Week 3

Class Ground Rules

Read all the assignments before class.
Keep yourself on mute unless called on.
Raise your hands electronically.
Focus your comments only on the question at hand rather than straying to other parts of the story.
Refrain from offering a review of the whole story or jumping to the end.
Try to support your comments by referring to details from the text.
Listen to and respond to others with respect.

READ (at least twice): Nancy Hale – “On the Beach,” (from Where the Light Falls, pp. 186-196).

A mother glimpses mortality on the beach with her son.

Think About:

The mother's relationship with and feelings about her son.
The mother's thoughts as she lies on the beach.
The relevance of her recollection the poem, "You, Andrew Marvell." (See the poem below.)
What she learns from her husband during the bridge game and her reaction (the "sudden jerk").
Her son's reaction to the jets overhead on the beach. How does this affect her?
Does she reach some resolution by the story's end?
What feeling does Nancy Hale's skill with language and description bring to the story?

You, Andrew Marvell

by Archibald MacLeish

And here face down beneath the sun

And here upon earth’s noonward height

To feel the always coming on

The always rising of the night:

To feel creep up the curving east

The earthy chill of dusk and slow

Upon those under lands the vast

And ever climbing shadow grow

And strange at Ecbatan the trees

Take leaf by leaf the evening strange

The flooding dark about their knees

The mountains over Persia change

And now at Kermanshah the gate

Dark empty and the withered grass

And through the twilight now the late

Few travelers in the westward pass

And Baghdad darken and the bridge

Across the silent river gone

And through Arabia the edge

Of evening widen and steal on

And deepen on Palmyra’s street

The wheel rut in the ruined stone

And Lebanon fade out and Crete

High through the clouds and overblown

And over Sicily the air

Still flashing with the landward gulls

And loom and slowly disappear

The sails above the shadowy hulls

And Spain go under and the shore

Of Africa the gilded sand

And evening vanish and no more

The low pale light across that land

Nor now the long light on the sea:

And here face downward in the sun

To feel how swift how secretly

The shadow of the night comes on ...

Explanation - MacLeish's poem, "You, Andrew Marvell," traces the coming of the night westward from Persia and across the Middle East and Europe to the Atlantic Ocean. He is alluding to Andrew Marvell's poem, "To His Coy Mistress," which expresses the theme of carpe diem. In it, Marvell is trying to speed his seduction of a woman by arguing that life is short, with constant threat of mortality.

MacLeish was captivated by notions of the place of man in the vastness of the universe, the stars, and notions of eternity. His biographer, Scott Donaldson, noted that the most prevalent image in MacLeish’s writing is "insignificant man adrift in space on the spinning earth."

MacLeish alludes to the passage of time and to the growth and decline of empires. The speaker, lying on the ground at sunset, feels "the rising of the night." He visualizes sunset, moving from east to west geographically, overtaking the great civilizations of the past, and feels "how swift how secretly / The shadow of the night comes on."

The sun's path in the poem - Iran, Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Crete, Sicily, Spain, the Atlantic Ocean.

Link to Week 3 class recording: brandeis.zoom.us/rec/play/yQIhP2OIQAFkrDp3mY6DFY6rnJzpixim7ZCqNxgUQVc09oiR_-olSZe0EfYnkih_kHk7Awa5DMJalpa1.GRlw5s08G4NL6qFV