Tom,

I wonder if Gilpin's poem is a distilled rip-off or a comment on James Dickey's "The Sheep-Child":


"Farm boys wild to couple
With anything with soft-wooded trees
With mounds of earth mounds
Of pine straw" etc
*

"... I have heard tell
That in a museum in Atlanta
Way back in a corner somewhere
There's this thing that's only half
Sheep like a woolly baby
Pickled in alcohol" etc
*

"...the sheep-child may
Be saying saying...

I who am half of your world, came deeply
To my mother in the long grass
Of the west pasture, where she stood like moonlight
Listening for foxes. It was something like love
From another world that seized her
From behind..." etc. etc.

Southern Gothic, no?




[This message has been edited by J.A. Crider (edited March 16, 2005).]

I doubt it. Gilpin, as far as I know, only put out one volume of poetry, but it won the first Walt Whitman award (which is one of the most prestigious of the American poetry prizes awarded specifically for a first volume by a poet who has yet to publish a book of poems). So while she may have been influenced by Dickey--he was A Big Name at the time she was probably writing these--I don't think she ripped him off.

In fact, I've been reading a book of interviews with Andy Warhol. He says that at the beginning of the 60s, at the height of abstract expressionism several painters who later formed the core of the Pop movement, started using commercial art motifs and cartoons as the basis for paintings. None of the artists knew each other--it was, as Warhol explains, just something in the air at the time.

In any case, Gilpin was one of the first poets I absolutely loved, and I've always loved that poem.

But here is another, one I'm surprised hasn't been posted yet:

Words

Axes
After whose stroke the wood rings,
And the echoes!
Echoes traveling
Off from the center like horses.

The sap
Wells like tears, like the
Water striving
To re-establish its mirror
Over the rock

That drops and turns,
A white skull,
Eaten by weedy greens.
Years later I
Encounter them on the road---

Words dry and riderless,
The indefatigable hoof-taps.
While
From the bottom of the pool, fixed stars
Govern a life.

—Sylvia Plath

I too was instantly put in mind of "The Sheep-Child" (a poem I like very much, probably partly because I remember going to the quirky museum at the Atlanta Capitol as a kid and seeing suchlike pickled critters--particulalry a two-headed snake), but "The Two-Headed Calf," which I did not know before, has its own charm. Thanks for posting it.

Plath's "Words" with its pool of fixed stars put me in mind of this famous star poem:

Lucifer in Starlight

ON a starred night Prince Lucifer uprose.
Tired of his dark dominion swung the fiend
Above the rolling ball in cloud part screened,
Where sinners hugg'd their spectre of repose.
Poor prey to his hot fit of pride were those.
And now upon his western wing he leaned,
Now his huge bulk o'er Afric's sands careened,
Now the black planet shadowed Arctic snows.
Soaring through wider zones that pricked his scars
With memory of the old revolt from Awe,
He reach'd a middle height, and at the stars,
Which are the brain of heaven, he looked, and sank.
Around the ancient track marched, rank on rank,
The army of unalterable law.

--George Meredith


It's a poem we all know, but I still get the shivers from it. I love the "black planet" casting its shadow, and stars being "the brain of heaven." And of course, the terrific last line which goosesteps its iambs through every syllable of "unalterable".

Tom,

I was being half-provocative with my rip-off line. I actually think she was consciously writing a coda to Dickey’s poem—-imagining the brief, but astonishingly beautiful moments when the just-birthed “sheep-child” or “two-headed calf” is still alive and breathing in the pasture; before the farm boys take it to a museum.

