Monday, November 21, 2016

Shelley's Heroic Poet

A Short Video of a Skylark "skylarking"

 

To a Sky-Lark

(first part based on John L. Mahoney's "Teaching 'To a Sky-lark' in Relation to Shelley's Defense")

From Shelley’s A Defence of Poetry (1821)

But poets, or those who imagine and express this indestructible order, are not only the authors of language and of music, of the dance, and architecture, and statuary, and painting: they are the institutors of laws, and the founders of civil society, and the inventors of the arts of life, and the teachers, who draw into a certain propinquity with the beautiful and the true that partial apprehension of the agencies of the invisible world which is called religion . . . Poets, according to the circumstances of the age and nation in which they appeared, were called, in the earlier epochs of the world, legislators, or prophets: a poet essentially comprises and unites both these characters . . . A poet participates in the eternal, the infinite, and the one; as far as relates to his conceptions, time and place and number are not. (922-923)
Contrast between
  • the skylark (sky, flight, ascendency, purity, joy, transcendence) and
  • the human condition (earth-bound, languor, annoyance, sadness, pain, death)
The logic or rhetoric of the poem—emotions: is it mere gush? A spontaneous overflow?
Poetry is ever accompanied with pleasure: all spirits on which it falls open themselves to receive the wisdom which is mingled with its delight . . . A poet is a nightingale, who sits in darkness and sings to cheer its own solitude with sweet sounds; his auditors are as men entranced by the melody of an unseen musician, who feel that they are moved and softened, yet know not whence or why. (923)
Stanzas 1-6 (lines 1-30):
  • the poet’s emotional greeting
  • celebration of the bird and its song
Poets are not only subject to these experiences as spirits of the most refined organization, but they can color all that they combine with the evanescent hues of this ethereal world; a word, a trait in the representation of a scene or a passion will touch the enchanted chord, and reanimate, in those who have ever experienced these emotions, the sleeping, the cold, the buried image of the past. Poetry thus makes immortal all that is best and most beautiful in the world; it arrests the vanishing apparitions which haunt the interlunations of life . . . (927)
  • The poet’s struggle to describe the bird, the song, and the experience
Poetry is indeed something divine. It is at once the centre and circumference of knowledge; it is that which comprehends all science, and that to which all science must be referred. . . What were virtue, love, patriotism, friendship-what were the scenery of this beautiful universe which we inhabit; what were our consolations on this side of the grave-and what were our aspirations beyond it, if poetry did not ascend to bring light and fire from those eternal regions where the owl-winged faculty of calculation dare not ever soar? Poetry is not like reasoning, a power to be exerted according to the determination of the will. A man cannot say, "I will compose poetry." The greatest poet even cannot say it; for the mind in creation is as a fading coal, which some invisible influence, like an inconstant wind, awakens to transitory brightness; this power arises from within, like the color of a flower which fades and changes as it is developed, and the conscious portions of our natures are unprophetic either of its approach or its departure. (926)
Stanzas 7-12 (lines 31- 60):
  • Develops the opening invocation to the skylark in an excited but carefully constructed unit of questioning: “What thou art we know not” but then tries to know
  • How does he try to describe the experience?
Stanzas 13-21 (lines 61- 105):
  • Review
    • First part—address to the bird
    • Second part—struggle to understand it
    • Third part—final prayer (plea) for inspiration
  • The poet asks Teach us what sweet thought are thine
  • The contrast between the bird and the human: Is this breach permanent? Or does the poem suggest that we can learn even “half the gladness” of the song and that others will hear our song?
. . . poetry acts in another and diviner manner. It awakens and enlarges the mind itself by rendering it the receptacle of a thousand unapprehended combinations of thought. Poetry lifts the veil from the hidden beauty of the world, and makes familiar objects be as if they were not familiar . . . The great secret of morals is love; or a going out of our nature, and an identification of ourselves with the beautiful which exists in thought, action, or person, not our own. A man, to be greatly good, must imagine intensely and comprehensively; he must put himself in the place of another and of many others; the pains and pleasure of his species must become his own. The great instrument of moral good is the imagination . . . (924)
The Consolation of Shelley’s Adonais

Concluding verses of Prometheus Unbound
To suffer woes which Hope thinks infinite;                           [4.570]
To forgive wrongs darker than death or night;
   To defy Power, which seems omnipotent;
To love, and bear; to hope till Hope creates
From its own wreck the thing it contemplates;
   Neither to change, nor falter, nor repent;                             [4.575]
This, like thy glory, Titan, is to be
Good, great and joyous, beautiful and free;
This is alone Life, Joy, Empire, and Victory.

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