Jane Austen: Free indirect discourse

A post in the ongoing series Poetry in the Arts.

Jane Austen

In an earlier entry, on Emily Dickinson, I tried to focus on the way poetry arises by metaphor: the author introduces a beginning that demands an certain ending, but then replaces that ending with a different one that’s only partially compatible.

The incongruities between the two ideas surprise us — they make us see double.

This fits into my main theme in two ways.

• The surprise — the apparent roadblock that we bump into — forces us out of our fascination with the content of the story to look at the author and at the surface of the story, as we try to puzzle our way through the impasse. This looking at the author and at the surface of the story (the way it’s told) is one of the criteria I’ve proposed for poetry.
• The metaphor makes us learn to live with ideas that don’t seem to fit together, even though they individually report a valid aspect of the reality. We have to grow until we build a new idea that’s deeper, subtler, and more accurate. Poetry isn’t just information: it’s a process, an experience, for us. This is another of the criteria that I’ve proposed.

This mode of double vision is very close to the center of what poetry is, I think.

But metaphor isn’t the only way that it happens. It also results when the reader tunes in to multiple points of view within the same story.

Two Frescoes, by Giotto and by Taddeo Gaddi

This post is the second in a new series, Story Structure.

In this entry, I write about two Renaissance frescoes with the same title, and try to relate them to the idea of story structure — or, especially screenplay structure, about which so much has been said.

The meeting of Joachim and Anna by Giotto, c. 1305.

The meeting of Joachim and Anna by Taddeo Gaddi, 1338.

Here’s what a standard art history book says about these paintings.

Pieter Brueghel and W.H. Auden

This post begins a new series, Story Structure.

Pieter Brueghel, Landscape with the Fall of Icarus

Keeping focus — ratcheting up the tension

You know what “they” tell us: “Icarus is your main character. Keep focus on him. Make sure he’s got motivation. Make sure he’s got an antagonist. Make sure every scene ratchets up the tension.”

Well, that’s “their” humble opinion.

Pieter Brueghel, in his painting The Fall of Icarus, and W.H. Auden, in his poem, Musée des Beaux Arts, about the painting, seem to have other ideas.

The warning that Jacob Marley’s ghost gave to Scrooge

A lonely boy was reading by a feeble fire

For those of you who celebrate the other holiday, on December 25 — and for those of you who don’t — and for me.

This entry repeats Charles Dickens’s warning, in A Christmas Carol, that a spirit can doom itself to “witness what it cannot share, but might have shared on earth, and turned to happiness.”

(from) A Christmas Carol
by
Charles Dickens

“Mercy!” he said. “Dreadful apparition, why do you trouble me?”

“Man of the worldly mind!” replied the Ghost, “do you believe in me or not?”

“I do,” said Scrooge. “I must. But why do spirits walk the earth, and why do they come to me?”

Giving advice to the young — according to Thoreau and to Emerson

Henry David Thoreau, in one of his famously crusty moods, gave some famously negative advice in Walden about accepting advice from those who are older:

Practically, the old have no very important advice to give the young.

I’m sure he intended this to be taken seriously — after all he did think it’s important for each person to break from the past and to re-invent himself — but I’m not sure he meant it to be taken literally. After all, how straight would I read someone who also remarks the following, very dryly, tongue in cheek?

It is true, I never assisted the sun materially in his rising, but, doubt not, it was of the last importance only to be present at it.

Thoreau’s friend, Ralph Waldo Emerson, said something perhaps wiser — or at least more explicit.

Emily Dickinson — I could not stop for death

A post in the ongoing series Poetry in the Arts.

Because I could not stop for Death
by Emily Dickinson (1830-1886)

Because I could not stop for Death –
He kindly stopped for me –
The Carriage held but just Ourselves –
and Immortality.

We slowly drove — He knew no haste
And I had put away
My labor and my leisure too,
For His Civility —

The battle of the statues in Wyman Park

A post in the ongoing series Poetry in the Arts.

Wyman Park is in Baltimore, just in front of the Baltimore Museum of Art and near the Homewood Campus of the Johns Hopkins University. It has two statues, not far from each other.

The first statue has an inscription on its base saying that it represents Stonewall Jackson saying farewell to Robert E. Lee at Chancellorsville. Another inscription explains that the statue was donated by a private individual.

One inscription at the top of the base reports Jackson as saying, “So great is my confidence in General Lee that I would follow him anywhere.” The other quotes Lee as saying, “Straight as the needle to the pole Jackson advanced to the execution of my purpose.”

D. H. Lawrence’s “Snake”

Snake
by D. H. Lawrence

A snake came to my water-trough
On a hot, hot day, and I in pyjamas for the heat,
To drink there.

In the deep, strange-scented shade of the great dark carob-tree
I came down the steps with my pitcher
And must wait, must stand and wait, for there he was at the trough before me.

Allen Ginsberg’s “America”

Note: this post is an extension of my About page.

Allen Ginsberg in 1960 by Mario Jorrin/Getty Images

YouTube: Photomontage of Ginsberg and his “america” music by Tom Waits. Incredibly moving.

America
by
Allen Ginsberg

America I’ve given you all and now I’m nothing.
America two dollars and twentyseven cents January 17, 1956.
I can’t stand my own mind.

Thoreau: a “self-appointed inspector of snow-storms and rain-storms”

Note: this post is an extension of my About page.

from Walden
by
Henry David Thoreau

If I should attempt to tell how I have desired to spend my life in years past, it would probably surprise those of my readers who are somewhat acquainted with its actual history; it would certainly astonish those who know nothing about it. I will only hint at some of the enterprises which I have cherished.

Shelley’s “Hymn to Intellectual Beauty”

Note: this post extends my About page.

Portrait of Percy Bysshe Shelley
by Amelia Curran (1819)

HYMN TO INTELLECTUAL BEAUTY
by
Percy Bysshe Shelley

[Composed, probably, in Switzerland, in the summer of 1816. Published in Hunt’s “Examiner”, January 19, 1817, and with “Rosalind and Helen”, 1819.]

1.
The awful shadow of some unseen Power
Floats though unseen among us,–visiting