Athanasia

     “In sorrow we must go, but not in despair. Behold! we are not bound for ever to the circles of the world, and beyond them is more than memory.” This was a description of J.R.R. Tolkien’s view of the afterlife, is a 

J.R.R. Tolkien

huge theme throughout much of the literature we have read. By “the circles of the world” Tolkien was talking about time, in the end we all fear that one thing, running out of time. We strive to stay alive, to fight to live, however we all know it to be an inevitable fact, we die. How do we, as humans, cope with this realization? We have faith and or believe in an afterlife, or some form of an eternal time. We do this through the church with religious afterlives, but we also do this by trying to create timeless legacies to keep our name and essentially ourselves alive.

     Athanasia as defined by dictionary.com means “deathlessness; immortality.” This adequately sums up humanity’s quest for a timeless life, or immortality. Throughout all of the literature we have read this semester, one constant theme that crops up is the idea of the supernatural and afterlife. We associate these two together because the idea of an afterlife, or immortality, is so foreign we associate it with the supernatural.

         Lenora and William riding on horseback. In this 
         painting we see death through the colors and
         the style. (Notice the horses nostrils and 
         William's hand.)
         

     The first time the class encountered this theme was with Burger’s “Lenora.” This piece showed up to us kicking and screaming with the idea of the afterlife, providing for us a stepping stone into this idea of athanasia. The idea of Lenora being carried away by her lover after a war by itself is a mundane story idea. However, this changes when her dead husband comes knocking on her door to take her to their marriage bed. Even though he was been missing for a while we see his ghost come back to retrieve her and then proceed to take her to his grave. William, the lover, is later revealed as death. Throughout the poem the idea of religion is embodied by Lenora’s mother, however, the idea of Lenora being able to remain with William outweighs her religious upbringing. The idea of the afterlife comes in with the idea of William as a ghost and “the dead travel fast”, this implies, without a doubt, the idea of an afterlife. One can also rip apart that small line “the dead travel fast,” fast being an idea associated with time, then one must beg the question, why are the dead traveling fast? It is because the dead must feel a sense of urgency; it must have not only lonely for Lenora without William, but for William also without Lenora. Tiffanee had a great post entitled Psychological Obsession in which she explored the idea of madness and most importantly the idea of religion within this ballad. It is within this poem we see a change in the style of literature compared to the Enlightenment. Rather than use reason Tiffanee states “her daughter is relying on her sensory ability to see, and feel something else around her,” this is what the Gothic and supernatural were all about, you cannot view the concept of athanasia with any other type of reason other than feeling.

     The idea of ghosts and specters was bound to continue after “Castle of Otranto” and “Lenora.” This concept of supernatural entities persisted in our class reading of Wordsworth’s “The Thorn.” This poem is about the death of an infant and the mother’s lamentation over this death. The narrator looks on to the scene unfolding from afar and pieces a story together from local town myths. There were many great posts about this particular topic, in this case I have chosen to reference Cassiopeia’s fantastic post entitled There Are


William Wordsworth

Superstitions... In her post she wrote “[d]espite continually saying, "I cannot tell how this may be," the speaker tells the haunted tale as he believes it to be true.” This sparked a conversation within the comments on her post describing how this changes the poem. Rose in particular stated “[b]y capitalizing the plant, Wordsworth brings life to it. In Biblical scripture, there are many references to "thorns" as problems or ailments.” Before this Jamasaurus had stated “It could be that her child (the thorn) was a "thorn in her side" so to speak.” If this is the case then the woman must have some concept of afterlife to sit by the grave and mourn every day waiting, perhaps, to again one day see her child. In a post by Toff mandrake entitled Oh Misery! he states “The entire poem reads like a ghost story that the narrator is reluctant to tell.” This ballad does indeed create this vibe, and what is a ghost if not eternal.

We are Seven! Immortalized!
In this image we see the grave from We are Seven,
immortalized in a church yard along with a plaque.

