3. Robert Frost (cont.) - VoiceTube: Learn English through videos!

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Professor Langdon Hammer: We talked on Monday
about Frost's idea of "the sound of sense" and vernacular speech
forms, his wish to put these in tension or, as he put it,
"strained relation" with metrical pattern.
The primary metrical pattern in Frost is the primary metrical
pattern in English poetry, which is to say blank verse or
unrhymed iambic pentameter.
Well, meter: what is meter?
Meter is--it's a scheme for organizing verse,
for organizing lines of verse.
It's a scheme that in English counts accents or stresses per
line and then arranges them in a pattern.
Ordinarily, in accentual syllabic verse,
which is what we're reading more often than not in English
poetry, the accents are arranged in
relation to unaccented syllables, creating a kind of
limited array of standard units.
The most standard of these is the iamb.
The iamb is a simple pattern of an unstressed syllable followed
by a stressed one.
A boat, about,
a dress, a coat:
these are all simple iambic phrases that you hear in our
language all the time.
If you repeat a boat three times--a boat,
a boat, a boat--you have
trimeter, iambic trimester – three iambs in a row.
If you do it four times, you've got tetrameter,
a more common meter in English.
And if you repeat them five times, you have pentameter.
Accent: what is an accent?
For some of you, this will seem self-evident;
for others, it'll seem like a great puzzle.
What constitutes an accent when you--what is an accent in a
given English word?
In fact, linguists often argue about this subject,
and it's a complicated one.
Accent is something somewhat difficult to define and
categorize. Don't worry about that.
Poetry is not interested in expert debate at all,
and it converts the big spectrum of possible degrees of
accent into those two simple categories: stressed and
unstressed syllables.
So, if you're unsure about the metrical definition of a line,
because it's hard to discriminate between levels of
stress, as will almost certainly be the
case, remember that more often than not, the context takes over
and the regular beat of a meter rules and perhaps promotes an
accent in a phrase that might not otherwise seem to have one
to you. Let's illustrate these general
points by just reading together and trying to hear the beginning
of Robert Frost's poem "Birches,"
on page 211 in The Norton.
This is an example of blank verse, and that is always to
be--blank verse always, perhaps confusingly,
to be distinguished from free verse.
Blank verse is unrhymed iambic pentameter.
Free verse is non-metrical poetry, another thing
altogether. This is blank verse;
it's the language of Shakespeare;
it's the language of Milton.
When I see birches bend to left and right
Across the lines of straighter darker trees,
I like to think some boy's been swinging them.
Well, for me, when I try to make sense of the
meter of given lines, I think it's useful to try to
settle, to start, those syllables that
seem most clearly stressed, to, you know,
identify where there isn't question;
and use that then as a structure from which to
interpret the rest of the lines.
So, why don't we do that together?
Just looking at this first line: "When I see birches bend
to left and right."
"When I see birches bend to left and right."
"When I see birches bend to left and right."
And sometimes it's not good to repeat it too often;
then you start to become unhinged.
Let's see if we can't identify those syllables that we all are
going to agree on.
Where's the first accent that you really want to say,
"that's an accent"?
"I." "Birches."
"Bend." "Left."
"Right." Debate there?
Anybody want to propose another stress in that line?
Yes? There's a stress on "when" and
"see." But what if I had the phrase,
"I see"? What would be stressed in that
phrase, "I see"? "See."
That's true. "When I see birches bend to
left and right." I think I would want to scan
that line as a bit of an odd beginning.
I think that word "see" deserves the accent there,
and so it's--the first unit of sound isn't quite normative.
It takes Frost a little sweep to get going.
"When I see birches bend to left and right."
But by the time we finish the end of that line,
we are really right in the middle of very regular iambic
pentameter. When I see birches bend
to left and right Across the lines of straighter
darker trees, I like to think some boy's been
swinging them. "Across the lines of straighter
darker trees." Let's do "the lines of
straighter darker trees."
Let's do that line.
Accents here? "Cross."
"Lines." "Straight."
"Trees." Yes, that one's pretty simple.
Thank you Frost, you have delivered this to us.
And as is not often the case – excuse me,
as is not seldom the case in Frost – there is almost a kind
of metaphorical play between what he's describing and the
sounds with which he is doing the describing.
Here, this image of the lines of trees and the metrical
regularity of that verse that describes them.
