Some American Poetry

After my quadrennial Winter Olympics marathon, I had some reading to catch up on. And now I have some blogging to catch up on.

Over the last few weeks, I’ve read (among other things) some poetry by Carl Sandburg and some by Robert Frost. In each case, I bought an anthology of a few hundred pages and read most of the book. Carl Sandburg’s wasn’t what I thought it was going to be, and maybe because I felt rushed, I didn’t give myself the time fully to enjoy it for what it was. It was mostly free verse, and after having studied and worked to understand meter, I was at sea again. So much attention directed itself at the lines of varying length and at trying to confirm that there really, truly was no hidden meter, there wasn’t always enough left attention for assimilating the meaning of the text. But I did get the drift. The poems had a lot of praise for manual laborers (who can never have enough light shining on their dignity), for industrial advances (which haven’t always proven to be, shall we say, unalloyed blessings), and for the way the prairie land of Illinois shapes the lives of people living there (I’ll take his word for it). It didn’t grab me like the poetry of, say, William Cowper and William Cullen Bryant did. (Those two came up in earlier years of my project of planned reading.) But I definitely have a clearer picture of Sandburg as a whole now, where previously I really only knew the poet as the guy who wrote a poem about fog and little cat feet.

Robert Frost’s poetry sank in more easily, perhaps because he often wrote in iambic pentameter. But there were some surprises. From the little bits of Frost that I had read in anthologies or that I had heard quoted, I had previously thought of him as a nature poet. But most of the poems in the collection I read were narratives – or at least I should say that most of the pages are devoted to longer narrative poems rather than the one-pagers that might or might not be about nature. Another surprise: the narrative poems are full of dialog, with people speaking so plainly, the pentameter can barely be heard:

Our hens and cows and pigs are always better
Than folks like us have any business with.
Farmers around twice as well off as we
Haven’t as good. They don’t go with the farm.

Admittedly, the meter jumps out in that first line with the hens and cows and pigs getting naturally accented. But I needed the context for the last two lines, which I would say are typical.

It’s easy to understand why a poet would get known for one type of poem more than another more abundant type if the scarcer type is typically shorter: they’re easier to quote and anthologize. And I guess I’ll carry on with the skewing by giving more space to a shorter poem. Here’s one I found especially pretty:

Spring Pools

These pools that, though in forests, still reflect
The total sky almost without defect,
And like the flowers beside them, chill and shiver,
Will like the flowers beside them soon be gone,
And yet not out by any brook or river,
But up by roots to bring dark foliage on.
The trees that have it in their pent-up buds
To darken nature and be summer woods---
Let them think twice before they use their powers
To blot out and drink up and sweep away
These flowery waters and these watery flowers
From snow that melted only yesterday.

I have to say first that I know from the meter “flowers” needs to be pronounced “flours,” which sounds more elegant to me somehow. (Knowledge of meter makes a difference!) I like the casual rhyme scheme: the rhymes come sometimes one line after another (reflect/defect) and sometimes in alternation (shiver/gone/river/on). That changing pace seems to suit the walk of a contemplative man through the winter woods. The poem has no elevated vocabulary as a poem from a century earlier would have had. But in the context, common words seem to take up meaning into the very shapes of the sounds. “Chill” and “shiver” sound cold with their sibilants and short “i” sounds. (Say “shiver” and “river” and tell me the first one doesn’t sound colder.) And while all of the first lines portray a picture in whites and lights colors, doesn’t line 6 suddenly sound darker with its “oo” and long “o” sounds? I think Frost, despite his name and the topic of his most famous poem, would be happy in summer woods as well. But I like his warning to the trees to think twice. Don’t be hasty, as Treebeard would say. Let these fresh pools and the delicate flowers beside them, in them, and under them have their day and show us their picture. Plus, I like any celebration of life and color during winter instead of portraying it in the old, tired way as dead and gray.

I guess that’s part of why I watch the Winter Olympics every four years.

Consolation

Have I really not posted anything about Boethius and The Consolation of Philosophy before? I thought I would look up what I said on this site during my earlier reading of the book. But it appears that I last drew consolation from Boethius’s philosophy in 2008, two years before I started this blog. In those early years, I wrote lots of posts about books I had read previously, but apparently not about this one.

