Teaching poetry: Helen Vendler at Harvard University

when you're thinking about speaking for 45 or 50 minutes to students you lose five minutes hither and yon but the question of how to pace and time the exposition that you're going to do is always a matter of concern beforehand I think my own feeling is that I have never liked to be read asked and I don't believe in reading lectures or writing them out beforehand but I believe in thinking them out beforehand and knowing how many minutes more or less you're going to give to each one of the several points we are talking today about Yates's poem among schoolchildren as an example of what this week's rubric calls the philosophical poem that is a poem that explicitly considers some of the questions that philosophers have asked or some of the readings of the world that philosophers have offered you'll see three philosophers named in the poem three famous Greek philosophers from the beginning era of philosophy Plato Aristotle and Pythagoras and how to teach poems by a 60 year old man to people of eighteen is a real problem it was a problem for me myself when I first was doing my thesis on Yeats my PhD thesis and I thought I am too young to write on these poems and I didn't write on the light poems at all because I knew I was too young at 23 to think about what somebody 60 was thinking about so I'm very conscious of that gap and what you can count on to fill it in part as it was filled in part for me as a reader even though I was only 23 was the power with which language is used this is one of those poems written by a man 60 who expects you to be willing to tolerate the well-stocked furniture of a 60 year old mind it's not that the poem is undecipherable it's perfectly well decipherable but it's not easy to decipher because it's the ruminations of a man who has read all his life for his thought all his life who has written all his life who has been in love most of his life and it was thinking about all of these things as he finds himself in an unlikely place for a 60 year old man a school an elementary school at that in order to take a lecture class at least inside a poem it might be different in a small class but in a lecture class you have to make them see the life situation out of which the poem is being written sometimes that's quite clear in the poem itself of the life situation is described other times the life situation is only implied and because you know the life situation from having been more experienced with the poem you could say to them this is an utterance that has been compelled by the death of a child or so that they know from the start what is motivating the breaking of the silence and the compulsion into speech that marks every poem and the reason that Yeats the poet is in that classroom is that now that he's sixty and a famous man a famous poet winner of the Nobel Prize he is being asked to visit places like that to encourage the children more or less and so that he stands before them as an exhibit it's a very hard thing to be an exhibit when you're a person but there he is and all the children are asked rise children and say good morning seventy-eights and then they all have to get up and say good morning 78 so you feel like an object or a spectacle rather than like yourself the way you are inside when you're dealing with a large heterogeneous group of students none of whom most of them are not humanities majors since the cool and the humanities are intended for students in the social sciences and the sciences the first thing you have to know inside yourself is that this is not a path that they have been naturally led to by their own talents or compelling interests and it's up to you to get them interested so that there's a kind of challenge thrown down to you especially since a lot of people have a kind of negativity towards poetry that has come out of the way it's been taught to them in high school and they have a certain terror that it's not like prose they use to prose they don't understand why poems look the way they do and why they should talk the funny language that they talk and they often have a certain mule ish thought why can't if that's what they mean why can't they say it straight out the in directions and deflections of poetry seem unnatural to them since most of their reading has been processed not towards pleasure but to us information retrieval so that you have to overcome the unfamiliarity of the jar to them and I think the way you do that is by telling them a great deal to start with so that the poems don't seem difficult one of the myths in plato's myth of creation was that originally everybody was a sphere everybody was half of a sphere I should say we were all spherical and the two halves could be either a male half linked with a male half or a female half linked with a female half are a female half linked with a male half when we're born somebody splits us in two and we're thrown as fractions into the world this has Plato Smith to explain the varieties of sexuality if you're a male and your other half was male you go around the world seeking that of a male half if you were female and your other half was female then you go around seeking your other female half of your female if you were one of the hemispheres that were unlike male/female then whatever you are male or female you go around the world seeking for the opposite he thinks that when he met his beloved they were both united back into the sphere that they were originally before they were shot down here and then why the utterance should be as it is is only clear to them if you give some alternatives what else might have been said in this kind of circumstance my someone else have said about the death of a child or about getting married or whatever I think students aren't always used to thinking about the many possibilities of utterance and the choice of one angle of