English L115: Literature for Today

Introduction to Poetry

Reading Assignment: In the Norton Introduction to Literature (NIL), pp. 694-696, pp. 876-882 plus

Galway Kinnell, "After Making Love We Hear Footsteps," NIL, p. 630

William Shakespeare, "Let me not to the marriage of true minds," p. 616 (Listen to two different readings on CD Disk 1 that accompanies your textbook: one by Patrick Stewart (Captain Jean-Luc of Star Trek fame) and African-American actor Ossie Davis.)

Sharon Olds, "Sex without Love," p. 701

Anne Bradstreet, "To My Dear Husband," p. 415

Linda Pastan, "love poem," p. 603

John Donne, "The Flea," p. 664

William Shakespeare, "The expense of spirit in a waste of shame," p. 959

Directions:

Read "Reading Poetry" and do "Response Assignment" for 2/21 (Do "Making Poetry" for 2/25)
Remember that words shown in boldface may be on the quiz for literary terms near the end of this segment.
Hint: As you work online, if you encounter vocabulary you are unfamiliar with, you can get a definition and pronunciation by looking the word up at http://www.miriamwebster.com

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Reading Poetry

Response Assignment: due 2/21

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Reading Poetry

Poetry comes in many forms and sizes, but it always aims to say something important in special language. Try thinking of poetry as a message found in a bottle, written by someone and sent out on the sea to an unknown but intended audience.

Let's look at some poems about love to see what messages we find and to build a shared set of experiences and terms that we can use to discuss these special examples of literature in the poetry segment of this course. There are seven poems that we'll deal with in this introduction. You can read them on your own first or read them along with some comments on them in our Web materials and in the Norton Introduction to Literature (NIL).

As we did in the drama section, we'll analyze in a guided way, and you'll post responses, and then you'll be asked to try your hand at learning from the inside--by becoming a writer who puts a message in a bottle.

When we find a message in a bottle, we assume that there is an important message the writer is trying to communicate. And since the message is often brief and sometimes puzzling, we pay attention to all the hints we get. Instead of reading to get the gist, automatically "correcting" apparent errors, we need to pay careful attention to the special ways that language is being used.

To illustrate, let me tell you about a "found poem" by the writer Joyce Carol Oates at a conference years ago. A "found poem" is something that sounds ordinary until you are asked to look at it carefully. Oates read us the Emergency Directions found on the door of every hotel room at the conference center. As I remember it, what she read us was something like this:

1. In case of fire, the alarm is a two-tone siren. Proceed immediately to the nearest stairway. The all-clear signal is a pulsing siren, alternating loud and soft.

2. In case of nuclear attack, the alarm is a sustained wail. There is no all clear.

In fact, although she had kept the wording of the notice, she had left out some things and rearranged others. That is, it was made, formed, to convey meaning. When we find it in a bottle--that is, when someone says "This is a poem"--we look at the words differently.

When responding to a poem, it's always good to notice our first impression of meaning and emotional impact and also things that we notice as unusual or strange in the language--things that may help us decipher the message.

With Oates' "poem," copy the table below into your word processor and try filling in the middle box below. You can click on the highlighted words, on the Web, to see my initial response.

Poem	First impression (message and impact) and notes of strangeness	sample response
Emergency Directions		Helen[hjs1]

In this class, I'll ask you to use a note-taking matrix form as a starting point, but as we use it to look at love poems, you'll see that you do not have to fill in every box. And as we share responses, we'll see that different people notice different things about the poem and respond differently. Let's go through some of the items that will be on the form.

Dramatic Situation

Hmm. How come a section on poetry starts with "dramatic" situation? Answer: because it's familiar and useful! Our first example is Galway Kinnell's "After Making Love We Hear Footsteps."

Get out your textbook and turn to p. 630 and read the poem. Then jot down a few sentences with your first impression (message and impact) and anything you notice as strange or striking or unknown to you. Then come back and pick up here.

START of Kinnell's "After Making Love..."

Let's start out by agreeing to the following distinction.

"the speaker" = the "voice" we hear in the poem
"the poet" = the one who stands outside the poem crafting it

The speaker in the poem makes several references to time and place that help us "see" a scene. The speaker and his wife lie together in bed

after making love, quiet, touching along the length of our bodies,

familiar touch of the long-married (ll. 10-11)

when their son Fergus comes in and snuggles into bed between them and the speaker contemplates "this blessing love gives again into our arms" (l. 24). So the dramatic situation is the speaker in bed with his wife after making love and their son hops into bed lying between them (as the poem progresses).

