Arcadiana

A Blog about Literature, Culture and the Environment

Tag: poetry

  • You are a sky full of stars

    by Demet Uygun

    You are a sky full of stars,
    A floating voyage,
    Infinite beauty that never leaves scars,
    Cause you light up the path through the dark.
    Like the Sirius, the brightest star in the night sky,
    Continuous as the stars that shine,
    You light up the world from afar.

    Working Notes on Demet’s poem:

    I chose the line “continuous as the stars that shine” because it reminded me of Coldplay’s song “A
    Sky Full of Stars.” Then, I looked at the names of the stars, especially the brightest star, which is
    Sirius. I gathered the lines of the song, the poem, and a basic definition I found on Wikipedia about
    Sirius.

  • Beside the lake, beneath the trees 

    by Charmaine Küllenberg 

    The wind rises 

    Like a wave upon the sea 

    Where the weeds are growing free  

    There deep, deep in the forest night  

    Some are born to sweet delight  

    _

    There we wander, there we weep 

    As the crows fall asleep 

    Hear the forest talking, insects and birds  

    An idiot prayer of empty words 

    With no alarms and no surprises 

    _

    I looked up to the sky above 

    To you, who was dearly loved 

    Working notes on Charmaine’s poem:

    For the Wordsworth rewriting poem, I chose the line “Beside the lake, beneath the trees” because I
    had the idea of describing a new scene based on it. So when I was collecting lines, I picked the ones
    that I thought would fit the scene I had in mind. I had a lot of fun working on the poem, but it was
    also quite challenging. What made it difficult for me was that I found lines that rhymed at the end
    (the first pair I found was ‘night’, ‘delight’) and decided that I wanted the whole poem to rhyme. I
    found most lines from songs I’ve been listening to at the time and other things I’ve read. The line
    “Some are born to sweet delight” is taken from William Blake’s ‘Auguries of Innocence’ because I
    just like that poem and wanted to use a line for this. Personally, the poem invokes a feeling of
    solitude and melancholy, but also calmness. The first two stanzas build a sort of frame as I put the
    rhyming lines at the beginning of the first stanza and the end of the second one (‘rises’, ‘surprises’).
    I’m not quite sure why I wanted to frame it like that; it just felt right to me.

  • Application for state-funded jocund company support during higher educational training under the Federal Training Assistance Act

    by Noah Brelage

    1. Extract from Personal Details:

    “I wandered lonely as a cloud 

    In vacant or in pensive mood, 

    Which is the bliss of solitude”

    2.1 Declaration of the person receiving the daffodils:

    I am aware that 

    I am obliged under § 60 of 

    Fluttering and dancing in the breeze 

    to immediately report any changes 

    Beside the lake, beneath the trees, 

    without being asked to do so 

    and to submit the documents required for the final determination of dances with the daffodils. 

    2.1 Appendix: Required supporting documents & other evidence

    ● stars that shine 

    ● sparkling waves in glee 

    ● sprightly dance 

    ● heart with pleasure 

    more documents may be requested upon further processing of the application

    3. Overview of personal information

    A duly enrolled as a student at 

    the university of a host, of golden daffodils, 

    A poet

    Working Notes on Noah’s poem:  

    I tried to find a document that is as far away as possible from a romanticised presentation of  nature, so I decided to use an application form for state funded financial support during study. I  myself have already oftentimes had the pleasure of reading these documents written in byzantine  wording far removed from the real world. Ironically, I felt some similarities in the needlessly  strange choice of wording in both the application form and the Wordsworth poem. Additionally, I  can not imagine something more distant from any concept of nature than an overly-arbitrary,  human-made, bureaucratic financial system. Juxtaposing these two became a fun challenge. The italicised parts of text are the parts I took from the Wordsworth poem. I wanted to make a  clear distinction between the texts to present the stitching-together of the original texts. The rest of  the structure of the text is, obviously, based on the application form I had used.

  • Unframing Wordsworth’s Daffodils. A practical and theoretical poetry class

    Even outside of environmental literature circles, William Wordsworth’s poem ‘I wandered lonely as a cloud’, also commonly known as ‘Daffodils’, is widely recognised as ‘one of England’s most famous and most quintessentially Romantic poems’ (British Library). In 2007, local tourism officials of the Lake District even released a pop video and hip hop version to celebrate its bicentennial legacy – and to advertise Wordsworth’s beloved home to a younger audience. In environmental discourse, Wordsworth’s status as an “ecopoet” whose sensitivity to emotions, elements, and place turns poems into “imaginary parks in which we may breathe an air that is not toxic and accommodate ourselves to a mode of dwelling that is not alienated” (Bate 64) has been particularly secured by Jonathan Bate. Other critics, however, are more skeptical of what they see as an erasure of material, economical, and political conditions in favour of an idealised pristine natural idyll (cf. Hess, McGann, Levinson). Though acknowledging the Romantics’ attentiveness to the non-human, later strands of ecocriticism and ecopoetics have further pushed against traditions of nature poetry that reduce nature to a pastoral scene we admire from afar. Moving beyond this, ecopoetics, as Evelyn Reilly writes, includes the “rejection of compensatory notions of nature as retreat and of our role as consumers of consoling description” and engages “the recuperation of cultural, industrial, and political erasures; the dismantling of dichotomies of self/other, nature/ culture, indigenous/alien and central/peripheral” (257). 

