Tennyson

Beyond The Utmost Bound

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bee on hebe
A bee enjoying a Hebe, front garden, 2 July

Day Four of my  slow reading of Tennyson’s ‘Ulysses’ – an idea for a Shared Reading group, which will take a full session, and won’t be suitable for every group. But for a bunch of people who may be in a give up/don’t give up situation, or for those of us facing the growing closeness of age… really worth reading. Search ‘Ulysses’ to find previous posts. Go here to find the whole poem and don’t forget to read it all aloud before you start trying to get into it!

Yesterday I was writing in the back garden to keep the birds away from the cherries, and I am back there today, late to my writing for a number of reasons, one of which is the  big online sleep experiment.  Scientists are trying to  see how much sleep or lack of sleep affects brain function. My goodness, some of those puzzles are scary!  I realised while I was doing them that even the word ‘test’, as in ‘Take the Test!’  makes me feel anxious. All those years of failure at school leave their mark.  But I enjoyed participating and am hoping that the study will encourage me to get my sleep  hours up to at least  seven a night.

However, to ‘Ulysses’. I was in this section:

How dull it is to pause, to make an end,
To rust unburnish’d, not to shine in use!
As tho’ to breathe were life! Life piled on life
Were all too little, and of one to me
Little remains: but every hour is saved
From that eternal silence, something more,
A bringer of new things; and vile it were
For some three suns to store and hoard myself,
And this gray spirit yearning in desire
To follow knowledge like a sinking star,
Beyond the utmost bound of human thought.

I think I was about up to ‘but every hour is saved/from that eternal silence’, which is sometimes how I feel on days when I wake up early and have the dawn hours to myself to read and write. Ulysses doesn’t just want the time, he wants time for a purpose, to him time gained is time as a ‘bringer of new things’. He makes his own argument for movement, for change, against  staying put, and  as he slightly thinks about his stay-at-home life we’re back to the frustrated vocabulary of the opening – ‘vile’, ‘store’, ‘hoard’.

What does he mean by ‘for some three suns’?  It’s a period of time and I guess years – though why that would be a sun I do not know.  But I don’t think it is months. This is the kind of thing someone in the group might want to look up on their phone but I’d ask them to hold off until we’ve tried to work it out a bit – we want the sense that we can either understand it or not be  bothered by not understanding it. It’s not the time period but the feeling of ‘hoard’ that is important here, the feeling of going ‘grey’ when you still have

                         spirit yearning in desire
To follow knowledge like a sinking star,
Beyond the utmost bound of human thought.

This ‘utmost bound of human thought’ seems connected to the arch we read about yesterday:

Yet all experience is an arch wherethro’
Gleams that untravell’d world whose margin fades
For ever and forever when I move.

This is that sense of what Wordsworth calls ‘something ever more about to be’, the uncatchable,  the ineffable, the  reaching after which is the engine of human endeavour. There is always more, and a person like Ulysses will always want to pursue it.  And so he does, turning now to his son, and handing on the duties of  rulership:

This is my son, mine own Telemachus,
To whom I leave the sceptre and the isle,—
Well-loved of me, discerning to fulfil
This labour, by slow prudence to make mild
A rugged people, and thro’ soft degrees
Subdue them to the useful and the good.
Most blameless is he, centred in the sphere
Of common duties, decent not to fail
In offices of tenderness, and pay
Meet adoration to my household gods,
When I am gone. He works his work, I mine.

You can feel him reaching for his coat and heading for the door as he speaks. Telemachus is suited to one kind of job – and that job is not nothing, either –  building a civilisation:

by slow prudence to make mild
A rugged people, and thro’ soft degrees
Subdue them to the useful and the good.

This is good work, but not  the kind  of work Ulysses  could fancy.  And Telemachus seems damned by his father’s faint praise: he is described as  discerning, prudent, blameless, decent and ‘centred in the sphere /of common duties’.

I would want to stop here, in my Shared Reading group, to talk about ways in which the good can seem mundane, or even boring. The wildness of a Ulysses, or any great hero who goes beyond the bounds of human experience, human thought, is enormously attractive, but as a species we need our Telemachuses as much as our great adventurers, don’t we? Is it simply because the great adventurers are rarer spirits that we  prize them more?  (If we were making a film of this poem, who would you cast to play Ulysses? Clint Eastwood, Russell Crowe?  and Telemachus? Some quiet, well-behaved bod I can’t even  remember the name of… This is a game  I often play in groups, because most people have ideas about actors, and know they stand for something when you are trying to cast them, it gives us a clue into the character we are reading about).

And the faint praise continues: Telemachus can keep everything ticking over, even ‘pay/Meet adoration to my household gods’.

