Expanding Eyes: A Visionary Education

A thank you to my listeners, all over the world, on our 200th episode. The thematic spectrum of Donne’s love poetry, continued. Moods of skepticism (“Go and catch a falling star”), hatred (“The Apparition”) and requited sexual and romantic love (“The Good Morrow,” “The Sun Rising,” “The Canonization”).

Donne’s are arguably the greatest love poems in English after Shakespeare’s sonnets. Donne as a Metaphysical poet. Donne’s fascinating and troubled life. A spectrum of types of love, beginning with the satiric and overtly erotic: “Elegy 19” and “The Flea.”

Shakespeare’s enigmatic and fascinating poem about the love-death union of two lovers symbolized as the phoenix and the turtledove. The symbolism of two who are paradoxically one in love, in religion, and in poetic metaphor, which says “A is B.”

The ironic themes in the beautiful youth sequence include old age and death and the possibility of infidelity. The Dark Lady sequence begins with mildly tender irony and moves to fierce condemnation of both the Lady and love itself.

Ideal resolutions in the beautiful youth sequence include (1) urging the youth to marry and perpetuate his beauty through offspring; (2) finding their own Platonic love satisfying; (3) making the youth immortal through the poet’s art. Famous examples of each.

Shakespeare’s texts, both the plays and the sonnets, are “equivocal.” They are endlessly suggestive because they seem to offer a range of interpretive possibilities, from the ideal to the ironic, and force the reader to read actively and choose. Sonnets 12, 20, and 29: the beautiful youth and an ideal love.

The Sonnets constantly suggest a total order and total meaning. Yet they simultaneously suggest that such an order is “undecidable,” tantalizing yet elusive. The meaning of a text and the meaning of a love affair may be undecidable, despite our repeated attempts to find a definitive meaning or moral in them.

The two sequences, the “beautiful youth” sonnets (1-126) and the Dark Lady sonnets (127-52), are so distinctive, so unlike the standard Courtly Love formulas, that it is natural to wonder if they are based on real life, but there is no proof. The enigmatic Dedication to the sonnets only confuses the issue. The beautiful youth is a young male, and in the opening sonnets, the poet urges him to perpe...

The various conspiracy theories about alternate authorship of Shakespeare’s works. What we actually do know about Shakespeare, as opposed to the various legends.

The Arthurian stories or Matter of Britain are not just a set of tales but a vision evolving through time, at the hands of many authors. A brief look at the conclusion of Malory’s Morte Darthur, where the destruction of all that Arthur created suggests an ideal too great for this imperfect earth. And yet, the prophecy that Arthur will return someday.

Gawain’s adventure consists of two contests or games. Huizinga’s Homo Ludens: human culture as play, as game-playing. But for real stakes. Gawain is really striving not for a prize or fame but for loyalty to virtue. He comes short because he is human and imperfect, but we must strive anyway, or nothing is achieved.

The lord’s wife tries three times to seduce Gawain while her husband is out hunting, but Gawain resists. On New Year’s, Gawain endures his ordeal at the Green Knight’s “chapel,” an opening in the earth. He feels shame that he has tried to cheat by wearing the lady’s magic belt that confers invulnerability, but the Knight commends him, and back at home the lords and ladies all wear green belts in h...

Description of the seasonal cycle. Finally, it is winter again, and Gawain leaves to find the Green Knight’s chapel. His shield with the pentangle or “endlesse knot,” symbolizing five sets of five virtues. The northern journey through wonders and adventures. The northern lord’s castle. Hopitality is granted by the lord, who also offers a wager—another bet.

A quick sketch of the development of the Arthurian mythos. The Middle English alliterative Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, a romance full of wonders. The Green Knight challenges the Court of Arthur. Gawain accepts the challenge, and cuts off the Knight’s head. The Green Knight picks up his head and departs, telling Gawain that a year hence he must allow the Knight to strike his own blow.

The Norman Conquest of 1066. The transformation of Old English into Middle English, partly through the influence of Anglo-Norman French. From heroic poetry to the romance, the tale of wonders. The new theme of Courtly Love, a new kind of idealized romantic love.

Beowulf returns to the Geats, eventually becomes king for 50 years of peace. The dragon is awakened when someone steals from his hoard. Beowulf and Wiglaf defeat the dragon, but Beowulf is mortally wounded. He asks to see the treasure, then dies. The Geats may not long survive his death.

Grendel’s mother breaks into Heorot, grabs Hrothgar’s best friend and her son’s hand. Beowulf pursues her to the uncanny mere, dives in, slays her with the help of a sword from the days of the giants, whose blade is melted by her blood. Return and a second celebration. Beowulf the triumphing warrior—but also Beowulf the peacemaker.

Hrothgar’s line from the mysterious Scyld opens the poem. The building of Heorot, and the bard’s song. Grendel preys on Heorot 12 years. The arrival of Beowulf. Beowulf insulted by Unferth. The battle with Grendel.

Everything about Beowulf is a mystery: its date and place of origin; its atypical hero, a monster slayer rather than heroic feuding warrior; its problematic relationship to Christianity. J.R.R. Tolkien’s famous essay about these problems.

Northumbria, along the northeastern coast, site of a cultural efflorescence in the 7th and 8th centuries. From here, the Lindisfarne Gospels and Bede’s Ecclesiastical History of the English People, 731 CE, which preserves the first English poem, “Caedmon’s Hymn.” Also, an Anglo-Saxon elegiac lyric, “The Wanderer.”

The 18th century discovery that 1/3 of languages today, including English, derive from the lost language of the Indo-Europeans. The waves of settlement of the British Isles: the Celts, then the Romans, then the Anglo-Saxons, bearing with them what became Old English, the first form of the English language.

Faust and Mephistopheles win a war for the Emperor in Act 4. In Act 5, Faust, now 100, reclaims land from the sea, and is responsible for the death of an aged couple in the process. He dies, angels save his soul in a wildly comic scene, and he is redeemed in the eternity of the Eternal Feminine. He is not yet done striving.

Helen has been rescued from the underworld and taken to a medieval castle by Faust, courting her, uniting with her as a union of opposites, Classical with Medieval/German/Romantic. Their child Euphorion plunges to his death by trying to climb too high.

It is easy to read Act 3 ironically. Faust strives for the archetypal feminine, but their union is an illusion and produces a child who, because ungrounded in the real world, leaps to his death. But there may be a less reductive way of looking at it, not instead of but in addition to the ironic reading.

As Faust disappears to find Helen again, the Homunculus achieves his quest to be embodied at the climax of the Classical Walpurgis Night, the end of Act 2. Alchemical and scientific imagery of the union of fire and water unite with the imagery of evolution as Homunculus "impregnates” the waters of the sea nymph Galatea.