Nature Of Poem Research Articles

Gender, Class, and the Beehive Mary Collier's 'The Woman's Labour' (1739) As Nature Poem

Gender, Class, and the Beehive Mary Collier's 'The Woman's Labour' (1739) As Nature Poem

To Leave My Heart at Catlettsburg by Billy C. Clark (review)

"? aim to see both someday/ I said. ? plan to. I've lived in a mine camp, but it wasn't a real town. A bunch of houses in a hollow.'" What James Still has done is to look at the people of the mountains and just a "bunch of houses in a hollow" and see a universe unto itself. Some of what happens is good, some bad. Some things there are universal; some are unique to the region. Still captures these qualities of mountain culture and renders an endearing portrait that is true to that life, and true to himself. —Art Jester Editor's Note: This article appeared earlier in the Lexington Herald-Leader as Revisiting Sporty Creek. Billy C. Clark. To Leave My Heart at Catlettsburg. Ashland, KY: Jesse Stuart Foundation, 1999. 80 pages. $9.95. Paperback. This new collection of poems from Catlettsburg, Kentucky, native Billy C. Clark is part of the Jesse Stuart Foundation's commitment to reprint/publish Clark's works during this decade. Best known as a youth novelist, short story writer and favorite son of Catlettsburg, Clark's literary successes occurred in the 1950s and 1960s. His Song of the River (1957), remains a popular coming-of-age novel for youth and adult readers; and his autobiography, A Long Row to Hoe (1960), also has a popular following. Many of the major themes in Clark's previous books—the Big Sandy River, elements of nature, and family stories—are reworked as poems in To Leave My Heart at Catlettsburg. Unfortunately, Clark's overuse of rhymed sonnets and strict, metered verse impose monotony on these poems. Certainly there can be a richness and a familiarity in the tradition of metrical poems. Rhymed poetry is often invitational and pleasurable. What is generally missing in these poems, however, is invention. The rhythm is often too restrictive and contrived, and there is no discovery within the journey of the poems other than the clearly obvious. A good example would be in "Return of the Snowbirds," for instance, when the speaker observes: I have waited a summers/autumns time to see Snowbirds return to eat pecans and be Home again in my backyard and free To sing and sit there, in the pecan tree. 74 Other poems of nature or of Clark's beloved Big Sandy River bear similar construction. An overabundance of cliché, stock images, and sentimentality keep these poems from offering more than a nostalgic recollection of the poet's experiences growing up along the riverbanks in Catlettsburg. One wonders if many of these poems might not have been writing exercises, since there are some twenty similar sonnets about the river in this volume. Including all of them may be the publisher's fault, as is the lack of any central metaphor or organizing principle by which to place these poems. The collection has a random arrangement, and the poems are crowded onto the page. This slim volume (66 pages of text) contains 107 poems. The publisher has haphazardly combined all of Clark's poems, it seems, instead of the best of his work. Two narrative poems, however, stand out from the rest as memorable efforts. "Sourwood Hollow," a place that runs deep and dark in the speaker's memory, eerily gives up its ghosts of logging and mining and loss of life. "The Death ofAunt Lottie," a long poem about a blind aunt who gives the speaker her dulcimer, is reverent and musical: Breath-held I waited for her hair to catch In the dulcimer strings although it never did. She strummed with turkey quill and said to me: Lordy, Lordy, Isaac, few will ever know What company this dulcimer is to me! Lord-sent to fight this awful loneliness, Music from the heart runs down the arm, Drops from the finger tips here on the strings . . . Sadly, there are too few of these moments in this collection. Obviously these poems will nonetheless appeal to some readers in Clark's home place and can, in fact, be taken as Clark has offered them: as a gift of saved-up memories. The often strained metrical design of the majority of the poems, however, evokes greeting-card sentimentality...

