sonatina in green

I think sonatina in green is saying something totally different about chance than the others.

Sonatina in Green


One spits on the sublime.
One lies in bed alone, reading
Yesterday's newspaper. One
Has composed a beginning, say,
A phrase or two. No more!
There has been traffic enough
In the boudoir of the muse.

And still they come, demanding entrance,
Noisy, and with ecstatic cries
Catching the perfume, forcing their way—
For them, what music? Only,
Distantly, through some door ajar,
Echoes, broken strains; and the garland
Crushed at the threshold.

And we,
We few with the old instruments,
Obstinate, sounding the one string—
For us, what music? Only, at times,
The sunlight of late afternoon
That plays in the corner of a room,
Playing upon worn keys. At times,
Smells of decaying greenery, faint bouquets—
More than enough.

And our cries
Diminish behind us:
Cover
The bird cages! No more
Bargain days in the flower stalls!
There has been traffic enough
In the boudoir of the muse,
More than enough traffic. Or say
That one composed, in the end,
Another beginning, in spite of all this,
Sublime. Enough!

Closed are the grand boulevards,
And closed those mouths that made the lesser songs,
And the curtains drawn in the boudoir.


for my students

This poem is all about inspiration and, in my opinion, the writing process.

The key phrase is “There has been traffic enough/ In the boudoir of the muse.” A muse is typically thought of as a woman (goddess) who is a source of inspiration to poets, musicians, artists, etc. A Boudoir is a woman’s dressing room/bedroom-type-thing by the way. The “boudoir of the muse” line is important enough that Justice repeats the line in the second to last stanza.

He seems to describe three writers in the first stanza: one who looks to the past for inspiration (yesterday’s newspaper), another who cannot get past “a phrase or two,” and a third who just straight-up rejects inspiration (weird). They can’t find inspiration because there “has been traffic enough in the boudoir of the muse.”

Next he describes how they try to force the inspiration, “demanding entrance” and “forcing their way.” After considering the subject material, story, and the “chance method,” I think that Justice is really saying something about the writing process. A lesson for his students if you will.

He is telling us that it’s alright to stumble upon a great line through trial and error or by accident, that our poems need not come from steady contemplation and a search for inspiration. How our creative minds work is a somewhat random process. We may have a certain syntax and diction for a line in mind, but it can morph into something we totally did not imagine beforehand. I know that is how my blog analyses come to be. I generally begin typing my close-read with a basic observation in mind, and just by typing it out I start to make new connections on the fly, things I didn’t even think of while just staring at the poem. I think that’s where the chance concept comes about. Ideas that one did not preconceive can spring about within the writing process itself. You just cannot force these ideas out like our friends in the poem “forced their way.”

Without knowledge of the chance method that he used in creating this poem, it may just seem like a poem about inspiration in general. But by telling us that he used this random process, he can teach us a more specific lesson if we correctly tie in the chance method to the subject matter.

This poem is really just a terrific lecture in poetic disguise.

Departures

Clock

These quiet hands, their gestures,

These circles drawn upon air.

And the whiteness of the face

That attends the unspoken.

This listening of the deaf.

Justice’s word choices in “Clock” all seem to reinforce this feeling of intangibility with regards to the clock; it is a sense of absence or vacancy. “Quiet,” “upon air,” “whiteness,” “unspoken,” “the deaf.” Contrast this with the nature of a clock itself. It is a strictly quantitative and mechanical device to measure time, hardly of the mystical nature the poem assigns to it.

Now notice the demonstrative pronouns Justice uses: “These,” “These,” and “This.” Three for three with the proximals. His use of the proximal demonstrative pronouns lends weight to the immediacy and significance of the clock. It’s not “those circles” or “those quiet hands,” he specifically uses “these” to emphasize the importance and nearness of the clock. Our lives completely revolve around the measurement of time (deadlines, appointments, schedules, etc) and using the proximals acknowledges the significance of the clock.