But there's something funny about the telling of the scene. In some ways it seems to be a short story told by the speaker to his wife, but it starts out in a funny way for a short story, and there's too much detail--about the pajamas and the mental capacity of baseball players.

Now try listening to the poet Galway Kinnell reading his poem in front of an audience: http://endeavor.med.nyu.edu/lit-med/lit-med-db/webdocs/webdescrips/kinnell396-des-.html (Click "on-line audio" and then "Hear it."

He doesn't read it in a conversational way. He intones the poem. And suddenly, I see--and hear--why all the stuff about the baseball pajamas is in there. He's playing it for laughs! That is, the poet has set it up that the speaker (also called Galway Kinnell, also with a son named Fergus) is addressing his remarks to his wife, but he wants his audience--you and me--to join in. Not in an erotic way. This is after making love. But he wants us to identify--even if we are not long-married or don't have a kid. I feel charmed into his point of view by the joke at the beginning: the kid can sleep through lots of noise, but try to have a little privacy and bingo! Here comes the kid. I laugh at the baseball joke. Do you love this kid, too, despite the interruption? The poet keeps it light with everyday language: "He flops down between us and hugs us and snuggles himself to sleep" (l. 17).

And then there's a line skipped typographically--like starting a new paragraph. This signals the start of a new stanza, like a new paragraph in an essay or short story. And now the tone changes and the language becomes more elevated--"this one whom habit of memory propels to the ground of his making" (l. 22). He seems to talk directly to his wife, but we are still there. Joking annoyance has given way to affectionate warmth and the poet earns the simple but poetic affirmation of love that is spiritual, physical, sexual and familial, all united in one.

Special Language:

The next love poem we'll look at is by William Shakespeare (NIL, p. 616). Here the dramatic situation seems simpler:--it's more like a lecture or a statement of faith, sometimes called a credo (from the Latin, meaning "I believe"), and we happen to be in the audience.

Let me not to the marriage of true minds

Admit impediments. Love is not love

Which alters when it alteration finds,

Or bends with the remover to remove:

Oh, no! it is an ever-fixéd mark,

That looks on tempests and is never shaken;

It is the star to every wandering bark,

Whose worth's unknown, although his height be taken.

Love's not Time's fool, though rosy lips and cheeks

Within his bending sickle's compass come;

Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,

But bears it out even to the edge of doom.

If this be error and upon me proved,

I never writ, nor no man ever loved.

This poem sounds more like what we might ordinarily think of as poetry:

It uses the convention of starting each line with a capital letter
It uses rhyme
It seems harder to understand

Shakespeare is using a prescribed form called a sonnet that was popular in his day. Because there is a prescribed rhyme and rhythm--which we'll explore in a bit--the poet wrenches the usual word order in English to make his rhymes and rhythm work according to a given form. If we try to unscramble the poem into normal English word order, a lot of the confusion can be cleared up.

Let me not admit impediments to the marriage of true minds.

Love is not love when it finds alteration

Or [when it] bends with the remover to remove.

Oh, no! it is an ever-fixed mark, that looks on tempests and is never shaken,

It is the star to every wandering bark, whose worth's unknown, although his height be taken.

Love is not the fool of Time, though rosy lips and cheeks come within the compass of his bending sickle.

Love doesn't alter with his brief hours and weeks, but bears it out even to the edge of doom.

If this is error and proved [so] upon me, [then] I never wrote, nor has any man ever loved.

There may still be lines whose meaning is unclear to you, but at least let's try to summarize our initial reaction and questions and noticing of strangeness as we try to decipher the message in the bottle. Try this yourself, and then click here to see my noticings.

Let's look at a few more features of Shakespeare's poem with his use of special language.

Situation: A female is talking about her lover and says, "I was so mad that I ate his head off!" If the female is speaking literally--that is, telling the exact truth--then she is a preying mantis, which bites off its mate's head after he has fertilized her eggs. If the female is speaking figuratively, she is using a "figure of speech"--a comparison to the real situation--and she only means that she was very angry--so angry she felt like doing physical harm to him. There are two common types of figurative language:

a simile is a comparison that points out it is a comparison by using the words "like" or "as" For example, "I was as mad as a wet cat."

a metaphor simply states a comparison without pointing it out. For example, "I ate his head off."

