This is The End

I must agree with Iain. This was my first blog group project and all of you made it quite an enjoyable experience. Thanks to everyone for keeping up with their quota and not slacking off. Hopefully I see you all again sometime and if I do not, good luck with the rest of your schooling and the future. Thanks again.

the climax

“Even the most casual reader of Nathaniel Hawthorne cannot fail to notice his conspicuous and consistent focus on nature…As a Romanticist who gives abundant literary attention to nature, as an individual writer who attempts to remain true to the vision of his own art, and as a human being who treasures the importance of nature in his own life experiences, Hawthorne gives distinct attention in his works to the natural environment” (Daniel 307).


Hester and Dimmesdale meet in the woods and have a real conversation for the first time in seven years. In this private scene, “no golden light had ever been so precious as the gloom of this dark forest. Here, seen only by his eyes, the scarlet letter need not burn into the bosom of the fallen woman! Here, seen only by her eyes, Arthur Dimmesdale, false to God and man, might be, for one moment, true!” (134).

Having received Hester’s verbal forgiveness, and having forgiven himself at last, Dimmesdale is “surprised by joy,” from moral cleansing. Hester also embraces a new beginning, by removing the scarlet letter and “[throwing] it to a distance among the withered leaves” (138). As stated before, Hawthorne shows his Romanticism in seeing the Body, Soul, Imagination, and the Mind as connected parts of the self. Hester, who had been exquisitely beautiful when she was first introduced, went through a wholly effecting transformation. The “A” put a weight upon Hester’s wild personality, and this manifested in her outward appearance, which became serious and somber, in increasing likeness of the Puritans. Once she removes the “A”, her beauty and colour return. Dimmesdale’s sickly body also becomes youthful and full of energy. In a show of the intimacy between humanity and Nature, the surrounding forest responds:

“And, as if the gloom of the earth and sky had been but the effluence of these two mortal hearts, it vanished with their sorrow. All at once, as with a sudden smile of heaven, forth burst the sunshine, pouring a very flood into the obscure forest, gladdening each green leaf, transmuting the yellow fallen ones to gold, and gleaming adown the gray trunks of the solemn trees. The objects that had made a shadow hitherto, embodied the brightness now. The course of the little brook might be traced by its merry gleam afar into the wood’s heart of mystery, which had become a mystery of joy.

Such was the sympathy of Nature – that wild, heathen Nature of the forest, never subjugated by human law, nor illumined by higher truth – with the bliss of these two spirits! Love, whether newly born, or aroused from a deathlike slumber, must always create a sunshine, filling the heart so full of radiance, that it overflows upon the outward world. Had the forest still kept its gloom, it would have been bright in Hester’s eyes, and bright in Arthur Dimmesdale’s!” (139).

Here, Hawthorne restates the British Romantic notion that man’s perception is vital to the beauty of Nature.

The relief of joy that finally comes to Hester and Dimmesdale is unfortunately short-lived. Pearl had been playing by herself in the distance during their talk, but when she comes upon her parents in this new state, she does not know how to handle the new reality presented to her. Pearl had always existed in contrast to Hester, and had always known Hester by the “A,” and does not know how to function without what is contrary to her. Pearl stands there, divided from her parents by a brook, pointing her finger at them. Her reflection in the brook joins her, and under this judgment, Dimmesdale’s hand creeps back over his heart, and Hester “turned again towards Pearl, with a crimson blush upon her cheek, a conscious glance aside at the clergyman, and then a heavy sigh; while, even before she had time to speak, the blush yielded to a deadly pallor” (144). She takes the scarlet letter, which the brook had washed back to her, and fastens it to her dress again. Not only could she not get away from the scarlet letter, she could not get away from Pearl, who is also the symbol of the scarlet letter.

“ ‘Dost thou know thy mother now, child? [...] Wilt thou come across the brook, and own thy mother, now that she has her shame upon her, - now that she is sad?’
‘Yes; now I will!’ answered the child, bounding across the brook, and clasping Hester in her arms. ‘Now thou art my mother indeed! And I am thy little Pearl!’” (145).

This could be an example of Hawthorne’s Negative Romanticism (see Crystal (rustykeloid)’s previous blog entry), in which contraries are a necessary part of life, but this balance can have a high cost.

Works Cited

Daniel, Janice B. “ ‘Apples of Thoughts and Fancies’: Nature as Narrator in The Scarlet Letter.” ATQ 7.4 (1993): 307-320.

Hawthorne, Nathaniel. The Scarlet Letter. Ed. Stanley Appelbaum. New York: Dover, 1994.

summary: part four

Hester continues to be a faithful servant to the Puritan community, offering her services wherever needed. The town would have allowed her to remove the scarlet letter, and return as one of them, but now Hester chooses to remain apart, for she cannot be a part of the unnatural Puritan system.

She happens to come across Chillingworth in the woods one day, and is shocked and disturbed at the change in him. The motivation of revenge has turned him into a hateful and sinister figure. Resolving to warn Dimmesdale, Hester awaits him in the woods and they have their first real conversation in at least seven years, since their affair took place. She reveals that Chillingworth was her husband, and the two resolve to leave the stifling town, away from Chillingworth’s bad intentions.

There is a New England Holiday, where Dimmesdale gives his final sermon to the town, and after which he, Hester and Pearl plan to leave on a boat. The ship master mentions to Hester at the celebration that everything is set, including the addition of Chillingworth to their party. To her horror, Chillingworth found out about their departure and told the ship master he is one of their party and will be leaving with them.

After Dimmesdale’s sermon, he becomes very faint, and, perceiving that he is about to die and has one last chance at public confession, reveals to the town that he is the one who had the affair with Hester. He dies, and Chillingworth, without the purpose of revenge to fuel him, dies in the same year, leaving Pearl a large inheritance. Hester and Pearl disappear for a number of years, and then one day children playing in the woods see Hester return alone to her cottage on the outskirt of town, wearing the scarlet letter. Hester’s home becomes a refuge for other woman to come to for comfort and counsel that they cannot find in their own society. It is suggested that Pearl is living overseas, married, with a child, wealthy, and content.

At the end, it seems Hester’s life was meant to be educational, and a warning against taking Romantic aspects of Solitude and Individuality to an extreme. Living in the wilderness of human nature without community is a harsh and unnatural life, though perhaps it is preferable to living in a community that prevents the natural wildness of human nature.

Works Cited

Hawthorne, Nathaniel. The Scarlet Letter. Ed. Stanley Appelbaum. New York: Dover, 1994.

chillingworth and dimmesdale

Here is Lars Hanson as Rev. Dimmesdale, with a sinister Chillingworth in the back. Dimmesdale is supposed to be a "pretty boy," so I like this actor better than Gary Oldman from the '95 movie.

Each of Hawthorne’s major characters in The Scarlet Letter can be seen to represent one of his Romantic philosophies. Pearl is associated with a beautiful but wild Nature and also the untamable will of the human nature. Hester represents individuality for she refuses to live by the confining system of the Puritans and is true to her personal nature, which is more in touch with earthly Nature. She is also one of the characters Hawthorne uses in dealing with morality: not only does she wear a symbol of shame, but personally deals with the emotional, mental and spiritual consequences of her adultery in a state of saint-like penance.

Here is a look at the Romantic qualities in the two male characters, Reverend Dimmesdale and Roger Chillingworth.

DIMMESDALE:

Chillingworth notes that Dimmesdale, “pure as they deem him, - all spiritual as he seems, - hath inherited a strong animal nature from his father or his mother” (89).

“For the sake of the minister’s health, and to enable the leech [Chillingworth] to gather plants with healing balm in them, they took long walks on the sea-shore, or in the forest; mingling various talk with the plash and murmur of the waves, and the solemn wind-anthem among the tree-tops” (84).

-Dimmesdale habitually takes “meditative walks…along the shores of the peninsulas, or on the wooded hills of the neighbouring country” (125).
So he is a follower of peripeteaetism, but his personal burden and philosophies prevent him from receiving the education and healing of walking and meditating.

