Review: The Lays of Marie de France

The Lays of Marie de France by Marie de France
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

The Lays of Marie de France are a series of twelve short lays (narrative poems) in Old French. I read this translation as a library ebook, but it turns out that it is also available under a Creative Commons license:
https://www.aupress.ca/app/uploads/12...

The translator, David R Slavitt, writes:
Marie who? A number of suggestions have been proposed for the identity of this wonderful twelfth-century poet. Marie, Abbess of Shaftesbury, the illegitimate daughter of Geoffrey Plantagenet and half-sister to Henry II, King of England, is a plausible
candidate, but Marie, Abbess of Reading, Marie I of Boulogne, Marie, Abbess of Barking, and Marie de Meulan, wife of Hugh Talbot, are all possibilities. There were a lot of Maries, after all, but only a few who could read and write in English, Latin, and Anglo-Norman French. It is not inappropriate, however, for her to be a bit mysterious and even emblematic as the author of these strange, suggestive, and intriguing poems. One important thing we do know about her is that she also translated the Ysopet, a collection of 103 Aesopic fables, which could have influenced the
Lais but at least suggest something about her taste in literature. There is a fabulous quality to these poems, which are at one and the same time childish and very knowing, innocent and sophisticated.

From the first tale:
A good story deserves to be
well told. My gracious lords, Marie
understands her obligation
on such a fortunate occasion
when an interesting story
presents itself. And yet I worry
that any show of excellence
invites envy of women’s or men’s
achievements. Slanders, insults, and lies
attend me. Everybody tries
to sneer at whatever one composes —
they joke and even thumb their noses.
They are cowardly dogs that bite,
mean, malicious, and full of spite.
But I refuse to be deterred
as, line by line and word by word,
I do my best to compose my lay,
whatever the jealous critics say.
I shall relate some tales to you
from Brittany that I know are true
and worthy of your attention. In
a friendly spirit, let us begin.


The highlights for me were Bisclavret (one of the earliest werewolf stories!) and Lanval. Lanval is (I think) the only one set in king Arthur's court and I think I will want to come back to it after I have read Malory. Arthur holds a feast for the knights where he gives them all rewards for their great deeds but he forgets about Lanval who later sets out on a journey. He is wooed by a fairy lady who makes him rich, and must promise not to reveal her existence. I'm sure you can guess that a promise like that is going to cause problems for him down the road, but that would be telling! Ultimately it's a fun reversal of the traditional damsel in distress tale where a knight rescues a lady, but I'm not saying any more than that. Just read it.

There's also a very short lai concerning the romance of Tristan and Iseult. This one is so short that it was a little unsatisfying, but it made me want to read the longer version/s. I'm not sure when I will get around to it.



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Review: The Metamorphoses

The Metamorphoses by Ovid
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

In 15 books and more than 200 stories, with transformation as his unifying theme, Ovid chronicles the history of the world from its creation to the time of Julius Caesar. I have read some of these before, in Tales from Ovid: 24 Passages from the Metamorphoses by Ted Hughes.

I read the Horace Gregory translation. From the translator's introduction:

It can be said that The Metamorphoses, written at the beginning of the Christian era, was the last long-sustained major work of a great age in Latin poetry -- and it was also evidence of a peculiarly Italian genius which places it at a middle distance away from the Aeneid, since it was not a true and heroic epic, toward the novellas of Bandello and the lyricism of Petrarch. In English literature, The Metamorphoses held sustained appeal for Chaucer, Spenser, Shakespeare, Chapman (whose famous version of Homer shows debts to Ovid), Dryden, Swift...

The nineteenth century, even among its poets, lost contact with The Metamorphoses, or rather, The Metamorphoses showed aspects of mythology as well as of human conduct that the age did not care to advertise. An extremely un-Italian Victorian Olympus came into view... the Metamorphoses was read as the work of a capricious poet, one who was irreverent, decidedly un-Olympian, and at times immoral. He was no longer the poet's poet, but belonged to readers who were looking for a collection of naughty stories. As studies in classical literature declined, it had become easier to discard Ovid in favor of Horace and Virgil; had lost the prestige he had held for so many hundreds of years.

The translator goes on to say that Ovid was newly appreciated in the 20th century due to interest frm anthropologists and psychologists.

It is in the play of emotional extremes, the forces of illogical & conflicting impulses that Ovid offers the richness of psychological detail to the reader. His many heroines are set before us in dramatic moments of their indecision. Actually they do not meditate; they waver between extremes of right and wrong. They live & act within a world of irrational desires which are as vivid to them as things that happen in a dream. they are in heat and caught up in disaster. One might complain that their motives, however complex and contradictory, are not subtle. ...We are asked not to forgive them but to see them. It is by their dreams (desires) and their actions -- that we know them.

My favorite stories were probably:
Arachne (Bk VI) -- The woman who challenged Athena to a weaving contest.
They took delight in speed and craftsmanship
And there upon the looms Tyrian purple
Shaded to lavender and violet-rose
As though one saw the sun strike passing rain
Its arrow like a ribbon across the sky,
A thousand colors streaming light within it,
Each melting into each where no eye sees
One fade into the other, yet both far ends
Colors of distant hue -- gold thread to bind them,
To weave the story of long years ago.

Orpheus & Eurydice (Bk X-XI) -- This is probably the most famous story in Ovid, but still worth reading even if you already know how it goes. 

O king and queen of this vast darkness where
All who are born of Earth at last return,
I cannot speak half-flattery, half-lies;
I have not come, a curious, willing guest,
To see the streets of Tartarus wind in Hell.
Nor have I come to tame Medusas children,
Three-throated beasts with wild snakes in their hair.
My mission is to find Eurydice... 

