Gleaning

            On Monday at 10:00 I left for Romantic Literature class. It was cool enough to wear my motorcycle jacket but I didn’t need gloves. At OISE female students were looking at me, possibly mostly because I stand out in many ways. There are very few people my age there and the ones that are tend to work there. No one else wears a motorcycle jacket and so when you throw that on someone that already stands out, well …

            There was only one female student in the room when I arrived, and I think she's always there first. The desks were arranged in circles and so a previous class must have had some discussion groups. Gabriel walked in just after me, but I'll have to ask him to confirm his name because I’d thought for sure he'd said it was Gabriel but I hear the professor calling him Gibran.

            While waiting for class to start I made notes toward my short essay on how Wordsworth represents childhood in the poem “We Are Seven”.

            Professor Weisman always comes at least ten minutes early and wasn’t wearing her sling this time, though she was wincing a bit from her now healing broken shoulder.

            The professor told us that we need access to details in order to learn to appropriate textual material. We need to learn to bring to the fore an analytic yield of textual details and to learn to incorporate those details into an understanding of the historical and sociological context of the Romantic Period. Romanticism is especially responsive to the sociology and politics of its time because it echoes the circumstances the Romantic authors were responding to. The great event for Romantics was the French Revolution and its slogan, "Democracy, Egality, Fraternity!” The professor had us all repeat the slogan in unison a few times. The slogan provided an example for Europe of possibilities for change, democracy and human dignity. 

            But that hope turned to a bloodbath in the reign of terror. Revolutionaries turned on revolutionaries because some were suspected of sympathizing with the royals. There was deep paranoia and a sense that the achievements of the revolution needed to be brutally defended. Wordsworth saw it as the second fall of man.

            In the Prelude Wordsworth says of that period, “Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive but to be young was very heaven!”

            The French Revolution was part of a general movement towards an understanding of the principles of democracy. There was a movement of the working classes for economic independence. At the same time there was the Industrial Revolution and the American Revolution.

            Another important element that spurred Romanticism was the movement towards land enclosure. Land enclosure was a hot topic because it rose against the English tradition of the open field system. There had always been common land for the grazing of sheep but land began to become consolidated into private and enclosed farms. With land enclosure large open meadows were divided by fences and walls. Before land enclosure the greater portion of the population of a village shared the use of the surrounding land and so land enclosure was a threat to a farmer’s connection to the landscape. Celebration of the landscape is the primary reference point in Romanticism. Wordsworth was playing also with the threat of enclosure and nostalgic longing for pastoral settings that had already been lost.

            In rustic life Wordsworth saw an example of unadulterated human nature and of uni9verdal aspects of human nature free of trauma and triviality. His Lyrical Ballads and his preface to them are a celebration and a forum for mental ease but they are a celebration tainted by sociological pressures on that idealization.

            Another key term in Romanticism is “pastoral”. The pastoral is an ancient genre depicting beautiful, rolling hills rather than cliffs and gentle flowing streams rather than waterfalls. These settings tend to be populated with shepherds and shepherdesses playing lutes. Pastoral simplicity in Wordsworth’s view is a release but for him there is also an internalized landscape.

            The pastoral is not always peaceful but there is very little work being depicted, whereas in the Georgic genre there is plenty of struggle and farm-work being done. The Virgilian pastoral carries an ethic of simplicity, cooperation and ease. Wordsworth’s pastoral poetry also holds an anxiety about the threat to the land. One can't miss the political context.

            I wonder if Wordsworth’s interest in rustic people and their lifestyle might also be a bit of a Roman holiday.

            The professor asked us to think of the place where or the situation in which we feel most at ease. What comes to mind form is when I’m thinking of rhymes for the translation of a song.

            Romanticism is not just about enjoying a landscape but escaping to it as in Yeats “The Lake Isle of Inisfree”. It is freighted with an urgent need to escape to pastoral refuge and belonging. This is a time of the encroachment of the urban on the pastoral but it is also a time of war. England was at war through pretty much the entire Romantic period and so celebrations of English engagement in the English landscape were patriotic. Keep the home fires burning.

            We looked at the poem “Goody Blake and Harry Gill: a True Story” which isn’t a true story. The piece is an evocation of real poverty and the idea that magic is possible. It shows the ideal of pastoral refuge under threat. The professor said it is written in ballad stanzas, but ballad stanzas are supposed to have non-rhymed first and third lines in iambic tetrameter and the second and fourth lines are supposed to rhyme and be in iambic trimeter. The poem is not in true ballad stanzas but it is a narrative ballad with simple diction.

