Liturgical Writing 1: Rev. Nancy McAndrew
1. Describe how ADF's order of ritual expresses the following concepts: "Serving the people"; "Reaffirming shared beliefs"; "Reestablishing the cosmic order"; "Building enthusiasm". (Min. 500 words)
Humans wrestle with the conviction that we are more than the sum of our physical parts. At our core we rebel at the idea that we are merely animate matter. We feel our own individuality; our consciousness transcends our physical self. One way in which we demonstrate this sense of “more than matter” is when we seek connection with the spiritual. I believe it is in the seeking of this connection that we begin to cultivate our best selves and begin to truly become more than a collection of instinct and automatic synaptic response. Propagating a spiritual life enhances one’s existence. In this way, religious and spiritual pursuits improve our individual human conditions and offer us a deeper level on which to connect with our fellow homo-sapiens.
Serving the People: If we accept that humans may find fulfillment and a satisfying sense of meaning by participating in spiritual work, then any endeavor which promotes that work is of service to the people. We humans hunger for a sense of belonging, a sense of fitting into some sort of order. It is this very hunger that is fed by religious cosmologies. We want to know that there is a plan, or at least a pattern to existence. The ADF COoR offers just that.
When we ritually Re-Establish the Cosmos, we connect ourselves to the pattern of existence and re-affirm our place in the order. Additionally, ADF ritual offers the folk the opportunity to make offering to the Kindreds and, in return to receive the gifts of the Kindreds. This opportunity to fully engage with the spiritual world feeds a deep part of ourselves. Entering into and strengthening a reciprocal relationship with the Kindreds should be an integral part of a personal pagan practice, and ADF allows the folk the opportunity to do precisely that (Corrigan). The Return Flow literally bestows upon the folk the wisdom or blessings from the Gods, Ancestors, and Land wights.
Reaffirming Shared Beliefs: “The more your participants know and accept the intellectual, artistic, psychological, social, and spiritual worldviews to be expressed by your liturgy, the more effective they will be affirming a group mind and the more each individual will get out of their experience” (Bonewits, 59). ADF used to have a step early in ritual called Establishing the Egregore, or group mind. The intention is to get everyone on the same wavelength, linked together in intention and in agreement as to how to further the goals of ritual. We do this through meditation, group chanting, and reminding the participants what we have in common (Bonewits, 29). The Two Powers meditation, often used at the very beginning of ritual, grounds the participants, sets the stage for meaningful ritual trance, and begins the work of connecting the microcosm of the individual celebrant to the macrocosm of the cosmos which be liturgically fleshed out later in ritual. Chants early in ritual are useful to reinforce the egregore.
As an orthopraxic religion we have an uneasy relationship with the word “belief.” We are really reaffirming what we agree will be true for the duration of the ritual which allows folk with a wide-ranging set of belief to function together as a cohesive people in ritual. ADF ritual reaffirms our group consensus that spiritual beings are real and external to us. We gather and open a channel of communication, via Opening the Gates, to those beings who reside in the Otherworlds, namely the gods and our ancestors. Our ritual further demonstrates that we believe that spiritual beings can and will enter into a gift/boon-based relationship with us. This is reaffirmed when we make sacrifices and offerings in ritual and then ask the beings, via the Omen-taking, addressed if they have accepted our gifts and/or what they offer in return. The folk then receive these reciprocal gifts via the Return Flow.
Re-establishing the Cosmic Order: Isaac Bonewits writes that, “a necessary first step to re-creating the cosmos seems to be defining a ritual center, the place from which the new cosmos can be born” (Bonewits, 31). Each public ADF ritual involves establishing the ritual space and participants within the cosmic map. When we perform this step, we are re-affirming the cosmic order and strengthening it. Our rites begin connecting with spiritual currents when we define the Sacred Center, also referred to as Establishing the Cosmic Order. Our ADF COoR includes step #5
(Re)Creating the Cosmos
In my experience, the majority of ADF rituals employ a Fire-Well-Tree model. The Fire is magically connected to the upperworlds and serves as a conduit for offerings and blessing to travel from the folk to the Gods and from the Gods to the Folk. Similarly, the Well connects the ritual space and participants to the underworld carrying offerings to the halls of the Ancestors and chthonic deities and blessings back to the Folk. The Tree is the axis mundi, the lynch pin of the realms, around which the cosmos turns. The Tree is rooted in the lower realms, and reaches through the middle realms to uphold the upper realms.