    The creative writing & artistic research seminar “Beyond Nature Poetry: Ecopoetics” that I currently teach at Düsseldorf University aims to foster critical engagements with so-called nature poetry precisely along these lines of investigation. Open to BA and MA students in the English department, it seeks to explore the capacities of ecopoetics to disclose, reflect on, and reimagine the power dynamics between humans, language, and what we refer to as “nature”. In this context, we discussed how the poetic I in Wordsworth’s “Daffodils” encounters the natural world and how we as readers encounter it in turn. The students were quick to point out that the first iconic line “I wandered lonely as a cloud” suggests a bird’s-eye perspective that places the speaker outside the landscape. The description of the “crowd” of daffodils that come into view “all at once”, like in a picture, adds to the picturesque spell of the poem that frames nature as a spectacle the disconnected spectator observes from distance. Driven by an exclusive focus on the visual – “saw I”; “I saw”; “I gazed and gazed” – this distance continues throughout all four stanzas. As students noted, the poem thus appears to be more about us seeing the poet seeing the daffodils rather than the daffodils themselves. Although the content of the poem seems to suggest an emotional connection with the daffodils as “company” for the lonely poet, the way it is presented, framed by the narrator and an omnipresent lyrical eye, simultaneously continues to separate the disembodied speaker’s mind from the natural, socio-political, and physical environment they are engaging – or, rather, failing to engage with. 

    Scott Hess, who reads Wordsworth’s poem in relation to the conventions of Romantic-period landscape aesthetics, suggests that it demonstrates the persistence of the picturesque as a mode of structuring perception and framing landscape. Focusing quite literally on “that peculiar kind of beauty, which is agreeable in a picture” (Gilpin xii), the emergence of the picturesque as an aesthetic ideal propelled a new way of looking at nature as if it were a landscape painting. From the 18th century onwards, the Lake District in particular became popular with new picturesque tourists who used the Claude glass, a portable convex tinted mirror, to impose a perceptual frame around the landscape whilst – not only metaphorically, but physically – turning their back to it. Enacting a similar framing technique through its point of view and emphasis on the visual, Wordsworth’s poem arguably implies separations between viewer and landscape, subject and object, mind and body – separations that are unhelpful when we are searching for reparative ways of ecological interconnectedness. Anthropomorphised only, it seems, to make the poetic I feel less lonely, the daffodils that are “tossing their heads in sprightly dance” are exclusively bent towards the human, suggesting a non-reciprocal and anthropocentric relationship between human and nature. The final stanza adds to this reading, as the daffodil scene is now completely interiorised and becomes an imaginative resource for the narrator’s pleasure and sense of individual self. In that sense, the poem’s activation of picturesque framing can thus be read as reinforcing a persistent perception of nature as a projection surface and separate stylised idyllic retreat for anthropocentric purposes.

    With this in mind, we set out to re- or unframe Wordsworth’s daffodil poem. Since my seminar embraces ecopoetics as a “creative-critical edge” (Skinner 1) that combines theoretical and practical modes of investigation, our critical discussion was paired with a creative writing task. Inspired by a combination of conceptual/procedural poetry techniques, Charles Bernstein’s language experiments and this playful Daffodil variation I found online, I asked the students to pick a line from the Wordsworth poem that spoke to them in some way. They were then supposed to find material (leaflets, newspaper articles, dictionary entries, other poems…) that somehow related to that line and to finally make a new poem composed of phrases from the new sources, juxtaposed with lines from the original if desired.

    The results are surprising and wonderful in many ways. Students’ materials included songs, references to Blake, bureaucratic forms, research on dance, manuals, and advertisements that begin to move Wordsworth’s poem into the chaos of our contemporary present. Unraveling a detached bird’s-eye view on nature, the new poems became expressions of embedded narrators whose reading experience, context, and environment shape and in-form their writing. In that sense, many of the new poems no longer describe but start to embody a more connected, interdependent sense of being in the world and having to deal with its material, physical, and economic conditions: Wordsworth meets the struggles of applying for student funding; “dancing daffodils” are complicated by the bodily strains of professional athletes and commercialised resource extraction. Often questioning nature as an idyllic retreat separated from the human realm, the poems disclose various contact points between humans and their multifaceted environments. Juxtaposing different registers and sources, they open themselves up to new relations between textual and extratextual ecologies and reflect on the various uses of language as it connects us to “the fragile and finite territory our species named, claimed, exploited, sentimentalized, and aggrandized as ‘our world.’” (Retallack para 30) We do not need to wander out into nature, we are in the midst of it, part of it, and it is not always pretty but includes “fear, dominance, confusion, or pain”. Amidst this confusion, we can find poetry and “experience art” that is not separated from but fully embedded in everyday life and thereby directly interacting with its social, political, and historical layers.

