And to help you in reading a little wider, here are a few more poems from Some Imagist Poets (1915). These are by Richard Aldington (H.D.'s husband).
A GIRL
You were that clear Sicilian fluting
That pains our thought even now.
You were the notes
Of cold fantastic grief
Some few found beautiful.
NEW LOVE
She has new leaves
After her dead flowers,
Like the little almond-tree
Which the frost hurt.
OCTOBER
The beech-leaves are silver
For lack of the tree's blood.
At your kiss my lips
Become like the autumn beech-leaves.
And here is another from the same colleection, this time by D. H. Lawrence (you may remember looking at one of Lawrence's poems, 'Hummingbird', at the start of the course):
GREEN
The sky was apple-green,
The sky was green wine held up in the sun,
The moon was a golden petal between.
She opened her eyes, and green
They shone, clear like flowers undone,
For the first time, now for the first time seen.
i had to buy the penguin book of american verse for a previous course by Anthony Lake. and actually it seemed so vain to but it as we do not come across many american poets. this semester, i started to believe that i was wrong to think so. now here we are trying to speculate on h. d. and d. h. - funny to say one after another =)
ReplyDeleteplus i remember the humming bird it was the one i liked better than the other as it was the modernist one, yet the humming bird was getting less and smaller, the gyre idea of yeats, etc... unless my memory tricks me. but the green poem is well, tricky to call imagist i thought the imagistes were writing almost without weird metaphors and like. but here i am looking at a poem which is supposed to be imagist but also talking about an apple-green sky :-< is it an idiom or something that the native speakers may know better? cause in turkish language we dont call any state of the sky green.
ReplyDeleteone more thing, aldington's poem october, i could only read it as a love poem. but what we called imagist poetry is that they are like a single stick around which goes many topics round and round. how can we read this poem in a different context?
ReplyDeletesemanurketenci.blogspot.com
Thanks for the comments and forgive a hasty reply from an internet cafe. On 'October' - who do you think 'your' refers to? Could it refer to October itself? And again, who is the speaker? Is s/he necessarily human? I think you are right to read it as a love poem, but again, it can perhaps also be read in various ways as a poem on autumn. That fusion of human emotions and the natural world may be inspired by Japanese and Chinese poetry. It is perhaps closer to Romantic poetry, too, than a lot of modernist poetry, in the relationship it establishes between human passions and the natural world. the next question os what does it MEAN for lips to become like the 'autumn beech leaves'? Cracked? - by the 'kiss' of the October wind perhaps? Bright red? There's a lot to think about in this short poem.
ReplyDeleteI'll try to reply to your other posts soon, but in the meantime, thanks for commenting!
*the next question IS...
ReplyDeleteso "your" in October does not necessarily refer to a beloved. oh, i'm tricked so easily by these imagist poems =) of course, it is october's kiss that makes the persona's lips like cracked autumn beech-leaves. kiss is kind of, arrival of the season. oh, here is another interpretation, please dont think i'm pushing too far to make it refer to other things. maybe, just maybe, autumn refers to the after middle-age years of the persona, and october's arrival brings together many wrinkle's. so his "lips" are "like autumn leaves", cracked yea, but also full of lines. how about that? well, i know it is too traditional to associate autumn with after mid-age but sometimes we cannot escape it too far, can we? plus as u suggested it is close to romantic poetry, but it's ok if it is, for most of the poetry was also experimental.
ReplyDeleteThe most obvious reading, I suppose, is that at the lover's kiss the speaker's lips turn bloodless and silvery (like the beech leaves). This is perhaps not very far away from the decadent idea of the vampiric lover - or simply that of a passion so intense that it somehow turns into its reverse, and becomes chilling, draining life. I think my original comments about the 'redness' of the lips are problematic, prescisely because of the reference to the silvered beech leaves. I don't think you are pushing too far in seeing a possible reference to ageing in the poem, either - this fits perfectly with the idea of blood draining away.
