The Runaway by Anton Chekhov

Posted on August 1, 2016 by cleopatra

I’m trying to get back on track with my Deal-Me-In Challenge, and I finally drew the first short story of the year, The Runaway by Anton Chekhov.

Science and Charity (1897)
Pablo Picasso
source Wikiart

After a long journey, young Pashka and his mother wait at the hospital to see the doctor. Pashka has a boil on his elbow, but the mother has waited too long and the doctor scolds her, declaring that the wound is infected and the boy may lose his arm. A stay is required, about which Pashka is not thrilled but he is lured by the doctor’s promises of seeing a live fox and eating sugar-candy. After a sumptuous dinner of soup, roast beef and bread, the boy awaits the doctor to honour his commitment but when he doesn’t come, he explores the wards, finally returning to his own where he hears the patient, Mikhailo, coughing and wheezing. When he wakes late in the night, he finds three people at the dead Mikhailo’s bed, yet when they leave, the old man’s chest wheezes again. Terrified, Pashka screams for his mother, leaps out of bed and tears through the wards and into the yard, intending to run home but a graveyard looms ahead, and Pashka is intensely relieve to spot the kind doctor through a window in a building. When he burst inside the doctor’s words echo: “You’re a donkey, Pashka! Now aren’t you a donkey? You ought to be whipped ….”

The Runaway (1958)
Norman Rockwell
source Wikiart

Well, what to make of that? There is the danger of infection, the tension of being separated from his mother, the doctor’s promises that manipulate (for good or ill, who knows) yet come to nought, the wards of sick people and the boy’s terror, perhaps at hearing a dead man who appears to still live. It’s curious, especially since Pashka’s condition appears serious, yet the reader never has a whisper as to its outcome. Chekhov himself spent most of his life in the medical profession, so one wonders if he is also exploring the psychological methods physicians might use on their patients. Through the boy’s eyes the doctor is “kind” but is he really? The boy has a serious medical condition yet no one seems to be rushing him to surgery, and the doctor has promised many delights for Pashka and is delivering none of them. What is behind Chekhov’s tale? Is it a simple tale or a story with a deeper meaning?

Birthhouse of Anton Chekhov
source Wikipedia

Deal Me In Challenge #11

Different Tastes in Literature by C.S. Lewis

Posted on June 15, 2016 by cleopatra

Art and Literature (1867)
William-Adolphe Bouguereau
source Wikiart

Is there good literature? Is there bad literature? How do we make the determination, and do we even have the criteria to judge? In his essay, Different Tastes in Literature, if Lewis does not directly answer these questions, he at least gives the reader criteria that makes it easier to judge, and challenges us to examine our reading experiences.

First, Lewis investigates the notion of “tastes” and indicates a determination between good and bad literature is complicated by the fact that there are no objective tests. But the error people make is in assuming that people like bad art in the same way that they like good art. Instead, Lewis proposes, bad art does not succeed with anyone.

Lewis defines bad art as very low art, such as novels, and popular music that are read or sung and then forgotten soon after. When it goes out of fashion, it is never thought of afterward.

Geniuses of Art (1761)
Francois Boucher
source Wikiart

Yet while bad art itself is not so easy to describe, the consumer of bad art is more easily targeted:

“He (or she) may want her weekly ration of fiction very badly indeed, may be miserable if denied it. But he never re-reads. There is no clearer distinction between the literary and the unliterary. It is infallible. The literary man re-reads, other men simply read. A novel once read is to them like yesterday’s newspaper …… It is as if a man said he had once washed, or once slept, or once kissed his wife, or once gone for a walk. Whether the bad poetry is re-read or not …. I do not know. But the very fact that we do not know is significant. It does not creep into the conversation of those who buy it. One never finds two of its lovers capping quotations and settling down to a good evening’s talk about their favourite. So with the bad picture. The purchaser says, no doubt sincerely, that he finds it lovely, sweet, beautiful, charming or (more probably) ‘nice’. But he hangs it where it cannot be seen and never looks at it again.”

With bad art, there is no question of the ‘joy’ that good art brings. “The desire for bad art is the desire bred of habit: like the smoker’s desire for tobacco, more marked by the extreme malaise of denial than by any very strong delight in fruition.”

Art Critic
Norman Rockwell
source Wikiart

On experiencing good art, it is not like moving from one type to the next, but more like “when you opened the door, to lead to the garden of the Hesperides ….” However, we must not say that some men like good art and some bad, rather that the term “like” is not the proper word for good art, and the response towards good art, has never been produced in bad.

