Tuesday, 23 February 2016

Christina Rossetti

Time for some more female representation. Rossetti was a Victorian poet and I am so glad that I found her name on my reading list because her poems are very relevant to certain moments in my life. The one I am about to share with you reminds me of the thought I have often had, when I question where or how I first met some of the most important people in my life. And it frustrates me when I cannot recall, as if it had not mattered enough at the time for my brain to recognise it as important. Rossetti captures all of this in her poem:

I Wish I Could Remember That First Day

I wish I could remember that first day,
    First hour, first moment of your meeting me,
    If bright or dim the season, it might be
Summer or Winter for aught I can say;
So unrecorded did it slip away,
    So blind was I to see and to foresee,
    So dull to mark the budding of my tree
That would not blossom yet for many a May.
If only I could recollect it, such
    A day of days! I let it come and go
    As traceless as a thaw of bygone snow;
It seemed to mean so little, meant so much;
If only now I could recall that touch,
    First touch of hand in hand – Did one but know!

Let's start at the end for a change. As I have said, I often suffer the same problem as depicted here, and she recognises that she is not alone; the general pronoun 'one' ends the poem after written in a first person narrative, so gives the personal emotion but then the reflective inclusion of the reader.

By covering different lengths of time, through 'bright or dim' to 'summer or winter', we see that the relationship she has had has spanned years, meaning it is all the more important to her. And thus, it is all the more upsetting for her not to remember even the season in which she met the narrattee of the poem.

I find the repetition of various different items, such as 'first', 'so' and 'if' mimics her attempt to recall the same thoughts and memories over and over again. Even the rhyme scheme, with only four phonological rhymes, maintains this, as once you think you have lost the 'a' or the 'b' rhyme, it returns, due to the Petrarchan sonnet form. You can hear her sifting through the same memories, checking each one over and over but never quite reaching the hoped-for conclusion.

Wednesday, 17 February 2016

Cambridge Virtual Classroom

Seeing as I am hoping to study English at Cambridge, I thought I would share a part of their site that I have come to find very intriguing. They offer a 'Virtual Classroom' to explore some of the approaches to literature that they offer. They ask you to read a poem without context, as I sometimes do here, and evaluate your own thoughts and feelings towards it. They then provide you with an exemplar reading to see how you faired.

This is the link to the first example poem they want you to examine: http://www.english.cam.ac.uk/classroom/class1/index.htm

I would like to stress that this activity is for absolutely anyone, whether you have studied poetry in great depth or not. It might be just nice for you to read a poem out of context, as you do not have to follow their instructions at all. The poem is not long or difficult to read and so is a great introduction to Practical Criticism.

From it I have learnt the term 'Rhyme Royal': ababbcc rhyme scheme. Also, that an unstressed syllable is 'feminine' (no, I do not like that term and shall not use it again).

It surprised me that when I did look into the context of the poem, it was as old as 1535 and by Thomas Wyatt (another poet I am yet to cover, noted). The language did not read as far divided as that in my mind. Which is what I love about poetry; it is universal and ageless in many cases.

I wonder how I sound to my readership sometimes. I talk about all this lovely, intelligent poetry, but unknown to you I sit here listening to Sk8er Boi.

Thursday, 11 February 2016

E.E. Cummings your way

A few days ago, I watched the film, 'The Life and Death of Charlie St Cloud'. I rather enjoyed it (and cried a lot too), and within the film, one of the sweetest moments came from a conversation about poetry, specifically, the poetry of E.E. Cummings. Thus, he is this week's poet.

It seems as though his modernist approach to grammar means that Cummings' name was often written with lower case letters, as in, 'e. e. cummings'. So these should be some good reads. It even affects his title. I might even find that I enjoy this so much that I do a few weeks' worth of purely his works. Sorry!

i like my body when it is with your

i like my body when it is with your
body. It is so quite new a thing.
Muscles better and nerves more.
i like your body.  i like what it does,
i like its hows.  i like to feel the spine
of your body and its bones, and the trembling
-firm-smooth ness and which i will
again and again and again
kiss, i like kissing this and that of you,
i like, slowly stroking the shocking fuzz
of your electric furr,and what-is-it comes
over parting flesh….And eyes big love-crumbs,

and possibly i like the thrill

of under me you so quite new


Rather a risqué poem, I grant you. But I consider the syntax to fit so well with the ideas of experiencing the 'new', and how the words seem unbound, mimicking the freedom of the narrator's body. I have a sneaky suspicion one of the Es of his name stands for 'enjambment'.