Ceyx & Alcyone (Bk XI) -- They were king and queen of the city of Trachis. Ceyx undertook a sea voyage to visit an oracle and was shipwrecked. The goddess Juno arranged for an apparition of Ceyx to appear to Alcyone and tell her of his fate, and the gods turned both of them into kingfishers.

There are some wonderful descriptive passages in this one; here is the description of a shipwreck:
 ... Like a siege engines ram in iron against a fort,
So the waves struck port and starboard of the ship,
Or as great lions charge at hunters shields,
So waves that rode the winds crashed the ship's sides,
And mounted at their will. Then decks began
To crack, pitch, wax, and ropes gave way, boards broken,
Sides gaping, while Death's sea poured in the hold.
Rain fell in curtains from black clouds; you'd think
The very heavens had joined the sea, or that
The sails hung like pale sheets of sea and rain;
The starless night above them closed in darkness,
And from that dark came ragged lightning flashing
Red fires that danced across the waves; then sea
Poured, rippling over each foot of deck and hull.

I had not heard of this one before reading The Metamorphoses, but it was a great discovery.

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Metamorphoses Books X-XII

Two great tales in these chapters: Orpheus & Eurydice and the less famous Ceyx & Alcyone.

Book X

Orpheus & Eurydice 

Edward Poynter, Orpheus and Eurydice. 1862.

This story starts with the Hymen, god of marriage, arriving at the wedding of Orpheus and Eurydice. Already there is a bad sign:
Though Hymen came to help him at the feast
And waved his torch, its fires guttered out 
In coiling smoke that filled the eyes with tears.

The morning after the wedding, Eurydice trips on a deadly snake and is bitten. Orpheus sings of his loss so that everyone on earth can hear, and goes to the underworld through the gates of Taenarus. (Taenarus was a real town in the southeastern part of the Peloponnese; a nearby cave was the legendary entrance to the underworld.) Charon, the boatman who transports the souls of the dead, takes him across the Styx, the river that separates Earth from the underworld, and sings before Hades and Persephone.

However much I took her loss serenely,  
A god called Love had greater strength than I; 
I do not know how well he's known down here, 
but up on Earth his name's on every tongue,
And if I'm to believe an ancient rumor, 
A dark king took a princess to his bed,
A child more beautiful than any queen;
They had been joined by Love.

That is a much more romanticized description than the way it came across in Book V. I can see how Orpheus would want to stay on Hades’s good side, though. 😏

... Since these pathetic words were sung to music,
Even the blood drained ghosts of hell fell weeping:
Tantalus no longer reached toward vanished waves 
And Ixion's wheel  stopped short, charmed by the spell; 
Vultures gave up their feast on Tityus's liver
And cocked their heads to stare; fifty Belides 
Stood gazing while their half-filled pitchers emptied,
And Sisyphus sat down upon his stone. 

Ixion was king of the Lapiths, the most ancient tribe of Thessaly. He murdered his father in law and was shunned as an outlaw. When Zeus had pity on him and brought him to Olympus, but while there he lusted after Hera, so he was expelled from Olympus.  Zeus ordered Hermes to bind Ixion to a fiery wheel, in some stories a solar wheel in the sky, but in Ovid transferred to the underworld.

Tityus: According to Wikipedia: "Tityos was the son of Elara; his father was Zeus. Zeus hid Elara from his wife, Hera, by placing her deep beneath the earth. Tityos grew so large that he split his mother's womb, and he was carried to term by Gaia, the Earth. Once grown, Tityos attempted to rape Leto at the behest of Hera. He was slain by Leto's protective children Artemis and Apollo. As punishment, he was stretched out in Tartarus and tortured by two vultures who fed on his liver, which grew back every night. This punishment is comparable to that of the Titan Prometheus."

The fifty Belides are also known as the Danaides, the fifty daughters of Danaus. According to Wikipedia: "Ovid refers to them as the Belides after their grandfather Belus. They were to marry the 50 sons of Danaus' twin brother Aegyptus, a mythical king of Egypt. In the most common version of the myth, all but one of them killed their husbands on their wedding night, and are condemned to spend eternity carrying water in a sieve or perforated device. In the classical tradition, they came to represent the futility of a repetitive task that can never be completed (see also Sisyphus)."

Eurydice is allowed to return from the underworld as long as Orpheus does not look at her until they are back in the upper world. He cannot resist the temptation to look at her, and she fades away into the underworld. He tries to cross the Styx again but cannot. He sits in rags and mud for a week, not eating or drinking. Then he goes to Thrace, where he will not sleep with women but teaches the men of Thrace the art of making love to boys. One day he tells a series of stories: the tales that make up the rest of Book X.

Book XI

The Death of Orpheus 

Orpheus is attacked by a crowd of raging women. I think these are meant to be the followers of Bacchus (the Bacchae, aka Bacchante or Maenads) who appeared in the story of Pentheus (Book III). They are attacking him because he has rejected the company of women: "Look at the pretty boy who will not have us!" 

The saddened birds sobbed loud for Orpheus;
All wept: the multitude of beasts, 
Stones, and trees, all those who came to hear 
The songs he sang, yes, even the charmed trees
Dropped all their leaves as if they shaved their hair. 

Orpheus's head lands in the River Hebrus, along with his lyre. His head continues to sing and the lyre continues to play until both are washed up on the island of Lesbos.

The poet's shade stepped down from earth to Hades;
To stroll again the places that it knew,
It felt its way toward fair Elysium.  
There Orpheus took his Eurydice, put arms around her 
Folding her to rest. Today they walk together,
side by side-- or if they so wish, he follows her, she, him, 
But as they move, however they may go, 
Orpheus may not turn a backward look at her.

Hadestown, a musical based on the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice, won a Tony Award for Best Musical this year. I listened to the recording, and I recommend it if you can find it. (I checked it out from the library.)

The myth of Orpheus and Eurydice inspired a Middle English version which I read last year (in translation.)

