Gold Glade (1957). Content and Description

“Gold Glade” first appeared in Promises: Poems 1954-1956, which received the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 1958. As several other poems in Promises do, “Gold Glade” draws on Warren’s memories of his boyhood in Guthrie, Kentucky, and his grandfather’s farm in Tennessee. While the speaker cannot remember the exact location, he remembers the powerful event—an encounter with a giant tree in the middle of a gold glade, which helped forge his relationship with the natural world.

The speaker’s discovery of the giant tree is an encounter with the sublimity of nature that momentarily suspends his awareness of time. The speaker connects this momentary “freezing” of time with the “gold light” the giant tree radiates. Faced with the overwhelming image of this gold light, the speaker asserts, “There could be no dark,” a sentiment he knows to be untrue yet cannot help but express given the extraordinary nature of his encounter.

The next line reveals that the speaker is aware that the vision is temporary. Interestingly, however, the speaker insists that the image can be found “in no mansion under earth, / Nor imagination’s domain of bright air, / But solid in soil that gave it its birth,” suggesting that the feeling of timelessness he experienced originated in the natural world itself rather than his own creative imagination (7.1-3).

“Gold Glade” uses the poet’s memory as a springboard for complicated musings on the relationships among perception, time, and the creative act. Though Warren sets the scene for his speaker’s epiphany with detailed descriptions of “the woods of boyhood,” the poem undercuts the authority of the speaker’s memory by noting in the sixth stanza that he is unsure as to whether the memory originated in childhood experiences in Kentucky or Tennessee.

Though the gap in time between Warren’s boyhood experience and his writing “Gold Glade” in the late 1950s is considerable, we can also interpret this as Warren’s reminder that “Gold Glade,” like all literary remembering, is an attempt to (re)construct experience through language. For the speaker to have any hope of reliving his childhood vision, then, he must return to the place where it occurred, as he resolves to do in the poem’s final line: “I shall set my foot, and go there” (7.5).

For Discussion or Writing:
1. The last line of “Gold Glade” recalls the first line of William Butler Yeats’s poem “The Lake Isle of Innisfree,” which also concerns a speaker’s relationship to an idealized location in the natural world. Compare and contrast the attitudes the speakers in each poem adapt toward nature as well as the language each poet uses to describe the natural world.

2. In Poems of Pure Imagination the critic Lesa Carnes Corrigan connects the vision Warren describes in “Gold Glade” with the phenomenon described by the English romantic poet William Wordsworth in his work The Prelude as “spots of time.” Research Wordsworth’s concept, then compare and contrast “Gold Glade” with Wordsworth’s “Tinturn Abbey,” considering imagery, themes, and content.

3. Warren wrote “Gold Glade” during the height of the Civil Rights movement. While Warren addresses the issue of race at length in many of his essays, poems, and novels, “Gold Glade” can be read as a sort of elegy for an idealized version of the U.S. South in which the suffering of African Americans was underrepresented, if not ignored. Do you feel that authors have an obligation to create art that explicitly addresses contemporary political issues? Why or why not?

 






Date added: 2025-01-09; views: 7;


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