-Other Romantic ideas that Dimmesdale fail at is that of Blake’s Innocence and Experience, and solitude. He keeps himself in seclusion, “simple and childlike…in the shadowy by-paths” but this leads to something amiss in his character (46). While Pearl often shows adult perception and knowledge of Experience, the reader has the sense that she is simply accelerated in adopting Experience into her world of Innocence. With Dimmesdale, however, he seems to be rejecting Experience in his reluctance to take adult and mature responsibility for the consequences of his affair with Hester. He is unnatural, then, because he is using Innocence as an evasion of Experience, when one should embody both. It does raise the interesting question: if Innocent children can live in a world of Experience (for example, in Blake’s The Chimney Sweeper), can an adult who should be (?) Experienced live in an Innocent world? Is it wrong here because Dimmesdale self-constructs his childlike world out of fear?

CHILLINGWORTH:

-Chillingworth is like an evil Goethian scientist in the sense that he understands the connectivity between mind, body, and soul, but desires to expose his findings in ill will rather than to illuminate or educate. He is also like Wordsworth’s Man of Science, who “seeks truth as a remote and unknown benefactor; he cherishes and loves it in his solitude” (unlike “the Poet, singing a song in which all human beings join with him, rejoices in the presence of truth as our visible friend and hourly companion” (Wordsworth 606)).

Chillingworth experiments with Dimmesdale’s soul: he wants to observe the reverend “in his ordinary life…and as he appeared when thrown amidst other moral scenery, the novelty of which might call out something new to the surface of his character” (85). Like the European Romantics we have studied in class, Chillingworth believes that “[w]herever there is a heart and an intellect, the diseases of the physical frame are tinged with the peculiarities of these. In Arthur Dimmesdale, thought and imagination were so active, and sensibility so intense, that the bodily infirmity would be likely to have its ground-work there” (85).

-Chillingworth observes that within Dimmesdale, there is “[a] strange sympathy betwixt soul and body,” for the sickness of his soul manifests in his physical body (95).

-The novel warns against worshipping Science, even (or especially) Chillingworth’s science of soul and body. Here is one of the key passages of The Scarlet Letter, a climactic scientific moment for Chillingworth:

“It came to pass…that the Reverend Mr. Dimmesdale, at noon-day, and entirely unawares, fell into a deep, deep slumber, sitting in his chair, with a large black-letter volume open before him on the table…To such an unwonted remoteness, however, had his spirit now withdrawn into itself, that he stirred not in his chair, when old Roger Chillingworth, without any extraordinary precaution, came into the room. The physician advanced directly in front of his patient, laid his hand upon his bosom, and thrust aside the vestment, that, hitherto, had always covered it even from the professional eye.
Then, indeed, Mr. Dimmesdale shuddered, and slightly stirred.
After a brief pause, the physician turned away.
But with what a wild look of wonder, joy, and horror! With what a ghastly rapture, as it were, too mighty to be expressed only by the eye and features, and therefore bursting forth through the whole ugliness of his figure, and making itself even riotously manifest by the extravagant gestures with which he threw up his arms towards the ceiling, and stamped his foot upon the floor! Had a man seen old Roger Chillingworth, at that moment of his ecstasy, he would have had no need to ask how Satan comports himself, when a precious human soul is lost to heaven, and won into his kingdom.
But what distinguished the physician’s ecstasy from Satan’s was the trait of wonder in it!” (95).

-Hawthorne never does reveal what, if anything, was on Dimmesdale’s chest. He tells the theories of the town after Dimmesdale literally bares his chest on the scaffold. Some think he has carved an “A” on his own body, some think Chillingworth’s mysterious medines have caused one to raise onto his skin from within, some swear there is nothing there at all (176-7).

-It is not purely Chillingworth’s identity as a scientist that makes him unnatural, but that where the world’s “great heart would have pitied and forgiven,” he is “Pitiless” and “Unforgiving,” showing an Unromantic sensibility towards fellow man (96). Specifically, “the revenge which he had stooped for” has over time corrupted him, and compromised the scholarly intelligence he once was known for (115).

Works Cited

Hawthorne, Nathaniel. The Scarlet Letter. Ed. Stanley Appelbaum. New York: Dover, 1994.

Wordsworth, William. “Preface to Lyrical Ballads (1808).” The Major Works. Ed. Stephen Gill. New York: Oxford UP, 1984. 606.

End Emerson

He was the kind of man who could wait hours for a shooting star, days for a whip-poor-will's call, and months for the kingfisher's return. He never gave up on religion or science but like William Blake, he divined his God through the world around him; the rocks, the mosses, the shadowy nooks in the woods, and the birdcalls that to him sang as beautifully as any well conducted church choir.

He cringed at the thought of Nature as a giant laboratory. He looked to Goethe for help in reconciling his love of poetry and his curiousity in the natural sciences. The result of this was a joyful proliferation of poetry, letters, and quips on the part of Emerson.

He may never quite live up to the mastery of Blake or be thought of as having the fluid versatility of Goethe. He will never be as 'cool' as Whitman or as tragic as Poe. What he will live on as for many is a welcome companion and an eloquent dreamer of lives worth living. He was one of the last to appreciate the nature of America before she was ruined by industry and the memory of her passed on to us from him is one worth more than what any archaeologist could unearth.

hollywood vs. romanticism

"Thankfully, this movie will be forgotten. It will fade into the field of worthless movies, a single strand in a sea of spent celluloid. The book, on the other hand, has already lasted 150 years. Even Hollywood's best intentions won't be enough to kill it."
-Jeremial McNichols [source]

In case anyone has seen the 1995 version of The Scarlet Letter, I just wanted to comment on the difference between the movie and the text. A lot of the time, I don't spend too much time contemplating the similarities and differences between the novel and the movie, because I don't think they can be judged with the same criteria. In this instance though, it's interesting to note that in Hawthorne's text, there is no sex scene between Hester Prynne and Arthur Dimmesdale, and the tale actually begins nine months after the fact. Also, Hester and Dimmesdale do not even have private and intimate conversation until the very end of the book. Not that sexuality or sensuality does not have a place in Romantic literature - for fellow bloggers have already made note on the presence of sexuality in American Romantic literature - but for this text, it is not relevant (or even interesting) to Hawthorne's more controversial ideas about human nature and morality. So, if you have only seen the movie, don't write off the book.

morality

Specific to Hawthorne’s sense of American Romanticism is the concern with morality and, in a broader political view, how it is important to America as a new country.

-Hester is a public figure of humanity because she does not pretend at Puritanism, as many in the town do, but displays CONTRARIES of martyrdom (or sainthood) and rebellious independance.
-in American Romanticism, it is not only Nature, poetry, or community with fellow man that instructs, but moral instruction is also vital: when Governor Bellingham threatens to take Pearl away from Hester for proper instruction of “the truths of heaven and earth,” Hester argues that she can impart wisdom she herself has learned from her “badge” of shame and punishment, which “daily teaches [her]” (76).
-In contrast, Dimmesdale lets Hester suffer the shame alone, and raise their child alone, while receiving the admiration and love of the entire town. This was not done out of cruelty, but cowardice, and Hawthorne shows the psychological effects of hidden crime in Dimmesdale’s character. He finally admits to Hester, “ ‘I have laughed, in bitterness and agony of heart, at the contrast between what I seem and what I am! And Satan laughs at it!”

Hawthorne is also asking the question of what one should do when the common moral system is not one they subscribe to, when the common moral system is against one’s nature.
-Significantly, Hester and Dimmesdale are deeply regretful, but they are not sorry for their earlier affair. Hester cries to Dimmesdale, “ ‘What we did had a consecration of its own. We felt it so! We said so to each other!’” (134).
Hester and Dimmesdale’s relationship become more “sinful” or harmful to their psyches because it is forbidden by society, yet right to them. In doing what it true to them, they must take on the roles of lawless cultural rebels. They enter a dangerous type of psychological, emotional, spiritual and moral wilderness not because of their (desire for) relationship with each other, but because they are so separated from community and accountability. They are lacking the wisdom and objective voice of fellow man.

