For our creative project, David and I decided to write an epic poem made up of haikus. Inspired by our blog assignment, which was to write a haiku on Frankenstein, each haiku makes up one stanza of the entire epic. Using the form of a haiku of 5-7-5 syllables inside the form of an epic poet intertwining the works we have read this semester. We used the ideas talked about in our 102 discussion of the literature and nuanced this a bit with Shakespeare’s sonnet and references to Trimble. This epic is a tribute to the many things we have learned in Thematic Option and especially with Ed’s writing class! The greatest challenge was being able to fit what I wanted to say into a certain amount of syllables. This constraint resulted in a lot more trial and error than normal written essay. I can’t imagine what writing in iambic pentameter was like for Shakespeare.
The poem begins by invoking a muse, which parallels the beginning of Homer’s The Odyssey. Just as The Odyssey begins with “O sing to me muse,” we began with “Oh sing to me Ed” (1). We are telling this story through “Ed” just like the Odyssey. The line “many twists and turns” (4) is also an allusion to a quote from The Odyssey. Ed is like a muse he is godlike and the “inspiration for a creative artist,” with David and I as the creative artists of this poem. Next we reference Trimble and Ed and all that we have learned about writing from them, proving that we did learn an immense amount over the course of the semester. We learned not to end a sentence with a preposition, which Trimble said was okay to do, but Ed did not. If there is one thing that was emphasized the most by about writing style, it was to never end a sentence with a preposition. The fifth stanza talks about the one-sentence paragraph that Ed encouraged us to try in our A5 essays.
The next section of haikus is about Margaret Shelley’s Frankenstein. We discuss his obsession with progress and his drive to learn more about science. Frankenstein was so obsessed with his project that “He did not notice” (21) the ugliness of his monster. It was when the monster physically moved that Frankenstein realized what he had done and now unnaturalness of creating life from nothing. Stanza 11 shows the monster’s shift from goodness and a desire to live in harmony with humans to his evilness. He was able to learn about humans and their customs by spying on the De Lacey family. He proved to be a very smart being and was able to teach himself many things such as speech. This gain of knowledge led us to the next section of the epic, which is about Milton’s Paradise Lost. This epic talked a lot about knowledge and the realizations of Adam and Eve. God says that he made Adam and Eve “free to fall,” which we used in our epic as well. One quotation that we emphasized in 102 was to “justify the ways of God to men,” which we also included in our epic, highlighting the main points of the epic.
The next theme of our epic is blindness. Blindness pretty much showed up in everything we did this semester. Eve’s desire and curiosity blinded her from God’s words, Oedipus blinded himself in Oedipus Rex, and Edmund blinded Gloucester in King Lear. The next stanza (16) references the Sphinx. Even though Oedipus solved the Sphinx’s riddle and saved his city, it really led to his final demise. Stanza 17 and 18 references Shakespeare’s Sonnet 24. Stanza 17 is as follows:
Blindness is not bad
Just a matter of perspective
See what I did there?
In Shakespeare’s sonnet 24, he breaks iambic pentameter on the word “perspective.” In this haiku, we broke the 5-7-5 pattern on the word “perspective” also because that line is eight syllables instead of seven. The next stanza alludes to the “cunning” eyes of Shakespeare’s sonnet and how he concludes that the truth can never be found in line “fails to find the truth.”
Next we went into Pygmalion. We quoted Higgins with “simple phonetics” and “the science of speech.” He saw making Eliza as a game but he forgot that she was a real person. Luckily, “Romance in Five Acts” is five syllables. Our epic also discusses the role of creator versus creation. Shaw created his play Pygmalion with many specific stage directions and was very intense about making sure that these were followed exactly in performances. Higgins also created Liza.
Lastly, our epic comes to a close with the last work that we read in Core 102, Arcadia. This play discusses the Law of Thermodynamics and Fermat’s Last Theorem, both worked on my Thomasina. Thomasina worked on this problem, but Hannah, Valentine, and Bernard are able to work on this “detective story” (90) and figure out that Septimus was the hermit in Sidley Park (stanza 29). The epic concludes with “in Arcadia Ego/Written on the tombs” (92). “Et in Arcadia Ego” is a saying that means, “Even in Arcadia, I am here” or “I, too, am in Arcadia.” This is written on tombs and is one of the first symbols in art history.
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