Week 3

Welcome Back!


     Last week we discussed Joni Mitchell's ballad "Woodstock," a poem about a touchstone event in the lives of a generation of American youth that makes a theme of the journey through life, innocence and experience, and the yearning for core experience and truth.  The symbol of the Garden, familiar to most of us through the biblical story of creation described in Genesis, recurs in the poem's refrain:


            We are stardust
            We are golden
            And we've got to get ourselves
            Back to the garden.  (lines 9-12)


Perhaps we are transported to the biblical Garden of Eden, the first world of Adam and Eve, according to the Old Testament.  But what does the garden mean, as symbol, to us today?  What kind of relationship(s) do we maintain with the natural world, with each other?  The subject is one that strikes to the core of our existence.  We speak of heaven and hell, metaphorically, of course, to describe states of being not literal places, and thus the images evoked are always open to investigation and interpretation, as are our experiences and states of being.  Figurative language-symbol, metaphor, personification-allows us to link the known with the unknown, and to discover through implied comparison or identity the nature of our experience.  
       "I wandered lonely as a cloud," writes William Wordsworth.  Literal and figurative language reflects the actual world of our senses and mind, our sensations and and responses to them:  "It is the East, and Juliet is the Sun!" cries Romeo, and we understand how she blazes forth from darkness, just as does the familiar sun.


      In other poems, the world of Nature, and all that is living and breathing around us but is not us, sometimes evokes a darkly sympathetic response, particularly as we realize the impacts that humans are having upon the natural world and all its inhabitants.  "There Will Come Soft Rains" is one such poem; another is "Traveling through the Dark."  The caged cat in "The Panther" and Kate Chopin's story of a liberated cat speak to us of wild things, in all their apparent innocence and magnificence, that want life as fully as we ourselves do.  As  poet Czeslaw Milosz writes in the poetry anthology A Book of Luminous Things,

Our attitude towards nature is not the same as that of our ancestors.  The Book of Genesis authorizes man “to have dominion over the fish of sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over the earth, and over every creeping thing that prospereth upon the earth.”  The line separating man from the rest of living creatures remained firm for centuries, and as late as the seventeenth century Descartes considered animals to be living machines.  With the progress of life sciences this line has become blurred.  Man now realizes that our species shares with animals their physiology and their basic drives.  Nature, as we approach it, has grown much more enigmatic:  our feeling of kinship engenders both empathy and guilt.  At the same time, Nature stands before us as the great Other, deprived of any notion of good and evil, and therefore perfectly innocent, even if it is Natura Devorans and Natura Devorata, the devouring and the devoured.  We are akin to it and yet we are alienated by our consciousness–our curse and our blessing.  And precisely this ambiguity in our relationship, marked by the warmth of closeness and by the cold of detached observation, transpires in many poems.   (11)

Identify some of the figurative devices that appeal to you in the handouts distributed and think about how you might organize an essay on the rich resource that figurative language provides in several literary pieces.




See an outline of Joseph Campbell's description of the Hero's Journey here:  http://www.mcli.dist.maricopa.edu/smc/journey/ref/summary.html