            I worked on my essay from 6:00 till 9:30, adding a few things that my stale brain wouldn’t have thought of the night before and generally just fiddled with the wording.

            When I left the old guy that had been shouting was still hanging around outside but he was much quieter.

            Today was marijuana legalization day in Canada but I didn’t personally see much difference. I have no idea where the legal cannabis stores are in Toronto. When I got to OISE and used the washroom there was someone smoking a joint in a toilet stall, and though it’s not a common occurrence I can’t say that it might not have happened before pot day. The guy that was smoking the doobie didn’t look like a student and his behaviour seemed like it would have been erratic whether he’d been stoned or not. I think there must be a silent smoke alarm because a security guard came into the washroom and followed the guy out. The guy left the building and walked up the corridor towards the theatre entrance. The security guard was watching him intently from inside but I don’t know if he followed him.

            I’d left my place at 10:25 but still ended up waiting for ten minutes. Professor Weinstein always has to step in to chase the economics class out. After getting her lectern in place for her I asked if she could bend the MLA rules for the next paper. MLA format requires that the “works cited” section of a paper has to have its own page. Since our paper was 900 words, once one adds the in-text citations it pushed the text slightly into the fourth page. If we’d been allowed to I could have saved paper by putting my works cited at the bottom of the fourth page, but as it was, those three lines had to waste a fifth and sixth page.

            She told me that I wouldn’t lose any marks for not putting works cited on a page by itself but that I should do it anyway.

            We began looking at the poetry of Samuel Taylor Coleridge.

            The professor encouraged us to read everything twice. I usually read everything at least three times.

            We've finished our study of Wordsworth but he carried tremendous weight all through Romanticism. Coleridge and Wordsworth were sort of the Lennon and McCartney of Romanticism. Coleridge wrote some of the Lyrical Ballads and they collaborated on some. Wordsworth’s Prelude takes the form of a letter to Coleridge.

            Coleridge’s biography is extraordinary. He was brilliant, multilingual and he had almost perfect recall.

            Like Wordsworth he was orphaned when he was eight.

            He went to Germany to study German Rationalism. He introduced German Idealism and Immanuel Kant to England. There is an antagonism in his poetry between his philosophy and his art, but this is not necessarily a contradiction. The tension was never entirely resolved.

            Coleridge was sickly and took laudanum, an opiate to relieve his discomfort and became addicted. Opium was legal and readily available at that time but addiction was not understood and so it was considered to be a failure of the will. Coleridge felt guilt about his addiction, the failure of his marriage, his religious failings and about the conflict between his poetry and his philosophy.

            At the time of the French Revolution, Coleridge, Wordsworth and Robert Southey were caught together in the idealism of the cry of “Liberty, Egality, Fraternity!” Together they formed a scheme for a utopian society called a “Pantisocracy”. The plan was for them to all get married, move to Pennsylvania and form an egalitarian community where they would have a zillion children. Since Coleridge didn't have any romantic prospects, Southey hooked him up with his sister-in-law, Sara.

            Coleridge pined over the failure of that marriage, the failure of his utopian ideal and over accusations of plagiarism. After Germany he would dictate from bed and intersperse his own writing with his translations.

            We looked at the poem “The Eolian Harp” for which the impetus is Samuel Coleridge's honeymoon with Sara.

            An Eolian harp is a stringed equivalent to a wind chime. The strings are over a box exposed to the wind.

            Thinking of this poem, consider also of Wordsworth's idea of the wind having an internal equivalent.

            This is in the tradition of the loco-descriptive poem like Tintern Abbey. It is localized.

            He is describing a beautiful world that is valued for its own sake, but which also functions in a symbolic capacity. This world is not only a refuge, but also a ground to transmute the creative expression, maybe with too much emphasis. It is an erotic scene or suggestive of one. There are two motifs: the harp and the breeze. The harp is a representation of the passive female while the wind is the active male. Tenor and vehicle.

            My love is a rose is a metaphor.

            My love is like a rose is a simile.

            Sara is not in his thoughts. There is an interpenetration of the organic unity of the world in his thoughts. The reactivity of the harp to the world works with the sense of exalted presence that uplifts him. The world is pressing in and turning passivity to an active response. This is the philosophy of Organicism. Random, wild gales are compared to his flitting fantasies. He thinks, "What if all animated nature be but harps animated by god?”

            Exaltation of mind and spirit crescendos in an eroticized scene of ecstasy departing from normative Christianity. Sara was a pious Christian who did not appreciate Coleridge's alternative spirituality. She censors him. He reconciles with the tragic present.

            The poem goes full circle, starting at the cot and ending there. Failure to launch. He has to give in to her view of religion or he’s not going to get laid.

            There is a lot of feminist discussion about this poem.

            The word “gay” is in the poem and Gabriel thought that he was talking about homosexuality. She explained to him that “gay” was not used in that sense at that time.

            After I got home I went out to the liquor store to buy a can of Creemore.

            I had a ham and cheese sandwich for lunch.

            That evening I grilled a couple of chicken burgers and had one in a sandwich for dinner with tomato, Dijon, ketchup and Tabasco.

            I watched an episode of Perry Mason. In this story, an old war buddy of Mason’s named Frank is working as a handyman for a rich guy named Shelby and his wife Marian. Shelby thinks. Frank and Marian are a little too friendly with one another but it’s more a vibe than anything they are actually doing. Shelby takes a shotgun to a remote area, fires it once into the air and then brings it home. Mason receives a telegram saying it’s from Frank and that he needs help because he will soon be arrested. Mason heads for Pinewood to see him. That night Shelby sneaks out of the house in his pyjamas, takes a large wad of money from his car and heads for his private dock. From there he calls Frank, telling him to bring his shotgun to the dock and to hurry, then he severs his own line with wire cutters. Frank runs to get the shotgun but on the way hears Shelby yell, “Don’t! Stop!” and then there is a shot. When Frank gets to the dock, Shelby is nowhere in sight. Marian comes running and they call the police. The police come and see that the shotgun that Frank was carrying had been fired once. Mason arrives. Detective Sergeant Dixx arrests Frank for murder, based on a journal entry that says he can’t be with Marian as long as Shelby is alive. In court it is revealed that Shelby withdrew over $100,000 the day before he died. Mason proposes that he’s not dead and that an accomplice with a boat picked him up at the dock, but later though, Shelby’s body is found in the lake. Shelby’s accountant, Arthur admits that he and his wife Ellen were going to help Shelby disappear and he was waiting that night with a boat but then Marian blew Shelby’s head off with a shotgun. He took an infrared photo of her kneeling over his body.         

            Marian was played by Phyllis Avery.
            Ellen was played by Barbara Lawrence.
            Claude Akins played Detective Dixx. Akins is always either a cop of a crook. He’s never a plumber or an accountant.