Ceyx & Alcyone

Ceyx is the son of Lucifer (the morning star) and a friend of Peleus (the father of Achilles). He plans a voyage to Delphi. It is a dangerous journey, and his wife Alcyone pleads with him not to go, or to take her with him. His ship is destroyed in a storm.

Like a siege engines ram in iron against a fort, 
So the waves struck port and starboard of the ship,  
Or as great lions charge at hunters shields, 
So waves that rode the winds crashed the ship's sides,
And mounted at their will. Then decks began
To crack, pitch, wax, and ropes gave way, boards broken,
Sides gaping, while Death's sea poured in the hold.

Rain fell in curtains from black clouds; you'd think 

The very heavens had joined the sea, or that

The sails hung like pale sheets of sea and rain;

The starless night above them closed in darkness,

And from that dark came ragged lightning flashing

Red fires that danced across the waves; then sea 

Poured, rippling over each foot of deck and hull. 

Juno intervenes to help Alcyone and speaks to the god of Sleep for help. Sleep sends Ceyx's apparition to Alcyone in a dream. In the morning, Alcyone decides to take a walk on the beach, where she sees a man floating on the waves and recognizes him as her husband. She runs into the waves and turns into a bird. Then the gods turn both of them into birds. According to Wikipedia, the birds were kingfishers, called halcyon birds after Alcyone (Halcyon being another version of her name).     

Herbert James Draper, Halcyone. 1915.

She stripped herself, then ran upon a breaker

That caught the waves, and leapt as if broad wings

Took her to sea; even her cries were birdlike;

And as she neared the floating man beneath her,

She thrust her growing beak between his lips. 
The story is: he raised his face to hers, 

And I half think Ceyx did--if he had life.

The gods changed both to birds, and both were one, 
Though love had given them a strange mutation. 

I had never heard of this tale before, but I'm guessing that Alcyone was an inspiration for Tolkien's Elwing.

This is definitely one of the highlights for me, maybe because of the vivid descriptions. 

Book XII

the death of Achilles

Book XII includes several stories from the Trojan War and ends with the death of Achilles. The sea god Neptune, whose son Cygnus was killed by Achilles, speaks to his nephew Apollo:

O darling nephew of my heart, 

Best of my nephews and my brother's sons,

Who joined me as we built the walls of Troy, 

(A labor that is now too soon undone)

What of Troy fallen with many thousand dead?

Neptune goes on to say that it is beyond his power to face Achilles and asks Apollo to arrange Achilles's death. Apollo agrees and guides one of Paris's arrows to shoot Achilles. Ovid calls it  a dishonorable death, as Achilles had fallen prey to one whose best performance, timid at the best, was stealing wives of Greeks! 

Book XII concludes by introducing the dispute between Ajax and Ulysses (Odysseus) over Achilles's armor.
Agamemnon called all the Greek leaders together to decide between them. 

His splendor lives; it fills the rounded world,

And that is how the man should be remembered; 

The splendor is himself, son of Peleus, 
And Tartarus is not the place for him. 

His shield still goes to war against the world, 

And in his name all weapons go to war. 

my previous recaps for Metamorphoses:
Books I-III

Books IV-VI

Books VII-IX

Metamorphoses Book VII-IX

Book VII

Jason & Medea

Jason & Medea - John William Waterhouse, 1907

Jason and his Argonauts meet King Aeëtes to claim the Golden Fleece, which Ovid says he had stolen. Aeëtes will not give it up unless Jason meets his terms, performing great tasks for him. The king's daughter, Medea, falls in love with Jason. She decides to help him fulfill the tasks that Aeëtes has demanded in exchange for the Golden Fleece, if he will marry her, and Jason agrees. First, he tames dangerous bulls with herbs given to him by Medea, and the bulls draw a plow for him. Second, he sows serpent's teeth in the newly plowed land, and the teeth become mighty warriors. Medea sees Jason facing the warriors and works magic to give him good luck, and Jason throws a rock into the center of the assembled army, so that the warriors turn on each other, leaving Jason alone. Third, Jason must face the dragon who guards the Golden Fleece. Jason puts the dragon to sleep with juices from herbs, and sails home with his bride Medea and his crew. At home, he finds his father growing old and close to death, and asks Medea to use her arts to prolong his father's life. On the night of the the full moon, Medea goes into the forest to pray to Hecate.

O Hecate, who answered my last prayer 

To still the smoking breath of fiery bulls,

And tamed the beasts who never ploughed a field,

And spurred wild warriors of the serpent's teeth

To fall in their own blood, who charmed the Sleepless

Guardian of the Golden Treasures when Jason took

That famous shield to Greece, now, I need more,

A magic, potent drink that dissipates

Old age and fills old veins with manly blood --

Nor shall you fail me; even the distant stars

Have bowed their shining heads at my command, 

And here's my chariot with its winged dragons.

For nine days and nights Medea collects magic herbs, including mosses that will later change Glaucus the fisherman into a sea god. Foreshadowing! I can tell from the table of contents that this refers to a story in Book XIV. Medea makes two altars out of mounds of earth, one for Hecate and one for Youth. She sacrifices a black sheep to Hades and Dis (Persephone) to extend the life of Jason's dying father, Aeson. She purifies his body with fire, water, and sulfur, three times each. She boils herbs, precious stones, animal parts and other nameless things together in a pot. Then she cuts the old man's throat to pour the brew into him, and he is restored to youth.

She pretends to quarrel with Jason and offers her services to another king, Pelias. She tricks him by sacrificing an old, sick sheep as part of the ritual, and using herbs that have no power. The daughters of Pelias, who were supposed to assist her, close their eyes when they are supposed to cut their father's throat, and strike blindly at him instead. Medea slits the old man's throat and throws his remains into the boiling pot. She flees, finding Jason in Corinth, where he has remarried. She kills his new wife, sets fire to his halls and kills their children. Before Jason can take revenge on her, Medea escapes and is welcomed by King Aegeus of Athens. She marries him. Theseus, the son of Aegeus, arrives in disguise. She attempts to poison him, but his father dashes the cup from his son's lips. Medea vanishes in a cloud. 

