Apr
29
The Final Act
April 29, 2009 | Uncategorized | 1 Comment
In the graveyard, to gravediggers are digging a whole for Ophelia. Hamlet and Horatio watch them from a distance. As they empty skulls from the grave, Hamlet begins to wonder who the skulls belonged to and then wonders who the grave is being dug for.
While Hamlet speculates the skulls, he becomes distressed that the gravediggers are tossing the skulls about in such a light-hearted manner as they are singing. Hamlet becomes more distressed when he realizes that everyone dies eventually and essentially become meaningless as they are forgotten with time like Alexander the Great and Julius Ceasar.
Hamlet and Horation hide when they see the King and Queen coming towards the grave, but it is then that Hamlet realizes that the grave is for Ophelia. Hamlet jumps into the grave with Laertes to fight and confess his love for Ophelia.
At this point, Hamlet is completely mad. When he jumps into the grave, he is driven by his impulses. He has just come to the sad realization that everyone dies and this additional death of a women he once had a feelings for is too much for him to handle, so he acts on his rage. Hamlet is desperate to hold onto her because his realization is being played out in his reality. If Hamlet truely loved Ophelia, he should feel guilty. His murder of Polonius drove Ophelia into madness and she committed suicide for this reason. Hamlet does not even show much remorse for Polonius’ death. When he is in the room with his mother, he shows a little remorse, but if Hamlet loved Ophelia as much as he says he does that he would have cared a lot more. In the last scene, Hamlet asks for Laertes forgiveness stating that it was his madness that drove him into killing Polonius even though he has been denying that he was going insane throughout the whole play.
In the end, of course, they all die. None of them were tragic heroes, instead, they were all pathetic because they were driven by their own impulses of getting even and only had their self-interest in mind. Yet, as we see Fortinbras standing over the scene of dead bodies saying, “For me, with sorrow I embrace my fortune. I have soem rights of memory in this kingdom, Which now to claim my vantage doth invite me,” it gives hope that Fortinbras could be a strong leader if he takes over the kingdom.
Apr
27
Seeking Revenge
April 27, 2009 | Uncategorized | 1 Comment
Everyone is learning of the murder of Polonius in Act IV. Claudius is outraged and wants to send Hamlet to England and he ordered that Hamlet be killed because he is crazy and he wants to explain the murder of Polonius to the public without the distraction of Hamlet. Under the order of Claudius, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern looked for Hamlet to find out wher Polonius’ body was buried, but Hamlet refused to tell them. This scene showed that Hamlet no longer considered these men his friends in the least even though they have known each other since they were little. They have completely turned there backs on Hamlet and Hamlet openly scorns them for instance when he Hamlet calls Rosencrantz a sponge for obeying the kings orders, “That soaks up the kings countenance, his rewards, his authorities.” Hamlet refused to tell them where the body was buried.
When Claudius asks Hamlet he says hat he he is at supper, being eaten by the worms, “A man may fish with the worm that hath eat of a king, and eat of the fish thast hath fed of that worm.” When asked again where Polonius is Hamlet responds, “In heaven. Send thither to see. If your messanger find him not there, seek him i’ the other place yourself.” He tells Claudius that he could be in heaven or hell and that Claudius should look for him himself.
Ophelia is devastated and has turned mad. She seeked the Queen for comfort and kept singing a woeful song. Later, consumed in her insanity, Ophelia drowned in the river.
Laertes secretly returned from France and is furious. He wanted to avenge his father’s death and the mob of commoners that have come with him want him to have the throne. After learning from Hamlet’s letters that he will be returning home after his trip to England failed, Laertes is pleased that his revenge will not be delayed and Claudius encourages Laertes to kill Hamlet.
Since Hamlet is a tragedy, and we know that all the characters will eventually die, in Act IV we Opherlia’s unfortunate death and all the characters that seek revenge plotting their murders as the rest of the character’s death lie up for the final act.
