A TALK ON ADVERTISING - HERMAN WOUK (TEXT)

Text for III Semester B.A./ B. Com./ B. Sc. Additional English 

A TALK ON ADVERTISING

HERMAN WOUK

An after-Dinner Oration by the Artist

Marquis, while you were talking I looked around this table and saw that (nearly) everyone here earns a living through the activity called advertising. Now, I realize that you invited me in the absence, enforced by your sedentary ways, of stuffed tiger heads or other trophies on your walls, a live artist being the equivalent of a dead beast as a social ornament. I will not question your motive because it has given me a chance to do a beautiful and good thing. I should like to entreat all these gentlemen to redeem the strange, bittersweet miracle of their lives, while there is yet time, by giving up the advertising business at once.

Has it ever occurred to any of you gentlemen to examine the peculiar fact that you find bread in your mouths daily? How does this happen? Who is it that you have persuaded to feed you? The obvious answer is that you buy your food, but this just states the question in another, less clear way, because money is nothing but a token of exchange. Drop the confusing element of money from the whole process, and the question I’ve posed must confront you bleakly. What is it that you do, that entitles you to eat?

A shoemaker gives shoes for his bread. Well. A singer sings for her supper, well. A capitalist leads a large enterprise. Well. A pilot flies, a coal-miner digs, a sailor moves things, a mister preaches, an author tells stories, a laundryman washes, an auto worker makes cars, a painter makes pictures, a street-car conductor moves people, a stenographer writes down words, a lumberjack saws, and a tailor sews. The people with the victuals appreciate these services and cheerfully feed the performers. But what does an advertising man do?

He induces human beings to want things they don’t want.

Now, I will be deeply obliged if you will tell me by what links of logic anybody can be convinced that your activity – the creation of want where want does not exist – is a useful one and should be rewarded with food. Doesn’t it seem, rather, the worst sort of mischief, deserving to be starved into extinction?

None of you, however, is anything but well-fed; yet I am sure that until this moment it has never occurred to you on what a dubious basis your feeding is accomplished. I shall tell you exactly how you eat. You induce people to use more things than they naturally desire – the more useless and undesirable the article, the greater the advertising effort needed to dispose of it – and in all the profit from that unnatural purchasing, you share. You are fed by the makers of undesired things, who exchange these things for food by means of your arts and give you your share of the haul.  

Lest you think I oversimplify, I gave you an obvious illustration. People naturally crave meat; so the advertising of meat is on a negligible scale. However, nobody is born craving tobacco, and even its slaves instinctively loathe it. So the advertising of tobacco is the largest item of expense in its distribution. It follows, of course, that advertising men thrive most richly in the service of utterly useless most richly in the service of utterly useless commodities like tobacco or underarm pastes, or in a field where there is a hopeless plethora of goods, such as soap or whisky.  

But the great evil of advertising is not that it is unproductive and wasteful; were it so, it would be no worse than idleness. No. Advertising blasts everything that is good and beautiful in this land with a horrid spreading mildew. It has tarnished Creation. What is sweet to any of you in this world? Love? Nature? Art? Language? Youth? Behold them all, yoked by advertising in the harness of commerce.

Aurora Dawn! Has any of you enough of a ear for English to realize what a crime against the language is that (trade) name? Aurora is the dawn! The redundancy should assail your ears like the shriek of a bad hinge. But you are so numbed by habit that it conveys no offence. So it is with all your barbarities. Shakespeare used the rhyming of ‘double’ and ‘bubble’ to create two immortal lines in Macbeth. You use it to help sell your Dubl-Bubl Shampoo, and you have not the slightest sense of doing anything wrong. Should lifts man above the animals and that you are smothering the flame in mud, you would stare. You are staring. Let me tell you without images, then, that you are cheapening speech until it is ceasing to be an honest method of exchange, and commercial is meant to be a lie and the English in the President’s speech which follows, a truth, will in the end fall into a paralyzing scepticism in which all utterance will be disbelieved.

God made a great green wonderland when he spread out the span of the United States. Where is the square mile inhabited by men wherein advertising has not drowned out the land’s meek hymn with the blare of billboards? By what right do you turn Nature into a painted hag crying ‘Com buy’?

