Week 12: Wrapping Up

First, some final thoughts from my exhibition project:

I know my writing on the project ended up being a bit stiff and stilted.  I think the main reason this happened is that the topic, while something I was very interested in and passionate about, ended up being very difficult to research.  I'm not sure if not many people have written on the act of looking and being in dialogue with the artist or if I was just looking in the wrong places, but I definitely struggled to have my thoughts make "intellectual sense"--if that makes sense.

Other things:

I'm really happy we made it to the V&A.  I loved getting to spend time with the sculptures there, and I think it helped me a lot with my final Nature and Culture project.  Especially important to me was Samson Slaying a Philistine (1562) by Giovanni Bologna.  The way it invites--no, begs--the viewer to walk around it and take it in from all angles is amazing.

Another sculpture that was completely different but also fascinated me was Vessel (1988) by Takiguchi Kozuo.  Part of this is due to the title, which is so general so as to allow this abstract figure to be almost any kind of container, and yet so specific with the choice of word 'vessel' over some blander word like 'container'.  

Illustrating the importance of a title in abstract art, this next work has perhaps a more interesting shape--more human, suggesting the curves of a body?--than the previous one, but its name Sculpture draws you in far less.  It doesn't pin as much importance to the figure as the word 'vessel' does for the previous one.  

Sculpture (1958-9), by Yagi Kazuo

Unfortunately the museum had both of these two works behind class with a wall behind them, so their interesting shapes couldn't be explored 3-dimensionally in the way that sculptures need.

Also just to touch on Keats, watching Bright Star and visiting his house made his obsession with death make a lot more sense.  Seeing him in the movie constantly taking care of his brother with tuberculosis and then seeing his medical instruments from his early career as a doctor brought home just how close his contact with death was, even way before he began to face it for himself.

I think reading some of To the Lighthouse made the visual/textual connection clearer to me.  There's the obvious stuff where Woolf is writing about painting, but also just the way she writes in general is incredibly visual and painterly in the detail.  The density of the descriptions does make it hard to read quickly though.

I read Great Gatsby before coming to London, which was another novel that has immensely creative descriptions.  I wasn't at that time thinking about visuals in terms of texts as much as now, so I'll be curious whenever I go back and read that if there's a similar quality in it.

Week 9: Performance and Audience Depicted in Painting and Poetry -- Exhibition Planning

The biggest problem I'm having right now for my exhibition is that I have about 5 poems and 5 paintings now that are swirling around in my thoughts, and it's too much to organize.  I'm actually surprised and I guess happy in a way to be having this problem because I anticipated having trouble finding things that would be good pairings.  In fact, I think I have a lot of interesting pairings/trios, but I need to delve deeper into the works and uncover their redundancies so that I can cut it down to 4 and 4 or 4 and 3--hopefully 3 and 3, which seems much more manageable to think about.

Theme:
Performance and Audience Depicted in Painting and Poetry

My possible paintings as of now:
1) Two Dancers on the Stage - Degas (1874)
2) La Loge - Renoir (1874)
3) At the Theatre - Renoir (1876)
4) Portrait of Bibi la Purée - Picasso (1901)
5) Bar at the Folies-Bergère - Manet (1881-2)
6) Miss La La at the Cirque Fernando - Degas (1879)

Thoughts:
1., 4., and 6. deal with performers.  There are differences among them, however.  While there is no audience in 1., the ballet dancers aren't HEAVILY focused on.  It's almost as if the background, a mysterious dark swirl, is more important to Degas than them.  Indeed they are not very individualized.  In the other two--4. and 6.--the performers are given names and shown on their own.  The one in 6. is in the midst of performance, while in 4. the figure is not (at least in a strict sense, though the case can be made that he is still performing).  One thing I like more about 4. than 6., though, is that we can see the face of the performer in 4.