So, he is both emphasizing the nebulous aspect of “this” clock and the enormous significance of it. Although I know he is trying to tell us something, I’m having trouble pinning down a solid interpretation, especially one involving the chance method he said he used in writing this poem. I think the central focus of it is the conflict between the orderliness of the clock and his “chance method.”

I can’t argue that he is saying time is an enormous force looming in the background because I’m pretty sure that people are almost always aware of time in their hectic schedules. Time’s influence is not transparent, it’s definitely there and very noticeable. I really don’t have a great explanation for these elements :(

More on the preceeding title. If you haven't read the previous two posts, it's imperative that you do so

Now let's look at another of Justice's chance experiments, "The Assassination."

"The Assassination"

It begins again, the nocturnal pulse.

It courses through the cables laid for it.

It mounts to the chandeliers and beats there, hotly.

We are too close. Too late, we would move back.

We are involved with the surge.

Now it bursts. Now it has been announced.

Now it is being soaked up by newspapers.

Now it is running through the streets.

The crowd has it. The woman selling carnations

And the man in the straw hat stand with it in their shoes.

Here is the red marquee it sheltered under,

Here is the ballroom, here

The sadly various orchestra led

By a single gesture. My arms open.

It enters. Look, we are dancing.

June 5, 1968

For context, June 5, 1968 was the day that RFK was shot. I know this because my birthday is the day after, June 6^th.

Although we know that this is about an assassination, the most important part of the poem is that it never says what “it” is. Hell, it doesn’t even really come close to even implying what “it” is. This “it” is portrayed as some kind of animal, invisibly lurking.

“the nocturnal pulse./It courses through the cables laid for it./It mounts. “It bursts,” “it is running,” “it sheltered under,” “it enters.”

The chance methods involved in writing this poem tie into the vagueness of Justice’s use of “it.” Chance, being this intangible, mathematical force that inconspicuously governs so many aspects of our lives, ties nicely into the unnamed “it.”

The question that I will leave with, and will come back to in subsequent posts (because of this I’ll respectfully ask that you don’t comment on this post with your theories), is why Justice would choose to use his now famous “chance method” for the poem “Clock.” Clocks are lauded for their extraordinary regularity and order, hardly something governed by chance. Here it is:

Clock

These quiet hands, their gestures,

These circles drawn upon air.

And the whiteness of the face

That attends the unspoken.

This listening of the deaf.

Proof of the significance of "chance methods" through the analysis of selected poems and formal elements.

In case you forgot, the following poem was listed by Justice as being one of his “chance methods” experiments.

“The Success”

He asked for directions, but the street

Was swaying before him drunkenly.

The buildings leaned together. There was some

Conspiracy of drawn curtains against him.

And all around him he could sense the beauty

Of unnseen arms, of eyes that slid off elsewhere.

Someone was living his life there, someone

Was turning back sheets meant to receive his body.

This was the address if not the destination.

The moonlight die along his wrist. His hand

Slipped off through the darkness on its stubborn mission,

Roving the row of mailboxes for the name it dreamed.

He entered. The doorman vanished with a nod.

The elevator ascended smoothly to his desire.

The light in the hall, the door against his cheek…

He had arrived. He recognized the laughter.

Did you miss it? Here’s the crucial line: “…he could sense the beauty/of unseen arms, of eyes that slid off elsewhere./Someone was living his life there…”

Someone was living his life there, huh? Gee I wonder who that could be…oh wait, CHANCE! This concept of an unknown force pervades the poem, “There was some/Conspiracy of drawn curtains against him.” “Slipped off along the darkness,” “Doorman vanished.” The central idea of this poem is chance governing our lives but there’s one more important question. Where is The Success?

The last line: “He had arrived. He recognized [italics are my own] the laughter.” After four stanzas of “unseen arms,” conspiracies, and being ruled by chance, he finally recognizes something. That sole feeling of familiarity in his life of obscurity is The Success.

