Reading Perdita: Spoiler Alert!

Reading Perdita: Spoiler Alert!

In Shelley’s The Last Man, Perdita, Lionel’s sister is an intriguing character. Her name is a Shakespearian reference to The Winter’s Tale. In Shakespeare’s play, Perdita is the Sicilian princess unaware of her own royal status because her father, King Leonotes, suspected Queen Hermoine of adultery before Perdita was born. Perdita grows up poor, but in the plot of the play, learns of her royalty, is reunited with her parents, and lives happily ever after with her lover Florizel. Shelley’s Perdita is quite different. although their beginnings are quite similar. Both Perditas begin with nothing. And Shelley’s Perdita has fallen from a high position due to her father’s demise. Here the stories start to deviate. The suspected adultery in The Winter’s Tale is perhaps emulated in Shelley’s Perdita through her husband, Raymond’s infidelity later in the book. However, Shakespeare’s Perdita enjoys a happy ending. Shelley’s does not. When Lionel decides to take Perdita away from the city Raymond died against her will, she takes her own life. After all, the name “Perdita” means “loss” in Italian. And maybe in her own way, Shelley uses her own Perdita to rewrite Shakespeare. The Winter’s Tale is considered as one of his problem plays, as the first three acts are full of psychological tension, while the last three acts end as a comedy.

            Although, what seems even more interesting regarding Perdita is how Lionel describes her, especially in her childhood. Very early in the novel, he describes his sister as such: “If my darling and courage obtained for me a kind of respectful aversion, her youth and sex, since they did not excite tenderness, by proving her to be weak, were the causes of numberless mortifications to her; and her own was not to be constituted as to the evil effects of her lowly status” (11). Pretty harsh words to describe a young girl, let alone a sister. And it seems strange that Lionel regards Perdita’s status as low when his is no higher. At this point in the novel, they both have nothing. so why does Lionel perceive himself superior? Probably because he is a man, their only difference. And let’s also consider that when Perdita is older Lionel seems to miraculously find her less repugnant, and Shelley offers no explicit answer as to why. I believe the only possible reason is that when Perdita is older and at a mature age, she can offer something to society in Lionel’s eyes: she can bear children, when as a girl, she had no such ability. Perhaps in this way, Shelley is very subtly critiquing the way men have only found value in women through their power of reproduction. And perhaps that better explains why Perdita kills herself. When Raymond dies, she no longer has the opportunity to bear children. This is only one way that Shelley puts forward a feminist argument in The Last Man.

            

Strange Future

I am still trying to understand whether Shelley’s vision of the future in The Last Man is purposefully inaccurate. In my original draft for a paper on this novel, I wrote the following:

"Early in the second chapter, the narrator completely disrupts the sense of time by discussing the year 2073 in past tense. However, to modern readers the text’s description of world in 2073 is obviously, almost laughably, false. Most interesting, it appears Shelley never really attempted to present a true vision of the future. For instance, despite the openings of railways in Britain and America prior to the writing of the novel, the text contains no images of trains, railways, or even steam engines. When characters in the novel decide to travel long distances quickly, they utilize a hot air balloon with feathered wings. Much of the novel’s plot revolves around the Greek and Turkish wars. Moreover, many of the early events in the text take place in a world that can only be described as pastoral, with no sense of modern industrialization. Surely this is not Shelley’s best guess at the state of the world over 250 years in the future. "

However, after reading Shelley’s History of a Six Weeks Tour, I am no longer feel quite so confident about this statement. The time just before Shelley wrote the novel feels as alien as the future would have seemed to her. Moreover, technology has allowed the world to move forward at a constantly accelerating speed. Shelley would have known about the railway, but may not have had any clue about how quickly society would accelerate technologically. On the other hand, she may have been aware of the upcoming changes, but been more interested in preserving Britain in its current state.

Does Shelley lack foresight? Or does she purposely maintain her vision of Britain in an attempt to raise Britain to the level of Greece and Rome as eternal cities?

