TWO VIEWS OF MARY OLIVER’S POEM THE SUMMER DAY: DOOR ONE, DOOR TWO, OR SOMETHING ELSE

 The Summer Day

Who made the world? 
Who made the swan, and the black bear? 
Who made the grasshopper? 
This grasshopper, I mean— 
the one who has flung herself out of the grass, 
the one who is eating sugar out of my hand, 
who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down— 
who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes. 
Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face. 
Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away. 
I don’t know exactly what a prayer is. 
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down 
into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass, 
how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields, 
which is what I have been doing all day. 
Tell me, what else should I have done? 
Doesn’t everything die at last, and too soon? 
Tell me, what is it you plan to do 
with your one wild and precious life?

There is a subtle irony there. But is it affectionate, sharp or mocking?

The big phrase “your one wild and precious life” is laden: “wild” hints at vitality and daring; precious” suggests rarity and great  value; and “one” of course stresses we have but one life to live.

Yet when the speaker refers to how she lives, she’s strikingly prosaic: lying in grass; kneeling; wandering; idling; considering a grasshopper. Isn’t there self-deprecating humour in that after all of that laden line her ideal comes to spending a day wandering through fields and querying a grasshopper washing its face?

Is the irony productive or undercutting? Does the poem invert what counts as a full life? Does the laden line demand drama and grand accomplishments? Does the speaker suggest—with a tinge of mild ostensible self deprecation —that a full life can be the prosaic one she prizes?

Does the ironic contrast, paradox?, generate a tug between a conventional norm and its opposite, the virtue of life pastoral?

Does the mismatch accentuate the poem because it suggests how the sheerly prosaic might be a profound way to live a laden life?

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Yet another view of the poem, rather than it being affirmative, is the speaker’s defensiveness. “Tell me” can be seen as a defensive or self-protective stance, especially, “Tell me, what else should I have done?” That might sound more like self-justification than gentle self affirmation. 

Has she wasted time, withdrawn from the world, failed at anything meaningful? 

“Tell me…?” can be seen as self-aware insecurity, as if the speaker suspects her ideal day isn’t much of one at all in the face of one rare, wild, precious life, the only one we have.

So on this reading, “Doesn’t everything die at last, and too soon?” feels like jejune even desperate rationalizing—justifying sheerly prosaic idleness as an ideal to ward off uncomfortably understood meaninglessness.

Seen this way, the poem’s movement isn’t affirmative. Rather, anxiety gets layered into it to suggest idle contemplation bathed in inactivity isn’t enough. The robust fullness of “one wild and precious life” in tension with the sheerly prosaic informs that anxiety.

And so, underlying the poem’s seeming affirmation might be seen the anxious rationalization of a kind of aimless drifting. Seen as that, The Summer Day doesn’t quietly overturn conventionality as to a meritorious life, but rather dramatizes a fraught try at justifying a lesser life that actually can’t satisfy the criteria of the oneness, the wildness and the preciousness of life.

“Tell me, what else should I have done? 
Doesn’t everything die at last, and too soon? 
Tell me, what is it you plan to do 
with your one wild and precious life?”

Door 3/ something else

Granting the rich existence of paradoxes and tensions in good and great poetry, they still must pass a kind of aesthetic smell test. If I mock your heralding of a wild and precious life on the ground of “what are you doing that is so wild and great?”, then might I not be necessarily disclaiming those qualities as vital to a full life? If so, then the poem might be said to turn on not what counts as wild and precious but rather on a critique on those very qualities as essential to fullness. And that might seem consistent with poem’s opening on the inability to answer big questions and inability to understand what prayer is as it descends to smaller observations and doings of quiet idleness.

Maybe this gets to the poem’s core that actually sharpens the it more than treating it as affirming pastoral attentiveness but layered with doubt.

Tensions in poetry can’t be unendingly elastic. They need to measure up logically and psychologically. If the speaker means to mock the absence of “wildness” and “preciousness” while still affirming them as the way to fullness, the poem would wobble. But the poem might instead be questioning the view that “wild” and “precious” are necessary to fullness. In that case, the poems irony doesn’t run between having and not having a full or worthy life.

This arguably goes with the poem’s movement. The opening questions — “Who made the world? / Who made the swan, and the black bear?” — raise massive categories: creation; origins; God; prayer; meaning. But then the  speaker moves down from big (unanswerable?) questions to bite-sized particularity: “This grasshopper, I mean—”.

 The turnabout matters.

The speaker retreats from largest to smallest. Similarly, “I don’t know exactly what a prayer is” gives up on a certain spiritual path to transcendent understanding and fastens onto how to pay particularized attention. The poem yields mastery of inexplicable big questions in favour of bite-sized presence and observation, a grasshopper eating sugar, how it moves its jaws differently.

