Sonnet 29 by Edna St Vincent Millay

Pity me not because the light of day
At close of day no longer walks the sky;
Pity me not for beauties passed away
From field and thicket as the the year goes by;
Pity me not the waning of the moon,
Nor that the ebbing tide goes out to sea,
Nor that a man's desire is hushed so soon,
And you no longer look with love on me.
This have I known always: Love is no more
Than the wide blossom which the wind assails,
Than the great tide that treads the shifting shore,
Strewing fresh wreckage gathered in the gales:
Pity me that the heart is slow to learn
When the swift mind beholds at every turn.

Discussion on: 24 March 2011
What stayed with you:
Lots of powerful images...
image in the lines 1 and 2 - of the dark
image in the lines 3 and 4 - how nature grows old through the year
She is sad but she doesn't want to be pitied. She is sad because a relationship is ending.
She has been in and out of relationships and wishes they would last for ever but they don't.
She compares tides coming in and going out to a man's desire which changes. In this she is bringing her feminist side out. She is using a stereotype - all men want the same thing.
She has always known how powerful love can be - and how potentially destructive as well.
In the last two lines she asks to be pitied because her heart has not learnt what her mind always knew.

Rhyme scheme: abab, cdcd, efef, gg
This makes it a Shakespearean sonnet - 3 quatrains followed by a couplet. This makes it a sonnet, Viraj! And no, we cannot have a sonnet which is longer or shorter :).
[Just to remind everyone that the other type of sonnet is Italian or Petrarchan and is divided into one octave and one sestet. And no, that doesn't mean there's a space between the two parts - the poem can be in one block. You would find the "division" in the rhyme scheme or the thoughts expressed perhaps even in the mood or tone.]
Sensory images:
Lines 1 and 2 - a visual image of the light fading from the sky at the end of the day - it becomes dark - a comparison to the end of the relationship. We are assuming that during the relationship night did not become "dark". Figuratively speaking, it is the sunset of the relationship. However, she doesn't want to be pitied for this.
Lines 3 and 4 - a visual image of seasons growing "old" as the year goes by. We notice the word "beauties" as it connects perhaps to women - or a woman growing old. It could also be read at a more literal level as various beautiful things that flower in spring and summer and then die out.
NB: the first quatrain ends with a semi-colon thereby carrying forth the mood of sadness caused by the end of the relationship as well as the "not wanting to be pitied" feeling.
Lines 5 and 6 - two visual images - one of the moon growing smaller, the second one of the tide going out to the sea. The moon is associated with relationships, love, lovers; it is also associated with the tide. The moon apparently also affects our hormones [thank you, Shashank, for that piece of information]. The tide ebbing - is like love is being drained out leaving the shore empty.
Lines 7 and 8 - two images - the first one is probably auditory - because a "man's desire" is silenced very soon. [Yes, Abhay, I agree that this is a stereotype.] The second image is visual - "he" doesn't have the same love in his eyes.

Discussion on: 25 March 2011
Lines 9 and 10 - we think this is a very strong image which combines a visual - that of a flower - and an organic image of it being assaulted by the wind. It's a comparison between love and a flower which is attacked by the obstacles [the wind] which love [or the people in love] has to face. According to Shashank, the phrase "This have I known always" is significant as the poet says that she has always known that there are two sides to love which her mind has known - but her heart has looked only at the good side.
Lines 11 and 12 - she continues the comparison of love this time with the "great tide" - strong, powerful - and the "shifting shore" could be an unsteady base or changing moods - it's a visual image combined with an organic one of "treading". "Fresh wreckage" could be according to Shashank old relationships and Aakriti feels that it could be fights that they have. Where in line 10 she has introduced the idea of a strong [assailing] wind, it is echoed in line 12 as a "gale" [thank you, Jasmehar].
Lines 13 and 14 - now she asks to be pitied because, metaphorically, the heart [the symbol of love] and it is said that love is blind - so when people are in love, they don't think straight, don't act as they normally would, don't listen to their minds [thank you, Abhay, for putting that so neatly].

What is your personal response - how do you relate to this poem?
 Abhay: If I could meet the poet I would tell her to stop obsessing about the relationship; there's more to life than love - for example, games.
Jaideep and Mansher [in chorus] - love is not the priority - money is.
Jasmehar - money can't buy everything - you can buy books with money but you cannot buy education; you can buy a clock but not time. Money can buy sex, but not love, and it cannot fill the emptiness inside you.
Abhay: it is said that the best things in life come free.
[The exchange with Shashank cannot be published on the Web. Although I'm certain that everyone in class will remember this exchange of all the other discussions we had.]
Disha: fights are often kept aside but keep coming back.
Aakriti: without love your mind and heart will not be at peace.
Atil: nothing to share.
Shruti: not really felt any of this.
Viraj: doesn't want to share.
Shashank -

a video of scene 4 and 6 from act 1

found it on youtube

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mI0nIEDjNkM

The Elements of Drama in My Mother Said...

SETTING
CONFLICT
THEME(S)
CHARACTERISATION - protagonists and antagonists
PLOT, SUB-PLOT(S)
DRAMATIC and THEATRICAL DEVICES
MOTIVATION
MOTIFS and SYMBOLS
STRUCTURE

A Play Within a Play

In Act Three a lot is revealed that the playwright has built up to in the first two acts. The Wasteland scene reveals the ancient and innate desire of all human beings to rebel against figures of authority - and the subsequent guilt at having done so.