The Myrmidons

I could not find a good picture for this tale (maybe I will add one later) but I included it because it tells of the ancestors of Achilles. Ovid relates how Jove fell in love with a nymph and named the island of Aegina after her. In revenge, Juno sends a plague to the island, killing many people, and King Aeacus of Aegina prays to Jove to ask him to repopulate Aegina. Jove answers by sending thunder and lightning, which Aeacus takes as a sign from the gods. He sees a colony of ants on the trunk of a great oak tree and asks for as many people to fill his cities as there are ants. That night, Aeacus has a dream in which the oak tree shudders and the ants turn into humans, who settle in the deserted parts of the island. He calls them Myrmidons, and says that they are hardworking, thrifty, and honest, just like the creatures they were before.

Book VIII

Erysichthon
This is probably my favorite story in Book VIII. I had expected to like Dedalus and Icarus more because I was previously familiar with it. But no, the highlight has to be this one: Erysichthon,  king of Thessaly, chops down the sacred oak tree of the goddess Ceres in order to build himself a feast hall. The angry goddess curses him with insatiable hunger, which drives him to exhaust all his wealth to satisfy his hunger, up to and including selling his daughter for food.

But when her father learned she had the gift
Of being anything she wished to be
He set her up for sale to many a man
And sold her as a mare, a cow, a bird,

 Over at the GoodReads group I am reading along with, Ovid's Metamorphoses and Further Metamorphoses, commenter Desirae has posted an analysis of how hunger is a driving force in the other stories in book 8, which provides a common thread throughout the stories that I had not noticed.

I am reminded of the legend of Midas and the golden touch, which also appears in Metamorphoses, but it must be later on because I haven't read it yet. I shouldn't get too far ahead of myself.

Book IX: 

Achelous & Hercules

Achelous, a god of rivers, tells Theseus the story of how he lost his horn in a fight with Hercules. He and Hercules both had asked the father of Deianera for the girl's hand in marriage. Achelous attempted to persuade the father that he was a better choice, provoking Hercules to challenge him to a fight: My hands make better speeches than my tongue. Go try to win a battle with your talk!

Achelous turned himself into a serpent, but Hercules nearly strangled him, so he turned into a bull. Heracles tore off one of his horns and forced the god to surrender. The Naiads fund it and filled it with fruits and flowers, and it became a sacred cornucopia for a goddess.

I wasn't a big fan of book IX, but Orpheus & Eurydice is the next story! Looking forward to it.

Previous posts:
Metamorphoses, Books I-III

Metamorphoses, Books IV-VI

The Sunday Post

The Sunday Post is a weekly meme hosted at @ Caffeinated Reviewer. It’s a chance to share news~ A post to recap the past week on your blog and showcase books and things we have received. Share news about what is coming up on our blog for the week ahead.  

I last did one of these about a month ago. Here is what I have been up to on the blog since then. 

Recent reviews of books: 

City of Bones by Martha Wells (fantasy)

The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula Le Guin (science fiction) This is one of my favorite books!

Why Poetry by Matthew Zapruder (nonfiction)

Upcoming reviews:
A Vindication of the Rights of Woman -- Mary Wollstonecraft
Declare -- Tim Powers (fantasy, currently listening on audio)

other posts: 

Top Ten Tuesday: Top 10 Inspirational/Thought-Provoking Quotes from Classics (April) 

Wyrd & Wonder Blog Tag, prompts 1-10 (Wyrd & Wonder blog event) 

Book Beginnings & The Friday 56: One Hundred Years of Solitude 

Bout of Books 25: May 13-19 sign up post!

Almost a year ago, I selected the 17th century poem "Corinna’s Going a-Maying" (Robert Herrick)  for the weekly feature The Monday Poem in a  GoodReads group, All About Books. I didn't write about it, but you can read the poem here with some helpful annotations. Herrick’s best-known poem is "To the Virgins, to Make Much of Time," on a similar theme. The first stanza:

Get up, get up for shame, the blooming morn
Upon her wings presents the god unshorn.
    See how Aurora throws her fair
    Fresh-quilted colors through the air:
    Get up, sweet slug-a-bed, and see
    The dew bespangling herb and tree.
Each flower has wept and bow'd toward the east
Above an hour since: yet you not dress'd;
    Nay! not so much as out of bed?
    When all the birds have matins said
    And sung their thankful hymns, 'tis sin,
    Nay, profanation to keep in,
Whereas a thousand virgins on this day
Spring, sooner than the lark, to fetch in May.

Review: Why Poetry

Why Poetry by Matthew Zapruder
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

"I have a confession to make: I don’t really understand poetry." For over twenty-five years, I have heard this said, over and over in slightly different ways, but friends, family, colleagues, strangers I met in bars and at dinner parties, on planes -- so many people, practically everyone who found out I was a poet. Clearly, there is something about poetry that rattles and mystifies people, that makes them feel as if there is something wrong. Maybe the problem is with them as readers... or maybe the problem is with poetry itself. why don't poets just say what they mean? why do they make it so hard?

... How poetry creates the poetic state of mind in a reader is the central question of this book. It happens through the form of the poem, which guides the mind of the reader. It happens through leaps of association. And it happens as the poem explores and activates and plays with the nature of language itself.

This is a great introduction to poetry, but difficult to summarize. Zapruder starts by arguing that poetry isn't as esoteric as people believe. The first couple of chapters are about how poetry is different from other kinds of writing and about meaning in poetry. Some of the other chapters are essays on specific concepts (such as chapter 10 on metaphor) but much of this book examines specific poems.

