"The Native American" ~ a poem.

You make your own town,

You make your own friends.

But none of them are really yours.

Ever wondered why?

Have you ever paused

And thought about where you live?—

In the shadows of a forest,

The Native American shines his arrow.

He holds on to his past,

And yet he embraces the present.

It explodes in his face.

Stevens, Crane, and Plath and their Imagery at the Ends of their Poems

Daniel Alexander Apatiga

Professor Simmons

English 3420

7-28-2015                                                                    

All three poets—Stevens, Crane, and Plath—search for a special effect at the end of their poems that is often achieved through an image.  As in a play’s final act there is a resolution. At the end of the play, when the last word has been spoken, the special effect is this lingering where there is no more text.   The stronger the lingering effect, the stronger the quality of the poem.  Arguably, this effect can only be attained by understanding the close relationship between the reader and the narrator (or poet).  This relationship depends upon the imagination of the poet and, as Yvor Winters outlines in his review of Crane’s poetry, what he or she considers great: the values, morals, artistic outlook that the poet has on poetry itself (Winters).  This special effect differs from poem to poem obviously, but also differs from poet to poet.  My essay will look at these authors’ poems with the strongest imagery, or most affecting imagery, with special attention to the ending of poems. 

First, this essay will delineate Steven’s poetry and how his imagery reveals a lot about his interests and character; the essay will also explore how Stevens often employs some sort of contradiction within the last few lines that makes the reader wonder whether he or she fully understood the poem.  The essay will draw from many examples for demonstrating how the endings of his poems employ imagery in a way that demonstrates this intellectual equivocation.   Then, the essay will explore Plath and how the endings of her earlier poems and those in the later collection of poems, Ariel, seem to reflect fatalist beliefs.  Then, this essay will analyze Crane in a manner agreeing with Winter’s assessment.  Crane’s poetry has much sadness as an effect and a nationalistic, romanticism to it, as Winters writes in his critique of “The Bridge.”  I will draw from examples of Crane’s poems, exploring how their endings achieve a special effect through nationalistic or romantic imagery.  Finally, this essay will compare the imagery of these three poets.  This essay will hopefully draw contrasts from other authors, especially since Sylvia Plath has had many obstacles that she had not overcome as a writer perhaps because of her gender, whereas Crane had his homosexuality as a source of bias that people had against his poetry.  The essay’s final paragraphs will explore how Plath is similar to Crane in the same respect that Winter wrote his review of Crane.  The paragraphs will contrast Crane’s endings to those in Ariel, which were Plath’s last poetry before she committed suicide.  The conclusion will briefly discuss the importance of having a special effect, or a “goosebumps” effect, in poetry.

Stevens has a knack for including sexual innuendoes, and his interest in women pervades much of his earlier poems in “Harmonium,” and the images in the poems’ endings often reflect this.  His special effect at the end of many of his poems affects his reader with a taste of hetero-erotic love for a particular woman.  In the “Plot against the Giant,” the final stanza has the image in its final few lines of lips and throats, which reveals his interest in sexual intercourse: “Heavenly labials in the world of gutturals, / It will undo him” (Stevens 6, lines 6-7).  What will be undone is left purposely ambiguous, but I picture him undoing his belt or something important to a woman.  In the following poem in the collection, “Infanta Marina” has the last few lines about something flowing and uttering a “subsiding sound.”  This suggests sexual arousal. “The Snow Man” introduces the reader to Stevens’s character as being cold, and so the final image that he expresses is a contradiction about existence: “For the listener, who listens in the snow, /And, nothing himself, beholds / Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is” (Stevens 8, lines 13-15).   Those lines have the special effect of asking me: why is that something that is there nothing?  This image is unlike the endings with strong sexual innuendoes that I have described already, but the special effect is: this “nothing” could refer to the unseen, and by unseen we mean his body, mind, and desires—again, something that is left purposely unspecific.  The first two poems rely more strongly upon sex, however, for evoking a certain kind of reading-pleasure.

