L08-330-04-23-15 Book keeping. Quiz The paired poems: Many of you picked poems, but not always as contrary pairs. Many poems will fit in more than one pairing, but the focus for this is clarity on Blake’s conception of contraries. We need to sort that out, and to arrange for choices for the next assignment. Write a paper on two poems, or do a joint video explication of two poems? Scheduled Rooms are not workable. You form a group and select your own place.?

Regulating the self The sense in which Romanticism is an exploration of the agency and nature of the self, it is also, particularly in its poetry, a much more engaged exploration of how it is possible to regulate the self. The impetus from Kant’s “What is Enlightenment” continues and deepens. How are we constituted? By what means to we learn not just the facts of our emotions, but their consequences and structure?

Reading a poem Poetry is an art. It leaves little room for self-indulgence, and it is not just a collocation of its devices. While it is true that it is a species of composition where the lines do not go all the way to the edge of the page, the line is measured: it starts and stops at a definite point. It literally makes something. Robert Scholes: I don’t want you to read what is behind the lines, under the lines, or between the lines. I just want you to read the damn lines. The most important issue: precision, exact attention. The poem itself is a form of comprehensive thinking.

From Tuesday The big problem is that because poems are rarely transparent (i.e., you go over it, and it doesn’t make sense to you), the opinion arises that it means whatever you want it to mean, or that it ‘means’ whatever you thought that it meant. The contrary position is not that there is an absolutely right reading, but it is absolutely right that there are an unlimited number of ways to get things wrong. When the poem makes sense, its meaning is an EVENT. You cannot tell someone else what it means in ‘other words.’ IF you understand it, you recognize that it does not end: it changes you, and changes not what you think, but how you think. It is NOT propositional, but appositional and relational; It doesn’t have a message, it has a CONSEQUENCE. It does NOT lead to a tidy ‘reading’ of the poem: it leads to another poem. The natural unit is not the individual poem, but the SEQUENCE. You have to take them through it, showing how connections are made, how errors are discovered, and how ideas are created, not announced.

Holy Thursday

Holy Thursday HOLY THURSDAY t HOLY THURSDAY Twas on a Holy Thursday their innocent faces clean The children walking two & two in red & blue & green Grey headed beadles walkd before with wands as white as snow Till into the high dome of Pauls they like Thames waters flow O what a multitude they seemd these flowers of London town Seated in companies they sit with radiance all their own The hum of multitudes was there but multitudes of lambs Thousands of little boys & girls raising their innocent hands Now like a mighty wind they raise to heaven the voice of song Or like harmonious thunderings the seats of heaven among Beneath them sit the aged men wise guardians of the poor Then cherish pity, lest you drive an angel from your door HOLY THURSDAY Is this a holy thing to see, In a rich and fruitful land, Babes reduced to misery, Fed with cold and usurous hand? Is that trembling cry a song? Can it be a song of joy? And so many children poor? It is a land of poverty! And their sun does never shine. And their fields are bleak & bare. And their ways are fill'd with thorns. It is eternal winter there. For where-e'er the sun does shine, And where-e'er the rain does fall: Babe can never hunger there, Nor poverty the mind appall.