On eating animals

I'd recently read Bob Comis's blog entries about reconciling loving yet killing his "humanely" raised hogs--though we haven't talked a lot about animals in terms of the ecological thought, this is an interesting read:

http://theamericanscholar.org/loving-animals-to-death/#.UzTAEVwVJa1

Critical Response to Timothy Morton’s

 “Of Matter and Meter:  Environmental Form in Coleridge’s ‘Effusion 35’ and ‘The Eolian Harp’

I must confess that at the beginning of the essay, I felt very upbeat that this article was going to be a great one, due to the fact that very early on it seemed Morton would point out a more effective manner in which literature could assume environmental concerns.  Perhaps this article did complete that mission, but not for the reasons Morton endeavored to point out.

            Morton tells us that “A truly ecological reading practice, then, would think the environment out of the box – it would include as much as it could of the radical openness of the ecological thought, the profoundest possible meditation on how everything is interconnected.”  While I totally agree with this line of reasoning, my challenge is the pathway through which Morton chooses to accomplish this feat. 

            We follow him down roads of thought about aperture and how Coleridge has left the poem open in such a fashion; how it was given a number with its title because Coleridge “treats the poem itself as an object;” brings up witchery and the fact that witchery is also sorcery, talks about vibrations, and suggests that the eolian harp was a symbol, so to speak, of automation and materialism, two outgrowths of the Industrial Revolution.  While I believe it is true that Coleridge was not favorable toward the Industrial Revolution, due to its effects on humanity, the environment, and life in general as it was known to him, I don’t see any undeniable evidence of any of those claims in Coleridge’s poem.

            I do not deny that the eolian harp is an excellent symbol of the beauty of sound and the potential it has for allowing the breeze to materialize in a way other than the obvious (feeling); and, that this can all be interconnected to show the wonders of the environment and its effect upon humanity.  It seems to me that in the poem, “And what if all of animated nature / Be but organic Harps diversly fram’d, / That tremble into thought, as o’er them sweeps, / Plastic and vast, one intellectual Breeze, / At once the Soul of each, and God of all?” Coleridge is assigning a reverential signification to the harp, not one attached to automation or materialism.

           Morton ends by telling us that “What ‘Effusion 35’ suggests, then, is a deeply deconstructive ecological view, a materialist view that is nevertheless spiritual, but not metaphysical.”  I do not agree with this conclusion.  Except for some very minimal suggestive words, as far as I am concerned, the poem may only have been the beautiful words he spoke to the woman he loved.

            Thoughts for discussion:  Does anyone agree with Morton?  Does anyone fully understand what Morton was endeavoring to say?

Coleridge's Synesthetic Ode to String Theory

Coleridge's "The Eolian Harp" displays an incredibly intimate relationship between the poet and nature. In this poem, the poet exhibits synesthetic abilities as he sees and hears the sound of nature playing his lute. In the poem, the lute remains encased, but plays music as nature sweeps across its strings.

Coleridge demonstrates a sort of super-hearing in this poem as he listens to the lute's silent melody.  The poet states, "And that simplest Lute, / Placed length-ways in the clasping casement, hark!" Moreover, the sound is given material form as "melodies round honey-dripping flowers. This level of hearing is heightened even more when he compares light and sound stating, "A light in sound, a sound-like power in light, / Rhythm in all thought, and joyance every where—" Thus, while Clare listens to real sounds, this poem presents Coleridge with an ability to become fully immersed in nature.

Even more fascinating is the poet's view of nature. He inquires, “And what if all of animated nature/Be but organic Harps diversely fram'd,/That tremble into thought, as o'er them sweeps/ Plastic and vast, one intellectual breeze,/At once the Soul of each, and God of all?” The poet's description of nature sounds extremely close to string theory, the scientific idea that suggests that all of nature is made of tiny vibrating strings. Coleridge's acute listening has actually produced an extremely astute understanding of the universe.


I do find it strange that the poet so quickly repents for his meditations on nature. He seems to enter a sort of religious state as he pictures nature playing the lute's strings, but seems to be afraid to admit it, feeling incredibly guilty at the end of the poem. Through this poem, Coleridge creates interesting chords as he connects sound and light, and as he challenges the superiority of religion over naturalism.

Nature Versus Man in DW's Alfoxden Journal and Clare's Poems

I found a strange consistency in thematic content and subject matter in all three of our readings for this week, but felt this connection most strongly between Dorothy Wordsworth's Alfoxden journal and Clare's poems. The Alfoxden journal seems like a collection of reflections on "rambles" (akin to Clare's titular ramble), where the Grasmere journal seemed more concerned with the putting-down of daily routines and social interactions. At the heart of both selections, however, I find an affinity for nature's peculiarities and an aversion to man's dominion over them.

