Story of the Stone (part two)

In this volume of The Story of the Stone, the cousins are a little more grown up (14 or 15), and they are mad for poetry.  The Crab Flower Club is the name of their club, and many of "their" poems are included in this volume.  Our anthology includes only a few scenes from this section of The Story of the Stone, but I think that it is still well worth reading not only to see what happens to Bao-yu and his family but also to understand a little more about Chinese literature and literary studies as well as their attitudes towards gender.

The picture below is China-Guide's illustration of Dai-yu composing one of her poems.



However, this volume is not as wonky as it seems.    In fact, here, the clouds begin to gather over Bao-yu and his family.  Early on, Jia Zheng, Bao-yu's father, attacks his son, giving him an extremely severe beating because of what he perceives as his dissoluteness.  Keep in mind that Bao-yu hates to study and that he shows especially contempt for what is considered masculine knowledge.  His father, on the other hand, is a Confucian scholar and civil servant.  Almost at the beginning of the book, Golden, a servant to Bao-yu's mother, is dismissed for flirting with the young man.  Later she kills herself.  When Jia Zheng inquires into this young woman's suicide, Jia Huan (his other son by a concubine) informs him that Golden killed herself after Bao-yu had raped her.  (Right now I'm reading Vol. 3, and this lie has not yet been exposed although it is clear to the family that Jia Huan and his mother are troublemakers.)  Jia Zheng leaves the family compound shortly thereafter when the Emperor promotes him to high office.  However, Bao-yu's days in the garden may be limited.  His maid and now "chamber wife," Aroma, advises Bao-yu's mother to be stricter with him, move him into lodgings outside of the garden, and encourage him to be more like his father.  In other words, it is time for Bao-yu to learn to be a man.  (Below is a picture of Confucian scholars from www.cultural-china.com.) 



Dai-yu, Bao-yu's beloved cousin, also faces certain gender strictures.  At one of the meetings of the Crab Flower Club, she quotes lines from Dream of the Western Chamber, a risque novel that Bao-yu has encouraged her to read.  How explicit it is you may see here:
http://press.princeton.edu/chapters/s7134.html
Afterwards, Bao-chai takes her aside to warn her about her reading and even her absorption in literature.  She reminds her that for both girls and boys literature is just a pastime. 

Unfortunately, I can't find a picture of Baochai at work, so here is An Ho's portrait of Wang Xifeng, the relative who runs the household...or shall I say family complex.  Wang Xifeng is perhaps Dai-yu's polar opposite.  She is energetic, practical, manipulative, and illiterate.  She puts a great deal of energy into humoring Grandmother Jia and managing the servants as well as making money for herself.  Let's imagine that Wang Xifeng is sitting listening to reports from the various servants.



However, all is not well for Wang Xifeng either.  Her husband Jia Lian is a philanderer, and in the Crab Flower Club, we will see her attack him and her servant Patience after she overhears his complaining about her to a mistress.

As you might imagine, at this point, the poetry club, though, is a useful diversion, uniting the younger members of the family, a group that becomes even more numerous near the end of this volume.  Even Wang Xifeng is involved as the enforcer of penalties.


Perhaps I will end this entry with another picture of the Grandview Garden in Beijing:

Study Guide for Final (Spring 2009) -- Poetry

The picture above is William Blake's original published version of "Holy Thursday" in The Songs of Experience.  Blake is also known as an artist and printmaker.

We began our poetry unit by reading both versions of William Blake's "Holy Thursday."  One was from The Songs of Experience (1794).  The other was from The Songs of Innocence (1789).  Consider the difference between the way that William Blake portrays these children and that earlier writers like Voltaire and Behn portrayed the poor, servants, and slaves.   Romantic writers were more sympathetic to the poor and children.  (Rousseau--we are born good but are corrupted by society.)