2., 3., and 5. highlight audience members.  I will probably not choose the Manet.  I love it and was looking forward to spending more time in front of it, but it simply would draw too much attention to itself in the "room" of the exhibit due to its size compared to the other paintings.  2. and 3. are similar, both highlighting the audience as a sort of spectacle in themselves, not necessarily totally engaged with the performance.  2. is a more interesting painting, so I will probably choose that.

I will probably choose one from 1/4/6 (Degas/Picasso/Degas) and then 2. (Renoir).


In terms of poems, I have two poems I definitely want to use: "Magician" by Gary Miranda, about the relationship between magician and audience from the perspective of the magician; and "Cheap Seats, The Cincinnati Gardens, Professional Basketball, 1959" by William Matthews, about a crowd member at basketball games and how he experiences the games in terms of his own life.

"Magician" - Miranda

What matters more than practice
is the fact that you, my audience,
are pulling for me, want me to pull
it off—this next sleight. Now
you see it. Something more than
whether I succeed’s at stake.

This talk is called patter. This
is misdirection—how my left
hand shows you nothing’s in it.
Nothing is. I count on your mistake
of caring. In my right hand your
undoing blooms like cancer.

But I’ve shown you that already—
empty. Most tricks are done
before you think they’ve started—you
who value space more than time.
The balls, the cards, the coins—they go
into the past, not into my pocket.

If I give you anything, be sure
it’s not important. What I keep
keeps me alive—a truth on which 
your interest hinges. We are like
lovers, if you will. Sometimes even
if you don’t will. Now you don’t.



"Cheap Seats..." - Matthews

The less we paid, the more we climbed. Tendrils
of smoke lazed just as high and hung there, blue,
particulate, the opposite of dew.
We saw the whole court from up there. Few girls
had come, few wives, numerous boys in molt
like me. Our heroes leapt and surged and looped
and two nights out of three, like us, they'd lose.
But "like us" is wrong: we had no result
three nights out of three: so we had heroes.
And "we" is wrong, for I knew none by name
among that hazy company unless
I brought her with me. This was loneliness
with noise, unlike the kind I had at home
with no clock running down, and mirrors.




That leaves me with two paintings and two poems.  I think choosing the 3rd of each will be the hardest part, though.  The question is, do I choose ones that will fit in really nicely with everything else (for example, choosing the Picasso in addition to Degas and the Renoir), or ones that will challenge them?  Right now I'm leaning toward the latter.


I think Shelley's "Ozymandias" would be a very interesting poem to pair with the others, definitely taking them in a somewhat different direction, pulling the perspective out a bit.

I met a traveller from an antique land,

Who said—“Two vast and trunkless legs of stone

Stand in the desert. . . . Near them, on the sand,

Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown,

And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,

Tell that its sculptor well those passions read

Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,

The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed;

And on the pedestal, these words appear:

My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings;

Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!

Nothing beside remains. Round the decay

Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare

The lone and level sands stretch far away.”

The poem is not just about power's ephemerality but also art's, it seems, which might explain Shelley's

hesitance to make the main content of the poem come out of his own voice--instead, he gives it to "a

traveller from an antique land".  In the poem there is also the presence of an audience and a

performer/artist, though they are very divided in time.  So a question this poem might ask of the others is, "considering the relationship between performer and audience shown by the pairings of these paintings and poems, what does the future hold for that meeting (between artist and audience), and what is the importance of that meeting?

Then, a very interesting work of art to end with would be some kind of reproducible thing, like something from the Richard Hamilton exhibit or something from the Serpentine Gallery in Hyde Park, which is right now exhibiting the work of Haim Steinbach, which includes lots of everyday items.

My only worry is that including a poem and a work of art like that would stretch the limits of the exhibit and carry me too far away from the central themes...

Week 8: Vikings Exhibition

Who would've known that Vikings made so many beautiful brooches?  Yes, the Vikings exhibit at the British Museum, running until June 22, showed that the Vikings are a lot more than just savage warriors, even if the curation provided many head-scratching moments.

