On Tuesday morning I memorized the first verse of “Vie, mort et resurrection d’un amour passion” (Life, Death and Resurrection of Passionate Love) by Serge Gainsbourg. There are only two verses but each one is longer than average, plus it’s barely a song since the words are basically recited to music. I made some major adjustments in my translation.
For lunch I had kettle chips, salsa and yogourt.
In the afternoon I took a bike ride to Bloor and Ossington, south to Queen and home.
I returned to my paragraph assignment for Brit Lit 2 which I hadn’t had time to work on much Monday because of typing my lecture notes. I’d left off with 1800 words and before dinner managed to knock them down to 1479. I only need to get rid of about 1200 more.
For dinner I had a potato, a curried chicken leg and the rest of my gravy while watching Andy Griffith.
In this story Thelma Lou’s attractive cousin Karen comes to visit her from Arkansas and she and Barney decide to match-make Karen with Andy. At first Barney tries to trick Andy into accidentally meeting Karen at the coffeeshop by suggesting that Andy come to have coffee with him, but Andy keeps asking why. Finally in frustration Barney says it’s to meet Thelma Lou’s cousin and he says okay. Andy and Karen hit it off right away and he invites her crow shooting the next day. She doesn’t tell him that she’s a crack shot and he doesn’t invite her to shoot anyway but she doesn’t mind and they have a nice time. The next night Karen comes over for dinner and Andy and Aunt May quiz Karen on the things she likes. The next day Barney tells Karen that she passed the test and so now she is offended because she hadn’t known their date was an interview. When Andy invites Karen to a skeet shooting competition she comes along to teach him a lesson. She surprises Andy by whipping his ass in shooting and then gives him hell for testing her. Instead of being ruffled Andy realizes he’s done wrong and makes up with Karen. In the end they go pistol shooting together and she takes out six bottles in quick succession. Andy is fine with her being a better shot than him but Barney finds it humiliating.
Karen was played by Gail Davis, who really was a trick shot from Arkansas and even competed in rodeos before she went to Hollywood. Gene Autrey considered her the perfect western actress and cast her as the star of the TV series Annie Oakley in 1954. She was the first female star of a western TV series and the show ran for three years.
Before I gave up for the night I had my document down to 1428 words:
John Keats’ sonnet “When I have fears that I may cease to be” is a poem about time and how thoughts of worry over time causes fear and fatality to rob the thinker of the timeless moment. The speaker is worried about the immortality of his poetry and the fleetingness of love. But he is also afraid that if he wastes his time dwelling upon fears of his relationship with time running out. that he will cease to be before his desires are realized then that worry is the very thing that weighs him down and wastes his life as a poet and lover and will cause life to pass him by until he sinks into oblivion. He realizes that he is missing out on fame as a poet and fulfillment in love. That he needs to focus on the poetry and the “unreflecting” love and not worry whether he will pile up volumes of poetic enchantment. His fear holds him back from diving into the ocean of the world instead of standing on its shore. He concludes that he should jump in and stop worrying.
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 the fear of their loss.
The assonance of "cease to be" renders it a key phrase. To cease to be is not merely to die but to suddenly be gone before one’s time. “Before” shows that the speaker is fine with dying after his task of harvesting his brain has been completed. He renders himself rustic in an industrious agricultural metaphor but not pastoral like a shepherd. He puts himself metaphorically in a rustic relationship with seasonal time as a farmer of ideas in order to overcome his fear by reconciling himself with time and understanding his place in the world as a poet. He knows that the ripening of a crop requires time. His mind is overflowing and his writing is the means by which he will reap its abundance. He envisions the successful, full and rich harvest of a crop that has been nurtured and carefully developed, piled up in volumes if he does not cease to be. He knows that the results of his labour could be as valuable and essential to the world as the staple of grain. He knows that he has a harvest to bring in and he needs to face the task as a farmer would. Harvest time is an end result and he understands that the poetic harvest will end his season. He does not mind an end to his labours and of his existence. But his fears are that he will “cease to be before” the season ends and his harvest is complete.
The starry sky is partially obscured by cloudy symbols of the muse of high romance. Romance is uncertain but visibly present while elevated above him in unclear symbols. The speaker understands his limitations. He does not hope to discern the full meaning from the symbols but to romance the unreachable indirectly by tracing with a pen the shape of their shadows cast by the light of the stars down on the earth. This tracing is done by the by the magical skilled hand of chance that a poet wields for tracing the shadows into writing and to magically transform accidents into poetry. A magic hand of chance is ironic because magic is a supernatural skill not done randomly. Being open to chance in order to plant poetry involves waiting. He wants to use this hand with intention to trace, but one cannot trace by chance. 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. Before he stumbles on the truth. The poet makes magic out of random experience. “Their shadows, with the magic hand of chance” is the volta. By it the most assonance heavy line in the sonnet he fills it with intention. He renders it magical and the least accidental of all the lines. In rhyming “chance” with “romance” he connects the two. Chance is a shadow of destiny. Chance is a fortuitous sudden occurrence that seems magical. The magic hand of chance is inspiration. A high romance could be a great poetic narrative, deep inspiration or a love affair, or all three combined. Romance is not chance if it is symbolic. Symbols are by nature not accidental because they indicate a solid meaning.
The fair creature of an hour is a momentary love. He begins the sestet with talk of love and romance with 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 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 giving in to 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 semi-colon and the em dash are two barriers that separate the speaker from magical unreflecting love. On the other side of the em dash the speaker is confined to the result of his reflection on “never” having unreflecting love 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. After the em dash is “then” which depends on the previous occurrences of “when” at the beginning of the sestet. He uses “when” three times, placing himself in time in each quatrain. 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. “When” is another time dependent element. The poet places himself in time and therefore condemns himself to unenchanted mortality which feeds on reflections of death. These three occurrences of “when” result in the “then” of his potential aloneness at the conclusion. “When” he limits his love to reflection “then” he is separated from unreflecting love”. 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. 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 bridge 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.
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