In Praise of Limestone Flashcards
Rebecca Price Parkin on the tone
it can be summarised as having ‘intimacy, humility and tenderness’, informal and friendly tone
Rebecca Price Parkin on reality as there’s a
‘relaxed but intimate and knowing contact with reality’
Antony Hecht
‘presents to us a climate which corresponds to, certain moral qualities of human behaviour’
there is no regular rhyme scheme which ____
mirrors the irregularity of the limestone landscape
What is the shift in the poem?
midway it shifts from addressing humanity to directing it to a single person
When was in Praise of Limestone written?
May 1948 after a visit to Italy
James Persoon it’s about…
‘the beauty of mutable, imperfect human nature’
What goes hand in hand together in this poem?
romance and the parody of romance
what two landscapes does he combine
a landscape in northern England and the Italian landscape where he returned to in the post-war period
Rebecca Price Parkin on humanity in the poem
‘the same plasticity that is the ground for man’s redemptive hopes makes it possible for a secular Caesar to turn him into a monstrous genocide machine’
what does the granite wastes attach?
‘saints-to-be’
what does the clays and graves attract?
‘Intendant Caesars’
what does the oceanic whisper attract?
‘the really reckless’ - Nietszchean nihilists
although at the beginning of the final stanza the poet doubts the authenticity of his vision of the Good Place…
he realises that although not intrinsically the ideal in itself, it can at least stand for an analogy of it.
‘born lucky’
lucky is used by the later Auden with similarities to Grace
form and structure
loose syllabic lines in three long stanzas
it is a porous, rich, fertile and moderate landscape that Auden can only describe as an imaginary place through _____ ____
counterfactual statements
‘steep stone gennels’
‘gennel’ is a step away from ‘channel’, meaning a ‘narrow passage between houses’ so that the human architecture blends with its limestone landscapes
‘rival’ etymology
‘rival’ and ‘river’ are connected through latin ‘rivals’ (person living on the opposite bank of a stream. Auden’s band of rivals denies the modern sense of the word; there is camaraderie between them not antagonism, but the modern sense remains a vague threat
Auden invokes the etymology of ‘rival’ to imply that language has been determined by nature,
and so the words used to describe people once described them as elements in nature
‘or a thing like water / Or stone whose conduct can be predicted’
‘conduct’, like ‘rivals’ and ‘gennels’ has human and. non-human meaning in its etymology, suggested through the poem in its earlier use of the word ‘conduit’.
Rebecca Price Parkin: ‘the door is open to the ______, the unpredictable - life as it is lived’
unplanned
R.EMIG
‘through its multiple contradictions ‘In Praise of Limestone’ has already achieved its own utopia: the poem is its own poetic paradise, and one that need not fear a Fall, because it thrives on falls.’
reminiscent of Wallace Stevens
‘Paradise is imperfection’
