AMERICAN POETRY—WEEKLY NOTES
WEEK I: THE (PRE-)COLOMBIAN PERIOD
THE NAVAJO PEOPLE
Largest Native American group in the U.S., living in the Southwest (US
and Mexico) as crafts-workers, farmers and cattle-raisers
Destroyed systematically in the 1850s-60s (“The Long Walk” of 1864:
8.000 Navajo forced to walk 483 km from Arizona to their prison in
New Mexico)
“Dance of the Atsálei, or Thunderbirds”
Concluding ritual of the 9-day Night Chant or
Nightwalk
Poetry chant as healing ritual
Poetic rhythm, repetition--} trance, rhythm of
internal organs
Symbols:
Dark cloud of Male Divinity, rain
Dawn
Grasshoppers (spring, vitality)
4 thunderbirds (corn, child-rain, vegetation, pollen)
WEEK II: THE COLONIAL PERIOD
ANNE BRADSTREET (1612-1672)
1st American (woman) poet, 1st
female writer to be published
with The Tenth Muse Lately
Sprung Up in America (1650)
She and her husband emigrated
with John Winthrop’s group in
American in 1630
(Massachusetts Bay Colony)
Educated; her father and husband were among the founders of Harvard;
two of her sons graduates
Faced starvation, many difficult relocations, house fire, the death of her
daughter-in-law and three grandchildren, smallpox paralysis,
tuberculosis
Themes: personal, religious, on mortality, on women’s worth, on
philosophical issues
“To My Dear and Loving Husband”
-Puritan appropriation of Elizabethan
sonnet convention:
woman woos man
model of feminine virtue, not sin
form/rhyme reflecting theme
typology: heavenly over earthly love, but latter leads to former
(C/c Plato’s Symposium)
opposite of “carpe diem”; promise of immortality not through art
“In Memory of My Dear Grandchild, Elizabeth Bradstreet, Who
Deceased August, 1665, Being a Year and a Half Old”
Poems for 3 grandchildren dead, house burned down
Apostrophe, eulogy, consolatio
Prefiguration of mourning as human fault:
“too much content”; “was lent”
Variation of 8+6 convention: 7+7—why?
-why rhyming scheme of same last 3 lines?
(Human sorrow, nature-based metaphors matched by super-natural
God’s plan, which is given extra final emphasis)
EDWARD TAYLOR (1642-1729)
Emigrated from England to American in 1668
(Massachusetts Bay Colony); Strict religious
sectarian, Harvard graduate, served as pastor
and doctor in Massachusetts.
5 of his 8 children died.
Dubious view of poetry, didn’t want his
published
Themes: metaphysics, blend of the religious
and the homely
“Huswifery”
Appropriation of metaphysical conceit (typology)
Wheel as a symbol of “complete” actions
3 phases: spinning, weaving, clothing=> formation, building up,
embellishment of personality
What gender does the poet perform? How?
-domestic metaphor
-passive, obedient role of being “molded”
PHILLIS WHEATLEY (1753-1784)
First African-American woman
poet published (1773)
Brought as slave to America in
1761 (named after her slave
ship); the Wheatleys classically
educated her and nurtured her
talent; success tour in the UK;
liberated, but poverty, her
husband’s imprisonment,
deaths of all her 3 children and
illness lead her to an early death.
Themes: elegies, classical, religious ideals and values, freedom
Problem of “Uncle Tomism” (alienated race consciousness) VS
minority abolitionist rhetoric politics?\
“On Being Brought from Africa to America”
 Self-deprecating vocabulary
 Irony (Cain, train, not seeking redemption)?
FROM REVOLUTION TO U.S. ROMANTICISM
War of Independence (1775-83) introduces themes of:
 American secular character (VS previous Colonialist
Puritanism or adventurous spirit of discovery)
 Liberty, sovereignty, national glory (attempted epics,
domestic poetic styles)
 Domestic problems: abolitionism, the Civil War (1861-65),
the loss of “wild” America to urban capitalism
European Romanticism, with its turn to the medieval/exotic
past and emphasis on wild, tremendous, hidden aspects of
human soul, becomes:
 American Gothic (exploration of Darkness, often
metaphysical)
 Transcendentalism (return to Nature)
PHILIP FRENEAU (1752-1832)
-Wealthy origins; West Indies, British
capture experience sensitizes him
towards anti-slavery, anti-British
imperialism; journalist and “Poet of the
American Revolution”; after savage
political activity, died impoverished and unknown.
