Don Juan

Don Juan is very particular, in my opinion. He is both womanized and a womanizer. The term "Don Juan", in more recent times, is a term used to describe a man that flirts with a lot of women, and potentially has relations with them, in private. How odd it is that in John Clare's poem, it discusses love and marriage, rather than sex and masturbation, as it was in Lord Byron's poem of Don Juan. Don Juan is portrayed in a romantic sense, but one of those senses is far more sexual, and somewhat describes a sexual frustration for a first love, in the first couple of stanzas.

John Clare's Don Juan: In Your Face

I found John Clare's Don Juan very abrasive.  What really came through was Clare's cynicism.  It's overwhelming.  I've never felt a negative emotion come through so strongly in a poem.  Women are portrayed as overly sexual and untrustworthy.  One excerpt I wanted to focus on:

"Children are fond of sucking sugar candy

& maids of sausages—larger the better

Shopmen are fond of good sigars & brandy

& I of blunt— & if you change the letter—

To C or K it would quite as handy

& throw the next away—but I'm your debtor

For modesty— yet wishing nought between us

I'd hawl close to a she as vulcan did to venus"

This is a great example of Clare's abrasiveness.  Clare simplifies the desire for a woman to simply the desire for "cunt."  I had to reread this several times to make sure I was interpreting it correctly.  I was not sure if that word was even in use at the time, but a little research confirmed my suspicions.

If that wasn't offensive enough, there is an obvious sexualization of the maids shopmen... with the most disturbing sexualization being that of the children "sucking sugar candy."  John Clare seems like he's trying to point out that sex is everywhere.  Something about the format...the way he presents it, maybe, reminds me of John Wilmot, 2nd Early of Rochester as he was portrayed by Johnny Depp in The Libertine: 
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FfTPS-TFQ_c

It's the wit and the animalistic sexuality mixed with cynicism.  It's upsetting, but in an almost entertaining way.

Negative View of Women in Clare's Don Juan

What I found particularly interesting in John Clare's Don Juan A Poem is the negative view of women throughout the work. In lines 15-16, Clare writes "Wherever mischief is til womans brewing Created from manself--to be mans ruin." Without knowing his past or relationship history, I would guess that he had been heartbroken by a woman or have ill will toward women.
During this time period I know it was common to view women as closer to nature and "hysterical." I also know that women were blamed for the fall of man because Eve ate the apple in the biblical story of how mankind succumbed to sin. I wonder if Clare felt that women were to blame for his misery and thus is "mischief" is about, it is most defintely "womans brewing."(line 16)
This also makes me wonder if Clare viewed woman as wholly more sinful than men, and if so, who does he blame his own sin on? Does he believe that his sin is a result of something that a woman did to him?

Byron the Sass Master

Lord Byron's snarky opinions make Don Juan an amusing read, in part because of his criticism on the literary market of the time. In stanza 178, for example, he says that tact keeps "a lady distant from the fact" when "pushed by questions rather tough (1421-1422). While this of course is a direct reference to his own scandalous lifestyle and the rumors spread because of it, and the fame that both he and Don Juan received as a result, it also raises an interesting commentary on the truthfulness of literature. It is almost as if he is asking if politeness and "tact" are of higher value than candid, honest writing. He is critical of flowery, pastoral writing, calling Wordsworth's writings "unintelligible" (720). He seems to mock writers who "find materials for their books" "within the leafy nooks" of nature (717, 715). By using a snarky tone to criticize other writers and styles, Byron seems to be defending the candid nature of his works, and suggesting that truthfulness is more important than style.

