Academic literature on the topic 'German Elegiac poetry'

Though there are many seminal works on early Romanticism and Thomas Moore’s poetry, their hymns remain understudied. This article focuses on the genre problem in the hymns by the Lake Poets (S.T. Coleridge, W. Wordsworth, R. Southey) and Thomas Moore, whose poetry is studied in context of English Literature and German Romanticism. The characteristics of the hymn are emotionality, associative composition, abundance of repetitions and parallelisms, archaic grammatical forms of verbs and pronouns, and the use of verb contractions. The combination of genres in hymns results in such variants as the odic hymn, the idyllic and elegiac hymn, the mythological hymn, and even the satirical hymn, with each of them evolving in its own way in the period under study. The odic hymn is represented in “Hymn before Sun-rise, in the Vale of Chamouni” (1802) by S.T. Coleridge and “Hymn. For the Boatmen, as They Approach the Rapids under the Castle of Heidelberg” (1820/1822) and “To the Laborer’s Noon-Day Hymn” (1834/1835) by W. Wordsworth. These poems have such odic features as comparisons and conditional and cause-and-effect syntactic constructions. Coleridge’s hymn going back to the psalms of praise was influenced by German Romanticism, while Wordsworth’s hymns feature religious vocabulary and quotations from the Mass. The mythological hymn comes in two versions – one with idyllic features (“Hymn to the Earth” (1799, publ.1834) by S.T. Coleridge) and the mythological hymn-fragment (“Fragment of a mythological hymn to Love” (1812) by T. Moore). The fist is the translation of Stolberg’s hymn, from which the leitmotif of the Earth as the mother and the nanny of the World is borrowed. The image of the Earth has anthropomorphic features, with the marriage of the Earth and Heaven going back to W. Blake. The myth created by T. Moore is more complex. The creation of the world begins with the marriage of Love and Psyche. Love appears as the masculine principle of the Universe, while Psyche as the feminine one. The plot goes back to the ancient myths of the world creation from the Chaos and marriage of Eros and Psyche. However, T. Moore changed the myth and transformed the heroes into a source of life. “Hymn to the Penates” (1796) by R. Southey combines the idyllic, elegiac, publicistic and hymn features proper. The idyllic features are related to the image of the Penates that turn into a force controlling human lives and the souls of the dead. The childhood memories give rise to the elegiac features. The publicistic features appear in the verses of the people who do not worship the Penates. The composition, repetitions and parallelisms in the satirical “A Hymn of Welcome after the Recess” (1813) by T. Moore go back to the hymn genre; however the main stylistic devices used are irony and metonymy. Summing up, the genre of hymn in the works by the Lake Poets and Thomas Moore undergoes significant transformations, which will be further developed in late Romanism.

The image of Ivan the Terrible in the propagandic European poetry of the Livonian War is considered. On the example of two poetic works “An elegiac poem about the campaign of His Majesty Stephen the First, the King of Poland and the Grand Duke of Lithuania against Ivan Vasilyevich, the Grand Duke of Moscow” by the German author Samuil Wolf (1582) and “The Song of the Capture of Polotsk” by the Polish poet Jan Kokhanovsky (1580) the conclusion is made about the great interest of the European reader in the personality of the Moscow tsar. The analysis of these texts shows the grotesque image of Ivan the Terrible, formed under the influence of the “political order” coming from the Polish King Stefan Batory. It is also concluded that European propaganda played a negative role, contributed to the loss of the Muscovite state in the Livonian War. The indifference of the tsar himself to what was published about him in the West is also noted, this was the reason that Ivan the Terrible did not want to carry out reciprocal propaganda campaigns and limited himself in this regard to exculpatory and accusatory letters to S. Batory, A. M. Kurbsky and some European monarchs. “The Song of the Capture of Polotsk” was first translated into Russian by the author of the article and is published here in full.

Some of the early goethian influences on the original poetry by Maragall can be found in the poems from his series Claror. They are only preceded by a few translations of the poet from Weimar. Maragall, who for biographical reasons finds himself in the same situation as Goethe when he wrote Roman Elegies, imitates the German author in many topics. On the one hand, Maragall does not understand the crucial point in Roman Elegies, on the other hand, neither does his limited classic culture allow him to stage his love to Clara Noble in the ancient Rome. On the formal level Maragall also only uses very few of the resources that Goethe offered him.