"I like to think some boy's been swinging them."
"I like to think some boy's been swinging them."
Yes, what about this line?
"I like to think some boy's been swinging them."
Student: [inaudible] Professor Langdon
Hammer: The point is that "swing" has some interesting
swinging effect. Yes, I'm not sure how to
describe that exactly.
Yes, we want to put a stress on "swing."
What other words in that line?
I'm sorry, "think"? Good.
"Like," yes. "I like" is like "I see."
"I like to think some boy's," "swing," "them."
Yes, this, too, is an utterly regular iambic
pentameter line: unstressed syllable followed by
a stressed syllable, five in a row.
And, yet, think about the qualities of sound that are so
different between "across the lines of straighter darker
trees" and "I like to think some boy's been swinging them."
What Frost is interested in is what, really,
ultimate variety of sounds he is able to produce as that
metrical pattern comes into some kind of tension with English
sentence sounds, as he calls them,
with the effect that each of Frost's lines of iambic
pentameter has different qualities,
even when they're utterly regular.
And there are, in Frost, often some
variations. This is something I'd like you
to practice, I'd like you to think about, be conscious of,
and it's something we can return to.
It's not something I expect you to necessarily master or become
advanced in your expertise, but it is a dimension of the
poetry that's absolutely essential to what it is and to
what you're doing when you read and you hear that voice
speaking. And so, I'd like you to work on
attuning yourselves to it.
What can you do with sound as interpreters?
How do we start to make a connection between what we hear
and what things mean?
Well, in Frost's case, as I'm suggesting,
there's often very skillful and complex imitation going on
between Frost's sounds and what he's imaging or describing or
the actions and events in the poem.
That's the case marvelously in this poem, and I'd be happy to
talk about particular examples with any of you who'd like to
work through it. But the point I want to make
about it is much more general and we don't have to look at
particular cases to make it.
This is a poem about bending and breaking,
or not breaking, forms – forms,
the material givens of the world.
It's a poem, in fact, about strained
relation in a kind of play that Frost is exploring,
and that strained relation that the boy achieves as he learns
how to play with these trees.
Well, that's a version of what we hear in the poem when we hear
the forms of strained relation between Frost's dynamic speech
sounds and the metrical pattern of his writing.
The kinetic activity of the form of the poem,
in other words, is something that's like,
but it's also itself for Frost, an instance of the relations of
force and counter-force, desire and gravity,
that the poem is describing.
The meter has, in other words,
in relation to his individual sentence sounds,
some of the flexibility and also resistance that those trees
have in relation to the boy using them to swing;
to swing, to go up and down; to come and go safely.
These are primal forms of play, if you like,
that suggest forms of poetic activity;
also, spiritual activity.
Frost's ways of using language in short are like--are versions
of the boy's way of using the trees.
Let's look at the poem together.
I'll read it. I like to think some
boy's been swinging them.
But swinging doesn't bend them down to stay
As ice-storms do.
[Frost is going to counter-pose the boy's swinging to
the natural forces imaged in the ice storm.]
Often you must have seen them Loaded with ice a sunny winter
morning After a rain.
They click upon themselves As the breeze rises,
and turn many-colored As the stir cracks and crazes
their enamel. Soon the sun's warmth makes
them shed crystal shells Shattering and avalanching on
the snow crust-- Such heaps of broken glass to
sweep away You'd think the inner dome of
heaven had fallen.
They are dragged to the withered bracken by the load,
And they seem not to break; though once they are bowed
So low for long, they never right themselves:
You may see their trunks arching in the woods
Years afterwards, trailing their leaves on the
ground Like girls on hands and knees
that throw their hair Before them over their heads to
dry in the sun. But I was going to say when
Truth broke in With all her matter of fact
about the ice storm, I should prefer to have some
boy bend them As he went out and in to fetch
the cows-- Some boy too far from town to
learn baseball, Whose only play was what he
found himself, Summer or winter,
and could play alone.
One by one he subdued his father's trees
By riding them down over and over again
Until he took the stiffness out of them,
And not one but hung limp, not one was left
For him to conquer.
He learned all there was To learn about not launching
out too soon And so not carrying the tree
away Clear to the ground.
He always kept his poise To the top branches,
climbing carefully With the same pains you use to
fill a cup Up to the brim,
and even above the brim.
