Footnotes/ Annotations to Poems
Tuesday, April 19, 2011
Dear All Souls Book Group,
Below are some footnotes from Mario Di Cesare’s anthology, George Herbert and the Seventeenth-Century Religious Poets, to help you navigate the poems we'll be discussing during Monday's meeting, on April 25th, at 7 PM. Those poems are, to remind you, “The Pulley,” “The Collar,” “Artillery,” and “Love (III).”
Please also remember to read Seamus Heany’s essay, “The Redress of Poetry,” which was handed out at our last meeting (Monday, April 18th.) In this wonderful essay Heany treats both “The Pulley” and “The Collar.”
And for those of you without copies of the poems, all the ones we talked about last night, along with those we’re to talk about this Monday, are available in the blog entry below.
Here, then, are some footnotes, or we might call them annotations, for the poems we’re to discuss on Monday (first floor Conference Room of the Warner Building, 7 PM). Also, just so you know: There are no footnotes in Di Cesare’s anthology for “The Pulley.”
For “The Collar”
••First line, “board”: Table; communion table, maybe
••Sixth line, “Shall I still be in suit?”: Petitioner; in attendance; waiting on another (see line 31)
••Ninth line, “cordial”: Invigorating
For “Artillery”
••Second line, first stanza, “Me thoughts”: It seemed to me
••Sixth line, first stanza, “Do as thou usest,”: Art accustomed to
••First line, second stanza, “But I also have stars and shooters too,”: “shooters” here could be shooting stars, but also “those who use artillery”
••Seventh line, third stanza, “articling”: Negotiating, arranging by treaty
For “Love (III)”
••Di Cesare has a footnote next to the title, and it’s a verse from Luke, and the verse presumably is meant to inform your understanding of the poem entire: “Blessed are those servants, whom the lord when he cometh shall find watching: verily I say unto you, that he shall gird himself, and make them to sit down to meat, and will come forth and serve them" (Luke 12: 37, St. James).
**It's with hesitation I refer you to this verse (above.) If in reading "Love (III)" you experience something like surprise when you get to the words "taste," "eat," and "meat" -- well, good. Best just to attend to the poem while reading; if the biblical precedent arises naturally, all the better. The hope in expressing this hesitation is to preserve the impact those words may have had on you when you first read them.
••Third line, first stanza: “slack”: Hesitant, reluctant.
Okay, enjoy them poems. Memorize them if you have time. Memorize them even if you don’t have the time. To Eliot’s likely disgruntlement, we have not read them in the order in which they appear in The Temple -- and he is right: the poems do tell a kind of story when read first to last, and I hope you will try and read them that way when you can. For now I want to reiterate what we said in our last meeting, which is that “Love (III)” is the last poem in The Temple. Following it is the word Finis -- in italics -- and following Finis, also in italics, is Luke 2:14, arranged like this:
Glory be to God on high
And on earth peace
Good will towards men.
Best,
Emilie