I almost think I like the traditional "How do you feel about..." questions because I had a really hard time coming up with comparisons between the "sound elements" of these two pieces of work. I chose What Are Years? by Moore because I noticed a obvious sound pattern while reading it. "what is our innocence, what is our guilt?"- She already starts with repetition. "All are naked, none is safe"- all and none are opposites but the repetitious feeling is still present. "dumbly calling, deafly listening"- the "d" sound is repeated here, flowing the poem right along. "stirs the soul to be strong"- I should knwo the technical name for multiple words starting with the same consonant... asonance maybe? Regardless, that is what it going on here. "He sees deep...who accedes"- all these words have the same middle sound which also gives the feeling of pushing the reader right along through the poem. The ending sounds of each word from the last two lines of each stanza are also very similar. "others and stirs" have the same general ending sound, as do "surrendering and continuing" as well as "mortality and eternity". I really liked the sound elements that exist in this poem. I felt like I was being bumped along through the poem and I had no difficulty noticing various sounds throughout the poem.
The Emperor of Ice Cream had similar sound elements through it. "bid him whip" all have the same middle sound and "kitchen cups concupiscent curds" all have that hard "c" or"k" sound. This poem, similar to What are Years kept me rolling along, mostly through the first stanza. "Let be be finale of seem" has the same middle "ee" sound to it. Similar to What are Years, the ending sounds of the last words of the last 2 lines in each stanza are similar. "seem" and "cream" obviously rhyme as do "beam" and "cream". "Dresser of the deal" both start with the hard "d" sound. In the second stanza of this poem, I started to lose the sense of sound elements which was not the case in What are years. Both authors tend to use a repetitious sound, either in the beginning, middle or end of certain words and both give the reader the effect of being guided through the poem in a faster pace that most other poems.
Thursday, March 8, 2007
Sunday, March 4, 2007
T.S. Eliot's The Wasteland
You weren't kidding about this being a difficult text. After reading it three times or so, there were still only a couple of things I noticed n relation to modernism. First off, Eliot uses more description in this work than any of the other authors we have covered. The notes on page 1078 stated that this work is actually "anti-modern" as it "interprets modernity as an experience of loss". This confused me because I thought most modernists viewed modernity this way. This work was definitely fragmented as were most of the other works we read as well. Each fragment of the piece is dealing with completely different issues told by different "characters" or "personas". Eliot's biography on page 1419 stated that this writing was a sort of anti-political movement known as "New Criticism" and this was clearly evident in the text.
In the first section, "The Burial of the Dead", the narrator is speaking about mass deaths when he mentions the crowd flowing over London Bridge and he states that he "had not thought death had undone so many" (1432). I assumed this dealt with the war and just when I thought I was understanding, the line, "That corpse you planted last year in your garden, Has it begun to sprout" appeared and truly confused me. I couldn't tell is Eliot was drawing attention to the lack of emotion over the loss of so many men or if there was some other meaning. The second section to me was the most descriptive and therefore the least like modernism as we have known it. I don't understand the role of the woman who is supposed to get a new set of teeth and what significance "Albert", who has been away at war, has on this section. The third section also references war "But at my back in a cold blast I hear" and death is then referenced after. Eliot then takes the perspective of Tiresias, who forsees all the damage the war is evidently causing. This was one of the few references in the text I could almost understand.
The poem appears to jump around from having a rhyme scheme to not having one, which correlates to what we discussed in class about the authors not giving in to what we, as readers, expect. Eliot uses the word, "Unreal" multiple times throughout the text almost as if to demonstrate how horrific the effects of the war have been and he obviously references war and death multiple times as well. I had a hard time seeing what was so different about this modernist work in comparison with others that we have read. I constantly flipped back to the notes on modernism to try and make comparisons and find things that didn't necessarily match the definition of modernism but the only main difference I could find was the use of description and the fact that this work is longer than most others. Eliot's pessimistic view of the world post-war was evident through this text but the things he made reference to made it very difficult to grasp the true meaning of the work.
In the first section, "The Burial of the Dead", the narrator is speaking about mass deaths when he mentions the crowd flowing over London Bridge and he states that he "had not thought death had undone so many" (1432). I assumed this dealt with the war and just when I thought I was understanding, the line, "That corpse you planted last year in your garden, Has it begun to sprout" appeared and truly confused me. I couldn't tell is Eliot was drawing attention to the lack of emotion over the loss of so many men or if there was some other meaning. The second section to me was the most descriptive and therefore the least like modernism as we have known it. I don't understand the role of the woman who is supposed to get a new set of teeth and what significance "Albert", who has been away at war, has on this section. The third section also references war "But at my back in a cold blast I hear" and death is then referenced after. Eliot then takes the perspective of Tiresias, who forsees all the damage the war is evidently causing. This was one of the few references in the text I could almost understand.
The poem appears to jump around from having a rhyme scheme to not having one, which correlates to what we discussed in class about the authors not giving in to what we, as readers, expect. Eliot uses the word, "Unreal" multiple times throughout the text almost as if to demonstrate how horrific the effects of the war have been and he obviously references war and death multiple times as well. I had a hard time seeing what was so different about this modernist work in comparison with others that we have read. I constantly flipped back to the notes on modernism to try and make comparisons and find things that didn't necessarily match the definition of modernism but the only main difference I could find was the use of description and the fact that this work is longer than most others. Eliot's pessimistic view of the world post-war was evident through this text but the things he made reference to made it very difficult to grasp the true meaning of the work.
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