The Biggest Christmas Tree on the Block; or Season’s Greetings

         First, you must know this about my father: he liked things big. The bigger, the better. For him, the value of an object was directly related to its size. He drank his beer from quart bottles; he drove the largest car the finance company would allow him to buy; he made sure we had in our living room a couch on which six people could comfortably sit.  Above the couch hung a huge gilt-framed mirror that was big enough to reflect nearly your whole height when you stood across the room from it. He not only brought home the first television on our block, but he also brought home what remained the largest television on our block for several years.  The screen was not large by today's standards--21 inches--but the cabinet would still fill many a modest living room.  It was a large wooden affair with hinged doors that closed over the screen when viewing was over to allow the television to disguise itself as an old-fashioned large china cabinet or sideboard.  Needless to say, these doors were seldom shut.  Whereas most people we knew placed an antenna, called rabbit ears, on top of their TV’s to receive any signal available, my father was not satisfied with such a paltry and ugly antenna. He mounted a grand outdoor antenna on the roof of the house; it resembled a hulking hydro tower. Inside the house, a small control box rested discreetly on a windowsill.  This box had a dial you turned in order to change the position of the antenna on the roof. This was supposed to improve the TV reception.

      And so we had a room fit for a crowd. Six people, however, rarely sat on our magnificent couch at any one time. My father would stretch his large frame on it and watch the large television until he fell asleep and the very round and very large pattern (which reminded me of the old Chicago Black Hawks' emblem) that indicated the only TV station we had was finished broadcasting for the night had shone dimly through the 21 inches of what we referred to as “snow” for several hours. The TV reception was not great, but at least the TV with its magnificent cabinet impressively occupied much space.

         Now if you have a large television and a large couch in your living room, you undoubtedly would wish to have a large coffee table to set off the whole decor.  Not only did my father purchase a grand coffee table, but he made sure it was formidably heavy.  Our coffee table was four feet long, with a removable marble top.  Yes, marble.  My father never tired of having guests, indeed anyone who happened by--the egg man, the milk man, the bread man, the Fuller Brush man, the transient asking for a handout—to try to lift the monster coffee table. He exhorted everyone to lift the coffee table to see just how heavy it was.  Its weight apparently testified to its worth. My father even brought people—friends and strangers alike--home to try their luck with the prodigious table.  I have a sneaking suspicion that lifting this table long into the nights kept my father in some semblance of physical fitness.

         One of my father's most cherished fantasies was to own a motel, and I have little doubt that his desire was as much for a home with more bedrooms than anyone else he knew had, than it was to make money without having to work for it. His fantasy had him sitting in the office, his feet stretched out on a desk, signing in guests, and taking in money to fill cardboard boxes big enough to hold that fine coffee table he so prized. What did not occur to him was that my mother would be the person cleaning those many rooms and doing the heavy laundry from so many beds. His vision was of the life of Riley, with money just floating into those large boxes. He would spend the days conversing with guests and accepting bundles of cash provided by those same guests. His days would benefit from the comforts of a soft chair and all that money could provide. His nights would slide by in pleasant dreams in which money actually did grow on trees.

         So you have the idea: my father always thought big. It should be no surprise, then, that when December rolled around he always wanted the largest Christmas tree on the block.  Not satisfied with the puny trees available from the Boy Scouts or from the Orange Young Britons, he decided one year to drive into the country and cut down his own tree, the biggest one he could find. He wanted a majestic fir fit for a once and future motel owner. I went along because my father harboured a hope that I would learn all the manly skills, including the chopping of trees, but truth to tell I was young and as puny as the Boy Scout trees my father scorned.

Consequently, my father asked Mr. Wobble from the house in back of us to go with us.  We would take two vehicles and cut down two trees, one for the Wobbles and one for us, but the real reason Mr. Wobble came along was that my father knew he would need as much lifting power as he could find to haul his handsome giant of a tree out of the woods and onto the roof of his car, a 1954 Ford Crestline. I suspect he had visions of giant redwoods as he imagined the wondrous tree in our front room. This would be a tree to complement the couch, the coffee table, and the television. This would be a tree to impress the many visitors who came to try their hands at lifting that awesome marble-topped coffee table. This would be a tree worthy of appearing in the pages of the local newspaper, The Record News. This would be a tree people would remember for years to come.

         We drove south on the Lombardy road for about ten miles, then turned into a side road and drove another three or four miles until the bush became thick on both sides of the road.  We stopped, got out of the cars, took an axe from each trunk, and climbed the split rail fence that separated the woods from the roadside ditch. We had galoshes on, of course, but none of us was prepared for the depth of snow that greeted us on the other side of the fence.  My legs disappeared.  My father and Mr. Wobble sank up to their calves.  They had a difficult time trudging through the snow, but I had an impossible time.  I saw them moving into the trees, and in my horror I shrieked.  I had visions of being left behind to fall prey to some savage beast. Snow was beginning to fall in fat fluffy flakes, and the track of my dragged body would quickly disappear. The two men stopped.  Turned.  And they began to laugh at the puny one wriggling up to his waist in snow.  Their laughter only made me feel worse than I felt when I saw them receding from me. They returned and hauled me out of the snow and onto my father's shoulders.  On we trudged into the depths of the forest looking for the perfect tree.  Before we cut the Wobble's tree, we had to find the McGillicuddy tree, the magnificent pine that would fill our living room with its grandeur, towering over the huge couch, TV, and coffee table. Placed correctly, it might also find itself reflected in the huge mirror giving our room two giant trees instead of one.

         After some time appraising trees, measuring them with the eye from top to bottom, looking for perfection in both height and symmetry, we came upon a giant among pines, a stately tree fit for a town square, a tree that might fittingly take its place on Parliament Hill in Ottawa or even in front of the White House.  We simply gazed up at it in admiration.  Then my father sent out the call to action.  "Let's fell this one, Ernie," he said to Mr. Wobble.  Warning me to stand back, the two men flung their axes over their shoulders to begin the deed.  With a mighty swing, my father brought his axe down toward the tree.  Instead of the hearty "thud" I expected to hear, I heard a slight "ping" as the axe head flew yards away and into the snow.  This flying of the axe head was a familiar occurrence; my father never got the hang of fixing the axe head to the handle firmly. A few loud and blistery words came my way from my father, whose face registered fury, the fury of the hunter who has found his prey only to be cheated of it at the last second.  The axe head had entered the snow cleanly, but where it entered was not where it came to rest, and it took several minutes of frantic snow flailing to find the thing.  Once the axe was, at least temporarily, repaired, the two men began again, chopping with all the zeal of seasoned lumberjacks.  This was manly work, work for the hardened woodsman, work that would earn a good glug from a handy bottle. They chopped and chopped, chips flying like snowflakes, until their axes came together in a clang and a curse.  The two men stopped and stared at each other, my father with a malignant look on his face. I thought my father was about to brain Mr. Wobble, when a terrific crack rent the air.  The great tree began to list and then to fall slowly and gracefully to the ground.  The three of us quickly moved away as the tree came down between Mr. Wobble and me and my father. It landed softly in the thick snow and lay there like Mr. French in his white satin-lined coffin, with the stillness of eternity. The deed was done.