I want a hero: an uncommon want

The first stanza “I want a hero” is about how he wants someone to stand up and be that figure, someone that inspires and encourages others to be better and how that is uncommon to want. It also talks about how there have been so many people that have showed up over the years, that have claimed they were a hero or tried to fill this role of hero but they have all ended up being false heroes. The second stanza lists many political figures each different in their own way. Some good, some not, some military, others royalty but each a person who tried to stand as a hero of some kind. These two stanza tells us that Byron’s chosen genre is the epic, which has three elements. One it must be a trilogy or longer, two is that the time span must encompass years or more and three it must contain a large back story or universe setting in which the story takes place. More well-known works that are considered epics are J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings and Thousand and One Nights, where the stories Aladdin, Ali Baba and Sinbad the Sailor come from. These two stanzas and Byron’s choice in genre tell us the he is trying to influence the people. He is trying to teach a way of thought that could convince the people to take a stand and control their own futures. He wants them to see that the heroes of the past that have all failed were part of the aristocracy and that they should try and shape their own lives.

Reaching for More or Humanity is "Never" Satisfied

In the spirit of Kubla Khan is a poem about reaching for something beyond yourself and basicly not getting it. The problem with the narrator in I Am by John Clare is that they want to be closer to "god" or a godlike being because they feel they have nothing left so being something other than what they are is appealing. The need that people have to want something beyond all sanity is frightening in and of itself because we recognize that theirs a limit to when we just have to stop, but obsession can of course drive people to do insane things, such as bringing a dead person back to life when you "know" a person is suppoused to stay dead in Frankenstein. Humanities struggle to keep going even when your not sure where your going too is something that in the narration of the poem is explored where the narrator simply wishes to return to something or be reborn into a life where they aren't in pain or suffering from depression since the tone of the poem seems to lean that way.

Clare's Madness

After reading John Clare’s first I Am it seemed to me that he thought of himself as an eternal spirit that was not shackled by time or by body. This would explain how he thought he was Byron. Yet Clare’s Don Juan A Poem, seems to not be similar to the portion we read of Byron’s Don Juan. Both poems contain spite yet Clare’s poem seems to be more pointed and hateful. The poem seems to shift focus frequently. Whatever Clare's focus falls upon could either be praised or lambasted seemingly on a whim. Clare's second I Am seems as if it were written with a clearer head.  A man plagued by illness is locked away and abandoned by his friends and family. He longs for peace with God like the peace he knew in childhood. The selection of Clare's work is a very interesting representation of his disease. The work displays the anger, hubris, and vulnerability of a troubled mind in a way that is totally unique to me.

Vulgarity at its Finest

While reading Don Juan by Clare, my jaw was completely dropped. However, the vulgarity of the subject matter was a very clever strategy to use. His very vibrant choice words and visuals invoke a tavern or pub feel. The questionably stated subject matter engages the reader in a personal conversation with many personal opinions expressed freely. This method of audience engagement really draws in the reader while using vulgar expressions to create a level of humor over serious political views (Queen Victoria and the Prime Minister for example). Overall I found his method of getting his point across in an almost drunken manner to be effective. It was entertaining. And if anyone takes what he says offensively it can be disregarded by means of the sloppy drunk friend we all know who behaves inappropriately after hours.

Byronically Brilliant

While reading the poem, I thought it was so intriguing that he would use two people who were so recognized in the literary community, Southey and Coledridge. It almost seemed as if he was making a satire out of Coleridge’s, and by extension, Bob Southey’s beliefs. For you see, these two had plans for a political uptopia where everyone would work for the common good of the community. Byron apparently did not agree with this thus resulting in his lovely wordy elaborate poem Don Juan. Glorious and very well played Lord Byron because not only did he use two important literary figures who already had a connection with each other, the poet laureate and the founder of Romantic Movement, but he also used the connection that they had against them, showing first off Southey as a hero for his venture to try to establish “with all the lakers” (the Lake Poets) his perfect society and his position as a poet laureate in the very first stanza. As poet laureate, he is seen as some kind of a hero, a hero with his words if you must. However, Byron draws on the fact that the society which Southey wanted to establish was crumbling because Coleridge (a Lake Poet) did not agree with him on the location for it for even the perfect hero of literature (if pushed into that position of Poet Laureate as was the case for Southey) can crumble himself.

