That's Right, Me & Keats

Beauty is false, and truth
can be ugly. That's some
of what we know but only
a little of what we need
to know. Keats's formulation

is beautifully circular.
Like the urn, real or
imagined, it's neither true
nor false. It just is, so
we like seeing. That's

right, John, we still like
looking at that ode.



hans ostrom 2015

Keats's "To Autumn" Read Aloud

Well, here comes fall, often known as autumn in poetic circles, perhaps most famously in Keats's ode "To Autumn," which is read in a traditional (and deep) British voice in the following recording:

http://classicpoetryaloud.podomatic.com/entry/2007-05-28T23_15_03-07_00

Keats's Autumnal Gem

*
*
*
*
*
*
*
American baseball player Reggie Jackson was dubbed "Mr. October" because he performed so well in several different World Series. Fair enough. But before that, poet John Keats might have earned the same moniker, or at least "Mr. Autumn," for having written his great ode, "To Autumn." I thought of the poem today as, like a lot of people, I caught that hint of fall--you know, something about the air-temperature, the look of some foliage, the knowledge that a tide of students is going back to school.

Here are the opening lines, which should be indented in a certain pattern (but the blog-machinery doesn't like to cooperate with that sort of thing):

I

Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness,
Close bosom friend of the maturing sun,
Conspiring with him how to load and bless
With fruit the vines round the thatch-even run:
To bend with apples the mossed cottage-trees,
And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core;
To swell the gourd, and plump the hazel shells
With a sweet kernel; to set budding more,
And still more, later flowers for the bees,
Until they think warm days will never cease,
For summer has o'er-brimmed their clammy cells.


In this stanza as in the rest of the poem, Keats blends a deliberate, stately rhythm with a palpable sense of exuberance. The language of the poem itself seems almost to burst, full of ripeness. It's hard to achieve this kind of stateliness, common to odes, in contemporary poetry because there is a kind of demand for irony and cynicism. I happened to re-read the poem in Keats: The Complete Poems, edited by Miriam Allot, and published by Longman in 1970. The annotation of the poem reminded me taht the poem was written in September 1819 and was "the last of K.'s major 1819 odes" ( page 650).

I Dropped Keats's Grecian Urn

Dropping Keats's Grecian Urn


I dropped Keats's Grecian Urn
on a tile floor today. Luckily
the thing existed only on paper
in the weighty anthology that
slipped from my hands. Still
the imaginary sound of ancient
pottery hitting mass-produced
tile was terrible and beautiful.
It made me feel guilty and thrilled.
I picked up the book and made
sure Keats's poem was all right.
Not a scratch.

"Beauty is Truth, and Truth,
Beauty": great phrasing, the kind
that gets a poem anthologized.
I like the sound of it, but I never
knew what it meant because it
went in a circle like a toy-train,
and a lot of truth is damned
ugly, and some beauty is an
illusion, which some people
consider to be different from truth.

--Like my opinion matters to Keats
or anyone else, though. Anyway,
the timeless urn is timelessly encased
in Keats's oft-reprinted words, which
are always awake and ready to conjure
images and thoughts. One way to make
your pottery unbreakable is to put it
in poetry. Pottery/poetry. That's one thing
I got out of the poem a long time ago.

True, in words, the pottery's less
beautiful, and it won't hold much liquid, but
you can always pick it up with your
eyes or your ears and hold it in
your mind's hands, never pay to
insure it, and not worry about dropping it.


Copyright 2009 Hans Ostrom

Thing-Poems for Spring?

For college-teachers, these early days of January compose the interval in which we create plans for courses we are slated to teach in Spring. Our quirky little name for such plans is "syllabi," the plural of "syllabus." Before one of my recent high-school reunions (I suspect it was one I did not attend), a former classmate found my home-page on the Internet, and I put syllabi from courses on there. He sent me an email in which he claimed never to have used the word, "syllabus," in his life, partly because he hadn't (he informed me) gone to college. (At least at our high school, in our era, one did not hear or see the word "syllabus".) The remark was his not-so-subtle attempt to point out the obvious: I am a nerd. I always was a nerd, even though I played sports, came from the backwoods of the High Sierra [something hickish this way comes], and didn't wear horn-rimmed glasses or compete in debate-tournaments. I wrote back and told him that if I hadn't become a professor, I probably wouldn't have occasion to use the word, either. I mean, it's not like I derive measurable satisfaction simply from saying or writing "syllabus," nor am I attempting to put on airs by using the word. When one works a job, learns a trade, or joins a profession, one picks up the lingo, that's all. When I worked as a carpenter's assistant, I used the words "partition," "truss," "stud," "joist," and "eight-penny [nail]," but it wasn't personal.

