Storyteller , livre ebook

Troubador Publishing Ltd - David Hamilton

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87 pages

English

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Storyteller is the third collection of stories written in verse by David Hamilton. Each story is told by a historical figure to convey allegory, symbolism and metaphor, with the author as the overarching narrator. The book takes readers on a journey through imaginative worlds where the reader witnesses experiences and meets people they would meet in their own lives. David's unique collection aligns contemporary content with traditional poetic forms, linking the two together to provide a social commentary on the modern world. Such technique can be witness in 'The Lotus Eaters', a story that first appeared in Homer's Odyssey. Circe's transformation of men into swine is here presented as escapism through drugs. David has also updated other traditional stories such as Reynard the Fox to tell the story from the fox's point of view, and Chaucer's The Hall of Fame. The collection concludes with a sequence of seven Pastorals, featuring myths and deities from classical times telling practical stories of husbandry. David's latest collection of poetry is wordly and not academic, and presents readers with a unique combination of traditional forms and contemporary content. The book will appeal to fans of poetry, as well as readers that have enjoyed David's previous works, King Alfred's Jewel (Matador, 2014) and Concept Poems (Matador, 2016). David has contributed essays to the New English Review and Storyteller is advertised in the Literary Review.

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Poetry

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Publié par	Troubador Publishing Ltd
Date de parution	28 novembre 2017
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781788031202
Langue	English
Poids de l'ouvrage	5 Mo

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,0150€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

Extrait

Storyteller
on the journey of poetry
David Hamilton
Copyright © 2017 David Hamilton

The moral right of the author has been asserted.

Apart from any fair dealing for the purposes of research or private study, or criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, this publication may only be reproduced, stored or transmitted, in any form or by any means, with the prior permission in writing of the publishers, or in the case of reprographic reproduction in accordance with the terms of licences issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside those terms should be sent to the publishers.

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ISBN 978 1788031 202

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Matador is an imprint of Troubador Publishing Ltd

To Terry Finnegan, advertising manager of Literary Review. A friend and helper when no one took me seriously.
Contents
Introduction

Introductory Poem

NEW TRADITIONAL POEMS
The Lotus Eaters: A Dramatic Monologue
The Hall of Fame
Reynard Moves to Town: A Dramatic Dialogue

MASQUES AND MUSIC
The Masque of Titania: Prologue
The Masque of Titania for May Day
Return of the Shepherd: Seven Pastorals for Music and Costumes

David Hamilton’s Epilogue
Introduction
About 3,000 years ago, Homer wandered the land, homeless, but welcomed wherever he went, a storyteller in verse. Legend says he was born on the island of Chios and was blind. In that time, a great poet was feted, and when a feast was prepared, a page was sent to lead in the honoured guest, a silver-studded chair was brought for him and set against a pillar and on the pillar, the page hung the poet’s harp and when feasting was over, the rhapsode sang songs celebrating deeds of heroes. We who write today are linked to that.
Homer composed two great poems: The Iliad, about the ten years of war when the Greeks tried to recover abducted beauty Helen, wife of King Menelaus; the other is the Odyssey, the story of the great struggles of Odysseus, one of the leaders of the Greek armies, to return home, and his battles against the wrath of Poseidon, god of the sea. Before Poseidon would let him return to his home on the island of Ithaca, he drove the homesick hero to and fro in chaos on the sea for ten years and subjected him to many challenges.
There is confusion over what genre I work in so I have given a brief introduction to the forms people have said I use.

Medieval Dreams and Visions
There are many dreams in early English literature which allowed the author to do things that realistic writing did not. Visionary literature was when the dream was the subject, not a literary device. It was of course subject to medieval dream lore and Parliament of Fowles, for example, embodies conscious and unconscious fears expressed in the psychology of the time though we now use a different psychology and vocabulary. It is also a way new ideas and values are brought into the world.
Chanticleer had a terrifying dream and thought it prophetic. They were interested in causes of dreams and the interpretation of them. The tale of Chanticleer and the Fox is in several mediaeval narratives, there has been considerable investigation into the question of its origin It has been stated that the tale developed out of the basic situation in Aesop’s fable of The Fox and the Crow. Early examples of the story are fabular but towards the middle of the 12th century it appears as an extended episode of the Reynard cycle called “How Renart captured Chanticleer the cock”.
The cock Chanticleer, lives with his three wives in an enclosure on a rich man’s farm. He is forewarned in a dream of his capture by a predator but is inclined to disregard it, against the persuasion of his favourite wife, Pinte, who has already seen Renart lurking in the cabbage patch. Eventually the two creatures meet and Renart overcomes the cock’s initial fear by describing the great admiration he had for the singing of Chanticleer’s father.
Macrobious, author of a commentary on Cicero’s account of The Dream of Scipio, noted five different categories:
Somnium – were enigmatic and needed interpreting
Visio – Were prophetic dreams
Oraculum – had an interpretation written by, say, a priest. Those who had an Oraculum could claim they had been chosen.
Insomnium – these were held to be caused by mental or physical stress and had no meaning,
Phantasium – The moment between waking and slumber. If you fall asleep again you dream vividly.

