Owls by Rilla. I’m in love.
This morning’s reading:
“Passer-by, these are words…” by Yves Bonnefoy. Such a great discussion we had about this. Rose really loves this poem.
“Song: Go and Catch a Falling Star” by John Donne. Their introduction to the metaphysical poets. We’ll spend the next week or so on Donne, with a little Herbert and Marvell. Read some biographical info on Donne. I always enjoy him so much and it’s been quite a long time since I’ve read him. This meant I put a bit of time in this week reading up, refreshing my memory on these poets. Consequently I haven’t begun a new book yet—but I’ve got the Muriel Spark autobiography burning a hole on my desk.
By Marilyn Deegan
The new discoveries of the Mars rover Curiosity have greatly excited the world in the last few weeks, and speculation was rife about whether some evidence of life has been found. (In actuality, Curiosity discovered complex chemistry, including organic compounds, in a Martian soil analysis.)
Why the excitement? Well, astronomy, cosmology, astrology, and all matters to do with the stars, the planets, the universe, and space have always fascinated humankind. Scientists, astrologers, soothsayers, and ordinary people look up to the heavenly bodies and wonder what is up there, how far away, whether there is life out there, and what influence these bodies have upon our lives and our fortunes. Were we born under a lucky star? Will our horoscope this week reveal our future? What is the composition of the planets?
Astronomy is one of the oldest natural sciences, but it was the invention of the telescope in the early 17th century that advanced astronomy into a science in the modern sense of the word. Throughout the course of the 16th and 17th centuries, Copernicus, Galileo, Kepler, and others challenged the established Ptolemeic cosmology, and put forth the theory of a heliocentric solar system. The Church found a heliocentric universe impossible to accept because medieval Christian cosmology placed earth at the centre of the universe with the Empyrean sphere or Paradise at the outer edge of the circle; in this model, the moral universe and the physical universe are inextricably linked. (This is a model that is typified in Dante’s Divine Comedy.)
Authors from John Skelton (1460-1529) to John Evelyn (1620-1706) lived in this same period of great change and discovery, and we find a great deal of evidence in Renaissance writings to show that the myths, legends, and scientific discoveries around astronomy were a significant source of inspiration.
The planets are of course not just planets: they are also personifications of the Greek and Roman gods; Mars is a warlike planet, named after the god of war. Because of its red colour the Babylonians saw it as an aggressive planet and had special ceremonies on a Tuesday (Mars’ day; mardi in French) to ward off its baleful influence. We find much evidence of the warlike nature of Mars in writers of the period: Thomas Stanley’s 1646 translation Love Triumphant from A Dialogue Written in Italian by Girolamo Preti (1582-1626) is a verbal battle between Venus and her accompanying personifications (Love, Beauty, Adonis) and Mars (who was one of her lovers) and his cohort concerning the superior powers of love and war. Venus wins out over the warlike Mars: a familiar image of the period.
John Lyly’s play The Woman in the Moon (c.1590-1595) also personifies the planets and plays on the traditional notion that there is a man in the moon. Lyly’s use of the planets is thought to reflect the Elizabethan penchant for horoscope casting. The warlike Mars versus Venus trope is common throughout the period, and it appears in the works of Shakespeare, Marlowe, Middleton, Gascoigne, and most of their contemporaries. A search in the current Oxford Scholarly Editions Online collection for Mars and Venus reveals almost 300 examples. Many writers of the period also refer to astrological predictions; Shakespeare in Sonnet 14 says:
Not from the stars do I my judgement pluck,
And yet methinks I have astronomy,
But not to tell of good or evil luck,
Of plagues, of dearths, or seasons’ quality;
This is thought to be a response to Philip Sidney’s quote in ‘Astrophil and Stella’ (26):
Who oft fore-judge my after-following race,
By only those two starres in Stella’s face.
Thomas Powell (1608-1660) suggests astrological allusions in his poem ‘Olor Iscanus’:
What Planet rul’d your birth? what wittie star?
That you so like in Souls as Bodies are!
…
Teach the Star-gazers, and delight their Eyes,
Being fixt a Constellation in the Skyes.
While there is still much myth and metaphor pertaining to heavenly bodies in 17th century literature, there is increasing scientific discussion of the positions of the planets and their motions. To give just a few examples, Robert Burton’s 1620 Anatomy of Melancholy discusses the new heliocentric theories of the planets and suggests that the period of revolution of Mars around the sun is around three years (in actuality it is two years).
In his Paradoxes and Problemes of 1633, John Donne in Probleme X discusses the relative distances of the planets from the earth and quotes Kepler:
Why Venus starre onely doth cast a Shadowe?
Is it because it is neerer the earth? But they whose profession it is to see that nothing bee donne in heaven without theyr consent (as Kepler sayes in himselfe of all Astrologers) have bidd Mercury to bee nearer.