     In Wordsworth other poem “We Are Seven” we see the concept of afterlife through the eyes of children. Children, as a general rule of thumb, see the world defiantly than adults. Until they are thought to think differently, children have a completely different rationalization. When a girl tells a man she has seven siblings and yet two are in the ground, he tries to protest by saying there are only five. However, the young lady remains persistent and says “We are seven.” In a post by Porphyria entitled Natural Communion she states “The graves in this poem are not described as frightening or ominous. Instead, they are “green” and close to the home, as if the departed children never truly left. The little girl spends time with her siblings, communing with the graves as she sits in the grass and sings to them.” This is a great statement and one that express a happier view on the afterlife through the eyes of a child. The adult only views death as death, but the little girl sees her sibling as almost alive. We can see this through the green grass and bright nature surrounding the girl and the graves. One thing that Coyle Permetter points out in his post titled Perspective as it relates to Romanticism (We Are Seven) is that “The very first line "a simple child" gives the reader a sense of curiosity, life, fertility, and pacifism.  This is sharply contradicted by the third line "what should it know of death?"” Indeed what should a child know of death, children are simple right? Wrong. This child sees the afterlife as something to look forward to, a place where she can be with all her siblings.



Minnie Dibdin Spooner

Lucy Gray by William Wordsworth

The Golden Staircase ~ 1906

            The footsteps in the snow provide a chilling supernatural and otherworldly element to the poem “Lucy Gray” also by Wordsworth. After Lucy was lost in the snow on her way home she perished, never to be seen again. Her parents searched in vain however, all that remained was her footprints. To this day her footprints are still left in the snow eluding to her ghost, and in turn the notion of the spirit world. This poem has a strong tie with nature and as Cassiopeia put it in her post entitled One with nature, “the poem links Lucy's presumed death with the idea that she lives on through nature.” This was great insight and we see this through the use of Wordsworth’s imagery in lines such as; “I chanced to see at break of day; The storm came on before its time; And thence they saw the bridge of wood; That whistles in the wind.” I wanted to link this idea with an idea from another post, by keeping her ghost tied in with nature she remains to have a sense of “aliveness.” In Cricket’s post entitled Where is Lucy? He makes a point that within the poem itself they state "Yet some maintain that to this day She is a living Child." He goes on to say “her being apart of nature now and being preserved as an innocent child.” Here we can bring new light on the situation and see nature as a “preservative” for both the dead, and for literature itself.

I found this eerie video rendition of Lucy Gray.

 "John Keats is perhaps the brightest star, "the crown of his countries desire" as Robert Bridges puts it." (Smith) One poem the class read that failed to be adequately talked about in the blog was Keats’s “This Living Hand.” Because of the poem’s short nature it is included here:

This Living Hand

This living hand, now warm and capable  

Of earnest grasping, would, if it were cold

And in the icy silence of the tomb,

So haunt thy days and chill thy dreaming nights

That thou wouldst wish thine own heart dry of blood

So in my veins red life might stream again,

And thou be conscience-calmed—see here it is—

I hold it towards you.

                                                  John Keats

Here we see Keats speaking about his out of body experience where he is conversing with his dead/alive self, in the hopes that his “veins red life might stream again.” This is another example of athanasia and the idea of deathless or immortality. By experiencing death in the plane of worlds, living and dead, Keats paints a vivid imagine in just a few short lines.

Modern Image of When I have Fears that may Cease to Be
From This Blog Click Here

     In Keats’s poem “When I have Fears that may Cease to Be” we see a connection once again between literature and nature and an aspiration to become Timeless. We see this in lines like: “When I have fears that I may cease to be; Hold like rich garners the full-ripen'd grain; And when I feel, fair creature of an hour!” Here we see through the use of Keats’s wording the connection between time and nature. In Not_Eitak’s post entitled Death = Comfort Food? they state “Keats does share that he is afraid of death more or less because he does not want to die unsuccessful or unloved.” This comment reverses back to the idea of time and how we as humans fear the idea of time running out. This causes us to strive to immortalize ourselves through literature, and nature.        Perhaps the most in your face poem about death would be Rossetti’s “After Death” which is a blatantly obvious commentary about the afterlife, as suggested both in the poem and within the title. Here we see the narrator…DEAD…and offering commentary to another person, at first assumed to be a lover, but thoughts about this are crushed when she says “He did not love me living; but once dead He pitied me; and very

Christina Rossetti

sweet it is To know he still is warm though I am cold.” Here we see a view of death were death creates new emotions in the people still living, although he did not love her before, he loves her know and it is too late. We see this same idea in Daydreamer’s post After Death when he says “It ends the poem with a sense of hope that the woman’s death was not in vain. Her death may be the coming alive of this unknown man.”

