The Windhover: Gerard Manley Hopkins

The Windhover by Gerard Manley Hopkins is a semi-romantic, religious poem dedicated to Christ. It is a usual Hopkinsian sonnet that begins with description of nature and ends in meditation about God and Christ and his beauty, greatness and grace. The poem also uses his usual “sprung rhythm”, Anglo-Saxon diction, alliteration, internal rhyming, new compound metaphors, elliptical grammar and complex threads of connotation

Hopkins has mixed his romantic fascination with the nature with his religious favor of gratitude towards God for giving us a beautiful nature. The beauty of nature is here illustrated by a wonderful bird flying in the air. He describes a bird which he saw flying in the sky that morning. Like in a romantic poem, he remembers the experience to express his feelings. That morning, the speaker had been out at dawn. From the excited description in the poem, we can infer that the speaker was probably in the field. His attention was suddenly drawn by the scene of a bird flying in the sky. The first stanza of the poem is a description of the different tricks of the bird’s flight. In the second the speaker remembers the beauty of Christ and says that he is a billion times loveliest. So, claiming that the nature’s beauty is no wonder, he concludes in the last stanza that everything he looks at reminds him the pain and suffering of Christ which has made human life so beautiful and given this opportunity to enjoy it. To this devotee of Christ, everything brings the image of Christ and his wounds and pain and sacrifice. This suggests that he always remembers and becomes thankful to Christ. As the subtitle suggests, the poem is a thanksgiving to Christ. The Windhover is a sonnet whose octave describes the flight of a kestrel (windhover) that he saw that morning. The sestet is divided in two parts: the first three lines are about the bird and the comparison of the bird with Christ who is ‘a billion times lovelier’, and the last three lines express his memories and appreciation of Christ. But the poem is rather difficult because the poet has used odd old English words, only implications, and Christian symbols to suggest the pain (gall), wound (gash), blood (vermillion), sacrifice, and so the greatness of Christ. The bottom-line of the difficult ideas in this poem is that ‘it is because of the sacrifice of Christ that we have such a life, and we can enjoy the majestic beauty of the nature: so we should thank him. The speaker compares the bird with Christ, “my chevalier”, who is a billion times lovelier, more brute (wild) and dangerous (consuming) in his beauty. The fire or brilliance of Christ is dazzling this bird is no wonder. “No wonder”, says the poet about the bird because the real wonder of the world is another supreme gift of God, his son, the Christ. His steps on the soil make a semblance (shape) of a wound (gash) when the blood-red (vermilion) and golden light of the sun is cast on it. The flight of the bird reminds the speaker of his Christ’s crucifixion; his blood falls on us for redemption: his suffering (gall) is also another thing to remember.  The last stanza associatively brings together unrelated words, each telling something about Christ and his suffering and sacrifice for human beings. The description of the first stanza and the comparison of the second stanza are all forgotten when the poet deeply meditates and exalts in the sacrifice and greatness of Christ in the last three-line stanza. The red ember-like the light of the morning sun on the horizon of the blue-bleak sky and he is lost in contemplation. The poem is almost impossible to understand without good background knowledge about Hopkins’s ideas and his odd words. There are many words of the Anglo-Saxon origin like rung (past tense of ‘ring’ meaning go round), minion, dauphin, chevalier (prince), etc. There are also unusual combinations like “dapple-dawn-drawn”, which is an image of the bird. The last stanza is particularly complex because of the associatively linked words related to Christ and his sacrifice. Finally, the grammar is also odd; actually the poem does not follow any traditional grammar and structure. In short, the poem can be discussed as a sonnet because it has some of the features of the typical sonnet, but it must be called a modified sonnet adapted to a different kind of subject, word-game and music. By implication, the poem is therefore a poem of thanksgiving to Christ. It is a hymn that is romantic in form but religious in theme. When the poet sees the beautiful bird, he is reminded of Christ and becomes thankful and appreciative of him. The poem’s theme is therefore related to the poet’s praise of Christ rather than being about the bird.