Seen that way, the final line might not only be slightly sarcastic about a “wild and precious life” itself, but might also be questioning staid assumptions about what counts as fullness in life.

And so self doubt abides. The speaker can be seen to feel that kneeling in grass and watching a grasshopper can appear absurd beside “your one wild and precious life.” 

While pressures press on assumed significance in life, conventional values still operate inside the poem. We still feel that “Surely a precious, wild life demands more than this.”The poem doesn’t erase that intuition: it raises it to question it.

The poem continually moves downward:

from cosmology → to a grasshopper;

from theology → to attention;

from prayer → to kneeling in grass;

from existential meaning → to idleness and strolling.

This downward motion can look anti-climactic or even evasive if judged conventionally. But the poem can be seen to inform seriousness by what’s seemingly small such that fullness lies not in largeness but in acute immediate presence.

Yet again tension lingers since the speaker doesn’t wholly cancel our intuition about the significance of largeness. “Wild and precious” stays compelling. The poem still looks to the exaltation of big doings even while wanting to define fullness downwards. 

So the richest reading might not be just that the speaker harbours doubts its own living fully. Rather, on this reading, the poem critiques dominant ideas of fullness while staying aware of the questionability of the alternative the speaker wants to inhabit even as it’s defended.

SOME OF MY PROBLEMS WITH THE 2025 MOVIE NUREMBERG

 Some Of My Problems With The 2025 movieNuremberg

Lots of stretches of it are boring; pacing is poor;

Nothing is riveting and movie fares badly in comparison to Judgment At Nuremberg; 

Remi Malik's acting is an unbearable, exaggerated performance;

Parallel to Trump and nascent fascism in America is baseless, TDS preaching;

Much of the discussion between Malik and Goring is claptrap, especially the reference to Goring’s example of the atomic bombing of Japan, of which Malik’s defence is wrong—collateral damage;

Robert Jackson’s concern that the trial is being held so that the Holocaust can never be repeated and that international law will be established via the trial and will bring peace to the world comes across as pious;

The trial comes across as partially a show trial with a paucity of due process on a number of fronts: no lawyers for Nazis appear; can the defendants be compelled to testify; does Jackson co-opt Malik into revealing what he’s learned about Goring through his (what seems to be as the movie has it) doctor-patient relationship with him, even though Malik is merely to determine whether Goring is competent to stand trial; the movie suggests that Malik is under a duty of confidentiality to Goring and if he is, then the movie shows Jackson wanting Malik to breach that duty in the interest of trial success so that such a thing as the Holocaust can never recur. The movie seems uncritical of these nuances or else bluntly steam rollers over them saying it’s all fine in the interest of an avowed greater good.

Russell Crowe is the best thing in the movie but why, given the vast horror and evil of the Holocaust, spend so much time humanizing him, to what end? Plus, the movie fails persuasively, emotionally to dramatize Goring’s evil such that it finally overwhelms the humanization of him. Nuremberg nods at it but fails to make it felt. 

Remi Malik indispensably on the eve of trial helping the prosecution as his humane act overcoming his cynicism is poorly handled:

Why is it that the long account by the Jewish soldier doing the translating is the pivot for Malik’s turnabout as opposed to all the evidence of Nazi atrocities brought out during the trial;

Malik giving Jackson his big “book” on Goring summarizing 1,000s of hours of interviewing Goring and testing him just hours before Jackson examines him, and Jackson absorbing it all and crafting his examination accordingly in that short time is ridiculous; 

It’s unclear whether it’s a set up that Jackson would “hand off” his examination to the British prosecutor to complete it successfully. There’s some suggestion that it’s purposefully coordinated, but that runs into the problem of it being unclear whether the Tribunal would allow the British prosecutor to take part. One of the indications of a set up is both Jackson and the UK prosecutor happily together thanking Malik for the insight about Goring's absolute loyalty to Hitler regardless of all the genocidal depredation. 

Also whether a set up or not, it's simply absurd, as the movie has it, that Jackson failed to establish that Goring knew about the Holocaust genocide.

WHAT MAKES GREAT ART

 https://nabeelqu.substack.com/p/what-makes-art-great

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TO A FRIEND WHO SENT ME THIS SUBSTACK

I read the Substack and agreed with some of it and disagreed with some of it too. 

On surprise, I’m wondering if NQ takes his point too far. How can he say a different detail or word or phrase would undermine the work? Something seems logically off with that. It’s like saying had such and such occurred mid game, then X not Y would’ve won. But usually, not always, that can’t be known. Such and such sets off a whole new set of possibilities that are unknown to us. What if the black in that painting were a different shade or a different colour, would the work necessarily be devalued? I don’t think so. We might see the work in a different way, see its internal relations differently, and think it as great. Same with a different word or phrase and other stuff in a celebrated poem. The mistake is to identify the work as great and therefore illogically conclude we can accept no substitutes. Why not? 