I tended to think of Vikings as not too far off the people who designed Stonehenge, likely having very little in terms of art.  However, the exhibit did a great job showing off this aspect of Vikings' culture with intricately designed brooches and items from hoards, like the one from Hiddensee, Germany, shown below.  Laid out elegantly, it was one of the most impressively intricate of sets of objects in the exhibit.

(http://i.dailymail.co.uk/i/pix/2014/03/06/article-2574607-1C07DCF600000578-886_634x460.jpg)

The exhibit also did a great job giving more detail about some things a common person might already know about the Vikings if only vaguely.  It showed their reliance on boats and the sea for transportation as well as culture, with little toy/model boats as well as the humongous boat in the last room (more on that later).  This aspect of Viking culture was beautifully accented by nice sounds of the ocean over the speaker system, as well as a conversation in Norse language.  It would've been nice to have been given some follow-up information on what the conversation was about, but the choice was still very humanizing right from the start.  

Everyone knows that Vikings were really into their weapons, and there were many on display.  One might not have known, however, that Vikings went to great trouble to decorate their weapons, making them beautiful, like this axe-head below.  Indeed, weapons were very important not just for fighting but as status symbols, too.

(http://static.guim.co.uk/sys-images/Observer/Columnist/Columnists/2014/3/7/1394219952974/viking-Silver-inlaid-axeh-008.jpg)

Some of my favorite parts of the exhibit were explorations of Vikings' daily life.  There were cool combs made out of bones, cups and horns for drinking, and a feasting bucket as well as a board game called hnefatafl that slightly resembled chess.  It would've been nice, however, to see more in terms of clothes and a general sense of what these people looked like--something the Natural History Museum did a great job of with their exhibit on ancient human life in the UK.

There were moments of curatorial brilliance in the exhibit.  For example, some hoards were placed alongside weapons and warrior items, bringing to light how war was often necessary in collecting beautiful items from other peoples.

However, there were also very confusing moments.  For example, one hallway exhibited items related to horses, like spurs and stirrups, totally out of the blue, while water sounds played over the speakers in that hallway.  (Even more strangely, water sounds did NOT play in the room with the huge boat.)  The horse items would later return more sensibly alongside information on weapons and battle--horses were important in war.

The 37-meter long ship known as Roskilde 6, the longest Viking warship ever found, was hyped as one of the most exciting aspects of the museum, but it was a complete dud.  Bits and pieces of it were displayed around the room, but only the frame was exhibited intact.  Also, placed around it were many other interesting but unrelated Viking items that seemed like afterthoughts.  These were just interesting enough to draw attention away from the ship without being especially memorable for themselves.   Especially random was a huge Viking rune stone that looked like nothing else in the exhibit.

Informative, illuminating, and eye-pleasing with beautiful objects that told a different side of Vikings from that which one tends to imagine, the exhibit nonetheless could've been organized far better to give a viewer a clearer sense of the Viking world.

Week 6: Isolating the Senses

Something William Gallagher said at the Tate Britain that really struck me was this simple, obvious statement: paintings are silent.  He also talked about how paintings are motionless and often have to imply motion, an idea I've thought about before with Greek sculptures in the contraposto pose.  It had never really occurred to me, though, that paintings make no noise!

(An example of contraposto--one knee bent, the foot slightly raised, the other leg straight):

Polykleitos, Doryphorus, 450-440 BC

However, just as paintings can imply motion, they can imply sound.  I'm thinking of Munch's The Scream, which implies sound through not only its title and the figure's classic 'O'-shaped mouth, but through the intense, swirly colors--perhaps a shrill yet echoing scream.

Munch - The Scream (or, as Spanish Wikipedia here in Barcelona calls it--El Grito)

That sense of visual art as silent really opened up Keats's "Ode on a Grecian Urn" for me, too.  When I first read it at the beginning of the semester, it seemed Keats was going on and on about how the depictions in the urn were still and so on.  I'm not sure why, but that stillness just came to life to me this time.