    The writing and reading procedures/process of these poems invite closer attention to these layers and how they are curated by language, searching for an ecopoetics of disruption, imagination, and critical consciousness that can make us aware and perhaps push the limits of our view. Resembling branches that grow out of Wordsworth’s original poem, as one the student described it, all of the new, unframed poems emphasize process and offer new perspectives on and beyond Wordsworth’s “Daffodils”. My intention with this task has not been to disparage his poem, but rather to show it is not the end of the story and encourage us to investigate, shift, and lift the frames that structure our perception. One voice, one poem, one frame is simply not enough to register the fullness, multiplicity, and complexity of this ancient earth we humans inhabit only briefly.

    References

    Bate, Jonathan. The Song of the Earth. Picador, 2001.

    British Library. “William Wordsworth’s ‘I wandered lonely as a cloud’. https://www.britishlibrary.cn/ en/works/i-wandered-lonely-as-a-cloud/ 

    Gilpin, William. An Essay on Prints. A. Strahan, 1802. 

    Hess, Scott. “John Clare, William Wordsworth, and the (Un)framing of Nature”. John Clare Society  Journal, Iss. 27, 2008. pp. 27-44. 

    Levinson, Marjorie. Wordsworth’s Great Period Poems. Cambridge University Press, 1986. 

    McGann, Jerome. The Romantic Ideology: A Critical Investigation. University of Chicago Press, 1983. 

    Reilly, Evelyn. “Eco-Noise and the Flux of Lux”. Eco Language Reader, edited by Brenda, Iijima, Portable P at Yo-Yo Labs/Nightboat, 2010, pp. 255–74. 

    Retallack, Joan. ‘What Is Experimental Poetry and Why Do We Need It’. Jacket Magazine, 2007,  jacketmagazine.com/32/p-retallack.shtml. 

    Skinner, Jonathan. ecopoetics 01. Periplum, 2001.  

    Soth, Amelia. ‘The Claude Glass Revolutionized the Way People Saw Landscapes.’ JSTOR Daily, 2021.

    Wordsworth, William. “I wandered lonely as a cloud.” PoetryFoundation, https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/45521/i-wandered-lonely-as-a-cloud. 

  • t4t as a model of eco intimacy and kinship in Oliver Baez Bendorf’s “T4T”

    t4t as a model of eco intimacy and kinship in Oliver Baez Bendorf’s “T4T”

    T4t stands for “trans for trans” and originated in the early 2000s within Craigslist personals to describe trans individuals choosing to pursue relationships and/or sex with other trans people. t4t as a model has been problematised because it might risk epitomising cis/trans binaries and “distract[ing] us from or cover[ing] over the significant axes of difference, race chief among them, that characterize and trouble trans affinities and solidarities”(Awkward-Rich and Malatino 3). In this way, t4t needs to be reframed through a more expansive approach, one which, as theorised by Black feminist Amira Lundy-Harris, could describe more accurately and comprehensively the different connections between trans people and explore “the relationship between Black feminist thought and trans studies, as part of a larger structure of thinking Blackness and transness in relationship to one another” (89). Expanded in this way, t4t would be a useful and joyful ideal. There is, after all, a great and hopeful resistance in actively choosing only people within your own trans collectivity, outside the borders of which there is a much higher chance of rejection, misidentification, and a forceful need for explanations and justifications. t4t could then summarise and stand for the intricate nets of “recognition, attraction, solidarity, and support” within trans circles described by Hil Malatino (SA).

    Much of the trans experience is based on such exchanges – on webs of relationality and connections with others, which are essential to resistance (Edwards 324). As analysed by Malatino, webs of care, collectivity, and kinship among queer and especially trans individuals arise in a system built on types of collectiveness that are cisheteronormative and centred around the nuclear family, thus leaving no space for trans and queer individuals (TC). These trans counter systems of care contrast both the ways in which care and kinship are “steeped in forms of domesticity and intimacy that are both White and Eurocentered, grounded in the colonial/modern gender system” and “the mythos of neoliberal, entrepreneurial self-making” (TC). The trans self is relational rather than self-sufficient and the webs of collectivity, care, and kinship on which it depends for survival configure a type of care that evades established heteronormative structures. “Subjectivity and dependency” (TC) are then inextricably linked, which is further augmented by the fact that an act of care in trans circles is never a linear, unidirectional exchange; instead, in these webs, any act of care towards another is an act sustaining and supporting those same networks of care you are part of (TC). The trans self that emerges from this analysis is then interconnected and relational, contrasting the “capitalist […] ideology of individualism” (Drucker 56) and the neoliberal idea that the individual must be self-sufficient and self-reliant.

    Starting from the t4t experience, poet Oliver Baez Bendorf shows how this relationality can expand towards a similar interrelationality and kinship with nature and our surroundings. Bendorf’s poem “T4T” opens mid-scene and mid-action, with an “And” that signifies that what is written on the page continues something that is left unwritten, left unseen. 

    And I think he must be drunk, from the sweet way he.