The first line uses this technique to balance the starting 'i' with the finishing 'your', which makes the couple appear like a reflection of one another. The line 'muscles better and nerves more' uses comparatives without other adjectives to mimic the inexplicable sensations of the body, whilst presenting a distracted state of mind, one focused more on pleasure than thought.

Cummings uses the pronoun 'i' on almost every line of the poem. This is because he is of course referring to his own experience of pleasure and is almost a stream of consciousness, but I really like the fact that he has decapitalised it, because to me it helps the poem read far less self-centred, and focuses the mind more on the partner whom he is describing.

I am now going to try to unpack the image of 'eyes big love-crumbs'. Even though I have not yet pondered over it, it feels such a unique and cosy image, emphasising that this relationship is not only about the physicality but also of the person. He is not just talking about any woman/man, but a particular 'you', which comes as an intimate address to show he isn't bragging to another about her/him, but is in fact complimenting her/him, even if only mentally.

Sorry, back to my deciphering. If the eyes are big love-crumbs then I suppose the partner is looking at the narrator in a tired but affectionate way, with the 'crumbs' being the remnants of consummated passion.

The one thing I am not so sure about being positive in this poem is the adjective 'new'. Its use mkes it seem that maybe the narrator only appreciates the body he is with because it is fresh and untouched by him. And the way that it is given end focus by being the final word of the poem makes it more unsettling, from my reading at least, anyway. I do hope I am wrong and that he didn't get bored!

Monday, 1 February 2016

I'm Shaw you will love this one

George Bernard Shaw is most famous for his work Pygmalion (which I am yet to read, unfortunately, but I shall!) but today I am going to open your eyes to his poetic side. Most of the poems I have read are easy enough to read but cover very broad aspects of life. This one immediately caught my attention because I have always had a thrill from the feeling of being lost. Even when I was younger, I would purposely try to run from my parents when on walks in the woods, or hide behind racks in shops, always wanting to hear my name on the tannoy to prove I had won. It never happened though; I wasn't very good at hiding, evidently, or maybe my parents were just amazing seekers. Yes I'm sure it's the latter...


Completely Lost


Have you ever had that feeling?
That you are completely lost.
Your mind and senses reeling,
As in a dark foreboding frost.
Nothing but nothing is as it seems,
Words like phantoms come and go.
It is as if all the bizarre dreams,
Have turned your brain to snow.
The ticking of the mantelpiece clock,
Cuts the silence like a knife.
Your mind is in a mysterious block,
You ask yourself is this my life.
Perhaps I am just getting old,
Brain and body gone to pot,
Where are the times that I was bold,
And my brain could solve every plot.



This poem takes me all the way back to my younger years in the woods, at least at the start. And Shaw wants the reader to love that feeling (he addresses the reader in the first sentence), but also to come to fear it as well. It is a positive '[dream]' that, when young, one can be 'bold' in a 'solve' any problem. But as you age that thrill lessens, demonstrated by the cold lexis in 'frost' and 'snow'. And in reality to the older generations, this climate is in fact deadly, leading to hypothermia. So a very real sense of danger is brought through this poem.


He has also kept the sense of the literary; he focuses on 'words' passing through his mind, he wants to solve the 'plot' of his life, he has even got writer's 'block', and perhaps the ticking of the clock is a deadline he feels he must reach with his work, although it also gives the sense of foreboding, with the end of life nigh. 'Knife' augments this fear, with further danger in isolation.


It is important that he mentions 'brain' before 'body', as if the former instrument is most significant and important to him, which is likely as he was an intellectual. It is also interesting to see that the final sentence, which is in the interrogative mood, does not end in a question mark. Perhaps this is to signify the exhaustion of the writer - he can no longer 'solve' anything so why bother? A full stop makes the poem and the narrator's voice seem more final, as if accepting that the end is coming, and he is no longer looking for a way out. The 'plot' of everyone's life must end in death and so there is no solving this one. I guess it's therefore a very honest piece of writing.


I still like getting lost, though.