Also, I noticed the title this time as "Ode ON a Grecian Urn" rather than "TO".  Is that out of the ordinary?  I was wondering what to make of it--I guess just that the poem's thoughts don't revolve totally around the urn but seem to suggest thoughts on life in general--but then again, don't most poems or odes do that?

Grecian Urn

(http://maggiefelisberto.files.wordpress.com/2012/04/urn.jpeg)

One other thing: thinking of how paintings (and other visual art) isolate the actual sensual experience to the single sense of the visual reminded me Tom Espiner's talk in class.  He talked about how they isolate the aural sense, but how it can intimate space as well--a kind of visual quality.

I got to thinking--are there arts that appeal to simply one of the other senses--the "secondary" ones as we might call them?  Taste, smell, touch.  Are they just too close to "home" or the body for art to be able to interact comfortably with them?  (Food is definitely an art, but it is always meant to be pleasing--never to make one think or be sad or horrified, as far as I know.)

This seems like too easy an answer to me--after all, revolutionary art has always been extremely uncomfortable at first even to the visual and aural senses.  I'm thinking of Stravinsky's Rite of Spring (1913) and of some Manet works, like Le Dejeuner Sur L'Herbe:

I talked about this idea with my parents, and the only "arts" we could think of that appeal to those other senses were:

-Eating chili peppers or spicy food

-Roller coasters--a rush of wind

Yeah, so not much.

Could there be an exhibit of many different textures on the walls?  Of rooms of different smells?  It would be really interesting.

Week 5: Hardy and Cézanne Presentation Follow-Up

-Paul Cézanne, An Old Woman with a Rosary (1895-6)

(http://www.nationalgallery.org.uk/upload/img/cezanne-old-woman-rosary-NG6195-fm.jpg)

Thomas Hardy, "Ah, Are You Digging on My Grave?"

(originally published 1913, published in collection 1914)

"Ah, are you digging on my grave 

          My loved one? -- planting rue?" 

-- "No, yesterday he went to wed 

One of the brightest wealth has bred. 

'It cannot hurt her now,' he said, 

          'That I should not be true.'"  

"Then who is digging on my grave? 

         My nearest dearest kin?" 

-- "Ah, no; they sit and think, 'What use! 

What good will planting flowers produce? 

No tendance of her mound can loose 

         Her spirit from Death's gin.' "  

"But some one digs upon my grave? 

         My enemy? -- prodding sly?" 

-- "Nay: when she heard you had passed the Gate 

That shuts on all flesh soon or late, 

She thought you no more worth her hate, 

         And cares not where you lie."  

"Then, who is digging on my grave? 

         Say -- since I have not guessed!" 

-- "O it is I, my mistress dear, 

Your little dog, who still lives near, 

And much I hope my movements here 

         Have not disturbed your rest?"  

"Ah yes! You  dig upon my grave . . . 

         Why flashed it not on me 

That one true heart was left behind! 

What feeling do we ever find 

To equal among human kind 

         A dog's fidelity!"  

"Mistress, I dug upon your grave 

         To bury a bone, in case 

I should be hungry near this spot 

When passing on my daily trot. 

I am sorry, but I quite forgot 

         It was your resting-place." 

_____________________________________________________

This project made me think more about the medium of each work of art as essential to what it is.  The poem is set up like a joke, all leading up to a "punchline."  A joke requires expectation and result, playing out through growing tension and eventual release, which are only possible through temporality—something a work of writing is good at depicting--not a painting.

The painting plays with expectation and result in another way more inherent to its medium though: space.  I struggled mightily with the painting's strange, obscure background.  Together with my group I was eventually able to grasp onto the wood panels in the wall behind the figure--why don't they line up from the left to the right?  By presenting a pattern (a straight line), Cézanne sets us up to expect continuation--then denies us.  It is the same feeling in the poem--both denial of the woman-in-the-grave's expectations and the reader's.

