Shirley Satterfield

by: Shirley Satterfield

James Joyce: Ireland’s Premiere Artist

James Joyce was born in February of 1882 the Irish city of Dublin and became one of the 20th century’s foremost writers of the Modernist Movement. He was an innovative writer who was the father of a new form of writing called stream of consciousness narrative in which the author describes a stream of random thoughts that pass through a character’s mind as if in real time, but not necessarily in a logical order.
In his autobiography “Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man” Joyce writes about himself in the third person, essentially becoming both the narrator of the book and the main character whom he calls Stephan Dedalus, a young student in a boarding school who was also his alter-ego and he records the childlike thoughts as if thoughts of a young child, almost in baby talk.

Once upon a time and a very good time it was there was a moocow coming
down along the road and this moocow that was down along the road met a
nicens little boy named baby tuckoo… He was baby tuckoo. The moocow
came down the road where Betty Byne lived: she sold lemon platt.

O, the wild rose blossoms
On the little green place
He sang the song that was his song.
O, the green
wothe botheth.
Although his father failed in business and his family of two parents and nine siblings fell into deep poverty and dark squalor, Joyce attended a private Roman Catholic Boarding school and another private Parochial anyway as a child. His family made the necessary financial sacrifices to educate him because of the self-evident intellectual and academic gifts he demonstrated early in life. Joyce became a devout Catholic as a child and even became quite religious for a while, but as he became a young man he became disillusioned by a church corrupted by politics and demanding of unquestioning conformity by its parishioners, a kind of mind-numbing conformity deemed bad for society by Joyce.
Finally Joyce left Ireland altogether to live with his wife and two children as an expatriate in the countries of Italy and Switzerland where unfortunately his ballet dancer daughter Lucia was diagnosed with the mental illness of schizophrenia by famed Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung, his daughter eventually becoming a permanent resident of an institution, inspiring Joyce to write this poem:

A Flower Given to my Daughter,

Frail the white rose and frail are
Her hands that gave
Whose soul is sere and paler
Than time’s wan wave.

Rosefrail and fair — yet frailest
A wonder wild
In gentle eyes thou veilest,
My blueveined child. 

Notice the profound simplicity of this poem. J oyce describes both the woman that gives the flower and the precious daughter that receives it as being frail, even using the image of a blueveined child to describe his child which conjures up images in this reader of what the “old wives” used to call a blue baby, a child that is dying of a heart defect. Yet she receives the gift “in gentle eyes” denoting compassion. Perhaps both frail women were residents of the same hospital.
James Joyce, a giant of a writer, was probably one of the darkest and most complicated personalities in the literary world, and writing as though he was standing afar-off from his characters and peering down a tunnel of time, and the thing that made him so different was that not only did his writings engage the five senses of sight, sound, smell, taste, and texture, but also Joyce could appeal to the sixth sense of the human intuition.

by: Shirley Satterfield

John Milton: The Great English Scholar Poet

Born in London in the year of 1608 Milton lived and wrote at a time when England was in political turmoil and religious flux, and to understand Milton you have to understand Oliver Cromwell’s revolution for more personal freedom, his government and his Puritanical religious views, with Milton being the poetical voice and Cromwell’s civil servant of these changing times in the British Isles. In short, Milton himself was no great friend of King Charles I and his age old Monarchy and was, for the most part, ignored in England by the gentry of his time, especially after the death of Cromwell when the King reascended his throne and took back his power.
However, Milton was an adept poet and a man of Letters who wrote in the four languages of English, Latin, Italian and Greek and made his mark on the rest of the world to the point that he is considered to be second only to Shakespeare in his poetic stature by scholars today. And in fact, Shakespeare was greatly admired by Milton and was his seminal inspiration when he called the Bard a “Dear son of memory, great heir of Fame…” in his poem On Shakespeare, meaning that Shakespeare would always be remembered for his great works for all time.
But Milton’s own skill as a poet is self evident in his twin poems on Mirth and Melancholy which describes two opposite moods reflected against each other and two different kinds of people with opposite humors, one a morning person and the other a night person but who share the same dreamy muse, each poem reflected the image of the other in perfect form and rhyme scheme. These are some highlights:

L” Allegro

“To many a youth and many a maid,
Dancing in the checkered shade; 
And young and old come forth to play
On a sunshine holiday,”
– – – 
“Such sights as youthful poets dream
On summer eves by haunted stream.” 
– – – 
“And ever against eating cares;
Lap me in soft Lydian airs,” 

Il Penseroso

“Hide me from the day’s garish eye,”
– – – 
“And let some strange mysterious dream
Wave at his wings in airy stream
Of lively portraiture displayed
Softly on my eyelids laid.”
– – – 
“Dissolve me into ecstasies,
And bring all heaven before mine eyes.” 
Unfortunately Milton lost his eyesight as he aged, but by no means his insight when he wrote his book length masterpiece Paradise Lost about the fall of man in the garden and his eventual redemption by Jesus Christ in Paradise Regained when he dictated his work to his daughter on his deathbed in 1667. Legend has it that this scholarly man lost his eyesight from overmuch reading of the Greek and Latin classics by candlelight at night.

by: Shirley Satterfield

Langston Hughes:The Harlem Voice Prophetic Pain and Hope

Born in 1902, Langston Hughes was a great American Negro poet who who flourished as a writer and an author during the Harlem Renaissance Roaring i920′. He was a versatile writer who wrote in many different genres including poetry, plays and novels, but we will only give focus in this article on his poetry.
America, during the 1920’s was essentially a prejudice, segregated, repressive regime which relegated people of color to a no-man’s-land of second class citizenship. The reality was that for at least half the population of America, complete freedoms were being denied and this sparked a political controversy, and a kind of cultural revolution of sorts, in New York City’s vast neighborhood of Black Harlem which was expressed in an explosion of the African American literary and musical arts. During this time Hughes came along who was a brilliant, sensitive man with a great soul and an uncanny vision of what will happen in the future,
It was a dark time in America when Hughes came along to shine a little light on us and the whole world about the humanity of all people regardless of hue or color. He wrote:

The Negro Speaks of Rivers

I’ve known rivers:
I’ve known rivers ancient as the world and older than the
flow of human blood in human veins.

My soul has grown deep like rivers.

I bathed in the Euphrates when dawns were young.
I built my hut near the Congo and it lulled me to sleep.
I looked upon the Nile and raised the pyramids above it.
I heard the singing of the Mississippi when Abe Lincoln
when down to New Orleans, and I’ve seen its muddy
bosom turn all golden in the sunset.
I’ve known river;
Ancient, dusky rivers.

My soul has grown deep like rivers.

This is a work in which Hughes reminds us that the Black Man shares the same blood and the same rivers with all men and that and that He has been here with the whole collective “us” on this planet since the dawn of time itself and are sharing the same Divinely inspired spirit as is in us all regardless of color. Then Hughes waxes prophetic about the future here where he expresses both his pain and his hope in these few verses.
I, Too

I, too, sing America.

I am the darker brother.
They send me to eat in the kitchen
When company comes,
But I laugh,
And eat well,
And grow strong.
Tomorrow,
I’ll be at the table
When company comes.
Nobody will dare
Say to me,
Eat in the kitchen,
Then.

Besides, They’ll see how beautiful I am
And be ashamed–
I, too, am America.

Here he expresses a sort of serene acceptance of the injustice of the present without losing hope for the future, all the while pointing out to America specifically what is wrong here but without disowning or losing hope for the moral advancement of his his beloved America. In short, Langston Hughes, the man whose dreams were so deferred because of the color of his skin, and whose dreams of more freedom and equality for the future had become burdensome to him, became a prophetic voice of the future and set the stage for the Civil Rights Movement, when Martin Luther King took up the gauntlet of this dream that had just exploded into a worldwide movement of brotherly love. Hughes had remarkable foresight in this poem when he wrote:

Harlem

What happens to a dream deferred?

Does it dry up
like a raisin in the sun?
Or fester like a sore–
And then run?
Does it stink like rotten meat?
Or crust over like a syrupy sweet?

Maybe it just sags
like a heavy load.

Or does it explode?

I think this man’s dream just exploded throughout the generations of earth’s people and still explodes in many American hearts today. Lets all take up the gauntlet.