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The Vocabulary of Emotion
“I've never had the right words to describe my life, and now that I've entered my story, I need them more than ever.” -- Jeffrey Eugenides, Middlesex
English consists of three types of words: concrete, abstract, and emotion. There are said to be over 500 emotion words in English. Researchers have found that emotion words are “linked to a richer conceptual base than the other word types.”8 Study participants were able to come up with a greater number of word-associations when presented with emotion words than with concrete or abstract words. Further, emotion words describe at least eight different categories of thought: purely affective states like happiness, affective-behavioral states like cheerfulness, affective-cognitive states like encouragement, cognitive states like certainty, cognitive-behavioral states like caution, bodily states like laziness, evaluations of character like attractive, and objective conditions like abandoned.9 While I am not trained in interpreting such scientific studies, I can draw some implications for the importance of studying the language of emotion. I imagine various synapses firing when learning new emotion words--associations being made across the mind, a recognition of the power of language to help us make sense of ourselves.
As I wondered about this, I remembered how engaged students have been in discussions of synonyms. For example, when reading The Scarlet Letter one year, my high school students and I became engrossed in a discussion about the differences between types of “sad”: melancholy, wistful, poignant, and desolate. “Melancholy” carries with it the sense of pensiveness: it is gentle but heavy, lasting, and associated with disposition. “Wistful” is also gentle, but it is more about regret than pensiveness--the brow does not furrow; instead, the eyes gaze and water. What is “poignant” stings but is still a beautiful feeling, whereas “desolate” is not gentle or beautiful at all. It is heavy, empty, sort of existentially dreadful. The shades of sadness are explored by languages across the world. For example, the Portuguese word saudade is a poetic notion of “a vague, constant desire for something that does not and probably cannot exist, a nostalgic longing for someone or something loved and then lost.”10 There is a word/feeling that has launched a thousand literary ships!
As we explore these shades of meaning, we can delve into etymology. An exploration of the Proto-Indo European (PIE) root “sa,” the base for saudade and sad, reveals how emotion words are often connected to bodily states. The root “sa” actually means “satisfied.” The sense of satiation and fullness seems to have given rise to connotations of uncomfortably full and tired--heavy. It was not until the fourteenth century that the word finally came to mean something like the “sad,” meaning unhappy, that we use today.11 “Sad” has travelled through time as a bodily state (full of food), to a pure affective state (unhappy), and even to subjective evaluation of character (pathetic). Studying etymology lends to a better understanding of not only related words, but also connotation, polysemy, and even metaphor.
Lastly, literary moods as well as personal moods are complex and often hard to describe. In this unit, we will learn new and better words with which to do so. Students often confuse literary mood with tone, but in understanding better how our emotions work in response to the mix of stimulus (like art and literature), past experience, temperament, and so on, I hope they will begin to fully grasp how mood is an experience of a text,, not simply an aspect of a text (or another work of art). Mood cannot exist without their response.
Color
Like words, colors have connotations rooted in history. Like writing, combinations of colors evoke moods. An artist chooses her color palette the way a poet chooses her words. As emotion words may call up a memory of feeling that emotion (if we know what it means), subtle differences in shades of color have an effect on our thoughts and feelings.
Take the color blue, whose connotations are varied and well known. It is a special color: even the totally blind have a cone in their eye that senses blue light. Scientists theorize that this is because of its importance to our circadian rhythms. The morning has the highest concentration of blue light in our 24 hour day.12 The connotations of blue through history can explain how we see it today. Ancient Romans wore it to funerals; Medieval artists and then religious thinkers associated it with divinity. The high price of natural blue pigments made its use in Middle Age and Renaissance painting precious. Navy blue became associated with honor and seriousness, as in military uniforms. It is also the color of the sky and bodies of water as we see them, so all the associations with the sky, night or day, and water are shared with blue. For one thing, both the sky and the ocean have depth--thus blue entails the feeling of being deep. Couple these myriad connotations from history with our personal connotations: Was blue the color of your bedroom growing up? The color of your grandmother’s favorite dress? Your father’s eyes?
