R.E. Slater - The Glory of the Lord (a psalm)

The Great Pyramids of Giza, Egypt

The Glory of the Lord

by R.E. Slater

Where is thy glory now O Kings of Egypt?
Where is the glory of the tombs of thy people?
For dust thou art and to dust thou hast returned,
And naught but the Lord doth sustain.

Who rules over the heavens and earth,
Who commands the seas and all that is in them,
Who raises up mountains and lays low
Those who by pride would stride the earth.

Who rule not by wisdom nor by mercy,
But by brute strength and vain glory,
To these the Lord of the heavens commands,
Bow down and lay low all ye nations of the earth.

For I am the Lord your God,
Maker of the heavens and the earth,
Whose forgiveness is unmeasured,
Whose joy is boundless as the stars.

Whose glory arises on the wings of the dawn,
Who strideth the earth seeking wisdom's mercy,
That peace might reign over the land of the living,
Before all nations of men full of sin and ruin.

For you, O Lord, art enthroned forever,
You are remembered throughout all generations,
Even as your years endure through all generations,
May all the kings of the earth fear your just name.

O Lord, we lie as a broken people,
Spent before the hot mid-day sun,
All our works lie in toil's upheaval,
Worn out like perishable garments.

O Lord, hear the prayers of the destitute,
Despise not the prayers of your children,
Who lament in sin's grief and lie stricken before you,
Whithered upon the dark days of mortal distress.

O Lord, remember the cries of your servants,
That we might dwell in your glory and praise,
Though the heavens be rolled up like a scroll,
Though the earth passes like an evening shadow.

For you, O Lord, art enthroned forever,
You are remembered throughout all generations,
Even as your years endure through all generations,
May we, your servants, dwell securely in your holy name.


- R.E. Slater
April 6, 2013
*written as a psalm

@copyright R.E. Slater Publications

all rights reserved

Psalm 102
English Standard Version (ESV)

Do Not Hide Your Face from Me

A Prayer of one afflicted, when he is faint
and pours out his complaint before the Lord.

102 Hear my prayer, O Lord;
let my cry come to you!
2 Do not hide your face from me
in the day of my distress!
Incline your ear to me;
answer me speedily in the day when I call!

3 For my days pass away like smoke,
and my bones burn like a furnace.
4 My heart is struck down like grass and has withered;
I forget to eat my bread.
5 Because of my loud groaning
my bones cling to my flesh.
6 I am like a desert owl of the wilderness,
like an owl[a] of the waste places;
7 I lie awake;
I am like a lonely sparrow on the housetop.
8 All the day my enemies taunt me;
those who deride me use my name for a curse.
9 For I eat ashes like bread
and mingle tears with my drink,
10 because of your indignation and anger;
for you have taken me up and thrown me down.
11 My days are like an evening shadow;
I wither away like grass.

12 But you, O Lord, are enthroned forever;
you are remembered throughout all generations.
13 You will arise and have pity on Zion;
it is the time to favor her;
the appointed time has come.
14 For your servants hold her stones dear
and have pity on her dust.
15 Nations will fear the name of the Lord,
and all the kings of the earth will fear your glory.
16 For the Lord builds up Zion;
he appears in his glory;
17 he regards the prayer of the destitute
and does not despise their prayer.

18 Let this be recorded for a generation to come,
so that a people yet to be created may praise the Lord:
19 that he looked down from his holy height;
from heaven the Lord looked at the earth,
20 to hear the groans of the prisoners,
to set free those who were doomed to die,
21 that they may declare in Zion the name of the Lord,
and in Jerusalem his praise,
22 when peoples gather together,
and kingdoms, to worship the Lord.

23 He has broken my strength in midcourse;
he has shortened my days.
24 “O my God,” I say, “take me not away
in the midst of my days—
you whose years endure
throughout all generations!”

25 Of old you laid the foundation of the earth,
and the heavens are the work of your hands.
26 They will perish, but you will remain;
they will all wear out like a garment.
You will change them like a robe, and they will pass away,
27 but you are the same, and your years have no end.
28 The children of your servants shall dwell secure;
their offspring shall be established before you.

Footnotes:
Psalm 102:6 The precise identity of these birds is uncertain

T.S. Eliot - The Hollow Men

Mistah Kurtz—he dead.
   A penny for the Old Guy


I

We are the hollow men
We are the stuffed men
Leaning together
Headpiece filled with straw. Alas!
Our dried voices, when
We whisper together
Are quiet and meaningless
As wind in dry grass
Or rats' feet over broken glass
In our dry cellar

Shape without form, shade without colour,
Paralysed force, gesture without motion;

Those who have crossed
With direct eyes, to death's other Kingdom
Remember us-if at all-not as lost
Violent souls, but only
As the hollow men
The stuffed men.


II

Eyes I dare not meet in dreams
In death's dream kingdom
These do not appear:
There, the eyes are
Sunlight on a broken column
There, is a tree swinging
And voices are
In the wind's singing
More distant and more solemn
Than a fading star.

Let me be no nearer
In death's dream kingdom
Let me also wear
Such deliberate disguises
Rat's coat, crowskin, crossed staves
In a field
Behaving as the wind behaves
No nearer-

Not that final meeting
In the twilight kingdom


III

This is the dead land
This is cactus land
Here the stone images
Are raised, here they receive
The supplication of a dead man's hand
Under the twinkle of a fading star.

Is it like this
In death's other kingdom
Waking alone
At the hour when we are
Trembling with tenderness
Lips that would kiss
Form prayers to broken stone.


