On Sunday morning I finished working out the chords to “L’aquoiboniste" (The Whatsthepointist) by Serge Gainsbourg. I ran through it in French and English and then uploaded it to Christian’s Translations where I started arranging the text the way it is in my original Word document.
When I was going to sweeten my cereal I suddenly realized that yesterday I had once again forgotten to buy honey when I was at the supermarket. I had no choice but to use pancake syrup that I got from the food bank three years ago.
After doing the dishes I decided to take an early bike ride so that on the way back I could stop at Freshco and buy honey. I rode up to College and headed west but I should have gone up to Bloor because College still had too much snow because of the parked cars. I went as far as Ossington and then headed south.
It’s interesting that Ossington south of Dundas is now this trendy and artsy little white hipster restaurant and fashion stretch. I remember that thirty years ago it was on its way to becoming Toronto’s Vietnamtown, but now there’s only one Vietnamese restaurant left. It makes me wonder if the Vietnamese businesses were pushed out because they attracted gang activity or for some other reason. Or maybe there was no conspiracy at all and they just faded away naturally.
The honey was on sale.
For lunch I had saltines and old cheddar.
I finished typing my notes on “When I Have Fears That I May Cease To Be” by John Keats and they are almost three pages of single spaced text or 125 lines of notes on a fourteen line poem. But the notes have lines that are twice as long so more accurately I wrote 1,919 words of notes on a 104 word sonnet. My assignment needs to be between 200 and 300 words. I ran through it and edited the text down to 1,808 words. Next I’ll create a second document into which I’ll past my notes and pare them down to an argument of 200-300 words.
For Keats his sonnet “When I have fears that I may cease to be” is personal. He is worried about his poetry.
The poem is about his own immortality. He is worried that he is wasting his time worrying. Life is passing him by from too much dwelling on his own fear while he misses out on both fame as a poet and fulfillment in love. He concludes that he should just jump in and stop worrying.
Keats’ speaker is afraid that if he dwells upon his fears of ceasing to be before he finds love, then that very dwelling will cause him to sink into oblivion. He needs to focus on the poetry and the “unreflecting” love and not worry whether he will pile up volumes and be enchanted. His fear holds him back from diving into the ocean from the shore on which he is standing. The fear is what will cause him to cease to be. Fear is the enemy because a poet and a lover must be fearless. He associates the poet with the lover. The octave is about poetry and the sestet is about love and he brings them together as the same in the couplet or as married in loss and oblivion. Not wanting to die and dwelling upon that fear of his relationship with time running out is the very thing that weighs him down and wastes his life as a poet and lover.
The assonance of "cease to be" renders it a key phrase. To be is not just about living. It is an action that involves substantial force of will. To cease to be is not merely to die but to suddenly be gone.
“Before” shows that the speaker is fine with dying after his brain has been harvested fully. There is a task to be completed. His mind is overflowing and his writing is the means by which he will reap its abundance. He puts himself in seasonal time as a farmer of ideas. There must be a harvest and it will be piled up in volumes. He understands that the harvest will end his season, but his fears are that he will end before the season. In associating himself with a farmer he is attempting to make himself more steadfast because a farmer would be glad that the crop is rich and would not worry that it might not be harvested. He is comparing himself to a farmer who understands his place in time in relation to the seasons. Keats is trying to reconcile himself to time. He knows that he has a harvest to bring in and he needs to face the task as a farmer would without worrying that he will not have time. He knows that his harvest is potentially rich. He knows that the ripening of a crop requires time. He knows that the results of his labour could be as valuable and essential to the world as the staple of grain. He envisions a successful, full and complete harvest of a crop that has been nurtured and carefully developed. He renders himself rustic in an industrious agricultural metaphor but not pastoral like a shepherd. He invokes the spirit of honest and simple labour. Harvest time is a season of rejoicing. It is an end result. He does not mind an end to his labours and of his existence. He just does not want to “cease to be before” his harvest is complete. The harvest frightens him but he knows a farmer has no such fear and so he tries to enter into the rustic relationship with seasonal time in order to overcome his fear. This is in the first four lines.
The starry night sky is partially obscured by huge clouds that are cloudy symbols of a high romance. High, elevated to the sky, large, huge, obscure, cloudy, uncertain, unclear symbols. He wants to trace the shadows cast from them onto the Earth by the light of the starred sky. High romance is above him and he hopes to romance the unreachable through its shadows. Love is uncertain and indiscernible but present in a higher place. High romance is his muse.
The magic hand of chance is the magic hand that a poet wields. Magic is supernatural while a hand is corporeal. He wants to use the hand for tracing the shadows. Magic is not done by chance. “Shadows”, “trace”, “magic”, “hand”, “chance” together have magical assonance. To trace is to follow. The shadows are not the clouds. He does not hope to discern the symbols of high romance above him but the shape of their shadows. He makes it clear that he understands his own limitations. He only wants a trace of the meaning. “Their shadows, with the magic hand of chance” is the volta. By making the volta the most assonance heavy line in the sonnet he fills it with intention. He renders it magical and clearly the least accidental of all the lines. In rhyming “chance” with “romance” he connects the two. Chance is a shadow of destiny. A high romance could be a great poetic narrative, deep inspiration or a love affair, or all three combined. A pen also traces. Tracing is to draw an outline. He does not expect to discern the full picture of the meaning of life. The “Magic hand” intentionally gestures to cast magic spells but “chance” renders it ironically random or accidental as if the magic is chanced or fallen upon but utilized toward the purpose of tracing. Do poets use accidental magic? He wants to use this hand with intention to trace, but one cannot trace by chance. Romance is not chance if it is symbolic. Symbols are by nature not accidental because they indicate a solid meaning. Magic is a skill and a magic hand is a skilled hand. A magic hand of chance is ironic. The hand of chance is magic. Chance is magical. Being open to chance to accomplish a goal is much less time specific than the harvesting referenced in the first four lines. Being open to chance involves waiting. Before he stumbles on the truth. Before he dies. Tracing is writing and writing with the magic hand of chance is writing poetry. The poet makes magic out of random experience. Chance is a fortuitous event. Sudden occurrences that seem magical. The magic hand of chance is inspiration.