We also looked at William Wordsworth's "She Dwelt Among the Untrodden Ways" and "Simon Lee: The Old Huntsman."  Interestingly, neither were in our anthology.  Both poems are from Lyrical Ballads, the 1798 collection of poems by Wordsworth & S.T. Coleridge.  Our editors seem to prefer Wordsworth's self-scrutiny to his poems of observation.  Note how "Simon Lee" resists narrative yet sounds like a ballad.  (Its rhyme scheme is ababcdce.)
Unfortunately, we did not get to Wordsworth's sonnets, but here is a link to John Green's reading of "Westminster Bridge."  Note that the sonnet was another form that he helped to revive.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wz4v9x3PIZc

Below is an 1897 painting of Westminster Bridge by Frederick Marlett Bell-Smith:



Here are some remarks by William Wordsworth on poetry.  They are from his preface to Lyrical Ballads (1800, 1802):

"All good poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings."

Poetry "takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquility."

"Poems to which any value can be attached, were never produced on any variety of subjects but by a man who, being possessed of more than usual organic sensibility, had also thought long and deeply."

A poet "is a man speaking to men: a man, it is true, endued with more lively sensibility, more enthusiasm and tenderness, who has a greater knowledge of human nature, and a more comprehensive soul, than are supposed to be common among mankind."

"a large portion of the language of every good poem can in no respect differ from that of good Prose."



Above is a picture of William Wordsworth's home, Dove Cottage, in the Lake District of England.  If you scroll to the links below, you may listen to actor Jeremy Irons reading Wordsworth's "Daffodils."

Emphasizing the supernatural rather than ordinary individuals who lived in the country, Wordsworth's friend Samuel Taylor Coleridge took a different approach to poetry in his fragment, "Kubla Khan" and his "Rime of the Ancient Mariner."  (Coleridge, by the way, lived for a time in Germany.)  If you scroll to the links at the bottom, you may listen to Sean Barrett reading from "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner."

Blake (1757-1827), Wordsworth (1770-1850), and Coleridge (1772-1834) belong to the first generation of Romantics.  These men lived through the French Revolution as adults.  With John Keats (1795-1821) and his narrative poem, "The Eve of St. Agnes," we move on to the second generation of the Romantics.  Note how Keats handles the supernatural in his narrative.  Note how Porphyro takes advantage of Madeleine's belief that she will dream of her husband-to-be on the Eve of St. Agnes. 

Below is an image of Pre-Raphaelite painter William Holman Hunt's painting "The Eve of St. Agnes."  By the time Hunt created this painting (1847-1857), Keats' reputation had risen.  During his lifetime, critics attacked his work, in part because of his social standing and perhaps their assumptions about his politics.  (Keats was an apprentice to a surgeon at a time when doctors' social standing was not as high as it is today.  Early nineteenth-century England was conservative politically and culturally, perhaps in response to the upheaval of the French Revolution.)

We then moved on from the British Romantics to some other 19th century poets from Vol. E.  We began with Charles Baudelaire (1821-1867), a controversial poet and the author of Les Fleurs du Mal (The Flowers of Evil).   The poem of his that we read (in French and its English translation) was "The Albatross."

http://fleursdumal.org/poem/200

Below is a photo of an albatross.

We also read the Nicaraguan poet Ruben Dario (1867-1916) 's "Walt Whitman" and "In Autumn,"
Emily Dickinson (1830-1886)'s "I heard a Fly buzz," and
Walt Whitman (1819-1892)'s "I Hear America Singing" and "O Captain! My Captain."  With these poets (including Baudelaire), modern poetry begins.  Latin American critics, in fact, call Dario the father of Modernismo.  Emily Dickinson, by the way, published very few poems during her lifetime, and Walt Whitman self published his book, Leaves of Grass.  This was not too hard as he was a printer by trade.

Below is a picture of Emily Dickinson's room at home.  Can you imagine the fly buzzing?  The house where she lived and wrote her poetry is now part of a museum run by Amherst College.


We moved into the 20th century with Ezra Pound (1885-1972) ("A Pact," "In a Station of the Metro," and "The River Merchant's Wife," his translation of a translation of Li Bo's poem).  Although Pound knew many other languages and was an instructor of modern languages at Indiana's Wabash College, he did not know Chinese.  Although he did not know Chinese, he brought much attention to that culture's poetry and used it to change English-language poetry, making it more stripped-down and focused, exchanging the metronome for the phrase, making it new, to cite his famous command. 