Building Enthusiasm: There is an energetic current to ADF ritual. Beginning with explanations and internal meditations the folk are led through opening prayers and the establishment of the egregore. These preliminary steps are aimed at bringing the folk to a more unified mental state, each prayer or offerings getting the participants more in tune with one another and the current of the ritual itself (Bonewits, 29). By the time the Gates are opened the ritual has ideally reached its first plateau. When honoring the Kindreds, energy and enthusiasm are again rising. Songs, chants, and the opportunity for individual offering serve to keep building the current to its apex which is the main sending of power to the deities of the occasion, often called the main sacrifice (Bonewits, 35). This is the peak of the ritual and is immediately followed by the Omen; the main sacrifice and omen act as the ritual hinge after which the energy is unwound (Bonewits, 41).
2. Create a prayer of praise, offering, or thanksgiving to a deity modeled on a mythic, folkloric, or other literary source of at least 75 words. Include a summary of what your sources were and how you utilized them (summary at least 150 words).
At the center of the worlds I remember Ymir
Carved by the cosmic cow Ymir of the Rime
Begetter of Buri Ymir First Father
Cruelly cut by Odin Vili, Ve
Pulled into pieces by Odin, Vili, Ve
Made into Midgard by Odin, Vili Ve
Heaven’s Dome Ymir, your skull
Salty seas Ymir, your blood
Stones of the Earth Ymir, your bones
At the center of the worlds I remember Ymir
Carved by the cosmic cow Ymir of the Rime
Home of the folk, First Father Ymir
I certainly consider the Prose Edda of Snorri Sturluson to be a literary work. In the Edda is described the creation of the world from the butchered body of Ymir, one of two original beings. Ymir is killed by the sons of Bor, Odin, Vili, and Ve. From Ymir’s blood they made the seas, from his body the earth, mountains from his bones, pebbles from his teeth, and, finally, from his skull they fashioned the dome of the sky (Young, 34-35).
Using the tale as inspiration, I composed the above piece to be used as a part of the Re-Creation of the Cosmos. I consider it a poem of praise.
The structure of the poem is loosely based on Old English poetry in that each line is made up of two verses (or half-lines) divided by a caesura. The rhyme, such that there is, is alliterative. The lifts and drops (stressed and unstressed syllables) do not conform to any of the Old English poetic styles. However, in the stanzas which include reference to Ymir, each verse contains two lifts. The stanza containing reference to Odin, Vili, and Ve breaks this pattern and the second stanza’s second verses each contain three lifts. The purpose of that was to hint to the ear that something is fundamentally changed once the sacrifice is made.
3. Discuss a poem of at least eight lines as to its use of poetic elements (as defined by Watkins): formulaics, metrics, and stylistics. Pay particular attention to use of meter and phonetic devices, such as rhyme and alliteration. (Minimum 100 words beyond the poem itself.)
Excerpt from “The Waste Land” by T. S. Eliot
I. THE BURIAL OF THE DEAD
APRIL is the cruelest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain.
Winter kept us warm, covering
5
Earth in forgetful snow, feeding
A little life with dried tubers.
Summer surprised us, coming over the Starnbergersee
With a shower of rain; we stopped in the colonnade,
And went on in sunlight, into the Hofgarten,
10
And drank coffee, and talked for an hour.
Bin gar keine Russin, stamm’ aus Litauen, echt deutsch.
And when we were children, staying at the archduke’s,
My cousin’s, he took me out on a sled,
And I was frightened. He said, Marie,
15
Marie, hold on tight. And down we went.
In the mountains, there you feel free.
I read, much of the night, and go south in the winter.
What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow
Out of this stony rubbish? Son of man,
20
You cannot say, or guess, for you know only
A heap of broken images, where the sun beats,
And the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief,
And the dry stone no sound of water. Only
There is shadow under this red rock,
25
(Come in under the shadow of this red rock),
And I will show you something different from either
Your shadow at morning striding behind you
Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you;
I will show you fear in a handful of dust.
30
Frisch weht der Wind
Der Heimat zu,
Mein Irisch Kind,
Wo weilest du?
“You gave me hyacinths first a year ago;
35
They called me the hyacinth girl.”
—Yet when we came back, late, from the Hyacinth garden,
Your arms full, and your hair wet, I could not
Speak, and my eyes failed, I was neither
Living nor dead, and I knew nothing,
40
Looking into the heart of light, the silence.
Öd’ und leer das Meer.
Madame Sosostris, famous clairvoyante,
Had a bad cold, nevertheless
Is known to be the wisest woman in Europe,
45
With a wicked pack of cards. Here, said she,
Is your card, the drowned Phoenician Sailor,
(Those are pearls that were his eyes. Look!)
Here is Belladonna, the Lady of the Rocks,
The lady of situations.
