Wednesday, January 25, 2006

The return and the catch-up

After lots of long, boring days filled with long boring work (plus school, classes, sleeping betimes, etc.), I am finally in the mood to transcribe some stuff. We'll get caught up gradually, most likely by posting two a day for a while. Once I get transcribing and editing, it tends to take a great deal of time. Which I don't have right now, as Lost is starting in half an hour. Thereafter I will be going to the movies.

Our first piece upon the return is rather odd. For reasons I can not adequately explain, I felt a strange and poetic sensation descend upon me while reading Jane Eyre, and this poem is the result. It is a poetic retelling of a brief episode in Jane's time at the Lowood school, in which she is summoned to the drawing room of one of the matrons to discuss some allegations against her.

An episode from Jane Eyre

Jane is in the chamber of the Temple with her friend
For an eve of conversation and the former to defend
Against the mighty slander 'pon her name by Brocklehurst
(In humility the rearmost, in hypocrisy the first).

And the Temple is the Mother that the Orphan never had;
And the fire is waxing greatly with the children rosey glad;
And they sup on furtive seedcake and on toast brought on a tray;
And they drain their teacups primly at the closing of the day.

The chamber's filled to bursting with the warmth of love and care;
Temple's chairs are soft and supple, and her books are everywhere.
Young Helen reads from Virgil and it set's Jane's eyes ablaze
With the force of newborn rapture at the gold of bygone days.

And Jane pours out confession under Temple's matron smile,
And describes the lies of Mrs. Reed that did her name defile;
And the Temple takes her shoulder and embraces her in love;
And the children leave her smiling to return to rooms above.

Miss Temple puts her books away and stirs the little hearth;
She recalls Jane's tale with dolore, and young Helen's words with mirth.
She sheds a tear for innocence assailed at every turn,
And for Helen's coming coldness, and for Jane who can but burn.

¶ 4:48 PM

Comments:

so the resolution didn't get held past Jan?

looking forward to the next rhyme...

# posted by

Joe : 7:07 PM

Well, it did and it didn't.

I've still written stuff every day; it's been the transcription that is lacking. I have to do all of the following before I can even begin to spare time to copy out something as monumentally unimportant as these poems.

1. Verse history of Louis Riel for a rapidly approaching scholarship.

2. Borges-style story about Judas Iscariot for a creative writing workshop (due tomorrow, as it happens; I'm sort of in Full Gear for this one right now).

3. A lengthy retreatment of the Hercules myth within the context of the Mafia.

4. An essay examining different representations of heroism in "The Lady of Shalott," "Goblin Market," and some other stuff I can't remember.

5. A lecture on the subject of Moral and Philosophical issues in Huckleberry Finn

6. Unrelated poetry for the upcoming Alfred Poynt Award.

7. Creative work of some kind for the upcoming Lillian Kroll award.

8. Short play for the Samuel French award.

9. Lengthy, exhausting essay for the Norton Scholar's prize.

On top of all of this, there's endless reading for courses, dealing with Christendom in all of its distractions, and close studies of the following:

1. The latesy encyclical.
2. Pascal's Pensees
3. Nietszche's Twilight of the Idolts and Antichrist

And on top of even that, I have a spoken poetry contest to plan for in March, as well as A Gentle Fuss to update at least five times weekly, and posts to make on Chesterton and Friends, not least of which is the promised discussion of "For For Guilds" which I put off until Monday because I need to get this damned Judas story done!

In short, they're on their way. :/

# posted by

Nick Milne : 10:17 PM

Don't forget to read my main blog

What is this place?

This blog was started in an attempt to write a poem once a day, every day, for an entire year, but this expedition has met with failure! I gave up on transcribing the damn things in late January, and gave up writing them entirely around the end of February. It's not easy to do this at all. In fact, it is hard. I still feel as though I've learned something, anyway, so I'll keep what I did manage to do up here for now. I'll probably start posting stuff again irregularly when my workload decreases somewhat, which was really the reason for my problems in the first place. Who would have thought being in the third year of an honours BA would give you a lot of work to do?

Johnson on Poetry

"To a poet nothing can be useless. Whatever is beautiful and whatever is dreadful must be familiar to his imagination: he must be conversant with all that is awfully vast or elegantly little. The plants of the garden, the animals of the wood, the minerals of the earth, and meteors of the sky, must all concur to store his mind with inexhaustible variety: for every idea is useful for the enforcement or decoration of moral or religious truth; and he who knows most will have most power of diversifying his scenes, and of gratifying his reader with remote allusions and unexpected instruction."
- Imlac, in Rasselas

"The essence of verse is regularity, and its ornament is variety. To write verse is to dispose syllables and sounds harmonically by some known and settled rule -- a rule however lax enough to substitute similitude for identity, to admit change without breach of order, and to relieve the ear without disappointing it."
- From the biography of John Dryden in Lives of the Poets

Chesterton on Poetry

"Imagination does not breed insanity. Exactly what does breed insanity is reason. Poets do not go mad; but chess-players do. Mathematicians go mad, and cashiers; but creative artists very seldom. I am not, as will be seen, in any sense attacking logic: I only say that this danger does lie in logic, not in imagination. Artistic paternity is as wholesome as physical paternity. Moreover, it is worthy of remark that when a poet really was morbid it was commonly because he had some weak spot of rationality on his brain. Poe, for instance, really was morbid; not because he was poetical, but because he was specially analytical. Even chess was too poetical for him; he disliked chess because it was full of knights and castles, like a poem. He avowedly preferred the black discs of draughts, because they were more like the mere black dots on a diagram.

Perhaps the strongest case of all is this: that only one great English poet went mad, Cowper. And he was definitely driven mad by logic, by the ugly and alien logic of predestination. Poetry was not the disease, but the medicine; poetry partly kept him in health. He could sometimes forget the red and thirsty hell to which his hideous necessitarianism dragged him among the wide waters and the white flat lilies of the Ouse. He was damned by John Calvin; he was almost saved by John Gilpin. Everywhere we see that men do not go mad by dreaming. Critics are much madder than poets. Homer is complete and calm enough; it is his critics who tear him into extravagant tatters. Shakespeare is quite himself; it is only some of his critics who have discovered that he was somebody else. And though St. John the Evangelist saw many strange monsters in his vision, he saw no creature so wild as one of his own commentators. The general fact is simple. Poetry is sane because it floats easily in an infinite sea; reason seeks to cross the infinite sea, and so make it finite. The result is mental exhaustion, like the physical exhaustion of Mr. Holbein. To accept everything is an exercise, to understand everything a strain. The poet only desires exaltation and expansion, a world to stretch himself in. The poet only asks to get his head into the heavens. It is the logician who seeks to get the heavens into his head. And it is his head that splits."
-From Orthodoxy

: Name: Nick Milne; Location: Canada

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