Poetry Review: "The Force That Through the Green Fuse Drives the Flower" by Dylan Thomas

I love Dylan Thomas' work. He was an early 20th-century Welsh poet, and I'm very enamored of his verbal style with its big emphasis on sounds and images. His most famous poem is probably "Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night", but I like some of his slightly more obscure work, like "The Force That Through the Green Fuse Drives the Flower". I'll try to explicate/critique it a bit.


"The force that through the green fuse drives the flower
Drives my green age; that blasts the roots of trees
Is my destroyer.
And I am dumb to tell the crooked rose
My youth is bent by the same wintry fever.

The force that drives the water through the rocks
Drives my red blood; that dries the mouthing streams
Turns mine to wax.
And I am dumb to mouth unto my veins
How at the mountain spring the same mouth sucks.

The hand that whirls the water in the pool
Stirs the quicksand; that ropes the blowing wind
Hauls my shroud sail.
And I am dumb to tell the hanging man
How of my clay is made the hangman's lime.

The lips of time leech to the fountain head;
Love drips and gathers, but the fallen blood
Shall calm her sores.
And I am dumb to tell a weather's wind
How time has ticked a heaven round the stars.

And I am dumb to tell the lover's tomb
How at my sheet goes the same crooked worm."


Technical breakdown: We've got 4 stanzas of 5 lines each, plus an ending couplet. The middle line of each stanza if half-length, for emphasis, and the closing couplet reminds me of a sonnet's ending. "The Force" has an ABABA rhyme scheme, but it's loosely done--"flower," destroyer," and "fever" only sorta-kinda rhyme. The long lines are basically iambic pentameter ("The FORCE that DRIVES the WAter THROUGH the ROCKS").

Thematic breakdown: The poem is mostly talking about life, death, and the way time connects the two. Nature and humanity are also compared and contrasted a good deal.

Stanza 1, Explosiveness: Time is the "force that through the green fuse drives the flower", but time doesn't just nudge or push the flower into the open--it forces it. Time is aggressive in this poem. Also, the flower's middle is a "green fuse"--not a stem, stalk, or tube, but a fuse as if it were a stick of dynamite. Flowers+dynamite=Dylan Thomas' poetry. Time also "blasts the roots of trees", which could mean that it makes them grow or that time sends tree roots slamming through the dirt like shrapnel. Time destroys by pushing life along at such a pace that the living things are worn out and broken by the pace of their development--at the end of stanza 1, the speaker tries to talk to a "crooked rose"and mentions how his own youth is "bent".

Stanza 2, Currents, Drought, and Draining: Time moves the waters, too, in the same rough way that it produces plant growth. The water doesn't flow on its own power over the rocks; it is driven right through the rocks. The running water is compared to the speaker's own bloodflow, but the same force of time that makes water and blood burst along their paths, also dries river beds and solidifies human veins. Creeeepy. The speaker feels time draining him like a vampire, like it drains the mountain springs.

Stanza 3, Divine Destruction: For the first time, the speaker address the role of the Divine in the processes of Time. Unfortunately, though the divine presence can heal and can avert destruction, it also brings about death eventually.  "The hand that whirls the water in the pool" is a Biblical reference to the healing waters of the pool at Bethesda mentioned in John 5:4 --"For an angel went down at a certain season into the pool, and troubled the water: whosoever then first after the troubling of the water stepped in was made whole of whatsoever disease he had." The same supernatural intervention that heals some people of their diseases also stirs the quicksand of time, bringing about the speaker's death. I'll be honest and admit that I have no idea what "the hangman's lime" line means. Obviously it's something to do with death, but if you Google "the hangman's lime" you'll find Wesleyan's poetry magazine, and if you try to do other hanging-related web searches, you get disturbing results. So. Draw your own conclusions on this one.

Stanza 4, Scattered Meaning: This stanza is a puzzler, because while time is leaching "at the fountainhead" of something--life?--love is dripping something and easing it's own sores with fallen blood. The blood of what? Of life? Time drains Life, and Love is satisfied by the bits of Life that fall upon it? Dylan Thomas loves his lyrical complexities, and this one is a doozy.


Final Couplet, Love and Death: Well, we've got lovey words like "lover" and "sheet" in these two lines, but both romantic images are directly tied to death. The lover is in a tomb and the sheet seems to be a funeral shroud that the speaker envisions for himself.
What a devastating poem. It's absolutely beautiful, but it doesn't offer even a smidgen of hope about the future. Death is eminent. Time will drive you, force you, and explode you in a direction you don't want to go--straight toward the grave. And along the way, the speaker notes his own loss of choices and his loss of speech, since he can barely convey his sense of growing panic and inevitable doom.
 