    Brother. I think about his XX all the time. It’s like a joke,

    that we’ll start dreaming of men once we. […]

    Not only does the poem open as if halfway through an already-started action, story, or scene. It also opens by declaring a sense of inebriation. The t4t encounter is then immediately portrayed as belonging to a different state of consciousness, one where “his XX” does not require any further words but can immediately move to being an inside joke shared only between the two men. It is never revealed what the lover is doing that shows a drunk-like state, as some lines abruptly halt and break mid-sentence, so that the reader is left only knowing about a “sweet way” and not what this sweet way is applied to. These unfinished sentences consistently happen after the use of a pronoun referring to either the speaker, the lover, or both together. The actions, descriptions, and definitions of the speaker and the lover are left unsaid, because interrupted or unsayable, so that their identities remain nebulous, interrupted, unfinished. However, their identities are built throughout the poem in the exchange(s) between them. The self is then (partly and) intimately constructed from an encounter with and recognition of the similar, exemplifying how t4t can become “a site of identity formation” (Adair and Azura 46). The sites of the interruptions also become the sites of the constructions, so that what is left unknowable for an external reader is a site of becoming for the two trans men. 

    Identity is built through and within an ‘other’ which is other but is also same, through a process of recognition of similarities and recognition of differences, embodied in the poem by the “brother” address, isolated as a single-word sentence. The use of the term brother pulls the reader into a system of relationality that borrows terminology from the standard heteronormative family just to subvert it and build a different type of kinship and bonds that can only exist outside such family. Further, the term “brother” in the context of sex also creates an immediate connection to incest. According to Lee Edelman, incest, because it confounds and destabilises sameness and difference, threatens the stability of culture as opposed to nature and, as it is in culture rather than nature that meaning is produced, it also disrupts the stability of meaning itself (BE). If “the incest prohibition is the fundamental social rule” that culture is articulated around and depends on (Ramadanovic), the “brother” address interrupts culture and disrupts a clear, singular, and stable presence of meaning – as articulated in the unfinished sentences. It declares its disassociation from culture as opposed to nature and reinforces the t4t encounter as a webbed exchange of sameness and difference belonging to an alternative space. In this way, nature (as opposed to culture) becomes part of what makes these expansive movements of encounter & recognition and similarity & difference possible.

    This expansiveness and enmeshment also directly extends to the non-human, so that t4t evades separatism by merging with what goes beyond the human. Natural imagery is scattered throughout the poem. It starts from being in the surroundings – a place which is already intertwined with the two men and their actions. They eat “citrus on river rock / while others swam out”, in a way that denotes a singularity of interconnectedness with the natural: while “others” swim out, preparing themselves to leave such a space, the two men remain there and eat. Such interconnectedness is then furthered through the t4t encounter so that nature moves from being in the background to becoming part of their sex and intimacy. In the image of their “clothes scattered around pine root” the trees and the ground become what creates the time and space for their nakedness and sex. Nature is also co-creative of their own bodies, as the root of the pine also becomes the root of the lover, the root which the speaker, if given “the chance”, would “go right to”, wanting to reach not only the lover’s deepest core but also the core of the nature around them. The t4t erotic recognition and suspension creates a reaching towards an erotic similarity and intimacy with the non-human, so that the two become intertwined with each other, and one happens through the other, in a process that is reminiscent of the principles of the Ecosex Manifesto, formulated and written by Elizabeth M. Stephens and Annie M. Sprinkle. 

    The Ecosex Manifesto rejects the image of Earth as a mother to instead think of Earth as a “lover”, to be “madly, passionately, and fiercely in love” with, in a relationship to be renovated and continued every day and that can become “more mutual and sustainable” only through a collaboration with nature. The relationship with nature is erotic, sensory, and physical, made of “shamelessly hug[ging] trees, massag[ing] the earth with our feet, and talk[ing] erotically to plants” and, ultimately, “mak[ing] love with the Earth through our senses”. The relationship with nature articulated in the manifesto is an enmeshed and mutual one furthered through physical exchanges and love. In Bendorf’s poem, a similar relationship with nature is depicted, and it is in this fusion with and commitment to nature that queer love, sex, and intimacy can find further fulfilment. 

    The identity formation that happens through t4t intimacy and sex in Bendorf’s poem is, thus, an identity formation that also happens with and through nature. Here we see the trans self is not interconnected and relational only because it belongs to a trans collectivity, but also because – in its t4t exchange – is located within and existing in nature, with which it merges and mingles, in a continuous exchange akin to the one that happens within trans circles of care. This merging with the surroundings intertwined with the merging between the two men’s bodies culminates in the acknowledgement that “there’s something happy and right about us mating”. 

    The word “mating” clearly carries an animal-like connotation. This evocation of non-human animals in the context of t4t sex disrupts even further the social and cultural boundaries that the term brother has already eroded. Going beyond the human as an exclusive subject of love, sexuality, and inter-subjective co-creation, Bendorf shows the happiness and rightness of a t4t encounter bleeding into the happiness and rightness of an inter-nature encounter. This poem thus offers a powerful example of how the potentially problematic or overly simplistic characterization of t4t can be eluded: by showing the body and self are interconnected not only with more, different bodies and selves, but also with the (natural) spaces that allow for those bodies to meet. 

