Okay, here’s the rest of Roethke’s The Far Field. I’m going to mess it up with my comments, but you’ll find it nice and neat here.

Scroll down to the previous post for part one of Snow Poems.

*************************************

II

At the field’s end, in the corner missed by the mower,

[We’re done with the dream in section one. Now the poet recollects his rural youth, and the way encounters with dead animals taught him not about death, but about the eternal. This seems paradoxical.]

Where the turf drops off into a grass-hidden culvert,
Haunt of the cat-bird, nesting-place of the field-mouse,
Not too far away from the ever-changing flower-dump,
Among the tin cans, tires, rusted pipes, broken machinery, –
One learned of the eternal;
And in the shrunken face of a dead rat, eaten by rain and ground-beetles
(I found in lying among the rubble of an old coal bin)
And the tom-cat, caught near the pheasant-run,
Its entrails strewn over the half-grown flowers,
Blasted to death by the night watchman.

[Marvelous detail, marvelous assonance (learned/eternal; among/rubble.]

I suffered for young birds, for young rabbits caught in the mower,
My grief was not excessive.
For to come upon warblers in early May
Was to forget time and death:

[A child of visceral responses, the poet mourned the deaths of the animals he saw; yet the spectacle of the natural world coming back to vibrant life in the spring made him euphoric. He easily forgot the scenes he’s described of death and rot.]

How they filled the oriole’s elm, a twittering restless cloud, all one morning,
And I watched and watched till my eyes blurred from the bird shapes, –
Cape May, Blackburnian, Cerulean, –
Moving, elusive as fish, fearless,
Hanging, bunched like young fruit, bending the end branches,
Still for a moment,
Then pitching away in half-flight,
Lighter than finches,
While the wrens bickered and sang in the half-green hedgerows,
And the flicker drummed from his dead tree in the chicken-yard.

[Ever-renewed natural life is a form of eternity; it asserts itself endlessly against the pressure of all that death.]

– Or to lie naked in sand,
In the silted shallows of a slow river,
Fingering a shell,

[The poet turns his memories this way and that. Now he thinks of lying once on a sandy riverbank considering a shell.]

Thinking:
Once I was something like this, mindless,
Or perhaps with another mind, less peculiar;

[What was I in a previous life? A previous incarnation? Maybe an inanimate object, or maybe a person, but one not so strange as I.]

Or to sink down to the hips in a mossy quagmire;
Or, with skinny knees, to sit astride a wet log,
Believing:
I’ll return again,
As a snake or a raucous bird,
Or, with luck, as a lion.

[Previous lives; and also afterlives. This is the eternity about which nature has taught the poet.]

I learned not to fear infinity,
The far field, the windy cliffs of forever,
The dying of time in the white light of tomorrow,
The wheel turning away from itself,
The sprawl of the wave,
The on-coming water.

[The dying of time in the white light of tomorrow. Tomorrow’s white light is the snowy pall from the dream in section one. We’re back in the car, I think… And not just not fearing infinity, but, as the dream suggests, being drawn again and again toward it, toward the far field at the end of the peninsula, and then toward the oncoming water after the peninsula.]

**********************************

III

The river turns on itself,
The tree retreats into its own shadow.
I feel a weightless change, a moving forward
As of water quickening before a narrowing channel
When banks converge, and the wide river whitens;

[From the description of a recurrent dream, to a set of memories of the natural world, to the present. Section three is set now, with the mature poet describing a strange temporal/spiritual experience he’s undergoing. The experience in a sense mirrors the experience of his dream: Both experiences have a dual nature: They are both physical narrowings – the world converging in on itself, things getting smaller and darker – and temporal advancements, quickenings, implying the impending end of the poet’s life.]

Or when two rivers combine, the blue glacial torrent
And the yellowish-green from the mountainy upland, —
At first a swift rippling between rocks,
Then a long running over flat stones
Before descending to the alluvial plane,
To the clay banks, and the wild grapes hanging from the elmtrees.
The slightly trembling water
Dropping a fine yellow silt where the sun stays;
And the crabs bask near the edge,
The weedy edge, alive with small snakes and bloodsuckers, —

[Again, an experience akin to the convergence of different waterways as they meet and plummet to the plain, becalmed.]

I have come to a still, but not a deep center,
A point outside the glittering current;

[I too, in my many-streamed complexity, have arrived at a becalmed place, outside the rush of daily reality.]

