The Invisible Mentor

Archive for the ‘Poem’ Category

Image via Wikipedia

Of all the genres of literary fiction, I like poetry the least and it could be that I do not understand a lot of it, especially when it’s very deep. As some of you may know already, my summer project is to read through some of the classics in literature.

Because I find poetry so difficult to understand, I did some background research on The Rime of the Ancient Mariner. According to Harold Bloom in How to Read and Why, “At the root of Coleridge’s poem is the popular ballad “The Wandering Jew,” but the Ancient Mariner has more in common with Franz Kafka’s characters in “The Hunter Gracchus” or “A Country Doctor” than with the traditional mocker of Christ.” Unfortunately for me, I haven’t read any of those poems so I haven’t seen the story before. If you remember, in How to Read Like a Professor, we are encouraged to ask, “Where have I seen that before?” when reading literary fiction.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge was born on October 21, 1772 in Devon, UK. He was a gifted child who read widely and had a knack for learning languages. As an adult, Coleridge could read in German, Italian, Latin, Greek, Spanish, French and Portuguese. Coleridge was a poet, critic, philosopher, lay theologian, and political theorist. He never finished his university education, but like many authors, he was influenced by the social issues of his times. For many years he had an alliance with William Wordsworth and they published literary works together.

Coleridge’s neighbour, John Cruikshank, had a dream which he described to the poet. Coleridge told the dream to William Wordsworth and his sister Dorothy, and discussed the ideas for a poem. William and Dorothy made some suggestions to him on how to make the tale better. Coleridge spent four months writing The Rime of the Ancient Mariner. The version of the book that I have, published by Arcturus Publishing Limited has beautiful illustrations by Gustave Doré.

The Rime of the Ancient Mariner by Samuel Taylor Coleridge is the longest poem he wrote. It’s a 625-line ballad, in seven parts, written in old English. Some of the passages have modern English interpretations so it’s easier to understand. The Rime of the Ancient Mariner is about the events a mariner experienced while he was on a long sea voyage.

There are three men on their way to a wedding feast and the mariner stops one of them to tell his tale. At first the wedding guest cannot believe what is happening to him, he becomes impatient and somewhat angry with the mariner because he is next of kin to the bridegroom and feels that the mariner is delaying him from going to the wedding feast. The wedding guest finally becomes fascinated, listens like a three year old child, and sits on a stone waiting for the tale to unfold.

The tale begins when the mariner and his crew depart on their journey. His ship sets sail southward with good weather. Along the journey they encounter a strong storm, which drives them off course and sends them toward the South Pole, which is located on Antarctica, where they experience mist, snow and ice everywhere. The ship is stuck in the frozen sea.

A great bird, called the Albatross, comes through the mist and snow. The crew sees this as a good omen and feeds the bird. The albatross stays with them and would spin round and round. Magically, the ice splits, the weather starts to improve and the helmsman is able to steer them northward through the fog and ice, leading them out of Antarctica. The albatross follows behind the ship, but the mariner kills the albatross with a cross-bow. The tale takes off from there and we get a glimpse of what it is like to be in Hell.

His shipmates deride him for killing the bird of good luck. The weather calms down and they enter the Pacific Ocean. The crew suddenly change their tune and now say that it was the albatross that brought the bad weather. The weather becomes completely calm and they stop moving – they are stuck again. Even though water is everywhere, they do not have any drinking water. Everything is rotting. The sailors blame the mariner for their thirst.

A spirit follows the ship. The albatross is being avenged.

The sailors place the dead albatross around the mariner’s neck. They later encounter a ghostly ship. One by one his 200 sailors fall dead, and their souls depart in pain from their bodies. The sea is rotting, the ship is rotting, but the mariner lives on. The mariner tries to pray but the curse for killing the bird lives on.

Something changes in the mariner and now he watches and admires the beauty of the water snakes that he sees in the sea. Originally he considered them to be slimy beings. He tries to pray again and this time the albatross falls from his neck. The mariner falls asleep and when he arises it’s raining. The wind comes to life again, angelic spirits fill the bodies of the dead sailors – the helmsman steers the ship, the mariner and sailors work the ropes and the ship moves on toward home. The angelic spirits leave the dead bodies of the sailors and appear in their own form.

