4/19 notes from class

Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone

Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone,

Prevent the dog from barking with a juicy bone,

Silence the pianos and with muffled drum

Bring out the coffin, let the mourners come. 

Let aeroplanes(airplanes) circle moaning overhead

Scribbling on the sky the message He Is Dead,

Put crepe bows round the white necks of the public doves,

Let the traffic policemen wear black cotton gloves. 

He was my North, my South, my East and West,

My working week and my Sunday rest,

My noon, my midnight, my talk, my song;

I thought that love would last for ever: I was wrong.

The stars are not wanted now: put out every one;

Pack up the moon and dismantle the sun;

Pour away the ocean and sweep up the wood.

For nothing now can ever come to any good.

summary

The poet calls for the clocks to be stopped, the telephone to be cut off, and the dog and pianos silenced. The coffin will be brought out to the mourners with a muffled drum and under the moan of airplanes that spell out the message, “He Is Dead.” Doves are to be decked with bows around their necks, and the traffic policemen are to wear black cotton gloves.

The poet thinks of the deceased as “my North, my South, my East and West,” his work and his rest, his noon and his midnight, his talk and his song. He incorrectly thought their love would last forever.

The stars, moon, sun, ocean, and forests, the poet writes, should be sent away; they are no longer needed, and “nothing now can ever come to any good.”

＊What is stanza: a selection of poem, marked by extra line spacing before and after, which often has a single pattern if meter and rhyme.

※coffin :casket

Analysis

“Funeral Blues” has an interesting composition history. It originally appeared as a song in a play Auden cowrote with Christopher Isherwood called The Ascent of F6. In this form the last two stanzas were not included, and three others followed instead. The characters in the play were specifically invoked, and the play was an ironic statement on how “great men” are lionized after their deaths. The poem was then included in Auden’s poetry collection of 1936 (sometimes under the book title Look, Stranger!, which Auden hated). The poem was titled “Funeral Blues” by 1937, when it was published in Collected Poems. Here it had been rewritten as a cabaret song to fit with the kind of burlesque reviews popular in Berlin, and it was intended for Hedli Anderson in a piece by Benjamin Britten. It is also sometimes referred to as “Funeral Blues (Stop All the Clocks)” due to its famous first line. It is perhaps most famous for its delivery by a character in the English comedy/drama Four Weddings and a Funeral, in which a character mourns his dead lover.

The poem in the format readers usually see it today is a dirge, or a lament for the dead. Its tone is much more somber than early iterations, and the themes more universal, although it speaks of an individual. It has four stanzas of four lines each with lines in varying numbers of syllables but containing about four beats each. Auden plays with the form a bit in the poem, and critics debate whether or not this was a manifestation of his tendency to do just that—whether he was simply playing around or intended a larger point.

※dirge:a  slow sad song  or piece of music .sometimes played because someone has died
※iteration: a procedure in which repetitions of a sequence of operations yields results successfully closer to a desired result. 

As with many of his poems, there is a mingling of the high and the low. This is in the style of a classical elegy, though it features informal language and objects of everyday life such as a telephone. This mingling, writes one scholar, “is a powerful modernist move, one which suggests that only by embracing the modern world can art come to terms with the complexities of human experience.

※invoke:to cause something t be used; bring into effect
=bring about, bring on , produce, prompt , result in 

※elegy: 

1:  a poem in elegiac couplets

2 a :  a song or poem expressing sorrow or lamentation especially for one who is dead

b :  something (as a speech) resembling such a song or poem

3 a :  a pensive or reflective poem that is usually nostalgic or melancholy

b :  a short pensive musical composition

The poem appears from the perspective of a man (seemingly the poet himself) deeply mourning the loss of a lover who has died. He begins by calling for silence from the everyday objects of life—the telephone and the clocks—and the pianos, drums, and animals nearby. He doesn’t just want quiet, however; he wants his loss writ large. He wants the life of his lover—seemingly a normal, average man—to be proclaimed to the world as noble and valuable. He wants airplanes to write the message “He Is Dead” in the sky, crepe bows around doves, and traffic policemen wearing black gloves. What seems unbearable to him is the thought that this man’s passing from life to death will be unmarked by anyone other than the poet.

※writ: if one thing is another thing writ large, it is similar to it but more large and obvious
for example:Hollywood is often said to be American society writ large

In the third stanza the poet reminisces about how much the man who died meant to him. It is a beautifully evocative section that illustrates the bond between the two; note the theme of completeness in the language, which covers all four primary compass directions and all seven days of the week. Similarly, “noon” and “midnight” together cover, by synecdoche (parts standing for the whole), all hours of the day. The stanza, at the same time, reveals the tragedy of human life, which is that everyone must die and that almost everyone will experience being severed from a loved one; love does not, after all, last forever in this world.

In the fourth stanza the poet’s anguish rings out even more fervently. Here he demands that Nature heed his grief, calling her to extinguish the stars and the moon and the sun and get rid of the ocean. He wants the world to reflect the emptiness within him. Human memorials to the dead will not be sufficient. There is no hope at the end of the poem; the reader is left with the very real and very bitter sense of the man’s grief, since no end can be achieved without the poet’s lover.

※anguish: extreme pain, distress ,or anxiety

poetic subgenres:

1. Narrative poetry: Edward Arlington Robinson’s “Richard Cory” 

2. Lyric Poetry: William Wordsworth’s "" 

3. The Dramatic Monologue: Bruce Springsteen’s "Nebraska"

Appreciation

Richard Cory 

Whenever Richard Cory went down town,

We people on the pavement looked at him:

He was a gentleman from sole to crown,

Clean favored, and imperially slim.

