Technique of Delight ( in"A Clear Midnight" )

This is thy hour O Soul, thy free flight into the wordless,

Away from books, away from art, the day erased, the lesson done,

Thee fully forth emerging, silent, gazing, pondering the themes thou lovest best,

Night, sleep, death, and the stars.

Walt Whitman, “A Clear Midnight”

From its first phrase, “A Clear Midnight” builds an aura of wonder. Whitman carefully develops the mood to lift the soul in contemplation. But, how does this short poem so easily move one to quiet meditation? The answer is elemental. Every letter is perfectly chosen to fit the mood of its line. After establishing the poem’s quiet, elevated mood in the first line, the next three lines move the reader from the excitement of activity to the peace of meditation. As a true master, Whitman uses the elements of sound and rhetorical devices to delight and inspire the reader’s own soul.

From the first clause, Whitman creates a hushed setting. Entirely lacking mute consonants, “This is thy hour O Soul” (line 1) impresses the reader with a quiet and gentle ambiance. While the liquid letters establish a peaceful tone for the poem, the words inspire a meditative mood in the reader. Whitman begins contemplation of abstract truth with a direct address to the intangible soul. Combined with soft sounds of the consonants and long vowels, the elevated language of “O Soul” works from the quiet setting and lifts the reader into meditation.

The rise is punctuated and confirmed by the emphasis on “flight.” In the first line, only “flight” ends with a consonantal mute, while the other words are full of vowels, liquids and semivowels. Even the other two stops in “into” and “wordless” are softened by vowels and gentler consonants. According to Mary Oliver, “Within a line, use of a mute sound is like a tiny swoon, a mini-caesura” (Oliver 61). As the reader is forced to pause at the end of the word, he is given time to picture the implied metaphor. The alliteration in “free flight” ties the words together and brings up the traditional metaphor of the soul as a dove. By using slightly more powerful letters in the second phrase, Whitman and further lifts the reader’s thoughts builds up his exhilaration.

The second line builds off this energy to move the reader out of pressures and distractions. With a long vowel in “away,” Whitman places a distance between the soul and the business of the day. This is also emphasized his avoidance of mentioning the word “soul” in the line. Without even a pronoun reference, the soul is completely disconnected from both the line and the demanding work it represents. Whitman establishes the day’s agitation with heavy mutes in “books” and “art.” The oppressive consonants build the feeling that if the soul does not escape, books and art will trample it. Whitman demonstrates this detachment with the line’s ending. As the d’s enclose “day erased,” one can see the whole day closed and put away just like a book. At midnight, the soul leaves all distractions and finishes the day. Even so, another mute consonant in “done” emphasizes the break from stress while the liquid n closes both the line and the reader’s mouth. Whitman builds up the antagonistic energy with the power of mutes and uses the visual absence of the soul to argue that, as in the line, the soul must break with the day’s pressure and fly away to the quiet of midnight to meditate.

After establishing the flight from the cares of the day, Whitman transitions back to the soul and its meditation by returning to the softer voiced “Thee” and “thou.” With the opening vowels and consonant clusters he presents a fall from the forceful energy in the second line. Mary Oliver explains that liquids “suggest softness, fluency, motion” while a mute “is an enforcer of the self-containment, and so the certainty, of what has been said” (Oliver 61). Thus, the rest of the line returns to the initial sense of quiet elation by swelling the energy from the opening th’s to the gentler g’s within “emerging” to the hard t’s closing “lovest best.” In the description of the soul, one word stands out from the parallel –ing suffixes. “Silent” is not only set apart from the balance, but its t ending also helps to elevate it above the rest of the line. Like “wordless” from the first line, it hits on the poem’s main point. When the soul is engaged in meditation, it has no words to describe the beauty it contemplates.

As it rebuilds a meditative mood, the third line also returns to a more cheerful attitude. Whitman develops the thoughtfulness by using increasingly more forceful words. Yet, even with more stops, as in “gazing” and “pondering,” only the t’s particularly stand out. As the line ends, several technical devices focus the reader’s attention on the last two words. Once again, the reader lingers over the words because of the mutes’ natural pause. Furthermore, the slight rhyme ties together “lovest best” and multiplies the impact of the pleasant word and positive superlative. These devices effect a happy feeling as the soul fully embarks on its journey of wondering meditation.

The poem’s upward flight reaches its crescendo in Whitman’s final line. Fittingly, each of the beginning three words has a natural punch from a consonantal mute. Since they are the substance of the soul’s contemplation, “night,” “sleep,” and “death” rightly stand out from the rest of the poem. The hard consonants, however, also set them apart from the rest of the line and emphasize their significance. But, the stops only symbolize the weight that each word carries in its own meaning and the silence inherent in each. Although the first few words of the line hit the reader with their quiet heaviness, Whitman does not leave the reader depressed and weighed down. Rather, he ends the poem on a pleasant note.

