Landscapes of the Heart by Elizabeth Spencer

Author:Elizabeth Spencer
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: BenBella Books, Inc.
Published: 2003-10-19T04:00:00+00:00

… mute speculation, the patient curse

That stones the eyes, or like the jaguar leaps

For his own image in a jungle pool, his victim.

I wonder what a jaguar is doing in this Southern scene. Many a young brain worked hard to discover the meaning of such difficult images. Yet there were wonderful, accessible and justly famous lines, like “What shall we say who have knowledge/ Carried to the heart?” and “… the salt of their blood/Stiffens the saltier oblivion of the sea.” Here was brilliance at work.

This studious attention went side by side with the textual study of Eliot, Ezra Pound, Gerard Manley Hopkins. Few others were so thoroughly approved. Tennyson was out, Browning was a maybe. Besides, who studied Victorian literature anymore? You had better go straight back to John Donne.

Then there was poetry by John Crowe Ransom, the pride of Vanderbilt, recently hired away “up north,” to Kenyon College. To my reading, Ransom was so deep buried in the Southern myth of people, landscape, history, that his marvelous lyric gifts seemed always to be wandering around there. The speaker of his poem “Old Mansion” is wandering, too, thinking about one of those old Southern houses, an icon, so easily read as a model of how we all lived once, or thought we did or should have:

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.