“Baccalaureate” is the oldest poem in Archibald MacLeish: Collected Poems 1917-1982:
A year or two, and grey Euripides,
And Horace and a Lydia or so,
And Euclid and the brush of Angelo,
Darwin on man, Vergilius on bees,
The nose and Dialogues of Socrates,
Don Quixote, Hudibras and Trinculo,
How worlds are spawned and where the dead gods go,--
All shall be shard of broken memories.
And there shall linger other, magic things,--
The fog that creeps in wanly from the sea,
The rotton harbor smell, the mystery
Of moonlit elms, the flash of pigeon wings,
The sunny Green, the old-world peace that clings
About the college yard, where endlessly
The dead go up and down. These things shall be
Enchantment of our heart's rememberings.
And these are more than memories of youth
Which earth's four winds of pain shall blow away;
These are earth's symbols of eternal truth,
Symbols of dream and imagery and flame,
Symbols of those same verities that play
Bright through the crumbling gold of a great name.
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Baccalaureate -- Archibald MacLeish
August 13, 2006
One of the universals of the "college experience" - and pretty much everyone I know who has attended college agrees with me - is that the actual classroom education is the least part of it. Of course, that's not precisely true; it's just that lectures are seldom the stuff of which memories are made, and therefore loom progressively less significant in nostalgic reveries. Nonetheless, college remains one of life's defining experiences, and it is interesting to see what poets have made of the memories that *do* linger and tint the time thereafter.
Today's poem tackles the theme head-on, with MacLeish's characteristically beautiful phrases flowing like a wash of colour over the contrasting aspects of college life. The sequence of images is exquisite; I'm tempted to say that this is a poem that is more about atmosphere than message, but the atmosphere is definitely part of the message here, and the list format works very well indeed. And not just the imagery either - there is a slight weightiness to the language that helps enhance the academic feel, perhaps most evident in the phrase "symboks of those same verities", but present throughout.
The other noteworthy thing is the painstaking attention MacLeish pays to the sound of his poetry. With some poets, this is easy to see - the music of the words takes over, and leaps out at the reader. MacLeish's verse is usually more quietly euphonious, but none the less beautiful, and none the less perfect for not being showy.
Martin
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Archibald MacLeish’s Early Poems
December 3, 2002
Reading the entire works of a poet from beginning to end is in some ways like reliving the poet’s life, even a little like growing with him as his insights and philosophy grow. In addition, you gain insights into his poetry because you can follow shifts in his style while simultaneously seeing how his style was influenced by those around him. You can also follow the development of images and symbols that become vital to a fuller understanding of the poet’s work.
Baccalaureate is the oldest poem in Archibald MacLeish: Collected Poems 1917-1982:
BACCALAUREATE
A year or two, and grey Euripides,
And Horace and a Lydia or so,
And Euclid and the brush of Angelo,
Darwin on man, Vergilius on bees,
The nose and dialogues of Socrates,
Don Quixote, Hudibras and Trinculo,
How worlds are spawned and where the dead gods go, -
All shall be shard of broken memories.
And there shall linger other, magic things, -
The fog that creeps in wanly from the sea,
The rotten harbor smell, the mystery
Of moonlit elms, the flash of pigeon wings,
The sunny Green, the old-world peace that clings
About the college yard, where endlessly
The dead go up and down. These things shall be
Enchantment of our hearts' rememberings.
And these are more than memories of youth
Which earth's four winds of pain shall blow away;
These are youth's symbols of eternal truth,
Symbols of dream and imagery and flame,
Symbols of those same verities that play
Bright through the crumbling gold of a great name.
While I found it only mildly interesting in itself, I found the symbols, the “magic things” that lie at the heart of his poetry quite interesting. Of course, the idea that symbols will live while the ideas of great writers like Socrates and Quixote will disappear could merely be attributed to the fact that MacLeish is a poet and not a philosopher or novelist. On the other hand, the “symbols” he chooses are “experiences” that are “eternal” precisely because they are a part of nature and do not rely on human interpretation. In terms of MacLeish’s poetry itself, the symbolism of “the sunny green” and, in particular, “moonlit elms” become increasingly significant as you read his works.