IV

The eyes are not here
There are no eyes here
In this valley of dying stars
In this hollow valley
This broken jaw of our lost kingdoms

In this last of meeting places
We grope together
And avoid speech
Gathered on this beach of the tumid river

Sightless, unless
The eyes reappear
As the perpetual star
Multifoliate rose
Of death's twilight kingdom
The hope only
Of empty men.


V

Here we go round the prickly pear
Prickly pear prickly pear
Here we go round the prickly pear
At five o'clock in the morning.

Between the idea
And the reality
Between the motion
And the act
Falls the Shadow
For Thine is the Kingdom

Between the conception
And the creation
Between the emotion
And the response
Falls the Shadow
Life is very long

Between the desire
And the spasm
Between the potency
And the existence
Between the essence
And the descent
Falls the Shadow
For Thine is the Kingdom

For Thine is
Life is
For Thine is the

This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.

 

 

- by T S Eliot, © -1, All rights reserved.

 

 

 

 

Editor's notes

 

1. Mistah Kurtz: a character in Joseph Conrad's "Heart of Darkness."
2. A...Old Guy: a cry of English children on the streets on Guy Fawkes Day, November 5, when they carry straw effigies of Guy Fawkes and beg for money for fireworks to celebrate the day. Fawkes was a traitor who attempted with conspirators to blow up both houses of Parliament in 1605; the "gunpowder plot" failed.
3. Those...Kingdom: Those who have represented something positive and direct are blessed in Paradise. The reference is to Dante's "Paradiso".
4. Eyes: eyes of those in eternity who had faith and confidence and were a force that acted and were not paralyzed.
5. crossed stave: refers to scarecrows
6. tumid river: swollen river. The River Acheron in Hell in Dante's "Inferno". The damned must cross this river to get to the land of the dead.
7. Multifoliate rose: in dante's "Divine Comedy" paradise is described as a rose of many leaves.
8. prickly pear: cactus
9. Between...act: a reference to "Julius Caesar" "Between the acting of a dreadful thing/And the first motion, all the interim is/Like a phantasma or a hideous dream."
10. For...Kingdom: the beginning of the closing words of the Lord's Prayer.

 

 

Summary

http://www.shmoop.com/hollow-men/summary.html

 

 

The poem begins with two epigraphs: one is a quotation from Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness remarking on the death of the doomed character Kurtz. The other is an expression used by English schoolchildren who want money to buy fireworks to celebrate Guy Fawkes Day. On this holiday, people burn straw effigies of Fawkes, who tried to blow up the British Parliament back in the 17th century.

 

The poem is narrated by one of the "Hollow Men."

 

In the first section of the poem, a bunch of Hollow Men are leaning together like scarecrows. Everything about them is as dry as the Sahara Desert, including their voices and their bodies. Everything they say and do is meaningless. They exist in a state like Hell, except they were too timid and cowardly to commit the violent acts that would have gained them access to Hell. They have not crossed over the River Styx to make it to either Heaven or Hell. The people who have crossed over remember these guys as "hollow men."

 

In the second section, one hollow man is afraid to look at people who made it to "death's dream kingdom" – either Heaven or Hell. The Hollow Men live in a world of broken symbols and images.

 

The third section of the poem describes the setting as barren and filled with cacti and stones. When the Hollow Men feel a desire to kiss someone, they are unable to. Instead, they say prayers to broken stones.

 

In the fourth section, the hollow man from Section 2 continues to describe his vacant, desolate surroundings, in which are no "eyes." The Hollow Men are afraid to look at people or to be looked at.

 

The fifth and final section begins with a nursery rhyme modeled on the song "Here we go 'round the mulberry bush," except instead of a mulberry bush the kiddies are circling a prickly pear cactus. The speaker describes how a "shadow" has paralyzed all of their activities, so they are unable to act, create, respond, or even exist. He tries quoting expressions that begin "Life is very long" and "For Thine is the Kingdom," but these, too, break off into fragments. In the final lines, the "Mulberry Bush" song turns into a song about the end of the world. You might expect the world to end with a huge, bright explosion, but for the Hollow Men, the world ends with a sad and quiet "whimper."

 

 

 

 

Explanation

http://www.shmoop.com/hollow-men/

 

 

In A Nutshell

 

"The Hollow Men" is a huge downer of a poem. In this way, it fits into the general arc of T.S. Eliot's career, which can be divided into Huge Downers and Glorious Uppers. For example, The Wasteland: Huge Downer; Four Quartets: Glorious Upper.

 

Clearly we're over-simplifying. But Eliot was going through a rough patch when he wrote "The Hollow Men." His marriage to Vivienne Eliot had collapsed, and some scholars think she was having an affair with the British philosopher Bertrand Russell. Also, Eliot was still moving toward a religious conversion to Anglicanism that did not arrive until 1927. Several of the poems that Eliot wrote before this conversion concern the total failure of religious hope and love (see, for example, "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock").

 

"The Hollow Men" begins with a quote from Joseph Conrad's famous novella Heart of Darkness, the story of a colonial Englishman who goes power-hungry in Africa, and things only go downhill from there. Eliot's poem is about a group of scarecrow-like individuals who exist in a state between life and death and suffer from a serious case of moral paralysis. They are forever trapped on the banks of the River Styx, the ancient Greek symbol for the dividing line between life and death. Some critics consider "The Hollow Men" to be a companion piece for Eliot's most famous work, The Waste Land, another poem about moral paralysis.