    Works Cited

    Adair, Cassius, and Aizura, Aren. ““The Transgender Craze Seducing Our [Sons]”; or, All the 

    Trans Guys Are Just Dating Each Other”. TSQ: Transgender Studies 

    Quarterly, vol 9, no 1, 2022, pp 44–64. https://doi.org/10.1215/23289252-9475509.

    Awkward-Rich, Cameron, and Malatino, Hil. “Meanwhile, t4t”. TSQ: Transgender Studies 

    Quarterly, vol 9, no 1, 2022, pp 1-8. DOI: 10.1215/23289252-9475467

    Bendorf, Oliver Baez. “T4T”. Poetry, 2020. 

    https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/151771/t4t.

    Drucker, Peter. Warped: Gay Normality and Queer Anti-Capitalism. Brill, 2015.

    Edelman, Lee. Bad Education. Why Queer Theory Teaches Us Nothing. Duke University 

    Press, 2022.

    Edwards, Kari. In Troubling the Line: Trans and Genderqueer Poetry and Poetics, edited by 

    Trace Peterson and TC Colbert, Nightboat Books, 2013.

    Malatino, Hil. Trans Care. University of Minnesota Press, 2020.

    —. Side Affects: on Being Trans and Feeling Bad. University of Minnesota Press, 2022.

    Lundy-Harris, Amira. ““Necessary Bonding” On Black Trans Studies, Kinship, and Black 

    Feminist Genealogies”. TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly, vol 9, no 1, 2022, pp 

    84-100. https://doi.org/10.1215/23289252-9475537.

    Ramadanovic, Petar. “The Non-meaning of Incest or, How Natural Culture Is.” Postmodern 

    Culture, vol 20 no 2, 2010. doi: 10.1353/pmc.2010.0004

    Stephens, Elizabeth M. and Sprinkle, Annie M. “Ecosex Manifesto”. 

    https://sprinklestephens.ucsc.edu/research-writing/ecosex-manifesto/.

  • Challenging Mother Nature through the Feminised Imagery of the Moon: An Ecofeminist Reading of Ann Radcliffe and Sylvia Plath

    Challenging Mother Nature through the Feminised Imagery of the Moon: An Ecofeminist Reading of Ann Radcliffe and Sylvia Plath

    Photograph taken by Artist on Unsplash

    This essay explores the ecofeminist characteristics of Ann Radcliffe and Sylvia Plath’s poetry. Employing an ecofeminist lens offers a novel approach to studying their shared vision of nature across literary movements. This essay centres on how the poets challenged the essentialist link between nature and women through Radcliffe’s “Sunset” (1791) and Plath’s “The Moon and the Yew Tree” (1961). Both poems explore empowerment and control of the environment through the feminised imagery of the Moon.

    While critics such as Jane Stabler and Alison Milbank have started to unpack the impact of Radcliffe’s poetry, the ecofeminist characteristics of her verses have remained relatively unaddressed in recent scholarship. In his eco-critical reading of Radcliffe’s novels, Christopher Hitt states that “the visionary is apprehended only in fleeting glimpses, obliquely and indefinitely” (139). The feminised Moon in Radcliffe’s verses, especially the “pale orb” in “Sunset”, is one such example of a “fleeting” and “oblique” symbol of motherhood and the natural world. “Sunset” is a poem narrated by the heroine Adeline in The Romance of the Forest.The twenty-two line single verse poem begins with the onset of Twilight, a soft, obscuring and nurturing female force, characteristic perhaps of an “Edenic Evening” (Milbank 147). The first twelve lines of the poem are devoted to establishing “Ev’ning’s dome”, a space seemingly constructed by female figures who control the transition into the night (Radcliffe 297).

    The appearance of the Moon contrasts with the shadow-casting of Meek Twilight. Countering the gloomy “purple” and “gray” hues, the Moon relights the earth by “throwing her radiance wide” (Radcliffe 297). Her power is concentrated in a sharp and bright “line”, which is at odds with the inky “curling tide”. The “pale orb” ushers in an unpredictable flow of syllables, couplets, and a triplet: 

    Or the Moon’s pale orb appear,
    Throwing her line of radiance wide,
    Far o’er the lightly-curling tide,
    That seems the yellow sands to chide. (Radcliffe 297)

    The unbalanced succession of ‘-ide’ rhymes speaks to wildness in nature. The water commanded by the gravitational force of the moon “chides”, or rather “scolds” the sand, suggestive of raising a child (Johnson 365-6). Radcliffe gives the impression that the guiding hand of the maternal Moon shapes the coast, but this mother figure is not necessarily a gentle force. Her “chiding” juxtaposes the sweep of Meek Twilight’s “shadows” over the landscape. However, the final disruption of the scene comes not from the stars, Moon, or shadowy female figures who have established a silence, but from the distant activities of sailors and oars on the surface of the water. These sounds, which ride the “dying wave,” hail in a masculine gothic presence, immiscible with the evening space (Milbank 147, Passey 194).