See more at: http://www.bachelorandmaster.com/britishandamericanpoetry/the-windhover.html#.WErQcJrA-_I

Feminism

A Brief History: The Three Waves of Feminism

While the roots of feminism are buried in ancient Greece, most recognize the movement by the three waves of feminism. The third being the movement in which we are currently residing.

The first wave (1830’s – early 1900’s): Women’s fight for equal contract and property rights

Often taken for granted, women in the late 19th to early 20th centuries, realized that they must first gain political power (including the right to vote) to bring about change was how to fuel the fire. Their political agenda expanded to issues concerning sexual, reproductive and economic matters. The seed was planted that women have the potential to contribute just as much if not more than men. 

According to Miriam Schneir, Simone de Beauvoir wrote that the first woman to "take up her pen in defense of her sex" was Christine de Pizan in the 15th century.^[3] Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa and Modesta di Pozzo di Forzi worked in the 16th century.^[3] Marie Le Jars de Gournay, Anne Bradstreet and François Poullain de la Barre wrote in the 17th.^[3]

Mary Wollstonecraft published one of the first feminist treatises, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), in which she advocated the social and moral equality of the sexes, extending the work of her 1790 pamphlet, A Vindication of the Rights of Men. Her later unfinished novel, Maria, or the Wrongs of Woman, earned her considerable criticism as she discussed women's sexual desires. She died young, and her widower, the philosopher William Godwin, quickly wrote a memoir of her that, contrary to his intentions, destroyed her reputation for generations.

Wollstonecraft is regarded as the grandmother of British feminism and her ideas shaped the thinking of the suffragettes (women's right to vote), who campaigned for the women's vote. After generations of work, this was eventually achieved.

For more details visit: https:First wave feminism

 The second wave (1960’s-1980’s): Broadening the debate

Coming off the heels of World War II, the second wave of feminism focused on the workplace, sexuality, family and reproductive rights. During a time when the United States was already trying to restructure itself, it was perceived that women had met their equality goals with the exception of the failure of the ratification of the Equal Rights Amendment (which has still yet to be passed).

Misconceptions…

This time is often dismissed as offensive, outdated and obsessed with middle class white women’s problems. Conversely, many women during the second wave were initially part of the Black Civil Rights Movement, Anti Vietnam Movement, Chicano Rights Movement, Asian-American Civil Rights Movement, Gay and Lesbian Movement and many other groups fighting for equality. Many of the women supporters of the aforementioned groups felt their voices were not being heard and felt that in order to gain respect in co-ed organizations they first needed to address gender equality concerns.

Women cared so much about these civil issues that they wanted to strengthen their voices by first fighting for gender equality to ensure they would be heard. 

For more details visit:  Second wave feminism

The third wave (1990’s – present): The “micropolitics” of gender equality

Today and unlike the former movements, the term ‘feminist’ is received less critically by the female population due to the varying feminist outlooks. There are the ego-cultural feminists, the radicals, the liberal/reforms, the electoral, academic, ecofeminists… the list goes on.

The main issues we face today were prefaced by the work done by the previous waves of women. We are still working to vanquish the disparities in male and female pay and the reproductive rights of women. We are working to end violence against women in our nation as well as others.

We are still fighting for acceptance and a true understanding of the term ‘feminism,’ it should be noted that we have made tremendous progress since the first wave. It is a term that has been unfairly associated first, with ladies in hoop skirts and ringlet curls, then followed by butch, man-hating women.

Third-wave feminism deals with issues which appear to limit or oppress women, as well as other marginalized identities.  Arguably, the biggest challenge to the efforts of third-wave feminism is the decline in popular support for the relevance and importance of feminism in what some claim is the "post-feminist" era. Third-wave feminists have recently utilized the internet and modern technology to enhance their movement, which has allowed for information and organization to reach a larger audience..