Then he flung outward, feet first, with a swish,
Kicking his way down through the air to the ground.
So was I once myself a swinger of birches.
And so I dream of going back to be.
It's when I'm weary of considerations
And life is too much like a pathless wood
Where your face burns and tickles with the cobwebs
Broken across it, and one eye is weeping
From a twig's having lashed across it open.
I'd like to get away from earth awhile,
And then come back to it and begin over.
May no fate willfully misunderstand me
And half grant what I wish and snatch me away
Not to return. Earth's the right place for
love: I don't know where it's likely
to go better. I'd like to go by climbing a
birch tree, And climb black branches up a
snow-white trunk Toward heaven,
till the tree could bear no more,
But dipped its top and set me down again.
That would be good both going and coming back.
One could do worse than be a swinger of birches.
So, think about the birches as a tool, another tool,
but this time a tool for play, a tool for playing alone.
As in "Mowing," Frost is writing about solitude,
an essential loneliness.
The boy's solitude is like the mower's.
Who's absent? Well, other children.
The other character that's mentioned in the poem is the
boy's father, whose trees they are,
the property owner, who also is absent.
It's his absence that leaves the boy alone to his own
devices. We might think of him not
simply as the farmer who holds the deed to those birches but as
maybe God the Father, who created them,
and is likewise absent or invisible.
In the solitude, the solitude of that absence,
the boy uses the tree to work his will playfully.
This time, he's not really a worker--to work his will on the
world. And the boy uses the trees to
do two things, right: to go up,
or go out, and come back, to return.
This activity in a wonderful homely way is a version of
romance quest. It's an image of ascent toward
heaven, from which the boy returns.
He's able to rise, to transcend the limits of his
own body and station.
At the same time it's dangerous.
It's dangerous to want to get away from earth awhile,
to get your feet entirely off the ground.
What might happen to you?
Well, to put too much pressure on any tool is to risk breaking
it – breaking down maybe, crashing, coming back to earth
like Icarus, the over-reacher.
The poet, after all, is subject to gravity in Frost,
to the force of the earth.
That checks. It's a counter-weight to
Frost's romantic longing.
The skill and the play that Frost is talking about depend on
being able to use the tool – in this case the tree,
emblematic of the world in its sturdy but also delicate
materiality – to use the tool to return safely to the ground
to get your feet back on the ground.
For "earth's the right place for love," Frost says.
It's love that makes the boy climb, as it made the mower
work, remember? But who was talking about love?
It's the--Frost is so sly.
He brings it up as if we know that this is what he's been
talking about all the time.
Notice, in fact, the cleverness of all this
discourse in the poem!
Notice the freedom that he exercises in unfolding what
feels like an improvisatory monologue in which he makes you
race to keep up with him as he follows a semi-hidden logic that
he treats as self-evident.
Notice that final colloquial phrase, "to go."
He repeats it twice.
"I don't know where it's" – love – "likely to go better,"
and then, "I'd like to go by climbing a tree."
A wonderful phrase, "to go," meaning what?
A variety of things: "to go" in the sense of to make
something work out, to make it go,
to journey, to choose how to live, to go to the limit,
where the tool can bear no more.
Yes. And people use that phrase,
too, to mean "to die," don't they?
You know, "I'd like to go in this way";
all those resonances in those two words.
On Monday I stressed that poetry was, for Frost,
always a mode of work, and that work was for him a
model of poetic activity.
With "Mowing" as the example, I said that in Frost,
meaning is always something made, something the poet works
on and works for.
Frost's modernity consists in that: the idea that truth is
something that's concrete and contingent,
not a metaphysical matter, not an ideal principle,
and that it's something that's only available in the act of
deriving it, constructing it;
an act that is ordinary, that's not capable of being
completed and therefore necessarily always to be
repeated; an ongoing task,
something you have to get up and do every day.
Frost is a kind of materialist, by which I mean he calls
attention to the circumstances of imagination,
its limits and conditions.
Poetry is, in Frost, an encounter between fact and
desire: what we want and what is.
Tools, in Frost, are an image of the enabling
and defining conditions of imagination,
and they include in the work of poetry itself all sorts of
tools, all the technology of language and the technology,
in particular, of verse, including,
importantly, meter.