I would want to ask what might be lost by not paying  ‘meet adoration’ to your own household gods –  loss of domestic security, the quiet comforts of home, or of being well-ordered at home.  How much does that matter?

But the poem presses on and Ulysses manages a  generous wave as he leaves the palace:  ‘He works his work, I mine.’ And he is about to get to his work now… but we’ll leave the last movement til tomorrow, as I must stop now for today.

Slowing Down for Deep Waters

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under th tree.JPG
My guard-station under the Cherry tree

Day three of my appallingly slow reading of Tennyson ‘Ulysses’ – an idea for a shared Reading group, which will take a full session, and won’t be suitable for every group. But for a bunch of people who may be in a give up/don’t give up situation, or for those of us facing the growing closeness of age… really worth reading. Search ‘Ulysses’ to find previous posts. Go here to find the whole poem and don’t forget to read it all aloud before you start trying to get into it!

I’m writing this in the back garden where I am keeping guard on the cherry tree – today is the day of the major battle between me and the starlings, crows and blackbirds. The cherries are nearly ripe and if the sun stays out, they will mainly ripen today. Birds are loitering on nearby rooftops and telephone wires.  I don’t mind the blackbirds and crows, it’s the starlings, descending in a ravening locust-like horde… I have to keep jumping up and running shouting and clapping under the tree… was it Jude the Obscure who began life as a bird-scarer? Not an easy job! And I’ve got to go out this afternoon and lleave them to do their worst….

But back to the poem! I’d got to this point:

I am a part of all that I have met;
Yet all experience is an arch wherethro’
Gleams that untravell’d world whose margin fades
For ever and forever when I move.

This part of the poem always affords me a stopping place. ‘I am a part of all that I have met’ is wonderful account of the permeable nature of human experience: everything from (in Ulysses case) stormy seas to battlefields to abandoning your wife, become part of what or who you are. That seems straightforward and just true, doesn’t it? Until you look forward and see where you haven’t been yet or what you haven’t done. And the pull of that, for a rover (like Ulysses, and like, a little, myself) all those prior experiences form ‘an arch’. That’s an interesting  metaphor, and he means, I guess, a kind of gateway, through which one must pass to get to a bigger set of experiences, ‘that untravell’d world whose margin fades/ For ever and forever when I move…’  He is, and always will be, as he has said earlier, ‘roaming with a hungry heart’.

An aside: Was thinking last night about Springsteen’s ‘Hungry Heart’  and the connections between the guy from who walked out on his wife and kids in Baltimore and Ulysses, who also ‘went out for a ride and never came back…’ (well not for ten years, anyhow.) Springsteen influenced by Homer? I expect so.

Let’s get back in:

I am a part of all that I have met;
Yet all experience is an arch wherethro’
Gleams that untravell’d world whose margin fades
For ever and forever when I move.

Don’t be afraid to stay in a part of a poem or story or novel for as long as it takes – there’s no rule that says you have to finish the story, finish the poem. the experience of live reading – picking up on the feeling of the group, the depth of involvement, is as important as anything else we might do in Shared Reading. More important than finishing, or getting through to a certain point, is depth : how deep can you make your hour or two of reading?  When you find a place where there are deep waters, stay there for as long as you can!

The arch of what you’ve already experienced, what you know and have become, is merely way into the future ‘that untravell’d world’. That’s exciting to Ulysses and he does not seem to care that the ‘margin fades/for ever and forever when I move.’ It’s possible to imagine a person for whom is a nightmare – people want security and to know what is coming. But not this man – look back to the beginning of the poem and his sense of revolt at quiet stability. Ulysses loves that  movement of ‘forever and forever’.

How dull it is to pause, to make an end,
To rust unburnish’d, not to shine in use!
As tho’ to breathe were life! Life piled on life
Were all too little, and of one to me
Little remains: but every hour is saved
From that eternal silence, something more,
A bringer of new things; and vile it were
For some three suns to store and hoard myself,
And this gray spirit yearning in desire
To follow knowledge like a sinking star,
Beyond the utmost bound of human thought.

He’s like a suit of armour thrown down in a corner! I look at the language here: ‘dull’, ‘unburnished’, ‘not to shine in use’, and feel the sense of massive frustration building up. ‘Use’ that is the key – to be used, and he can’t do that in any way other than adventure. The quiet life of an adventurer retired to merely being King seems to him like doing nothing ‘as though to breathe were life’ – that’s to say just continuing to breathe, to stay alive is not ‘life’.

