tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9987513.post115170389105152185..comments2024-03-17T11:05:22.464+00:00Comments on The Life And Opinions of Andrew Rilstone: Guilty PleasuresUnknownnoreply@blogger.comBlogger2125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9987513.post-1152013180853349282006-07-04T12:39:00.000+01:002006-07-04T12:39:00.000+01:00Well, it's about subjectivity in so far as liberty...Well, it's about subjectivity in so far as liberty is subjective. <BR/><BR/>Wordsworth says that the difference between the cell of a monk and the cell of a prisoner is that the former choses to be there, and the latter does not. What makes you free, then, is your right to choose, not the choices which you in fact make. "The prison unto which we doom ourselves, no prison is." It's a state of mind. Well, you know; you'd better free your mind instead.<BR/><BR/>It seems to be almost obligatory for people who use the sonnet form to at some point write a sonnet about writing sonnets. (The villanelle about writing villanelles is an even worse literary menace.) The surface meaning of the poem is therefore something like "People sometimes ask me why I limit myself to writing 14 line stanzas with a rhyming scheme intended for a language where lots more words rhyme than they do in English. The answer is that it isn't a limitation if I impose it on myself: sonnet structure actually gives me great freedom to write about Milton, Cromwell, Westminster Bridge, hanging, etc. Free-verse is just as much a form as the sonnet is: and it can be an extremely limiting one." <BR/><BR/>However, he's pretty obviously also drawing a political analogy: the French Revolution was a good thing in itself -- bliss was it in that dawn, and all that -- but the revolutionary terror rather emphatically wasn't. Freedom is good, but freedom doesn't imply the abolition of all structure whatsoever. <BR/><BR/>That basic dilemma runs through pretty much all romantic writing: you want to be free of structure and limits, but if you get rid of all structure ad all limits, then you couldn't even write poetry, because language is in itself a limiting structure. If I catch the west wind, a nightingale or a skylark in my poem, then I've taken away the exact thing that I liked about them in the first place -- the fact that you can't capture them in a poem. <BR/><BR/>Obviously, all I was doing was drawing an analogy between what Wordsworth says about sonnet form and the equally severe form of a 25 minute adventure story.Andrew Rilstonehttps://www.blogger.com/profile/05786623930392936889noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9987513.post-1151951857285451922006-07-03T19:37:00.000+01:002006-07-03T19:37:00.000+01:00I'll see your Bunuel and raise you a Wordsworth.Nu...I'll see your Bunuel and raise you a Wordsworth.<BR/><BR/>Nuns fret not at their convent's narrow room;<BR/>And hermits are contented with their cells;<BR/>And students with their pensive citadels;<BR/>Maids at the wheel, the weaver at his loom,<BR/>Sit blithe and happy; bees that soar for bloom,<BR/>High as the highest Peak of Furness-fells,<BR/>Will murmur by the hour in foxglove bells:<BR/>In truth the prison, unto which we doom<BR/>Ourselves, no prison is: and hence for me,<BR/>In sundry moods, 'twas pastime to be bound<BR/>Within the Sonnet's scanty plot of ground;<BR/>Pleased if some Souls (for such there needs must be)<BR/>Who have felt the weight of too much liberty,<BR/>Should find brief solace there, as I have found.Andrew Rilstonehttps://www.blogger.com/profile/05786623930392936889noreply@blogger.com