Stevens’s later poems take on many contradictions in the images of their final lines.  And as the poems progress chronologically to near his death, I believe that his poetry takes on a retrospective tone of youthful age and yet is not reminiscent, or positive.  In “The House Was Quiet and the World was Calm,” the narrator takes the persona of the reader of the poem: the poem knows exactly what the reader is doing, which is “…reading leaning late and reading there” on the last line (Stevens 312).  The special effect of this image is of self-reflection and is uncanny; the reader gleans a keen sense of Stevens’s knowledge of the reader; the reader often finds himself (or herself) in a situation very similar to the one described in the above poem.    And the sexual innuendo latent in Harmonium is no longer so powerful.  This self-reflection puts the reader in a state of lingering after he or she has read Stevens’s poem by forming a contradiction: the “summer and night” cannot possibly be “the reader leaning late.”  (Although part of that sentence makes sense, conjoining the two independent clauses is characteristic of Stevens that forms something akin to an oxymoron, though far more complicated).  In “Large Red Man Reading,” the imagery is consistent and reminiscent with that of “The House Was Quiet and the World was Calm,” except it is more climactic in the end: “Which in those ears and in those thin, those spended hearts, / Took on color, took on shape and the size of things as they are / And spoke the feeling for them, which was what they had / lacked” (Stevens 365, lines 21-27).  Why would he say “thin” or “spended” about hearts?  Well, they are bi-oppositional images to “wide” and “freshly;” so, the final image has a negative tone to it, which is more pronounced than the earlier poem.  The special effect I received from reading this ending image was the illusion of having access to the narrator’s thoughts without actually knowing them, because he continues the theme of “nothingness” even in this poem.  If deciphered further, Stevens has a fascination with animate bodily features that seem to possess amorphous qualities in his later poems.   For instance, in “This Solitude of Cataracts,” the poem is about a man who is observing a river, and the narrator takes on an omniscient, science-fiction-like diction, because of the special effect on the final lines: “Without the oscillations of planetary pass-pass, / Breathing his bronzen breath at the azury center of time” (Stevens 366, lines 18-19).  (The word “azury” is a motif that is in the prior poem, L.R.M.R.).  What is the center of time?  And why mention planets that make passes around it?  Like a planet, a human or more particularly, a partner, can oscillate, and this man who breaths the metal bronze is purely speculative just like a man reading from his “blue tabulae” in the poem, L.R.M.R..  Both poems have a similar special effect: this notion of the “center of time” and “feelings that they lacked” (from each respective poems) are both metaphysical symbols for “nothingness;” and so as his poems get progressively more out there, they also have a stronger special effect.  In “The Plain Sense of Things,” or T.P.S.T., the tone of the narrator remains similar to that in his earlier works, though it has allusions to a book—Lord of the Flies—and the imagery of it made me think of Vincent Van Gogh’s “Starry Night” with the twirling clouds.  The reality aspect of the poem is surreal, but in the end, we are given a sudden truth as a special effect: “The great pond and its waste of the lilies, all this / Had to be imagined as an inevitable knowledge, / Required, as a necessity requires” (Stevens 428, lines 18-20).  What is this necessity?  Is it the narrator’s sexual drive?  Again, the necessity is a metaphor for something absolutely ambiguous. In “The Planet on the Table,” Ariel is the subject of the poem who suddenly outpours his thoughts that were “if only half-perceived, / In the poverty of their words, / Of the planet of which they were part” (Stevens 450, lines 14-15).  The “they” could be referring to his poems; and so the special effect of the last imagery of the ending of the poem evokes a sense of death for poetry.  To the omniscient, mythological narrator who is grasping these large objects or has a Godlike perspective on things, every human being on earth has a “poverty” of “words” for describing anything substantial. Again, Steven’s poetry gets more and more dismal and less positive as they progress chronologically.  In “The River of Rivers in Connecticut,” the ending image of a river “…that flows nowhere, like a sea” on the last line seems contradictory to reality—fantastical—as it defies the laws of physics, yet the reader must look in the poem for complete understanding.  The contradiction lies in a situationally ironic scene: the eye-of-the-beholder, who is the narrator (or Stevens), is making the keen observation that the reader likes ambiguities when seeing the world and does not with effort see the larger perspective: there might be fish in those rivers; there is also a history with that river with respect to the Native Indians who lived there before our arrival.  The special effect of the last image is a questioning of what the river is if it flows nowhere.  Can it then be a river?   The next poem, “Not Ideas About the Thing But the Thing Itself,” has a purposely vague title, but the content is clearly about a bird that Stevens will revisit again as a motif in “On Mere Being,” his last poem.  The ending image of the former poem, N.I.A.T.B.T.I., also asks what reality is to Stevens and how can it be knowledge if it appears as a hallucination: 

“That Scrawny cry—it was

A chorister whose c preceded the choir.

It was part of the colossal sun,

Surrounded by its horal rings,

Still far away.  It was like

A new knowledge of reality.”  (Stevens 452, lines 13-18)

               The poem’s last image—that of the mind grasping a new thought—is like experiencing a hallucination because of the way the narrator moves about in this poem from image to image.  This has the special effect of questioning whether what the narrator had heard was part of reality or not, because knowledge might not be knowledge at all—it might be scientifically flawed or incorrect, though a paradigm nonetheless.  Either way, this “new knowledge” is only the reader who knows what has happened (a fact established earlier in the poem). 

               In Stevens’s last few poems, the poem “A Mythology Reflects Its Region,” is largely about poetry as an art form, arguably, since he talks about the image as though it is something that can change.  The last lines are complicated and are built from conceits and contradictions: he says it is in his region, but is the region then not universal if “he” refers to the reader.  So why does Stevens end with a specific image: “And it is he in the substance of his region /Wood of his forests and stone out of his fields / Or from under his mountains” (Stevens 476,  Lines 9-11)?  The special effect of the poem is that the perspective of the poem has a large, grandiose conclusion about imagery, which is that “The image must be of the nature of its creator” (Stevens 476, line 5).  And then he narrows that vision to his own, which is a description of a forest and mountains presumably in the Appalachians.  Stevens could also be driving at the individual who has only a limited set of experiences from which he can describe things.  In his last poem, “Of Mere Being,” the last imagery is again on the subject of birds, but this time the narrator is more observant—almost as though he wishes he could go back in time and do things over again:

“The palm stands on the edge of space.

The wind moves slowly in the branches.

The bird’s fire-fangled feathers dangle down” (Stevens 477, lines 9-12). 

               “Dangl[ing] down” produces an image equivelant of a facial expression that humans can read.  Although, the notion of a palm standing “on the edge of space” suggests that the narrator himself, like prior poems have suggested, has a limited, narrow perspective on life, because “space” is a big concept, astronomically, and a potted palm is small and humble.  Furthermore, “fire-fangled feathers” of a bird suggests that this is no ordinary bird—nay, it is phoenix—though he does not explicitly say it is.  When the phoenix dies, it resurrects itself.  So in a sense, Stevens likens himself to mystical creatures, Jesus, or he believes in the Hindu concept of reincarnation at least.