-“[Hester’s] intellect and heart had their home, as it were, in desert places, where she roamed as freely as the wild Indian in his woods…The scarlet letter was her passport into regions where other women dared not tread” (137).
-“Since that wretched epoch, [Dimmesdale] had watched, with morbid zeal and minuteness, not his acts, - for those it was easy to arrange, - but each breath of emotion, and his every thought” (137).
Hawthorne is expressing here his philosophy on morality: it is not just the outwardly observable actions that are the measure of morality. If the body, mind, soul and emotions are all interconnected, then immorality threatens every “breath of emotion, and…every thought” (137).

-“Among many morals which press upon us from the poor minister’s miserable experience, we put only this into a sentence: - ‘Be true! Be true! Be true! Show freely to the world, if not your worst, yet some trait whereby the worst may be inferred!’” (177).
One of the prominent messages of the novel is that secrecy only magnifies that unhealthy thing which is being hidden. Hawthorne is also commenting on the danger of a society or system that produces fear in people to be open about aspects of themselves that are imperfect, or short of the set standard. He shows in the characters of Hester, Chillingworth and Dimmesdale the manifestations of suppressed self.

Whitmania: Round 8, Wrapping Up.

What is known I strip away,
I launch men and women forward with me into the Unknown.

Do I contradict myself?
Very well, then I contradict myself
(I am large, I contain mutitudes).

To end my study on Whitman I thought it would be helpful to think of the poet himself as transcendental. He is man that has remained alive and vibrant through the years and even through movements, as I hope I have proven comparing him to the British Romantics. I thought this final quotation shows Whitman’s true nature. He was concerned with stripping away commonly held beliefs about religion, Nature and America. What is also important is that he called us to do the same. He was not content only expressing his views but through his work he inspires his readers to do the same.

Whitman also recognized that as he grew his views changed and he may even contain contradictions, like Blake. He refused to be pinned down by the norms of his society and was not afraid to express and explore all the facets of his own personality even if they were in opposition to each other. It is this that makes Whitman timeless and memorable as a Romantic.

Whitmania: Round VII, God.

I found in reading “Song of Myself” this passage:

I hear and behold God in every object, yet understand God not in the least,
Nor do I understand who there can be more wonderful than myself.

Why should I wish to see God better than this day?
I see something of God each hour of the twenty-four, and each moment then,
In the faces of men and women I see God, and in my own face in the glass,
I find letter from God dropt in the street, and every one is sign’d by God’s name,
And I will leave them where they are, for I know that wheresoe’er I go
Others will punctually come for ever and ever.

I find in this passage echoes of Blake; first the idea of the macrocosm in the microcosm. The speaker of the poem sees God in every object that he encounters, no matter how small it is. Whitman sees God in the macrocosm because God’s character is infinite. Even though the speaker is able to see God in all aspects of life, he still does not understand him in the least. Although he is able to experience some of God in reality, he does not mistake that for the whole as the Enlightenment thinkers did.

In following Blake, Whitman also, it would seem, has a problem with churches who claim to know all there is about God and create dogma surrounding their knowledge. Through this poem, Whitman shows how it is wrong for churches to place limits on God. He sees God as infinite and putting Him in a box is wrong.

Longfellow: Under the Influence

Edward Wagenknect on American identity and poetry:

“To be American, poets must write ‘naturally…from their own feelings and impressions, from the influence of what they see around them, and not from any preconceived notions of what poetry ought to be, caught by reading many books, and imitating many models (134)’”.

Weagenknect on Longfellow and America:

“Longfellow champions and exemplifies nationalism in literature, but it should be understood that his nationalism is clearly of the eclectic variety… American literature does not imitate English literature but rather continues it; that the development of its national character cannot be forced; and, finally, that it ought to embrace not only our English but also our contintental heritage (135)”.

The Song of Hiawatha, based on American Indian legends, demonstrates an appreciation for the “real” American traditions. The speaker participates in the fabric of his tales; he is not a mere outsider looking in. Instead of imposing European perspectives and imagery, Longfellow is careful in choosing a voice which seeks to illustrate rather than to judge. He employs repetition to create a sense of rhythm.

Excerpt from the introduction

Should you ask me,
whence these stories?
Whence these legends and traditions,
With the odors of the forest
With the dew and damp of meadows,
With the curling smoke of wigwams,
With the rushing of great rivers,
With their frequent repetitions,
And their wild reverberations
As of thunder in the mountains?


I should answer, I should tell you,
"From the forests and the prairies,
From the great lakes of the Northland,
From the land of the Ojibways,
From the land of the Dacotahs,
From the mountains, moors, and fen-lands
Where the heron, the Shuh-shuh-gah,
Feeds among the reeds and rushes.
I repeat them as I heard them
From the lips of Nawadaha,
The musician, the sweet singer."

The Indians are a perfect exemplar of the communion between man and nature, the speaker participates in presenting a form of American identity that is not European. Like Longfellow’s other poetry, the style throughout emphasizes simplicity and clarity. Longfellow believes that “every work of art should explain itself (104)”, and was against “deep profundities beyond the reach of the everyday reader (104)”. This makes his works very accessible, but at the same time their simplicity seems to provoke only emotion and not thought. Longfellow is best known for his nursery rhymes such as “Mother Goose”, and “There was a Little Girl.”

Perhaps due to his simplistic style, Longfellow has come under harsh criticisms from other American Romantics, “The most important attacks made upon Longfellow during his lifetime came from Edgar Allan Poe and Margaret Fuller. Margaret Fuller did not charge him with plagiarism, but she was very severe upon what she considered his shortcomings as a poet (143)”.

Works Cited:

Wagenknecht, Edward. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow: Portrait of an American Humanist. New York, Oxford University Press, 1966.

The Shape of a Life: Emerson discovers Goethe

Ralph Waldo Emerson, a preacher at age 29, found himself unable to do his job with an honest heart. He became increasingly conflicted for he felt that the modern reality, his reality, wasn't represented in the religion he purveyed. The church, for him, had become an old man set in his ways, perpetuating dead concepts.
Emerson stepped forward and away. Away from a rigid, confining past and toward nature's vast and mysterious amphitheatre.


It seems as if the present age of words should naturally be followed by an age of silence, when men shall speak only through facts, and so regain their health. We die of words. We are hanged, drawn and quartered by dictionaries. We walk in the vale of shadows. It is an age of hobgobblins...When shall we attain to be real, and be born into the new heaven and earth of nature and truth?


The impetus for Emerson's flight was born out of his research into old world Europe. While in Paris in 1833, he found himself pleasantly disturbed by what he saw inside the Musée d'Histoire naturelle. He choose then and there to become a 'naturalist.' He returned home and enthusiastically threw himself into the realm of natural science. However, he again soon experienced a disheartening, a frustration. Emerson could see from his new vantage point that science was sometimes propelled by sinister motivations, or, at the least, scientists themselves were "becoming obsessed with scientific meaning and losing sight of the real aim of science" (Van Cromphout 24).


She poured a stream of amber over the endless store of private anecdotes, of bosom histories which her wonderful persuasion drew out of all to her. When I heard that a trunk of her correspondence had been found and opened, I felt a panic would strike all her friends, for it was as if a clever reporter had got underneath a confessional and agreed to report all that transpired there in Wall street.

Reluctant to abandon science altogether, and put off by the idea of focussing all his energies on being a poet, Emerson opted to combine the two occupations. For inspiration, he looked to the works of Goethe. Emerson was thrilled by Goethe's emphasis on nature and opposition to mechanized modernity. The combination of science and poetry, for Emerson and most likely Goethe as well, made perfect sense for both men understood nature to be an "open secret" which eluded textbook definitions and could only be properly recounted through poetry (26).


Poet

To clothe the fiery thought
In simple words succeeds,
For still the craft of genius is
To mask a king in weeds.



Works Consulted:

Emerson, Ralph Waldo. Emerson: a modern anthology. Ed. Alfred Kazin and Daniel Aaron. New York: Dell, 1958.

Van Cromphout, Gustaaf. Emerson's modernity and the example of Goethe. Missouri: U of Missouri, 1990.