Background. The article tells about the work of the famous German writer Johann Wolfgang Goethe and about the history of the creation of the famous "West-Eastern Divan". Methods. The famous German writer Johann Wolfgang Goethe (1749-1832) was a poet, playwright, literary critic, jurist, orientalist, historian and philosopher, painter, theater critic, naturalist, and scientist and statesman who made discoveries in biology and mineralogy. He was one of the first to use the term "world literature." His 143-volume artistic and scientific legacy includes his works such as Faust, The Sufferings of Young Werther, West-east collection of poems, Muhammad (peace and blessings of Allaah be upon him), Tawrida Iphigenia, Roman Elegies, Torquato Tasso, "The Evolution of Nabotot", "The Magic Whisper", "Information about Color", as well as more than three thousand poems have attracted the attention of readers around the world. Results. In particular, Goethe's main idea in his artistic heritage was to bring together the cultures of all the peoples of the world and to open the way to world literature. "West-east collection of poems" brought him a lot of fame. At that time, the poet was 70 years old. Discussion. Before Goethe created the "West-east collection of poems" (or “Mag‘ribu Mashriq devoni”), he began to study the Qur'an, the holy book of Islam, which the Orient worships. At that time, the Qur'an was translated into German, as well as into Latin, English and French. Although the poet was still young, more precisely, twenty-four years old, he studied these translations by comparing them because he knew all the languages listed above. He even mastered the Arabic orthography, through which he tried to understand and study the essence of the verses of the Qur'an. He also took a keen interest in studying the life of Muhammad (peace and blessings of Allaah be upon him) and the hadeeths that are his sayings. The full manuscript of Surat an-Nas, written by Goethe in Arabic, includes "Allah," "Muhammad, may Allah bless him and grant him peace." The manuscript is still housed in the House Museum in Weimar, Germany. Conclusion. Thus, Goethe, who from an early age was interested in the languages, history, literature, religious and philosophical views, customs and traditions of the peoples of the East, wrote the "West-east collection of poems", primarily under the influence of the Qur'an and hadiths, mystical teachings. as well as in the interpretation of the ghazals of such famous representatives of Eastern poetry as Rudaki, Firdavsi, Hafiz Sherozi, Saadi, Anvari, Nizami, Rumi, Jami, Navoi. He even chose the oriental nickname "Hotam" to create it

This study aims to assess the adequacy of the form of German sonnets when reproduced in English translations. The focus is on interrogative sentences, which, together with the sonnet in the form of a macro-sentence, the shortened verse and enjambment, are the characteristics of the innovative features of Sonnets to Orpheus by R. M. Rilke. The lyrical cycle Sonnets to Orpheus is among the most translated into world languages of Rilke’s poetry works, as well as Duino Elegies. Both professional and amateur poets and translators have been competing to put the Austrian writer’s best poems into English. Here we examine more than twenty English translations of the Sonnets into English, made from 1936 to 2008. The importance of the comparative linguistic-stylistic study of the original and its translations is determined by the continuing interest in Rilke’s works in English-speaking countries and the necessity to understand the principles of reconstructing the features of Rilke’s poetics using the English language. The system of methods used in this work includes: historical and philological analysis, comparative linguistic and stylistic description, as well as comparative analysis of the original and translation in the form that was developed in the works of V. Bryusov (1905), N. Gumilev (1919), M. Lozinsky (1935), E. Etkind (1963), S. Goncharenko (1987). We have found that the innovative nature of German sonnets is not always reflected in English translations. In some translations, American and British translators significantly modified the form of the original: interrogative sentences dominating in XVII and XVIII sonnets of the second part of the lyric cycle were not reproduced in English translations made by G. Good, D. Young, C. Haseloff, N. Mardas Billias and others.

D’Annunzio’s relationship with Goethe presents itself as a case of intertextuality. A hundred years after the publication of the Römische Elegien, d’Annunzio composes a poetry collection with the same title that in several places refers to the German text. Quotes are also found in the Chimera and in Il piacere.

representatives of modern German literature. In particular, Duino Laments and Sonnets to Orpheus are characterized as his masterpieces in the field of poetry. However, the writing of these two works took place under very difficult conditions. Rilke was plunged into a deep crisis in 1910, but was able to find peace when he completed Laments and Sonnets in 1922. The intervening years (1910-1922) are the subject of this study. Our aim is to examine how and under what conditions these two masterpieces were written. In these twelve years, Rilke had experiences that left deep traces in his art and were reflected in the motifs of both works. These twelve years are also referred to as Rilke's "late period" in which he reached maturity and begins after the 1910 publication of the novel The Notes of Malte Lauridds Brigge. Set in Paris, this novel is considered the first modern novel written in the German language. Rilke reached the pinnacle of his art with this novel and the New Poems published before it. However, as soon as Malte Lauridds finished Brigge's Notes, Rilke, as noted, fell into a major productivity crisis. The following years were spent trying to overcome this crisis and continue to produce at the same high artistic level. Rilke's first remedy to overcome the crisis was to distract himself by translating. At this time, the desire to travel also showed up. While Rilke's "Middle Period" (1902-1910) bore the stamp of Paris, his late period after 1910 was marked by his travels and travels. This study mainly deals with these years and aims to show how Rilke's two works, which are considered his masterpieces, came to be despite such displacement. The experiences that left deep traces in Rilke's life and work are discussed throughout the study and reflected from a positivist perspective. According to the order in his biography, the first important trip of Rilke in these years was the 1910 trip to North Africa and Egypt. Rilke was heavily inspired by ancient Egyptian civilization and the vibrant Islam of the Maghreb. As a matter of fact, he managed to write the first lines of Duino Laments in the Duino Castle, where he stayed as a guest in 1912. His second important trip was his trip to Spain in 1912-13. Shortly after returning to Paris from Spain for a while, World War I broke out and Rilke was forced to stay in Germany until 1919. In 1919, however, he left Germany, never to return, and settled in Switzerland (where he completed both of his masterpieces in 1922).