A few heavenly talents brighten the world in each generation. Artistic inspiration is entrusted to weak human beings who can be tempted with gold. Has advertising scrupled to buy up the holiest of these gifts and set them to work peddling?

And the traffic in lovely youth! By the Lord, gentlemen, I would close every advertising agency in the country tomorrow, if only to head off the droves of silly girls, sufficiently cursed with beauty, who troop into the cities each month, most of them to be stained and scarred, a few to find ashy success in the hardening life of a model! When will a strong voice call a halt to this dismal pilgrimage, this Children’s Crusade to the Unholy Land? When will someone denounce the snaring allurements of the picture magazines? When will someone tell these babies that for each girl who grins on a magazine cover a hundred weep in back rooms, and that even the grin is a bought and forced thing that fades with the flash of the photographer’s bulb, leaving a face grim with scheming or heartbreak?

To what ends is all this lying, vandalism and misuse? You are trying to sell; never mind what, never mind how, never mind to whom – just sell, sell, sell! Small wonder that in good old American slang ‘sell’ means ‘fraud’! Come now! Do you hesitate to promise requited love to miserable girls, triumph to failures virility to weaklings, even prowess to little children, for the price of a mouth wash or a breakfast food? Does it ever occur to you to be ashamed to live by preying on the myriad little tragedies of unfulfilment which make your methods pay so well?

I trust that I am offending everybody very deeply. An artist has the privileges of the court fool, you know. I paint because I see with a seeing eye, an eye that familiarity never glazes. Advertising strikes me as it would a man from Mars and as it undoubtedly appears to the angels: an occupation the aim of which is subtle prevarication for gain, and the effect of which is the blighting of everything fair and pleasant in our time with the garish fungus of greed. If I have made all of you, or just one of you, repent of this career and determine to seek decent work, I will not have breathed in vain today.

-----

Glossary

oration:            a formal speech

sedentary ways: spending much of the time seated

lumberhjack:   a person who cuts down trees for a living

extinction:       ruin or destruction

dubious:           doubtful or questionable

plethora:          plenty or excess

mildew:             destructive growth of tiny fungi forming on plants, leather, food, etc. in warm and damp conditions

behold:             look, notice

yoked:              bound, linked or tied to

Prometheus:      a mythical character who stole fire from heaven

smothering:       suffocating, suppressing

paralyzing:        rendering helpless

scepticism:        doubt

hymn:               sacred song or music

bill boards:        advertisements displayed on boards

traffic:               immoral and illegal trade

crusades:          religious battles in the Middle Ages led by Christian rulers to recover the Holy Land from the Muslims

prevarication:    evading the truth

****

    

The Cop and the Anthem - O.Henry

The Cop and the Anthem - O.Henry

On his bench in Madison Square, Soapy moved uneasily. When wild geese honk high of nights, and when women without sealskin coats grow kind to their husbands, and when Soapy moves uneasily on his bench in the park, you may know that winter is near at hand.

A dead leaf fell in Soapy's lap. That was Jack Frost's card. Jack is kind to the regular denizens of Madison Square and gives fair warning of his annual call. At the corners of four streets he hands his pasteboard to the North Wind, footman of the mansion of All Outdoors, so that the inhabitants thereof may make ready.

Soapy's mind became cognizant of the fact that the time had come for him to resolve himself info a singular Committee of Ways and Means to provide against the coming rigor. And therefore he moved uneasily on his bench.

The hibernatorial ambitions of Soapy were not of the highest. In them were no considerations of Mediterranean cruises, of soporific Southern skies or drifting in the Vesuvian Bay. Three months on the Island was what his soul craved. Three months of assured board and bed and congenial company, safe from Boreas and blue Coats, seemed to Soapy the essence of things desirable.

For years the hospitab1e Blackwell's had been his winter quarters. Just as his more fortunate fellow New Yorkers had bought their tickets to Palm Beach and the Riviera each winter, so Soapy had made his humble arrangements for his annual hegira to the Island. And now the time was come. On the previous night three Sabbath newspapers, distributed beneath his coat, about his ankles and over his lap, had failed to repulse the cold as he slept on his bench near the spurring fountain in the ancient square. So the Island loomed big and timely in Soapy's mind. He scorned the provisions made in the name of charity for the city's dependents. In Soapy's opinion the Law was more benign than Philanthropy.

