The Prelude.
- Thread starter luka
- Start date
luka
Well-known member
The Prelude (Wordsworth) - Wikisource, the free online library
luka
Well-known member
The first word is O. This is a very fun playful and short essay by Prynne about the word O. It includes discussion of The Prelude.
luka
Well-known member
O there is blessing in this gentle breeze,
A visitant that while it fans my cheek
Doth seem half-conscious of the joy it brings
From the green fields, and from yon azure sky.
Whate'er its mission, the soft breeze can come
To none more grateful than to me; escaped
From the vast city, where I long had pined
A discontented sojourner: now free,
Free as a bird to settle where I will.
What dwelling shall receive me? in what vale
Shall be my harbour? underneath what grove
Shall I take up my home? and what clear stream
Shall with its murmur lull me into rest?
The earth is all before me. With a heart
Joyous, nor scared at its own liberty,
I look about; and should the chosen guide
Be nothing better than a wandering cloud,
I cannot miss my way. I breathe again!
Trances of thought and mountings of the mind
Come fast upon me: it is shaken off,
That burthen of my own unnatural self,
The heavy weight of many a weary day
Not mine, and such as were not made for me.
Long months of peace (if such bold word accord
With any promises of human life),
Long months of ease and undisturbed delight
Are mine in prospect; whither shall I turn,
By road or pathway, or through trackless field,
Up hill or down, or shall some floating thing
Upon the river point me out my course?
A visitant that while it fans my cheek
Doth seem half-conscious of the joy it brings
From the green fields, and from yon azure sky.
Whate'er its mission, the soft breeze can come
To none more grateful than to me; escaped
From the vast city, where I long had pined
A discontented sojourner: now free,
Free as a bird to settle where I will.
What dwelling shall receive me? in what vale
Shall be my harbour? underneath what grove
Shall I take up my home? and what clear stream
Shall with its murmur lull me into rest?
The earth is all before me. With a heart
Joyous, nor scared at its own liberty,
I look about; and should the chosen guide
Be nothing better than a wandering cloud,
I cannot miss my way. I breathe again!
Trances of thought and mountings of the mind
Come fast upon me: it is shaken off,
That burthen of my own unnatural self,
The heavy weight of many a weary day
Not mine, and such as were not made for me.
Long months of peace (if such bold word accord
With any promises of human life),
Long months of ease and undisturbed delight
Are mine in prospect; whither shall I turn,
By road or pathway, or through trackless field,
Up hill or down, or shall some floating thing
Upon the river point me out my course?
luka
Well-known member
What I like about this, most of all, is the way the flutterings and soarings perturbations and stillnesses of our own minds hearts guts souls are given their conventional, true objective correlatives linking back and forth between inner and outer.
The soft breeze is joy and it's little movements sensitise the skin and increase and focus alertness as we register its folding and tumbling, it's playful shoves and nudges. A living spontaneous presence, an at least somewhat self aware Ariel, spirit of living nature.
I like the big pastoral summer colour blocks of green and azure, one stacked above the other and the sense of space they provide and the contrast with smoky Pandemonium, the vast infernal city we have just recently escaped.
I like the conventional bird as another iteration of that conventional breeze, living spirit, spontaneous and free to pursue its own whim and desire and which a little later becomes a cloud.
I like the groves and vales which are also groves and glades and vales of the mind body soul in which thought and feeling settles, calms, spreads out and finds and expansiveness and depth.
A persistent theme also of Vegetable Empire which tracks these same movements and metamorphoses.
"Wait. Stay a while. There is more to be explored here.
Acceptance at this point creates a lull. Wait here.
The mind billows and pools
Finds a level resting place
Expands
Into the space given it."
The soft breeze is joy and it's little movements sensitise the skin and increase and focus alertness as we register its folding and tumbling, it's playful shoves and nudges. A living spontaneous presence, an at least somewhat self aware Ariel, spirit of living nature.
I like the big pastoral summer colour blocks of green and azure, one stacked above the other and the sense of space they provide and the contrast with smoky Pandemonium, the vast infernal city we have just recently escaped.
I like the conventional bird as another iteration of that conventional breeze, living spirit, spontaneous and free to pursue its own whim and desire and which a little later becomes a cloud.
I like the groves and vales which are also groves and glades and vales of the mind body soul in which thought and feeling settles, calms, spreads out and finds and expansiveness and depth.
A persistent theme also of Vegetable Empire which tracks these same movements and metamorphoses.
"Wait. Stay a while. There is more to be explored here.
Acceptance at this point creates a lull. Wait here.
The mind billows and pools
Finds a level resting place
Expands
Into the space given it."
luka
Well-known member
I breathe again!
This recovery of life and a consciousness buried and suffocated in city life, in routine, habit and the social duties we are enmeshed in. The sludge of days cleared. The nerves extend outward again, trusting and eroticised. Not in retreat, closed in and clenched to defend against the assault of urban life. The depredations of dirt and smoke and ash and abrasive noise, from moral and aesthetic degradation. Able to abandon the face, exit the face and it's grimaces, it's rictus smile, it's wagging eyebrows, it's assumption of levity and solemnity, it's constant, frantic signalling, free from the face at last., that burden of my own unnatural self.
