Today's Topics:
Songs of Innocence & Experience
Re: Songs of Innocence & Experience
Re: Metaphor and Blake...a belated reply
Re: Songs of Innocence & Experience
Re: Metaphor and Blake...a belated reply
Re: Metaphor and Blake...a belated reply
Innocence & Experience/Metaphor/Symbol
Re: Metaphor and Blake...a belated reply
whoops
Metaphors, Boredom, and DEPTH...
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Date: Wed, 28 Jan 1998 12:22:39 -0800 (PST)
From: "A. Crigger"
To: Blake@albion.com
Subject: Songs of Innocence & Experience
Message-Id:
Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII
Hi everyone. My name is Amy and I'm a communcations major at the U. of
Washington. I'm taking an English class right now that's focusing on
Blake's writings. I'm having a really hard time understanding the contrary
poems' "Nurse's Song" and "Nurses Song" from "Songs of Innocence" and
"Songs of Experience." If anyone can help with either an idea of where I
can find criticism on these two poems or would like to take a crack at
trying to explain these to me, I'd greatly appreciate it. I've already
written my paper on this but I feel like I don't fully understand them.
Thanks a bunch!
Amy
------------------------------
Date: Wed, 28 Jan 1998 21:25:06 -0900
From: ndeeter
To: blake@albion.com
Subject: Re: Songs of Innocence & Experience
Message-Id: <34D020C2.7AD7@concentric.net>
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A. Crigger wrote:
>
> Hi everyone. My name is Amy and I'm a communcations major at the U. of
> Washington. I'm taking an English class right now that's focusing on
> Blake's writings. I'm having a really hard time understanding the contrary
> poems' "Nurse's Song" and "Nurses Song" from "Songs of Innocence" and
> "Songs of Experience." If anyone can help with either an idea of where I
> can find criticism on these two poems or would like to take a crack at
> trying to explain these to me, I'd greatly appreciate it. I've already
> written my paper on this but I feel like I don't fully understand them.
I suppose it kind of all depends on what you've got so far... I think as
far as plain sense on these poems is pretty clear. The speaker of the
Innocent Nurse's Song is one who is endeared towards children, children
at play remind the speaker of innocence, of the beauty there is in being
young and innocent, the transcendence of his or her own frantic
adulthood into that innocent state of tranquility, blind acceptance.
Even though it is getting darker, the children want to play longer
because there is still a little bit of daylight left. They want to live
as fully as they can, filling their day with what children do: play.
Even the romantic nurse reminds them to come home and go to sleep, but
he or she is easily encouraged to stay out with the children. Nature is
there in all its harmlessness: the birds, the sheeps, and those echoing
hills that seem to show up so often in Blake. Those echoing hills, I
think, are Blake's evidence that the speaker has "transcended" him or
herself, his or her own "experience", and achieved a little slice of
heaven, a little piece of salvation.
The Experienced Nurse, however, on seeing the same scene, rejects the
chance to transcend his or her adulthood. He or she is reminded not of
the eternal idea of youth, but the practical, mundane idea of youth. The
nurse is reminde of his or her own childhood, which having grown up and
lost is necessarily a bad memory, regardless of whether the childhood
was good or not. The speaker feels the loss of the apparent good
sweetness that these children display and he reminds them that this is
all temporary. He grows sick at their seemingly "eternal" state of youth
and he invokes the images of the cold winter and the dark night as these
hindrances which are to come and ruin the lively youthful spring and
their bright cheerful days.
For the stubborn cold-hearted Experienced nurse, there are no echoing
hills, there is no transendence, there is no moment of divine
consciousness. The poem ends as abruptly as it begins, perhaps because
the experienced has merely caught a glimpse of these children playing
and has turned back to his evening task with a bah humbug manner,
completely shutting off the possibility of deriving anything good from
watching children play.
But that image of the Scrooge like nurse is just speculation and is
nowhere in the poem...
Nathan Deeter
ndeeter@concentric.net
------------------------------
Date: Wed, 28 Jan 1998 22:03:05 -0900
From: ndeeter
To: blake@albion.com
Subject: Re: Metaphor and Blake...a belated reply
Message-Id: <34D029A9.6562@concentric.net>
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H.W.D. Brenton wrote:
>
> Hello,
>
> I'm a second year English undergraduate doing a dissertation on Blake and
> Metaphor. This disscusion group looked interesting so I
> thought i'd sign up. If anyone has any thoughts about Blake and metaphor
> i'd greatly appreciate hearing them.