This paper explores the Baltic German reception of English graveyard poetry. The first translation of a graveyard poem was published in 1783 by Gottlieb Schlegel (Gray’s “Elegy”). Next, a poem by Elisa von der Recke is analysed in its dialogue with Blair’s “The Grave” and Schiller’s “Resignation”. The earliest and the most often talked about graveyard poem with the longest reception was Edward Young’s “Night-Thoughts”. Heinrich Mutschmann, professor for English at the University of Tartu, interpreted it as late as 1939. Tõukudes ühest 1759. aastal Tallinnas trükitud matuseluuletusest, mis meenutab nii hiliskeskaegset Niguliste „Surmatantsu“ kui 18. sajandil populaarset inglise kalmuluulet (vt Kaur 2018, 365–366), vaadeldakse käesolevas artiklis inglise kalmuluule baltisaksa retseptsiooni. Ehitamaks silda Notke „Surmatantsu“ järgse ja 18. sajandi teise poole baltisaksa surmakujutuste vahele, on alustuseks lühidalt resümeeritud raamatuteadlase Tiiu Reimo artiklit surma visualiseerimisest 17.–18. sajandi Eesti ala võõrkeelsetes matuseluuletustes, täpsemalt vinjettides. Selle põhjal võib aimata, et uudsem, barokist inspireeritud, kuid nüüd juba rokokooliku kuju võtnud surmakäsitlus hakkas siinkandis maad võtma alates 18. sajandi teisest poolest, selle kõrgaeg jäi aga 18. sajandi viimse veerandi ja 19. sajandi esimese kolmandiku vahele. Kas võiks seostada sellise surmakujutuse populariseerumist inglise kalmuluule mõjude jõudmisega siiakanti? Esimene teadaolev inglise kalmuluule tõlge Baltimail (nüüdsel Eesti-Läti alal) ilmus 1783. aastal Riia toomkooli rektori Gottlieb Schlegeli sulest ajakirjas Vermischte Aufsätze und Urtheile. Selleks oli Thomas Gray „Külasurnuaial kirjutatud eleegia“ („Elegy Written on a Country Churchyard“, 1751), tõlgitud ilmselt „vooruste edendamiseks“ ja näitena, kuidas „raskeid teemasid“ meisterlikult „vaimu ja värvidega hingestada“, nii nagu Schlegel ühes oma 1779. aastal Riias avaldatud programmkirjutises luulele ülesandeks seadis. Schlegel jääb oma Gray eleegia tõlkes sõnastuslikus plaanis üsna originaali lähedale, järgneb sellele pildikeeles, mõjudes ehk sellest kord veidi idüllilisemalt, kord „maavillasemalt“, kuid ka baroksema ja õpetatumana; baroksele muljele aitab kaasa ka stoofivormivalik, mis erineb originaali lihtsast ristriimilisest viisikjambist. Järgmise retseptsiooninäitena on vaadeldud kuramaalanna Elisa von der Recke dialoogi Robert Blairi poeemiga „Haud“ („The Grave“, 1743) ja Friedrich Schilleri luuletusega „Resignatsioon“ („Resignation“, 1786) luuletuses „Surnupead“ („Die Todtenköpfe“, esmatrükk Schilleri „Hoorides“ („Die Horen“) 1797). Nagu Recke päevikust ilmneb, oli ta Schilleri teosest väga häiritud, kuna see näis tema jaoks hülgavat kristlikku hinge surematuse doktriini ja nõnda edendavat moraalitust (Rachel 1902, 330–331). Tundub, et toetudes just Blairile, astub Recke Schilleri käsitlusele vastu, Blairi poeemi siiski edasi arendades. Teadaolevalt Elisa von der Recke inglise keelt ei osanud ja tugines tõenäoliselt mingitele vahe-eeskujudele. Kõige enam retsipeeritud kalmuluule teoseks paistab olevat olnud siiski ulatuslik, üheksast osast või „ööst“ koosnev Edward Youngi pikk poeem „Kaebus ehk Öömõtteid elust, surmast