utterance and when they see the many possibilities they're more able to see how the imagination is working and choosing this possibility over others Melville says refer to the same myth in one of his poems who clothed the integral in two and shied the fractures through life's gate wonderful poem called after the pleasure party these are some of the things that this 60 year old man is thinking about as he is in the schoolroom with the children he's of course supposed to be paying attention to the teacher who's taking through the classroom and explaining the principles of the Montessori method this is not deeply interesting to go forward and so his mind wanders and as you might expect his mind wanders as he looks over the little girls in the classroom wondering what his beloved had looked like a bad age whether she had looked like this little girl of that little girl whether her her cheeks with that color pale or that color rosy whether her hair was that color chestnut of that color blonde and he didn't know her then there he doesn't have pictures of her then so he doesn't know how she is how she was but he thinks about what she must have been like there he thinks of her another piece of the cultural information floating around in his head he thinks of her as as beautiful as Helen of Troy now that they are less likely to be acquainted with the Bible Oh with Greek myths I remember when I was first teaching and realized that they didn't know these things I would say story time and then tell the story of Orpheus and Eurydice I'll tell the story of Ruth and Boaz and Naomi and they loved that I mean because storytelling is a natural activity and listening to stories is different from trying to focus on an artwork as such so that to break from the structural or lexical nature or metrical nature of the artwork and subside into something very familiar like telling the story of the betrayal of Jesus by Judas sorts of things that students who come from such diverse backgrounds are not likely to know that a certain loose-limbed feeling for a moment in the classroom aside from the high focus of the attention to a single line or a single image Helen of Troy was one of the children born to by Leda after Jove assaulted Leda in order to change the course of history Jeff came in the form of a swan - leader impregnated her and one of the children born of that union was Helen of Troy but she was the twin of Clytemnestra so the two children were in the one shell Leda bore eggs rather than children because Jove had come to her in the form of a swan so in one egg there was Helen and Clytemnestra and in the other egg there were the heavenly twins castor and Pollux that are now Gemini up in the sky and so that in reinterpreting plato's parable of the two Hobbs that we were before we were cloven into and sent down here he thinks of himself in his beloved as being inside the one shell because she looks like Helen of Troy so she is born of Leda and he of course has does not have the beauty of leadeth he never had that beautiful plumage of the daughters of the Swan but still he was once alright - but now he's 60 the other piece of cultural information that he has is a fairy tale that most of you have read which is the fairy tale of the ugly duckling you remember that there was one duckling that was ugly among all the brood of ducklings and the other ducklings made fun of the ugly duckling and as the ducklings grew up the ugly duckling suddenly was transformed into a swan and became that was why the duckling was different from the end the Ducks they were just ordinary paddlers but she was a daughter of the Swan and yet when they were young no one could tell them apart she looked like a duckling - it was only later that you could see that she was really a daughter of the Swan and not the ugly duckling that she had seemed to be this poem is about labor that is to say Adams curse as Yeats calls it in another poem when Adam fell God told him that he would have to earn his bread by the sweat of his brow that was the curse specially ascribed to Adam the curse ascribed to Eve was that she would bear her children in pain so that the primal deficit that we all suffer under is that we don't know things by innate knowledge that everything we end up knowing we have to have learned by a painful process of acquisition starting with school going on - from rote instruction to individual instruction to philosophical thought to reach the more complex realms of human thought and finally to express ourselves in one way or another some people express themselves in art but many people express themselves in life they live a life of interesting twists and turns and curves and they choreographed for themselves their entire life cycle and that is their means of expression when Yeats sees the children beginning to learn his heart sinks the road of learning is such a very long road and even when you reach the very tip-top of it as Plato and Pythagoras and Aristophanes it all amount to for you personally even if you've reached the heights of learning this is a poem that asks what is the point of life and have as its ending two points of life and I'll come to that when we come to the ending what how are we to think well we're 60 about the life we have led what it adds up to what it's worth and you can see that at least the first of Yates's thoughts which is given for you and footnote on the second page when he wrote to a friend it means that even the greatest man Plato Pythagoras Aristotle uh old scarecrows by the time their fame has come and he is now one of those men and feels himself to be an old scarecrow when I was lecturing on among school children saying in the core it's a long poem it was going to take the whole hour so that the first fifteen minutes might be stage setting setting of the dramatis personae who is Yeats who was Maud gonne what is he doing in