The direct tie into the second stanza is with the mention of Coleridge, using the metaphor of “too has lately taken wing, but like a hawk encumbered with his food” for though they both didn’t agree on a place, Coleridge still spread his idealogy to the people, telling them of the tales of this perfect society of how this would happen. You see, Byron establishes the very skeleton of a Byronic hero simply in these two stanzas. Broken, beaten, trying for the better good – these characteristics of the Byronic hero are established in the knowledge of these poets, and Byron uses it to show that even the best of the literary heroes will fall, but their ideas will never die, not while the word still lives. Perhaps that is the true political sense of it, that ideas that have the potential to change society will never die. The trick is that someone must understand it which Byron shows that many people can’t by the words “I wish he would explain his explanation.” They may be literary Byronic heroes pushing for their own political views, but Byron uses that to his advantage, using their acts and position as such to show his own political view. He makes a satire out of them in order to show his audience what he thinks which if you ask me is Byronically brilliant.

Morality versus Nature

Don Juan seems to have a problem throughout Canto I with being unable to rein in his passions and act on logic something that gets him and Julia into a lot of trouble when they begin an affair and get caught. This problem with not being able to control there passions and act completely on instinct seems to be a way for Byron to explore whether man is ruled by his base instincts first and learns morality later or has personal morals that are instilled at birth. This question was something that was being studied at the time and looking at this question through the eyes of a character so obviously portraying his own morality rather than what is expected is a good idea.

The fact that Don Juan is 16 at the time was a odd choice though in that by him being so young it casts a reckless light to this character making his actions more primal in that as teenagers were more in tune with our baser emotions and allow them to rule us, not that Don Juan being a teenager excuses his actions but it does cast them in a more realistic light. The fact that this question of whether people are ruled by logic or instinct is a fundamental question for the nature of this story but there's no true way to tell whether people are born with morality or learn it.

Stanza Five of Ode to A Nightingale

Keats seems to be able to relate to the Nightingale because they are going through the same seasons of life. You get a sense of Spring turning to Summer. Yet for all of the Spring imagry, he can still only focus on his own sense of mortality. He wishes he could enjoy it more, but just can't seem to shake off the darkness.

The Nightingale

In "Ode to a Nightingale", the nightingale represents Keats' mortality. He loves it, because although it is mortality, it's song is immortal, which is exactly what he wants to become through song and story. But at the same time, he hates the nightingale, as it means that he will surely die, and there is no way of telling when or how, and if he will become immortal through song and poetry or not.

Poetic form and eco-criticism

Here are the books I mentioned yesterday in class:

For eco-critical discussions on Romantic literature, see Jonathan Bate, Song of the Earth (Harvard, 2002) and James McKusick, Green Writing: Romanticism and Ecology (Palgrave, 2000).

For an in-depth discussion of how Romantic poets use form and genre, see Stuart Curran, Poetic Form and British Romanticism (Oxford, 1986). Another important treatment of form appears in Susan Wolfson's Formal Charges (Stanford, 1999).

Curran's argument has many facets, but his approach to defining formal innovation is useful. He argues that genres and forms have a "logic" that arises from the history of their use and the reader's expectations. So, when we recognize the form of a Shakespearean sonnet, it carries withit certain expectations (for example, that it might monumentalize the beloved object in various ways, but it is often playing with the trope of the Petrarchan sonnet, as in "My mistresses eyes are nothing like the sun"). Curran argues that poetry of the Romantic period takes up conventional genres while transforming them and redeploying them to address the political, social, and literary climate of the late 18th and early 19th century. Romantic poets often use conventional, recognizable forms--we were discussing terza rima yesterday--while also disrupting reader's expectations about the themes and concepts associated with that form. Shelley's "Ode to the West Wind" uses terza rima, which would have immediately suggested Dante's Divine Comedy, but Shelley's poem is neither epic nor addressed to religious themes. While he invokes Dante's work (the leaves in the opening section suggest Dante's hell), he doesn't follow it's lead--and in fact, his focus on material nature (wind, leaves, storm) runs directly counter to Dante's use of allegory to plot the soul's journey toward the afterlife. Shelley's indirect political and environmental message in the poem thus pushes up against the thematic logic of the form he has chosen--and this should, as we discussed in class, be disconcerting and make use feel uneasy.