How hungry his heart is! he wants tons of lives, and if he can’t have them, he wants to use every minute of the life he has got:

Life piled on life
Were all too little, and of one to me
Little remains:

In my Shared Reading group I’d be stopping here to talk about  the passing of time, how long life felt when I was ten and a day at the Riveacre Road open air baths  seemed to last for months. And how  much shorter all days now seem, all weeks, all months, all years. I remember talking to  Miss Stella Pope, a lady who taught at the Queen’s School, Chester, when my mother was pupil there. Miss Pope (you couldn’t call her anything else) must have been Very Old Indeed when she  attended my Victorian Literature course at the Lady Lever Art Gallery in Birkenhead – years before the birth of The Reader. Miss Pope always wore a hat and she kept it on in the class. Sometimes she fell asleep but when she woke up she’d be wide-awake and spot on the mark of whatever we were  reading. She told me, the years go by like days in the end.  It all speeds up just as you come to value it.

Little remains, he says and I wonder … how old is this man ? Would you put him at a modern sixty?  and then the question the poems poses for us: what are you going to do with your remaining time? This is a  difficult area of conversation and almost certainly will get very serious. I’ve had a man talking about living with bowel cancer, a man talking about drinking himself to death. You have to be ready for anything. But what are you ready with?  Why, what we’ve actually got: human companionship, another cup of tea, being there, at the table together with the hard question in front of us. As a reader said to me yesterday, you’re not on your own, you’re going through with the others.

Let’s read on. Oh, no, time is up!

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View from under the  tree

 

What to read in a Shared Reading group: ‘Ulysses’ by Alfred, Lord Tennyson

drjanedavis3 Comments
scabius.jpg
Immensely tall yellow scabious in the Old English Garden at Calderstones

Earlier this week while reading ‘Beyond The End’ by Denise Levertov, I was reminded of ‘Ulysses’ by Alfred, Lord Tennyson. I thought I might read it over the next few days. You’ll find the poem here.

This is a poem for a whole session, or possibly, depending on the amount of time you and your group spend talking, for two sessions. It’s a story-poem with thinking in it. Not sure how much I can get through  this morning but I’m going to start by reading the first two sentences. In a longish poem like this , it might not be a good idea to read the whole thing all the way through, because, if you have inexperienced readers in your group, they may well get lost very early on and then be adrift and  worried for lines and lines. Better to take it in small chunks and make sure you are keeping everyone with you.

It little profits that an idle king,
By this still hearth, among these barren crags,
Match’d with an aged wife, I mete and dole
Unequal laws unto a savage race,
That hoard, and sleep, and feed, and know not me.
I cannot rest from travel: I will drink
Life to the lees: All times I have enjoy’d
Greatly, have suffer’d greatly, both with those
That loved me, and alone, on shore, and when
Thro’ scudding drifts the rainy Hyades
Vext the dim sea: I am become a name;
For always roaming with a hungry heart
Much have I seen and known; cities of men
And manners, climates, councils, governments,
Myself not least, but honour’d of them all;
And drunk delight of battle with my peers,
Far on the ringing plains of windy Troy.

First – do you need to know the ancient Greek story behind the poem? No, you don’t –  the poem contains everything yo need to know to experience it. would Tennyson have expected his readers to know? Yes, he’d probably have assumed this  background was  in most readers’ minds. So might you want to glance at wikipedia. You might want that background info, and fair enough. But as I read it, I find myself thinking – there is tone of authority – about the poem, its setting , its meaning, its author, that I find at odds with the Reader spirit of Shared Reading. What is at odds?  Oh, received wisdom, the ways in which experts agree in knowing voices, how literary people talk in this dead and deadening way about a living thing… Read up,  by all means but then – throw it up. Get that info out of you.  Don’t let these men and women inside your head!

Now you have to read again, as if you yourself, with the poem, were entirely able to read, to understand. It doesn’t matter if sometimes we don’t understand. what matters more than anything is that we should have a live experience as we read, not regurgitating something  someone says or thinks or writes, but living our response – whatever it is. So let’s read:

It little profits that an idle king,
By this still hearth, among these barren crags,
Match’d with an aged wife, I mete and dole
Unequal laws unto a savage race,
That hoard, and sleep, and feed, and know not me.

The poem is in the first person, and ‘I’: it’s in the voice of someone talking to us (or to himself or another and we’re overhearing).And it is a voice of complaint, this is someone who is fed up: there’s little profit in what he’s doing – look at all the words of  grumpy dissatisfaction: little, idle,still hearth, barren, aged wife, mete and dole, unequal, savage, hoard, sleep, know not me.