Apr
25
To be or not to be…
April 25, 2009 | Uncategorized | 1 Comment
In Act III, Hamlet’s acting on being insane is starting to become his reality. In his infamous soliloquy “To be or not to be,” he debates death. He lists off all the unfortunate events that have recently taken hold of his life such as his father’s death, seeing his father’s ghost, his uncle marrying his mother, learning that his uncle killed his father, Polonius forbidding Ophelia to see him, and even his friends have sided with Claudius and his mother. Although all of these occurrences would lead him to believe that committing suicide is the best option, he is puzzle by the afterlife or “the undiscovered country, from whose bourn, No traveler returns” as he calls it. After seeing his father caught is purgatory yelling, “horrible, horrible, horrible,” it is no surprise that he is uncertain if that is the route he wants to take.
When Ophelia is setting up Hamlet for her father and Claudius to observe and Hamlet and Ophelia talk for the first time since her father forbade them to meet, we see Hamlet take another turn towards his insanity. One of the only people Hamlet can rely on is Horatio. His family, friends, and now is love have all turned on him. In his conversation with Ophelia, Hamlet shuns all women saying, “God has given you one face, and you make yourselves another. You jig, you amble, and you lisp, you nickname God’s creatures and make your wantonness your ignorance.” Hamlet is fed up with the way women toy around with men and he shows this too her by saying that he can see how ugly and vile she is underneath her outside beauty. The betrayal of the woman he once loved pushed him to his limit and now he wants to take revenge.
Apr
22
This is the very ecstasy of love…
April 22, 2009 | Uncategorized | 1 Comment
In Act II, the first scene Polonius is talking to Reynaldo and he sends him to France to watch his son, Laertes, to see what he his up to. Previous to this scene, Polonius seemed as though he trusted his son, but this clearly shows that he is mistrusting of his children and he is untrustworthy himself.
When Reynaldo leaves, Ophelia came bursting in (a bit too overdramatically might I add) to tell Polonius that she thinks Hamlet has gone mad perhaps because Ophelia is obeying her father by not seeing him. Hamlet’s mom and Claudius think that he is going crazy because of his father’s death and there marriage, but after Polonius’ visit to them, they will soon hear the other side to it. Yet the questions is, Has he truly has gone mad or is he just acting?
At the end of Act I, he made Horatio and Marcellus swear that if others said he was acting crazy that they would play along with it. So this shows that he knew ahead of time that he would intentionally act crazy. My feeling is that he has a plan for revenge in mind, but I’m not sure what acting crazy has to do with it. The only time he acts insane in Act II is when he was talking to Polonius. When his friends Rosencratz and Guidenstern came to visit him, he spoke to them normally. He interrogated them to find out if they were sent for. The reason he did this was so he could see what his mother and Claudius thought of him acting crazy and if it had any impact.
In Scene II when Hamlet is talking to Polonius and acting insane, I noticed his play on words. When he calls Polonius a fishmonger it had a double entendre of meaning a fish seller and a pimp and when he says “Conception is a blessing, but not as your daughter conceives,” which can be referring to ideas or becoming pregnant. He also repeats his words three times, once when he says “words, words, words” and the second when he says “except my life, except my life, except my life.”
Apr
20
This bodes some strange eruption to our state…
April 20, 2009 | Uncategorized | 1 Comment
Reading Shakespeare is never at the top of my list for things I enjoy doing, but nevertheless, he is a very important part of literature and the English language. As for Hamlet, so far its not half bad. It has a twisted eerie tone to it which is found in a lot of Shakespeare’s tragedies. It kind of reminds of Edgar Allan Poe. Maybe there is some intertextuality Mrs. Hazel! Although I’m sure Shakespeare influenced a great deal of writers.
The play “Hamlet” opens up very dramatically with the ghost encountering Bernardo, Marcellus, and Horatio while they are on night watch. This scene opens the reader up to ask many questions like why is the ghost haunting them? Who is the ghost? When did the king die?