Also on unpredictability, lesser works are often unpredictable and great works sometimes are predictable. So the answer to that might be that that’s at the level of the work as a whole and NQ is dealing with the unpredictability in the parts. But there too, take novels. Prose isn’t poetry, accepting for the moment Pound’s definition, which might have its own problems. And so generally in novels we don’t bear down on the poetics of the language. Our thoughts go to the stories and the plots, the characters, their dilemmas, their interactions, their moral choices. So here we can be surprised, but we can also be surprised in lesser works, even lousy ones, with plot twists, whodunnit and what not. And too there’s a blurry line between surprise and contradiction. 

I don’t know about surprise as a necessary condition of great visual art, say paintings and sculptures. If it’s in technique, might’nt we be surprised by that in lesser works? Are Henry Moore’s big creations surprising or do we get pleasure from their pleasing sensuousness? Cannot paintings that maybe prove unsurprising still move us deeply? 

And in poetry, especially free verse I read some of it as devoid of the kind intricate word play NQ spends a lot of time on without lessening its emotional impact. Poems might describe a deeply evocative event or sense of something, a perception, a feeling or they might harbour deep thoughts. Where might the surprise be? Some poems are deeply moving without being verbally or intellectually difficult. 

If you want a surprise, then consider the toilet placed in the art museum. Hell forget surprise, consider shock. But far from great art. Once I was in the AGO, and adjacent to the works of art was some fire fighting equipment encased in glass. I thought it was part of the art work till I was told it wasn’t. But then I wondered and still do, why not? 

Then I wonder too who’s to say what is and isn’t surprising in a work. That involves a comparison between what we’d ordinarily expect and what confounds that. No doubt there are innumerable instances where that can be shown. But I’d think in many cases arbitrary judgments are made as to both what we’d expect and why what we get is a surprise.

I’m with NQ on the rich ambiguities and meant ambivalences in great works. And he spends a lot of time on this. But there are powerful works that are straight forward where there’s no surprise as to what is happening yet they’re deeply affecting. Sister Carrie comes to mind. And in film Dead Man Walking comes to mind. And in my choice of the greatest movie ever The Godfather Part 2, what happens to Michael is inexorable but the step by step tracing of his descent into evil is powerful and the relation of his utter emptiness to his achieved power is as starkly bleak and affecting as anything you might see. Same in a different way with Life is Beautiful. And so on.

I think while I’m at it he goes overboard on depth; and on depth he isn’t careful enough to distinguish emotional depth with stylistic possibilities, and in that failure he seems to equate depth with formal intricacy, which is a mistake.

“There’s a feeling of limitless depth that is unique to the really great works: it feels like you can always find more patterns, more coherence, more beauty on rereading. Or that more readings will give you a deeper understanding, but never a perfect or complete one.”

All that formal complexity is fine and analyzing it, I argue, is worthwhile and deepens appreciation, but I’d argue the chief quality of great art is its power to compel us emotionally. I said to someone that Hamlet is more a cerebral tragedy full of civic or state-based themes, while Lear is a cosmic, affective tragedy.  And I argued that, therefore, Lear is the greater play. Besides my Shakespeare professor Akrigg, said so. 😊 

Finally I don’t agree that poetry is language charged to the greatest degree. For one thing there’s no objective way to measure the greatest possible degree. And less of a cavil, there are plenty of “uncharged” poems that are indeed poems and are terrific. 

A NOTE ON A CERTAIN PART OF JANE AUSTEN’S MANSFIELD PARK

I’ve read up to Fanny’s rejection of Crawford’s proposal to marry her and Sir Thomas reprimanding her for that. 

Here’s my note on what I see going on.

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When Sir Thomas reprimands Fanny for rejecting Crawford, then again in the novel a lot trivial goings on crystallize into compelling fiction. So much goes on in his reprimand and in what comes right after. 

He’s lovelessly married to an utterly languid, superficial woman and is somewhat obtuse, though well meaning, about the relation between love and marriage. Only somewhat, because when he senses that his own daughter Maria does not, cannot, love Mr. Rushworth, he immediately puts her happiness first and says she need not marry him. 

Austen takes what can seem like drawing-room trivia and reveals the coercive structure underneath it. No monster Sir Thomas, but he is “big daddy” in a society where “reasonableness” often means “submission.” His remonstrations have seem plausible—he commends/commands gratitude and prudence as obligation. So he’s trying to exert dominance. He’s, as just noted, not wholly obtuse about love, because he does worry about Maria and Rushworth. But he has blind spots, and they widen over Fanny because she is less real to him than his daughters are.