Most of these opening five lines are words of complaint or fed-upness or disgust. Ulysses  is wasting his own time  – you can imagine in pacing up and down, looking out of the window, trapped and longing to be away and in the next  – much longer sentence – he casts about for a different feeling:

I cannot rest from travel: I will drink
Life to the lees: All times I have enjoy’d
Greatly, have suffer’d greatly, both with those
That loved me, and alone, on shore, and when
Thro’ scudding drifts the rainy Hyades
Vext the dim sea: I am become a name;
For always roaming with a hungry heart
Much have I seen and known; cities of men
And manners, climates, councils, governments,
Myself not least, but honour’d of them all;
And drunk delight of battle with my peers,
Far on the ringing plains of windy Troy.

It feels really different now – hunger, appetite, movement, fame – this is the old life of Ulysses. He led the siege of Troy, he built the trojan horse, he travelled the world…and now, he had became the man who has led the life he led: ‘I cannot rest from travel.’

This would be a good a point to stop to think about ways in which, as Nietzsche said, we become what we are. How much does what we habitually do make us what we  are? Does being a nurse make you careful of people’s hurt? Tough or loving or both?  If you run a bar for thirty years will that affect your understanding of human nature?

Certainly Ulysses has had an amazingly active life: did that make him the man who says, now, in older age, ‘I will drink life to the lees’ ? (Does anyone know what that phrase means? As Reader Leader, you might well have looked it up. But don’t say so until everyone else has  had a a chance to share what they think!)

What does your group think of the word ‘cannot’? is Ulysses making a choice or is he in some way trapped in his own personality? And  ‘will’, as in ‘I will’ seems related to that cannot, doesn’t it? As if  this  speech is somewhat willed, as if  he is deliberately making himself this man?

Do you have to look up stuff you don’t already know?  In this next part, for example –  Hyades? Easy enough with wikipedia to do so.  But wear your wiki knowledge lightly, because it really doesn’t matter – the meaning is already in the poem:

All times I have enjoy’d
Greatly, have suffer’d greatly, both with those
That loved me, and alone, on shore, and when
Thro’ scudding drifts the rainy Hyades
Vext the dim sea:

I’d read it first and get the group to work at it – then I’d ask someone to look it up on their phone. But only after we’ve shown ourselves that we can understand it without the reference, wiki-confirmation.

Ulysses loves feeling a big feeling, loving greatly, suffering greatly – the connector is ‘greatly’. And he has felt these huge feelings in company – ‘both with those/that loved me’

and he has felt them alone when …

Thro’ scudding drifts the rainy Hyades
Vext the dim sea

Translate that, then… leaving an X to  stand for Hyades if no one knows what they are…Ulysses is saying he  had big feelings when the seas were stormy?  As when in shipwreck or storm, physical danger?  ‘…the rainy Hyades vext the dim sea’ means something like – they cooked up a storm.

Times up, more tomorrow

The footnote killeth

drjanedavis4 Comments
The Japanese Garden at Calderstones

Yesterday I was  thinking about what a novice reader in Shared Reading needs to know, and made a list of 9 things to do, most of which were, read the poem aloud. Heather commented on the importance of No. 3, ‘Check how you are feeling’.

Heather writes, ‘This is the key that can begin to unlock a scary-looking poem. I have seen people being astonished by feelings that have emerged after initially having said things like ‘I don’t get this’.’

Yes. It is  important that we feel able to stay in that creative place of uncertainty. At that place, ‘I don’t get this…’ we are on the very cusp of new thought, new understanding. The reader and the text are trying to find each other. The reader stands face to face with the words, an equal. As when we meet a new person, we try to find  out who they are – not by references, but in their own terms. A man (new to his Shared Reading group)  said to me yesterday, ‘It’s just us, and the words, and something… happens…’

The model of brave uncertainty characterised by, ‘I don’t get this… but I’m beginning to feel…’ may be a one of the contributing factors to one of the key outcomes shared Reading Group members report – feeling more confident.

Often, in more experienced, or more educated, literary worlds (I’ve seen it  in literature courses, in talks at Lit Fests, in lectures, at Book Clubs ) there is a reaching after fact to put-off  or smooth over those feelings uncertainty, of not-knowing, as if fact could do it for us and save us those worries. But it doesn’t. It might sometimes add to something we are experiencing in the reading but, very often, it intrudes, and the experience becomes something else, almost corrupted.

If I said to you, I’ve looked up ‘The Eagle’, and Tennyson wrote it to celebrate the adoption of the american eagle at the end of the American Civil War (I’ve just made that up, but say it was historically true). Your relation to the poem is now a historical  one. It’s no longer just you and poem, the words on the page. It’s art, Jim, but with footnotes. And, particularly at the beginning of  an experience, of a relationship with a work of literature (perhaps any art?) , the footnote killeth.  It certainly affects the democracy of reading.