The very last word perfectly encapsulates Whitman’s excellent use of words and sounds. In the end, Whitman again lightens and elevates the mood by metaphorically lifting the reader’s gaze to “the stars.” The final word inspires the soul in its meditative hour to think of great things outside itself. Here is the full culmination of the poem as the reader saying the last a in “stars” physically drops his jaw like the soul in silent wondering meditation in “A Clear Midnight.” Thus, Whitman proves his masterful use of sounds and letters, which gives the poem its inspirational power and encourages the reader to join the soul’s contemplative wonder.

Works Cited

Oliver, Mary. Rules for the Dance: A Handbook for Writing and Reading Metrical Verse. Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1998.

Whitman, Walt. “A Clear Midnight.” From Leaves of Grass, 1900. Bartleby. 17 April 2006. http://www.bartleby.com/142/283.html

Happy Memories

When Father Carves the Duck

E. V. Wright

We all look on with anxious eyes
When father carves the duck,
And mother almost always sighs
When father carves the duck;

Then all of us prepare to rise,
And hold our bibs before our eyes,
And be prepared for some surprise,
When father carves the duck.

He braces up and grabs a fork
Whene'er he carves a duck,
And won't allow a soul to talk
Until he's carved the duck.

The fork is jabbed into the sides,
Across the breast the knife he slides,
While every careful person hides
From flying chips of duck.

The platter's always sure to slip
When father carves a duck,
And how it makes the dishes skip!
Potatoes fly amuck!

The squash and cabbage leap in space,
We get some gravy in our face,
And father mutters a Hindoo grace
Whene'er he carves a duck.

We then have learned to walk around
The dining room and pluck
From off the window-sills and walls
Our share of father's duck.

While father growls and blows and jaws
And swears the knife was full of flaws,
And mother laughs at him because
He couldn't carve a duck.


HT: To Kristen, who introduced me to this poem.

Ten reasons to be in academia

I will post something educational-philosophically-related one of these days, but a conversation earlier today inspired the following list (not in order of importance, necessarily):

1. Constant immersion in ideas (good, bad, or indifferent) from the wide range of human experience
2. Constant contact with people who also have constant contact with those ideas (meaning that one can actually converse with them instead of having to explain everything)
3. A heightened appreciation for ever-subtler jokes (mostly puns – and then there is Bales, which is not a purely intellectual reference)
4. Having the pleasure of talking about the stuff one enjoys every week while school is in session
5. Related to that, the pleasure of having people pay attention to what one says (mostly)
6. For those who tend towards the sadistic, there is the pleasure of wielding power embodied in the red pen
7. Professors have .edu email addresses. That sort of email address can get lots of fees lowered.
8. One can justify favorite books because “I’m doing research.” (provided one doesn’t have a mid-life crisis in the middle of a semester)
9. One can justify having shelves and shelves of books – they’re one’s livelihood, after all
10. One has access to ILL services!

The Venerable Bede

I used to wonder what he ever did to earn that title, but after reading his book, I think I knew. Bede’s Ecclesiastical History of the English People is a very precise, very accurate, sometimes dry, but also mystical exploration of the Church’s founding and history.

Bede’s history is rich in all the historical details—who was king when, which people groups moved where and when, who executed whom. But the real beauty of the work is the miraculous. The book is mystically top-heavy. Without the knowledge that Bede personally authenticated all his recorded accounts, and the knowledge that modern historians have been unable to discount any of them, one would assume that he was simply making up stories.

Incorruptible corpses, chips from tombs that cure diseases of all kinds, springs that burst forth from the ground where martyrs were slain, all occur repeatedly within its pages. In many ways it is an optimist’s version of Foxe’s Book of Martyrs. It is a book about death, but an intrinsically hopeful view of death. Most of those mentioned die of natural causes—many of extreme old age. Most have lived lives of great piety and virtue, most are given visions of the exact time of their deaths. Their friends and compatriots are given visions of them escorted to heaven by angels of Christ himself. Death is inevitable, but it is either the gateway to eternal and everlasting beauty, or it is the gateway to misery beyond any human comprehension.

Amid the constant visions of heaven, one is forced to consider, do I take heaven seriously enough. Am I living as if I seriously consider that there is heaven and not reaching it is quite literally, “a fate worse than death.”

The more irreverent might wonder, “did those old Christians do anything besides die?” Well, they say “the blood of the saints is the seed of the Church” and Bede would prove them right. Every peaceful death of every Abbess, abbot, chaste queen, king turned monk, bishop, and eccentric laymen spurred on a new concentration of devotion and piety. Tentative lesson? Your manner of leaving life might be just as important as how you lived it. Now that is a thought to make one shudder.

