Literature Foundation 2009
Week 7
For week 8
Please read and be prepared to comment on this poem:
Day of These Days
Such a morning it is when love
leans through geranium windows
and calls with a cockerel's tongue.When red-haired girls scamper like roses
over the rain-green grass;
and the sun drips honey.When hedgerows grow venerable,
berries dry black as blood,
and holes suck in their bees.Such a morning it is when mice
run whispering from the church,
dragging dropped ears of harvest.When the partridge draws back his spring
and shoots like a buzzing arrow
over grained and mahogany fields.When no table is bare,
and no beast dry,
and the tramp feeds on ribs of rabbit.Laurie Lee (1944)
This poem was set in last year's Literature Foundation exam paper. The sole instruction was: 'Your answer should include detailed discussion of form, content and style'. If you want to see it in the context of the actual exam paper, it's here (the formatting of the poem has been a bit distorted by translation to the Web).
I would like each small group, please, to read the whole poem carefully with the examiners' instruction in mind, and be prepared to talk about it.
You can't do a traditional scansion of this poem because the lines vary in length, and there is no explicit sense of a formal metre from which the irregularities depart. Or I can't see one, anyway: maybe you can. So you can't really use the proper terminology -- 'trochee' and 'spondee' and so on. But clearly it is a poem, and has its own distinctive rhythms: if you read it out loud it's not like reading out prose.
The way you deal with this is by deciding, for each line, which syllables take the emphasis; when you've done this, decide how the resulting rhythm -- the stressed and unstressed syllables -- relates to the meaning, as usual. And remember that for all English poetry, however strange, there is an expectation of a iambic rhythm in the reader's mind, against which the poem's irregularities work. As here.
I would like you also to think, please, about the difference between the modernist style of this poem (which is, clearly, a nature poem) and the Romantic attitude to nature. A brief introduction to modernism is here (pdf). To find out more you could read the rather exhaustive (and somewhat forbidding) account in the Wikipedia. Or, you could gain much merit by reading The Waste Land, the pre-eminent, truly wonderful modernist poem. It is, to say the least, very difficult. Wrestle with it. Attempt to fall in love with it. It's important. A heavily annotated version is here.