With T.S. Eliot (1888-1965), we were able to listen to his recording of the first part of "The Waste Land," an immensely influential and erudite poem in five parts and many languages from Italian and German to the closing Sanskrit.  This poem, however, takes place in London, the city where Eliot, an American, had chosen to live.  (By the way, Ezra Pound helped edit "The Waste Land.")  We also read Eliot's earlier poem, "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock," which he wrote when he was 22.  Does Prufrock ever leave his room?

Here is a link to the recording of Eliot's reading that we listened to:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3tqK5zQlCDQ

How does Eliot's London compare to Blake's or Wordsworth's?

Below is a picture dating from World War One.  It is from the British Postal Museum and Archive's website.


We also looked at two poems by the Irish poet W.B. Yeats (1865-1939):  "The Second Coming" (the poem where Chinua Achebe derived the title, Things Fall Apart) and "Easter 1916" (a poem about the aftermath of the Irish declaration of a republic -- Ireland was then a British colony).  Both poems were published by 1921, after World War One had ended but before Ireland became independent.  Here you may listen to Yeats' reading his poems:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u2FT4_UUa4I

Below is a picture of the General Post Office that served as the Irish rebels' fort in 1916:

Here you may listen to an Irish-American rock band Black 47 play its song "James Connolly."  Connolly was one of the leaders of the rebellion.  Yeats did not mention him.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zwEv2YCrSoY

We finished our unit on poetry with the work of Australian aborigine political activist and poet Oodgeroo of the tribe Noonuccal (1920-1993) 's "We Are Going," Laguna/Sioux poet and scholar Paula Gunn Allen (1939-2008)'s "Taking a Visitor to See the Ruins," Laguna Pueblo poet and novelist Leslie Marmon Silko (1948-)'s "Toe'osh" and "Franz Boas' Visit."  Paula Gunn Allen's visitor, by the way, was Abenaki poet Joseph Bruchac.  Ironically, the Franz Boas that Leslie Marmon Silko refers to was a pioneering, progressive anthropologist who not only developed scientific method in anthropology but also encouraged his students to be more tolerant to the groups they studied.

Below is a picture of Laguna Pueblo (NM) from 1902:



These are links to the videos that we watched on review day (Monday):

Sean Barrett reads from "Rime of the Ancient Mariner" http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_E9crjEp0_A

The words to "Bonnie St. Johnstone" are here:
http://www.richardthompson-music.com/song_o_matic.asp?id=586

Here is a link to Richard Thompson's performance of this song:
http://www.last.fm/music/Richard+Thompson/_/Bonnie+St.+Johnstone

Jeremy Irons reads "Daffodills" http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rL7ysgRNAT0

William Blake's "London" is transformed into a song and music video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PkGi_XAhtPc

Here "London" is read: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BIDUf6V8OLM

To see the poem itself, go to this link: http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/15818

T.S. Eliot reads "The Waste Land" http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3tqK5zQlCDQ

Elizabeth Bishop's "One Art" is read here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KblU3g32l5g

For more information about the ballad, see these links:

http://www.writing.upenn.edu/~afilreis/88/ballad.html

http://www.csufresno.edu/folklore/BalladSearch.html

http://www.pbm.com/~lindahl/ballads/early_child/#what

http://www.theotherpages.org/poems/ballads.html

Entry on Sonnets pt. 2 (Aha...I knew that someday I'd teach EN 202)

 

Did you know that poets continued to write sonnets after Shakespeare? The woman pictured above, Mary Robinson, an actress who became a writer and feminist, helped revive this type of poetry in the late 18th century (late 1700s).