The editor’s note suggests that Donne is following the Ptolemaic geocentric system rather than the recently proposed heliocentric system. In his Devotions upon Emergent Occasions of 1623 Donne castigates those who imagine that there are other peopled worlds, saying:
Men that inhere upon Nature only, are so far from thinking, that there is anything singular in this world, as that they will scarce thinke, that this world it selfe is singular, but that every Planet, and every Starre, is another world like this; They finde reason to conceive, not onely a pluralitie in every Species in the world, but a pluralitie of worlds;
There are also a number of letters written in the 1650s and 1660s between Thomas Hobbes and Claude Mylon, Francois de Verdus, and Samuel Sorbière concerning the geometry of planetary motion.
William Lilly’s chapter on Mars in his Christian Astrology (1647), is a blend of the scientific and the metaphoric. He is correct that Mars orbits the sun in around two years ‘one yeer 321 dayes, or thereabouts’, and he lists in great detail the attributes of Mars: the plants, sicknesses, qualities associated with the planet. And he states that among the other planets, Venus is his only friend.
There are few areas of knowledge where myth, metaphor, and science are as continuously connected as that pertaining to space and the universe. Our origins, our meaning systems, and our destinies — whatever our religious beliefs — are bound up with this unimaginably large emptiness, furnished with distant bodies that show us their lights, lights which may have been extinguished in actuality millenia ago. Only death is more mysterious, and many of our beliefs about life and death are also bound up with the mysteries of the universe. That is why we remain so fascinated with Mars.
Marilyn Deegan is Professor Emerita in the Department of Digital Humanities at King’s College, University of London. She has published widely on textual editing and digital imaging. Her book publications include Digital Futures: Strategies for the Information Age (with Simon Tanner, 2002), Digital Preservation (edited volume, with Simon Tanner, 2006), Text Editing, Print and the Digital World (edited volume, with Kathryn Sutherland, 2008), and Transferred Illusions: Digital Technology and the Forms of Print (with Kathryn Sutherland, 2009). She is editor of the journal Literary and Linguistics Computing and has worked on numerous digitization projects in the arts and humanities. Read Marilyn’s blog post where she looks at the evolution of electronic publishing.
Oxford Scholarly Editions Online (OSEO) is a major new publishing initiative from Oxford University Press. The launch content (as at September 2012) includes the complete text of more than 170 scholarly editions of material written between 1485 and 1660, including all of Shakespeare’s plays and the poetry of John Donne, opening up exciting new possibilities for research and comparison. The collection is set to grow into a massive virtual library, ultimately including the entirety of Oxford’s distinguished list of authoritative scholarly editions.
Oxford University Press’ annual Place of the Year, celebrating geographically interesting and inspiring places, coincides with its publication of Atlas of the World – the only atlas published annually — now in its 19th Edition. The Nineteenth Edition includes new census information, dozens of city maps, gorgeous satellite images of Earth, and a geographical glossary, once again offering exceptional value at a reasonable price. Read previous blog posts in our Place of the Year series.
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Today is National Poetry Day, and Britain's favourite top three poets are, in order, T.S.Eliot, John Donne and Benjamin Zephaniah. So far so good.
Thomas Stearns Eliot I first discovered as part of my English Literature degree, and my battered and well-thumbed copy of his Collected Works is full of impenetrable studenty scribblings such as 'theological beliefs also fragmented throughout but imagery becomes predominant here.' Nowadays I prefer to savour his words out loud, letting them linger on my tongue and relishing the sound of them falling into silence. Poetry, for me, is a pleasure of both eye and voice.
John Donne was also a degree course discovery--and again, my copy of his works is annotated by my secondhand interpretation of that long-ago tutor's ideas on the metaphysical. Those were the days of frantic deconstruction, and it took me a while to shake off the dust of that horror from my feet. One of my favourite poems of all time is
Goe and Catche a Falling Starre--something about its hypnotic, spell-like rhythms speaks to the soul of my imagination, and I even tried my own tribute to it, thus:
Spellsong
(for John Donne 1571-1631)
Go and save a dying star,
Seek magic from an ash tree root,
Ask me where the Fair Folk are,
Grasp a firebird's feathered foot.
Treasure up a seal's soft singing,
Hold fast to a nettle's stinging,
And find
What wind
Blows spellsongs at a wizard's mind.
As for Ben Zephaniah, my
May blog about him will tell you that I am a huge admirer of his work, and I am delighted that the people who entered the poll obviously feel the same way. He is passionate, funny, delightful, controversial, honest, challenging--all the things a poet should be in this modern age.
But you will see that the title of this piece is 'National Poetry Disgrace?' Why? Because a less happy headline today has been that 58% of primary school teachers (yes,
58%) cannot name more than two poets and just 10% could name 6--the number asked for. Although the article is in the
Daily Mail (not usually my paper of choice), the study was a joint one done by Cambridge, the OU and Reading Universities--all reputable bodies. We are also told by
Scholastic Magazine that more than a quarter of parents have never sung or read a nursery rhyme to their children. In combination, these two reports lay bare a devastating lack in our children's education. Poetry--and nursery rhymes are also poetry--teach rhythm, rhyme and pattern--all important developmental building blocks for young ones. Luckily Booktrust's
Bookstart has made a beginning attempt at addressing this disgraceful situation by distributing one million books with 8 favourite rhymes in them--and also promoting storytelling, song and poetry sessions all over the UK, I just hope it's enough to start us on the long steep road to recovering our poetic heritage for the next generation.