ja surematusest“ („Complaint, or, Night-Thoughts on Life, Death and Immortality“, 1742–1745), mida kinnitavad nii teose arvukad eksemplarid Eesti raamatukogudes kui ka mainimised kaasaegsete kirjades ja mälestustes. See kujutas endast nii harduskirjandust kui ka lugemisvara sõpruskondade ühisteks ettelugemisteks. Selle omamine võis anda märku üldisemast huvist inglise keele ja kultuuri vastu (kõige tuntum oli inglis- ja saksakeelse rööptekstiga Braunschweigi õpetlase Johann Arnold Eberti tõlge saksa keelde aastatest 1760–1771). 19. sajandi alguskümnenditel paistab poeem „Öömõtteid“ olevat jõudnud ka baltisaksa koolide kirjanduskaanonisse. See võis olla ka kõige varem baltlaste huviorbiiti jõudnud kalmuluule teos: esimesi katkeid saksakeelses tõlkes avaldas sellest Hamburgi luuletav raehärra Barthold Hinrich Brockes [loe: Brooks] oma antoloogia „Maine rõõm Jumalas“ („Irdisches Vergnügen in Gott“) 7. osas (1743), just siit pärineb aga Baltimaade ühe esimese pikema loodusele pühendatud poeemi, Johann Bernhard Fischeri värssjutustuse „Mäetaguse üldine ja eriomane talve- ja suverõõm“ („Hinter-Bergens allgemeine und eigene Winter- und Sommer-Lust“, Riia 1745) moto. Seevastu ilmumisajalt varaseim klassikalise kalmuluule teos, Thomas Parnelli „Ööpala surmast“ („A Night-Piece on Death“, 1721) tundub olevat jõudnud vaid tõsisemate anglofiilideni, kes oskasid inglise keelt ja kõige hiljem, 19. sajandi alguskümnendeil. „Öömõtteid“ jäi baltisaksa retseptsioonis oluliseks ka erakordselt kauaks. Kui nii Inglismaal endal kui ka Saksmaal näib huvi selle teose vastu 19. sajandi keskpaigaks raugevat, vähemasti lõpeb selleks ajaks uustrükkide ilmumine teosest ja peamised kirjandusteaduslikud kokkuvõttedki saksa Youngi-retseptsioonist jäävad 19. sajandi lõppu, 20. sajandi algusse, siis veel 1930. aastate teises pooles kirjutas Tartu Ülikooli inglise filoloogia korraline professor Heinrich Mutschmann (1885–1955) mitmeid artikleid Youngi „Öömõtete“ fenomeni selgitamiseks (vt Mutschmann 1936 ja 1939), pakkudes teosele välja oma, psühholoogiast inspireeritud tõlgenduse. Viimast artiklit on siin ka lähemalt vaadeldud. Eesti kirjanduses ei ole „Öömõtetel“, vaatamata Mutschmanni seda Goethe „Faustiga“ võrdsustavale tõlgendusele, õnnestunud kanda kinnitada. Ei ole teada, et seda oleks tõlgitud. Päris eesti luuletajate tähelepanuta see teos siiski ei ole jäänud: faksiimiletrükk esimesest rootsikeelsest „Öömõtete“ tõlkest (1770) kuulus väliseesti poeedi, sürrealist Ilmar Laabani raamatukokku. Ainus eesti keelde jõudnud kalmupoeesia klassikasse kuuluv teos paistab olevat Gray eleegia. Sellest leidub Eesti Kirjandusmuuseumis avaldamata tõlge Ants Oraselt, mille lõpuepitaaf on ilmunud ajakirjas Vikerkaar (1990, nr 1, lk 1). Trükki jõudis täiemahuline tõlge sellest Gray teosest Märt Väljataga tõlgituna alles 2018. aastal (vt Väljataga 2018, 70–74). Ka inspireerinud see teos kirjandusteadlast ja luuletajat Ivar Ivaskit tema „Balti eleegiate“ („The Baltic Elegies“, 1986/88) loomisel (tänan vihje eest Tiina Kirssi). Siin ring omamoodi sulgub, sest ka Ivask, lätlasest ema ja eestlasest isa poeg, kelle kodune keel oli saksa keel, oli märkimisväärse etapi oma elust riialane nagu Gottlieb Schlegelgi.