While I was not particularly impressed by most of MacLeish’s early poems, there are several interesting lines and images to be found in them. The following images appear in from the long poem The Happy Marriage (1924):
The Happy Marriage
Man is immortal for his flesh is earth,
And save he lives forever -- why, he dies:
Woman is mortal, for her flesh will rise
In each new generation of her birth.
She is the tree: we are the feverish
Vain leaves that gild her summer with our own
And fall and rot when summer’s overblown
Now though I’m not sure it’s politically correct today to ascribe the child only to the woman, I found the comparison of woman to the tree and man to the leaves particularly interesting, considering the constant reference to trees and leaves in MacLeish’s poems. Strangely enough,
Germanic creation myths also suggest that woman was derived from the elm tree. Of course, in Germanic myth man is also a tree, an ash, and not the leaves of the elm tree. But it is always the poet’s personal adaptation of myths and symbols that is most interesting, not the use of myth
per se.
Even this MacLeish poem about death contains references to trees, in particular “elm” trees:
SOME ASPECTS OF IMMORTALITY
The alley between the elm trees ends
In nothing, abruptly, as a life ends.
Down that straight avenue I stare
At the final blank, the abyss of air.
A nursemaid with a carriage steers
Across the vista, pushes, nears
The brink, goes over, disappears.
Too ignorant, think I, for fears.
There’s a startling contrast between the ancient elms and the nursemaid with the child in the carriage, but even more startling is his perception of the end of the row of elms as the final abyss, death. When we go beyond the trees we encounter the nothingness of death. Of course, this fear is balanced against the irony of the final line, for we surely know that it’s not the nursemaid that’s “too ignorant,” but, rather, the narrator that has been overcome by an “irrational” fear.
MacLeish’s poetry from 1917 to 1928 seems largely derivative. His long early poems seem to owe much to T.S.Eliot, even going so far as to borrow an opening line from The Golden Bough. Ezra Pound is also a major influence. Even the much-anthologized “Ars Poetica” seems derivative and atypical, somehow borrowed from the imagist movement that was sweeping the world of poetry.
In fact, it is only in the section serendipitiously named “from New Found Land (1930) that MacLeish seems to have discovered his own voice. It is, to be sure, a melancholic voice that has been echoed in many of his earlier poems, but finally MacLeish seems to have discovered his “own” vision. He effectively combines two of the images from the earlier “Baccalaureate” to create a vision of beauty underlaid by an impending sense of loss:
MEMORY GREEN
Yes and when the warm unseasonable weather
Comes at the year's end of the next late year
And the southwest wind that smells of rain and summer
Strips the huge branches of their dying leaves,
And you at dusk along the Friedrichstrasse
Or you in Pans on the windy quay
Shuffle the shallow fallen leaves before you
Thinking the thoughts that like the grey clouds change,
You will not understand why suddenly sweetness
Fills in your heart nor the tears come to your eyes:
You will stand in the June-warm wind and the leaves falling:
When was it so before, you will say, With whom?
You will not remember this at all: you will stand there
Feeling the wind on your throat, the wind in your sleeves,
You will smell the dead leaves in the grass of a garden:
You will close your eyes: With whom, you will say,
Ah where?
Perhaps this philosophical conjunction is merely the natural result of having come of age in the optimistic roaring twenties and suddenly finding yourself in the middle of America’s greatest Depression, but MacLeish seems to make it uniquely his own. It is precisely this inability to understand “why suddenly sweetness/ Fills in your heart nor the tears come to your eyes” that seems to haunt modern man. We have lost our innocence and are too often unable to experience life’s joys directly and fully because of the awareness that sorrow and misery lurks not too far away.