The project fits into my theme of so far in London of looking at objects, as we have in Nature and Culture, and thinking about them critically.  For the first presentation we did on British Museum objects, I really struggled.  I looked at a teapot and thought, "It's a fucking teapot, why would I ever study this?"  (As it turned out, I thought the group that presented on the teapot had one of the strongest presentations, so kudos to them.)  The experimental table clock by Thomas Mudge that my group ended up choosing seemed more significant to me in that it represented a particular advancement.  Still, I didn't really know why one would study it.

Now I think I'm getting better at finding all the different threads that run through an object.  As an example, I'll use the goa stone container I've been studying for the mid-term project for Nature and Culture.  I've looked at it in terms of its medium (metalwork--gold), style (filigree), and context as a work of art in both India and Britain--all in relation to its medical thread.

Surprisingly to myself, I've been thinking about how I just wish I could've been there for the object's creation to see exactly how and why and by whom it was made, to see its exact birthplace and time, see its journey from India to Britain and its new life there.

Likewise, I thought about the Cézanne painting and the Hardy poem in terms of their contexts and their stories.  I wanted to meet the ex-nun in the painting and to see how Cézanne interacted with her.  I wanted to be in Hardy's head while he wrote a poem that seems to have to be about his dead 1st wife yet also contradicts the tenderness he showed for her in other poems.  But all we have is what we have.  It's a great challenge but really an interesting one.

        

Hardy and Cézanne - Pairing Thoughts

I've been thinking a lot about Thomas Hardy's "Ah, Are You Digging on My Grave?" and Paul Cézanne's Old Woman with a Rosary for the pairings project.  I'll just share some of my thoughts.

Central to both works is a woman--the only person in the painting and one of two real characters in the poem and certainly the main character.  Both women are in the latter stages of life--the woman in the painting old, the woman in the poem dead.  Both are despairing over their state.

Each work deals with this despair in different ways, however.  I wrote in my last blog post about the lack of dissonance between background and subject in the Cézanne painting.  In fact, there is more to the background.  Characteristic of a few of Cézanne's portraits is a kind of bending, not-quite-right perspective, which we can see in the wood panels on the wall--they don't line up from one side of the woman to the other.  I'm still thinking about this and how to incorporate it into my thoughts on the painting, but the main sense of the background anyway is darkness and bleakness, a reflection of her inner state.

The poem itself could be considered the frame for its main character's voice--and here there is great dissonance.  The dead woman is plaintive, lonely, and growing more and more desperate (as evidenced by a quick glance at the first line of each of the first 5 stanzas (I included the 2nd line of stanza 4 as well):

stanza 1, line 1 (1.1): "Ah, are you digging on my grave

2.1: "Then who is digging on my grave?

3.1: "But some one digs upon my grave? 

4.1 - 4.2: "Then, who is digging on my grave? 

         Say -- since I have not guessed!"

5.1: "Ah yes! You  dig upon my grave . . . 

The poem as a frame for her voice, on the other hand, is extremely ironic, perhaps mocking of her loneliness in death.

Although one woman is dead and one is alive, there is a parallel in the state of both of them, the perspective that the works take, as evidenced by their "endings."  The poem leaves off with the dog's voice, taking up the whole 6th stanza:

"Mistress, I dug upon your grave
         To bury a bone, in case
I should be hungry near this spot
When passing on my daily trot.
I am sorry, but I quite forgot
         It was your resting-place." 

We don't get a return to the dead woman's voice, saying something like (obviously horrible writing), "Ah!  Begone you wretch!"  or "Ah, I thank you for your piercing honesty" or anything like that.  Rather, we have to imagine her reaction--does she sink back in her grave, sad but accepting?  Does she want to burst out into the air, screaming?

Paintings obviously don't "end," but just like the poem we do not see any resolution to the woman's plight--only her in the midst of it.

