Felicia Heman's poem

Group work on Felicia Herman's poem "The Child and Flowers":

("For a day..." to "...each human heart." Pages 2 and 3.)

"For a day is coming to quell the tone
That rings in thy laughter, thou joyous one!
And to dim thy brow with a touch of care,
Under the gloss of its clustering hair;
And to tame the clash of thy cloudless eyes
Into the stillness of autumn skies;
And to teach thee that grief hath her needful part,
Midst the hidden things of each human heart!"

1) Is the meaning of the poem the same in all three versions? Does the format affect the meaning?

- the meaning is the same, but the text gives a different feeling: the TEI version made some of us indifferent, because the code was so distracting - it didn't add to the poem's overall meaning or our understanding of it. The form affects the meaning, not the way its processed. To me, the image version of the poem gave me a context to read the poem in: the older paper, the type of font chosen, influenced me.

2) What difference, if any, will digitizing make to our understanding of poems?

- Metadata! Metadata makes a big difference. To the uneducated-in-html-type, the site of all that coding looks like a headache waiting to develop. On the other hand, it will also make poems widely available - no more hunting them down in obscure literary magazines or catching snippets on the web. In XML, the context of the poem - where this text would have originally appeared, and therefore who it was meant for, and when it was read (traveling, or in a library) - disappears.

Ironically, the page most people preferred and got the most out of, the image version, was the most expensive to come by. Very expensive equipment is needed to take such detailed pictures of things without hurting the (old, old, old) books and paper-sources they're from. The HTML poem, meanwhile, streamlines the poem - it makes it easy to access, since it's in a form and font most contemporary computer-users are familiar with.

3) How are each of these versions made (doesn't have to be a techy answer)? Versus how a book/pamphlet is made?

- Typos are very possible, among a host of problems with virtually-visualized text. A book and pamphlet have a more physical presence - the internet poems have a kind of intangibility to them that anything on paper does not.

Problems with audience - who is the audience? It's too mature for children, but it's about children. Is the poet writing to one's inner child? Ekphrastic - a poem written about something visual, or something visual using text as inspiration.

Appreciation of the aesthetic: "Nature has mines of such wealth..."