Even reading the names of colors can be evocative of the color itself and the word’s etymological meaning--ultramarine, cobalt, Prussian blue, indigo, sapphire. The sound and feel of the words can be beautiful on their own: cerulean, azure. Or they can be mysterious and ancient sounding: woad, perse.
Some colors are named objectively based on their mineral content or their place of origin, but some are named subjectively. Much like some words in the vocabulary of emotions (e.g. saudade), some languages’ color words seem to tell a story. Consider the French word feuillemort, which means “having the color of a faded, dying leaf.” The need for a name for that color must have arisen from the desire to capture that beauty of an autumn landscape and its effect on our emotions. In fact, feuillemort could, in a metaphor, describe an emotion that would otherwise be difficult to pin down. If you understand the word, and you have ever had the pleasure of a solitary walk down a tree-lined city street in New England on a late-October evening, you will understand what I mean. A related and equally beautiful concept-word is komorebi, the Japanese word for the color of leaves when the sunlight filters through them.13
And of course, as poets juxtapose emotions (such as awe and suffering in the following poem by Longfellow), painters use contrasting colors to make a point and generate emotional impact. A brief study of the color wheel with students will certainly be useful here.
Reading Ekphrastic Poetry
“Art is the antidote that can call us back from the edge of numbness, restoring the ability to feel for another.” -- Barbara Kingsolver, High Tide in Tucson
I have chosen sixteen poems that I feel are accessible to 7th grade students, differentiation considered. Each poem speaks to a work of art that I also feel that students can access. The poems also have an emotive quality or seem to illustrate an emotion, hence I choose them for their applicability to the objectives of the unit around affective response.
I plan to teach the following three poems and to use the remaining poems for classroom activities. I chose these poems strategically. The Longfellow poem comes with interesting biographical information that will help us to see how he came to ekphrasis. Therefore, the focus there is the poet’s encounter and relationship with the image. I want my students to consider how the photograph of the mountain evokes, or even unlocks, emotion and memory for Longfellow. How did an explorer’s photograph trigger such a deeply personal response for Longfellow, who had never been out West?
The focus for the Hirsch poem by contrast is my own affective response to both the painting and the poem. For the Hirsch poem, I will purposely focus my discussion on my affective response to the poem and what I think that is about. I want to model that process in all its subjectivity and weirdness so as to help my students do the same. It is important for me to share how the painting and poem evoke moods, memories, and associations for me as honestly as possible if I want my students to do the same. I have great enthusiasm for this ekphrastic pair. It serves my sense of seeing our “reflection” in art.
The last poem that I will teach is Robert Hayden’s “Monet’s Water Lilies.” Conveniently, this poem is about going to a museum, among other things, something my students and I will do toward the end of this unit. Hayden’s poem is also about the news of the world in 1965. I think it draws a lovely bridge from current events to the art museum. This poem will also take a brief close reading that will not be too taxing for my seventh graders.
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, “The Cross of Snow”
William Henry Jackson's photo of Mount of the Holy Cross from the top of Notch Mountain, 1873
The first poem that I will present to students is Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s “The Cross of Snow.” Longfellow was once a poet superstar in the United States and in Europe--a household name. Although he went out of fashion after his death (to the point of being ridiculed), I think his poetry is beautiful and no less so for being accessible. This poem will help illustrate the point I want to make that poetry and art--like the symbol of the cross--can help bring deep feelings to the surface, however painfully, and that there is great value in that for the writer as well as the reader. I hope that I will be forgiven for any forays into intentional fallacy here--the fact that we have access to the story around the poem will serve students well in their understanding of how poets come to form their content.
We happen to have some biographical record of Longfellow’s ekphrastic experience thanks to Henry’s correspondance with his brother, William, who saved and commented on these letters in his own writing.14 Longfellow’s second wife, Frances Appleton, died from severe burns incurred from an accident lighting a match. (His first wife had died from complications from a miscarriage.) Longfellow incurred severe burns on his face in his attempt to save her, and the story goes that that is why he wore a beard. He was not able to attend Fanny’s funeral and burial because he was in the hospital for his own burns. The tragedy was no doubt exacerbated by his sense of failure in not being able to save Fanny and the lack of closure as a result of not being able to attend the funeral--perhaps another failure in his mind. Longfellow was devastated by this. He became quite reclusive and wrote less of his own poetry, turning instead to writing translations of Dante.15 With this information, it is interesting to imagine the writing of the “The Cross of Snow” as a turning point for Longfellow. Doing so with my students will certainly help me connect this poem to my unit’s theme, even though I am touching on another critical fallacy.