(We recall that being on the rebound from Crawford’s rejection of her, Maria in some mix of spite and calculation—Rushworth being wealthy—insists she will marry him. And we recall that Sir Thomas in his partial obtusity thinks highly of Rushworth, a completely stupid bore, at first and only over time comes to see him for what he is.) 

So there is by Sir Thomas a subtle looking down on Fanny in not according to her the same high importance of her happiness in marriage as he accords to his daughter Maria. But in the complexity of his character and simultaneous with that looking down, he is shocked that she does not have a lit fireplace in her room and orders it for her the very day he reprimands her and for each day after. (Mrs. Norris, we learn, did not want Fanny to have it.) 

Sir Thomas is capable of humane concern at the very moment he bullies Fanny. That’s what makes him convincing. It isn’t that he’s simply hypocritical. It’s that he can feel tenderness but still assume entitlement to obedience. The fireplace detail might be seen as subtly deepening the reprimand: he can “provide,” so, therefore, he feels even more entitled to demand.

In his obtusity Sir Thomas cannot begin to understand how Fanny can reject Crawford, given that he appears smashingly to meet every criterion of suitability. With Fanny and Crawford he sees  a spectacular rise in her status and can’t believe she’s not overwhelmed by gratitude. So he treats her refusal as insolence, not as discernment. Here a class element is evident: Sir Thomas cannot imagine that Fanny has taste or judgment equal to his.

Nor can he perceive, as Fanny does, Crawford’s true repugnance. But then as Fanny stays stalwart in her fraught way in rejecting Crawford, and in her fraught way standing up to Sir Thomas’s bitterest criticisms, he begins to soften. And then some time later he comes finally to prioritize her happiness in marriage as he had Maria’s. 

Austen makes Crawford’s repugnance explicit in his, for his own sport, playing on the emotions of Maria and Julia, and in his telling his sister Mary that, again merely for the satisfaction of his ego, he’ll win over Fanny. That backfires on him when she unintentionally wins him over, causing him to fall in love with her while she abhors him. But Crawford is brilliantly reptilian. He takes everybody in except when Julia finally sees through him after rejection by him and except Fanny, who from the start sees clearly what an egotistical cad he is. 

Fanny understands Crawford’s failed attempt at manipulation in getting William his lieutenant’s commission in order to obligate her to him, Crawford. And she is torn between her joy for William’s advancement and her detestation of Crawford’s snake-like wiles. 

Crawford’s unblinking egotism is evident in his refusal to perceive Fanny’s plain-as-day continual rejections of him. He just rolls over them. And Austen brilliantly conveys his serpentine brilliance when she describes how magnificently he reads passages from Shakespeare’s Henry VIII. His great capacity as an actor reading Shakespeare is of a piece with, and is meant to suggest, how he performs in life, without capacity for authentic goodness. 

One complication for Fanny in resisting Sir Thomas’s onslaught on behalf of Crawford’s proposal to marry her is wanting to spare her cousins, Maria and Julia, from their father’s disapprobation in falling for Crawford’s flirtations. She reveals nothing of that even as it forms firm ground for rejecting Crawford. In what is in effect her self-sacrifice, she shows sensitivity and high humane concern. And so, in contrast with her simpering, her real emotional fragility, her allowing herself to be prevailed upon, her deep lack of self esteem, we see sharp differences even as she blanches under Sir Thomas’s attack. 

She, as noted, fraughtly sticks to her guns. In that she is true to herself more than anyone else in the novel. She will not compromise her deepest feelings, even as Sir Thomas lists the apparent advantages to come from her accepting Crawford’s proposal. The coexistence in her of this strength and emotional fragility is compelling characterization. And so we see her unstinting integrity. (By comparison, Lady Bertram’s reaction to Crawford’s proposal to Fanny is to make her esteem Fanny more now that such an ostensibly superior gentleman as Crawford has so prized her.) Fanny  sees things more deeply and accurately than anyone else because she is free of vanity, social ambition, and self-deception.

Austen’s great achievement is making Fanny both inwardly strong and outwardly fragile. She isn’t “heroic” in any loud way, but she is so in endurance—she holds her self-truth under great pressure but with remorse rather than with self-congratulation. 

With Crawford’s proposal, Austen isn’t writing about marriage proposals as such. She’s writing about how a whole social world applies pressure as born-poor Fanny’s

inner truth is treated as disobedience. But in contrast, her steadfast rejection of Crawford is in effect an implicit slap across the face of the superficialities, hypocrisies, class based snobberies, deceptions, vanities, false values, human weaknesses, scurrilousnesses and unprincipled compromises that comprise much of the life at Mansfield Park.