To Autumn

I enjoyed this poem for its bold and powerful imagery of nature, which is a well-known attribute of Keats' works. I also liked the sense of the conspiratorial tone between the sun and Autumn in the first stanza; seeing as though they are both responsible for the bounty of fruit and crops for the harvest. This setting is portrayed by the swelling growth of fruits and vines under the intense sunlight, moving into the spring and summer.

Between the conspiring first stanza and the harmonious singing in the last I noticed that time had gotten away from me. It starts with the brightening sun and the full ripening of fruit, and then suddenly birds, lambs and crickets are singing and moving to the sunset of a dying day. The construction of the poem sucks you in with all the poetic landscape and imagery to where it almost seemed as though the sun had been slowly descending the entire time. Also, Autumns careless and relaxed persona in stanza two makes it feel like the day is slowly stretching forward but not toward an ending; as if time itself was expanding.

Side note - what is with the random cider press? Throughout the entire poem it is painted a vibrant setting of color, fragrance, and music of the seasons and of the harvest - then right in the middle, at the end of stanza three, there is a cider press, which Autumn appears to be watching ever so closely. Why? To me it just seemed like a random addition; like if someone had a screw in a box of plant and flower seeds.

Last Stanza Ode to a Nightingale

By the last stanza he is 'coming down' from his vision.  He discusses the word forlorn tolling him back to his true self, a play on the imagery of a funeral bell in a small town, a symbol of lament for death.  The "plaintive anthem" is fading; his connection to the bird is winding down.  There is significance that the anthem is fading into nature: 

Past the near meadows, over the still stream,

Up the hill-side; and now 'tis buried deep

 In the next valley-glades:

Perhaps nature could be thought of as the source for the anthem, and in that case it is returning to the source in the same way Keats will eventually return to the source when he is buried in the earth.  Or if there is a distinction between the anthem and nature, the anthem is succumbing to nature, and this interpretation gives nature a sense of power.

It ends with

Was it a vision, or a waking dream?

  Fled is that music: - Do I wake or sleep?

At this point Keats is contemplating the meaning of what he's just experienced.  Maybe he is contemplating the meaning/importance of what he's just experienced, or maybe even if he should indulge in such fancies later on..."Do I wake or sleep" is in the present tense; one could argue that he is deciding how to view consciousness from this point forward having experienced 'the music.'

The last stanza wraps up his experience, and shows him starting to wonder how to interpret this vision.

Seasonal transitions

Although both Keats’s “autumn” and Shelly’s “Ode to the West Wind” contain both seasonal changes they have different interpretations of autumn. Keats interpretation contains more of a dying love most likely a forbidden love that is flourishing “ close bosom-friend of the maturing sun” but has to end due to natural circumstances-, hence the autumn “death” and hook or scythe reference. He could also be referring to his physical condition, the fact that he had developed tuberculosis that very year of 1820 and would be dying very soon “summer has o’er-brimmm’d their clammy cells” this sudden realization that once he was very healthy and lively but as the summer ends and the fall approaches he too is falling apart and dying along with nature. For Shelly I think the most probable reason for which he wrote Ode to the West wind was because of his dear friend Keats’s illness “ whose unseen presences the dead leaves are driven”.                

"La Belle Dame sans Merci"

I found it interesting, and a little confusing, that "La Belle Dame sans Merci" means "The Beautiful Lady without Pity" since in stanzas 5, 7 and 9 she appeared to be sweet, caring, and nurturing to the knight; almost as if she was taking care of him by providing him with food, a sense of divine purity, love and company.

Then once she puts the knight to sleep, he has this very distressing dream of death befalling kings, princes and warriors - which is why, in the last stanza, he conveys this being his reason for staying where he is. Personally, stanzas 9-12 make it seem that the knight was able to dream because of the faery-like lady - a warning in the form of his dream - so if the lady is to be without pity, why does it appear as if she is warning the knight of the death that could come? Or was she simply showing the knight the sureness of his future, and that there was no escaping it, no matter how long he stayed on that cold hill side?

