The deformation program we used helped me to see poems like “This is Just to Say” in a different way, but I am not sure how useful this tool is in examining poems. I did notice that when words were changed, it highlighted things like the tone of the poem, repetition, and word choice. Words that stuck out to me were the “so”‘s, and the adjectives that could be replaced. Sometimes when words were replaced, I would take that word/theme and compare it to the original, which would also help to see the poem in a different way. The only thing I wonder is how I would be able to explain how I came to realize my examination of the poem, when a majority of the time the program puts out random words that don’t relate to each other. In that way, the program could be used to brainstorm and to help pick out some forms of deformation that aid your examination of the poem. Other Modernist poems or shorter poems would also be good to examine with the program.
Author: grahamd5
“The Angel” by William Blake
In the poem “The Angel” by William Blake, the speaker describes a dream where he is a maiden guarded by an angel. The angel comforts her while she cries over her love for the angel, unknown to him because she says she “hid from him my hearts delight” on line eight. The angel then leaves and the maiden collects herself, arming her fears “with ten thousand shields and spears” on line twelve. The arming of her fears means she is giving her fears power, which distances herself from the angel. By the end of the poem the Angel comes back “in vain” on line fourteen because he sees how old she’s grown. What she feared; growing old and remaining unmarried, gives her something to fend the angel off with, whether she wants to or not. Blake’s drawings change the depiction of the poem through the way he colors the maiden, the angel, and the background. Some maidens look younger like the maiden depicted at the beginning of the poem, and some maidens look older like the maiden depicted at the end of the poem. For example, Copy T shows the maiden with golden hair and red hues in her face that make her look younger. Copy L shows the maiden with grey hair, making her look older. This copy also has a sky painted like the morning scene in the third stanza with red hues. Archives change the way we read poems because they allows us to see the artist’s creative process and uncover different meanings to poems depending on how the artist chooses to represent the poem. Archives allow us to see multiple forms of the same poem at once and create a community where we can talk about their different meanings.
Lover’s Silence
“Lover’s Silence” by Agnes Mary Frances Robinson is a poem written out of Robinson’s love for Vernon Lee (Violet Page). Robinson and Lee shared a close relationship for many years, although it was never discovered if it was platonic or romantic. The poem fits the theme of queerness in that the speaker is describing silence that fills the room when the woman she loves enters, and her beauty almost stuns the speaker. The speaker tries to recall that feeling when she saw her, when she is alone. Robinson could be talking about the way she feels about Vernon Lee during the time when they separated, a time that had a hard impact on Lee. This poem and the Victorian Queer Archive changed my way of understanding nineteenth century life, sexuality, and literature through the way they describe queer relationships during a time when different types of sexuality were not recognized in a positive way. Even though people were not allowed to talk openly about how they felt for people of the same sex, they could express themselves in poetry. Because I saw the restriction that society put on expressing sexual desire in the nineteen hundreds, I thought people did not feel the same way back then, but that is just not true. People had these feelings, they were just restricted in how they expressed them. It takes poems like these to show how queer men and women had an important place in history, and in this case, literature.
Bagpipe Music Performance
When reading the poem “Bagpipe Music” by Louis MacNeice, the rhythm of the poem is clear, but the performance by MacNeice makes the poem sound even more lyrical. There are many iambs, and end-rhymes that are roughly emphasized, like “rickshaw”, “pension”, and “forever” that contribute to the lyrical quality of the poem. In the performance, the beginning of the lines start at a higher pitch and end in a lower one, which may have something to do with the author’s accent, but still adds to the rhythm. For example, in the beginning of line nine, the double stress on the words “no go” starts off high, comes down a little on “man”, and ends with a harsher “Blavatsky”. The hard emphasis on the end rhymes and especially the last line “But if you break the bloody glass you won’t hold up the weather”, reflects the distaste the speaker has towards the changing times in Scotland that MacNeice explains at the beginning of the performance. For the most part, the performance is fast-paced, with the exception of the end-stopped lines and feminine rhymes that slow the poem down. Another thing I noticed in the performance that I did not hear in the reading, was the way MacNeice slowed down on line thirty-two and thirty-three when he says “Work your hands from day to day, the winds will blow the profit./The glass is falling hour by hour, the glass will fall forever,”. The drawn out “day to day” and “hour by hour” emphasizes the passing of time made slow by work, and the fact that the work does not amount to anything.
Sweet Rain by Train
Train’s live performance of their song “Sweet Rain”, which was recorded at the Workplay Theater in Birmingham, Alabama, and included in the album “Train: Alive at Last”, took the mood of the original version of the song and amplified it. In the live performance, lead singer Pat Monahan repeats lines like “come down on me”, and holds notes for a longer period than in the original, which plays on the longing and weight expressed throughout the song. The last verse is also modified in the live version in order to flesh out the speaker’s relationship with his “brother” and the struggles he has had to endure. For example, Some words are more stressed than others, like when pat emphasizes the “love” in “and how I love you” and the way he says “I had to grow in ways I didn’t want to know” with apprehension. Lines that were not in the live version, like “everybody knew that she was just too much for you”, “I know everyone here wants you”, and “I know everybody here thinks they need you” helps the audience focus on the relationship the speaker has with this person instead. Overall, I think that the impact of the live version is greater than the original because of the live crowd. The original version is still sung passionately, but there are empty spaces that hang around the speaker’s words. In the live version, the energy of the crowd is infused into Pat, so the words seem to come alive, and any “gaps” are filled.
http://www.lyricsfreak.com/t/train/sweet+rain_20140432.html