What I find most fascinating about the Alfoxden journals is that they are written largely in fragment form, where the Grasmere journal seemed more "journalistic," for lack of a better term. The Alfoxden journal verges on poetic language at various points, most so when DW seems particularly impassioned over her subject matter. This heightened passion also seems to coincide with DW's "rambles," both those accompanied and unaccompanied. DW notes after a walk in January that she and her party "could never hear [the sea] in summer," which they "attribute . . . partly to the bareness of the trees, but chiefly to the absence of the singing of birds, the hum of insects, that noiseless noise which lives in the summer air" (142). This noted absence of birds and insects smacked of Clare's "bird poems," with their precision and display of specialized knowledge (I was reminded of Stephanie Kuduk Weiner's comment about how expert ornithologists can identify birds not only by their calls, but also simply by the sound of their wings.)

On page 152, DW describes the "squire's grounds": "Quaint waterfalls about, where Nature was very successfully striving to make beautiful what art had deformed--ruins, hermitages . . . In spite of all these things, the dell romantic and beautiful, though everywhere planted with unnaturalised trees. Happily we cannot shape the huge hills, or carve out the valleys according to our fancy." It is interesting to note that where DW is concerned with the additions man has made to the landscape (the ruins and hermitages, and the "unnaturalised" trees, which I take for an invasive or non-native species [or at the very least, trees planted for show/landscaping purposes]), Clare is rather upset by man's deductions, as in "To a Fallen Elm." Addressing the tree, Clare describes the relationship between the elm and the axman who chops it down: "I see a picture that thy fate displays / And learn a lesson from thy destiny / Self interest saw thee stand in freedoms ways / So thy old shadow must a tyrant be" (97). Clare later chides the axman for "bark[ing] of freedom" as he cuts down the tree, and describes him in no uncertain terms as an "oer bearing fool" (98). "Such was thy ruin music making elm" (98), Clare mourns, making another unintentional parallel with DW's description of the trees' roles in the summer's "noiseless noise."

Though Clare's rhetoric is decidedly more political than DW's, they seem to share the same concern--that man's additions and deductions may be impacting the environment in equally destructive ways, and that at the heart of this destruction is man's desire for agency over nature. I am thus fascinated by this idea of "man's freedom" versus "nature's tyranny"...what can we make of this dilemma? Are the details noted by Clare and DW examples of ecophobia? Are these passages to be read as attempts to dismantle the stranglehold of the picturesque, the first rumblings of industrialization, or both?

"Comforts Cottage" in Clare and Coleridge's Poetry

In the three poems that Dr. Porter assigned, I find it interesting that each speaker affirms the aesthetic value and social significance of the domestic space. Each speaker, however, constructs a very different relationship between himself and that space. In tomorrow’s class, I think it would be beneficial to discuss how the domestic space is constructed in each of the poems.

In Clare's "Recollections after a Ramble," the speaker recalls the joy that he felt while walking through the English countryside. Even though this journey is characterized by the most mundane features of a rural landscape (cottages and trees), the speaker believes this "rout" leads to and enlightening experience (ll. 241-248). The cottage, which represents the domestic space here, is part of that journey, but it is not the end of the journey. The speaker finds enlightenment by standing outside the domestic space as an observer.

In “The Fallen Elm Tree,” the speaker envisions the tree as a domestic space. He refers to the elm as nature’s “domestic tree” (l. 18) and praises it for remaining “stedfast to thy home” (l. 19). The tree, firmly rooted and resistant to change, is important because it offers shelter to travelers on stormy nights. Those who take shelter underneath this tree enjoy “comforts never penned” (l. 14). Because of the tree’s social importance, the speaker considers the act of chopping it down to be an act against the community itself. Later in the poem, he laments the fact that “comforts cottage” has been replaced by “workhouse prisons” (ll. 57-58), a change that has left wild animals, domesticated animals, and human beings with no place to enjoy the comforts of a domestic space. 