50
Here is the man with three staves, and here the Wheel,
And here is the one-eyed merchant, and this card,
Which is blank, is something he carries on his back,
Which I am forbidden to see. I do not find
The Hanged Man. Fear death by water.
55
I see crowds of people, walking round in a ring.
Thank you. If you see dear Mrs. Equitone,
Tell her I bring the horoscope myself:
One must be so careful these days.
Unreal City,
60
Under the brown fog of a winter dawn,
A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many,
I had not thought death had undone so many.
Sighs, short and infrequent, were exhaled,
And each man fixed his eyes before his feet.
65
Flowed up the hill and down King William Street,
To where Saint Mary Woolnoth kept the hours
With a dead sound on the final stroke of nine.
There I saw one I knew, and stopped him, crying “Stetson!
You who were with me in the ships at Mylae!
70
That corpse you planted last year in your garden,
Has it begun to sprout? Will it bloom this year?
Or has the sudden frost disturbed its bed?
Oh keep the Dog far hence, that’s friend to men,
Or with his nails he’ll dig it up again!
75
You! hypocrite lecteur!—mon semblable,—mon frère!”
Formulaics as defined by Watkins, are those phrases repeated through the family of Indo-European literature which indicate, by their repetition and recurrence, values or themes held to be important within a culture. For a phrase to be considered a formula it must have a consistent metrical structure as well as present oft-encountered theme. An example would be the theme of “imperishable fame.” Watkins presents case after case of the concept of a man’s unquenchable fame and offers this grammatical formula, “where a man in the subject, the notion HAVE (IMPERISHABLE FAME) is expressed either by the verb BE (*h,es-) and a dative pronoun (PRO), or by a true verb (e.g., *segh-, *dheh,- middle) and a subject pronoun, together with an optional form of the word for EVER(LASTING), ETERNITY, LIFETIME. . .here a god is the subject the verb is GRANT (e.g. *dheh,- active) and the indirect object (man) is expressed in the dative pronoun (PRO)” (Watkins, 177-8). I can find no instances of any of the specific formulas discussed by Watkins in this section of The Waste Land though Eliot extensively employed what he referred to as the Mythic Method which is, in many ways, arguably a contemporary use of formulaics drawing from all of classical literature and not just ancient Indo-European texts.
If we move away from the detailed grammatical analysis of ‘Watkinite’ formulas and focus on his broader definition, “formulas are the vehicles, the carriers of themes; they are the collectively the verbal expression of the traditional culture of the Indo-Europeans themselves” (Watkins, 152), then we may begin to discern such in The Waste Land. What else is literary allusion, but reference to a shared literary culture? Eliot’s inclusion of fragments of classical literary works is precisely that, an invocation of culture. The clearest example perhaps is found in “The Burial of the Dead” in lines 62 & 63, “A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many, / I had not thought death had undone so many.” This mirrors an image from Dante’s Inferno lines 55-57, “si lunga tratta / di gente, ch’io non avrei mai creduto /che morte tanta n’avesse disfatta” (Eliot’s notes). Roughly translated in my imperfect Italian, the last two lines double-checked by GoogleTranslate, we read, “such a long line / of people, I would never have believed / that death had undone so many.” Dante surely is a part of the Indo-European literary tradition, called up in Eliot’s work to reinforce the surprise at the size of the ranks of the dead. Eliot is using this formula to emphasize his theme of the death within life that plagues modern life.
Metrics is the formal arrangement of stressed and unstressed, or long and short syllables. Eliot intentionally abandoned notions of poem-wide meter and instead, throughout The Waste Land employs meter at intervals to abruptly alter the tone, to draw attention to a new speaker, or when quoting another literary work. In this first section of the poem, there is no unifying meter. Nevertheless, The first four lines are fairly straightforward iambic meter which might offer a sense of stability, but the enjambment interrupts the flow. By line 5, the meter begins to dissolve.
Eliot offers an excerpt from Wagner’s Tristan and Isolde, verses 5-8 which is written in iambic dimeter.
When we consider “Burial of the Dead” by the light of what Watkins refers to as stylistics we find some meat to sink our teeth into. If we accept stylistics as “all the other formal features of language,” (Watkins, 21) or, more to the point as “what makes a verbal message a work of art” (Watkins, 32) then we can examine Eliot’s masterpiece for his linguistic choices, for what makes it an important piece of modern poetry and not just a statement. Eliot consciously employs references, allusions, and images, making artistic word choices to maximize the effect of each word in order to evoke a strong response in the reader. His goal is to evoke in the reader a sense of loss, of barrenness, and of shock over the dissolution of spirituality in the modern age.
