Hello again! Dr. Musgrove here. Welcome back to our course together. As always, please take a moment to get settled into a distraction-free place, a period of time that is quiet and peaceful, and a sitting position that is comfortable so that you can focus your attention, your energy, and your learning on the ideas I'll be presenting in this video lecture. In addition, once you're ready, make sure you are prepared with a method you like for taking notes during this lecture, and this will prepare you for the reflection assignment that follows the viewing of this lecture. --- In this lecture, I'd like to introduce some basic concepts that will help us in our study of poetry, both as a genre and as a discipline, especially as they relate to balance in poetry. Previously, we focused on the four elements of the text: the author, the reader, the form, and the topic. These are presented in the visual of the subdivided triangle to show how they can be identified and discussed separately, but also to accentuate the relationships within what the text has to offer. In this lecture, we'll be focusing on the form and what it delivers, specifically the balance created by the poet in the poem between different formal elements, such as the container of the stanza, the line, or the music, and the topic or subject matter it contains. This balance is an important aspect of the aesthetic unity and beauty the poet aims for in the poem. We have already looked at some of these examples in previous lectures, and we will look at further examples in this lecture too. As a reminder, there are five elements authors use to create poetry, and they are the basic language elements of shape, line, music, comparison, and balance. These five elements must be in place for a poem to be a poem. Ultimately, we will be looking for ways these elements are assembled artfully and cooperate to create poetic beauty. --- By balance in poetry, we mean the correspondence between and the harmony of form and content in art, also known as aesthetic unity. Another way to say this is that aesthetic unity is achieved when the poet marshals as many elements as possible into a unified whole to support the topic or subject matter or purpose of the poem. And here are the six aspects of balance described in the course glossary: 1. Freedom: This is the feeling that arises from balance. 2. Happiness: This is the feeling that arises from freedom. 3. Container and Contained: This is a comparison used to describe the correspondence in harmony between form (the container) and content (the contained). 4. Form: These are the choices made by the author in the language material. 5. Content: This is the emotional world depicted by the author. 6. Aesthetic unity: These are the choices in the language material in the emotional world that demonstrate harmony and balance. --- So let's look at a few examples of balance that come from the collection The Poetry of Impermanence, Mindfulness, and Joy, edited by John Bram. So here's an example of a poem that achieves a balance in a number of ways and uses all five of the formal elements of beauty in poetry. It's by the American poet William Carlos Williams and is titled "To Awaken an Old Lady." To Awaken an Old Lady Old age is a flight of small cheeping birds skimming bare trees above a snow glaze. Gaining and failing they are buffeted by a dark wind. But what on harsh weed stalks the flock has rested. The snow is covered with broken seed husks, and the wind tempered with a shrill piping of plenty. Okay, so the title of the poem tells us its purpose: it should be used to awaken an old lady. In other words, the poem is a recipe or incantation to be used to awaken an old lady. The shape of the poem and the short lines reflect the thin frame and halting movement of an elderly person. And as we see in the first line, the old lady is not only a real person but is a symbol for old age in general. Old age in general is also a symbol for becoming weak and dying, seeing death soon approaching. So in the beginning of this poem, we have the stated purpose, to awaken, and an intended reader or audience, anyone who is experiencing old age or knows someone who is, and a topic, the certainty of old age and death. So from the start of the poem, the poet is also speaking in a voice, a third-person omniscient perspective, and employs comparison in the form of a metaphor to equate old age with the flight of small birds flying low over a winter scene. The poet also uses the onomatopoetic "cheeping" to indicate their tiny size, the fragility of the small birds, and the winter scene with its bare trees and hard snow echoes and re-emphasizes the comparison to old age, that is, the thin frame of older people and their snow-white hair. "Gaining and failing," they make progress in flight, but they also retreat as they are "buffeted by a dark wind." Again, this halting flight corresponds to the struggle of old age, and the "dark wind" is another symbol for the inevitability of aging, despair, and death. Then this extended comparison between old age and a winter scene of birds thrown off balance by a harsh, dark wind is suddenly interrupted by a question. This interruption