 Due to the range of feminist issues today, it is much harder to put a label on what a feminist looks like.  Quite frankly, it all comes down to the dictionary’s very simple yet profound definition: “the theory of the political, economic and social equality of the sexes.” 

Fore more details visit:  Third wave feminism

Paintings

Caspar David Friedrich was a German Romantic landscape painter during the early 1800s, and it would seem, judging from his work, he thought about little else.

Friedrich was born in 1774, the son of a candle maker. Though born in Pomerania on the Baltic, he was raised in Dresden, Germany,  where he had a strict, Protestant upbringing, marred early in his life by an incident in which he fell through some ice. In rescuing him, his older brother drowned. His brother's death was to profoundly effect him for the rest of his life. He was a deeply sad and melancholy individual. He was forty years old before he married, and then to a girl 22 years his junior. She bore him three children. A product of the illustrious Copenhagen Academy, Friedrich spent his entire life in Germany, where his exquisitely detailed, modest-sized landscapes each come loaded with solemn symbolism relating to his deep awareness of his own mortality. The Stages of Life, painted in 1835, just five years before his death, is one such work.

The Stages of Life, 1835,
Caspar David Friedrich

Though all of his work was done from his imagination, they were loosely based upon sketches of actual locations. This painting is set on a beach recognizable as the harbor of Greifswald where he was born. Five ships are depicted at various distances representing the passing of life. The mast of the central ship, painted head on, forms a crucifix symbolizing Friedrich's deep religious faith. On the shore is an old man in the foreground, his back to us, representing old age (Friedrich), while a young man in a top hat, (his nephew) represents maturity. Beyond them, playing on the beach are a young girl (his eldest daughter) representing youth, and two children playing with a Swedish flag, (his two younger children), representing childhood. The painting with its luminous, golden sky and lavender clouds is remarkably tranquil. Yet there is a feeling of sadness as one watches the ships, symbolizing life, sailing away into the sunset. How different we are today.  How likely we are to dismiss such musings as something we'd just as soon not think about.

Poems

Arvind Krishna Mehrotra

Arvind Krishna Mehrotra is a noted Indian English poet, anthologist, literary critic and translator. He is well known for incorporating a post-modernist style in modern English poetry.  His poetry is notable for its quiet command of the reader’s attention; the small details of everyday life in India are its currency. ‘Ironing Lady’, a series of neat descriptions of the precise process of the activity becomes a metaphor for Mehrotra’s approach to writing itself: ‘Common everyday clothes, / Kept loosely in a bundle, / From which the ironing lady / Pulls out a kerchief / … / Making the wrinkles / Disappear under her hand’. In each of his poems it is the accumulation of such apparently simple details that build towards meaning and are allowed to speak for themselves, whether through the poet’s measured, rhythmic delivery in the recordings available here, or on the page.

Readers of Mehrotra’s later work might be surprised to learn that his early poetry was much influenced by Surrealism, a fact Mehrotra has attributed to his need to find an alternative language in which to convey his experiences, which seemed at odds with his ‘Eng. Lit.’ encounters with poetry – as he put it in an interview: ‘How does one write about an uncle in a wheelchair in the language of skylarks and nightingales?’ His later work is firmly situated in – indeed anchored by – the recognisable world of home, domesticity and family. He has said: ‘Discovering the French and the Americans (Pound, William Carlos Williams, Ginsberg) was, for me, a moment of liberation. My subjects did not lie in Europe or the United States, but I had first to make a detour to those places, through their poetry, to realize that my subjects lay nearer home, if not at home.’