The poem “You, Andrew Marvell” should instantly recall memories of Marvel’s famous “To His Coy Mistress” with its classic statement on carpe diem. MacLeish’s poem, emphasizes how swiftly time flies by, but, unlike Marvell, seems incapable of celebrating the moment with such knowledge:
YOU, ANDREW MARVELL
And here face down beneath the sun
And here upon earth's noonward height
To feel the always coming on
The always rising of the night:
To feel creep up the curving east
The earthy chill of dusk and slow
Upon those under lands the vast
And ever climbing shadow grow
And strange at Ecbatan the trees
Take leaf by leaf the evening strange
The flooding dark about their knees
The mountains over Persia change
And now at Kermanshah the gate
Dark empty and the withered grass
And through the twilight now the late
Few travelers in the westward pass
And Baghdad darken and the bridge
Across the silent river gone
And through Arabia the edge
Of evening widen and steal on
And deepen on Palmyra's street
The wheel rut in the ruined stone
And Lebanon fade out and Crete
High through the clouds and overblown
And over Sicily the air
Still flashing with the landward gulls
And loom and slowly disappear
The sails above the shadowy hulls
And Spain go under and the shore
Of Africa the gilded sand
And evening vanish and no more
The low pale light across that land
Nor now the long light on the sea:
And here face downward in the sun
To feel how swift how secretly
The shadow of the night comes on.
The phrase “the always coming on,” to me, at least, conveys a sense of impending doom although literally, of course, the poem merely describes the night moving from east to west. It’s probably not entirely accidental, though, that the first city described, Ecbatan, is an ancient Persian city long since vanished. Time, after all, can be measured not only by the day but by the century. It is not a peaceful darkness that encompasses Ecbatan, but, rather, a “flood” of darkness that lies about the “knees” of the trees.
The night moves on, passing Palmyra, another ancient city in Syria, where there are “wheel ruts in the ruined stone.” Finally, this dark force swiftly and secretly “comes on,” throwing a long shadow over the narrator. Strangely enough, though, the narrator is lying “face downward in the sun,” suggesting that he has already given in to the night long before the night actually arrives. Perhaps that’s appropriate for a series of poems written in the middle of the Depression.
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eNotes Critique
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Biography of Names
Euripides (A ncient Greek: Εὐριπίδης) (ca. 480 – 406 BC) was one of the three great tragedians of classical Athens, the other two being Aeschylus and Sophocles. Some ancient scholars attributed ninety-five plays to him but according to the Suda it was ninety-two at most. Of these, eighteen or nineteen have survived complete (there has been debate about his authorship of Rhesus, largely on stylistic grounds)[1] and there are also fragments, some substantial, of most of the other plays. More of his plays have survived intact than those of Aeschylus and Sophocles together, partly due to mere chance and partly because his popularity grew as theirs declined[2][3] — he became, in the Hellenistic Age, a cornerstone of ancient literary education, along with Homer, Demosthenes and Menander.[4]
 |
Bust of Euripides:
Roman marble copy of a 4th-century
|
Euripides is identified with theatrical innovations that have profoundly influenced drama down to modern times, especially in the representation of traditional, mythical heroes as ordinary people in extraordinary circumstances. This new approach led him to pioneer developments that later writers adapted to comedy, some of which are characteristic of romance. Yet he also became "the most tragic of poets",[nb 1] focusing on the inner lives and motives of his characters in a way previously unknown.[5][6] He was "the creator of...that cage which is the theatre of Shakespeare's Othello, Racine's Phèdre, of Ibsen and Strindberg," in which "...imprisoned men and women destroy each other by the intensity of their loves and hates",[7] and yet he was also the literary ancestor of comic dramatists as diverse as Menander and George Bernard Shaw.[8]
He was also unique among the writers of ancient Athens for the sympathy he demonstrated towards all victims of society, including women.[5][9] His conservative male audiences were frequently shocked by the 'heresies' he put into the mouths of characters, such as these words of his heroine Medea:
Sooner would I stand
Three times to face their battles, shield in hand,
His contemporaries associated him with Socrates as a leader of a decadent intellectualism, both of them being frequently lampooned by comic poets such as Aristophanes. Whereas Socrates was eventually put on trial and executed as a corrupting influence, Euripides chose a voluntary exile in old age, dying in Macedonia.[11] Recent scholarship casts doubt on ancient biographies of Euripides. For example, it is possible that he never visited Macedonia at all,[12] or, if he did, he might have been drawn there by King Archelaus with incentives that were also offered to other artists.[13]
* * * * * * * * *
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horace Quintus Horatius Flaccus (8 December 65 BC – 27 November 8 BC), known in the
English-speaking world as
Horace, was the leading
Roman lyric poet during the time of
Augustus. The rhetorician
Quintillian regarded his
Odes as almost the only Latin lyrics worth reading, justifying his estimate with the words: "He can be lofty sometimes, yet he is also full of charm and grace, versatile in his figures, and felicitously daring in his choice of words."