 

Eliot's poems from the 1920s are often read in a political context as a reaction to the aftermath of World War I. Eliot was preoccupied with the idea of a European literary and ethical tradition, and he saw this tradition fragmenting everywhere around him. He turned, as he often did, to his favorite Italian poet Dante Alighieri, whose Inferno was inspiration for this poem. "The Hollow Men" was published in 1925, three years after The Waste Land. In 1948, Eliot was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature.

 

 

Why Should I Care?

 

Many people know this poem only for its immortal final lines:

 

This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.

 

We find these lines terrifying because we tend to like stories to have big, flashy endings, and what could be a bigger story than the history of the world? And yet, sometimes real life isn't very dramatic. Every time some petty and preventable catastrophe befalls humanity (or a part of humanity), you'll find journalists, diplomats, and newspaper editorialists turning to T.S. Eliot 's prediction that the world will end with a "whimper."

 

Don't believe us? Try a Google search with a major global problem and the words "bang" and "whimper." Global warming? Click here. Conflict in the Middle East? Got it covered here. Financial meltdown? But of course. The last lines of "The Hollow Men" have entered the mainstream culture as a way to describe the sometimes arbitrary ways that we humans make a mess of a situation.

 

The irony is that Eliot really disliked journalists. He thought they were just like the "hollow men" of this poem, and that the politicians and newspaper editors in Paris weren't even capable of making enough of a splash to get into Hell (source). When you read the final lines of "The Hollow Men" in light of the rest of the poem, you'll see that the poem is not so much about the end of the world as about people who sit around and talk without ever trying to put their beliefs or ideas into practice. The poem's message is dark: if you're not going to be a good person, then at least be a really bad person.
 

 

Sectional Analysis

 

Section 1 - http://www.shmoop.com/hollow-men/section-1-summary.html

Section 2 - http://www.shmoop.com/hollow-men/section-2-summary.html

Section 3 - http://www.shmoop.com/hollow-men/section-3-summary.html

Section 4 - http://www.shmoop.com/hollow-men/section-4-summary.html

Section 5 - http://www.shmoop.com/hollow-men/section-5-summary.html
 

 

 

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

 

 

Epigraphs

http://www.shmoop.com/hollow-men/epigraphs-summary.html

 

First Epigraph

Mistah Kurtz—he dead.

• The first epigraph is a quote from a servant in Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness.
• The servant reveals to the character Marlow that another character named Kurtz has just died.
• Conrad's novel is a true classic, but we don't think you need to rush out to read it to understand this poem.
• Here's the lowdown: Kurtz is an British ivory trader in Africa, and is one of the many Europeans who arrived to exploit that continent's resources in the 19th and early 20th centuries. He seems to have some qualities of greatness because he collects more ivory than other traders, but in one memorable passage, Marlow suspects Kurtz of being "hollow to the core" and lacking a human and moral nature. (Read more.) The epigraph tells us that, in some sense, the poem is set after the death of Kurtz, or someone "hollow" man like him.

Second Epigraph

A penny for the Old Guy

• The English celebrate Guy Fawkes Day every November 5th with fireworks and the burning of little straw men or "effigies."
• Guy Fawkes was convicted of trying to blow up King James I in 1605 by stashing gunpowder underneath the Parliament building. The incident is known as the "Gunpowder Plot." But Fawkes and the gunpowder were discovered before the plan went off, and Fawkes gave up the names of his co-conspirators under torture.
• To celebrate Guy Fawkes Day, English children ask for money to fund the explosions of their straw effigies of Fawkes, so they say, "A penny for the guy?" "Guy" being his first name. You can read more about it here.
• But there's more. According to Ancient Greek mythology, a person who died would need to pay Charon, the ferryman, with a coin before he would take you across the River Styx into the realm of death. So the "Old Guy" also refers to the ancient figure of Charon. Apparently, someone is begging for a "penny" to give the ferryman to get across the Styx.

 

 

 

 * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
 

 

Wikipedia Info

  

Bio: TS Eliot - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ts_eliot

 

Poem: The Hollow Men - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hollow_Men








 

 

R.E. Slater - Three Coins in a Fountain (a poem)

Three Coins in a Fountain

by R.E. Slater

I placed three coins in a templed fountain,

wishing each worn farthing fare thee well,

content before its glittering, flowing waters,

against a clearing sky’s deep azured blue.

With the first I wished for wonder’s contentment,

the second a lifetime filled with abiding joy,

and third for love’s sublime abundance,

upon all my days this jealous earth.

Thence followed to my greatest pleasure,

a golden parade playing wondrous tunes,

heralding fine instruments in regaling colours,

filling with boys and girls each gaily dressed,

bearing fair golden lockets upon blazing vests.

Bright with happy, joyous faces beaming,

clasping flashing golden harps their breasts,

marching to brassy drums’ thunderous beats,

beneath superfluous melodies soaring high.

So fine a parade that I forgot my wishes,

feeling blessed with warmth and happiness,

lasting all my days until evening’s hours,

when darkness finally came to rest.

And there before the golden fountain,

I sought again each coin I tossed,

to give each one a little lad beside me,

filling all his days and waking hours,

like as mine upon a fountain blest.

- R.E. Slater

March 25, 2013

@copyright R.E. Slater Publications
all rights reserved

Repost: Never End a Story With a Dream?

