Hyacinths and symbolism

[TWL as a recovery from a mental breakdown = restoration *and* dramatic process - the recognition of desoltaion, attempt to do something about it...]

Hyacinths are the equivalent of Whitman's lilacs (recalling Lincoln): so in other mythologies, what do hyacinths represent?

In Greek mythology, the hyacinth was offered to Apollo (god the light and the sun, but also music, poetry and fine arts, and, key for TWL, prophecy and the cure - sanity and reason). Apollo is also associated with the laurel, (Daphne's transformation).
The hyacinth is also connected with sports and games, for some reason... It's odd, actually.
Different colours of hyacinths apparently represent different things: blue = constancy, purple = contrition, yellow = jealousy...

From mythencyclopedia.com: "The Greek myth of Hyacinthus and Apollo tells of the origin of the hyacinth, a member of the lily family. Hyacinthus, a beautiful young man of Sparta*, was loved by the sun god Apollo. One day the two were amusing themselves throwing a discus when the discus struck Hyacinthus and killed him. Some accounts say that Zephyrus, the god of the west wind, directed the discus out of jealousy because he also loved Hyacinthus. While Apollo was deep in grief, mourning the loss of his companion, a splendid new flower rose out of the bloodstained earth where the young man had died. Apollo named it the hyacinth and ordered that a three-day festival, the Hyacinthia, be held in Sparta every year to honor his friend."

So, jealousy, sports and games, contrition - it's all there. I'm not sure if Hyacinthus was cured, or anyone prophecised about it happening, though.

According to Wikipedia (it has its uses...), the Hyacinthia is spread over two days, so:
'The first day was given over to mourning for the death of the hero: sacrifices were offered to the dead, banquests were stark and without pomp or decoration, the sacrificial breads were very plain.
The second day was one of celebration for his rebirth. The young people played the cithara and the aulos, and sang of the glory of Apollo. Others participated in horse races. Numerous choirs competed in town, singing country songs and dancing. Amycla was also the location of parades of carts decorated by the girls and women of Sparta. Numerous sacrifices were offered, exclusively goats, with the occasion of the κοπίς, kopis, banquets where the citizens invited their friends and relatives."

This is a pretty cool line of study - it covers the whole idea of death and resurrection. Also, goats.

Weeks 10/11/12: The Waste Land III

[Memory and Desire] are key.

1. Sibyll - what do you want?
2. I want to die.

Quotations from Satyricon
Petronius - arbiter of elegance to Nero - told to commit suicide, did so at a high point of a party...

Eliot wanted "the horror, the horror" from Heart of Darkness - the ultimate futility of existence..

April cf the opening of The Canterbury Tales, and rebirth / resurrection / crucifixion

E's pilgrimage = recovery from a nervous breakdown..

Accepts the motion of the mystical experience.

[Whitman - homoerotic communion with nature, the transcendent impulse // Lilacs in Whitman's poem - representative of Lincoln. cf hyacinths...]
[Beckett acknowledges the experience but denies the significance...]

Borges: certain kinds of images reccur... the deeply personal...
//
Munich - Wagner -> Wagenrian echoing
Mad king Ludwig drowning in Lake Starnberg
cf Parsifal / Tristan & Isolde

The idea of rootlessness - unreal city - bertrand Russell -> London as unreal, a hallucination. (cf Conrad's Heart of Darkness)

Memory buried - will it reawaken?
- past sensations of desire and love, quickened by memory.

"Dog"//"God" - nails, travesty of resurrection, cf Joyce - Dog's body...
"hypocrite lecteur" - Baudelaire - hypocritical reader - my likeness, my brother!
- "you will find these experiences in common with me, don't presume to judge..."

Therefore - a process has been set underway - read on...

Weeks 10/11/12: The Waste Land II

Part 2: A Game of Chess

Second half - dramatically more accessible, immediacy.

First part - he pulls out all the stops, luxury (opulence and sexual licentiousness)

Antony & Cleopatra // Romeo and Juliet...
Irony and cynicism - [middle-aged love] - more than the heroic ethos could ever entail...

Beauty, but with potential catastrophe awaiting... An intimation of beauty, but with an underlying threat.

A poem written for many voices.

2nd half of part 2 - Eliot speaking in his own voice (or the closest to it...)

Nothing ... cf Heart of Darkness

"I remember the pearls that were his eyes" - the love that used to be - again, it's that Proustian moment, where the past is restored in its full immediacy...

= pattern of sexually ambiguous language and imagery - e.g. Tiresias
- male-orientted moment of psychological intensity
- death of someone who was fondly remembered / cf present relationship that's miserable

// Pub scene: scathing (echoing)

cf poet Villon
end -> "good night sweet ladies" - Ophelia in Hamlet - the drowning of the soldier.