Born in Lahore in 1947, Mehrotra is the author of seven volumes of poetry – including Nine Enclosures (1976), Distance in Statute Miles (1982), Middle Earth (1984) and The Transfiguring Places (1998) – as well as three of translations, most recently Songs of Kabir (2011). His Collected Poems 1969–2014 is to be published by Penguin Modern Classics. He lives in Allahabad, where he was Professor of English at the university until his retirement in 2012, and Dehra Dun. In his work as an anthologist and translator Mehrotra has done much to bring the work of Indian poets past and present to a wider audience and has been an outspoken critic of the failure of the Indian literary establishment to do more in this field, remarking in an interview with the Times of India that ‘the list of what Indian academics have not done is a long one’. In the 1970s, along with poets Adil Jussawalla, Gieve Patel and Arun Kolatkar, Mehrotra founded the Bombay poetry publishing collective Clearing House, in response to a lack of such outlets for Indian poets. He has edited several works on Indian literature including The Oxford India Anthology of Twelve Modern Indian Poets (1992), A History of Indian Literature in English (2003) and Collected Poems in English by Arun Kolatkar (2010). Amit Chaudhuri has said of him: ‘In the staid world of Indian poetry in English […] Mehrotra appeared to be what is today called “cool”’.

His works are noted for their innovative exploration of modern concerns and ways of representation. Mehrotra's work has been wide ranging, including both traditional forms and unconventional techniques. Mehrotra's occasional literary experimentation, emphasizing a variety of perspectives, has made his work a part of modern Indian English poetry.

Continuities 

 
I

This is about the green miraculous trees,
And old clocks on stone towers,
And playgrounds full of light
And dark blue uniforms.
At eight I'm a Boy Scout and make a tent
By stretching a bedsheet over parallel bars
And a fire by burning rose bushes,
I know half a dozen knots and drink
Tea from enamel mugs.
I wear khaki drill shorts, note down
The number-plates of cars,
Make a perfect about-turn for the first time.
In September I collect my cousins' books
And find out the dates of the six Mughals
To secretly write the history of India.
I see Napoleon crossing the Alps
On a white horse.

II

My first watch is a fat and silver Omega
Grandfather won in a race fifty-nine years ago;
It never works and I've to
Push its hands every few minutes
To get a clearer picture of time.
Somewhere I've kept my autograph book,
The tincture of iodine in homeopathy bottles,
Bright postcards he sent from
Bad Ems, Germany.
At seven-thirty we are sent home
From the Cosmopolitan Club,
My father says, ‘No-bid,'
My mother forgets her hand
In a deck of cards.
I sit reading on the railing till midnight,
Above a worn sign
That advertises a dentist.

III

I go to sleep after I hear him
Snore like the school bell:
I'm standing alone in a back alley
And a face I can never recollect is removing
The hubcaps from our dull brown Ford.
The first words I mumble are the names of roads,
Thornhill, Hastings, Lytton;
We live in a small cottage,
I grow up on a guava tree
Wondering where the servants vanish
After dinner, at the magic of the bearded tailor
Who can change the shape of my ancestors.
I bend down from the swaying bridge
And pick up the river
Which once tried to hide me:
The dance of torn skin

Is for much later.

Over the years his style changed from flowing surrealism and seems to incline towards a leaner, restrained lyrical poetics in the later work. What remains constant, however, is a sense of the mysterious, the poet’s continued engagement with poetry as a form that deals with the unsayable. Quiet, laconic, sometimes deceptively throwaway, a Mehrotra poem leaves the reader on the verge of larger revelations; the poem’s strength is that these are never articulated.

In a poem entitled ‘The Death of a Sunday Painter’, for instance, a weekend painter is brought to life in a few spare strokes: we learn that he smoked a cherry-wood pipe, that he knew about cannas; that when an essay on literature is read out to him, he listened with a certain courteous attention. There is a fitting air of understatement to the close of the poem; it works not just as effective poetry but as a fitting tribute to a man of some taste and discernment; not a trailblazing artist perhaps, but a man who mattered in his own way to those who knew him.

I followed the truck on my bicycle
And left early; his friends sat all afternoon
In the portico of a nearby house.

The cities of Allahabad and Dehra Dun, the smell of university libraries and seminar rooms, the whiff of colonial history in old clubs and billiard rooms – these are the images that pervade Mehrotra’s poems. This selection also includes some of his family poems, which, to my mind, are among his finest. ‘To an Unborn Daughter’ remains a personal favourite. It combines a lightness of touch, an attention to detail (see the sudden poignant particularity of the “close-bitten nails and light-brown eyes”), a tone both wistful and whimsical, with that sense of the unspoken that pervades so much of his poetry. The last line is subtle and elegantly poised: “I think she wanted to say something.”