The ship sinks like lead leaving the mariner afloat. He is rescued by the Pilot – who is a holy man – and Pilot’s son in a boat, but they think the mariner is dead. When the mariner comes to, he moves his lip and ends up scaring the Pilot. He takes the oars from the son and begins to row. When they reach land, the mariner asks the Pilot to shrieve him. The mariner tells his tale and he is set free, but only temporarily. His agony returns, and the mariner pays penance by going from land to land telling his tale. And he has a keen sense of who to choose to relate his tale to. It appears that one lesson that the mariner learned is that all creatures are important.

“He prayeth best, who lovest best

All things both great and small,

For the dear God who loveth us

He made and loveth all.”

The mariner leaves the wedding guest who now goes home. He feels very forlorn and when he arises the following morning, he is sadder but wiser.

Because I read How to Read Literature Like a Professor, I was looking at the poem with news lens. Water can mean cleansing, destruction as well death and rebirth. Metaphorically speaking the mariner died and was reborn, and is more respectful of all living creatures. He was not completely redeemed because he has to pay penance for what he did. But through the story he grows as a person and has a different way of viewing all things. The name of the person who rescues the Mariner is Pilot, which is someone who flies and flying liberates us.

I’d love it if you read The Rime of the Ancient Mariner by Samuel Taylor Coleridge and give me your take on it. Originally, mostly sailors bought The Rime of the Ancient Mariner. “Contemporary critics were underwhelmed when it appeared in 1798. The ‘Ancient Mariner’ was published anonymously in the Lyrical Ballads, a collection of poems by Samuel Taylor Coleridge and William Wordsworth.”

I read The Rime of the Ancient Mariner by Samuel Taylor Coleridge twice so that I could really understand it. If you are someone who enjoys poetry, you’ll get it the first time and you’ll enjoy the tale that the poem tells. It’s quite an imaginative and creative work of literature. Incidentally, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner by Samuel Taylor Coleridge includes other poems such as “Kubla Khan,” Frost at Midnight,” This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison,” “Dejection: An Ode,” “Youth and Age,” Work Without Hope” and  Epitaph.

How can you use this information? What do you have to add to the conversation? Let’s keep the conversation flowing, please let me know your thoughts in the comments section below. Many readers read this blog from other sites, so why don’t you pop over to The Invisible Mentor and subscribe (top on the right hand side) by email or RSS Feed.

Some book links are affiliate links.

The Rime of the Ancient Mariner by Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Cover of The Hunger Games

This is what we talked about on The invisible Mentor Blog this week: Reading list for this Summer 2011, Review of Catching Fire and Mockingjay by Suzanne Collins, Ada Lovelace the First Computer Programmer and Interview with Patty DeDominic.

Mondays at the Salon

A list of books to keep you busy this summer.

The Invisible Mentor Summer 2011 Reading List

Booked on Tuesdays

We previously reviewed The Hunger Games and today we review the last two instalments: Catching Fire and Mockingjay in The Hunger Games trilogy.

Review: Catching Fire and Mockingjay by Suzanne Collins

Wisdom Wednesdays

In this profile, you’ll learn about Ada Lovelace the first computer programmer. Ada was a visionary and over a century ahead of her time.

Ada Lovelace, First Computer Programmer.

Perspective Thursdays and Workshop Fridays

This week we featured Patty DeDominic a very successful businesswoman. She always operates with high integrity. Patty started an international women’s festival, celebrated around International Women’s Day (March 8th) to honour the accomplishments and potential of women. Here are Part One and Part Two of Patty DeDominic’s interview.

How can you use this information? What do you have to add to the conversation? Let’s keep the conversation flowing, please let me know your thoughts in the comments section below. Many readers read this blog from other sites, so why don’t you pop over to The Invisible Mentor and subscribe (top on the right hand side) by email or RSS Feed.

