The Use of Outside References to Enrich Poetry Reading

Jessica Davis
ENGL 4420
5/14/2015

Use of Outside References to Enrich Poetry Reading

            One of the things I found most fascinating about this class was the use of outside references and resources to help flesh out the understanding of a poem. In many cases, these poems were fine on their own—we could understand the basic gist of what was going on, or get at a base-level comprehension of the poem’s setting, speaker, and purpose—but by doing a little research, we were able to come to a fuller understanding of what the poet was trying to convey. I found that in some cases, the poet was purposefully directing us to do further research on words or concepts used. This was true of such poems as Angie Estes’ “Rhapsody,” which required some work with the Oxford English Dictionary, or Paisley Rekdel’s “Arctic Scale,” which meant hunting down the Subhankar Banerjee photography on which she was writing. In other cases, particularly poems from a century ago or older, we were required by changing language and culture to go back and expand our understanding of certain references. Some poets even made deliberate reference to mythology, Christianity, folklore, etc. I really enjoyed the times when I could latch onto an unfamiliar idea in a poem and go Googling to figure out what it meant by itself and in the context of the larger poem—it was kind of like an Internet scavenger hunt, but the prize was better understanding great writing. The three poems I’m going to focus on for this final blog post are “The Mower Against Gardens,” “Ozymandias,” and “The Work.” Each has at least one reference that enriches your understanding of the poem by researching it.

            Andrew Marvell’s “The Mower Against Gardens” gave me some trouble, but doing some additional research did actually help me understand it. The first thing I did after reading it was head straight to the Oxford English Dictionary to look up “mower,” thinking that it surely couldn’t mean what it means now, a lawnmower. In fact, the first definition on the OED reads as follows: “A person who cuts grass, etc., with a scythe or (now usually) a mowing machine”, and the earliest reference is from 1225. With this knowledge of what the title meant, I was better able to come up with my own interpretation of the poem. I saw the Mower as mankind in general, interfering with nature—“With strange perfumes he did the roses taint; / And flowers themselves were taught to paint … He grafts upon the wild the tame”, etc.—to make the garden after his own idea of how it should look and function. I thought of this as a sort of act of defiance against God, who of course created nature—taking His creation and bastardizing it to make it prettier, more. This also goes against nature itself, whose beauty comes from its wildness instead of an outside force cultivating it.

            This reading, however, is harder to come by when given more context about depictions of a “mower” in Medieval manuscripts. On the site Hay in Art (http://www.hayinart.com/003277.html) we can see many depictions of normal men using scythes outdoors, but as Dr. Porter pointed out in class and on the blog, it was often common for Death itself to be personified as a skeletal figure wielding a scythe, as in “Denise Poncher before a Vision of Death,” below.

            If the Mower in the poem is actually Death, then what can be made of the poem itself? I honestly found this confusing, but maybe a couple of places in the poem point to an interpretation. In lines five and six, the poet describes the Mower’s actions: “He first enclosed within the gardens square / A dead and standing pool of air”. “Dead” could certainly be connected to Death, but what then of the cultivation of living plants? It’s hard for me to understand, personally, but knowing what “mower” means and who the Mower Against Gardens could be adds a layer of depth to the poem when trying to interpret it.

            A later poem that was clarified for me by research was Percy Shelley’s “Ozymandias.” Most of the poem consists of the speaker/poet quoting someone else’s account of a statue in the desert, which he describes as “Two vast and trunkless legs of stone” which “Stand in the desert…Near them, on the sand, / Half sunk, a shattered visage lies”. On the pedestal, the speaker continues, are these words: “‘My name is Ozymandias, king of kings: / Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!’”

            With some quick research over at the British Museum (http://www.britishmuseum.org/explore/highlights/highlight_objects/aes/c/colossal_bust_of_ramesses_ii.aspx) I learned that Ozymandias refers to Ramesses II, a pharaoh who reigned for 67 years and who “probably built more temples and sired more children than any other Egyptian king”. This definitely helps add to the irony that is already there in the poem—the boastful inscription is attached to nothing but crumbling remains, and “Nothing beside remains.” The speaker describes the surroundings: “Round the decay / Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare / The lone and level sands stretch far away.” There’s nothing left of Ramesses II’s despair-worthy works but “vast and trunkless legs of stone” and his “shattered visage,” which lies “Half sunk” in the sand. If Ramesses II was the great pharaoh that research suggests he is, then this poem is not only ironic but also somewhat sad. Someone who did such great work for Egypt and was so proud of it is left with only small, crumbling traces of his reign centuries later. Further research would probably uncover more specific details of Ramesses II’s reign and deepen the connection between the poem and the actual person.

            The final poem I’d like to discuss with reference to, well, references, is Andrew Feld’s “The Work.” I won’t copy the entire blog post I did about the musical references in this poem (http://4420poetry.blogspot.com/2015/04/the-work-musical-references-and-song.html) but I would like to talk about at least a couple of them. The poem is largely about the song of birds of prey, as set up by the epigraph: “Birds of prey have no song. –James Richardson.” The first reference Feld makes to music is that “The eagle’s voice was sampled from Metal Machine Music, an album that can drive roaches out of your apartment.” Lou Reed’s Metal Machine Music is, according to Wikipedia, “variously considered to be a joke, a grudging fulfillment of a contractual obligation, or an early example of noise music.” I think the idea of “noise music” is definitely important to this poem. Birds of prey, if this reference is to be believed, do not have a beautiful song like a nightingale might. They might, in fact, just make noise that sounds sort of like garbled garbage rather than a whistle-able tune.

            This idea is reinforced in the final musical reference of the poem, “all 17 minutes of Sister Ray.” Again turning to Wikipedia for cursory knowledge, I found that this song was by the Velvet Underground, and member Lou Reed (the same as above) has said that the lyrics were basically a joke—“it has eight characters in it and this guy gets killed and nobody does anything.” It hardly sounds like something beautiful or purposeful, and I think Feld wanted the reader to explore this reference in the context of songs of birds of prey. Based on the poem as a whole, it seems really important to Feld that the reader look up these references and internalize their possible meanings related to the idea of bird song, particularly the musical references. Without at least some cursory research, the poem turns into a bit of a “list” of things, and I don’t think that was Feld’s intent. He gave us specific ideas and concepts to look into to influence our ideas of the songs of birds of prey, and finished by telling us, “Expand your definition of song.” I think that’s exactly what these references have us do as readers.

            Ultimately, I think that poets using references in their poems or writing poems that age into having references makes us grow as readers. We have to stretch ourselves and at least click over into a new Google tab, or fire up Wikipedia to gain enough cursory knowledge to better understand what the poet and poem are trying to get across. It’s a really interesting exercise, and always makes me feel like I’ve really accomplished something in reading poetry. That’s definitely something I loved about this class, learning and growing as a reader of poetry.