     After the Great War, otherwise known as World War 1, we see a change in the town of literature regarding death, this is because World War 1 was the first war to encompass new technologies and tactics such as trenches, photography and weapons. This caused mass destruction on a scale otherwise unheard of before the time. In Kipling’s “Epitaphs of War” we see many examples of these written in short poetic lines in the form of an Epitaph. MeguhD made a great point in her post titled Kipling in regards to Kipling being English; she said “these Epitaphs could mean more considering England was in the war from the beginning. Unlike America who joined in just the last year.” This was a very good point because not only was he English but overall England was closer to the war making it a lot more real. These Epitaphs provided insight into the ideas of death after the war, when people from all religions, races, and places, came together to pick up the pieces.

     In the end the ideas of death and timelessness was an important part of the class. The idea of athanasia was an important and throughout the text we see it tied with the ideas of nature, time, and immortality. The writers present in this class all used their ability to achieve these states of timelessness. It truly provided a gateway through the Impossible, Perverse, and Strange. "Death is a bad thing by virtue of its ability to frustrate the subjectively valuable projects that shape our identities and render our lives meaningful." (Preston)

Works Cited
Smith "John Keats: Poet, Patient, Physician." Reviews of Infectious Diseases 6.3 (1984): 360-404.Jstor. Web.

Ted M. Preston and Scott Dixon International Journal for Philosophy of Religion , Vol. 61, No. 2 (Apr., 2007), pp. 99-117 Who Wants to Live Forever? Immortality, Authenticity, and Living Forever in the Present

Kipling

One of my favorite things we read for Monday was Kipling's Epitaphs. I didn't really have one epitaph in particular that I liked better than the rest but there is a few I prefer more than the others. As a whole I found the Epitaphs to be very moving, especially since they were written just a few short years after world war one. Kipling was an English man so I believe that these Epitaphs could mean more considering England was in the war from the beginning. Unlike America who joined in just the last year. I also think they mean so much more considering this was the first world war. All the death and destruction had world wide implications and relationships with countries were ruined forever. During world war one there would be pages in the newspaper filled with the names of those who died. It was one of those things that hadn't been seen before in England, at least not by the people of that generation. The news coverage on the war was probably just as shocking to the people living in World War I as the television coverage was to those living through Vietnam in America. There was probably a lot of epitaphs written that year, but Kipling's were't published until two years after the war was over. Even though they were published later I believe they probably still held a deep emotional significance to those who lost family and friends in the war. For some it was probably therapeutic to read it, and for others it was probably just an unwanted reminder. Either way, Kipling used this great historical event (which would have been a contemporary event for him) to immortalize those who died during world war one. I see this book of multiple epitaphs to be like one giant epitaph and whoever reads it can identify the one they lost with a particular epitaph. Kipling is reaching the general audience and a particular audience all at once. That's what I like so much about this work, he is reaching out to people and feeling what they feel. No one is alone.

After Death

As I was reading “After Death” by Christina Rossetti, my brain couldn't help but paint a picture of who these two people in the poem were, and what exactly their story was. It is clear from reading the poem that the narrator has just died, and she is speaking this poem once she is already dead. She is describing the surroundings of where her dead body lay and how the man that is mourning her death is reacting. The way the narrator was describing the man gave me the impression that he was either her past lover or husband. Either way, it made me think that they once had a romance that tragically faded or ended. Maybe the man left her for another woman or because he just didn't love her anymore, or maybe they were still married and up until she died their marriage had grown cold. She mentions that although he did not love her while she was living; he pitied her once she was dead and it was sweet knowing that he was still warm even though she was cold. I interpreted this part of the poem to be saying that although she is dead and her body is physically cold, it brought her some happiness knowing that the cold heart of this man that she knew so well had now grown a little warmer at the sight of her dead body. Maybe it took the narrators death for him to show a little warmth and emotion. It ends the poem with a sense of hope that the woman’s death was not in vain. Her death may be the coming alive of this unknown man. 

