HS2 Rail link and a 250 year old pear tree

What would Gerard Manley Hopkins feel about this?

https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2020/aug/17/tree-of-the-week-the-beloved-250-year-old-wild-pear-being-cut-down-for-hs2

Hopkins' Binsey Poplars: 'O if we but knew what we do...'

More about trees...Below you can read one of my favourite poems, by Gerard Manley Hopkins. It is about the brutal felling of a row of poplar trees near the village of Binsey near Oxford.  It was written in 1879, and resonates strongly with us in this time of ecological crisis. 

Hopkins' highly original, even revolutionary, style is in sharp contrast to his retiring life as a Jesuit priest. The striking images and vigorous unconventional rhythms express a love of and feeling for the vitality of nature, and an existential grappling with the questions of life. 

Le Chêne de Flagey (Gustave Courbet)

Following on from yesterday's post on tradition, the symbol and the tree, thank you Cécile for your very interesting comments about the painter Courbet. Here is the painting you mention, Le Chêne de Flagey of 1864 (The Oak at Flagey) that you mentioned. I can't add anything better than your comments below, and the extraordinary painting itself: "Quand je lis ce texte superbe sur le symbolisme de l'arbre, je pense immédiatement au Chêne de Flagey de Gustave Courbet. Un chêne tellement grand qu'il sort du cadre. Sa cime, ses frondaisons, ses racines échappent à l'emprise du cadre qui pourtant le magnifie. Et ce chêne, c'est Courbet lui-même, fort, résistant, déterminé, enraciné dans sa terre du Jura, et s'épanouissant à Paris."

Click below for the painting:

Tradition - The symbol of the Tree

In class we often, necessarily, talk of tradition. The knee-jerk reaction might be rejection of tradition because, throughout history, those embodying forms of tradition have often abused positions of power in its name. But we are talking about something quite different here. It is not dusty and fuddy-duddy, blocking the way for us to the newness and freshness we all long for. Quite the opposite.

There are archetypal patterns, symbols, some of them shared by the whole of humanity. We are born into a world which is Nature itself, our own bodies firstly; and Nature, the rain, storms, cloudy skies, birdsong, sunrise, are among our very first impressions, and accompany us all throughout our lives, in joyful and harder times. They speak to us deeply, on deeper levels than we can really, fully articulate, and the artists naturally turn to this primordial language. So we might define tradition as the universal 'language' which speaks to us because it conforms to or reflects our unchanging inner natures as human beings. 

This language can take the form of story, legend, myth, such as the myths of Creation, the Fall of Man, Divine vengeance, the Flood, the great Quest of the Holy Grail, or the journeys across the seas, tales of exile and return to the kingdom. These narratives underpin many if not most of our great stories and dramas, because they are the eternal blueprint of what our lives actually are, unfolding in time as narrative, and encountering the storms and clear skies of all voyages. We all begin at home, leave, and in some way return. These stages, or phases, might be related to location, or not. Whatever they are, we all experience them as feeling, impression, sensation, intuition.

I don't think any great artists can be disconnected from tradition. They may react against it, as was the case of the Modernists, but that was in the knowledge of what they were reacting against.

Below is an extract from Northrop Frye's The Great Code, a brilliant study of biblical language, image and story, in relation to other traditions. This part concerns the networks of meaning related to the tree. They include of course the cross, as demonic image and image of salvation, Adam, Jack and the Beanstalk, the Hanged Man of the Tarot pack.

What could be more primordial than the tree, symbolically, and literally? It gives shade to man and animal, it is a habitat for millions of creatures, its roots burrow deep into the earth as we need roots, it stands vertically as we stand, 'dressé vers le Ciel', as Rémi Brague describes mankind's unique stance on the Earth in his remarkable study of our place in the Cosmos: https://www.amazon.fr/Sagesse-monde-Histoire-lexp%C3%A9rience-lunivers/dp/2253943223/ref=sr_1_7?__mk_fr_FR=%C3%85M%C3%85%C5%BD%C3%95%C3%91&dchild=1&keywords=remi+brague&qid=1603101585&sr=8-7

and its branches recall our hair, or can be the mirror image of the roots in the Earth but crisscrossing the sky.

Click on the link below to access the Frye document in pdf form:

Kathleen Raine: The Use of the Beautiful

In these challenging times, perhaps the most challenging nationally and globally since the last world war, it is important we turn to the great values of our cultures, and look for unity in all things. For millenia, Beauty has been central to philosophy and artistic creation, and in this essay, from her remarkable collection Defending Ancient Springs, the poetess Kathleen Raine affirms these eternal principles. 

This blog is a space for open enquiry and debate, so when you read the essay, add your comments in the comments section of the site, your thoughts, questions, anything that comes to mind. Do not hesitate. Say something, because these thoughts cannot leave us indifferent!

