الاسم: fadi apu-dria
الملف الشخصي
بحث
حديثا...
استطلاع الرأي
هذه مقالة عن اهم الشعراء
13 ايار, 2008
`Lucy Poems' became cemented during the mid-nineteenth century as consisting of the following poems in the following and familiar order: "Strange fits of passion," "She dwelt among th' untrodden ways," "I travelled among unknown men," "Three years she grew in sun and shower," and "A slumber did my spirit seal." These five poems provide, along with Keats's six odes and Coleridge's conversation poems, the touchstones of Romantic period studies, the poems we can teach to our students as embodying the mystery and artistry of the literary imagination. These are our disciplinary fascinations, love affairs that we transfer to students often without the accompanying reasons that justify such passion. And this is a compounded and textured love we hold for these works, composed of what our own teachers have taught us about loving texts as much as of what we ourselves have discovered. The loyalties multiplied in our literary passions can be too cherished for us to want to question or analyze their cost basis, and so it is fortunate that Jones sets about demystifying them and their attraction for us, because we can no longer uphold the kind of Victorian and early Modern purviews that reified and biographically identified the artwork, those projects that first endowed the `Lucy' grouping with such value, we need to understand the history and the context of those earlier projects, and consequently the condition of our literary love. "The important question, finally, is not whether a given grouping is right, but what the readerly activity invited by Wordsworth's text can reveal about the functions of both provocation and response" (12). The puzzle is a considerable one: these are poems that discourse about interpersonal love but that are tacitly about artistic love, evoke textual love from their readers. How vulnerable are we to this triangulated passion, one which is the mediated product of generations of editors, scholars, theorists-in short, an institutional rather than purely poetic feat? And what do the institutional conditions of this love cost us, particularly at the intellectual level?
Jones argues that our relation to the `Lucy' texts, a relation I have been assigning an affective nature although he does not, is a case in point of "the modern literature institution's will to knowledge." The `Lucy Poems,' that is, open themselves up in such a way that they demand interpretive intervention, thus facilitating the process of "legitimat[ing] `English' as a `discipline' capable of producing `knowledge,'" because the indeterminacies of the `Lucy' texts were always suppressed through the interpretive process in order to produce such knowledge. Put another way, our affective relation to the `Lucy Poems' has such power over us because the cost basis is integral to the value of our discipline; we love the thing that has the power to grant our activity institutional, social, and political value; we love to expend its richness to both taste that power and the lovely mystery of its suppressed articulation. On the other hand, the indeterminacies of the `Lucy' texts also give us some pain since they will not reduce to sheer knowledge, and the more freedom we allow ourselves interpretively over these texts, as Jones points out, the less we are able to contain and define our `knowledge.'
Jones not only engages the enigma of the `Lucy Poems' in itself and within criticism, but he broadens the problem to the academy by wondering how the sociopolitical critique of the institution today by a critic like Tern' Eagleton, for instance, takes into account the historical reception of the `Lucy Poems.' These were poems composed in a period that saw the "Rise of English as a modern institution, but it also [saw] the rise of `theory' and considerable changes in the specific practices of criticism," and Jones urges that these three be viewed not disparately as Eagleton does, but "as cognate functions" that sit in relation to larger social contexts, particularly democratizing ones (55). So, too, the change in the early judgmental and analytic Reviews to the more subjective and interpretive Magazines of the nineteenth century might perhaps map out a similar critical response to literature today as we ourselves move between interpretation and analysis in our critical writing; moreover, the shift "epitomizes the liberalization of `the institution of criticism' since the romantic period" (59). The recurrences, fascinating as they are, that the case study of Lucy reveals in institutional practice, rationale, and self-propagation, are spun out not in order to refute Eagleton but to set him straight. As valuable as this is for us (and as much as we might wish him to push it further), Jones confines his critique to clearing the ground for his study of Lucy, subjugating it to her.
But who is Lucy? That, finally, becomes the centering question for Jones, and it is the one that causes him most trouble in this otherwise elegant book. As he points out, Lucy cannot be the grandmotherly figure of "Dear Child of Nature" with her "old age serene and bright"; whether a young w omen or a child, she must be eternally young. Representing the immortality of youth, Lucy signifies (or perhaps is) that quality of the child that makes death inconceivable. Or, she signals the youth in immortality as represented by one who dies young. Both of these conceptualizations of death or not-death are vessels for the mystery we weave about life and spirit by way of an emotional nexus that allows us to bind these into some kind of certitude that is strong enough to contain mystery and doubt, but at a distance. Lucy is the container for this certitude and this doubt in the Wordsworthian canon; Keats's odes and Coleridge's conversation poems offer more formal, less figurative kinds of containers. But the figure is an extremely powerful medium, which is what allows critics to go beyond the authorial project of the `Lucy' poems. The pre-sexual being, in this case the female with her cultural connotations for the desiring reader, represents potential rather than experience, and because of this convention we accept Wordsworth's consignment of this mystery to the young girl--whose figurative or literal death is the only way to stabilize the mystery she contains.