Here's a link to some of her sonnets from her book, Sappho and Phaon. Sappho was the Greek poet (or poetess) who is now considered one of the lesbian foremothers. In Robinson's day, Sappho was more noted for her relationship with the young man Phaon. Robinson, in fact, encouraged an identification between herself and Sappho.

http://etext.virginia.edu/britpo/sappho/sappho-poems.html

Here is a link to another more political sonnet, "To Liberty."

http://digital.library.upenn.edu/women/robinson/other/rmd-liberty.html

Below is a sonnet dedicated to Robinson's daughter, Maria:

http://digital.library.upenn.edu/women/robinson/1791/1791-daughter.html

Another late 18th century poet/novelist Charlotte Smith also worked in this form. Below is a sonnet inspired by Goethe's phenomenally successful novel, The Sorrows of Young Werther.

http://www.engl.virginia.edu/enec981/dictionary/16smithM1.html

She was also known for writing about nature:

http://www.sonnets.org/smith.htm

Nineteenth-century poets wrote sonnets as well. You might recognize this one by Elizabeth Barrett Browning (who also wrote a novel in verse, Aurora Leigh):

http://www.amherst.edu/~rjyanco94/literature/elizabethbarrettbrowning/poems/sonnetsfromtheportuguese/howdoilovetheeletmecounttheways.html

Another poet was Christina Rossetti. Here is a link to her sonnet, "Sappho":

http://www.victorianweb.org/authors/crossetti/sapho.html

She also wrote a "Sonnet of Sonnets." The Great Poetess whom she refers to in her introduction is Barrett Browning. (By the way, you may recognize Christina Rossetti's last name because her brother translated Petrarch's sonnets into English. I think that I linked to some of his translations!)

http://celtic.benderweb.net/cr/cr90.html

Although male poets wrote sonnets at this time as well, like Rossetti, I wonder what Laura -- or Shakespeare's Dark Lady (whether or not she was Aemelia Lanyer) would have made of these later sonnets by women!

Poetry, Poets, & Poetesses

After Lauren's wonderful presentation on women poets in world literature, I thought that I would post a few links.

Here are some sites that show how literary scholars are reviving the term poetess. A number of these sites are fairly specialized, but this is a "hot" topic, and I think that you'll benefit from seeing how literary studies is changing as I type! (See these sites for more conventional definitions of the term poetess: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poetess

http://www.bartleby.com/68/59/4659.html

http://www.cubanow.net/global/loader.php?&secc=7&cont=show.php&item=569).

The first article, "The Poetess in America," is long but begins with a good definition of the term poetess as it is being revived. The author, Annie Finch, is a poet, translator, and literary scholar.

http://www.ablemuse.com/critique/a-finch_poetess.htm

Here is her website at the University of Southern Maine. She also keeps a blog at this site:

http://www.usm.maine.edu/~afinch/

Here is another academic site, The Poetess Archive, that is edited by literary scholar Laura Mandell. It focuses on English-language poets and the scholars who write about them, but it is not limited to 19th century poets. One poet included here is Sylvia Plath, a confessional poet from the 1950s and 1960s.
http://unixgen.muohio.edu/~poetess/index.html

Prof. Mandell defines the poetess tradition in a detailed essay here. As part of her definition, she considers the extent to which this tradition does or does not include political poetry. She also talks about the distinction between "major" and "minor" poetry.

http://www.erudit.org/revue/ron/2003/v/n29/007712ar.html


But has the term poetess ever really gone away? See these sites.
http://www.etsu.edu/writing/studentsamlit/plath.htm
http://www.utep.edu/rgr/poetry6.html

And here are some sites on one of the poetesses that Lauren mentioned (Ono no Komachi):
http://www.museum.cornell.edu/HFJ/handbook/hb74.html

http://www.washburn.edu/reference/bridge24/Komachi.html

http://www.classical-japanese.net/Poetry/komachi.html

Here the poetess appears on stage:
http://www.callmekomachi.com/
http://www.sonic.net/~tabine/SAApoem_nikki_noh_fall_2005/saa2005aki_noh_sekiderakomachi.html

For more information about the Indian poetess Mirabai and her work:

http://www.biographyonline.net/spiritual/mirabai.html

http://www.poetseers.org/the_poetseers/mirabai/poems/

http://www.poetseers.org/the_poetseers/mirabai/2/
http://www.poetseers.org/the_poetseers/mirabai/poems3/


http://www.vistarfoundation.org/repertoire.html#mirabai