[nb 1]
Horace also crafted elegant
hexameter verses (
Sermones and
Epistles) and scurrilous
iambic poetry (
Epodes). The hexameters are playful and yet serious works, leading the ancient satirist
Persius to comment: "as his friend laughs, Horace slyly puts his finger on his every fault; once let in, he plays about the heartstrings".
[nb 2] Some of his iambic poetry, however, can seem wantonly repulsive to modern audiences.
[1]
His career coincided with Rome's momentous change from Republic to Empire. An officer in the republican army that was crushed at the Battle of Philippi in 42 BC, he was befriended by
Octavian's right-hand man in civil affairs,
Maecenas, and became something of a spokesman for the new regime. For some commentators, his association with the regime was a delicate balance in which he maintained a strong measure of independence (he was "a master of the graceful sidestep")
[2] but for others he was, in
John Dryden's phrase, "a well-mannered court slave".
[3][nb 3]
His poetry became "the common currency of civilization", and he still retains a devoted following, despite some stigmatization after
World War I (perhaps due to popular mistrust of old-fashioned patriotism and imperial glory, with which he was identified, fairly or unfairly).
[4] Horatian studies have become so diverse and intensive in recent years that it is probably no longer possible for any one scholar to command the whole range of arguments and issues.
[5]
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Angelo
Angelo is an
Italian and
Greek masculine
given name meaning "
angel", or "messenger". Angelo is also an Italian
surname that has many variations:
Angeli (disambiguation),
Angela (disambiguation),
De Angelis,
D'Angelo,
Angelini,
Angelino (disambiguation),
Angelina (disambiguation),
Angelucci,
Angeloni,
Angeletti (disambiguation).
Angelo as a given name may refer to:
As a surname it may refer to:
* * * * * * * * *
 |
| Venus, Cupid, Folly, and Time |
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Angelo_Bronzino
Agnolo di Cosimo (November 17, 1503 – November 23, 1572), usually known as
Il Bronzino, or
Agnolo Bronzino (mistaken attempts also have been made in the past to assert his name was
Agnolo Tori and even
Angelo (Agnolo) Allori), was an
Italian Mannerist painter from Florence. His sobriquet,
Bronzino, in all probability refers to his relatively dark skin.