To further my interest and confusion of her being known as  "The Beautiful Lady without Pity;" why is it that she was crying, and sincerely portraying the emotion of sorrow in stanza 8 if she truly has no pity? In my opinion, those with no pity would not shed a tear in such situations, or even have a remorseful thought on the matter.

On Ozymandias and Stanza 2 Of Keats' Ode To A Nightingale

Ozymandias by Percy Shelley has a bleakness to it that I don't recall seeing in earlier Gothic poetry. There's a sense of the futility of effort that runs throughout the poem, from the desert setting to the words of the ancient King himself. The idea that Ozymandias thinks that his works will outlast the works of all who came after him and be greater still, juxtaposed by the ruinous state of the statue leaves the reader with the feeling that there is no real point in creating anything grand; time itself will sweep away all things.

In Keats Ode to a Nightingale, the second stanza, through its imagery conveys the speakers' want for opium; I say want deliberately for the speaker expressely notes in the first stanza that he has not taken any sort of poison or drug to dull or amplify his senses. The speaker brings to mind the fountain of the Muses (the source of poetic inspiration) and couples this with reference to the goddess of flowers. Opium, being a flower, and being at this time consumed primarily in the form of Laudnaum, a solution of opium, is then an easily noted conclusion. Yet, it seems as though the speaker wants this so that he can feel some sort of connection with the Nightingale. It is an enhancing substance for the speaker, not a dulling one, but the speaker also refrains from taking any sort of opium. Perhaps through this, the speaker gains a significant connection to the natural world the Nightingale inhabits because he is in his natural and non-intoxicated state.

Stanza 2 ode to Nightingale

In stanza 2 Keats tries to display a long lost desire to see a moment of happiness within his consciousness with the drug f opium. The clue that the author desires opium towards the end of the stanza where he mentions a liquid that opens the world he enjoys, in which he wishes to escape the reality of the present moment. Also it appears that the stanza describes of a more natural approach to what happiness is for Keats when he describes the desire for the country side of the world. However, I believe Keats misunderstood seeing the beauty of the world through opium is not the answer. Perhaps opium opened a new world for the people who used them who wished to see an entirely different world from the one they lived in. The time of Keats wasn’t any better than ours apparently.

Stanza 6 of Ode to a Nightingale

In stanza 6 of "Ode to a Nightingale", Keats speaks of his thoughts about death as the Nightingale sings above and emphasizes that "Now more than ever seems it rich to die" (55) provoking a calm nature towards accepting death.  The Nightingale song is so soothing to him in the darkness that he imagines "To cease upon the midnight with no pain" (56).  However doing so he would not be able to hear the bird sing anymore and would "have ears in vain" (59).

1. Keats positions the narrator as harmonious creature in this stanza and almost delusional as it ponders existence, using words to describe death as 'easeful' and having 'soft names'.

2. Keats feels very connected to the Nightingale, he seems it "rich to die", almost as if he is memorized.

3. The narrator wants to quietly and peaceful slip off into breathlessness (death) while enjoying the song, however he comes to some realization.

Feel free to add on

-Luke

Oblivious Happiness

In Stanza I of "Ode to a Nightingale" there is a separation between the speaker and the bird. The colon at the end of the fourth line sets it apart from the rest of the stanza. The first four lines are set a part from the rest as well with a sense of obvious melancholy. The speaker’s heart aches and there is a drowsy numbness that pains his senses. The speaker seems to be set apart from the bird in a way that allows for analysis or interpretation of the bird. This can be seen through the use of the word “thy” in line 5, the speaker is talking to the bird as he observes the bird’s “happy lot”. The phrase “melodious plot” in line 8 brings up an image of a gravesite. This is a place where oblivious happiness could cause the sort of sadness that the speaker is experiencing. The bird is unable to note the sadness that the speaker seems to be consumed with. It seems as though the bird is too happy. Drinking from the river Lethe in Hades causes a sort of oblivion, there’s a reference to this river in line 4. For the speaker the oblivion has sunk, and he is fully aware of a sadness that the bird seems unconscious of.