There was an endless round of institutions, municipal and eleemosynary, on which he might set out and receive lodging and food accordant with the simple life. But to one of Soapy's proud spirit the gifts of charity are encumbered. If not in coin you must pay in humiliation of spirit for every benefit received at the hands of philanthropy. As Caesar had his Brutus, every bed of charity must have its toll of a bath, every loaf of bread its compensation of a private and personal inquisition. Wherefore it is better to be a guest of the law, which, though conducted by rules, does not meddle unduly with a gentleman's private affairs. I Soapy, having decided to go to the Island, at once set about accomplishing his desire. There were many easy ways of doing this. The pleasantest was to dine luxuriously at some expensive restaurant; and then, after declaring Insolvency, be handed over quietly and without uproar to a policeman. An accommodating magistrate would do the rest.

Soapy left his bench and strolled out of the square and across the level sea of asphalt, where Broadway and Fifth Avenue flow together. Up Broadway he turned, and halted at a glittering cafe where are gathered together nightly the choicest products of the grape, the silkworm, and the protoplasm.

Soapy had confidence in himself from the lowest button of his vest upward. He was shaven, and his coat was decent and his neat black, ready-tied four-in-hand had been presented to him by a lady missionary on Thanksgiving Day If he could reach a table in the restaurant unsuspected success would be his. The portion of him that would show above the table would raise no doubt in the waiter's mind. A roasted mallard duck, thought Soapy, would be about the thing; with a bottle of Chablis, and then Camembert, a demitasse and a cigar. One dollar for the cigar would be enough. The total would not be so high as to call forth any supreme manifestation of revenge from the cafe management; and yet the meat would leave him filled and happy for the journey to his winter refuge.

But as Soapy set foot in side the restaurant door the head waiter's eye fell upon his frayed trousers and decadent shoes. Strong and ready hands turned him about and conveyed him in silence and haste to the sidewalk and averted the ignoble fate of the menaced mallard.

Soapy turned off Broadway. It seemed that his route to the coveted Island was not to be an epicurean one. Some other way of entering limbo must be thought of.At a corner of Sixth Avenue electric lights and cunningly displayed wares behind plate-glass made a shop window conspicuous. Soapy took a cobblestone and dashed it through the glass. People came running around the corner, a policeman in the lead. Soapy stood still, with his hands in his pockets, arid smiled at the sight of brass buttons.

"Where's the man that done that?" inquired the officer, excitedly.

"Don't you figure out that I might have had something to do with it?" said Soapy, not without sarcasm, but friendly, as one greets good fortune.

The policeman's mind refused to accept Soapy even as a clue. Men who smash windows do not remain to parley with the law's minions. They take to their heels. The policeman saw a man halfway down the block running to catch a cat. With drawn club he joined in the pursuit. Soapy, with disgust in his heart, loafed along, twice unsuccessful.

On the opposite side of the street was a restaurant of no great pretensions. It catered to large appetites and modest purses. Its crockery and atmosphere were thick; its soup and napery thin. Into this place Soapy took his accusive shoes and telltale trousers without challenge. At a table he sat and consumed beefsteak, flapjacks, doughnuts and pie. And then to the waiter he betrayed the fact that the minutest coin and he were strangers.

"Now, get busy and call a cop,' said Soapy, "And don't keep a gentleman waiting."

"No cop for youse," said the waiter, with a voice like butter cakes and an eye like the cherry in a Manhattan cocktail. "Hey, Con!"

Neatly upon his left ear on the callous pavement two waiters pitched Soapy. He arose joint by joint, as a carpenter's rule opens, and beat the lust from his clothes. Arrest seemed but a rosy dream. The Island seemed very far away. A policeman who stood before a drug store two doors away laughed and walked down the street.