Is it too simple to say that bad art does not ever have the same effect on a person as good art? What about those books that captured our imagination in youth but that we now consider bad? Might this simply mean that the reader’s imagination was superior to the author’s, but lacking both maturity and discernment? In effect, we would not have been enjoying the book for what it was, but for what it was not. But this “mirage” is quite different from the actual liking of bad art. Bad art is “tepid, trivial, marginal, habitual. It does not trouble them, nor haunt them ….. No one cares about bad art in the same way as some care about good.” It is only when we eliminate the bad art that the discussions about the superiority of one work of art to another can have some value.

The Disquieting Muses (1916-18)
Giorgio di Chirico
source Wikiart

In this essay, Lewis more distinguishes what is not good art than what is, however his insights, as always, are invaluable. We have so little time on this earth. Life comes and goes in the blink of an eye. Don’t we want to be discerning about our literary choices and choose to read works that add perspective, wisdom and purpose to our lives, instead of reading words that pass through us in the blink of an eye? I do.

Deal Me In Challenge #10

The Morning of Life by Victor Hugo

Posted on March 25, 2016 by cleopatra

My ninth choice for my Deal Me In Challenge comes from “diamonds,” my poetry section. I have completely avoided my short story section so far, not out of design, but out of fate. I just haven’t chosen a club yet. In any case, for this choice we move to France and the poetry of Victor Hugo.

Le Voile du Matin

by Victor Hugo

Le voile du matin sur les monts se déploie.

Vois, un rayon naissant blanchit la vieille tour ;

Et déjàdans les cieux s’unit avec amour,

Ainsi que la gloire àla joie,

Le premier chant des bois aux premiers feux du jour.

Oui, souris à l’éclat dont le ciel se décore ! –

Tu verras, si demain le cercueil me dévore,

Un soleil aussi beau luire à ton désespoir,

Et les mêmes oiseaux chanter la même aurore,

Sur mon tombeau muet et noir !

Mais dans l’autre horizon l’âme alors est ravie.

L’avenir sans fin s’ouvre à l’être illimité.

Au matin de l’éternité

On se réveille de la vie,

Comme d’une nuit sombre ou d’un rêve agité.

Skylark
source Wikipedia

The Morning Of Life (an ode)

by Victor Hugo

The mist of the morning is torn by the peaks,

Old towers gleam white in the ray,

And already the glory so joyously seeks

The lark that’s saluting the day.

Then smile away, man, at the heavens so fair,

Though, were you swept hence in the night,

From your dark, lonely tomb the owlets would stare

At the sun rising newly as bright.

But out of earth’s trammels your soul would have flown

Where glitters Eternity’s stream,

And you shall have waked ‘midst pure glories unknown,

As sunshine disperses a dream.

This is a beautiful poem, but this was the only English translation that I was able to find, and the poem really suffers in the translation. From the French (keeping in mind, my French is adequate, but I’m certainly not fluent), the reader is assailed wtih images of newness and light and birth and song, but there is also a reference to an old tower. Yet in the second stanza the poet mentions that though he may be found in a coffin (I suspect that he is the “old tower” from the first stanza), the sun will continue to shine and that same bird will sing on his tomb. And should the reader be saddened by his death? The third stanza indicates not, as the poet will have an endless horizon as he awakens in the light of eternity. The first life now appears as a dark night or restless dream in comparison to this new everlasting life.

Ai-ya! I was able to pull very little of that explanation from the English translation. The French says “mon tombeau” (my tomb), not your tomb, and with the English second person pronouns in the third stanza, it is very confusing as to who is speaking. Anyone with more adequate French skills than I have, is welcome to comment.

For those of you who didn’t know that Hugo was also a recreational artist, producing more than 4000 drawings, I’ll leave you with one of them:

The Wave of My Destiny (1857)
Victor Hugo
source Wikiart

Deal Me In Challenge #9

The World of Tomorrow by E.B. White

Posted on March 21, 2016 by cleopatra

I seem to be getting mostly essays lately for my Deal Me In Challenge. This week, I read The World of Tomorrow by E.B. White, the famed author of Charlotte’s Web. White wrote this essay about the 1939 World’s Fair in New York, where visions of the future abounded and a bright tomorrow was laid before eager and credulous eyes.