On an unrelated note, Happy 4th of July!

Poetry Review: Farewell to Florida by Wallace Stevens

The four 10-line stanzas of this poem have captured my attention even better than Stevens' better-known poems like The Idea of Order at Key West and Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird. I want to get better acquainted with the poem, so I'll show it here and then do some criticism/analysis/explication afterward.

I
"Go on, high ship, since now, upon the shore,

The snake has left its skin upon the floor.

Key West sank downward under massive clouds

And silvers and greens spread over the sea. The moon

Is at the mast-head and the past is dead.

Her mind will never speak to me again.

I am free. High above the mast the moon

Rides clear of her mind and the waves make a refrain

Of this: that the snake has shed its skin upon

The floor. Go on through the darkness. The waves fly back

II

Her mind had bound me round. The palms were hot

As if I lived in ashen ground, as if
The leaves in which the wind kept up its sound

From my North of cold whistled in a sepulchral South,

Her South of pine and coral and coraline sea,

Her home, not mine, in the ever-freshened Keys,

Her days, her oceanic nights, calling

For music, for whisperings from the reefs.

How content I shall be in the North to which I sail

And to feel sure and to forget the bleaching sand ...

III

I hated the weathery yawl from which the pools

Disclosed the sea floor and the wilderness

Of waving weeds. I hated the vivid blooms

Curled over the shadowless hut, the rust and bones,

The trees likes bones and the leaves half sand, half sun.

To stand here on the deck in the dark and say

Farewell and to know that that land is forever gone

And that she will not follow in any word

Or look, nor ever again in thought, except

That I loved her once ... Farewell. Go on, high ship.

IV

My North is leafless and lies in a wintry slime

Both of men and clouds, a slime of men in crowds.

The men are moving as the water moves,

This darkened water cloven by sullen swells

Against your sides, then shoving and slithering,
The darkness shattered, turbulent with foam.

To be free again, to return to the violent mind

That is their mind, these men, and that will bind

Me round, carry me, misty deck, carry me

To the cold, go on, high ship, go on, plunge on."

At first I thought this poem was about a woman who lived in Florida, then for a long time I thought it was about Florida itself with the woman as a metaphor for it, and now I'm back to the "it's a woman" theory. But whichever you think the poem is about, it is clear that the speaker is running for his life from Florida and from "her".

The speaker is traveling on a ship, and it can't go fast enough for him. He keeps mentally encouraging the boat to go faster and it's almost like he's being hunted by his memories. The speaker keeps trying to say that he has cut all ties to Florida: "the past is dead," "I am free," and "she will not follow in any word," but it's hard to believe him. Sure, speaker...you keep telling yourself that you've moved on. He's desperate to believe that he has escaped Her, but he can't stop thinking about the place he has left--his whole being is wrapped up in Florida. The speaker is styling himself as the Stanza 1 snake who has "shed its skin upon the floor," leaving behind a trace of himself while escaping into a new life, but what is he actually escaping from and what is he running toward?

It's interesting that Florida and all things related to Her sound rather pretty and pleasant. Stanza 2 has gorgeous descriptors like "Her South of pine and coral and coraline sea" and "her home...in the ever-freshened Keys". But in with these nice snapshots, there are also hints of ugliness and death, at least from the speaker's point of view: "a sepulchral South"(making the whole area a graveyard), "the bleaching sand," and "trees likes bones". Why does he keep inserting these images of decay into a place so full of life? It could be that he was feeling the death or dissolution of his own personality. "She" seemed to totally dominate his life in Florida: "her mind had bound me round". Maybe he's trying to get out while he still has the will to move.

The place he's sailing toward certainly doesn't seem welcoming, but it is his place: "my North of cold". He's leaving a wild, natural, feminine place for a regimented, civilized, male place: "My North is leafless and lies in a wintry slime/ Both of men and clouds, a slime of men in crowds". He's thrilled to be going to this slimy place full of smoggy skies and crammed streets. What's up with that? What is it about either his relationship with the insidious She or his relationship with Florida itself that makes him hate the pools and "vivid blooms" and want to exchange them for the city? I'm not quite sure, but it looks like something was seriously dysfunctional about his time in Florida, and something even more concerning about his longing to return to the wintry slime and the "violent mind" of the guys back home in the North.

