English
140 S1IHA
Summer
1 2008
Introduction
to Poetry
Professor
Richter
Assignment
III
Your
final assignment is to write a paper comparing and
contrasting two poems. As you select two poems that
have some definable similarity--that share a subject
or theme--
you are to show how each poet has made the subject
his or her own. The
topics of comparison are open. Among other things, you might
want to talk about the attitude each poet takes
toward the
subject-matter, the poem's tone, the
prosody, the way imagery is
used, the way the poet is related to the speaker,
the relative
subjectivity or impersonality of the
treatment. It's up to you to
find the most salient points of comparison that will
bring out
the differences-within-likeness of the two poems.
As
usual, I want an essay, with a title, an introductory
paragraph setting up the problem, a thesis,
suitable quotations
from the poetry making your points, and a conclusion
of some
sort. A
sample paper is attached. Here are some suggested
pairings:
Robert
Herrick: "Corinna's Going A-Maying"
Andrew
Marvell: "To His Coy Mistress"
William
Wordsworth: "Tintern Abbey"
A.R.
Ammons: "Corsons Inlet"
Emily
Dickinson: "A narrow Fellow in the Grass"
D.H.
Lawrence: "Snake"
Wilfred
Owen: "Strange Meeting"
Randall
Jarrell: "Eighth Air Force"
Anne
Bradstreet: "A Letter to Her Husband, Absent upon Public Employment"
Ezra
Pound: "The River-Merchant's Wife: A Letter"
Suggested
length: 1000-1500 words (4-6 pages).
Other
pairings are possible, but you MUST check them out with me, do not go ahead without permission.
Due:
Monday June 23, 2008. Late papers cannot
be accepted. Papers will
be graded asap, will be returned by the 25th.
A
sample paper is attached.
Two Responses to the Railroad:
Walt Whitman's "To a Locomotive in Winter"
and Emily
Dickinson's "I like to see it lap the miles"
We
usually think of poetry as the poet's way of responding, in
picturesque language, to those issues which are
permanent and
eternal in human life, issues like the loss of
innocence, the
love between man and woman, the place of man in
nature, the
destruction wrought by time and death. But poets also must
respond to things less timeless, to the events
which make epochs
in their societies, and even to the objects which
new
technologies force upon people's
lives. Such an object, in the
mid-nineteenth century, was the
railroad.
It
was not, perhaps, strictly speaking, a brand new technology,
for the engines which were to power the locomotives
had been
invented late in the eighteenth century, and the
rail lines had
begun to be laid down in the eighteen-thirties. The railroads
had provided supplies and reinforcements for the
Confederate
armies during the War between the States, and the
lines of track joined the
Nevertheless,
for anyone born in the generation before the Civil
War,
the railroad had transformed utterly the society in which he
had grown up.
In practical terms, the railroad had destroyed the
isolation--and the self-sufficiency--of the rural
towns of which
provided in the locomotive engine an image of
simple power and
might, made by man but yet inhuman, which dwarfed
that of any
person, however Herculean, or of any animal, however
elephantine.
To
a person whose image of strength and power had been limited to
the familiar horse or ox, the locomotive engine
made a
difference, a difference in scale. To us over a
century later,
who have grown up with the trains and so many other
machines, to
us for whom "train" calls up only the
image of the commuter
special, ubiquitous, crowded, irritatingly dirty
and
undependable, it is almost
impossible to recapture the wonder of
the train.
It is hard for us to see that the poets of the
eighteen-sixties and -seventies needed
to find some sort of
response to the awe and wonder it created in
them. But how to
respond?
Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson, the two greatest
American
poets of the post-Civil-War period, exemplify in their
poems about the railroad two very different
attitudes, attitudes
that betoken different strategies for coping with
change which we
may see in American society even today.
The
first strategy, that of Walt Whitman's "To a Locomotive in
Winter," is to celebrate the engine, to identify
with its might
and power, and then to identify that power with
that of the brute
Force
of Nature itself. The poem is one
lengthy apostrophe of
admiration, directly addressed to the locomotive.