In scene two in the castle, I was evoked to ask other questions such as Why was Hamlet’s Uncle being handed the crown instead of Hamlet? Why didn’t Hamlet’s mother grieve more over her husband’s death? My thought was that Claudius and Gertrude fell in love and in order to be together Claudius killed King Hamlet…much to my surprise Claudius killed King Hamlet while he was sleeping in his orchard by putting poison into his ears because Claudius had fallen in love with Gertrude! By the end of the Act nearly all of my questions were answered. The ghost was in fact the ghost of King Hamlet who died one month ago and he wanted to send Prince Hamlet to get revenge on Claudius.
While reading Shakespeare it is not only important to grasp the content of his Elizabethan text, but to also take note of Shakespeare’s play on words and the signature elements of his works.
Apr
12
Summary of Spring Research
April 12, 2009 | Uncategorized | 1 Comment
I really enjoyed the spring research project and I was really relieved that it was blogging instead of a written essay. It was fun to show our research in an informal response rather than compiling it all into one paper. I like having it spread out with short blog posts because it was easier to manage the information. I was mostly frusterated when the site was down and it deleted my blog posts and I had a lot of difficulty writing on other peoples blogs out in the blogosphere, especially the google blogs. I would write up my whole response only to have it deleted when I would try to post it on their site. I found it cool to see how many other people were talking about my poet, connecting him with other poets, and reading his poetry. I ended up loving my poet, even though I did not at first. I found that I really had to delve into his poetry to find an appreciation for it. Overall, I thought blogging for the spring research project was a really good idea even though it was sometimes frusterating, thats just technology.
https://www.blogger.com/comment.g?blogID=3630843956063719011&postID=2528629142989604882&page=1
http://sarahegr5.edublogs.org/2009/03/11/a-bly-ography-life-and-career-of-robert-bly/#comments
http://kelseyegr1.edublogs.org/2009/03/25/reflections-of-stevens/#comment-11
Apr
12
Patchwork Poem
April 12, 2009 | Uncategorized | 1 Comment
The Beginning is the End
It is an old story, the way it happens
I am beginning again without anything.
the self no longer belonging to me, but
asleep in a stranger’s shadow.
dreams of motion circle
their wooden wings bruising the air
my mind floats in the purple air of my skull
slowly I dance out of the burning house of my head
everything dims, the future is not what it used to be
and the present is always dark
its maps are black
as they rise into being, they are like breath
the black stars are holding up the black sky
and there is need for surprise endings
the green fields where cows burn like newsprint
where nothing, when it happens, is never terrible enough
Already giving myself up
I am beginning again without anything
I empty myself of my life, and my life remains
This is patchwork poem of Mark Strands poetry from his books of poems Darker. I thought this was his best book of poetry and I noticed that he used a lot of the same objects for his use of imagery and his themes of emptying himself, giving himself up, and what remains. I tried writing my own poems mimicking him, but it was really difficult to copy his abstract imagery and ideas, so I made a patchwork instead. So here it is! Each line of two lines is from a different poem from the same book of poetry.
Apr
2
Poetry Poetry
April 2, 2009 | Uncategorized | 1 Comment
The Whole Story
-I’d rather you didn’t feel it necessary to tell him,
“That’s a fire. And what’s more, we can’t do anything about it,
because we’re on this train see?”
How it should happen is this way
I am not sure, but you
Are sitting next to me,
Minding your own business
When all of a sudden I see
A fire out of the window.
I nudge you and say,
“That’s a fire. And what’s more
We can’t do anything about it,
Because we’re on this train see?”
You give me an odd look
As though I had said too much.
It may be that trains
Can kindle a love of fire.
I might even suspect
That you are a fireman
In disguise. And then again
I might be wrong. Maybe
You are the one
Who loves a good fire. Who knows?
Perhaps you are elsewhere,
Deciding that with no place
To go you should not
Take a train. And I,
Seeing my own face in the window
May have lied about the fire.
The Guardian
The sun setting. The lawns on fire.
The lost day, the lost light.
Why do I love what fades?
You who left, who were leaving,
what dark rooms do you inhabit?
Guardian of my death
preserve my absence. I am alive.
Letter
Men are running across a field,
pens are falling from their pockets.
