Time, Oxford English
Dictionary, definition 1.1: “The progress of time as affecting people and
things”
When I first started going through the
roughly 182 posts that we as a class have created over the course of this
semester, I was already sure that I wanted to create my magnum opus of posts
over time and decay, especially as it relates to and affects both humanity and
its structures. IN the poems and our responses, the idea of humans as mortal
has repeatedly come up. But as I looked at the poems I wanted to use and the
posts that relate to them, my vision for what I wanted to create changed. As I
looked at the poems and saw the same concepts and tropes repeating in slightly
different forms, my mind turned to the idea of time as a cyclical construct,
and humanity’s place as simply one part of one cycle of time. So while my
thread is titled “Humanity and its Constructions vs Time”, it would probably be
more accurately known now as “Humanity and Cycles in the Sea of Time”. However,
the base concept, humanity and its institutions slide into decay, is still
intact.
When choosing the possible poems we looked
at to illustrate this part, two that continually called out to me were
Shakespeare’s sonnets to the young man (represented by Sonnet 15 for me) and
Spenser’s Sonnet 75. While their subject matter drifts from the standard
Petrarchan trope of a man pining for the one he loves, the structure is
replicated; 15 lines, even rhythm, and rhyming couplets ending with a heroic
couplet are all present. Both speaker’s deal with the reality of the mortality
of humans as it relates to the objects of their respective affection; that is,
that their “day of youth” as said by Shakespeare are fated to turn into “sullied
night”, as time and its decay will ultimately turn youth to old age. Both have
the same solution to this problem; by preserving their loves in the lines of
their poetry, all that was great and beautiful in their days of youth will be
preserved for those that will come after to see. In the context of humanity
society, this method of attaining eternal youth seems like the ideal solution;
as their verses are added to the growing stockpile of the poetic tradition,
their beloveds (along with the poetic trope of using verse and writing to
preserve feelings and images) will be preserved. However, already we encounter
problems in Spenser’s Sonnet 75. It goes
a step further in its meditations on time and its affects. In another break
from the tradition of Petrarch, the speaker’s beloved in “Sonnet 75” speaks to
him directly, chiding him for his futile (in her eyes) attempts to immortalize
her name; “’Vain man,’ said she, ‘that dost in vain assay’…” This line comes in
response to the speaker’s attempts to record her name on the sand of the shore,
something that is constantly changing due to the influence of the sea. It was
in this rumination of what the sea represents that my vision expanded.
For the first of my two
pictures, I chose the album cover of The Caretaker’s 2012 album “Patience
(After Sebald)”, which was the epynonomous soundtrack to the Grant Gee documentary
of German writer WG Sebald. This album was designed on a fundamental level to
complement the themes of memories fading with age and decay that are found in
Sebald’s works. In the picture, a snow globe like object appears in the middle
of a dark void, with the centerpiece being a lighthouse continuing to
illuminate one section of a dark void. The dome stands on a sea of sand, which
stretches into eternity. This, for me, is the perfect metaphor for the total
sum of humanity’s work; one glimmer of light in an endless void.
These same themes of decay and humanity in
the face of eternity and the small space it takes up in that void are echoed in
both Peter Bysshe Shelley’s “Ozymandias” and Algernon Charles Swineburne’s “A
Forsaken Garden.” Compared to Shakespeare and Spenser’s work, Shelley’s is the
closest in nature, even if it is just structurally similar. “Ozymandias”
follows all of the structural conventions of the sonnet, with rhyming couplets.
However, there is one crucial exception to this form; instead of closing the
poem and its ideas with a nice little heroic couplet, Shelley instead continues
to use the same rhyme scheme as the rest of the poem, possibly representing the
continuation of time after the speaker has said his piece. Thematically, “Ozymandias”
is radically different, but inherently works from the same themes as “Sonnet 15”
and “Sonnet 75.” While it still deals with man and decay, the timespan of the
poem is stretched from centuries to millennia; instead of the decay of a human
body, it deals with the decay of an empire and the human institutions that the
empire’s society had. And with it, the final line, this idea of eternity, in
the form of a sea of sand, surrounding the momentary void of human work
remains; “The lone and level sands stretch far away.”
These same themes of the decay of human
constructions and institutions can be found in Swineburne’s “A Forsaken Garden”.
Radically different structurally from the sonnets seen previously, all of the
stanzas are relatively the same structurally, emphasizing an idea of repetition
as time progresses in the poem and as one reads the poem. Going even further
than the decay seen in “Ozymandias”, in which the speaker was able to at least
understand the feelings behind the face of the titular Ozymandias, “A Forsaken
Garden” features the decay of the feelings and relationships that may have
bloomed in the garden; “And were one to the end – but to what end, who knows?”
Not even the garden or the rocks it was built upon countless years ago is safe
from time and decay; “Till the slow sea rise and the sheer cliff crumble/Till
the terrace and meadow the deep gulf drinks…” In the span of one poem, what was
tens of years became hundreds, what was hundreds became thousands, and what was
thousands became eons. All of the possible meaning and feelings that once were
represented by the garden are gone, returned to the sea.
But what comes after this? Is there
nothing after this consumption of the garden by the sea? Is there nothing but
the eternal void stretching out before us? The final lines of “A Forsaken
Garden” can be taken to reject this notion of nothing; “As a god self-slain on
his own strange altar/Death lies dead.” Rather than being the same, death
itself is another victim in the sea of time, fated to return once again when
life rises anew to replace that which has passed. This idea of an endless cycle
of repetition stretching out into eternity is a central concept to the Hindu view
of the Universe, in which time and the Universe is an endless series of cycle,
timed by creation at the hands of Brahma, life during the reign of Vishnu, and
destruction at the hands of Shiva. When Shiva’s work is done, Brahma is born
from the lotus that sprouts from the navel of Vishnu, repeating the cycle. In western
thought, this idea of cyclical eternity is best represented by Ouroboros, a
serpent eating its tail as pictured here. By eating its own tail, the serpent creates an endless cycle, one that will remain constant.
This concept of time as
cyclical can and has been applied to time as defined by humanity in Walter
Kaufman’s biography of Nietzsche “Nietzsche: Philosopher, Writer, Anitchrist”; “…all
configurations which have previously existed on this earth must yet meet,
attract, repulse, kiss, and corrupt each other again...”
This type of repetition, in the context of
the poetic tradition, can be found in Ange Estes’ “Almost Autumn.” Again, the
repetition in stanza structure that is found in Swineburne’s “A Forsaken Garden”
can be found here, which does away with rhyme schemes in favor of structural
symmetry. However, this holds one exception; the poem ends with a three word
phrase, “to swim away.” Playing off of a pun of the French word “fin” which
means to end and the word “fin” as is relates to the fins of a fish, Estes
presents the image of a fish swimming off in the ocean. When the fish is read
as the poet, the speaker of “Almost Autumn” whoever else is included when they
use “we” will swim to something new when the old poetic tradition has run its
course. Because much like time repeats, the tropes and themes found in poetry
will continue to repeat in the context of human society. And while the
structure and language may change, the feelings and thoughts that produce
poetry will remain the same.
Time, Oxford English
Dictionary, definition 1: “The indefinite continued progress of existence and
events in the past, present, and future regarded as a whole”
Links/Sources
- Hindu Thesis of Creation, as Summarized by the World Public Library
- Nietzsche: Philosopher, Writer, Antichrist
No comments:
Post a Comment