Boethius was a Roman senator and a philosopher living in the fifth and sixth centuries A.D. He was a Christian who also loved reading and teaching the Greek classics and in fact translated many of them for the Latin-speaking world. He and Cassiodorus and Isidore of Seville helped promote an outline for learning that lasted for over a thousand years. In this curriculum, beginners studied grammar, logic, and rhetoric. (In the twentieth century, some elementary schools were still called “grammar schools” because of this tradition.) These subjects formed the group of three roads, or trivium. Because the material is for the young, we get our word “trivia” from its title, as in, “What a beginner learns is trivial.” The word has had fifteen hundred years to morph, though. We now might say that much of what a beginner learns is essential, not trivial in that sense. And “trivia” is now thought of as esoteric knowledge, less so on Tuesday nights at the pub and more so on Jeopardy! Knowing that the word “trivia” comes from the trivium constitutes an excellent piece of trivia, I’d say, and I’d be super excited to see it come up on the great game show.

I digress from my digression of biographical background. After learning how to get one’s thoughts together and express them convincingly, students following the plan of Boethius et al. next studied the quadrivium: the mathematical disciplines of arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, and music. (These wise people acknowledged that knowledge of music theory was essential toward understanding how the world works!) Once a student had become a “master” of the quadrivium (hence the name of the second degree in the universities that would rise some 700 years after Boethius), he could move on to professional study in the pinnacle fields of law, medicine, philosophy, or theology. Those who finished this course were qualified to teach doctrine in those upcoming universities, and hence were called “doctors.” In our times, most people graduating from the third program of higher education in areas other than law, medicine, or theology receive a degree known as “Doctor of Philosophy”: PhD. All of this to say that Boethius’s books have been so influential that many of their ideas and terms remain with us after a millennia-and-a-half.

But Boethius fell out of grace with the government in 523 and was imprisoned. Feeling every wretched thought one might think in that situation, he began to think of the philosophy he had learned from Plato & Co. as something more than academic knowledge – as helpful, inspiring, consoling knowledge. And he memorialized the journey of his heart in the remarkable book known as The Consolation of Philosophy, which he wrote between the time of his incarceration and the time of his execution a year later. He begins the book by bemoaning his fate and then declaring that the figure of Philosophy personified appeared to him to teach him his lesson.

Or to re-teach him, rather. Philosophy’s first point is that Boethius is unhappy because he has forgotten the end of all things and the means by which the world is governed. But he can’t simply be told those things. Learning – either the first or the second time – is a process. She tells her author that she must start with basic ideas that her student can handle now and progress only slowly to the great lessons of ultimate things he must relearn. Clearly, Philosophy has read his other books and knows to start with the trivia! So she begins the course by pointing out that it is better to be grateful for all one has rather than resentful for all one has lost. Wouldn’t it be great if we all felt better after hearing that?

But we don’t. So now she starts to talk about true happiness. Everyone agrees that the goal of life is happiness: it makes no sense to say that you want to be happy so you can use that happiness for a further goal. But what is happiness? Is it power, as some say? Is it wealth? Is it pleasure? All have their advocates, but none of these can be true happiness. What powerful person doesn’t have to keep constant guard over his power lest he lose it all? Is it really power then? And can it possibly be ultimate happiness if it can be lost at any moment? Similarly, no wealthy person is either satisifed with wealth or confident that the wealth is safe. And pleasure is the least stable, reliable blessing of the three. The problem is, she explains, that philosophers have divided true happiness up. True happiness consists of all these things together: power is good only if it is pleasant, and wealth is pleasant only if the wealthy has the power to keep it, and pleasure is only good if one has the means to attain it. (Notice here that Philosophy is actually a critic of philosophy!) She then says that the happy one must be powerful, wealthy, and comfortable (she talks of other goods: I’ve narrowed down the list so my post isn’t as long as Boethius’s book) not as possessing these things but in his very nature. And this is true only of the one God. Any true happiness on the part of a human, then, must come from participating in godliness.