the schoolroom why is he a public man all of those things that need to be explained just to have the poem clear because it is not a biographical poem once the students are ready to go into the poem then the next 15 minutes are after the first 10 minutes let's say of biography setting why the Montessori School was modern and so on then to move into the speak structural divisions of the poem let me read the beginning the first four stations you might say of this poem and I call them stations because each stanza is preceded by a Roman numeral as you know most of the poems we've seen don't have a stately Roman numeral which is far more stately than an Arabic numeral standing in front of each of its eight successive eight lines it's as if to say here we are in stage one you stop then you have a big Roman numeral Stage two here we are at point two but then here we are at point three those Roman numerals tell you that each point is a really different starting point that's why the poem doesn't seem to continue seamlessly it seems to start anew almost with every stanza and you'll remember that sailing to Byzantium had the same Roman numerals before each one of its four stations that is no country for old men and then coming to and therefore I have sailed the seas and come to the holy city of Byzantium at the end of its second station the third station raised thought to heaven osage's stand to gain God's holy fire and then the fourth station was back down to earth again of what has passed singing to lords and ladies of Byzantium in a garden of what has passed are passing or to come so that these four stations of thought and often of the body as in sailing to Byzantium a part of the meaning of those sovereign Roman numerals standing at the beginning of each place the first four of these eighth stanzas it's a very symmetrical poem it has eight stanzas that each of the stanzas has eight lines that's a form of perfection eight times eight George Herbert for instance wrote a poem called Sunday which has seven times seven because sunday is the seventh day of the week these stanzas are called a Tov arena we've seen them before in sailing to Byzantium and they have a unit of six followed by a unit of two a b a b a b c c so they end in a couplet the basic paradigmatic or normative form of such a stanza is to have a six line unit of thought followed by a two line unit of thought you'll notice how this poem disobeys the paradigmatic our normative form and therefore keeps us going in a sense of restlessness it hasn't settled down and sat down you might say in it's a chav ARIMA form until the very end we begin this is a process poem you might say which begins with a mind made up that is a resolved view of the present state of affairs sometimes you'll want to start with the end a surprise ending sometimes you'll want to start with the beginning if it's an eruptive beginning isn't done sometimes you start in the middle some poems only get to the heart of themselves in the middle like sailing to Byzantium where you might isolate sick with desire and fastened to a dying animal as the place where the poem comes from when the heart is sick with desire and fastened to an impotent and dying animal and to lift those parts of the poem up to them before you even start on the poem or against them towards this situation from which home comes this is a very different kind of poem it's sort of like a movie it moves from place to place I walk through the long schoolroom questioning he's being polite what else do you teach the children a kind old nun in a white hood replies and then you hear the nuns voice proudly telling about all the things they teach the children in rather simple terms the children learn to cipher and to sing to study reading books and history to cut and so be neat in everything in the best modern way she's justifiably proud of their modernity progressive education and then he looks and sees himself as the object of spectacle the children's eyes in momentary wonder stare upon a 60 year old smiling public man that's what they see an old man somebody famous coming to smile at them you have to imagine yourself back in a time when nobody visited schools parents were not allowed inside schools I had a friend who had a child in school in Ireland and wanted to come and visit the school and she was told Oh madam nobody physics to school except the bishop so they were back in that realm of culture where it is a peace of momentary wonder when somebody actually comes into the classroom who doesn't belong there I believe in reading things aloud so that the students hear the poem since it's meant to be heard I also believe in spending long enough on the poem for the principle of pleasure around which the poem is constructed to communicate itself to the audience so it's the idea of making it pleasurable for the students as well as letting them inhabit the poem for a little while as well as pointing out certain formal or technical things that they're supposed to be learning as they go along it's the recollection that you must make eye contact the recollection that you must lift your head from the text interested though you are in it and that you must make your voice the medium of the tones of the poem so that you're not reading in a monotone but you make it sound like something alive human being could have said all of those things are important I think in talking to groups I dream of Aladin by bent above a sinking fire a tale that she told of a harsh with proof or trivial event that changed some childish day to tragedy told and it seemed that our two natures blend into a sphere from youthful sympathy or else to alter Plato's parable into the yolk and white of the one shell till they were twins inside the one egg and thinking of that fit of grief or rage that she told me about I look upon one child or the other there and wonder if she stood so