Eternity
Posted: 20 October 2007
Word Count: 56
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Eternity
Eternity seen as
endless time
leaves life’s mystery
untouched
A sentence with
no point
a story with
no end
a journey with
no arrival
a life with no
youth or age
knowledge with
no wisdom
beauty with
no rebirth
and love without
its deepest power
of loss
Death is part
of the grammar
of life
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Comments by other Members
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 Elsie at 14:06 on 21 October 2007
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Zettel, a good point, well put. Just wondering if different lines breaks, that would put the stress on the important words, rather than 'with, would help?
Say for example:
Eternity seen as endless time
leaves life’s mystery untouched.
A sentence with no point,
a story with no end,
a journey with no arrival,
a life with no youth or age,
knowledge with no wisdom,
beauty with no rebirth,
and love without
its deepest power of loss.
Death is part of the grammar of life
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 joanie at 20:05 on 22 October 2007
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Hi Zettel. I have enjoyed reading; very thought-provoking! I wondered, however, why the pattern of 'no' at the start of the lines was broken with 'a life with no/youth or age'. I am always aware of structure and patterns (as you probably know) and it just made me pause and think. Perhaps that was your intention!
I love the final stanza; I have repeated it several times already.
joanie
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.JPG) Zettel at 10:11 on 23 October 2007
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Elsie
Thanks. I'm very tempted. You highlight an interesting issue it would be nice to have general comment on.
This is that I rather think your line structure makes the rhythm and structure of the WORDS better than mine. But...
... a poem is in a sense a kind of dance between words and thought and the balance between the two. To continue the metaphor, while both thought and words are always present there remains a question of which of them so to speak leads. Personally I think my 'philosophical' poems of which this is one, are weaker than those where the evocation of feeling and emotion is leading. (Your Day was one of the others). But I am fascinated by the challenge of thought-leading poetry.
Considered in this way the rhythm of reader response is different. The ryhthm of emotional, sensual responses to a poem reflects the rhythm of emotional sensual responses in life. They are wonderfully (or horribly) immediate and much of the immmediacy and power of poetry is derived from this fact. A basic biological fact about human beings to which poetry speaks better perhaps than any word-based art form. (Music is even more direct). But philosophical ideas by their nature try to dig under the outer layers things. Perhaps more like a scientist. The poet sees beauty in the colour, scent, image and setting of the cherry blossom. The scientist sees beauty in the underlying botanical structures that bring about the very phenomena that excite the poet. There is beauty in both. Not lesser or greater - just different. (We have to be wary of the tendency of language through words like deep and inner to posit a false hierachy).
To dispel this fog of words let me apply my thought back to the poem. Words like 'eternity' 'wisdom' 'mystery' 'wisdom' 'knowledge' 'death' and even 'endless' and 'grammar' are philosophical in character. My point is that these words should resonate with thought rather than feeling leading. And response to thought is a slower more contemplative rhythm. SO I like not to put more than one of these 'pebble' words on a line so the ripples they are supposed to generate have a little time to work. Put more than one on a line as your correct structural change suggests, and the poem runs the danger of being too overtly philosophical or worse didactic. I used to write a lot of poetry like that, much of it I now find unreadable. I am constantly trying to improve the expression of philosophical ideas poetically. That's tricky because like science, philosophical thought is cumulative not existential (paradoxically). Perfection for me is the poem that resonates with thought and feeling but I guess we have to look to the great poets of whom Blake for the purposes of this argument, is the paradigm.
Anyway, thanks for the very thought-provoking comment. Sorry about the verbiage it generated.
Joannie
I need to put 'youth' and 'age' in contrast to one another and that foreced a pattern break. I'm making a virtue of necessity if I say that phrase repetition is a very powerful technique that I use a lot but it can outstay its welcome and when I saw that the line you mention just broke up that pattern I was pleased.
One could apply to language a remark French Philosopher Simone Weil once made about Nature:
"If you would command Nature (langauge)then first you must obey Her." (Her image was of a sailboat tacking upwind).
regards and thanks for the comments
Zettel
PS Philosophically the ultimate achievement is what for me only Wittgenstein ever achieved: 'thought' poetry where thoughts themselves interact and resonate in a poetic way in each reader's mind. His thought is a 'conversation' with the reader just as capable of different interpretations as any poem. Probably why he's no longer a fashionable philosopher. Philosophy got hi-jacked a long time ago by scientists and their false certainties. But that's another hare I won't run here.
Z
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 Tina at 16:04 on 23 October 2007
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Fascinating, fascinating stuff - gosh I have really enjoyed reading this - extraordianry Z !!!
AND not something I am going to delve into as I have scant - almost non-existant, philosophical knowledge BUT as for the poem what about this as a suggestion? Ihave recently been introduced to spacing in poetry - putting spaces between words and lines to emphasise meaning and augment the theme - you could use spacing in this poem to create that effect if you wanted to give it a go?