               Sylvia Plath’s early poems seem evocative of a mood or an emotion rather than a constant questioning as evoked by Stevens, since her ending images usually end on a dismal note.  This is, I believe, characteristic of her fatalistic beliefs.  In the poem, “Bucolics”, the poem is about two lovers who walk together in a kind of medieval romantic fantasy gone sour, since the language used is rather English and the setting rather simple.  The ending stanza has a lot of imagery packed in it:

“Now he goes from his rightful road

And, under honor, will depart;

While she stands burning, venom-girt,

In wait for sharper smart to fade.” (Internal.org)

               This knight who is with her who is on this “rightful road”—that seems suggestive of the right path, which is with her, the narrator of the poem.  There is a lot of metaphor in this poem for something larger, like relationships in general.  “While she stands burning, venom-girt, / In wait for sharper smart to fade” suggests that the knight abandons her while she is hurting, which seems foretelling of her own future, when Ted Hughes hurts her and she commits suicide.   In “Pursuit,” a poem about sexual foreplay more-or-less if the words are taken for metaphors: “There is a panther talks me down: / One day I’ll have my death of him;” (lines 1-2).   (If she is indeed using the ancient use of “death” to mean orgasm, than the rest of the poem can be construed to mean sexual foreplay).  The last image of the poem, which is this image of a panther climbing the stairs has little special effect other than the fact that someone very threatening (if the panther should be taken as a conceit for a man) is approaching who can do God-knows what to the narrator.   If it were just a panther, then it would not make sense that it would climb the stairs as some kind of pet.  Sylvia Plath’s earlier poems lack that special effect, somewhat, that causes a lingering after-effect than her later poems.

               Sylvia Plath’s later poems in her collection, Ariel, have something somewhat in common: the contemplation of suicide.  Because of this, the ending image is more dismal than in her earlier poems and they have the illusion of something grander that is underway—like she is heading somewhere better.  In her poem “Gulliver,” we see where she gets her idea for being small and insignificant in the Bee poems just by the title of it.  The ending image of that poem is somewhat damning to men in general, and is in that respect daring and strong: “That resolve in Crivelli, untouchable.  / Let this eye be an eagle, / The shadow of his lip, an abyss” (Plath 56, lines 22-25).  The ending image has the special, lingering effect of imagining letting men grow old and weary while she enjoys life without them.  In the poem prior to “Gulliver,” “Berck-Plage,” we see a somewhat psychedelic painting of an image: “And a naked mouth, red and awkward./ For a minute the sky pours into the hole like plasma. /There is no hope, it is given up” (Plath page 55, lines 16-18).  “Plasma” has multiple meanings, because it could either mean plasma from the blood that is where the blood “is suspended” and is “protein-rich” according to the OED; or, Plasma could mean the fourth state of matter (that which is beyond gas and is the state of matter in the Sun).  Both meanings are applicable, which can arguably give a poem its inherent strength, whenever this is true—although, I prefer the latter meaning of the word “plasma.”   The ending image has the grand concept of hope becoming dismal.  In her poem “Getting There,” the image of “Lethe” is again brought up as it had been visited to before in her prior poems; it means according to the OED:  “A river in Hades, the water of which produced, in those who drank it, forgetfulness of the past.”    The ending image is suggestive of her desire to forget the past and that she cannot because Lethe is pure fantasy.

“And I, stepping form this skin

Of old bandages, boredoms, old faces

Step to you from the black car of Lethe,

Pure as a baby” (Plath 59, lines 66-70).

               The lingering effect of this poem is strong, of which evokes a questioning of why she uses war-torn imagery earlier in the body of the poem and then closes it with becoming “pure as a baby”—truly climactic in terms of a special effect.  In “Medusa,” the imagery at the end of it is rather negative sounding: the imagery is that of a couple who are together yet it means the exact opposite—she is far away and he has no intention of being with her.  The last line of the poem leaves a bitter emotion in my mind, because it represents something that is relatable and is located in a dark, dismal place in the unrequited mind: “There is nothing between us” (Plath 61, line 41).  In “The Moon and the Yew Tree,” the poem’s content seems dismal and bleak, especially towards the last image: “Their hands and faces stiff with holiness. / The moon sees nothing of this.  She is bald and wild. / And the message of the yew tree is blackness—blackness and silence” (Plath 65, lines 25-28).  This has the overpowering effect of imagining life from the perspective of a tree, which implies she understands trees, or will soon.  Her last poem, “Wintering,” seems to take the word “bee” and flip its meaning to “to be” as a special effect:

“Will the hive survive, will the gladiolas

Succeed in banking their fires

To enter another year?

What will they taste of, the Christmas roses?

The bees are flying.  They taste the Spring” (Plath 90, lines 46-50).

               Despite it clearly written as “bees” and not be’s, her complaints of living with other people and not wanting to meet other people makes me wonder whether she had considered this secondary, homophonic meaning.  The last poem, of which I will set my music to, has many double-meanings that mystify femininity, perhaps because she is planning on ceasing “to be” in its entirety.  “Wintering” somewhat reminds me of a poem by a German poet: “Erl Konig.”  The last two lines is packed with many images at once and Plath omits some obviously final-sounding lines that I would have written, such as “They do not taste the Christmas roses anymore because she is dead.”  She sums up her life in this poem, suggesting that it was meaningless as if she were a mere “bee.” 

