The Notion of Wind on Rossetti’s and Damono’s Literary Work

Christina Rossetti and Sapardi Djoko Damono are two poets born in different nationalities. Both mostly drew simple poems using natural objects, such as wind. The wind as a symbol of poem writing seems more appealing towards the poets and also the readers to interpret. The paper discusses several poems involved wind as an element on Rossetti’s work. It also analyses “Angin 3” by Damono.

Christina Rossetti and the Triumph of Revision

Christina Rossetti is well known for subjecting her poems to what Jerome McGann calls ‘severe prunings’, the most conspicuous of her strategies for achieving her characteristically spare lyricism. She isolates the two stanzas of ‘Bitter for Sweet’ from a longer draft; she retrieves the two stanzas of ‘The Bourne’ from a shapeless 12-stanza poem. The extant Rossetti Notebooks, now at the Bodleian and the British Libraries, reveal intensely careful work—an adroit verbal change here, a rhythmic adjustment there—on the poems that eventually appear in Goblin Market (1862) and The Prince’s Progress (1866). For Rossetti, a manuscript ‘fair copy’ seldom remains pristine. The revisions to a poem such as ‘My Dream’ show that the deft revision that produces Rossettian understatement in her poems also produces their fine exuberance.

Poetry in the Making

Poetry in the Making investigates the compositional practices of Victorian poets, as made evident in the autograph manuscripts of their poems. Written in an accessible and stimulating style, the book offers careful readings of individual drafts, paying attention to the revisions, cancellations, interlineations, trials of rhyme and form, and sometimes the large structural changes that these documents reveal. The book shows how manuscript revisions offer insights into the creative priorities and decisions of major Victorian poets (Wordsworth, Tennyson, the Brownings, Clough, Hopkins, Christina Rossetti, Swinburne, and Yeats); and investigates ideas of composition in the period, particularly the uneasy balance between inspiration and labour. Collectively, the chapters develop a survey of how Victorian poets experienced and understood their own creativity, setting abstract claims about inspiration and craftsmanship against their own practical experiences. The book testifies to the value for criticism of poetic drafts, establishing the significance of revision and of manuscript studies for the field of Victorian poetry and for literary scholarship more generally.

Poetry

This chapter suggests that Christmas poetry offers readers a way to become intimate with a loving, elegiac, mysterious, and communal emotional experience particular to the season. With reference to poems by Maya Angelou, e. e. cummings, Toi Derricotte, T. S. Eliot, Martín Espada, Robert Frost, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Langston Hughes, Elizabeth Jennings, Peter Larkin, W. S. Merwin, Christina Rossetti, Evie Shockley, Sufjan Stevens, and W. B. Yeats, the chapter argues that only poetry can capture the magical, incantatory, and holy spirit of the Annunciation, Advent, Christmas trees, Christmas Eve, Epiphany, and Christmas Day. Poetry’s oblique and indirect expression is ideally suited to a series of feasts and fasts that culminate in an event that replaces our desire for empirical reason and reassurance with the joy, wonder, and love of uncertainty and faith.

JOHN McLEOD (b. 1934)Peacocks With a Hundred Eyes (1984)

This chapter discusses Peacocks with a Hundred Eyes by John McLeod. Written for counter-tenor, this cycle skilfully exploits the distinctive timbre of that voice. Here, McLeod manages to create an intriguing and distinctive amalgam of baroque and contemporary gestures, including double-dotted Purcellian rhythms, graceful curling melismas, and glissandos. The composer furthermore has the happy idea of intertwining the texts, and this works splendidly, providing a balanced and satisfyingly cogent structure. Percy Bysshe Shelley's familiar poem (‘Music, When Soft Voices Die’) is split into four, each two-line fragment followed by a Christina Rossetti setting, which is expanded by piano solo passages, and it all ends in buoyant mood with the well-loved ‘A Birthday’. Unifying features include repeats of pitch sequences, often as haunting refrains. The cycle runs continuously, and its richly contrasting material and imaginative sweep sustain interest throughout.