“The eyes of the fair are on the future —- not in the sense of peering toward the unknown nor attempting to foretell the events of tomorrow and the shape of things to come, but in the sense of presenting a new and clearer view of today in preparation for tomorrow; a view of the forces and ideas that prevail as well as the machines.

To the visitors the Fair will say, ‘Here are the materials, ideas and forces at work in our world. These are the tools with which the forces of the World of Tomorrow must be made. They are all interesting and much effort has been expended to lay them before you in an interesting way. Familiarity with today is the best preparation for the future.”
( ~ official New York World’s Fair pamphlet)

British Pavilion
source Wikipedia

Someone is obviously trying to sell something grand, and it was enlightening to read about White’s experience at the Fair. Right from the start, we sense a disconnect between the two, as he personifies the event. His first sentences read: “I wasn’t really prepared for the World’s Fair last week, and it certainly wasn’t prepared for me. Between the two of us there was considerable of a mixup.” White informs the reader that upon his visit, he had a cold and that “when you can’t breath through your nose, Tomorrow seems strangely like the day before yesterday.” He then gives a catalogue of the exhibitors with strangely impersonal names such as Kix, Astring-O-Sol, Textene, Alka-Seltzer and the Fidelity National Bank. White’s impressions do not inspire awe or a trust in Tomorrow.

“It is all rather serious-minded, this World of Tomorrow, and extremely impersonal. A ride on the Futurama of General Motors induces approximately the same emotional response as a trip through the Cathedral of St. John the Divine. The countryside unfolds before you in $5-million micro-lovliness, conceived in motion and executed by Norman Bel Geddes. The voice is a voice of utmost respect, of complete religious faith in the eternal benefaction of faster travel …….. When night fall in the General Motors exhibit and you lean back in the cushioned chair (yourself in motion and the world so still) and hear (from the depths of the chair) the soft electric assurance of a better life — the life which rests on wheels alone — there is a strong, sweet poison which infects the blood. I didn’t want to wake up. I liked 1960 in purple light, going a hundred miles an hour around impossible turns ever onward toward the certified cities of the flawless future. It wasn’t till I passed an apple orchard and saw the trees, each blooming under its own canopy of glass, that I perceived that even the General Motors dream as dreams so often do, left some questions unanswered about the future. The apple tree of Tomorrow, abloom under its inviolate hood, makes you stop and wonder. How will the little boy climb it? Where will the bird build its nest?”

White makes a few other observations which are very powerful statements:

“In Tomorrow, people and objects are not lit from above but from below”

“Rugs do not slip in Tomorrow, and the bassinets of newborn infants are wired against kidnappers. There is no talking back in Tomorrow. You are expected to take it or leave it alone.”

“In Tomorrow, most sounds are not the sounds themselves but a memory of sounds, or an electrification.”

At the end of the essay, instead of remembering the Fair itself, White’s recollections are quite different: the trees at night, eerie shadows, fountains in the light, a girl, remembered not just as passing impressions, but in generous detail. The last line of the essay stabs home his point:

“Here was the Fair, all fairs, in pantomime; and here the strange mixed dream that made the Fair: the heroic man, bloodless and perfect and enormous, created in his own image, and in his hand (rubber, aspetic) the literal desire, the warm and living breast.”

After my first read of this essay, I was left completely unmoved. I had no interest in the 1939 World’s Fair, and White’s ramblings about his cold, standing in line, etc. which I found annoyingly pointless. It was only when I read the essay for a second time, that his consummate skill as a writer drummed me over the head. Though not stating his views outright, with each sentence White was building his case, having the reader experience the loss of humanness and empathy that the rapid rise of technology was moving towards. When one places the value of machines and progress above the people they are supposed to be serving, you lose the human qualities of life and the simplicity, the wonder and human connection in life that make it so fulfilling.

Perhaps it’s telling that White moved from New York to Maine that very year.

Deal Me In Challenge #8

Out Of Your Car, Off Your Horse by Wendell Berry

Posted on February 22, 2016 by cleopatra

This “essay” is set up in point-form with the sub-title, Twenty-seven Propositions About Global Thinking and the Sustainability of Cities. It’s going to be difficult to review, not only because of the structure, but also because Berry is such an original thinker and has so much of value to say. It is almost a shame to leave anything out.

1. Global thinking is not possible; those who claim to be global thinkers have
done so in a manner too simplistic and oppressive to merit the word
“thinker”. Global thinkers are dangerous (national ones too) and he gives
the example of his state of Kentucky being used as a garbage dump.
Apparently it’s okay with everyone except those who live in the state.