[1]
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michelangelo
Michelangelo di Lodovico Buonarroti Simoni[1] (6 March 1475 – 18 February 1564), commonly known as Michelangelo (Italian pronunciation: [mikeˈlandʒelo]), was an Italian Renaissance sculptor, painter, architect, poet, and engineer.[2] Despite making few forays beyond the arts, his versatility in the disciplines he took up was of such a high order that he is often considered a contender for the title of the archetypal Renaissance man, along with fellow Italian Leonardo da Vinci.
 |
Portrait of Michelangelo by Jacopino
del Conte (after 1535) at the age of 60 |
His output in every field during his long life was prodigious; when the sheer volume of correspondence, sketches, and reminiscences that survive is also taken into account, he is the best-documented artist of the 16th century. Two of his best-known works, the
Pietà and
David, were sculpted before he turned thirty. Despite his low opinion of painting, Michelangelo also created two of the most influential works in
fresco in the history of Western art: the scenes from Genesis on the
ceiling and
The Last Judgment on the altar wall of the
Sistine Chapel in Rome. As an architect, Michelangelo pioneered the
Mannerist style at the
Laurentian Library. At 74 he succeeded
Antonio da Sangallo the Younger as the architect of
St. Peter's Basilica. Michelangelo transformed the plan, the western end being finished to Michelangelo's design, the dome being completed after his death with some modification.
In a demonstration of Michelangelo's unique standing, he was the first Western artist whose biography was published while he was alive.
[3] Two biographies were published of him during his lifetime; one of them, by
Giorgio Vasari, proposed that he was the pinnacle of all artistic achievement since the beginning of the
Renaissance, a viewpoint that continued to have currency in art history for centuries. In his lifetime he was also often called
Il Divino ("the divine one").
[4] One of the qualities most admired by his contemporaries was his
terribilità, a sense of awe-inspiring grandeur, and it was the attempts of subsequent artists to imitate Michelangelo's impassioned and highly personal style that resulted in
Mannerism, the next major movement in Western art after the
High Renaissance.
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Darwin
In recognition of Darwin's pre-eminence as a scientist, he was honoured by a major ceremonial funeral in
Westminster Abbey, where he was buried close to
John Herschel and
Isaac Newton.
[15] Darwin has been described as one of the most influential figures in human history.
[16][17]
* * * * * * * *
 |
Depiction of Virgil, 3rd-century AD,[1]
"Monnus-Mosaic", Rheinisches
Landesmuseum Trier |
Virgil is traditionally ranked as one of Rome's greatest poets. His
Aeneid has been considered the
national epic of ancient Rome from the time of its composition to the present day. Modeled after
Homer's
Iliad and
Odyssey, the
Aeneid follows the
Trojan refugee Aeneas as he struggles to fulfill his destiny and arrive on the shores of Italy—in
Roman mythology the founding act of Rome. Virgil's work has had wide and deep influence on
Western literature, most notably the
Divine Comedy of
Dante, in which Virgil appears as Dante's guide through hell and purgatory.
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 |
| Socrates |
Socrates (
/ˈsɒkrətiːz/;
Greek:
Σωκράτης,
Ancient Greek pronunciation: [sɔːkrátɛːs],
Sōkrátēs; c. 469 BC – 399 BC)
[1] was a
classical Greek Athenian philosopher. Credited as one of the founders of
Western philosophy, he is an enigmatic figure known chiefly through the accounts of later classical writers, especially the writings of his students
Plato and
Xenophon, and the plays of his contemporary
Aristophanes. Many would claim that Plato's dialogues are the most comprehensive accounts of Socrates to survive from antiquity.
[2]
Through his portrayal in
Plato's dialogues, Socrates has become renowned for his contribution to the field of
ethics, and it is this Platonic Socrates who also lends his name to the concepts of
Socratic irony and the
Socratic method, or
elenchus. The latter remains a commonly used tool in a wide range of discussions, and is a type of
pedagogy in which a series of questions are asked not only to draw individual answers, but also to encourage fundamental insight into the issue at hand. It is Plato's Socrates that also made important and lasting contributions to the fields of
epistemology and
logic, and the influence of his ideas and approach remains strong in providing a foundation for much western philosophy that followed.
As one recent commentator has put it, Plato, the idealist, offers "an idol, a master figure, for philosophy. A Saint, a prophet of the 'Sun-God', a teacher condemned for his teachings as a heretic."