I spent years reading and teaching and sharing my readings of three  of the greatest poems ever written – The Divine Comedy, Paradise Lost and The Prelude. I like to have an edition with  good footnotes, and I like the footnotes to be at the bottom of the page, so you don’t have to flip backwards and forwards. Alastair Fowler’s edition of Paradise Lost is excellent for this. I read the footnotes quite often. But what I’ve found over thirty years is that they don’t help. Not when you are really struggling. That real struggle is the struggle to enter the mind of the author, to follow, through language, form, syntax, the experience of the author’s thoughts.

In this respect reading is like eating or dancing. No one can do it for you. There are things to learn about dance and food and what other people like or believe, and learning that extra stuff might well add to your experience. But you don’t start there. You start by doing it yourself. And no one, however expert, can do your eating or dancing.

Back the The Eagle. Yesterday I’d read some of the first stanza, now I’m going to read the second and try to understand why  it makes me afraid.

The Eagle

He clasps the crag with crooked hands;
Close to the sun in lonely lands,
Ring’d with the azure world, he stands.

The wrinkled sea beneath him crawls;
He watches from his mountain walls,
And like a thunderbolt he falls.
Alfred, Lord Tennyson

The first thing in the second stanza that frightens me is ‘the wrinkled sea.’ That sea is very far down: I feel vertigo as I read. Height changes time on cliff tops. Tennyson uses the verb ‘crawls’ to get at that feeling. If you were walking on the shore, the waves would be crashing, the tide moving at  a speed. From very high above,  (I’m remembering cliff tops on a Greek Island, the Aegean seeming miles below) the sea seems to move a very slow speed.  The eagle ‘watches’ and I’m seeing something alert, intelligent, deliberate and very very far above everything else –  as in the first stanza, when  he seemed god-like.  the giving way implied in ‘falls’ is what frightens me most. It is absolute abandonment. It is power too, because this is not an uncontrolled fall. This is the power, and self-control of the high diver. The diver, the faller, becomes an object –  cannonball- submitting to gravity in this way, terrifyingly making of their own body a weapon.

The ‘thunderbolt’ connects me back to the sense of him as out-of-this-world, godlike, ‘ring’d with the azure world.’

Do you see a film of this unfolding  moment in  your mind as you read?
I’m asking myself Do you see anything human? The long distance of a very far-off encompassing gaze, the seeing of things in a large pattern, the ability to move with great certainty and very fast…it’s the difference between the long far off gaze and fast,’ terrifying action, the ‘thunderbolt’ that unsettles me.

I’ve noticed the way each stanza has three rhymes. That makes the rhythm of the poem act strangely, I think. I read it aloud to myself a couple of times. You sort of expect a fourth line, that’s what it is. The lines themselves are very regular, four beat lines:

He clasps the crag with crooked hands;

And you’d expect each stanza to be a four line stanza, to match , as it were. But you don’t get the fourth line. When you don’t get it, it’s like the great down-swoop of the bird. Something is suddenly not there.

This poem is a sketch, a small one, in pencil. Its  full of a moment of life and it shows Tennyson’s skill. But I want something bigger. I move on the next picture. Tell me more about humans.

A Room Full of Snakes and a Very Big Bird: How To Read A Poem

drjanedavis3 Comments
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Agnes playing with leaves, Calderstones, September 2016

How do you read a poem?

Many of us, readers and non-readers, seem to believe that knowledge, expertise, years of practice are needed to understand those human artefacts we call poems. A world industry has evolved to promote that  view.

Attentive readers will have noted how I have slipped from ‘read’ to ‘understand’.

‘Bah,’ as D.H. Lawrence may well have said (don’t  have time to check this morning) ‘the mind understands and there’s an end to it.’

Is reading poetry an art? Is it a skill? It is certainly true that, as in almost all human actions, practice helps. We can talk about that another time. But for today, because the question arose for me yesterday, I ask myself what does a novice need?  Look at the picture of Agnes playing with leaves. That’s what we’re aiming for today. Get the feel of poems. Gaze at them a lot. Chuck ’em about.

Here are 9 tips for reading a poem:

1. Enter the room

If you said to a snake-fearer, ‘Enter this room with a snakes in it…’ your snake-fearer would probably say, ‘No thanks.’

That’s what most people say to reading poetry.

But you are reading this. You are over your fear enough to have looked in this place for help. You are in the room with a live poem!