at that age three even daughters of the Swan can share something of every paddlers heritage and have that color upon cheek or here and there upon my heart has driven wild she stands before me as a living child at that moment of ecstatic recognition of what she must have been like as a child the poem suddenly turns into the kind of painting that we call a diptych where you have two paintings very close to each other they could be the angel and Mary the Virgin at the Annunciation they could be two angels standing together but it's often the sort of painting that can fold in half and then when you open it up you see the two things just juxtaposed imagery helps to bridge the gap between a deficiency of experience perhaps and the experience that's being retold the deficiency and the student the experience told by the poet but there's also the driving momentum of syntax of an urgent utterance feeling urgent and there's also the bridge that comes simply from the sense of things falling into shape a poem has a shape and it has a rightness of shape just the way a painting has a rightness of balance of masses balance of colors certain ways in which the eye is drawn in by perspective so a poem has all of that focus balanced composition and it clicks for that reason in a way that is different from the imagery different from the syntax but the whole the Gestalt when it clicks is very powerful to her present image floats into the mind did Quattrocento finger fashioned it hollow of cheek as though it drank the wind and took a mess of shadows for its meet and I though never of lledon kind had pretty plumage once enough of that better to smile on all that smile and show there is a comfortable kind of old scarecrow that's the end really of the picture in the classroom it's the end of the process through which the poem has been taking you to show you his thoughts as they wander away from the children they are back to his own past and to his own present when now he stands as a 60 year old man entirely unlike the young man he was who had pretty plumage and she his beloved stands as the old ravaged woman she is 60 was older in those days than now I hope and and and she is a living child so you now have two dipsticks himself when he had pretty plumage and himself as the comfortable kind of old scarecrow herself as a living child and herself as the ravaged Crone when you look at such things as what life turns out to be what you amount to by the time you're 60 you think you know even my mother wouldn't think it was worth having had me if she saw that I was going to turn into an old scarecrow the first thing you have to believe is that it's that everybody is curious about how the world works and everybody is susceptible to rhythms and language and the expression of human emotions so you get down to the bedrock of whatever it is that is evolutionarily available to you in a human being they must respond to otherwise they wouldn't have evolved we wouldn't have evolved the way we have and I count on the all those things like rhythm momentum of syntax brilliance of imagery pathos of situation all of those are just available to us as human beings and as Wordsworth said the poet is a man speaking to men we would translate it now into the poem the poet is a human being speaking to other human beings and barring everywhere.we with him relationship and love and there's nobody who doesn't want relationship and love and poetry says Wordsworth that's the only constriction placed on a poet is that the poem must give immediate pleasure and if it doesn't then it has failed so that you count on the immediate pleasure that's there to be retrieved but that will touch the linguistic side of the mind of these very bright students all of whom have a linguistic side they are usually quite good at language and and they have human feelings because they're adolescents and are full of human feelings so with the combination of language and feeling there you are labor is blossoming a dancing where the body is not bruised - pleasure soul nor beauty is thinking of art born out of its own despair nor blear-eyed wisdom out of midnight oil the philosophers all up late thinking and rising in the morning more ravaged in their faces than before because of their sleepless nights so that wisdom entails the ruin of the body the pleasuring the soul becoming religious person entails the mortification and destruction in a way of the physical body and beauty is born out of its own despair if you have the despair of the artist out of it he creates something beautiful he says of that in himself but he he wrote everything so that his beloved would not finally understand him and she never did understand him in spite of everything that he had written and he said but had she done so who can say what might have shaken from the sieve I might have thrown poor words away and been content to live and so this beauty born out of its own despair is his summary really of his own art that all of the despair of love trying again and again to make her understand him he made beautiful things but it had to be in that way it was not effortless it was not blossoming it was not dancing poem has come almost to its very end then I think you could do say for the end of it the drama of the poem how is he going to reconcile himself to life when it ends up as in such disaster and tragedy who I have lived at all the poem keeps making this problem more and more acute until it only solves it so to speak in the last two lines so that you can talk about the drama and suspense of the poem and still the mock the bitterness is there that he has been mocked by his enterprise the enterprise has been one of arduous labor and each person ends up mocked by the image they themselves created he then looks to find some solution the first solution he found when he was writing this poem was to say well it's just 60 is awful