In lines 5-6, the speaker compares love to a stable point that nothing can shake. In lines 7-8, love is compared to something that is unmeasurably useful, although some measurements of it can be taken. For example, someone might say "we've been married 20 years [a measurement], but that doesn't measure how much I love you." Reminds me of the Visa (or is it MasterCard) ads that talk about how much it costs to charge items needed for a priceless moment of love or "quality time" together. So figurative language takes something abstract or hard to understand and tries to explain it by a comparison to something known. Charles Schultz's cartoon Peanuts once said "Happiness is a warm puppy" with a picture of an ecstatic Snoopy jumping up and down. Anyone who has tried to hold a young puppy glad to see an attentive human can decide whether the excited wriggliness is like a feeling of happiness.

In lines 9-10, the speaker uses another kind of figurative language--personification. Time is pictured as a farmer using a sickle to cut a crop. In lines 11-12--" Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,/ But bears it out even to the edge of doom"-- the metaphor seems to change from a field at harvest to something timeless despite the passing of time. The sense I get is that the speaker is boasting about Love. "My father can beat up your father. Nyah, nyah!" That is, true love lasts eternally, not measured in such finite units of time as hours and weeks. Love fights Time better than Oil of Olay or plastic surgery, maybe even better than death?

The use of figurative language helps make an abstraction, such as love, into an image--something we can picture.

Historical context:

Before we look at sonnet form and how it helps us decipher the message in the bottle, let's look for a minute at literary history. Sonnets were made popular by the Italian poets Dante and Petrarch in the fourteenth century. A sonnet became defined as a 14-line poem with a particular rhyme scheme and usually with a particular attitude toward love. Dante and Petrarch both wrote a whole series of sonnets (called a sonnet cycle) that talked about the speaker's love for an unattainable, beautiful woman. Dante loved the married Beatrice; Petrarch loved Laura.

According to the Courtly Love tradition, a man would love a woman who was both good and beautiful--and unattainable. He put her on a pedestal, as someone better than himself. His unrequited love for her tortured him but also ennobled him as he did good deeds to win her attention and love. Finally, in each cycle of sonnets, the speaker turned his love of an earthly woman into love of God.

Sonnet sequences became popular in the mid-16th century in England with poets such as Sidney and Wyatt. Shakespeare wrote a sonnet cycle, probably from 1592 to 1598, but no one knows for sure what the order of the poems should be. The most commonly accepted "order" for the 152 sonnets loosely tells a story of the speaker's love for a fair young man (sonnets 1-126) and his unhappy physical affair with the so-called Dark Lady. According to this ordering, most of the poems which are well-known favorites (such as "Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?") were written to the man.

What does this tell us? Some people say that the love for the young man is Platonic, not physical. Others say it is physical and that this supports the idea that Shakespeare had a homosexual attachment to the noble young man. Still others argue that Shakespeare is creating a witty variation on the "standard" sonnet cycle created by Italians and imitated by Sir Philip Sidney, among others, in England.

The sonnet "Let me not..." is usually grouped with the sonnets concerning the young man. The distinction between "the poet" and "the speaker" is especially useful here. What do you think? If it is written about the young man, does it change the meaning? Does the emotion expressed seem appropriate to use in talking about heterosexual love? homosexual love? a Platonic love relationship?

Form and Sound:

The sonnet in England is usually called an Elizabethan sonnet (named after Queen Elizabeth I who ruled from 1558-1603). Like the Italian sonnet[hjs2] , it has 14 lines, but it has more rhyme sounds. Italian sonnets have a rhyme scheme of abbaabba plus some use of the rhyme sounds cde in the last six lines, with the sense of the poem breaking after the eighth line (called the octave) and going in a different direction in the last six (called the sestet).

But notice what happens in Shakespeare's sonnet. What lines seem to be grouped[hjs3] together around one idea? Where do the rhymes change[hjs4] ? You may not have the exact same break-points in ideas as I have, but don't your breaks pretty much coincide with changes in rhyme? That is, rhyme is used to reinforce a sense of changed argument. Usually an Elizabethan sonnet is made up of three quatrains (a unit of 4 rhyming lines) and an ending couplet (2 lines next to each other that rhyme). This helps to "organize" the movement of ideas in the poem: notice here the shifts come mainly after line 4, line 8 and line 12.

Notice also that there is a fairly regular rhythm. Much of Shakespeare's poetry is written in iambic pentameter. What that means is that the meter (or rhythmic pattern) usually has five (pent- means "five") units (also called "feet") to a line. And the rhythmic pattern is an unstressed syllable followed by a stressed syllable. For example, uniformly iambic lines are:

or BENDS/ with THE/ re-MOV/-er TO/ re-MOVE:

oh, NO! / it IS / an EV/ -er-FIX/ -éd MARK,

That is, the change from unstressed to stressed syllable is regular, regardless of where a word starts or ends.