And each of the
opening twelve lines seems to select some part,
some aspect, of
the locomotive to describe in its strength and
grandeur. He
celebrates its "black cylindric body,"
its "ponderous side-bars,"
is "great protruding headlight fix'd in
front"; he is awed by the
"dense and murky clouds out-belching from thy
smoke-stack." But
with all this power, Whitman also sees a delicate
beauty in its
"long, pale, floating vapor-pennants," in the way its
"knitted
frame" is put together, and in the
"tremulous twinkle" of its
wheels. At the
beginning of the second strophe, Whitman calls
the locomotive a "fierce-throated
beauty," and there indeed seems
to be something sexual in Whitman's admiration: it
is like that
of an awed girl tracing the terrific body of a
muscle-bound he-
man. And the
rhythms of Whitman's free verse, in their moving
from part to part in erotic wonder, are apt to
remind us of the
Song
of Songs:
Thy neck is a tower of ivory; thine eyes
like the
fishpools in
Heshbon, by the gate of Bath-rabbim: thy
nose is like the
and thy breasts
like clusters of grapes.
--Song of Songs, 7: 4-7
The
usual goal of such foreplay--this praise of the beloved's
anatomy--is sexual union, and union, of a rather
different sort,
is where this opening section is headed. For, his catalogue
complete, Whitman now calls upon the locomotive
to "come serve
the Muse and merge in verse, even as here I see
thee,/ With storm
and buffeting wind and falling snow...." Like many of Whitman's
constructions, it is a bit obscure,
but the tenor seems to be
that the might and beauty of the train is now
united, within
Whitman's
poetic imagination (his Muse), with that of the winter
storm, which is that of Nature, which proceeds from
God. So
that, at the end of the first strophe, when Whitman
seems to be
returning to his catalogue ("By day thy warning
ringing bell to
sound its notes,/ By night thy silent signal lamps to
swing"),
these familiar monitory signs seem more grandiosely
to echo
Exodus
14:21: "And the Lord went before them by day in a pillar
of cloud, to lead them the way; and by night in a
pillar of
fire...." These biblical echoes are hardly
accidental, but even
the reader who does not hear them nevertheless
responds to
Whitman's
celebration of the power and beauty of the engine, to
his presentation of it as a force comparable to that
of Nature,
and to the poet's personal identification of
himself with both.
But
Whitman does not stop with identifying with the locomotive
himself; he wants to make every American reader
identify with it
too, and he does so by linking the engine firmly
with the American
nation itself.
At the climax of the catalogue in the first
strophe, the locomotive is seen as the
"type"--the symbol--"of
the modern--emblem of motion and power--pulse of
the continent."
And
at the end of the second strophe, the train rumbles through
the American landscape, which is described almost
as it would be
in "
Thy trills of shrieks by rocks and hills
return'd,
Launched o'er the prairies wide, across
the lakes
To the free skies unpent
and glad and strong.
Almost "from sea to shining sea." As it moves into this
patriotic vision of the railroad uniting a free
country and
uniting it with the freedom of the skies,
Whitman's verse
retreats from the wild freedom of the opening to
a fairly strict,
comfortably manageable iambic pentameter, just as
the
locomotive's power is portrayed as
comfortably serving a people
with its own free spirit.
It
would be hard to imagine a more different approach to the
locomotive than that of Emily Dickinson. Whereas Whitman's
impulse is to do full justice to the might of
the locomotive, so
that he can then identify his own egoistic
grandiosity with it,
animal. Her
locomotive is like a big, friendly dog, annoyingly
powerful and noisy at times, but no more
awe-inspiring than an
overgrown collie or golden retriever. Actually these varieties
of dog are misleading, for
explicitly a species of horse--we remember the old
cliche for the
railroad, the "iron horse"--whose voice
is a "neigh" and which
comes to rest in a station which she calls its
"stable door."
There
is no title to alert us to what
and it takes a few lines for the tenor of her
extended metaphor
to emerge.
The animal imagery is what first appears, in "I like
to see it lap the miles--/ And lick the valleys
up--"; not until
we read that this beast stops "to feed itself
at Tanks" do we
begin to figure out that this running animal is
actually a
machine.
Since we think of it first as horse and then as
machine, its true scale never quite strikes our
senses.
of course: she calls it "prodigious" in
the first stanza and
"omnipotent" in the last. Yet somehow this aspect of the
locomotive never becomes vivid. The image of the train squeezing
between the walls of a rock quarry lets us see
the train as
small--as of course it is, relative to a quarry. And when the
train peers superciliously into houses, the houses
are
"shanties," small, mean shacks one might equally gaze
down into
from horseback, or even, perhaps, on foot. And the proud gaze of
a train is reduced to the "supercilious"
sneer we sometimes fancy
we meet in the face of a horse. Even its pride has no grandeur.
