Class notes: 09.09.03
First, a little bit of history in poetry types:
In contemporary poetry, you count the number of accent beats and syllables. The way a person makes accents (through speech) is by raising the intonation of a syllable and the variation in volume.
Ex: INtoNAtion -- trochaic, which means to go from accented to unaccented.
Most English poetry is accentual and syllabic, containing 8 syllables and 4 accents.
Tetrameter is four in Greek.
Italian and French poetry contains 7 beats, 7 syllables for a line, but does not include the accents.
Old English poetry is accentual and alliterative poetry, which is made up of four beats in a line and alliterative in some of those lines. Alliteration is the first consonant in the accented syllable is the same as the first consonant in another accented syllable. Example: Betty blew bubbles.
The Wanderer and The Wife's Lament:
In these works, what was noticed most?
+ Sense of loss, love or reject
+ Suffering equals wisdom and way of life
+ Warning to others (especially in The Wife's Lament)
We see Beowulf as being more of a history record of warning, advice, and entertainment. Beowulf can be seen as a public and cultural document.
So, then, why are the two works, The Wanderer and The Wife's Lament, about sense of loss? A person can relate and get lesson from it, like a personal one-to-one.
In art, there are two possibilities - Public or Personal:
Something seen as artistic to one person, is not seen the same to another.
Artists create art work according to their principles --> viewers view the art and learn the principles. They then take those principles and apply it to their works as well.
Something to ponder: Is The Wife's Lament a work of art or just a lament?
Courtly Love:
What is love and where does it come from? Five feet of heaven in a ponytail (a song)
Love was never written about, until near the end of the 11th century; many poems on love seemed to pop up out of nowhere. Not I like you, you like me love, but a cultural love.
In Courtly Love, it's possible to see a number of stereotypes:
The woman:
Object (as in a flower)
Pure
Delicate
Gentle
Hair (long and golden)
The lover:
A knight/upper-class/strong/courteous
Wants to be respectful
Often in despair
Doesn't get woman because she is pure
Love is a sickness
And only a woman can cure a man of this sickness.
Love is overpowering and controls the man. The man thinks that love will make him pure as the woman is.
Some of these points are with us still today: Courtesy -- the man paying for dinner, buying the woman things, treats woman as if she is on a pedestal, etc.
There are a few theories about where love came from:
+ Came from Spain (a cultural influence)
+ A literary game. Poetry, but then became real.
+ Was always real (built into humans) but never expressed until poems expressed it for us.
+ Economic base. Man of castle off fighting/battling and left woman in charge of castle. Minstrels/singers went from castle to castle for a living, and sang for the woman about how pure and good she was, flattering the woman and her paying the singer good money.