Five blocks Soapy traveled before his courage permitted him to woo capture again. This time the opportunity presented what he fatuously termed to himself a "cinch." A young woman of a modest and pleasing guise was standing before a show window gazing with sprightly interest at its display of shaving mugs and inkstands, and two yards from the window a large policeman of severe demeanor leaned against a water plug.

It was Soapy's design to assume the role of the despicable and execrated "masher." The refined and elegant appearance of his victim and the contiguity of the conscientious cop encouraged him to believe that he would soon feel the pleasant official clutch upon his arm that would insure his winter quarters on the right little, tight little isle

Soapy straightened the lady missionary's ready-made tie, dragged his shrinking cuffs into the open, set his hat at a killing cant and sidled toward the young woman. He made eyes at her, was taken with sudden coughs and "hems," smiled, smirked and went brazenly through the impudent and contemptible litany of the "masher." With half an eye Soapy saw that the policeman was watching him fixedly. The young woman moved away a few steps, and again bestowed her absorbed attention upon the shaving mugs. Soapy followed, boldly stepping to her side, raised his hat and said:

"Ah there, Bedelia! Don't you want to come and play in my yard?"

The policeman was still looking. The persecuted young woman had but to beckon a finger and Soapy would be practically en route for his insular haven. Already be imagined he could feel tile cozy warmth of the station-house. The young woman faced him and, stretching out a hand, caught Soapy's Coat sleeve.

"Sure, Mike," she Said, joyfully, "if you'll blow me to a pail of suds. I'd have spoke to you sooner' but the cop was watching."

With the young woman playing the clinging ivy to his oak Soapy walked past the policeman overcome with gloom. He seemed doomed to liberty.

At the next corner he shook off his companion and ran. He halted in the district where by night are found the lightest streets, hearts, vows and librettos. Women in furs and men in greatcoats moved gaily in the wintry air. A sudden fear seized Soapy that some dreadful enchantment had rendered him immune to arrest. The thought brought a little of panic upon it' and when he came upon another policeman lounging grandly in front of a transplendent theatre he caught at the immediate straw of "disorderly conduct."

On the sidewalk Soapy began to yell drunken gibberish at the top of his harsh voice. He danced, howled, raved, and otherwise disturbed the welkin.

The policeman twirled his club, turned his back to Soapy and remarked to a citizen.

"Tis one of them Yale lads celebratin' the goose egg they give to the Hartford College. Noisy, but no harm. We've instructions to lave them be."

Disconsolate, Soapy ceased his unavailing racket. Would never a policeman lay hands on him? In his fancy the Island seemed an unattainable Arcadia. He buttoned his thin coat against the chilling wind.

In a cigar store he saw a well-dressed man lighting a cigar at a swinging light. His silk umbrella he had set by the door on entering. Soapy stepped inside, secured the umbrella and sauntered off with it slowly. The man at the cigar light followed hastily.

"My umbrella," he said, sternly.

"Oh, is it?" sneered Soapy, adding insult to petit larceny. "Well, why don't you call a policeman? I took it. Your umbrella? Why don't you call a cop? There stands one on the corner."

The umbrella owner slowed his steps. Soapy did likewise, with a presentiment that luck would again run against him. The policeman looked at the two curiously.

"Of course," said the umbrella man, "that is...;well, you know how these mistakes occur...; I...;if it's your umbrella I hope you'll excuse me...;I picked it up this morning in a restaurant...;If you recognize it as yours, why...;I hope you'll --

"Of course it's mine," said Soapy, viciously.

The ex-umbrella man retreated. The policeman hurried to assist a tall blonde in an opera cloak across the street in front of a street car that was approaching two blocks away.

Soapy walked eastward through a street damaged by improvements. He hurled the umbrella wrathfully into an excavation. He muttered against the men who wear helmets and carry clubs. Because he wanted to fall into their clutches, they seemed to regard him as a king who could do no wrong.

At length Soapy reached one of the avenues to the east where the glitter and turmoil was but faint. He set his face down this toward Madison Square, for the homing instinct survives even when the home is a park bench.

But on an unusually quiet corner Soapy came to a standstill. Here was an old church, quaint and rambling and gabled. Through one violet-stained window a soft light glowed, where, no doubt, the organist loitered over the keys, making sure of his mastery of the coming Sabbath anthem. For there drifted out to Soapy's ears sweet music that caught and held him transfixed against the convolutions of the iron fence.