And he was always quietly arrayed,

And he was always human when he talked;

But still he fluttered pulses when he said,

"Good-morning," and he glittered when he walked.

And he was rich—yes, richer than a king—

And admirably schooled in every grace:

In fine, we thought that he was everything

To make us wish that we were in his place.

So on we worked, and waited for the light,

And went without the meat, and cursed the bread;

And Richard Cory, one calm summer night,

Went home and put a bullet through his head.

The speaker of this poem belongs to the lower class. When Richard Cory went to the city, the speaker and his friends would look at him. Richard Cory looked a perfect gentleman. He seemed to be enjoying all the advantages. He was well dressed. He talked very politely. But when he said good morning, he would be over-excited.

The jewelry he wore would shine brightly. He was richer than a king. He was trained in every kind of polite behavior. The speaker was jealous of him and wished that he had been Richard Cory. The working class people would work hard but they could afford only bread, not meat.

They heard that one night Richard Cory went home and shot himself dead. 'Richard Cory' is a character sketch of a legendary character who lived in the poet’s native town of Gardiner, Maine. This modern American poem quietly exposes the irony of a rich gentleman’s life. Cory was the only son of an extremely rich merchant who ‘owned’ almost half the place. He was everyone’s ideal and dream. But he killed himself suddenly, without apparent reason. The incident has become the subject matter of other poets also, but Robinson’s viewpoint and the meaning is unique. Irony is the main feature in the poem.

The narrator of the poem seems to be one of the workers in some of Richard Cory’s factories. He is among the poor people who looked at Cory in amazement as he went downtown. He describes the gentleman with exaggeration which is almost absurd. This tells how highly these poor people regarded by him. As the narrator describes, Richard Cory was a gentleman ‘from sole to crown.’ This is an indirect comparison with a king. He then adds that he was “imperially slim”. Of course, he was “richer than a king.” He was “clean favored” and “human” when he talked. He was trained in “every grace”. In short, this man made everyone wish that they were in his place. But the irony is that he “went home and put a bullet through his head.” There was no reason that the poor people could see. Probably, he was unhappy. He was depressed. He was tired of life itself. Perhaps his status did not allow him to speak out. Perhaps he was burdened with inarticulate grief and worries.

※imperial: 

belonging or relating to an empire or the person or country that rules it
※slim: (especially people)attractively thin
For example:She has a lovely slim figure.
 ※inarticulate: incapable of speech especially under stress of emotion
※a supportive smile: beam 
Richard Cory is basically an ironic poem. It deals with the irony that rich people are not happy with their life, and the poor think that wealth is the guarantee of happiness. Richard Cory, the character, is also an individual who represents the irony of modern American life.

The poem develops in such a way as to suddenly expose the irony of all its overstatement until near its end. In the first three stanzas of the poem, we are given the impression that Richard Cory is a man who has all what he wants from life and is completely satisfied. The exaggerated descriptions of his appearance, wealth, personality, and even slimness sound as if Cory’s life is an example of perfection. Only that we are a bit puzzled by the uncommon wording and expressions. Some expressions are somewhat absurd and we fail to make sense out of them. But we are still under the impression that it is because the speaker doesn’t know the proper words to express the high appreciation he has about Richard Cory. Suddenly, in the last two lines of the poem we see that Richard Cory’s life was different from what it appeared. It is clear that he had been living with a suicidal depression. All the appreciation of wealthier life, great personality, and all the big words given to describe Richard Cory now tell us a striking irony. The exaggeration in all that description adds to the irony, the irony that material possession and fine appearance don’t ensure happiness and peace of mind. We now rather begin to doubt whether the speaker is only a simple man who doesn’t know the right words to describe. We now feel that he is using absurd words to indicate the absurdity of the apparent perfection and happiness of Richard Cory. After we learn that he commits suicides without any good reason we now begin to search for a probable reason from the preceding stanzas. His slimness (stanza1), quietness and fluttering and glittering (stanza2), his being richer than a king and his enviably perfect manners (stanza3) all become ironic in the light of the fact that none of them were making his personal life happy and satisfying. The speaker thought that poor people are the only sufferers in life, as if poverty is the only problem in life. Now we see that it is a foolish idea. Happiness is not a matter of being rich or powerful. To have a high status, a lot of money or to be popular are no guarantees of happy life. This in general, is the theme of the irony; it is also an irony about the material prosperity of the modern American.

There is also another more general irony about human beings. The speaker also says that they did not eat the bread they could get and they went without the meant that they could not get. They cursed the bread they could get! This is an irony; those who get something like something else, something better, and those who do not get it are dreaming of it, somewhere.

The poem Richard Cory by Robinson has also been described as a modern ballad by some critics. It is in simple four line stanzas and a rhyming scheme as abab. It is tragic and has a moral. It is also dramatic in a sense that it is a thought-provoking compressed little story.

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I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud

I wandered lonely as a cloud 

That floats on high o'er vales and hills, 

When all at once I saw a crowd, 

A host, of golden daffodils; 

Beside the lake, beneath the trees, 

Fluttering and dancing in the breeze. 

Continuous as the stars that shine 

And twinkle on the milky way, 

They stretched in never-ending line 

Along the margin of a bay: 

Ten thousand saw I at a glance, 

Tossing their heads in sprightly dance. 

The waves beside them danced; but they 

Out-did the sparkling waves in glee: 

A poet could not but be gay, 

In such a jocund company: 

I gazed—and gazed—but little thought 

What wealth the show to me had brought: 

For oft, when on my couch I lie 

In vacant or in pensive mood, 

They flash upon that inward eye 

Which is the bliss of solitude; 

And then my heart with pleasure fills, 

And dances with the daffodils. 