The cottage as a domestic space is equally important in Coleridge’s “The Eolian Harp.” Here we find the cottage overgrown with jasmine and myrtle, but interestingly the speaker situates himself outside the cottage so that he and his beloved can observe the same clouds that thrill the speaker in Clare’s “Recollections.” The domestic space, as envisioned by Coleridge’s speaker, seems to link nature with domesticity and to create a space in which the speaker can contemplate that relationship.

Tomorrow, I would appreciate hearing everyone’s thoughts on the relationship between trees and cottages, between nature and domestic space, that are prominent in each of these poems.

What Does the Bird Say?

Stephanie Kuduk Weiner’s Listening With John Clare asserts that Clare’s poetry exhibits great progress through the act of acutely listening to nature and birdsong in particular. She begins her argument by suggesting that Clare’s use of first person allows him to help the reader learn to listen to nature in the same way as Clare. Weiner then explores Clare’s use of unusual syntax to bring various “sound images” to the foreground. The strongest portion of her argument is her assertion that Clare’s poems “present a coherent music whose separate sounds are shown to interrelate in numerous ways” (381). The sounds in “[The sparrow chirps the spring begun]” build on top of each other to create a quite noisy text. However, Weiner’s high praise of Clare’s use of onomatopoeia in The Progress of Rhyme falls short.

While Weiner makes a fairly strong argument to support her overall claims regarding the importance of listening in Clare’s works, I argue that Clare’s act of listening does not go far enough as his poetry does little more than record the birds’ sounds  while maintaining a human centric perspective. Weiner further claims that Clare’s use of first person clearly demonstrates the shift from his early poems to a more mature style. However, this is precisely the problem. Clare’s poems continue to describe nature as a sort of backdrop surrounding the enlightened poet.

Weiner’s primary evidence of Clare’s expertise in the use of onomatopoeia, his poem entitled The Progress of Rhyme, presents the nightingale’s song as either clearly enunciated gibberish or phrases sung directly to the benefit of Clare himself. While his precise recording of these sounds may be praised as an accomplishment, it does little to illuminate what statements or emotions the birds are actually voicing. This may seem like an impossible task, but at least striving to understand the meaning of these intonations and the possibility that they have nothing to do with the welfare or pleasure of humans would demonstrate true progress.

In many ways, this appears similar to the Ylvis’s 2013 hit song, The Fox (What Does the Fox Say?). While Clare’s poetry clearly presents a higher level of aesthetic value, the song was also praised for incorporating the true sounds of several species of fox. (See The Wired, “What Does the Fox Say?  The Viral Music Video Isn’t Totally Wrong” September 6, 2013.) Clare similarly records fairly accurate bird sounds, but this does not seem revolutionary for a poet. Poets have been attentive listeners of communication for centuries.

This is not to say that Clare is a poor poet or that these works do not provide evidence of an attentive ear to the sounds of nature. However, they also represent a human centric perspective that subverts true ecological awareness and a healthy relationship between man and the environment.

I am interested in further exploring comparisons among the relationships between Coleridge, Wordsworth, and Clare and the environment. Wordsworth seems to be more aware of problems caused by his intrusion into a natural setting.

I also would like to examine how Clare’s “sound images” compare with the picturesque.

Finally, I would like to know if any other readers found Clare’s poems to be too noisy. By the time I finished reading them, I wanted peace and quiet. Does that prove their effectiveness?

 

Put a Bird on It--Clare's Bird Poems

It’s striking how often these poems tend to bring the reader’s gaze toward the ground: to weeds, puddles, flowers, pebbles, and, of course, the birds’ nests themselves. While some of Wordsworth’s poems observe nature through a narrower aperture (The Waterfall and the Eglantine, The Oak and the Broom, A Pastoral—both conspicuously personified and engaged in “lessons” of some sort), we could say Wordsworth is a poet more concerned with vistas and horizons. This made me wonder to what degree the Romantic poetic horizon or scope of vision is connected to class. What “horizon” is available to Clare, and, similarly, does Wordsworth’s affluence preclude certain types of engagement with the natural world? How might we situate Clare’s poetics (as we can determine it thus far) in terms of the critical material we’re engaging?