 

 

 

 

Chasing the White Rabbit
http://www.nybooks.com/blogs/nyrblog/2013/mar/08/chasing-white-rabbit/

 

by Francine Prose

An illustration by John Tenniel from

Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland

 

My seventh-grade teacher warned our class, “Never end a story with, ‘It was all a dream!’” She sounded thoroughly sick and tired of stories like that. I remember thinking that one of my favorite books ends with Alice waking from the long summer-afternoon dream that begins with her chasing the White Rabbit. Even so, my teacher’s advice sounded correct. Writing “It was all a dream” seemed crude and…immature.

 

Years later, another teacher read Delmore Schwartz’s classic short story, “In Dreams Begin Responsibilities,” aloud to our college class. As the story begins, its narrator is sitting in a theater, watching a film:

It is a silent picture, as if an old Biograph one, in which the actors are dressed in ridiculously old-fashioned clothes, and one flash succeeds another with sudden jumps, and the actors, too, seem to jump about, walking too fast. The shots are full of rays and dots, as if it had been raining when the picture was photographed. The light is bad.

 

It is Sunday afternoon, June 12th, 1909, and my father is walking down the quiet streets of Brooklyn on his way to visit my mother.

In the film, the narrator’s parents go on a date to Coney Island. They stroll on the boardwalk, look at the sea, have their portrait taken. Schwartz’s sentences are simple, cadenced, evocative, and graceful. Finally, the courting couple has a fierce argument outside and then inside a fortuneteller’s studio, and the narrator’s father stalks off.

 

Suddenly terrified—partly, we presume, by the possibility that, if this disagreement is not resolved, he may never be born—the narrator rises from his seat and begins to shout. What is the couple doing? “Why doesn’t my mother go after my father and beg him not to be angry?” Though it is all a dream, Schwartz’s story never fails to deliver a jolt of the mysterious, of melancholy, anxiety, and of admiration for what he has accomplished in this masterpiece of fewer than ten pages.

 

Literature is full of dreams that we remember more clearly than our own. Jacob’s ladder of angels. Joseph saving Egypt and himself by interpreting the Pharoah’s vision of the seven fat and lean cows. The dreams in Shakespeare’s plays range as widely as our own, and the evil are often punished in their sleep before they pay for their crimes in life. Kafka never tells us what Gregor Samsa was dreaming when he awakens as a giant insect, except that the dreams were “uneasy.” Likely they were not as uneasy as the morning he wakes into. By the end of the first paragraph of “The Metamorphosis,” Gregor has noticed his arched, dome-like brown belly, his numerous waving legs. “What has happened to me? he thought. It was no dream.”

 

If Schwartz’s story represents one of literature’s most blatant violations of my middle-school teacher’s advice, possibly the boldest use of dreams in fiction occurs in Anna Karenina. In the work of a lesser writer, we might pay only minimal attention to the nightmare Vronsky has, early in Part Four—a dream about a scruffy old peasant with a tattered beard: stooped over, doing something, muttering to himself in French. It occupies the few sentences that separate the obligations Vronksy has undertaken, showing a foreign prince around town, from his visit to see Anna. Extremely upset, she has begged him to come, despite the fact that she is still living with her husband, who knows that Vronsky is her lover and has forbidden her to receive him at home.

 

What makes Anna so distraught, and what makes Vronsky’s dream lodge in our own minds—what makes it so much more than a simple description of a character’s dream—is that she cannot stop thinking about a nightmare she has had, in which a bearded old peasant was bent over, rummaging in a sack, muttering to himself in French something about iron, the iron must be beaten. She dreamed she woke up and asked a servant what the dream signified and was told that it meant she was going to die in childbirth. Vronksy tells Anna it’s nonsense. But, unnerved by the fact that they have dreamed the same dream, he feels that his attempt to reassure her lacks conviction.



David Levine

Vladimir Nabokov

Readers will recall that by this point, Anna and Vronsky’s love affair is already clouded by tensions that will continue to grow as the book progresses. Anna is jealous of the life Vronsky leads without her, and though he still loves her, he notes that she has put on weight and no longer seems quite the same woman he fell in love with. A divide has opened between them, yet they are dreaming the same dream! Had something similar happened earlier—say, after the couple met and before they became lovers—it might have seemed “romantic” at the cost of depth and complex verisimilitude. And whatever dream they shared would probably have been about something other than the scary, bearded peasant, mumbling in French.

 

It’s a risky and daring plot turn, one with which Tolstoy tests our belief in the apparently paranormal bonds that passion and intimacy can forge. Despite their disagreements, the lovers are more closely entwined and know more about one another than either one understands or might knowingly choose. By the end of the novel, the dreams will turn out to have been premonitory, as Anna fears, but they are warnings about a death quite different from the one she has imagined.

 

Nabokov devotes several pages of his Lectures on Russian Literature to what he calls The Double Nightmare in Tolstoy’s novel, tracking the dreams’ antecedents in the couple’s shared experience—most notably, an accident in which a man is crushed on the tracks near the train in which Anna and Vronsky first meet. Predictably, Nabokov has no patience for Freud. “I am politely but firmly opposed to the Freudian interpretation of dreams with its stress on symbols which may have some reality in the Viennese Doctor’s rather drab and pedantic mind but do not necessarily have any in the minds of individuals unconditioned by modern psychoanalytics.” And yet the enthusiasm and the conviction with which he and others have parsed the twin dreams in Anna Karenina are not so very unlike the dogged way in which Freud delves into his patients’ dreams.

 

Tolstoy showed it was possible to give a character a dream that strikes the reader as plausible, convincing, important enough to pay attention to, without being heavy-handedly symbolic or portentous. Or boring. What’s harder to recreate on the page is anything remotely resembling the experience of actually dreaming, with all the structural and narrative complexities involved, the leaps, contradictions, and improbable elements. Maybe that was my seventh-grade teacher’s problem: She’d read too many middle-school accounts of dreams that were nothing like dreams.