               Hart Crane’s collection of poems, “White Buildings,” has many poems that lack a special effect though to other readers the poems might be evocative of just that.  In “Emblems of Conduct,” the poem’s content is about “spiritual gates” as its main motif, since he has the last two words of each stanza containing them.  What this spiritual gate leads to is a mystery and he does not explain, leaving it purposely ambiguous.  In the last stanza and last few lines, the significance of “spiritual gates” is that there is separation between people, places, and groups by this abstract concept: “Dolphins still played, arching the horizons, / But only to build memories of spiritual gates” (Crane 4).  In “My Grandmother’s Love Letters,” Crane’s grandmother is dead and he is morning her absence.  In the last stanza, the ending image of nature having an anamorphic quality such as “laughter” is suggestive of his Grandmother’s presence after all: “And the rain continues on the roof / With such a sound of gently pitying laughter” (Crane 5, lines 25-6).  In “Garden Abstract,” Crane foreshadows perhaps his own suicide: by drowning.   The ending image has an uncanny effect as though the narrator or is the God of the Sun: “Drowning the fever of her hands in sunlight.  /She has no memory, nor fear, nor hope / Beyond the grass and shadows at her feet” (Crane 8, lines 10-12).  In “Stark Major,” Crane uses “death” in its obsolete connotation, which is important in understanding the ending image of the poem: “Walk now, and note the lover’s death. / Henceforth her memory is more / Than yours, in cries, in ecstasies / You cannot ever reach to share” (Crane 8, lines 23-4).  Perhaps Crane was bisexual, since this poem is latent with passionate jealousy for a woman who is in the throes of intercourse with another man.  Or is Crane jealous that the man who the woman is with is without Crane?  Crane uses, in the last line, imagery that is evocative of the dismal realities of unrequited love, and he paraphrases this beautifully.  “In Shadow” is a poem perhaps about Crane’s homosexuality since the ending image of the poem elides over “her” whoever she might be:

“’Come, it is too late,--too late

To risk alone the light’s decline:

Nor has the evening long to wait,”—

But her own words are night’s and mine.” (Crane 10, lines 13-16)

The poem is clearly about a male fantasy for a woman, yet this woman might be a man (to Crane); it stresses the importance of confidence and perhaps having a confidant, which again has a beautiful special effect.  The last image, “night,” has the symbolic meanings of darkness, despair, and being blind in general, which is how Crane might have perceived the woman as through those lenses.  In the collection of poems, Powhatan’s Daughter, “The Harbor Dawn” takes the reader back to when the white Westerners met Native Americans for the first time; and, the ending image produces romantic imagery for this innocent event:

“The fog leans one last moment on the sill.

Under the mistletoe of dreams, a star—

As though to join us at some distant hill—

Turns in the waking west and goes to sleep” (Crane 39, lines 37-41).

               Of all the authors, Plath has the most lingering after-effect at the ends of her poems, because of how she jumps from image to image at a rapid pace.  Winters has the most abstractness and is the most enjoyable for reading when the reader has spare time.  Crane’s narrator is somewhat of an enigma because of the irony between his life and his poems, yet this irony is absent when it comes to images of drowning since he committed suicide that way.  Similarities between various works can be observed: especially between Crane’s “Garden Abstract” and “Getting There” by Plath, mostly in each respective poets’ desire for a strong, lingering effect in the last few images of their poems. 

Bibliography

Crane, Hart.  Hammer, Langdon, Ed.  Hart Crane : Complete Poems and Selected Letters.  New York: The

Library of America, 2006.  Print.

Wallace, Stevens.  Wallace Stevens : Collected Poetry and Prose.  New York: The

Library of America, 1997.  Print.

Plath, Sylvia.  Ariel : The Restored Edition.  New York: HarperCollins, 2004. Print.

Winters, Yvor. Uncollected Poems and Essays.  August 6^th, 2015.  Web.

"The Hallucination." a poem.

Father,
she's on an airplane disappearing above the clouds of snow flakes.
I have a picture of her on my laptop.
I saved the picture so that I can remind myself an important facet of life;
I need a will for I may die.
I threw the photo to the ground,
but it was my laptop that suffered the most.
My vision of my eyes are lost in Father's image.
My laptop destroyed is stored among my artifacts of my past.
The hallucination is etched,
carved into my nerves,
into my DNA.
Father,
I imagined she flew on an airplane towards the sunset.
What I really didn't mention was that I had a hallucination.
I sat behind the bars of the police vehicle and then--a hallucination!
It hung on the back of the front seat right before my brown eyes.
I turned to the thick window,
and she still sat there in front of me right after a police officer asked me,
"Are you having a hallucination?"
To which I replied, "Yes, I am."
I know the hallucination was surreal
because the image of her was the one who cried for help from Police.
Interpersonal relationships,
unions come and go,
for Father doesn't know my life of unrequited love,
Good bye!