The New Oxford book of children's verse

This anthology of poetry written for children begins in the 18th century and ends in 1995, with the emphasis on modern work, and the explosion of talent that has emerged on both sides of the Atlantic in the last 25 years. It contains over 350 poems by more than 200 poets, in which narrative poems jostle with limericks, nonsense verse with nature poems, concrete verse and performance poetry with poems of the classroom and playground. Acute observation and language inform all these poems, which represent the ethnic and cultural diversity of contemporary writing for children ranging from African-American and Aborigine to Caribbean/Black British and New Zealand and Canadian. Familiar names such as Edward Lear, Christina Rosetti, Rudyard Kipling and A.A. Milne lead on to new generations, including the work of Charles Causley, Ted Hughes, Roger McGough, Allan Ahlberg, Jackie Kay and many more.

The Figure of (Self-)Sacrifice in Hegel's Naturphilosophie

The poem with which we open is one of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel's lesser known literary efforts. It has none of the poignancy of Eleusis, dedicated to Friedrich Holderlin, nor the innocence of some of the more lyrical nature poems. One of Hegel's biographers describes the poem as an interplay of "playful freedom, natural necessity, estrangement of self and return to self."2 On this account, the description of Hegel's interaction with his pet poodle could almost encapsulate the later dialectical method. Both the poem and the explanation certainly have a foreboding ring of what is to come; at the time of the poem's composition Hegel had broached neither the philosophy of nature nor the dialectical method. Perhaps it is not frivolous to see in this "playful description" an ominous sign of what would become Hegel's attitude towards nature in his mature works. The poem describes a dog that runs about on the grass in circles, possibly chasing a stick, always returning to the master who is walking with his friends. But the dog, a mere animal without language or rationality, is distracted by other dogs, and in particular, by a female dog who pulls him away from the cycle of the master that Hegel indicates is "higher" than the natural, sexual cycle that tempts the dog away. The master shouts "Halt!" and "Come back!" The words "tear [the dog] loose" from mere instinct, but he is weak, and the natural drive pulls him away again. The master shouts, and awaits the dog with a cane, determined to teach through pure force what could not be communicated rationally. Though the dog cannot understand the words, the blows of the cane teach him the power of the necessity of reason over the contingency of pure natural impulse. "Do you see what 'Must' means? Now you see it." But Hegel somewhat excuses the dog: "He cannot help it." In spite of this, the dog is beaten, in order that he may learn to obey his master. One cannot help visualizing a slightly hysterical young Hegel, his face red with righteous indignation, repeatedly beating his dog with a cane "for its own good" for not realizing that chasing a human's stick is spiritually higher than indulging in the pleasures of the senses. The alternation of perspective within the poem intensifies the uneasy feeling the poem creates in the reader: in the moments when Hegel speaks of the dog as "he," he (Hegel) is distant and descriptive, if utterly anthropocentric ("He [the dog] runs in broad circles on the plane, we are his point of return"). Yet as soon as he speaks directly as master to the dog (in the intimate Du form) Hegel becomes shrilly insistent upon the necessity of the lower animal's obedience and subservience ("You cry at the blows: Obey the commands of the master"). At this moment the pet dog becomes a metonym for nature itself, and the relationship of master and dog can serve as an analogy of the way that Hegel will approach nature. Cane in hand. If this poem illustrates the cycle of freedom, natural necessity, estrangement of self and return to self, then the "self" of the dog is understood only in its relationship to a higher level of nature, namely (in this example) to the human being. As we will come to see, this is indeed the case with every level of organic nature as Hegel describes it in both his early lecture courses on the philosophy of nature and the later versions of the Encyclopedia. For Hegel nature has a value only as a known, conceptualized nature, only to be approached through the assumption that it has already been filtered through human understanding.3 After Hegel moved to Jena in 1801 and began lecturing at the university, he lived and worked closely with Schelling; it is generally assumed that Hegel's turn to the philosophy of nature-an area of philosophy that had not concerned him, at least thematically, prior to 1801-was a result primarily of his association with Schelling. Hegel taught three lecture courses as a Privatdozent from 1803 to 1806, fragments of which have been preserved from Hegel's own manuscripts and those of his students and put together as the Jenaer Systementwurfe. …

The Poetics of (S) Cat-Ology in Guilhem VII, Count of Poitiers, IX Duke of Aquitaine's Canso V.