            In the poem the old hedge that Goody Blake wants to use for firewood is also the fence that indicates Harry Gill’s property. This is a conflict between a healthy worker and an impoverished woman. It’s a conflict between warmth as an ethical imperative and the protection of private property.

            This is a poem about the end of gleaning laws. Gleaning is picking things up off the ground, which was a right in traditional England. The poor were allowed to wander in the fields and to gather the scraps left over after the harvest. Gleaning had been essential to the rustic life, but in 1788 there was a lawsuit called The Great Gleaning case, which disallowed gleaning. Some landlords used physical force to remove gleaners. There was a desentimentalization of the rustic ideal and the sense of refuge. The idea of private property was something new.

            She asked us to think about what way the historical and political context resonates in the background of “Goody Blake and Harry Gill”.

            For a poor person, when it is cold a hedge represents firewood. It does not symbolize a boundary. Not freezing to death is more important than ownership. The law goes against objective morality.

            Wordsworth appropriates folklore in this poem. Goody’s successful curse on Harry is a reversal of fortune like the storming of the Bastille.

            Wordsworth wanted to democratize diction and poetry.

            We looked at the poem “We Are Seven”. The professor asked for a volunteer to read it out loud and so I spun my chair 180 degrees and read it to the other students.

The professor said this was also written in ballad stanzas and in this case, except for the alternate rhyme, it fits.

The narrator represents the adult attitude towards death and our views are aligned with his. If we align with someone that acts like a bully, what does that make us? The poem is meant to be didactic and to teach us the unclouded, unmediated perspective of a rustic child, representing nature. Adults mediate and so we can’t fully be aligned with the child but in the narrative continuum we can recognize something of value in between.

The adult is “throwing words away”. It’s a self-reflexive poem in that it comments on its own status.                                                                                                               The complicated Lyrical Ballads are meant to represent authentic human nature.

There’s a change in the last verse in that it’s the only time the girl exclaims to the adult while he exclaims to her a few times in the poem.

In our last four minutes we looked at the poem “Lines Written in Early Spring”.

Escapism. There is recognition of central division between human engagement and the natural world. There is recognition that we have failed the natural order.

We live in the Anthropocene Age in a world that has been fundamentally altered by humanity.

She told us that we should read “Lines: written above Tintern Abbey” many times.

As we were packing up I approached the professor on the subject of gleaning. I told her that I was raised on a potato farm and that when the big mechanical harvesters started being used people used to walk behind them and gather what the machines had missed because McCain’s didn’t come back for them. I hadn’t known it was called gleaning.

We were the last two people in the room and she asked me, “What’s your story? You’re obviously not the same age as the other students.” I explained that I’d quit high school and had gone on the road. I got my education from second hand bookstores and hadn’t had any respect for formal education. But I’d taken academic bridging ten years ago and got into university and so I‘ve been chewing my way through ever since.

She told me that I have a great reading voice. I thanked her and explained that I’ve had a lot of experience with public reading from poetry readings.

On the way home I stopped at Freshco where I bought grapes and a field tomato.

I did some writing.

That night I watched an episode of Perry Mason. This story was unique in that it took place entirely outside of a courtroom. Mildred Kimber, the very ill owner of an orchid company has a husband named Bob who has used the controlling shares of her company to pay off a gambling debt to a nightclub owner named Sam Lynk who runs a crooked game upstairs at his club. Mildred calls Perry Mason but he can’t see her till the next morning and so meanwhile she tries to see Lynk at the club to get the shares back but he’s not there. Lola, the platinum blonde voluptuous hostess at the club, who is mad at Lynk over his philandering tells Mildred that she has proof that Lynk uses marked decks in his games and she agrees to meet her at Mason’s office. On her way out of the club Lola receives a box of chocolates that had been sent there for her by an anonymous admirer. That night Mason gets a call from a desperate Lola, saying she’s been poisoned. When he gets to her place with the police she is barely alive. Mason goes to see Lynk and finds him shot dead. A prescription bottle with Mildred’s name on it is near the body. He goes to see Mildred and discovers that she has the murder weapon. She swears she didn’t kill Lynk but took her husband’s gun from the crime scene to protect him. Lola recovers and goes home from the hospital but Mason convinces Lieutenant Tragg to come with him to Lola’s place because her life is being threatened. When they arrive her place is on fire. She claims that a crook named Harry Marlow, who also wants Mildred’s shares knocked her out and set fire to her place but she is informed that he’s been in custody since morning and so she admits to setting the fire and to killing Lynk. She had also poisoned herself to make everything look good.

Lola was played by Peggy Maley, who only acted for seven years. She’s the one who asked Marlon Brando’s character in “The Wild One”, “Hey Johnny, what are you rebelling against?”