2. Global thinking is only based on statistics and can only do something if it is willing to
be destructive on a large scale, however, conversely, one is able to make a positive
impact locally. Global thinking takes you so far from your neighbourhood, soon you
are unable to recognize it. Instead, get out of your spaceship, car, or horse and
walk on the solid earth to discover its wonder.

3. If we really thought locally, we would make better choices and those choices would
make a positive impact globally.

4. By making the local community independent, self-sufficient and capable, and do it
with creativity, mercy and endurance, we ensure the community is seen in “proper
relation” to the rest of the world, instead of employing “presumptuous abstractions
of ‘global thought'”.

5. We must ensure that we don’t demand too much of the globe, and therefore help
destroy it, and to accomplish this desire, we must live at home as independently
and self-sufficiently as we are able. The earth’s limitations should be constantly
kept in mind.

6. A sustainable city can only exist if the city and countryside are in balance.

7. Our current cities are “out of balance”, living off the “principal” of ecology without
adding to it, and their faulty assumptions will lead to their downfall.

8. Industrial machinery has contributed to the destruction of this balance, by providing
cheap production and transportation.

9. Since the Civil War, and more since WWII, the fossil-fuel industries regulate the
patterns of productivity.

10. Fossil fuel sources are rural and historically have been produced at the expense of
the community and local ecosystems, because care of these does not profit the
producer. “It assigns no value to local life, natural or human.”

11. When industrial principles are applied to field and forest, both die.

12. Industrial principles forced onto the countryside make people dependent and the
corporations powerful. A small number of people own land, and the workers are
hostages of their employers.

13. Our leaders, most of whom have wealth, do not understand how to make
community function well because they must be ready at any time for power and
wealth to destroy community.

14. Ecological sense is in conflict with economic entities because it requires reduction
or replacement of those entities. Only the work and will of the people can further
this “sense”.

15. Because now all institutions have adopted industrial methods of organizational
patterns and quantitative measures, both sides of the ecological debate are
alarmingly abstract.

16. The abstraction is what’s wrong. The evil of either capitalist or communist industrial
economy is its inability to distinguish one place or person or creature from another.

17. The abstractions of sustainability can destroy the world, the same as the
abstractions of industrial economy. Even those who want to save the plant can ruin
it by abstractions and central organization because they cannot know the local
nature or community.

18. You must make ecological good sense locally. You can’t act locally and think
globally.

19. No one can make ecological good sense for the planet; everyone can make
ecological good sense locally, if the scale, knowledge, tools and skills are right.

20. “The right scale in work gives power to affection”. When when one works beyond a
love for a place, destruction results, and an adequate local culture is needed for
balance. (I didn’t quite understand this point. Sorry, Wendell!)

21. How do we make a local culture that will preserve our community? We need a
knowledge that comes from or with affection, but is unavailable to the unaffectionate
or to anyone simply as “information”.

22. What is the economic result of a local affection? We may never know as love can
be enigmatic and unfathomable, and the answer would never satisfy a corporate
executive.

23. The steps to saving the planet are small steps, which are humbling and rewarding.
Its jobs and successes will be many but rarely noticed, nor will they make anyone
wealthy or eminent.

24. Many people are motivated by fame instead of greed, but this sort of attitude will
never truly be a benefit to the planet.

25. Good workers are persons willing to enter the daunting and humbling local
presence of a problem and tackle it one life at a time.

26. Some cities will never be sustainable because they don’t have countryside
surrounding them or near them. For example, New York or Phoenix will never be
sustainable.

27. To make a city sustainable, start small by increasing local food brought in by
farmers, then as the demand for local food grows, farming could become more
diverse, the farms smaller yet more complex in structure and production, and also
provide more jobs. As the intimacy of city and countryside grow, their thought
would become more unified towards sustainability.

Lately, I’ve been reading Alexander Schmemann’s Great Lent, and I was surprised to see Berry’s words in this essay echoed back in a Christian context.

