Re-imaginings of myth in the landscapes of Thomas Hardy’s ‘Tess of the D’Urbervilles’ (Part II)

Re-imaginings of myth in the landscapes of Thomas Hardy’s ‘Tess of the D’Urbervilles’ (Part II)

Posted on 23 June 2018 by essexmyth

Myth Reading Group

Thursday 28 June

12.00-1.30pm in Room NTC.2.06

Robert William Allen (member of the Centre for Myth Studies)

We are very pleased to announce that Robert William Allen concludes our discussion of Trees & Forests this term with a session on Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the D’Urbervilles (Part II)

‘Tess flung herself upon the undergrowth of rustling spear-grass as upon a bed’: Illustration by E. Borough Johnson published in the serial issue of Tess of D’Urbervilles in The Graphic  (1891), in The Victorian Web

In this meeting of the Myth Reading Group, we will continue our discussion of the ways in which Hardy incorporates elements of myth into his novel, paying particular attention to his figuration of landscape.

In Part I, we considered selected extracts from Tess of the D’Urbervilles [final part of Ch.X (from ‘Tess was indignant…’) & Ch. XI], Ovid’s account of the rape of Proserpina in the Metamorphoses (Book V, ll. 512 – 615), and Ted Hughes’ version of the passage in his Tales from Ovid [pp. 56-57]. Further reading from Hardy’s novel included Chapters XLVII& XLVIII.

In Part II, we will consider extracts from D. H. Lawrence’s ‘The Lost Girl’ [full text on the Project Gutenberg] and ‘Bavarian Gentians’ [available on the Representative Poetry Online site].

ALL WELCOME

Adam Bede,

這當然有中譯本，只是不知其翻譯品質。

Oxford World's Classics

"The beginning of hardship is like the first taste of bitter food—it seems for a moment unbearable; yet, if there is nothing else to satisfy our hunger, we take another bite and find it possible to go on."

The early short fiction of George Eliot at once attracted praise for their domestic realism, pathos, and humour, and speculation about the identity of ‘George Eliot’. Her first novel, Adam Bede, was received with great enthusiasm and at once established her as a leading novelist.

"The Sick Muse" "Hymn to Beauty", LES FLEURS DU MAL

On this day in 1857, Charles Baudelaire published LES FLEURS DU MAL (Flowers of Evil), leading to his conviction on charges of blasphemy and obscenity.

"Hymn to Beauty"

Do you come from Heaven or rise from the abyss, 
Beauty? Your gaze, divine and infernal,
Pours out confusedly benevolence and crime,
And one may for that, compare you to wine.
You contain in your eyes the sunset and the dawn;
You scatter perfumes like a stormy night;
Your kisses are a philtre, your mouth an amphora,
Which make the hero weak and the child courageous.
Do you come from the stars or rise from the black pit?
Destiny, bewitched, follows your skirts like a dog;
You sow at random joy and disaster,
And you govern all things but answer for nothing.
You walk upon corpses which you mock, O Beauty!
Of your jewels Horror is not the least charming,
And Murder, among your dearest trinkets,
Dances amorously upon your proud belly.
The dazzled moth flies toward you, O candle!
Crepitates, flames and says: "Blessed be this flambeau!"
The panting lover bending o'er his fair one
Looks like a dying man caressing his own tomb,
Whether you come from heaven or from hell, who cares,
O Beauty! Huge, fearful, ingenuous monster!
If your regard, your smile, your foot, open for me
An Infinite I love but have not ever known?
From God or Satan, who cares? Angel or Siren,
Who cares, if you make, — fay with the velvet eyes,
Rhythm, perfume, glimmer; my one and only queen!
The world less hideous, the minutes less leaden?

*

Modern poetry begins with Charles Baudelaire (1821-67), who employed his unequalled technical mastery to create the shadowy, desperately dramatic urban landscape — populated by the addicted and the damned — which so compellingly mirrors our modern condition. Deeply though darkly spiritual, titanic in the changes he wrought, Baudelaire looms over all the work, great and small, created in his wake. READ more here: http://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/…/baudelaire-poems-by-ch…/

"The Sick Muse"

My poor Muse, alas! what ails you today? 
Your hollow eyes are full of nocturnal visions;
I see in turn reflected on your face
Horror and madness, cold and taciturn.
Have the green succubus, the rosy elf,
Poured out for you love and fear from their urns?
Has the hand of Nightmare, cruel and despotic,
Plunged you to the bottom of some weird Minturnae?
I would that your bosom, fragrant with health,
Were constantly the dwelling place of noble thoughts,
And that your Christian blood would flow in rhythmic waves
Like the measured sounds of ancient verse,
Over which reign in turn the father of all songs,
Phoebus, and the great Pan, lord of harvest.

*

Modern poetry begins with Charles Baudelaire (1821-1867), who employed his unequaled technical mastery to create the shadowy, desperately dramatic urban landscape — populated by the addicted and the damned — which so compellingly mirrors our modern condition. Deeply though darkly spiritual, titanic in the changes he wrought, Baudelaire looms over all the work, great and small, created in his wake. READ more here: https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/…/baudelaire-poems-by-c…/

John Podsnap, a Dickensian character personifies a great divide in British politics

 John Podsnap, a Dickensian character personifies a great divide in British politics




John Podsnap was convinced of England’s superiority. Many people in Britain today suffer from the opposite delusion


ECONOMIST.COM

A Dickensian character personifies a great divide in British politics
What the Dickens?