[Editors’ note: this lyric essay was presented as the keynote address at Edith Cowan University’s CREATEC symposium on the theme Catastrophe and Creativity in November 2012, and represents excerpts from the author’s publication Threading Light: Explorations in Loss and Poetry. Regina, SK: Hagios Press, 2011. Reproduced with the author’s permission].Essay and verse and anecdote are the ways I have chosen to apprentice myself to loss, grief, faith, memory, and the stories we use to tie and untie them. Cat’s cradle, Celtic lines, bends and hitches are familiar: however, when I write about loss, I find there are knots I cannot tie or release, challenging both my imagination and my craft. Over the last decade, I have been learning that writing poetry is also the art of tying together light and dark, grief and joy, of grasping and releasing. Language is a hinge that connects us with the flesh of our experience; it is also residue, the ash of memory and imagination. (Threading Light 7) ———Greek katastrophé overturning, sudden turn, from kata down + strophe ‘turning” from strephein to turn.Loss and catastrophe catapult us into the liminal, into a threshold space. We walk between land we have known and the open sea. ———Mnemosyne, the mother of the nine Muses, the personification of memory, makes anthropologists of us all. When Hermes picked up the lyre, it was to her—to Remembrance —that he sang the first song. Without remembrance, oral or written, we have no place to begin. Stone, amulet, photograph, charm bracelet, cufflink, fish story, house, facial expression, tape recorder, verse, or the same old traveling salesman joke—we have places and means to try to store memories. Memories ground us, even as we know they are fleeting and flawed constructions that slip through our consciousness; ghosts of ghosts. One cold winter, I stayed in a guest room in my mother’s apartment complex for three days. Because she had lost her sight, I sat at the table in her overheated and stuffy kitchen with the frozen slider window and tried to describe photographs as she tried to recall names and events. I emptied out the dusty closet she’d ignored since my father left, and we talked about knitting patterns, the cost of her mother’s milk glass bowl, the old clothes she could only know by rubbing the fabric through her fingers. I climbed on a chair to reach a serving dish she wanted me to have, and we laughed hysterically when I read aloud the handwritten note inside: save for Annette, in a script not hers. It’s okay, she said; I want all this gone. To all you kids. Take everything you can. When I pop off, I don’t want any belongings. Our family had moved frequently, and my belongings always fit in a single box; as a student, in the back of a car or inside a backpack. Now, in her ninth decade, my mother wanted to return to the simplicity she, too, recalled from her days on a small farm outside a small town. On her deathbed, she insisted on having her head shaved, and frequently the nursing staff came into the room to find she had stripped off her johnny shirt and her covers. The philosopher Simone Weil said that all we possess in the world is the power to say “I” (Gravity 119).Memory is a cracked bowl, and it fills endlessly as it empties. Memory is what we create out of what we have at hand—other people’s accounts, objects, flawed stories of our own creation, second-hand tales handed down like an old watch. Annie Dillard says as a life’s work, she’d remember everything–everything against loss, and go through life like a plankton net. I prefer the image of the bowl—its capacity to feed us, the humility it suggests, its enduring shape, its rich symbolism. Its hope. To write is to fashion a bowl, perhaps, but we know, finally, the bowl cannot hold everything. (Threading Light 78–80) ———Man is the sire of sorrow, sang Joni Mitchell. Like joy, sorrow begins at birth: we are born into both. The desert fathers believed—in fact, many of certain faiths continue to believe—that penthos is mourning for lost salvation. Penthus was the last god to be given his assignment from Zeus: he was to be responsible for grieving and loss. Eros, the son of Aphrodite, was the god of love and desire. The two can be seen in concert with one another, each mirroring the other’s extreme, each demanding of us the farthest reach of our being. Nietzsche, through Zarathustra, phrased it another way: “Did you ever say Yes to one joy? O my friends, then you have also said Yes to all Woe as well. All things are chained, entwined together, all things are in love.” (Threading Light 92) ———We are that brief crack of light, that cradle rocking. We can aspire to a heaven, or a state of forgiveness; we can ask for redemption and hope for freedom from suffering for ourselves and our loved ones; we may create children or works of art in the vague hope that we will leave something behind when we go. But regardless, we know that there is a wall or a dark curtain or a void against which we direct or redirect our lives. We hide from it, we embrace it; we taunt it; we flout it. We write macabre jokes, we play hide and seek, we walk with bated breath, scream in movies, or howl in the wilderness. We despair when we learn of premature or sudden death; we are reminded daily—an avalanche, an aneurysm, a shocking diagnosis, a child’s bicycle in the intersection—that our illusions of control, that youthful sense of invincibility we have clung to, our last-ditch religious conversions, our versions of Pascal’s bargain, nothing stops the carriage from stopping for us.We are fortunate if our awareness calls forth our humanity. We learn, as Aristotle reminded us, about our capacity for fear and pity. Seeing others as vulnerable in their pain or weakness, we see our own frailties. As I read the poetry of Donne or Rumi, or verse created by the translator of Holocaust stories, Lois Olena, or the work of poet Sharon Olds as she recounts the daily