Weeks 10/11/12: The Waste Land I

The Waste Land (hereafter TWL) - similar scope to Paradise Lost - secondary and tertiary associations...

cf Stravinsky - The Rite of Spring - dissonance/disharmony -> antagonising people
TWL - counter-rhythm / couterharmony

Epic and imagistic at the same time

Title page -> Mallory's La Morte D'Arthur -> the search for a sign...
Eliot talked about the "mythic method" - structure for something devoid of narrative -> cf Ulysses...
The Fisher King - wounded (usually, according to myth, in his genitals - his land became waste (fertility links, with Christian elements - redeem/restore the land)

Coherence of the poem // Fragmented
Modernism // Post-modernism
Modm - Allows for a dramatic reading, but from reading the manuscripts we can see that Pound cut out a lot of the original - he made it... But he cut out a lot of the crap - turning it inot a imagistic dramatic masterpiece.
Post-Modm - Celebrates fragmentation (but after Pound cut out the parts - it was a lot less fragmented before Pound deleted parts of it).

geronition: quote from Measure for Measure

The field: "The Potter's Field" - Judas bought with his 30 pieces of silver... Overgrown, grass/weeds/rocks ... and a goat. Moral overgrowth?

goats/sheep:
Goats - those who have passed over
Sheep - still alive? (not been passed over)

The modernist aesthetic -? Joycean detail ("demented particulars" - Beckett)

Infans -> unable to speak/hear
The Word within a word unable to speak a word

Christ the tiger -> cf Blake - "tyger burning bright" -> the eternal energy of the kosmos.

[TWL: econciles personal and impersonal: Part 2 more personal (3-part structure) - Eliot's dramatic sense of his 1st marriage...]

*Proust - involuntary memory - much more intense* (this comes up again and again in the course...)
I: Involuntary memory in a hyacinth garden (I'll come back to this later)
II: Dramatic present

Week 9: Eliot's quatrain poetry: "Sweeney"

"I consider my Sweeney poems as serious as anything I have ever written, in fact much more serious and more mature than the early poems but I do not know anyone who agrees with me on this point except William Butler Yeats and Vivienne who have both said much the same thing about them" (Eliot, Letters 608).

Here's a great article on Eliot's early poems.

On my first reading of the "Sweeney" poems, and after reading "Prufrock", I was struck by the disparity between them - Sweeney, on one hand, is an animal-man, a brute, but Prufrock is the repressed intellectual. I'm unsure whether Eliot meant to play one against the other - it's likely, I suppose, but it's a great opposition.
Sweeney lacks self-reflection, but Prufrock lacks anything much beyond self-reflection... It would make a great dissertation topic, I'm sure, but I'm somewhat unwilling to start with something that seems so.. broad.


...
The nightingales are singing near
The Convent of the Sacred Heart,

And sang within the bloody wood
When Agamemnon cried aloud,
And let their liquid siftings fall
To stain the stiff dishonoured shroud.

As we discussed in class - the liquid siftings of the nightingales are clear enough, but I want to chase down Agamemnon, and get a better idea of who he was, why Eliot used him, etc...

So, armed with facts from pantheon.org:

Agamemnon was the son of Atreus and the brother of Menelaus. He was the king of either Mycenae (in Homer) or of Argos (in some later accounts), and was the leader of the Greek forces during the Trojan War. He married Clytemnestra and had several children by her, including Orestes, Electra, and Iphigenia.

When the Greeks sailed for Troy, their fleet was trapped by unfavorable winds at Aulis. The seer Calchas revealed that their misfortune was due to Agamemnon, who had boasted that he equalled Artemis in hunting; the winds would only change if Agamemnon's daughter Iphigenia was sacrificed. Agamemnon reluctantly agreed to the sacrifice, but Artemis herself whisked Iphigenia away from the altar and substituted a deer in her place.
During the seige of Troy, Agamemnon offended the greatest of the Greek warriors, Achilles, when he took the girl Briseis from him. Achilles' anger with Agamemnon furnished the mainspring of the plot in the Iliad. After the sack of Troy, Agamemnon acquired Cassandra, the daughter of King Priam, as his concubine, and took her home with him to Greece.

Well, that's fine, but it was his homecoming that was featured in Greek tragedy....



Upon arriving, Agamemnon found that Aegisthus, who had killed his father Atreus, had become the lover of Clytemnestra, and the two together murdered Agamemnon and Cassandra shortly after their arrival. Aegisthus and Clytemnestra then ruled Agamemnon's kingdom, but were eventually killed by Agamemnon's son, Orestes (or by Orestes and Electra in some accounts).



So the importance of Agamemnon in "Sweeney Among the Nightingales" would begin with the sacrifice of the child (Iphigenia), and look toward the murder of Agamemnon by Aegisthus.. And the dishonoured shroud - presumably the marriage shroud of Agamemnon and Clymenestra, dishonoured by her betrayal of Agamemnon with Aegisthus.

Update: Pindar, the ancient Greek lyrical poet, wrote that Agamemnon was slain by his wife Clytemnestra while he was bathing, and that she threw a cloth or net over his head to prevent him from either noticing her or resisting. So it's less of a marriage-dishonoured-by-adultery shroud, and more a murder-of-a-spouse kind of dishonour, the stains, somewhat predictably being his blood.
Which, of course, makes the indignity of the nightingales emptying their bowels on his death-shroud all the more apparent.