As I said in my previous post, Bella and Sophie colored butterflies and then cut them out and then made butterfly gardens out of their silk scarves and dress-up clothes.Just thought I’d share what one of those gardens looked like.
In our outside garden we have crocuses and daffodils! It feels like an extremely early spring. I wonder if it is earlier than previous years.
bearing, Yes! Thank you. Escaping from time, from natural daylight and the progression of the seasons…. preferring to feel less, seeking shelter from sensation…. That fits perfectly with the denial of the regeneration of springtime implied in “April is the cruelest month” and the numbness of “winter kept us warm”.
If you don’t mind, I’m going to bump your comment up to the entry.
Don’t mind at all, and I am glad you agree.
Isn’t it funny how something can be obscure one moment to one person, and obvious to another the next? If I had not been following along with your posts, the line would not have jumped out at me as having any particular meaning whatsoever; but having read your commentary, when you asked the questions about it, I got such a plain impression of that line fitting into the whole.
Poetry is indeed a dialogue.
It is funny. Even though I majored in English and then got my MA, I still often feel like a dunce when I read not only poetry but even novels. I miss the thrill of the classroom discussion—or some of the the grad seminars which were even better when we all sat in comfy easy chairs—where a work really comes alive as each person adds his insights until the whole group sees more clearly than the sum of the individuals could ever have done. I am truly blessed that, having forsaken the classroom, I am able to have such able conversation partners by way of the internet.
I will take a stab at the line. The two pieces “read much of the night” and “go south in the winter” do not say a whole lot on their own, but together add up to an impression of denial of, perhaps fear of, the natural march of time and seasons.
Someone who reads much of the might must be using artificial light. He or she is in a way refusing to accept the natural progression of light into darkness and then back into light again, that comes from the turning of the earth.
Someone who goes south for the winter is, likewise, trying to escape the natural progression of change of seasons. So this is someone who is taking refuge in the power of modern technology, and of personal wealth (that is how you can afford to go south for the winter—most people can’t) to escape the natural condition of the human person, which is to experience darkness at nighttime, and to experience the change in seasons.
I think I would be reading too much into these individually if they stood alone, but because they are juxtaposed, and in the same speaker, we are forced to say, “this is the kind of person who is afraid of the dark, and afraid of the cold.” This is a person who prefers to feel less of all strong sensations, because, so insulated, he or she is sheltered from the scary ones.
The question I am left with is, in the mountains you feel free from what?
I have an MA in Eng as well and I too miss those classroom discussions. We all feel dunces when we read a work for the first time.