The first seven lines of the poem employ juicy fertility gerunds (breeding, mixing, stirring, covering, feeding) which are juxtaposed with language of desolation: “the cruellest month,” “dead land,” “ dull roots,” “ winter,” “forgetful, “ “dried tubers.” This precise use of language sets the tone for the whole piece and introduces the tension of expecting to find fertility where there ultimately is none. The unity which should arise from the rhyming gerunds is instead stilted and disjointed due to the enjambment.
The lines from the Hyacinth girl (35 -42) seem to be spoken in apostrophe. This is a poetic device not seem overly much in modern poetry. Eliot’s use here may be a way of invoking a more classical form of poetry, or he may be indicating that the speaker is engaged in discussion with herself. Either way, the result is a feeling of emptiness, of solitude, of something lost (either the formal poetic form, or her companion).
Lines 65 and 66 offer a rhyming couplet. There are lines throughout The Burial of the Dead which offer rhyme, but more often rhyme a word with itself; lines 25 & 26, 28 & 29 (which are also written using parallelism) and 62 & 63. These flashes of rhyming intentionally remind the reader of formal poetic styles. However, those styles lay broken through the body of the text, a comment on the dissolution of society and culture.
4. Create a prayer suitable for the main offering of a High Day rite which includes invocation of at least one deity suitable to the occasion, description of the offering and its suitability to the occasion, and the purpose of the offering, totaling at least 100 words. Any stage directions necessary for performance of the offering should be included.
I stand in the sacred grove on the day of the vernal equinox
The Earth agrees to bring forth life, Demeter rejoices in Her daughter’s return.
I rejoice in Her daughter’s return.
I feel the rising sap,
I feel the stirring seed,
I feel the strengthening sun.
Persephone, bouquet of violets
Persephone of the sunlit field
Persephone, with red-stained lip
Persephone, beloved by grains
Persephone of the deepest throne
Persephone of the white cypress
Persephone of the mirrors
Persephone, moved by Orpheus
Persephone of the lyre’s tear
Persephone of the Traveler’s gift
Persephone of the hens
Persephone of the secret seed
Persephone of the melted snow
Persephone of the shining stones
Persephone of the wreathed grave
Persephone of the paw-paw
Persephone of my garden.
To honor your return, I bring you blooms (hold aloft the potted violets), sweet violets, among the first to herald your approach.
Persephone, turn your face to this quickening land, bless this space with your bounty.
Hail to you Persephone (pour an offering of oil on the Fire)
[This question quite clearly states that the 100 word prayer must include an invocation of at least one deity suitable to the occasion (Persephone), description of the offering (“sweet violets”) and its suitability to the occasion (“among the first to herald [Persephone’s] approach”), and the purpose of the offering (“to honor Persephone’s] return,” and to “bless this space”). The question does not ask for an essay of explanation. ] (this portion deleted for the final submission)
The offering consists of “sweet violets” and a libation of oil. Violets are mentioned Homer’s Hymn to Demeter as one of the flowers being picked by Persephone when she is spirited away by Hades. Violets are among the first flowers to bloom in the Spring to herald the return of Persephone. Oil is a fairly standard offering to the Gods in ADF ritual. The purpose of giving these gifts is foremost to honor Persephone, as the Patron of the rite. The secondary purpose of the offerings is to ask Persephone to give her attention to the “quickening land” and to bless the immediate area of the offering.
Works consulted:
Bonewits, Isaac. Neopagan Rites: A Guide to Creating Public Rituals that Work. Woodbury, MN: Llewellyn Publications, 2007. Print.
Corrigan, I. (n.d.). The Intentions of Druidic Ritual. Retrieved June 26, 2015.
Eliot, Valerie; ed. The Waste Land: A Facsimile and Transcript of the Original Drafts Including the Annotations of Ezra Pound. Orlando: Harcourt Brace & Company, 1971. Print.
Ferguson, Margaret, Mary Jo Salter, Jon Stallworthy; eds. The Norton Anthology of Poetry Fourth Edition. New York; W. W. Norton, 1996. Print.
Nagy, Gregory. "Homeric Hymn to Demeter." University of Houston. Web. 2015. <http://www.uh.edu/~cldue/texts/demeter.html>.
Serith, Ceisiwr. A Book of Pagan Prayer. San Francisco: Weiser, 2002. Print.
Watkins, Calvert. "Aspects of Indo-European Poetics." How to Kill a Dragon Aspects of Indo-European Poetics. New York: Oxford UP, 1995. Print.
Young, Jean; trans. Snorri Sturluson: The Prose Edda. Berkeley: U. of California Press, 1954. Print.