John Podsnap 

Podsnap

NOUN

• A person resembling Dickens's Mr Podsnap, embodying insular complacency, self-satisfaction, and refusal to face up to unpleasant facts.

Origin

Mid 19th century; earliest use found in The North American Review. From the name of John Podsnap, a character in Dickens' Our Mutual Friend, known for his complacency and refusal to face up to unpleasant facts.

"To My Friends" by Primo Levi

2018.6.21 重讀
感動

這首，我2016貼過了。今天重讀，更感動。

今年漢清講堂作系列友情片：

227 《喬治‧ 桑與福樓拜 》George Sand and Gustave Flaubert

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xdUyKDF71qo&t=2s

2016.9.21

"To My Friends" by Primo Levi

Dear friends, and here I say friends
the broad sense of the word:
Wife, sister, associates, relatives,
Schoolmates of both sexes,
People seen only once
Or frequented all my life;
Provided that between us, for at least a moment,
A line has been stretched,
A well-defined bond.
I speak for you, companions of a crowded
Road, not without its difficulties,
And for you too, who have lost
Soul, courage, the desire to live;
Or no one, or someone, or perhaps only one person, or you
Who are reading me: remember the time
Before the wax hardened,
When everyone was like a seal.
Each of us bears the imprint
Of a friend met along the way;
In each the trace of each.
For good or evil
In wisdom or in folly
Everyone stamped by everyone.
Now that the time crowds in
And the undertakings are finished,
To all of you the humble wish
That autumn will be long and mild.

"Cezanne's Ports" by Allen Ginsberg

Everyman's Library

Poet Allen Ginsberg was born Irwin Allen Ginsberg in Newark, New Jersey on this day in 1926.

"Cezanne's Ports" by Allen Ginsberg

In the foreground we see time and life
swept in a race
toward the left hand side of the picture
where shore meets shore.

But that meeting place
isn't represented;
it doesn't occur on the canvas.

For the other side of the bay
is Heaven and Eternity,
with a bleak white haze over its mountains.

And the immense water of L'Estaque is a go-between
for minute rowboats.

*

ART AND ARTISTS: Poems is a sumptuous collection of visions in verse—the work of centuries of poets who have used their own art form to illuminate art created by others. A wide variety of visual art forms have inspired great poetry, from painting, sculpture, and photography to tapestry, folk art, and calligraphy. Included here are poems that celebrate Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa, Claude Monet’s Water Lilies, and Grant Wood’s American Gothic. Here are such well-known poems as John Keats’s “Ode on a Grecian Urn” and W. H. Auden’s “Musée des Beaux Arts,” Homer’s immortal account of the forging of the shield of Achilles, and Federico García Lorca’s breathtaking ode to the surreal paintings of Salvador Dalí. Allen Ginsberg writes about Cezanne, Anne Sexton about van Gogh, Billy Collins about Hieronymus Bosch, and Kevin Young about Jean-Michel Basquiat. Here too are poems that take on the artists themselves, from Michelangelo and Rembrandt to Frida Kahlo and Georgia O’Keeffe. Altogether, this brilliantly curated anthology proves that a picture can be worth a thousand words—or a few very well-chosen ones. READ more here: https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/…/art-and-artists-by-ed…/

Poet Federico Garcia Lorca

Everyman's Library

Poet Federico del Sagrado Corazón de Jesús García Lorca was born in Fuente Vaqueros, Granada, Andalusia, Spain on this day in 1898.

"Wounds of Love" by Federico Garcia Lorca

This light, this flame that devours,
this grey country that surrounds me,
this pain from a sole idea,
this anguish of the sky, earth and hour,

this lament of blood that now adorns
a lyre with no pulse, lubricious torch,
this weight of sea that breaks on me,
this scorpion that lives inside my breast,

are a garland of love, bed of the wounded,
where dreamlessly, I dream of your presence
among the ruins of my sunken breast.

And though I seek the summit of discretion
your heart grants me a valley stretched below,
with hemlock and bitter wisdom’s passion.

*

From Sappho to Shakespeare to Cole Porter–a marvelous and wide-ranging collection of classic gay and lesbian love poetry. The poets represented here include Walt Whitman, Hart Crane, Gertrude Stein, Federico García Lorca, Djuna Barnes, Constantine Cavafy, Elizabeth Bishop, W. H. Auden, and James Merrill. Their poems of love are among the most perceptive, the most passionate, the wittiest, and the most moving we have. From Michelangelo’s “Love Misinterpreted” to Noël Coward’s “Mad About the Boy,” from May Swenson’s “Symmetrical Companion” to Muriel Rukeyser’s “Looking at Each Other,” these poems take on both desire and its higher power: love in all its tender or taunting variety. READ an excerpt here: https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/…/love-speaks-its-name-…/