“In this respect, Christian love is sometimes the opposite of ‘social activism’ with which one so often identifies Christianity today. To a ‘social activist’ the object of love is not ‘person’ but man, an abstract unit of a not less abstract ‘humanity.’ But for Christianity, man is ‘loveable’ because he is person. There person is reduced to man; here man is seen only as person. The ‘social activist’ has no interest for the personal, and easily sacrifices it to the ‘common interest.’ Christianity may seem to be, and in some ways is, rather sceptical about that abstract ‘humanity,’ but it commits a mortal sin against itself each time it gives up its concern and love for the person. Social activism is always ‘futuristic’ in its approach; it always acts in the name of justice, order, happiness to come, to be achieved. Christianity cares little about that problematic future but puts the whole emphasis on the now — the only decisive time for love. The two attitudes are not mutually exclusive, but they must not be confused. Christians, to be sure, have responsibilities toward ‘this world’ and they must fulfil them. This is the area of ‘social activism’ which belongs entirely to ‘this world.’ Christian love, however, aims beyond ‘this world.’ …… “

I hope that I’ve done Berry’s words justice with my review. I’ve tried to keep his ideas and words as close to his own as possible for clarity. It’s a great essay and I encourage you to read it. Once again, with his clear insight, Berry brings to light many problems with the structure of our world today and the callous, ineptness of those in power to even attempt to set it right. However, his words to bring hope. When we think ‘big’ often the problems seem too overwhelming to solve, but when we think small, or locally, everyone has a purpose and change is possible, one life at a time.

All images from Wikipedia or Wikimedia Commons

Deal Me In Challenge #7

A Man’s A Man For A’ That by Robert Burns

Posted on February 11, 2016 by cleopatra

A Man’s a Man For A’ That

By Robert Burns

Is there, for honest poverty,

That hings his head, an’ a’ that?

The coward slave, we pass him by,

We dare be poor for a’ that!

For a’ that, an’ a’ that,

Our toils obscure, an’ a’ that;

The rank is but the guinea’s stamp;

The man’s the gowd for a’ that,

What tho’ on hamely fare we dine,

Wear hoddin-gray, an’ a’ that;

Gie fools their silks, and knaves their wine,

A man’s a man for a’ that.

For a’ that, an’ a’ that,

Their tinsel show an’ a’ that;

The honest man, tho’ e’er sae poor,

Is king o’ men for a’ that.

Ye see yon birkie, ca’d a lord

Wha struts, an’ stares, an’ a’ that;

Tho’ hundreds worship at his word,

He’s but a coof for a’ that:

For a’ that, an’ a’ that,

His riband, star, an’ a’ that,

The man o’ independent mind,

He looks and laughs at a’ that.

A prince can mak a belted knight,

A marquis, duke, an’ a’ that;

But an honest man’s aboon his might,

Guid faith he mauna fa’ that!

For a’ that, an’ a’ that,

Their dignities, an’ a’ that,

The pith o’ sense, an’ pride o’ worth,

Are higher rank than a’ that.

Then let us pray that come it may,

As come it will for a’ that,

That sense and worth, o’er a’ the earth,

May bear the gree, an’ a’ that.

For a’ that, an’ a’ that,

It’s coming yet, for a’ that,

That man to man, the warld o’er,
Shall brothers be for a’ that.

The more I read of Robert Burns, the more I like his poetry. There must be something about my Scottish heritage that feels an affinity with it. In any case, in spite of its popularity, this was my first introduction to A Man’s A Man For A’ That, and I wasn’t disappointed.

Burns challenges the popular premise that a man’s worth lies in his birth or employment or station, instead emphasizing that the measure of a man lies in his character. From the beginning of the poem, the poor man is first presented in a lowly, yet honest manner, but as the poem progresses, Burns gradually elevates him until he has pride of worth and is looking down on the respected gentleman. In fact, Burns actually inverts the class structure and hierarchies of rank, calling the poor honest man a “king”, and the rich “fools” and “knaves”. The qualities of honesty and unrewarded toils of the poor man make him inherently a man of greater character and therefore, worth, compared to the entitlements and indiscretions of the gentry. Burns egalitarian principles shine through with his claim, “that man to man, the warld o’er, / Shall brithers be for a’ that” echoing his radical politics and his sympathy for the French Revolution that was still in progress during the time of his song’s publication in the Glasgow Magazine in 1795. In fact, Burns must have been wary as to how this song would be perceived by his detractors, as he originally chose not to have his name attached to it.

Here’s a wonderful reading by David Rintoul (of Doctor Finlay fame) of A Man’s A Man For A’ That:

Deal Me In Challenge #6

Big John’s Secret by Eleanore Jewett

Posted on February 6, 2016 by cleopatra

This was one of my children’s books that I had scheduled for my Deal Me In Challenge, and I was planning to review it only on my children’s blog, yet it was such a wonderfully uplifting story that I decided to share it here too!