 

The most sustained and artful literary recreations of the dream state I know occur in Bruno Schulz’s stories, especially in “Sanitorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass, ” which, in Celina Wienewska’s elegant translation, unfolds in the present tense and in the straightforward tone of someone describing a dream on the psychoanalyst’s couch or at the breakfast table. Consider this summary of the story’s opening sections: Joseph, the narrator, sets out on a long, halting, and peculiar train journey, then arrives in a desolate landscape and finally at the sanitorium, where he has booked a room. He is eyeing the cakes in the restaurant when he is called to see the doctor. It turns out that Joseph has come to see his father. But there is some uncertainty, as there so often is in dreams, about whether his father is living or dead. Joseph’s father is dead, the doctor says, but not to worry, all of the sanitorium patients are also dead, and none of them know it.

 

Joseph crawls into bed with his father and falls asleep. When he wakes, Father, “wearing a black suit of English cloth, which he had made only the previous summer,” announces his plan to open a shop. And now the narrator is wandering through a city with an unsettling resemblance to the city in which he lives. Somehow he finds his father’s shop, where he is given a package containing a pornographic book he has ordered. But the book is out of stock, and instead he has been sent an expanding telescope: “Like a large black caterpillar, the telescope crept into the lighted shop—an enormous paper arthropod with two imitation headlights on the front.”

 

Time moves strangely. Joseph encounters his father in unexpected places: a restaurant, back in bed, surrounded by a large crowd. Returning to the sanitorium, he is frightened by a chained watchdog that turns out to be a chained man, whom he releases. Transported back to the station, Joseph boards a train. “Farewell, Father. Farewell, town that I shall never see again.”

 

He begins to travel continuously, and the story ends:

My suit becomes torn and ragged. I have been given the shabby uniform of a railwayman. My face is bandaged with a dirty rag, because one of my cheeks is swollen…I stand in the corridor outside a second-class compartment and sing. People throw small coins into my hat: a black railwayman’s hat, its visor half torn away.

Schulz never frames the story as having been “all a dream.” We know it and we don’t, just as we know it and we don’t when we ourselves are dreaming.

 

A few days after writing the sentence above, I decided to delete a dream sequence from the novel on which I’ve been working. It took me another day or so to make the connection between the blog post and my decision to cut a passage that had survived for four years and through, let’s say, forty drafts. Having reread Schwartz and Schulz, I’d realized that the dream in my novel didn’t sound like a dream but rather like a novelist’s attempt to signal that a character knows more about the present—and the future—than he realizes. After reading Tolstoy’s double dream, my character’s nightmare seemed timid and conventional. I’d grown fond of the passage, and I missed it. Briefly.

 

 

 

Sylvia Plath - Words

 

Words
by Sylvia Plath


Axes
After whose stroke the wood rings,
And the echoes!
Echoes traveling
Off from the center like horses.

The sap
Wells like tears, like the
Water striving
To re-establish its mirror
Over the rock.

That drops and turns,
A white skull,
Eaten by weedy greens.
Years later I
Encounter them on the road ---

Words dry and riderless,
The indefatigable hoof-taps.
While
From the bottom of the pool, fixed stars
Govern a life.

Comments by Readers from Sylvia Plath's Forum

http://www.sylviaplathforum.com/words.html

 

It's a strong poem, without any grief, just images showing something extraordinary. The words are not just words... something is happening beyond them - how the poet could make all these [images] relevant. It makes you sympathise and takes you to the place. It's not a demonstration of pain, but pain as that which you can touch. All those sacred elements are meaningless now. It's a big challenge perhaps, the absurd which you cannot define very well, and the nature [that] supports the poet as something permanent and meaningful. All those elements which come from the nature are reliable and everlasting and blue can't be always holy....

 

Rosa Jamali Iran
Friday, June 24, 2005

 

 

To me this is a very direct poem. Words are like axes, powerful and sharp, loud, emitting echoes, that everyone can hear, that everyone can see in their effect. They hurt. They cut into the tree which may symbolize a person, the sap which wells being tears. The tears are heavy like a rock and disturb the calm waters which try to return to normality.

 

Sylvia's life tries to return to normality. The tears grow old and covered in weeds, forgotten, but still [they are] there forever. Later in life she encounters the words again, but now they are "dry and riderless." They have no effect. They are old and worn. This is while her life is fixed, her destiny controlling her, waiting in the pool which may be the same one once disturbed by the rock, the weight of her tears and hurt. But her destiny has always lain untouched like the stars, never to be disturbed or changed by emotions.

 

Oleander Normal , USA
Tuesday, March 8, 2004

 

 

The poem can be construed to be about the power of words, though in this case a destructive power. Images of echoes, resonations, reverberations, concatenations are numerous in Plath's poems--each word like a stone dropped in a pond, the meanings and symbolism of words travelling out from them like ripples.

 

In "Words" they drag her, like the horse in "Ariel" and wound her, bringing to the surface sap, like tears, or like the blood-jet of poetry, trying to re-establish her own image, the mirror, her own sense of self, over the rock, which here is the "white skull eaten by weedy greens", that represents her father's death; the white skull at the bottom of the pool is the "fixed star" that represents her fate. This has been the task of the poems, to heal the psychic wound caused by his death, and to reestablish her own image.