Women’s Power and Crossdressing in “Twelfth Night” and "As you Like it"

Women’s Power and Crossdressing in “Twelfth Night” and "As you like it" by Shakespeare

Female crossdressing in “Twelfth Night” and “As you Like it” symbolizes a yearning for power from women.  In “As you Like it,” the symbol of crossdressing is a reaction against the unfairness of society because Rosalind has been exiled by her uncle from her father’s rightful kingdom, whereas, in “Twelfth Night,” cross dressing is done as a reaction against a dismal situation: the lack of income for Viola (or a desire of working among men).  In “As you like it,” Rosalind decides to cross-dress because of her lack of a stable relationship with Duke Ferdinand.  In both plays, not only does cross-dressing represent the lack of power the heroines have for acquiring a male-dominated position—as a servant of Orsino’s for Viola and as a conversationalist for Rosalind—but it also symbolizes a desire of being with the opposite sex for them both.   For instance, Orsino, who does not recognize the situational irony (until the end of “Twelfth Night”) of perceived reality from the fact that Cesario was a woman, Orsino would have appreciated the symbology of cross-dressing as not only an art, but as a means of seduction.  In “As you Like it,” Rosalind’s search for her father began as a consequence of Duke Ferdinand’s decree of banishment and her desire to also be among men, like Orlando.  She does this so that she can gleam information from Orlando, whom she loves. 

In both plays, the act of cross-dressing challenges Shakespeare’s audience at the time about the notion of the merits of the sexes: are women in fact more varied in personality than they seem?  It would appear so.  In Shakespeare’s time, a huge rift between the perceived abilities of men and women manifested itself as a reproduction of the so-called separation of spheres.  In Shakespeare’s time, women, who were typically viewed as lower, mainly sexual beings, rarely entered the domains of masculine power, because of their perceived merit.  And most men believed in their own natural right to dominate over women.  The motif of cross dressing, in the plays, challenges that notion; the plays seem to suggest that women are the ones who dominate over men.  Also, the matriarch, Queen Elizabeth I, presumably would have been someone who could appreciate the concept of crossdressing in a male-dominated political environment.

In “Twelfth Night,” the fact that Orsino cannot see past Cesario’s guise implies one of two possibilities: either he is too dumb to realize that there might be foul play involved, or, her guise is so well done by the Captain that even the keenest of human beings cannot decipher her true identity.  Does Shakespeare expand on the former possibility in the play?  No.  In this fictitious situation, Viola does not point out that Orsino seems less intelligent and daring than her, even though Viola goes unnoticed as a man, right under his nose.  But, Orsino, recognizing the importance of there being a man with him of whom he can confide in when talking about Olivia, states: “There is no woman’s sides / Can bide the beating of so strong a passion / As love doth give my heart; no woman’s heart / So big, to hold so much.  They lack retention” (1813; lines 91-94).   

The motif of crossdressing in “As you Like it” is also used in a way to reveal a deep, inner loathing for certain individuals such as Duke Ferdinand.  Rosalind crossdresses because she does not want to be found by “thieves”: “Beauty provoketh theives sooner than gold” (1636; line 104).  Also, she implies that Duke Ferdinand is a coward, which is why she wants to become a man:

“Were it not better,

Because that I am more than common tall,

That I did suit me all points like a man,

A gallant curtal-axe upon my thigh,

A boar-spear in my hand, and in my heart,

Lie there what hidden woman’s fear there will.

We’ll have a swashing and a martial outside,

As many other mannish cowards have,

That do outface it with their semblances.” (1636; 108-114)

In contrast, Viola crossdresses mainly so that she can receive work, and she knew beforehand whom she was going to work for: “Orsino.  I have heard my father name him / He was a bachelor then” (1795; lines 24-25).  She was either not overly impressed with Orsino’s intelligence or was overly confident with the Captain’s ability to hide her identity. 

The symbol of crossdressing also implies it has, as a prop, the power of connecting people like a dating service between people of the opposite gender, which is not a bad thing.  In “Twelfth Night,” Orsino, who is consumed, in terms of time, by the homosocial bonds of his friends, Sir Toby and Sir Andrew, would not have fallen in love with Viola at the very end if she presented herself as herself because he was preoccupied with his male fantasies of being with Olivia.  Later, in the end of the play, Viola’s and his marriage actually falling through symbolized hope exists for cross-dressers.  Moreover, Viola’s search for power through the symbol of cross-dressing and her eventual marriage to Orsino implies that Orsino may have even recognized Cesario’s guise from the beginning and was secretly planning on marrying him/her: “Dear lad, believe it; / For they shall yet belie thy happy years / That say thou art a man” (1799; lines 28-31).

The act of cross-dressing as a motif in both plays avoids the discussion of women’s inequality during Shakespeare’s time period, yet the motif is a step in the right direction.  In “Twelfth Night,” were Viola a woman and she were allowed to work for Orsino as a woman, would not that have been a more radical and less crowd-pleasing choice on the part of Shakespeare? Although the play would lose some of its comedic high-points, Viola as herself—a woman—would have allowed, perhaps, for a more realistic treatment of the struggles of women in Elizabethan England.               

In terms of the heteronormative, cross-dressing in both plays breaks the norm.  Towards the middle of “Twelfth Night”,” Orsino, feels homoerotically in love with Cesario because of his feminine qualities: “Diana’s lip is not more smooth and rubious; thy small pipe / Is as the maiden’s organ, shrill and sound, / And all is semblative a woman’s part” (1799; lines 30-33).  Orsino’s statements, to me, seemed typical of a heterosexual man who might be questioning another man’s or his own masculinity especially in a situation like that (where a woman is actually playing the part of a man).  Orsino’s predicament of finding a mate seems momentarily clouded by Cesario’s femininity.  The act of cross-dressing in both plays represents a challenge to straight-men’s comfort zones. 

