Zephyr: A Muse to Many

I mentioned previously that Matt often calls me his Zephyr, correct? The other day he asked me the name of the town where I was born (I was born in Florida but my family moved back to Missouri shortly thereafter). I told him Seminole, Florida. At that, he quickly commented, "Like, the song, Seminole Wind?" I assented. Then I realized what he was alluding to. "Can I call you my Seminole Wind sometimes?" he asked. I agreed, smiling. I think it made both of our days.

In case you didn't know, Zephyr (sometimes also Zephyrus, though that is the masculine version and would be weird for me to use as a nickname) is the Greek name for the West Wind. Zephyr is usually described as a gentle breeze, often associated with spring. When Matt mentioned that song, it made me think of other, more intentional uses of Zephyr in poetry and song. Here are a "few," in no particular order, some in which the West Wind features prominently, and others in which Zephyr is only briefly mentioned:

• Ode to the West Wind - Percy Shelley
• Epipsychidion - Percy Shelley
• The Solitary - Percy Shelley
• Zephyrus the Awakener - Percy Shelley (you'd think he owned the rights to it!)
• Essay on Criticism - Alexander Pope
• The Window, or the Song of the Wrens - Alfred, Lord Tennyson
• The Zephyr Song - The Red Hot Chili Peppers
• Zephyr - Mary Chapin Carpenter
• Lines to a Beautiful Spring in a Village - Samuel Taylor Coleridge
• The Character of Charles Brown - John Keats
• Ode to the Psyche - John Keats
• The Rose - John Keats
• Endymion - John Keats (I think he was just trying to outdo Shelley)
• Eleonora - Edgar Allan Poe
• Fields of Gold - Sting
• The Rose and the Zephyr - Elizabeth Barrett Browning
• The Power of the Supreme Being - Robert Browning
• Nocturnal Reverie - Anne Finch

Well, as you can see, if you decide to allude to Zephyr in a musing of your own, poetic or otherwise, you are following a long-standing tradition. I like Matt's nickname for me all the more because of the vast allusion to works of literature that it brings with it. Feel free to post other references that I overlooked that you especially like or think are worthy of inclusion in a list that could practically start its own literary canon. The Zephyr Canon of Literature. I think I might write an anthology all based around the West Wind. Ha.

Happy Reading,

Elizabeth

Things I Have Learned as an English Major

1. Don't skip Composition I. Don't do it. Even if they tell you, "Your ACT scores are high enough to 'test out' of this class;" even if you think, "This is great, I can save money and time;" even if there are no foreseeable problems ... don't do it. As a naive freshman who didn't know any better, I took SFCC's advice to skip ahead and it has caused a lot of problems both with getting into other classes and now with getting into the UCM Teaching Program. It seemed like a great idea at the time but it turned out to be one of those too good to be true ones.

2. Don't become an English Major if you don't like reading. Duh, right? Well, after the reading load I am going to have this current semester I am thinking that even though I love reading I am probably going to reconsider that choice several times this semester. This past weekend alone I had to read approximately 500 pages.

3. It's great to see everyone in my non-English classes scramble for the back seats, only to have to fight for a front row seat in my next class of all English majors.

4. "Never trust a writer." - Dr. Charles Martin on writer intention.

5. If you use or hear the same word over and over again in conversation about a piece of writing, after a while it seems to become an ambiguous concept that encompasses more than you can grasp at once. The other day this happened for me with the words "binary" and "multiplicity" used in regard to feminist writings.

6. Bruce Wayne could never understand Deconstruction.

7. You will never be able to win a war against a concept. Concepts don't die.

8. (April 2011) If you are in a poetry class and your first choice for a poet over which to write a short paper seems to have been overlooked in scholarly writings ... switch to T. S. Eliot.