But the poem as a whole is not uniformly regular. To see how I'd read it--in terms of stressed and unstressed syllables--click here. You may read it somewhat differently. But notice that the variation helps keep the sound from being monotonous.

Ok, now read the poem aloud and listen for where you pause or slow down or speed up. That also helps keep the poem from being sing-song-y. A poet varies the pace by putting a pause in the middle of a line--called a caesura (example--after "impediments" in line 2), marked in a text by two slash marks//. Putting a pause at the end of a line (called an end-stopped line) slows the poem down. Having a natural continuation at the end of a line (called a run-on line or enjambement) helps pick up the pace. Where and why do you hear the poet speed up or slow down by the use of pauses or run-on lines? Try coming up with your own answers before you look at what I think[hjs5] .

Word choice and variation of stresses can also slow down or speed up the pace. A couple of places where I hear the speaker slowing down are:

the four stressed syllables in a row in line 9: "Love's not Time's fool" At least that's true of the way I read [hjs6] the poem

"the edge of doom"--that vowel sound in "doom" can go on forever!

After all this analysis, let's put it all together. Read the sonnet aloud once or twice. Here are some questions that I ask myself:

What is the speaker claiming about love?
Do I agree with it?
Do the ideas develop or is it a series of spotlights on the same idea? or some other movement of ideas?
Would I like someone I cared about to read or send this poem to me? If so, when--after a fight, on an anniversary?
How could the same poet write this sonnet and also "The expense of spirit in a waste of shame/ Is lust in action"?

Tone

Let's look at one last poem before you try your hand at it independently and then in discussion with each other. But let's also use the note-taking matrix form I'll ask you to fill in before you write your responses for independent work. You can find the blank form at http://www.iupui.edu/~elit/L115/poetryrespform.htm .

Sharon Olds' poem "Sex without Love" (NIL, p. 701) rocked me when I first read it, as it turned and twisted on me. Try reading it now, filling in a blank response form on your computer. As you read, underline at least three words that "bother" you--either because they seem harsh or unexpected, perhaps signaling a new direction. Then try writing down your initial overview of what the poem seems to be saying, its emotional impact on you and strange noticings--things that you might brush aside as mistakes or wrong word choices if it weren't for this poem being like a message in a bottle found at the seashore. This initial response should note the three underlined words and try to explain why they seem bothersome.

Click here to see my original response and questions. I find a lot of contrasts, especially where the connotations seem to jar with the subject of the poem. The dramatic setting--time and place--isn't very particular. It's like a musing or wondering meditation with the speaker not directly addressing anyone, but of course the poet expects us to be listening in. The first sentence actually sets the question in the poem: "How do they do it, the ones who make love/ without love?"

The next sentence starts out with a nice-sounding simile "Beautiful as dancers"--but dancers are very aware of an audience and of technique--not my usual picture of sexual intimacy. The speaker seems to be exploring an idea as the initial simile begets its own simile "gliding over each other like ice-skaters over the ice." The follow-up explanation makes the lovers/dancers/skaters still graceful but the introduction of ice seems a bit chilling, discordant.

Things heat up in the next thought: "fingers hooked/ inside each other's bodies." The image is of physical union, but "hooked" is an ugly, almost savage word, although it seems more appropriate to physical passion than ice-skaters!

The speaker goes on searching for ways to explain and piles up three startlingly different similes. "Faces/ red as steak"--red from exertion, but with connotations of appetite, gorging oneself. And the picture I get is of raw steak, not medium rare. The image of raw steak revolts me in this context. But then comes "wine" and I figure I'm over-reacting. But the next lines introduce a simile comparing sexual wetness to new-born babies' wetness! Why introduce that imagery here? To remind what sex can produce? To jar the exertion of labor against the exertion of sexual intercourse? And at the end I get wrenched around again. This isn't just a comparison to any old childbirth, but "wet as the/ children at birth whose mothers are going to/ give them away." Reminder--this is sex without love, without consequences, not the love that combines with parenthood in Kinnell's poem.

But just as the poet's comparison detaches us, the language in lines 9-13 shows the speaker caught up in the climax of the sex act with exhaustion ("still waters") afterward. The suggestion of physical involvement (or memory of involvement) is where I sense that the speaker is someone who makes love, combining emotion with sex, but her partner has sex without love. The description of a lover after sex has the tenderness I associate with involved love-making:

light

rising slowly as steam off their joined

skin

But again, one impression fights with another. I notice that lines 9-13 are put in the form of a detached question, not a description: "How do they . . . ?"

