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1.    Chaucer:

·          The Canterbury tales

·          The nun’s priest’s prologue

2.    Why were the 17th century metaphysical poets so called?

3.    John Donne: 

·          The Flea

·          The Canonization

·          A Valediction: forbidding Mourning

4.    Edmund Spenser:

·          Amoretti

·          Epithalamion

5.    Robert Browning:

·          Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came

·          Fra Lippo Lippi

·          Porphyria’s Lover

·          The Bishop Orders His Tomb at Saint Praxed’s Church

6.    Samuel Taylor Coleridge:

·          Dejection: An Ode

·          Kubla Khan

7.    T. S. Eliot: The Waste Land

8.    William Butler Yeats:

·          Adam’s curse

·          Sailing to Byzantium

·          Easter 1916

9.    P. B. Shelley: The Triumph of Life

10.  William Blacke:

·          The Lamb

·          The divine image

·          The sick rose, London

·          The tiger

·          The Chimney Sweeper

11.  Poetry explication: A comparison of William Blake's Songs of innocence and Songs of experience

12.  Poetry analysis: The Blessed Damozel, by Dante Gabriel Rossetti

13.  Poetry analysis: The Ballad of Reading Gaol by Oscar Wilde

14.  Sylvia Plath:

·          Ariel

·          Lady Lazarus

15.  Dylan Thomas:

·          And Death Shall Have No Dominion

·          Poem in October

·          Fern Hill

16.  Poetry analysis: The Prelude, by William Wordsworth

17.  Literary analysis: Mac Fleknoe, by John Dryden

18.  Poetry analysis: To His Coy Mistress, by Andrew Marvell

CHAUCER: THE CANTERBURY TALES : GENERAL PROLOGUE

Plot Overview

At the Tabard Inn, a tavern in Southwark, near London, the narrator joins a company of twenty-nine pilgrims. The pilgrims, like the narrator, are traveling to the shrine of the martyr Saint Thomas Becket in Canterbury. The narrator gives a descriptive account of twenty-seven of these pilgrims, including a Knight, Squire, Yeoman, Prioress, Monk, Friar, Merchant, Clerk, Man of Law, Franklin, Haberdasher, Carpenter, Weaver, Dyer, Tapestry-Weaver, Cook, Shipman, Physician, Wife, Parson, Plowman, Miller, Manciple, Reeve, Summoner, Pardoner, and Host. (He does not describe the Second Nun or the Nun’s Priest, although both characters appear later in the book.) The Host, whose name, we find out in the Prologue to the Cook’s Tale, is Harry Bailey, suggests that the group ride together and entertain one another with stories. He decides that each pilgrim will tell two stories on the way to Canterbury and two on the way back. Whomever he judges to be the best storyteller will receive a meal at Bailey’s tavern, courtesy of the other pilgrims. The pilgrims draw lots and determine that the Knight will tell the first tale.

General Prologue : Introduction

Fragment 1, lines 1–42

Summary

Whan that Aprill with his shoures soote

The droghte of March hath perced to the roote . . . (See Important Quotations Explained)

The narrator opens the General Prologue with a description of the return of spring. He describes the April rains, the burgeoning flowers and leaves, and the chirping birds. Around this time of year, the narrator says, people begin to feel the desire to go on a pilgrimage. Many devout English pilgrims set off to visit shrines in distant holy lands, but even more choose to travel to Canterbury to visit the relics of Saint Thomas Becket in Canterbury Cathedral, where they thank the martyr for having helped them when they were in need. The narrator tells us that as he prepared to go on such a pilgrimage, staying at a tavern in Southwark called the Tabard Inn, a great company of twenty-nine travelers entered. The travelers were a diverse group who, like the narrator, were on their way to Canterbury. They happily agreed to let him join them. That night, the group slept at the Tabard, and woke up early the next morning to set off on their journey. Before continuing the tale, the narrator declares his intent to list and describe each of the members of the group.

Analysis

The invocation of spring with which the General Prologue begins is lengthy and formal compared to the language of the rest of the Prologue. The first lines situate the story in a particular time and place, but the speaker does this in cosmic and cyclical terms, celebrating the vitality and richness of spring. This approach gives the opening lines a dreamy, timeless, unfocused quality, and it is therefore surprising when the narrator reveals that he’s going to describe a pilgrimage that he himself took rather than telling a love story. A pilgrimage is a religious journey undertaken for penance and grace. As pilgrimages went, Canterbury was not a very difficult destination for an English person to reach. It was, therefore, very popular in fourteenth-century England, as the narrator mentions. Pilgrims traveled to visit the remains of Saint Thomas Becket, archbishop of Canterbury, who was murdered in 1170 by knights of King Henry II. Soon after his death, he became the most popular saint in England. The pilgrimage in The Canterbury Tales should not be thought of as an entirely solemn occasion, because it also offered the pilgrims an opportunity to abandon work and take a vacation.