1. Describe how ADF's order of ritual expresses the following concepts: "Serving the people"; "Reaffirming shared beliefs"; "Reestablishing the cosmic order"; "Building enthusiasm". (Min. 500 words)
Humans wrestle with the conviction that we are more than the sum of our physical parts. At our core we rebel at the idea that we are merely animate matter. We feel our own individuality; our consciousness transcends our physical self. One way in which we demonstrate this sense of “more than matter” is when we seek connection with the spiritual. I believe it is in the seeking of this connection that we begin to cultivate our best selves and begin to truly become more than a collection of instinct and automatic synaptic response. Propagating a spiritual life enhances one’s existence. In this way, religious and spiritual pursuits improve our individual human conditions and offer us a deeper level on which to connect with our fellow homo-sapiens.
Serving the People: If we accept that humans may find fulfillment and a satisfying sense of meaning by participating in spiritual work, then any endeavor which promotes that work is of service to the people. We humans hunger for a sense of belonging, a sense of fitting into some sort of order. It is this very hunger that is fed by religious cosmologies. We want to know that there is a plan, or at least a pattern to existence. The ADF COoR offers just that.
When we ritually Re-Establish the Cosmos, we connect ourselves to the pattern of existence and re-affirm our place in the order. Additionally, ADF ritual offers the folk the opportunity to make offering to the Kindreds and, in return to receive the gifts of the Kindreds. This opportunity to fully engage with the spiritual world feeds a deep part of ourselves. Entering into and strengthening a reciprocal relationship with the Kindreds should be an integral part of a personal pagan practice, and ADF allows the folk the opportunity to do precisely that (Corrigan). The Return Flow literally bestows upon the folk the wisdom or blessings from the Gods, Ancestors, and Land wights.
Reaffirming Shared Beliefs: “The more your participants know and accept the intellectual, artistic, psychological, social, and spiritual worldviews to be expressed by your liturgy, the more effective they will be affirming a group mind and the more each individual will get out of their experience” (Bonewits, 59). ADF used to have a step early in ritual called Establishing the Egregore, or group mind. The intention is to get everyone on the same wavelength, linked together in intention and in agreement as to how to further the goals of ritual. We do this through meditation, group chanting, and reminding the participants what we have in common (Bonewits, 29). The Two Powers meditation, often used at the very beginning of ritual, grounds the participants, sets the stage for meaningful ritual trance, and begins the work of connecting the microcosm of the individual celebrant to the macrocosm of the cosmos which be liturgically fleshed out later in ritual. Chants early in ritual are useful to reinforce the egregore.
As an orthopraxic religion we have an uneasy relationship with the word “belief.” We are really reaffirming what we agree will be true for the duration of the ritual which allows folk with a wide-ranging set of belief to function together as a cohesive people in ritual. ADF ritual reaffirms our group consensus that spiritual beings are real and external to us. We gather and open a channel of communication, via Opening the Gates, to those beings who reside in the Otherworlds, namely the gods and our ancestors. Our ritual further demonstrates that we believe that spiritual beings can and will enter into a gift/boon-based relationship with us. This is reaffirmed when we make sacrifices and offerings in ritual and then ask the beings, via the Omen-taking, addressed if they have accepted our gifts and/or what they offer in return. The folk then receive these reciprocal gifts via the Return Flow.
Re-establishing the Cosmic Order: Isaac Bonewits writes that, “a necessary first step to re-creating the cosmos seems to be defining a ritual center, the place from which the new cosmos can be born” (Bonewits, 31). Each public ADF ritual involves establishing the ritual space and participants within the cosmic map. When we perform this step, we are re-affirming the cosmic order and strengthening it. Our rites begin connecting with spiritual currents when we define the Sacred Center, also referred to as Establishing the Cosmic Order. Our ADF COoR includes step #5
(Re)Creating the Cosmos
- Sacred Center must be established in a
triadic Cosmos
- The Three Worlds or Realms must be
acknowledged
- The Fire must be included
- Sacred Center is most commonly represented
as Fire, Well and Tree
In my experience, the majority of ADF rituals employ a Fire-Well-Tree model. The Fire is magically connected to the upperworlds and serves as a conduit for offerings and blessing to travel from the folk to the Gods and from the Gods to the Folk. Similarly, the Well connects the ritual space and participants to the underworld carrying offerings to the halls of the Ancestors and chthonic deities and blessings back to the Folk. The Tree is the axis mundi, the lynch pin of the realms, around which the cosmos turns. The Tree is rooted in the lower realms, and reaches through the middle realms to uphold the upper realms.
