and what’s left of my New Englandish brain.
Tonight’s discussion started with a bit of Plato, which one of the other students had brought up and which the teacher explained quite succintly while tying it in to our subject matter at hand. A few people were still coming in as we launched into the first few Dickinson poems.
Tonight we started with a sheet containing:
I shall not murmer if at last – E.D.
I reckon – When I count it all- – E.D.
Nothing Gold Can Stay – R.F.
Here you can see my wild scribbled notes ranging from references to other materials like the Bible and Shakespeare.
Then it was on to:
Of Bronze – and Blaze – E.D.
My Splendors, are Menagerie –
But their Competeless Show
Will entertain the Centuries
When I, am long ago,
An Island in dishonored Grass –
Whom none but Beetles – know.
and we compared this to a couple sections of Wallace Stevens’ Auroras of Autumn:
This is nothing until in a single man contained.
Nothing until this named thing nameless is
And is destroyed. He opens the door of his houseOn flames. The scholar of one candle sees
An Arctic effulgence flaring on the frame
Of everything he is. And he feels afraid.
Both poems have this sense that, as an artist, we believe (and in fact must believe) we can do it – we can create this description or this world that will be as good or even better than what we see before us (in this case the aurora) and we risk being slapped down by the magnificence of the world etc.
In her poems that describe her passion for her mysterious lover, I couldn’t help but think that this same description and same passion might be aligned with the passion of an artist for creating.