horror of her youth, I can become open to pity, or—to use the more contemporary word—compassion. The philosopher Martha Nussbaum argues that works of art are not only a primary means for an individual to express her humanity through catharsis, as Aristotle claimed, but, because of the attunement to others and to the world that creation invites, the process can sow the seeds of social justice. Art grounds our grief in form; it connects us to one another and to the world. And the more we acquaint ourselves with works of art—in music, painting, theatre, literature—the more we open ourselves to complex and nuanced understandings of our human capacities for grief. Why else do we turn to a stirring poem when we are mourning? Why else do we sing? When my parents died, I came home from the library with stacks of poetry and memoirs about loss. How does your story dovetail with mine? I wanted to know. How large is this room—this country—of grief and how might I see it, feel the texture on its walls, the ice of its waters? I was in a foreign land, knew so little of its language, and wanted to be present and raw and vulnerable in its climate and geography. Writing and reading were my way not to squander my hours of pain. While it was difficult to live inside that country, it was more difficult not to. In learning to know graveyards as places of comfort and perspective, Mnemosyne’s territory with her markers of memory guarded by crow, leaf, and human footfall, with storehouses of vast and deep tapestries of stories whispered, sung, or silent, I am cultivating the practice of walking on common ground. Our losses are really our winter-enduring foliage, Rilke writes. They are place and settlement, foundation and soil, and home. (Threading Light 86–88) ———The loseability of our small and larger worlds allows us to see their gifts, their preciousness.Loseability allows us to pay attention. ———“A faith-based life, a Trappistine nun said to me, aims for transformation of the soul through compunction—not only a state of regret and remorse for our inadequacies before God, but also living inside a deeper sorrow, a yearning for a union with the divine. Compunction, according to a Christian encyclopaedia, is constructive only if it leads to repentance, reconciliation, and sanctification. Would you consider this work you are doing, the Trappistine wrote, to be a spiritual journey?Initially, I ducked her question; it was a good one. Like Neruda, I don’t know where the poetry comes from, a winter or a river. But like many poets, I feel the inadequacy of language to translate pain and beauty, the yearning for an embodied understanding of phenomena that is assensitive and soul-jolting as the contacts of eye-to-eye and skin-to-skin. While I do not worship a god, I do long for an impossible union with the world—a way to acknowledge the gift that is my life. Resonance: a search for the divine in the everyday. And more so. Writing is a full-bodied, sensory, immersive activity that asks me to give myself over to phenomena, that calls forth deep joy and deep sorrow sometimes so profound that I am gutted by my inadequacy. I am pierced, dumbstruck. Lyric language is the crayon I use, and poetry is my secular compunction...Poets—indeed, all writers—are often humbled by what we cannot do, pierced as we are by—what? I suggest mystery, impossibility, wonder, reverence, grief, desire, joy, our simple gratitude and despair. I speak of the soul and seven people rise from their chairs and leave the room, writes Mary Oliver (4). Eros and penthos working in concert. We have to sign on for the whole package, and that’s what both empties us out, and fills us up. The practice of poetry is our inadequate means of seeking the gift of tears. We cultivate awe, wonder, the exquisite pain of seeing and knowing deeply the abundant and the fleeting in our lives. Yes, it is a spiritual path. It has to do with the soul, and the sacred—our venerating the world given to us. Whether we are inside a belief system that has or does not have a god makes no difference. Seven others lean forward to listen. (Threading Light 98–100)———The capacity to give one’s attention to a sufferer is a rare thing; it is almost a miracle; it is a miracle. – Simone Weil (169)I can look at the lines and shades on the page clipped to the easel, deer tracks in the snow, or flecks of light on a summer sidewalk. Or at the moon as it moves from new to full. Or I can read the poetry of Paul Celan.Celan’s poem “Tenebrae” takes its title from high Christian services in which lighting, usually from candles, is gradually extinguished so that by the end of the service, the church is in total darkness. Considering Celan’s—Antschel’s—history as a Romanian Jew whose parents were killed in the Nazi death camps, and his subsequent years tortured by the agony of his grief, we are not surprised to learn he chose German, his mother’s language, to create his poetry: it might have been his act of defiance, his way of using shadow and light against the other. The poet’s deep grief, his profound awareness of loss, looks unflinchingly at the past, at the piles of bodies. The language has become a prism, reflecting penetrating shafts of shadow: in the shine of blood, the darkest of the dark. Enlinked, enlaced, and enamoured. We don’t always have names for the shades of sorrows and joys we live inside, but we know that each defines and depends upon the other. Inside the core shadow of grief we recognise our shared mortality, and only in that recognition—we are not alone—can hope be engendered. In the exquisite pure spot of light we associate with love and joy, we may be temporarily blinded, but if we look beyond, and we draw on what we know, we feel the presence of the shadows that have intensified what appears to us as light. Light and dark—even in what we may think are their purest state—are transitory pauses in the shape of being. Decades ago my well-meaning mother, a