"Strange fits of passion have I known"
Summary
The speaker proclaims that he has been the victim of "strange fits of passion"; he says that he will describe one of these fits, but only if he can speak it "in the Lover's ear alone." Lucy, the girl he loved, was beautiful--"fresh as a rose in June"--and he traveled to her cottage one night beneath the moon. He stared at the moon as his horse neared the paths to Lucy's cottage. As they reached the orchard, the moon had begun to sink, nearing the point at which it would appear to the speaker to touch Lucy's house in the distance. As the horse plodded on, the speaker continued to stare at the moon. All at once, it dropped "behind the cottage roof." Suddenly, the speaker was overcome with a strange and passionate thought, and cried out to himself: "O mercy! If Lucy should be dead!"
Form
The stanzas of "Strange fits of passion have I known" fit an old, very simple ballad form, employed by Wordsworth to great effect as part of his project to render common speech and common stories in poems of simple rhythmic beauty. Each stanza is four lines long, each has alternating rhymed lines (an ABAB rhyme scheme), and each has alternating metrical lines of iambic tetrameter and iambic trimeter, respectively--which means that the first and third lines of the stanza have four accented syllables, and the second and fourth lines have only three.
Commentary
This direct, unadorned lyric is one of the most striking and effective of the many simple lyrics like it, written by Wordsworth in the mid to late 1790s and included in the first edition of Lyrical Ballads. This little poem, part of a sequence of short lyrics concerning the death of the speaker's beloved Lucy, actually shows extraordinary sophistication and mastery of technique. The sophistication lies in the poet's grasp of human feeling, chronicling the sort of inexplicable, half-fearful, morbid fantasy that strikes everyone from time to time but that, before Wordsworth, was not a subject poetry could easily incorporate. The technique lies in the poet's treatment of his theme: like a storyteller, Wordsworth dramatizes in the first stanza the act of reciting his tale, saying that he will whisper it, but only in the ear of a lover like himself. This act immediately puts the reader in a sympathetic position, and sets the actual events of the poem's story in the past, as opposed to the "present," in which the poet speaks his poem. This sets up the death-fantasy as a subject for observation and analysis--rather than simply portraying the events of the story, Wordsworth essentially says, "This happened to me, and isn't it strange that it did?" But of course it is not really strange; it happens to everyone; and this disjunction underscores the reader's automatic identification with the speaker of the poem.
Also like a storyteller, Wordsworth builds suspense leading up to the climax of his poem by tying his speaker's reverie to two inexorable forces: the slowly sinking moon, and the slowly plodding horse, which travels "hoof after hoof," just as the moon comes "near, and nearer still" to the house where Lucy lies. The recitation of the objects of the familiar landscape through which the speaker travels--the paths he loves, the orchard-plot, the roof of the house--heightens the unfamiliarity of the "strange fit of passion" into which the speaker is plunged by the setting moon.
Analysis
Wordsworth's monumental poetic legacy rests on a large number of important poems, varying in length and weight from the short, simple lyrics of the 1790s to the vast expanses of The Prelude, thirteen books long in its 1808 edition. But the themes that run through Wordsworth's poetry, and the language and imagery he uses to embody those themes, remain remarkably consistent throughout the Wordsworth canon, adhering largely to the tenets Wordsworth set out for himself in the 1802 preface to Lyrical Ballads. Here, Wordsworth argues that poetry should be written in the natural language of common speech, rather than in the lofty and elaborate dictions that were then considered "poetic." He argues that poetry should offer access to the emotions contained in memory. And he argues that the first principle of poetry should be pleasure, that the chief duty of poetry is to provide pleasure through a rhythmic and beautiful expression of feeling--for all human sympathy, he claims, is based on a subtle pleasure principle that is "the naked and native dignity of man."
Recovering "the naked and native dignity of man" makes up a significant part of Wordsworth's poetic project, and he follows his own advice from the 1802 preface. Wordworth's style remains plain-spoken and easy to understand even today, though the rhythms and idioms of common English have changed from those of the early nineteenth century. Many of Wordsworth's poems (including masterpieces such as "Tintern Abbey" and the "Intimations of Immortality" ode) deal with the subjects of childhood and the memory of childhood in the mind of the adult in particular, childhood's lost connection with nature, which can be preserved only in memory. Wordsworth's images and metaphors mix natural scenery, religious symbolism (as in the sonnet "It is a beauteous evening, calm and free, in which the evening is described as being "quiet as a nun"), and the relics of the poet's rustic childhood--cottages, hedgerows, orchards, and other places where humanity intersects gently and easily with nature.
Wordsworth's poems initiated the Romantic era by emphasizing feeling, instinct, and pleasure above formality and mannerism. More than any poet before him, Wordsworth gave expression to inchoate human emotion; his lyric "Strange fits of passion have I known," in which the speaker describes an inexplicable fantasy he once had that his lover was dead, could not have been written by any previous poet. Curiously for a poet whose work points so directly toward the future, many of Wordsworth's important works are preoccupied with the lost glory of the past--not only of the lost dreams of childhood but also of the historical past, as in the powerful sonnet "London, 1802," in which the speaker exhorts the spirit of the centuries-dead poet John Milton to teach the modern world a better way to live.
05:39:22 2008-05-14
تعليقات
A service provided by Al Bawaba