We know how the saints died, but, how did they live? According to Bede, they lived by a code of constant self-denial, humility, chastity, study, and asceticism. In his praise of their lives there is a strong influence, and the accompanying weaknesses of Old-School Catholicism (such as if everyone was perfectly chaste producing the next generation might be a problem). But in a model that presents men and women who pursued the study of the world and Christ with never-ending fervor and willingly gave up meals two days a week to pray, at the very least one can’t complain about a measly getting up at 7:00 to go to church again. Protestants are quite amazing about how saying asceticism is unnecessary to true faith, but in reading Bede’s history I am forced to wonder what we are missing. Can 2000 years of church history be entirely wrong?

Bede’s work is readable, well-researched, convicting, and a thoroughly good read for anyone with any interest in church history or the balance between faith and reason.

Burnt Norton, Section V

Perhaps it is a mistake to try and unravel the magic of Eliot in stages. He is complex, he is abstract, and one must believe that the imagery is consistent, but it is difficult to maintain that consistency when one is analyzing in long-separated sequences. However, we try.

Throughout this segment of the poem, Eliot has been working with the divided cohesion of time. All time, past, present and future, are all gathered together in one picture, one glimpse, in the now. This last segment continues that thread.
“Words move, music moves/Only in time.” With the abstract nature of the examples, he identifies objects that possess an odd immortality, yet the epitome of a temporal life form. Words and music live only as long as the breath that summons them. Only in print can they live beyond, and even that is dependent on the book that holds them and the eyes that read them. They live, like humans, but they can live beyond, much like an antiquity, such as a Chinese jar.

Does this analysis have a point? Good question. I’d love to hear the answer. Yet, with words and music and antiquity, “Only by the form, the pattern,/Can words or music reach the stillness” dare I say? Of eternity? Yet, how does one grasp those living words that stretch into eternity. Not the “still of the violin, while the note lasts” but the stillness of a co-existence that ties the present to eternity. Words, and lives, without this binding to eternity break, crack, and crumble unto the burden of finding and upholding meaning.

Yet, like any works of art, words of import cannot be fully at rest. They are active, and as they are active, they are strained—the more important the word, the greater the strain. “Shrieking voices/Scolding, mocking, or merely chattering,/Always assail them. The Word in the desert/Is most attacked by voices of temptation”

In the last two stanzas, Eliot once more binds himself to the overarching theme of the dances of time—a dance that encompasses the beautiful, the terrible, and the ever changing, the “disconsolate chimera.”

This dance of time is solved and made in the manner of the movement. It isn’t the pattern, it is the steps. I do not have an understanding of the ten steps. It is the perfect number, perhaps the Ten Commandments, perhaps the ten steps to heaven of Jacob’s Ladder. Desire makes a pattern but it does not define the pattern, love cannot move, it must be acted on within the will, and the motive of the will is what dictates its movement in the dance. In the words of Eliot: ends do not justify the means, ends determine the value of the means.

The pattern of the movement, left to itself, is dead, it is limited by its entrapment in a single dimension. It is unbeing and being, and therefore stuck. One must see the forward and backward movement of time, but one cannot treat it like an ancient vase trapped in the present in a museum case that will stolidly be sent forward in time. The movement of time is not a still picture of academic interest. No, rather to live, it is like a “Sudden shaft of sunlight/Even while the dust moves/There rises the hidden laughter.” It is a lively, intricate, joyful and beautiful dance that we enter as children. Left as an academic exercise it is “Ridiculous the waste sad time/Stretching before and after.” But, it has the trademark of "hidden laughter/of children in the foliage."

Where is Eliot going and what was he doing? In Burnt Norton, Eliot stripped away the reader's unimaginative acceptance of the mere present. He challenges them to see the present as a rich continuation of the past, and both binding the future. In short, everything one does echoes all of the past and all of the future. No pressure. He furthers the challenge. Do not be burdened by this and be like the cowardly servant that was given a talent and then buried it. Rather approach this mysterious, powerful, and utterly beautiful whirligig of time like a dance, like a note on a violin, like dust motes in the a beam of light. Knowing this, is successfully reaching childhood.

The paradox, all we do has eternal weight, yet we cannot know all of what we do. As to the Eliot's own continuation? That waits for East Coker.

Without Excuse

For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men, who by their unrighteousness suppress the truth. For what can be known about God is plain to them, because God has shown it to them. For his invisible attributes, namely, his eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly perceived, ever since the creation of the world, in the things that have been made. So they are without excuse. For although they knew God, they did not honor him as God or give thanks to him, but they became futile in their thinking, and their foolish hearts were darkened. Claiming to be wise, they became fools, and exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images resembling mortal man and birds and animals and reptiles. (Romans 1:18-23, ESV)

In my Omnibus class this month, we are studying portions of Genesis, Exodus, the Epic of Gilgamesh, and the Code of Hammurabi, as well as some Egyptian history. My students, I am happy to report, are horrified at the wickedness of the ancient nations and are constantly pointing out how different the pagans are from the Jews. However, my reaction has been a little different. It is amazing how close the Egyptians and Mesopotamians were to the truth, and yet how far they strayed from it.