It is the style of Mehrotra to continually revise a small body of work, polishing, crafting, and aiming at elegance, wit precision and an impersonality which will fix the poem and the personal memories that are its source.

Mehrotras poetry largely falls into two groups. His earliest work is an immediate reaction to his discovery of various modern, post-modernist and earlier avant-garde style and poetics. On the contrary Mehrotra`s present phase is different as it involves a precise recording of external, a making of art from specifics and details, the notating of what he calls, "location". Often the subject matter comes from memories of childhood or from reading history. The technique which has been used by Mehrotra is generally the surrealistic technique. He likes to juxtapose bits and pieces of sensibility as represented by cliche'd language, sentiments and situations.

In the poems there has been abundant use of Allahabad because most of his poems are related to the nostalgic moments and reminiscences of Allahabad where he had spent a major portion of his life. Mehrotra`s increasing pre-occupation with personal and local realities is derived from his imagism and he demands that poetry be made of specifics and also express its locations.

As a poet Mehrotra also has the capacity to create continuities and connections between language and experience. Mehrotras early poems have several characteristics of post-modernism. The form is highly fragmented and relies on collage and montage with no mythic, formal or symbolic structure to create coherence. As in much post modernist literature it seems to enclose itself with the focus on the text rather than society or history.

The poems of Mehrotra show very little feeling of exhaustion and hopelessness which is noticeable in some of the other post-modernist writers. As far as humour of Mehrotra is concerned it was iconoclastic in nature. Mehrotra`s poetry offers a cool, clever, ironic catalogue of received ideas and ready made speech.

He picks mundane events of his childhood days to base his work, his matter at hand spans not more than a couple or more lines, some are even just one liners, they are subtle events of his childhood the beauty of which he has cherished even till now, not continuous of any single subject but is very much so with another mundane.  He finds poetic beauty even in insignificant things and events such as old clock towers, making a tent as a boy scout, having tea from an enamel mug, an old broken wrist watch, old homeopathy bottles, wornout advertisement sign of a dentist, old cottage that he lived, bearded tailor...

        ##  =========================================================  ##

Arvind Krishna Mehrotra’s poetry is notable for its quiet command of the reader’s attention; the small details of everyday life in India are its currency. ‘Ironing Lady’, a series of neat descriptions of the precise process of the activity becomes a metaphor for Mehrotra’s approach to writing itself: ‘Common everyday clothes, / Kept loosely in a bundle, / From which the ironing lady / Pulls out a kerchief / … / Making the wrinkles / Disappear under her hand’. In each of his poems it is the accumulation of such apparently simple details that build towards meaning and are allowed to speak for themselves, whether through the poet’s measured, rhythmic delivery in the recordings available here, or on the page.
Readers of Mehrotra’s later work might be surprised to learn that his early poetry was much influenced by Surrealism, a fact Mehrotra has attributed to his need to find an alternative language in which to convey his experiences, which seemed at odds with his ‘Eng. Lit.’ encounters with poetry – as he put it in an interview: ‘How does one write about an uncle in a wheelchair in the language of skylarks and nightingales?’ His later work is firmly situated in – indeed anchored by – the recognisable world of home, domesticity and family. He has said: ‘Discovering the French and the Americans (Pound, William Carlos Williams, Ginsberg) was, for me, a moment of liberation. My subjects did not lie in Europe or the United States, but I had first to make a detour to those places, through their poetry, to realize that my subjects lay nearer home, if not at home.’
Born in Lahore in 1947, Mehrotra is the author of seven volumes of poetry – including Nine Enclosures (1976), Distance in Statute Miles (1982), Middle Earth (1984) and The Transfiguring Places (1998) – as well as three of translations, most recently Songs of Kabir (2011). His Collected Poems 1969–2014 is to be published by Penguin Modern Classics. He lives in Allahabad, where he was Professor of English at the university until his retirement in 2012, and Dehra Dun. In his work as an anthologist and translator Mehrotra has done much to bring the work of Indian poets past and present to a wider audience and has been an outspoken critic of the failure of the Indian literary establishment to do more in this field, remarking in an interview with the Times of India that ‘the list of what Indian academics have not done is a long one’. In the 1970s, along with poets Adil Jussawalla, Gieve Patel and Arun Kolatkar, Mehrotra founded the Bombay poetry publishing collective Clearing House, in response to a lack of such outlets for Indian poets. He has edited several works on Indian literature including The Oxford India Anthology of Twelve Modern Indian Poets (1992), A History of Indian Literature in English (2003) and Collected Poems in English by Arun Kolatkar (2010). Amit Chaudhuri has said of him: ‘In the staid world of Indian poetry in English […] Mehrotra appeared to be what is today called “cool”’.
- See more at: http://www.poetryarchive.org/poet/arvind-krishna-mehrotra#sthash.5CcaEJ6I.dpuf