Or else, if we take the simultaneous combustion theory of artistic creation (rather than one of contiguous influences) we should ask what was happening in the world of Dickey and Gilpin and others (i.e. Flannery O’Connor) that would make similar motifs (“freaks of nature”) pop-up with frequency in southern literature after 1950. The transformation of the rural south, or indeed any rural agricultural area, would be a likely context, I think. Pressures of modernization/capitalism can impinge so utterly on agricultural life-ways that shame and guilt at not being able to survive (as a people or a culture) could easily drift down deeper into self-deprecation or suspicions of genetic weakness (all those jokes about inbreeding etc.)—for which a deformed animal would be an apt literary emblem. (I’m launching far a-field from astronomy here, but I’ve been reading this lovely novel by George Sessions Perry, "Hold Autumn in Your Hand" (1941), set in rural Texas, which I heartily recommend to anyone who likes or dislikes "The Grapes of Wrath")

That abstract expressionists would individually co-opt commercial and popular iconography in the 1950s makes perfect sense, given the boom in advertising and the quantification of mass media following WWII.

Is Laura Gilpin the poet, the same Laura Gilpin the photographer?

The Plath poem is beautiful, Tom. Her ability to distill an image down to a “psychological correlative” is consistently amazing. (BTW, J. Kristeva talks about this poem with reference to the aphasia-like symptoms of deep depression in her essay “About Chinese Women”).


John

Alicia,

Thanks for posting the Meredith poem, which I think may be even more astronomical than people think. I’ve been sitting on a point of explication since I was undergraduate, so I might as well chime in here.

Brooks & Warren famously explicated the poem in their <u>Understanding Poetry</u> (1938, pp. 493-99), emphasizing its mythic and thematic dialogue with Milton’s <u>Paradise Lost.</u> It’s a sturdy and rich reading, but their attempt to recreate the “logical steps” in Meredith’s composing “Lucifer in Starlight” met with resistance by scholars. One professor, John W. Morris, found the “germ” of the sonnet in Meredith’s own novel <u>The Ordeal of Richard Feverel</u>. Another, John Lucas, asked of “Lucifer in Starlight”:


"Why are the stars the brain of Heaven? (Do they hold intelligences, if so what sort, if not is the image meant to be visual?) What is the army of unalterable law? Who is Lucifer? (At the beginning of the sonnet he seems to be Satan, but if he is, why is he defeated by [just] the sight of this un-Christian army?) To these and other questions Brooks and Warren try to provide answers, but I think they get too far from the words on the page to be really convincing. It is not that I wish to deny the poem a certain skill, but I simply cannot see that it has a genuine subject.”


That’s pretty harsh even by Brian Phillips' standards. Lucas could have added another question: “Why is Lucifer a black planet?” The answer to which would be because Lucifer is a planet: “The planet Venus in its appearance as the morning star (<u>The American Heritage Dictionary</u>). Here is an authored text that Milton and Meredith both knew, Luke 14:12: “How are thou fallen from heaven, O Lucifer, son of the morning.” And here is one that only Meredith could have known, by the nineteenth-century popular writer on astronomy, R.A. Proctor: “…it is by passing between the sun and the earth that the evening star changes into the morning star, while it is by passing beyond the sun, so that the sun comes between the earth and her, that Venus changes from morning to evening star” (“The Past and Coming Transits” in <u>Cornhill Magazine</u>, Vol. 31, January 1875).

A little more digging yields up this historical coincidence: Meredith’s poem was first published in the volume “Poems and Lyrics of the Joy of Earth” in 1883; and one of the premier astronomical events of the century, a transit of Venus, occurred on December 6, 1882. Actually there were two transits of Venus, an earlier one occurred on Dec. 8, 1874. Observatories all over the world prepared to capture the best views. At Greenwich, the forecast was unfavorable: “Wind shifting to N.East, moderate, cloudy generally with occasional showers of snow or sleet…” (<u>London Times</u> Dec. 6). But British astronomers in Madagascar and Cape Colony observed “the early ingress.” Astronomers at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, including one Dr. Doolittle (father of the poet H.D.), fared better, acquiring useful measurements. The <u>London Times</u> goes on to give some expository details about Venus: “…there is an atmosphere surrounding the planet, which is illumined by the sun, presenting the appearance of a narrow ring or arc around the black body of Venus" (itals mine). One thing you can say about Meredith, he read the newspapers.