THE POETICS OF (S) CAT-OLOGY IN GUILHEM VH, COUNT OF POITIERS, IX DUKE OF AQUITAINE'S CANSO V. The Naming of Cats is a difficult matter, It isn'tjust one ofyour holiday games; At first you may think I'm as mad as a hatter When I tell you a cat has THREE DIFFERENT NAMES. T.S.Eliot, ? Perhaps more than any other, Guilhem's cansoV, Farai un vers, posmisonelh(Pillet-Carstens 183. 12) typifiesthe image ofan author labelled in his famous vida as one of the greatest courtiers in the world (Boutière and Schutz, p.7), and one of the foremost deceivers ofwomen, further described by contemporary chronicler William of Malmesbury asfatuus et lubricus, wallowing in vice, and possessing the ability to make his audience's jaws ache with laughter (Bond, p. 120- 1 , quoting William ofMalmesbury). The present study aims to analyse the somewhat overlooked cat imagery ofthe poem inits two main variant readings, in order to gauge its impact on possible interpretations of both texts. There are four manuscript versions, forming one group labelled V, N, ?/2, and the other C, presenting potentiallyvery differentversionsofthe poem'sfinal outcome. I hope to show that the cat is adversary, counterpart, and symbol of the narrator, and a device that playfully mirrors the presence and absence of the poet in his work. Many have commented on the fact that Guilhem'spoetic production reflects the seemingly dual nature ofhis life. One song, Pos de chantar m'es près talenz (P-C 183. 10), has the sad tone impending separation fromworldly things, while the bulkofhis corpus is evenly split between songs that illustrate the tenets offbi'amor, and comic and often obscene poems of a subversive nature. As well as being important on account oftheir early date, more crucial isthewaythat Guilhem's works have come to embody the conflictual character of the troubadour canon as a whole, as it is obvious that half of his extant poems undermine the conceptual integrity of the rest. As a consequence, howwe read Guilhem has abearing on our analysis of subsequent poets, as if he establishes a horizon oflyric expectation and somehow sets the tone ofan entire ethos. At the same time, poets are often the creation of critics, and the border between our objectivity and their subjectivity is a fluid one. In this case, considering POETICS OF [S] CAT-OLOGY twoversions ofthe same poem compounds the sense ofthe fragmentarynatureofGuilhem 'sworks, andgivesustwoversionsofthesame poet. Of his elaborate songs, few have proved more of a rich critical challenge than the risqué canso V. The two aforementioned manuscriptgroupings reflectchangesinstanzaorderandtextualvariants, andboth have significant omissions and additions, the most significant element for our purposes being the inclusion ofa larger role for the cat. However, before analysing the importance of the feline imagery in both versions, it is useful to outline the major differences in their composition as, particularly in the case of the omissions, a change inthe mood and orientation ofCis apparent. Greatestcritical and editorial weight is given to the larger cluster on the grounds of presumed chronology, and on the assumption that there is greater fidelity to a hypothetical original in the Vgroup. At the same time, given that establishing exactly when and in what order Guilhem composed his works, and given the broad margin for speculation existing in any manuscript tradition, this study focuses on the singular C version, in order to argue that the departure it takes from what is ostensibly the most reliable version adds to our appreciation of the poem's potential significance, and provides an essential alternative reading of the text. Whether or not one takes this as the definitive version of Guilhem's cat poem, if indeed we can talk of definitive versions given the transmission of troubadour texts, it is a cat poem, and has arguably more thematic coherence than the other versions, further demonstrating the importance of mouvance in modifying our potential interpretation of crucial works: it furnishes a second poem, and a commentary that we might even interpret as a regenerative reading of the main body of text.2 The C manuscript (BN fr.856) dates from the 14th century, and originates from South West France: Vs provenance is...

La Estrella de Sevilla as a Mirror of the Courtly Scene—and of its Anonymous Dramatist (Luis Velez???)