The moon was above, lustrous and serene; vehicles and pedestrians were few; sparrows twittered sleepily in the eaves; for a little while the scene might have been a country churchyard. And the anthem that the organist played cemented Soapy to the iron fence, for he had known it well in the days when his life contained such things as mothers and roses and ambitions and friends and immaculate thoughts and collars.

The conjunction of Soapy's receptive state of mind and the influences about the old church wrought a sudden and wonderful change in his soul. He viewed with swift horror the pit into which he had tumbled, the degraded days, unworthy desires, dead hopes, wrecked faculties and base motives that made up his existence.

And also in a moment his heart responded thrillingly to this novel mood. An instantaneous and strong impulse moved him to battle with his desperate fate. He would pull himself out of the mire; he would make a man of himself again; he would conquer the evil that had taken possession of him. There was time; he was comparatively young yet: he would resurrect his old eager ambitions and pursue them without faltering. Those solemn but sweet organ notes had set up a revolution in him. Tomorrow he would go into the roaring downtown district and find work. A fur importer had once offered him a place as driver. He would find him to-morrow and ask for the position. He would be somebody in the world. He would --Soapy felt a hand laid on his arm. He looked quickly around into the broad face of a policeman.

"What are you doin' here?" asked the officer.

"Nothin'," said Soapy.

"Then come along," said the policeman.

"Three months on the Island," said the Magistrate in the Police Court the next morning.

 ****

The Two Trees – W B Yeats

The Two Trees – W B Yeats (1865- 1939)

Beloved, gaze in thine own heart.

The holy tree is growing there;

From joy the holy branches start,

And all the trembling flowers they bear.

The changing colours if its fruit

Have dowered the stars with merry light;

The surety of its hidden root

Has planted quiet in the night;

The shaking of its leafy head

Has given the waves their melody,

And made my lips and music wed,

Murmuring a wizard song for thee.

There the Loves a circle go,

The flaming circle of our days,

Gyring, spiring to and fro

In those great ignorant leafy ways;

Remembering all that shaken hair

And how the winged sandals dart,

Thine eyes grow full of tender care:

Beloved, gaze in thine own heart,

Gaze no more in the bitter glass

The demons, with their subtle guile,

Lift up before us when they pass,

Or only gaze a little while;

For there a fatal image grows

That the stormy night receives,

Roots half hidden under snows,

Broken boughs and blackened leaves.

For all things turn to barrenness

In the dim glass the demons hold,

The glass of outer weariness,

Made when God slept in times of old.

There, through the broken branches, go

The ravens of unresting thought;

Flying, crying, to and fro,

Cruel claw and hungry throat,

Or else they stand and sniff the wind,

And shake their ragged wings; alas!

Thy tender eyes grow all unkind:

Gaze no more in the bitter glass.

Glossary:

wizard:        a man with magic powers

gyring:         to move around in circles                   

guile:           clever dishonest behaviour in order to trick people

barren:         infertile

Summary:

The poet in his poem ‘The Two Trees’ invites his beloved (Maud Gonne) to look inside his heart, where a holy tree grows. Joy shakes its leaves. The shaking of the tree has made him murmur a wizard song for her.

The poet continues, telling his beloved not to look into the mirror, or only for a little while, because a dangerous image there. All things turn to barrenness and mirror holds the image of tiredness. In those frightening places the ravens of unresting thought fly, and make one’s eyes unkind.

This poem, like many that are addressed to Maud Gonne, contrasts her inward with her outward beauty. On a simple level, the poem suggests that the beloved look within herself to the spirit of her nature (the tree), which he himself loves.

Further, she should shun the mirror, which captures her external appearance. Her appearance, though beautiful now, will fade with age. Her inner tree, though, will never grow any less beautiful on a more arcane (mysterious) level. The holy tree could refer either to the tree of knowledge or to the Sephardic tree of the Kabbalah. The Sephardic tree resonates with both good and evil. This poem would fit with the Kabbalic notion of man, which is divided between good and evil. Looking in a glass makes the tree into its reverse image, barren and threatening. Yeats was certainly familiar with the Kabbalah from his theosophical practices.