Click on the link below to download the essay in pdf format. 

For Hypokhâgne 811 - Extract from Herman Melville's 'Moby-Dick'

For those absent from class yesterday, here is the extract from Melville's Moby-Dick. For Friday 6th November you need to come to class with questions 1, 2, 3 and 4 prepared in note form for oral presentation. Have a good break!

Click on the link below to download and print out the document:

Two translations (versions) for Hypokhâgne 811

 For those absent from class yesterday, here are the two short texts to translate. You need to prepare the first one, for presentation in class on Friday 13th November. Have a good holiday, keep well!

Click on the link below to access and print out the pdf document:

Middle English literature

Since the Norman invasion of 1066, Anglo-Saxon had been displaced as the language of the court and the ruling classes of England, and was mainly spoken by the peasant classes. The English kings and queens spoke French for going on three hundred years. And very few high-ranking members of society spoke English. But a big shift was underway in the 14th century and English was back with a vengeance, in new and exciting ways! Freed from imposed rules and customs, it had taken on a life of its own, evolving 'underground' at its own pace and integrating elements from French especially. This vastly increased its scope, its vocabulary and idiom, and it was rapidly regaining respectability among the learned and the elites of the country. The tendancy was encouraged by the highly nationalistic outlook of the king, Edward III (1312-1377), who spoke English, and expressed pride in the language. When Henry IV claimed the throne in 1399, he did so in front of Parliament, in English. Nothing could stop it now.

Ted Hughes: The Birthday Letters

Ted Hughes is widely regarded as one of the greatest post-war British poets. He came from Yorkshire, and wrote mainly nature poetry, expressing the ruggedness and an often dark side to the animal world. He is also known for having been the husband of American poetess Sylvia Plath, until she took her life in 1963. Late on in life, and many years after his marriage to Plath, Hughes wrote a powerful set of poems addressed to her, published in 1998, and called Birthday Letters. This verse stands out starkly from his other work, and is deeply intimate and personal, expressing his love and pain, as he tries to come to terms with this difficult period of his life.

By following the link below, you will find the deeply symbolic poem, 'Sam', about an incident during which Sylvia Plath loses control of her horse:

"A Room of One's Own" by Virginia Woolf - broadcast on BBC Radio 4

The HK class have been writing a commentary on Virginia Woolf's Mrs Dalloway. This morning while listening to BBC Radio 4 over breakfast, I heard they are going to be broadcasting a dramatisation of her major work, A Room of One's Own. Interestingly, it was recorded during lockdown with actors and production team all in rooms of their own. It should be very good.

Virginia Woolf's funny, provoking and insightful feminist text on female creativity dramatised for radio by Linda Marshall Griffiths.

Part of Electric Decade: classic titles that influenced and characterised the 1920's.

It is 1928, a woman is asked to talk of women and writing. In the university town of 'Oxbridge' she is refused entry to the gardens and library and discovers the poverty of the one female college there. She searches the British Museum library for proof that women even existed in history.

You will find the link below to click on and listen. It will be available shortly after broadcast tomorrow 31st May:

'Passage to Modernity' - evolution of the self, of language, and literary forms

In previous posts I have published thoughts on artistic creation from philosophers and poets. What interests me in particular is the evolution in our sense of selfhood over the centuries; because how we conceive of ourselves today is radically different from how our ancestors did, in the Classical world, in the Medieval Age, the Renaissance and the Early Modern period. It can be enriching to think of these things, because they allow us to see our own confused and difficult times perhaps at one remove, putting them in healthy perspective.

It is difficult to introduce such thinking without making inaccurate generalisations. Yet we could say that in ancient societies there existed a sense of the self not just in relation to itself, or the collective, but the cosmic; that the individual was not seen as a discete, atomistic entity with its private desires and concerns in isolation, but as a part of a cosmic whole, with its God or pantheon of gods, its mythologies, its cosmologies, cosmogonies, astronomy and astrology, and its ancestors. When we read poetry, epic or shorter poems, watch plays or read novels, rarely do we see these phenomena as quite unique and special, and lying within a long evolution of the human story. Shakespeare seen in this way is revolutionary, Hamlet, hugely modern, the novel, a recent invention inconceivable until relatively recent times. The question is, Why?

The modern period is characterised by the increased significance given to the individual, while the cosmic sense has withdrawn entirely, to leave mankind thrown back upon himself, with quite different existential and artistic questions from before. 

The extract below, from Louis Dupré's excellent work Passage to Modernity (1993, Yale University), traces, from this wide perspective, the ways in which our sense of self and the world have changed, and thereby changed the very literary forms we now take for granted. 