One of the unsolved mysteries of comedia scholarship has been: Who wrote La Estrella de Sevilla ? Early critics amassed considerable circumstantial evidence to attribute the play, respectively, to Lope and to Claramonte. In a note to his introduction to the 1939 Reed-Dixon edition, John M. Hill used internal evidence from the text to draw the following profile of the author: "1) he was an Andalusian; 2) he was a skillful dramatist, highly versed in all dramatic resources with an undeniable instinct for the tragic and the pathetic; 3) he was thoroughly familiar with the writings of Quevedo; 4) he was thoroughly versed in conceptismo and cultismo and did not hesitate to employ the one or the other, or both, when it suited his purpose; 5) he was likely familiar with Sevilla and fond of the city, with a liking and a familiarity gained by extensive residence therein." For Hill, the only dramatist to combine these characteristics was Luis Vélez de Guevara. Drawing further on both circumstantial and internal evidence, the present study proposes adding these features to Hill's profile of the author of La Estrella de Sevilla : 6) he had a general knowledge of astrology and was familiar with the poems of astrological nature which the Conde de Villamediana had written about Francelisa; 7) he was familiar with the literary scene in Madrid and specifically with the vejamen that followed the celebrations of the Plaza in August, 1623; 8) he was opposed to the new regime of Philip IV and the Count-Duke of Olivares. Applying these characteristics, the study concludes, tentatively, that La Estrella de Sevilla was not penned by Vélez. (CGP)

The Forgotten Language: Contemporary Poets and Nature ed. by Christopher Merrill

82 Western American Literature The Forgotten Language: Contemporary Poets and Nature. Edited by Christopher Merrill. (Salt Lake City: Gibbs-Smith Publisher, 1991. 176 pages, $14.95.) Reviewing an anthology always presents special problems. With so many authors (93) and works (149), what does one praise or blame? A reviewer must look instead at how well the editor’s purposes are realized. The editor’s intro­ duction here makes his purpose clear: “. . . what these poems suggest in their various ways is the need to respect the earth, which has suffered so much at our hands.”His program is environmental; his medium is poetic. He acknowledges “a political component embedded in the tradition of nature poetry,”but this is more implicit than overt. Does the anthology succeed? For the most part, yes. It contains fine poems that provide insights into our relationship with nature. One might mention Sandra Alcosser’s bear poems, and A. R. Ammons’s “Corson’s Inlet,” about form in nature and art. Philip Booth’s “How to See Deer,”Joseph Bruchac’s “Cattail Wind,” Christopher Buckley’s “Sparrows,” John Daniel’s “Common Ground,” and James Dickey’s “The Last Wolverine” are notable. Hayden Carruth’s “Essay” looks both at nature and nature poetry. Gary Snyder’s and William Stafford’s poems are wonderful as usual. Some few selections, however, seem out of place, out of harmony. Aga Shahid Ali’s “Leaving Sonora,”Ralph Angel’s “It Could Have Been More,”and Douglas Crase’s “The Revisionist” use natural images, but they are not nature poetry. Wendell Berry’s delightful “Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front” is not nature poetry. Compare it with Michael Pettit’s “Neat New Eng­ land Fields,”with the same theme but looking directly at humanity’s relation­ ship with nature. Norman Dubie’s “Elegy to the Sioux”is not a nature poem, in contrast with Louise Erdrich’s “I Was Sleeping Where Black Oaks Move,”which is a nature poem, from a Native American angle of vision. One might question why Donald Hall’s poem about draft horses, or Maxine Kumin’s about selling a domestic lamb for slaughter, are included. Such lapses in focus are distracting. Nevertheless, for those who care about humanity’s relationship with nature, and feel the power of poetry, this is a worthwhile and sometimes moving book. PAUL T. BRYANT Radford University Nightsoil. By Levi Peterson. (Salt Lake City: Signature Books, 1990. 192 pages, $14.95.) There is a quiet movement afoot in western literature to forge a missing link, and perhaps without even knowing it or wanting to be, Levi Peterson is one of the strongest forces in that movement. ...

