Christian
Daigle
Dr. Porter
ENGL 4420
14 May 2015
Sleeping Memories
Over
the semester one of the most prevalent themes that have stuck with me is dreams
and how they fade to memories just as memories fade to dreams. The motion of
fading is what has caused me to question the purpose of a poet and who they
are, a dream or a memory? Which motion is it better to dwell in and in my
thoughts I asked why there needed to be a line drawn. The very motion of fading
is without a distinct line giving the poet freedom to fade in and out of their
dreams and memories. So I decided instead of defining a line to investigate
what the many forms and faces the line takes within poetry. The distinct faces
of this line are poetic tropes such as birds and gardens. Theses tropes
connected poetry in the greatest conversations humans have ever had because
they are dependent on specific conversation between at least two people. The
conversations between When I Have Fears
That I May Cease to Be, The Orchard, and, Sonnet 15: When I Consider Everything That Grows by Keats, Kelly,
and Shakespeare are tied by the idea of fading between dreams and memories that
creates a realm of solitude for the poet and the reader to stay in, a chapel of
contemplation, to question what it means to be a poet.
This
is a print made by Trenton Doyle Hancock.What is interesting here is that there
are many images working together that can be almost overwhelming, but if you
try hard enough the print tells a narrative that is in constant motion. The
brain sees all the images and decides what it thinks about it as art, but
because all the motion within the print are images that are recognizable to the brain everything becomes
muddled as to answer is good or not?
The
concept and action of creation is crucial within these dream like poems. In When I Have Fears That I May Cease to Be
Keats points out that his prominent fear is that he will die before he has written
his best work and arguably realizes that fame, or the his memory, is nothing
is. This idea can only be argued after
an closer look of the long dash in the middle of line 12 “Of unreflecting love—then on the shore” the line is not a complete thought syntactically, but what
can be seen is a division between Keats’s dream like state and reality. The
dash serves as a portal between his fears, which have manifested in his head
causing Keats to question his mortality as a poet. The fear of not living to his
fullest potential serves as the face of his dream like state because they, his
fears, push him to create poetry, to create symbols, and to create meaning in
one’s identify. He recognizes what exactly are his fears, but knows that he does not
control his fate. All he can do is chooses to see what he wishes and creates
his own narrative from his fears that are piled up on him. Keats uses his fears
to keep him a state where he does not have to decide anything he can just
dwell, but that dash is where things changed for Keats. He realizes that even
if he has an even more limited amount of time on the earth he must create
because that is what he is.
In Shakespeare’s Sonnet 15: When I Consider Everything That Grows the creation
is seen in the final couplet “And all in war with Time for love of
you/ as he takes from you, I engraft you new”
(13-14). To engraft is to insert (a section of one tree) as a graft into
or upon another (OED). The speaker invokes creation through a promise to
keep the speaker’s friend alive through memories. The speaker thinks about
growth and realizes that death of the body is apart of growth, but does not
want to accept that fate. So the speaker promises to engraft to take the
memories they shared and put them within a poem so they as their physical body
dies their memory will not. It stays in a dream like state fading between dream
and memory based on the reader’s connection to the poem. For example a person
who reads this and connects with the poem by a similar memory the poem fades into
memory, but if the reader see the poem as a dream state where one can live
without Keats’s long dash then the poem becomes dream like. The shift is ever
changing as it serves the specific needs for the conversation to happen.
This
is a painting that was (as of spring break) a painting done by Rothko hanging
in the Menil. Rothko painted during the time of abstract expressionist only
after as Rothko puts it "killed the cubists". Making his paintings in
some respect creation for death. There is raw emotion here that cannot be
defined by symbols the brain gives. The dream like state becomes less unclear
and the viewer must define the art for themselves rather than have it defined
for them and only having to accept it. The painting demand the highest degree
of contemplation forcing the viewer to jump into this dream like state and come
out changed. They are not allowed to dwell forever here because there is
physical symbol to dwell on.
Kelly’s The Orchard goes back in forth within a dream trying to define the
dream, which does not work because dreams are not rooted in reality. “And I saw/ that the horse was a dog. But
the apples/ were still apples”(49). The speaker is trying to define the
boney creature with character, words
symbols that translate to Dog, wolf, and horse. The dream is a stream of
consciousness created from the speaker. The speaker fully immerses inside the
dream state past the help of the long dash. “Fallen—I
closed my eyes/ not out of distaste. But to see if the dog/ would disappear” (50). The dog does not disappear because the
dog serves as the fear. Emotionally, worldly, and physical fears that come with
being human. How to speaker deals with these fears is through creation of death
and the beauty gore. Seeing the images of the dog holding the sacrificial doe
in its jaw is a sight of beauty as it shows us our mortality. The memory of our
bodies are tied directly with the body of the animal that eats us. The animal
is seen as the dog, but Keats’s dog is seen as his legacy and fear of not
living up to his potential. The speaker in Sonnet
15 uses the fear of losing his friend and preserves the memory within
poetry while Kelly either attempts to escape or retreat into poetry, but uses
it as a median for realization that the dream is a tool the poet has to come to
grips with the relationship between doe and dog. The poet is the blood the
median between doe and dog just as the motion of shifting between dream and
memory.
Deadpool is
famous for many things the main one being his constant breaking of the fourth wall.
Here Deadpool is where I like to think in motion between memory and dream. The “merc
with a mouth” is aware that he has been stabbed by an elephant tusk, but does
not fear because he can’t physically die (like in a dream). Deadpool also is
aware of the sound “SPLOORP” which can serve has human fear that we are aware
of, but his body is in motion to push him self off the tusk and most likely lay
waste to the mean elephant. I think this image shows the beauty of blood and
the creation within the movement of dream and memory while at the same time
showing that the fears and question that stem from dreams are still very real
to the dreamer, but at the same time know that their memory can’t die because
of the creation they make.
References
Video on how grafting
Graphic video of wolves eating a deer
Fruit harvesting
Tips to a healthy orchard
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