Summary

The speaker says that, wandering like a cloud floating above hills and valleys, he encountered a field of daffodils beside a lake. The dancing, fluttering flowers stretched endlessly along the shore, and though the waves of the lake danced beside the flowers, the daffodils outdid the water in glee. The speaker says that a poet could not help but be happy in such a joyful company of flowers. He says that he stared and stared, but did not realize what wealth the scene would bring him. For now, whenever he feels “vacant” or “pensive,” the memory flashes upon “that inward eye / That is the bliss of solitude,” and his heart fills with pleasure, “and dances with the daffodils.”

※daffodils:  a yellow flower that blooms in the spring and that has a center that is shaped like a long tube

daffodils

※glee:  exultant high-spirited joy (for example :  merriment dancing with glee)

Form

The four six-line stanzas of this poem follow a quatrain-couplet rhyme scheme: ABABCC. Each line is metered in iambic tetrameter.

Commentary

This simple poem, one of the loveliest and most famous in the Wordsworth canon, revisits the familiar subjects of nature and memory, this time with a particularly (simple) spare, musical eloquence. The plot is extremely simple, depicting the poet’s wandering and his discovery of a field of daffodils by a lake, the memory of which pleases him and comforts him when he is lonely, bored, or restless. The characterization of the sudden occurrence of a memory—the daffodils “flash upon the inward eye / Which is the bliss of solitude”—is psychologically acute, but the poem’s main brilliance lies in the reverse personification of its early stanzas. The speaker is metaphorically compared to a natural object, a cloud—“I wandered lonely as a cloud / That floats on high...”, and the daffodils are continually personified as human beings, dancing and “tossing their heads” in “a crowd, a host.” This technique implies an inherent unity between man and nature, making it one of Wordsworth’s most basic and effective methods for instilling in the reader the feeling the poet so often describes himself as experiencing.

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Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day? (Sonnet 18)

William Shakespeare

 Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?

Thou art more lovely and more temperate.

Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,

And summer’s lease hath all too short a date.

Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines,

And often is his gold complexion dimmed;

And every fair from fair sometime declines,

By chance, or nature’s changing course, untrimmed;

But thy eternal summer shall not fade,

Nor lose possession of that fair thou ow’st,

Nor shall death brag thou wand’rest in his shade,

When in eternal lines to Time thou grow’st.

     So long as men can breathe, or eyes can see,

     So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.

Why is he saying it?

Sonnet 18 is arguably the most famous of the sonnets, its opening line competitive with "Romeo, Romeo, wherefore art thou Romeo?" in the long list of Shakespeare's quotable quotations. The gender of the addressee is not explicit, but this is the first sonnet after the so-called "procreation sonnets" (sonnets 1-17), i.e., it apparently marks the place where the poet has abandoned his earlier push to persuade the fair lord to have a child. The first two quatrains focus on the fair lord's beauty: the poet attempts to compare it to a summer's day, but shows that there can be no such comparison, since the fair lord's timeless beauty far surpasses that of the fleeting, inconstant season.
※stipulate:
 to ask something earnestly or with authority;to state exactly what must be done
for example:  State laws stipulate that public education be free.
※procreation:to produce young
for example:
While priests were denied the right to marry and procreate, he said, their situation would remain impossible.

Here the theme of the ravages of time again predominates; we see it especially in line 7, where the poet speaks of the inevitable mortality of beauty: "And every fair from fair sometime declines." But the fair lord's is of another sort, for it "shall not fade" - the poet is eternalizing the fair lord's beauty in his verse, in these "eternal lines." Note the financial imagery ("summer's lease") and the use of anaphora (the repetition of opening words) in lines 6-7, 10-11, and 13-14. Also note that May (line 3) was an early summer month in Shakespeare's time, because England did not adopt the Gregorian calendar until 1752.

The poet describes summer as a season of extremes and disappointments. He begins in lines 3-4, where "rough winds" are an unwelcome extreme and the shortness of summer is its disappointment. He continues in lines 5-6, where he lingers on the imperfections of the summer sun. Here again we find an extreme and a disappointment: the sun is sometimes far too hot, while at other times its "gold complexion" is dimmed by passing clouds. These imperfections contrast sharply with the poet's description of the fair lord, who is "more temperate" (not extreme) and whose "eternal summer shall not fade" (i.e., will not become a disappointment) thanks to what the poet proposes in line 12.

In line 12 we find the poet's solution - how he intends to eternalize the fair lord's beauty despite his refusal to have a child. The poet plans to capture the fair lord's beauty in his verse ("eternal lines"), which he believes will withstand the ravages of time. Thereby the fair lord's "eternal summer shall not fade," and the poet will have gotten his wish. Here we see the poet's use of "summer" as a metaphor for youth, or perhaps beauty, or perhaps the beauty of youth.

But has the poet really abandoned the idea of encouraging the fair lord to have a child? Some scholars suggest that the "eternal lines" in line 12 have a double meaning: the fair lord's beauty can live on not only in the written lines of the poet's verse but also in the family lines of the fair lord's progeny. Such an interpretation would echo the sentiment of the preceding sonnet's closing couplet: "But were some child of yours alive that time / You should live twice; in it and in my rhyme." The use of "growest" also implies an increasing or changing: we can envision the fair lord's family lines growing over time, yet this image is not as readily applicable to the lines of the poet's verse - unless it refers only to his intention to continue writing about the fair lord's beauty, his verse thereby "growing." On the other hand, line 14 seems to counter this interpretation, the singular "this" (as opposed to "these") having as its most likely antecedent the poet's verse, and nothing more.