There is a good interview with the author here: https://thecreativeindependent.com/pe...

a partial list of the poems discussed:
Moore, Marianne: Poetry
Keats, John: To Autumn
Auden, W.H.: Musee de Beaux Arts
Machado, Antonio: At a Friend's Burial
Neruda, Pablo: The Enigmas
Dickinson: I Felt A Funeral In My Brain/Hope is the Thing With Feathers

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Review: The Truro Bear and Other Adventures: Poems and Essays

The Truro Bear and Other Adventures: Poems and Essays by Mary Oliver
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This is my favorite book by Mary Oliver. It is a collection of 55 poems (with two essays) all about animals: bears, snakes, spiders, porcupines, humpback whales, and others. I love having these all in one book!

Some excerpts:

Humpbacks

There is, all around us, the country
Of original fire.

You know what I mean.

The sky, after all, stops at nothing, so something
Has to be holding
our bodies
in its rich and timeless stables or else
we would fly away...


Pipefish
In the green
and purple weeds
called Zostera, loosely
swinging in the shallows,

I waded, I reached
 my hands
 in that most human
of gestures -- to find,
to see, to hold whatever it is that's there --
 -- and what came up
wasn't much,
but it glittered
 and struggled,
 it had eyes, and a body

like a wand,
it had pouting lips.
No longer, all of it,
than any of my fingers,
it wanted
away from my strangeness,
it wanted
to go back
into that waving forest
so quick and wet...

Swoon (essay)


In a corner of this rented house a most astonishing adventure is going on. It is only the household of a common spider, a small, rather chaotic web half in shadow. Yet it burgeons with the ambition of a throne. She-- for the female that is always in sight-- has produced six egg sacs, and from three of them, so far, an uncountable number have spilled. Spilled is precisely the word, for the size and motions of these newborns are so meager that they appear at first utterly lifeless, as though the hour of the beginning had come and would not be deferred, and thrust them out, with or without their will, to cling in a dark skein of tangled threads...


... All the questions that the spider's curious life made me ask, I know I can find answered in some book of knowledge, of which there are many.  But the palace of knowledge is different from the palace of discovery, in which I am, truly, a Copernicus. The world is not what I thought, but different, and more! I have seen it with my own eyes!



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Review: Citizen: An American Lyric

Citizen: An American Lyric by Claudia Rankine
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Citizen: An American Lyric won National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry (2014) and was a finalist for the National Book Award for Poetry. The book combines prose, verse, and images, describing Rankine's experience of racism in America. There are seven parts.

Part I begins with the narrator's memory of a girl in her class asking her to let her copy her exam answers. Like the rest of the book, it is told in the second person.

You are twelve attending Sts. Philip and James school on White Plains Road and the girl sitting behind the seat asks you to lean to the right during exams so she can copy what you have written [...] You never really speak except for the time she makes her request and later when she tells you you smell good and have features more like a white person. You assume she thinks she is thanking you for letting her cheat and feels better for cheating from an almost white person.

The book is full of incidents like this, cataloging the daily experiences of white racism, both overt and subtle, that Rankine and other black people face in the United States.

Part II is Rankine's meditation on black tennis star Serena Williams and racist attacks Williams has experienced in her career. The next few sections (parts III-V) are more in the style of Part I, focusing on her personal experiences of racism.

Someone in the audience asks the man promoting his new book on humor what makes something funny. His answer is what you expect -- context. After a pause he adds that if someone said something, like about someone, and you were with your friends you would probably laugh, but if they said it out in public where black people could hear what was said, you might not, probably would not. Only then do you realize you are among "the others out in public," and not "among friends."


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Book Beginnings & The Friday 56: I Explain a Few Things

My book for Book Beginnings is I Explain A Few Things: Selected Poems by Pablo Neruda. It includes more than fifty poems spanning Neruda's career, translated into English by various poets and printed alongside the Spanish.

The introduction says: The title comes from a defining poem in Neruda's book Third Residence, usually incorporated into the more ambitious Residence on Earth. A benchmark in the Chilean oeuvre, it is a manifesto renouncing the romantic tonalities of Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair and an embrace of the type of ideological poetry with which he would be identified for the rest of his life. In it Neruda is at his most domestic -- it has a house as its leitmotif -- while also striving to confront the impact of the Spanish Civil War on him and his entire generation. The personal and the universal are juxtaposed in just the exact way. It is, undoubtedly, one of my own favorite poems. The title also encompasses Neruda's humble approach to art, making it heartfelt and confessional, a journey of self-discovery. Plus, it articulates his moral dilemma in appropriate fashion: how can one make art out of tragedy?

I think it will take me a few months to finish this. I started several other books this week, so I will feature one of those next week (and probably the week after that). This is one of my books for my Classics Club list.

The Friday 56 is hosted by Freda's Voice

For the Friday 56: page 56 has the last few lines at the end of a long poem, I have included the last stanza beginning on page 55:

From France, and Okinawa, and the atolls 
of Leyte (Norman Mailer has written it out) 
and the infuriated air and the waves, 
almost all the men have come back now, 
almost all . . . The history of mud and sweat 
was green and sour; they did not hear 
the singing of the reefs long enough 
and perhaps never touched the islands, those wreaths of 
     brilliance and perfume, 
except to die: 
                    dung and blood 
hounded them, the filth and the rats, 
and a fatigued and ruined heart that went on fighting. 
But they have come back,
                                         you have received them 
into the immensity of the open lands 
and they have closed (those who came back) like a flower 
with thousands of nameless petals 
to be reborn and forget.

This is a poem about the United States (I Wish the Woodcutter Would Wake Up), selected from the collection Canto General (poems 1938-49).