Sephardim: (pl. Sephardi):                  A Jew whose ancestors came from Spain or North Africa.

Ashkenazim: (pl. Ashkenazi):              A Jew whose ancestors came from central Eastern Europe.

Kabbalah (also: Cabala/Qabalah):      (in Judaism) the ancient tradition of explaining holy texts through

                                                          Mystical means.

*****

Down by the Salley Gardens – W. B. Yeats

Down by the Salley Gardens – W. B. Yeats (1865- 1939)

Down by the salley gardens my love and I did meet;

She passed the salley gardens with little snow-white feet.

She bid me take love easy, as the leaves grow on the tree;

But I, being young and foolish, with her would not agree.

In a field by the river my love and I did stand,

And on my leaning shoulder she laid her snow-white hand.

She bid me take life easy, as the grass grows on the weirs;

But I was young and foolish, and now am full of tears.

salley:             willow

weirs:            a low level wall or barrier built across a river in order to control the flow of water or change its direction

About the poet:

William Butler Yeats, poet and playwright, was born in Dublin, Ireland on 13^th June 1865, but moved to ChisWick , London in 1867 due to his father’s career as a lawyer and did not return to Ireland until 1881, where he studied at the Metropolitan School of Art, it was here that he met fellow poet George Russell who shared his interest in mysticism.

“Down by the Salley Gardens’, first published as “An Old Song Resung” in the “Wanderings of Oisin and other Poems” in 1889. “Down by the Salley Gardens” was originally an old Irish folk song, Yeats turned it into a poem as a dedication to oral tradition.

Summary:

“Down by the Salley Gardens” is a short poem written by W. B. Yeats describing both love and nature. The poem is split into two stanzas with two rhyming couplets in each.

The poem is written in the first person that draws the reader strongly into the theme, relating it to personal events. Yeats has the woman deliver the advice and the young man foolishly not take it, so the point is driven home by this repetition making it resemble typical conversational language, as “She bid me take love easy, as the leaves grow on the tree;”

The most significant effect in the poem is the obvious rhyming scheme present at the end of each line. Yeats defines the rhyming clearly by using rhyme scheme ‘ab ab ab’, such as “I did meet and snow-white feet”.

The rhyming couplets give the poem a sing-song style which gives it a positive and light tone. The poem is unique in that it holds many forms of repetition throughout the description.  The second stanza mimics the first theme-wise however its descriptive texts shows that it occurs afterwards. The similarity of expression is as “my love and I did meet” in the first stanza and      “my love and I did stand” in the second stanza

The poem is quite interesting as it holds many themes. The main one is being the man’s regret with not staying with his love. However, it is important to note that nature also plays a large role within the poem rather than having a literal significance. It is the most probable that Nature acts as a metaphorical role as the man’s love:

“She bid me take love easy, as the leaves grow on the tree;”

The lyrical form of the poem creates an imaginative text that draws that reader to a sense of flexibility.

****

The Glory – Edward Thomas

The Glory – Edward Thomas (1878-1917)

The glory of the beauty of the morning, ——

The cuckoo crying over the untouched dew;

The blackbird that has found it, and the dove

That tempts me on to something sweeter than love;

White clouds ranged even and fair as new-mown hay;

The heat, the stir, the sublime vacancy

Of sky and meadow and forest and my own heart: ——

The glory invites me, yet it leaves me scorning

All I can ever do, all I can be,

Beside the lovely of motion, shape, and hue,

The happiness I fancy fit to dwell

In beauty’s presence. Shall I now this day

Begin to seek as far as heaven, as hell,

Wisdom or strength to match this beauty, start

And tread the pale dust pitted with small dark drops,

I hope to find whatever it is I seek,

Hearkening to short-lived happy-seeming things

That we know naught of, in the hazel copse?

Or must I be content with discontent

As larks and swallows are perhaps with wings?

And shall I ask at the day’s end once more

What beauty is, and what I can have meant

By happiness? And shall I let all go,

Glad, weary, or both? Or shall I perhaps know

That I was happy oft, and oft before,

Awhile forgetting how I am fast pent,

How dreary-swift, with naught to travel to.