Summary

The speaker opens the poem with a question addressed to the beloved: “Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?” The next eleven lines are devoted to such a comparison. In line 2, the speaker stipulates what mainly differentiates the young man from the summer’s day: he is “more lovely and more temperate.” Summer’s days tend toward extremes: they are shaken by “rough winds”; in them, the sun (“the eye of heaven”) often shines “too hot,” or too dim. And summer is fleeting: its date is too short, and it leads to the withering of autumn, as “every fair from fair sometime declines.” The final quatrain of the sonnet tells how the beloved differs from the summer in that respect: his beauty will last forever (“Thy eternal summer shall not fade...”) and never die. In the couplet, the speaker explains how the beloved’s beauty will accomplish this feat, and not perish because it is preserved in the poem, which will last forever; it will live “as long as men can breathe or eyes can see.”

Commentary

This sonnet is certainly the most famous in the sequence of Shakespeare’s sonnets; it may be the most famous lyric poem in English. Among Shakespeare’s works, only lines such as “To be or not to be” and “Romeo, Romeo, wherefore art thou Romeo?” are better-known. This is not to say that it is at all the best or most interesting or most beautiful of the sonnets; but the simplicity and loveliness of its praise of the beloved has guaranteed its place.

On the surface, the poem is simply a statement of praise about the beauty of the beloved; summer tends to unpleasant extremes of windiness and heat, but the beloved is always mild and temperate. Summer is incidentally personified as the “eye of heaven” with its “gold complexion”; the imagery throughout is simple and unaffected, with the “darling buds of May” giving way to the “eternal summer”, which the speaker promises the beloved. The language, too, is comparatively unadorned for the sonnets; it is not heavy with alliteration or assonance, and nearly every line is its own self-contained clause—almost every line ends with some punctuation, which effects a pause.


Sonnet 18 is the first poem in the sonnets not to explicitly encourage the young man to have children. The “procreation” sequence of the first 17 sonnets ended with the speaker’s realization that the young man might not need children to preserve his beauty; he could also live, the speaker writes at the end of Sonnet 17, “in my rhyme.” Sonnet 18, then, is the first “rhyme”—the speaker’s first attempt to preserve the young man’s beauty for all time. An important theme of the sonnet (as it is an important theme throughout much of the sequence) is the power of the speaker’s poem to defy time and last forever, carrying the beauty of the beloved down to future generations. The beloved’s “eternal summer” shall not fade precisely because it is embodied in the sonnet: “So long as men can breathe or eyes can see,” the speaker writes in the couplet, “So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.”

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 Bruce Springsteen’s "Nebraska"

I saw her standing on her front lawn just twirling her baton

Me and her went for a ride sir and ten innocent people died

From the town of Lincoln Nebraska with a sawed-off .410 on my lap

Through to the badlands of Wyoming I killed everything in my path

I can't say that I'm sorry for the things that we done

At least for a little while sir me and her we had us some fun

The jury brought in a guilty verdict and the judge he sentenced me to death

Midnight in a prison storeroom with leather straps across my chest

Sheriff when the man pulls that switch sir and snaps my poor neck back

You make sure my pretty baby is sitting right there on my lap

They declared me unfit to live said into that great void my soul'd 

Be hurled

They wanted to know why I did what I did

Well sir I guess there's just a meanness in this world

※verdict :an opinion or decision made after judging the facts that are given, especially one made at the end of the trial 

※void: not occupied(= vacant); containing nothing(a void place)

※hurl

※baton: U.k also truncheon, us also nightstick a thick, heavy stick used as a weapon by police officers

※karma: (In the Buddhist and Hindu religious) the force produced by a person's actions in one life that influences what happens to them in future lives 

《Meaning》

Bruce Springsteen's Nebraska, in which the great rock & roll emancipator takes a long hard look into the "great void," tells ten stories of the fate of hope in the face of hopelessness, and of the need for meaning in a world of violent caprice and endemic injustice. Recorded at home on a four-track cassette machine, it is arguably Springsteen's best work, certainly his most artless, a solo outing across terrain deadly and cruel. The Boss has met darkness before, but generally he's come out swinging: "Badlands" and "Promised Land" and "Ties That Bind" and even "Born to Run" (and a dozen others) are battle cries in a war on nothingness. But on Nebraska the Boss disappears into characters whose victories, if and when they come, are small -- quiet acts of love and faith that enable each to live and to continue to live with himself, acts unremarkable yet, in the context of such palpable despair, heroic. "Man turns his back on his family, well, he just ain't no good," figures officer Joe Roberts (in "Highway Patrolman"), and in that moral equation and his living to it, he scores a point against the darkness. 

caprice: 

UK Dictionary→ (the quality of often having) a sudden and usually silly wish to have or doing something ,or a sudden or silly change of mind or behavior

endemic: 
especially of a disease or condition ,regularly found and very common among a particular group or in a particular area
＊Making a sentence→ Malaria is endemic in many of the hotter regions of the world.

terrain:
an area ,when considering its natural feature; a geographic area

badlands:
a dry area without plants and with large rocks that the weather has worn into strabge shapes,especially the area like this in Dakota and Nebraska in US.

patrolman:
 a police officer who regularly walks or drives around an area in in order to prevent pr deal with crime

    An auto worker is laid off, can't find work, gets in debt, gets drunk, shoots a clerk during a robbery, gets prison for life, asks for death. A guy knocks off work, travels the New Jersey turnpike through the night to see a girl. Another rides the same turnpike in a (stolen?) car, praying the state troopers leave him alone, for their sake ("Maybe you got a kid, maybe you got a pretty wife") as well as his. A son dreams a powerful dream of finding again his father's love and, waking, resolves to find him but cannot. A working-class family buys a "brand new used car"; the son yearns for the money that might lift them for a humiliating hand-me-down life on "dirty streets," while his kid sister, oblivious, happily licks an ice cream and honks the car horn. A highway patrolman chases his murderer brother to the Canadian border, pulls "over to the side of the highway and [watches] his taillights disappear." 

