We ended class today by looking at Frances Greville's highly popular poem, "A Prayer for Indifference."
The question we didn't get to: In what way is this poem a "retirement poem"? Is it in fact a retirement poem? What insight does Backscheider's taxonomy give us into how to read the poem and make sense of it?
On a different, but related issue: How can we make sense of the tremendous popularity of this poem?
Sometimes, measuring the assumptions of the past against those of the present can make their particular contours more apparent to us. "Indifference" was a common theme for C18 women writers; in what way is "indifference" as characterized in this poem different from (or similar to) the attitude expressed in the song embedded below?
Feel free, too, to make your own post about Greville, Finch, "retirement poetry" or any related issues.
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I think that the popularity this poem enjoyed at the time of its writing may be in part attributed to two factors. The first is simply that the allusions made ("Oberon", "Cynthia") are few and so allow the poem to appeal to a wider pool of readers whilst not entirely robbing them of the ability to feel clever about themselves at being able to recognize basic allusions. The second potential reason for its popularity is a little deeper. This poem does NOT ask for happiness for, at the approach of Indifference, "see Hope, see Fear,/See Expectation fly!". (Greville 305) The loss of both the good and the bad in the speaker's life, the hope and the fear, is seen as a good thing. This fact allows for a much deeper portrayal of pain or loss than wishing to be happy again. A pain that can be balanced by happiness appears trite next to a pain that is SO overwhelming that a person will give up anything, even the best things in life, simply to never feel it again. The ability to portray a pain this severe matched with a limited set of allusions allows this poem to appear different and therefore more appealing than hackneyed verse on wanting to be happy.
And on the video:
1) This woman scares me. She really does. I'd give her a 8.0/10 on the "I would not want to come across you in a dark alley some night" scale.
2) Unlike the speaker in this poem, Messina does not appear to want to feel nothing. She claims that she feels nothing (at least for a certain person) already, yet it is obvious from the tone and action in the clip that she is in fact feeling something. Anger. Essentially, she claims a state that Greville lauds but cannot back it up due to the ferocity of her performance.
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