My eyes stare at the bottom of a river,
At the irregular stones, iridescent sandgrains,

[Earlier, the poet wrote I watched and watched til my eyes blurred. He was talking about birds; now he stares at another manifestation of bejeweled nature: iridescent sandgrains. In the perpetual glory of nature the rapt poet finds his religion.]

My mind moves in more than one place,
In a country half-land, half-water.

I am renewed by death, thought of my death,
The dry scent of a dying garden in September,
The wind fanning the ash of a low fire.
What I love is near at hand,
Always, in earth and air.

[The dead animals renewed him, made him not fear infinity; and he repeats the idea here, with two beautiful images of near-death: the September garden and the faint red ash of a weak fire. A lover of the earth, the poet finds transcendent bliss near at hand.]

*****************************

IV

The lost self changes,
Turning toward the sea,
A sea-shape turning around, —
An old man with his feet before the fire,
In robes of green, in garments of adieu.

[Again he revisits the initial death-dream. Dying, what used to be you drives toward the sea, toward the infinite. Your robes are green – the dress of nature – as you return to nature, converge with it, narrow into it.]

A man faced with his own immensity
Wakes all the waves, all their loose wandering fire.
The murmur of the absolute, the why
Of being born falls on his naked ears.

[Death concentrates the mind wonderfully. Thoughts of death – and allied thoughts of the oddness of our having been born at all – empty the comforting phenomenal world and make us naked – without psychological defenses.]

His spirit moves like monumental wind
That gentles on a sunny blue plateau.
He is the end of things, the final man.

[In death your spirit converges with nature.]

All finite things reveal infinitude:

[In those dead animals the child saw the immensity, saw the infinite life of the earth.]

The mountain with its singular bright shade
Like the blue shine on freshly frozen snow,
The after-light upon ice-burdened pines;

[The September garden, the faint red in the ash; and now the after-light — the after-life — created after the pines have been coffined in ice; and a certain shade paradoxically, at singular moments, bright; and also the pale snow vividly blue… The poem brims with images of unexpected, supplemental vivacity, with evidence of a sort of permanent imprint made on the world by virtue of each particular person having been here. The rest of the poem will list this poet’s particularities, his memories, his imprints.]

Odor of basswood on a mountain-slope,
A scent beloved of bees;
Silence of water above a sunken tree :
The pure serene of memory in one man, —
A ripple widening from a single stone
Winding around the waters of the world.

[The tree is sunken; the self has died. But the tree’s sunkenness creates the silence of the water above it, lends the water the mysterious beauty of its placidity. One man’s consciousness, having lived, having gathered memories, survives him, ripples out from his singular mind to all the waters of the world. Frozen his body may be, in the car that drove to the end of earthly life; but his spirit continues into the water beyond the land, part of ever-regenerating nature.]

Cream of crab soup
Salt and pepper calimari
How I survived The Blizzard of 2010

Yes, I could offer many haiku detailing UD‘s snowed-in week here at the Legacy Hotel in ‘thesda (She was just interviewed by the George Washington University newspaper, The Hatchet, which is doing a feature on “stranded professors.”), but I think I’ll stop with one, and turn instead to the consideration of a very fine poem about snow, Theodore Roethke’s The Far Field. It’s a bit long, so let’s take it section by section.

***************************

I

I dream of journeys repeatedly:
Of flying like a bat deep into a narrowing tunnel
Of driving alone, without luggage, out a long peninsula,
The road lined with snow-laden second growth,
A fine dry snow ticking the windshield,
Alternate snow and sleet, no on-coming traffic,
And no lights behind, in the blurred side-mirror,
The road changing from glazed tarface to a rubble of stone,
Ending at last in a hopeless sand-rut,
Where the car stalls,
Churning in a snowdrift
Until the headlights darken.

*************************

The initial stanza tells us we’ve got a lyric poem, autobiographical — I, I dream. The poet describes a recurrent dream of his in which he drives alone in the snow, no other traffic, himself carrying nothing of his life (without luggage) out to the end of a long peninsula; and when he gets to the point at which he can drive no further, he sits in his car while its stalled engine churns until everything shuts down — the headlights darken.

Such a dream, recurrent, seems suicidal, the poet drawn to an eerie narrative of a more and more narrowing world in which his mind – headlights – finally stalls and shuts off. Snow is all over this dream as the pall of coffined earth, covering the dying poet more and more as he moves forward.

