amimetobios

Who organizes the voices organizing voices in the Songs of Innocence and of Experience?  How does Bishop make us of Hemans's "Casabianca"? Digression on enjambment.  Bishop's "Casabianca" as a love poem.  Student reading of three wonderful "Songs of Experience" responses to Hemans.

Petrarch performed, and Wyatt and Surrey's translations.  The nature of translation for Wyatt: the estrangement that he himself allegorizes and embraces under the name of Love.  Digression on allegory, via Edward Gorey:

A quick retrospect of the play of voices in the Nurse's songs, then most of the class on the two versions of the Chimney Sweeper, with attention to the difference between Blake as presenter of these poems and their first person singer.

How the Nurse's Song differs in the Songs of Experience.  Polyphanic voices.  Who the real speakers are, in both versions.

Skelton on Phillip Sparrow, and on Chaucer.  Potted history of English rhyme, and of rhyme in general.  Rhyme and decorum: Cole Porter's listing songs.  Wyatt's rhyming in the Petrarchan Sonnet "The long love that in my thought doth harbor." Quick reading of "Whoso list to hunt."

A discussion of lullabies in general, and the way that they aim at more than one audience: the child who shouldn't hear them, and us who do.  A consideration, next, of the innocence version of Blake's Nurse's Song.

We rush through the rest of Auden's "Lullaby," with some attention to prosodic innovations and subtlety, but with every intention of moving on to other poems Wednesday.

We go over Wyatt's "The Flee From Me" again, and then do a close reading of Herbert's "Love" (III) as a descendant of Wyatt's poem.  We pay special attention to the tenses of dialogue

Some more about the adjectives in Auden's "Lullaby."  The transposition of the word "human" from her to him.  A consideration of Yeats's "Cradle Song" as a sort of precursor.

Mainly on Wyatt's "The Flee from Me," as a poem of disillusion, wonder, and astonishing subtlety and depicting the psychology of love and disappointment.  Here's the poem:

They flee from me that sometime did me seek

With naked foot, stalking in my chamber.

I have seen them gentle, tame, and meek,

That now are wild and do not remember

That sometime they put themself in danger

To take bread at my hand; and now they range,

Busily seeking with a continual change.

Thanked be fortune it hath been otherwise

Twenty times better; but once in special,

In thin array after a pleasant guise,

When her loose gown from her shoulders did fall,

And she me caught in her arms long and small;

Therewithall sweetly did me kiss

And softly said, “Dear heart, how like you this?”

It was no dream: I lay broad waking.

But all is turned thorough my gentleness

Into a strange fashion of forsaking;

And I have leave to go of her goodness,

And she also, to use newfangleness.

But since that I so kindly am served

I would fain know what she hath deserved.