nurse, gave me pills to dull the pain of losing my fiancé who had shot himself; now, years later, knowing so many deaths, and more imminent, I would choose the bittersweet tenderness of being fully inside grief—awake, raw, open—feeling its walls, its every rough surface, its every degree of light and dark. It is love/loss, light/dark, a fusion that brings me home to the world. (Threading Light 100–101) ———Loss can trigger and inspire creativity, not only at the individual level but at the public level, whether we are marching in Idle No More demonstrations, re-building a shelter, or re-building a life. We use art to weep, to howl, to reach for something that matters, something that means. And sometimes it may mean that all we learn from it is that nothing lasts. And then, what? What do we do then? ———The wisdom of Epictetus, the Stoic, can offer solace, but I know it will take time to catch up with him. Nothing can be taken from us, he claims, because there is nothing to lose: what we lose—lover, friend, hope, father, dream, keys, faith, mother—has merely been returned to where it (or they) came from. We live in samsara, Zen masters remind us, inside a cycle of suffering that results from a belief in the permanence of self and of others. Our perception of reality is narrow; we must broaden it to include all phenomena, to recognise the interdependence of lives, the planet, and beyond, into galaxies. A lot for a mortal to get her head around. And yet, as so many poets have wondered, is that not where imagination is born—in the struggle and practice of listening, attending, and putting ourselves inside the now that all phenomena share? Can I imagine the rush of air under the loon that passes over my house toward the ocean every morning at dawn? The hot dust under the cracked feet of that child on the outskirts of Darwin? The gut-hauling terror of an Afghan woman whose family’s blood is being spilled? Thich Nhat Hanh says that we are only alive when we live the sufferings and the joys of others. He writes: Having seen the reality of interdependence and entered deeply into its reality, nothing can oppress you any longer. You are liberated. Sit in the lotus position, observe your breath, and ask one who has died for others. (66)Our breath is a delicate thread, and it contains multitudes. I hear an echo, yes. The practice of poetry—my own spiritual and philosophical practice, my own sackcloth and candle—has allowed me a glimpse not only into the lives of others, sentient or not, here, afar, or long dead, but it has deepened and broadened my capacity for breath. Attention to breath grounds me and forces me to attend, pulls me into my body as flesh. When I see my flesh as part of the earth, as part of all flesh, as Morris Berman claims, I come to see myself as part of something larger. (Threading Light 134–135) ———We think of loss as a dark time, and yet it opens us, deepens us.Close attention to loss—our own and others’—cultivates compassion.As artists we’re already predisposed to look and listen closely. We taste things, we touch things, we smell them. We lie on the ground like Mary Oliver looking at that grasshopper. We fill our ears with music that not everyone slows down to hear. We fall in love with ideas, with people, with places, with beauty, with tragedy, and I think we desire some kind of fusion, a deeper connection than everyday allows us. We want to BE that grasshopper, enter that devastation, to honour it. We long, I think, to be present.When we are present, even in catastrophe, we are fully alive. It seems counter-intuitive, but the more fully we engage with our losses—the harder we look, the more we soften into compassion—the more we cultivate resilience. ———Resilience consists of three features—persistence, adaptability transformability—each interacting from local to global scales. – Carl FolkeResilent people and resilient systems find meaning and purpose in loss. We set aside our own egos and we try to learn to listen and to see, to open up. Resilience is fundamentally an act of optimism. This is not the same, however, as being naïve. Optimism is the difference between “why me?” and “why not me?” Optimism is present when we are learning to think larger than ourselves. Resilience asks us to keep moving. Sometimes with loss there is a moment or two—or a month, a year, who knows?—where we, as humans, believe that we are standing still, we’re stuck, we’re in stasis. But we aren’t. Everything is always moving and everything is always in relation. What we mistake for stasis in a system is the system taking stock, transforming, doing things underneath the surface, preparing to rebuild, create, recreate. Leonard Cohen reminded us there’s a crack in everything, and that’s how the light gets in. But what we often don’t realize is that it’s we—the human race, our own possibilities, our own creativity—who are that light. We are resilient when we have agency, support, community we can draw on. When we have hope. ———FortuneFeet to carry you past acres of grapevines, awnings that opento a hall of paperbarks. A dog to circle you, look behind, point ahead. A hip that bends, allows you to slidebetween wire and wooden bars of the fence. A twinge rides with that hip, and sometimes the remnant of a fall bloomsin your right foot. Hands to grip a stick for climbing, to rest your weight when you turn to look below. On your left hand,a story: others see it as a scar. On the other, a newer tale; a bone-white lump. Below, mist disappears; a nichein the world opens to its long green history. Hills furrow into their dark harbours. Horses, snatches of inhale and whiffle.Mutterings of men, a cow’s long bellow, soft thud of feet along the hill. You turn at the sound.The dog swallows a cry. Stays; shakes until the noise recedes. After a time, she walks on three legs,tests the paw of the fourth in the dust. You may never know how she was wounded. She remembers your bodyby scent, voice, perhaps