-Didacticism, philosophical spirit and sensuous verse
-Influence on later Romantic Primitivism, Gothic, and
Transcendentalism
“The Indian Burying Ground”
18th-century “Graveyard Poetry” influence
Why a Native American graveyard?
Vocabulary for Natives
Is their mysticism appreciated?
Why is burial posture important?
“Activity that knows no rest” symbolic of?
c/c Keats’s “Ode to a Grecian Urn”
Past ghosts vs white visitor--> reciprocal cultural assimilation
(final couplet)?
History as “trace” (Jacques Derrida)
WILLIAM CULLEN BRYANT (1794-1878)
Classical education; “graveyard poets”
influence becomes Romanticism; from
law to successful journalism and
literary fame
“Thanatopsis”
-Meaning of title
-Effect of enjambment, no rhyme
-How is this poem “American”?
Power of Nature vs mortality
-Influence of Roman poets (“sic transit gloria mundi,” “ubi
sunt?”), metaphysical poets (Donne’s “Death”) and early
Romantics (Wordsworth’s “Lucy” poems)
-Is this a consolatio poem, or a gothic one?
o Select company of multitudes, everywhere
o One with natural majesty
o Life goes on, despite mortality
o Death as democratic human condition
o --> dying not as “a slave,” but with dignity
EDGAR ALLAN POE
(1809-1849)
Abandoned orphan,
adopted by Allan family;
teen bride died of poverty;
literary enemies (via
criticism), alcoholism and
illness led to late fame and
early death.
Gothic Romanticism,
Aestheticism
Definition of the short story
creation of detective story
Metaphysics, psychological horror, mystery
“Sonnet—To Science”
Attitude towards scientific fact, reality
Poetry as “shelter,” “dream”—from/of what
Mystery as necessary for poetry (Spenser, Shelley)
Is this poem “American”?
“To Helen”
Why this character? Symbol of?
Which one is the speaker’s “native shore”?
Why does she turn to “Psyche” with an “agate lamp”?
Can this “Holy-Land” be available to the speaker?
“The Raven”
Effect of alliteration, rhyme, long lines
Theme (and biographical analogy)
Symbols:
Midnight hour, December
Attic with purple curtains
bust of Pallas
the raven
Metaphysical elements: “Nevermore”
WALT WHITMAN
(1819-1892)
Teen prodigy, autodidact,
man of many trades
(journalism, printing, Civil
War volunteer nurse)
Democratic activist and
abolitionist
Bohemian, unconventional,
“rough”, openly gay (Live
Oak, with Moss; Calamus)
Influences:
transcendentalism,
pantheism, romanticism,
republicanism
1855 Leaves of Grass, American “epic,” revised and
implemented until 1892 (“deathbed” edition)
Unrhymed, long lines; rhythmic repetition, grand, bold epic
tone; key presence of nature; “father of free verse”
“Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking”
Romantic topos: childhood epiphany revisited by older poetnarrator
Symbols: cradle/ “savage old mother,” bird, boy, summer shore
Why are there two formats for the poem’s stanzas?
Poet as seer, oionoscopos, “translator” of Nature
Why is the bird called a “demon”? What is the boy’s “curse”?
Why is “death” the sweetest word?
What is this poem about?
“Song of Myself” (1-13)
-What is “myself”?
-Transcendental elements
Relation to nature
Grass as a symbol
Attitude towards books
-Relation to other people (what kind?)
-Attitude towards problems of America
(racism, sexism, classism)
-How is this poem American?