Death = Comfort Food?

At first glance “Sonnet: When I have fears” can be read as someone that has become aware and fearful of their own mortality. John Keats was a little death obsessed too I think, so it would make sense for him to have such an awareness and fear of death. Both his parents were dead by the time he was fourteen years old, and his brother died from tuberculosis (like their mom)a few years after “Sonnet: When I have fears” was written after all.  However, after re-reading “Sonnet: When I have fears”, I felt like the fear of death was both an issue and an illusion of what Keats was really reflecting upon. Keats does share that he is afraid of death more or less because he does not want to die unsuccessful or unloved. Let’s face it, who really does want to die without love or some sort of fame in their life? Death has a tendency to create a sense of anxiety in one. At the same time though, I also felt like Keats made death out to be more of a double agent that frees one from that anxiety. Death makes everything else mentioned meaningless. Both success and love are twisted into something that ultimately means nothing in the end, so why worry or fear? Death appears to be the problematic cure according to Keats, and not something to completely fear.

Where is Lucy?

In William Wordsworth's poem "Lucy Gray," he creates the story of a young girl who disappears in a snowstorm, causing her family to go searching for her with little hope. The ballad is bleak and heart-wrenching as the mother follows her young daughter's footprints but fails to bring her home, and yet the final stanzas give a trace of hope with the words "Yet some maintain that to this day She is a living Child." This verse could have easily have been more haunting, saying something along the lines of "To this day, her spirit dwells in the midsts forever searching for her family..." (which would certainly give it more of a Gothic influence) but instead it claims that she could be alive. Could this futile optimism be to spare the reader the idea of the death of a child? Is it even optimism at all? The idea of Lucy being alive or at the very least having her spirit still lost in the wild could either be interpreted as her being apart of nature now and being preserved as an innocent child, or it could be seen as her being forever lost and ignorant much like in Purgatory. Innocence and ignorance seem to hand-in-hand when it comes to the bliss of naivete but Wordsworth is well aware that there is nothing blissful about a child being lost in the height of a snowstorm. He based the poem on a real story of a girl who got lost in a snowstorm and was later found drowned in a canal. Rather than tell that story and give Lucy a conclusive and finite ending, he gives the story a certain vagueness that is looming. Should we feel hopeful or haunted?

One with Nature

In William Wordsworth's lyrical poem "Lucy Gray," a young girl ventures out into a stormy night and is never seen again. Rife with eerie imagery of nature, the poem links Lucy's presumed death with the idea that she lives on through nature. A similar event happened to Wordsworth's sister, so the poem holds even greater meaning as a possible coping mechanism Wordsworth wrote to indirectly immortalize his sister not only through words, but imply that life does not completely end in death, but rather continues on through  nature.

In the poem, Lucy originally goes out into the storm to light the way for her mother when she returns home. When the search party goes looking for Lucy, "the Mother spied/ The print of Lucy's feet." Lucy ends up leading her mother after all as the search party tracks her footprints "downward from the steep hill's edge," "through the broken hawthorn-hedge," "by the long stone-wall," and "(across) an open field." Lucy goes through all the aspects of nature but is barred by the manmade stone wall that she does not cross but only walks beside. She is essentially already one with nature and when her footsteps disappear in the middle of the bridge, she is disappearing on a man made item. The bridge, of course, can symbolize a variety of things, the most obvious being the bridge between life and death; or man's interruption of nature. Lucy presumably doesn't die from the weather, but rather the bridge is what causes her death, probably from slipping off.

The fact that Lucy's footsteps are still visible in the snow, the comparison of Lucy to "the Fawn at play" and "The Hare upon the Green," and Wordsworth's final stanzas depicting Lucy as "sweet Lucy Gray/ Upon the lonesome Wild," all indicates that she has a strong relationship with nature that transcends and even extends life. She lives on in the woods, not hauntingly as the Gothics would prefer, but instead happily, singing, whistling, and never looking back. Lucy is essentially just as alive at the end of the poem as she was in the beginning.