Is Time? I cannot bite the day to the core.

Glossary:

Glory:              grandeur

cuckoo:            a bird with a call that sounds like its name

blackbird:        a European bird, the male black with a yellow beak and the female is brown with brown beak; a black North American bird is larger than the European black bird.

mow:               to cut gross using a machine or tool.

scorn:              a strong feeling that sb/sth is stupid or nor good enough

sublime:           a field covered in grass

scorn:              a strong feeling that sb/sth is stupid or not good enough

hearkening:     (hearken/harkens) to listen to sb/sth

hazel:               a small tree that produces small nuts those can be eaten

copse (ka:ps): (also coppice) a small area of trees or bushes growing together

lark:                 a small brown bird with a pleaser-song

swallow:           a small bird with long pointed wings and a tail with two points.

oft:                   often

pent:                an expensive

dreary:             that makes you feel sad, dull and not interested.

swift:                done quickly/immediately

naught/nought: (not successful) all our efforts have come to nought

Summary:

Edward Thomas is a famous early modern English poet, began to write poetry late in his short life. His poetry is plain – as Wordsworth’s. He is quite outstanding, conjuring up images of delicate yet sumptuous natural landscapes.

‘The Glory’ is mainly focus on the beauty of Nature that occupies a great deal of Thomas’s work, and it is one of the central concerns of the glory of the nature. For all the ability Thomas undoubtedly a poet, he does not seem to consider his insight to mean much – having been inspired by the Nature around him, its glory leaves him ‘scorning, all I can ever do, all I can be’; any attempt to put the beauty of nature into words can only ever be synthetic in some-way, and therefore inadequate. A feeling of inadequacy seems to pervade in this poem, as Thomas constantly questions himself and wonders whether he should change approach. Thomas appears to be striving for the perfection in the way he writes and describes as he perceives in nature itself. As someone who is wretchedly prone to perfectionism and self-questioning seen in his words. Above all, ‘The Glory’ appears to be a poem of paradoxes. The obvious one is being in the berating of himself for not matching the glory of nature. Thomas writes beautifully and truthfully about the Nature but induces uncertainty and self doubt. Another contradiction comes in the fabulous closing line of the poem: ‘I cannot bite the day to the core’.

Besides producing a great image, it has been suggested that it contains religious undertone referring specifically to the Garden of Eden. For someone who appears to want to know more, too much knowledge can be dangerous – indeed, ‘biting to the core’ may lead to the discovery that nature is not as glorious as it seems, with illusions being shattered, perhaps some trepidation is good if it means you can keep your ideals of ‘glory’ intact.

****

The Children of Stare – Walter De la Mare

The Children of Stare – Walter De la Mare (1873-1956)

    Winter is fallen early

    On the house of Stare;

Birds in reverberating flocks

    Haunt its ancestral box:                    

    Bright are plenteous berries

    In clusters in the air.

    Still is the fountain’s music,

    The dark pool icy still,

Whereupon a small and sanguine sun

    Floats in a mirror on,

    Into a West of crimson,

    From a South of daffodil.

    ’Tis strange to see young children

    In such a wintry house;

Like rabbits’ on the frozen snow

    Their tell-tale footprints go;

    Their laughter rings like timbrels

    ’Neath evening ominous:

    Their small and heightened faces

    Like wine-red winter buds;

Their frolic bodies gentle as

    Flakes in the air that pass,

    Frail as the twirling petal

    From the briar of the woods.