>
> In the words of Arthur Symmons
>
> "For Blake the universe was the metaphor"
>
> Many thanks
> Harry Brenton
I'm sorry if this response is not very timely, but I've been mulling
over this question of metaphor for quite some time. Not just in Blake,
but in poetry in general.
Being a practicing poet, I have endeavored to tell the absolute truth in
my poetry and I am often distraught at reading a poet who overuses
metaphor.
I will not say right now whether Blake uses too much of it or not. Not
yet anyway. But let's look at what a metaphor is.
It happens when a writer says something (the tenor, the thing which the
writer is talking about) is, in fact, something else (the vehicle, the
thing which carries the tenor forward to a new kind of understanding).
And often, there are widely successful metaphors. Surprising,
innovative, daring, enlightening. Read Sylvia Plath's poem called
"Metaphors". A wonderfully rich poem that states more than nine lines
worth of poetry in nine lines worth of metaphor about her subject...I
won't give away the kicker if you haven't read it, if you have, you know
what I'm talking about...
However, the very principle of making metaphor's, it seems, is
anti-truth. In saying that this thing here exists as that other
unrelated thing there, a metaphor is basically lying. It is forsaking
saying what it means to say, for a much more "poetic"--and when I say
"poetic", I mean imagistic-- for a much more "poetic" way... which often
leads people in the wrong direction. For example, if I say, "You are my
universe."--which I wouldn't unless I wanted to write a really bad love
poem-- I am, of course, using a metaphor. I am attempting to say how I
feel about the addressee in using that word universe. Presumably, I mean
"I love you as if you were the only thing there was to love." or
something along those lines. However, someone might percieve the
universe being a very large, frightening place where a person is easily
lost. Apply that meaning to the metaphor and it's a whole other meaning
to the sentiment. What if the reader experiences the universe as a
limitless expanse of nothingness with little bits of matter spread
through out it?
One reason heavily laden poems and literature falls victim to a vampiric
deconstruction--which kills the author, the speaker, the sentiment, and
the human experience behind a piece of literature leaving nothing but an
illogical, dead fallacy of language--is because of an uncarefully
thought out metaphor. One reason why so many people don't claim to "get"
literature is because the metaphor is too mystifying or not grounded
well enough in common experience. For a writer, the metaphor can be like
a drug, hard to kick when it becomes a bad habit and something which
inevitably obscures the truth too far from itself.
Your quote: "For Blake the universe was the metaphor."
This is intriguing because under this understanding of metaphor, it says
in a very nihilistic/Douglas Adams-esque way that the universe is
precisely what it is not.
But what Arthur Symmons surely must mean by this, if I understand Blake
correctly, is that Blake thought everything was "poetic" and worthy of
attaining that kind of seamless, graceful image that the poem can
attribute to things.
Basically, I ask, why continue to use metaphor so much? Why continue to
say what we do not mean and then repeat it and still not be fully
understood? Don't misunderstand me. I'm in no way saying abolish
metaphor in poetry, in language. In a small way, all language is based
on metaphor...we've just become so used to it that the word symbol and
the object has conjoined.
But effectiveness and truth is what we should be striving towards. Not
"poetic," that term based on artifice. Real poetry should be like
Coleridge's "mighty fountain" that flings up "momently the sacred
river": an honest geyser there calling a bird a bird, a stone a stone, a
feeling a feeling, an impulse an impulse.
Blake's metaphors... Well, often an entire poem is a metaphor, or can be
read as a metaphor for something else. He often writes the extended
metaphor. I think that an effective extended metaphor is one that works
wihtout being an extended metaphor. If you take it literally and it
makes sense and it seems to make meaningful sense, then it's doing its
job and you don't have to worry about it being a metaphor or an actual
thing. We make metaphors, connections in our minds, but elsewhere they
can often be awkward, pointless, absurd.
Nathan Deeter
ndeeter@concentric.net
------------------------------
Date: Thu, 29 Jan 1998 09:14:02 -0500
From: Robert Anderson
To: blake@albion.com
Subject: Re: Songs of Innocence & Experience
Message-Id: <3.0.32.19980129091401.00767618@pop.oakland.edu>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"
I suggest you start with the Princeton/Blake Trust edition of the poems,
edited by Andrew Lincoln. His comments are a helpful starting place, and
it is alwaysYou might also want to consider Anne Cormarty Yearsley's 1796
poem "To Mira, On the Care of Her Infant" which was published in her _The
RuralLyre_, but is available in Mellor and Matlak's anthology _British
Literature 1780-1830_, for an interesting and related view of
adult/children relations. Although I don't believe he discusses this poem
in particular, Alan Richardson's _Literature, Education, and Social
Practice_ well help illuminate some of the issues the poems address.