         It didn't take long for the two men to find and bring down a smaller tree for the Wobble household.  This tree was so small that Mr. Wobble carried it over his shoulder back to the trunk of his car. It stuck out about a foot or so and Mr. Wobble tied the lid of the trunk to keep the tree from jumping out on the drive home. I could sense my father’s disdain. My father's tree could not be carried over anyone's shoulder, and certainly would not fit in anyone’s trunk.  It was too big even for the box of a good-sized pick-up truck. He and I just stood admiring this fallen forest monument while we waited for Mr. Wobble to return. By the time he got back, my father had had a few nips from the flask that he carried in a large pocket. He then shared it with Mr. Wobble. They both needed fortification before lifting the heavy load, my father said. Once fortified, they hauled the large tree with great huffs and puffs back to the split rail fence. The next trick was to get the tree over the fence and to do this they needed more fortification. Once fortified, they got the tree up and onto the fence and then rolled it until it slid to the ground on the road side of the fence, in the ditch. The tree was now only a few feet from the car, but in a depression that would make it difficult to haul up and onto the car.

       Now, my father prided himself on being prepared for anything, and he had brought several stout ropes with which he planned to lash the tree to the roof of our 1954 Ford hardtop.  The two men tied ropes to the tree and my father began pushing and shoving the thing up the bank toward the car while Mr. Wobble pulled on the ropes from above. I stood to the side and shivered in the cold. Grunting, cursing, and straining every muscle, my father and Mr. Wobble managed to get the tree beside the car and then stand it up. The next step was to hoist it onto the roof of the car.  This they did with more grunting and cursing. The tree was situated crossways on the roof until they swiveled it round like a compass needle. They positioned the tree so that the its pointy top hung down over the windshield effectively making two panes where there once had been one. Yes, my father had prepared the roof by covering it with an old blanket; he certainly did not wish to scratch the paint on his big car, the most glamorous car on the block.

         Much of the tree hung over the front of the car and over the trunk of the car, leaving little space for seeing out either the windshield or the rear window. The tree balanced precariously along the middle of the roof with its wide branches hanging over each side, effectively disturbing the view from the side windows. Since the car had only two doors, my father’s next bright idea was to place a rope around the tree near the back of the roof and bring it underneath the car so that the car became a huge wrapped Christmas present with the great tree on top serving as a decorative bow. Then he and I got in the car and Mr. Wobble circled a rope over the front of the tree and around the car itself, bringing the long rope up on either side of the car where he tied each end to a door handle.  My father and I were inside peering out through the small spaces left to see through. Once we got home, Mr. Wobble would untie the front rope and release us from the car. In the mean time, my father and I would be prisoners beneath the glory that was our Christmas tree. The tree lay like a great carcass on top of our big Ford V8. I could tell that my father was excited to get his prize home so that everyone could see it as he drove slowly down the block.

         Mr. Wobble's car was ahead of my father's when we began the return journey. The plan had been that we would be the first to leave for home so that if we had difficulty Mr. Wobble would be able to help. But the best-laid plans often go awry and Mr. Wobble quickly headed for his car and drove off before my father had a chance to lower the flask that he held victoriously to his mouth.  My father and I squinted through the branches that flecked the front windshield and watched Mr. Wobble pass out of sight. My father cursed and started the car. We had to go very slowly with the great tree creaking and shifting on the roof above us.  By the time we reached the Lombardy road, the tree had shifted noticeably because the blanket slid easily on the smooth roof.  The pointy top of the tree had shifted to the left making it even more difficult for my father to see the road. He had to lean way over to the right or else crane his neck out the half-lowered window. My father drove with care and I sat mute in anticipation of more of those familiar words. I continued to shiver with the cold. Turning into the main road, we confronted a huge truck that loomed upon us on the wrong side of the road.  My father lunged forward with his foot on the gas; the car lurched; the great tree began to slide backwards; my father crushed the brake with his right foot; the tree swung forward and several of its great branches moved down onto the hood effectively covering the windshield and my father's view.  Before he could recover from having gunned the engine, we bumped, slid, and jostled to a stop in the deep ditch beside the road.  The car had stalled. The huge truck disappeared into the distance. I heard those words.  I heard even more of them when my father tried to open his door only to find that Mr. Wobble had fixed the ropes well enough to stay around the car, even though they had not kept the tree immobile.  Neither of us could open our doors.

          My father suggested that I climb out my window and then undo the rope. I tried, but the car had tilted enough that my side of the car leaned against a large snow bank making it difficult if not impossible for me to get out. My father thought I was just being silly. “Don’t be a sissy,” he scoffed. If I was not going to get out my side, then he said I could climb over him and get out his window. But when he tried to role his window the rest of the way down, it stuck. As hard as he tried, he could not get the window to roll down. We would have to wait until someone came along. I began to whimper. I imagined the two of us frozen stiff and white by the time anyone found us. I wanted to go home. My father just glowered and tipped his flask skyward.

         After what seemed hours of sitting there and yelling frantically to each passing car, I got the bright idea of climbing out my window and digging through the snow bank.  I was small and could easily make my way out into the winter cold.  The snow bank was deep, but the car window was near the top of the bank and digging through would not be terribly difficult. Once outside the car, I could, I hoped, undo the rope and release my father.  I accomplished the deed without too much difficulty, but once I had untied the offending rope the tree slid farther off the side of the car until it came to rest between the edge of the roof and the snow bank out of which I had recently climbed.  My father knew that the two of us could not get the tree back into place and then get the car back onto the road.  I could hear him cursing my worse than boyish limbs, and cursing Ernie Wobble for abandoning us to the elements.  And the elements responded with an increased snowfall that came up quickly.