   Springsteen sings these stories against acoustic guitar, punctuating verses with mournful harmonica or dark vocal wails. The language throughout is unaffected, uncluttered, pared of metaphor -- a world away from the dense clusters of baroque verbiage that mark (and often mar) much of Springsteen's work through Born to Run (precisely the stuff that got him pegged "the new Dylan"). There's none of the cocky street poet here; we hear instead the voice of a gas jockey, a highway patrolman, the flat, dull tones of a witless murderer. Each tells his story, creating through small detail a whole world beyond the events related. The Tanqueray and wine that sets of Johnny 99, the Club Tip Top where an off-duty cop nabs him from behind, the farm deferment that keeps Joe Roberts out of the army, Caril Fugate's baton, the Bob's Big Boy where the kid from the gas station meets his Wanda, and the Texaco map they use to wipe fingers greasy from fried chicken together constitute a sort of poetry of the incidental. And the musical referents out of which Nebraska is fashioned -- bits of folk song, hymns, Hank Williams and Chuck Berry -- are beautifully apt, as natural to these characters as the words they choose to tell their tales, and serving as subtext to the piece each has to speak. 

turnpike:a high-speed high way, especially one maintained by tolls

New Jersey Turnpike

taillight:a light, usually red, at the rear of an automobile ,train ...etc

baroque verbiage

verbiage: overbundance and suprerfluity of words, as in writing or speech

＊Synonym→ wordiness, verbosity, diffusion, redundancy

uncluttered: not cluttered , not filled or covered with unecessary things

clutter: to fill something in a untidy or badly organized way

deferment: (a) tempoary delay in taking someone into the military forces

jockey: a person whose job is to riding horses in races

nab: to take something suddenly ,or to catch or arrest a criminal

lay off: an occasion when a company stops employing someone , sometimes temporarily , because the company does not have enough money or enough work

Some critics are choosing to view Nebraska as Springsteen's response to the Age of Reagan (and Springsteen as a Woody Guthrie of the new depression), but that is too limited a reading 

Hard times are an old affliction, and even though the men and women who inhabit Nebraska's badlands are all thus afflicted, they differ markedly in their symptoms. Some go under, but others do not. Of the album's three murderers, only Johnny 99 kills out of socioeconomic despair; the title song's Charles Starkweather-based narrator kills for "fun" and Frank Roberts (in "Highway Patrolman") just "ain't no good." The tenor of the times may well have driven Springsteen to make this album, but as a political tract, Nebraska is awfully ambiguous. 
tenor:
tract:

    If there's a message here, it is not, it seems to me, that we ought to get Reagan out of the White House and 11 million people into jobs (not that it's a bad idea), but that the harder the world comes down, the greater is the need for faith. That while moral codes and belief systems might appear absurd luxuries to a man with an empty belly, they are all that holds off a greater emptiness. ("Listen to my last prayer," Springsteen sings on "State Trooper" and again on "Open All Night," "deliver me from nowhere" -- and that's got nothing to do with class or politics or economics). And that, finally, the only meaning we have is the meaning we make, and that without meaning we are in the dark, lost, the dead waiting to die. 

    "Everything dies, baby, that's a fact." The measure of these players is the degree to which they can continue to dream and to hold faith in the cold light of certain loss. "But maybe everything that dies someday comes back." A man stands prodding a dead dog with a stick, "like if he stood there long enough that dog'd get up and run"; a woman is deserted, a groom left at the altar; somebody gets baptized, somebody gets buried. And "Still at the end of every hard-earned day people find some reason to believe" -- those words end the album. Decide for yourself whether that's foolish, or brave, or if at times you might not have to be one to be the other.

《Description》

"Nebraska" is sung as a first person narrative of Charles Starkweather, who along with his teenage girlfriend Caril Ann Fugate murdered 11 people over an eight-day period in 1958. Springsteen sings of 10 deaths, as Starkweather had already killed one man prior to their meeting. Although the narrator describes the murders and his trial and impending execution, he sings in a flat, unemotional voice, which makes the events described seem all the more chilling. The song begins with Starkweather meeting Fugate:

I saw her standin' on her front lawn just a twirlin' her baton

Me and her went for a ride, sir ... and 10 innocent people died

impending: about to happen; imminent

The economy of language in the opening is reminiscent of American writer Flannery O'Connor, who Springsteen had been reading prior to writing the songs for Nebraska. O'Connor's influence is heard throughout the song, with its confused characters who resort to violence.The song's last line, where the narrator gives his reason for the killings as "I guess there's just a meanness in this world" is similar to the ending of O'Connor's story "A Good Man Is Hard to Find", where the killer states "it's nothing for you to do but enjoy the few minutes you got left the best way you can -- by killing somebody or burning down his house or doing some other meanness to him. No pleasure but meanness."In another line from the song, the singer states that he isn't sorry for his actions and that "At least for a little while, sir, me and her we had us some fun."Springsteen has stated the last stanza, including the lines "into that great void my soul'd be hurled" and "there's just a meanness in this world" summarizes how he saw himself and all of humanity, as dogged by an existential doom.