The book is initially set in England during the reign of King John. The main character, John, is a twelve year old boy, yet big for his age, who works on the manor of Sir Eustace as a villein. Old Marm, is an old woman who acts as his guardian, and through her we learn of John’s noble connections, of how she saved him from an attack on his father’s castle when he was a mere babe. With his father either dead, or missing, John’s heartfelt desire is to find him and wreak vengeance on the baron who attacked his family estate when his father fell afoul of the king.

One day, John’s gentleness with the animals is noticed by a visiting lord, who takes John with him in his company to work as a page. The position means leaving Old Marm, but it allows John to work towards his dreams of reunification and revenge. He is given to Sir Alwynn, a Knight of St. John and a participant in the upcoming Fifth Crusade. Through various circumstances and adventures, John learns that his father was perhaps seen in the Holy Land, and is ecstatic to be sailing with Sir Alwynn to Acre. In battle there, John, through giving mercy to a Muslim boy and allowing him to live, is taken by the Muslim commander and finds himself in Jerusalem. Grateful for John’s actions of mercy, the boy’s father, Sultan Nur-Aslan, treats John as a guest and he becomes friends with the son, Yusuf. An encounter with a monk called Francis, leads John to follow the monk to visit the ruler, Muslim Sultan Melek-al-Kamel; John is in search of his father, Francis a new convert. In a situation of danger and uncertainty, bravery and grace are their only weapons. Will the visit bring only more conflict and strife, or something entirely different?

This book was such an inspiring read, especially as the reader witnesses John’s desire for revenge come in conflict with his naturally compassionate and charitable nature. As we observe John’s struggles and experience the positive effects that multiply with his acts of goodness, acts that can sometimes seem to be done against his own will, we realize that the world can give us perceptions that are often false, and we must look to higher standards to govern ourselves.

St. Francis before Sultan Al-Kamil of Egypt
Giotto (wall fresco)
source Wikipedia

The visit of Saint Francis of Assisi to Melek-al-Kamel is documented history. After failing to stop the Crusades by meeting with his own religious leaders, Francis set out with Brother Illuminatus to visit the Kamel, the nephew of Saladin, in an attempt to spread the Gospel, but while the sultan received the monk graciously, his visit left him unaffected and Francis was returned safely to the Crusader camp. Also, the battle at Acre on December 24, 1217 to capture the fort on Mt. Tabor actually happened and Lord Ranulf, Earl of Chester was an historical figure who participated in the Fifth Crusades.

While Jewett manages to weave a story full of adventure and intrigue, the emphasis on understanding and forgiveness is most compelling. She reminds us that Christians and Muslims were able to live in harmony, and show tolerance, mercy and compassion towards each other, even in the midst of the tumultuous times of the Crusades. What John encounters through his experiences and with Saint Francis, shows him that mercy, instead of weakness, is strength; differences are only a big as we make them; and that forgiveness can be the most powerful action of all.

Deal Me In Challenge #5

A Lover’s Complaint by William Shakespeare

Posted on January 24, 2016 by cleopatra

From off a hill whose concave womb re-worded

A plaintful story from a sistering vale,

My spirits t’attend this double voice accorded,

And down laid to list the sad-tuned tale;

Ere long espied a fickle maid full pale,

Tearing of papers, breaking rings a-twain,

Storming her world with sorrow’s wind and rain

This “fickle maid” relates her story, a story of love unrequited, but as she describes her inner conflict, we receive a vision of the maid, no longer young:

“Whereupon the thought might think sometime it saw

The carcass of a beauty spent and done;

Time had not scythed all that youth begun,

Nor youth all quit; but, spite of heaven’s fell rage,

Some beauty peept through lattice of sear’d age.”

Crying despondently and wiping her eyes with a handkerchief, the maid tells a respectable man, who is grazing his cattle nearby, of her troubles.

“Not age, but sorrow, over me hath power;

I might as yet have been a spreading flower,

Fresh to myself, if I had self-applied

Love to myself, and to no love beside.”

She fell in love with a young man with a silken tongue and enchanting brown curls, who stole her heart in spite of other more questionable qualities.

“His qualities were beauteous as his form,

For maiden-tongued he was, and thereof free;

Yet, if men moved him, was he such a storm

As oft twixt May and April to see,

When winds breathe sweet, unruly though they be.

His rudeness so with his authorized youth

Did livery falseness in a pride of truth.”