As Jason was, I was also interested in the lack of punctuation in Clare’s poems. The sonnets and poems written in short stanzas were much easier to read, and I wondered about the difference in communicative intent between, for example, Crows in Spring and The Robins Nest. Although there are many sonnet-length nest poems, I thought that the open-endedness of the longer poems might speak to an anxiety about not only closing things in (as mentioned in the introduction) but also about breaking some kind of covenant. The discoveries of Clare’s speakers are often very private events: how much is he trying to conceal even as he reveals?

While Clare personifies and projects as Wordsworth does, we almost get a sense of the poet shrinking in order to experience and report back from unexceptional yet hardly quotidian engagements with a nature both constructed and engaged much differently from Wordsworth’s. I found myself interested in the bird that “dreamth wrong” in The Firetails Nest juxtaposed with the clown who “thinks the strange bird guards a serpents nest” in The Wrynecks Nest. In Clare’s poems, neither people nor birds have a monopoly on “understanding” the world they belong to. As in The Nightingales Nest, the speakers, especially, seem to struggle toward that which remains “hidden as a thought unborn.” Is “deep ecology” behind this thought that Clare’s poems grope toward?

Clare's Bird Poems.

In Clare’s poems, there is a difference between the poems that have the “I” voice and those that more or less have a third person narrator. The “Thrushes Nest” and “The Wren” both (210-11), for example, present the “I” as a center around the beginning and the end of the poem; the ending is an expected outcome, presented in the past-tense. The expected outcome in the former is the “brood of natures minstrels” "witnessed" in the “sunshine and the laughing sky”; “the happy stories of the past,” in the latter, stabilizes the center of the perspective of the mediator. The poems in the third person, lacking the “I,” tend to be about moments of being—moments of performance or action, embedded within a moment of being—written in the present tense. “The March Nightingale,” for example, is written in the third person, in the present tense, and is about a bird performing an action in an indefinite space in time, carried on by the distant human mediator for an indefinite space in time: “. . . the wondering boy / Listens again—again the sound he hears / And mocks it in his song for very joy” (210). “Again” and “again” he "hears." This sense of perpetual stasis is augmented by the lack of punctuation. Any sentence, with commas, contractions, periods, etc., allows the reader to stop and start, to leave the poem and return to the following sentence without having to start over again from the beginning. These poems almost demand that you read them in one setting because of the lack of punctuation; the performance of reading mimics a sense of being in the moment. In this way, Clare mimics consciousness. How do you think these poems compares to L. B., that is, if he we think of L. B. as a guide to nature? Does Clare present a less commodifiable product by meddling with structure? What does he lose or gain?  

This might look familiar...

http://www.salon.com/2014/03/13/fairway_to_heaven_what_happens_to_an_abandoned_golf_course_partner/

Environmental Philosophy colloquium March 7

The Philosophy department hosts a series of talks that might be of interest to you. Here's the announcement for this week's event:

Our colloquium this week, the last one before Spring Break, will feature the Chuck Siegel, whose topic is

"Transhumanism and the Epic of Evolution."  Please joins us on Friday March 7th, EESAT room 115.

Abstract:  Since Darwin first presented evolutionary theory’s grand view of life, we have sought in it as much meaning as we have scientific fact. Leopold, for example, recognized in evolutionary theory a source for a “sense of kinship with fellow creatures,” and, an ethical foundation for valuing ecological processes. In contrast, mainstream transhumanists, such as Bostrom and Kurzweil, find in evolutionary theory much for humans to transcend, including organic evolution itself. Each approach has philosophical implications with regard to extant biodiversity. I suggest the latter approach, transhumanist philosophy, lays a foundation of disregard for extant biodiversity, and, as such, should be a source of concern to environmentalists. I will also suggest that it is not too late to remediate transhumanist philosophy with a “greener” understanding of evolution.

You can get on the mailing list for the philosophy dept. colloquium by contacting george.james@unt.edu

Crit Response to Heise (the other Ursula)

Quickly put, Ursula K. Heise's chapter “From The Blue Planet to Google Earth” is critiquing the well-established argument in environmentalism that to immerse ourselves in an ecological perspective we must be established in the local immediate environment, while, at best, conceptualizing the global. 