*****************************

II

At the field’s end, in the corner missed by the mower,
Where the turf drops off into a grass-hidden culvert,
Haunt of the cat-bird, nesting-place of the field-mouse,
Not too far away from the ever-changing flower-dump,
Among the tin cans, tires, rusted pipes, broken machinery, —
One learned of the eternal;
And in the shrunken face of a dead rat, eaten by rain and ground-beetles
(I found in lying among the rubble of an old coal bin)
And the tom-cat, caught near the pheasant-run,
Its entrails strewn over the half-grown flowers,
Blasted to death by the night watchman.

I suffered for young birds, for young rabbits caught in the mower,
My grief was not excessive.
For to come upon warblers in early May
Was to forget time and death:
How they filled the oriole’s elm, a twittering restless cloud, all one morning,
And I watched and watched till my eyes blurred from the bird shapes, —
Cape May, Blackburnian, Cerulean, —
Moving, elusive as fish, fearless,
Hanging, bunched like young fruit, bending the end branches,
Still for a moment,
Then pitching away in half-flight,
Lighter than finches,
While the wrens bickered and sang in the half-green hedgerows,
And the flicker drummed from his dead tree in the chicken-yard.

— Or to lie naked in sand,
In the silted shallows of a slow river,
Fingering a shell,
Thinking:
Once I was something like this, mindless,
Or perhaps with another mind, less peculiar;
Or to sink down to the hips in a mossy quagmire;
Or, with skinny knees, to sit astride a wet log,
Believing:
I’ll return again,
As a snake or a raucous bird,
Or, with luck, as a lion.

I learned not to fear infinity,
The far field, the windy cliffs of forever,
The dying of time in the white light of tomorrow,
The wheel turning away from itself,
The sprawl of the wave,
The on-coming water.

***********************************

Wait – I’ll post what I have so far. What with all the interruptions (along with the Hatchet reporter, La Kid called wanting to talk about Pride and Prejudice, and Mr UD called), I haven’t been able to concentrate on the poem’s second section.

I think Mr UD misses me. He said: “You are like Formula One racing. Maybe not so great for one’s longevity, but very exciting.”

Remember her? Harvard undergrad who published a chick-lit novel at 19?

UD, who’s been around forever, blogged about her back in 2006.

Everyone got all excited about this woman until much of her novel turned out to have been plagiarized.

Now 17-year-old Helena Hegemann also turns out to have cut and pasted her amazing, scandalous, about-to-be-prize-winning novel.

No one ever seems surprised by these slews of Francoise Sagans. No one thinks it odd that people just learning to insert tampons can pen tomes of astounding maturity and darkness.

Just like BHL (Europe’s hoax-quotient is certainly high lately), Hegemann’s brazening it out, lecturing us on the difference between originality and authenticity, etc., etc.

She’ll be fine. Unlike Gerald Posner, she doesn’t work for a magazine that can fire her. She’s an independent agent. Plus, the whole point of Hegemann is what a bad girl she is. Plagiarism can only help.

I’m watching a fifty mile an hour white-out from my hotel room window. There are virtually no cars on the road – only emergency trucks. The power company has stopped sending crews until the blizzard’s over.

But the Legacy Hotel, UD‘s new home, is warm and powered-up and still has room service.

**********************

UD thanks her sister for the picture.

… with years of insider trading in front of him. Carrying on the family tradition of thievery while working toward his MBA at NYU, his life was shattered when the SEC got wind of what he, his father, and his brothers were doing, and put them all in jail. At the tender age of 26, Ayal Rosenthal had to go to prison.

NYU decided to revoke his degree onaccounta they didn’t want to be known as the school that made Ayal Rosenthal what he is today.

Rosenthal is suing the university. He wants his degree back.

*************************

It’s an interesting moral question. Should you be denied an education merely because you’re a precocious criminal? Universities don’t typically revoke the degrees of people who commit crimes after they’ve graduated. Do you think Wharton will revoke Rajiv Goel’s degree? Scads of insider traders and associated miscreants graduated from Harvard. Have you heard about any of them getting their degrees revoked?

Just because this guy was so smart he broke the law before he graduated, he has to suffer?

SEXUAL SATISFACTION IS A COMPLEX PROCESS
THAT VEXES MANY WOMEN AND THEIR DOCTORS

Headline, Washington Post

… as the Captain and Tenille sing. Once is never enough… whoaaa…

Same thing when it comes to plagiarism, as you know if you read University Diaries, because she never stops telling you. Plagiarized articles are like roaches. Find one, and ten others will come scurrying out of the plagiarist’s past.