Neither work gives us much background at all about who these women are.  For that, we must enter into the dangerous territory of biography: the artists who depict these women.  Cézanne's woman is apparently a destitute ex-nun he took in.  All but one of the female portraits he had painted in the previous five years had been of his wife.

I also know from research that the artist was a very poorly-tempered person who had difficulty interacting with others and so missed out on many models to paint.  Not only that, but Cézanne himself was obsessed with death, having drawn up a will out of fear for death at an early age and turned to religion originally out fear.  All of these things suggest that he felt a deep connection with this woman--also seeming to fear death and her fate.  (Indeed he might've felt such a connection with anyone he painted, as he apparently took up to 150 sessions to complete a portrait.)

We can only speculate about the woman in Hardy's poem, though it is extremely interesting that the poem was first published less than a year after his first wife, Emma Lavina Gifford, had died.  Also, only a few months prior to the poem's publication, he remarried--to a close friend of Emma's, Florence Dugdale.  It seems impossible that the dead woman in the poem is not his wife, that he is not the lover gone off to wed another.  It is well known that Hardy and Emma had a mostly unhappy marriage.  Do we dare read into this poem as mocking his dead ex-wife?

Subject and Background in Paintings and Poems

At the Courtauld Institute in class I was fascinated by two paintings in particular: Degas's Two Dancers on a Stage and Manet's A Bar at the Folies-Bergere.  I've been thinking about what about them interests me, and the biggest thing, I think, is their dissonance between subject and background.

Degas - Courtauld

In the Degas, the subjects are two ballerinas clad in white, shimmery dresses--you can see visual echoes of their movement--and colorful shoes and flowers adorning their hair.

The background is necessary to the painting not only for its utilitarian use simply as a placement for these subjects but for the dialogue it opens up with the subjects.  The background is filled with muted browns and greens.  It is not only a bit blurry, like the subjects, but smoggy.  A brown cloud even seems to be coming out to engulf the foreground in the upper-center part of the painting.  Furthermore, the space on the stage floor is very strange.  It seems to tilt in to the line that crosses the painting (going behind the legs of the dancers)--not at all expected from a stage floor.

Now--imagine the painting without that background, just with the subjects...  It's completely different!  That's what's amazing to me about it.  The question is, what does the background really mean in relation to the subjects?  Does it represent their inner states?  Someone else's inner state while viewing them?  Some sinister backstory or something horrible that has yet to happen?  General disillusionment? There are so many possibilities!  Nothing can be nailed down.  It is beautiful.

Manet - Courtauld

Similar things can be said about the Manet.  The main subject is the woman tending the bar, facing us.  There is so much interesting simply about her, perhaps more than the subjects in the Degas, because we see her face and it is a very interesting face, one that suggests great depth of emotion.  Even more interesting is the choice to pair her with a reflection in the mirror behind her.  How does she feel about all those people sitting there?  The placard says they are watching a performance, but why do they seem to be facing her--is this reflective of her inner state, feeling as if they are watching her?  And perhaps the biggest question of all--what is she doing in the reflection, leaning forward, when in the foreground she is totally upright?  The mirror can't possibly be a true reflection.  Other possibilities: is it reflecting her memory of some interaction with the man?  Or simply her thoughts and wonders--maybe that interaction hasn't actually happened?

Again, the painting imagined as just the subject without the background is entirely different.

Cezanne - National Gallery

(from http://www.zucapaca.com/wp-content/uploads/Paul-Cezanne-1900-1904-the-old-woman-with-rosary.jpg)

Perhaps the same can't be said of this painting by Cezanne, An Old Woman with a Rosary.  I need to go back to the National Gallery and spend more time looking at this one in person, but as far as I can tell so far, the background seems to merely reflect the deep melancholy of the woman.  It doesn't open up any additional questions like the first two did.  Does that make it a lesser painting?  I'm not ready to make that kind of judgment yet--perhaps the dissonance in the painting is just less apparent than in the first two.  The one thing that is clearly dissonant is her white hat, the only light color in the painting.  I know from a little bit of research that she was a nun.  So I am looking forward to delving more into her as a subject.