Sentimental Longfellow

Longfellow: Sentimental Mode

Doing any kind of research on the the internet for Longfellow will inevitably reveal that often his works were thought of as belonging to the realm of "sentimentalism". Merriam Webster's dictionary defines sentimental as:

1 a : marked or governed by feeling, sensibility, or emotional idealism b : resulting from feeling rather than reason or
thought
2 : having an excess of sentiment or sensibility

From what we have studied of the Romantics, it is evident that while a emotional response is quickly generated by their works, "thought" is prompted as well. However, perhaps "feeling rather than reason" may be taken to mean a response against Englightenment values.

Mary Louise Kate suggests, "The poetics of sentimentality is best revealed by attention to quotidian verse that celebrates not the sublime, the individual, and the possibility of dissent, but the domestic, the familial, and the possibility of
consent (3)." This is interesting because it denies the sublime, which has been brought up repeatedly in this group blog in relation to other American ROmantics. Also, it shifts away from individualism and refocuses on the domestic and familial.

The following quote looks at sentimentalism and how it fits in with American Romanticism:
"...the sentimental mode can be seen as the functional aspect of the American Romantic movement, the aspect that enables the widespread diffusion of Romantic sensibilities through a culture invested in imagining itself as a cohesive, integral whole. Imagine, for a moment, the exclusion of Wordsworth's Lucy poems from considerations of the British Romantic period because of their focus on the ordinary, the domestic, or on loss, and you have imagined the nature of the gap that currently exists in conventional studies of American Romanticism (3)".

I believe that among his works, the poems "Children" and "Maidenhood" are two which focus on the "ordinary" and the "domestic".

Maidenhood begins with the glimpse at a young maiden, and associates imagery of the brook and river meeting as the coincidental point at which womanhood and childhood meet.


Oh, thou child of many prayers!
Life hath quicksands, Life hath snares!
Care and age come unawares!

Like the swell of some sweet tune
Morning rises into noon,
May glides onward into June
[source]

This excerpt from the poem indicates the transition stage between childhood to womanhood and seems almost cautionary in tone. Although the speaker addresses a specific maiden, she is made to represent all maidens. The seasons change from spring, to winter, to spring again, completing a full cycle. Winter seems to bring with it life's hardships, while the return of spring is associated with the return of blooming flowers which conjures images of childbirth or the renewal of the family.

Here are excerpts from the poem "Children":


Ah! what would the world be to us
If the children were no more?
We should dread the desert behind us
Worse than the dark before.

What the leaves are to the forest,
With light and air for food,
Ere their sweet and tender juices
Have been hardened into wood,--

That to the world are children;
Through them it feels the glow
Of a brighter and sunnier climate
Than reaches the trunks below.

Come to me, O ye children!
And whisper in my ear
What the birds and the winds are singing
In your sunny atmosphere.

Ye are better than all the ballads
That ever were sung or said;
For ye are living poems,
And all the rest are dead.

Children are the basis and the connective tissue in a family unit, here they are exalted as the main key to happiness in a domestic sphere. They are strongly associated with nature, by providing spritual fulfillment they bring the speaker closer to the divine. Like Wordsworth's Frost at Midight, there is the presence of childhood power but instead of mourning the loss of childhood the speaker here is able to live through the children. What frightens the speaker is not the possibility of lost youth, but the loss of the children themselves. In this poem the celebration of children is not just a celebration of the self but a celebration of the family. The first line opens up the poem to indicate a broader aim other than just the self.
For the speaker, the glory and beauty of children does not just impact "me" or "I", but "the world be to us".


Works Cited:

Kate, Mary Louise. Sentimental Collaborations. Duke University Press, 1999.

Whitmania: Round 6, Funk Soul Brother

I will begin this post by quoting the fifth section of “Song of Myself:”

I believe in you my soul, the other I am must not abase itself to you,
And you must not be abased to the other.

Loafe with me on the grass, loose the stop from your throat,
Not words, not music or rhyme I want, not custom or lecture, not
even the best,
Only the lull I like, the hum of your valvéd voice.

I mind how once we lay such a transparent summer morning,
How you settled your head athwart my hips and gently turn’d over
upon me,
And parted the shirt from my bosom-bone, and plunged your tongue
to my bare-stript heart,
And reach’d till you felt my beard, and reach’d till you held my feet.

Swiftly arose and spread around me the peace and knowledge that
pass all the argument of the earth,
And now I know that the hand of God is the promise of my own,
And now I know that the spirit of God is the brother of my own,
And that all the men ever born are also my brothers, and the women
my sisters and lovers,
And that a keelson of the creation is love,
And limitless are leaves stiff or drooping in the fields,
And brown ants in the little wells beneath them,
And mossy scabs of the worm fence, heap’d stones, elder, mullein, and
poke- weed.

I wanted to point out how this passage illustrates the transcendentalism of the Americans and how it is derived from Immanuel Kant, similar to the British Romantic Movement. Ralph Waldo Emerson spoke of Kant in his lecture “The Transcendentalist”:

the Idealism of the present day acquired the name Transcendental, from the use of that term by Immanuel Kant, of Konigsberg, who replied to the skeptical philosophy of Locke, which insisted that there was nothing in the intellect which was not previously in the experience of the senses, by showing that there was a very important class of ideas, or imperative forms, which did not come by experience, but through which experience was acquired; that these were intuitions of the mind itself; and he denominated them Transcendental forms (quoted in Reynolds et al 148).

Here the speaker of the poem is having a transcendental a priori experience that is initiated by his senses. As his soul becomes entwined with his body while being close and touching Nature (the first two stanzas), something transcends his body and enters his mind. Reynolds writes, “This symbolic sexual experience [compare with Ann’s postings on homosexuality] results as he sees a series of spiritual [a priori] truths” in the last stanza of section five (149). The soul of the speaker aids him in his quest to find truth in the universe simply by touching and communicating with Nature, for it is on the grass that their a priori journey begins.

This passage also shows how Whitman deviated from the other American Romantics as well. His transcendence does not stop at his fellow man but extends to include all things. It is “less vague, less formless, less other-worldly, and more attentive to mankind than either Emerson’s or Thoreau’s” (150). His Kantian connection to the world was inclusive and his a priori experiences were recorded sensitively in this poem.

Works Cited

Reynolds, Larry J., Tibbie E. Lynch. "Sense and Transcendence In Emerson, Thoreau, and Whitman." The

South Central Bulletin, Vol. 39, No. 4, Studies by Members of the SCMLA. (Winter, 1979) pp. 148-151.

summary: part three: MORALITY

Here's a visual of the scaffold from the introductary scene when Hester had to stand there before the town. This is where Dimmesdale ends up in the following scene...

Rev. Dimmesdale suffers from his “secret burden” for years, longing to reveal his “black secret” but not having the courage to confess (99). Late one night, he is driven by guilt into the town and ends up on the scaffold, where sinners stand to be judged and jeered at by the Puritans.

“Without any effort of his will, or power to restrain himself, he shrieked aloud; an outcry that went pealing through the night, and was beaten back from one house to another, and reverberated from the hills in the background; as if a company of devils, detecting so much misery and terror in it, had make a plaything of the sound, and were bandying it to and fro” (102).

Dimmesdale is frozen in horror, thinking the whole town will have heard and come find him standing on that guilty spot, where Hester and the infant Pearl once had to stand for three hours as part of the punishment for the adultery. Ironically, Hester and Pearl happen to pass by at this time on their way home from the deathbed of a governor, where Hester had been measuring to make him a garment for the funeral.

Over time, Hester had become part of the community again by offering her services as a seamstress and helper. Though many have forgiven her and even forgotten about her adultery, Hester never becomes “one of them” again, for she never was one of them to begin with. Her individualistic nature is fundamentally different from the Puritan code, and along with Pearl, Dimmesdale and Chillingworth, remain Other for it.

Dimmesdale calls Hester and Pearl to join him on the scaffold, and the the three stand there holding hands. Pearl asks him to stand there with them the next day, before everyone, but Dimmesdale refuses. Suddenly, there is a meteor event that lights up the whole night-scene: “all were visible, but with a singularity of aspect that seemed to give another moral interpretation to the things of this world than they had ever borne before” (106). Here, Hawthorne shows a distinct aspect of American Romanticism, in his primary use of natural phenomena and morality.