ReplyDeletewell, just remembering things from previous terms: the contemporary book "twilight" included detailed descriptions of how the wampire wants to bite the girl and those passages are also associated with lust and sex of course which reminds me of blood draining idea you suggested. but didnt know that aldington would be interested in such gothic ideas. what is this a pioneering interest in the wampire elements in lit.? also an english idea from centuries ago sex is consuming life, the more you have it the more your life is consumed. well, guess it has been a train of mumbo-jumbo ideas :s
ReplyDeleteI think a strong case can be made for Dracula, by Bram Stoker, as a great modernist novel. Look at its date of publication! It has the fascination with new technologies - blood transfusion, telegrams, the typewriter - and an interest in a deathly, 'undead' 'nature'. Look at its experiments with narrative form, too. I'd argue that on some level "Dracula" isn't properly 'Gothic' at all, but very, very modern - or perhaps, in the figure of Dracula himself, the revolt of 'undead' tradition against the modern world. I can talk about this until people drop dead of boredom (and I frequently do).
ReplyDeleteI've never read any of the 'Twilight' books. I have friends who hate them with a passion, for their politics, their ideas of gender roles, and for their (apparently) awful prose style. Maybe one day I'll find out for myself (or maybe I'll see if one of them will contribute here). It is interesting how vampires have become ultra-fashionable over the last ten years or so. Now we are straying from Modernist poetics, though...
Last vampire note - is HBO's series "True Blood" shown in Turkey? That's an interesting take on the vampire myth. And then, there is always this: http://www.amazon.com/Vampire-Darcys-Desire-Prejudice-Adaptation/dp/1569757313
ReplyDeleteok, i'm going one by one;
ReplyDeletei saw the first dracula film shot in 1931 in black and white (as most of the time adopted fims save me time), and i can say that they didnt look gothic at all. actually i was confused to find it so soft but for then i couldnt think of it in a modern context as i can now. well, wiki says that the version i saw was based on bram stocker's, deane's and balderstone's dracula. like a mixture of irish and american Draculas :) yet, yeah, they dont mention much of the wampire tradition and stuff. more like a mesmerizing guy mesmerizing a young lady =)just for the records, i wouldnt drop dead of boredom because of twisted view-points.
the twilight word only makes sense when we talk about the twilight zone series =) i'm sure your friends will like the movie "wampires suck", a parody to the twilight movies. actually commercial lifestyle can sell you the most expensive 3 stripes you can buy and the worst prose you can read. sorry for the diversion.
and true blood is not shown in turkey, i watched it on the internet. at first i thought it was too pornographic to have a good plot and good acting but then i realized that it was my prejudice =) it even argues that vampires can actually be seen in the mirror but they prefered to spread that rumour around so that vampires willnot be choosen from the regular people =) and the mind-reading girl sookie cannot read bill's mind just because her ability should rely on the brain waves of alive people, but now that a vampire is actually dead he doesnt have a brain wave so she cannot read his mind. in the twilight movie the vampire boy cannot search the girls feelings so he is attached to her, etc.. i like true blood better =)
ReplyDeleteGosh I know it's ridiculous that I just got here and make this comment but; hallo? isn't modernist poetry/imagists aim to find the 'exact curve' by lessening of sentences with less words and no use of exaggerated adjectives? if I am to get the exact curve then why do I always have hard time understanding what the poem says? isn't exact curve supposed to help me figuring out what the poem 'exactly' means? this may not be the case with "new love" or "a girl" but how can I DEEM that for lips to become like the 'autumn beech leaves' means cracked OR "sea rose" speaks to a tradition of writing?
ReplyDeleteanswer to you from years back :
ReplyDeleteI am a poet...a professional writer for forty-plus years. It is interesting
to me how individuals, even enlightened, scholarly types can, with any
semblance of confidence, profess to 'know' what the poet 'means' through
the words, implications and symbology; even if, in fact, s/he has intended
a symbolic facet to the poetic words and phrases employed. My poetry is
written solely for ME. The famous American poet and novelist, Robert Penn
Warren said, "For what is a poem but a hazardous attempt at
self-understanding; it is the deepest part of autobiography." THAT is the
mien of the poets I've met and have been honored to know. To me, to be able
to rummage around on the darker, more jagged edges of my being and pull a
demon or angel painfully through my heart and mind, then have the
expressive ability, Flaubert's 'le mot juste' to grasp them tightly and
push them onto paper IN BLACK AND WHITE is a sweet, relieving,
self-administered cathartic process; a 'very, very personal' auto-therapy
of renewal and reassessment. NO ONE knows what I ‘mean or intend,’ what I
‘imply or suggest,’ what I have ‘explicitly stated or have symbolically
veiled.’ If I choose to share my poem with someone and they discover and
derive within themselves their own meaning from it and are touched by my
words, I am more than pleased and delighted. But I hasten to advise them
NOT TO TELL ME ‘WHAT I MEANT.’ They simply do NOT know.