      As we stood there shivering in the December wind and snow, a pick-up truck stopped and its driver, a Mr. Tenant who just happened to be the father of Winston, a class-mate of mine who was even punier than I, offered to give us a hand.  Mr. Tenant owned a farm nearby, and he offered to go and get his tractor so he could pull the car from the ditch. My father thanked him by proffering him a slug from the flask. The two of them shared the flask and then Mr. Tenant got back in his pick-up and drove into the gathering dusk. Nighttime comes early in December. By the time Mr. Tenant returned with his tractor, darkness had long surrounded us. We were cold and miserable, and my father was feeling the effects of the contents of his flask that was now empty. Once the men had connected the tractor and car with a large chain, it was not long before the car was back on the road. Next Mr. Tenant placed the chain around the tree and hauled it up to the edge of the road, leaving a branch or two behind and ruining its once splendid symmetry. From there, the two men wrestled it onto the roof of the car. Then they secured the tree to the roof, only this time Mr. Tenant tied the ropes in such a fashion that we were not imprisoned in the car. He had a rope passing round the tree and down over the hood to the bumper. He added a second rope at the back where it attached to each side of the rear bumper. The tree seemed firmly in place.

        Before we could leave, my father had to thank Mr. Tenant.  So the two of them had a few snorts from the bottle my father had secreted in the trunk.  By the time we waved good-bye to Mr. Tenant, my father was somewhat higher in spirits than he had been a short while since. In less than an hour after Mr. Tenant had rescued us the tree was in place on the car roof, and we were headed home. We drove carefully toward town, my father humming Christmas music all the way.  At the edge of town, however, my father's high spirits took a dip when we passed Mr. Wobble heading the other way.  I can only guess that he had begun to wonder where we were and fearing something was wrong, he was on his way to find us.  Beside him in the front seat was my mother who probably feared that her son and husband had perished in the winter cold. My father honked, gesticulated, and hollered several familiar phrases, but Mr. Wobble was too intent on the road ahead of his vehicle to give us any notice.  How he could not see a car with an enormous Christmas tree tied to the roof is beyond me. We drove on home.

      When we got there we had to wait until Mr. Wobble and my mother returned so my father could have help getting the tree into the house. I offered to help, but my father indicated that this was not a good idea. He just waved me away. And so while we waited, my father turned to that bottle he had shared with Mr. Tenant. By the time Mr. Wobble and my mother returned it was past my bedtime, but I wanted to see this tree in our house. The two men wrestled the majestic pine up our front steps and onto the porch. Then it went through the front door, but it was too large to go from the hallway into the living room. They had to take the tree all the way past the living room door and through the dining room to the kitchen door. Then they could go through the dining room and through the large roller doors that separated dining room and living room. Once in the living room, they tried to stand the tree up, my mother ready with the bucket we used to hold the Christmas tree from year to year. The bucket, however, proved useless. The tree was too tall for the room. Undaunted, my father insisted that he and Mr. Wobble push until the top of the tree fit tightly to the living room ceiling. We had no need for the bucket because the tree fit snuggly from ceiling to floor. Nothing was going to dislodge that perfect Christmas tree.

       The next day, we began to decorate the tree, but the few decorations we had were just enough for one of those modest trees from the Boy Scours or the Orange Young Britons and so this tree of trees looked sadly bereft of bulbs and lights and tinsel and bells and candy canes and other Christmas tree decorations. My father threw several cotton wool balls onto the tree to try to fill out the decoration, but the attempt was futile. The tree also had a couple of empty spots where the branches we left back in the ditch had once lived. Its beautiful symmetry now looked truly fearful. The tree looked as if the elves had purloined most of its decorations and a couple of its branches. And the top of the tree, being squashed against the ceiling, would not take the familiar Christmas angel that in previous years had adorned the top of our trees. My father just said that the few decorations accented the size of the tree, and made it that much more impressive. The few lights we had winked wanly from a few of the great branches, reminding me of the lights from a lonely buoy out on the water near my uncle’s cottage.

       In any case, we had the largest Christmas tree on the block. This was the important thing for my father. We had the biggest Christmas tree on the block, and we had this tree well after there was no competition. That tree graced our living room long after all the other trees on the block had gone to Christmas tree heaven. That tree stayed put until the beginning of February when my mother put her foot down and insisted that the tree be removed. The dining room floor and the living room carpet were littered with pine needles. And so my father called on Mr. Wobble once again, and the two of them worked for quite some time until they managed to dislodge that tree along with some plaster from the ceiling, take it out to the kitchen doorway, then down the hall and out the front door, leaving a trail of pine needles behind. The tree then stayed on the front lawn for another couple of weeks before it disappeared. I never did know who took it away. But the tree did not leave us without a reminder of its majestic presence in our house. For years after, in fact until I left that house for good, the ceiling of our living room had a blemish in the corner nearest the outer wall of the dining room, and the floor below was marked with a sticky circle of pine sap that my mother could never completely remove.

Notes on the History of English Poetry

What follows are thoughts on the history of English poetry. As I review these, I see how incomplete they are. They reflect a rather time-bound view of literary history, one that has missed the 'advances' in literary studies since about 1975! Oh well.

I would like more on this notion of the change in society and in poetry from the 19th century to now. Certainly 19th century England (and America too, I suppose) valued the individual as opposed to the grouping of individuals. Liberalism was in full sway in terms of the sense of personal responsibility and freedom. Marx and Engels offer something of a counter to the liberal agenda, but for the most part Anglo-American culture valued individual enterprise, what Americans knew as 'rugged individualism.' How this manifests itself in poetry, I am less clear about. A poem such as Browning's "The Bishop Orders His Tomb" indicates the poet's interest in the individual in his or her full complexity. Perhaps this interest in the individual explains, in part, the fashion for the dramatic monologue in the 19th century. But overall, I am not clear on how poetry reflects the interest in the individual over time. The lyric (I am thinking of a poet such as Yeats here) is a form that highlights the individual. I guess my question is: how does poetry reflect a communal as opposed to an individual ideology?

Change in atmosphere. Well a lot changes from the 19th to the 20th century. But one thing remains constant from about 1769 or so until now. The late 18th century sees a challenge to old certainties. The "master plots" that had served western Europe as the ground to stand on (in the sense of that which gave stability to the way people thought of life and its meaning) came under scrutiny. The list of challengers is familiar: science, industry, urbanization, the failure of monarchies, the Higher Criticism, even history itself with its long list of both natural and human disasters. Belief in the old stories, the old verities, was shifting. The ground seemed no longer stable. The earthquake is a common metaphor in the poetry of the late 18th and early 19th centuries. The result of so much ferment was a breakdown in belief. How could people restore lost certainty. This is why the poetry since that time is obsessed with myth-building, with examination of the inner life, with revisiting old stories to look for what is worth preserving. We can read "She dwelt among the untrodden ways" as a poem about myth-making in the sense that the poet sees the loss of Lucy as both grievous and also as a revelation of Lucy's continued presence as nature spirit. She continues to exist beside the springs of Dove (should that be the "wings" of Dove?) in that she is the land itself or at least she has become the land. She is the light of hope that nature itself offers. She dies and this is grievous; paradoxically, she dies and this allows her light to shine in a manner it could not shine while she was alive. She allows for a kind of certainty (what kind, you rightfully ask?). 