Perspective as it relates to Romanticism (We Are Seven)

William Wordsworth's We Are Seven is a very romantic poem that invokes deep philosophical thought about mortality.  This poem is structured like a ballad yet contains several things to set a serious tone within the poem.  Focusing on the first stanza there are quite a few details that convey the whole meaning of the poem.  The very first line "a simple child" gives the reader a sense of curiosity, life, fertility, and pacifism.  This is sharply contradicted by the third line "what should it know of death?"   Not only does this contrast the first line of the poem, but it's also juxtaposition for the B rhyme on line 2 "and feels its life in every breath" So mechanically the poem is contrasting the words in the 2nd line, it is also conflicting with the readers expectations from the previous 3 lines.  In those we get such words as: life, lights, child, and draw are all things that can be perceived as "happy" words that set a light tone.

A good way to take in the overall feeling of the poem is to listen to a reading with music by composer Mohammed Fairouz.

Listening to the music "performed" as opposed to just reading it to yourself gives you a different feeling.  Much like Wordsworth, this is a very romantic poem that focuses on something so simple as a dialogue.  On the surface we get a simple banter between an an adult and a child about why she considers her two dead siblings to be alive.   Deep down however, Wordsworth is using the child's innocence to represent the universally polarizing ideologies that reside between the young and old (age and experience coincidence?).  The exterior frustration of the man, is really the fact that the man sees the naivety of the child, because he once was young.

Natural Communion

Wordsworth’s “We Are Seven” is a surprisingly innocent and sweet poem surrounding the idea of death. In it, Wordsworth tells of a little girl’s connection to her late siblings, and relates it to human connection with nature. The innocence of a child is often thought of as natural, and the child this speaker addresses is “a little cottage girl” with “a rustic, woodland air.” The child, in her youthful and wild state, is closer with the natural world. As the poem continues, the reader learns that she is also close with her siblings who “in the church-yard lie.” She refuses to reduce her number of siblings, insisting that they are seven even though two have passed away. As a poet who loved nature, Wordsworth may be suggesting that those connected closely with nature are also connected with the dead in a way that most do not understand. He allows the child to have the last word in the poem, as she again says, “Nay, we are seven!” This suggests the authority of the child’s statement, as if she knows a truth that the readers and speaker have forgotten.

The graves in this poem are not described as frightening or ominous. Instead, they are “green” and close to the home, as if the departed children never truly left. The little girl spends time with her siblings, communing with the graves as she sits in the grass and sings to them. From this perspective, death is as natural as the environment itself, and there is little to prevent the little girl from being with the dead. The poem is somewhat reassuring, perhaps suggesting that as long as humans, dead or alive, are all a part of nature, nothing can separate them.

Psychological Obsession

The expansion of the British influence on the rest of the world shaped the way literature was written and percieved. After expeditions into the east, the British people were awakened with new art, food, clothing, music and ways of living. This became an enormous influence on how people percieved the outside world. It is a very common thought that people are afraid of the unknown, this is where I believe the darkness of gothic literature comes into play. The theme of madness is one of my personal favorites. The interest in the psychological decline of a human being and the questioning of what is real and what is imagination is extremely important when dealing with the question of whether the supernatural is real or imaginary. Tales of ghosts and spirits and supernatural abilities have been around for centuries, which completely go against the ideals of the enlightenment. The Enlightenment authors, philosophers and teachers would tell you that this is the wrong way to look at reality. The diminishing of the enlightenment period, the rise of the violence of the French Revolution and the growth of British exploration became the major components of the growth of the British gothic literature.