    Above them silence lours,

    Still as an arctic sea;

Light fails; night falls; the wintry moon

    Glitters; the crocus soon

    Will open grey and distracted

    On earth’s austerity:

    Thick mystery, wild peril,

    Law like an iron rod: —— 

Yet sport they on in Spring’s attire,

    Each with his tiny fire

    Blown to a core of ardour

    By the awful breath of God.——

Glossary:

sanguine:         cheerful and confident about the future

timbrels:          (Tumbrels) a kind of musical instrument

ominous:          suggest that sth (bad) is going to happen in the future

frolic:               play and move happily and lively

twirling:           to move or dance round and round

briar:               a wild bush with thorns esp a wild rose bush

lours:               looks sullenly or threateningly

crocus:             a small yellow, purple or white flowers that appears in early spring

austerity:          bad economic condition

peril:                threat, danger

ardour:             passion, enthusiasm

About the poet:

Walter De la Mare (1873 – 1956) was a highly regarded English poet and short story writer who had a particular talent for writing for and about children, although he was no means exclusively a children’s writer. His “The Children of Stare” was originally published in collection, “Poems” that appeared in 1906, and then in Volume 1 of his “Collected Poems 1901 – 1918)”. It is written, although it is not a poem that children would find easy to read or understand. It should therefore be regarded as a poem in which children are the subject matter rather than the intended audience.

Summary:

The first two stanzas of the poem “The Children of Stare” sets the scene of a winter evening in the grounds of a large mansion, “the house of Stare”. This name would appear to an invention on the poet’s part, but the world worked well in this context, with its implications of silence and lack of motion. The house can be imagined as staring at the grounds and the children who are introduced later, and the reader is invited to stare back.

The imagery of these stanzas is fairly standard, with emphasis being given to sound and colour. The flocks of birds are ‘reverberating’, whereas the ‘fountain’s music’ is silent. There is bright colour in the ‘plenteous berries’, but the chief function of ‘the dark pool icy still’ is to reflect the ‘Sanguine Sun’ as its colour changes from ‘daffodil’ to ‘crimson’ as it sets. There is no hint of movement apart from that of the sun, and even the birds ‘haunt’ rather than fly. There is something faintly sinister about this environment that reminds the modern reader of scenes from Alfred Hitchcock’s “The Birds”

In the Third stanza the children (De la Mare does not say how many) are introduced, playing and laughing in the snow, but immediately one is thrown off one’s guard with the line

`Tis strange to see young children

In such a wintry house;

The children are clearly unexpected, but is there also another implication to ‘strange’? The final word of the stanza is ‘ominous’ which serves to take today’s reader away from thoughts of Hitch Cock and move towards Stephen King!

In the fourth stanza De la Mare present three similes that link the children to their environment. Their red faces are like ‘wine-red winter buds’ (which refers back to the barriers of the first stanza), and describes them as:

Their frolic bodies gentle as

    Flakes in the air that pass,

    Frail as the twirling petal

    From the briar of the woods.

The children clearly belong to this setting, even to the extent of there being mysterious connection between the world of Nature and these particular children.

The fifth stanza emphasizes the threat from Nature as ‘silence lours’, ‘light fails’ and ‘night falls’. The moon appears bright and all colour will soon be lost to become ‘grey and distracted’. The implication is that this is not the time or the place for children, and that they should be elsewhere. This theme continues at the start of the final stanza:

Thick mystery, wild peril,

Law like an iron rod,

although the reader must decide what nature this mystery and peril might take. Like wise, what is the ‘law like an iron rod’? Is it the law of Nature, or that of parents who might try to force the children to come indoors?

The view of De la Mare’s approach might seem to be belied by the way the poem ends:

“Yet sport they on in spring’s attire,

Each with his tiny fire

Blown to a core of ardour

By the awful breath of God.”

The air of mystery is deepened by the knowledge that these children are dressed “in spring’s attire”, but apparently solved by the revelation that they are warmed by “the awful breath of God”. De la Mare was not religious in an orthodox way, and this is not a religious poem, but he ends with an assertion of the divinity of innocent childhood (in a Blakean sense) as well as drawing attention to the frailty of that childhood in a threatening universe. For the children, the world extends no further than the confines of the (presumably) large garden of their “ancestral box”, But de lad Mare is aware of hostile (ominous) forces from beyond, as represented by the setting sun and “wintry moon” the determine “earth’s austerity”.

There is both hope and fear expressed by “The children of stare”. If the children can continue to play in an environment that would seem not to be conducive for play, thanks to their “tinyfire”, this bodes well for how they will face when they are exposed to the world beyond the garden. However, will those outside forces of “austerity” prove too much for their “frail” bodies? As mentioned this question, leaving the reader to make up his or her own mind

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