    Like Radcliffe’s poetry, ecocriticism remains an under-researched area in Plath’s work, with only a handful of critics, such as Tracy Brain, Scott Knickerbocker, and Irena Ragaišienė, engaging with the ecological aspects of her writings. The figure of the Moon in Plath’s “The Moon and the Yew Tree” challenges the essentialist link between women and nature. Plath wrote the poem in October 1961 in Devon. She reflects on a tree growing next to a churchyard, visible from her office window. The material existence of the tree that still stands in the village of North Tawton highlights that without the natural tree, there are no “trees of the mind” that dominate the speaker’s imagination (Plath 172). “The Moon and the Yew Tree” not only rejects the essentialist view of ‘Mother Nature’ but removes the dominant structure of patriarchy altogether. The four seven-line stanzas are characterised by gothic imagery and isolation. In this ambiguous, feminised landscape, the Yew appears as a death-tree, and the Moon represents the antithesis of the nurturing Christian mother. Christina Britzolakis argues that Plath “inverts Romantic lunar symbolism and refuses empathetic identification” (126). Other critics like Judith Kroll noted the influence of Robert Graves’s The White Goddess in Plath’s Moon-Muse, particularly the Moon as a Triple Goddess, such as Hecate (Kroll 44).

    The use of the female pronoun personifies the Moon and singles it out as the only living subject. The Moon “is bald and wild. / And the message of the yew tree is blackness—blackness and silence” (Plath 173). Here, Plath portrays the Moon as a violent supernatural entity that humans cannot control. Escaping from a male-dominated society symbolised by the physical presence of the church, the speaker desires the ambiguous maternal Moon and the ominous presence of the yew tree. The poem contrasts the Christian religious setting of the churchyard with a pagan Moon-mother, which challenges anthropocentric views of nature: “The moon is my mother. She is not sweet like Mary. / Her blue garments unloose small bats and owls. / How I would like to believe in tenderness –––” (Plath 173). Here, the Moon signifies the freedom of nature as she’ releases’ the flying creatures into the night. The speaker longs for a mutually respectful and intimate connection, similar to what she perceives to be between the Moon and nature. She questions the legitimacy of the Christian mother figure and prefers the non-hierarchical and authentic maternalism of the Moon, suggesting an ecofeminist reading of the human and nonhuman relationship.

    In Radcliffe and Plath’s poems, the “pale orb” or “White as a knuckle” face of the Moon represents an empowered female force in a gothicised landscape. Although these poets are part of different literary movements, both use a maternal Moon figure to symbolise a challenge to patriarchal structures. Radcliffe achieves this through an environment under female control, where the Moon relights and reshapes the darkened earth. On the other hand, Plath expresses an interest in nature without a dominant human presence, counters the simplicity of a ‘motherly’ Mother Nature, and presents the ambiguous Moon and the deathly Yew as independent entities.

    Works Cited:

    Brain, Tracy. The Other Sylvia Plath. Harlow: Longman, 2001.

    Britzolakis, Christina. “‘Gothic Subjectivity’.” Sylvia Plath. Edited by Harold Bloom. New York: Bloom’s Literary Criticism, 2007. 115-146.

    Hitt, Christopher. “Ecocriticism and the Long Eighteenth Century.” College Literature, vol. 31, no. 3, 2004, pp. 123–47, http://www.jstor.org/stable/25115211. Accessed 19 Apr. 2022.

    Johnson, Samuel. A Dictionary of the English Language: In Which the Words Are Deduced from Their Originals, and Illustrated in Their Different Significations by Examples from the Best Writers. To Which Are Prefixed, A History of the Language, and An English Grammar. 3rd ed., vol. 1, London: Various, 1765, https://link-gale-com.liverpool.idm.oclc.org/apps/doc/CB0131375552/GDCS?u=livuni&sid=bookmark-GDCS&xid=4e749f2d&pg=365.

    Knickerbocker, K. ““Bodied Forth in Words”: Sylvia Plath’s Ecopoetics.” College Literature 36.3 (2009): 1-27.

    Kroll, Judith. Chapters in a Mythology: The Poetry of Sylvia Plath. Stroud: Sutton Publishing, 2007.

    Milbank, Alison. “Milton, Melancholy and the Sublime in the ‘Female’ Gothic from Radcliffe to Le Fanu.” Women’s Writing, vol. 1, no. 2, 1994, pp. 143–60.

    Passey, Joan. “Sound and Silence: The Aesthetics of the Auditory in the Novels of Ann Radcliffe.” Horror Studies, vol. 7, no. 2, Oct. 2016, pp. 189–204, doi:10.1386/host.7.2.189_1.

    Plath, Sylvia. The Collected Poems. Edited by Ted Hughes. New York: HarperCollins, 2008.

    Radcliffe, Ann. The Romance of the Forest. Edited by Chloe Chard, Oxford University Press, 2009.