 

But, encountering them years later, in this case just days before her death, they appear "dry and riderless", sterile and powerless to do what she tries to make them do. So, in a larger sense the poem is about the impotence of words to resist one's fate, as embodied in the white skull at the bottom of the pool, where, in "Lorelei", "the daft father went down/ orange duck-feet winnowing his hair".

 

This sense of fatalism, the inevitability of her death is, in my opinion, a legacy she inherited from Ted Hughes, in whose work this sense of fatalism, particularly in "Birthday Letters" is a major motif. In BL, in fact, [Hughes] claims to be the source of the idea that it is the fixed stars that govern one's life.

 

I call this a major poem because it encapsulates in 20 lines the whole task that she set for herself and her work, and, in spite of the triumph of her poetic accomplishment, the ultimate failure of that task.

 

Jim LongHonolulu HI, USA
Monday, April 15, 2002

 

 

 

Sylvia Plath - The Cry of "Ariel" in Dawn's Black Light

 

 

February 12, 2013

 

Sylvia Plath’s Joy

http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/books/2013/02/ariel-and-sylvia-plaths-joy.html

 

Posted by Dan Chiasson

 

 

It is fifty years since Sylvia Plath killed herself, in her flat in London, near Primrose Hill, in a house where William Butler Yeats once lived. She was thirty-one. Her two children, Frieda, age three, and Nicholas, barely one, slept in the next room. Plath jammed some rags and towels under the door, then turned the gas on in the oven and laid her head inside. She was separated from her husband, the poet Ted Hughes, who had betrayed her; raising the children was left almost entirely to her. She wrote several dozen of the most extraordinary poems in the English language within the span of a few months, before the children awoke at dawn.

 

The care with which she prepared her own death scene, leaving out mugs of milk for the children, is the work of a person whose talent for hospitality never left her, though it took a macabre turn. This care extended to her book. On her writing table, she left a black spring binder that contained a manuscript she had completed some months earlier, “Ariel and Other Poems” (she had scratched out alternate possibilities: “Daddy and Other Poems,” “A Birthday Present,” and “The Rabbit Catcher”) and, beside it, a sheaf of nineteen additional poems that she had written since. Hughes published a book he called “Ariel,” derived from the manuscript, with the newer poems added, in 1965. Robert Lowell, who contributed a forward, is said to have exclaimed, when he opened and read the manuscript, “Something amazing has happened.”

 

The feeling that “Ariel” is a discovery, a revelation, has never really faded. For me, it is the great book of earliest morning—the “substanceless blue” of predawn, as the gathering light reveals a world of sense—data previously obscured. Many poets have prized that hour of the day for its clarity, for the clamor of the dawn chorus, or because of its vestigial associations with prayer. Plath took these essentially languorous, and deeply male, associations and added her own stopwatch urgency. Here is “Ariel,” her great title poem, in its entirety: 

Ariel

Stasis in darkness.
Then the substanceless blue
Pour of tor and distance. 

God’s lioness,
How one we grew,
Pivot of heels and knees!—The furrow 

Splits and passes, sister to
The brown arc
Of the neck I cannot catch,

Nigger-eye
Berries cast dark
Hooks—

 

Black sweet blood mouthfuls,
Shadows.
Something else

 

Hauls me through air—
Thighs, hair;
Flakes from my heels.

 

White
Godiva, I unpeel—
Dead hands, dead stringencies.

 

And now
I Foam to wheat, a glitter of seas.
The child’s cry

 

Melts in the wall.
And I
Am the arrow,

 

The dew that flies
Suicidal, at one with the drive
Into the red

 

Eye, the cauldron of morning.

There is nothing else like this in English; it is, I think, a perfect poem, perfect in its excesses and stray blasphemies (that “nigger-eye”), which make Plath Plath—that is to say, dangerous, heedless, a menace, and irresistible. The greatest thing in it, though, is a detail whose uncanniness will strike any new parent: “The child’s cry / Melts in the wall.”

 

The feeling of being inside the addled sensorium of a new mother—prey to the wild swings of mood, the flare-ups of unforeseen tenderness and rage—is inextricable from Plath’s sense of the urgency of passing time, time that, in “Ariel,” she runs toward and into, not away from or alongside of, as poets are supposed to do. That “child’s cry” was a cry, of course, for her, for Plath. In the most straightforward way, it brought “art” and “life,” those bedraggled abstractions, into real conflict. To master it in an image that brilliant is only a temporary solution, and so the poem careens to a close upon the word “suicidal,” an odd figurative occurrence of a word whose literal meaning Plath took very seriously.

 

“Melt” is the genius stroke. She uses it elsewhere, too, to describe the sound of crying. In “Lady Lazarus,” one of her best-known poems, Plath calls herself a “Pure gold baby / that melts to a shriek.” What makes “melt” so good in “Ariel,” though, is its materiality: the child’s cry from the adjoining room happens inside the wall, not in Plath’s ear or the child’s mouth. It is one of many details in “Ariel” that bring Plath’s surroundings to life; probably, there is no more vivid rendering in poetry of what it is like to share a small house or apartment with young children. (Coleridge’s “Frost at Midnight” is an important antecedent.) The Plaths’ house in Devon and their flat in London are brightly present in this poetry: the rose curtains, the kitchen knives, the “soft rugs / The last of Victoriana.”