which means we are not trying to find out what 2x2 equals but what the unknown x could be. yes, the Imasgiste omitted the embroidery of a poem and reached a pure definition of an object. but it doesnt mean that there should be one single explanation for each imagist poem. actually one of the first things we learned about the imagist poetry was that the poem itself is like a single spot around which many interpretations spin. moreover, the shorter the poem is the harder you try to find out what the persona meant. exact curve here, i guess, is only peculiar to the object itself, not the whole poem. this is the ABC's of the imagist poetry as well as the whole literature!
I have just written a long reply which disappeared into thin air. Sorry. I'll try to rewrite the main points and post them up here later. There's lots of interesting stuff here, though!
ReplyDeletewell, i love shakespeare but not when a huge piece of comment vanishes just like that =)expecting to hear soon =)
ReplyDeletesema thank you for your response. I must say I was thinking just like that. it's just I got confused when we were talking about "sea rose" and it's connotations.
ReplyDeleteand did you try ctrl+z patrick? although it's too late now, you can try it right after you lose a written text (I know this is BASICS but some people just do not know that). ant the other way is; go to "edit posts" and there you may find your disappeared text was saved as a draft by blogspot.
wow, wow, wow! watch your Caps Lock =)
ReplyDelete'You should say what you mean,' the March Hare went on.
ReplyDelete`I do,' Alice hastily replied; `at least--at least I mean what I say--that's the same thing, you know.'
`Not the same thing a bit!' said the Hatter. `You might just as well say that "I see what I eat" is the same thing as "I eat what I see"!'
So to begin with Ilke's point about having a hard time, and deeming that something 'means' something: I think I'd go back to the class where we talked about Wittgenstein and other philosophers working on language at the same time as the Imagists were writing. The one thing these writers all seem to agree on is that it is incredibly difficult to use language precisely, accurately. Language always brings with it a remainder: it always ends up saying something else, that we may or may not want to say, or 'mean'. If I try to tell you something simple about a dog in the corner of the room, I'll probably end up telling you about all sorts of other things too - you'll be able to tell things about my origins and class, almost certainly, and my attitude to the dog, and so on. If I try to write about something more complex, it gets even more impossible. As Prufrock says in T. S. Eliot's 'The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock', "It is impossible to say just what I mean!".
The Imagist solution, rather than simplifying language, or inventing a perfectly logical language (!) as some philosophers wanted to do, was (as shape shifter says) to find an image, a single point that brings together that whole 'intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time'. For Ezra Pound, this point or image quickly became a VORTEX, a spinning whirlwind where all these complexities can be concentrated (that in itself is of course a metaphor). Of course, Pound changed his theory every few months, but this didn’t stop him writing great poems.
And then what do I 'mean' (to go back to Alice) - what I say, or what I meant to say? Both, I think, in different ways. But I mean one thing, my language another, and often my language has far more interesting things to say than I do (even if perhaps I’d prefer those things not to be said!). And this is not surprising (I tell myself when I feel bad), because the language has been developing for hundreds, even thousands of years, and Shakespeare, Chaucer, Johnson, and Keats have helped make it. So when we read the poem, any poem, I think we are interested not only in what the poet is saying (although this is interesting too) but in what the language is saying through her/him.
For this reason I think that the Imagists - Pound certainly, and later Eliot (who did not consider himself an Imagist) - would have been suspicious of Robert Penn Warren's autobiographical emphasis. For them it is the POEM that thinks. The poet is the agent, but language is the means - and language is shared, communal, and historical.
thank you Anonymous. good points to make! and they remind me of some stuff that Saussure argues. if my memory doesnt fail me, he was talking about what we mean when we say a particular word and basicly when we talk about, say, a rose we also mean every other thing that is not a rose. almost like saying "nothing else but rose" or "rose and not any other thing". nice way of thinking =)just one word and you mean everything =)
ReplyDeletePlus, edit posts only saves the POSTS that you are going to publish, not huge COMMENTS!
ReplyDeleteGood connection with Saussure. I just came across this, from Wittgenstein again
ReplyDelete- Uttering a word is like striking a note on the keyboard of the imagination. -
I thought I ought to throw it into the conversation.
sure, we are expecting more throwings =)
ReplyDelete