    Ragaišienė, I. “‘I am not a Tree with my Root in the Soil’: Ecofeminist Revisions of the Tree/Root Dialectics in Sylvia Plath’s Poetry.” Journal of Ecocriticism 1.2 (2009): 31-41.

    Stabler, Jane, ‘Ann Radcliffe’s Poetry: The Poetics of Refrain and Inventory’, in Ann Radcliffe, Romanticism and the Gothic, ed. by Angela Wright and Dale Townshend (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), pp. 185–202 <https://doi.org/DOI: 10.1017/CBO9781139507448.015>

    Authors:

    Dorka Tamás has submitted her PhD thesis at the University of Exeter, which explores the supernatural themes in Sylvia Plath’s poetry. Her research interest includes literary representations of magic and witchcraft and the relationship between the natural environment and supernatural subthemes across literature and culture.

    Roslyn Irving is a PhD candidate co-supervised by the University of Liverpool and XJTLU. Her research centres on Ann Radcliffe’s third novel, The Romance of the Forest and the author’s eighteenth-century socio-political environment.

  • Αρκαδία, Here We Go Again: A Journey from ‘Pastoral’ to ‘Post-Pastoral’. And Beyond.

    Αρκαδία, Here We Go Again: A Journey from ‘Pastoral’ to ‘Post-Pastoral’. And Beyond.

    Image by Judith Prins on Unsplash

    “Small pleasures must correct great tragedies”

    V. Sackville-West, The Garden, 1946

    It has not been long since I first decided to devote (at least) three years of my life to the study of pastoral poetry. I remember that I was reading The Land (1926), the delightful – and often disregarded – poem by Vita Sackville-West (1892 – 1962) when I started pondering what was so intriguing about the rural world, which she described so elegantly through her verses.

    In my hand was a 1928 reprint of the original, a yellow stained booklet that smelled like a mixture of camphor and tobacco. The perfect condition for a book of pastoral poems, I thought, considering the démodé aura that often accompanies this subject in and out of academia. Barrell and Bull have put it quite clearly in the preface of their seminal pastoral poetry anthology: the pastoral primarily works “to decorate the shelves of tasteful cottages [and] to furnish nostalgia” (Barrell & Bull 1974, 432).

    Often referred to as bucolic and idealized, the pastoral has also usually been associated with the idea of enhancing pleasant feelings, inspiring quietness and ensuring tranquility in its readers. This conviction is so rooted in Western culture that the notion of the pastoral locus amoenus, the pleasant place par excellence, has made the concept of the ‘environment’ overlap with the visual legacy of a golden (c)age pastoral idyll. The result is evident in the fact that thinking of ‘nature’ as a pristine, virgin natural landscape still dominates the contemporary ‘environmental imagination’, as Lawrence Buell would say. Alan Ruff has effectively expressed the sense of innate familiarity of the Western world with the pastoral traditional landscape by saying that it seems as if “we have all dwelt in Arcadia” (Ruff 2015, 1). This awareness not only contributes to highlighting the extent of this idea in our culture, but it should also become, I suggest, a warning about the necessity of approaching such a perpetuating narrative in a more critical way, especially when we live in a time called the Anthropocene.

    Since I delved into the reading phase of my PhD, I soon realized that the pastoral was much more than sheep and shepherds. Likewise, my escapist perspectives towards a peaceful, Edenic universe inhabited by herds grazing in boundless meadows abruptly shifted when I understood how early ecocritics had tackled this topic. By sweeping away the widespread idea of the pastoral as a (mere) nostalgic retreat to an idealized natural setting, the “mature environmental aesthetics” (Buell 1995, 32) that appeared in the 90s promoted a revisionist stance (Clark 2011, xiii) which, hand-in-hand with a critical reconceptualization of ‘nature’ as a complex, intricate net of human and nonhuman entities, has led the pastoral to be regarded along a similar trajectory. Taking a famous line from Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, I would say that that was the very moment when “everything began to change” (1964, 9) in pastoral theory. Not only have notions such as the human-nonhuman continuum (Massumi 2002), intra-action (Barad 2007), and mesh (Morton 2010) led the pastoral to become a fertile terrain from which to dig up valuable considerations about the human-nonhuman relationship; but the hermeneutical complexity advocated by the Environmental Humanities has also contributed to eroding the equation of the pastoral with “any literature that describes the country with an implicit or explicit contrast to the urban” (Gifford 1999, 2).

    The shift in my perspective about the pastoral naturally allowed for an evolution in the way I approached Sackville-West’s poem. Suddenly, from the seductive verses that had titillated my escapist impulses, an array of surprising narratives started exploding from the text, which transferred my attention from the fashion of pastoral clichés, to the issues of human and nonhuman relationality that they entail. The overlooked classical poem, which caused the writer to be remembered primarily as a traditionalist, conservative author, suddenly became visible as the intersection of multiple discourses populating current ecocritical scholarship: in her verses, there are not only flocks and shepherds, but also the features of their entanglement; not only the sentimental celebration of plants and flowers, but also references to how these entities interact with the human, among many other ‘but also(s)’ that offer to this poem fresh flavor. In alignment with what Gifford described when he introduced the notion of “post-pastoral”, my perspective had departed “beyond the closed circuit of pastoral and antipastoral to achieve a vision of an integrated natural world that includes the human” (1999, 148).