Like:
Eternity
seen as
endless time
leaves life’s mystery
untouched
Just a thought??
Enjoyed this - thanks
Tina
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Zettel at 11:11 on 24 October 2007
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Thanks Ti and Vy. Appreciated
Tina
NOW I'm gonna seem perverse. You've followed my principle exactly - but too many gaps and the ideas don't quite link smoothly. There's a common practice in sound editing in movies which we never really notice. Can't remember what it's called. In this we hear the dialogue of the next visual scene while we are still looking at the scene before. When you notice it, it's a bit weird, then you immediately forget it again. It's part of the subtle 'grammar' of movies.
Not quite the same thing but 'thought' poetry if I can use such a dumb phrase (because all poetry is both thought and feeling) sort of links the ideas by overlapping them. Read anything of Wittgenstein's and while the content might drive you nuts you'll see the technique in action. Perhaps a more poetic metaphor might be a still early morning pond and a supply of pebbles. Lots of things you can do and sequences and rhythms of throwing the pebbles but the one I like best is throwing one and watching the ripples radiate. Then just before they fade tryng to get a second pebble to exactly the same place (the skill challenge adds to the fun) and watching the near, but not quite the same radiating ripples chase the last vestiges of the ones before. So you have a series of interlinked beautiful effects, each one both different but also the same.
The only indeterminacy in what happens, the only thing that say science with its weight, shape, velocity of the pebble and the density, surface tension etc of the water cannot subsume under laws and predict is where I intend to throw it and where it does in fact land. These are of course not the same BUT they are inseparably connected by my intention which intitates the whole process. What a shame philosophers and scientists don't talk more of ponds and pebbles and less of synapses and mitochondria etc etc.
Sorry now you too have sent me off to the faeries with philosophy.
Thanks for the comment. Like Elsie you too are right in a sense.
Regards
Z
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Jordan789 at 16:53 on 24 October 2007
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Hi Zettel, and everyone.
What I like to do with a poem that I don't full comprehend is to go through it line by line, and detail my impressions and possible understandings of each, in order to hopefully, at the end, reach an understanding of the poem. So, here goes.
Eternity
Eternity seen as
endless time
leaves life’s mystery
untouched
The terms are not simply "eternity" but "eternity [that is] seen as endless time" that "leaves life's mystery untouched." I immediately wonder about the distinction in "eternity" because isn't eternity already "endless time?" And then I wonder about what "leaves life's mystery untouched." And how could the idea of eternity "leave life's mystery's untouched?" I begin to make a connection to religious views of eternity, where scientific views are denounced in favor of stories and the what-not, but already in my mind a hundred problems have sprung up with making a grandiose statement such as this.
A sentence with
no point
a story with
no end
a journey with
no arrival
These three points seem to share a similar thread, because they all deal with a "point" "end" and "arrival" or a certain amount of finality. The examples continue from the start, where the word "as" could be added before each line, as a series of similes to the first stanza: "Eternity... leaves life's mystery untouched as a sentence with no point..."
And I must say this confuses me. Surely, no sentence ever uttered has no point whatsoever? Or is this the point?
And a story with no end, and a journey with no arrival: cannot it be said that the journey is the ultimate arrival? Or is this also the point?
a life with no
youth or age
Is this what is meant in the start by the first stanza? That this is not simply a perception of eternity, or knowledge of eternity, but an "If humans lived like the God's" sort of comparison, a praise in the value of death? Like the race in gulliver's travels who although live for much longer than their friends and family, and turn pallid and depressed by the time they're 38?
knowledge with
no wisdom
Quite an abstract distinction.
beauty with
no rebirth
and love without
its deepest power
of loss
Death is part
of the grammar
of life
Ah. Yes.
So I see. As you can see, that first stanza really sent me on a confusing spin and I wasn't sure what to make of it. Once I arrived down by the stanza of life without old age or youth, I sort of saw the meaning of the poem, but I'm sorry to say that it's sort of platudinal. It's an old argument. From Gulliver's travels, to Bette Midler's "The Rose," and even in Harry Potter, this issue has been spat and wrangled and wrangled some more.
If I were to follow Burough's guidelines in critiquing a poem--I have found the intentions of the speaker, they are said in the last stanza of the poem, to show that "Death is a part of the grammar of life."
Has he achieved it?
I am unsure. Part of me says Yes, but part of me wants to say No.
Was it worth achieving?
Again, I am unsure. I feel somewhat unsatisfied because I feel that I already know that death is part of life, and all of the similes to prove this point seemed dry platitudes.
I know that this will probably offend you, zettle. But I've been through this with you before, and ultimately it comes to the two of us having vast differences in the ideals and methods of poetry.
-Jordan
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Zettel at 19:14 on 24 October 2007
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Not offended old boy.
But planet Jordan does seem to me a curious place.
Zettle (sic)
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