Rob Anderson
Oakland University
At 12:22 PM 1/28/1998 -0800, you wrote:
>Hi everyone. My name is Amy and I'm a communcations major at the U. of
>Washington. I'm taking an English class right now that's focusing on
>Blake's writings. I'm having a really hard time understanding the contrary
>poems' "Nurse's Song" and "Nurses Song" from "Songs of Innocence" and
>"Songs of Experience." If anyone can help with either an idea of where I
>can find criticism on these two poems or would like to take a crack at
>trying to explain these to me, I'd greatly appreciate it. I've already
>written my paper on this but I feel like I don't fully understand them.
>Thanks a bunch!
>Amy
>
>
------------------------------
Date: Thu, 29 Jan 1998 10:52:41 -0800 (PST)
From: Ralph Dumain
To: ndeeter@concentric.net, blake@albion.com
Subject: Re: Metaphor and Blake...a belated reply
Message-Id: <2.2.16.19980129134635.3017c454@pop.igc.org>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"
Either I have completely misunderstood Deeter or his view of metaphor, esp.
in Blake, is highly eccentric. Perhaps more example from poetry would help.
My own impressions are quite the reverse. I don't keep up with what's
happening in poetry generally, but I do attend readings of celebrity poets
at the Library of Congress from time to time, people who have been
recognized by the literary establishment. I find myself being bored most of
the time, not because the poets concerned don't have a facility with
language, but because everything is on the surface: clever ways of reporting
on everyday experiences and occurrences, no imaginative depth or unusual
insight. It seems we are living at an unusually literal moment. And then
when one climbs down from the literary elite to the streets: having to
endure graybeard 60's burnouts ranting black nationalist revolutionary
poetry that was shit even 25 years ago and listen to the youngsters rapping
and slamming about what's happening in the hood--it just turns my stomach.
No, I think we are suffering from a severe lack of imagination as a culture.
Probably it is impossible now to recreate the type of poetry that Blake
wrote, but what he does accomplish is what contemporary poets cannot: he
expresses profound ideas metaphorically that could not be expressed any
other way. I could write you a prose history of my life story, but why
bother? "I feared the fury of my wind" tells it all in eight lines. How
about "The Fly", "The Sick Rose", "The Crystal Cabinet"?
Or have I misunderstood the use of metaphor that you're criticizing?
At 10:03 PM 1/28/98 -0900, ndeeter wrote:
>However, the very principle of making metaphor's, it seems, is
>anti-truth. In saying that this thing here exists as that other
>unrelated thing there, a metaphor is basically lying.
>Blake's metaphors... Well, often an entire poem is a metaphor, or can be
>read as a metaphor for something else. He often writes the extended
>metaphor. I think that an effective extended metaphor is one that works
>wihtout being an extended metaphor. If you take it literally and it
>makes sense and it seems to make meaningful sense, then it's doing its
>job and you don't have to worry about it being a metaphor or an actual
>thing. We make metaphors, connections in our minds, but elsewhere they
>can often be awkward, pointless, absurd.
------------------------------
Date: Thu, 29 Jan 1998 13:56:17 -0900
From: ndeeter
To: blake@albion.com
Subject: Re: Metaphor and Blake...a belated reply
Message-Id: <34D10910.61E6@concentric.net>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit
Ralph Dumain wrote:
> Either I have completely misunderstood Deeter or his view of metaphor, esp.
> in Blake, is highly eccentric. Perhaps more example from poetry would help.
> My own impressions are quite the reverse. I don't keep up with what's
> happening in poetry generally, but I do attend readings of celebrity poets
> at the Library of Congress from time to time, people who have been
> recognized by the literary establishment. I find myself being bored most of
> the time, not because the poets concerned don't have a facility with
> language, but because everything is on the surface: clever ways of reporting
> on everyday experiences and occurrences, no imaginative depth or unusual
> insight.
This is probably for the most part true.
> It seems we are living at an unusually literal moment. And then
> when one climbs down from the literary elite to the streets: having to
> endure graybeard 60's burnouts ranting black nationalist revolutionary
> poetry that was shit even 25 years ago and listen to the youngsters rapping
> and slamming about what's happening in the hood--it just turns my stomach.
> No, I think we are suffering from a severe lack of imagination as a cu