Ravenna Diagram Reading Guide #4

This be the next entry in Ravenna Diagram reading notes for Susan Brown.  Inquire here for more info....

R.D. READING NOTES #4

COLD SPRING (p.6)

Poem full of obscurities.  Stanzas 1 & 2 : we are back in northern MN winter landscape.  Raven/Ravenna.  Shakespeare’s “treble-dated crow” (Phoenix & Turtle) – which, according to legend,  engenders offspring by breathing – is flying back and forth.

“scrawny schemer.... Signature / of Cain-torn soil”  :  slight mingling of Biblical and Native American legends.  Raven, along with Bluejay, appears in some Trickster stories.

“something resolute... smoke-dispute” : a basic philosophical debate – what is Death?  What is Life?

“dissipating ghost-limb, drifting / wake” : allusion to parallels between 19th-cent. Ghost Dance movement and Christian doctrines of Resurrection

“morse code... remorse” : sound echo with Latin mors, death

“chancy chancery... So choose” : the actuality of death, its duel or chess game with life, motivates the moral conscience – what shall I choose to do, how shall I live, in the face of mortality?

“Only way / is up, replies the smoke” : affinity between ghost, or spirit, and smoke – the “morse code” of Native Am. smoke-signals (& peace pipes)

“raven-laughter (hoarse / sneers)” : the suggestion behind this poem’s folktale dialectic is of something beyond cynicism or fatalism

the Ides of March in its idea

DOUBLE-BIND

That brilliant peacock-feathered eagle

Joachim fingerpainted

on parchment (ancient

plummet out of Calabrian ingle-

cave) figured the Holy Ghost –

monarch of the air,

white-haired regal raptor

rapt to avenge every Tuscan boast.

I marvel at the prestidigitation

of the priestly mind –

the Akeda, a double-bind,

knotting its pivotal vocation

under the shadow of those gilded wings...

that mountebank YHWH

in his coyote way

the widerruf of pyramidal things.

Folktales & myths were a defense.

Mechanism of the nurse

to lullaby the curse

& soothe the children in their tents...

they builded better than they knew.

The king is dead, long

live the king.  Bong

sounds the gong – old Caesar’s through.

Absolute control is crumbling.

Even now, the axe

is laid to the root... don’t

ask.  Meek Joachim is mumbling.

3.15.18

good comment today by Jack Kimball re these issues. I agree, though it may not seem like it. At least I agree if one is willing to think of the Bible, the Constitution, Shakespeare, Keats, Pushkin, Poe, etc. also - along with Dickinson and Whitman - as "folk art".

Authentic "fine art" is sophisticated art which has kept its roots in reality, experience, feeling, truth. Like authentic folk art.