In regards to Pansies:

When I saw this course was available way back when, I remember thinking, “Now here is a class that I want to take, a class about a bunch of pansies who write about, well… pansies.” I like pansies. I would admire them, for although they did nothing particularly useful, they actually got their heads out of the clouds for a minute and wrote down a poem or two; they weren’t total procrastinators (like I am, see: this post date), but a group who chose to avoid real life like I do, who lived in their own little bubbles floating along a river somewhere deep in an enchanted forest. I could connect with them.

Had I misjudged them, or what?

I did vaguely recall from high school that there were more to these pansies than what meets the eye as reactionaries against the Great Enlightenment Figures of Reasoning. But what struck me the most was the immense complexity of the poems. I’d walk out of class even more confused than when I went in, but I liked it! Thinking. Thinking. Thinking. It was all that I could do. By grappling with these texts I was forced to think about my life and life in general. Paradoxes that were logical: A fragment made whole, an original from imitation. The Hegelian dialectic applied to more than just History. All these poems shocked me into thinking, none more so than Blake. For example, in “Thel” we are imprisoned by our senses and yet what do we know without our senses? How would we experience things without them? Do we bring them with us to the afterlife even though we have no body? Or do we have a body? What is our purpose in life? Is it to be food for worms? Is there such a thing as a static figure because everything changes and transmutes? In “The Marriage of Heaven and Hell” Blake turns everything I learned as a child upside down, but it makes perfect sense. If Heaven is perfect, it is therefore unalterable. If Hell is not perfect, then it is changeable and there is a sense of progression, which takes on a positive connotation for me (a positive corrosion). Blake attempts to answer these questions through his mythology, but I still have no answers.

I have come to the conclusion that these poets were special pansies. Their lives were rather depressing (Not pansy like). They pushed the limits more than anyone else in history, more so than those of the Enlightenment (Not pansy like). They were a bit weird; they tended to live in their heads after exposing themselves to life. Their ideas are so unique. (Every pansy has his/her own eccentricity). They left us without answers to their questions. But it is their thoughts that push us forward into the realm of thinking and bring us back to the real world. The cycle continues; pansies come and pansies go (both flowers and people). We live. We die. We become fertilizer for future flowers. We think about what the Special Pansies thought… we come back down… and write about what we think for future generations to come. Maybe they’ll be able figure it all out…