Poetry and Poetics–Lit 204

Reflecting on suffering in the world, and how terrible things for certain people’s lives are insignificant to other people. He uses the example of the Breughel painting “The Fall of Icarus,” where a man is plowing his field and the splash of Icarus falling out of the sky and into the water is largely insignificant. This is the same painting that William Carlos Williams talks about in his poem ‘Landscape with the Fall of Icarus’ that we talked about earlier. The line of ”how everything turns away quite leisurely away from disaster captures the main idea of this work, since these tragedies like Icarus are easily forgotten. They are not denied or ignored, just as how the Old Masters of art that he speaks about do capture them in their works, however they just have a place in the works but are not this perpetual thing that fills everyone with doom. This suffering is a passing feeling, where the “martyrdom must run its course” for everything else to be. It is a part of a whole but a part that some people can see as insignificant or easily ignorable when they are not the ones suffering. The line talking about the torturer’s horse innocently scratching its behind was also particularly interesting since the horse here is an unknowing agent that is technically a part of the suffering although the horse itself is innocent and not understanding of what the torturer is doing.

On my first read it was difficult to pinpoint a meaning of this poem, but giving a closer look at the final lines I saw the comparison between performing this great swimming feat for glory as opposed to for love. After mentioning this difference in reasoning for the swim, he says “For he was drown’d and I’ve the ague,” or that Leander drowned doing this swim and that the speaker got sick from it. I could read this one of two ways, either that the speaker is a better swimmer than the hero of Greek myth which is an idea that fits with Lord Byron’s love of self promotion, or that since both drowning and getting sick is bad, that maybe both of these motivations are silly since it did not end up going well for Leander or for the speaker.

I chose to write about this poem because it carried a tone of self deprecating humor and is also rife with brags which I found quite funny. The poem opens with talking about this great athletic feat done in myths, which the speaker also completed so the speaker makes it known from the very title like “hey, I am now writing this poem after I did this cool thing.” This tone of self promotion was supported by the meter of the poem with five quatrains at iambic tetrameter, which carries that epic feel to it.

In “On the Late Massacre in Piedmont” Religious imagery, purity, and innocence is often juxtaposed with violent atrocities. The literal event it is referencing is a massacre on Easter day, so it is about bloodshed on the holiest of Christian holy days. The line one alliteration of “thy slaughtered saints” places these two opposites right next to each other as is done many more times in the poem. That opening line establishes the idea early on that bad things happen to good people. Here the specific topic of the Piedmont Easter Massacre is a culturally relevant example of this since the Catholic majority massacred the innocent Waldensians because of religious persecution. One strong poetic device that jumped out at me from the poem was the enjambments in  lines 7 and 8. It reads “Slain by the bloody piedmontese that rolled // mother with infant down the rocks. Their moans //.” Through these enjambments, line 8 is made to begin with “mother and infant” and end with “their moans,” which is another terrifying image of linking what is pure with atrocious violence. The concluding line compares the government in power in Piedmont, and the pope who is referred to as “the triple tyrant” to the city of Babylon which fell due to its evil ways and which is believed by protestants to be an allegory of the same fate that the Roman Catholic church will meet due to the evil deeds of the “triple tyrant.” The poem is in the voice of praying to god to smite these evil people who would slaughter these innocent people in Piedmont. So this individual is calling on God to bring the fate of Babylon to the catholic church.

Sonnet 1 from Astrophil and Stella is the introductory work in the collection by Phillip Sydney about loving the muse or the “star.” Being the sonnet form there are a lot of formulaic expectations that are set up by the meter, however I think this poem was interesting for the narrative elements that broke my expectations of what a sonnet should be. What I enjoyed and found funny was how meta the poem is, talking about the difficulties of finding elegant enough words to win over a love interest while writing to a love interest. It follows the narrative of this character’s doubt in their own poetic abilities inside of a poem. The concluding couplet of this sonnet does what a good conclusion should, which is to sum up the poem and make the meaning visible. At the end of Astrophil and Stella sonnet 1 we are shown how the poem is a self referencing introduction to the whole collection. The muse whose role is to provide inspiration for the artist says “fool… look in thy heart and write.” Which seems like a very direct and literal way of trying to inspire the artist, so there is clever humor being used in this sonnet. Lines 2-4, reflect the idea of being a star-crossed admirer and getting easily carried away, as they are one long sentence about the sequence to grace that stems from her taking pleasure in his pain.