get left: to be killed
hurl:to throw or fling with great force or vigor Springsteen was inspired to write the song after seeing Terrence Malick's movie Badlands on television.The portrait in the opening lines of the girl standing on her front lawn twirling her baton was taken from the movie.[3] He researched the Starkweather killings, including interviewing Ninette Beaver, who had written a book about the killings. Perhaps owing to artistic license, Springsteen did not create an entirely accurate account of the events.For example, Starkweather was not known to have attributed his actions to "a meanness in this world",however, many aspects of the song reflect history. The narrator hopes his "pretty baby is sittin' right there on my lap" when he is sent to the electric chair. In real life Starkweather did his best to take Fugate down with him (although she escaped execution).In a letter from prison to his parents, Starkweather wrote "But dad I'm not real sorry for what I did cause for the first time me and Caril have (sic) more fun."This is reflected in the lyrics:

I can't say that I'm sorry for the things that we done

At least for a little while, sir, me and her we had us some fun

Springsteen recorded the entire album on a cassette tape deck in his bedroom on Jan. 3, 1982. Although intended as a demo for the E-Street Band, producer Jon Landau felt that the song would be best served by an arrangement with an acoustic bass, brushed drums and piano. However, the arrangement did not work. Neither did full-band arrangements of other songs from the original recording. Eventually, the demo version was released.

Biography

Nineteen-year-old Charles Starkweather embarked on a murderous rampage in January 1958 that left 10 people dead.

rampage: 

UK Dictionary→to go through an area making a lot of noises and causing damage

Merriam →t rush wildly about

Making a sentence: 
The demonstrator rampaged through the town , smashing windows and setting fire to cars.

demonstrator:

UK Dictionary→a person who marches or stands with a group of people to show that they disagree with or support something or someone

Merriam →a person who participates in demonstration

flank (being flanked by): to be situated at both sides of

Synopsis

Born on November 24, 1938, in Lincoln, Nebraska, Charles Starkweather was bullied as a child and dropped out of high school at age 16. He killed a gas station attendant in late 1957, and in early 1958 he embarked on a spree with girlfriend Caril Ann Fugate that left 10 people dead. The two were caught after a high-speed car chase, and Starkweather was executed on June 25, 1959. His grizzly murders have since been remembered though music, film and books.

grizzle: (especially of a young child) to cry continuously but not very loudly , or to complain all the time

grizzly: (grizzled): streaked or mixed with gray

Early Life

A child of the Great Depression era, Charles Raymond Starkweather was born on November 24, 1938, in Lincoln, Nebraska, the third of seven children of parents Guy and Helen. Starkweather's family had little money, and as a child he was bullied for his bowlegged walk and speech impediment. 

impediment: something that makes progress ,movement , or achieving something difficult or impossible

=balk , block, chain, crimp ,cramp, handicap, inhibition, obstruction, encumbrance, menacle

bowlegged :outward curvature of the legs causing a separation of the knees when the ankles are close or in contact.

Starkweather left school at the age of 16, taking work as a lorry loader for a local newspaper business. Inspired by the 1955 James Dean movie Rebel Without a Cause, he tried to emulate the look and style of its(the film) star. He also became romantically involved with a kindred rebellious spirit, Caril Ann Fugate, who was only 13 years old at the time.

lorry:  truck

emulate: to be the same in meaning or effort; 

to copy something achieved by someone else and try to do it as well as they have

=add up, correspond to ,equal , amount(as a verb)

Murderous Rampage Begins

Starkweather left the newspaper haulage job to find work as a refuse collector, but the injustice of his poverty, as he saw it, began to consume him, and he convinced himself that crime was his only route to financial gain. In the early hours of December 1, 1957, Starkweather took his first victim, gas station attendant Robert Colvert, for $100. 

haulage :the business of moving things by road r railway
refuse collector: formal for dutsman; someone who collects rubbish and waste,usually in a rubbish or refuse truck , before final disposal

On January 21, 1958, Starkweather drove to Fugate's house, where he was denied entry by her mother and stepfather, Velda and Marion Bartlett. Following an altercation, he killed both of them, as well as Fugate's 2-year-old half-sister, Betty Jean. Starkweather and Fugate lived in the house for six days, with Fugate telling visitors that the rest of the family was bedridden with the flu, but they fled after other family members grew suspicious.

altercation: is a noisy argument or disagreement; a loud argument or disagreement
=brawl, cross fire, controversy, dispute, donnybrook  (a usually public quarrel or argument), falling-out

Starkweather drove to the farm of a family friend named August Meyer and killed him, though his car got stuck on the property. He and his girlfriend hitched a ride with another teenage couple, Robert Jensen and Carole King, eventually killing them as well and taking the car.

Starkweather and Fugate drove to a suburb of Lincoln, where they sought refuge at the home of a wealthy industrialist, C. Lauer Ward. They killed both Mr. and Mrs. Ward and their maid, then headed to Washington state, where Starkweather's brother lived.

By this point, the National Guard had been notified of the killing spree. Seeking to switch vehicles, Starkweather killed shoe salesman Merle Collison, but had trouble operating the unfamiliar car. Encounters with passerby drew attention and a high-speed police chase ensued, ending after Sheriff Earl Heflin shot out the car's back window.  

Charged with multiple counts of murder, Charles Starkweather pleaded innocent by reason of insanity. He was sentenced to death and executed by electric chair in Lincoln on June 25, 1959. Fugate claimed that she was a hostage, but the jury found her guilty. Because she was only 14 years old when she participated in the murders, she received a life sentence. She was paroled in June 1976.

parole: permission for a prisoner to be released before their period of  in prison is finished ,with the agreement they will behave well

Pop Culture References

The killing spree shocked the nation, and reverberated throughout society for years to come with references in art and popular culture. Badlands (1973) and Natural Born Killers (1994) were among the movies based on the murders, while Bruce Springsteen recorded a track in 1982 called "Nebraska," an account of events from Starkweather's point of view.