Dupré also, necessarily, considers how our conception of language itself has changed fundamentally with this shift towards the discrete individual.

Dupré's is dense thinking, but wonderful to grasp. I think that giving it time and staying carefully with it can reap very great rewards!

Click on the link below to download the pdf document:

'O sweet spontaneous...': e e cummings (HK)

e e cummings was a leading figure in the American Modernist movement. Like the manner of writing  his name, his poems are idiosyncratic; lower-case letters and an absence of punctuation. He nevertheless, like most Modernists, remains traditional on many levels along with being avant-garde; his themes of love, use of the sonnet form, and a shared affinity with the Romantics. 

You will find one of his most famous poems, 'O sweet spontaneous...' by clicking on the link below. We will be looking at this in class.

Poetry by Vernon Watkins - for HK and anyone who loves a good poet!

Vernon Watkins (1906-1967) was a Welsh poet, translator and painter. During his lifetime he was highly regarded, though never at the height of fashion. He has since been rather neglected, unlike his friend and fellow Welshman, Dylan Thomas. Watkins took poetry very seriously, from his ealiest years: "I was already writing poems when I was seven or eight, and between that age and twelve bought the English poets one by one". These early years were marked by great ambition and determination to become recognised, but he came to care little, if not at all, for fame or recognition, only for the vision and craftsmanship needed in all good poetry. This is grounded, in Watkins' verse, in an uncompromising modernity, at the same time as drawing on tradition. As he said: "The fountain, what is it? What is ancient, what is fresh".

Here is a sonnet he wrote about poetry itself, from Fidelities (1967):

The prose purveyors of doubt, the dismantlers of

Ecstasy, who traffic without a god

In broken metre, would have their Pegasus shod

Wth discord, not strict numbers. At love they scoff,

And then, in the revolution of anti-love,

Unsheathe chaos, the death of the period,

While a new Sibyl, shrieking above her tripod,

Proclaims transformation, treachery, trough.

Yet even the disenchanted, disordered, fret

For lost order. Breakers recall rhyme,

Anchors weighed, and divine proportions set.

As hawk hovers, as compass needle in time

Flies unswerving, steadied, where the stars climb,

Fixed laws hallow what none can forget.

to curry favour: "flatter, seek favour by officious show of courtesy or kindness"

Through the miracle of association, which can lead you all sorts of places, I got to thinking about this rather wonderful and strange expression in English: to curry favour. I found, remarkably, that it has nothing to do with either Indian spices, or 'favour'. 

It all began while reading Les Trois Mousquetaires, when I recently came across some colourful verbs like 'ferrailler' and "étriller un cheval". Not knowing much about things equestrian, I wanted to find out the English for "étriller", which is (specialists might correct me) 'to curry', or 'to currycomb' a horse. This led in turn to wondering what brushing down a horse had to do with one of my favourite dishes, so I began an investigation into 'curry', and this is what I found in Skeat's exciting (no irony intended) etymological dictionary:

The Culture of Modernity - Charles Taylor (HK/KH)

In a much earlier post, I put up a chapter from the Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor's excellent work, Sources of the Self. I have chosen another chapter to put on line for you, which I think is particularly interesting and useful, from a literary point of view. It comes in the middle of a long enquiry into the evolution of a sense of self, from the Middle Ages to this point in his study: the eighteenth century. So it might not be fully understandable at the outset. Be patient, it is a good read! And Taylor has the virtue of being clear and intellectually integral.

His approach here is quite literary, because he refers to the growing trend and development of the novel at this time, particularly in Britain, but with references to France, for example Rousseau's La Nouvelle Héloïse. He mentions Pamela (1740) and Clarissa (1748), two epistolary novels (a fashionable form at the time) by Samuel Richardson, and of course Daniel Defoe's works, which all embodied the new sense of importance given to 'sentiment', and the moral value of 'noble and good' sentiment within the context of relationship, especially marriage. It was also the time in which greater validity was given to childhood, as a distinct period in life. We can see future elements of Romanticism in embryonic form.

Upmost in this thinking is the growth of the private sphere, along with the importance given to 'the ordinary life', all of which we now take for granted. He articulates this as a major shift from 'archetypal' vision to the subject being the locus of meaning, particularly in its quality of instrumental, reasoning subject. The new understanding replaces the traditional cosmology based on hierarchy. Whereas before (and we can see this in Shakespeare) Nature corresponded to and found an echo in human being through a cosmology structured around hierarchies which could be disrupted, now what counts is the effect Nature has on us, the locus of feeling, and the way it reflects our feelings, our mood. This developed over a long period, and the novel, with its attention to the detail of ordinary life, expressed and reinforced this.

