I'm Dying...So Here's a Poem About a Flower...

So if memory serves me right--and I think I'd remember if we did--Professor Hague scratched D.H. Lawrence off the schedule to spend more time on James Joyce's "Ivy Day in the Committee Room." I wasn't sure what to write my last blog on but then I decided to look at D.H. Lawrence. Why not? We didn't cover him but the poems are actually interesting. It went back and forth on which poem to write about: "Piano" or "Bavarian Gentians." Boy, are they on different ends of the emotional scale!
"Piano" is an interesting poem. Not too sad and all about longing for the past--a concept we became familiar with previously this semester. It's because of the familiar theme that I considered writing about it but the other poem is equally fascinating.

"Bavarian Gentians"
By D.H. Lawrence

Not every man has gentians in his house
in Soft September, at slow, Sad Michaelmas.

Bavarian gentians, big and dark, only dark
darkening the daytime torchlike with the smoking blueness of Pluto's
     gloom,
ribbed and torchlike, with their blaze of darkness spread blue
down flattening into points, flattened under the sweep of white day
torch-glower of the blue-smoking darkness, Pluto's dark-blue daze,
black lamps from the halls of Dio, burning dark blue,
giving off darkness, blue darkness, as Demeter's pale lamps give off
     light
lead me then, lead me the way.

Reach me a gentian, give me a torch!
Let me guide myself with the blue, forked torch of a flower
down the darker and darker stairs, where blue is darkened on blueness
even where Persephone goes, just now, in from the frosted September
to the sightless realm where darkness is awake upon the dark
and Persephone herself is but a voice
or a darkness invisible enfolded in the deeper dark
of the arms Plutonic, and pierced with the passion of dense gloom,
among the splendor of torches of darkness, shedding darkness on the
     lost bride and groom.


So...for some reason...there are tons of versions of this poem online, all of them with several endings! It's really frustrating but I'm just ready to give up and say here's one of the versions. I'll post a link to a youtube reading of the poem at the bottom of this blog. It's really interesting to listen to it.

So, it's a really, really depressing poem, right? It's one of Lawrence's most famous poems about death. It was published posthumously in a collection called Last Poems, published in 1932. D.H. Lawrence (David Herbert Lawrence, b. 1885 d. 1930) wrote this poem after being diagnosed with TB and learning that he would likely die from it soon. I don't particularly want to analyze this poem like we usually do, talking about what kind of poem it is and all that because honestly, the research for this poem has proven somewhat inconsistent. I chose to write about it merely to bring to our attention a dark attitude towards death through such vivid imagery that we've not really been presented with  in this modernism period. It wasn't about conforming to the current style of poetry at the time. Lawrence was facing his mortality and gave it all he had to write this poem and a couple more. He put his heart into it. The imagery in this poem is incredible! It's not very black and white though (maybe black and blue?) but what I mean to say is that it's not a general description of a scene. It's very deep, requiring a lot of thought to recognize the merging of the beauty of a flower with a Greek/Roman mythology in a way that illustrates a depressing outlook on life.

I found this picture when googling Persephone.
One can almost picture Bavarian  Gentians growing at her feet.

The flower--which has a torchlike shape--becomes a mode of transition to a myth famous for it's symbolism for life and death. Persephone was the daughter of Demeter, the Goddess of the Harvest, and was stolen away by Hades or in this case the Roman counterpart, Pluto, to be his wife. After being tricked into eating a pomegranate in the realm of Hades, Persephone is bound to Pluto. She is bound to stay in Hades with him but allowed for a period of 6 months, I believe, to return to the surface and reunite with her mother. This story corroborates the changing of the seasons. Spring symbolizing rebirth. However, it's really about Persephone's constantly having to descend into the darkness that Lawrence is touching on. Like all mortals, it is inevitable that Persephone travel to the Underworld.

Basically, Lawrence is contemplating life and death, imagining a vast darkness to come. It's a complex story that he writes and I'm not sure if I'm up to the task to interpret it word for word. But here's one thing that really drew me in...could he have used the words dark(ness) and blue(ness) a couple more times!?! I wonder if it's that kind of repetitiveness where he just went with the flow and wrote his emotions down, not caring if he was repetitive because that's how he felt, blue (depressed) and consumed by the darkness to come.

photo credit: 
Persephone: http://browse.deviantart.com/?offset=552#/d20ql8f
The Flower: http://www.edwardbach.org/Research/creative_Poetry_gentian.htm 

http://youtu.be/9caKhhq8TIw

Am I a puppet? Who's pulling the strings? Are there strings or is it a game of chance?

So...I'm going to be honest...