The poem, an Italian sonnet, consists of an octave (the first eight lines) centered on Fanny, and a sestet (the last six lines) about the mountain. The octave tells of a ghostly presence in the poet’s bedroom that keeps him awake. The tone toward the presence is reverent: “a soul more white / Never through martyrdom of fire was led / To its repose.” It presents Fanny as a angel/ghost whom Longfellow feels blessed/haunted by. Correspondingly, the octave feels spooky and melancholy, but also celebratory of a “benedight,” or blessed, life. In explaining how these different moods coexist, I want my students to begin to understand that mood need not be single-layered. As moods are in life, so in poetry.
The sestet may at first confuse students, who will not be familiar with sonnet structure. I will simply have them note where the poem’s subject shifts. Once the location is identified, it will serve as a good illustration of the twists and turns of poetry, specifically sonnets, and how you must be patient in the process of making a whole of its parts.
The backstory to the sestet will happily help to connect those parts. Sometime in 1879, eighteen years after Fanny’s death, we know that Longfellow came across a picture of a mountain with a “cross of snow” on it, aptly named the Mount of the Holy Cross, in a book about the landscape of the American West. The image was probably the first photograph taken of this fabled cross, by William Henry Jackson in 1873.16 The cross is formed when snow fills the deep gullies in the mountainside. Why did this image, which I imagine Longfellow came across while resting in his chair by the fire one Cambridge winter’s night, evoke such melancholy for Longfellow? I think it is the deep resonance of the religious symbolism. The cross that nature carved into a mountainside may have initially affected Longfellow as if it were a miracle he encountered during an arduous hike, an epiphany: I am that mountain; God is speaking to me. And yet, this is not exactly the tone of the poem toward the image. The tone is not awe-struck, but contemplative about suffering if not resigned to it. Note that Longfellow simply says “There is a mountain in the distant West;” there is no reference to an image in the poem; the image of the Mount of the Holy Cross is immediately an emblem--the bare rock face and the “sun-defying” ravines of snow are his life since Fanny’s death, and the scars that will not heal.
Symbols evoke emotions and memories on many levels, consciously and unconsciously. The symbol of the cross will be a familiar one to my Christian students. Even to a secular mind, it speaks eloquently of human suffering. However, suffering is not only a burden (“my cross to bear”), it is also what brings us together as humans, the reason why we need to connect to each other, and it is--theologically--the way to redemption. For Longfellow, it evokes the suffering of Fanny, his own suffering as a result of her death, and the suffering of Christ on the cross. We are reminded that “The son of man will suffer many things” (Isaiah 53).17 And yet believers look to the cross for comfort as well--it can symbolize both Christ’s suffering and his resurrection, and the glory of his goodness. In this last sense, we go back to the celebration of Fanny’s goodness.
In writing the poem, although it is a sad one to us, it is possible that Longfellow experienced some relief, if not catharsis. John Dewey theorizes that “expression is the clarification of turbid emotion.”18 “Clarification” is a positive word--and this idea reminds me of the relief one feels when finally expressing, in a manner that is finally satisfactory, sorrows and worries to a loved one or a therapist. My words may not be happy ones, but it is a positive thing to say them nonetheless. It is a relief to verbally identify and confess the crosses we bear, even if they cannot be taken off of us. The cross connotes the truism that to live is to suffer, yet there is meaning, and perhaps redemption in that. In fact, if Longfellow considers his suffering his penance for Fanny’s death, maybe his “vision” of the cross represents his atonement, his coming back to his God and community (of readers).
(An extension for this poem will be an assignment to find a symbol that feels personally meaningful, connected to your experiences or identity. Students will be asked to draw the symbol and write three brief paragraphs about it. The first will describe the symbol, the next will describe the personal experience or aspect of identity it is related to, and the third will connect the two.)