Book links are affiliate links.

Ada Lovelace was the first computer programmer, and a woman ahead of her time. Most may not know this, but I have a computer science diploma from Mount Royal College in Calgary, Alberta, Canada, and one of my majors for my Bachelor of Commerce Degree is Management Information Systems. Even though I had computer science training I have never worked in the field. During my computer science studies, we learned about Charles Babbage, who designed a machine that would do many of the things that today’s computer does, and Ada Lovelace wrote the computer program for Babbage’s Analytical Engine. Lovelace was unable to test her computer program because it was never built. The machine was a century ahead of its time – the technology did not exist to build it. Lovelace made such a mark on the world that a day is named for her – Ada Lovelace Day.

Image via Wikipedia

Name: Ada Augusta King, Countess of Lovelace

Birth Date: December 1815 – November 1852

Job Functions: Early-nineteenth-century English mathematician and scientist

Field: Mathematics and Computer Science

Known For: First computer programmer, best known for her work with Charles Babbage, an early pioneer in computing machines.

Mentors: Charles Babbage, Mary Fairfax Somerville

Ada Lovelace was the daughter of the poet Lord Byron. Very shortly after Lovelace’s birth, her mother, an amateur mathematician left her husband. As an amateur mathematician, Lady Byron ensured that her daughter had a solid education by developing her intellect. Lovelace studied reading, grammar and spelling, arithmetic, music, geography, drawing, and French. When she was 17 years old, she met Charles Babbage at a party hosted by Mary Fairfax Somerville. At that party, Babbage was demonstrating how to use his Difference Engine, a prototype he had built to show the idea behind his Difference Engine concept. When Lovelace saw the machine, it was love at first sight. She studied the machine very closely until she understood how it worked.

After a failed attempt to elope with her teacher, Lovelace decided to focus on her education and decided to seriously study science. She was a very smart young lady and quickly outgrew her tutors, so she continued to teach herself. In addition to her self-education she corresponded with informal tutors such as mathematician Mary Somerville and improved her mathematical skills.

The following year she got married, and within the first four years of marriage, Lovelace had three children. She loved her children dearly, but lamented because she could not pursue her intellectual interests.

Her mother, Lady Byron, an amateur mathematician, and her husband, William King, Earl of Lovelace searched for ways for her to pursue her academic interests since her desire was so strong. Lady Byron and William King made it happen for Lovelace. In 1940, the year after the birth of her third child, Lovelace returned to her study of mathematics with Augustus De Morgan, a famous British logician and mathematician. She was an impressive and keen student because she had an affinity for the subject. During that same year, Charles Babbage whom she had met at a party a few years earlier, gave a series of talks in Turin, to scientists about his Difference Engine, and his new Analytical Engine, which could be programmed by encoding instructions on punched cards.

Luigi Federico Menabrea, an Italian military engineer, summarized Babbage’s series of talks in a French article in the journal Bibliothèque Universelle de Genève. It was very difficult for Menabrea to adequately describe how the machine would work because the Analytical Engine didn’t exist, so all he had to rely on were drawings of the machine. The article was subsequently published in 1942.

Through a family friend, Charles Wheatstone, developer of the electric telegraph, Lovelace learned about Luigi Menabrea’s article. Wheatstone wanted her to translate the article from French to English for the prestigious British journal Taylor’s Scientific Memoirs. Lovelace started her translation project with zeal. When Babbage learned of what Lovelace was doing, he wanted her to write an entirely new article instead. She declined his request, but offered to add extensive “Notes” to bring Menabrea’s article up-to-date. There were seven notes in all – labelled A through G and the added notations were three times the length of the original article.

Among other things, her “Notes” explained the differences between the Difference Engine and the new Analytical Engine, and other similar machines on the market. It also included detailed steps of how Babbage’s Analytical Engine worked, explained the concept of computer memory, and presented what is now known in computer programming as a loop or subroutine (If-Then-Else, Do-For). Lovelace introduced the idea of “garbage in, garbage out” (The output of the computer is only as good as its input) and also detailed how the machine could be programmed to compute the calculation of Bernoulli numbers (According to Wikipedia, Bernoulli numbers the sums of powers of consecutive integers; named after Swiss mathematician Jacques Bernoulli (1654–1705)). The detailed plan she outlined is now regarded as the first computer program.