"Departures" by Donald Justice

I would say that the strongest recurring element in the poems of Departures is that of insignificance and worthlessness. The speakers’ tones are consistently detached, exasperated, and sometimes quite cynical. “Prescenes,” the last poem, provides a great look at the tone that many of the speakers take.

Everyone, everyone went away today.

They left without a word, and I think

I did not hear a single goodbye today.

And all that I saw was someone’s hand, I think,

Thrown up out there like the hand of someone drowning,

But far away, too far to be sure what it was or meant.

No, but I saw how everything had changed

Later, just as the light had; and night

I saw that from dream to dream everything changed.

And those who might have come to me in the night,

The ones who did come back but without a word,

All those I remembered passed through my hands like clouds—

Clouds out of the south, familiar clouds—

But I could not hold onto them, they were drifing away,

Everything going away in the night again and again.

Diction like “drowning,” “far away,” “everything changed,” “passed through,” “drifting away,” “going away” creates a helpless tone, as if the speaker is being left behind by both people and changing objects that were once familiar (dreams, clouds, “everything”). The fact that he is being left behind appropriately forms a feeling of worthlessness for the speaker as if he is a piece of trash being tossed aside.

One thing that greatly intrigued me was the fact that, in his notes at the end of the book, Justice says,

"The Confession, The Success, The Assassination, 'Clock' (from 'Things'), and the sonatinas come, in part, from chance methods."

I think the fact that he used “chance methods” in some of his poems can tell us a great deal about the poem and his views on poetry as a whole. My guess as to what “chance methods” are is that he probably randomly selected certain words.

Going by what he said, 6/29 poems (or 21%) used some amount of randomness in their writing. This is a relatively large proportion and it deserves much attention.

By using chance, I think that Justice is tying the idea of chance itself into our own lives and reinforcing the depressed tones in Departures. It’s a depressing thought that there may be things that are out of our control and are governed by chance. One could argue that a person is cynical if he truly believes that we don’t really have control over our lives, that they are guided mostly by the forces of probability. Huh, this is an interesting proposition…let’s look for solid proof that Justice intends for this.

The Wheel

"The Wheel"

Through winter-time we call on spring,
And through the spring on summer call,
And when abounding hedges ring
Declare that winter's best of all;
And after that there's nothing good
Because the spring-time has not come--
Nor know that what disturbs our blood
Is but its longing for the tomb.

What I liked about “The Wheel” is its contrast between the image of a wheel and life itself. Most people think of life as a linear progression from birth to death while Yeats seems to imply that it is more of a circular progression. He begins the poem with winter then moves through spring and summer until we “Declare that winter’s best of all” but “spring-time has not come.” I think what reveals that this second winter is really the end of life is when he says “Nor know that what disturbs our blood/Is but its longing for the tomb.”

It is also interesting that the last four lines are really just slant rhymes. “Good” with “blood” and “come” with “tomb.” These slant rhymes tie into the effects of age itself: when young we are vibrant and full of life but as we age humans deteriorate in many aspects. The first four lines are perfect rhymes but the last four are not, this tells us much about aging. I feel that the semicolon at the end of the fourth line is enormously important as well. It denotes a separation between the first four lines (youth) and the last four (old age) BUT does not completely separate them as a period would. The semicolon keeps a continuity of time but separates the two sections by characteristics. A period would separate them by characteristics but would also stop time.

in response to professor white's comment

Professor White asked: "how do you think that avoiding figurative language serves Yeats? Does it make his adjectival obsession necessary, more noticeable, or weaker? Are the two even related?"