The complex emotions and motivations in this poem are very attention-grabbing, but the words and sounds are equally intriguing. There's something purely delightful about the steady rhythm in the first lines: "Go on, high ship, since now, upon the shore,/ The snake has left its skin upon the floor". The beat of the syllables emphasizes his steady progress away from Florida. You can envision the ship sailing with the "silvers and greens spread over the sea" and the fading shore, sunken "under massive clouds". Stevens paints a few scenery pictures and then goes off into the inner turmoil of the speaker, and both are beautifully done. Check out some Wallace Stevens when you have a chance!

Poetry Review: "Byzantium" by William Butler Yeats

This eerie poem establishes a lot of disturbing imagery within it's five 8-line stanzas. It was written after Yeats' famous poem "Sailing to Byzantium" and seems to be like a sequel to that poem. But the easiest thing to say about "Byzantium" is that if it's a continuation of "Sailing" (and I believe it is), things have gone horribly, horribly wrong. You can read my discussion of "Sailing to Byzantium" HERE.

Here's the text of "Byzantium", and afterwards I'll see if I can do a little analysis/explication of it.

"THE unpurged images of day recede;
The Emperor's drunken soldiery are abed;
Night resonance recedes, night walkers' song
After great cathedral gong;
A starlit or a moonlit dome disdains
All that man is,
All mere complexities,
The fury and the mire of human veins.

Before me floats an image, man or shade,
Shade more than man, more image than a shade;
For Hades' bobbin bound in mummy-cloth
May unwind the winding path;
A mouth that has no moisture and no breath
Breathless mouths may summon;
I hail the superhuman;
I call it death-in-life and life-in-death.

Miracle, bird or golden handiwork,
More miracle than bird or handiwork,
Planted on the star-lit golden bough,
Can like the cocks of Hades crow,
Or, by the moon embittered, scorn aloud
In glory of changeless metal
Common bird or petal
And all complexities of mire or blood.

At midnight on the Emperor's pavement flit
Flames that no faggot feeds, nor steel has lit,
Nor storm disturbs, flames begotten of flame,
Where blood-begotten spirits come
And all complexities of fury leave,
Dying into a dance,
An agony of trance,
An agony of flame that cannot singe a sleeve.

Astraddle on the dolphin's mire and blood,
Spirit after Spirit! The smithies break the flood.
The golden smithies of the Emperor!
Marbles of the dancing floor
Break bitter furies of complexity,
Those images that yet
Fresh images beget,
That dolphin-torn, that gong-tormented sea."


This is pretty much a wildly disorienting poem. If the speaker for the two Byzantium poems is the same, the question is, how did we get from “sages standing in God's holy fire” in the first poem to a courtyard filled with “blood-begotten spirits” in the second? It looks like the speaker reached Byzantium and found it vastly different than he'd imagined. He isn't redeemed from old age; he's transformed into a bodiless observer of the weird happenings in the city. He is passive and entranced by the arcane energy around him.

The speaker isn't having much of an impact on his world and he's not introducing any order to it. There's very little order, period--the Emperor of Byzantium never physically appears, and his agents are less than imposing (“the Emperor's drunken soldiery are abed,” line 2). Who is ruling the roost in this world? The "shade," the“blood-begotten spirits”, or maybe the golden bird in stanza 3?
In "Sailing," the bird was the speaker's ideal self: a beautiful and permanent piece of interactive art that could predict the future. But now the bird is immobile on its perch and shows a disdain, bordering on hatred, for living things, those "complexities of mire and blood". The speaker was once intent on leaving a sensual world filled with reveling youths who ignored the wisdom of senior citizens, but he supposed that he was leaving his young country for an eternal paradise. Though it's true that age and entropy can't intrude upon Byzantium, neither is there any possibility of growth or change.

The most disturbing aspect of this whole poem is the fact that the speaker does not even seem to notice that everything surrounding him is inescapably wrong. From what little information is given, he seems content. But although the speaker doesn't feel his own plight, the reader gets a strong sense that Byzantium is a place where individuals can be trapped by the supernatural and fall into “an agony of trance” until there is no hope and no thought of breaking free.

Or that's my take on it.

Sparknotes has a brief and totally different take on the poem HERE

Have you read it? What do you think about the poem?

Poetry Review: Sailing to Byzantium by W.B. Yeats

Buy it from Amazon.com: The Tower: A Facsimile Edition

Yeats is one of my Top 5 favorite poets, and while I don't really have a favorite collection of his (overall, I stick to his Selected Works to get a wide range of his writing), The Tower is special because it contains "Sailing to Byzantium," one of the loveliest and most well-known poems he wrote. It's 4 stanzas of ottava rima, rhyming ABABABCC (young, trees, song, seas, long, dies, neglect, intellect), and it sticks pretty close to iambic pentameter.


