Goblin Market

            On Monday morning I worked out the chords for most of the first verse of “Exercise en forme de Z” by Serge Gainsbourg. Since there is no chorus, the chords for one verse will be the same as all the others. This is a surprisingly complex song to figure out. 

            In the late morning I cleaned the faucet of my bathroom sink and the area around and behind it where it collects a lot of guck. 

            I read “Fra Lippo Lippi” by Robert Browning out loud. It's about the Florentine painter who was raised by monks and forced to take monk's vows as a child when he didn't know what he was saying. Found expression in painting. Had an affair with a nun who became his model. 

            I read “Goblin Market” by Christina Rossetti. 

            I took another early siesta at noon because reading made me sleepy. 

            I had chips, salsa and yogourt for lunch when I got up. 

            I read “Goblin Market” out loud. It's got an interesting frantic pace mostly in trimeter but sometimes in dimeter. The goblin men are the only men in the poem sand so I assume they are just men lumped together as terrible. What the goblins offer is delicious but it is fatal for girls. It ages them. I think that the fruits offered are really just the sexual delights of womanhood, which of course do mean the death of girlhood. One girl covers herself in what the goblins offer and lets the other girl lick it off of her. This somehow serves as a cure. 

            I took a bike ride to Yonge and Bloor, south to Queen and home. 

            I talked to Benji in the hall. He really misses the 70s in Toronto and the job as a printer he had downtown. He was in ecstasy talking about it. He thinks that people born in Canada are more easy going and jovial than immigrants. 

            When I got home my Brit Lit professor had finally posted this week's lecture video. The lecture was on Robert Derozio and John Keats but he started with an overview of the Romantic period and how it was about freedom of the imagination. It was situated with the French revolution but it was also an artistic revolution. Like last time he asked questions and stopped to stare at the camera for a while. 

            The Romantic period was a short period between the French Revolution and the Victorian era. “Romantic” is a retrospective description. They didn’t say it. The period was defined by revolution and change. The French Rev for Brits was a major point about transforming everything. The French Revolution started in 1789 and reflected a radical change in world view against monarchy. Overthrowing the monarchy, guillotining the aristocracy. Unthinkable, radical, strange combination of radical and conservatism. The Revolution meant not just political change but in world view with the belief that man could perfect togetherness and egalitarianism. Mary Robinson in 1781 wrote that Freedom echoes through the skies ... The goddess speaks to mark the blest decree that tyrants shall fall ... Humanity will be free. Freedom was important. Free from work and subjugation. Many poets of the time were in favour of revolution because of the hope it promised. But the promise fades sadly into violence and the rise of Napoleon and war. It turns against itself. 

            Britain’s reaction to the revolution was to become more authoritarian. Wordsworth was hopeful but became a cranky conservative. The women remained hopeful but the men got cranky. Art was transformed to the rise of the importance of the everyday, of peasants and their work. There was a rebellion against the neoclassical stripped order of poetry. There was a complex interrogation of the relationship between beauty and truth and nature and art and imagination. Pope saw art as the imitation of the classical manner of appreciating nature. But the Romantics were interested in wild, radical, chaotic nature. They believed in freedom of the imagination. Unfettered human capacity. Wordsworth's preface of Lyrical Ballads articulated that he was choosing common life and the language used by men of the low, rustic condition. This was better soil for the passions to mature, plainer more emphatic and the state of simplicity was more contemplatable, more strongly communicative of the character of rural occupations, more easily comprehendible and durable. The passions are more incorporated with the form of the permanence and beauty of nature. Nature for Pope was ordered but this is wild. Hearts and minds of common value. Here it is the people that have value because they are more receptive to the work of nature on the imagination. If we are to understand nature it must be through the common rustic farmer, shepherd, reaper and the workers in the fields. This was a subjective view safely insulated from political freedom. Only in the imaginations of later poets like Keats and Derozio was freedom more political and public. 

            Derozio's "The Harp of India" begins in doubt and questions. Who is addressed and what does it mean? The harp in this lament is a symbol of culture, language and traditions. One edition has an epigraph from "The Harp of Erin" about how in Wales the English killed the bards to eradicate Celtic culture; eliminated those that carried rhetorical power. What happened? It’s a lament. What about the speaker's tone at the beginning and what is the tone at the end? 

            The professor paused for us to answer while his cat meowed and whined very loudly and needily.

            I write Derozio wants to be a poet for India. He identifies as an Indian poet. He wants what he does to be remembered as part of India. He wants a sense of purpose. He thinks he’s good enough to set the tone. 