In 2004, Liza Ward, the grandaughter of two of the victims, wove the story of the murders into her novel Outside Valentine. Seven years later, Christian Patterson published Redheaded Peckerwood, a photographic chronicle of the people and places Starkweather and Fugate encountered while on the run.

reverberate: 
(1)If a loud, deep sound reverberates, it continues to be heard around an area, so that the area seems to shake
(2) If an event or idea reverberates somewhere, it has an effect on everyone or everything in a place or group
revel: a time or instance of carefree fun

(=spree)

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Killing Spree

When Fugate’s suspicious grandmother threatened to call the police, Starkweather and Fugate fled to Bennett, Nebraska, where family friend August Meyer lived. The 70-year-old man offered hospitality to the couple, but Starkweather repaid him by shooting him and killing his dog.

Later that same night, another teenage couple would offer Starkweather and Fugate a ride. Their bodies were found in a storm cellar, both of them shot and their car gone. Seeking a hiding place, Starkweather and Fugate stayed with a prominent businessman in Lincoln, C. Lauer Ward. The next day, Ward, his wife, and their maid were all found dead.

The murderous couple stole Ward’s car and drove toward Washington state, where Starkweather’s brother lived. They saw a traveling salesman napping in his car along the highway, and Starkweather shot him. Before they could drive off in the dead man’s car, another man, Joe Sprinkle, approached the vehicles to see if they had broken down and needed assistance. Sprinkle was alerted to the danger of the situation when he spotted the dead body in the car just in time, and he wrestled with Starkweather over the weapon, managing to grab it.

A deputy sheriff happened to drive along, and that prompted a high-speed chase that ultimately ended in Starkweather’s surrender. Both he and Fugate were arrested and charged with multiple counts of murder.

deputy: a second in command or assistant who usually takes charge when his or her superior is absent

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Flannery O'Connor

Flannery O'Connor

Mary Flannery O'Connor (March 25, 1925 – August 3, 1964) was an American writer and essayist. An important voice in American literature, she wrote two novels and thirty-two short stories, as well as a number of reviews and commentaries. She was a Southern writer who often wrote in a Southern Gothic style and relied heavily on regional settings and grotesque characters. Her writing also reflected her Roman Catholic faith and frequently examined questions of morality and ethics. Her posthumously compiled Complete Stories won the 1972 U.S. National Book Award for Fiction and has been the subject of enduring praise.

When she was six, living at a home still standing (now preserved as the Flannery O'Connor Childhood Home), she experienced her first brush with celebrity status. The Pathé News people filmed "Little Mary O'Connor" with her trained chicken and showed the film around the country. She said: "When I was six I had a chicken that walked backward and was in the Pathé News. I was in it too with the chicken. I was just there to assist the chicken but it was the high point in my life. Everything since has been an anticlimax."

anticlimax:  A decline viewed in disappointing contrast with a previous rise

O'Connor and her family moved to Milledgeville, Georgia in 1940 to live on Andalusia Farm,which is now a museum dedicated to O'Connor's work. In 1937, her father was diagnosed with systemic lupus erythematosus; it led to his eventual death on February 1, 1941,and O'Connor and her mother continued to live in Milledgeville.

O'Connor attended Peabody High School, where she worked as the school newspaper's art editor and from which she graduated in 1942.She entered Georgia State College for Women (now Georgia College & State University) in an accelerated three-year program and graduated in June 1945 with a social sciences degree. While at Georgia College, she produced a significant amount of cartoon work for the student newspaper.

O'Connor with Arthur Koestler (left) and Robie Macauley on a visit to the Amana Colonies in 1947

In 1946, she was accepted into the prestigious Iowa Writers' Workshop at the University of Iowa, where she first went to study journalism. While there, she got to know several important writers and critics who lectured or taught in the program, among them Robert Penn Warren, John Crowe Ransom, Robie Macauley, Austin Warren and Andrew Lytle.[citation needed] Lytle, for many years editor of the Sewanee Review, was one of the earliest admirers of her fiction. He later published several of her stories in the Sewanee Review, as well as critical essays on her work. Workshop director Paul Engle was the first to read and comment on the initial drafts of what would become Wise Blood. She received an M.A. from the University of Iowa in 1947.During the summer of 1948, O'Connor continued to work on Wise Blood at Yaddo, an artists' community in Saratoga Springs, New York, where she also completed several short stories.

In 1949, O'Connor met and eventually accepted an invitation to stay with Robert Fitzgerald (a well-known translator of the classics) and his wife, Sally, in Ridgefield, Connecticut.

Career

Regarding her emphasis of the grotesque, O'Connor said: "anything that comes out of the South is going to be called grotesque by the northern reader, unless it is grotesque, in which case it is going to be called realistic."Her texts usually take place in the South and revolve around morally flawed characters, while the issue of race often appears in the background. Most of her works feature disturbing elements, though she did not like to be characterized as cynical. "I am mighty tired of reading reviews that call A Good Man brutal and sarcastic," she wrote. "The stories are hard but they are hard because there is nothing harder or less sentimental than Christian realism ... when I see these stories described as horror stories I am always amused because the reviewer always has hold of the wrong horror."

O'Connor's two novels are Wise Blood (1952) and The Violent Bear It Away (1960). She also published two books of short stories: A Good Man Is Hard to Find (1955) and Everything That Rises Must Converge (published posthumously in 1965).

Many of O'Connor's short stories have been published in major anthologies, including The Best American Short Stories and Prize Stories.

