TPO 13 Lecture 3 Poetry
Narrator: Listen to part of the lecture in poetry class, the professor is discussing medieval poetry.
Professor:
OK, so the two poems we are looking at today fall into the category of medieval times, which was how long ago?
Student:
Almost a thousand years ago, right?
Professor:
Yes, that's right.
Student:
But, professor, are you sure these are poems? I mean I thought poems were shorter; these were more like long stories. I mean one of them must all about love, but the other one the Chan…Chan…whatever it called, the other one; it's all about fighting and battles. I mean can both of them be considered to be poems?
Professor:
Well, think back to the very beginning of this course.
Student:
Aha
Professor:
Remember how we, we define poetry? In the very broadest sense, we said it's written to evoke, to make you, the audience, have some kind of the emotional experience through the use of imagery, en, some kinds of predictable rhythm. And usually, but not always, there's more than one meaning implied with the words that are used.
Let's start with the Chanson poetry first. That's Chanson. Chanson poem became popular in Europe, particularly in France, and the term is actually short for a longer French phrase that translates to a…huh… songs of deeds. Now they were called songs of deeds because strangely enough, they were written to describe the heroic deeds or actions of warriors, the knights during conflicts. We don't know a lot about the authors, it still contests somewhat. But we are pretty sure about who the Chanson poems were written for. That is---they were written for the knights and the lords---the nobility that they served. The poems were song performed by a minsstrola, a singer who travelled from castle to castle, singing to its local lord and its knights. Ah… well, would someone summarize the main features of the Chanson poems you read?
Student:
Well, there's a hero, and a knight, who goes to battle, and he is inspired for his courage, bravery and loyalty, loyalty to the royalty serves, his country and his fellow warriors in the field. He's a, he has a, he's a skilled fighter, willing to face the most extreme dangers, sacrificial, willing that sacrifice anything and everything to protect his king and country.
Professor:
Ok, now be given that the intended audiences for these poems were knights and lords. What can we say about the purpose of Chanson poetry? What kinds of feelings were it meant to provoke?
Student:
I guess they must been really appealing to those knights and lords who were listening to them. Hearing the songs probably made them feel more patriotic, made them feel like a good noble thing to serve their countries, and whatever way they could.
Professor:
Good, we've got a pretty good picture of what the Chanson hero was like. Now let's compare that to the hero in the other poem. The other poem is an example what's called Romance Poetry. And the hero in the romance poems was also in knight. But what made the knight in Romance Poetry different from the knight in Chanson poetry. Well, first the purpose of the hero's actions was different. The hero in the Romance Poetry is independent, purely solitary in a way, not like the Chanson poet who was always surrounded by his fighting companions. He doesn't engage in the conflict to protect his lords or country. He does it for the sake of adventure, to improve himself, to show his worthy of respect and love for his lady. He's very conscious of the particular
rules of social behavior he has to live up to somehow. And all of those actions are for the purpose of proving that he is an upright moral, well-mannered, well behaved individual. You may have noticed that in Chanson's poetry there isn't much about the hero's feelings. The focus is on the actions, the deeds. But the Romance Poetry describes a lot of the inner feelings, the motivations, psychology you could say, of the knight trying to improve himself, to better himself, so he's worthy the love of a woman.
What it explains this difference? Well, a digging into the historical context tells us a lot. Romance Poetry emerged few generations after Chanson, and its roots were in geographical regions of France that were comer, where conflict wasn't central to people's lives. More peaceful times meant there was more time for education, travel, more time for reflection. Another name for Romance Poetry that's often synonym with it is troubadour poetry.
Troubadours were the authors of the new romance poems. And we know a lot more about the troubadours than we do about the Chanson authors, because they often had small biographical sketches added to their poems that gives more specific information about their social status, geographical location and small outlines of their career. These information wasn't particularly reliable because they were sometimes based on fictitious stories, great adventure or the scrape together from parts of the different poems. But there is enough to squeeze or infer some facts about their social class. The political climates have settle down enough so that troubadours had the luxury being able to spend most if not all of their time, creating, crafting or composing their love songs for their audiences. And yes these poems were also songs; many troubadours were able to make a living being full time poets which should tell you something about the value of that profession during the medieval times.TPO 13 Lecture 4 Astronomy
Narrator: Listen to part of a lecture in an astronomy class.
Professor:
OK, I wanna go over the different types of meteoroids, and what we've learned from them about the formation of earth, and solar system. Uh… the thing is what's especially interesting about meteoroids is that they come from interplanetary space, but they consist of the same chemical elements that are in matter originated on earth, just in different proportions. But that makes it easier to identify something as a meteoroid, as it opposed to…to just a terrestrial rock. So to talk about where meteoroids come from, we need to talk about comets and asteroids, which basically...they're basically made up of debris left over from the origin of the solar system 4.6 billion years ago.
Now I'm going a bit out of a boarder here…umm…I'm not going to go into any depth on the comets and asteroids now, but we'll come back later and do that. From now, I'll just cover some basic info about them.
OK, comets and asteroids. It might help if you think of...remember we talked about the two classes of planets in our solar system? And how they differ in composition? The terrestrial planets--like Mars and Earth--composed largely of rocks and metals, and the large gas giants, like Jupiter. Well, the solar system also has two analogous classes of objects, smaller than planets--namely, asteroids and comets. Relatively near the sun and inner solar system, between Jupiter and Mars to be precise, we've got the asteroid belt, which contains about 90 percents of all asteroids orbiting the sun. These asteroids are…uh…like the terrestrial planets, and they're composed mostly of rocky materials and metals.
Far from the sun, in the outer solar system, beyond Jupiter's orbit, temperatures are low enough to permit ices to form out of water and…and out of gases like methane and carbon dioxide. Loose collections of these ices and small rocky particles form into comets. So comets are similar in composition to the gas giants. Both comets and asteroids are...typically are smaller than planets.
And even smaller type of interplanetary debris is the meteoroid. And it's from meteoroids that we get meteors and meteorites. "Roids" are, for the most part anyway, they are just smaller bits of asteroids and comets. When these bits enter earth's atmosphere, well, that makes them so special that they get a special name. They're called meteors. Most of them are very small, and they burn up soon after entering earth's atmosphere. The larger ones that make it through the atmosphere and hit the ground are called meteorites. So meteorites are the ones that actually make it through.
Now we've been finding meteorites on earth for thousands of years, and we've analyzed enough of them to learn a lot about their composition, most come from asteroids, though a few may have come from comets. So essentially they are rocks, and like rocks, they're mixtures of minerals. They are generally classified into three broad categories--stones, stony irons and irons.
Stone meteoroids, which we refer to simply as, uh, stones, are almost entirely rock material. They actually account for almost all of the meteorite material that falls to earth. But even so, it's rare to ever find one. I mean, it's easier to find an iron meteorite or stony iron. Anyone guess why? Look at their names. What do you think iron meteorites consist of?
Student:
Mostly iron?
Professor:
Yeah… iron and some nickel, both of which are metals. And, if you're trying to find metal?
Student:
Oh! Metal detectors!
Professor:
Right, thank you. At least that's part of it. Stone meteoroids, if they lie around exposed to the weather for a few years, well, they're made of rock, so they end up looking almost indistinguishable from common terrestrial rocks--once that originated on earth. So it's hard to spot them by eye. But we can use metal detectors to help us find the others, and they're easier to spot by eye. So most of the meteorites in collections, uh, in museums, they'll be...they're iron meteorites, or the stony iron kind, even though they only make up about 5 percents of the meteorite material on the ground.