Without the actual machine to study, to ensure success of her now expanded translation project, Lovelace used information and formulas supplied by Babbage to determine where the calculations would go into the machine and where the answers would be displayed. Since the machine did not exist, and was never built because the technology did not exist in the early 1800s to create such a machine, Lovelace couldn’t test her computer software program to determine if it worked. Her “Notes” has secured her a place in history, and Ada Lovelace is considered to be the first computer programmer.

Her ideas and deep insights in the “Notes” about the capabilities of an Analytical Engine became a reality in computers in the Twentieth Century, and that’s a testament that she had a solid understanding of the implications for Babbage’s invention. Much later after her death, her program was tested and it had a few bugs in it, but I am confident that had Lovelace had access to a working Analytical Engine, she would have been able to debug her computer program. It is worthy to note that based on the drawing and specifications of Babbage’s design, The London Science Museum later built the machine and it did exactly what Babbage wanted his Analytical Engine to do, which show s that his ideas were sound.

Babbage and Lovelace had a disagreement about publishing the manuscript. Even though they resolved their differences, they never worked together again. For the next few years, Lovelace focused on various fields of science, reading German books, and corresponding with prominent English scientists. Her only other big scientific contribution was a book review of a French book on meteorology and agriculture, which she wrote jointly with her husband.

What you can learn from Ada Lovelace

• Her ideas were over 100 years before their time.
• She went against traditional Victorian society by studying mathematics which was a discipline few women attempted.
• Lovelace knew how to work the system. Her husband who was 11 years her senior, was very supportive of her academic endeavours, though people of their class felt pursuing such interests were beneath them. To live in both worlds, Lovelace signed her Notes A.A.L. Thirty years after the paper was published her full name appeared as the paper’s author.
• She also predicted the use of mechanical mathematical devices for such purposes as music composition and the production of graphics.
• Lovelace’s tutors fostered her early interest in systems as well as her desire to understand how things worked.

Lovelace did not obtain widespread recognition until the historian, Lord B.V. Bowden, rediscovered her “Notes” in 1952 and had them reprinted the following year – 110 years after their original publication. In 1980, the United States Department of Defense named its Ada programming language after her.

Interesting Information: Even though Lord Byron didn’t get to see his daughter again after his wife left him, he wrote about her in some of his poems.

Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage: Canto the Third (excerpt)

George Gordon Lord Byron (1788-1824)

Is thy face like thy mother’s, my fair child!

Ada! sole daughter of my house and heart?

When last I saw thy young blue eyes they smil’d,

And then we parted–not as now we part,

But with a hope.–Awaking with a start,

The waters heave around me; and on high

The winds lift up their voices: I depart,

Whither I know not; but the hour’s gone by,

When Albion’s lessening shores could grieve or glad mine eye.

Source: http://rpo.library.utoronto.ca/poem/344.html

How can you use this information? What do you have to add to the conversation? Let’s keep the conversation flowing, please let me know your thoughts in the comments section below. Many readers read this blog from other sites, so why don’t you pop over to The Invisible Mentor and subscribe (top on the right hand side) by email or RSS Feed.

Further Reading

Ada Lovelace Day 2011 – Innovation and Gaming

Works Referenced

Computer Sciences

Encyclopedia of World Biography

New Dictionary of Scientific Biography

Mathematics

Image Credit: Wikipedia

Related articles

• Ada Lovelace Day: Celebrate Women in Technology (GeekDad Wayback Machine) (wired.com)
• Ada Lovelace Day of the Day (geeks.thedailywh.at)
• Wisdom of Life: Charles Babbage, Father of the Computer</li>

Can you determine your wages? I have been thinking about this a lot recently. Reading books by Seth Godin and Hugh MacLeod, as well as reflecting on interviews I have conducted, has brought this issue front and centre for me. If you are doing work that matters. If you are doing work that changes people. If your are doing the one thing you were born to do, could you set your own wages?