Deal Me In: The Eve of St Agnes by John Keats (1820)

Manuscript of the poem (British Library)

This is the first poem I have read for the Deal Me In challenge. I have read some of the short stories and I will write about them later, but I think I will do individual posts for all the poems (if I read all of them). I read the poem a couple of times, and then read the commentary on the poem at the website of Brooklyn College (found via Wikipedia). The "overview" at that link quotes some comments (from a reviewer of the time) calling it "one long sensuous utterance," but lacking in substance. The commentary, I think, shows that there actually is a great deal to think about in this poem, but it goes through the whole thing in much more detail than I have in this post!

The Eve of St Agnes was written in 1819 and published in 1820. The poem is named for the evening before the feast of Saint Agnes, which falls on January 21st. Legend had it that a girl could see her husband in a dream if she performed certain rituals, going to bed without supper and lie down naked, looking upward to the heavens rather than behind or sideways.

The British Library website (at the link above) says: "The poem is richly detailed with full of intimate descriptions, although Keats’ publishers forced him to tone down some of the sexual description for fear of provoking an adverse reaction from readers." 

I.

ST. AGNES' Eve—Ah, bitter chill it was!

The owl, for all his feathers, was a-cold;

The hare limped trembling through the frozen grass,

And silent was the flock in woolly fold:

Numb were the Beadsman's fingers, while he told 

His rosary, and while his frosted breath,

Like pious incense from a censer old,

Seem'd taking flight for heaven, without a death,

Past the sweet Virgin's picture, while his prayer he saith.

The poem begins outside a medieval chapel, where a beadsman enters to say his prayers. (A beadsman is a poor man paid to pray for a wealthy patron; the word refers to the beads of a rosary.) He overhears the music from the revels in the castle nearby. The narrator shifts to describing the revels, where Madeline is anticipating the vision she hopes to receive from St. Agnes that night. 

VII.

Full of this whim was thoughtful Madeline:

The music, yearning like a God in pain, 

She scarcely heard: her maiden eyes divine,

Fixed on the floor, saw many a sweeping train

Pass by -- she heeded not at all: in vain

Came many a tiptoe, amorous cavalier,

And back retired; not cooled by high disdain,

But she saw not: her heart was otherwhere:

She sighed for Agnes' dreams, the sweetest of the year.

Porphyro is introduced in stanza IX. He is hiding nearby in the shadows, seeking Madeline. 

Apparently, he has seen her in a vision. He sneaks into the castle, and we are told (in stanza X) that he would be killed if discovered, because the castle's inhabitants are hostile to "his lineage." (I am guessing this refers to a family feud). The only one who is friendly to him is the old woman Angela. She recognizes him and urges him to leave. I don't think there is any explanation of how she knows who he is. Porphyro convinces her to help him find Madeline. He finds her in her room, where he watches her. At the end of stanza XXIII, she is compared to a nightingale:

XXIII

... As though a tongueless nightingale should swell 

Her throat in vain, heart-stifled, in her dell. 

This looks like an allusion to Philomela, the woman who was raped by Tereus, who also cut out her tongue; ultimately she was transformed into a nightingale. The most famous version of the story comes from Ovid's Metamorphoses. (I wrote a post about Metamorphoses last week which covered this story.) I will come back to this, as its relevant later.

XXIV

A casement high and triple-arch'd there was,

All garlanded with carven imag'ries

Of fruits and flowers, and bunches of knot-grass,

And diamonded with panes of quaint device,

Innumberable of stains and splendid dyes,

As are the tiger-moth's deep-damask'd wings;

And in the midst, 'mong thousand heraldries,

And twilight saints, and dim emblazonings,

A shielded scutcheon blushed with blood of queens and kings.

XXX
And still she slept an azure-lidded sleep, 
In blanched linen, smooth, and lavendered,
While he from forth the closet brought a heap
Of candied apple, quince, and plum, and gourd;
With jellies soother than the creamy curd,
And lucent syrups, tinct with cinnamon;
Manna and dates, in argosy transferred
From Fez; and spiced dainties, every one,
From silken Samarcand to cedared Lebanon.

Porphyro continues to watch Madeline sleep, and starts to play her lute. In stanza XXXIV, she opens her eyes and sees Porphyro. At this point she is "wide awake," but she still sees "the vision of her sleep" indicating that she still thinks that she is dreaming. She speaks for the first time in the next stanza (XXXVI), revealing that Porphyro was in her dream. Now that she sees him in the waking world, she is startled by the difference between the dream Porphyro and the real one; the latter, she says, is "pallid, chill and drear." Almost as soon as she says this, he becomes invigorated again and... melts into her dream: "Into her dream he melted, as the rose/Blendeth its odour with violet,—"

So this looks like a poetic way of saying that they're having sex, and consent is ... dubious under the circumstances. This is why the mention of Philomela jumped out at me... without that allusion, I might say that any disturbing element in the relationship is probably unintentional. As it is, that angle sort of looks deliberate. 

There is a storm outside, and the moon sets. Porphyro declares that this is not a dream. Madeline is not pleased to hear this; she fears that he's going to leave her, even though she says a few lines later that she has been deceived (and it seems plausible that if she had known the whole thing was real, she would have refused to have premarital sex with him). He tells her that the storm outside is an elfin-storm from faery land, and that it will help them slip away to his home in the southern moors before everyone else in the castle wakes up. This is partly because they drank a lot the previous night (so they are sleeping in) but also possibly a magical effect of the storm.

And they are gone: ay, ages long ago
These lovers fled away into the storm.
That night the Baron dreamt of many a woe,
And all his warrior-guests, with shade and form 
Of witch, and demon, and large coffin-worm,
Were long be-nightmar'd. Angela the old
Died palsy-twitch'd, with meager face deform;
The Beadsman, after thousand aves told,

For aye unsought for slept among his ashes cold.


So maybe they never arrived at that house on the moors; it sounds as if they were blown away to faery land. 