The relation between the speech sounds and the metrical frame of
a poem, such as "Birches"--it's like the relation,
as I'm saying, between the boy and the
birches. In other words,
meter is something Frost knows how to use.
It's a material force that his rhetoric challenges and relies
on, gives him a means of getting off the ground,
and a means of always getting back to it, too.
And that's another kind of doubleness in Frost.
I talked about doubleness last time.
Think, in "Birches," of really the extraordinary play of
language, the freedom of association,
the metaphorical invention – all of which is being played off
of the strict demands of the meter,
at every moment. It's part of the energy and
force of the poem.
The work of poetry in Frost, really the high drama of the
will at work in the world, is something that we can
actually hear in his poetry, in the expertly explored
tensions between speech and meter.
In that meter, too, we're hearing some of
Frost's modernity.
Let me say more about what I mean.
Let me say more about what I mean by approaching the question
of his modernness, his modernity,
from the point of view of his subjects.
Last time I showed you his second book and its cover,
North of Boston.
The title of that book, published in 1914,
and the one that more than any other made him famous,
locates his subjects in a specific geography.
It's important for thinking about Frost's place in modern
poetry. Boston, well,
it was the capital of nineteenth-century American
literature and culture, a name synonymous,
eventually, with gentility, Puritanism, old American money
and style; exactly, in other words,
everything modernism was attacking.
So, where do you go to write modern poetry?
Well, anywhere but Boston.
Pound and Eliot importantly go to London, Paris.
There's the New York of Crane, of Moore, of Stevens,
too. But Frost says differently.
He alone moves poetry north of Boston.
To do this is to reverse the social direction in which
everyone else is going, to reverse the direction of
American modernization, which is evacuating rural New
England, sending its workers to the
cities in the new industrial economy.
You can think about Crane's images of the Brooklyn Bridge in
this course and then compare Frost's image of the woodpile
– that abandoned woodpile that some worker has left in the poem
called "The Woodpile."
These are, in a sense, complementary images of the
modern in America.
Frost, when he goes north of Boston, goes back to the
country, goes in, in a sense, the opposite
direction that America is going.
He goes in a sense in an anti-modern direction,
maybe even in some sense in a reactionary direction,
at least in relation to other poets' ideas of progress and
innovation. This move roots Frost's poetry
of work in the lives of rural workers, people who have to
sustain and entertain themselves,
often on their own or alone.
What these people have to work with are the tools that have
been passed down to them, or sometimes that they have
invented. The poverty of the people Frost
writes about is important.
It makes them materialists, too, or realists,
like Frost. They are acutely conscious of
the circumstances in which they live their lives.
And they suffer, they rage.
Their New England, importantly,
is not an ideal, pastoral place.
The heart of North of Boston is a series of
dramatic monologues and dialogues,
speeches and conversations for people who really had never
spoken or never spoken very much in modern--excuse me,
in American poetry before and who, in Frost,
speak in a wholly distinctive way: that is,
in Frost's combination of colloquial sentence sound and
unrhymed iambic pentameter.
Blank verse: it is the heroic language of
Shakespeare, of Milton, of Wordsworth.
"The Death of the Hired Man," "Home Burial," "A Servant to
Servants," "The Fear" – these are poems in which Frost is
giving New England workers the language of the great English
poets. I've been stressing Frost's
solitude. Well, all the people Frost
writes about are in some sense alone, often alone together.
They share solitude, solitary, too,
in their relation to each other.
Frost as a narrator, in these great poems I'm
describing, frames his people's words minimally,
with few bits of narrative information.
He just sort of plunges you into their speech,
into their lives, and you have to,
in a sense, work to get into their character to be able to
keep track of who is speaking.
Let's look at what is, for me, the most gripping
example of this kind of poem: "Home Burial," on page 204.
Giving us little introduction, little framing,
and no consoling closure really,
where the moral might come in another poet,
Frost creates a kind of uncomfortable intimacy for us
with his characters where we're challenged by them,
we're brought up close to them.
Look at "Home Burial" here.
He saw her from the bottom of the stairs
Before she saw him.
[And that's a kind of emblematic moment in Frost
where one person is, in a sense, seeing another
without being seen.] She was starting down,
Looking back over her shoulder at some fear.
She took a doubtful step and then undid it
To raise herself and look again.