This recovery of life and a consciousness buried and suffocated in city life, in routine, habit and the social duties we are enmeshed in. The sludge of days cleared. The nerves extend outward again, trusting and eroticised. Not in retreat, closed in and clenched to defend against the assault of urban life. The depredations of dirt and smoke and ash and abrasive noise, from moral and aesthetic degradation. Able to abandon the face, exit the face and it's grimaces, it's rictus smile, it's wagging eyebrows, it's assumption of levity and solemnity, it's constant, frantic signalling, free from the face at last., that burden of my own unnatural self.
luka
Well-known member
"so what this requires is a sea-change in our mode of consciousness and being we have to exchange costumes and roles and swap this surface social self for another. We don’t need that outward facing self now, that nervous, twitchy social self searching for social cues, trying to gauge the mood of the room and fit itself to what it finds.
Reflex responses to social cues. Pavlovian conditioning. That shiny silver tea-tray self.
There’s something much larger behind that, where we go when we’re alone, or, if we’re lucky, with people we trust."
Reflex responses to social cues. Pavlovian conditioning. That shiny silver tea-tray self.
There’s something much larger behind that, where we go when we’re alone, or, if we’re lucky, with people we trust."
luka
Well-known member
Dear Liberty! Yet what would it avail
But for a gift that consecrates the joy?
For I, methought, while the sweet breath of heaven
Was blowing on my body, felt within
A correspondent breeze, that gently moved
With quickening virtue, but is now become
A tempest, a redundant energy,
Vexing its own creation. Thanks to both,
And their congenial powers, that, while they join
In breaking up a long-continued frost,
Bring with them vernal promises, the hope
Of active days urged on by flying hours,—
Days of sweet leisure, taxed with patient thought
Abstruse, nor wanting punctual service high,
Matins and vespers of harmonious verse!
Thus far, Friend! did I, not used to make
A present joy the matter of a song,
Pour forth that day my soul in measured strains
That would not be forgotten, and are here
Recorded: to the open fields I told
A prophecy: poetic numbers came
Spontaneously to clothe in priestly robe
A renovated spirit singled out,
Such hope was mine, for holy services.
My own voice cheered me, and, far more, the mind's
Internal echo of the imperfect sound;
To both I listened, drawing from them both
A cheerful confidence in things to come.
But for a gift that consecrates the joy?
For I, methought, while the sweet breath of heaven
Was blowing on my body, felt within
A correspondent breeze, that gently moved
With quickening virtue, but is now become
A tempest, a redundant energy,
Vexing its own creation. Thanks to both,
And their congenial powers, that, while they join
In breaking up a long-continued frost,
Bring with them vernal promises, the hope
Of active days urged on by flying hours,—
Days of sweet leisure, taxed with patient thought
Abstruse, nor wanting punctual service high,
Matins and vespers of harmonious verse!
Thus far, Friend! did I, not used to make
A present joy the matter of a song,
Pour forth that day my soul in measured strains
That would not be forgotten, and are here
Recorded: to the open fields I told
A prophecy: poetic numbers came
Spontaneously to clothe in priestly robe
A renovated spirit singled out,
Such hope was mine, for holy services.
My own voice cheered me, and, far more, the mind's
Internal echo of the imperfect sound;
To both I listened, drawing from them both
A cheerful confidence in things to come.
luka
Well-known member
We will make an invincible team. Starry eyed youth and crabbed experience.
luka
Well-known member
The only bit that really leaps put at me there is
To the open fields I told a prophecy.
"
First, some simplicities that a man learns, if he works in OPEN, or what can also be called COMPOSITION BY FIELD, as opposed to inherited line, stanza, over-all form, what is the “old” base of the non-projective.
(1) the kinetics of the thing.[6] A poem is energy transferred from where the poet got it (he will have some several causations), by way of the poem itself to, all the way over to, the reader. Okay. Then the poem itself must, at all points, be a high-energy construct and, at all points, an energy-discharge. So: how is the poet to accomplish same energy, how is he, what is the process by which a poet gets in, at all points energy at least the equivalent of the energy which propelled him in the first place, yet an energy which is peculiar to verse alone and which will be, obviously, also different from the energy which the reader, because he is the third term, will take away?"
www.poetryfoundation.org
Cluttered by what feels to me like junk shop bric a brac, my eye tends to skid over this stuff unless I force it not to, matins and vespers of harmonious verse
To the open fields I told a prophecy.
"
First, some simplicities that a man learns, if he works in OPEN, or what can also be called COMPOSITION BY FIELD, as opposed to inherited line, stanza, over-all form, what is the “old” base of the non-projective.
(1) the kinetics of the thing.[6] A poem is energy transferred from where the poet got it (he will have some several causations), by way of the poem itself to, all the way over to, the reader. Okay. Then the poem itself must, at all points, be a high-energy construct and, at all points, an energy-discharge. So: how is the poet to accomplish same energy, how is he, what is the process by which a poet gets in, at all points energy at least the equivalent of the energy which propelled him in the first place, yet an energy which is peculiar to verse alone and which will be, obviously, also different from the energy which the reader, because he is the third term, will take away?"
Projective Verse by Charles Olson | Poetry Foundation
PROJECTIVE VERSE[1] (projectile (percussive (prospective ...
www.poetryfoundation.org
Cluttered by what feels to me like junk shop bric a brac, my eye tends to skid over this stuff unless I force it not to, matins and vespers of harmonious verse