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Lesson Plan for Wednesday, November 15, 2023 (inspiration by combining inspiration from two
different poems) with Barbara Regenspan

Today we are going to think more deeply about how to exploit poetry’s concentrations in order to
make the emotionality and “sense” of two very different poems “speak to one another.” In our own
combined, and then revised individual poems, we’ll be “voicing” our interpretations of the
inspiration of the Victorian-era poet Gerard Manley Hopkins as these interpretations “speak to” the
interpretations of the very contemporary poem, “Under the Shadow of Death” by Lisa Loden, who
is responding to the death of unarmed civilians, including children, in Gaza in present time.

"Pied Beauty" is a poem by Victorian poet, Gerard Manley Hopkins. It is a kind of hymn of praise
to God that marvels at the varied world that God created. The poem sees God's majesty (which we
can subsititute for any notion of the divine we hold) not just in nature's sheer variety, but also in the
labors of humankind and in the abstract categories that people use to understand their experience of
the world. The poem was written in 1877 but not published until 1918. Where do we identify use
of poetry’s concentrations?

Pied Beauty by Gerard Manley Hopkins

1Glory be to God for dappled things –

2 For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow;
3 For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim;
4Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches’ wings;
5 Landscape plotted and pieced – fold, fallow, and plough;
6 And áll trádes, their gear and tackle and trim.
7All things counter, original, spare, strange;
8 Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)
9 With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim;
10He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change:
11 Praise him.
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Under the Shadow of Death

By: Lisa Loden

In the shade of the mango tree,

beside the rosebush,
stands an ancient plowshare,
a symbol of peace,
created from forged iron.
Perhaps it was once iron swords.

Under the lengthening shadow of death,

live seventeen million
Israelis, Gazans, Palestinians
divided by
impenetrable walls,
walls of suspicion, hatred, fear.
Grief, and suffering stalk their streets

At the Gazan borders, by the sea

untold thousands, soldiers
stand ready to invade.
A million ordered to evacuate
each one a mother, father,
brother, sister, daughter, son.

The dream of peaceful plowshares,

scent of roses, redolence of ripe mango
obliterated by smoke, shrapnel
and fallen ash on once holy ground.
stained now by death’s red shadow,
and the double-sided stab of iron swords.

Lisa Loden continues with non-poetic narrative to express her horror about the killing of unarmed
families, including their children, and about the inexcuseable humanitarian disaster that is Gaza at
the hands of the relentless Israeli army and its bombs and guns.
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So the challenge of today’s writing experiment is to consider opposite emotions in one poem.

Poetry’s six concentrations as identified by the poet who wrote, “I Wanted to Be Surprised,” one of
the most loving and precise Buddhist-inspired poets, Jane Hirshfield, author of Nine Gates:
Entering the Mind of Poetry (The page numbers refer to that book, which is one you might want to
read someday.)

1) Music Here’s an example of musicality/prosody in Yeats’ famous poem “The Lake Isle of
Innisfree” (That “lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore” becomes part of and/or
resonates with “the deep heart’s core.”)

2) Rhetoric (P. 11)“…rhetoric’s concern is the precise and beautiful movement of mind in
language. “…We need to know where we stand”) “…”The word art is neighbor to artifice”
(Sometimes we can identify “rhetoric” when we answer the question: “To what end is the narrator
speaking?”)

3) Image (p. 17) “The deepest of image’s meanings is its recognition of our continuity with the rest
of existence: within a good image, outer and subjective worlds illumine one another, break bread
together, converse.” “With my whole body, I taste these peaches,” wrote [Wallace] Stevens, and
(Jane Hirshfield says, “it is by our own bodies that we know what this means.” “Thinking with the
fields of image, the mind crosses also into the knowledge the unconscious holds—into the shape-
shifting wisdom of dream.” (p.22)

4) Emotion Pablo Neruda reference on p. 23: “the furious blood” note (p. 23: “music of forceful
repetition, both in rhythms and words…”

5) Narrative (p. 26) “torytelling, like rhetoric, pulls us through the cognitive mind as much as
through the emotions.”

6) Voice (It’s easy to confuse with rhetoric, but rhetoric has more to do with grammar and
construction choices in terms of a style in getting across some message, whereas voice is about the
(p. 29) “the lived inhabitance a good poem gives off.” What great voice gives a poem is the sense
that its ink, it’s literal words, have “been dipped in the stubborn ink of one person’s uniqueness.”