We think of dreams as coming from ourselves but medievals’ thought that only of insomnium, others were messages from without. Even today it is thought that if you ask your guardian angel for help you will receive the answer in your thoughts on waking.
Dream literature was also a literary genre as in Chaucer’s the Boke of the Duchess, The Parliament of Fowles, Pearl and Winnour and Waster. House of Fame is a dream story. Dreams give a neat structure like an envelope to encapsulate the work within and confer authority. It was a fictional framework to write within and gives an illusion of distance from the reader to the subject.
Pearl has a narrator who bears a relationship to the poet and is sometimes comically stupid. The dream is clearly fiction which makes the poem easier to read. In the Elegy to Gaunt’s wife Chaucer hides behind a mask of stupid narrator which releases the narrator from the demands of realism. The demands of realisation, to get everything right and real are also avoided. Dreams are symbols from the unconscious. The puppy in the Book of the Duchess has no function but is just part of the dreamscape. The meanings are symbolic not literal, which is a helpful device in didactic literature.

House of Fame
The poem opens with a poem in which Chaucer speculates on the nature and causes of dreams. He claims that he will tell his audience about his “wonderful” dream “in full.” He then writes an invo-cation to the god of sleep asking that none, whether out of ignorance or spite, misjudge the meaning of his dream. The first book begins when, on the night of the tenth of December, Chaucer has a dream in which he is inside a temple made of glass, filled with beautiful art and shows of wealth.
In 1609, Ben Jonson and Inigo Jones used the image of The House of Fame for their Masque of Queens for Anne of Denmark, James VI and I’s queen consort, who performed in the masque. In the eighteenth century, it was adapted by Alexander Pope as The Temple of Fame: A Vision . John Skel-ton had earlier used Chaucer’s vision of Fame, Rumour and Fortune in A Garlande of Laurell .
The Victorian Romantics looked back to the middle ages as a time of pure vision and the young Byron read Dante. Medieval writers were not anxious about the truth of their vision. The Romance of the Rose stressed individuality and originality and needs a translator of that eternal book of which God was the author. Chaucer did not see himself as mediating heavenly visions and they often thought of themselves as storytellers. Julie of Norwich had visions and wrote them in sensual metaphors in excellent prose. The example for this was Peter’s sermon in Acts which was an epistle from prison.
It is claimed that when peasants walked through London in the 13c singing “When Adam delved and Eve span.” Langland struggled to understand the Gospels in a corrupt society and the conventions of the genre. The story moves forward through a series of dreams not logical progression. The fair field of folk opens surrealistic scenes describing the seven deadly sins and a strong element of political prophecy and foresaw the coming of the anti-Christ. A lot of medieval political prophecy was influenced by apocalyptic literature and this can be seen in the Book of Daniel , even then drawing on tradition. The poem has theological allegory and social satire is a journey of the narrator for the Christian, of a medieval Catholic which entails a series of dream-visions and an examination into the lives of three allegorical characters, Dowel (“ Do-Well ”), Dobet (“ Do-Better ”), and Dobest (“ Do-Best ”). The poem is divided into passus (‘steps’).
Some think Langland really had the dreams which prophesied what had already happened as Virgil did. Symbolism was usually of beasts but a key is needed to make sense of them like a lily, a lion and the son of man battle between them in texts that were used for centuries. Langland was dreaming something that is difficult to interpret. It is struggling between a Conservative hierarchy and radical view of the Gospel. He is trying to say something important but does not say it.

What am I? What do I write?
Once upon a time, most people could not read but listened to stories, and the verbal art of storytelling was an important social act but now reading is private, a personal act. Public storytelling relies on the audience as the reader is guided by their response, which is immediate, liking or otherwise.
A correspondent wrote to me after reading my first book of stories in verse, King Alfred’s Jewel :

“My favourite lesson at school was English. The teacher would sit on her desk, feet resting on a chair, and ask the class to shout out proper nouns, adjectives, and verbs. She would mime catching them in her hands as if catching a ball and, utilising the intercepted words, improvise a story. She altered tones for different characters and spoke in her own voice for na