Time/memory Flashcards
Time and Death: Rhapsody on a Windy Night and During Wind and Rain
Both show the inevitability and destructive nature of time which is linked to death. They both demonstrate the absurdity that living your life means to simply get closer to death. There is a loss of meaning.
Eliot’s is cold while Hardy’s is warm and more personal. However, they both demonstrate that no one can escape time. it is universal.
Eliot, being a mordents and influences by Frued sees memory and the present closely linked and offers no clear line between them. Hardy rather sees memory as a clear progression of time and depicts past scenes as a linear movement towards death.
Eliot’s narrator is anxious and hopeless, Hardy’s is hopeless too but it seems more cheerful.
Beginning of RHAPSODY ON A WINDY NIGHT
“Twelve o’clock” - the poem starts with the speaker among the time, akin to the starting of the stop watch. Twelve o’clock is also contextually linked to supernatural, setting the nocturnal but also mystical atmosphere.
“lunar synthesis” and “lunar incantations” are vertically juxtaposed, introducing a strong dreamlike quality to the poem.
The magical qualities “dissolve the floor of memory”,
- showing an uncontrollable nature that makes the speaker fall. there is an unstable atmosphere
- the sibilance enhances the magical nature. The alliteration of the O sound slows down the line, depicting a distortion of time.
Quote: fear of time and death
“every street lamp that I pass beats like a fatalistic drum”
- the simile is incongruent - showing a slipping mental state and consciousness
- fear of the inevitable and the inescapable
“midnight shakes the memory as a madman shapes a dead geranium”
- similar vibe
- something which becomes a symbol of health becomes one of death
Context: freud on dreams
Eliot as a modernist and post freudian poet may have been exploring his notion on dreams that they are a manifestation of our deepest desires but also fears, many of them being unconscious
Context: freud on time
Half past one - seems like a regular movement of time that is linear
However, the amount of time passed doesn’t seems to be accounted for in the poem, it seems like the poet is jumping from time to time.
Freud postulates that while the conscious subscribe to linear time, the unconscious brain is timeless and associates the past and present all at the same time.
Quote: Time and past memory are mixed together
“the border of her dress is torn and stained with sand”
- sand has connotations of time, here is portrayed as destructive and violent but at the same time associating nature with it
- the torn border depicts mixing, the mixing of past memories and the present which the speaker is going through now
Critic: Grover Smith
“The poem shows memory as a force of disintegration, rather than cohesion”
- a disintegration of identity and of reality
- incongruous similes and comparisons
destructiveness of time shown through nature
“A twisted branch on the beach eaten smooth”
- nature wears down everything
- death is personified
- even the surrounding is desolate, a desert landscape that alludes to Eliots later work in the wasteland.
image of ‘skeleton’ as mortality/
destructiveness of time shown through industrialisation
“A broken spring in a factory yard”
- decaying into uselessness
- factory yard that is supposedly full of use and life is abandoned
“rust that clings to the form”
- imagery that seems like a virus, something that corrupts and spreads.
- time applies to everything, even objects
“hard and curled and ready to snap”
- violent imagery
- snap becomes a euphemism for death
Context on industrialisation
The image of the spring can be linked to Eliot’s negative view on the rapid industrialisation that was happening in the early 20th century. Just as the branch decays, showing a pastoral disintegration, so does the spring. Both nature and man made cannot stand the test of time.
Ending:
“The lamp said, four oclock”
- the speakers agency is completely removed and the lamp gains control
The bed is open; the tooth-brush hangs on the wall, Pur your shoes ar the door, sleep, prepare for life.’
- seems to return to reality but it is still the lamp speaking. The lamp is commanding him
‘The last twist of the knife”
- ends on a fatalistic note
- the line is isolated for emphasis
- to live is to approach death - there is a certain absurdity to this
ends on hopelessness and on the brink of existential nihilism
DURING WIND AND RAIN
Hardy reminisces Emma through a recalling of her family and perhaps an imagination of her younger years of life. But the poems is dualistic, on one side focusing on Emma’s life and her family, the other focusing on the inevitability of the passing of time.
Quote: stanza structure (happy)
“They” - “He, she, all of them”
- Hardy although adopts a personal view, it is clear from the beginning that the message is universal
“treble and tenor and bass”
- there is a strong sense of unity and harmony in the music
- even the stanza adopts a lyrical format
Critic: Donald Davie
“Hardy’s poetry is haunted by the tension between the beauty of remembered life and the relentless certainty of death.”
- the poem adopts a format that depicts a happy scene that is then corrupted by the reminder of time passing.