Looking at the sky, Dimmesdale sees a giant, red letter A. The next day, the whole town is talking about the A, imagining it to mean Angel, for the governor had just passed away at that time. It is implied that Dimmesdale, imagined quite a different, more personal meaning.

Hawthorne definitely deals with a darker Romanticism (in my opinion) in the sense that it deals with the relationships between Nature, morality, psychology, the soul and the body.

pearl as rose bush

-“‘Pearl? – Ruby, rather! – or Coral – or Red Rose, at the very least, judging form thy hue!’” (75). –Governor Belllingham

-Reverend Wilson asks if Pearl can tell him who made her (wanting her to give the proper Christian answer), but Pearl refuses to say that God made her…“the child finally announced that she had not been made at all, but had been plucked by her mother off the bush of wild roses, that grew by the prison-door” (76).

This refers back to the rose bush by the prison door that offers Nature’s kindness and beauty to the lone criminal. This in itself is a statement too, that Nature is non-discriminatory in its sympathy to criminals and society’s outcast, who maybe appreciate it most in the absence of human sympathy.

“In the afternoon of a certain summer’s day, after Pearl grew big enough to run about, she amused herself with gathering handfuls of wild-flowers, and flinging them, one by one, at her mother’s bosom; dancing up and down, like a little elf, whenever she hit the scarlet letter. Hester’s first motion had been to cover her bosom with her clasped hands. But, whether from pride or resignation, or a feeling that her penance might best be wrought out by this unutterable pain, she resisted the impulse, and sat erect, pale as death, looking sadly into little Pearl’s wild eyes. Still came the battery of flowers, almost invariably hitting the mark, and covering the mother’s breast with hurts for which she could find no balm in this world, nor knew how to seek it in another. At last, her shot being all expended, the child stood still and gazed at Hester, with that little, laughing image of a fiend peeping out – or, whether it peeped or no, her mother so imagined it – from the unsearchable abyss of her black eyes” (67, emphasis mine).

The first time I read this scene, I found Pearl so eerie, and interpreted her action as one of attack. However, in relation to her personification of the rose bush and Nature’s kind sympathy, Pearl could be using the flowers here not as weapons, but as a way to cover Hester’s “A”. In this reading, the flowers covering “the mother’s breast” become a symbol of Nature’s touch of compassion, and Pearl could be attempting to cover the symbol of her mother’s isolation and pain (67).

Innocence and Experience in The Scarlet Letter

Notice the display of the Romantic view of Nature, as well as Blake’s Innocence and Experience in this passage:

“‘Mother,’ said little Pearl, ‘the sunshine does not love you. It runs away and hides itself, because it is afraid of something on your bosom. Now, see! There it is, playing, a good way off. Stand you here, and let me run and catch it. I am but a child. It will not flee from me; for I wear nothing on my bosom yet!’
‘Nor ever will, my child, I hope,’ said Hester.
‘And why not, mother?’ asked Pearl, stopping short, just at the beginning of her race. ‘Will not it come of its own accord, when I am a woman grown?’
‘Run way, child,’ answered her mother, ‘and catch the sunshine! It will soon be gone.’
Pearl set forth, at a great pace, and, as Hester smiled to perceive, did actually catch the sunshine, and stood laughing in the midst of it, and brightened by its splendor, and scintillating with the vivacity excited by rapid motion. The light lingered about the lonely child, as if glad of such a playmate, until her mother had drawn almost nigh enough to step into the magic circle too.
‘It will go now!’ said Pearl, shaking her head.
‘See!’ answered Hester, smiling. ‘Now I can stretch out my hand and grasp some of it.’
As she attempted to do so, the sunshine vanished; or to judge from the bright expression that was dancing on Pearl’s features, her mother could have fancied that the child had absorbed it into herself, and would give it forth again, with a gleam about her path, as they should plunge into some gloomier shade” (126).

In this passage, Pearl clearly represents Innocence, and Hester, Experience. Also, the sunshine is portrayed as a symbol of childlike purity while Hester’s scarlet “A” symbolizes the consequences that come with experience. Pearl finds companionship in the sunlight, and here Nature replaces the human playmates that the ostracized girl lacks. Just as there is often a hint of the coming Experience in Blake’s Songs of Innocence, Pearl shows her hint of adult wisdom in asking her mother, “‘Will not it [Experience] come of its own accord, when I am a woman grown?’” (126). Though Pearl and Hester, as a family unit, show the co-existing contraries of Innocence and Experience, the two states do not blend here. When Hester tries to touch the sunshine, it either vanished or was absorbed by Pearl. Hawthorne also points to the linear path into further Experience in the final mention of their path and the coming gloomy shade.

A Thread Runs Through All Things Emersonian

How wild and mysterious our position as individuals to the Universe; here is always a certain amount of truth lodged as intrinsic foundation in the depths of the soul, a certain perception of absolute being, as justice, love, and the like, natures which must be the God of God, and this is our capital stock, this is our centripetal force. We can never quite doubt, we can never be adrift, we can never be nothing, because of this Holy of Holies, out of sight of which we cannot go. Then, on the other side, all is to seek. We understand nothing; our ignorance is abysmal, the overhanging immensity staggers us, whither we go, what we do, who we are, we cannot even so much as guess. We stagger and grope. (Emerson 136)


These words could have come from the mouths of any of the early British Romantisits we've been studying. The mention of "centripetal force" (turning one's attention towards the centre) evokes lines from Goethe On Science: "Nothing is more constant with Nature than that she puts into operation in the smallest detail that which she intends as a whole," and "If you would seek comfort in the whole, you must learn to discover the whole in the smallest part" (59). This idea can also apply to the cultivation, or glorification, of childhood innocence within the context of adulthood put forth by Blake. It seems Emerson departs slightly in tone from his European peers with regard to his notions of the self. The use of words like "depths," "abysmal," and "overhanging immensity" conger images of a dangerous world, an unsafe place where nature - external and internal - is more immediately frightening. Perhaps the kind of environment one might find in the New World where fewer spaces have been tamed and links to home and family are frayed or broken. Hence the need to seek comfort in the thought of God while we are left here to "stagger and grope."


Emerson, Ralph Waldo. Emerson: a modern anthology. Ed. Alfred Kazin and Daniel Aaron. New York: Dell, 1958.

Goethe J. W. Goethe on Science. Ed. Jeremy Nadler. Edinburgh, UK: Floris, 2006.

summary: part two

Coinciding with Hester’s emergence into the town again is Roger Chillingworth’s entry into it. Hester had been sent ahead to New England and though nobody knew her husband’s identity, they expected his eventual arrival. Chillingworth is that husband, but any theory that he is the father of the controversial baby is soon disproved, because he had been a captive of the nearby Indians for the last few years. When he becomes part of the town, it is as a stranger to everyone but Hester. The two decide the marriage was a part of a former life, and their ties are severed. However, Chillingworth’s one goal is to discover who Pearl’s father is, for Hester refuses to expose him. Hawthorne does not confirm who Pearl’s father is until the end of the novel, but I’ll have to spoil the fun for you: it’s the town’s beloved Reverend Dimmesdale.

Hawthorne uses this character like a psychological exploration of morality and guilt. The Puritan society is criticized by Hawthorne for its lack of imagination and relationship to nature. The Puritans are shown to lack Blake’s embracing of contraries, for they strive for an idealistic innocence (which they equate with righteousness) while condemning and refusing the experience and darkness of human nature. Hester and Dimmesdale are contrasted, for the former’s experience is displayed on her chest while the former hides his behind his good reputation. Dimmesdale develops a habit of clutching his heart as though in pain, and becomes noticeably weaker in his physical body. Chillingworth is accepted by the Puritans as a learned scientist and is at first highly admired for his intelligence, but as he “leeches” onto Dimmesdale as his constant companion, some begin to think he is an agent of Satan and not of God.

In the meantime, Pearl is growing up into a beautiful and wild-natured child who invokes discomfort and slight fear in everyone including her own mother. Hester wonders at times whether this unearthly creature is her human child.