the taste of contraband food at the door of the house. Story of human and dog, you begin—but the wordyour fingers make is god. What last year was her silken newborn fur is now sunbleached, basket dry. Feet, hips, hands, paws, lapwings,mockingbirds, quickening, longing: how eucalypts reach to give shade, and tiny tight grapes cling to vines that align on a slope as smoothlyas the moon follows you, as intention always leans toward good. To know bones of the earth are as true as a point of light: tendernesswhere you bend and press can whisper grace, sorrow’s last line, into all that might have been,so much that is. (Threading Light 115–116) Acknowledgments The author would like to thank Dr. Lekkie Hopkins and Dr. John Ryan for the opportunity to speak (via video) to the 2012 CREATEC Symposium Catastrophe and Creativity, to Dr. Hopkins for her eloquent and memorable paper in response to my work on creativity and research, and to Dr. Ryan for his support. The presentation was recorded and edited by Paul Poirier at Mount Saint Vincent University in Halifax, Nova Scotia. My thanks go to Edith Cowan and Mount Saint Vincent Universities. ReferencesBerman, Morris. Coming to Our Senses. New York: Bantam, 1990.Dillard, Annie. For the Time Being. New York: Vintage Books, 2000.Felstiner, John. Paul Celan: Poet, Survivor, Jew. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2001.Folke, Carl. "On Resilience." Seed Magazine. 13 Dec. 2010. 22 Mar. 2013 ‹http://seedmagazine.com/content/article/on_resilience›.Franck, Frederick. Zen Seeing, Zen Drawing. New York: Bantam Books, 1993.Hanh, Thich Nhat. The Miracle of Mindfulness. Boston: Beacon Press, 1976.Hausherr, Irenee. Penthos: The Doctrine of Compunction in the Christian East. Kalamazoo, MI: Cistercian Publications, 1982.Neilsen Glenn, Lorri. Threading Light: Explorations in Loss and Poetry. Regina, SK: Hagios Press, 2011. Nietzsche, Frederick. Thus Spake Zarathustra. New York: Penguin, 1978. Nussbaum, Martha. Upheavals of Thought: The Intelligence of Emotions. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001. Oliver, Mary. “The Word.” What Do We Know. Boston: DaCapo Press, 2002.Rilke, Rainer Maria. Duino Elegies and the Sonnets to Orpheus. (Tenth Elegy). Ed. Stephen Mitchell. New York: Random House/Vintage Editions, 2009.Weil, Simone. The Need for Roots. London: Taylor & Francis, 2005 (1952).Weil, Simone. Gravity and Grace. London: Routledge, 2004.Further ReadingChodron, Pema. Practicing Peace in Times of War. Boston: Shambhala, 2006.Cleary, Thomas (trans.) The Essential Tao: An Initiation into the Heart of Taoism through Tao de Ching and the Teachings of Chuang Tzu. Edison, NJ: Castle Books, 1993.Dalai Lama (H H the 14th) and Venerable Chan Master Sheng-yen. Meeting of Minds: A Dialogue on Tibetan and Chinese Buddhism. New York: Dharma Drum Publications, 1999. Hirshfield, Jane. "Language Wakes Up in the Morning: A Meander toward Writing." Alaska Quarterly Review. 21.1 (2003).Hirshfield, Jane. Nine Gates: Entering the Mind of Poetry. New York: HarperCollins, 1997. Lao Tzu. Tao Te Ching. Trans. Arthur Waley. Chatham: Wordsworth Editions, 1997. Neilsen, Lorri. "Lyric Inquiry." Handbook of the Arts in Qualitative Research. Eds. J. Gary Knowles and Ardra Cole. Thousand Oaks: Sage, 2008. 88–98. Ross, Maggie. The Fire and the Furnace: The Way of Tears and Fire. York: Paulist Press, 1987.

When the Germanic tribes arrived in Britain, a long history of fen use by native Britons preceded their advent and would have modeled some uses of the environment, as evidenced by a site such as Flag Fen with its wooden roadways. With water levels rising and likely contributing to the movements of Germanic peoples from their homelands, fen and marshland would have increased and so become a more pervasive landscape and resource, especially for seagoing peoples. If we understand fens as both a challenge and a defining edge, we can consider how that manifests in Anglo-Saxon thought. Poetry such as elegies, Andreas and even "The Battle of Maldon" draw on fen landscapes to evoke particular cultural resonances in service of poetic effect. Famous secular and religious figures use fens as key strategic sites in defining themselves, whether it be Alfred's retreat to the fens before negotiating the survival of England against the Danelaw or monastics and hermits who cultivate the spiritual isolation of fenland. For a people identified with their very landscape, the ecological richness of such environments drew interest in plant use and fishing, part of Anglo-Saxon medical knowledge and supply.

This chapter continues the examination of Rilke’s ‘interim’ work with a focus on his responses to German literature, which he began to read in a more systematic fashion at this time, moving away from the French tradition which he had virtually made himself part of in Paris. Although the First World War stifled Rilke’s writing, he remained committed to a poetics of experimentation. The chapter looks in detail at his relationship with the poetry of Hölderlin, which was edited fully for the first time in these years and, within the context of the war, goes on to deal with the ‘phallic’ ‘Sieben Gedichte’ and other poems including ‘Der Tod’, ‘An die Musik’ and ‘Laß dir, daß Kindheit war…’ ending with ‘Solang du Selbstgeworfnes fängst…’ as a prelude to the Duineser Elegien.

In 1947, Southern German poet Gottfried Kölwel (1889–1958) published a cycle of six poems under the title ,Munich Elegies‘, in which he laments the destruction of this city caused by the bombings of World War II. Kölwel makes use of the erudite literary form of the elegy and thus attempts to counteract the notions of chaos and destruction, which are inherent in his literary material, by imposing a formal structure upon it. In this contribution, the poems are contextualized within the literary history of the years immediately following the war as well as analyzed in a close reading.