Sir Thomas Wyatt ≈ Bruno Mars

I am not a fan of Bruno Mars. I'm not a fan because virtually all of his music follows a single theme and pattern. Bruno Mars meets a girl, she dumps him (usually because he was a jerk) and then he cries about it for the rest of the song. He writes songs about jumping in front of trains, blowing himself up with grenades, and medicating himself into oblivion because he can't face the sadness that comes with a girl leaving him. 

If Bruno Mars had existed during the Rennaisance, They Flee from Me is the type of poem/song he would have written.

They Flee from me is the story of a man lamenting the fact that his once submissive and demure lady-friend (or friends) decided she wasn't interested in him any more and left him. There are bits of the poem that suggest some sexual action "did me seek with naked foot, stalking in my chamber" and "When her loose gown from her shoulders did fall, and she me caught in her arms long and small". There are clearly some ladies wandering around in the speaker's room without shoes and with their clothes falling off.

But then there's also the lines that imply that these ladies aren't exactly keen on the speaker, like "I have seen them gentle, tame, and meek, that now are wild and do not remember", or "ow they range, busily seeking with a continual change." So, now the speaker is saying that this lady who used to be "gentle and meek" is now wandering away from him, looking for new, more exciting adventures.

The part of the poem that most reminds me of Mars is the last line "I would fain know what she hath deserved." Here the speaker is saying that he doesn't know if he was good enough for the lady. Did she deserve better than him? Is that why she left him? This entire poem is about a guy looking back on a sexual experience and wishing his partner hadn't left him and wondering what he did wrong and what he could have done better. It sounds exactly like any one of Bruno Mars's songs.

**A little historical conext: Wyatt was part of King Henry's court (The same King Henry who kept killing and banishing his wives and then getting remarried) and during that time it was extremely common to men and women in the aristocracy to fool around with one another and even keep one or several mistresses.

Loss of Faith

Dover Beach has been one of my favorite poems for years, which is saying something because I really hate poetry. I remember the first time I read it I was supposed to be doing an analysis on the symbolism in the poetry, and for the first time I really got into it. My favorite part of the poem is this stanza:

"The Sea of Faith

Was once, too, at the full, and round earth’s shore

Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furled.

But now I only hear

Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,

Retreating, to the breath

Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear

And naked shingles of the world"

I love this section because I feel that it really embodies the over feeling of the poem. Here, Arnold is comparing his faith, which he was once confident in, to the crashing and receding waves of an ocean. The same way that a huge powerful wave breaks and is eventually pulled back by the tide, so has Arnold's faith receded, even though it was once very strong. Arnold feels as though the rug has been pulled out from under him. He was once very blissful and happy in his cacoon of faith, but now it's been torn away and he sees the "naked" world for what it really is.

I can really relate to the idea of the poem; that one can live in blissful ignorance thinking everything you beleive is fine and will always be that way, only to realise that things aren't really the way you thought it was. That you were lead to beleive a lie or were tricked. I can see this idea reflected in a lot of different ways, from no longer beleiving in a religion that you once had complete faith in, to being cheated on by a lover, or finding out that someone has broken into your home while you were a school. There's a feeling of betrayel and a broken sense of security that comes after all of those events, and I think that's what the poem was getting at.

PS. I don't know what went wrong there with the indentation. I can't figure out how to fix it 

Are women ever NOT sexual?

There is a section of this part of the book that really got me thinking. Two authors, Kristeva and Cixous, both make comments about how feminist writing comes from feminine sexuality. Cixous in particular says "Write your self. Your body must be heard", and goes on to say that the key for women to enter the realm of writing is to become intuned to their sexuality.

I have to say, I was a little underwhelmed. When I saw the title, I was expecting someone more than "the key to feminist writing is sex!' which really doesn't seem all that different than the key to male writing of female characters, which is also sex, albeit in a different way. Throughout history men have been guilty of writing, generally, two types of female characters. The sex symbol, and the anti-sex symbol. A woman is either gorgeous, desireable, and attractive, or she is an ugly, repulsive old hag. Regardless of any other traits, women would nearly always fit into these two categories.And that's without even going into the "good women don't have sex" and "bad women are sluts who get their comuppance" sub-categories.

I realise that at the time the dead was written, female sexuality was suppressed. However, it still upsets me to read this sort of critisism because I am sure that if we were to read an essay on how to be a good male writer we'd see mentions of internal and external inspiration, observations of how society can affect writing, the theories of romanticism, realism, the sublime, etc. etc. etc. But NO! Women's righting of course has to be all about sex, sex, sex. Like it always has been.

I understand where the writer was coming from with this viewpoint. But reading it is a modern woman in a modern world I would have to say it's a failure as a feminist work. Feminism is all about breaking away from the norm and showing women that they are more than a sex organ that exists only in relation to men. In my opinion this critizism did the opposite. It only reinforced the idea that women and sexuality are one and the same, and that men always have to be part of the equation.