This is a follow-up post to one I did a year ago, “Using the Poem “My Wage” by Jessie B. Rittenhouse to Think Differently.” Let’s take a look at the poem My Wage by Jessie B. Rittenhouse again.

My Wage

I bargained with Life for a penny,
And Life would pay no more,
However I begged at evening
When I counted my scanty store;

For Life is a just employer,
He gives you what you ask,
But once you have set the wages,
Why, you must bear the task.

I worked for a menial’s hire,
Only to learn, dismayed,
That any wage I had asked of Life,
Life would have paid.

So if life is a just employer, and you are doing work that matters, will you get the wage that you ask? What has been your experience? Please share your comments in the box below. How can you use this information? What do you have to add to the conversation? Let’s keep the conversation flowing, please let me know your thoughts in the comments section below. Many readers read this blog from other sites, so why don’t you pop over to The Invisible Mentor and subscribe (top on the right hand side) by email or RSS Feed.

Most readers have at least one book that profoundly impacts them; Omar Khayyam’s Rubaiyat was the “book” that profoundly impacted Dee Hock, father of the credit card and founder of Visa. It’s a book he consults daily. Hock, like many accomplished professionals is a voracious reader and he found all he needed in Rubáiyát.

Rubáiyát is a poem written in the 11^th Century by the Persian poet Omar Khayyam who was also a notable astronomer and mathematician. There are many translations of the Rubáiyát, but this one was published in 1859 by Edward Fitzgerald an English writer, poet and translator. For this kind of poem, the rubai, there are four lines in each stanza where the first, second and fourth line rhymes.

“XVI

The Worldly Hope men set their Hearts upon

Turns Ashes – or it prospers and anon

Like Snow upon the Desert’s Dusty Face

Lighting a little hour or two – is gone”

In the New York Times Article, “C.E.O. Libraries Reveal Keys to Success,” Mr. Hock is quoted as saying that the Rubáiyát “Warns of the dangers of greatness and the instability of fortune.”

When I first read The Illustrated Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam: Special Edition, I didn’t see what Mr. Hock was saying, and I concluded that his summary of what the poem is about is based on a translation very different from the one I read. There are many translations and some stay closer to the original Persian text than others, and some are twice as long. Research suggests that Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyam translated by Peter Avery and John Heath-Stubbs is closer to the original Persian text.

But understanding poetic language has never been a strong point for me, and I am often feel frustrated that I do get the message that the poet is trying to convey. I found The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyam translated by Fitzgerald to be very complex the very first time I read it. After reading it three times the light went on and I started to see what Dee Hock was saying.

“XXIV

Ah, make the most of what we may spend,

Before we too into the Dust descend;

Dust into Dust, and under Dust to lie,

Sans Wine, sans Song, sans Singer, and sans End!

XCIII

Indeed the Idols I have loved so long

Have done my credit in this World much wrong:

Have drown’d my Glory in a shallow Cup

And sold my Reputation for a Song.”

Like most poetry, the imagery is strong, and what I saw in The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyam were the pitfalls of excess and worshipping “things”. The difficulty with the English version of the poem is that it’s translated into Old English, so if you’re not familiar with it you have to read it through a few times to understand it.

If the goal of reading is to further your knowledge, the best books are those that make you think and The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyam delivers on that. I recommend The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyam because it takes you out of your head space and places you in a different realm. I will be reading it a few more times to see what other pieces of wisdom I may glean from it.

How can you use this information? What do you have to add to the conversation? Let’s keep the conversation flowing, please let me know your thoughts in the comments section below. Many readers read this blog from other sites, so why don’t you pop over to The Invisible Mentor and subscribe (top on the right hand side) by email or RSS Feed.

Related articles

• 12 Blog Posts People are Reading on The Invisible Mentor (theinvisiblementor.com)