She “gave him all my flower,” without being demanding of him like others. She claimed that “mine honour shielded” but she became an “amorous spoil.” Even though she knew of his other women, of his “foul beguiling” and of his illegitimate children, still she is taken in by his false charm. Yet, in spite of this sorrow that is a burden to her heart, she claims that she would be captivated by him all over again.

O, that infected moisture of his eyes,

O, that false fire which in his cheek so glow’d,

O, that forced thunder from his heart did fly,

O, that sad breath his spongy lungs bestow’d,

O, all that borrow’d motion seeming ow’d,

Would yet again betray the fore-betray’d,

And new pervert a reconciled maid.

Young Woman in a Straw Hat (1901)
Pierre-Auguste Renoir
source Wikiart

Popular in medieval and renaissance times, this “complaint poem” is written in rhyme royal (ababbcc), with seven lines per stanza in iambic pentameter, which I just encountered while recently reading The Brubury Tales (in The Feet’s Prologue), a take on Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales. Because this style was unusual for Shakespeare, some critics question his authorship, yet there are parts of the poem that certainly echo of Shakespeare, and coincidentially the first stanza is very close to the first stanza of The Rape of Lucrece.

As for figures of speech, the following are included in the poem: alliteration, anaphora, hyperbole, metaphor, paradox, personification and simile. Could I identify them all on the first read? No, but that means that I’ll have to read The Lover’s Complaint again!

Deal Me In Challenge #4

Shooting An Elephant by George Orwell

Posted on January 12, 2016 by cleopatra

“In Moulmein, in Lower Burma, I was hated by large numbers of people — the only time in my life that I have been important enough for this to happen to me.”

Orwell tells of his stint in Burma as a police officer under British colonial rule. He was despised by the people as an agent of the perceived oppressors, but in spite of his job, his sympathies lay with the natives and he felt constant guilt because of his duties.

One day he received word that an elephant had stampeded a Burmese Indian to death and was rampaging through the local bazaar. It was a tame elephant that had been chained when it had gone “must,” (a periodic cycle experienced by a bull elephant when its hormones are elevated), but it had broken the chains and escaped. Orwell took his rifle and a small gun, not at all sure what he could do to stop the invader. Initially he had no intention of shooting the animal, but when he arrived at the scene, the locals were in high emotion with the anticipation of the killing of the elephant, and Orwell felt he had no other choice.

“And it was at this moment, as I stood there with the rifle in my hands, that I first grasped the hollowness, the futility of the white man’s dominion in the East. Here was I, the white man with his gun, standing in front of the unarmed native crowd —- seemingly the leading actor of the piece; but in reality I was only an absurd puppet pushed to and fro by the will of those yellow faces behind. I perceived in this moment that when the white man turns tyrant it is his own freedom that he destroys ….”

Approaching the elephant, who was now calmly munching grass, he shot it a number of times, however, it merely groaned and sagged to its knees. While Orwell knew that he’d fired the fatal shot, the animal took what seemed like forever to expire, and he finally left the scene, hearing later that it died a half an hour after his departure. Relief flooded him that the elephant had killed a “coolie” because it gave him a pretext for the execution, and he was able to avoid admitting the real reason for his actions …… that he didn’t want to look like a fool.

African Bush Elephant
source Wikipedia

Orwell begins his essay by describing his feeling of helplessness at being part of the British imperialist movement, but ends up inverting it by describing the impotence he feels against the masses, the very people for which he harbours sympathy. He is trapped between not only a political sytem, but a social one as well, and his powerlessness is very effective. Once part of a collective, to a certain degree “self” must disappear. Yet one must retain enough self to act as a human, instead of merely a machine taking orders or acting from impulse, without taking into account reason or morality. In this case, Orwell is paralyzed and chooses to conform.

Deal Me In Challenge #2

Hamlet: The Prince or The Poem? by C.S. Lewis

Posted on January 5, 2016 by cleopatra

“A critic who makes no claim to be a true Shakespearian scholar and who had been honoured by an invitiation to speak about Shakespeare to such an audience as this, feels rather like a child brought in at dessert to recite his piece before the grown-ups.”

In Hamlet: The Prince or the Poem, Lewis begins his lecture by claiming that his aim is not to examine what other critics have before him, but to consider why the critics have failed to agree about the procrastination exhibited by the character of Hamlet. He first outlines the three different camps:

Those who think the play “bad” and that there are no motivations to explain Hamlet’s actions
Those who believe he did not delay and acted with as much alacrity as was possible.
Those who believe he did procrastinate and explain his paralysis through his psychology.