How is this brought out by the playwright?

The Significance of Dust

My Mother Said I Never Should, Act Two

A cold room, covered in dust... from which secrets emerge...

Doris, Margaret and Jackie all have secrets, some of which are revealed in Act Two.

In what ways does the playwright bring out the characteristics of the four women in Act Two?

Contributed by Shruti:

in act 2 show how the history and some of the past memories are revealed through the 4 women in play. when the history and some of the past is revaled to jackie about  doris she doesnt react to well because she could have then provented from that to happen to. also doris tells rosie this and they keep their secert. doris tells jackie to be strong ask want from margaret.

margaret and jackie try to deny the bag og baby cloths because they dont want to rosie to find out about the whole mother thing

Contributed by Aakriti:

In act 2 the history is brought out by the various objects and clothes in the room. This starts the unsolved memories between the women. Act 2 shows how the 4 women decide to deny or accept this.  Rosie is different, she explores the bedrooms and finds out what is hidden underneath them. Whereas, margaret and jackie cannot face the past.  They are scared to see what they find. Doris stops hiding in the shadows and starts a new life.

happy womens day.

Dust the Pages of Your Memory...

I know it's been a loooong time... and most of what we discussed last year has been buried deep, deep in the recesses of your memory. So I've pasted a review of a performance of the play below - it should bring back the plot at least and remind you of the characters... which, if you want a head count, totals to four.

My Mother Said I Never Should

People's Light & Theatre Co., 39 Conestoga Rd., Malvern, through Nov. 12, (610) 644-3500.
Granddaughter: "It's all old here."
Grandmother: "It wasn't always."
Just as the piano, so carefully polished for 60 years, was new once, so was Gran once a child in a pinafore; and so, too, will the granddaughter grow up to be a woman who will have a child of her own. Charlotte Keatley's poignant and engrossing play, My Mother Said I Never Should, traces four generations of women through the changing times of our century and the carefully guarded secrets of an English family. A brilliant ensemble of four actors, under Abigail Adams' intense and meticulous direction, brings Keatley's fine and wise play vividly to life.
This is not one of those trash-the-past Feminism Triumphant plays, nor is it one of those sit-com-cutie Nothing Ever Changes plays. My Mother Said I Never Should manages to say something about both how things change and how they stay the same — that the changing role of women has deeply altered the way women view themselves and their lives, as well as showing us that mothering a daughter is the tie that binds.
The play is presented as short scenes, developing the chronology of the family. It begins when Doris Partington (Ceal Phelan), born in 1900, becomes a mother in Manchester during WWII. Her daughter Margaret (Marcia Saunders) will grow up and marry in the 1950s, having a daughter of her own, Jackie (Kathryn Petersen), who will grow up to be first a hippie art student and then a sleek art dealer, with a daughter of her own, Rosie (Susan McKey), born in 1971. Rosie will be raised by Margaret, whom she believes is her mother, but the secret of Rosie's birth is not a dark and haunting pivot in the plot — it is simply a difficult fact of these women's lives, like husbands, like cancer.
The plot scenes are occasionally interrupted by playground scenes — glimpses of the girls, each inhabiting their own time in the century, each inhabiting their own personality, playing together. We see that Doris was always cowed, that Margaret was always unsure, that Jackie was always wild, that Rosie was always complicit. These glimpses are deeply disturbing, filled with violence and sexuality and mantras of misinformation.
The acting is wonderful — every gesture, every walk, every variation on the Manchester accent seems perfect. Most wonderful is Ceal Phelan whose progress from young matron to old great-grandmother happens in exquisitely subtle increments, as does her character's self-knowledge and tolerance. Marcia Saunders is heartbreaking as Margaret, creating the long-suffering, self-effacing humility of a woman caught in the middle — by her time, and by her mother, her daughter, her love that has too little self-love. Kathryn Petersen makes the play's least likeable character irresistible and shows us the high cost of independence, and Susan McKey (who may be getting a bit too old for all these girlish roles) conveys the ungovernable energy and startling insight of a contemporary teenager.
My Mother Said I Never Should is about women and womanly relationships, and it is also about particular people who each have their own personalities and pleasures and limitations, each distinct, yet each connected by family resemblances. And it is a play about the way women relate to men and what it was, at different times, to be a wife and mother. And it is a play about possessions — the value things gain — and lose — through time.
The goods of these lifetimes are contained in the clever set that is the small stage's back wall — a huge open cupboard, sort of a vertical attic, filled with teddy bears and willowware plates and wicker hampers and tennis racquets and hatboxes. (Hats off to William McNeil Marshall, David Monnin, Kristin Steva and Roseanne Haines, who created the set and the props.)

Perhaps most symbolic of the possessions is a 19th century solitaire set (marbles on a board, not unlike the peg-game called "Hi-Q") Gran's mother had given her a century ago. Gran gives it to young Rosie who, at the end of the play, finally figures out how to "win" — leaving only one marble in the middle. This may be the secret that has to be learned: the trick of being solitaire, of being on your own, independent, squarely in the middle of your own life, surrounded by the women of the past who got you there.
— Toby Zinman
http://citypaper.net/articles/110295/article014.shtml

Themes in "On Her Knees"

To find the theme(s) in the story "On Her Knees" - ask yourself the question: What is the story about? From your answer to that question, you should be able to arrive at a theme or two.

Let me see your views.