Working on a syllabus for a poetry-writing class, I went in search of some thing-poems: poems that express some kind of concentrated, fanciful, and/or vivid view of an object (although I often lump poems about creatures and vegetation into this category, too.) William Carlos Williams' "The Red Wheel Barrow" is a classic example of a thing-poem--and an ironic one, for the main thing that makes the poem famous (arguably) is the line "So much depends," not the description of the barrow, per se. One impetus behind the writing of thing-poems in the early 20th century--an impetus that has persisted--was the desire to get away from flaccid poems about emotions and abstractions. A thing-poem may certainly evoke emotions and imply concepts, but the first task is to look at and to represent a concrete thing. "No ideas but in things," wrote Williams, in his poem, "A Sort of Song."

Of course, by the time the class reaches the official day for thing-poems, we will have already read and discussed--and written--thing-poems, including Williams' famous one. But on that official day, we will, I decided, discuss the following poems (from The Norton Anthology of Poetry):

1. "God's Grandeur," by Gerard Manley Hopkins--a counterintuitive choice, I must admit. The title suggests something theological. But the poem itself is a tribute to "dappled things," "stuff" (not Hopkins' word) that on first glance looks like a bit of a mess but on closer inspection is beautiful. The implicit advice is to look for God's grandeur in ordinary, mixed up, disheveled things of this world.

2. "To a Chameleon," by Marianne Moore. This is not her most famous poem, but in my opinion it is as good as if not better than her most famous poems.

3. Charles Simic, "Watch Repair." Simic gives us an accessibly surreal, whimsical look inside a watch--an old-fashioned watch, not a digital one. I've probably mentioned this poem before on the blog.

4. Eric Ormsby, "Starfish." An accomplished, effective poem. I may also use "Skunk Cabbage," by Ormsby.

5. "Facing It," by Yusef Komunyakaa. This poem concerns a visit to the Viet Nam War Memorial--and the wall itself. Obviously, this is a potentially treacherous subject for a poet to take on, but Komunyakaa has the chops, and the poem is terrific.

6. "The Ant Hill," by Cynthia Zarin. Fresh description.

The anthology doesn't include another favorite thing-poem of mine--and one students tend to like: "Manhole Covers," by Karl Shapiro. His descriptions and comparisons are exquisite, and tells us (or reminds us of) why we sometimes find these huge round metal plates so fascinating. I still stare at and read the words on one near campus frequently.

Any thing-poem enthusiasts out there? It's okay to include plants and animals, in my opinion.

The most famous thing-poem in English? That's a question guaranteed to start an argument among syllabus-wielding nerds. I'll get the argument going by claiming the answer is "Ode on a Grecian Urn," by John Keats. Hang that answer on a joist and see how you like it (the answer, not the joist).

Yeats Tosses One Back

In one class this term, I asked students to choose an extra volume of poetry (by one author--not an anthology, that is) to read and to discuss with me. One of the students chose an edition of William Butler Yeats's Selected Poems and Plays. He'd studied Yeats's poetry in another class, and he was familiar with the well known poems like "The Second Coming" and "Easter 1916." He said he enjoyed reading this volume because he was able to discover much less well known poems that were enjoyable in their own right. We did end up discussing the well known "A Prayer for My Daughter," which includes the intriguing reference to Apollo and Daphne; the speaker of the poem wants his daughter to be like the shrub, Daphne, and remain rooted in one place--Ireland, presumably. But we also discussed a slighter poem that is nonetheless enjoyable. Here it is:

Drinking Song

By W. B. Yeats

WINE comes in at the mouth
And love comes in at the ear.
That’s all we shall know for truth
Before we grow old and die.
I lift the glass to my mouth,
I look at you, and I sigh.

The half-rhyme mouth/truth is vintage (so to speak) Yeats.

I wonder if someone has, in fact, set this lyric to music; probably so. However, the poem might work better as a simple toast than a song. If a person were to sing it, he or she would have to select the appropriate saloon, pub, or cocktail lounge; it may not work in every venue. In any event, I agreed with my student's idea that one advantage of reading a poet's selected or collected works is that you get to discover the poems that are not anthologized often or at all but that are nonetheless memorable. You get to take your own angle on the poet's opus. I'm in favor of rummaging through such books, as opposed to hitting the familiar high spots or reading systematically.

I also like to think of Yeats's "Drinking Song" in connection with Keats's "Ode on a Grecian Urn," partly because the pronunciations of Yeats and Keats constitute something of a running joke, but also because the poems disagree on what we know "in the final analysis." Keats says we know that beauty is truth and truth, beauty. Yeats says we know only that wine comes in at the mouth and love comes in at the ear. Maybe the claims aren't as far apart as they seem to be at first glance.