    And then came that moment, a mix of epiphany and frustration, when young scholars realize that their brilliant ideas are, in fact, not that brilliant – or original – considering that an array of critics have already developed similar considerations in the field of pastoral theory. In the last three decades, a number of publications on the pastoral have sealed a point of no return in this scholarship. Neologisms including ‘toxic pastoral’ (Farrier 2014), ‘necropastoral’ (McSweeney 2015), and ‘dark pastoral’ (Sullivan 2017) have transformed the subject into an effective navigation tool for exploring human-nonhuman entanglement in the many pastoral manifestations that Western culture presents. Instead of conceiving widespread interest as a negative aspect, one should reflect on how it represents further proof of the relevance of the topic in today’s world: the time has come to pull our pastoral poetry books off the shelves of our cottages, dust off their covers, and read – and re-read – them again, while shedding light on how they can contribute to tackling the challenges of our epoch. That, I think, is what it is (also) like to study pastoral today.

    The idea that the pastoral represents “a species of cultural equipment that western thought has for more than two millennia been unable to do without” (Buell 1995, 32) helps us understand the extent of this subject over time, as well as the importance of regarding the pastoral as an ongoing cultural narrative in need of ever-renewing critical perspectives. And while its gradual resurfacing in critical theory during the last years has gone hand in hand with its reappearing on the shelves of our stores (Corey and Waldrep 2012), many other new versions of pastoral are visible in a variety of cultural contexts, including advertisements, movies, videogames, and even blogs, as the title Arcadiana reveals.

    Hence, one can conclude that not only “have [we] all dwelt in Arcadia” (Ruff 2015, 1), but also that Arcadia is still here, and together with us it has entered the Anthropocene. Here we go again, after more than two millennia, relying on such ancestral imagery to reflect on our relationship with the environment. Perhaps Vita Sackville-West was aware of this when, during WWII, she first drafted the opening of her celebrated poems in The Garden (1946): “Small pleasures must correct great tragedies”, a line that, in 2020, reveals some unexpected ecocritical, modern vibes that resonate with the urgencies of current ecological – among many others – crises.

    Works Cited

    Barad, Karen. Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning. Durham: Duke University Press, 2007.

    Barrell, John and John Bull. The Penguin Book of English Pastoral Verse. Middlesex, England; New York: Penguin Books, 1982 [1974].

    Bennett, Jane. Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things, Durham. Duke University Press Books, 2009.

    Buell, Lawrence. The Environmental Imagination: Thoreau, Nature Writing, and the Formation of American Culture. Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University PressHarvard University Press, 1995.

    —. The Future of Environmental Criticism: Environmental Crisis and Literary Imagination. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2005.

    Carson, Rachel. Silent Spring, Greenwich, CT: Fawcett Publications, 1964.

    Clark, Timothy. 2011. The Cambridge Introduction to Literature and the Environment, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

    Corey, Joshua, and G. C. Waldrep. The Arcadia Project: North American Postmodern Pastoral. Boise, Idaho: Ahsahta Press, 2012.

    Farrier, David. “Toxic Pastoral: Comic Failure and Ironic Nostalgia in Contemporary British Environmental Theater.” Journal of Ecocriticism, 6.2, 2014, pp. 1-15.

    Gifford, Terry. Pastoral, London: Routledge, 1999.

    Massumi, Brian. Parables for the Virtual: Movenment, Affect, Sensation, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002.

    McSweeney, Joyelle. The Necropastoral. Poetry, Media, Occults, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2015.

    Ruff, Allan R. Arcadian Visions: Pastoral Influences on Poetry, Painting and the Design of Landscape, Oxford: Windgather Press, 2015.

    Sackville-West, Vita. The Land. London: W. Heinemann, 1926.

    —., The Garden. London: Michael Joseph, 1946.

    Sullivan, Heather I. (2014). “Dirty traffic and the dark pastoral in the Anthropocene: Narrating refugees, deforestation, radiation, and melting ice”. Literatur für Leser, 14, 83-97. Frankfurt, Germany: Peter Lang.

    Author: Stefano Rozzoni is a PhD Candidate in “Transcultural Studies in Humanities” at the University of Bergamo, Italy, in cotutelle with Justus-Liebig-Universität Gießen, Germany, where he is a member of the International PhD Programme “Literary and Cultural Studies”, and an affiliate member of the European doctoral program PhdNet. He is also a member of the Research Group “Oikos. Ecology and the Study of Culture” at the Graduate Center for the Study of Culture (GCSC) in Gießen. His research interests focus on Ecocriticism, Posthuman Studies, English Modernism, Virginia Woolf, and pastoral poetry. His dissertation project proposes an ecocritical reading of English Georgian pastoral poetry (1911-1926) for a critical reevaluation of this trend.