[Kate Benedict]

I just meant that Michael's and Po's responses made me laugh. The perils of drug use ... the continuing popularity of small asses -- them's jokes, Alan. If you're not tickled, we will have to charter a bus to where you live in the back of beyond, and tickle you in person.

[A. E. Stallings]

Well, probably I'm just in an absurdly charitable frame of mind. Obviously, all of your points are good ones.

It's just that I have this niggling feeling that in quoting Hamlet's soliloquy from the highest of high tragedy for the colt of an ass, Coleridge is being deliberately over-the-top. It's hard to imagine how it could be otherwise (I shudder to think). Again, I'm reminded of Thomas Gray's deliberate mock epic tone in "Ode on the Death of a Favorite Cat Drowned in a Tub of Goldfish" (Nor all that glisters gold"). To call that sentimental--which one well might--would be missing the point entirely.

Or maybe it's from living in Greece and seeing those poor sweet patient donkeys tied up to an olive tree for days on end...

cheers,

Alicia

[This message has been edited by A. E. Stallings (edited January 21, 2001).]

[Alan Sullivan]

Kate, I'm not lacking a sense of humor; I'm lacking any idea what LOL stands for. Not in my lexicon. Something regional, I would imagine. Or maybe my ignorance is a consequence of low exposure to popular culture.

Alicia, I hate you. Nothing personal, it's just that Greece sounds distinctly preferable to North Dakota winter. Maybe I need to visit my cousins in Kalamata. My mother's maiden name was Spiropoulis, and my household accounts for most of the olive consumption in this area.

Alan

[wendy v]

Aw, c'mon Alan. Even my mother knows that.

LOL = laughing out loud. Not regional, but world web wide.

I promise I'm not ROFLMAOing at you.

Now that we've seen how not to do sentimentality, I was hoping some folks would post poems that demonstrate how it can be done. Here's one I think qualifies and that I simply adore.

The Writer
Richard Wilbur

In her room at the prow of the house
Where light breaks, and the windows are tossed with linden,
My daughter is writing a story.

I pause in the stairwell, hearing
From her shut door a commotion of typewriter-keys
Like a chain lauled over a gunwale.

Young as she is, the stuff
Of her life is a great cargo, and some of it very heavy:
I wish her a lucky passage.

But now it is she who pauses,
As if to reject my thought and its easy figure.
A stillness greatens, in which

The whole house seems to be thinking,
And then she is at it again with a bunched clamor
Of strokes, and again is silent.

I remember the dazed starling
Which was trapped in that very room, two years ago;
How we stole in, lifted a sash

And retreated, not to affright it;
And how for a helpless hour, through the crack of the door,
We watched the sleek, wid, dark

And iridescent creature
Batter against the brilliance, drop like a glove
To the hard floor, or the desk-top,

And wait then, humped and bloody,
For the wits to try it again; and how our spirits
Rose when, suddenly sure,

It lifted off from a chair -back,
Beating a smooth course for the right window
And clearing the sill of the world.

It is always a matter, my darling,
Of life or death, as I had forgotten. I wish
What I wished you before, but harder.



[This message has been edited by wendy v (edited January 21, 2001).]

[Len Krisak]

Antics with Semantics:

He is maudlin (saccharine, bathetic, etc.).
You are sentimental.
I am a man of great personal feeling.

How's the Lucretius coming, Alicia?

Cheers to all.

[Alan Sullivan]

Wendy, my websurfing sometimes makes me LOL, but I never encountered the acronym. When visiting news sites I more often GOL (groan-out-loud, just coined).

Glad you posted the Wilbur, but I do not take it for an example of sentimentality, a word which has acquired a decidedly negative connotation. Wilbur speaks of his daughter with compassion and understanding, but he does not indulge in the manner of a sentimentalist. Instead his observations are both tough-minded and fatalistic.

Wilbur is a Christian Stoic. He recognizes that his daughter, like most writers, is probably motivated by grief or grievance, "a great cargo." Ideally her craft should impel her to rise and fly free, like the battered starling. But the venture is fraught with doubt, and nothing the father can say or do seems likely to affect the outcome.

Though "The Writer" is a prayer, it is not sentimental in the least.