Building Enthusiasm: There is an energetic current to ADF ritual. Beginning with explanations and internal meditations the folk are led through opening prayers and the establishment of the egregore. These preliminary steps are aimed at bringing the folk to a more unified mental state, each prayer or offerings getting the participants more in tune with one another and the current of the ritual itself (Bonewits, 29). By the time the Gates are opened the ritual has ideally reached its first plateau. When honoring the Kindreds, energy and enthusiasm are again rising. Songs, chants, and the opportunity for individual offering serve to keep building the current to its apex which is the main sending of power to the deities of the occasion, often called the main sacrifice (Bonewits, 35). This is the peak of the ritual and is immediately followed by the Omen; the main sacrifice and omen act as the ritual hinge after which the energy is unwound (Bonewits, 41).
2. Create a prayer of praise, offering, or thanksgiving to a deity modeled on a mythic, folkloric, or other literary source of at least 75 words. Include a summary of what your sources were and how you utilized them (summary at least 150 words).
At the center of the worlds I remember Ymir
Carved by the cosmic cow Ymir of the Rime
Begetter of Buri Ymir First Father
Cruelly cut by Odin Vili, Ve
Pulled into pieces by Odin, Vili, Ve
Made into Midgard by Odin, Vili Ve
Heaven’s Dome Ymir, your skull
Salty seas Ymir, your blood
Stones of the Earth Ymir, your bones
At the center of the worlds I remember Ymir
Carved by the cosmic cow Ymir of the Rime
Home of the folk, First Father Ymir
I certainly consider the Prose Edda of Snorri Sturluson to be a literary work. In the Edda is described the creation of the world from the butchered body of Ymir, one of two original beings. Ymir is killed by the sons of Bor, Odin, Vili, and Ve. From Ymir’s blood they made the seas, from his body the earth, mountains from his bones, pebbles from his teeth, and, finally, from his skull they fashioned the dome of the sky (Young, 34-35).
Using the tale as inspiration, I composed the above piece to be used as a part of the Re-Creation of the Cosmos. I consider it a poem of praise.
The structure of the poem is loosely based on Old English poetry in that each line is made up of two verses (or half-lines) divided by a caesura. The rhyme, such that there is, is alliterative. The lifts and drops (stressed and unstressed syllables) do not conform to any of the Old English poetic styles. However, in the stanzas which include reference to Ymir, each verse contains two lifts. The stanza containing reference to Odin, Vili, and Ve breaks this pattern and the second stanza’s second verses each contain three lifts. The purpose of that was to hint to the ear that something is fundamentally changed once the sacrifice is made.
3. Discuss a poem of at least eight lines as to its use of poetic elements (as defined by Watkins): formulaics, metrics, and stylistics. Pay particular attention to use of meter and phonetic devices, such as rhyme and alliteration. (Minimum 100 words beyond the poem itself.)
Excerpt from “The Waste Land” by T. S. Eliot
I. THE BURIAL OF THE DEAD
APRIL is the cruelest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain.
Winter kept us warm, covering
5
Earth in forgetful snow, feeding
A little life with dried tubers.
Summer surprised us, coming over the Starnbergersee
With a shower of rain; we stopped in the colonnade,
And went on in sunlight, into the Hofgarten,
10
And drank coffee, and talked for an hour.
Bin gar keine Russin, stamm’ aus Litauen, echt deutsch.
And when we were children, staying at the archduke’s,
My cousin’s, he took me out on a sled,
And I was frightened. He said, Marie,
15
Marie, hold on tight. And down we went.
In the mountains, there you feel free.
I read, much of the night, and go south in the winter.
What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow
Out of this stony rubbish? Son of man,
20
You cannot say, or guess, for you know only
A heap of broken images, where the sun beats,
And the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief,
And the dry stone no sound of water. Only
There is shadow under this red rock,
25
(Come in under the shadow of this red rock),
And I will show you something different from either
Your shadow at morning striding behind you
Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you;
I will show you fear in a handful of dust.
30
Frisch weht der Wind
Der Heimat zu,
Mein Irisch Kind,
Wo weilest du?
“You gave me hyacinths first a year ago;
35
They called me the hyacinth girl.”
—Yet when we came back, late, from the Hyacinth garden,
Your arms full, and your hair wet, I could not
Speak, and my eyes failed, I was neither
Living nor dead, and I knew nothing,
40
Looking into the heart of light, the silence.
Öd’ und leer das Meer.
Madame Sosostris, famous clairvoyante,
Had a bad cold, nevertheless
Is known to be the wisest woman in Europe,
45
With a wicked pack of cards. Here, said she,
Is your card, the drowned Phoenician Sailor,
(Those are pearls that were his eyes. Look!)
Here is Belladonna, the Lady of the Rocks,
The lady of situations.
