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  #11  
Unread 04-20-2020, 08:32 AM
Aaron Novick Aaron Novick is offline
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Rogerbob, I strongly disagree with this critique:
And I think DNGG is burdened by being too message-y, with the message failing to resonate with those who might want a dying loved one to go as gentle as possible.
First off, I don't think it's "message-y" at all. It's a personal address from the N to his father. The general appeals of the first five stanzas must be read in the light of the personal turn in the last. I just don't see that the N's concern is with the dying struggles, or not, of people in general. It is about one such struggle and one such struggle only.

Second, if any readers fail to resonate with the poem because it does not capture their relation to the death of a loved one, I have no hesitation in placing the blame squarely on these hypothetical readers. "I can only resonate with poetry that expresses feelings exactly as I, myself, have felt them" is an attitude that makes for bad reading of poetry. Surely one of poetry's greatest strengths is to help its readers encounter attitudes not their own, expressed in their most persuasive form.
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  #12  
Unread 04-20-2020, 07:25 PM
Tim McGrath Tim McGrath is offline
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Roger, my favorite line has always been "Though I sang in my chains like the sea," which aptly describes what formalists do, I believe. But Thomas only loosely adheres to a formal scheme in the poem. Yes, every stanza has nine lines, and the corresponding line of each stanza has roughly--very roughly--the same metrical pattern. However, the poem's overall effect is that, for all its loveliness, it verges on disorder. Thomas should have tightened up its chains. And he could have deleted the penultimate stanza without damaging the poem

Last edited by Tim McGrath; 04-20-2020 at 09:36 PM.
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  #13  
Unread 04-20-2020, 07:36 PM
Roger Slater Roger Slater is offline
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Aaron, of course I can "resonate" with poems that express views that are different from my own. For example, I am often moved by deeply Christian poems by the likes of Herbert and Milton, though I have never for a moment been even slightly tempted to the Christian faith. But my claim that the Thomas poem is "message-y" does not mean that I deplore any poem with a message, any more than my dislike of sentimental verse means that I don't like poems with sentiment. It's a judgment call, of course, though clearly you and I reach different judgments.

Don't get me wrong. I do think it's a fine poem. But the idea that it's a once in a thousand year poem strikes me as way over the top. There are probably dozens of poems written in the last millenium of so that I think are better. If you don't think Fern Hill is one of them, then what about Keats's odes or Wordsworth's immortality ode? What about any number of poems by Blake? What about some of Shakespeare's sonnets? And do you really not think that Emily Dickinson wrote anything as good as Thomas's villanelle?
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  #14  
Unread 04-20-2020, 07:49 PM
Tim McGrath Tim McGrath is offline
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As any good anthology will show, there are hundreds of thousand-year poems, including some from all of those you mention. There may be an even thousand. I would say that "Rage, Rage" makes the cut but that "Fern Hill" doesn't.

Last edited by Tim McGrath; 04-20-2020 at 08:56 PM.
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  #15  
Unread 04-20-2020, 08:31 PM
Roger Slater Roger Slater is offline
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I thought that calling it "a poem so good that no one will write a better one for at least a thousand years" you were excluding the ones I mentioned. But if there are a thousand such poems, then I certainly have no trouble finding a slot for Fern Hill. To each his own, but I would have thought its stature as great poetry was something we'd all take for granted along with the other poems I mentioned.
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  #16  
Unread 04-20-2020, 08:45 PM
Aaron Novick Aaron Novick is offline
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Roger, sorry that my critique imputed to you views you don't hold. I should've stuck to my first point: I just think it's wrong, as a matter of literary analysis, to think the poem is message-y. The rest was overkill, and uncharitable.

I wasn't meaning to defend that it's a "thousand-year poem", since I don't understand what that means (and I understand it less now than before Tim's clarifications).
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