Wonder

We had a whole section at the beginning of this reading about mystery. Now, when I read in the schedule that one of the excerpts was actually called The Mystery, I couldn't help but going back to to the myriad of sleuth-related novels I had read over the years: Harriet the Spy, Sherlock Holmes, even (sadly) the Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen detective series. I was thinking of the question-answer, crime-victim-witness-criminal, cops-and-robbers kind of mystery. So I was a little surprised by what the first reading selection actually consisted of.

Exhibit A of the kind of mystery book I thought of.

http://www.fantasticfiction.co.uk/series/adventures-of-mary-kate-and-ashley/case-of-dog-show-mystery.htm

"Nobody..." said the child "[knows] what a single thing is." (19)

Smart kid. And as I read deeper, as I slowly fell into "loving the mystery,"(19) and in the next excerpt, as I left behind everything and looked for "illumination which [left me] breatheless"(20), I realized that the mystery referred to in our anthology was the mystery of life: the wonder that IS life.

Anyhow, the poems I've decided to analyze are the ones I felt fit in best with this theme of the wonder and mystery life is full of, namely "The Lamb" by William Blake and "Hurrahing in Harvest" by Gerard Manley Hopkins.

I liked "The Lamb" because it was all about the miracle that is the mundane. At least, that's how I saw it. I know Blake best for his poem "The Tiger". In fact, I don't think I'd ever heard anything else by him... which is probably mostly due to my avoidance of poetry at all cost. I'm a story girl. I think poems have always scare me with how slow and focused they can be. Anyhow, Blake begins "The Lamb" with a question: "Little lamb, who made thee?" (140). The question is sort of an opening to a more... I don't know. Conventional mystery? More like the mysteries of sleuths then the mystery of wonder. But as the poem continues, Blake crafts a sense of wonder at the existence of the lamb by continuing the question in a list of all the different features that the lamb and it's environment possesses. First he generally mentions "life", "feed" and "the stream" (140). Then Blake moves on the characteristics of the lamb itself: "softest clothing, woolly, bright" and the lambs "tender voice" (referring to the lulling baa-ing sounds lambs are so well known for) both make an appearance in the poem (140). At the end of the first stanza, Blake repeats the first question.

http://aznliu.googlepages.com/lamb2.jpg

Throughout the first stanza, Blake is not only creating a sense of wonder at that which is the lamb, he is also building suspense. This is accomplished through repeated questioning, as well as through the number of syllables in each line, which for the first and last two is six and for the middle is seven. The increase and then decrease in syllables (and therefore how hard the mouth has to work to pronounce the lines) gives the reader hope at the end of the stanza (since less work is necessary to pronounce the words) that an answer is approaching. In addition, by rhyming lines in sets of (AA,BB,CC, etc.), Blake is helping the poem flow, which contrasts nicely with the suspense he builds in the first stanza: though the poem is suspenseful, it moves quickly towards, hopefully, and answer.

In the second part of the poem, Blake continues building suspense by beginning the section saying twice "little lamb, I'll tell thee"(140) without answering the question. In fact, Blake never answers the question, leaving the reader to figure the answer out for himself with the clues he leaves in this stanza: "He calls Himself a lamb. He is meek...He is mild,"(140) and so on. He ends in what I consider to be a sort of teasing and yet jubilant way, wishing for the Lamb blessings from God. I consider it to be teasing because the answer to the question first posed is God, but the exclamation points used as punctuation for this repeated line gives the reader a sense of the happiness Blake is attempting to convey with these lines.

Hopkins' "Hurrahing in Harvest" is all about the wonder of life. It talks begins by describing nature, speaking of "the barbarous beauty" of summer and the lovely way the wind "walks"(160). Calling summer barbarous gives you a sense of how untamed Hopkins sees his environment as, and yet this contrasts with the way he describes the wind, which simply "walks" in a calm manner, bringing to mind the soft breezes that start up as "summer ends" (160) and fall approaches. After describing the beauty and wonder he beholds when he looks at nature, Hopkins goes back to the creator of this all, talking of how he "glean our savior" (160) in nature itself. The "azurous hills" are his shoulder, and this would be clearer to all but the beholder is "wanting," blind to the wonder which reflects its creator". I really responded to the first few lines of the last stanza because of how Hopkins manages to really convey his wonder at Earth. The word "azurous" is sort of long, drawn out, tumbling off your tongue in a distinctly foreign but familiar way because of the combination of "z" with a myriad of rounded vowels. Hopkins then breaks up the second line of this stanza, as though he couldn't help but exclaim that not only is this "majestic" but also "very-violet-sweet!"(70).

God's shoulders.

http://www.destination360.com/north-america/us/wyoming/images/s/wyoming-rocky-mountains.jpg

Besides having a sense of wonder and mystery in common, both of these poems also attribute this wonder and mystery to God. To generalize these poems in an effort to make them more universal, I'd say both poets are trying to convey to their audiences how incredible it is that once upon a time, this, referring to nature, had to be created, had to be thought up. They're so... impressed, I guess you'd say, or better yet, in awe, at what they are able to look out their windows and see.

I feel that, sometimes. The other day, I was in friends dorm room and she gave me and apple to eat, because I was basically dying from meal after meal of my only fruit source being those awful honeydew and cantaloupe chunks they have at Kinsolving. The apple, needless to say, was DELICIOUS, but as I was devouring it, feeling a bit like Snow White, I had this sort of moment where I realized that no human had made this apple. No one took out a cook book, or turned on their oven, or even added water to the mix. The apple had come purely from nature.

Apples come from trees!

http://i82.photobucket.com/albums/j280/gardenplansireland/apple-tree-ireland-image-picture-ph.jpg

I don't know. I realize that it was just an apple. It was just being an apple, much like Miguel was "just being a tiger" when the "gruesome and unhappy incident" (155) that was Rucardo Tovar's death occured. But think about the power that "just being a tiger" gave Miguel: he killed. All on his own, just using the tools nature had endowed him with.

Yeah, it was just an apple. But it was so PURELY an apple, and it was able, just be being an apple, to feed me.

For me, that was an epiphany.