She felt deeply informed by the sacramental and by the Thomist notion that the created world is charged with God. Yet she would not write apologetic fiction of the kind prevalent in the Catholic literature of the time, explaining that a writer's meaning must be evident in his or her fiction without didacticism. She wrote ironic, subtly allegorical fiction about deceptively backward Southern characters, usually fundamentalist Protestants, who undergo transformations of character that, to her thinking, brought them closer to the Catholic mind. The transformation is often accomplished through pain, violence, and ludicrous behavior in the pursuit of the holy. However grotesque the setting, she tried to portray her characters as they might be touched by divine grace. This ruled out a sentimental understanding of the stories' violence, as of her own illness. She wrote: "Grace changes us and the change is painful." She also had a deeply sardonic sense of humor, often based in the disparity between her characters' limited perceptions and the awesome fate awaiting them. Another source of humor is frequently found in the attempt of well-meaning liberals to cope with the rural South on their own terms. O'Connor used such characters' inability to come to terms with race, poverty, and fundamentalism, other than in sentimental illusions, as an example of the failure of the secular world in the twentieth century.

ludicrous: so absurd and incongruous as to be laughable

disparity: a lack of quality or similarity ,especially in a way that is not fair

sardonic:

(1) showing little respect in a humorous but unkind way ,often because you think that you are too importantto consider or discuss a matter

(2)disdainfully or skeptically humorous; derisively mocking

Synonym of sardonic: acidic, acidulous, caustic, 

derisive: expressing or causing contemptuous ridicule or scorn (showing derision)

liberal(adj.)respecting and allowing many different types of beliefs or behavior

well-meaning: 

(1)wanting to have a good effect,but not always achieving one

(2)having good intention; based on good intention
※Make a sentence→I know he's well meaning, but I wish he'd leave us alone.

fundamentalism: 

(1)the belief in old and traditional forms of religion ,or the belief that what is written in a holy book ,such as the Christian Bible ,is completely true.

(2)often capitalized(Fundamentalism)
a movement or attitude stressing strict and literal adherence to a set of basic principles 

secular: not having any connection with religion

For example

→secular education

→secular state
◎List of secular states by continent
take some instances of Europe
 1.Czech Republic
2. Estonia

3. France

allegorical :of ,or relating to having the characteristics of allegory
incongruous: unusual or different from what is around or from what is generally happening 

However, several stories reveal that O'Connor was familiar with some of the most sensitive contemporary issues that her liberal and fundamentalist characters might encounter. She addressed the Holocaust in her story "The Displaced Person" and racial integration in "Everything That Rises Must Converge." Her fiction often included references to the problem of race in the South; occasionally, racial issues come to the forefront, as in "The Artificial Nigger," "Everything that Rises Must Converge," and "Judgment Day," her last short story and a drastically rewritten version of her first published story, "The Geranium."

Fragments exist of an unfinished novel tentatively titled Why Do the Heathen Rage? that draws from several of her short stories, including "Why Do the Heathen Rage?," "The Enduring Chill," and "The Partridge Festival."

Illness and death

By the summer of 1952, O'Connor was diagnosed with systemic lupus erythematosus (lupus),like her father, and subsequently returned to her ancestral farm, Andalusia, in Milledgeville, Georgia. O'Connor lived for twelve years after her diagnosis, seven years longer than expected. Despite the debilitating effects of the steroid drugs used to treat O'Connor's lupus, she nonetheless remained very active by maintaining a daily writing schedule and making appearances at lectures to read her works.

At Andalusia, she raised and nurtured some 100 peafowl. Fascinated by birds of all kinds, she raised ducks, ostrich, emus, toucans, and any sort of exotic bird she could obtain, while incorporating images of peacocks into her books. She described her peacocks in an essay entitled "The King of the Birds." Despite her secluded life, her writing reveals an uncanny grasp of the nuances of human behavior. O'Connor gave many lectures on faith and literature, traveling quite far despite her frail health.

O'Connor completed more than two dozen short stories and two novels while struggling with lupus. She died on August 3, 1964, at the age of 39 in Baldwin County Hospital.[21] Her death was caused by complications from a new attack of lupus following surgery for a fibroma. She was buried in Milledgeville, Georgia,[22] at Memory Hill Cemetery.

Letters

Throughout her life, O'Connor maintained a wide correspondence, including with writers Robert Lowell and Elizabeth Bishop, English professor Samuel Ashley Brown, and playwright Maryat Lee.After her death, a selection of her letters, edited by her friend Sally Fitzgerald, was published as The Habit of Being. Much of O'Connor's best-known writing on religion, writing, and the South is contained in these and other letters.[citation needed]

In 1955, Betty Hester, an Atlanta file clerk, wrote O'Connor a letter expressing admiration for her work. Hester's letter drew O'Connor's attention, and they corresponded frequently. For The Habit of Being, Hester provided Fitzgerald with all the letters she received from O'Connor but requested that her identity be kept private; she was identified only as "A."[17] The complete collection of the unedited letters between O'Connor and Hester was unveiled by Emory University in May 2007; the letters were given to the university in 1987 with the stipulation that they not be released to the public for 20 years.[27][16]

Religion[edit]

O'Connor was a devout Catholic despite living in the Protestant South. From 1956 through 1964, she wrote more than one hundred book reviews for two Catholic diocesan newspapers in Georgia: The Bulletin, and The Southern Cross.[29] According to fellow reviewer Joey Zuber, the wide range of books she chose to review demonstrated that she was profoundly intellectual.[30][page needed] Her reviews consistently confronted theological and ethical themes in books written by the most serious and demanding theologians of her time.[31] Professor of English Carter Martin, an authority on O'Connor's writings, notes simply that her "book reviews are at one with her religious life."[31]

A prayer journal O'Connor had kept during her time at the University of Iowa was published in 2013.[32] It included prayers and ruminations on faith, writing, and O'Connor's relationship with God.[33][32][34]