During our study of Genesis, we read the flood narratives from the book of Genesis and from The Epic of Gilgamesh. In The Epic of Gilgamesh, Gilgamesh meets Utnapishtim, who is the Noah figure of Sumerian mythology. The story of Utnapishtim and the flood is obviously mythical: Utnapishtim is warned about the flood by a god whispering through the reeds of his house, it takes Utnapishtim only one week to build his ark with the help of all his neighbors, and the earth was flooded for seven days. On the other hand, the story is a close parallel to the story of Noah, and many details are similar.

The part of the story that struck me the most came at the end of the flood, when Utnapishtim sends out three birds to look for dry land: first a dove, then a swallow, and finally a raven, who finds land and never comes back. Noah sends out a raven first, who does not return, and then he sends out a dove twice. The similarity of the detail is too striking: there are three birds, one of which is a dove and one of which is a raven. The Sumerians knew so much and were so far from God. Truly, they understood the significance of the flood, but they still refused to turn to the true God for salvation. They were without excuse and followed the foolish desires of their hearts.

Between Genesis and Exodus, we learned about the beliefs of the Egyptians in the Old Kingdom, who built the pyramids. The ancient Egyptians believed so strongly in life after death that their earthly life became a great preparation for the world to come. According to these people, each person had a ba (a soul) and a ka (a spiritual copy of the body). In order for a person to have a happy life in the afterworld, the body was mummified so that the ba and ka could recognize the person after death. Today, people think very little about life after death, and cremations are a popular option at funeral homes. However, as Christians we know that our bodies will be resurrected and perfected at Christ’s second coming. We have more authority than the Egyptians on life in the world to come, and yet we care less about our heavenly future and resurrection bodies.

Next week, my class will be comparing the law of Moses from Exodus with The Code of Hammurabi. The Code of Hammurabi, given by the king of Babylon around 1800 B.C., is famous for being the first written law code. Many of Hammurabi’s laws are similar to the laws in Exodus, reminding us of the passage in Romans 2:14-16:

“For when Gentiles, who do not have the law, by nature do what the law requires, they are a law to themselves, even though they do not have the law. They show that the work of God is written on their hearts, while their conscience also bears witness, and their conflicting thoughts accuse or even excuse them on that day when, according to my gospel, God judges the secrets of men by Christ Jesus.”

Even though Hammurabi did not receive a special revelation of the law from God like Moses did, he still saw much of the same truth, leaving him and his people without excuse.

Through all these instances, God has left knowledge of himself in the hearts of men. The Epic of Gilgamesh shows how oral histories passed down the story of the flood in Sumerian culture. The Egyptians realized the importance of the physical body in the world to come, and Hammurabi showed that God’s law is written on the hearts of men. Although the ancient peoples chose to ignore this knowledge of God, the signs are still there.

This summer, I was lamenting that I did not get to read medieval literature with my students. I enjoy medieval literature, because it is a Christian response to pagan literature and philosophy. However, I have realized in the last month that ancient literature still has a connection to Christianity: it shows the world that Christ came to save, and it shows clearly that men are without excuse. Once again, I am excited to be teaching about the ancient world.

Burnt Norton, Section 5

V

Words move, music moves
Only in time; but that which is only living
Can only die. Words, after speech, reach
Into the silence. Only by the form, the pattern,
Can words or music reach
The stillness, as a Chinese jar still
Moves perpetually in its stillness.
Not the stillness of the violin, while the note lasts,
Not that only, but the co-existence,
Or say that the end precedes the beginning,
And the end and the beginning were always there
Before the beginning and after the end.
And all is always now. Words strain,
Crack and sometimes break, under the burden,
Under the tension, slip, slide, perish,
Decay with imprecision, will not stay in place,
Will not stay still. Shrieking voices
Scolding, mocking, or merely chattering,
Always assail them. The Word in the desert
Is most attacked by voices of temptation,
The crying shadow in the funeral dance,
The loud lament of the disconsolate chimera.

The detail of the pattern is movement,
As in the figure of the ten stairs.
Desire itself is movement
Not in itself desirable;
Love is itself unmoving,
Only the cause and end of movement,
Timeless, and undesiring
Except in the aspect of time
Caught in the form of limitation
Between un-being and being.
Sudden in a shaft of sunlight
Even while the dust moves
There rises the hidden laughter
Of children in the foliage
Quick now, here, now, always—
Ridiculous the waste sad time
Stretching before and after.