People out walking will pick them up.
It is one of the ways letters are written.
How things fall to others!
The self no longer belonging to me, but asleep
in a stranger;s shadow, now clothing
the stranger, now leading him off.
It is noon as I write to you.
Someone’s life has come into my hands.
The sun whitens the buildings.
It is all I have. I give it all to you. Yours,
Fire
Sometimes there would be a fire and I would walk into it
and come out unharmed and continue on my way,
and for me it was just another thing to have done.
As for putting out the fire, I left that to others
who would rush into the billowing smoke with brooms
and blankets to smother the flames. When they were through
they would huddle together to talk of what they had seen-
how lucky there were to have witnessed the luster of heat,
the hushing effect of ashes, but even more to have known the
frangrance
of burning paper, the sound of words breathing their last.
Mar
28
In the Present: Mark Strand and Elizabeth Bishop
March 28, 2009 | Uncategorized | 3 Comments
You know, when you read a poem, very often it’s not so much what is said but the way the poet is saying it. I…I would have to say that my Influence has to do mainly with the way things are said by Stevens and Elizabeth Bishop.
Mark Strand and Elizabeth Bishop met on several occasions and he greatly admired her work. They both came from the same Nova Scotia background, so Mark Strand was not only captivated by her writing, but he felt a connection to what she was writing about. In an interview with Lenny Emannuel, he stated,
With Elizabeth Bishop, it’s the air of precision, the intense evocation of place.
According to Mark Strand, time and space become interchangeable,for Elizabeth Bishop.
Mark Strand began reading her while he was at Antioch University. They met when Strand was teaching English at the University of Brasil in Rio de Janeiro and talked about Nova Scotia and their favorite American poets. After that, they met several other times in San Francisco, Boston, and Mexico.
Mark Strand was compelled by the precision of her word choice, how her stanzas appeared on the page, and he tone of her poetry which he revealed to Norman Klein in an interview on contemporary poetry:
There’s something about the shape of her stanzas, the tone of her poems- a certain distance or neutrality she maintains without sarcificing intensity, a strong perceptual energy that works without destroying the balance and clarity of her poems.
In a lot of Mark Strand’s poems, he uses short stanzas made up of broken sentences. Compiled together it creates a story. In Reasons for Moving, Strand said he was very concious of his writing to create into something of his own, but he admitted that it perpetually had the impression of Elizabeth Bishop. For example in “The Last Bus” (Rio de Janeiro 1966) Strand uses broken up sentences to create the visual of shortened stanzas and uses another characteristic of Bishop, specific places. “Nothing moves/ in Lota‘s park” and “And Rio sleeps:/ the sea is a dream/ in which it dies and is reborn.”
The following stanzas from “Eating Poetry” demonstrate the slant rhyme/rhyme pattern used in this poem which is uncommon of Mark Strand’s usual free verse poetry and the dream-like tone and ghoulish humor he admired of Bishop’s work:
Eating Poetry
Ink runs from the corners of my mouth.
There is no happiness like mine.
I have been eating poetry.
The librarian does not believe what she sees.
Her eyes are sad
and she walks with her hands in her dress.
The poems are gone.
The light is dim.
The dogs are on the basement stairs and coming up.
Their eyeballs roll,
their blond legs burn like brush.
The poor librarian begins to stamp her feet and weep.
She does not understand.
When I get on my knees and lick her hand,
she screams.
I am a new man
I snarl at her and bark.
I romp with joy in the bookish dark. (Strand’s dark menacing humor. Usually he has dry humor that is light and usually used a paradoxical situation)
The brevity of each stanza creates a phantasmagoric effect because of the precision of each of Strand’s words. As he jumps from stanza to stanza, he paints a different image. As though it were a dream, he leaves out the sections that happen in between giving us an altered perception of the sequence of events.
I’m also fascinated by the sudden, unexplained intrusion of dreams, or ghoulish humor, or something slightly awry that her poems manage to absorb effortlessly. There’s never a false note. She’s an absolutely sure craftswoman.