and everything has gone to wrack and ruin but there was a moment that was nice there was a moment when I was in love there was a moment in the seasons of the year where everything blossoms and it's spring and about all you can salvage from life if you're asking whether it was all worth it was to say yes there was that one magical moment and the original ending reflected that it showed two dancers dancing together it showed the moment of being coupled it showed the moment of mutual recognition that is blending into a sphere from youthful sympathy that we saw earlier in the poem and that he says was a good moment and he also thinks that it was a good moment in the springtime when the Hawthorn tree which is called the may often in English usage when the Hawthorn tree blooms and all that beautiful the hedges are white with the blossoms of the Hawthorn tree all over wherever you look the first time a student finds the Yeats poem of great complexity they may be almost tempted to throw up their hands and think I don't know what he's talking about but then to be led through it in a kind of rational and serious way but to have some of the difficulty difficulties eased by being explained means that they can perhaps be led to the pleasure that the poem is intended to give which if they were struggling with it all along they might not be able to attain at that stage in their education so that it's purveying of the pleasure that is locked up there in the artwork that they might not be able to unlock for themselves yet oh just nutty great rooted blossom er are you the leaf the blossom of the bowl an absurd and only rhetorical question of course the tree is all of it pieces it is great rooted it's old but it's still a blossom er however the organic image of the thing that always blossoms year after year that is to say the image of the perennial blossoming of the old which is different from saying Oh Hawthorn tree and all that gaudy gear the spring flora flourishing alone but the organic world can't solve a human problem after all we don't look at an old chestnut tree and make the same comparisons with youth as we do with a body and casting about for some image that will not be the image of the dancing couple glance that Mira's glance and asking the final philosophical question what is there to be said for a prolonged life a life that passes by its moment of sexual reciprocity and goes on and on and on continuing itself he thinks of the image of the dancer the kind of dancer like Isadora Duncan that had become popular in Yates's time a dancer who makes up her own dance that is to say a self choreographing dancer not somebody who dances to a choreography by ballet she does somebody else but rather a dancer who creates his or her own choreography as he goes along or as she goes along however there is some constraint on the choreography because there's a set piece of music to which the choreography is being invented so there is a fixed element in the dance somebody is inventing choreography to the afternoon of a faun or something the music is there and the music is of course prolonged in time thinking of this poem I think Anthony pol the novelist the British novelist called his multi-volume autobiography in in fiction a dance to the music of time you can't control time or the context into which you're born you're born in a particular place at a particular historical moment then against that backdrop you have to invent your own dance as you invent your dance the steps change and they stay change all your life long he ends up with this picture of life and you notice that it ends with a present participle in the drawing of the picture in the word brightening the verb Brighton is a member of the most interesting class of verbs in English because to Brighton as in to redden or to wax or to grow our verbs that have an infinite extension you can read in and read and read and read and read and you can write I was somewhat taken aback since I very carefully planned what I'm going to do in every given lecture to have students occasionally say while she is sometimes rambling I thought rambling what do they mean by rambling and it was that at any given moment in a poem you might think this is a good moment to talk about and it might be imagery in general it might be this kind of stands it might be this kind of form it might be the differences between the Renaissance sonnet what you're teaching and some modern sonnet writing that will come much later and so you stop in the arc of the lecture and do a little bubble of digression on what will happen to the sonnet in two hundred years or why this form will be picked up later by Byron and it will be because it is of use to them to know that four weeks down the line but because they don't see its relevance necessarily to the poem which has sprung it off in you this side issue this little digression they think of it as rambling I hope by the end they think of all these digressions as adding up to part of the overview that the course gives them but it is not so strictly limited in a course in literature as it would be in doing a problem set or something in chemistry where the logic and tales that you'll keep on going though I can imagine a chemistry teacher to stopping in the middle of the discussion of one kind of organic molecules and going on to say we didn't think then that when these were discovered that they would have practical uses but it has now that kind of looking forward or looking backward perhaps is a little distracting to the student but in the long run it's part of the way the human mind works true you wouldn't want a lecture to be wholly digressive but on the other hand you wouldn't want it to be put in such a pro crusty embed that a human digression couldn't take place this verb Brighton implies that the eye is always catching a new idea from which it can make up a new step