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April 28, 2014 at 3:39 pm #408Devon PoniatowskiParticipant
Joseph, I’m interested in what you mentioned about the “intellectual distance” that Heaney assumes in his work, especially in the bog poems where he does romanticize death and corpses. I think it is important to note that Heaney (over and over again) tries to rationalize the place of his art amongst the violence—as if the art is a meditation in itself that directly questions the input/output relationship that poetry can have with the society in which it is written. The depth of your post brings me back to the very first poem I read from Heaney in Death of a Naturalist, “Digging”. The mention of the pen resting in the speaker’s hand “snug as gun” seems to be an assertion from Heaney that the speaker has faith in his art, specifically contrasted against the violent imagery evoked by the gun.
Your post has me thinking about the opening poem in a new light, as it introduces the conflict of memory (and all of its idealized mirages) vs. truthful historic preservation. After reading this post, I have come to interpret this poem in a new light. Heaney has learned the motion of digging from his father, who learned it from his “old man,” and therefore Heaney’s version of digging becomes reduced in a sense: merely another distraction from the real questions at hand. From this line of understanding, the act of digging becomes a passive action that is seeped in a degree of avoidance. Also, digging into the soil requires the destruction of ROOTS. It’s not surprising that readers may be drawn to the connection between the idea of familial relations and the roots of plants that ground plants in soil. Heaney’s speaker seems to struggle with the acceptance of his roots. This idea in Heaney’s work is very Yeats-inspired. Heaney’s speaker may then view his “pen” as more of an escape than a weapon that can bring about notable transformation.
Going back to the your post, I want to address the question of Heaney’s own conscience, and note a similar observation that appears in “Digging”: the (perceived) attempt from Heaney to rationalize his actions through the previous behaviors vested in the patterns of his family lineage.
April 23, 2014 at 2:43 pm #398Devon PoniatowskiParticipantTherese, I think you raise a valid point. Honestly, how can one plant bombs and then make a statement that there was no intent to kill? I am reminded of a certain mentality that men of the American revolution had when it came to the consideration of violence, and its perceived “necessity” in the realm of generating change within a firmly rooted ideological structure. Consider this quote from Thomas Jefferson: “The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is its natural manure.” This quote is from a letter that Jefferson wrote to W. Smith in 1787. The mentality it presupposes is relevant when discussing the uprisings in Ireland. Along these lines, I resonated with another sentiment in the video, which implied there can be no peace without war or violence—in other words, the light does not exist if there is no dark. I’m not entirely sure where I fall on the spectrum of these ideas—I would not want to project a view that insinuates I am a supporter of wars. I will note, however, that the video footage we’ve been exposed to has put my opinion of revolution and revolt in a new frame. I understand better that there are moments when forceful retaliation is needed in the face of injustice.
I say the above fully aware of the contradicting ideas that spring from it. For example, there is much to be gained by meditating on the political tactics of Ghandi and the “eye for an eye” argument… even still, I do see that uprising is sometimes the action that must be taken–the action that will elicit the most change in the quickest amount of time. These thoughts are challenging my interpretation of poetry’s role in political discourse: what is it in poetry (and even in other dimensions of art) that incur change and inspire/fuel revolutionary movements? Heaney himself seems to ruminate on this question, for example in part six of “Singing School”: “How did I end up like this? […]/ As I sit weighing and weighing/ my responsible tristia./ For what? For the ear? For the people?” In this section of the poem, it seems to me that Heaney is questioning poetry’s place within the violence of revolution. If the writing is for the people, how is it justifiable when people are causing chaos and killing one another? If he is writing for the ear, how is that any good in the face of greater forces that are causing destruction? Is there room for art in midst of the raging tides of uprising and war? I would personally say yes: Heaney’s poetry—at least in the context of our class—provides a lens through which the reader can learn to humanize the conflicts in Ireland at the time of the Terrors. Heaney’s act of writing poetry is an admission, and arguably a counter to the quote from Jefferson, that there are non-violent responses to war that can elicit change and challenge the roots of ideological systems. Heaney bring this idea to light in his reference to Goya: Art has an important place in the discourse of political change, and ignoring that fact only fosters greater violence to an already chaotic circumstance.
March 23, 2014 at 7:54 pm #288Devon PoniatowskiParticipantI think it is interesting that you have paired Maslow’s theory of self-actualization with Yeats’s Michael Robartes and the Dancer. When I first read the poems from this collection, I had a similar reaction: the poems seemed to be slighting women. I even wrote a blog post about “A Prayer for my Daughter,” in reaction to how the piece seemed to be constricting female energy, rather than enriching it. After doing a little research on Yeats and letting this speculation permeate, I came to a new understanding of the poems presented in Michael Robartes. I’ll share some of my thoughts:
It didn’t make sense to me that Yeats would use his art to demean women, in part because he was a huge collaborator with A. Gregory, and a lot of his poetry revolves around women who he has loved. In the same vein as Shakespeare, Yeats had his “Dark Lady” (Maud? Her daughter?), toward whom he expressed bitterness and resentment in his work—but still, it does not seem to me that Yeats is anti-women, or even anti-feminist.
