[Close reading] After the dead end of his attempt to recover the Visionary Gleam, Wordsworth gives up the Intimations Ode for a couple of years.  Then he reboots, imagining a different source for the clouds of glory that he saw in youth, since "Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting."  We begin considering this new, Platonic perspective.

[Note: I am podcasting two classes this semester.  The shorter podcasts are from the close reading course; the longer ones, e.g. this one, are from the Renaissaince lyric course]

We look at what makes Southwell's "Burning Babe" work, and what doesn't: students defend the poem; and we look at some particularly gorgeous passages from Marlowe's "Hero and Leander."

Last class before vacation.

[Note: I am podcasting two classes this semester.  The shorter podcasts are from the close reading course, e.g. this one; the longer are from the Renaissaince lyric course]

We begin going through the Intimations Ode, after pausing (natch) to consider its motto from "My heart leaps up."  Some consideration of the crisis lyric, following on from Frost's Birches.

Finally, a reading of Frost's Birches.  Metaphor: tenor and vehicle.  Relation to the Intimations Ode.  The poem as a version of climbing birches and returning.  The idea of the crisis lyric, of a poem as a way to think things through.

Some passages from The Faerie Queene, particularly Mutablitie and the Bower of Bliss.  Question of relation of classical mythology to Christianity.  Typology and the fourfold principle of interpretation discussed.

Bloom's ideas of poetic vocation.  The Intimations Ode as everyone's vocation.  Demonstration of the sense of poetic vocation through a consideration of Yeats's Circus Animal's Desertion.  Wittgenstein on feelings.

Most people hadn't done the reading, so this is a desultory (root meaning: jumping around) class on Spenser, the aim being to give them some sense of what he's doing.  We look briefly at the Epithalamion, at the Amoretti, and at the last two stanzas of the Mutabilitie Cantos.

Poetry's fictional addressee is the personification of Love.  When Love leaves, Love is abandoned.  A character only in literary space: a character who can only be fictional, which is what makes the personification so sad.  That's what's going on in Bishop, Shelley's "When the Lamp is Shattered" and Yeats's "When you are old." NB: I think that I come close to being able to say what I mean here.

Love as the burning boy in Bishop's "Casabianca": metaphor and personification.   Metaphor vs. simile.  Pound's haiku like poem.  The background in Southwell's high conceit in his "The Burning babe."  Freud and the dream of the burning child.  Love personified when all that's left of the desired other is the personified desire for the other: like her as another to who somehow is adequate to our passionate gried; like ourselves for the same reason, and neither of us, but rather the thing lost and returning to lament its loss.  Yeats's "When you are old": her face, Love's face.

Two of Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey's poems.  Violation of Petrarchan convention in "The Soote Season."  How its rhymes work.  "Ye Happy Dames" and the poetry of absence.