Next, he asks you to suspend all knowledge of the play, as if “you had no independent knowledge of the thing being criticized,” and proceeds to examine each view.

In the first case, if Hamlet is indeed a failure, we waste our time investigating why his actions were delayed. Yet, if this failure were indeed a reality, why does Hamlet touch us so? Why does it echo with “the sense of vast dignities and strange sorrows and teased ‘with thoughts beyond the reaches of our souls'”? If Hamlet is failure, then perhaps failure is better than success, and such a verdict could never be rendered with less certainty.

With regard to point two, the opponent to this view is Hamlet himself. He declares that he is a procrastinator, a cowardly soul who wavers with indecision. The ghost, for the most part, is in agreement.

The last point seems to be the most logical, yet why then, in all three camps, does the play appear to hold each in thrall, enchanting the very critics who criticize it? Does the mystery and magical appeal of the play have little to do with Hamlet’s actual character, but instead is due to something entirely different?

Czachórski Actors Before Hamlet
Wladyslaw Czachórski
source Wikimedia Commons

Lewis brings to light Aristotle’s definition of tragedy, which is an imitation not of men, but of action and life and happiness and misery, yet “action” by ancient standards means “situation.” Instead of always attempting to delineate a character, one should first “surrender oneself to the poetry and the situation.” It is through poetry and situation, and for their sake, that the characters exist.

Hamlet’s Vision (1893)
Pedro Américo
source Wikimedia Commons

For Lewis, the ghost does not merely tell of the murder of Hamlet’s father. Instead, the ghost and Hamlet are inseparable, and indeed the spectre is different from most vile ghosts in Elizabethan drama; this ghost is willfully ambiguous. Its presence lends an enigmatic uneasiness to the play, filling Hamlet’s, and even other character’s, minds with doubt and uncertainty. ” ….. the appearance of the spectre means a breaking down of the walls of the world and the germination of thoughts that cannot be thought; chaos is come again.”

The subject of Hamlet is death. Lewis does not base the theme on the numerous deaths of the characters, rather the situations they find themselves contemplating. We read it in the ghost, in the line of “melting flesh”, in the rejection of suicide, in the graveyard, the skull …….. As we read Hamlet, we cannot escape it, which gives the play its quality of obscurity and apprehension. There are other elements to the play, but there is always this groping toward the final end and questions about the destiny of the soul or body.

Hamlet’s vacillations do not balance on his fear of dying, but instead a fear of being dead.

“Any serious attention to the state of being dead, unless it is limited by some definite religious or anti-religious doctrine, must, I suppose, paralyse the will by introducing infinite uncertainties and rendering all motives inadequate. Being dead is the unknown x in our sum. Unless you ignore it or else give it a value, you can get no answer.”

Hamlet and Ophelia (1858)
Dante Gabriel Rossetti
source Wikimedia Commons

Yet Lewis says that Shakespeare’s own text does not confirm his theory, nor has Shakespeare given “us data for any for any portrait of the kind critics have tried to draw.” We enjoy Hamlet’s speeches “because they describe so well a certain spiritual region through which most of us have passed and anyone in his circumstances might be expected to pass, rather than because of our concern to understand how and why this particular man entered it”. And, in fact, Hamlet is an Everyman. He is a hero yet also a “haunted man — man with his mind on the frontier of two worlds, man unable either quite to reject or quite to admit the supernatural, man struggling to get something done as man has struggled from the beginning, yet incapable of achievement because of his inability to understand either himself or his fellows or the real quality of the universe which has produced him.”

The critics have never doubted the greatness or mystery of the play, but they simply put it in the wrong place, “in Hamlet’s motives rather than in that darkness which enwraps Hamlet and the whole tragedy and all who read and watch it.” It is the mystery of the human condition.

Lewis ends by acknowledging the weakness of his theory, only because his type of criticism does not have centuries of vocabulary to support it, as does the other type of criticisms. Yet he wishes that Hamlet could be played as “a dishevelled man whose words make us at once think of loneliness and doubt and dread, of waste and dust and emptiness, and from whose hands, or from our own, we feel the richness of heaven and earth and the comfort of human affection slipping away.” Perhaps his views are childish, yet children remember the details of stories. So, is Lewis a literary child?

“On the contrary, I claim that only those adults who have retained, with whatever additions and enrichments, their first childish response to poetry unimpaired, can be said to have grown up.”

Click for: Hamlet Review and Scene by Scene Analysis

Deal Me In Challenge #1