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  #21  
Unread 12-13-2018, 10:35 PM
Julie Steiner Julie Steiner is offline
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[Never mind. I shouldn't think with my mouth open. I'm still changing my mind about the importance of a male rape metaphor in what is basically a Poem about Poetry, not a poem about sexual dynamics.]

Last edited by Julie Steiner; 12-14-2018 at 01:59 AM.
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  #22  
Unread 12-14-2018, 12:12 AM
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Allen Tice Allen Tice is offline
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Julie, and other interested parties, it’s quite late here on the east coast in the City of Sin and I’m not up to speed on Augustine, so my response will be brief. If this is not about some individual in particular, but it is nonetheless an aspirational rape, then it is rape broadside, like an ancient ship of the line with 74 guns starboard and port. Which is appropriate when Pirate Chaos is a target free to skim downwind, wheel around and rape back. Yet she holds her Chaos close, up close and personal. I didn’t say that this wasn’t rape, I just proposed that the rhyme with “ape” was too delicious to miss, and the dominatrix wants to gussy it up with piety: You Will Enjoy This, Whether You Like It Or Not! That’s some people’s idea of a real good time, I betcha. Well? For me in this poem it was First the “ape”—Then the “rape”. I’m not sure my reply fully addressed what you said or that it makes sense, but it seems like you are suggesting that Millay wants to eat her cake and have it later, so to speak. A rape of protean Chaos...seems chaotic, no? Hard to get a hold of. Anyway, my feet are now going to go pitter-pat down the path to the portal of pillow pictures, and pass up prolonging problematic partisanship on this particular, potentially pious, poetic porn possibility.
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  #23  
Unread 12-14-2018, 12:56 PM
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Allen Tice Allen Tice is offline
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It is very offensive to use a word that describes offering sexual violence to anyone, even an abstract philosophical concept. “Hope” is an imperfect rhyme that Millay would not accept, so her hurtful word has been edited to “jape”.
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  #24  
Unread 12-14-2018, 03:47 PM
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Gail White Gail White is offline
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Just peeking in to say that I love the unusual "Sonnets From an Ungrafted Tree" as well.
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  #25  
Unread 12-14-2018, 07:52 PM
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Allen Tice Allen Tice is offline
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Hullo, Gail. It’s quite nice to have you aboard. You got me to page through my Millay books again, and there’s just a lot that comes to mind. I could make some suggestions myself, like “Recuerdo” vs. “I, being a woman and distressed” or “Love is not blind. I see with single eye”. And the mathematician’s favorite, if not that of the historian of math, the almost perfect “Euclid alone has looked on Beauty bare”. I fancy I understand that personally better than most. She could be remarkably yet realistically cold. And yet.

Julie, forgive yourself. (Good) angels rush about where fools like me gently scratch their heads.
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  #26  
Unread 12-15-2018, 08:09 AM
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Michael F Michael F is offline
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Re: Donne: Eppur lo sento.

The question is how, by what agency, the poet’s world takes order. In Donne, it is the triune God. In ESVM, it is creativity, the poet’s own. Both poets speak about making sense of unruly experience, in a sonnet, and both invoke the language of rape. So for me, the comparison is inescapable. IMO it’s noteworthy that creativity assumes an almost divine importance for ESVM, as it does for other ‘secular’ poets (e.g., Rilke and Stevens). Or Keats to Shelley: 'My Imagination is a Monastery and I am its Monk.' For Donne, in orthodoxy, it’s an aspect of the divine.

Last edited by Michael F; 04-07-2019 at 06:18 AM. Reason: Keats
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  #27  
Unread 12-15-2018, 04:20 PM
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Allen Tice Allen Tice is offline
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Ach, Du lieber Augustine! Pious rape again. (Does anyone not outside of the standard Western cum Orthodox versions of Christianity allow a pious jape?)* I still have 99% of Julie’s recently retracted post in an Eratospere notification where she sees the sense of “rape” as an abduction rather than a physical violation. Plenty of corrrelates for that around the world. First the abduction, then comes the moral marriage. It’s found today, I’m told personally second or third hand, in high caste India, and used to occur in Mexico. That hardly fits Millay’s puzzle, though, so I’m sticking with my tweak to “jape”. YET, my mind has now stooped from its birdnest to this altered thought: Millay wanted to get “rape” (of a man by a woman) into a poem, and contrived then to rhyme it with “shape” and “ape”. These latter words being the rhyme-driven items. As I am not an ape except when I want to act like one,** I reject her implied slur on masculine chaos. There is civilized chaos too. It’s called sprezzatura. As for rape in the sexual sense for a religious experience, that’s not my thingo.

*Footnote: I can’t see this as a religious poem at all. There are plenty of markers in other poems by Millay that explicitly suggest a wide and deep hostility to anything not Greco-Roman pagan. If really sympathic poems exist, my skimpy reading has missed them.

**Footnote: One could think of this purported quote from Theodore Roosevelt in a more innocent age: “Speak softly and carry a big stick. Unless you can ride a dinosaur. Then do that instead.” — Found on a Fathers Day card made by Recycled Paper Greetings (c). It shows Teddy R in top hat and glasses, holding its reins and astride a gaping haltered Tyrannosaurus Rex. — I dunno! Don’t ride the saurians, me.
PPS: that is not an accurate quote from Teddy Roosevelt. But it’s a charming card.

For those who want think about riding a dinosaur, here’s a link to a chronoplastic (frequently changing) Dinosaur Comics on the Internet. Sometimes I look at it. http://www.qwantz.com/index.php

Last edited by Allen Tice; 12-16-2018 at 12:25 PM. Reason: “... by a woman”
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  #28  
Unread 12-16-2018, 05:33 AM
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Michael F Michael F is offline
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I am amused and blush at your moniker...

I don’t say the poem is religious in a conventional sense; I say ESVM puts the poet’s creativity in the place of Donne’s divine. I also say that the poem is 'voluntary', meaning it asserts an act of will, in the hope (faith?) that it will order her world.

As for pious rape in religion, here is something of an account. Also, this woman’s memoirs recount instances where she was taken against her will.

I think my friend Julie sometimes underprizes herself.

And of course I may be wrong. I'm usually wrong about 6 things before breakfast...

M

Last edited by Michael F; 12-16-2018 at 05:59 AM. Reason: being clearer, I hope
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  #29  
Unread 12-16-2018, 11:48 AM
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Allen Tice Allen Tice is offline
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This thread is veering close to discussions of Millay’s motivations rather than her craft. So it might ok to briefly think about “awful servitude” in the light of her possible attitude toward her father, who apparently was ejected from her childhood family when she was nine or ten years old. The prologue to that must have been traumatic and left her with immense ambivalence toward him and males generally. Maybe “I love him and hate him” plays a role here. Intact nuclear families may not always be possible, despite their huge advantages, other things being equal. But that is only armchair shrink wrapping. She might be just as well be cursing a life full of Chaos. I prefer that approach and applaud her choice of words.

Soon this thread will exhaust itself. Or not.
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  #30  
Unread 12-16-2018, 01:23 PM
Susan McLean Susan McLean is online now
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Allen, I think this forum is certainly wide open for discussions of what any poet means in any particular poem, but I am made uncomfortable by anyone "correcting" a poet's poem, for any reason--even as a joke, unless it is clearly just a joke and not really intended as a criticism--and it looks worse when a man does it to a woman's poem. It is rather like "mansplaining," and it certainly sounds like a putdown of Millay, as do many of your comments about her and about the poem. Can we agree that not everyone has to like every poem or every poet without being insulting to the poet (even the dead ones who cannot take offense)?

Susan
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