He spoke Advancing toward her:
"What is it you see From up there always?--for I
want to know."
[This is another important Frostian motivation,
"for I want to know"; here, a desire expressed
between two people, a husband and a wife.]
She turned and sank upon her skirts at that,
[as if collapsing] And her face changed from
terrified to dull.
He said to gain time: [And isn't that an interesting
phrase, "to gain time"?] "What is it you see?"
Mounting until she cowered under him.
[For he is fearful, or fearsome.]
"I will find out now--you must tell me, dear."
She, in her place, refused him any help,
With the least stiffening of her neck in silence.
She let him look, sure that he wouldn't see,
Blind creature; and awhile he didn't see.
But at last he murmured, "Oh," and again,
"Oh." "What is it--what?"
she said. "Just that I see."
"You don't," she challenged.
"Tell me what it is. Put it into words.
What does he see?
Well, "The wonder is I didn't see at once" and that is the
grave that he has made for their child.
In those blocks of speech there's, importantly--there's
white space around what they have to say.
It's almost a way of inviting us to visualize the separation
of these two people as they speak.
And as we read, we have to fill in the nature
of their relationship.
Here, well, people are locked into themselves in Frost and in
their points of view.
Here, the issue in this poem is grief, how the mother and father
each express how they deal with the death of their child.
Simply where and how they stand in relation to each other as
they speak is important.
The woman, the mother, wishes to--can't help herself
from trying to hold on to the dead child,
and she's caught looking behind her as if towards the past,
which is also, frankly,
a wish to escape her husband who is a frightening force,
to escape his will, I think.
His will, his force – these are his ways,
his resources for responding to death.
The woman's objection, as the poem unfolds,
is summed up by his choice, the father's choice,
to bury the child himself.
He responds to this grievous loss privately by taking it on
himself, by seeking to master it himself, and specifically as a
worker. And the grim tool,
if you like, of his mourning is his spade,
the shovel he uses to do the burying.
On page 206, she says, well,
"There you go sneering now!"
And he says: "I'm not, I'm not!
You make me angry.
I'll come down to you.
God, what a woman!
And it's come to this, A man can't speak of his own
child that's dead."
"You can't [speak] because you don't know how to
speak. [She says.]
"If you had any feelings, you that dug
With your own hand--how could you?--his little grave;
I saw you from that very window there,
Making the gravel leap and leap in air,
Leap up, like that, like that, and land so lightly
And roll back down the mound beside the hole.
I thought, Who is that man?
I didn't know you. Well, the father in "Home
Burial" is a worker, a worker there in those lines
reduced to this tool that he's using,
almost mechanically, that makes the dirt leap;
a kind of desperate mechanism that's trying to take control of
the world and failing as he, well, she says to him,
and this chills her: "I can repeat the very
words you were saying: 'Three foggy mornings and one
rainy day Will rot the best birch fence a
man can build.' Think of it,
talk like that at such a time!"
But in fact, in his own way,
he's talking about his inability to keep his child
alive there; in a kind of metaphorical way,
speaking of his failure to build a fence to last.
And it drives his wife ultimately, disgusted by him,
away, fearing him.
Well, "Home Burial" is a poem about the limits of work,
the inability of the worker to bring a knowable world,
a safe world, into being.
There is in Frost no God, no transcendental source of
guidance or consolation, nothing out there in the world
but the material conditions of our circumstances.
Over and over again in Frost poems, you see speakers,
you see the poet himself, wanting to know;
and wanting to know means pressing towards some
revelation, towards some sense of the meaning of things,
a search for some kind of presence behind the way things
are. That is the subject of the
great sonnet "Design."
Also, in a very different mood, the poem "For Once,
Then, Something."
It's also the subject of "Neither Out Far nor In Deep,"
which I asked you to read for today and is on page 220.
I won't read it since we're running a little short of time.
The people on the shore that Frost describes there looking
out to sea--they're watching for something.
But is there anything to watch for?
Is there anything coming?
No, it doesn't appear so.
But as he asks at the end, "...
when was that ever a bar / to any watch they keep?"
In these poems, well, when Frost does give us
images of God or some informing presence,
that presence is imagined negatively, to be,
well, as a kind of malevolence perhaps,
to be inferred from the arbitrariness and cruelness of
nature's destructive force of the conditions of life of the
people Frost is describing.