Starting in line 13 the speaker starts giving answers, using two main comparisons. Those who make love without love are like "the true religious" and "like great runners." The two comparisons don't seem to go together, another discord.

Line 13 starts with a metaphor. So far, the speaker has mainly used similes, thus calling attention to the comparison. But a metaphor is stronger, equating what is being-described (those who have sex without love) with the revealing comparison (those truly religious). I start out confused, because I thought the speaker was criticizing sex-without-love people, yet the comparison is with something I think of as positive, spiritual and holy. Only as I go on do I realize the speaker is using irony--that is saying one thing but implying that the opposite is true. I can chart the extended metaphor (called a conceit in Elizabethan poetry):

Thing being explained	Comparison	Point of comparison
People who have sex without love	the truly religious	are called the purists, the experts
Sexual partner	false Messiah	loving a partner instead of sexual pleasure is like believing in a false Messiah
sexual pleasure	God	don't mistake the priest for the true God = sexual pleasure

This comparison seems almost blasphemous. But I've been prepared for the religious comparison by what I heard as an allusion in "still waters" (line 10). I dismissed it at first reading, but now I hold up and look at the echo I heard from the 23rd psalm: "The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want./ He maketh me to lie down in green pastures; he leadeth me beside the still waters" (Psalms 23:1-2, emphasis added). The restful quiet after sexual intercourse is compared to God caring for the speaker as a shepherd provides food, water and safety to his sheep.

I realize the poet uses surprise and irony to say one thing about sex-without-love-ers in language and comparisons that might be appropriate with lovers like those in Kinnell's poem. Here those same terms--love as God, still waters--are discordant.

The final simile--a comparison to great runners--doesn't need to be as outrageous. I realize as I go along that the speaker sees these people as selfish loners. They are not even the dancers of the opening, who work together to create a work of art. Here "the partner/ in the bed" is only another "factor" such as background music, lighting, temperature control. In the same way, runners consider

the road surface, the cold, the wind,

the fit of their shoes, their over-all cardio-

vascular health

as "factors" in pursuit of the "truth"--that is, "single body alone in the universe/ against its own best time." The final vision is chilling as sex becomes physical conditioning or sport, but not even a team sport or a one-on-one competition.

One way to understand a poem is to go through and see what you understand. But messages in bottles have to pack so much into a small message, it really pays to follow up strangeness instead of sweeping it under the rug, hoping that no one else will notice the parts you don't talk about. Even putting your questions into words can be an important way of seeing a way out of a problem or discordant reaction.

After going through the poem noticing strangenesses, I turn back to the note-taking matrix form. I looked at Dramatic Setting, Special Language, Emotional Impact and Message. Not much on Form/Sound or Context. I'm content to stop here, but I might want to find out something about Sharon Olds. I can look her up in the Biographical Sketches in NIL (Appendix A, p. 86). That gives me a lead to her books of poetry and helps me figure out that she was 42 in 1984, the year the poem was published. I can also read the poem again, noticing any surprises in rhythm or ways the sounds or pacing contribute to meaning.

Now it's your turn.

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Response Assignment:

Due: Feb. 21 by 11:59pm

Evaluation: graded, up to 40 points

Assignment:

1. Take notes on a poetry note-taking matrix form for one of the following love poems by copying the form into your word processor. (Notice that the cells of the table will expand to give you as much room as you need.)

2. Once you have finished taking notes, then write out your response in the same document (500 words minimum), saying what you think the poem is about and pointing out what made you think that and how the poet "makes" the poem to convey that idea. If you have questions about certain lines or words, say that. (Sometimes in the process of explaining what is strange, an explanation will occur to you. Sometimes not. But at least you are not faking it or pretending you haven't noticed.) Save your total response (matrix and response essay) as a word-processing document.

Anne Bradstreet, "To My Dear Husband" (NIL, p. 415) Note: LITWeb provides some materials at http://www.wwnorton.com/introlit/poetry_bradstreet1.htm

Linda Pastan, "love poem" (NIL, p. 603)

John Donne, "The Flea" (NIL, p. 664)

William Shakespeare, "The expense of spirit in a waste of shame" (NIL, p. 959)

How to Submit Assignment: Go to our course's OnCourse, go to :InTouch:DiscussionForums and find the listing for the poem you have written on. Read the directions in the message and post your work as a Reply by typing in the URL.

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