But
what is more important is that the beast has been
domesticated. In its free moments, it seems playful, rather
than
threatening (as when it chases "itself down
Hill"), but the train
is not even man's companion, like the dog or cat,
but his
servant, like the horse. The train is "prompter than a
Star":
obediently present when it is called; and after its
run it is
made to "stop," a "docile" if powerful
slave, resting before
fulfilling further orders.
It
is not only the imagery that domesticates
locomotive, but the meter itself. Here there are none of the
grand biblical cadences of Whitman's free verse, or
of his
Miltonic
epic grandeur when he modulates into blank verse.
popular ballad or the Bay Psalm Book,
slant-rhymed and broken up
by hesitations and parentheses, a verse form that
seems as well-
designed to celebrate the humbly human as
Whitman's
biblical/Miltonic rhythms are to meditate
upon the supernatural
and the divine.
Psychologically
speaking, Whitman's and Dickinson's responses to
the incomprehensible power of the locomotive could
be
characterized as identification and
denial, respectively. And
while the novelty of the technology underlying the
locomotive has
certainly faded, as the train has been replaced,
as a means of
travel and cartage, by the car and the truck, the
airplane and
the rocket, these psychological responses to
technology are still
very much with us.
Just as Whitman and Dickinson were threatened
by the locomotive, so are we by the even greater
power of nuclear
energy and, in subtler fashion, by the computer, which
threatens
to replace us intellectually as inexorably as the
hydrogen bomb
threatens the annihilation of ourselves and our
world. And so we
deny the threat, like
software, and we play computer games, thus
reducing the computer
to a pet and playfellow; alternatively, we watch
science films
about "Our Friend, the Atom" and try
desperately not to think
about its possible role as our enemy. On the Whitmanesque side,
science fiction movies train us to identify with
science as a
tool of power, while politicians seek votes by
identifying the
future of
technology.
The gigantic but pathetically vulnerable MX missile
is comprehensible only as the product of our
generals' desire to
identify with a tool bigger and nastier than
whatever the other
side has got.
And so, if the steam locomotive itself is today a
museum piece, nevertheless the strategies Whitman and
Dickinson
adopted for living with technology are as fresh
as the morning's
paper, because their motives are as permanent and
eternal as
birth, love, mutability and death.
------------------------------------------------------------
Lyric #585 by Emily Dickinson
I
like to see it lap the Miles--
And
lick the Valleys up--
And
stop to feed itself at Tanks--
And
then--prodigious step
Around
a Pile of Mountains--
And
supercilious peer
In
Shanties--by the sides of Roads--
And
then a Quarry pare
To
fit its sides
And
crawl between
Complaining
all the while
In
horrid--hooting stanza--
Then
chase itself down Hill--
And
neigh like Boanerges* *Biblical
allusion to a
Then--prompter
than a Star loud, vociferous orator
Stop--docile
and omnipotent
At
its own stable door--
Walt Whitman: To a Locomotive in Winter
Thee in the driving storm, even as now—the snow—the winter-day declining;
Thee in thy panoply, thy measured dual throbbing, and thy beat convulsive;
Thy black cylindric body, golden brass, and silvery steel;
Thy ponderous side-bars, parallel and connecting rods, gyrating, shuttling at thy sides; 5
Thy metrical, now swelling pant and roar—now tapering in the distance;
Thy great protruding head-light, fix’d in front;
Thy long, pale, floating vapor-pennants, tinged with delicate purple;
The dense and murky clouds out-belching from thy smoke-stack;
Thy knitted frame—thy springs and valves—the tremulous twinkle of thy wheels; 10
Thy train of cars behind, obedient, merrily-following,
Through gale or calm, now swift, now slack, yet steadily careering:
Type of the modern! emblem of motion and power! pulse of the continent!
For once, come serve the Muse, and merge in verse, even as here I see thee,
With storm, and buffeting gusts of wind, and falling snow; 15
By day, thy warning, ringing bell to sound its notes,
By night, thy silent signal lamps to swing.
Roll through my chant, with all thy lawless music! thy swinging lamps at night;
Thy piercing, madly-whistled laughter! thy echoes, rumbling like an earthquake, rousing all! 20
Law of thyself complete, thine own track firmly holding;
(No sweetness debonair of tearful harp or glib piano thine,)
Thy trills of shrieks by rocks and hills return’d,
Launch’d o’er the prairies wide—across the lakes,
To the free skies, unpent, and glad,
and strong.