Walt Whitman and the Week of Modern Arts in Brazil

In English Literature a significant change took place in 1798 originated by William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge who in Lyrical Ballads broke with the reigning school of Pope and the spirit of the 18th century to achieve a new art freer in form and suited to the spirit of their time: Coleridge with poems of romantic wonder, Wordsworth with poems of nature and simple humanity. The new poetic tradition established by them and later romantic poets remained in authority in America until 1855 when the revolt of Walt Whitman, breaking away from the past, proclaimed a new age for America's poetry. Whitman considered himself - and was to some extent for his time - a literary radical, and as such he did not hesitate to write essays, poems, or utter remarks which among other things anathematized the poetry of his day.

Poetry by Seduction

who made us memorize a Longfellow poem and the concluding ten lines of Bryant's Thanatopsis. I also remember another teacher who made us tap out on our desks the beat of the poems he read to the class. And vaguely, I remember the surfeit of nature poems we had to read by Lowell, Riley, Whittier and Longfellow. Now that I look back on my earliest experiences with poetry I guess they didn't do me much harm and in some subconscious way perhaps they prepared me for the richer world of poetry later on. But a large segment of students today are culturally deprived as far as poetry is concerned. Not only have they never had a positive experience with poetry in a way that a poem reaches into our heart and soul and wakes up some sleeping part of us, but many of them literally hate poetry. They are not merely indifferent to it or bored by it; they are repulsed by it because they think it is the language of fraud. It's taking a simple thought and saying it complexly. Given this situation, we can either let them alone, recognizing that they can lead full, useful lives without ever experiencing poetry--or we can look for ways to overcome their resistance. If we choose the second alternative, we must decide on the right approach. One way is to trick them into liking poetry, as some people would describe the tactic. I prefer the word seduce.

Personal Poetry Collections. Their Origin and Development Through the Heian Period

J APANESE poets have always been at pains not only to write and preserve their poetry, but also to collect it in an appropriate form, and the art of anthologizing or compiling poetry collections has been developed to a greater degree in Japan than in the West. Three basic types of collection were developed by the early poets: the imperial anthology, the private anthology, and the personal collection.' The most obvious difference is between the anthologies, containing the works of many different poets, and the personal collection, containing the works of a single writer. An equally important distinction can be made between the public, formal mode of the imperial anthology and the private, unofficial character of the private anthology and the personal collection. The imperial anthology was compiled at the direct request of an emperor or retired emperor and received official imperial approval upon completion. Such was the enormous prestige of imperial sponsorship that these anthologies became the dominating form and overshadowed all other types of collection from the appearance of the first one, Kokinwakashfi,2 in 905 until the decline of court poetry in the fifteenth century. They have formed the focus of critical and scholarly attention to the virtual exclusion of any other type of poetry collection.3 They are perhaps well enough known to need no further description here. We should, however, remind ourselves of their intricate and highly formalized structure, in which poems are arranged not according to poet or period, but under formal categories: nature poems are grouped to follow the order of the seasons, love poems follow the course of a love affair, and every

Kinnell's "Walking down the Stairs"

IN THE RECENTLY PUBLISHED Walking Down the Stairs, selections from interviews with Galway Kinnell published by the University of Michigan Press, one of the interviewers asks Kinnell: That loneliness you say you wrote out of?do you think that young poets today are less rich be cause they lack that? Kinnell replies, I never thought of it as richness. One of the charming things about these interviews the way Kinnell changes a question by butting his head through the interviewer's premises. This particular question meant richness for of course, but Kinnell refuses to distinguish lonely poets from lonely people: no one richer for being lonely. Questions like this one are generated by the notion that poets are a special breed who welcome suffering, madness, poverty for the sake of their poetry. If art to provide our alternate medium of transcendence, as Matthew Arnold predicted, then we assume sacrifices of our poet-priests. From the pokes maudits, who cultivated the image, to the desperate poets Sylvia Plath John Berryman, poets' lives have encouraged us to think that some kind of dementia a prerequisite to creativity. Yeats, who lived a complex full life, didn't help by speaking so often of his own choice between life art. Many of us, at any rate, presume not only that the poet converts experience into poetry, but that he has the experiences in order to convert them into poetry. It refreshing, then, to watch Galway Kinnell sidestep such notions. Does political activity enrich your poetry, he asked. Any involvement that brings you to a sense of loving community, he replies, is bound to be enriching?for a writer or for anyone. Similarly, when asked how he copes with dry periods, Kinnell shows how much the question implies by answering that he regards dry periods as complications of life. This integration of poetry with life informs all of Kinnell's more interest ing responses in Walking Down the Stairs. Sensitive to either/or thinking, he quick to give both. . . and answers that are in the same inclusive spirit as his poetry. He balks, for example, at the distinction between nature poems urban poems: The idea that we our creations don't belong to 'nature' comes from the notion that the human a special being created in God's image to have dominion over all else. We are becom ing aware again of our connection with other beings. Asked about surreal ism, he makes a similar leap: The use of the term 'inner life' means that one not quite whole, that one has an inner life an outer life, they don't quite come together. In a culture that tends to separate the artist from his audience art from life, these remarks make Kinnell an important spokesman for poetry. His commitment to relation?between poetry everything else, between the poet everyone else?makes this collection of interviews crucial reading for anyone interested in the survival of healthy literature. 95