Whitmania: Round Five, All We Need is Love...

In studying Wordsworth’s The Prelude it becomes apparent that he valued love for humanity. In his (or her) article “Wedded in Natural Matrimony: Cosmic Love in Wordsworth and Whitman,” D.J. Moores argues that “[l]ove is the principle of individual growth in Wordsworth’s verse, and it is the stay of being.” Also he writes, “Love thus makes the many forms of communion possible in Wordsworth’s poetry” (163). As we have seen in The Prelude, Wordsworth’s preoccupation with the downtrodden and the “vulgar” is a source of inspiration for him. Furthermore Moores writes, “To overcome the isolation of the individual’s existence in a nihilistic world, one must transcend the confines of selfhood through one or more people” (163). It is his poetry that Wordsworth used to cosmically connect with and heal the people around him.

Similarly Whitman’s poetry can also be seen as trying to heal and connect to the world cosmically. In a time of political instability (i.e. the American Civil War), Whitman’s poetry was a source of comfort and healing. Moores writes, “In 1855 America did not enjoy the same stability it does today, and Whitman’s ecstatic poetry was a means to reassure the people of the conflicted states that the powers controlling the world are ‘near and can be invoked’” (164). Whitman’s medicine is love’s healing power which not only makes people whole but also unifies the past and the present. This can be seen in the fourth stanza of his poem “Starting from Paumanok.”

Take my leaves America, take them South and take the North,
Make welcome for them everywhere, for they are your own offspring,
Surround them East and West, for they would surround you,
And you precedents, connect lovingly with them, for they connect
lovingly with you.

I conn’d old times,
I sat studying at the feet of the great masters,
Now if eligible O that the great masters might return and study me.

In the name of these States shall I scorn the antique? Why these are the children of the antique to justify it.

For Whitman love bridges poet to reader. Love causes the reader moves out of their isolated “cogito” because the lover identifies no longer with himself alone but the object of his love. Moores sums up thusly, “Whitman’s poetic, therefore, is an attempt to effect self-transcendence through the healing properties of love” (165).

This same self-transcendence can be seen in Wordsworth’s poem “Lines Written at a Small Distance From My House.”

Love, now and universal birth, From heart to heart is stealing, From earth to man, from man to earth, -- It is the hour of feeling. (21-24)

Love’s power permeates all things and, similar to Whitman, it is able to transcend animate and inanimate borders. As a lover does, Whitman’s poetics and Wordsworth’s nature (cosmic love) offer the reader solace and comfort from a world that causes estrangement and isolation. Moores writes, “In returning home to a the lost consciousness of a primal state of unity, the poet has overcome the only true Romantic evil – that which drives apart. Since the good is ‘equated with the aggregate of what pulls sundered parts together,’ Wordsworth [and Whitman] embrace the most powerful integrative force known to human experience – love” (165).

Let the healing begin.

Walking- William and Thoreau hand in hand :-)

A month after his death from Tuberculosis in May 1862, The magazine entitled The Atlantic published one of his most famous essays "Walking" which praised the virtues of immersing oneself in nature and lamented the inevitable encroachment of private ownership upon the wilderness.
*As William Wordsworth tried to use the language of 'the common people" -Thoreau used the language of the'common people'- no forms or mechanics of'poetry', as if he was talking to you.
*I think this essay touched on the idea of what Blake calls "poetic genuis" or the same idea that William Wordsworth was trying to get across, that not everyone can be a "walker"- poetry comes from someone who has a gift: not everyone can be a poet or philosopher.Thoreau says in Walking that "it requires a dispensation from Heaven to a walker.You must be born into the family of the Walkers".
*Thoreau says:"The walking of which I speak has nothing in it akin to taking exercise, as it is called...but it is the enterprise and adventure of the day. If you would get exercise, go in search of the springs of life...When a traveller asked Wordsworth's servent to show him her master's study she answered,"Here is his library, but his study is out of doors"...
I believe this is comparable to William Wordsworths:"The feeling therein developed gives importance to the action and the situation, and not the action and situation to the feeling" (Preface to lyrical Ballads pg 599). *As William Worsworth says that the city disconnects on from the natural- blunts ones mind it appears that Thoreau agrees: "There are square miles in my vicinity which have no inhabitant. From many a hill I can see civilization and the abodes of man afar...man and his affairs, church and state and school, trade and commerce and manufactures and agriculture, even politics, the most alarming of them all- I am pleased to see how little space they occupy in the landscape".
*Thoreau continues with "when fences shall be multiplied and mantraps and other engines invented to confine men to the public road, and walking over the surface of God's earth shall be contrued to mean tresspassing on some gentleman's grounds". This reminds me of the Perlude book twelve how Wordsworth says that he loves a public road but contrasting it with public meaing natural, common to all, not owned by the state.

Walking
Henry David thoreau
The Atlantic Monthly;May 2006;297,4;CBCA Reference pg 54
http://proquest.umi.com.proxy.lib.sfu.ca/pqdweb

Woodnotes

Emerson's poem:
From WOODNOTES, I


And such I knew, a forest seer,
A minstrel of the natural year, Forteller of the vernal ides,
Wise harbringer of spheres and tides,
A lover true, who knew by heart
Each joy the mountain dales impart; 5
It seemed that Nature could not raise
A plant in any secret place,
In quaking bog, on snowy hill,
Beneath the grass that shades the rill,
Under the snow, between the rocks, 10
In damp fields known to bird and fox,
But he would come in the very hour
It opedned in its virgin bower,
As if a sunbeam showed the place
And tell its long descended race. 15
It seemed as if the breezes brought him;
It seemed as if the sparrows taught him;
As if by secret sight he knew
Where, in far fields, the orchids grew.
Many haps fall in the field 20
Seldom seen by wishful eyes,
But all her shows did nature yeild,
To please and win this pilgrim wise.
He saw the partridge drum in the woods;
He heard the woodcocks evening hymn; 25
He found the tawny thrushes' broods;
And the shy sky hawk did wait for him;
What others did at distance hear,
And guessed within the thicket's gloom,
Was shown to this philosopher, 30
And at his bidding seemed to come.
1840


Jane's thoughts on the above:

After a couple of readings, this poem seems to me to be about the godliness in nature and the rewards attained through a quiet, reverent, patient approach to the natural world. The deification of objects such as "Nature" with a capital "n, " a sunbeam spotlit "virgin bower," and the song of the woodcock as "hymn," recalls the Blakean sentiment that God should not be sought out in a bible or a building, but in the world in us and around us.This "forest seer" might represent the supreme naturalist, or perhaps what Emerson aspires to. The patient "minstrel" moving though the woods with the wisdom of a meteorologist ("forteller of the vernal ides"), the know-how of an astronomer ("wise harbinger of spheres and tides"), and the perception of a botanist ("Nature could not raise a plant in any secret place") exhibits the attitude that allows one entry into the forest's secret hemispheres. One might take the moral of this poem, situated in the final four lines, to be that if you have this reverence, patience, stealth, and wonder, you may be invited to gaze upon nature's hidden treasures instead of only imagining their whereabouts and having only theories to hold onto.

Whitmania: Addendum

After reading the article about sight and sound I used for the previous round of Whitmania, I realised a parallel between the Americans and the British. Both were fighting against the dominant culture of their time. The British Romantics were trying to the undermine the power and influence of the Enlightenment by finding solitude and inspiration from nature and everday people. The Americans were also fighting against something. They were fighting the influence of their colonial power and the culture is sought to impose on them. Both movements wanted break from what they saw as an environment that was stifling them.