Edward Hirsch, “Edward Hopper and the House by the Railroad”
Edward Hopper, House by the Railroad, 1925
Edward Hirsch, born in 1950 and still alive, is Hirsch’s poem about Edward Hopper’s House by the Railroad is, to me, so finely attuned to the mood of the painting that I cannot imagine one without the other. Here is an example of an ekphrastic poem that--I can confidently infer--was composed through the medium of mood.
The poem had the effect of making me appreciate the painting much more than I did on first viewing--and I think that is an interesting effect worth discussing with my students. In the following description of that process, you may note the significant shift in my tone toward Hopper’s work. I want to “perform” this tone a bit for my students to help them to understand what happened for me--a very interesting aesthetic experience.
Before reading Hirsch: The colors of Hopper’s sky remind me of times I am in an anxious, dysmorphic mood and a sunny day feels eerie in its disjointedness from my reality. The house itself, designed in the architectural style of high Victorian gothic, both annoys and depresses me because I see that the builders or architect put great effort into it but it is just really unattractive. I’d find more aesthetic pleasure in a split-level ranch painted maroon and mustard than in this house. Nobody wants to live here. So, there is this sense of futility.
Trying to be more analytical, I realize that Hopper’s use of a relatively limited color palette in House by the Railroad creates the mood. The strongest colors are cool blues, and the most prominent is a truly dark navy. This combination of navy blue, hospital-johnny-blue, and fluorescent-light-white is just about the worst, and I feel concerned about the house painter’s emotional state. Truthfully, I believe I have some unpleasant association with this color combination--and I don’t know if it is a memory or a dream, but I am in some sort of building with these colors and the feeling is awful.
Orange is opposite blue on the color wheel, so its presence in about one-fifth of the canvas creates visual interest but not harmony. Thus, the terracotta and burnt umber of the foreground, the railroad, do little to uplift the scene, though I know they try. Kudos must be given to the chimney’s lovely smooth scarlet, but really I have never seen a place more in need of emerald and komorebi. I imagine myself in the painting: even though I jump a train to seek out happier, greener vistas, I fear these dull blues will color my mood forever. I am surprised I am able to return to the painting without being committed.
After reading Hirsch: In his poem, Edward Hirsch does a wonderful thing in personifying Hopper’s house--he evokes a heartbreaking sympathy in me for this image that I don’t like looking at. This abstraction, this creative risk Hirsch takes, pays off because it captures the painting’s essence in that rhetorical way I discussed in the introduction. I feel the physical ache of abandonment through the poem, and now the painting too, which at first I found too depressing to want to look very closely at. I feel so guilty and sad, as if someone just heard me making fun of them, and they walk away slowly to their lonely apartment without saying anything, and it’s terrible because I know what it feels like to be made fun of too.
In one of her talks on aesthetic education, the teacher educator Maxine Green states that “coming into contact with a work of art is like coming into contact with another human being.”19 For me, that coming in to contact only happened through the support of Hirsch’s poem. Yet, now I realize that if I had sat with the feeling I had originally, I could still make much of it. Does the aesthetic response need to be positive to be meaningful? I think it does not, but it is difficult because that negative response is couched in uncomfortable feelings.
In their entry on emotion in the Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetics and Poetry, Lerner and Robinson discuss Stanley Fish’s reader response theory as well as, apparently, their own valuation of emotion in the interpretation of poetry:
readers’ emotional responses are often important in interpretation and evaluation not only for grasping what emotions the poem expresses but also more generally for bringing salient features of the poem to attention.... However, interpretation requires not just emoting, but reflecting on our emotional responses.20
I would like to extend this notion to our responses to visual art. My response to Hopper’s painting was indeed interpretive. It would be silly to think that Hopper chose “hospital-johnnie blue” for his window frames because he thought it was cheery. But I would argue that it is also reflexive: The art I feel strongly about communicates back to me something about myself. Looking at a painting I more immediately love, I hear myself thinking "this is me, this is so me, if someone could understand this painting, they could understand me." It is interesting to interpret the feelings that surface. For example, why did I find it so hard to tolerate the loneliness of Hopper's house? However strange it sounds, the distaste I had for the house is connected to the distaste I can have for myself. Its shame-filled awkwardness, its self-consciousness in the face of onlookers reminds me of myself at different points in life. Its modest, self-effacing dress of colors that are not pretty, and seek to blend in with the sky, feels familiar somehow.
