Virtual Light

I’m climbing a hill made up out of old clothing, like from a thrift store. Everything its raggedy and old but looks appealing nonetheless. I don’t really think of it as clothing though and sort of take it in as part of the natural landscape. As I get to the top of the hill everything around me merges together and I’m on a flat plane, this isn’t strange but sort of exhilarating and I enjoy the sensation of being atop something vast and expansive. I think that I want to go back to the hill just to get to this point again but the hill is nowhere to be found. I realize that I’m in a different country- something like Ireland but not quite. Everything is sort of peaceful yet tense at the same time- there’s no action or anything just being there is the whole dream. I wake up, I wish I was back there but I’m ok with the fact that I am awake.

Haven’t really been having many dreams lately. It’s been getting harder to wake up… maybe I’m too tired to dream, or too tired upon waking to remember them. My friend has a lot of very strange dreams and she tells me about them but I miss my own dreams and don’t really enjoy retelling other peoples’. She dreams of animals a lot, and intricate occurrences between groups of people- my dreams seem to be more abstract and vague and there aren’t really any conflicts between people… animals never leave a strong impression on me, even if they are in my dreams… it makes me think about personalities and dreaming trends… but I don’t really have any real insight as to why…

Should lanterns shine, the holy face,
Caught in an octagon of unaccustomed light,
Would wither up, an any boy of love
Look twice before he fell from grace.
The features in their private dark
Are formed of flesh, but let the false day come
And from her lips the faded pigments fall,
The mummy cloths expose an ancient breast.

I have been told to reason by the heart,
But heart, like head, leads helplessly;
I have been told to reason by the pulse,
And, when it quickens, alter the actions' pace
Till field and roof lie level and the same
So fast I move defying time, the quiet gentleman
Whose beard wags in Egyptian wind.

I have heard may years of telling,
And many years should see some change.

The ball I threw while playing in the park
Has not yet reached the ground.

I love this poem, something about it is deeply moving and emotive, the conflux of imagery between boyish love and youth and lust and ancient Egypt is confusing but ultimately engrossing… when reading this poem I am sort of caught between worlds and I feel like I live on Thomas’ plane. The meter helps create this otherworldly vibe… its irregular but potent… his use of language- the way he repeats sounds like in “But heart, like head, leads helplessly” all creates a very strange almost slowed down reality. The slowing down of the language parallels the skewed sense of time… his ball doesn’t reach the ground, ancient Egypt and adolescence coexists

I’m walking around a very large library that begins to turn into a maze, it’s not as exciting as it sounds, it feels natural. The floor is sort of moving for me, like at one of those airport conveyors only it moves unevenly and I need to be very conscious of everything that’s going on beneath my feet otherwise I will spiral out of control. I’m holding onto the wall to keep steady and my arm slips into a weird slot. I realize that my arm is now in a different dimension and that if I want to get it back I have to teleport into that other realm and reclaim it. This idea scared me and I hesitate but then I realize that I need my arm because it’s holding a book a picked up earlier in the adventure…the whole reason I was at the library from hell in the first place. I decide to walk around and look for a book that can tell me how to get back to my arm. I still have both arms while I’m walking around but I know that really my arm is in that other dimension- I don’t know how this works but it makes sense. As I’m walking I run into a friend of mine from kindergarten- he hands me something… I’m guessing the book that I need and the dream ends.

Renaissance Overview (Minus Shakespeare):
The English Renaissance, “rebirth” mid15th- very end of 16th century. Returns to and tries to capture the feelings of classical sources. Strongly influenced by the Italian Renaissance, particularly Petrarch and his sonnets. Elizabethan time period, “Early-modern”. The prose works produced focused on the nature of society, politics and Christianity. Texts like to compound Platonic ideals with Christian themes, an attempt to unify the mind/body schism. Strong notions of Humanism- the beginning of the uplifting of the self and the ability of the self to achieve greatness under God and nature. In drama, plays like Christopher Marlowe's Doctor Faustus and Thomas Kyd's The Spanish Tragedy stand out. They are verbally lush, very poetic- almost like poetry for the stage but often with a moral message or commentary, or fueled by drive for revenge- they are not linearly didactic like medieval plays but offer more of dialectic. Poetry often idealizes an object of love, feels very flourished and dramatics. Metaphysical poets of the 17th century, also influenced by platonic ideals, lots of intricate simile and metaphor, identifying existence with poetic devices, often a bit melodramatic but with intensity.

The use of English (rather than Latin/ Romance Languages) for higher literature expanded during this period- greater use of “has” over “hath” and “goes” over “goeth”- this is not the strictest rule, and interestingly Shakespeare used both “th” and “s” within the same line.

Thomas More- Utopia
Francis Bacon- philosopher, focus on scientific revolution, towards the latter end of the Renaissance.
John Heywood
John Skelton
Sir Thomas Wyatt
George Gascoigne
Phillip Sidney especially The Defence of Poesie (prose)
Edmund Spencer, particularly his Faerie Queene
Thomas Kyd
Christopher Marlowe
Shakespeare
Thomas Campion
Sir Walter Ralegh
Sir John Davies
Samuel Daniel
John Donne- metaphysical poet
John MiltonBen JohnsonThomas Hobbes- Leviathan
-----
A couple of specific dates:
Paradise Lost- 1667
Areopagitica- 1644 (non fiction by Milton about censorship… might be one of those curve balls they throw us)
Sidney’s Astrophel and Stella & The Defence of Poesy - 1580ish

This website is a little confusing, but I found it a little helpful: http://rpo.library.utoronto.ca/timeline/
http://www.luminarium.org/renlit/

I’m on a golf course and I see one of those flags flapping in the background. As I move closer towards it, it turns into a torch and I grab hold of it and use it to move into a cave that conveniently popped up along my side. It’s filled with neon yellow golf/tennis ball things. They’re edible and yummy and I fill up a bag them. It was nighttime at the beginning of the dream but now it’s bright high-noon daylight. I realize that the golf ball things are really made of gold and that they come from the end of the rainbow… I think this part of it is influenced by one of my favorite books of all time- American Gods by Neil Gaiman. I start thinking that they are little pieces of sun and this sort of scares me, because it’s so powerful and I’m afraid of the magnetic energy that I am convinced is emanating from it. I start to think that I’m going to get stuck to everything around me because I’ve been freakishly magnetized.

This is a great dream… like it's straight out of that commercial that I posted earlier. I wake up and I walk into my kitchen ready to make eggs and sausage and pancakes- I don’t really eat breakfast, and when I do its always fruit and organic oatmeal so this is sort of funny for me. I get out all my pans and eggs and various ingredients. As I rummage I realize that I have Napoleon’s head in my freezer- I think about how it must not be very fresh but that it’s ok because it’s very old and nothing needs to be both old and fresh. I decide to call up my friend Laura to tell her that it’s there but when I pick up the receiver it’s the president of the united states that’s on the phone- it isn’t G. Bush but a dream-president and he tells me that he needs the head to dissect to plan for and invasion of Canada. I get very nervous because Laura is Canadian! (she is not in real life) I know I must destroy the head… I decide to place a bomb in the electrical system to shut the power off from the freezer so the head will melt and no one will assume I did it intentionally. I realize that the explosives are in the freezer next to his head and that should I open the freezer I’ll get freezer burn and never activate the explosives. My dream just sort of ends… I think something happened but I can’t remember.

A lucid dream: very short and sweet but incredible vibrant, I can still taste the colors even as I think back to it now… I wish I could capture it in words. It started out with me in my living room and then it felt like I was drowning, only drowning upward… like floating to the ceiling, I thought I would die and the atmosphere would just swallow me up. Suddenly it just clicked that I was dreaming, I realized I could fly and I followed things like looked like starbursts and nebulas and all this craziness in the sky. It was very serene and invigorating at the same time…

Renaissance Poetry

The English Renaissance, “rebirth” mid15th- very end of 16th century [1485-1603] returns to and tries to capture the feelings of classical sources. Strongly influenced by the Italian Renaissance, particularly Petrarch and his sonnets.

The sonnet is usually addressing a figure of love, usually a woman who does not give her love readily to a suitor or is already married. There are elements of longing, hunting, chasing. The figure of love is often compared to natural elements like seasons and creatures.