Primary School teachers' noses are pressed so closely to the grindstone, Lucy, they scarcely have time to breathe. Give them a break!
Brian, they should be able to name poets just because they are human beings. It's not as though (horror) they were asked to READ any.
Spellsong is a lovely poem, Lucy.
Anne, that's all they hear all day every day. They should do this, they should do that. So now writers are joining the Daily Mail in throwing brickbats. Great.
I'd be more disturbed if English teachers were named as not having heard of poets. Maths teachers is a different matter. But I am surprised about the primary school teachers, don't they use poetry, and aren't they all-rounders? On the other hand, though the survey was done by reputable universities, and Reading, much to my pleasure, has a reading centre (I live near Reading)- that's not to say that the Mail has correctly represented the findings..
There is no must about poetry
no have to, no forced to,
no learn this or you’re for it,
no see me in my office,
no government inspector,
no guardians of culture,
no thundering headlines,
no disgusted of the suburbs,
Poetry has better things to do
Children here in Australia are much more likely to study an advertising jingle than a limerick. I am told that this is more important and that there is 'no time' for the teaching of poetry!
Brian, I'm sorry, but as a former primary school teacher myself I have to disagree with you.
Primary school teaching should require a certain breadth of general knowledge. No-one's saying every primary teacher should know the names of lots of poets, but if more than half don't know the names - just the names, mind you, not the titles of any of their poems, not first lines or quotes but just the names - of more than two, don't you think that indicates a problem with our culture?
You're right - teachers have for years been used as political whipping boys, and we should give them a break. And clearly we shouldn't respond to this by suggesting teachers go and learn lists of poets. But neither should we pretend there is no problem here.
I'm glad to see this has sparked a debate. Brian--I am not trying to use primary teachers as whipping boys (or girls). I know what a hard job they have and how many wretched Governmental directives they have to comply with, noses pressed to the grindstone. However, I am with John and Anne here. A teacher--any teacher--should have a certain amount of general knowledge of this kind before they even start in the classroom--it's not a question of something they must or should be learning after they are in the profession. If our education system has been broken for so long that 58% of this generation of teachers cannot even name, say Milton or Shakespeare (both poets), then there is clearly a very big hill to climb indeed before it is mended. The sampling was, from memory, a fairly large one for a study--over 2500 teachers. I do not know whether they were taken from one area or across the UK--and Leslie makes another valid point about whether the Mail has interpreted the findings in a balanced way (as I said, it's not my paper of choice). However, I felt it was important to draw attention to this study because, if true, I find it very worrying to contemplate such a large lacuna in what should be basic knowledge in the very people who have care of the education of our next generation. If we do not acknowledge it we cannot start mending it--ignoring it is not an option.
And thank you, Katherine. I am glad you liked it.
Primary school teachers and everyone else should have read some poetry/ learned who the poets are LONG LONG before they even get to be students. In their childhood. But THEIR teachers ( and PARENTS!! Let us not forget that people have PARENTS) should have taught them in their turn and so on down the line. EVERYONE has a right to know about poetry and be exposed to it and lack of knowledge leads on to MORE lack of knowledge....I'm sounding like a Grumpy Old Woman I know but there you go...
No, Adele--not a GOW at all. You are quite right and hit the nail squarely on the head. That's the bit which scares me--the lack of knowledge leading on to more lack of knowledge. The 'poetry car' is running very low on petrol and needs filling up soon or it will grind to a halt. But how do we do this--how do we start to redress the balance--and I mean all of us collectively, rather than just an initiative like Bookstart?
that last line was meant to read 'rather than just relying on an initiative like Bookstart?'
I understand that the actual question asked was to name "6 good poets writing for children". This surely makes a huge difference?
If that's the case, Colyngbourne, then it makes an enormous difference. That's certainly not how it's been reported - on Radio 4's Today as well as in the papers - but the media isn't always that good at reporting studies accurately (another problem to which attention needs to be drawn!).
Yes, the Daily Mail article 'damning' teachers is here (with a comment beneath explaining the misrepresentation) - http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1219130/More-half-primary-teachers-unable-poets.html
Then the actual report is here http://www.ukla.org/downloads/TARwebreport.doc
and the actual survey ("Name 6 'good' children's poets") is here http://www.ukla.org/site/research/research_projects_in_progress/teachers_as_readers_building_communities_of_readers/
Oops, sorry, it missed the last bit of the address off that:
http://www.ukla.org/site/research/research_projects_in_progress/teachers_as_readers_building_communities_of_readers/
There we are then... just the Daily Mail up to its usual foaming at the mouth.
Hanging out in bookstores (USA) I have noticed that almost all who buy poetry books are themselves poets. Makes me wonder if anyone reads it these days except poets (and some English teachers).
Sad, really. Nothing teaches a language better than poetry, and the lessons learned go far beyond just poems.