Pleiadian Poet Society: Recent Episodes
Orlando
✯ A spoken anthology of poems to be listened to at leisure.
✯ Recommended for nights at the end of busy days, when you can indulge in the arts, connect to your deepest imagination, and transcend into your own thoughts with the drowsy stars.
✯ Like a book club - complete with history, questions, and reflection.
New episode every Monday!
Poem starts at 2:01
There are no questions this episode.
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Poem starts at 2:01
Questions:
- Think about Brooks’ diction. How do her specific word choices add to the imagery of the poem?
- What effect does the absence of names and the use of first person and second person pronouns have on the poem?
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Poem starts at 3:00
Questions:
- In Japan, there is a myth surrounding the Milky Way, which is known as the Amanogawa or the “heavenly river”. In the myth, the two lovers Orihime and Hikoboshi are separated by the Milky Way and may only pass across its waters when a fleet of magpies form a bridge on the 7th day of the 7th month. How might knowledge of this myth influence the meaning of Yosano’s poem?
- Pay attention to the imagery in the poem. How do the images reflected in the work contribute to its overall symbolism?
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Poem starts at 3:00
Questions:
- There is a recurring motif of love and war. In what ways are the two concepts depicted as similar? In what ways do they contradict?
- What effect do the allusions to mythology have on the poems and their themes?
Footnotes:
Aphrodite: The goddess of love
Zeus: The ruler of Olympus and the god of thunder
Helen or Helen of Troy: The daughter of Zeus and Leda; considered to be the most beautiful woman in the world; the wife of Menelaus of Sparta who is kidnapped by Paris of Troy; her kidnapping led to the Trojan War
Anactoria: A lover of Sappho referenced in “Fragment 16” and thought to be the subject of “Fragment 31”, sometimes referred to as “Ode to Anactoria”
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Poem starts at 2:34
Questions:
- How does Oliver challenge the idea of organized religion?
- In the poem, Oliver uses the pronoun “you”. Who is the “you” that Oliver is addressing?
- What is the real message of the poem? Is there some universal truth in her personal reflection?
- How does Oliver characterize the narrator? How does that characterization compare with the narrator’s setting and with God?
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Poem starts at 3:25
Questions:
- What effect does the narration of the poem, from father to child, have on its meaning?
- What is the “something there is more immortal even than the stars”?
- Another one of Whitman’s poems, “When I Heard the Learn’d Astronomer” goes:
"When I heard the learn’d astronomer,
When the proofs, the figures, were ranged in columns before me,
When I was shown the charts and diagrams, to add, divide, and measure them,
When I sitting heard the astronomer where he lectured with much applause in the lecture-room,
How soon unaccountable I became tired and sick,
Till rising and gliding out I wander’d off by myself,
In the mystical moist night-air, and from time to time,
Look’d up in perfect silence at the stars.”
In what ways does this poem compare and contrast with the poem I am about to read? Does the message of this poem influence your interpretation of the meaning of the next?
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Poem starts at 3:41
Questions:
- Are J. Alfred Prufrock's fears reasonable? Are they valid? Does fear have to be reasonable to be valid or is the nature of fear and anxiety absurdity and irrationality?
- According to Eliot, what gives true substance to life?
- How does the voice of the poem change, knowing that Eliot was 22 when he began to write it?
- There is a line that is repeated throughout the poem which goes “Do I dare disturb the universe?” How does Prufrock disturb the universe? Must it take an enormous effort or an enormous calamity to perturb the stars or can even the smallest instance, the smallest mistake, cause great disruption.
- The epigraph of the poem comes from Dante’s Inferno. The translation reads “If I believed that my response were heard by one who may return to the world, this flame would stand still and never stir again, But since no one has yet returned alive from these depths of Hell, if what I hear is true, I will answer, with no fear of infamy.” What is the significance of this exposition to the poem as a whole?
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