is signaled by the punctuation of the em-dash in the previous line that also corresponds to a chance to pause and reflect upon this long comparison. Then appears the interrupting question: "But what?" We can also take this to mean "So what?" or "What are we to do or feel about the truth of old age?" This is where the poem pivots from one kind of comparison—old age is certain fragility and dark despair—to another use of the same imagery for a different purpose: to balance our understanding of old age and death with a different perspective, like joyful acceptance and appreciation. The remainder of the poem shows the same birds at rest, accentuated at first by the second long em-dash punctuation. It's also an echo of the first dash, another chance to rest, but in this case, it's the birds who are resting. They're described as having eaten the bounty of dried seeds they've harvested from the weeds, followed by their glad chorus of satisfaction. Even the dark wind of despair is tempered by their "piping of plenty." This final line of percussive "p" alliteration and the high-pitched vowels reflect the rising music of these happy birds. In other words, the heavy winter, a fragile old age, is balanced at last by a thanksgiving of birds who have made the best of their circumstances and gain a well-deserved rest from the struggles they faced. Balance is one of the five formal causes of beauty in poetry. It doesn't occur until the poet manages to arrange the other elements in such a way that correspondences occur between form and content, the container and the contained. Balance in this sense works as a unifying force, creating correspondences and symmetries between the formal elements and its topic, often through comparison, but also using the elements of shape, line, and music. These uses of balance create a harmonious and beautiful piece of art, like the acceptance of our inevitable old age and death, like our gratitude for each moment we find ourselves in, like the calm and loving words we would use to waken an old lady into the unwavering promise and bounty of each new day. --- In a previous lecture, I introduced the concept of poetic consciousness. It is defined as the ability to be awake to the present and then to develop the abilities to be attentive, fearless, focused, grateful, and compassionate in each moment. This discipline of poetry can provide us training in developing mindfulness, and that poetry itself, especially lyric poetry and haiku, can be understood as brief guided meditations. In other words, poets create through verse an opportunity for us to practice a heightened sense of conscious attention. Poetry is also designed to give us continual practice in sharpening and directing our minds so that we can give better attention to ourselves, others, and the world for the benefit of all. As a reminder, by balance in poetry, we mean the correspondence between and the harmony of form and content in art, also known as aesthetic unity. Another way to say this is that aesthetic unity is achieved when the poet marshals as many elements as possible into a unified whole to support the topic or subject matter or purpose of the poem. When we consciously attend to the balance of form and content in poems and their various aspects, we enter into guided practices and balance a habit of looking for ways to find balance in art, in work, in friendships, and in other aspects of our lives. We want balance because it produces a feeling of weightlessness and lift, a relief from oppressive habits and relationships and emotions that weigh us down every day. However, this release and lift is exactly what freedom offers us—our liberation from that suffering. This freedom may only happen for brief periods, but we recognize it when we feel in control of our time, of our habits, of our home, and of our future. We feel it when we have people in our lives who understand and support and love us. It is also evident in the emotion of happiness that follows from this freedom. In other words, when we pay attention to and analyze balance in poetry, we practice a poetic consciousness-building exercise that can be applied to finding balance, freedom, unity, connection, and happiness in our own lives, with others, and in the world. --- Okay, so this is the end of this lecture. If you wish to review, please watch again and take notes along the way that will help you remember what you've experienced. One of the main points I'd like you to remember from this lecture is that balance in poems is always present, just as we are always trying to find balance in our own lives between work and school, friends and family, emotion and reason, mind, body, and spirit. When we develop good practice in identifying balance in poetry, we can also transfer that habit to a more conscious balance-making ability that rejects false dichotomies and harmful dualities such as "me versus you" or "them against us." As a result, we benefit from seeing how much of the balance and freedom and happiness we seek are also dependent upon the balance and freedom and happiness of others. As always, email me if you have any questions or concerns about this lecture or our course together.