The idea of subject and background will be interesting in comparing paintings to poetry.  One poem that comes to mind is Percy Shelley's "Ozymandias," in which one might designate the statue as the subject, the background two-fold: the empty desert around the statue as well as the frame of the whole poem being a story told by a traveler.  I've been thinking more about that frame, and I didn't even notice until I listened to that strange dramatic reading of the poem over music how weirdly the poem begins.  I had always somehow thought the first two lines go: "I met a traveler from an antique land. / He said, ...etc."  rather than "I met a traveler from an antique land / Who said, ... etc.  The first (my imagined reading) seems to make much more sense--that pause there before going right into what the traveler says.  It almost seems as if the narrator, the one who met the traveler, has an agenda in retelling this story of the traveler's.

Just as an aside, Diebenkorn's painting Woman by a Large Window also has a fascinating relationship between subject and background--the background being multi-faceted in that there is seemingly a room that the woman sits in as well as a view through a window and a mirror reflecting the room and the view--and there are lots of dissonances among the parts.

Diebenkorn - AMAM

"Ode to West Wind" and Greek Sculptures of the Nereids

The Three Nereids from the Nereid Monument are an interesting pair with Shelley’s “Ode to the West Wind.”  Both are about life and death.  “West Wind” is about the wind which comes and goes as the seasons pass and symbolize the cycle of life and death.  Life and death are more overt subject matter in the sculpture, which shows the Nereids escorting the souls of the deceased to the afterlife.

Wind, too, links both works of art concretely in that it is both the subject of the poem and a feature of the sculpture in the figures’ clothes being blown as they journey over the sea.  And while wind is a more overt metaphor for the cycle of life and death in the poem, it is also symbolic in the sculpture, where it could be seen as an embodiment of the deceased souls rushing along over the sea.

Both works are very tactile.  The poem goes to great lengths to make the reader feel the main subject—the wind—and the metaphors used throughout, like the grand storm in the second section.  Looking at the sculpture, one can also very much feel the wind blowing and the spray of the sea very dramatically against the figures in all the dynamic wrinkles and wet transparence of the clothes as well as the sea bird and the partially visible dolphins.

Rather than totally reflect, the works also complement each other.  While the speaker of the poem calls the West Wind “Destroyer and Preserver,” the sculpture represents neither destruction nor preservation but a process that lies in some kind of space in between those two but is likewise a never-ending process.

Nature and Human Experience in Keats and Arnold

There's something powerful about nature and human experience in Keats's "On First Looking Into Chapman's Homer" and Matthew Arnold's "Dover Beach."  In Keats it has more to do with experiencing nature via language, while in Arnold it's simply experiencing nature.  I'll begin with Keats.


"On First Looking Into Chapman's Homer"

The poem is in a single stanza, but many things point to it being two sections, lines 1-6 and lines 7-14.  One obvious one is the use of the conjunction "yet" to begin line 7, creating a distinction between what follows that word and what preceded it.

More interesting to note is a change in diction that separates the poem into these sections.  There are a few interesting words in the first section:

• realms
• gold
• kingdoms
• deep-brow'd
• demesne

But the section is played down by plain adjectives and verbs, such as:

• goodly
• seen
• been
• hold
• wide
• told
• ruled

(The image is the first that comes up from a Google image search of the word "goodly".  The image doesn't evoke any feeling, and in fact almost all of the images that came up were just the word printed out on various things--books and t-shirts.)