To the best of my knowledge this has never elicited scholarly comment, and I’m quite sure that the germ of the poem was occasioned as much by this astronomical event as by an intellectual engagement with Milton. In fact, I think here is a classic case of “both” rather than “either/or,” and it may have implications for interpretating the poem. At the least, it solidifies a reading of Victorian agnostic scientism vs. Miltonic Christian mythology skirmishing in the poem.

That Meredith might have dashed off an occasional poem circa December 1882, have it published the following year, and for it to become one of the best-known sonnets in English, is remarkable to me. Another interesting scenario, however, would have the genesis of the poem prompted by the 1874 transit, then have it ripen and age in the vat for 8 years until the 1882 transit occasioned its release to the public. It’s worth noting that the date of the earlier transit, December 8, 1874, is just one day before Milton’s birthday in the bicentennial year of his death. A doubly-occasioned poem, perhaps.

Well, that feels good to get that moving off my plate, finally. I’ll spare you my thoughts on how Donne’s “Moving of th’ earth brings harms and fears,/Men reckon what it did and meant…” is not only about earthquakes and orbital interference between planets, so much as it’s about the shift from Ptolemaic to Copernican astronomy. Another day, perhaps.


John A. Crider



[This message has been edited by J.A. Crider (edited March 18, 2005).]

Somehow John's excellent insights into this poem escaped me first time round (possibly due to baby-induced sleep deprivation). Lucifer is certainly a title of the planet Venus as morning star, and this seems eminently plausible, and even probable, given the dates. You ought to dig around a little more and see what you can find and publish it. I think VERY often what seems a curious metaphor at a remove from the poem ends up being based on a literal truth to the poet. (Actually a pet theory of mine.)

As for stars being the brains of heaven and the army of unalterable law, this sounds very Stoical and Manillian to me. Certainly again astronomical (by way of philosophy) as well as Miltonic.

On a related topic, I am also boosting this back up to the top because I have been looking for a poem by Robert Frost, the Literate Farmer and the Planet Venus, and wonder if some kind soul would be willing to post it here. I do not seem to have it among my books and do not have access to a library. I would be very grateful.

Here 't is, Alicia:


THE LITERATE FARMER AND THE PLANET VENUS

A dated popular-science medley on a mysterious light
recently observed in the western sky at evening

My unexpected knocking at the door
Started chairs thundering on the kitchen floor,
Knives and forks ringing on the supper plates,
Voices conflicting like the candidates.
A mighty farmer flung the house door wide,
He and a lot of children came outside,
And there on an equality we stood.
That's the time knocking at a door did good.

<dd>"I stopped to compliment you on this star
You get the beauty of from where you are.
To see it so, the bright and only one
In sunset light, you'd think it was the sun
That hadn't sunk the way it should have sunk,
But right in heaven was slowly being shrunk
So small as to be virtually gone,
Yet there to watch the darkness coming on--
Like someone dead permitted to exist
Enough to see if he was greatly missed.
I didn't see the sun set. Did it set?
Will anybody swear that isn't it?
And will you give me shelter for the night?
If not, a glass of milk will be all right."

<dd>"Traveler, I'm glad you asked about that light.
You mind mistrusted there was something wrong,
And naturally you couldn't go along
Without inquiring if 'twas serious.
'Twas providential you applied to us,
Who were just on the subject when you came.
There is a star that Serious by name
And nature too, but this is not the same.
This light's been going on for several years,
Although at times we think it disappears.
You'll hear all sorts of things. You'll meet with them
Will tell you it's the star of Bethlehem
Above some more religion in a manger.
But put that down to superstition, Stranger.
What's a star doing big as a baseball?
Between us two it's not a star at all.
It's a new patented electric light,
Put up on trial by that Jerseyite
So much is being now expected of,
To give developments the final shove
And turn us into the next specie folks
Are going to be, unless these monkey jokes
Of the last fifty years are all a libel,
And Darwin's proved mistaken, not the Bible.
I s'pose you have your notions on the vexed
Question of what we're turning into next."