Quote: stanza structure (sinister)
“….” the split and change in the stanza is signaled by an elipses, usually signalling passing time.
“Ah, no; the years O!” - the repetition of this is like the fatalistic drums in Eliots poem. But here is more personal, an emotional expression of regret
“How the sick leaves reel down in throngs!”
- the DUAL MEANING of “reel”, both means to reel from sickness but is also a type of Irish dance. Everything fun and joyous in life is corrupted by death
- nature is corrupted, just like in eliots poem
Eliots poem has an increasing sense of the speaker losing control, this is the same for Hardy. But in Hardy’s the subjects of time seem ignorant to its passing, while Eliot’s exhibits an anxious frenzy due to it.
“They clear the creeping moss”
- the moss is personified just like the “the spring that clings onto its form”. time is a spreading disease. However, Hardy has a stronger focus on pastoral imagery
- Pastoral imagery often associated with life and purity is corrupted
“the white storm birds wing across”
- the storm birds signal a coming storm
- once again the impeding sense of death
RHYME: across goes all the way back to moss. this shows a sense of entrapment.
“they are blithely breakfasting all”
- Hardy seems to kind of blame them for being so happy and ignorant
- much like the speaker in Eliot, he sees a pointlessness in the mundane routines of life as it leads to death, here “breakfasting” is the same vibe.
Symbol of flowers
“And the rotten rose is ript from the wall”
- the imagery is sudden
- violent nature seen in the alliteration of the R sound
- this is a likely result of the wind - the storm is building up.
- each stanza is standard, showing a standard passing of time rather than the more incongruous nature of Eliots poem. Time for hardy is something that ticks periodically, getting more violent as it draws nearer
Ending:
“They change to their high new house”
- the structure doesn’t change, the reader expects this to be a happy line, and the EUPHEMISM makes them think that. But high house actually means heaven.
- So Hardy breaks the structure of the poem without actually doing so. This symbolises there is no escape from time and the cycle which every human goes through.
“He she all of them - aye”
- and echo of the first line, but here they are united by the universality of death
“Clocks and carpets and chairs on the lawn all day”
- their personal affections are being sold, Only the materialistic things survive. They could be holding memories of the family
- BUT for eliot the materialistic things decay too.
The song like lyrical nature is continued on towards the end. Perhaps this is ironic and used to contrast the bleak ending. However, songs contextually are used to pass down stories and memories, perhaps this is Hardy’s intention
Ending more:
“down their carved names the rain-drops ploughs”
- the storm finally breaks and its destruction continues to wear down on them after they are dead
- showing that time will even erase the mere memory of the family
The song like lyrical nature is continued on towards the end. Perhaps this is ironic and used to contrast the bleak ending. However, songs contextually are used to pass down stories and memories, perhaps this is Hardy’s intention
Memory and Landscape: Burial of The Dead and After a Journey
Burial of the Dead
Early Modernist, fragmented, uses landscape as psychological and cultural symbol.
Quote: The landscape is a gateway to memory
CONTEXT: “April is the cruelest month…” is an echo of the Canterbury tails which is concerned with rebirth and faith (religious pilgrimage). Eliots call-back to old texts introduces language as a form of memory, but he subverts the meaning of the lines for a modernist effect.
POINT: Eliot depicts April (usually holding good connotations) as evil due to its ability to uncover unwanted memories
“breeding lilacs out of the dead land”
- LILAC context: lilacs are associated with mourning, here they return naturally from ‘dead land’ connoting that the land is not ready for memory of death and so is the speaker.
- the painful memories are therefore forced back
THE NATURAL CYCLE OF CHANGING SEASONS BRING BACK MEMORY
There is a pattern of adjectives at the end of most line:
“feeding” “mixing” “stirring” - April is a disrupting force
“Winter kept us warm, covering earth in forgetful snow”
- the winter is personified as a protecting force
- Paradox further demonstrates how Eliot is subverting the landscape
- the ‘warm’ which Eliot talks about when associated with the snow evokes senses of emotional numbness, he wants to be ignorant
Lyndall Gordon
Eliot’s memory is tidal — always receding from him, never fully possessed.
Quote: Memory is a reflective of the inner state through landscape
This evokes a post-war cultural wasteland after WW!, where nothing meaningful can take root — the landscape depicts a haunting reminder of the war.
“A heap of broken images”
- Memory is no longer a coherent narrative, but a pile of disconnected ruins. The mind, like the landscape, is desolate.
- the landscape is fragmented - memory is confusing and fragmented too
“And I will show you something different from either / Your shadow at morning striding behind you / Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you”
- the past and present - Eliot says we do not experience them as linear
- In the wasteland all memory and time is a fractured mess
