What you say about dynamic appreciation seems reasonable. I wonder
though if appreciation can lessen, change direction. Not all
appreiciation is deepening, bettering.
To sort of answer your question, I was trying to answer Jon's question
about the poem. A deepening or rather changing appreiciation of the
poem in question and it's context still doesn't make it a political
poem. "the refusal to mourn" might play to the stoicism of the time
(die now, greive later) but I can see nothing in the poem that plays
to this idea. You might say that the questioning of religiosity and
atheism might ring a bell with the zeitgeist of the time but if most
readings at the time were as clotheared as Sitwell's, then I doubt it.
The answer to his other question has to be it's the wrong question.
The poem is about DT, not about the child; the child is the hook on
which DT hangs his prevarication btn humanism and religion. The girl
and the mother are cyphers in this poem, not even named. We only know
that she died by fire in London, and she has a mother. That's it. So,
in this case, even knowing quite a large part of the context, doesn't
give you that much. Sometimes knowing the context matters, sometimes
it doesn't. Here, I think it doesn't, and this is partly due to DT's
strategy of trying to stay outside of time, something which has been
commented on favourably. And as I said before, you can't have it both
ways.
I've only just invented the sea of referents; as a theory it may have
a few leaks. I think what I was getting at was how much assist the
poet gives the reader in trying to grapple with the poem's referents.
Sometimes lots, sometimes a little. In the case of DT, he's trying to
stay away from a particular set of referents, that of life lived at
the time; a lot of his poetry tries to exist outside of time, and you
can see that in the poetry, there aren't many hooks for the reader
into the real life of the 1940s.
Roger
On 8/25/07, Mark Weiss <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> There's no clean dichotomy possible here. For instance, to read
> anything at all distant from us we have to make sure we know what the
> words mean/meant, unless we want to impose on the work the exoticism
> of ignorance (as in te extreme case of homophonic translation). And
> words are never merely denotative. So, if the poem captivates us and
> we become increasingly interested in the mystery inherent in it (as
> opposed to the mystery of our own incomprehension) we start
> digging. The mystery remains, but becomes if anything more
> mysterious with increased comprehension. In Thomas' case, one's
> discovery of the blitz only deepens the poem, as does an awareness of
> his very public acknowledgement of Marvell. And this latter is I
> think unavoidable, given Thomas' determined archaism, if one has read
> any baroque poetry.
>
> When I was at Johns Hopkins I took a course on the Romantic Poets
> with Earl Wasserman. A very unpleasant man, but a great reader. What
> he gave me was an understanding that some of the words had changed
> meaning, and that some of them were terms in a philosophical debate
> about the nature of perception, unrecognizable to us now. I owe my
> love of Wordsworth to Wasserman, and my love of Coleridge was
> deepened enormously.
>
> Reading is a dynamic process (has someone said that before?), and
> what we bring to it as readers becomes a part of our own history and
> the poem's history for us. Otherwise it's static, an object, pretty
> sounds. But the poem also brings something to us--if it's not to
> remain words sitting on a shelf to be admired, it demands of us, if
> it works, that we understand the words more deeply, and that leads
> inevitably to context. One becomes interested in how it meant for its
> primary audience.
>
> Maybe. The adolescent's more innocent and sometimes mistaken reading
> is a perfectly ok reading, and can stimulate all kinds of rare
> growth. Come back to the poem--any poem--twenty years later and it's
> another ok reading.
>
> Try this: we don't need to know how old Sophocles was when he wrote
> the Oedipus at Colonus, but it's changed for us if we read it in old
> age. And it doesn't hurt to know about the disaster of the
> Pelloponesian War. But I loved the play when I read it at 15.
>
> Or are we promoting an aestheticist stance, by which the work of art
> is uniquely separate from everything else?
>
> "It's up to the poet as to how much referential buttressing the poem
> gets" sounds like a neat trick. The poet somehow limits our
> understanding or interest in context, his and ours. An impossibility, I think.
>
> Isn't this a version of the "intentional fallacy?" Itself a pretty
> limited concept. The poet's "intention" is of course unknowable,
> despite even a perfect knowledge of context, but one can certainly
> posit an "intentional field," into which not all ideas about the poem
> are admitted.
>
> Mark
--
My Stuff: http://www.badstep.net/
"In peace, sons bury their fathers. In war, fathers bury their sons."
Roman Proverb
|