[3]
 |
| Title page of first edition (1605) |
Don Quixote ( /ˌdɒn kiːˈhoʊtiː/; Spanish: [ˈdoŋ kiˈxote] (
listen)), fully titled The Ingenious Gentleman Don Quixote of La Mancha (Spanish: El ingenioso hidalgo don Quixote de la Mancha), is a novel written by Miguel de Cervantes. The novel follows the adventures of Alonso Quijano, who reads too many chivalric novels, and sets out to revive chivalry under the name of Don Quixote. He recruits a simple farmer, Sancho Panza, as his squire, who frequently deals with Don Quixote's rhetorical orations on antiquated knighthood with a unique Earthy wit. He is met by the world as it is, initiating themes like intertextuality, realism, metatheatre and literary representation.
Published in two volumes a decade apart, in 1605 and 1615, Don Quixote is considered the most influential work of literature from the Spanish Golden Age and the entire Spanish literary canon. As a founding work of modern Western literature, and one of the earliest canonical novels, it regularly appears high on lists of the greatest works of fiction ever published. In one such list, Don Quixote was cited as the "best literary work ever written".
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hudibras
 |
First Collected edition of Hudibras
by Samuel Butler, 1674-1678 |
Hudibras is an English
mock heroic narrative poem from the 17th century written by
Samuel Butler.
Purpose
The work is a
satirical polemic upon
Roundheads,
Puritans,
Presbyterians and many of the other factions involved in the
English Civil War. The work was begun, according to the title page, during the civil war and published in three parts in 1663, 1664 and 1678, with the first edition encompassing all three parts in 1684 (see
1684 in poetry).
[1] The
Mercurius Aulicus (an early newspaper of the time) reported an unauthorised edition of the first part was already in print in early 1662.
[2]
Published only four years after
Charles II had been
restored to the
throne and
the Protectorate of
Oliver Cromwell being completely over, the poem found an appreciative audience. The satire is not balanced as Butler was fiercely
royalist and only the
parliamentarian side are singled out for ridicule. Butler also uses the work to parody some of the dreadful poetry of the time.
The epic tells the story of Sir Hudibras, a
knight errant who is described dramatically and with laudatory praise that is so thickly applied as to be absurd, and the conceited and arrogant person is visible beneath. He is praised for his knowledge of logic despite appearing stupid throughout, but it is his religious fervour which is mainly attacked:
- For his Religion, it was fit
- To match his learning and his wit;
- 'Twas Presbyterian true blue;
- For he was of that stubborn crew
- Of errant saints, whom all men grant
- To be the true Church Militant;
- Such as do build their faith upon
- The holy text of pike and gun;
- Decide all controversies by
- Infallible artillery;
- And prove their doctrine orthodox
- By apostolic blows and knocks;
- Call fire and sword and desolation,
- A godly thorough reformation,
- Which always must be carried on,
- And still be doing, never done;
- As if religion were intended
- For nothing else but to be mended.
His
squire, Ralpho, is of a similar stamp but makes no claim to great learning, knowing all there is to know from his religion or “new-light”, as he calls it. Butler satirises the competing factions at the time of the protectorship by the constant bickering of these two principal characters whose religious opinions should unite them.
These are fawning but barbed portraits and are thought to represent personalities of the times but the actual analogues are, now as then, debatable. "A Key to Hudibras" printed with one of the work's editions (1709) and ascribed to
Roger L'Estrange names Sir
Samuel Luke as the model for Hudibras. Certainly, the mention of Mamaluke in the poem makes this possible although Butler suggests Hudibras is from the West Country making
Henry Rosewell a candidate. The
witchfinder,
Matthew Hopkins,
John Desborough,
parliamentarian general, and
William Prynne, lawyer, all make appearances, and the character of Sidrophel is variously seen as either
William Lilly or
Paul Neale.
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trinculo
Trinculo can refer to:
