English may not be a fun subject for many, or may be exciting for
others, but for me this class was truly a once in a life time class. I
have enjoyed the class and what we have studied, including the extra
credit that I had a chance to partake in this year. However, to wrap up
this class, I am not here to talk about what happened in this wonderful
class. What we learned in this class, besides being tied together by the
Humanities and the time frames that these readings belong in, do tie in
to each other. More importantly, everything in this class has tied
together. From these blog postings to the actual readings, everything
has been wonderfully held together by a single back bone. This backbone
is from the very first reading that we had in this class. Introduction to Poetry by Billy Collins puts this semester into a wonderful poem:I ask them to take a poem
and hold it up to the light
like a color slide
or press an ear against its hive.
I say drop a mouse into a poem
and watch him probe his way out,
or walk inside the poem's room
and feel the walls for a light switch.
I want them to waterski
across the surface of a poem
waving at the author's name on the shore.
But all they want to do
is tie the poem to a chair with rope
and torture a confession out of it.
They begin beating it with a hose
to fight out what it really means.
One may wonder why this poem holds together this class so perfectly,
but it is as simple as what Collins says. So much so, that the entire
class takes themes from what is being said here. In stanza one, the
class was asked to "hold up the poem to the light," and despite how the
class wanted to beat the poems during the lectures, we managed to do so
and found that within all the poems they all had one thing in common. In
my opinion, all of the poems that we read in the first part of the
semester truly had one thing in common: death. From Emily Dickinson's "I
died for beauty" to Elton John's "The Last Song" to even the Vier letze liede
[Last Four Songs] by Hermann Hesse, death is the biggest theme to them
all. Dickinson says it right in her title that death is present, like
the other two, as if they want you to take the feeling right off the bat
that a theme here is death. Its the easiest one to spot, as their texts
talk about the cycle of life and death and death itself but there are
of course other meanings that the class took, which could be found in
the postings that talk about these poems.
The next theme that is found in all of these postings, the class was
asked to "drop a mouse into a poem and watch him probe his way out." We
are asked to go through the maze of the readings and find out all we can
to it. To go down every path and every thought, just to find not just
the way out or the meaning but the experience we take from it. The best
way to explain this via textual readings were the readings that had many
ways to go. Now, this could be said about a lot of the readings we had
but the two I find to be perfect in this stanza are Midsummer's Night Dream and the Canterbury Tales. Chaucer and Shakespeare have something very common just by looking at the two stories; they both have stories within stories. Canterbury Tales
is literally tales put together with a backbone, of which you can read
more on in the posting, that ties the travelers together. The Dream
is truly a dream with many stories within it and many dreams within
those stories. So as Collins said, we literally have to "probe" our way
out.
"Walk inside the poem's room and feel the walls for a light switch"
explains it all, in my opinion to the next theme. To turn on the light
to the meaning or to have the light turned on to a problem is, in short,
the next theme. From Karl Marx's Communist Manifesto to the
Declaration of Independence, we are truly walking around looking the for
the light switch. Not only during the reading and interpretation but in
the actual text. We are learning about problems and how to fix them,
learning what's wrong and what's right, even as another theme between
them all puts it: working. We are truly finding the light switch within
these works to both their meaning and to our own lives.
We mustn't forget while we read all of these works to "wave at the
author," as found in the fourth stanza and most importantly the fourth
theme. We need to stand back, or waterski, through what we read. Most of
the time we get so caught up in what there is, what's happening, that
we don't take the time to step back and find the overall appeal or even
what the author themselves bring the to the table with these writings.
"Eleanor Rigby" says the theme perfectly within the song just like the
two arias from Vanessa or "Bisclavret" by Samuel Barber and Marie
de France -- respectively of course. In these works, it is so easy to
get caught up in their meanings, in what they are saying or doing, that
we don't take the time to step back and just look at everything. We dive
head first, or just skim without thinking must on it, that we never
truly think of the overall appeal that they have, the general meaning or
most importantly, how the world was when these were first put out to
the public. We don't "wave" or even acknowledge the outside meaning to
these works.
Maybe, as I step back and look at it, what happened was just Fate. I do
believe, if I look at the last stanza, I just put in the next theme:
Fate. In this class, all we did was work on "beating it with a hose" and
while this was close to the final few weeks of class, the entire
lectures were rough and a drag. That may be thanks to Fate or the Desire
to leave or even the Trojan horse that fixed itself into class with the
deadly boredom and summer looming to kill us all. Oh? Did I make a pun?
I do believe I talked about the Fate, Desire, and the Trojan Horse from
the last three readings we did in this class. The Iliad started by bringing in the Trojan war with the Trojan Horse with the Oresteia
following with Fate and Desire. These readings were truly the worst
readings in this class thanks to the lectures. Don't get me wrong, I love
these readings but the lectures were so rough thanks to no one truly
enjoying them like I did. No matter what we tried, only a handful of us
in the class got interested in these readings. Such a shame.
The "blog project" was the class involvement to the text that really
got us to "press an ear against its hive" and get our hands into every
reading that we had in this class. In my opinion its what help the
class, as well as myself, to get more out of the readings than any quiz
or test ever would, as they are just memorizing the information instead
of truly learning what we are reading. The essays that I expected turned
out to be these postings and in truth the postings are double the fun
than any essay in my life could ever possess. Essays are gathering
information together in a formal paper while blogs are learning about
the text and having fun with what we are reading as we find new ways to
look at the information give. What truly is memorable about this and I
recommend every class that I have from here on out have, is something
like these postings. While they take more time and are less words, they
are truly the best way to not only learn but to keep with you. Essays
and projects get lost, ruined, destroyed, and damaged no matter how hard
you try to keep them. With these, the postings are not only portable
but you can keep them safe while learning from them and going back to
them many years afterwards. It is also a lot of fun to have them. Its
thanks to these that all of the themes were able to come out and that I
was able to see that the entire class revolved around Collin's poem.