Whew! That was weirder than I was expecting. The danger and the attraction of being lost in dreams is a prominent theme here, and one that comes up in some of his other poems (e.g. La Belle Dame Sans Merci, which was written later). I have read some of Keats's other poems, but not since before I started blogging, and this one was new to me. 

The Eve of St Agnes by Arthur Hughes, 1856 (Wikimedia)

Metamorphoses, Books IV-VI

Two tales from Book IV, one from Book V and two from Book VI, this time.

Book IV:

Pyramus & Thisbe

Everyone welcomes Bacchus except for the daughters of the king Minyas, who stay indoors weaving, spinning and telling stories. One of them decides to recount a story of the mulberry tree:

... how a tree, famous for snow-white berries, took on a blood-red taint.

Wikipedia

Pyramus and Thisbe were young lovers in a city that was said to have built by Queen Semiramis, the legendary queen of Babylon. They lived next door to each other but they were not allowed to meet due to a rivalry between their families. They could only converse through a crack in the walls. The two of them plan to meet by the site of Ninus's tomb, beneath a mulberry tree. When Thisbe shows up, a lioness, with bloody jaws from devouring her prey, appears, and Thisbe flees into a cave. She leaves her cloak behind and the lioness picks it up in her jaws, staining it with blood. Pyramus arrives, finds the bloodstained cloak, and thrusts his dagger into his side. His blood stains the white fruits of the mulberry tree, turning them red. Thisbe returns to find Pyramus dying, and resolves to kill herself, praying that the two of them will share the same tomb and that the red berries of the tree will be the memorial of their deaths. Her prayer is granted and, when their bodies are cremated, their ashes are kept in a single urn.

It was hard to take this one completely seriously because I kept thinking of the jokes about it in A Midsummer Night's Dream. However, it is also thought to have been an inspiration for the earliest (Italian) versions of the story of Romeo and Juliet, which inspired the English poet Arthur Brooke in his poem "The Tragical History of Romeus and Juliet," which was the main source for Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet.

Andromeda as depicted in Urania's Mirror, a set of constellation cards published in London c. 1825 (Wikipedia)

Perseus & Andromeda

Perseus, the son of Danae and Jove, flies above the world holding the head of the Gorgon Medusa, whose hair was made of deadly snakes, as a trophy of his victory over her. As Perseus flies over the Libyan desert, the Gorgons blood streams down to earth and generates snakes, "and that is why the desert swarmed with serpents." He goes to Hesperides, where Atlas lives, and asks for Atlas's hospitality. Atlas refuses him because of a rumor that a son of Jove will steal his golden apples. Perseus wrestles with Atlas but soon realizes that he is outmatched, so he uses the head of Medusa to turn Atlas into a mountain.

Perseus discovers the maiden Andromeda, who has been chained to a rock to punish her mother's vanity. Andromeda's mother boasted of her daughter's beauty, and so Andromeda was chained up as a sacrifice to a sea monster (a dragon, in fact). The dragon comes after her but Perseus intervenes to defeat it, rescuing Andromeda after asking Andromeda's parents for her hand in marriage as a reward. (Her parents, Cepheus & Cassiope (also known as Cassiopeia) rule the kingdom of Aethiopia (Ethiopia). At the wedding celebration, Perseus tells the story of his defeat of Medusa.  He used the single eye shared by the Graeae, holding it in his hand for sight. He cut her head off and the winged horse Pegasus sprang up from her blood, along with the boy Chrysador. 

One of the wedding guests asks why Medusa had snakes for hair. Perseus says that she was beautiful once, with glorious hair. When Neptune raped her in Minerva's temple, Minerva punished her for her carelessness (!) by turning her hair into snakes.

As if to warn the girl of carelessness
She turned her hair to snakes. Today Minerva
To keep bold strangers at a proper distance
Wears snakes across the gold shield on her breast.

Book V

ancient statue of Persephone/Proserpina, also called Kore, the Maiden (Wikipedia)

Death & Proserpina

Venus tells her son Cupid to shoot his arrows of love towards Pluto in order to make him fall in love with Proserpina, the daughter of Jove and Ceres. She says that if they do not intervene,   
Proserpina will remain     

... A virgin til she dies, for even now
her models are the moonlit deities.

Huh? Proserpina is (presumably) immortal. Anyway, Cupid's arrow pierces Pluto's heart. Pluto goes to a lake in Sicily, where he comes upon Proserpina picking flowers in the woods and abducts her. The nymph Cyane protests to Pluto and tries to stop him, but he ignores her. Cyane grieves at Proserpina's fate, weeping until she becomes a pool of tears.

Demeter searches for her until she comes to Sicily and finds the pool of Cyane, where the girdle that her daughter had worn when she was abducted. Demeter becomes angry and curses the earth, especially Sicily, giving orders to the fields to make the harvest fail. There she finds the nymph Arethusa, who tells her that Proserpina was taken to the underworld. Demeter goes to find Jove and ask him to help her get their daughter back from Hades. Jove's response is rather disturbing:

She is our daughter, 
The token of our love and ours to cherish,
But we should give proper names to facts:
She has received the gift of love, unhurt, 
Nor will he harm us as a son-in-law.
And if he has no other merits, then
Its no disgrace to marry Jove's own brother.
For all he needs is your good will, my dear...

(My emphasis. It is hard to tell what Ovid thinks of this -- does he expect readers to agree with Jove or Demeter??) He goes on to say that if Demeter insists on ending the marriage, Proserpina must not eat any food in the underworld. As it turns out, she has already eaten seven seeds from a pomegranate. Jove arranges for her to be with Pluto half of the year and spend the other half on earth. The half of the year when Proserpina dwells in the underworld is fall/winter, while the half of the year when she dwells on earth is spring/summer. 