With the dark, violent overtones, and the hinting of some sort of omniscient supernatural power, it is easy to see why madness might have taken over our protagonists' psychological state. As a generation raised by science and reason, for the most part, we automatically look at Gottfried Burger's "Lenora" and see a very elaborate, artfully embellished fantasy. The dead coming back to life to visit you on horseback to take you, and ride off into the afterlife? --Nonesense. Even Lenora's mother, someone who was raise by the enlightenment, tries to not let her greif take over her sound mind, and tells her to let go of the fantasy and chalk it up to prayer. Her mother prayers for her, her enlightenment upbringing be shaken by her daughter's inability to trust in reason, God and what she has been taught. Instead, her daughter is relying on her sensory ability to see, and feel something else around her. From the way her mother way brought up, this is considered blasphemy, but to Lenora, what she is feeling is completely justified.

"Almighty God! O do not judge
My poor unhappy childe;
She knows not what her lips pronounce,
Her anguish makes her wilde."

When Lenora finally does submit to the darkness that her greif is trying to take her to, she is taken on this journey by William on horseback see some incredibly dark imagery. Corpes, ravens, a funeral train and the full moon. All images that leave a darker image in our minds, or malicious foreboding.

"O William, enter first my bowre,
And give me one embrace:
The blasts athwarte the hawthorne hiss;
Awayte a little space."

"Tho’ blasts athwarte the hawthorn hiss,
I may not harboure here;
My spurre is sharpe, my courser pawes,
My houre of flighte is nere."

As we spoke about in class, the repition is used very cleverly. It leaves us with a sense of a psychological imbalance. Like there is something just a little bit off about Lenora. In my mind repetition is a sign of anxiety, stress and that moment when you are starting to lose it a little bit.To me, the moment above is when we really start to see her disappear into her sadness and let go of reality.

The gothic period is so interested in the psychological state, and understanding more than what we can readily see, that this is the beginning of a very difficult time for female protagonists, and for women living in this era. Female sexuality is seem as madness, and many women were "medicated" by barbaric means of hospitalization and were often locked up in asylums for having sexual needs of desires. This is something I will explore more with my presentation.

There Are Superstitions...

In Wordsworth's "The Thorn," the narrator retells a story about a woman who lost her baby, though the details vary as the narrator is victim to the gossip mill of the community. Similarly, the narrator goes to great lengths in the description of the thorn and its location on the mountain top, but not where that mountain is. After a lofty account of the thorn ("No leaves it has, no prickly points/ It is a mass of knotted joints") and its surroundings ("Not five yards from the mountain path/ This Thorn you on your left espy/And to the left, three yards beyond/You see a little muddy pond"), the narrator introduces the phrase, "an infant's grave" that begins the supernatural element of the ballad. 

Not just an ancient, gnarled Thorn and scenic pond, the narrator's description turns eerie as he begins to outline the women in a scarlet cloak who cries over her lost child. Her howls of "Oh misery!" and "Oh woe is me!" indiciate a ghoulish presence that infects the natural scene and twists it into a supernatural site. After repeating the gossip surrounding the women's despairing tale, the narrator reveals he does not know much about the place, only watches from a distance "with my telescope/ To view the ocean wide and bright." Thus, the speaker merely builds up a ghostly story from the community rumors and his own distance observation. Despite continually saying, "I cannot tell how this may be," the speaker tells the haunted tale as he believes it to be true. By focusing on detail he can embellish instead of explaining concretely the linear order of events he creates a narrative that is based on myth and superstition rather than reality. 

Oh Misery!

     Lyrical Ballads sought to channel the voice of the common people. Wordsworth invoked ideas of nature, of simplicity, and of beautiful poetic diction and meter. “The Thorn” illustrates these concepts while telling the story of Martha Ray. The scarlet clad woman, who may or may not be a grief stricken, baby-killing ghost that haunts simple folk. The entire poem reads like a ghost story that the narrator is reluctant to tell. The narrator seems to display the psychology of the superstitious, as he timidly describes the lore of the woman and her illegitimate spawn. He is full of uncertainties about the myth and even his own account of the woman. His superstitious fear did not even allow him to interact with her at all, as he says “Her face!- it was enough for me: I turned about and heard her cry, Oh misery!” The fear of the narrator kept her at a distance and thus she was shroud in mystery. The fear of the unknown drives the imagination to create impossible, perverse and strange things.