The fair creature of an hour is a momentary love. He begins the sestet with talk of love and romance in the creature form of a woman who is bound by the time of an hour. He returns here to specific time. He knows that his time with her is limited because she is the fair creature of only an hour. But even in knowing this specific temporal limitation he worries about when she will be gone and so wastes his hour with her. He is ironically reflecting on having a love that is unreflecting. Of “the faery power of unreflecting love” he knows that there is magic in love that is unencumbered by thought and yet he dwells in thought and limits his time and the potential for magic. The faery power of the moment is derived from not reflecting, blaming or overthinking, from fully absorbing the enchantment of the moment. He could turn this hour of love into an eternity by making every moment within it magical. In the last half of the twelfth line the em dash separates the speaker from the magical idea of unreflecting love. After the em dash is “then” and so depends on the previous occurrences of “when” at the beginning of the sestet. “When” is another time dependent element of the poem. The poet places himself in time and therefore condemns himself to unenchanted mortality which feeds on reflections of death. “When” he limits his love to reflection “then” he is separated from unreflecting love”. The semi-colon and the em dash are two barriers that separate the dream of unreflecting love from the speaker and confines him to the reality of his reflection on “never” having unreflecting love. The em dash – takes us to the result of the speaker’s reflections in a place where he stands alone. He is not only alone but alone on a shore. A shore is a place of division between two great bodies of land and water. He is alone on the shore of the wide world. In “shore of” the “of” refers to the body of water but he says the shore of the whole wide world” and so world is the ocean and the shore on which he stands is not in the world. He is separated from the world by standing on its shore. And so when he has these thoughts of future loss he stands alone, not only separated from the world but he is also alone because no one can share these thoughts. When he has these thoughts he stands alone and thinks “until”. “Until” again places him in time. He thinks until his thinking leads to this result. He thinks the love he speaks of both high and present and the fame he speaks of that would result from his harvest are the ships that could propel him over the ocean of the world but they are sinking to oblivion while and because he is thinking. The rhyming of “think” and “sink” emphasizes the result of the action of thought. The world is the very ocean in which his love and fame will sink to nothing.
It is a poem about the dangers of thinking too much in the form of fear, fatality and worry about time. He uses “when” three times, placing himself in time in each quatrain. These three occurrences of “when” result in the “then” at the conclusion. With “When I fear …”, “When I think I may never …”, “When I feel I shall never …” he is thinking of the “never” of running out of time by way of death. These thoughts result in the “then” of his aloneness. His thinking leads to the oblivion of hopelessness.
The first four lines are about the fame that might result from poetic output. The second quatrain is about the high romance connects the first and the third quatrains. High romance can be poetic, spiritual and also the dream of loving another person. The placement of the second quatrain of high romance in between the quatrain of fame and the quatrain about love is intended to show what blends the two.
The conclusion is fatal but the solution lies before the couplet in the ideal of unreflecting love that he longs for but reflects too much upon.
It is a poem about time and how thought creates it and causes it to rob the thinker of the timeless moment.
I added a can of organic tomato sauce to the sauce I’d made the night before in hopes that it would improve the flavour. But the organic stuff was pretty bland and didn’t really help. However after adding some more Chinese chili paste and some Vegemite the taste improved. I had it with pasta and a beer while watching Andy Griffith.
In this story a very intelligent, charming and slick handed hobo named David Browne comes to Mayberry and makes friends with Opie. His sleight of hand tricks, his friendliness, relaxed manner and his creative philosophy are impressive for the little boy. But his philosophy of thinking long and hard before doing any work and that the best time to begin a job is tomorrow influences Opie in the wrong way. Opie skips school to go fishing with Browne. A chicken goes missing from a coop and a pie disappears from a window and Opie comes home well fed. Finally Andy tells Pete he’s going to have to leave town and then it’s going to take him some time to untwist Opie’s head from all the stuff Browne’s been teaching him. A little later Barney arrests Brown and tells Andy that he caught him with Aunt Bee’s handbag. Opie is there when Brown is brought in and seeing that he stole his aunt’s purse changes his mind about admiring Browne. After Andy is alone with Browne he tells him that he knows for a fact that Bee threw that handbag in the trash and that there is no law against recycling. Andy is about to thank Browne for what he did for Opie but Browne interrupts and says he has a train to catch.
David Browne was played by the great Buddy Ebsen, who the next year would be a household name for his role on the Beverley Hillbillies. He started out as a dance and had a vaudeville act with his sister Vilma. They were both signed with MGM and he danced with Judy garland and Shirley Temple. He had a unique style of dancing and it was used for the model of Mickey Mouse’s dancing. But when he was offered $2000 a week seven year contract but the studio wanted absolute control and so he turned them down. He didn’t work in the movies for twenty years. In the late fifties he became Fess Parker’s sidekick on Davey Crockett and started getting roles again. After the Beverley Hillbillies he had only a two year break before being the star of Barnaby Jones for eight years.
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