Heise believes authors such as Scott Russell Sanders, Wendell Berry and Gary Synder, for all the good they've done to promote the environmental movement, are fundamentally in a blind spot when the advocate that everybody root themselves in their own area. Blind because often only a certain kind of financial and educational privilege would allow for such immersing, “local” is always a thorny definition, and migration has been a defining element for all species since life has existed on this earth. 

The main problem though, as Heise sees it, is one of imagination. “Sense of place” as a sense of the immediate vicinity is a visionary dead end because it does not allow for the inclusion of the interregional and intercontinental connections, both natural and cultural, that shape the planet. Heise seems well-grounded when she points out that cultural criticism has long ago given up the strict understanding of people as defined by their localities. People are made up of many different kinds of places, influenced not by just their movements but also by cultural and ecological imports, a lesson that for some reason, environmentalism has yet to learn. 

What Heise wants to do is supplant the well-worn notions of sense of place as local with a more nuanced and, for her, accurate conception of how beings and communities inhabit the globe today and how allegory shapes our understanding. Given the vast influence of the Apollo 17 “Blue Planet” photo, a similar, updated allegory that makes connections could help comprehend the real, on-ground troubles of urban spaces as well as ecologically devastated areas. In which comes Heise’s metaphor of Google Earth, as a telescopic rendering not just of a blue-washed biosphere, but a nuanced, disjunctive world. With this interactive collage we can better imagine, create and shape our global understanding. Google Earth both overcomes the great cliche of “all-connectiveness” and sees past the localvore’s limiting sense of place. 

I find Heise’s arguments against the local persuasive but struggle to see where this could go on a practical level, even on a perceptual practical level. Any thoughts on that? Also, is she being strictly fair in her reduction of “sense of place” to the definition that she provides? Is she too-quickly overlooking the possible detriments to the “cosmopolitan” view she is arguing for? Is their something distinctly dubious in using a mega-corp’s center piece as her main environmental allegory or, contrarily is she just being more philosophically honest than the ecotypes who held up the Blue Planet photo as their rallying cry? 

As this relates to Lyrical Ballads, as I see it, though W&C are writing, I understand, with the Lakes District in mind, their poetical frames tend to have enough written complexity to, at least, hedge at the nuance Heise is arguing for. I hate to go back to well-tilled “Tintern” again, but there at least, we see, not so much an endearment to a particular locality, but to a state of mind. We can imagine that Tintern (to strictly speak of the narrator’s state of mind and not to the myriad other things going on in the poem) wouldn’t be so important as to whatever location caused Wordsworth to harken back to his youth regarding his eco-maturity now. As another example, In “Brothers,” thankfully the opposite of the obvious happens, and the regretful, estranged brother doesn’t set up shop in his home town, but instead departs, his trajectory ping-ponging him from mountain to sea and back. This represents, as Heise would argue, a more practical understanding of how lives are conducted on this earth and help us better see the connections taking place. W&C are writing from a place, as we understand, but are they cosmopolitan? 

Weirdly relevant Reddit post to the "dual creeds" discussed in class

http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1zj8ub/was_calculus_discovered_or_invented/

Thoughts on Michael

Like Kelly, after reading Wordsworth's final entry to Lyrical Ballads, the question of legacy was pressed upon me. However, the immortality of the poet does not seem to be affirmed by the content of the poem--though Wordsworth's introduction would suggest otherwise. 

"I will relate the same/ For the delight of a few natural hearts, / And with yet fonder feeling, for the sake / Of youthful Poets, who among these Hills / Will be my second self when I am gone" (385-386). 

Michael is an aged man that evokes the innocent, natural characterizations that are common tropes within the pastoral tradition. His son, born to him late in his life, brings a renewed sense of joy and love that he valued above all. However, after Michael is forced to leverage his farm for the sake of familial debts, he has no choice but to send Luke to apprentice with a merchant. Before Luke departs, Michael begins the construction of a Sheep-fold to form a covenant with his son to ensure his return. Instead, the son is corrupted and forced to flea, never returning to his familial land. This leaves Michael to die without his son and without the sheep-fold ever being completed. 

The function of lineage and immortality is clearly problematic when put in concert with the content of the poem. I read the poem with the presumption that the Shepard was functioning as the Poet. Wordsworth has crafted a failed "prodigal son" parable in which the innocent is lost with time with no hope of return. What, then, was Wordsworth suggesting he could pass on to his "second self?" And furthermore, what "natural heart" can really find "delight" within the world of "Michael?" 