So it ever was, so it shall be … and so it is, Dear Reader, with Gerald Posner.

Last week, a reader tipped me to an instance of potential plagiarism by Gerald Posner in the Daily Beast, for which Posner is chief investigative reporter. After I called the plagiarism to the attention of Daily Beast Executive Editor Edward Felsenthal, the site deleted five pilfered sentences and added an editor’s note to explain the deletions and to apologize.

… But this isn’t the only example of Posner pinching copy without attribution. Slate reader Gregory Gelembuik and I have uncovered additional examples of plagiarism by Posner in the Daily Beast from the Texas Lawyer, a Miami Herald blog, a Miami Herald editorial, a Miami Herald article, and a health care journalism blog…

Jack Shafer at Slate has done what Jolisa Gracewood did with Witi Ihimaera’s work — he has simply Googled.

Posner has been suspended.

Leading French intellectual Bernard-Henri Levy has been caught red-faced for praising the work of a philosopher who, it turns out, was invented as a joke by a journalist from a satirical daily.

In his latest book “De la guerre en philosophie” (Making war in philosophy), Levy quoted Jean-Baptiste Botul, an expert on German philosopher Immanuel Kant created by journalist Frederic Pages.

Levy acknowledged late Monday that he had often quoted Botul’s work “The sex life of Immanuel Kant” during many public appearances and in the pages of his latest book…

Didn’t look twice at a book titled Sex Life of Kant?

Charles Bremner, in the Times, elaborates:

In his latest book, published this week amid the traditional adulation in the media, Lévy, 61, attacks Immanuel Kant, the 18th century philosopher. He calls him “raving mad” and cites as his authority Jean-Baptiste Botul, a 20th century philosopher.

The trouble is that Botul never existed. He was invented as an elaborate joke in 1999 by Frédéric Pagès, a literary journalist, who wrote works in his name. One was titled “The Sex Life of Immanuel Kant.” His school, known as Botulism, subscribes to his theory of “La Metaphysique du Mou” [The metaphysics of the limp].

In “De la Guerre en Philosophie” [On war in philosophy], his new book, Lévy writes that Botul had proved once and for all “just after the second world war, in his series of lectures to the neo-Kantians of Paraguay, that their hero was an abstract fake, a pure spirit of pure appearance.” …

The Neo-Kantians of Paraguay? Isn’t that an emo band?

… I have two classes involving PRS, and the bugs still haven’t been worked out. In fact, last week, the system did not work at all for my chemistry class, and in biology it took more than a few minutes until the system was up and running properly.

So, does this spending of extra money and effort mean enhanced learning? The PRS is supposed to let professors see if their lecture has “stuck” with students, and if not, adjust accordingly. It also stimulates classroom participation, but listening and interacting is still in the hands of the students. With the introduction of PRS, the focus is shifted from actually understanding the material to making sure you get an answer into the system to get credit for the day.

I see how the PRS is effective in bringing people to class, but having to sit through an entire lecture just to press a button is a bit ridiculous. The PRS does not enhance my ability in the classroom, it just makes me resent having to lug around another piece of technology while wasting time to get it to work when the professors should just be teaching. I have a hard enough time getting my lazy self to go to class. I don’t need to have to remember to bring this random clicker.

Luckily, most professors drop about 10 PRS grades over the span of the entire semester. This amounts to a lot after one takes into account how many times the system collapses on itself and forces professors to give out free points. Professors also find other ways to counteract the failings of PRS. In my biology class, the professor gave a survey for extra PRS points, and I expect other professors do the same. Professors try to accommodate … the faulty system, but it doesn’t always work.

… Fred Zinn, Sr., designer of instructional technology at the Office of Informational Technology at UMass, described possible reasons behind trouble with PRS reception in series of blogs. Although very helpful, the blogs suggest that incorporating PRS into a course is a huge burden.

According to Zinn’s blogs, PRS could be adversely affected by its receivers being too close to laptops, low batteries in the remotes of the students, and more than 200 students using the same receiver. The blogs also report faculty losing data by minor mistakes when using the system.

The web page suggests that instructors having difficulty should set up a one-on-one consultation with the Instructional Media Lab. Professors already have enough on their hands, it isn’t necessary to bog them down with even more.