50
Here is the man with three staves, and here the Wheel,
And here is the one-eyed merchant, and this card,
Which is blank, is something he carries on his back,
Which I am forbidden to see. I do not find
The Hanged Man. Fear death by water.
55
I see crowds of people, walking round in a ring.
Thank you. If you see dear Mrs. Equitone,
Tell her I bring the horoscope myself:
One must be so careful these days.
Unreal City,
60
Under the brown fog of a winter dawn,
A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many,
I had not thought death had undone so many.
Sighs, short and infrequent, were exhaled,
And each man fixed his eyes before his feet.
65
Flowed up the hill and down King William Street,
To where Saint Mary Woolnoth kept the hours
With a dead sound on the final stroke of nine.
There I saw one I knew, and stopped him, crying “Stetson!
You who were with me in the ships at Mylae!
70
That corpse you planted last year in your garden,
Has it begun to sprout? Will it bloom this year?
Or has the sudden frost disturbed its bed?
Oh keep the Dog far hence, that’s friend to men,
Or with his nails he’ll dig it up again!
75
You! hypocrite lecteur!—mon semblable,—mon frère!”
Formulaics as defined by Watkins, are those phrases repeated through the family of Indo-European literature which indicate, by their repetition and recurrence, values or themes held to be important within a culture. For a phrase to be considered a formula it must have a consistent metrical structure as well as present oft-encountered theme. An example would be the theme of “imperishable fame.” Watkins presents case after case of the concept of a man’s unquenchable fame and offers this grammatical formula, “where a man in the subject, the notion HAVE (IMPERISHABLE FAME) is expressed either by the verb BE (*h,es-) and a dative pronoun (PRO), or by a true verb (e.g., *segh-, *dheh,- middle) and a subject pronoun, together with an optional form of the word for EVER(LASTING), ETERNITY, LIFETIME. . .here a god is the subject the verb is GRANT (e.g. *dheh,- active) and the indirect object (man) is expressed in the dative pronoun (PRO)” (Watkins, 177-8). I can find no instances of any of the specific formulas discussed by Watkins in this section of The Waste Land though Eliot extensively employed what he referred to as the Mythic Method which is, in many ways, arguably a contemporary use of formulaics drawing from all of classical literature and not just ancient Indo-European texts.
If we move away from the detailed grammatical analysis of ‘Watkinite’ formulas and focus on his broader definition, “formulas are the vehicles, the carriers of themes; they are the collectively the verbal expression of the traditional culture of the Indo-Europeans themselves” (Watkins, 152), then we may begin to discern such in The Waste Land. What else is literary allusion, but reference to a shared literary culture? Eliot’s inclusion of fragments of classical literary works is precisely that, an invocation of culture. The clearest example perhaps is found in “The Burial of the Dead” in lines 62 & 63, “A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many, / I had not thought death had undone so many.” This mirrors an image from Dante’s Inferno lines 55-57, “si lunga tratta / di gente, ch’io non avrei mai creduto /che morte tanta n’avesse disfatta” (Eliot’s notes). Roughly translated in my imperfect Italian, the last two lines double-checked by GoogleTranslate, we read, “such a long line / of people, I would never have believed / that death had undone so many.” Dante surely is a part of the Indo-European literary tradition, called up in Eliot’s work to reinforce the surprise at the size of the ranks of the dead. Eliot is using this formula to emphasize his theme of the death within life that plagues modern life.
Metrics is the formal arrangement of stressed and unstressed, or long and short syllables. Eliot intentionally abandoned notions of poem-wide meter and instead, throughout The Waste Land employs meter at intervals to abruptly alter the tone, to draw attention to a new speaker, or when quoting another literary work. In this first section of the poem, there is no unifying meter. Nevertheless, The first four lines are fairly straightforward iambic meter which might offer a sense of stability, but the enjambment interrupts the flow. By line 5, the meter begins to dissolve.
Eliot offers an excerpt from Wagner’s Tristan and Isolde, verses 5-8 which is written in iambic dimeter.
When we consider “Burial of the Dead” by the light of what Watkins refers to as stylistics we find some meat to sink our teeth into. If we accept stylistics as “all the other formal features of language,” (Watkins, 21) or, more to the point as “what makes a verbal message a work of art” (Watkins, 32) then we can examine Eliot’s masterpiece for his linguistic choices, for what makes it an important piece of modern poetry and not just a statement. Eliot consciously employs references, allusions, and images, making artistic word choices to maximize the effect of each word in order to evoke a strong response in the reader. His goal is to evoke in the reader a sense of loss, of barrenness, and of shock over the dissolution of spirituality in the modern age.