And--honestly--why wouldn't I? I wasn't too excited about having to do a blog for one of my classes at first. I had just hoped that I could do the readings, papers and tests and that would be the sum of work for this class. But it has been fun. I think I've really embraced blogging and putting my thoughts out here. There's a lot more freedom and I'm not afraid to put more of myself into these posts rather than just boring people with a cut and dry analysis. I do realize that it probably comes off as a cheap way of reaching my word limit but I hope that it just shows how much I enjoy this assignment.

However, this is the next honest part--and I expect you don't really care, if you're reading this you're either my professor or your a peer who's looking for a blog post to comment on to fill your comment quota--my head is not really into this blog post this week. My laptop broke last weekend and since then my productivity level has been incredibly low. So...let's get this over with--it's the only productive thing I'll be doing this weekend and it's already Sunday.

My default mode is to just look at the poems we read this last week. I tuned in and out various times throughout the week and so it makes sense that the only thing that really stuck with me and caught my attention came at the beginning of the week.

"Hap"

If but some vengeful god would call to me
From up the sky, and laugh: "Thou suffering thing,
Know that thy sorrow is my ecstasy,
That thy love's loss is my hate's profiting!"

Then would I bear it, clench myself, and die,
Steeled by the sense of ire unmerited;
Half-eased in that a Powerfuller than I
Had willed and meted me the tears I shed.

But not so. How arrives it joy lies slain,
And why unblooms the best hope ever sown?
Crass Casualty obstructs the sun and rain,
And dicing Time for gladness casts a moan....
These purblind Doomsters had as readily strown
Blisses about my pilgrimage as pain.

Does it say something about my work ethic that I always choose shorter poems? Honestly...kind of. I have a really good work ethic and it shines when the pressure is on (ergo...procrastination is key to a good grade--not really words to live by). But maybe it says more that basically I'm not a big poetry person. I'm studying Creative Writing to write fiction not poems. So I suppose I could say that my attention span for poetry is short. I don't think that's necessarily a bad thing, not all poems are epic poems so there is a great supply of shorter ones. I also think shorter poems are great at getting their point across if they only have two or three stanzas. Every word is important.

"Hap" is a sonnet written by Thomas Hardy in the year 1898. The rhyme scheme is a simple ABAB CDCD EFEFFE. The word "hap" can be taken to be a shorter version for the phrase "that which happen by chance." As we discussed in class, the poem has an "If..then..." premise that is completed with the optional "...but." This type of structure is complimented with three stanzas starting with each word. The title and "if, then, but" structure really drive home the meaning of the poem when reading into it.



A vengeful god pulls the strings of your life?
"Thou suffering thing,/Know that thy sorrow is my ecstasy,/That thy love's loss is my hate's profiting!"
Dance, Puppet, Dance...SUFFER!

In the first stanza, Hardy or the speaker mentions the idea that possibly there might be some vengeful god (not Christian God but a general deity) who basically has it out for him, controlling his life and causing him the pain and misery he experiences in his life and revels in making him suffer. If there is...see the next stanza...

In the second stanza, he then says that he'll just grin and bear until death--knowing that there is nothing he could do to change and improve his life because a higher power has control over it. How lazy! That's a kind of scapegoat isn't it? "I really wanna write the next Harry Potter but some god has it out for me and won't allow it to be published so I'll just remain a starving artist and never really apply myself. If there wasn't a vengeful god out to make me suffer, it wouldn't have been rejected by the one and only publishing company I sent it to." Obviously, not true in that instance. Everyone knows that getting published is by trial and error.

The third stanza is where Hardy completes the poem by saying that the if...then statement is not the case. Capitalizing words like Casualty, Time and Doomsters--to me, suggests the idea that there are other powers at work, in keeping with the polytheistic idea of a non-specifically-Christian God. He seems to assert that his life has been met with both sorrow and joy and a god is not responsible for the coming and going of these experiences but rather it is by happenstance, chance or "Casualty" which is neutral. "dicing Time" means that it is random and unexpected, further supporting the claim of chance having the power.

Basically, the speaker might almost prefer knowing that there was some powerful force controlling his suffering and events that cause it in his life so that he could be put at "half-ease[ed]" that it was out of his control. Rather instead, the speaker admits the likelihood of this is not very high and instead he is subject to a life of chance that would just as quickly deal him a card of happiness and joy or one of pain.

Does this all make sense or am I rambling? Like I said, I'm not completely focused. I found the poem really interesting though as it examines the idea of fate and higher powers. I'm sure it no doubt reflects many people's ideas of fate vs. free will.

photo credit: http://rogersroadrash.blogspot.com/2010_12_01_archive.html