And the search for certainty only becomes more intense as time passes and we have the first great war, then the second great war, the holocaust, the Korean war, the cold war, the Vietnam War, the discovery of black holes, the Kent State shootings, the scandals involving children and the Church, the first Gulf War (and I neglect the Falklands and Granada), the Trade Tower bombings and later the Trade Towers falling, and so on and on. Jim Jones, Waco, Texas, and so much more. 

And so even a small poem such as Elizabeth Bishop's "Sestina" becomes a statement of hope amid the darkness dropping down. This poem is about, among other things, the preservation of hope that the relationship between child and grandmother can offer. The two of them share jokes from the almanac and they also share a perspective on the almanac that sees it as "Birdlike." Capable of flight. The almanac is a repository of hope in that it contains a review of the year and a guide to how to approach the year - whether to go to sea or not (this is for Tobias).

And so yes, things change, but they also stay the same.

But the history of poetry goes way back beyond the changes that we can see from the 18th century until now. Where to begin? For our purposes, we can begin in the English Middles Ages. Of course, we might go back to Anglo Saxon times and read Caedmon's Hymn or Beowulf, but few read Anglo Saxon now. So we begin with Chaucer and the 15th century. This seems pertinent since Chaucer is contemporary with whoever that guy is who began printing in England around 1480 (my mind has gone blank- oh wait, William Caxton). Anyhow, the coming of print is contemporary with Chaucer, is it not? And poetry in printed form is a rarified thing in that it derives from a privileged segment of the population, more often than not from the court. In Chaucer we have the beginnings of poetry as both high art, and as a development of folk forms. The Canterbury Tales is a collection of familiar folk stories plus some new tales directed at the various professions of the day - especially, but not exclusively, those related to the Church. The standard heroic couplet with its iambic pentameter beat arrives. The history of English verse from Chaucer to Christian Bok or Tom Wayman is the history of migration and transformation. The accumulation of forms, strict forms such as sonnet or ode, becomes progressively looser over centuries until we get to free verse and found verse and anything-goes-verse. Secondarily, poetry moves from the court to the Church to the field. We might say that right up to the mid eighteenth century, poetry remains the property of the privileged. Later 18th century poets such as Thomas Chatterton and, most famously, Robert Burns bring poetry to the people. Of course literacy was expanding by this time. 

But the important question is: why bother becoming familiar with the history of English poetry? Do we really have to know Chaucer in order to appreciate a poem by Elizabeth Bishop? Or take those relentless heroic couplets by the likes of Dryden or Pope. Why in the world do we have to know these works when no one writes that way anymore - at least no one who has ambitions to be taken seriously as a poet?

Okay, we might like the poetry of Pope or Henry Vaughn or Sir Thomas Wyatt, but why do we have to read this stuff for an understanding of the poetry written today? And if we do not have to read this poetry in order to understand poetry written today, then why not just forget about the stuff?

I am not here to answer my last questions; I am here to sum up so far. Poetry begins with either a narrative structure or a reflective structure. The reflective structure seems closely attuned to matters of love and death. Disgruntled lover, ecstatic lover, lost lover, eager lover, sensitive lover - we meet these in early poems by the likes of Wyatt, Surrey, Sidney, Donne, and so on. Metaphors that derive from nature, hunting for example, give way in the early 17th century to metaphors that derive from what I might call scientific experimentation (alchemy in Donne's "A Valediction Forbidding Mourning"). Metaphors become conceits in that they are showy, unexpected, elaborate, and witty. John Donne's poetry is a casebook of such metaphoric ingenuity. The poetry is also growing more dramatic as the voice of the speaker registers irritation, frustration, sympathy, melancholy, passion, and irony. Interestingly, as we move on, we will see first a loosening of poetic form, followed by a tightening of poetic form. We might ask why this happens.

We are approaching George Herbert, one of the well-known divines who wrote poetry. Herbert turns to matters of the spirit and the individual's relationship with divinity, but he does so in the spirit of the metaphysical poetry we have been reading in Donne and even Herrick. Actually, Donne had turned his witty brand of poetry to matters of religion earlier in the century. His sonnet, "Batter My Heart, Three-Person God" is worth a moment of your time. Anyhow with Herbert we see poetry changing in that the look of the poem becomes even more pronounced and functional in terms of what the poem is communicating. We might ask why Herbert would create a poem such as "Easter Wings"? Does the shape of the poem serve any function other than being a form of visual wit? Herbert's formal play is perhaps the last gasp of poetic experimentation prior to the Restoration and the coming of the heroic couplet as the dominant form for poetry from about 1660 to about 1760.

Regarding numerology and the syllabic pattern in Herbert's "Easter Wings," I have little to offer. But since we are addressing the history of English poetry, I can note that the 17th century was a hotbed of religious ferment. As we saw in Donne, alchemical imagery was familiar to writers of the time. Dr. Dee reminds us of occult interests of the time, and Francis Bacon reminds us of the advancement of learning. This is the period when modern scientific method was just beginning to emerge, but science was still half empirical and half magical. Anyhow, people like Herbert and later Milton would have been conversant with somewhat secret materials such as the Kabbalah and Talmudic literature. The Cambridge Platonists (the two Vaughans, Traherne, for example) not only knew their Plato and Plotinus, but also mystical writing as well. Jakob Boehme wrote Aurora around the mid century. Mysticism was in the air. Many splinter religious sects, the Fifth Monarchy Men for example, drew on occult writing. All this will lead to a figure such as Emmanuel Swedenborg in the early 18th century and also the English cleric, William Law. My point is simply this: poets in the 17th and 18th centuries did know about numerology, mysticism, and the occult. We do, however, have to be careful not to read such material into poems that do not support such a reading. Some poets rejected such intricate and exclusionary knowledge. Once we get to Dryden, we see poetry beginning to turn from inward concerns to social concerns, from secret knowledge to public knowledge. Poetry as individual meditation becomes poetry as public discourse and debate. In short, we come to the satiric side of poetry.

In our potted history of English poetry, we have made our way from the Middle Ages (aka the Medieval period), to the Renaissance (aka Early Modernist era), and to the Restoration (and the Augustan age that follows closely on Charles 11 coming to the throne of England in 1660.)