Edit: I read the Wikipedia page for Persephone (Proserpina in Latin) which adds some important context: " The epithets of Persephone reveal her double function as chthonic and vegetation goddess. The surnames given to her by the poets refer to her character as Queen of the lower world and the dead, or her symbolic meaning of the power that shoots forth and withdraws into the earth."  

As Queen of the Underworld, she was given euphemistic names (that is, substitutes for her real name, which was dangerous to invoke). These include: 
Despoina: "the mistress of the house") in Arcadia
Hagne: "pure", originally a goddess of the springs in Messenia.
Aristi cthonia: "the best chthonic" (the chthonics were the various deities of the underworld)

As a goddess of vegetation, she was called: 
Kore: "the maiden".
Kore Soteira: "the savior maiden," in Megalopolis.
Neotera: "the younger", in Eleusis. (Eleusis was the site of the Eleusinian Mysteries, secret rites which revolved around the myth of Demeter and Persephone. The Eleusinian Mysteries were observed as early as 600 BC and attracted initiates until their decline in the 4th century AD.

Book VI

Arachne

Las Hilanderas (The Spinners) by Diego Velázquez, c. 1657

The translator (Horace Gregory) writes of this tale: "the stories of Arachne and of Niobe are among Ovid's commentaries on the workings of Divine envy. His story of Arachne may be read as a parable of the craftsman (or woman) who attempts to rival divinely inspired artists. But Ovid's way of telling the parable is important; the reader's sympathy veers in Arachne's direction. Her stubborn pride is foolish enough... yet Pallas Athena's punishment of her is deadly cold. Ovid's Italian attitude toward her is not without interests; as Athens' patron goddess, she might well represent cold-blooded Greek intellectual passion. As Ovid shows [see book IV], her prudish virginal fury transformed Medusa's hair into a nest of snakes. Envy is among her servants. She is attractive only on her visit to the Muses [book V]. Can we say that Ovid had a deep-seated distrust of highly formulated intellectual conduct? Perhaps. He loved wit, but kept a shrewd, half-doubting eye on deliberated wisdom."

Arachne of Maeonia is a famous weaver. She lives in Lydia, part of western Asia Minor. She boasts that her art owes nothing to Athena, the patron goddess of the arts, and proposes to compete with the goddess in a weaving contest. Athena adopts the disguise of an old woman and warns Arachne that she should take back her proud words, but Arachne ignores her advice. (Note: Athena/Minerva is one of the few characters who is called by both a Greek and Roman name in this translation.)

They took delight in speed and craftsmanship
And there upon the looms Tyrian purple
Shaded to lavender and violet-rose
As though one saw the sun strike passing rain 
Its arrow like a ribbon across the sky,
A thousand colors streaming light within it,
Each melting into each where no eye sees
One fade into the other, yet both far ends
Colors of distant hue -- gold thread to bind them,
To weave the story of long years ago. 

Athena weaves four different scenes into the four corners of her cloth so that the girl will see the consequences of pride. The scenes are: Rhodope and Haemon of Thrace, mortals who took the names of gods and were turned into mountains for their presumption; the queen of Pygmy who was turned into a crane and sent to war against her people; Antigone daughter of Laomedon, the king of Troy, changed into a bird by Juno; and Cinyras, who boasted of his daughters' beauty, for which they were turned into the marble steps of Juno's temple. Around all of these Athena wove the olive leaf, a sign of peace, her tree.

Arachne begins her weaving with tales of Jove, including the tale of Europa (Book II), the tale of Asteria (not in Ovid), the tale of Jove impregnating Danae (mother of Perseus) in the form of a shower of gold, and several others. She moves on to stories of the other gods, all of which show them as wrathful or manipulative. She finishes by weaving the edges of the cloth in a pattern of flowers and ivy. Arachne's work is flawless, and Athena strikes her with the shuttle of her loom in anger. Arachne says that she would rather hang herself than take such punishment, and puts a noose around her neck, but before she can kill herself, Athena intervenes to turn her into a spider.

Tereus, Procne, & Philomela

When Tereus and his troops came to the aid of Athens against barbarians, the king of Athens, Pandion, rewarded him with the hand of his eldest daughter, Procne. Procne's personal patron Juno was not there, nor Hymen the god of marriage, nor the three Graces. The Furies attended the wedding instead, carrying torches stolen from a funeral pyre. A screech owl howled from the rafters of the wedding room as an omen. The couple conceives a son, Itys. Five years later, Procne asks her husband to bring her sister Philomela to visit.

 Bernard Salomon, woodcut: Tereus, Procne & the Furies 1557 (http://ovid.lib.virginia.edu)

Tereus sets out to fetch Philomela from Athens in his ship. One look at her sparks a passionate obsession. He takes her with him to the shores of Thrace, where he leads her to a small stone cottage. There he rapes her and cuts her tongue out so that she cannot tell anyone. He returns to Procne and tells her that Philomela is dead. He keeps Philomela captive in the stone cottage, where she weaves a tapestry of her story. She gives it to her servant, indicating that it should be given to Procne. Procne sees the tapestry and plans to find her sister. She slips away on a night of festival dedicated to Bacchus, finds the cottage and smashes the bars of the cottage door. She takes Philomela to her own apartments and ponders how to exact revenge on Tereus. The boy Itys wanders into her apartments, and the two sisters decide to kill him and dismember him. They prepare his flesh in order to serve it to Tereus. Procne attends Tereus while he eats.

Philomela & Procne, Elizabeth Jane Gardner

Philomela arrives. She tosses the boys head at him, and he draws his sword to kill the two women, but they are transformed into birds: Philomela into a nightingale and Procne into a swallow. (This translation, oddly, does not say what kind of birds, so I am going with Wikipedia here.) Tereus, in turn, was turned into a  hoopoe. 

This is one of the darkest stories so far. Wow.