And here it is, chosen because it was the first or second grown up poem I ever read, and it came to mind in conversation yesterday. I was ten  when I found it in Palgraves Golden Treasury, which I’d been given  for my birthday. Almost every poem in the book seemed incomprehensible, though I wasn’t yet old enough to be afraid of them. I simply couldn’t get into them at all, and despite its lovely name, the Treasury seemed to me like reading an engineering manual, or Chinese. But I could read this one, I thought, and it was about something I could picture. And it was short;

                             The Eagle
                             He clasps the crag with crooked hands;
Close to the sun in lonely lands,
Ring’d with the azure world, he stands.
The wrinkled sea beneath him crawls;
He watches from his mountain walls,
And like a thunderbolt he falls.
                                                                             Alfred, Lord Tennyson

(Note to self – need to write a separate post on  how to choose a poem)

2. Read it aloud

Poems are songs and it is good when they pass through your body and out of your mouth. You want to feel the rhythm, not by counting syllables, but by tapping your feet or fingers. Often, in poems, the rhythm does something, I mean, it makes something happen, and you want eventually to know what that is, so you need to get into the habit of feeling it.

Read the poem aloud, as slowly as you can. Where there is punctuation, take a pause. In this poem that is easy because the commas and semicolons come at the line endings. That means you only have to think in one dimension, which is helpful for a beginner. Later we’ll come to poems where the line-endings and punctuation work together in a different way.

3. Check how you are feeling

Poems are messages, communications, from other people’s hearts and minds. As with any human communication, you need to be aware of  how you feel as it unfolds. In this poem, as I read it aloud, now, as I write, I feel exhilarated at the end of the first three lines, ‘Ring’d with the azure world he stands’, but I feel afraid  at the end of the poem ‘And like a thunderbolt he falls.’ I thought he might be a very dangerous creature. And he felt quite close. ‘Thunderbolt’= Aiieee.

One of the things that has been so wonderful about running Shared Reading groups, or listening to other people telling me about their Shared Reading groups, has been seeing how  often people who are new to poetry are astonished and delighted by the strong feelings they feel when they recognise themselves in a poem.

But I didn’t see myself in this poem when I was ten. I only felt something like (and it was a feeling,  not words) ‘I get it!’ then I felt the feelings of the poem, which are:  wow, and then, agh. Which may be something close to what Tennyson may have wanted his readers to feel.

Don’t get stuck on, or too attached to, these opening feelings: reading is a dynamic exchange, a live unfolding. You want to be free to go with whatever the flow of this day’s reading turns out to be.

4. Read it aloud again

Check in, see if anything has changed, see if you see more as the  mental film of the poem unfolds. Try to notice something you didn’t notice before. I notice ‘hands’, because eagles don’t have hands, they have claws. Humans have hands. When you’ve noticed something,  have a pause and think about it.

5. Believe the poet  did what s/he did on purpose

You might say, ‘Ah, it only says ‘hands’ because he’s got to find a rhyme for ‘lands’…’

And if you said that, I’d say, ‘Well-noticed! they do rhyme, don’t they?’  But I’d try to persuade you that even a half decent poet could either find another rhyme for ‘lands’ or have put the word ‘claws’ and found word to rhyme with that. This poet chose ‘hands’, on purpose, because he wanted to put the word ‘hands’ (with all their associated human powers of action perhaps) in our minds. Why?  Perhaps because this poem is not simply about The Eagle?

6. Read it aloud again.

Reading the poem is the reality of it. Go back to it as often as you can. In this respect reading a poem is a meditation. You wander, which is natural, and then you say to yourself, now go back to the poem.

7. Notice things

You started by noticing a word, (‘hands’) so now notice another in line two.

Poems work in 3-D, up and down, back and forward, as well as in a linear, narrative fashion. Having seen the human word  in line one, you’ll have noticed the human word in two: yep, it’s ‘lonely’.

This adjective, ‘lonely’ (yes, it’s good to know some technical words such as ‘noun’ ‘verb’ ‘adjective’ and  ‘enjambement’. You don’t need them. But they can be useful, just as a Guide to Snake Markings could be useful in the Snake Room. More of this another day)…

This adjective, ‘lonely’ is a human word. Yet  it’s used to describe an inhuman landscape. The eagle is about as far from human settlement as it is possible to be, in fact, he seems almost a god, ‘ring’d with the azure world, he stands.’

(I’ve suddenly thought of the American Eagle and have no idea if there is any connection and don’t have time to look it up, but if I was reading this poem with more than minutes at my command I would now Google the American eagle, its dates, whether Tennyson was interested in the USA etc. But these things are merely facts. I don’t need them to read the poem. If it was just me and the poem, locked in the room, I’d simply note the god-like loneliness of the eagle with his head  ringed by ‘the azure world’.

Why world? When azure refers to the blue of the sky?

8. Let the questions proliferate

Reading a poem is like entering a room full of snakes and like meditating. (Also, sometimes,  a bit like a more or less controlled bomb-explosion. But we are not exploding today. As far as I know.)

