Queen Charlotte

            I’m currently working on memorizing a Serge Gainsbourg song in French called “Melody”. I usually spend about an hour every morning on memorization but I make less progress with this song because there are long musical spaces between each verse. I’m averaging a little less than one verse a day.

            On Monday morning I read Percy Shelley for an hour before leaving for class.

            It’s nice to have my bicycle keeping pace with others and passing them again.

            I had hoped that our new classroom would be empty like it was last Monday so I could arrange the tables in rows, but the same small class that was there last Wednesday was there this time as well.

            In the hallway were some teaching students discussing a project. The one that might have been their TA reminded them that no one can get into trouble at the university level for having revolutionary ideas about children’s education, but once they are teachers in the Ontario curriculum they can.

            I asked the other teacher in the Biology class ahead of ours if he class would be there at that time every Monday and Wednesday and she said she would. She’d heard about Professor Weisman’s complaints about the floor plan and she told me that she just teaches in the classroom as she finds it and she doesn’t mind if we want to put the tables into rows. By the time her class got out though, a lot of my classmates had already taken their seats and so I just moved the three yet unoccupied tables into rows.

            Professor Weisman said that she's put in a request for a different room that will accommodate 45 students. As it is there aren’t enough tables for everyone.

            We continued with our study of Percy Shelley, starting with his sonnet "England in 1819". In the first line he refers to "An old, mad, blind, despised and dying king". This is King George III, the king against whom the American Revolution was fought. He was opposed to wider enfranchisement in England. Under his rule the fewest people had the right to vote and he had very bad relations with Ireland. He defended the Church of England as the only religion and he was against Catholic emancipation. Jews, Catholics and dissenters could neither vote nor be elected to government. Jews were not admitted to Oxford or Cambridge until the 1870s. He was pro land enclosure. He was a lynchpin of revolutionary thinking because every revolutionary act was against him.

            The professor recommended the movie “The Madness of King George” by Alan Bennett.

            When George III had his final mental breakdown he was replaced by his son George, the Prince of Wales who ruled as Prince Regent until George III's death and then became George IV, king of England.

            Sonnets were traditionally about erotic loss but this one is about disappointment.

            The first line "An old, mad, blind, despised and dying king" in removing the conjunctions between each listed adjective, uses asyndeton to pile on a breathless list of complaints. It also uses assonance.

            He refers to the royal family as “mud from a muddy spring”.

            Golden laws are those that have been bought.

            “A senate, Time’s worst statute, unrepealed” refers to Catholic emancipation and the right to vote in general. Out of a population of 16 million only half a million had the right to vote.

            The compressed form of this sonnet contains a long list of fiascos. A condition of political adversity poised to burst at the seams. Such cataloguing tends to require a much longer epic form of poem.

            I pointed out that a sonnet is a poetic island, with limited boundaries, much like England. I added that the first line already expresses hope by referring to a dying king and this speaks to the mention of graves in the final couplet. It’s like Shelley is digging a poetic grave for the monarchy.

            Unlike Shelley’s sonnet “To Wordsworth” the final couplet here is triumphant. Epic poems tend to end triumphantly. In this case the triumph is a hope of an enlightened rebirth. The poem is about achieving clarity as he stares unblinkingly at fiascos. The poem itself is also an example of a triumph of the imagination in that Shelley was able to fit this list of difficulties into the limited form of the sonnet.

            Shelley does not retreat into the pastoral the way that Wordsworth does.

            “A book sealed" rhymes with "unrepealed".

            For Shelley, hope is dangerous.

            George III is the king whose wife Queen Charlotte many believe was of African descent by way of the Portuguese royal family. In one or two paintings she really does look black while in others she looks very white.

            We looked at the sonnet “Ozymandias”. Ozymandias was the Greek name for the Egyptian king Ramses II. The statue referred to is one of Ramses that had been taken from Egypt by the British Museum.

            The poem is an example of ekphrasis, in which one art form is used to describe another.

            The sonnet is about the idea of the ruin of power.

            The professor asked us to think about who the speaker is. There is an initial narrator that may be the poet but then the speaker becomes a traveller from Egypt who refers to an inscription on the statue that may be the voice of the sculptor but which may be the voice of Ozymandias. We have displacements in speakers.

            Both art and empires decay.

I said that the art is still mostly there though and it is mostly the empire that has decayed. She said but there are other empires.

I said that the truncated statue with the inscription about the greatness of Ozymandias reminds me of Monty Python’s "Knights who say ni" in which a defiant knight keeps getting body parts cut off but won't admit defeat. The professor said we are dating ourselves to remember Monty Python. About half the students had heard of Monty Python but only a handful knew about the Knights who say “ni”.

We looked at the poem, “Ode to the West Wind” and the professor had me read the first section.

The poem uses a terza rima, which is a rhyming verse stanza form that consists of an interlocking three-line rhyme scheme. A tercet is a three-line stanza. The rhyme scheme is ABA BCB CDC DED and so on.

There are two motifs in this poem. One is sympathetic imagination and the other is political efficacy.

The leaves referred to are pages and words.

I wondered if a wind from the west referred to the American Revolution. She said that the American Revolution was ever-present on people’s minds but mostly the west wind is the wind of autumn, which signifies change. It’s not simply an allegory about the American Revolution.

Compare Shelley’s wind of change to Wordsworth’s wind of inspiration.

I asked her about her equating last class of assonance with slant rhyme. She said she should have clarified that they aren’t actually the same thing but can be used for the same purpose in a poem.

I gave her a couple of my favourite examples of assonance. In Little Town of Bethlehem: “deep and dreamless sleep” and in Bob Dylan’s Jokerman: “eyes of the idol with the iron head”.

I didn’t bother stopping at the supermarket on the way home, since I would be passing by there on Tuesday after work anyway.

For lunch I had refried beans and salsa with potato chips.

I typed up my lecture notes.

I the evening I rubbed a pork tenderloin with olive oil, salt, pepper, garlic, coriander and Italian seasoning and roasted it for dinner. It turned out well. I had a piece with a boiled potato and carrot while watching The Big Bang Theory.

Spoiler alert!

In the first story Amy and Sheldon receive a wedding gift from Penny and Leonard but they can’t figure out what it is and Amy says it’s not appropriate to ask. It turns out that Penny and Leonard’s intention is to drive the couple crazy and they are enjoying watching it happen. They are actually re-gifting the present that Bernadette and Howard got Penny and Leonard for their wedding, which was a re-gift of the crystal chakra wand that Raj got Bernadette and Howard for their wedding. Amy and Sheldon think that their gift is a clue in a scavenger hunt and they think it’s leading them to the café where they had their first date. In the lost and found they find a locket and conclude that is their gift because it has a compartment to hold both of their pictures. They are so happy with what they think is their gift that they make a thank you note for Penny and Leonard, but it’s in a code that they have to decipher because they blocked their wi-fi and deciphering the code is the only way to find their new password. What I don’t get is why the geniuses didn’t just take a picture of their gift and search for it on Google Images.

In the second story Raj has decided that he’s tired of waiting for romance and so he asks his father to arrange a marriage. He fills out an Indian marriage compatibility questionnaire and is set up with a very ambitious woman who seems to be more interested in finances than romance. At first he’s still going to go through with it but then he tells Anu that he’s a romantic and can’t go through with it. She gets down on one knee in the wine bar to ask him to marry her and he says yes.

Meanwhile Penny and Leonard try out one of Raj’s compatibility questionnaires and Leonard learns that Penny might not be interested in having kids. At first he’s upset but then Penny fulfills one of his dreams by renting him the TV Batmobile for a day.