"Sailing" begins with that famous line, "That is no country for old men," and it becomes clear that the poem is from the POV of an old man. Yeats himself was in his 60's when he wrote the poem, so the concerns of old age weren't far removed from him. Stanza 1:

     "That is no country for old men. The young
      In one another's arms, birds in the trees
     - Those dying generations - at their song,
     The salmon-falls, the mackerel-crowded seas,
     Fish, flesh, or fowl, commend all summer long
     Whatever is begotten, born, and dies.
     Caught in that sensual music all neglect
     Monuments of unageing intellect."

So he's complaining, basically. "That" country seems to be the one he's currently living in, or the one he is leaving or has just now left. It's a land of youth where all the attention is placed on young lovers and on the animals, birds, and fish that live exuberantly and then die without any sort of advancement. Old men aren't commended even if their wisdom is "unageing"--they don't fit into this country. Stanza 2 shows how he proposes to get past his biologically-obsessed environment:

     "An aged man is but a paltry thing,
     A tattered coat upon a stick, unless
     Soul clap its hands and sing, and louder sing
     For every tatter in its mortal dress,
     Nor is there singing school but studying
     Monuments of its own magnificence;
     And therefore I have sailed the seas and come
     To the holy city of Byzantium."

If physical forms are what we're celebrating, then senior citizens aren't much to talk about. An old man is valuable for his wisdom and his soul, and he should learn to appreciate the battle scars of life or tatters in his "mortal dress". Still, to gain this sort of appreciation he'll have to study art, the "monuments of [the soul's] magnificence". And it's for that purpose that he has has arrived in Byzantium, an ancient city known for its art and culture. I personally think he's only in Byzantium in his imagination, not simply because Byzantium's not really around anymore, but because the last two stanzas seem even less like reality than the first two. Stanza 3:

     "O sages standing in God's holy fire
     As in the gold mosaic of a wall,
     Come from the holy fire, perne in a gyre,
     And be the singing-masters of my soul.
     Consume my heart away; sick with desire
     And fastened to a dying animal
     It knows not what it is; and gather me
     Into the artifice of eternity."

He seems to be asking figures in a paining to come out of their artwork and teach him how to appreciate his condition and his soul. He's really done with his broken-down body and wants to be removed from it. His language is very rough at this point, comparing his body to a beast on the verge of death. He wants to belong to the world of eternal art.

     "Once out of nature I shall never take
     My bodily form from any natural thing,
     But such a form as Grecian goldsmiths make
     Of hammered gold and gold enamelling
     To keep a drowsy Emperor awake;
     Or set upon a golden bough to sing
     To lords and ladies of Byzantium
     Of what is past, or passing, or to come."

In Stanza 3 it seemed like the speaker was in Byzantium, talking to the mosaics, but now it seems like it was all in his imagination, because he's still not where he'd like to be. More than just being dissatisfied with his own weak body, he has decided that if he ever has another form, he'll want to be something finely crafted and unnatural (most scholars say that this signing gold object is a mechanical bird). It's so unusual that this is the speaker's ideal self: a beautiful, permanent piece of interactive art who has access to information about the future. As a reader, what do you even do with that? It sure keeps English teachers busy, diving into the possible interpretations.

The speaker is totally wrapped up in reaching that other country of Byzantium, whether it's supposed to be a literal place where old men are revered, a symbolic place representing the artistic imagination, or a depiction of the afterlife. It can be all three or something else entirely, as the reader likes--the main point is that in whatever way we interpret the specifics, we are listening to a speaker who is longing to be reprieved from decay and old age. And aren't we all? This is a beautiful poem that's very pleasing to the ear and it bears up under endless classroom discussion--if I'd written this review on a different day, I probably would have made entirely different points. It's a favorite poem of mine because it's hinting at something important, but it's just unnerving enough to make you wonder if the speaker's philosophy isn't quite as perfect as he thinks. Grade: A

Review: The Four Quartets by T.S. Eliot

The Four Quartets

T.S. Eliot, 1944
Buy it from Amazon.com: Four Quartets

These four poems from T.S. Eliot are very complex modern pieces, but they're so lovely, they can be appreciated even if we're not getting the full meaning. Time and redemption are the big themes of the quartets, and each of them is centered in a single location the poet had visited. They also roughly correspond to one of the four elements: "Burnt Norton" (air), "East Coker" (earth), "The Dry Salvages" (water) and "Little Gidding" (fire). Each contains five sections marked  off with Roman numerals, and they are all free verse poems with bits of metered verse showing up in the second and fourth sections of every poem. We get some of that world-weariness shown in The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock or The Wasteland, but in these poems we also see the possibility of redemption.