EMILY DICKINSON
(1830/1886)
Spent all her life in Amherst,
Massachussets (“Homestead”),
except for one-year college stint
at Mt. Holyoke Female Seminary
in 1847
Strict religious upbringing by
protective, stern father; became
a recluse, always dressed in
white, refusing to meet people;
intense relationships with
friends, family-members,
admired icons and possible lovers carried long-distance through prolific
letter-writing and poem-gifts; presumed to have carried passionate
sexual affairs with members of both sexes
Voracious reader and learner, greatly influenced by Transcendentalism
Her awareness of her great talent was thwarted by critics/editors, who
did not understand her odd poetry (unusual use of dashes, iambic
“slant”rhymes, meter taken from popular hymns, musicality,
concentration, odd metaphors); many poems scribbled informally on
scraps of papers, backs of envelopes, etc; many she burned due to
disappointment, others she ordered burned after her death. Thankfully,
her sister Lavinia did not comply all the way: surviving poems edited
and published posthumously by Lavinia and neighbor Mabel Loomis
Todd made Emily an instant and lasting success
49: “Irreverent” view of God/Father (possibly because of her own idea
of fathers)
autobiographical reference to deaths of two loved relatives
biblical motifs: the beggar Lazarus, Job, Jacob wrestling with the Angel
Format: dashes, stanza division re: tone, theme, vocabulary
185: Religion VS science as a more
dependable faith
Contrast between “faith”
and “see”
Double meaning of “fine
invention”: irony, sarcasm
Loaded use of “prudent”
214: Drunkenness as a metaphor
for happiness
Transcendental elements
(from nature to Heaven)
Seraphs, saints as symbols
of?
249: Love affair as sailing
Positioning: poet as ship, lover as calm “port”
The gender of images: port, rowing, sea suggesting a female lover
Alliteration, rhythm as joining metaphor to reality (sea waves,
love rhythms)
280: Funeral as a metaphor for:
a. A bad headache
b. A confusing rumination on the mystery of death and the afterlife
c. Emily’s attempt to deal with the alarming prospect of her
headache-inducing eye illness
Last line: double meaning of “finished knowing”
324: Sabbath church as foil to transcendentalist home experience of
theosis—experience of Emerson’s “Over-Soul” and “defiant pantheism”
Immediacy VS mediated contact with God
Individual human agency (Romantic) of choosing how to worship
and constructing worship space out of imagination and will VS religious
submission to fate, God, nature
712: Alternative view of Death as “kindly” gentleman
Journey stages: childhood—maturity—old age—grave
Eternity as a matter of perspective, speaker hasn’t felt its passage
MODERNISM
trauma of wars (especially World Wars)
love of new--worship of machine (fascism); orientalism
classic culture VS fragmentation
exploration of the unconscious (automatic writing, surrealism, language
experiments)
American expatriates (“The Lost Generation” Ezra Pound, Amy Lowell,
T.S. Eliot) VS
Home poets:
The Prohibition (1920-33) and “The Roaring Twenties”
The Great Depression (1929-1939)
Socialism: poetry for the masses (minorities, the proletariat),
symbolism, agrarian/regional themes
New York Dada (1915-1923)
Edwin Arlington Robinson (1869-1935)
 Received great education, but plagued by delicate health, alcoholism,
and bad luck: didn’t become famous until mid-life thanks to Kermit
Roosevelt
 Prolifically and exclusively dedicated to poetry about losers (like he
saw himself):
“The world is not a prison house, but a kind of spiritual kindergarten,
where millions of bewildered infants are trying to spell God with the
wrong blocks.”
 Won 3 Pulitzers and created “Tilbury Town” (modeled after
Gardiner, Maine) for many of his characters.
 Although influenced by imagism, he followed old-fashioned forms
with sensitivity and “democratic” outlook—see Frost’s praise that
while “our age, ran wild in the quest of new ways to be new....
Robinson stayed content with the old-fashioned ways to be new.”
 Influence on Frost, later songwriters (“Elinor Rigby,” “Richard
Cory”)
“Richard Cory”
-Name, archetypal
image (blighted
king/prince motif)
-Why do we have a list
of his attributes?
-Diction division
(pronouns)
-Final couplet—is it expected? Why? What does it mean?
Robert Frost (1874-1963)
 Regionalism (New
England rural),
symbolism, modernist
themes and diction
but traditional forms.
 Moved to England
briefly to find fame,
came back at 40 with
it; read poet for JFK’s
inauguration, enjoyed
favored poet status
and household-brand
name, 4 Pulitzers.
 From epigrams (“Fire and Ice”) to long dramatic poems (“Death of a
Hired Man”) with naturalist themes
 Poetry as “a momentary stay against confusion”
“Stopping by the Woods on a Snowy Evening”
Pairs with “The Road Not Taken”
Rhyme and meter: like a children’s/holiday poem—why?