I think that avoiding metaphors and similes brings much more attention to the noun at hand. This is because with figurative language, the reader's attention is split between the noun and the thing that it is being compared to. By omitting a metaphor, however, he needs to use other ways to describe his nouns and create rich imagery. He makes up for the missing figurative language with his “adjectival obsession.” I’ll copy the quotes I used in my previous post:

“sultry mud”

“wholesome sun has ripened”

“mummy wheat”

“mad abstract dark”

“sleep a long Saturnian sleep”

“unwearied eyes”

I really don’t think there’s much need for metaphors or similes with adjectives like those.

In response to the third question, adjectives and metaphors are connected only because they are both techniques to describe something. But the similarities end there. Adjectives are very direct way to describe a noun while with metaphors, you have to imagine the object that the noun is being compared to before you can imagine the noun itself. It’s an abstract and indirect way to create imagery and obviously many poets such as Bishop use it to great effect. I don’t, however, think that it is a “higher” path to imagery than adjectives because just as with all poetic techniques, there is a time and place for it to be used.

Look at Leda and the Swan. The whole idea of the poem is to make it have a primal and visceral feeling. I don’t think that that could be accomplished by using indirect methods of description such as metaphors. I’ll repost the poem for reference:

A sudden blow: the great wings beating still

Above the staggering girl, her thighs caressed

By the dark webs, her nape caught in his bill.

He holds her helpless breast upon his breast.

How can those terrified vague fingers push

The feathered glory from her loosening things?

And how can body, laid in that white rush

But feel the strange heart beating where it lies?

A shudder in the loins engenders there

The broken wall, the burning roof and tower

And Agamemnon dead.

Being so caught up,

So mastered by the brute blood of the air,

Did she put on his knowledge with his power

Before the indifferent beak could let her drop?

This is a brutal scene and the feeling of the poem would not be best served by Yeats using metaphors. Hell, even the adjectives are pretty straightforward. But what’s brilliant about this is that Yeats takes a reductionist approach to his diction. Contrast the language of “sudden blow” to “sultry mud” (sultry mud being a phrase he uses in a previous poem). The word sultry is a pretty unique word to describe mud but “sudden” is a pretty standard word to describe a blow. This kind of goes back to our discussion about Kenneth’s poem, in which we decided that he used simple lines and diction to convey the instinctual and primitive nature of “desire” itself. Yeats uses his straightforward adjectives for the same purpose. The primal nature of a rape would not be conveyed well by using indirect methods of description like metaphors.

more on the last post

Now I'm not going to delve into psychology here, but considering that most of the book is about aging and sex is also a recurring topic, I wonder why Yeats found sex important to include. Perhaps he saw it as a way to return back to some amount of youthfulness? But then what is ironic is that in "Sailing to Byzantium," the speaker complains that people "caught in that sensual music all neglect monuments of unaging intellect." He seems to look down on "that sensual music" and would rather a return to reason and intellect.

Later, the speaker pleads with the gods to "consume my heart away; sick with desire"

This is one conflicted speaker! He criticizes those indulging in pleasures of the flesh and only two stanzas later says that his own heart is lustful and "sick with desire." This shows the insecurities of the speaker, who is obviously an old man. He feels that he has no place or purpose on the Earth anymore, no reason for living, yet must live with the conflicts between his intellectual mind and still-lustful heart.

sensuality in "the tower"

Another thing I noticed after reading "The Tower" is that sensuality is a recurring topic throughout the work. In "The Mermaid" he writes,

A mermaid found a swimming lad,

Picked him for her own,

Pressed her body to his body,

Laughed; and plunging down

Forgot in cruel happiness

That even lovers drown.

Yeats also wrote a poem called “Leda and the Swan,” which is based on the Greek myth in which Zeus, in the form of a swan, has sex with Leda.

A sudden blow: the great wings beating still

Above the staggering girl, her thighs caressed

By the dark webs, her nape caught in his bill.

He holds her helpless breast upon his breast.

How can those terrified vague fingers push

The feathered glory from her loosening things?

And how can body, laid in that white rush

But feel the strange heart beating where it lies?