Cross-dressing is inherently unethical because of its misleading qualities.  The very fact that Viola must “conceal” herself on line fifty as a “eunuch” so that she can work with Orsino is a challenge for Viola to pull of (pg. 1795)?  But, at least, Viola’s cross-dressing at least brings Orsino into an uncomfortable position.  And furthermore, how would Orsino meet other women if he’s constantly preoccupied thinking about a single woman—Olivia?  Viola breaks social norms by cross-dressing yet it was for the better, becsause Orsino and Cesario (Viola) marry.  But before then, Orsino wastes too much time contemplating a perfect world in which his fantasies come true:

“Tell her my love, more noble than the world

Prizes not quantity of dirty lands.

The parts that fortune hath bestowed upon her

Tell her I hold as giddily as fortune;

But ‘tis that miracle and queen of gems

That nature pranks her in attracts my soul” (1813; lines 79-84). 

But, even if Olivia did consent to Orsino’s wishes, cross-dressing would have seemed even more unethical.  The only woman who meets the requirements of Orsino is in fact Viola, who’s in disguise.  The events that unfold in the play do not lead to Orsino’s original fantasies; he does not have extra obstacles that he climbs so that he can be noticed.  Orsino also has a right to choose whom he wants to marry and has set the ground rules/laws it would seem (even without his knowing) so that no woman can approach him.

The symbol of cross-dressing as a yearning for power, in both plays, exposes character weaknesses from those in the vicinity of a cross-dresser.   For instance, in “Twelfth Night”, Viola faces Olivia, (who can be arguably said to have a crush on Cesario because of their immediate connection with one another), and exposes her disdain for Orsino’s ears.  In “Twelfth Night,” furthermore, Orsino is confronted by Olivia in a manner that is quite cold, which goes against his fantasies of bedding and marrying her; only a cross-dresser who is audacious enough who can seduce him would merit his hand in marriage.   And whenever Olivia speaks with Orsino in the play, she has a much colder tone than Viola’s, suggesting Viola and Orsino, although not what Orsino originally intended, seems like the right choice.  Olivia also implies that Orsino is fat: “If it be aught to hears the jab and retorts sardonically, “Still so cruel?” (1840; line 106).  Further examples exist in the play where Olivia omits the “my” from “my lord”: “Still so constant, lord” on line 107 on the same page; and Orsino seems more preoccupied with Cesario than with Orsino, “Whither, my lord?  Cesario, husband, stay” (1840; line 138).  The play’s ending in act V, suggests male power over women’s sexual choices are really limited.  However, men had the power of wealth and a steady income whereas women simply did not.  In “As you Like it,” Rosalind expresses her knowledge of men in her act as Ganymede in a fashion that is quite insulting, yet humorous.  Her lines seem to imply there’s much more to her character, which may have been hurt by past experiences than what meets the eye.  When conversing with Touchstone, Ganymede states about the love engravings/letters he has found in the forest: “Peace, you dull fool, I found them on a tree” (1651; line 103).

               The cross-dressing symbol that is throughout the play indicates a failure of society, and perhaps of the play, in terms of rectifying gender inequality. To that end, Viola’s and Rosalind’s initial decisions of crossdressing indicates that they are intelligent, strong-willed, and non-traditionalist women Shakespeare is writing about.  And although Shakespeare fails at mentioning any allusions to Queen Elizabeth I, in that time period, having a female matriarch as a country’s leader would have been enlightening and revolutionary.  Viola’s and Rosalind’s characters might be allusions to Queen Elizabeth I, who surpassed all expectations of what a Queen could do. 

Bibliography

Greenblatt, Stephen, Walter Cohen, Jean Howard, Katherine Maus, eds.  “The Norton Shakespeare”.  2^nd

ed.  New York; W.W Norton, 2008. Print.

Inferences on the Absence of Cupid in Venus and Adonis by Shakespeare

Inferences on the Absence of Cupid in Venus and Adonis

Shakespeare broke Gender norms in the epic poem, Venus and Adonis, although the omnipotent, androgynous narrator of the epic love poem introduces what the reader expects to be a male fantasy.  Adonis faces a Goddess who’s extroverted sexually and wants him.  Although Venus embodies the ideal female corporeal, she does not fit the typical feminine personality.  Venus can be perceived as an “aggressive” or assertive woman in light of traditional gender roles. Venus, who portrays herself as a sexual object does not overturn the common gender roles that society expects of women assuming that Venus would not have complete control over her chosen love object.  She also just desires instant sexual gratification.  In this epic poem, she does:  “…sick-thoughted Venus makes amain unto him, / And like a bold-faced suitor ‘gins to woo [Adonis]” (Shakespeare 635, 5-6).  Typically, women are expected to desire more than just sexual gratification.  They are expected to desire friendship, companionship, something more than erotic love (altruistic, fatherly, or motherly).  

Adonis, likewise, fits the ideal physique for his gender.  He loves to hunt, and he would seem like he embodies the perfect heterosexual male.   However, he is weak in the field of battle: “Upon this promise did he raise his chin, / Like a divedapper peering through a wave / Who, being looked on, ducks as quickly in” (Shakespeare 637, 85-88).  So the typical hero archetype attributed to him goes contrary to heroic form.  In other English epics such as Beowulf and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, the hero has substantial strength and overcomes difficult tasks.  This is not so in Venus and Adonis or in The Tragedy of Coriolanus, where the soldier-hero is murdered. 