OK, but now Boethius has some questions. If happiness depends on God, then what about fate and chance? Is God bound by either? Why do bad things happen to us if He isn’t? And what about free will? If God knows everything, how can we be free? And if we’re not free, how can we be happy? Like a lot of us, even those of us who haven’t been put in prison and await execution, Boethius doesn’t want be happy and good and godly and serve the Creator and Sustainer of the universe just because it’s the right thing to do: he wants some answers! The post is long enough. I’ll only say that Philosophy provides very good answers to these questions; if she didn’t the book wouldn’t have brought actual consolation to so many people over so many centuries.

Maybe I’ve said enough to entice you to find the answers in this book. Just try not to wait until the government comes to get you.

PS: I’m pleased to see that blogspot's editor knows the words “trivium” and “quadrivium.” I’m confused to find that it doesn’t known the word “sustainer.” But then it doesn’t know the word “blogspot,” either!

First 2026 Roundup

I’ve had a good start with my reading list in the first three weeks of the New Year – such a good start that I have five things to report on already.

I started the year with some plays. Neil Simon’s Lost in Yonkers was entertaining and interesting, but was it really worthy of a Pulitzer? Two Jewish boys have to live for a year with their grandmother, who, in Yonkers now as the title suggests, has previously lived the difficult life of a Jew in early twentieth-century Europe. She’s hard and prickly and tells the boys it does no good to be sentimental. Her daughter, the boys’ aunt, confronts her for being so harsh, and the scene is interesting and provides a vehicle for the actors’ emotional display, but does either character come to a conclusion or learn a lesson? Or is the lesson that some people are just abrasive? I guess the grandsons accept her in the end even if her children don’t exactly.

Sam Shepard’s Buried Child, also a Pulitzer winner, was better. But, boy! was it weird! The family depicted is so crazy and dysfunctional, the audience (or reader) is left wondering how much is real and how much is in the imagination of . . . of somebody in this broken family. In some ways, hardly anything happens: half the first act consists of a conversation between a man on a couch and his wife, who is offstage. But the “action” of unfolding the psychology of these relationships is intense. And, yes, the title of the play indicates the elephant in the room: there is a child buried in the garden tha no one wants to mention.

I’ve read about a dozen books by Jules Verne, and he’s only disappointed me once (Michael Strogoff). He famously likes science but often gets it wrong. He loves geography and exploration even more but often gets that wrong. I think he wants his heroes to be godless rationalists but – thank heaven! – doesn’t get that quite right, either. And yet it all works, and it all makes me happy. The spirit of adventure and wonder in the not-so-accurate world Verne depicts is captivating and inspiring, and Around the World in Eighty Days provided fascinating treats on every page, even though I’d read it before. Phileas Fogg is described as being entirely mechanical, but he’s like Oz’s Tin Woodman: he has a heart that beats passionately once duty calls it into service. And Passepartout is one of the great sidekicks in literature: his position is maybe not so lofty as Sancho’s or Watson’s, but he’s close.

I have two quick, extra notes about Around the World. First, the narration says early on that Fogg was a member of the Reform Club (an actual institution in London) and replaced one of its great orators. I had to look this up! Who was the great orator of the Reform Club that Verne’s fictional character was supposed to have “replaced.” My internet search led me to a list of fictional members of the Reform Club, a list that included, from a Trollope book appearing just four years earlier – wait for it – Phineas Finn! Look at those names: Phileas Fogg and Phineas Finn. Can there be any doubt that Verne at least got his character’s name from Trollope’s? And maybe the fictional Finn is even the great orator that Fogg supposedly overshadowed. 

Second, I reported at the end of last year that I would try to read this book in French. I read it at a normal pace in English (well, normal for me, which is rather slow), but I am indeed also reading a bit of it in French every day. I’m in chapter 3 of the French, so I’ll probably finish it up around June if I can keep up the pace. The vocabulary is harder than I thought it would be, but I’m slowly learning. The goal is to practice on this familiar novel with good English translations (I read Butcher’s) that can serve as guides, so that later, sometime in the next few years, I can read some of Verne’s more obscure novels in French without having to rely on the problematic English translations of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

I’m also following through on my idea to read just one “directive” from chapter 3 of Richard Baxter’s Practical Works each day. That plan isn’t working as well as reading Verne in French. I’ll say more in a few weeks when either the piecewise reading has started to work or I’ve given up on the experiment.