Humanities 1: Questo Muro
Questo Muro
Written and read by Anita Barrows
Quando mi vide star pur fermo e duro
turbato un poco disse: “Or vedi figlio:
tra Beatrice e te è questo muro.”
(When he [Virgil] saw me standing there unmoving,
he was a bit disturbed and said, “Now look, son,
between Beatrice and you there is this wall.”)
— Dante, Purgatorio XXVII
You will come at a turning of the trail
to a wall of flame
After the hard climb & the exhausted dreaming
you will come to a place where he
with whom you have walked this far
will stop, will stand
beside you on the treacherous steep path
& stare as you shiver at the moving wall, the flame
that blocks your vision of what
comes after. And that one
who you thought would accompany you always,
who held your face
tenderly a little while in his hands—
who pressed the palms of his hands into drenched grass
& washed from your cheeks the soot, the tear-tracks—
he is telling you now
that all that stands between you
& everything you have known since the beginning
is this: this wall. Between yourself
& the beloved, between yourself & your joy,
the riverbank swaying with wildflowers, the shaft
of sunlight on the rock, the song.
Will you pass through it now, will you let it consume
whatever solidness this is
you call your life, & send
you out, a tremor of heat,
a radiance, a changed
flickering thing?
The Unit on Poetry was made possible by a special gift from Kim Meadows.
Poetry and prose differ fundamentally. In poetry, usually one tries to communicate multiple complex meanings with an absolute economy of words. Additionally, to reinforce the many meanings word orderings and choice are unusual and sentences tend to have novel structure. Why might this be so? (Click here for an answer.)
Unusual sentence structure forces one to really think about what is being said. In much the same way that autocompletion algorithms work, our brain fills in the gaps when shown prosaic sentences. If, for instance, I wrote “He is running ________ for work.” You would almost surely be able to fill in “late”. On the other hand, if I wrote, “Untimeliness has beguiled my proletariat father and his pathway is impaired.” then you have to really think to obtain the same meaning. Prose leverages our ability to quickly uptake written information in a familiar form while poetry accentuates the extraordinary power of language to convey many meanings.
This entire poem is a literary allusion. What is an allusion? Particular, what is being alluded to here? (Click here for an answer.)
An allusion is a reference to another literary work. Allusions are so pervasive in English (and other cultural) literature that we often differentiate them. Literary allusions refer to a nebulous body of work that specifically excludes the Bible, scientific research, and popular culture. This is only because each of those would be referred to with the correct adjective; i.e. an allusion to the Bible is a biblical allusion, ect. Here, our allusion refers to Dante Algieri’s Divine Comedy.
We want to understand why this poem is good. It is good on many levels. Here, I think even the most superficial level has some depth. What is the poem about? (Click here for an answer.)
Superficially, we see it’s about Dante seeking his love Beatrice. There is considerable evidence that both in the Divine comedy and in Barrow’s poem Beatrice both allegorically and symbolically stands for more than Beatrice. This poem is primarily about depression and gives a rather unique view on what is certainly a very complex and fraught topic. Barrows seems to think depression is like an old friend for many- that it serves a great purpose. That sometimes we stand before a wall of fire and just walking forward is the most difficult thing in the world, but depression (personified as Virgil) is telling us, “Look, you can stay with me forever, but you need change. I know you’ve grown fond of me, but Beatrice still exists- there is still Joy to be had. Walk beyond the wall of fire, leave me behind.”