Symbols: woods, snow, horse, season (irony of tradition)
“Home Burial”
Form: dramatic dialogue
Personae and dramatic tension
The role of the narrator—why minimal?
Symbols: house setting (stairs, window, cemetary, door); dead baby
Last line: why unfinished sentence? Why dashes?
Is it poetry, or narrative?
“After Apple Picking”
Symbols: various apple(s)
Winter season
Apple-picking activity
ladder
Final “sleep” as “woodchuck” or as man? What’s the difference?
MODERNISM AND ITS RHIZOMES
High (European) vs Low Modernism
-Imagism (Ezra Pound, HD, Amy Lowell), Vorticism, Dada
WALLACE STEVENS (1879-1955)
-Insurance company lawyer in Hartford,
Connecticut
-Late call to vocation but lasting fame-->
Pulitzer prize
-Fought with Frost and Hemingway
-Poetry an often playful oscillation
between the mundane and the
imaginative (in a secular way)
“Thirteen Ways of Looking at a
Blackbird”






Orientalist, cubist and imagist influence
Haiku-like form
Perspectivism
Why 13? Why blackbirds?
“sense” of each vignette?
The role of nature VS the role of the viewer
“Anecdote of the Jar”
 Imagist influence
 Importance of perception
 Axis mundi motif
 Why nonhuman perceiver? (“jar” slang for?)
WILLIAM CARLOS WILLIAMS (1883-1963)
-Pediatrician (and philanderer…)
-“No ideas but in things” (simple,
everyday American language and
themes) VS movements, theories, YET
experimental and fresh
-Member of NY’s “The Others” (with
Stevens, Marianne Moore, Mina Loy, et
al.) VS High Modernism
-Paterson, epic poem for Jersey town
-Great influence on the Beats and the
Black Mountain School
“The Red Wheelbarrow”
 From image to inference of story
 Color and item contrast
“This Is Just to Say”
 Haiku influence
 Is this a poem? (form, language, images)
 What does the poem “just” say?
CARL SANDBURG (1878-1967)
 Started life on a series of
working-class manual jobs;
then Chicago journalist;
finally, beloved author and
poet-urban folk singer
(guitar recitals); 3 Pulitzers
 Affinity for workers,
African-Americans
“Grass”
Why personified?
Perspective important (from train; in time)
Lethe VS History
C/c Whitman’s Leaves of Grass
“Chicago”
Apostrophe (ode mode)
Tone, epithets selected
Why this focus on workers?
Why repetitious ending?
FROM THE ROARING 20IES TO THE POSTWAR YEARS
-From Prohibition (1920-33) to the Great Depression (1929-39) to
McCarthyism and the Second Red Scare (1950-56):
America as a complex capitalist society with class and generation
struggles
DOROTHY PARKER (1893-1967)
Poet, short story writer, critic and satirical
poet for Vanity Fair and The New Yorker,
Hollywood scriptwriter (acclaimed but
blacklisted by McCarthyism), leftist
activist, notorious wit
Early orphan trauma, troubled marriages,
alcoholism
The only poet in Algonquin Round Table in NY
“Resumé”
Lifelong preoccupation with suicide in her art
Limerick form
Why this title?
Who is “you” she is talking to?
e.e. cummings (1894-1962)
-Poet, author, playwright, critic,
painter, avant-garde innovator
-Harvard education, well-traveled,
WWI experience makes him
pacifist and Republican (defends
small individual against state
bureaucracy, mechanisms);
modernist influence
“Buffalo Bill’s”
-Does BB seem “dead”?
-Formal innovation in:
punctuation
line placement
treatment (register)
—why “defunct”?
—why colloquial, irreverent tone?
-Meaning?
-Motif of the duel between Hero/Knight and Death
HILDA DOOLITTLE/ HD (1886-1961)
-“HD, Imagiste”
-Cosmopolitan, affluent, bisexual,
well-travelled, active in Euromodernist
movement and publishing
-Classicism, myth, the occult, and
psychoanalysis
-Trilogy: The Walls do not Fall (1944),
Tribute to the Angels (1945) and
The Flowering of the Rod (1946).
-Helen in Egypt (1955)
“Oread”
-imagist technique (Oriental economy and precision)
-meaning from contrast of images, elements, states
Sea/mountain; Waves/pines; (E)Motion-->meaning?