and so he ends not with a double body the couple glance that mirrors but with a single he accepts his own solitude in this image and accepts the fact that the dance is essentially a solitary dance which one choreographs through one's entire life obody swayed to music a brightening glance how can we know the dancer from the dance that is to say if you want to say Who am I you say I am the person who made these steps who invented these steps for my life I am the person who drew you know how you can try to dance the steps with lights by putting say lights on their feet and their arms and you can see the complex pattern that is made from the beginning till the end if you unscrewed that pattern for your own life I did these steps than I did these steps then I thought what shall I do next to my ID brightened and I thought oh I'll do these steps and then I'll do these steps and finally the steps end but the only way to say who you were is to track your steps and there isn't any one moment such as youth set up against one moment such as being 60 in those cruel diptych that the poem originally chose for its imagery instead there's only affluent himself invented the set of steps which defines you at the end so the by redefining identity not governed by time but invented against time not crushed by time not mocked by time as those dip dicks show being crushed and being mocked but instead as a constant challenge to invent yourself anew with each stage when you're 60 as much as any other time you were still doing dance steps when you're 60 as he was doing dance steps when he was young and the sudden pulling of the chestnuts out of the fire and finding a way to define both the purposefulness of life after its biological purpose has been fulfilled after the sexual moment is over and by defining it not biologically but imaginatively as the way you contrive to live to invent steps against the music of time that your life has been set to that the value that has been inscribed in this final couplet which is where the poem comes to rest by having this great human couplet and finally exceeding to its own sense of itself as an octave ARIMA poem with a couple of the finally in the poem is that it conceives of the imagination is the fundamental spiritual component of life if the biological component is indeed sexuality and reproduction the spiritual component of life is imagination which responds to each new temporal challenge with a new step and keeps putting forth its blossoms like the chestnut tree and every moment no matter how old great rooted and solid it is rescuing them from a sense of impotence and giving them an avenue towards mastery which is exactly what I adolescents need is the sense that they are in command of the world rather than helpless subjects of it that seems to be fundamentally what we're in the business of doing I also think that you give them a kind of model of what it might be like to talk about art it's not the kind of talk they hear much at home or on TV but it is a form of discourse that's been going on since the beginning of time and it's a discourse the changes but how to talk about paintings how to talk about music how to talk about poetry all of those are discourses they might at least some of them want to learn but that the only way to learn is to hear somebody doing it so that this is a poem which is exciting in part because it begins in such a desultory way I walk through the long schoolroom questioning but ends with the ultimate question of what is my life worth now if it's worth anything now that I'm 60 and keeping that revelation till the very last two moments of the poem make it a thrilling poem once you can read it without being sort of baffled by its various changes of position it aims at being a comprehensive poem and going from the Greek philosophers to now in treating both men and women in treating passion piety and affection and in treating both the organic world the chestnut tree and the human world the brightening eye at the same time it also aims it being comprehensive in thinking about the physical body over against the imaginative soul and giving both fair play the bitterness and exhaustion of the human the biological the passion of the venerable the worshipping and at the same time the Khans liveness of the brightening I as the imagination copes with life once more even at 60 there are many good styles of teaching I think as everybody agrees I had many different kinds of good teachers myself what I liked best of all was a teacher who had an aesthetic response to the work very often the teachers that I didn't like would spend the entire lecture on biography history context textual questions about editions or something and they would never get down to the poem and I would sit the Emily thinking but why don't they ever and I think that there will be students in everyone's class that are sitting there thinking but why don't they ever so that in my classes which tend to focus on the poems in an aesthetic sense some student will be sitting there thinking but why doesn't she ever talk more about biography history the French Revolution what have you I don't think you can please everyone but I think you have to find a style that expresses your own gifts and as Adrienne Rich says someplace our gifts compel us to our destinations and so that if your gifts are those of aesthetic response your lectures tend to go that way too if your gifts are those of historical synthesis your lectures will go that way if your gifts of those of Freudian analysis your lectures will go that way and finally you discover who you are in part by the friction you field against other methods you you you

Channel: readingthelinestv

Views: 17,653

Rating: 4.9622641 out of 5

Keywords: literature, teaching, professor, harvard, poetry, poems

Id: EkX8Y5sNg3U

Length: 41min 5sec (2465 seconds)

Published: Thu Sep 01 2016