A Sonnet by Sydney ~ Struggle of Mind and Body

The sonnet is a well-known form of poetry and favorite of poets in the European tradition. Often used to express love, the sonnet compresses much passion into a "little song."

Please learn the different forms and characteristics of the Italian, English, Spenserian, and Modern sonnets. By doing so you will have a grasp of sonnets that will assist you in identification of poetry and understanding of these "little songs."

Here's one sonnet as part of a series that the Elizabethan poet Sir Philip Sydney wrote. Read this sonnet and identify the form (Italian, English, etc.). Then identify how the form assists Sydney in expressing his struggle between love/lust/sex and ideas/mind/eternity, or between Eroticism and Platonism. Which does Sydney choose? Why?

Leave me, O love which reachest but to dust,
And thou, my mind, aspire to higher things;
Grow rich in that which never taketh rust:
Whatever fades but fading pleasure brings.
Draw in thy beams, and humble all thy might
To that sweet yoke where lasting freedoms be,
Which breaks the clouds and opens forth the light
That doth both shine and give us sight to see.
O, take fast hold; let that light be thy guide
In this small course which birth draws out to death,
And think how evil becometh him to slide
Who seeketh heaven, and comes of heavenly breath.
Then farewell, world! thy uttermost I see:
Eternal Love, maintain thy life in me.

Carpe Diem Poetry

The seventeenth-century British poet Robert Herrick wrote many poems exemplifying carpe diem (Latin for "seize the day"). Carpe diem is the attitude of one who lives for the day, who responds to the phrase "eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow you will die" by living it up immediately. Here is a carpe diem poem by Herrick:

I fear no earthly powers,
But care for crowns of flowers;
And love to have my beard
With wine and oil besmear'd.
This day I'll drown all sorrow:
Who knows to live tomorrow?

Please comment on how this lyric expresses the attitude of carpe diem. Also comment on the sound of the three rhyming couplets in this six-verse lyric and how the sounds reinforce the "live it up today" attitude.

Andrew Marvell is another of several seventeenth-century British poets who expressed carpe diem in his poetry. One of Marvell's best examples of this attitude is "To His Coy Mistress."

Introduction to Poetry ~ War Poetry

Poetry is often mistaken as lovey-dovey flowery words. Not at all. For at its best, poetry expresses experiences or ideas with tightly muscular or emotionally swift words. It has been known to cut, shock, spin, or stun readers into new thoughts.

As we begin studying poetry, there is no better place to start these days than with war poetry. With America acting more and more like an empire, overreacting and overreaching militarily in the world, especially in Iraq, and with a U.S. president deadset on violence as his hope for the world, American poets and international poets continue responding (see Poets Against the War).

But war was not all bad for poets. Before the twentieth century, war poetry celebrated the triumphs and glories of warriors, even the violence as in Homer's Illiad.

Since the late nineteenth century, war became more realistic and less honorable. For instance, poets like American Stephen Crane wrote ironically and cynically about war in "War is Kind."

As poets wrote about World War I, many of them were firsthand witnesses of mustard gas massacres (see John Singer Sargent's painting called Gassed and read Wilfred Owen's "Dulce Et Decorum Est"). The English translation of the Latin phrase ("how sweet it is to die for one's country") emphasizes the poet's dark irony about war.

During World War II, millions died as a result of weapons of mass destruction, and many soldiers died in the odd machinery of war--as in the ball turret of a bomber plane (read "The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner"). Not surprisingly, military weaponry is made first for killing, not protecting. Just look at the case of Private First Class John D. Hart who, before being killed because of a lack of bulletproof shielding or even metal doors on Humvees, talked with his father on the phone about the Humvee's lack of armor. Brian Hart, the soldier's father, took action with the help of Senator Edward M. Kennedy, Democrat of Massachusetts, to "up-armor" Humvees.

The U.S. involvement in Vietnam produced more poetry, anti-war music, and a huge counter culture movement. Then came military operations in the Persian Gulf, first with Operation Desert Storm and then with the Iraq War. Of the wars of the last 50 years, perhaps no more anger has been expressed among poets than about the current war (see "Orgres" and other poems on this website). Now, with Bush rejecting the announcement by an international group of physicians and researchers that we have killed close to 650,000 Iraqi civilians since 2003, we will hear from many other poets, I'm sure.

So why does war poetry produce so much passion, and why is it so anti-war in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries? Obviously, the case of Private First Class John D. Hart and the case of 650,000 Iraqi civilians dead are enough to create such animosity towards war. But what can poets accomplish?

Irony of Situation & the Grotesque in Flannery O'Connor

A Catholic and a Southerner, Flannery O'Connor is one of our finest American writers. Born in 1925, O'Connor died before she was 40 years old, plagued by lupus (an autoimmune disease). Despite an early death and difficult battle with lupus, O'Connor persisted in creative endeavors.

The O'Connor story we will study this week is "A Good Man is Hard to Find." Although the title may allude to Mae West's famous line, it does so only ironically. In fact, it is irony of situation that turns this story of grace into the exploits of gratuitous cruelty.

Irony is critical to understanding O'Connor's fiction. In this short story, how is irony effectively used to give the reader a grotesque revelation of reality?

Symbolism ~ Poe's "The Masque of the Red Death"

In 1964, a film version of Edgar Allen Poe's short story "The Masque of the Red Death" was released. Known for his roles in horror films, Vincent Price played Prince Prospero.

In looking at the text of "The Masque of the Red Death," you should have noticed lots of symbolic elements. One of these is Prince Prospero's suite of seven rooms. Seven is an important number in numerology, whether used in literature and myth. In fact, you will want to look at the various expressions of seven in myth and legend and then find correspondences between them and Poe's use of seven rooms. Why did Poe choose seven?

And why did he choose the colors that correspond with each room? There are different ways to look at colors. You could examine them according to liturgical colors of the faith or based on the psychology of color. Try both. Then explain what you believe Poe meant by the colors for the seven rooms in this famous story.