To elaborate, I want to touch on your point concerning Maslow and self-actualization. After reading some of what Maslow had to philosophize, he seems to write for the men, about the men. He speaks of the collective as an exclusively masculine body. With this in mind, I believe Yeats is reacting to (and actually fighting against) a male supremacist mentality in the poem “Michael Robartes and the Dancer.” For example, Yeats explicitly details that the “she” of the piece is a dancer—an artist and tool within a collective force of energy. This alone is a strong indication that the woman (dancer) is the poem’s heroine. Additionally, the reader * should * grow immediately skeptical of the man in the poem, as his first expression to the woman is “opinion is not worth a rush.” He is encouraging the woman to abandon her opinions. She continually challenges the man in the poem, stating “and must no beautiful woman be/ Learned like a man?” This question appears to be rhetorical, but it is answered by the man who encourages the woman to focus on the state of her body rather than the state of her cultivated mind. The woman’s response is golden, as she states: “there is great danger in the body,” (ephemerality, vanity) — and later says, “My wretched dragon is perplexed.” I interpret the dragon to be the woman’s mind–her opinions that grow and are potentially subject to being “tamed” by the man/ the mentality of male superiority.
In the cited lines above, the woman/dancer reveals her contradiction: a woman is far more than merely her body, though the traditional male mentality may not agree. Her last line enforces the feministic quality of the poem, as she says, “they say such different things at school.” In my opinion, this line speaks to the ability of education to transform the traditional roles of women, encourage women to question and rise above their oppression, and propel women forward as intellectuals capable of cultivating the artistic collective–much like Yeats’s dancer in the poem.
March 3, 2014 at 4:28 am #272Devon PoniatowskiParticipantHarry, something you said has me thinking a bit more about the stark and ironic differences between Yeats’s earlier, dreamy poems (from “The Rose,” for instance) and the futile ones we are now getting in to (from “The Tower”). You’ve mentioned that “we escape the dreamy mystical side of [Yeats’s] work” once we encounter his later poems, and that his poems become “mind-bendingly contradictory” in comparison with each other. I want to add on to your argument by commenting on Yeats’s use of the rose as a symbol in his earlier work—and how it seems to evolve into a representation of ephemerality.
In art history for example, flower paintings are often more than a mere depiction of loveliness: they’re a confrontation of life’s transience. A flower blooms and dies so quickly… Its existence in full flourish is short–lived. It’s interesting that in Yeats’s early work, he puts such blind faith in the beauty of the rose and the rose’s potential, almost as if his later poems (as they call to mind the reality of old age, death, and the illusory idea of beauty) rebut the poems he wrote when he was younger. I have to wonder if Yeats had a sense of this inevitability from the beginning? It is interesting to learn about Yeats’s gyre philosophy from “A Vision,” and think of it in relation to his belief in the cyclical nature of history. I think that the change in symbolism of the rose (from ideal beauty via cultivation, to ultimate and inescapable ephemerality) fits very well into Yeats’s dedication to “phases” and the idea that experiences progress in cycles. The idea also works to negate the assumption that the rose is desirable and worthy of being sought; it will ultimately wither no matter what sort of cultivation it undergoes to attain fleeting beautification.
February 10, 2014 at 6:01 pm #217Devon PoniatowskiParticipantThe link to Platonic philosophy is really interesting! It seems to me that Yeats is looking down on the middle class that labors for security—content with the dull, artificial flame within the cave, not valorous enough to seek beyond the domain of learned protection. Yeats’s motif of the color grey also plays into this idea—modernity as a sun-less, (truth-less?) province. If Plato’s form of THE GOOD is the ultimate object of knowledge, it makes sense that Yeats is drawing on the cloistered mind of the poet/artist to conjure the notion of “truth” and passion.
Joe’s reading of “Upon a House” inspires me to consider this: the house in the poem may represent the “artistic essence”—built carefully, with dedication and toil. In its loneliness, it is threatened by the common strife of the Irish middle class (that also threatens the evolution of art in society). It seems plausible that Yeats would craft a metaphoric poem, which draws on the political conditions (land wars?), in relation to its “ruinous” affect on the artist and the notion of “The Good” in Irish society. We see this admission by Yeats in “To a Shade,” where he declares that the true artists of yore “had enough sorrow before death” and are “safer in the tomb.” This is Yeats’s resignation from modernity, as he encounters this realization: the society he is observing exists in a vacuum of ingenuous labor and “grey” reality.
- This reply was modified 10 years, 3 months ago by Devon Poniatowski.
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