In Shakespeares’s day, relationships were traditionally initiated by the male.  Adonis does not, however, pursue Venus.  After he did not kiss her, Venus is unhappy. “’O puty,’ ‘gan she cry, ‘flint-hearted boy! / ‘Tis but a kiss I beg-why art thou coy?’” (Shakespeare 637, 95-96).  But Adonis desires mainly to hang out with his friends within the homosocial environment: in the end, Adonis appears to be a weak, uninterested, uncharismatic man who dies an unmanly death.  And despite being weak, he insists that, “I have been wooed as I entreat thee now / Even by the stern and direful god of war, / Whose sinewy neck in battle ne’er did bow / Who conquers where he comes in every jar” (Shakespeare 637, 97-99); the God of War, Mars, has influence over him.  Adonis claims to “favor reason” over “lust” (Shakespeare 653, 792).  Although, Adonis’ obssesion about his reputation with the God of War seems the most irrational of either Venus or himself despite his preference for reason in terms of normative gender roles. 

Shakespeare, exceptionally, does not overturn gender roles when it comes to male interest in war.  This results in tragedy because Venus’ aggression fails to protect Adonis, which flips the female role on its head.  The absence of Cupid can be said to lead to this tragedy, because if he had been present, he would have shot an arrow into Adonis, and Adonis would have fallen in love with Venus.  Then Adonis might have heeded her warnings from her premonition:

“…I thy death should fear;

And more than so, presenteth to mine eye

The picture of an angry chafing boar,

Under whose sharp fangs on his back doth lie

An image like thyself, all stained with gore,

Whose blood upon the fresh flowers being shed

Doth make them droop with grief, and hang the head” (Shakespeare 650, 660-6)

In this premonition it shows the weakness of Adonis: that he is incapable of killing a measly, smallish creature.  A stereotype of men, and expectation, really, of contemporary society (because of Nationalism) can be devolved as follows: men go to war or hunt and women do not (until recently).  This separation of spheres that Shakespeare breaks indicates that men are weak, also, and do not fare well all the time as expected.  The poem makes a subtle plea to the audience: are all men who cannot go to war, let alone hunt successfully, and succeed, undesirable?  Yet, Shakespeare says this is not so, because Venus claims she loves Adonis.  Regardless, he does not believe that she truly loves him—that her “love” for him is in fact an infatuation of some kind:

“If love have lent you twenty thousand tongues,

And every tongue more moving than your own,

Bewitching like the wanton mermaid’s song,

Yet from mine ear the tempting tune is blown;

For know, my heart stands armed in mine ear,

And will not let a false sound enter there” (Shakespeare 652, 775-80) 

Venus plays dead in order to kindle some kind of love from within Adonis: “And at his look she flatly falleth down, / For looks kills love, and love by looks reviveth…” (Shakespeare 646, 463-4).  Venus’ playing-dead trickery also sets up the reader for the real death of Adonis later on in the narrative.  In a way, Shakespeare uses this binary opposition—that of make-believe and that of real life.  The reader takes away this belief about love from the epic poem.  For a female lover, Venus, who is unrequited, she must evoke fantasies and delusions in Adonis if she will take him to bed.  In terms of gender reversal in terms of roles, typically the male dies instead of the female both in an earlier point in life (women live longer), and also, men sacrifice themselves in war for their significant other (as well as country).  The moral message of the epic poem, as indicated by the following stanza, suggests that idealized love can only be realized through death.  Only through the violent, physical touch can one snap the deluded Venus back into life:

“He wrings her nose, he strikers her on the cheeks,

He bends her fingers, holds her pulses hard;

He chafes her lips a thousand ways he seeks

To mend the hurt that his unkindness marred” (Shakespeare 646, 475-8).

Here, violence is shown to have a place in love, which is actually reflective of heteronormative sexuality; however, this is one of the few instances in which gender roles are not reversed. 

Cupid’s absence from the epic poem symbolizes the importance of true love rather than the necessity of a mythological figure, Cupid, to initiate it.  The “true love” described in the poem is initiated by Venus, the female, herself, in such a way that she is said to “conquer” Adonis: “Now quick desire hath caught the yielding prey, / And glutton-like she feeds, yet never filleth. / Her lips are conquerors, his lips obey” (Shakespeare 647, 547-8).  There they proceed to have sexual intercourse:

“And having felt the sweetness of the spoils, with blindfold fury she begins to forage. 

Her face doth reek and smoke, her blood doth boil,

And careless lust stirs up a desperate courage,

Planting oblivion, beating reason back,

Forgetting shame’s pure blush and honour’s wrack” (Shakespeare 648, 553-58). 

Were Cupid in the poem, Adonis would without a choice love Venus ‘till he dies at an old age, as wished for by Venus earlier on in the poem.  Shakespeare’s convenient omission of Cupid suggests a loss of power on behalf of Venus, who typically commands Cupid.  In terms of gender roles, this loss of power, according to the moral message of the play, suggests that women should not expect men to lay before them at an instant.  This may or not be a gender role reversal as it highly depends on the woman in question and her personality.

In terms of breaking gender norms, nature’s preference for either sex with egalitarianism in mind, and nature’s preference of humans over other animals in monotheism, nature prefers Venus.  Venus’ uncanny ability to communicate with animals and understand things that Adonis cannot, either in the form of promonitions, (which is a common motif in Shakespeare’s plays such as Julius Caesar, where Caesar’s wife has a vision that he will be murdered), compensates for her “natural” weakness as a female.  This power over nature for it to grant her clues has many symbolic meanings.  The grasping of her leg by the plant can indicate nature’s sensitivity to her; nature does not want her to grieve; or nature does not want her to prevent the death of Adonis, which is predestined: 

“And as she runs, the bushes in the way

Some catch her by the neck, some kiss her face,

Some twine about her thigh to make her stay. 