The first seven lines of the poem employ juicy fertility gerunds (breeding, mixing, stirring, covering, feeding) which are juxtaposed with language of desolation: “the cruellest month,” “dead land,” “ dull roots,” “ winter,” “forgetful, “ “dried tubers.” This precise use of language sets the tone for the whole piece and introduces the tension of expecting to find fertility where there ultimately is none. The unity which should arise from the rhyming gerunds is instead stilted and disjointed due to the enjambment.
The lines from the Hyacinth girl (35 -42) seem to be spoken in apostrophe. This is a poetic device not seem overly much in modern poetry. Eliot’s use here may be a way of invoking a more classical form of poetry, or he may be indicating that the speaker is engaged in discussion with herself. Either way, the result is a feeling of emptiness, of solitude, of something lost (either the formal poetic form, or her companion).
Lines 65 and 66 offer a rhyming couplet. There are lines throughout The Burial of the Dead which offer rhyme, but more often rhyme a word with itself; lines 25 & 26, 28 & 29 (which are also written using parallelism) and 62 & 63. These flashes of rhyming intentionally remind the reader of formal poetic styles. However, those styles lay broken through the body of the text, a comment on the dissolution of society and culture.
4. Create a prayer suitable for the main offering of a High Day rite which includes invocation of at least one deity suitable to the occasion, description of the offering and its suitability to the occasion, and the purpose of the offering, totaling at least 100 words. Any stage directions necessary for performance of the offering should be included.
I stand in the sacred grove on the day of the vernal equinox
The Earth agrees to bring forth life, Demeter rejoices in Her daughter’s return.
I rejoice in Her daughter’s return.
I feel the rising sap,
I feel the stirring seed,
I feel the strengthening sun.
Persephone, bouquet of violets
Persephone of the sunlit field
Persephone, with red-stained lip
Persephone, beloved by grains
Persephone of the deepest throne
Persephone of the white cypress
Persephone of the mirrors
Persephone, moved by Orpheus
Persephone of the lyre’s tear
Persephone of the Traveler’s gift
Persephone of the hens
Persephone of the secret seed
Persephone of the melted snow
Persephone of the shining stones
Persephone of the wreathed grave
Persephone of the paw-paw
Persephone of my garden.
To honor your return, I bring you blooms (hold aloft the potted violets), sweet violets, among the first to herald your approach.
Persephone, turn your face to this quickening land, bless this space with your bounty.
Hail to you Persephone (pour an offering of oil on the Fire)
[This question quite clearly states that the 100 word prayer must include an invocation of at least one deity suitable to the occasion (Persephone), description of the offering (“sweet violets”) and its suitability to the occasion (“among the first to herald [Persephone’s] approach”), and the purpose of the offering (“to honor Persephone’s] return,” and to “bless this space”). The question does not ask for an essay of explanation. ] (this portion deleted for the final submission)
The offering consists of “sweet violets” and a libation of oil. Violets are mentioned Homer’s Hymn to Demeter as one of the flowers being picked by Persephone when she is spirited away by Hades. Violets are among the first flowers to bloom in the Spring to herald the return of Persephone. Oil is a fairly standard offering to the Gods in ADF ritual. The purpose of giving these gifts is foremost to honor Persephone, as the Patron of the rite. The secondary purpose of the offerings is to ask Persephone to give her attention to the “quickening land” and to bless the immediate area of the offering.
Works consulted:
Bonewits, Isaac. Neopagan Rites: A Guide to Creating Public Rituals that Work. Woodbury, MN: Llewellyn Publications, 2007. Print.
Corrigan, I. (n.d.). The Intentions of Druidic Ritual. Retrieved June 26, 2015.
Eliot, Valerie; ed. The Waste Land: A Facsimile and Transcript of the Original Drafts Including the Annotations of Ezra Pound. Orlando: Harcourt Brace & Company, 1971. Print.
Ferguson, Margaret, Mary Jo Salter, Jon Stallworthy; eds. The Norton Anthology of Poetry Fourth Edition. New York; W. W. Norton, 1996. Print.
Nagy, Gregory. "Homeric Hymn to Demeter." University of Houston. Web. 2015. <http://www.uh.edu/~cldue/texts/demeter.html>.
Serith, Ceisiwr. A Book of Pagan Prayer. San Francisco: Weiser, 2002. Print.
Watkins, Calvert. "Aspects of Indo-European Poetics." How to Kill a Dragon Aspects of Indo-European Poetics. New York: Oxford UP, 1995. Print.
Young, Jean; trans. Snorri Sturluson: The Prose Edda. Berkeley: U. of California Press, 1954. Print.