Arvind Krishna Mehrotra’s poetry is notable for its quiet command of the reader’s attention; the small details of everyday life in India are its currency. ‘Ironing Lady’, a series of neat descriptions of the precise process of the activity becomes a metaphor for Mehrotra’s approach to writing itself: ‘Common everyday clothes, / Kept loosely in a bundle, / From which the ironing lady / Pulls out a kerchief / … / Making the wrinkles / Disappear under her hand’. In each of his poems it is the accumulation of such apparently simple details that build towards meaning and are allowed to speak for themselves, whether through the poet’s measured, rhythmic delivery in the recordings available here, or on the page.
Readers of Mehrotra’s later work might be surprised to learn that his early poetry was much influenced by Surrealism, a fact Mehrotra has attributed to his need to find an alternative language in which to convey his experiences, which seemed at odds with his ‘Eng. Lit.’ encounters with poetry – as he put it in an interview: ‘How does one write about an uncle in a wheelchair in the language of skylarks and nightingales?’ His later work is firmly situated in – indeed anchored by – the recognisable world of home, domesticity and family. He has said: ‘Discovering the French and the Americans (Pound, William Carlos Williams, Ginsberg) was, for me, a moment of liberation. My subjects did not lie in Europe or the United States, but I had first to make a detour to those places, through their poetry, to realize that my subjects lay nearer home, if not at home.’
Born in Lahore in 1947, Mehrotra is the author of seven volumes of poetry – including Nine Enclosures (1976), Distance in Statute Miles (1982), Middle Earth (1984) and The Transfiguring Places (1998) – as well as three of translations, most recently Songs of Kabir (2011). His Collected Poems 1969–2014 is to be published by Penguin Modern Classics. He lives in Allahabad, where he was Professor of English at the university until his retirement in 2012, and Dehra Dun. In his work as an anthologist and translator Mehrotra has done much to bring the work of Indian poets past and present to a wider audience and has been an outspoken critic of the failure of the Indian literary establishment to do more in this field, remarking in an interview with the Times of India that ‘the list of what Indian academics have not done is a long one’. In the 1970s, along with poets Adil Jussawalla, Gieve Patel and Arun Kolatkar, Mehrotra founded the Bombay poetry publishing collective Clearing House, in response to a lack of such outlets for Indian poets. He has edited several works on Indian literature including The Oxford India Anthology of Twelve Modern Indian Poets (1992), A History of Indian Literature in English (2003) and Collected Poems in English by Arun Kolatkar (2010). Amit Chaudhuri has said of him: ‘In the staid world of Indian poetry in English […] Mehrotra appeared to be what is today called “cool”’.
- See more at: http://www.poetryarchive.org/poet/arvind-krishna-mehrotra#sthash.5CcaEJ6I.dpuf