The remainder of the poem is a stark contrast.  Take in these powerful words and phrases:

• breathe
• pure
• serene
• speak
• loud
• bold
• watcher of the skies
• planet
• swims
• stout
• eagle eyes
• wild
• surmise
• silent
• peak

(This image is the first that comes from a Google image search of the word "breathe".  It is an action word, a human word, a feeling word, quite different from "goodly," a distinction which I think is shown strongly by the difference in pictures.)

http://lilavinyasa.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/09/breathe_by_sibayak.jpg

What turns the poem from the first section to the second is the speaker's experience with Chapman's Homer.  I think experience is a key word.  I'm not familiar with Chapman's Homer, but it must be that the speaker really experienced these lands based on that text, whereas before he(/she?  probably he) had merely taken in the greatness of the world superficially somehow, simply traveling it, seeing it, being told of it rather than breathing it.  Furthermore, the speaker doesn't just experience the world as himself but is even able to step into the shoes of others—Cortez and his men—by the end of the poem and feel (presumably) what they felt.  It seems that language is key to experiencing—really feeling—nature, which then seems to open up to feeling the world as a whole, including experiencing empathy for others.

"Dover Beach"

I'm not quite as strong on my understanding of this poem yet--especially its third stanza--but something really stood out to me in the second stanza that bears a strong relation to the Keats poem.  Sophocles, as the speaker of the poem says, heard the sounds of the tide and the pebbles long ago on the Aegean, and the sounds "brought / Into his mind the turbid ebb and flow / Of human misery..."  Here, rather than experiencing nature through language as in Keats, Sophocles has simply experienced nature first-hand. But it has still taken him to another level of human experience--it is a transformative experience that grants him greater empathy--just like in Keats.

Continued Desire for Legacies in the Romantics

Throughout history people have put lots of energy into their staying power after death, through religion.  One of the big ways they did this was through art.

A few examples:

Below is a tribute to the god Amun, represented as a ram, protecting King Taharqa.

The Parthenon's main sculptures are Greek Gods:

This Annunciation scene by Italian artist Paolo de Matteis from 1712 is one of so so many examples of Christian art's very intentional use of the colors gold and blue to best pay tribute to God.

Similarly in Westminster Abbey, King Henry III wanted to be buried as close to the center of the church as possible (I think close to the architect?), wanting the fasttrack to heaven.

Romantics like Percy Shelley continue the tradition of thinking about legacy.  I'll use his poems "Ozymandias" and "Ode to the West Wind" as examples.

Ozymandias - power’s ephemerality

"And on the pedestal, these words appear:
My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings,
Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!
Nothing beside remains.  Round the decay
Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away."

Shelley is clearly preoccupied by thoughts of legacy and power--both of which long ago vanished for Ramses II.  But unlike earlier thoughts on legacy, Shelley is pessimistic, suggesting that attempts to make one's self "symbolically immortal" (see link--might give a little trouble because it's through OhioLink) are in vain.

Ode to the West Wind - seeds of his writing spreading

The poem is very much about the cycle of life and death, paralleled by the west wind that comes and goes in its own cycle, the word 'wind' having the double meaning of breath or spirit.

In some parts of the poem, the speaker is accepting of death.  "Hectic red" in section 1, describing colored leaves of fall, also refers to "the kind of fever that occurs in tuberculosis" (thank you Norton footnote!).  Section 2 describes a fierce approaching storm, which could be seen as death.

However, as the poem goes on, the speaker definitely shows hints of thinking and wishing for a 'beyond' past death.  In section 4, "I fall upon the thorns of life!  I bleed!" seems a clear allusion to Christ's crown of thorns--suggesting his eventual resurrection.

Even more clearly, in section 5, the speaker begs the wind to "Drive my dead thoughts over the universe / Like withered leaves to quicken a new birth! / And, by the incantation of this verse / Scatter...my words among mankind!"

So while section 4 shows a religious sense of self-legacy, section 5 shows the speaker's desire for legacy through the words of the poem, through creativity, and through the influence words can have on other people--a very different sense of symbolic immortality than that of earlier thinkers.