So, if in Frost you can't look to God for it,
what kind of hope can be offered?
How can you save your soul?
This is a question Frost is interested in.
In his own ways, he's interested in redemption
– an important word for Stevens.
To conclude, let me look quickly with you at
two great late poems.
One on page 222 is called "Provide, Provide."
I'll read this. The witch that came (the
withered hag) To wash the steps with pail and
rag Was once the beauty Abishag,
The picture pride of Hollywood.
Too many fall from great and good
For you to doubt the likelihood.
Die early and avoid the fate.
Or if predestined to die late, Make up your mind to die in
state. Make the whole stock exchange
your own! If need be, occupy a throne,
Where nobody can call you crone.
Some have relied on what they knew,
Others on being simply true.
What worked for them might work for you.
No memory of having starred Atones for later disregard
Or keeps the end from being hard.
Better to go down dignified With boughten friendship at
your side Than none at all.
Provide, provide! And in some recordings Frost
then says, "... or somebody'll provide for ya."
It's a very funny poem, and you've got triplet rhymes
there to make sure you know that Frost is joking,
and it feels like light verse.
But, of course, what are we laughing at?
Public achievement, moral stature – they're of no
use. The end is hard and it's going
to be hard, no matter how you come to it.
So, you better look out for number one.
This is good, old-fashioned American wisdom.
What is scathing about it is that Frost gives up all
justification for self-interest.
There's no argument for it except self-interest itself.
And then, Frost says, even that won't work.
The choice is a terrifying one of no friendship and "boughten
friendship," which really isn't friendship at all.
In short, the only thing to do in life is to provide,
and provide is just what you cannot ever adequately do,
as the husband in "Home Burial" knows.
This is a poem written in the depth of the Depression and also
at the height of Frost's fame.
You could see the kind of grim refusal to apologize for
"boughten friendship," as a kind of, well, as a kind of apology
for his own popular success.
Let me conclude by just pointing to another poem,
a late poem, "Directive," a poem published
in 1947. It's on the page following.
A poem published after the Second World War,
written about the post-war world.
It begins by, in a sense, rehearsing or
taking us back to Frost's own initial move north of Boston.
Back out of all this now too much for us,
Back in a time made simple by the loss
Of detail, burned, dissolved, and broken off
Like graveyard marble sculpture in the weather,
There is a house that is no more a house...
And that is where he's going to take us in the poem.
You can see that house as, in a sense, a version of the
home in "Home Burial."
Frost describes it here, movingly, as,
well, an image of a home that is lost, of a home that has
failed. And, yet, Frost's attention is
drawn, interestingly, to a playhouse that is part of
that household. He says in the middle of the
poem on page 225: First there's the
children's house of make-believe,
Some shattered dishes underneath a pine,
The playthings in the playhouse of the children.
Weep for what little things could make them glad.
Then for the house that is no more a house...
And so on. At the end of the poem,
here, Frost gives us, however, a kind of alternative
to this image of the failure of the home and the failure of the
worker's life, in our own imaginative access
to a spring, a source, above the house that was the
water of the house that nurtured it,
that was its refreshment.
He says: Your destination and your
destiny's A brook that was the water of
the house, Cold as a spring,
as yet so near its source, Too lofty and original to rage.
... I have kept hidden in the
instep arch Of an old cedar at the waterside
A broken drinking goblet like the Grail
Under a spell so the wrong ones can't find it,
So can't get saved as Saint Mark says they mustn't.
[And there he sounds like a child, doesn't he?]
(I stole the goblet from the children's playhouse.)
Here are your waters and your watering place.
Drink and be whole again beyond confusion.
There, the goblet, the tool that Frost comes to is
a--it's a tool from romance quest.
It's the Grail; it's the cup of the Last Supper.
But what is it? It's, in fact,
a broken goblet from the children's playhouse.
Frost returns us there to the early sources of imagination in
children's play, and it gives us,
at least imaginatively in this shared journey with him,
access to a kind of primal refreshment,
what he calls our "waters" and our "watering place."
It's a disillusioned and self-consciously ironic promise
of salvation, of wholeness.
But it's still a promise, and it's a promise of the
powers of imagination and of poetry, and of poetry made out
of play, of a child's play.
Well, that's a good place to stop.
Next week we will go to work on William Butler Yeats.