At the close of the poem, Michael's natural world has been destroyed by the outside world. The "evil courses" of the "dissolute city" had taken his son, his land, and his home. The lineage of labor that Michael hoped to pass down was replaced by estrangement. So, again, what sort of covenant is Wordsworth suggesting for the generations to come? The Evening Star is destroyed by the poems end. Michael died without his son. His wife died three years after, completely alone. The covenant between father and son is left incomplete: broken. What then is Wordsworth's Shepard offering to his poetic progeny? It seems like a world that is shattered and an ideal that is withering away. The covenant does not seem strong enough to withstand the corruption of mankind. 

 

Weisman's The World without Us

Considering our discussion from last week, here is some material on the Weisman book I was talking about. I found this "timeline" quite interesting. Here are a series of excerpted reviews.

Piggy-backing on Beth's post...

http://www.cbc.ca/m/news/#!/content/1.2558417

Meditation on pages 374-398

The last several lines (42-47) of the first part of “Poems on the Naming of Places” introduce the theme of immortality, to be idealized in several modes further on in the lines, but given here as a person remembered by the placed once idly named for her. Similarly, and likely not coincidentally, lines 38-39 of “Michael” are an echo, wherein the poet speaks of his own immortalization in both the poets who survive him and the hills which he has immortalized in verse. This memorializing of natural objects through poetry hints at an answer to a question we have been asking since the beginning of the course: Why do we want the world to end? Why does apocalyptic thinking so intrigue us, especially now? Reading Lyrical Ballads has made me even more aware of our waning access to these hills, trees, craggy rocks that sometimes look like people, and all other natural objects captured in the text, and fill me with a kind of mourning. This apocalyptic yearning means we would rather see our human world break apart and disappear than subsist on the increasingly barren and wasting corpses that were once the beautiful artworks “made by Nature for herself” (V; 15). These romantic poets tried to capture for their readers, the “few natural hearts” (Michael, 36), the great emotions that their experiences with the environment occasioned, but in sad irony (or totally on purpose?) the beauty in the lines far outshines what’s left of beauty in this post-post-industrial environment, excepting what has been preserved in our national and state parks.

Scientists Have Resurrected a 30,000 Year Old Virus

I found this article interesting in light of The Last Man. Scientists say the risk of an outbreak from a resurrected virus is very low, but it still seems like a dangerous precedent.

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/04/science/out-of-siberian-ice-a-virus-revived.html?smid=tw-nytimesscience&seid=auto&_r=1

Do Animals Have Souls?

Do Animals Have Souls? A Response to Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s Rime of the Ancient Marinere

Allison Lowe

            On a surface reading, Coleridge’s Rime of the Ancient Marinere seems to be a caution tale about not killing animals. However, if the religious imagery is truly considered, much more is going on in this poem than is readily apparent. I intend to mainly discuss Coleridge’s descriptions of the albatross. When the albatross reveals itself in the fog, it is described as such, “It were a Christian Soul/ We hail’d it in God’s name” (53). These lines would seem to suggest that the albatross possesses a soul. Coleridge is going against a conservative Christian teaching that what separates humans from animals is that humans have soul, and animals do not.

            Or, let’s say line 61 (“It were a Christian Soul” is being hyperbolic. Rather than literally saying the albatross has a soul, the marinere is referring to how the crew attributes the albatross to the power of God. Thus, God is also responsible for the fog. This poem shifts from an ecological statement into a man versus God battle.

            I believe either take on the poem is valid. However, the last stanza in the second part seems to offer more power in the latter argument. Coleridge writes “instead of the cross the Albatross/ about [his] neck was hung (56). The albatross was a sacrifice, not shot out of anger, but to get rid of the fog to save the crew. The mention of the cross in this stanza is comparing the albatross’s sacrifice with that of Jesus Christ. Also, at the end of the poem, the Marinere gives advice to the wedding guest, saying “He prayeth well who loveth well/  Both man and bird and beast.” (72). Coleridge is not merely saying don’t kill animals to be a good Christian. Nor is he claiming that animals have souls. Coleridge is arguing that people should value the lives of animals more because they are closer to humans than most usually realize.