-C/c with Percy B. Shelley’s “Ode to the West Wind”
EZRA POUND (1885-1972)
-Poetical youth prodigy, “Make it new”
Initiator, nurturer and guide of top modernist movements/poets
-Volatile personality, fascist lapse and harsh imprisonment in 1945,
followed by 12 years in mental hospital
--> The Pisan Cantos (1948)
-Controversial legacy
“A Pact”
-Form
-Why VS Whitman?
-Art and/as politics?
-The role of tradition (family metaphor)
“Let there be commerce” VS “usury”
“In a Station of the Metro”
-Imagism, orientalist influence
-suggested emotion from language choice/contrast/metaphor?
T(HOMAS) S(TEARNS) ELIOT (1888-1965)
“Poetry is...an escape from emotion”—
here’s why:
 Childhood health problems
(“premature decrepitude”),
literary direction a “betrayal” of
active male family tradition
-Exceptional studies (classical letters
and languages—Greek, Latin,
Sanskrit; philosophy; French)
-Early turn to literature and college
teaching--> Faber and Faber
publishing director
 Severe health problems
aggravated by heavy smoking and alcohol abuse
 Religious and cultural dissatisfaction:
Unitarian American expatriate--> High Anglican Briton
Modernity VS Dante’s age
 Unsuccessful marriage to socialite Vivienne Haigh-Wood (possible
homosexuality)
“To her, the marriage brought no happiness. To me, it brought
the state of mind out of which came The Waste Land."
-Eventual contentment at 68 with 2nd marriage to his secretary, Valerie
Fletcher
 Poetry elusiveness:
“So here I am, ... having had twenty years—
Twenty years largely wasted...
Trying to use words, and every attempt
Is a wholly new start, and a different kind of failure....
...And so each venture
Is a new beginning, a raid on the inarticulate
With shabby equipment always deteriorating
(East Coker, 172-180).
-Fragmentation and allusion (“the mythical method”)
-Meeting with Ezra Pound gets “Prufrock” and The Waste Land
published (and shaped WL to about half-size and more powerful)
-Small poetical production (also plays, essays), but gems of
craftsmanship and art
-1948 Nobel Prize in Literature
FROM THE HARLEM RENAISSANCE
TO THE BLACK ARTS MOVEMENT
Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation 1/1/1863
Segregation, Jim Crow laws and the rural South/ urban, industrial North divide
The New Negro Anthology (1925) and Harlem, NY cultural explosion
The 1960s Civil Rights Movement (Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.; The Black
Panthers and Malcolm X)
The B.A.M.
LANGSTON HUGHES (1902-67)
Foremost African-American
poet of the Harlem
Renaissance, author (of
“Everyman” Jesse B. Semple or
Simple novels), playwright,
critic
Erratic childhood life (moves),
sporadic education, odd jobs
and world travels, yet early and
prodigious engagement with
poetry
Black rights/experience
spokesperson and (persecuted) communist
Canonical poetic forms melded with black urban themes, idiom, humor, music
(jazz improvisation)
“The Negro Speaks of Rivers”
- repetition; blues format
-significance of the rivers: Euphrates, Congo, Nile, Mississippi
-why “dusky” rivers?
-what does it mean to have known rivers?
GWENDOLYN BROOKS (1917-2000)
From teen poet to first AfricanAmerican to win the Pulitzer, Illinois
poet-laureate, Library of Congress
advisor, multi-celebrated poet,
professor
“Folksy narrative” of urban poor
portraits (A Street in Bronzeville, Annie
Allen)
From late-HR questions of identity to
1960s BAM political activism (In the
Mecca)
“We Real Cool”
-Form of the poem:
meaning of epigraph—symbolism of “Golden Shovel”
why “we” enjambment?
musical qualities
-Final line: self consciousness or irony?
“The Bean Eaters”
-Symbolism:
Beans
“plain chipware,” knickknacks
-Why “Mostly Good”
-What is the function of “remembering”?
-tone of the poem
AUDRE LORDE (1934-92)
Tripartite struggle against racism,
sexism, homophobia: “black,
lesbian, mother, warrior, poet”—
and teacher
The Black Unicorn (1978)
African (Yoruba) culture
influence, orature and social uses
of poetry, and militant attitude
VS invisibility, silence
The Cancer Journals (1980)
“The Woman Thing”
-Contrast between hunters and cultivators
-why is it a “woman” thing?