Next we have what used to be called the “pre-Romantics”; Thomas Gray's "Elegy in a Country Churchyard," is an example of what used to be called (passive voice - ugh) "pre-Romantic poetry." From there, we romp through the Romantic period to the Victorian Age, and through the Edwardians to Modernists with T.S. Eliot. Here is a list of the "periods" off the top of my head:

1. 13th and 14th centuries - Middle Ages

2. 15th to 17th centuries - English Renaissance

3. late 17th and 18th centuries (1660-1780) - Augustan Age, also known as the Age of Enlightenment

4. 1798-1832 - the Romantic period

5. 1834 to 1901 - Victorian era

6. 1902 to end of the First World War in 1918 - Edwardian age

7. 1920 to the 1960s - Age of Modernism (early and late)

8. 1966 to pretty much the present - Age of Postmodernism

9. Where are we now? And where are we going?

We can refine and define this timeline, should you wish to do so. We might also question the tendency to "periodization." Does such parceling out of literary history make any sense? Nomenclatures such as Romantic or Medieval are not selected by the people living and writing at the time; they are later designations. Then we have a term such as "Victorian"; this one denotes a specific time, the period of Queen Victoria's reign (my dates above will belie this, by the way). Then we have terms that appear during the time; modernism and postmodernism, for example. Can we typify poetry (or literature in general) by such period names? Ought we to typify poetry (or literature in general) by such names?

In my numerical listing above, I neglected to add "pre-Romantic" to the list of periods. "Pre-Romantic" is a strange locution because it implies that the writers of this period somehow knew that they were coming before something that had yet to materialize. Pre-Romantic writers include Thompson, Young, Collins, Gray, Goldsmith, Chatterton, and some others. These guys do not follow the pattern of heroic couplet-poetry we see in Pope and Johnson. Not only do they break away from the rigid form of Augustan poetry, but they also anticipate the themes of Romantic poetry (see for example Young's poem on Originality or Thompson's THE SEASONS). I mean they touch on imagination, nature, individuality, poverty and anonymity. They expand the subject matter of poetry. As Constable said (of painting), they found their subjects under the hedgerow.

If the pre-Romantics wrote about poverty and individualism and selfhood and nature and so on, then why are they 'pre-Romantics' and not Romantics? Good question, and I don't really have a good answer. These poets have yet to organize their thinking into an ideology the way Wordsworth and his contemporaries will. Romantic poetry has a clear political agenda. Also, we have this urge to find auspicious moments and 1789 and 1798 are two of these auspicious moments, the one the date (July 14 to be exact) when the French Revolution begins and the other the date of publication for LYRICAL BALLADS, the "experiment” in poetics by Wordsworth and Coleridge. But pre-Romantic poetry has its own interest. Here we have the beginnings of a sense of the poet as a "bard," a spokesperson for his (or her) people. The poet begins to assume a stature he (or she) had not had before, one that emerges precisely at the time when the poet is beginning to lose ground as a public figure. What the previous sentence says requires some explanation, but explanation can come later.

Above I mentioned a Romantic ideology. And I said the Romantics were political. I wonder how ideology manifests itself in "Kubla Khan" and "Dejection: An Ode." And how are these poems "political"? We can ask the same questions about "Ulysses." 

How do these poems differ from what has come before?

Until at least 1968, Eurocentric society lived inside a Romantic ideology, and we might argue that we still do.

As for “Ulysses,” this poem is an example of Victorian Romanticism. What does this mean? Well, the poem is not unfamiliar in its ballad/lyric fusion that we see in poems like The Rime of the Ancient Mariner or Christabel. It also has for a theme a Romantic longing, a longing for those “western isles” where ease and perfection supposedly dwell. But the poem also carries a sensibility closer to Arnold than to Coleridge. I am speaking of the “dejection” theme here. Romantic poetry does have an interest in dejection, a concern that focuses on the interchange between self and other, self and nature. By the time we get to mid century (“Ulysses” dates from 1842), the sense of futility grows stronger. Tennyson’s poem contacts the notion of “noble work” and the restlessness, the longing, the questing for certainty of the Victorian mind. The first person in this poem is not the poet directly as in so many Romantic poems, but rather a persona, either fictional or historical. I might also note the penchant to use history as an echo of the present and both Tennyson and Browning do. The Duke in “My Last Duchess,” for example, may represent the fear of an empty universe. What I man by this is that the Duke, like the Bishop in that other Browning poem, is a person without honour, without scruples, without sympathy for others. In a world drained of belief in anything other than the self, we get these inward-looking, selfish and self-regarding people.

From the perspective of history, we are reading poems that reflect the finding of Sir Charles Lyell and others, and the impending impact of Sir Charles Darwin. 

Revisionary Westerns? The Wild Bunch, Once Upon a Time in the West, Unforgiven

Evolution of genre

-      primitive phase

-      classical phase

-      revisionary phase

-      parodic phase

Primitive phase: see The Great Train Robbery and possibly a host of silent and early sound westerns that confused genre expectations. Perhaps the most infamous are Phantom Empire (1935) and The Terror of Tiny Town (1938).

Classical phase: represented by the westerns of John Ford, Henry King, Raoul Walsh, and others. This phase sets the conventions, and works with these in a celebratory manner. Themes of justice, honour, and protection appear in film after film. Ride the High Country serves as an example, as do the films by Ford and Hawks. ‘Myth” is a word that applies to the classic western. This western functions as an expression of the ‘mythic west.’ This is the west presented as a geography of freedom and enterprise. It celebrates America as the land of the free, as the land peopled with strong and independent people, especially men. In the classic western, women play relatively small roles. The land is open and ready for settlement, as if it were a “virgin land.”

         -conventions include: a high mimetic hero, a quest of some sort, a valuation of the natural, a masculinity associated with strength, responsibility, judgment, honour, loyalty, resolve, courage, and self-reliance/independence. The hero more often than not chooses the companionship of horse or sidekick to that of a woman; he chooses the life of a wanderer instead of the domestic life. He chooses duty over desire. The good guys are always small ranchers or pioneers or newspapermen, and they find themselves threatened by representatives of Big Business. The classic western supports small business – a classic form of capitalism that frowns on monopoly. Monopoly often finds itself allegorized in the figure of the gambler, or at least the gambler who cheats. This is a figure of corruption who turns a game of chance into a rigged system. The open market is compromised by the marked cards or ace up the sleeve. Corruption and cheating in the classic western are signs of civilization’s failures. Civilization fails when one person can monopolize land or business. We have come a long way from this vision of capitalism.

         The hero protects the very people who represent the hero’s obsolescence. The hero is different from the average person because he can make a difference. His action results in betterment.

Revisionary phase: reassessment of conventions and themes. ‘Revision’ suggests a re-seeing, a seeing from another angle or perspective. It also suggests a revising; a revisionary work revises what we have come to take for granted, asking us to see again for the first time familiar conventions. Defamiliarization is a term from literary studies that may apply here. What has become all too familiar is given a new look, made new, as it were.