Nature Poem: Demanding Stiff Sentences, and: Riven Doggeries

28 THEMISSOURIREVIEW NATURE POEM: DEMANDING STIFF SENTENCES / James Tate We wanted something: a nude instance of gaga, a tern in a sunken hammock, anecdotes that end with angry pigeons, pinnocle won. Should think profound— profound was the wrong word. We won't get anything so don't expect anything, a babe in the mouth and knees sacked dandling the natal muse, the hysterical victim's bouquet in Springtime. But we wanted somthing more than a fire's embrace and a worker's trance. We wanted one wail that would benefit the whole adventure or a last nickle to call home and thank ma. Geography, now there's a short street— the buildings, the great outdoors (which remain just that) flirtatious as blood-donors— why, I don't know—who sleep by the fountain in the shade of the palm. They didn't know the first thing about fishing, which was their lifelong ambition. Rivers, like churches full of bawdy ballads, the keen sloth greeted by scrappy doves raving in the sky. And fish, the furniture of fish, talked back. Typos in a U-boat, we were all members of Nature's alphabet. But we wanted more. James Tate 29 RIVEN DOGGERIES / James Tate A miserable day, his dog had leapt from the window The dog had leapt from my seventh story apartment into a Police helicopter that had been hijacked by some well-meaning murderers. But it was for dogs they entertained no mercy. And that afternoon, late, after a cold shower I went for a ride in our elevator, an immaculate dive, home of the lost soul and once third base to late working things. My animal has sunk he doesn't exist he won't come back. The ideal pet, however, is unrecognizable when it arrives in the river awash in the land afar. ...

Richard Lewis and Augustan American Poetry

Most Augustan poetry in America remains unattributed and unstudied. However, a critical study of the poems by Richard Lewis (1700?-34) reveals that he was not only the best Augustan American poet but also the first and most successful American nature poet before Bryant. His “To Mr. Samuel Hastings,” a progress piece on shipbuilding, is the earliest poem on an American industry. “A Journey from Patapsco to Annapolis,” a Thomsonian nature poem, and “Food for Clitics,” which anticipates Freneau, both contain the best elements of Lewis' poetry: a philosophy of scientific deism, praise of nature and the Creator, extended descriptions and catalogues of flowers, wildlife, and rivers presented in fine images which show his exact powers of observation, and the themes of the superiority of American nature, the wilderness as Eden, and the lost innocence of America. Pope refers to Lewis' “A Journey” in the Dunciad. His occasional verses, such as the one in honor of Lord Baltimore which shows Lewis' sense of history and patriotism, and his poems on Governor B. L. Calvert also reveal his merit. His reflection of contemporary poets and philosophers, his anticipation of significant American themes, and the excellence of his poetry all suggest that Lewis was an important poet.