These feelings were and are an excellent foray into understanding the painting, as Hirsch’s poem also attests. Hirsch takes it further, commenting on American culture and the darker side of progress and urbanization, but I am less interested in that. It can sit in the back of my mind; it does not at all detract from my personal experience. What I really care about is how Hirsch’s poem helps me feel such tenderness toward the house, toward my awkward younger self, toward anyone who feels abandoned and out of style. And I am struck by how my experience with the painting becomes poignant, interesting, even moral.
(An extension for this poem will be an assignment to find a building or inanimate object to personify. Have conversation with and write it in dialogue form.)
Robert Hayden, “Monet’s Water Lilies”
Claude Monet, Water Lilies, 1914-1926, http://www.moma.org
Robert Hayden (1913-1980) did not want to be known as an African-American poet, but rather an American poet. This wish caused some controversy during his career. Some of Hayden’s reasons had to do with curricular issues we still deal with today, such as the “ghettoization” of African American literature to February, Black History Month. However, the color of his skin has relevance for my students, as does his childhood. His family was poor and troubled, and he resided with an equally poor and troubled foster family most of the time. Still, he went on to work with W.H. Auden at the University of Michigan, teach at Fisk University, and serve as the first black poet in the position later to be known as Poet Laureate.21 While none of this has to be lectured about to students, Hayden’s extraordinary life circumstances are worth mentioning. It is safe to say that Hirsch and Longfellow did not have such trials before their triumphs.
In his essay on Hayden’s “Monet’s Water Lilies,” the poet Anthony Walton observes that “it’s interesting that Hayden, a child of the inner city, thought this painting of a bygone French countryside carried him to some restorative past.”22 Yet the painting itself is not really localized, though of course we know about Monet’s garden in Giverny. A huge triptych, over six feet high and spanning over forty feet in length, with no foreground or horizon, this is a painting of water and reflections. In the Metropolitan Museum of Modern Art’s guide to a 1978 Monet Exhibit, the authors explain that Monet “had begun to paint his experience of certain phenomena rather than the phenomena themselves.” (It was around this time in Monet’s life that he began to suffer from cataracts in one eye, so his new philosophy may have been influenced by necessity!)23 Essentially, as Walton later points out, this is a painting of light, and not unrelatedly, it is also about seeing, and knowing, and believing. These are also the subjects of Hayden’s poem.
Installation of Water Lilies at the MOMA, http://www.moma.org
In the first lines of the poem, Hayden alludes to the 1965 voting rights demonstrations in Selma and the bombing of the American embassy in Saigon, Vietnam. Here is a poem whose historical context is rather crucial to understanding the mood. Depending on our schedule, it might be worth having the students do the research on these allusions themselves. Such an activity would be illustrative of the point that allusions in literature are often sources of concentrated meaning integral to the work.
The events of March, 1965 in Selma and in Saigon were intense and deeply troubling. For over a month, under the leadership of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., citizens congregated in Selma, Alabama to protest the illegal disenfranchisement of Alabama’s African American population and eventually march to Montgomery. Despite the peaceful nature of the demonstration, violent reactions erupted within law enforcement and the white community. Jimmi Lee Jackson, a 26 year old black demonstrator, was shot and killed by police while he was trying to protect his mother from the police themselves. This was only the beginning. During what became known as “Bloody Sunday,” civil rights demonstrators, led by Hosea Williams and John Lewis, were violently abused by police and harrassed by citizens as they attempted to cross the Edmund Pettus Bridge. Later, in the ensuing discord, James Reeb, a white Unitarian minister, was beaten by a white mob and later died from his injuries. These atrocities led to federal protection for the marchers, and on March 21, Dr. King was finally able to successfully lead the march to Montgomery, Alabama. There must have been renewed hope for the movement. However, after the Montgomery demonstration, Viola Liuzzo, who was helping to transport marchers back to Selma, was murdered by members of the Klu Klux Klan.24
Meanwhile, the United States was becoming more involved in the Vietnam War after Northern Vietnam’s attacks on U.S. Destroyer Maddox, the Bien Hoa Air Base, Camp Holloway, the Pleiku Airfield, and the army barracks at Qui Nhon. Finally, the car bombing at the American Embassy in Saigon prompted President Johnson to order Operation Rolling Thunder, a three-year air bombing offensive on communist North Vietnam that began in March of 1965.25 Soon after, the first American ground troops were committed to the conflict, which galvanized the reality and controversy of the war for the American public.