Thoreau thoughts

Charles Ives's song, inspired by a passage in WALDEN.
Vital Force as Beneficent:
*Thoreau, when living by Walden wrote: "In a pleasant spring morning all men's sins are forgiven. Such a day is a truce to vice. While such a sun holds out to burn, the vilest sinner may return. Through our own recovered innocence we discern the innocence of our neighbours. You may have known your neighbour yesterday for a thief, a drunkard, or a sensualist, and merely pitied or despised him, and despaired of the world; but the sun shines bright and warm this spring morning, recreating the world, and you meet him at some serene work, and see how his exhausted and debauched veins expand with still joy and bless the new day, feel the spring influence with the innocence of infancy, and all his faults are forgotten. There is not only an atmosphere of goodwill about him, but even a savour of holiness groping for expression, blindly and ineffectually perhaps, like a new-born instinct, and for a short hour the south hill-side echoes to no vulgar jest. You see some innocent fair shoots preparing to burst from his gnarled rind and try another year's life, tender and fresh as the youngest plant. Even he has entered into the joy of his lord. Why the jailor does not leave open his prison doors, -- why the judge does not dismiss his case, -- why the preacher does not dismiss his congregation. It is because they do not obey the hint that God gives them, nor accept the pardon that he freely offers to all."

*It has been said that "Thoreau brought his soul face to face with Nature as wondrous artist, as healer, teacher, as mediator between us and the Creator, has slowly spread its wide beneficence. Look at out-of-door life, and love of plant and tree, and sympathy with animals, now, as compared with these seventy years ago. Yet today the inestimable value of frequent solitude is much overlooked".

*Thoreau wrote in his journal: "There are poets of all kinds and degrees, little known to each other. The Lake School is not the only, or the principal one. They love various things; some love beauty, and some love rum. Some go to Rome, -- and some go a-fishing, and are sent to the house of correction once a month. They keep up their fires by means unknown to me. I know not their comings and goings. I know them wild, and ready to risk all when their muse invites. I meet these gods of the river and woods with sparkling faces (like Apollo's), late from the house of correction, it may be, -- carrying whatever mystic and forbidden bottles or other vessels concealed; while the dull, regular priests are steering their parish rafts in a prose mood. What care I to see galleries full of representations of heathen gods, when I can see actual living ones by an infinitely superior artist?"

On seeing through the eye not with the eye:
A lady who, from her youth upward, was constantly meeting Thoreau at the homes of two of his friends where she also often stayed, and who was in friendly relation with his mother and sister, says:"He took great pleasure in learning from Nature and he wished to divide what he learned with others, and to help let them see with his eyes, that is, show them how to see."

On Death:
Thoreau wrote soon after little Waldo's death to Mrs. Emerson's sister:
"As for Waldo, he died as the mist rises from the brook which the sun will soon dart his rays through. Do not the flowers die every autumn? He had not even taken root here. I was not startled to hear that he was dead; it seemed the most natural thing that could happen. His fine organization demanded it, and Nature gently yielded his request. It would have been strange if he had lived."

http://www.vcu.edu/engweb/transcendentalism/authors/thoreau/youngfriend.html

Whitmania: Round IV, Sight & Sound

What is a poet?...He is a man speaking to men.

Wordsworth, “Preface to the Second Edition
of ‘Lyrical Ballads’”

He is a seer….the others are as good as he, only he sees it and they do not.

Whitman, Preface 1855- Leaves of Grass.

In his article “Whitman vs. Wordsworth: Visual and Aural Differences between American and English Poetry” William E.H. Meyer, Jr. argues that in trying to completely break from the British both politically and culturally, the American poets (esp. Whitman) turned to the sense of sight and away from the sense of hearing.

According to him the Americans had only one chance to break from the dominance of such writers as Shakespeare, Bunyan and Spenser and their influence. The American writers had to go through two revolutions: one to gain political independence and one to gain cultural supremacy. Thomas Paine wrote, “Independence is the only bond that can tie and keep us together. We shall then see our object, and our ears shall be legally shut against the schemes of an intriguing, as well as a cruel enemy” (77). One of the ways to gain this independence was to stress the importance of sight.

This attention to the visual can be seen in Whitman’s poem “Poets to Come” in which the reader can see the value that Whitman places on the future generations of poets.

“Poets to Come”

Poets to come! orators, singers, musicians to come!
Not to-day is to justify me and answer what I am for,
But you, a new brood, native, athletic, continental, greater than before known,
Arouse! for you must justify me.

I myself but write one or two indicative words for the future,
I but advance a moment only to wheel and hurry back in the darkness.

I am a man who, sauntering along without fully stopping, turns a casual look upon you
and then averts his face,
Leaving it to you to prove and define it,
Expecting the main things from you.

Whitman’s charge is for future poets to prove and define this casual look. Whitman wants the primacy of sight to be preserved in the minds of future generations and he does this by figuratively giving them an enigmatic “casual look” not with an oration or a speech.

Interesting to note here is that Whitman equates orators, singers and musicians with poets. Meyer writes that for Whitman and the other American Romantics the definition of what a song is changed. He writes of “Song of Myself” which was changed from its original title “Poem of Walt Whitman, an American,” “the concept of the work as a ‘song’ did not occur to the poet at the time of its inception or even during its maturation but only as a final ‘redefinition’ of the very concept of ‘song’ at all” (84). He then goes on to quote Whitman himself: “what I am after is the content not the music of words. Perhaps the music happens- it does no harm: I do not go in search of it” (85). For Whitman music is incidental. His main focus is to capture sight and content in his words. The music that may accompany it is coincidental. Also, if there appears to be any song like quality in his works, it is because he has changed its definition.

Works Cited

Meyer, William E.H., Jr. "Whitman vs. Wordsworth: Visual and Aural Differences between American and
English Poetry." The Journal of the Midwest Modern Language Association, Vol. 20, No. 1. (Spring,
1987), pp. 76-98.

Nature as a main character in The Scarlet Letter

(Following a description of a prison in a New England community):

“[O]n one side of the portal, and rooted almost at the threshold, was a wild rose-bush, covered, in this month of June, with its delicate gems, which might be imagined to offer their fragrance and fragile beauty to the prisoner as he went in, and to the condoned criminal as he came forth to his doom, in token that the deep heart of Nature could pity and be kind to him” (33-34).

Before we meet any of the major characters of the novel, Hawthorne first introduces us to Nature through the personified kindness and beauty of the rose bush by the prison door. Indeed, Nature is one of the main characters in The Scarlet Letter, and from this passage, we see that Hawthorne is concerned with Nature in relation to human nature. The Puritan community in the novel is portrayed as wanting to isolate, control and “purify” their communal and individual human natures. One of the failures of this that Hawthorne criticizes is their refusal of the darkness, complexity, unpredictability and wildness of human nature, which is basically a refusal of freedom. This suffocation of human nature is contrasted by the Nature of the woods that surround the community, as well as hints of its presence within the town (like the rose bush), and the character of little Pearl. Pearl and Nature is a whole other entry, so instead I will give the first digestible chunk of the novel’s summary so you can have a context to understand the quotations and discussions.

I will try to make this summary of The Scarlet Letter as relevant and to-the-point as possible. I’ll try to focus on the aspects of the novel that relate to the themes of Nature, Individuality, and Imagination.

SUMMARY: PART ONE

The action of the novel begins when the heroine, Hester Prynne, and her baby, Pearl, emerge from prison back into the Puritan community. Hester and her baby are ostracized by the townspeople because she had the baby out of wedlock, and nobody knows who the father is, so of course they’re going nuts, not knowing which man among them to judge.

Part of Hester’s punishment is to wear a scarlet A (for Adultery) on the bodice of her dress as a symbol of her sin. But Hester embroiders a huge, exquisite, gorgeous “A” instead of a simple and shameful one. This “A” and Pearl become interconnected as symbols that keep Hester in an individual world apart from the community, while drawing her into a closer relationship with Nature: both earthly Nature and human nature. Hester and Pearl live in a little cottage on the outskirts of town, by the alluring and untamed woods.

Coming up in Part Two…Hester’s secret husband enters the scene and wants to find out who Pearl’s father is…see how dangerously easy summary commercials start to sound like bad daytime television?

Works Cited

Hawthorne, Nathaniel. The Scarlet Letter. New York: Dover, 1994.

Daniel, Janice B. “‘Apples of the Thoughts and Fancies’: Nature as Narrator in the Scarlet Letter.” Literary Criticism 7.4 (1993): 307-320.