She wildly breaketh from their strict embrace,

Like a milch doe whose swelling dugs do ache,

Hasting to feed her fawn hid in some brake” (Shakespeare 655, 871-6). 

Also, in that quote, the narrator calls Adonis a fawn, which is notably an animal: so Shakespeare’s diction makes use of the opposite of personification, or dehumanization.

            Adonis’ death reinforces the theme of gender reversal and another moral message: gender role reversals can lead to tragedy when a man ignores a loving woman’s advice.  Since Adonis has faulty reasoning, he goes to hunt the boar and then Venus finds him dead in a delusion: “If he be dead—O no, it cannot be,” (Shakespeare 656, 937).  The moral appears to be this: although the female lover may appear to have delusions, be weak, or seem stupid, she rightfully has them.  This, even though society seems to put pressure on the male, who stereotypically desires a sane, stable woman.  Venus later finds out that she had a delusion, not a vision of the future that proved correct, so events can prove that the delusional are not in fact delusional:

“O Jove,” quoth she, ‘how much a fool was I

To be of such a weak and silly mind

To wail his death who lives, and must not die

Till mutual overthrow of mortal kind!” (Shakespeare 658,1015-8). 

But in Venus’ delusion, it later proves that she was correct; also, Venus believes she can woo Adonis and does.  Again, likewise, Venus speaks with animals and they respond.  Adonis, though, in actuality, died, as she had feared:

“And in her haste unfortunately spies

The foul boar’s conquest on her fair delight;

Which seen, her eyes, as murdered with the view,

Like stars ashamed of day, themselves withdrew” (Shakespeare 658, 1029-32).

In the last line above, note that the narrator alludes to stars, entities that refer to destiny or fate, a common theme throughout with respect to the gender reversal between men and women: Adonis and Venus rejected heavenly-sanctioned gender roles, and the result was therefore fated to be tragic. 

Works Cited

Shakespeare, William. “Venus and Adonis." The Norton Shakespeare: Based on the Oxford

Edition. Ed. Greenblatt, Stephen.  New York: Norton and Company, 2008, 635-662. Print.

Chapters 1-3 Summary of Security Analysis by Benjamin Graham and David Dodd (1934 edition)

Chapters 1-3 Summary of Security Analysis by Benjamin Graham and David Dodd (1934 edition)

On the nature of the stock market:

1)      Graham uses the metonymy of the stock market as not a “weighing machine,” but instead, as a “voting machine.”  As a voting machine, the market has “countless individuals [who] register choices which are the product partly of reason and partly of emotion” (Graham 23).

a.       It is this emotion that the stock analyst refers to as the irrational behavior of the stock market. 

2)      The sources of information on all companies that issue stocks/bonds can be simplified to the following list and are required to provide some basic information to the NYSE/Nasdaq/Other stock exchanges:

a.       Monthly statements (not all companies issue this and the following mentioned except the last one).

b.       Quarterly statements.

c.       Semiannual reports.

d.       Annual reports (all companies issue these).

3)      Most companies do not break the law when providing the facts so just assume that they will not.

4)      All predictions made by other reputable brokerage firms are done by solely (as well as some qualitative research) looking at the above reports made by companies to their stockholders.  Usually you can find this information on their website.

Important points made throughout the aforementioned chapters:

1)      Always consider investing with the intention to minimize loss and not to maximize profits.

2)      Any kind of analysis of a stock or bond will always need to be updated upon itself; in other words, do your analytic work of a stock frequently: do not count on a single analysis made, say, one month ago, since circumstances and environments change.

3)      There are two kinds of analysis: quantitative and qualitative.

a.       Quantitative data includes: “capitalization, earnings and dividends, assets and liabilities, and operating statistics

b.       Qualitative data includes: “the nature of the business; the relative position of the individual company in the industry; its physical, geographical, and operating characteristics; the character of the management; and finally, the outlook for the unit, for the industry, and for business in general” (Graham 34).

4)      In the many types of reports that companies provide to investors, you should paint a picture of the statistics of a company.  Look for this in a report:  

5)      Not all companies have their information reports made public, therefore, you should ask why you think they don’t?  Is the business a seasonal business?  Do they wish to conceal important information?

6)      If a stock answers to another group, such as OPEC/US. Government Trade Commission/any other institution, then it is important to do research on the reports that these groups provide on the company in question.   

7)      You might learn something that most other people do not know if you look for facts in hard-to-find locations.

8)      Graham’s interpretation of what it means to be a security analyst:

9)      Deciding upon which stock to invest in by looking rather than actual investing in a stock/bond can be more dangerous to the stock analyst than to the thorough analysis through quantitative and qualitative approaches.

10)   You must have standards of excellence when making a judgment on a stock/bond of which typically concerns itself with its “soundness and practicability.”

11)   Always ask the question: is the price of the security (bond/stock) too high or is it low compared to its intrinsic value?  Also take into account the irrational behavior of a stock market: try to predict what emotions people are having about it.

12)   While doing research on potential candidates for stocks, ask not about its name or brand nor dwell on its market price.  Instead, ask, “In what enterprise?” meaning: what industry does this security belong to?  Does the industry itself have a lot of potential?  Is it going to experience a boon or is it going downhill in terms of demand for its services?

  

General statistical tendencies in the stock/bond market:

1)      If a stock is worth more than its market price, it will correct itself; meaning, the stock will match its worth even though this worth might be at a different value from one moment to the next.