A shudder in the loins engenders there

The broken wall, the burning roof and tower

And Agamemnon dead.

Being so caught up,

So mastered by the brute blood of the air,

Did she put on his knowledge with his power

Before the indifferent beak could let her drop?

That’s a pretty messed up image.

Through his word-choice, Yeats shows some amount of reverence for the bird. He uses words like “great,” “feathered glory,” “mastered,” “his knowledge,” and “power” in describing the bird. This may tie in to the fact that the bird is actually Zeus and Yeats is treating it as such. Yeats depicts the scene as what seems to be a rape, although I do not know the details of the actual legend and it could perhaps have been consensual, which would be even more messed up. But nevertheless, Yeats molds this legend to be a rape yet also shows respect for the bird. He uses the words “staggering,” “helpless,” “terrified,” “vague,” “shudder,” “broken,” “caught,” “mastered,” “power,” and “indifferent” to set the scene for the reader. These words point to the girl’s helplessness and the bird’s control.

trope, or lack thereof

Trope

“transparent like the wind…”

Yeats does not use trope extensively at all, which is a stark contrast to Bishop's work in which I could practically turn to a random page and find a trope! I was very hard-pressed to find even simple similes let alone full metaphors. What “The Tower” lacks in metaphors (which is actually a nice change of pace), it makes up for in rich language full of interesting adjectives and adverbs. “On a Picture of a Black Centaur by Edmond Dulac.” And no, the poem was not written by Edmond Dulac, he was a book illustrator.

It uses phrases such as “dark margin of the wood,”

“sultry mud”

“wholesome sun has ripened”

“mummy wheat”

“mad abstract dark”

“sleep a long Saturnian sleep”

“unwearied eyes”

Daaamn!

Personification is also used very often in this work. All of “Owen Ahern and his Dancers” is about a heart that is personified to be a character in and of itself.

A strange thing surely that my heart when love had come

unsought

Upon the Norman upland or in that poplar shade,

Should find no burden but itself and yet should be worn out.

It could not bear that burden and therefore it went mad.

The south wind brought I longing, and the east wind despair,

The west wind made it pitiful, and the north wind afraid.

It feared to give its love a hurt with all the tempest there;

It feared the hurt that she could give and therefore it went

mad.

I can exchange opinion with any neighboring mind,

Io have as healthy flesh and blood as any rhymer’s had,

But oh my Heart could bear no more when the upland

caught the wind;

I ran, I ran, from my love’s side because my Heart went mad.

II

The Heart behind its rib laughed out, ‘You have called me

mad,’ it said.

‘Because I made you turn away and run from that young

child;

How could she mate with fifty years that was so wildly bred?

Let the cage bird and the cage bird mate and the wild bird

mate in the wild.’

‘You but imagine lies all day, O murderer,’ I replied.

‘And all those lies have but one end poor wretches to betray;

I did not find in any cage the woman at my side.

O but her heart would break to learn my thoughts are far

away.’

‘Speak all your mind,’ my Heart sang out, ‘speak all

your mind; who cares,

Now that your tongue cannot persuade the child till she

mistake

Her childish gratitude for love and match your fifty years.

O let her choose a young man now and all for his wild sake.’

The personification is pretty evident, illustrated by the heart’s being able to speak. What I was really intrigued by though were the words Yeats chose to isolate in their own lines. The words are “unsought,” “mad,” “caught the wind,” “mad,” “child,” “away,” “mistake.” These words are clearly negative in nature, greatly adding to the other words used through the poem: “burden,” “despair,” “pitiful,” “afraid,” “tempest.” These are appropriate I suppose, considering the disturbing subject matter: a man “with fifty years” in love with “that young child.”

What I love about Yeats’s writing is how detailed he can get without using metaphors or similes. Reading his work has taught me that great poetry need not include metaphors, something I mostly thought was a necessity of poetic writing. I’m not saying it’s a bad thing, but it is another option. As seen below.