         Another way of describing revisionary westerns is for us to say that these are westerns that debunk the myths of the west that the classic phase films construct. Instead of heroes, we get anti-heroes. Instead of noble deeds, we get petty action and dubious motivation. Instead of romantic landscapes, we get closed spaces, crowded spaces. Instead of perfunctory killing, we get brutal death. Instead of sartorial neatness, we get scruffy and dirty clothing, greasy hair, unshaven faces, and dust everywhere. Instead of a world that is thoroughly masculine, we meet strong women who sometimes are the equal of men. At the very least, we meet women who have independent lives.

         Casting might also mark the revisionary western. Actors we have come to know as a certain kind of character, take roles unusual for them. An example might be Joseph Mankiewicz’s There Was A Crooked Man (1970), in which both Henry Fonda and Kirk Douglas play to and against type. The obvious example in the films we have watched, is the casting of Henry Fonda as the cold-blooded Frank in Once Upon a Time in the West. We also have the case where the anti-type becomes the type – I am thinking of Eastwood’s man with no name character in his first westerns for Leone, and then in several of his later westerns.

Parodic phase: revisionary work continues to take a form seriously. It may turn familiar conventions on their heads, but it does so not to trivialize a form or genre, but rather to reinvigorate the form or genre. The parody, on the other hand, may or may not trivialize. I think films such as The Villain (1979), The Three Amigos (1986), Rustler’s Rhapsody (1985), maybe even Ride ‘Em Cowboy (1942) are examples of parodies that trivialize. They do not take the western seriously; they debunk the myth of the west. On the other hand, the parody that we find in the Italian western can celebrate as much as it burlesques – see for example, My Name is Nobody (dir. Tony Valerii/prod. Sergio Leone).

         One thing is certain, the parody western has fun with the genre by rendering its conventions in an exaggerated manner.

-the phases that a genre is supposed to go through appear chronological, and for the most part I guess they are. But it is crucial to note that each of these phases can occur at any time. In other words, we can have parodic westerns from the beginning – and we do. Buster Keaton, the Marx Brothers, W. C. Fields, Harold Lloyd, Abbott and Costello, Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis, Bob Hope, and others made comedy/parody westerns. We might also find revisionary westerns in the classic period. One obvious example is Ford’s The Searchers, but we might go back 10 years to King Vidor’s Duel in the Sun (1946) for another example.

Question: are The Wild Bunch, Once Upon a Time in the West, and Unforgiven classic westerns, revisionary westerns, or parodic westerns?

Answer: ultimately, the question for me is: what position vis a vis the western myth does a film take? If the answer is that the film ends with a feeling that the west and its iconic figure – the cowboy hero – are somehow great beyond the common order of men, then the film participates in the classic western’s “myth-building,” rather than myth dismantling.

-The Wild Bunch: Pike, Dutch, and the Gorch brothers take that heroic walk at the end of the film, a walk reminiscent of the gunman’s walk (the title of a film, by the way – Gunman’s Walk 1958). Given the epic proportions of the film, and the echo of the Greeks dragging Hector’s body around the walls of Troy, and the iconic backdrop to the action, we can have little doubt that these guys are the last of a noble breed. Elegy, as always, elevates. It lets us know that we are the poorer for what we have lost.

-Once Upon a Time in the West: need I say more? This film has a conflicted relationship with the western – for obvious reasons. It derives from a leftist culture at variance with the central concern of the western – individualism. The final panoramic crane shot (the shot missing from the screened version in class) lets us know two things: 1) the days of the individual (people like Harmonica and Cheyenne) are over, and 2) what matters in the future is not the railroad moguls (men like Morton who are “crippled” by their greed), but rather the collective, the workers, the men to whom Jill brings water, the men who might pat her on the behind, but who don’t mean anything by this gesture (ha!). But this film too cannot resist the elegiac content, as clear in the sound track as in what we see. Men like Harmonica and Cheyenne are the stuff of myth, and as the stuff of myth they are celebrated. Harmonica’s motive is revenge (a familiar theme in westerns), but we know that he is on the side of right, and he knows he is not a man for the future (“I gotta go.”). Cheyenne says Harmonica has “something to do with death.” Cheyenne’s motive is less clear, but we know that he is a man’s man, a fellow who rides with a gang who all wear the same kind of coat. He is a sign of the working together that will be important in the future, even though he will not be a part of this future. The scene in which Harmonica measures out the station, and the men begin to build it is important because it shows us the way to the future (the building of a town and civilization), and it also shows us how out of place in this future men like Harmonica and Cheyenne are. They quite simply do not look like carpenters.

         The Italian western often has a political edge – more often than not Marxist (see Corbucci’s The Companeros  1970 or Sergio Sollima’s The Big Gundown 1966 or Leone’s Duck, You Sucker 1971).  The political content may be seen as revisionary of the American western that is more often than not conservative or only obliquely political.

         The Italian western is also operatic or baroque. By this I mean that it delights in excess. It moves in the direction of camp. The music is an obvious aspect of this operatic quality. Then the films have baroque touches – Woody Strode’s sawed off Winchester in Once Upon a Time in the West, the harmonica in the same film, Sabata’s arsenal in the ‘Sabata’ series, Ringo’s golden pistol in the film of the same name, Django’s gattling gun that he drags around the west in a coffin in Corbucci’s Django (1966), and other crazy stuff like a rifle inside a banjo or a pony whose farts are like “cherry blossoms.” The ritualistic and drawn-out gun duels are an obvious extension and hence parody of the American western. And yet these same gun duels very much participate in the mythic west and take it seriously. Such content veers toward parody of the American western, but a parody that celebrates rather than deflates. We get what I might call serious parody. And so I conclude that the Italian western (generally) both parodies and celebrates the American western. Revisionary parody, maybe.

-Unforgiven: the western just cannot seem to get away from its own myth, here the myth of the lone gunman who cleans up a rotten place and leaves it for others to populate. This film consciously accepts the myth of the classic western while at the same time it attempts to re-see the classic western. Like Ride the High Country, it has three main protagonists, two of whom are aging gunfighters and the third is a young untried, but cocky, kid who will learn the truth about killing during his travels with his two aged partners. But unlike Ride the High Country, Unforgiven foregrounds race. In Ride the High Country, the main characters eat in a Chinese restaurant, but not much is made of this. The restaurant is a reminder of changing times. In Eastwood’s film, the two aging gunfighters are a black man and a white man. The black man has a Native American wife. Nothing obvious is made of this racial mix. It is taken for granted. Then we have English Bob who is hired by the railroad to shoot Chinese people. As he enters Big Whiskey in the stagecoach, English Bob mockingly pretends to shoot two Chinese men he sees walking in the town. Little Bill asks him if he has run out of Chinese to shoot. Such gestures are, in one way, small. But in another way, these gestures to race are large. They remind us that the west was not peopled only by whites or only by whites and Native Americans who provide canon fodder. And they remind us that racism was alive and well in the west, and they remind us that the west was peopled by a variety of people.