Alan Sullivan

[Richard Wakefield]

Alan, I agree that Wilbur's poem is not sentimental, but the questions is, What saves it? The image of the trapped bird, metaphor for the writer's soul or desire to express herself, is just aching to be used sentimentally, and it has been many times. How does Wilbur make it fresh? The short answser is that he's a mighty good poet, but inasmuch as this is where we muse on mastery rather than merely praise it, we must still wonder how he did it. By the time Frost wrote "A Leaf-Treader" autumn leaves had been used in almost as many poems as there are leaves in Vermont, usually meaning about the same thing, but Frost's poem works where the heaps of others don't. Let's figure it out, if it can be figured out.
Richard

[Joel Lamore]

Wow, great response!


[quote]Originally posted by Len Krisak:
But ... nothing that is weak or bad about this effort of
Coleridge's (or the starting lines from Marvell) derives
from the use of rhymed couplets. To say so comes dangerously close to the notion that certain meters and/or
stanzaic schemes, etc., are mimetic and/or appropriately expressive of, only certain kinds of subject, theme, or feeling--
a doctrine I think false.

Len, I didn't mean to imply that some meters/etc only have one use, but I think that meters/etc aid, deepen, heighten the subject, theme, feelings (or else why use them). As Pope wrote, "the sound must seem an echo to the sense" (a good practice, though not the only practice). In the case of Coleridge's "poem", I think the rhymed couplets do make the sentimentality just that much more cloying. I also realize that perceptions of metrical patterns and their effects to some extent can be culturally determined. The 18th cent. found the rhymed couplet satisfying, sophisticated, and adaptable to many uses. I think most today find the rhymed couplet less so.

Wendy V,

I agree that Wilbur controls the sentimentality fairly well. The thing with the bird though, hmm. After reading and rereading the poem, it strikes me that one thing that helps him control the sentimentality is that there is some self-awareness on the part of the narrator as to the danger of sentimentality. Coleridge's narrator seems unaware. Based on STC's work in general, I think he was likely a very sentimental man in life. One point I made back in December was that sentimetality has a social dimension: what is sentimental in public (or in print) isn't so much in private. As Alan also noted, Coleridge could get away with such sentimentality then, but a poetic reputation today would be tarnished by a similar piece.

[wendy v]

Alan, "not at all" ? Aren't the ideas contained in the poem of a mawkish or sentimental
nature ? I'm not talking about the treatment, I'm talking about the ideas. I was thinking the wounded bird and its pathetic, then victorious attempts at flight is where the poem allows the most excess/sentimentality to shine through. Still, the musing about a child coming of age are also rarely anything but inspired by sentimentality, and the poem doesn't seem to ever attempt to conceal that. It's fatalistic and tough minded, yes, but isn't it also complying to its own
inspiration -- to the very notion of sentimentality ?

If "The Writer" doesn't qualify, are there examples out there of what you'd call "sentimentality" handled succesfully ? Or does the very notion imply bad poetry to you ?

I've just read your comments on Corn Lake, and think you've hit on its biggest failing with, "I think that fear of expressing the buried sentiment keeps you too much on the surface." Yes, I buried it. The sentiment and sentimentality. No risks there. And the poem surely suffers for it.

I don't see that sort of (typically) buried sentiment, or even buried sentimentality in The Writer. I think it's all there, flying around, clearing sills, and handled beautifully.

Richard, yes, let's figure it out, but first I think you guys oughtta convince me there's no palpable and intentional (albeit controlled) sentimentality in this poem !

Joel, I think you hit on what I'm attempting to say when you mention self-awareness. Wilbur seems to be aware of the dangers of sentimentality, but isn't going to be caught running away from them.

wendy

[Alan Sullivan]

Wendy, while it might seem like hair-splitting, I think we need to make a distinction between sentiment and sentimentality. I noticed you placed the terms side by side, as though you think the direct expression of a sentiment is sentimental by definition. I do not agree, and I would cite "The Writer" as my best evidence.

There is nothing inherently sentimental about the image of a stunned and battered bird suddenly taking flight. It is merely an accurate observation of nature. For Wilbur, the image becomes the means of expressing a sentiment about his daughter. I think he evades sentimentality in part because he is fully aware of himself and his limitations. But he is equally aware of his daughter---the mystery of her autonomy---his grief and guilt as a parent. All these feelings imbue the poem; yet they are balanced, rational, and just. There is no hint of the mawkishness, self-exculpation, or self-aggrandizement that are hallmarks of sentimentality.

I'm glad you made the connection between my comment on your poem and this discussion. I think "The Writer" is a superb example for a parent who would write about a child. Go to it, and don't be so shy about your feelings.

Alan Sullivan