 

“Nick and the Candlestick” is, for me, Plath’s greatest poem. Like “Ariel,” you can reduce it to show how much it dwells and thrives in excess. Plath, “a miner” in the blue light of dawn, wakes to check on her son, and finds him in some bonkers position in his crib. I have discovered my own children (one of them named Nicholas, partly after this poem) asleep standing up against their crib walls and even upside down, their small faces smashed against the mattress, snoozing blissfully. Each time I found them this way, I quoted Plath: “O love, how did you get here?” That is, of course, a question not only about position but about origin. “Nick and the Candlestick” redoes the birth of little Nicholas Hughes as the birth of Christ, an event that resets time. The eight lines near its middle strike me as some of the most compassionate remarks ever made about a child:

O love, how did you get here?
O embryo

 

Remembering, even in sleep,
Your crossed position.
The blood blooms clean

 

In you, ruby.
The pain
You wake to is not yours.

A time of day, dawn, made sharp by anticipated interruption; a house animated by children, their happiness, their demands, their balloons and playthings; the potential for violence innate in all beauty, as well as the awful beauty of violence; the feeling of elation at filling a house with the clacking of a typewriter, and the fear of the silence when the typing ends: these elements are my personal “Ariel,” and I tire of the more rhetorical and showy poems—“Daddy,” “The Applicant,” “Lady Lazarus”—upon which Plath made her notorious name. “Ariel” ends with a poem, “Words,” about the season that T. S. Eliot called “midwinter spring” and Wallace Stevens called “the earliest end of winter”: March, when, in New England (a region all three poets share), the sap runs. Plath’s keystrokes in the quiet house are like “Axes / After whose stroke the wood rings.” Before, echoing away from her, they become like horses’ “indefatigable hoof taps”—“riderless,” as in a funeral procession. Add to the available accounts of Plath (there are so many) this, please: nobody brought a house to life the way she did. “Ariel,” despite the tragedy that attends it, is a book with much joy between its covers.

 

Dan Chiasson’s fifth book, “Bicentennial,” will appear next year from Knopf.

Photograph: Bettmann/Corbis.

 

Read more: http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/books/2013/02/ariel-and-sylvia-plaths-joy.html#ixzz2Kua4PCpc

 

 

 

Sylvia Plath: The Stigma of Writing and Mental Illness

Sylvia Plath

 

February 11, 2013

You’ll Love Her! She’s Crazy!
http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/books/2013/02/youll-love-her-shes-crazy.html?mbid=nl_Daily%20(178)

Posted by Sarah Manguso

I’m told that one of my grandmothers suffered from what must have been postpartum depression. She was prescribed Miltowns in the forties, and hid an opiate addiction for more than fifty years. On the same branch of my family tree is an aunt who ended her life. Everyone who would know the details of either story is dead.

 

Many somber words have been intoned about the taboo surrounding mental illness, recently and notably by former congressman Patrick J. Kennedy this past January, soon after the shootings in Newtown. “If we’re going to get rid of the stigma—one of the great civil-rights challenges of our time—we need more discussion in the real world, and less shame by those suffering with mental illness, or the loved ones around them,” he wrote, in an essay published by The Daily Beast.

 

Until recently in human history, mental illness was indeed a stigma, discussed in whispers with the vocabulary of shame. To varying degrees, however, these whispers have always been accompanied confidently by the vocabulary of pride.

 

In her 1978 essay “Illness As Metaphor,” Susan Sontag wrote about the received ideas that surrounded tuberculosis in the nineteenth century, and cancer in the twentieth. The tubercular character was vaunted as “sensitive, creative, a being apart.” She added, “In the twentieth century, the repellent, harrowing disease that is made the index of a superior sensitivity, the vehicle of ‘spiritual’ feelings and ‘critical’ discontent, is insanity.”

 

Indeed, wherever I go in the twenty-first century, people are proudly mentally ill, and conversations about mental illness invoke the idea of specialness and the stereotypical mad genius. Contemporary scripted TV advertises the benefits of disordered thought, perception, and behavior, from the associative manias of the bipolar C.I.A. officer Carrie Mathison on “Homeland” to the precise memory of the phobic, obsessive-compulsive private detective on the eponymous “Monk.” Unusual brains are shown to correlate with creative intelligence and exceptional cognitive sensitivity. Stereotypes of shameful weakness come far behind, if at all.

 

Most educated people can name half a dozen poets who are more famous for their messy lives and deaths than for their poems. The short lives of Shelley and Byron comprised several suicidal lovers and a half-dozen unfortunate children, all adopted or dead by age five. Deaf, miserable Beethoven; van Gogh and his severed ear; Hemingway and his shotgun; Poe in his gutter; Woolf in her heavy raincoat. The narratives endure because they align with the popular understanding of what it is to be an artist.

 

* * *

 

Sylvia Plath, who died fifty years ago today, attended my high school, Gamaliel Bradford Senior High, in Wellesley, Massachusetts. She graduated in 1950, and when I graduated in 1992 she was still the most famous person ever to have gone there. Her long shadow remained, decades after her death, and the writing prize was named for her.

 

She’d sat in the back right-hand corner of Room 200, the room where Wilbury Crockett had taught his English courses. We all knew it. I often ate lunch by myself, in Sylvia’s seat, when the room was empty—not because it was her seat but because it was the seat furthest from the door. I never read her poems. I didn’t like the idea of poetry. I liked the idea of long books that were impossible to understand, and I read Pynchon’s novels laboriously, consulting multiple reference books as I inched down the dense pages. Plath had been dead longer than I’d been alive, but we didn’t count the years. She was ageless and occupied all history.

 

Mr. Crockett, a legendary teacher whose written comments on Plath’s poems allegedly first encouraged her to become a poet, retired when I was in kindergarten, but when he was seventy-eight he visited my eleventh-grade English class. Our English teacher had prepared us to receive his great wisdom. Most important of all, she reminded us that he had been the teacher of Sylvia Plath.