         Age is an issue in both Ride the High Country and Unforgiven, but it becomes more of an impediment in the latter film. William Munny (Eastwood) can’t shoot the way he once could. Ned Logan (Morgan Freeman) no longer has the will to shoot at all. Munny cannot mount his horse easily, although we know this is partly his lack of practice and his horse’s lack of practice. Even the young gunsel, the Schofield Kid (Jaimz Woolvett) can’t shoot well because his eyesight is poor. These guys may be professionals or may have been professionals at one time, but now they are a rag-tag trio who work rather inefficiently.

         That is until the end when Munny reverts to his younger self after the news that Little Bill (Gene Hackman) his killed his friend. He becomes a killer again to avenge his friend who has been cruelly murdered. He takes to the bottle and regains both the nerve and the steady hand and eye of his younger crazier days. Here is where the film takes its classic turn.

         Before I comment on this classic turn, I note the revisionary examination of violence. In the early westerns, we have violence. But this violence is more often than not bloodless and painless. We may have spectacular falls from horseback or from roofs, but we rarely hear gasps of pain or thuds of bullets into flesh. We rarely see grimaces on the faces of those shot. We hear a gunshot, then we see someone fall down. That’s it. Then Peckinpah came along and slowed the action down, allowed us to see the impact of a bullet upon flesh, and the opening of the body and the release of blood in an arc of anguish. Eastwood shows the brutality of gun violence both orally and visually. First we have a story such as the one Munny recalls to Ned; remember, he says, the time he shot some drover in the mouth, and his teeth came out the back of his head. This guy did little or nothing, and yet he dies this horrid death. Then we have the shooting of the young cowboy who was with his partner who cut the prostitute. This shooting leads to a drawn out scene that allows us to know the pain of a stomach wound. The scene draws on an earlier one in Howard Hawks’s El Dorado, another film about pain and violence. The beatings Little Bill gives both English Bob and William Munny are also meant to suggest the ugliness of violence. The terrible nature of this violence registers on the faces of those who witness the violence. Late in the film, Little Bill whips Ned in a scene that registers the pain of violence both in the grimaces on Ned’s face and the blood running down his back, and also in the faces of the townspeople who stand outside the jail listening to what is happening inside. Finally, we have the scars on William Munny and on the prostitute, Delilah. These are reminders of the physical effect of violence – its lasting mark on both the body and mind.

         But violence has its heroic and romantic side. It is an aspect of the myth of the west. We see this in the presence of W. W. Beauchamp (Saul Rubinek), the western writer who chronicles the exploits of English Bob, aka The Duke (or the Duck) of Death. Beauchamp is a writer of dime novels, popular fiction that romanticizes the west and makes the figure of the gun fighter a popular hero. Ned Buntline is perhaps the most famous of these writers; Buntline chronicled the exploits of Buffalo Bill and was, for a time, the wealthiest author in America. The film means to expose such writing for what it is: fiction parading as history, sensationalism and a pack if lies. The kind of heroic violence chronicled in the dime novel is held up to scrutiny when it is contrasted with the actual violence of people like Little Bill and William Munny. At the end, Beauchamp slinks out of the saloon without his interview with the wild William Munny. He does not have a new gunfighter to follow about. But the film is not so simple. What Beauchamp does is turn history into myth, and the film does something the same with William Munny. And Munny himself speaks his own myth.

         For most of the film, William Munny is an aging pig farmer who used to be a killer and a drunk – or a drunken killer. Now he is a family man, a widower who vows to remain true to his wife’s memory. As a gunfighter, he is bumbling and ineffective. He can no longer shoot a pistol with any accuracy, and he is no great shakes with a Sharpes Rifle either. His ability as a horseman is questionable too. But when it comes to avenging a friend, William Munny is as efficient and cold as they come. He enters the saloon and dispatches the bad guys one by one. Once the smoke has cleared, W. W. Beauchamp begins to question him, but Munny will have none of this. He takes his own myth under his own control. He tells those waiting for him outside the saloon that he is coming out and that if anyone tries to shoot him, he will kill them, then he will kill their wives, then their friends, and then he will burn down their homes. He enters the street, mounts his pale horse (see. Revelations 6:8 – and he who sat upon the pale horse was Death), and rides into the night. No one dares shoot at him. He defeats his enemies, ultimately, by the force of his myth. Like Ulysses in Homer’s epic, Munny is a scourge. He comes to rid a place of its bad element.

         The mythic dimension to William Munny is clear from his horse and his words. But we also have this final scene played out in a thunderstorm, at night, in pouring rain. As so often, this scene echoes the opening scene which is also in the rain. In the opening scene, it is Little Bill who arrives like thunder to deal with the two cowboys who have cut the prostitute. Little Bill is a version of Munny. At the film’s end, Munny enters the saloon as a loud clap of thunder sounds. He is, in effect, a force of nature, a scourge of the gods. He comes from the thunder itself. And he comes to cleanse, to wash away the evil in Big Whiskey. Here is the heroic and enigmatic character Eastwood has played in such films as Pale Rider (1985) and High Plains Drifter (1973). In all three films, Eastwood plays a semi-mystical character – one reminiscent of Shane in George Stevens’s 1953 film. In Unforgiven, note the opening and closing shots. Both are elegiac in lighting (as is the film itself in its use of autumn and winter settings). The opening shot gives us the sense of a place out of time, and the closing shot accentuates this feeling by having the clothes on the line, and the figure of the man disappear from sight, just disappear. We read that William Munny may have ended up in San Francisco as a dry goods dealer. But this is the stuff of rumour and hearsay, a way to underscore the mysterious nature of this powerful force. William Munny exists in a state of limbo, neither of this world nor the next. He is what he is because of a bottle of whiskey (Eastwood’s insistence on the whiskey and on the empty whiskey bottle near the end of the film brings into focus all the drinking we have seen in earlier films, especially The Wild Bunch). He is William Munny the Killer only when he is drinking. When sober, he is William Munny dry goods dealer or hog farmer. The point is that the mythic William Munny lives outside normal, sober, quotidian reality.