To top it all off, the U.S. government (among others) continued to test nuclear weapons after detonating two in WWII. The Cold War and the threat of nuclear annihilation were ongoing. For Hayden, a scholar of American history, the state of the nation was bleak indeed. For an African American, it was even bleaker. In his aptly titled book Selma to Saigon, writer Daniel S. Lucks explains the complex situation African Americans who opposed the war were in:
As a vulnerable minority, African American leftists and pacifists had been targeted and marginalized for their early opposition to the Cold War. The witch hunts of the late 1940s and early 1950w had severed the civil rights movement’s long-standing engagement with pacifism and anticolonial movements in Africa and Asia (4).
That August, President Johnson pushed and passed the Voting Rights Act of 1965, guaranteeing and protecting the voting rights of minorities. Such legislative successes in the civil rights movement would ironically further complicate African Americans’ freedom to speak out against what was increasingly being seen as a tragically ill-conceived war. (For these reasons, Dr. King did not publicly criticize either the war or the Johnson administration until 1967.)26
Presumably with all of this in mind, Hayden compares the impact of knowing and feeling about the events of 1965 to nuclear “fallout.” It is a rich metaphor. Literal nuclear fallout, which causes environmental and biological trauma, is compared to the aftermath of tragic events, which cause psychic and spiritual trauma. What we know affects how we see the world and the people in it. It can also “poison” our inner worlds, potentially rendering ridiculous our faith in God and in humankind.
Hayden goes on to describe his self-care routine, going to the Museum of Modern Art in New York to look at Monet’s Water Lilies. It is as if seeing the painting washes his eyes and mind. “Here,” in the museum, in the world of the painting, everything exists “in light.” Here, looking at the painting, the poet can find harmony between what his actual eye sees and what his inner “eye of faith” sees. Here he can conflate what is seen with what is known--a temporary harmonic respite.
Hayden’s appreciation of Monet makes sense. They both seem to be interested in light and all its connotative possibilities in art. Consider all of the poem’s light- and sight- related words: see, light, eye, seen, iridescence, illusive, light, beheld, refracting, aura, shadow. Even “fallout” has a connection to light, as it is related to radiation and fiery debris from a nuclear explosion. The pigments in the paint “dissolve” in white, or “iridescence,” which is the partial reflection of white light--or white paint. Note that Monet’s palette is composed mainly of tints--primary colors mixed with white. The next metaphor, “flesh of light,” in line nine, is especially interesting in that it seems to be referring to color, and more obliquely, paint. Supposing that color is the tenor of the metaphor, “flesh of light” is a brilliant vehicle. With its oblique reference to paint, and thus art, we can see how this “flesh” is illusive, but also true.
In the last stanza, Hayden uses apostrophe, directly addressing the light, and then he seems to immediately switch to addressing himself and his readers. “Here is the aura of that world / each of us has lost,” he states. Something happens here that is incredibly poignant. The despair about the wider world is transformed into gentle pathos. What have you lost? This simple question evokes memories of childhood, loved ones, unfulfilled aspirations, the literal or figurative fallout of what we have known. It is painful, but it compels a feeling of empathy for other humans just as humankind seems lost. It finally evokes a more archetypal loss of a more innocent world. We “know” this noumenal world existed because of the “shadow” is casts.
We can interpret this last metaphor thus, that the painting, and art itself, is the only evidence we have of the existence of a better world. I cannot help but see, as I look at Monet’s triptych again, distant nebulas out in space, perhaps the remnants of what was once a galaxy, perhaps the potential for a new one.
(An extension for this poem will be an assignment to describe one or two situations going on in the world today that are personally distressing, and then to describe a place where one might go to find some peace and mental balance when feeling that distress. This could be a journal entry or a poem.)
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