 

What never seemed strange to me until much later is that Plath’s poems weren’t taught to us in high school; only her suicide was taught to us. A lady, who had lived on Elmwood Road, across the street from my elementary school, had become a poet and become inconsolable and stuck her head in an oven. The books we were assigned to read for our English classes were tedious novels about boarding school and dated plays about the American Dream. Our frowsy English teacher who had invited Crockett to speak assigned each of us to read a different Dylan Thomas poem, and we each presented our poem to the class, and that was it for our education in poetry.

 

A minute into Crockett’s presentation, a straight-A student made a sound. Did he mutter something? Whatever Crockett thought he’d heard, it lit a fuse. We sat silent while the great man raged. In our shame we knew Crockett had chosen the wrong boy to castigate—he was humorless and inoffensive. That the boy would have insulted an honored visitor is unimaginable. Crockett screamed that we had rejected a great gift, and that we were worthless. Worthless! He strode out of the room. Two years later, he died, and our sparse little school library was named in his honor.

 

* * *

 

Despite having begun college determined to become a physician, I failed Chem 10 and, after a cascade of results, went to writing school instead. My first poetry collection was published modestly by a small press when I was twenty-seven. A few poems found their way into anthologies. I worked part-time as a copy editor and ate a lot of oatmeal.

 

After my book came out, my former college boyfriend said, “At least you can go nuts, now that you’ve become a real writer.” Like every recent college graduate I knew, bringing up the rear of Generation X, he yearned to check out and waste some serious time. Despite his classics degree he’d become a management consultant, though, and, as such, he simply couldn’t find his way into the seemingly exclusive and glamorous milieu of mental illness. Was he depressed? Perhaps, but he couldn’t conceive of it as a possibility—not because of the taboo but because he didn’t believe he’d fulfilled the prerequisites. Management consultants drank. They didn’t take antidepressants. They weren’t interesting enough to go nuts. Going nuts was a point of pride. You had to train for it.

 

One of my graduate-school colleagues used to boast about his antidepressant prescription. “I’m crazy!” he’d squeak at parties. A little depression? It probably was the most interesting thing about him. Fifteen years later, he publishes workmanlike best-sellers. Several of the poets with whom I went to school, clinging to modest functional abilities, are too mentally ill even to know they could be boasting about being mentally ill. You will never hear of them.

 

Shortly after I earned my degree, caught in a constellation of simultaneous disappointments, I found myself in a locked psychiatric ward. One of the social workers spoke excitedly about the therapist he wanted me to see after I was released: “You’ll love her! She’s crazy, just absolutely crazy!”

 

I remember responding to the social worker as coolly as I could while pushing down hard on a weeping rage: “I’m not sure we share the same tastes.” “What do you mean?” he asked in his best therapist’s voice, his little eyes open wide to indicate he cared. I tried to explain why standing around in a circle holding hands and talking about my feelings made me want to hang myself. Squinting, as if calling out from a high pulpit, he said, “Standing around in a circle holding hands is my favorite thing to do.”

 

Treating mental illness is an economic, and therefore practical, problem. But more fundamentally it is a problem of rhetoric and therefore also an abstract one. Before we can address it, we must speak about it, and the vocabulary we use is highly polarized. On one hand, the sufferer is responsible for getting over the shameful condition; on the other, the sufferer is a mad genius whose quirks and foibles demand respect. Seldom is mental illness just illness.

 

In order to develop workable policy serving those functionally impaired by mental illness, we need to learn to talk about it without recourse to the broad brushes of its existing metaphors. What if we could imagine a mentally ill person as neither a potentially violent simpleton nor a mad genius but simply a person with an illness that might be diagnosed, treated, even cured?

 

I expect that history might solve the problem all by itself, now that the very condition of illness has moved from a strictly medical milieu to a capitalist one. As far as the drug companies care, mental illnesses provide just another opportunity to sell pills to impressionable consumers. When I visit my psychiatrist, more often than not there sits a smartly suited young person with a full briefcase. Sometimes it is a man, sometimes a woman, but the suit is always navy blue. The person does not look tempted to sit upon the lap of the enormous stuffed bear I call Flat-Bear, who sits in the corner, against the wall, his lap increasingly grubby and compressed. The person enters and leaves the doctor’s office briskly, in a few minutes. On my bad days, I am sure I would buy whatever he is selling, and that psychotropic medications will become the twenty-first century’s bottled shampoo.

 

That the medical establishment is in league with the pharmaceutical companies seems inevitable and in fact has been widely observed. It seems dubious that the language of commerce could be a positive influence, but brisk business feels like progress beyond the language of myth.

 

And, even without the help of commerce, time wears away at myth and everything else. Plath’s suicide at thirty, after publishing just one volume of poems, invited the stereotype of the mad poetess, the wife betrayed; it was impossible to read the posthumous publications without considering the biography. But in the fifty years since her death the myth has dimmed; the work endures.

 

The woman is perfected.

Her dead

Body wears the smile of accomplishment.

 

Though the facts of her life won’t soon fade from historical memory, Plath is now, at least, more poet than suicide.

 

Sarah Manguso is the author of five books, most recently “The Guardians: An Elegy for a Friend,” which will be published in paperback next month.

 

Photograph: Contrasto/Redux.

 

Read more: http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/books/2013/02/youll-love-her-shes-crazy.html#ixzz2KhNvgmpu