So.

"Burnt Norton" starts off all philosophical: "Time present and time past/ Are both perhaps present in time future,/ And time future contained in time past./ If all time is eternally present/ All time is unredeemable." Everything has happened already--we can't change the past and the future will impose itself on us without our permission. But even so, time is the medium we all have to work with, so what little bits of transcendence or clarity we experience are going to happen in time. As in all the quartets, this one has a great musing on the problem of language and the imprecision of words: "Words strain,/ Crack and sometimes break, under the burden,/ Under the tension, slip, slide, perish,/ Decay with imprecision, will not stay in place,/ Will not stay still." Words never mean exactly what you want them to--they lose meaning over time, and the more important the thing you have to communicate, the less likely it is that your words will bear up under pressure and adequately express your meaning.

The second quartet is "East Coker," the earthy poem. It begins with the phrase "In my beginning is my end."
and starts discussing the cycles of time; buildings that rise and fall, the lives and deaths of animals, the fertilization and subsequent harvesting of crops. Then there's an appearance by what seem to be faeries, out in the woods, having a rustic dance around a bonfire. Section II notes some disorder in nature--things that are appearing in strange mixes or that are in conflict. Just as the reader is wondering what it all means, a very prosy part of Section II mentions language again, and how it fails to satisfy certain needs and leaves you "still with the intolerable wrestle/ With words and meanings." Section III begins in despair, showing the decline or death of all things, but Eliot turns the dark metaphor around and fashions the horrible darkness into a waiting period, a time of purification that an individual can emerge from. I think this passage may also be talking about England during WWII, how the situation seems desperate, and that to achieve their important cause, a person or a country must "go by a way wherein there is no ecstasy." Section IV drives this point home by saying: "to be restored, our sickness must grow worse." It's going to get worse before it gets better, but thank goodness, it is going to get better. Section IV is particularly full of Christian imagery, and though Buddhist imagery (lotuses, etc.) is used throughout the quartets, Christianity gets more pagetime and seems to be at the heart of all the redemptive passages.

"The Dry Salvages" is the third poem in the sequence, and is my least favorite, probably because it seems the prosiest to me. Also, as the water/ocean poem, it's full of nautical terms that I have to look up if I want to know what the poet's referring to. The supremacy and power of water are established early on--we may use the water for commerce and travel, but we must never suppose that we have tamed it. The poem moves on to Section II, which had always seemed like an awkward passage to me, until I found out that it was a modified sestina. It contains six stanzas with six lines each, and they keep up an extended rhyme scheme that probably took a  lot of labor to sustain, since the rhyme connections are word-strings like: emotionless-devotionless-oceanless, and renunciation-anunciation-destination. Section III shows that "time is no healer," and progress is pretty much an illusion. Section IV is a prayer for the safety of those who navigate the water, and Section V shows that moments of human intersection with the divine purpose are possible.

"Little Gidding" is my favorite of the whole collection, because it serves as an anchor poem that ties all the previous themes together. It deals a lot with chronos time vs. kairos time; the regular tick-tock progressive time, and the moments of transcendence where time seems to stop, but something important is still happening. In “Little Gidding”, the reader is shown that brief moments of sudden illumination are important connections to the divine, and the suffering of human existence is necessary for spiritual purification. Section II is written in verse and counts down the deaths of the four elements. Next comes a long unbroken stanza of prose-like poetry discusses an illuminating experience the speaker had during a German air raid. Section III quotes the Christian mystic Julian of Norwich by saying that “Sin is Behovely, but/ All shall be well, and/ All manner of thing shall be well”. This, combined with Section IV's foray into verse to explore the connection between divine love and human suffering, reflects the more hopeful tone of this final poem. Section V ties together all the previous quartets by re-addressing the problems of language and time, and it contains the famous lines,


"We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time."

My copy of The Four Quartets has been living in my purse for the past four years. I pull it out when I'm standing in a long line, or when I feel the need to revisit some important, complicated literature. I've studied these poems for awhile, but I don't think I'll ever feel like their intellectual equal—for better or worse, they're beyond me. But that's no problem. Regardless of the results, I shall not cease from exploration. Grade: A+