The true faith discovered was

When painted panel, statuary,

Glass-mosaic, window-glass,

Straightened all that went awry

When some peasant gospeller

Imagined Him upon the floor

Of a working-carpenter.

Miracle had its playtime where

In damask clothed and on a seat,

Chryselephantine, cedar boarded,

His majestic Mother sat

Stitching at a purple hoarded,

That He might be nobly breeched,

In starry towers of Babylon

Noah’s freshet never reached.

King Abundance got Him on

Innocence; and Wisdom He.

That cognomen sounded best

Considering what wile infancy

Drove horror from His Mother’s breast.

Awesome

"The Tower" by W.B. Yeats

Much of this book is damn hard to understand, but I’m going to give it my best shot.

This volume as a whole deals with aging, the prospect of an afterlife, and nostalgia for younger days. It is clear that aging weighed heavily on Yeats’s mind. Let’s see what the poems reveal about his thoughts on aging.

Sailing to Byzantium

I

That is no country for old men. The young

In on another’s arms, birds in the trees,

Those dying generations—at their song,

The salmon-falls, the mackerel-crowded seas,

Fish flesh or fowl, commend all summer long

Whatever is begotten born and dies.

Caught in that sensual music all neglect

Monuments of unaging intellect.

II

An aged man is but a paltry thing,

A tattered coat upon a stick, unless

Soul clap its hands and sing, and louder sing

For every tatter in its mortal dress,

Nor is there singing school but studying

Monuments of its own magnificence;

And therefore I have sailed the seas and come

To the holy city of Byzantium.

III

O sages standing in God’s holy fire

As in the gold mosaic of a wall,

Come from the holy fire, perne in a gyre,

And be the singing masters of my soul.

Consume my heart away; sick with desire

And fastened to a dying animal

It knows not what it is; and gather me

Into the artifice of eternity

IV

Once out of nature I shall never take

My bodily form from any natural thing,

But such a form as Grecian goldsmiths make

Of hammered gold and gold enamelling

To keep a drowsy emperor awake;

Or set upon a golden bough to sing

To lords and ladies of Byzantium

Of what is past, or passing, or to come.

1927

I wrote out the whole poem because I think it is very important to see the poem’s form, especially the Roman numerals. The stanzas are separated by roman numerals, with each stanza containing eight lines in an abababcc rhyme scheme. Considering many of the other poems in the book are less strict with their forms, I paid special attention to this since its form likely ties into his obsession with age.

The roman numerals are especially important as they define the stanzas, which all end in periods, very clearly. This models our measure of age in which time is delineated in specific units: seconds, minutes, hours, days, years. Also, Yeats could have separated the stanzas easily using other characters such as solid lines, dots, etc. Instead, he chose to use Roman numerals, characters associated with the Ancients that function to count things out, just as we count out time with our arbitrary units. It is through the Roman numerals that he both illustrates the progression of time and his own feelings of old age.

Another thing to note is the strict attention to “rules” (rhyme scheme, 8 line stanzas, etc). Elder generations are often characterized as more disciplined, regimented, and sensible than the youth generation. The consistency within the form lends itself well to representing the assumed (and possibly stereotyped) characteristics of Yeats’s age group.

For context: 1927 was amidst the “flapper” trend in young women, with “The young in one another’s arms…” probably being a reference. If you are not familiar with the infamous flappers, they were young women who looked to break the rules of decency in 1920’s society and set their own trends. This included wearing makeup, dressing more provocatively, and drinking alcohol openly, something unheard of during the Prohibition Era.

After describing his current world, and the condition of the elderly in it, Yeats moves on to the supernatural: using words like “holy,” “soul,” and “eternity” multiple times. He pleads with the sages to lift him away from this place and meld his soul “Into the artifice of eternity.” Not only is the speaker dismayed with his age, but he is anxious to leave the world that has cast him aside.