Hopkins' "The Windhover" Viewed as a Nature Poem (Continued)

Hopkins' "The Windhover" Viewed as a Nature Poem (Continued)

Hopkins' "The Windhover" Viewed as a Nature Poem

Hopkins' "The Windhover" Viewed as a Nature Poem

Meredith and Goethe

Why was George Meredith, like so many of the Victorian philosophes, reticent about the sources of his philosophy? Perhaps he believed that his idea of nature was his own creation; or perhaps he felt that he had indicated his teacher (or teachers) clearly enough for posterity. Whatever was the case, his silence has aroused much speculation. Tennyson has been named as the inspiration of the sentimental spiritualism in Meredith's early nature poems; Mary (Peacock Nicolls) Meredith has been given credit for his belief in the spirituality of love and for his courageous outlook on life; the Moravian brothers of Neuwied and Thomas Love Peacock have been suggested as possible sources of Meredith's altruism; R. H. Horne and Wordsworth have been mentioned as contributors to the poet's embryonic nature philosophy; and even Shelley, James Thomson, and August Comte have received their due for influencing Meredith in the early years of his life. All these hypotheses, it is true, are supported by the idea of nature that one finds in Meredith's poems. However, it seems to me that if one takes all these suggestions into account one must assume that Meredith's philosophy of nature was a patched-up conception. There is no evidence in Meredith's poetry to justify that assumption.

Rabelais and the Chanson

French musical art during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries found one of its highest forms of expression in the chanson, in musical settings of poems of a popular nature, much closer to the heart of the people than the complicated and refined poetry of the grands rhétori-queurs. With composers of the Burgundian School—Binchois (d. 1467), Dufay (d. 1474), and other musicians connected with the Burgundian Court—the chanson, usually in one of the formes fixes (rondeau, virelai, ballade), reached a height hardly surpassed since: simple, elegant settings for one or two voices with instrumental accompaniment, in marked on‐trast to the complex and recondite ars nova of the preceding century. Even in their sacred music, composers of the Burgundian School made frequent use of the secular song, building their motets and masses upon popular melodies as cantus firmi (tenor melodies upon which a polyphonic structure was erected). With the rise of the Netherlandish School in the latter half of the fifteenth century and with its trend toward a more vocal style, chiefly under the influence of Ockeghem, Buynois, and Obrecht, polyphonic settings of the chanson became popular. In these, music and poetry alike were characterized by greater flexibility in composition: the formes fixes gradually gave way to free forms, generally light, graceful, and spirited in tone; and the music, although adhering to the imitative style of the motet, achieved a similar lightness and grace through the use of quick rhythmic patterns, short phrases with many repeated sections, and a leaning toward homophonic techniques. Most of the great Flemish composers, headed by Josquin des Prés, included music of this type among their productions; but it is perhaps Clément Janequin who best exemplifies the chanson at its gayest, its lightest, and its most frivolous. The popularity of the chanson is witnessed, further, not only by many chansonniers in MS from the late fifteenth century but also by the publication of nearly 600 chansons during the short space of twenty years (1529-49) by two editors alone—Pierre Attaingnant at Paris and Jacques Moderne at Lyons.

Country Life in Burmese Literature

While Burmese nature poems are numerous enough in all periods of W literature to fill a sizable anthology, interest in the life of countrypeople–w their work and diversions–does not seem to have been manifested till the first half of the eighteenth century, when Padethayaza wrote his idylls, one of which we give here as No. I.

Emily Dickinson and her Nature Poems

Emily Dickinson and her Nature Poems

A Source for Medwall's Nature

A comparison of Henry Medwall's Morality Nature and John Lydgate's poem, Reson and Sensuallyte, makes it plain that the two works exhibit remarkable coincidences of character, situation, and language. The general resemblance is obvious enough. In each of the works the plot is allegorical, and in each the hero, who is entitled “Man” in the Morality and, impersonally, “I” in the poem, is a type figure representing mankind. This representative of humanity is in each case approached by the lady Nature, who, after giving him a careful explanation of herself and a thorough list of admonitions, finally sends him away to travel through the world. The allegory which follows is of the familiar type in which the life of man is represented by a journey; but the manner in which this journey is undertaken is carefully specialized in the poem, and in this special form is so strikingly reproduced in the play that one may readily conclude that the former supplied much of the material to be found in the latter.