You will find the chapter by clicking on the link below:

Owen Barfield on poetic language (Kh/HK)

Here are some interesting thoughts by Owen Barfield, friend of Tolkien and C. S. Lewis, and one of the Inklings. This chapter, ‘Language and Poetry’, comes from his major, highly influential work Poetic Diction: A Study of Meaning.

Barfield here considers the stages through which poetry and poetic vision have passed, and the accompanying changes in language and thought. He begins, in a necessarily simplistic way, with the ‘concrete vocabulary’ of the world’s first mythologies, to Greek mythology as vector of meaning alongside living Nature, to the language of modernity. 

Particularly interesting are his remarks on the ancient Greek language of Homer being ‘looser’ than our more usual ‘architectural’ linguistic and poetic forms: ‘a living, muscular organism rather than as a structure...’. This move from an ‘organic’, ‘fluid’ type of poetry to the ‘architectural’ he places more or less in English from the seventeenth century onwards, for instance in Milton and the Metaphysicals, not so much in Chaucer or Shakespeare. The more ‘fluid’ types of verse are made for reciting, the more ‘architectural’, for reading, for seeing on the page.

He draws out the inherent tension between the ‘rational’ and the ‘poetic’ in the history of poetic utterance; the ‘rational, abstracting, formal principle’ and the ‘primal flow of meaning’. It is surely in a great poet like Shakespeare that we find the perfect balance; the great intelligence of an organising principle working with the ‘flow’ of life.

Compare the extracts of Shakespeare we have studied with Milton or John Donne, for example. The seventeenth century really is a watershed. Think of Milton's highly elaborate poetic architecture, the latinate syntax. I think in the twentieth century T. S. Eliot gave much thought to this, and brought back in a modern way the organic forms of poetic utterance in the context of Modernism.

Click here to download the chapter in pdf format:

'Fell' - let's look at a word

It is always healthy and interesting to stop for a second and look at a word. On this blog there are several posts on words (if you look at the categories on the left), on their origins, their etymology. When you start looking, you can see how each word is special, whereas before, probably, we just skimmed over it (as we only can most of the time). But each word is exciting, even the most apparently ordinary, and contains a whole history. 

In the post below I mentioned the 'fells' of Cumbria, a beautiful part of North West England which I recommend for anyone who likes walking, hiking and the great outdoors. 

So, apart from being the preterit of the verb to fall, what does fell mean, and where does today's word come from if it's a noun? 

This is what an etymological dictionary tells us, as we peer through the mists of time...:

BBC Radio 4: 'Yeats and Mysticism'

BBC broadcaster and writer Melvyn Bragg explores the strange and mystical world of the poet W B Yeats.

You will find the link below to the 2002 episode of BBC Radio 4's In Our Time on Yeats. Yeats, one of the greatest poets of the late nineteenth and first half of the twentieth century, was naturally drawn to many sources of spiritual knowledge, all of which nourished his extraordinary verse. We don't have to "believe" in these things of course, but they are part of him, and his complex character and deep soul.

Reading a novel by Patrick Modiano today, I came across a quotation ('I hear the Shadowy Horses, their long manes a-shake') from one of Yeats' most celebrated and powerful poems. Here it is, with the following lines. This is part of a much bigger poem. It is both apocalyptic in its images, and immensely gentle and loving:

He Bids His Love Be At Peace

I hear the Shadowy Horses, their long manes a-shake,
Their hoofs heavy with tumult, their eyes glimmering white;
The North unfolds above them clinging, creeping night,
The East her hidden joy before the morning break,
The West weeps in pale dew and sighs passing away,
The South is pouring down roses of crimson fire:
O vanity of Sleep, Hope, Dream, endless Desire,
The Horses of Disaster plunge in the heavy clay:
Beloved, let your eyes half close, and your heart beat
Over my heart, and your hair fall over my breast,
Drowning love's lonely hour in deep twilight of rest,
And hiding their tossing manes and their tumultuous feet.

Click on the link below to listen to the BBC Radio podcast:

Review of Achill: The Island - by John F. Deane

There are still many very good poets writing today. One of my favourites is the Irishman John F. Deane, who is greatly influenced by Kathleen Raine herself, and by Gerard Manley Hopkins, Ted Hughes, the Romantics, and many more besides. I would highly recommend this beautiful collection inspired by his island of birth, off the coast of Ireland. It contains twenty-five remarkable poems, illustrated by John Behan.

A Tribute to Kathleen Raine, her work and vision - Paris, March 2021

We are organising an international event around the work of the poet Kathleen Raine which will take place in Paris in March 2021. It will include guest speakers from France and abroad, talks on her poetry, her essays and autobiographies, her work on Yeats and Blake and other poets, as well as "tables rondes" on translations of her work into French and the Temenos Academy, which she founded in the early nineteen nineties. Here are the links to the Sorbonne pages for further information: