People
Leave Each Other in Poetry
Report of an Aesthetic
Realism
class
by Lynette
Abel
The
lecture I report on was given
originally by Eli Siegel in two parts, on
February 14th and 21st, 1968.
Titled, "People Leave Each Other in Poetry,"
it was a stirring example
of the Aesthetic Realism idea that poetry
shows what it means to like the
world on an honest basis, and that even the
most painful, unlikable things
can be given honest form in poems. "A
sign that the world is cared
for when one is suffering," Mr. Siegel once
said, "is that the exact expression
of it can still be musical."
And as he began this
talk he said, "The two most popular subjects
in poetry are death and love.
While persons wonder about death, they also
wonder why love changes.
And there are many poems having to do with
the difficulty of love, the
leaving of one person by another, the
feeling love was changed from what
one hoped for."
Using The English
Poets, an anthology edited by Thomas
Humphrey Ward, Mr. Siegel read
the anonymous Scottish ballad, "Waly, Waly,"
which appeared around 1727,
and which he said is great. It is a
girl's lament: she is going to
have a child, and her lover has left
her. "This man was like a tree
that I trusted," she says, "but when I leaned
against it, it broke." The
poem begins:
O waly waly up the bank,
O waly waly
down
the brae,
And waly, waly, yon burn-side,
Where I and my
love
were wont to gae!
I lean'd my back unto an aik,
I thocht it was
a trustie tree;
But first it bow'd and syne it
brak',--
Sae my true
love
did lichtlie me.
Love is only pleasant,
"bonnie" when it's new, the girl says: why
should I comb my hair or care
how I look now? My love has forsaken me and says
he'll never love me more!
O waly waly, but love be
bonnie
A little time
while
it is new;
But when it's auld it waxeth
cauld,
And fadeth awa'
like the morning dew.
O wherefore should I busk my heid,
Or wherefore
should
I kame my hair?
For my true love has me forsook,
And says he'll
never
lo'e me mair.
Mr.
Siegel then
spoke about why this poem is great as
art. "The melody of the words
is poignant and bitter," he said. In the
first line, "O waly, waly,
up the bank," there is, he explained, "a
wandering that is thoughtless
or careless because a girl is in grief."
The line is poetic because
"the sound...goes along with what is said or
the meaning." And he
continued: "The music here helps the knowledge
of the world." In
the last stanza, the girl says if she had
known that love could be so bad,
she wouldn't have gone for it. She longs for
the child to be born so she
can die with more ease:
But had I wist before I
kiss'd
That love had
been
so ill to win,
I'd lock'd my heart in a case o'
goud,
And pinn'd it
wi'
a siller pin.
Oh, oh! if my young babe were
born,
And set upon
the
nurse's knee;
And I mysel' were dead and gane,
And the green
grass
growing over me!
"This is an example,"
said Mr. Siegel, "of intensity and passion
equalled by metrical, artistic
control." This girl has her grief, but whoever
wrote this ballad gave it
beautiful form.
The next poem Mr.
Siegel read tells of a man being left by a
woman. "La Belle Dame
Sans Merci" by the 19th century English poet
John Keats belongs, Mr. Siegel
said, "with the undoubted heights" of
poetry. It is, he continued
"the greatest single poem" on the subject of
people leaving each other,
and is "about a man's suffering. It
begins:
'O What can ail thee Knight at
arms
Alone and
palely
loitering?
The sedge has withered from the
Lake
And no birds
sing!'
As the poem continues, the
Knight answers:
'I met a Lady in the
Meads
Full beautiful,
a faery's child
Her hair was long, her foot was
light
And her eyes
were
wild.
'I made a garland for her
head,
And bracelets
too,
and fragrant zone;
She look'd at me as she did
love,
And made
sweet moan.'
There is passionate
feeling here--this lady seems to be giving
herself utterly, but there is
also a strange foreboding, a sense of some
deception going on. The
lady lulls the knight to sleep and he dreams of
"pale kings, and princes,"
and "Warriors, death pale," who warn him that he
has been enthralled by
the beautiful lady without mercy: "La belle Dame
sans mercy / Hath thee
in thrall!"
Mr. Siegel discussed
each of Keats' 12 stanzas, describing why this
poem is beautiful--how
it puts together opposites. He
explained:
Two kinds of sound
correspond to
the two ways reality shows itself.
[There is] the lingering, enveloping,
permeating sound, and then the sound that is
sudden, the staccato, crackling
sound....These two things are of life
itself, like the flow of blood and
the heart beat.
To
Part 2 of People Leave Each Other
in Poetry
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