ENG354Y1 Lecture Notes - Lecture 2: Productive And Unproductive Labour, Confederation Poets, Synecdoche
ENG354: Canadian Poetry Sept 28 2017
Lecture Outline:
Confederation Poets
(Part 3)
1. Archibald Lampman
“Among the Timothy”
A) Progression of the Poem: Bliss to Privation to Renovation and Contentment
B) Stanza 1
i) Image of the mower
ii) First signs of unease
C) Stanza 2
i) Voice
ii) State of dejection
-synecdoche: using the part to invoke the whole: towers, streets, and throng to represent the city
-reducing a city down to its parts
-disconnection: using only parts of the whole
-in keeping with the effect of the city on his psychological and emotional state:
disjointed, isolated
-towers representing divided consciousness: split between mind and body, loss of the mind
-assume a causal link between the city and his artistic sorrow
-shift from first stanza, description becomes dominantly aural
-“jingle,” “echoing,” “moan”
-negative sounds
-effect of clangor contrasts will stillness of the first stanza
-a lot of f and s alliteration
-quiet, hissing sound
-last three lines transition to bland, stale iambic plotting
-stuck in a rut, losing imagination
-“weary most of song”
D) Stanza 3
i) Loss of the imagination
-lapses into very vague, general terms: loses ability to engage with the world around him
-falling back on poetic clichés-“like a flower”
-vague words: “sometime”
-he is showing us through his language that everything has gone lifeless
E) Stanza 4
i) Turning point: Distinguishing between thought and dream
ii) Ambiguities about willful purpose
iii) Thoughts and landscape
-strategy for overcoming his desolation
-the ah! Suggests that his poetic ability is not quite dead
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-“let it go”: a crucial shift in the poem
-speaker has recognized the toil that beareth not: toil that doesn’t produce anything
-difference between thinking and dreaming
-dream includes emotional, aesthetic, and moral sensitivity, but it also includes cerebral activity
-thought being rational as opposed to creative
-when thought usurps dream (when you start overthinking, over rationalizing), then mind
divides from nature, the dream evaporates, and the heart is dejected
-“unbourned thought”: the unbounded rational thought
-explaining what his problem is: he’s too caught up in logical, rational thought
-rational thought let loose in away that stifles the imagination is the problem
-unbound thought is unharnessed from nature
-this stanza marks a turning thought in the speaker’s despair
-his recourse is to renounce material things and let his expressions wander
-but he doesn’t let them wander wherever: he has previously diagnosed his problem as unbound
thought
-he lets them “take what shape it will”
-his thoughts take the shape of nature
-specifically, nature doing necessary and productive labor—he wants to make his labour into this
instead of the unproductive labor he was doing in the city
-using the confines of nature to make his labor productive
-in this submission of his mind to nature, his spiritual recovery begin
-but the plan is psychologically incoherent: will or willessness?
-he’s telling himself deliberately to let go: willed willessness
-“to take what shape it will” is not complete freedom: it is working within the confines of nature
-the importance of boundaries may explain why he chose to rest in the bounds of a circle
-what he does physically at the beginning of the poem is the solution to his mental trouble
-opening his mind within the boundaries of nature
-mentions the three elements for the three insects: earth, water, air
-the three insects as symbolic toilers
-welcoming a different kind of labor: slow like an ant’s, constructive like a spider’s, and fanciful
like a bee’s
F) Stanzas 5-7
i) Surrender to the landscape
ii) Impressionistic elements
-It’s not all perfect yet: recurring s sound, and the daisies are back-last time they were mentioned
they were dead
-Shift to focusing on what the landscape is doing indicates a surrender to the landscape
-Spiritual renewal ushered in by gentle winds
-jingle and throng replaced by nice calm winds
-leaves and beat: leaves of a page, beat of a poem
-hint at the medium of poetry itself
-chorus of natural sounds
-peripheral awareness of mowers in field calls back to the themes of cultivation, harvest
-more c and g alliteration, lot’s of plosives –lots of variety, suggesting the renewal of his
imaginative instincts
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