The Petrarchian Sonnet (Italian sonnet) influenced the (more applicable to our purposes):

The English Sonnet, primarily translations of Italian poems by Sir Thomas Wyatt and Sidney’s collection of sonnets Astrophil and Stella. The form is 14 lines divided into three quatrains and a couplet with a a-b-a-b, c-d-c-d, e-f-e-f, g-g rhyme scheme. They are generally composed in Iambic Pentameter- since Shakespeare is often considered the most successful at the sonnet, the English sonnet is also known as the Shakespearean Sonnet.

Spenserian Sonnet: Like the English Sonnet, a 14 line poem but with a: a-b a-b, b-c b-c, c-d c-d, e-e rhyme scheme.

The Conceit- a type of metaphor complex in its tenor/vehicle relationship, typical of the Metaphysical poets line Donne. Ranges from witty to almost ridiculous and robust.

John Donne- love poetry, sonnets, religious imagery, witty, enjoys puns and twisting words. Big on the conceits, if you see one that’s very much over the top it’s likely to be him (unless it’s something neoclassical or modern that’s poking fun at him)

Sydney’s Astrophil and Stella 1580’s- Compare the Beloved to
Spencer’s The Faerie Queen
Shakespearean Sonnets
Wyatt’s Whoso list to hunt
Paradise Lost- 1667

Thomas Campion 1567-1620
Sir Walter Raleigh 1552-1618
Sir John Davies 1569- 1626
Samuel Daniel 1562-1619 (Sonnets to Delia)
John Donne- 1571-1631 a metaphysical poet, towards the latter end of the era, into the 17th century. His form of conceit takes two objects of very little relation and creates a metaphor
John Milton 1608- 1673 Paradise Lost (1667)
Ben Johnson- wrote poems addressing other Renaissance figures, like Donne and Shakespeare, sonnets to Celia.

http://www.luminarium.org/renlit/index.html

I think that I greatly benefited from the practical application of our study of poetry. Learning all the terms will be the greatest aide in writing about poetry under time constraint. I tend to talk about what the poem means and how it means it… I’m usually too vague, not so much unclear, but that I could probably pinpoint the moment where something that I claim is exhibited in the poetry. I am always worried that I might just be interpreting the poem completely wrong, because sometimes I understand a poem in a way that is sort of convoluted, but it’s the feeling that I get and can’t shake… and usually its hard to point to a part of the poem and say “and this is exactly why your interpretation is wrong”… its just this vague sense of “no you are not right regarding this poem” in my poetry 140 class, our professor asked the class “would you rather be naked or nude” to illustrate denotation and diction and all that. And I was the only one who said naked because nude sounds cheesy and ridiculous and too flourishy… but when your just naked- it just seems unpretentious, real, simple,… everyone else thought naked was harsh and crass and exhibitionist-like and that nude was classy and elegant. I understand why their interpretation of the word is viable and even more common, but if I read a poem with the word naked in it I would instinctively read it very differently from most people.

My ex-boyfriend walks into my fiancé’s living room and looks around and says “well, it’s exactly as I pictured it would be” a little duck runs along the floor and he just says “exactly” (with emphasis) this is super strange, I have nothing to do with this person and it wasn’t a very emotional or dramatic breakup… just was (5 years ago in fact) anyway… he starts running around touching everything like a child/chicken like thing. My faince’s little sister walks in and says to him “what are you doing here” and he said “look- I’m allowed, there are laws about this… go to the library and learn something” and then he starts speaking about the legal system but not really… I just sort of know he’s thinking about it. I’m not in the scene at all just sort of watching it.

I didn’t really give it too much thought, going into the honors examine…. I should have taken my time but it was hard for me to really concentrate upon taking it- so I missed a number of things that I really knew. I don’t feel particularly confident going in to taking it but I know that it is something I am capable of… I wish there was more time for it though. I wonder if it’s really an adequate gauge of our capacity in understanding and recognizing literature… but I can’t really think of an exam that would be more appropriate. I need to learn the dates and really grasp the periods… not just styles or genres or trends/interpretations of the text. A part of me is looking forward towards the test, it would be fun if so much didn’t depend on it… a part of me hopes I’ll just get really lucky with the selections that will show up there… I don’t know how I’d feel about doing well based on just luck alone, because right now that feels like the greatest mitigating factor in determining a different between honors and high honors and highest… I need to get myself in the right mindset to just fully “do” the test. I wish everyone so much luck… you guys all sounded great while we were going over it in class!