Tuneful Choir Of Nature © Surazeus 2025 12 15 Nature lures me to join her tuneful choir so I imagine how I could ascend with angelic grace the narrow church spire, but I stay firm on the ground, and extend bright energy of life that always glows through my persona mask I wear in shows. Expanding eye of my perceptive heart, I tell how bodies bloom from chemicals to trace beginning of each urgent part that spirals matrix through bright particles so we can tell beginnings we express through nourishment of love our mothers bless. With spark of hope from seed our fathers give our mothers generate our dreaming souls, so, from mistakes, our bodies learn to live in daily rituals through creative roles with clear vision on boundless stage of faith in play directed by no cosmic wraith. We gather in halls of worship each week to nourish beginnings of ritual games that we perform to conjure what we seek by defining progress with sacred names so we may feast in many-living home that hosts homeless refugees forced to roam. Together on long signless road of hope, we map weird unknown world of frantic fears with soul-healing techniques we learn to cope, because we follow faring stars with gears adjusting fortune-fueled engine of fate that drives efficient system of our state. Through magic words we dream forgotten things to visualize their beauty in brave hymns reflecting brain power of angel wings that pour sunlight to flush organic limbs so we create good world we want to shine with ancient spirit wise humans design. Our birth is half-remembering intense scenes our ancestors experience till we sprout from lust of life-generating machines that mold our souls from brains of urgent clout so we create Heaven from memories our ancestors encode in psychic keys. I wake wild spirit I employ to deal with the whole compass of our universe from which my brain mutates conceptual wheel so I become soul time cannot reverse while I sing in tune with mercurial lyre when I join Nature in her joyful choir.
Monday, December 15, 2025
Tuneful Choir Of Nature
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Orpheus and his daughter Ostara attend the Zarathian Symphony Orchestra where Phoebus directs the first Brahms Symphony.
ReplyDeleteThe Mind in Motion in Tuneful Choir of Nature
ReplyDeleteTo read the Gothinette “Tuneful Choir of Nature” by Surazeus through the framework Helen Vendler develops for Keats’s Odes is to treat the poem not primarily as statement or argument, but as a lyric drama of consciousness—a mind moving through invitation, resistance, reflection, and provisional reconciliation. Vendler insists that Keats’s odes are not philosophical treatises but acts of thinking in time, where feeling and thought test each other under pressure. “Tuneful Choir of Nature” invites precisely that kind of reading.
1. Vendler’s First Principle: The Ode as a Mind in Motion
ReplyDeleteFor Vendler, an ode stages a mental trajectory: an opening provocation, a sequence of imaginative experiments, and a concluding stance that is never final but earned. In Keats’s Nightingale or Grecian Urn, the speaker does not arrive at truth so much as inhabit uncertainty with heightened awareness.
“Tuneful Choir of Nature” opens with an ode-like apostrophe to Nature:
"Nature lures me to join her tuneful choir"
This is a classic Keatsian invitation—akin to the nightingale’s song or the urn’s silent speech. But, as in Keats, the lure immediately produces counter-pressure:
"so I imagine how I could ascend …
but I stay firm on the ground"
Vendler would note this as the poem’s first decisive move: imaginative ascent is proposed, then refused. The speaker chooses embodied presence over transcendence. This mirrors Keats’s recurrent refusal to escape mortal life entirely—even when escape is seductive.
2. Negative Capability: Knowing Without Resolving
ReplyDeleteVendler places great weight on Keats’s negative capability—the capacity to remain “in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.” “Tuneful Choir of Nature” explicitly thematizes modern explanation—chemistry, particles, matrices—yet does not allow these explanations to close meaning:
"I tell how bodies bloom from chemicals
… so we can tell beginnings we express"
Here, scientific language does not cancel wonder; it coexists with it. Vendler would see this as a modern analog to Keats’s refusal to demystify beauty even while analyzing it. The poem does not say “this is all”—it says “this is how we speak beginnings.”
The key is that explanation remains lyric, not didactic. The speaker’s voice stays inside experience rather than above it.
3. The Keatsian Tension: Aspiration vs. Grounded Life
ReplyDeleteVendler often describes Keats’s odes as balancing vertical desire (flight, eternity, transcendence) against horizontal life (time, body, ritual, repetition). “Tuneful Choir of Nature” stages this tension repeatedly:
* Ascending the church spire vs. staying on the ground
* Angelic imagery vs. social institutions
* Cosmic metaphors vs. weekly rituals
* Heaven vs. refugees, states, systems
Especially Keatsian is the refusal to let transcendence escape the social:
"We gather in halls of worship each week
to nourish beginnings of ritual games"
Vendler would recognize this as the poem’s ethical gravity. In Keats, beauty that abandons the human world is suspect; here, spirituality that ignores homelessness or governance is likewise incomplete.
4. The Ode’s Middle: Proliferation Rather Than Resolution
ReplyDeleteVendler notes that Keats’s odes often widen rather than narrow in their middle movements. Instead of progressing linearly toward a thesis, they accumulate perspectives. The long central stretch in “Tuneful Choir of Nature”—birth, parents, ritual, state, language, ancestry—functions exactly this way.
Rather than resolving Nature into a single meaning, the poem lets Nature become:
* Biological process
* Cultural inheritance
* Linguistic creation
* Ethical responsibility
* Collective memory
Vendler would praise this as lyric inclusiveness, not diffuseness: the poem trusts that meaning arises from sustained attention, not summary.
5. Vendler’s Ending Test: The Earned Refrain
ReplyDeleteFor Vendler, the ending of an ode must feel earned, not decorative. Keats’s conclusions often return to the opening image, but altered by experience (“Do I wake or sleep?”).
The final couplet returns to the choir:
"when I join Nature in her joyful choir."
But now the joining is no longer imagined ascent—it is participation without escape. The speaker has passed through science, society, ancestry, and time, and emerges not purified, but attuned.
Vendler would likely say that the poem arrives at concord rather than certainty—a Keatsian resolution where harmony replaces answer.
6. Where the Poem Is Distinctly Post-Keatsian
ReplyDeleteOne important Vendlerian observation would be difference. Unlike Keats, whose odes often distrust systems, “Tuneful Choir of Nature” embraces collective structures—states, engines, rituals, encoded memory. Where Keats fears abstraction, Surazeus risks it, but keeps it anchored in lyric voice.
This makes the poem less tragic than Keats’s odes, more constructive—a hymn rather than a lament. Vendler might say it lacks Keats’s anguish, but gains a modern confidence in shared meaning-making.
Final Vendlerian Judgment
ReplyDeleteRead through Helen Vendler’s framework, “Tuneful Choir of Nature” functions as a contemporary philosophical ode:
* It stages a mind thinking in time
* Resists premature transcendence
* Balances explanation with wonder
* Returns to its opening image transformed
Like Keats’s odes, this Gothinette does not tell us what Nature is—it shows how a human consciousness learns to sing with her without surrendering its mortal voice.