As class sizes continually get larger, devices like the PRS will become more prevalent, even though this contributes to their failures. The only method of teaching proven to be glitch-free is writing notes on the board and taking notes with a pen and paper, and that is what we should be doing…

PowerPoint, laptops, clickers – universities cynically load them on “as class sizes continually get larger.” And it looks as though students are beginning to get the picture.

Are you and your professor being turned into robotic nullities?

Click A for Yes.

UD‘s extremely proud to appear in the following first paragraph in an Anthony Grafton essay in The New Republic:

Morning, nowadays, means coffee and the Times, as it did for my parents. But it also means something they never experienced: a trip across the Web. Slipping from link to link, occasionally falling in and spending a few minutes in one place, I pass from TNR to NYRB to Bookforum, from Atrios to Steve Benen, from Easily Distracted to University Diaries to Tenured Radical to TigerHawk, from Historiann and Arts & Letters Daily to Cliopatria and Athens & Jerusalem, from Andrew Sullivan to Megan McArdle to Ta-Nehisi Coates—and, for perspective, to the obituaries in the Telegraph.

Talk about being in good company.

Tony’s reviewing Mary Beard‘s latest book — UD and Mary are longtime mutual blog admirers.

UD thanks her friend Christina for noticing the TNR essay.

It’s just gossip. But it features one of the most important professors in the world, plus amazing quotations, like the one in my title. So why not.

Niall Ferguson, whose comments about Scotland have appeared on this blog, has left his wife for Ayaan Hirsi Ali, the Somali human rights campaigner, currently under a fatwa.

Three of them.

… in the hallway, the sun shines bright on the Rockville Pike, and UD sits up in bed, reacquainting herself with heat and electricity.

She’s at the Legacy – a boutique hotel, all angular lamps and ochre walls. The guests are mainly, like UD, ‘thesdans thawing out. It’s been quite the blizzard, and it ain’t over yet.

The snow came down thin and sifty like confectioner’s sugar, but when it finally stopped the whole world was whipped cream.

Evergreens leaned and creaked and spilled limbs all over town.

We sat quietly in our cold houses, marveling at how precisely we could see, in winter sunlight and with a backdrop of snow, the wing patterns of birds.

For heat there was the fireplace, and pots of water simmering on the stove, and piles of throws on the bed.

We took turns shoveling the walk and the car, and we managed to keep a path to Rokeby clear.

At night we settled under the throws and held little battery lamps to our chests so that we could read. I chose A Short History of Nearly Everything, a funny, well-written scarefest (asteroids! viruses!).

Hello!  This is Carolyn, the webmistress of University Diaries, here to let you know that my aunt Margaret is without an internet connection at the moment, thanks to the blizzard.  She asked me to inform you, her readers, that she will resume posting once her internet connection is restored.

Umbrage, high dudgeon, the taking of offense, the mounting of one’s high horse, Up Yours!ism, Well, I Never!ism — SOS has warned you against this sort of writing for years. She has directed you to this Onion article as a cautionary tale. She has provided real-world examples of what she calls Harrumphs.

Harrumphs are often letters to the editor, in which writers, offended by bad reviews, lose all restraint (Emotion, SOS always says, is the enemy of good writing.) and let their wounded egotism rip. If you want your writing to work for you, to persuade your audience to take your side, it’s a good idea not to reveal yourself to the world as an arrogant thin-skinned fool.

Here’s a recent rather amazing Canadian Harrumph, from Victoria’s poet laureate.

An English professor from Camosun College reviewed the laureate’s latest book of poetry (It was a perfectly ok review… thorough, not particularly exciting… critical here, admiring there…), and the laureate blew a laurel.

***************************

I wasn’t going to dignify the badly written, inaccurate and savage review of my book Muscle Memory in last week’s Times Colonist with a response. [Harrumphs always, always start like this. I wasn’t going to write! I have better things to do than stoop to that! I’m busy doing the Lord’s work!]

I considered the source and decided to ignore it. [Consider the source — a playground cliche.] The record speaks for itself. It is the first negative poetry review in a lifetime of writing and most of the poems have been published elsewhere and won national and international awards. [Never got a negative review, eh? Think that’s a sign of a strong poet, do you? Along with all the awards you just boasted about?]

… That the Times Colonist would publish hate mail in the form of a book review at a time when the world is focused on the devastation of lives in Haiti is in appalling taste. [Now we’re right round the bend. What does this sentence mean? Can you figure out what she’s saying? I can’t. It’s absolutely mad.] The newspaper insulted the suffering [and] insulted the city that has chosen me to be poet laureate …