            Uncertainty remains. There is a lack of certainty about the power of art. He's not striking the harp now But if maybe it is a call to arms. Let me start if world lets me. Comparing this sonnet with Keats’ “When I Have Fears That I May Cease to Be” the structure is similar and it is the same kind of English sonnet with the form abab cdcd efef gg in iambic pentameter with volta and couplet. They are both also about the possibility of poetic capacity and power. But what are the worries and how different is the Keats poem from the Derozio. The Volta turn in last quatrain asks a question and reverses at the couplet's resolution and this is the same in both poems. 

            He pauses again.

            I say for Keats the poem is personal for Derozio it is about himself in relation to India. Keats is more free. Derozio may not be talking about India but about his own limitations of being bound and held back by his own culture or by the world's relation or reaction to him. When he says India he may mean himself. Keats is less limited and perhaps more privileged and free to just worry about the poetry itself. 

            Keats is more metaphorical. It is about his own immortality rather than that of his culture. He says “I" nine times while Derozio says it once or twice and only near the end. What of the last lines of that great ender of poems Keats? 

           We pause again. 

           I say Keats is worried that he is wasting his time worrying. That life is passing him by from too much of dwelling on his own fear while he misses out on both fame as a poet and fulfillment in love. He thinks he should just jump in and stop worrying. 

           The iambic pentameter works at the end to create a sense of plodding stoicism. He must bring himself in line and relinquish his fears sink. The word “think" invokes the power of mind. He thinks his way to this place and shows the power of the imagination. Both poems are different. 

           Back to Derozio and another sonnet. “In Thy Days of Glory Past”. This sonnet has a different rhyme and structure. It is a petrarchan sonnet made of an octave and a sestet. The traditional form would be ABBAABBA CDDECE. He alters it. The first eight lines pose a problem and the last pose the answer. What to make of the language and imagery in lines 1-4 vs. 5-8. What problem and what answer? 

           I say his abababcc wants to be more song-like to praise India’s past The couplet concludes that it is lost. His conclusion of dedecc is also a song but there is not all that much hope but rather a kind wish for a small contribution. The couplets have the same cc rhymes in the octave and the sestet. He’s offering a wreath where it was absent to India. He wants it not to be about India's misery but it sort of still is. Lines 1-4 paint a picture of glory while lines 5-8 show defeat. Divine imagery is compared to that of servile clipped animals that are flightless pets in the dust and dirt. 

            At first it is airy but there is a super contrast with lines 5-8. A juxtaposition between halo and dirt. There is probably no glory, no respect, no reverence, but just sadness. The solution is for poetry to recover glory but it is still uncertain. The poem is not the reward. One kind wish from the world is what it needs to recover reverence from outside. There is alternate punctuation online and he thinks this inverts the meaning. I disagree. 

           The Sonnet is old and traditionally about love or romance. Keats and Derozio use new topics. The lesson is that despite radical newness the new does not displace but there is a new form of the old.

           Ekphresis is important for “Ode On A Grecian Urn". It is the most famous exkphrastic poem. Art is the topic for the sonnet. Art as the topic is not new but it becomes especially important in Romanticism, especially with Keats. He is poor and writes about art. Unlike the upper class poets he couldn’t read Greek and Latin and so he had to wait for English translations. Ekphresis is a Greek rhetorical device for describing a thing like the shield of Achilles in The Iliad. This was adjusted to verbal representation of visual art but also breaks from neoclassical style of imitation. Keats is expressing the experience of the art rather than describing it. His poem “To Homer" is not about Homer but about the poet's awe. “Ode On A Grecian Urn" is a new poem about the urn. He mixes standard abab rhyme with a sestet. The urn's immortality is a zombie. Keats describes the urn through his own encounter and his reactions. His ekphrasis is about the paradox of the art. Immortal images last forever but he is scared of its cold, slow, silent uncertainty. He worries if he may cease to live in. Of immortality he is trying to convince himself that it is good. The last lines about truth are quoted in a Simpsons episode at military school. The truth is harsh and disturbing, so what’s beautiful about it? 

            I stopped editing these notes at dinner. 

            I had a potato, two chicken drumsticks and gravy while watching Andy Griffith. 

            In this story Aunt Bee is complaining that Andy and Opie are slobs. Suddenly she has to go away for a sick relative. Andy and Opie try to keep things tidy but things just pile up to an extreme degree. When they hear Bee is coming home they work like crazy to put the place in order. But when they finish Opie says Bee will be happy to know they don’t need her. Andy suddenly realizes they made a mistake and so they work just as hard to mess the place up again. On their way to pick up Bee at the station they meet Bertha Edwards. She sneaks into their house after they are gone and tidies up and so when Bee arrives and sees the clean parlour she is sad to know the boys can get along without her. Opie sneaks up to his room to mess it up. Bee goes upstairs and finds it a mess and meanwhile Andy dishevels the kitchen. Bee complains but she is clearly happy. 

            I finished editing my lecture notes.