We ended class on Wednesday with me suggesting that Duck's invocation of the Muse displaces the labor of writing the poem onto a mythic female figure. He doesn't write the poem; she (the Muse) does.
Is this just Duck being weird and/or trying to play up his muscular manual manly manliness? Or does that moment in the poem tell us something about the prevailing conventions connecting class, gender, and poetry?
Offer your reflections here.
Deadline: Friday (2/6), noon.
2 comments:
I think this is a combination of Duck’s “weirdness” and a distinction between class, gender and poetry. I think Duck is making it a point that writing poetry is a “woman’s work” and that the muse is pretty much forcing him to write the poem. It’s like he’s saying he is ‘man enough’ to work as a thresher but since the muse is there she’s basically extracting this poem from him—he doesn’t want to be looked upon as a weak person for complaining by writing poetry. Nor does he want to be regarded as a sensitive soul because he writes poetry. However, this is clearly not the case—he obviously is truly affected by the work that he is doing because he does write a poem about it. I think that Collier picks up on his insecurities of writing a poem and swoops in when making her commentary. She’s responding to the portrayal of women he has; if he thinks that it’s a woman’s job to write poetry, she’s going to write poetry and she’s going to do it better. She wants to prove that all she is worth for is not just “prattling” but that she has talents too and one of them includes making Duck look like a fool, or at least showing him that women have intellects just as well as men.
It seems that Duck contributes his poetic outburst to the muse in concordance with gendered and class specific norms, at least as far as we've discussed within the scope of our classroom time. He spends an awful lot of time within the poem focusing on the endurance and brawn of his daily toils, leaving no time for intellectual or poetic pontification. The notion that Duck has the time to sit and reflect poetically proves antithetical to his claims of incessant hard work and labor. However, if the muse is simply inhabiting him and taking note of how hard he works, then he can't really be held accountable for the poem.
From another angle, he may attribute his poetry to the muse so as to not seem impetuous in the eyes of established poets. Duck presents himself as a simple hard working man who has this muse bothering him. He's not claiming to be as educated or lucky to be a part of the class of poets, so he can't be held accountable (once again) for these words; they are simply those of a muse. Even though he inherently is attempting to climb up through the social ranks, he sort of covers his own ass to any claims of social climbing here by claiming that the muse, and not he, pens the poem.
Post a Comment