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Writing
Exercise: W. B. Yeats' “Lapis Lazuli” If you
are taking a college class on poetry or even a composition class that focuses
on poetry, you will no doubt have to fulfill the assignment of writing a
paper on some aspect of poetry. You may know that a
good paper features a fine harmony of its parts: a unified, limited thesis,
relevant, strong support, clear organization, appropriate diction, clean
grammar and mechanics, and appropriate use of sources. But
knowing about the features of a good essay does not guarantee that you will
write one; the best way to become proficient at essay writing is to write
essays. An exercise that is helpful is to look at
essays, and study them to determine how well they harmonize thesis, support,
organization, diction, grammar/mechanics, and use of sources. With this pedagogical purpose in
mind, I have constructed this exercise. Please read
and consider the following essay. The assignment
is to compare two poems either in terms of theme, tradition, or event. How does the following essay stack up?
Using the six basic essay features--thesis, support, organization,
diction, grammar/mechanics, use of sources--determine the quality of this
following essay: Unity in W. B. Yeats' "Lapis
Lazuli" In his introduction to
Rabindranath Tagore's Gitanjali, W. B. Yeats
writes, "If our life was not a continual warfare, we would not have
taste, we would not know what is good, we would not find hearers and readers. Four-fifths of our energy is spent in the quarrel with
bad taste, whether in our own minds or in the minds of others." The flow of warfare eventually erodes creativity,
and the artist seeks a way out. Whether the war is
fought for love or material gain is irrelevant; the fighting has to cease and
unity plus harmony must be restored if the artist is to make order out of
chaos. When the desire for Unity and
Transcendence becomes very strong, the individual poet or artist is offered a
path. Yeats was offered the philosophy of the East. His contact with the work of Tagore and his intellectual
knowledge of the Bhagavad-Gita served him as a light dispelling the darkness
of imbalanced experience, that is, learning gleaned solely from the Western
tradition. The following poem is Tagore's poem
#7 from his Gitanjali: My song has put off her adornments. My poet's vanity dies in shame
before thy sight. Yeats, in his constant battle with
bad taste, adorns his poems lavishly. He relies on
symbolism to add the weight of multiple meanings. In
"Lapis Lazuli" Yeats refers to the stage as a symbol of life in the
Shakespearean sense. Not every Western peasant is
familiar with such a symbol; it seems that nowadays Shakespeare travels only
in the learned circles. Tagore's symbol of the flute
is familiar to every peasant and every caste, because they all know of Bhagavan Krishna's flute and the effect it has on the Gopis. Such symbols show no
"pride of dress," their being as natural as a breeze. Through the process of drawing on
history, sculpture, and classical literature of the Western tradition, Yeats
further adorns his song with allusion to Hamlet and Lear, Ophelia and Cordelia. He skillfully meshes
the symbol of the stage with the allusion to the players--"All perform
their tragic play." His theme of unity runs
through "Lapis Lazuli"--runs through the process of his blending
symbol and allusion. He adds historical and
geographical baubles when he refers to Callimachus "who handled marble
as if it were bronze." And those "Old civilisations put to the sword"--tragic, but
"those that build them again are gay." If
they could not be built again, if what the "hysterical women" say
was accurate, if the soul could die, then the poets (transcenders
and near transcenders) would not be gay. They would be like flecks of rusting metal--not eternal
sparks from the Unity of Being. Yeats uses symbolism and allusion
as tools to hammer and sculpt his theme into cathedrals. But
when he looks at Tagore and the women out in the fields singing Tagore songs,
it takes his breath and he wonders at the simplicity. In
his quarrel with the warfare and bad taste, he needs an arsenal full of
ammunition--symbol, allusion, rhyme, meter, history. This
is the Western tradition. Tagore's hut is celebrated
and marveled at by everyone. Yeats' magnificent
edifice must be defended by those who know what he knows of Western learned
culture. But just as the only reality is
Unity and Holy Indifference, it is a reality to which we all can transcend,
regardless of whether our nature is instructed by East or West. The key is balance. When Yeats
refers to the Chinamen, he paints a world quite different from the one
described in the beginning of "Lapis Lazuli." There
is a zeugmatic relationship between the third and fourth stanzas. The poem is a miniature world balancing Eastern and
Western philosophy. Western--where the hysterical
ones view art as frill: Hamlet and Lear, Callimachus' great work standing
only for a day--but for all this "those that build them again are gay." Eastern--Chinamen climbing up a mountain, the scene
is meditative like a Sesshu painting but even
looking out on the tragic scenes below, "their ancient glittering eyes
are gay." This recalls the Taoist symbol where
opposites make up the whole: Unity is achieve, and
Holy Indifference prevails. Here is an evaluation of the above
essay: Thesis: The thesis of this essay is not
clear, not limited to one claim. The assignment
called for a comparison of two poems, but the title of the essay mentions
only one poem. The paper does do some comparing of a
Yeats' poem and a Tagore poem, but the reader will not know that until he/his
read at least the first three paragraphs. The essay
seems to be addressing several issues: the difference between Yeats' and Tagore's poems, the way their readers respond
to the poems, the difference between Eastern and Western philosophy. Support: The paper's supporting evidence
includes some useful details, but because the thesis lacks a limited focus,
the reader becomes confused about what the those
details are meant to accomplish. Organization: The paper lacks a clear
organization, again owing to the fact that the thesis is not clearly focused. David Skwire in his textbook Writing
with a Thesis, claims that fifty percent of your work is done once you
have a good thesis. We can see how this is true. The flabby thesis of this paper is affecting the other
features of support and organization. It's difficult
to determine how a paper should be organized until you know exactly what the
paper is to accomplish. Diction: For the most part the diction is
appropriate for a college level paper. But it does
need to define some terms: Unity, Transcendence, Holy Indifference, zeugmatic. Just what the writer means by these terms is not clear. Are we to take them at their dictionary definition? What connotations might be hinted here?
We wonder about these terms especially when they appear capitalized. Does this paper also intend to interject some thoughts
on spirituality? Grammar/Mechanics: No problems here, except for
some of the sentence fragments in the conclusion. But
again the unclear thesis is responsible for the lack of clarity in use of the
fragments. Fragments can be affective as long as the
reader is following a close line of reasoning. Use of Sources: Because this paper refers to two
primary sources, it would be a good idea to append a Works Cited page,
offering full bibliographical information. Also it
would be helpful if the essay writer had appended the entire text of the
Yeats poem. The reader needs to be able to compare
the context of the quotations with what the essay writer claims about those
quotations. This essay is not entirely
successful, as the evaluation points out.
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