9. Aim for flexible stretch, poetry as pilates

As you read you are moving between modes: sometimes being afraid, not knowing, not understanding. Sometimes you are saying to yourself, ‘Back to the poem’, and breathing and reading and feeling rhythm and feeling unnamed feelings. Sometimes you are asking lots of questions: questions which arise from your core, like bubbles in water or sparks from a fire. They don’t necessarily need answers. They need dwell time, space. They need to be asked. ‘Ring’d with the azure world, he stands.’ Think about your core. How are you feeling now?

Time and word count are up for today – finish this one tomorrow. Then back to Spenser.

‘You Are Tennyson’s Mouthpiece’ : a great poem by Dennis Haskell

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It’s a short post today as I must get out early to catch the 7.47am London train to meet with some very interesting colleagues, supporters and potential new friends.

Yesterday I was remembering the way Tennyson’s poem, Crossing The Bar, had made me realise how powerful poetry could be once it had escaped the long-distance handling of University teaching and learning. Out of the educational context it was a different beast, dangerously alive!  Of course, it  always was dangerously alive for me as a private reader. And in some lectures and tutorials  something powerful did happen ( I mentioned Brian Nellist, my tutor yesterday. Meet him here, but be careful, it  starts with some strong swearing) but mainly, no… university tutorials were rarely the right place to share those personal experiences that made my private reading of  literature so rewarding. Why? Lots of the students were too young and shy, seemed mortified, dumbstruck, or scared of losing their best ideas to someone else. They made a lot of notes but not much noise. And lots of the tutors were strange-ish folk, and seemed equally socially uneasy, some of them dumbstruck, some terrible show-offs. So University tutorials were not, on the whole, occasions on which  to share one’s deepest thoughts. We kept ourselves to ourselves, or, if you were me, you talked too much and  felt an idiot in a different way.

When I started ‘Get Into Reading’ in 2002, I started with years of adult education teaching  behind me, and behind that, my having grown up in a pub, and having been a barmaid, a waitress. There’s a necessary human ease you have to find in those jobs, and it turns out, if you mix that barmaid and waitress, (not restricted to those professions: could be that kindly physiotherapist or creative midwife quality, or the quality of the man in B+Q who helps you find the spiggot without making you feel an idiot) with really great literature you get the most amazing firework mixture.

Over many years along with my colleagues at The Reader – both  staff and volunteers – I have been amazed by the power of poetry to ‘touch’, ‘strike’, ‘move’, ‘get’ and ‘hit’ people  – these interesting verbs come from readers trying to explain what is happening to them as they read.

A great poem about this effect sits alongside Tennyson’s poem in Phil’s out of print ( buy it on amazon for only 1p!) anthology, All The Days of My Life. That’s one of the great things about this  book – the setting together of different poems so that they form a kind of context for each other.

I didn’t have time to write to ask permission to use it here, so you will have to go Dennis Haskell’s own site. Read it aloud.  Take a tissue. I have  found myself moved to tears when reading this (with the Tennyson poem alongside) in Shared Reading groups. In fact I’ve just cried now, rereading it for the first time in several years.

You’ll find Dennis Haskell’s wonderful poem, ‘One Clear Call’  here. The poem sets out what happens when the human situation really makes the words come alive in all their wild animal power.

desk

Early experiences in Shared Reading: Crossing the Bar

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crossing

Today’s poem is an important one for me because, quite aside from its moving power in its own right,  it characterises my move from University English to Shared Reading and The Reader.

I don’t say, as I nearly did,  my move from the University to  the real world, because a University is as real as anything else, and is certainly part of ‘the world’  –  in fact you might say, the world is too much in them, to borrow and change a line from Wordsworth.

Before, during and after University  I  was a personal reader, and for that I have to thank my outsider status and the Women’s Movement of the 1970s. ‘The personal is political’ was one of our slogans  a key thought for me, and I took it with me when I moved away from the radical feminism from which I had gained so much. ( ‘War is Menstrual Envy’ was another slogan that I loved, for some reason particularly annoying my very few male friends).

I don’t remember ‘the personal is political’ being applied to book-reading in the Women’s movement – there was a lot of heavy political theory there, as everywhere. But we read everything women had written, novels, poetry in order to try to build up a sense of a womens’ tradition. Through novels and poetry I got the personal experience of women, and at interview for University the exasperated inquisitor  asked me crossly, ‘Haven’t you read any books by men?’

Being a ‘personal reader’  in a University English department in the period 1980-2002 was no mean feat. People were trying to make literature part of the social and political sciences, to make it inhuman, de-personalised (and therefore perhaps budgetarily defensible, not a softee humanities thing  but hard as science, a brother to theoretical physics or plastics engineering). They were not happy times and I’m afraid the effect still lingers. I was lucky in that my teacher at University, Mr Brian Nellist  (I had others, but he was The One, and you can meet him here) was an old-fashioned non-theoretical reader, and he encouraged me to be one myself, and to read as myself, rather than always in terms of women and men. Though by then, I had stopped being motivated by gender inequality. Perhaps need to think more about that another time.