         Finally elegy again. Unforgiven contains a dedication to Sergio and Don, that is Sergio Leone and Don Siegal, both directors who worked with Clint Eastwood in his early days, and both directors who made westerns. They are also both dead when Unforgiven is released in 1992. Eastwood’s invoking of both Leone and Siegal signals the past, the tradition, the connection with both directors and a form that is passing, that has seen its day. Eastwood has always known that the lone figure on horseback, the protector of the innocent and defender of the poor and disenfranchised, the man loyal to the code of honour and friendship exists only in myth, not in reality. And so we have two William Munnys, the one who is father and provider, and the other who is an inebriated killing machine. The former is hardly of interest; the latter captures our imaginations, just as he has captured the Schofield Kid’s imagination. What the kid learns is that imagination is not life. Life is raw and fearful; myth is quick, nimble, and beyond reach.

Property and Literacy:

         -before we leave the western, I note the recurring themes of property and literacy. In Unforgiven, for example, we have clear references to property in the prostitutes. Skinny Dubois (Anthony James) claims he has a paper that indicates he owns the prostitutes; they are his property. Little Bill, of course, has a house (“I don’t deserve this. I’m building a house.”). The two cowboys who cut the prostitute bring horses (property of a sort) to pay for their crime. Property in westerns is a burden. Someone is always trying to take it away or to gain control over it. The cowboy hero is, as often as not, without property. When William Munny has property, he is in the dirt with the hogs; when he rides free from property, he rides into myth.

         As for literacy, we see this in the figure of W. W. Beauchamp, a writer not just of letters (both Little Bill and William Munny make this mistake), but of books. In all the westerns we have seen, letters in the form of writing (most often writing on buildings or on signs, but sometimes in letters or newspapers indicates a new time, a change from a frontier existence to a modern urban existence with its technological changes.

Question: can a film be all three (classic, revisionary, and parodic) at once?

The Western and the Samurai Film

-The White, the Yellow and the Black (aka Samurai), directed by Sergio Corbucci (1975)

1.   Historical material:

-both the samurai film and the western locate their action at the end of an era – the closing of the frontier in America and the end of the clan system in late 19^th century Japan.

-both have mythic dimension, but the samurai genre stretches its mythic content to the extreme. For example, an element of the supernatural can pervade the samurai film, but rarely (and rarely successfully) does the supernatural pervade the western.

-the samurai film is, in some ways, a response to the post-atomic moment in 1945.

2.   The hero:

-the lone hero who wanders a land in search of injustices to combat.

-the maimed hero – one-armed samurai or blind samurai (e.g. Zatoichi). This aspect of the samurai film is not prevalent in the American western; however, it does inform the Italian western (e.g. Blindman dir. Ferdinando Baldi 1971 or The Great Silence dir. Sergio Corbucci 1968). One early American film that does draw on the maimed hero tradition of the samurai film is John Sturges’s Bad Day at Black Rock (1955). This is a modern day western. (Note: Sturges also directed the more famous western based on a samurai film, The Magnificent Seven 1960.)

-aversion to guns in samurai films. The samurai hero disdains the gun. The gun is anti-traditional, a sign of encroaching industrialization and mechanization.

-the duel: two swordsmen must fight, although neither is necessarily evil. These fights taker place in private, often in an open field – something the Italian western picks up. The American western more often than not has its duels in public (see Sam Raimi’s The Quick and the Dead, for example or Henry King’s famous film, The Gunfighter.

-honour and the conflict between inclination (desire) and duty (responsibility)

-from Stuart Kaminsky’s American Film Genres (1974): “The western hero has a great sense of self; the samurai has a great sense of subordination of self” (54).

-western hero is alone (mostly), but the samurai is alone only because he has been cut off from a master.

-pride and shame: the western gunman is often wary of his own prowess (see for example, Shane or The Gunfighter); the samuarai is proud of his ability with a sword. There is, perhaps, more art in being a samurai than in being a fast gun.

-the samurai film presupposes a knowledge of a great many fictional and historical characters. The American western has some of this, but to a much smaller extent.

Ritual:

     -both samurai films and westerns are ritualistic. However, the rituals in the western are often broken (“Put an A-men to it,” in The Searchers or the bad guys’ willingness to cheat in a duel or Cole Thornton’s ruse in El Dorado). Rituals in the samurai films are, for the most part, adhered to.

The Seven Samurai (1954)

     Why end with this film?

1.   Kurosawa has stated that he admired the American western films, especially those of John Ford.

2.   The Seven Samurai has the epic proportions of the western, although it is far less interested in the land than in the people who share the land.

3.   The film uses techniques we see elsewhere: the slow motion violence of Peckinpah, the frenetic cutting also of Peckinpah, the noble close-up for both the heroic characters and for the peasants, ritual in battles, funerals, food, etc., themes of friendship and honour, visual cues to themes such as the water wheel, the flowers, the forest undergrowth, the rain, fire, the guns, deep focus to create a full mise en scene, fast tracking shots of horses racing through the forest or across the landscape.

4.   Unlike the western, The Seven Samurai does not personalize the villains. They remain without character, nearly faceless. They say little other than grunts and yells. They are a force of nature that the peasant has to contend with.

5.   Unlike the western, horses are merely functional. If they serve to signify anything (I speak as a western viewer), then they signify necessity itself. They are a sign of an energy which is inevitable, natural, and powerful. The scene in which Mifune rides the horse through the covered bridge, and then has to chase the horse is both a comic moment and also a reminder of failure, perhaps a premonition of the end. This character is associated with nature; he captures a fish bare-handed; he rolls about the earth when he is drunk; he tries to ride the horse; he has kids follow him. He is a doomed character.

6.   The samurai take up the cause of the peasants for food and lodging, not for money or glory or even for justice.

7.   The Seven Samurai, like The Wild Bunch, has a rhythmic quality both in the story with its rhythms of calm and action and in the technique in which we see the camera weave establishing shots with medium and close-up shots. One example of the work the camera does is in an early scene in which one of the peasants wants to kill the bandits any way he can, but the other villagers refuse to accept his hot-headedness. From a crane shot, we see him leave the group and walk away from the foreground. He slumps to the ground. We cut to a shot closer to ground level in which we see the slumped figure in the foreground with the group of villagers behind him. The camera lens flattens the visual field so that we the figure in the foreground not so much isolated from the group as blending with the group. What follows is his re-integration into the group.

8.   Careful framing that gives each shot a pictorial look.

9.   Sound: the film uses sound carefully. Music is sparing, but important. Natural sounds – wind and rain, the sound of fire, the chopping of wood, the pounding of hoofs – all these intensify the emotional impact of the film.

10.                 The international nature of filmic art.

11.                 Because I like it. I like the characters. For me, this is a film of faces. Much of what the film communicates is through faces. I read that the dialogue in the film is often nearly indecipherable, and that the subtitles cannot capture this quality. We have seen this before in Godard’s Weekend. I especially like the peasant faces, and of course the face of Toshiro Mifune.