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You think biblical associations come too easy for you, Yvonne? I'm a former minister...major in Divinity Studies.
However, I also took a minor in psyche, and as Freud once said, Norm, "Sometimes, a cigar is just a cigar." Milton was a wealthy man already, by inheritance, and owing to a treatise he had written on the rights of subjects to depose and put to death an unworthy king, he was a Minister in Oliver Cromwell's government (Latin Secretary for foreigh affairs) when he went blind: he had secretaries, and managed to complete Paradise Lost and to begin and complete Paradise Regained while sightless. His writing doesn't seem to have suffered.
What he considered his 'good works' was his continual pamphleteering for reform of the Church of England along less ritualistic lines, as well as essentially agitating for Church recognition of matters like 'divorce for irreconcolable differences', and in this capacity as well as his work for Cromwell, he did a lot of travelling and meeting with Church officials and foreign dignitaries. He often complained bitterly that it was only with vast difficulty that he could obtain a true impression of the people with whom he dealt when he could not see their eyes.
Moving on (darn, y'all keep me hopping like a frog on a hot rock!) Tim, I've never read the book you mentioned earlier. I first started using references about poetry when I discovered the online Glossary I linked for y'all elsewhere. I learned about poetry from reading poets...not from texts about poetry. See, the various names of the poetic feet are not necessary knowledge to write metered verse...but they are VERY handy when it comes to discussing it! I don't think in terms of anapests and trochees, I think in terms of daDUMS first...then translate that into the terminology when discussing.
(Norm tells me I'm a teacher, but the truth is simply that I'm a poet who wishes strongly to see the art of poetry not be lost in this age where eight of ten rejection slips I see tell me that 'real' poetry doesn't rhyme anymore.)
As to the iambics of Browning's poem, y'all might remember that I mentioned elsewhere that the modern sonnet (and by modern I mean "post Elizabethan") is often considered 'rigid' if the iambic is pure. Here's the gig, though...
We don't want to get into that yet!
It's devilshly hard to show how to determie when and in what way lapses in the iambic are permissable or beneficial to a sonnet before you know how to keep the iambic pure. There are times when replacement with a trochee or a spondee can enhance the flow and times when it jumps out like a sore thumb (and makes you flinch just as hard!)...but here's one thing I was trying to get across when I talked about stripping the line breaks and reading the poem as prose...
Poets who begin their writing in free verse become accustomed to seeing a line-break as indicative of a pause. This is not the case with stanzaic poetry! This is WHY there is a defined difference between 'end-stop' and 'enjambment'!
Those of you who found the Browning sonnet a bumpy read, I'd like you to go back and read it again as if it were prose. If you must, then actually take the poem into Wordpad and strip the linebreaks! Lay it out in paragraphs instead of stanzas, and read it that way.
The point...Don't try to impose the rhythm on the read! (The reverse is also true...don't try to impose the meter on the write, choose words that create the meter! That's the biggest thing I'll be trying to help you get a handle on during the discussion of meter in this class.)
I need a favor, y'all. Would EVERYONE who's screen-name is not how you would like to be addressed (which of course already exempts Norm and Alan) please go back to your intro in the Roll Call thread, or go create one if you haven't already, and tell me how to address you! Yvonne, you don't have to, you've been signing your posts.
Essentially...I don't know who I'm talking to well enough yet, and if you want to be addressed by name, I need to know it, okay?
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Styles of Sonnet...the Petrarchan. (Read 204 times)