Mar
28
From the Past: Mark Strand and Wallace Stevens
March 28, 2009 | Uncategorized | 1 Comment
Surrounded by a number of great poets whom he admired greatly, the influence these poets had on Mark Strand mainly targed his writing style rather than the content of his poetry. Mark Strand was influenced by many contemporary and modern poets, but most prominently, Wallace Stevens. He read Wallace Stevens before he even began writing his own poetry. Reflecting on the times before he was a poet he admitted,
I discovered I wasn’t destined to be a very good painter, so I became a poet. Now, It didn’t happen suddenly. I did read a lot and I had been a reader of poetry before. In fact, I was much more given to poems than I was to fiction and the book I read a lot, and frequently, was The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens.
Mark Strand regards Wallace Stevens with much respect as he frequently makes reference to his name and some of his works. In The Way It Is, Strand uses a line from from Stevens’ Gubbinal at the top of his poem, “The world is ugly. /And the people are sad.” In The Sargentville Notebook, a collection of his peculiar thoughts, he says,
I am thinking of HB and RH and HM and SF and WB and DJ as I sit reading HV and WS.
in which he can be most nearly referring to Wallace Stevens. Although it yeilds a very small hint to Wallace Stevens affect on Strand, he later goes on to say,
The ultimate self-effacement is not the pretense of the minimal, but the jocular considerations of the maximal in the manner of Wallace Stevens.
Strand is commenting on how he thinks the poet should convey his pespective on the universal meaning of his poems. The poet should stay impartial by refraining from personal experiences and focusing on the universal meaning. Wallace Stevens does this by remaining absent from the poem and instead using his characters in his titles to reveal his message. Strand also attempts the same impartiality from his poems except that he uses the pretense “I.” And he is good at it too. Throughout Strands poetry he uses first person, but he maintains his impersonality from the poem and tells the story through the eyes of his characters. Samuel Maio discussed Strand by saying,
Such an inquiry–and tentative answers–could not have been effected without his use of the self-effacing voice, for, as we have seen, this voice cannot be distinguished from the self portrayed–and defined–in these poems, whoever it is Strand would have us believe is their author.
In Strand’s most recent book, he said that it was very “stevenesque.” I haven’t been able to get a hold of it, but I have seen Stevens impression in Strands earlier works also. Stevens and Strand present very abstract ideas in their poetry and it takes more than one read through to grasp the meaning, in fact, it requires close in-depth analysis. The audience they want reading their poetry is the intellectual. As Jane Candia Coleman stated,
Mark Strand is not a poet for everyone…but the reader who delves, who meets the poet halfway, will be rewarded by glimpses of a different world, that changeable one of dreams and the elusive beauty that haunts us all.
In Mark Strand’s “The Way It Is,” he dedicated his poem to Wallace Stevens and like Stevens he uses colors as a symbol to represent the tone for what is happening. For example, the image portrayed in Steven’s poem A Rabbit As King of the Ghosts,
The difficulty to think at the end of the day,
When the shapeless shadow covers the sun
and nothing is left except the light on your fur-
There was the fat cat slopping its milk all day
Fat cat, red tongue, green mind, white milk
And August the most peaceful month.
greatly resembles a few lines from Strand’s “The Way It Is,”
My neighbor marches in his room,
wearing the sleek
mask of a hawk with a large beak.
He stands by the window. A violent plume
rinses from his helmet’s dome.
The moon’s light
spills over him like milk and the wind rinses the white
glass bowls of his eyes”
In “A Rabbit As King of the Ghosts”, there is a cat watching a rabbit in the night and in “The Way It Is”, there is a man watching his neighbor in the night. Both use enjambment tho connect the stanzas also. At the top of the poem, Strand also quotes from Stevens poem “Gubbinal,” “The world is ugly and the people are sad.” In the poem “Gubbinal,” the lines ”That tuft of jungle feathers,/That animal eye,/Is just what you say,” which is referenced to by Strand when he says his neighbor is wearing a mask of a hawk and “a violent plume.”