<dd>"As liberals we're willing to give place
To any demonstrably better race,
No matter what ther color of its skin.
(But what a human race the white has been!)
I heard a fellow in a public lecture
On Pueblo Indians and their architecture
Declare that if such Indians inherited
The cóndemned world the legacy was merited.
So far as he, the speaker, was concerned
He had his ticket bought, his passage earned,
To take the Mayflower back where he belonged,
Before the Indian race was further wronged.
But come, enlightened as in talk you seem,
You don't believe that that first-water gleam
Is not a star?"

<dd><dd>"Believe it? Why, I know it.
Its actions any cloudless night will show it.
You'll see it be allowed up just so high,
Say about halfway up the western sky,
And then get slowly, slowly pulled back down.
You might not notice if you've lived in town,
As I suspect you have. A town debars
Much notice of what's going on in stars.
The idea is no doubt to make one job
Of lighting the whole night with one big blob
Of electricity in bulk the way
The sun sets the example in the day."

<dd>"Here come more stars to character the skies,
And they in the estimation of the wise
Are more divine than any bulb or arc,
Because their purpose is to flash and spark,
But not to take away the precious dark.
We need the interruption of the night
To ease attention off when overtight,
To break our logic in too long a flight,
And ask us if our premises are right."

<dd>"Sick talk, sick talk, sick sentimental talk!
It doesn't do you any good to talk.
It see what you are: can't get you excited
With hopes of getting mankind unbenighted.
Some ignorance takes rank as innocence.
Have it for all of me and have it dense.
The slave will never thank his manumitter:
Which often makes the manumitter bitter."

<dd>"In short, you think the star a patent medicine
Put up to cure the world by Mr. Edison."

<dd>"You said it--that's exactly what it is.
My son in Jersey says a friend of his
Knows the old man, and nobody's so deep
In incandescent lamps and ending sleep.
The old man argues science cheapened speed.
A good cheap anti-dark is now the need.
Give us a good cheap twenty-four-hour day,
No part of which we'd have to waste, I say,
And who knows where we can't get! Wasting time
In sleep or slowness is the deadly crime.
He gave up sleep himself some time ago,
It puffs the face and brutalizes so.
You take the ugliness all so much dread,
Called getting out of the wrong side of bed.
That is the source perhaps of human hate
And well may be where wars originate.
Get rid of that and there'd be left no great
Of either murder or war in any land.
You know how cunningly mankind is planned:
We have one loving and one hating hand.
The loving's made to hold each other like,
While with the hating other hand we strike.
The blow can be no stronger than the clutch,
Or soon we'd bat each other out of touch,
And the fray wouldn't last a single round.
And still it's bad enough to badly wound,
And if our getting up to start the day
On the right side of bed would end the fray,
We'd hail the remedy. But it's been tried
And found, he says, a bed has no right side.
The trouble is, with that receipt for love,
A bed's got no right side to get out of.
We can't be trusted to the sleep we take,
And simply must evolve to stay awake.
He thinks that chairs and tables will endure,
But beds--in less than fifty years he's sure
There will be no such piece of furniture.
He's surely got it in for cots and beds.
No need for us to rack our common heads
About it, though. We haven't got the mind.
It best be left to great men of his kind
Who have no other object than our good.
There's a lot yet that isn't understood.
Ain't it a caution to us not to fix
No limits to what rose in rubbing sticks
On fire to scare away the pterodix
When man first lived in caves along the creeks?"

<dd>"Marvelous world in nineteen-twenty-six."

<dd><dd><dd>--by Robert Frost

(Edited to correct typos.)



[This message has been edited by Patricia A. Marsh (edited May 13, 2005).]

It’s great fun seeing some of these older threads put up (for whatever reason – hope more moderators will continue to do this), and this one really includes some wonderful poems, especially the beautiful Cannon poem Margaret began with back in February.



[This message has been edited by B.J. Preston (edited June 27, 2005).]

Patricia, thanks so much! I owe you one.

Thanks, Preston, for the Ackermann.

Belated thanks to all,

Margaret.