-relevance of a primeval scene?
TOWARDS THE CONTEMPORARY
LOUISE BOGAN (1897-1970)
Poet Laureate, highly acclaimed, poetry
editor for The New Yorker, but personal
hardships (working-class Irish roots and
education, failed marriages, depressiveparanoid)
“Medusa”
-myth of Medusa
-tenses
-elements: landscape of house-cave, trees, water, bell, grass, dust
Medusa as the Terrible Mother, apotropaic symbol, the abject
-stasis as mental trauma (Freud)
ELIZABETH BISHOP (1911-79)
-Early life tragedies (father dead,
mother insane, separated from loving
grandparents to live in two successive
houses, frail health)
-Very good education, wealth, travel
(16 years in Brazil), acclaim and prizes
(Laureate)
-Influenced by Moore; friendship and
influence on Lowell
-Formal control of poetry, scientificity,
details, “reticence”
“The Fish”
Description of fish—why so meticulous/factual?
What is the impression one gets of “him”?
Meaning of “rainbow”--Why does she let the fish go?
THE CONFESSIONALS AND THE BEATS
-Post-war (1950s) period of “conformity and criticism”:
a. suburban conservative culture
b. veterans, young, questioners of the system/American Dream
-Confessional poetry a mix of:
a. modernist experiment
b. intense lyrical exposure (of taboos) VS WWII communal patriotism
SYLVIA PLATH (1932-63)
-Good Boston and Cambridge
education, fame and “dream”
marriage to Ted Hughes,
BUT death of German father at
8 years and life-long depression
(two prior suicide attempts,
death by suicide), divorce from
philandering Hughes
-Posthumous Ariel and Pulitzer
prize; also Bell Jar
(autobiofiction)
“Daddy”
-Portrait of Otto Plath (older, patriarchal, authoritarian, amputated foot and
early death due to diabetes)
-Why did she “have had to kill” him? Why “devil” and “bastard” and
“vampire”?
-Why comparison to Nazis? Why does “every woman adore a Fascist”?
-description of her marriage as Electra complex/masochism
-final line: “through” abandonment, breakthrough, or suicide?
“Lady Lazarus”
-autobiographical account of her two suicides (Plath and Sexton fascinated
with them)
10. Father’s death; 20. Suicide attempt; 30. Failed marriage
-Holocaust references
-why is it significant that Lazarus is a woman?
-Myth/fiction allusions:
Phoenix
Franz Kafka’s “The Hunger Artist” (hard view of poetry)
-Pele
Robert Southwell’s (1602) “The Burning Babe”
-End? Powerful or ghoulish?
ANNE SEXTON (1928-74)
-From fashion model to creative writing
professor
-Poetry/psychoanalysis as self-help
against life-long depression
-Confessional (friendship with Plath
unto death) and fairy-tale retellings
(Transformations)
-Pulitzer followed by suicide
“The Truth the Dead Know”
-poet as necromancer
-who is “my darling” interlocutor?
-Ironic contrasts:
parents’ (real-life) funeral VS “life goes on”
“sea” VS “sky”
“weighted,” “stiff” words, “iron gate,” “wind…like stones,” “stone
boats” VS “touch” (“entering” it)
love, “cultivate” VS “kill,” “die”
-last stanza: why “without shoes”?
Why “refuse to be blessed”?
Significance of “throat, eye and knucklebone”
ALLEN GINSBERG (1926-97)
-Radical, progressive, high-strung
upbringing—> poet, activist, public
figure
-Columbia scholar; met group who’d
become the Beats (“Howl”)
beaten/beatific anticonformist
live truly, express yourself fully in
all ways
eastern philosophy, drugs, sex,
bebop and jazz VS American Nightmare
“Howl”
-“Gallery 6 Reading” (1955), where Beats began
-Whitmanesque free verse
-apocalyptic vision
I. Destruction of the best (shocking definition of the “best” re
writer/fellow mental patient Carl Solomon)…
II. …as sacrifice to Moloch (symbol of?)
III. “I’m with you” refrain as chant, benediction of “lambs” (Solomon)
end: pessimistic or optimistic? A second coming?
IV. Footnote (added later): “Holy!” mantra of universal
benediction/celebration