I did not have a Theory of Reading. I did not want to be self-conscious about my reading,  I just wanted to read literature and see what happened, what I could learn, what touched me, what I cared about.  Brian encouraged me, both as my third year tutor and as my Ph.D supervisor to to do that, finding out stuff that was useful and interesting to me. Essentially, he laid out this huge buffet of literature and said let’s walk up and down this, and see what strikes your fancy.

Even so, what happened was at a formal distance. I’d like to think more about what that means another time.

But to the poem. When I first began to have the idea of taking ‘great literature out of the university and into the hands of people who need it’ (not a snappy slogan but mine own) I had no idea of the power of the stuff I was going to unleash. Despite reading personally myself since I was child, and despite having chosen pieces that I thought most adults would find moving, I wasn’t prepared for tears. In nearly twenty years in the University, I had never seen anyone moved to tears by a poem.

In the very first shared reading groups, which were called ‘Get Into Reading’ (there were two, on different days of the week, one at Ganneys Meadow Early Years Centre, on Woodchurch Estate, and one at the Community College on Laird Street, Birkenhead. Both mixed, open community groups) and before that, before 2000, in the prototype experimental groups I ran before the Get Into Reading , which took place in St Cath’s Hospital Birkenhead and in Waterstones, Bold Street, Liverpool,  I read this poem.

Crossing the Bar

Sunset and evening star,
And one clear call for me!
And may there be no moaning of the bar,
When I put out to sea,

But such a tide as moving seems asleep,
Too full for sound and foam,
When that which drew from out the boundless deep
Turns again home.

Twilight and evening bell,
And after that the dark!
And may there be no sadness of farewell,
When I embark;

For tho’ from out our bourne of Time and Place
The flood may bear me far,
I hope to see my Pilot face to face
When I have crost the bar.

Alfred, Lord Tennyson

 In each group as I read, someone was moved to tears. In Waterstones’ after work reading group, a nurse who had come straight from Arrow Park hospital filled up with tears as I read. She said it was the line, ‘But such a tide as moving seems asleep’, which had got to her, because her Dad had died  when she was a teenager, and when he was alive they used to walk sometimes along the riverside and the tide…poetic image and reality had crashed together for her. Nothing has ever put it into words, she said, as if seeing ‘ it’ in words had caused the release of tears.

There are things you need to know (what a bar is, how it functions, what a pilot is in harbour terms…) to understand the poem but like all great poems, it doesn’t matter if you don’t know them. The music of the poem will carry most listeners far.

What is interesting to me as I look at it this morning is how Tennyson, writing about death, (all the people who cried in those early groups spoke of someone they loved who had died: the poem seemed to speak to them of particular deaths) is actually writing about, anticipating, his own death. Yet the poem reads – sounds – like an elegy for another. Or perhaps it simply touches all death by thinking of one particular one.

The ‘one clear call’ of the opening line is open to much interpretation. People in Shared Reading groups have said to me over the years, that it might be any kind of sign, just something that reminds you of mortality. The ‘call’ is now but the death is in the future;

And may there be no moaning of the bar,
When I put out to sea

As I read these lines, they are coloured for me by the people I have read the poem with over many years –  the nurse (cannot remember her name) and Dorrie at Ganneys Meadow and a young woman with blond hair in the Laird Street group, and others. I think also of my own death – so much closer  now that when I read the poem in Ganneys Meadow, and the need for ‘no moaning’ seems more real and more pressing. Of course, ‘moaning of the bar’  in purely linguistic terms may be the noise made by waves  crashing against ‘the bar’ – the sandbar built up by currents in a harbour mouth or estuary… but is anything in a poem ever purely linguistic?  A word in a language  is like a bundle of sticks, a bundle of meanings (whose thought is this, please?). We put the sticks in the bundle according to our experience, memory. So I may  partly think of waves crashing far out in the  estuary, partly of my own complaining, partly of the sobbing of a bereaved friend.

Sunset and evening star,
And one clear call for me!
And may there be no moaning of the bar,
When I put out to sea,

But such a tide as moving seems asleep,
Too full for sound and foam,
When that which drew from out the boundless deep
Turns again home.

The poem, for all its sadness, is a brave one. ‘when I put out to sea’ does not feel like the end but rather a beginning.  It is a brave setting out on adventure, however terrifying.  The fact that the first two stanzas are one sentence seems to matter – there is no full stop after sea, but thethought caries on, after the line ending, after the ending of the stanza. and the second stanza is full of comfort.

But it is time to stop! oh dear. More tomorrow.