Part two of 'What does being Gay have to do with it'

Man in nature
* Some of his earliest journal entries speak of "young buds of manhood in the streets." "this suculent [sic] and rank-growing slip of manhood," "some rare specimen of manhood," or "a handsome younger man --a sailor like Greek like man." These phrases turn males into objects. Thoreau admires in most of his journal entries the males as embodiments of "manhood." Even when he hides behind some willow trees at the swimming hole in order to watch boys swim carefully describing their skin for his journal, he adds that their nakedness foreshadows "man in nature ". They are both objects and versions of self-ideals".
*Heterosexual romance interprets gender difference as a sign of the irreducible phenomenological difference between persons. Women and men at present can be counted on to have different histories, different relations to power, different rights of access to their own bodies, even different rights of access to thinking of themselves as selves or as objects. In the legitimating structure of heterosexuality these systematic inequalities and relations of power are interpreted as mere difference, reassuring individuals that in desiring the other they are not desiring themselves. Though he was anything but critical about the power relations of gender, Thoreau did not adopt the protective misrecognitions that constitute heterosexuality.
*Without those misrecognitions, however, he can only stress what appear to him to be paradoxes, since the prevailing discourse of gender and sexuality persistently implies that relations among men must be redundant, a relation of sameness. He speaks of two men as being "so one and single" that they think common thoughts "as one mind," while going on to say that "they will at the same time be so two and double, that each will be to the other as admirable and as inaccessible as a star." The buried image of the mirror becomes virtually explicit when he concludes the same passage, "So only shall we see the light of our own countenances." In 1840 he wrote. "I would live henceforth with some gentle soul such a life as may be conceived--double for variety, single for harmony." A year later he speaks of the male lover/friends as "not two united, but rather one divided"; a year later still they are "those twain who feel their interests to be one. ... All beauty--all music--all delight springs from apparent dualism--but real unity. I see his nature groping yonder so like mine--Does there go one whom I know then I go there." These entries obsessively circle around self and other as structuring terms, but only to disavow their coherent opposition. They stress the sameness of the other.
*As Thoreau treats the terms, other is as much ‘self’ as ‘self’ is other: "I only know myself as a human entity, the scene, so to speak. of thoughts and affections, and am sensible of a certain doubleness by which I can stand as remote from myself as from another. However intense my experience, I am conscious of the presence and criticism of a part of me which, as it were is not a part of me, but spectator, sharing no experience, but taking note of it, and that is no more I than it is you." This passage, later copied into Walden, has the tone of a lament, but the internal division it describes could also be thought of as critical serf-consciousness. Such self-dividing criticism is normative for modernity, and Thoreau preached its necessity as much as anyone: his two major works are, after all, a journal and a kind of autobiography. When he says his critical self is "no more I than it is you," he is speaking to himself. He makes an odd spokesman for modernity, then, because he only imagines self-consciousness as being anything other than painful division when it is mediated through another--even if the other is nature. The mediating relation that results, however, is understood as mirroring rather than as mediating.

On Reflection:
*Mirror imagery fascinates Thoreau because he never fails to notice that in desiring another he also desires an ideal relation to himself. But he also never tires of explaining to himself. as though anticipating an emergent language of pathology, that in a relation with another he desires both otherness and self. "When I meet a person unlike me, I find myself wholly in the unlikeness. In what I am unlike others, in that I am." Thoreau emphasizes "wholly" because it is a typically paradoxical pun: as the other's other he finds himself whole, where as an unrelated whole he felt defective and incomplete. "We do not want the double of ourselves--but the complement rather. ... After the longest earthly period he will still be in apogee to me." Or again, "It is not a chamber of mirrors which reflect me. When I reflect, I find that there is other than me."
*We might think of Thoreau's scene of reflective desire as an organizing problematic through which the dispersed erotics of the body come to be centralized as a sexuality of self/other relations. Not all erotic desires must have their source in self/other relations in order for them to be understood as though they do. Thoreau had, for example, an intense erotic investment in hearing that does not require him to thematize any particular relation to others or to a self. "Transport, rapture, ravishment, ecstasy. These are the words I want. This is the effect of music." Often sound represents an occasion for self-dissolution. "I would be drunk, drunk, drunk, dead drunk to this world with it forever. ... The contact of sound . . . is coincident with an ecstasy." Like many other intense pleasures that Thoreau describes, his ecstasy over musical sounds reminds us that an increasingly official liberal sexuality, with its self/other logic of "love," does not exhaust the possibilities of the erotic. Yet Thoreau's pleasure in hearing may be an exception that proves the rule, showing how an apparently unrelated pleasure can get incorporated in the self/other structure of liberal erotics: he finds dozens of occasions, not only in the journal but in Walden and A Week, to frame the erotics of sound as self-reflective. No sound excites him so much as an echo. "All melody is a sweet echo" he claims. "I should think that savages would have made a god of echo."
*Thoreau knew that the Greeks, if not exactly the "savages," had a mythology of Echo. While surveying in 1853, he found an echo that especially thrilled him, and in a long journal entry described it as the most memorable event of the day: "After so many days of comparatively insignificant drudgery with stupid companions, this leisure, this sportiveness, this generosity in nature, sympathizing with the better part of me; somebody I could talk with,--one degree, at least, better than talking with one's self. Ah! Simon Brown's premises harbor a hired man and a hired maid he wots not of." The hired maid in the last sentence is of course Echo. But who is the hired man that Echo speaks to: Thoreau himself, or Narcissus? Thoreau seems to have no shame about identifying with Narcissus. "There needs some actual doubleness like this in nature," he writes in the same entry. "Under such favorable auspices I could converse with myself, could reflect."
*With the pun on "reflect" Thoreau links pleasure in contemplating his image to the reflective self-consciousness of the modern individual. It may be his favorite pun. "Our minds should echo at least as many times as a Mammoth Cave to every musical sound" he writes elsewhere. "It should awaken reflections in us." Even more than echoes, reflective surfaces of water occasion the same pun. While watching reflections, he says, "My thoughts are driven inward, even as clouds and trees are reflected in the still, smooth water." He even goes so far as to say that the pun describes a causal link: "Most men, as farmers, hunters, fishers, etc., walk along a river's bank, or paddle along its stream, without seeing the reflections. Their minds are not abstracted from the surface, from surfaces generally. It is only a reflecting mind that sees reflections." These passages introduce the themes Thoreau is famous for: pleasure in self-contemplation and nature, scorn for the unreflective self of custom and tradition.

*"What signifies the beauty of nature when men are base? We walk to lakes to see our serenity reflected in them."
* "the reflection has the force of a great silent companion."
*The lakes and rivers acquire a glassy stillness, reflecting the skies, the reflex of the day. I too am at the top of my condition for perceiving beauty. ... The attractive point is that line where the water meets the land, not distinct, but known to exist. The willows are not the less interesting because of their nakedness below. ... The water, indeed, reflects heaven because my mind does. ... (The Vital Force)With what sober joy I stand to let the water drip from me and feel my fresh vigor, who have been bathing in the same tub which the muskrat uses! ... Think of a mirror on so large a scale! . . . if [only] men were social in a high and rare sense.
*"Thoreau represents himself as both ecstatic and self-conscious. He stands naked and dripping in the August evening in order to feel not just his skin or the air but his "fresh vigor." He sees in the reflective water not just images of nature, but images of his own reflective mind. All of nature becomes a mirror. The reflections of nature enable him to imagine an unalienated self-contemplation, which he also imagines when he speaks of men being social in a high and rare sense. High and rare indeed. Thoreau was so heavily invested in the erotic idealizations of reflective surfaces that once when a breeze disturbed the water the effect was ruined for him, he claimed, "as if some water nymph had written 'slut' with her finger there."
*"Reflection enchants us, just as an echo does," he says in one sentence before going on in the next to say: "I must make my life more moral, more pure and innocent . . . I must not live loosely, but more and more continently." Reflection seems to be a kind of continence; it confirms the self's boundaries under an ascetic inspection. Perhaps because the mirroring of the other has been construed as the means of perceiving the self's autonomy and integrity, any loss of that mirroring would threaten a capitulation to the other, a sacrifice.

Winter92, Vol. 11, Issue 3Database: Academic Search Elite