In line 20, the narrator abandons his unfocused, all-knowing point of view, identifying himself as an actual person for the first time by inserting the first person—“I”—as he relates how he met the group of pilgrims while staying at the Tabard Inn. He emphasizes that this group, which he encountered by accident, was itself formed quite by chance (25–26). He then shifts into the first-person plural, referring to the pilgrims as “we” beginning in line 29, asserting his status as a member of the group.

The narrator ends the introductory portion of his prologue by noting that he has “tyme and space” to tell his narrative. His comments underscore the fact that he is writing some time after the events of his story, and that he is describing the characters from memory. He has spoken and met with these people, but he has waited a certain length of time before sitting down and describing them. His intention to describe each pilgrim as he or she seemed to him is also important, for it emphasizes that his descriptions are not only subject to his memory but are also shaped by his individual perceptions and opinions regarding each of the characters. He positions himself as a mediator between two groups: the group of pilgrims, of which he was a member, and us, the audience, whom the narrator explicitly addresses as “you” in lines 34 and 38.

On the other hand, the narrator’s declaration that he will tell us about the “condicioun,” “degree,” and “array” (dress) of each of the pilgrims suggests that his portraits will be based on objective facts as well as his own opinions. He spends considerable time characterizing the group members according to their social positions. The pilgrims represent a diverse cross section of fourteenth-century English society. Medieval social theory divided society into three broad classes, called “estates”: the military, the clergy, and the laity. (The nobility, not represented in the General Prologue, traditionally derives its title and privileges from military duties and service, so it is considered part of the military estate.) In the portraits that we will see in the rest of the General Prologue, the Knight and Squire represent the military estate. The clergy is represented by the Prioress (and her nun and three priests), the Monk, the Friar, and the Parson. The other characters, from the wealthy Franklin to the poor Plowman, are the members of the laity. These lay characters can be further subdivided into landowners (the Franklin), professionals (the Clerk, the Man of Law, the Guildsmen, the Physician, and the Shipman), laborers (the Cook and the Plowman), stewards (the Miller, the Manciple, and the Reeve), and church officers (the Summoner and the Pardoner). As we will see, Chaucer’s descriptions of the various characters and their social roles reveal the influence of the medieval genre of estates satire.

General Prologue : The Knight through the Man of Law

Fragment 1, lines 43–330

Summary

The narrator begins his character portraits with the Knight. In the narrator’s eyes, the Knight is the noblest of the pilgrims, embodying military prowess, loyalty, honor, generosity, and good manners. The Knight conducts himself in a polite and mild fashion, never saying an unkind word about anyone. The Knight’s son, who is about twenty years old, acts as his father’s squire, or apprentice. Though the Squire has fought in battles with great strength and agility, like his father, he is also devoted to love. A strong, beautiful, curly-haired young man dressed in clothes embroidered with dainty flowers, the Squire fights in the hope of winning favor with his “lady.” His talents are those of the courtly lover—singing, playing the flute, drawing, writing, and riding—and he loves so passionately that he gets little sleep at night. He is a dutiful son, and fulfills his responsibilities toward his father, such as carving his meat. Accompanying the Knight and Squire is the Knight’s Yeoman, or freeborn servant. The Yeoman wears green from head to toe and carries an enormous bow and beautifully feathered arrows, as well as a sword and small shield. His gear and attire suggest that he is a forester.

Next, the narrator describes the Prioress, named Madame Eglentyne. Although the Prioress is not part of the royal court, she does her best to imitate its manners. She takes great care to eat her food daintily, to reach for food on the table delicately, and to wipe her lip clean of grease before drinking from her cup. She speaks French, but with a provincial English accent. She is compassionate toward animals, weeping when she sees a mouse caught in a trap, and feeding her dogs roasted meat and milk. The narrator says that her features are pretty, even her enormous forehead. On her arm she wears a set of prayer beads, from which hangs a gold brooch that features the Latin words for “Love Conquers All.” Another nun and three priests accompany her.

The Monk is the next pilgrim the narrator describes. Extremely handsome, he loves hunting and keeps many horses. He is an outrider at his monastery (he looks after the monastery’s business with the external world), and his horse’s bridle can be heard jingling in the wind as clear and loud as a church bell. The Monk is aware that the rule of his monastic order discourages monks from engaging in activities like hunting, but he dismisses such strictures as worthless. The narrator says that he agrees with the Monk: why should the Monk drive himself crazy with study or manual labor? The fat, bald, and well-dressed Monk resembles a prosperous lord.

The next member of the company is the Friar—a member of a religious order who lives entirely by begging. This friar is jovial, pleasure-loving, well-spoken, and socially agreeable. He hears confessions, and assigns very easy penance to people who donate money. For this reason, he is very popular with wealthy landowners throughout the country. He justifies his leniency by arguing that donating money to friars is a sign of true repentance, even if the penitent is incapable of shedding tears. He also makes himself popular with innkeepers and barmaids, who can give him food and drink. He pays no attention to beggars and lepers because they can’t help him or his fraternal order. Despite his vow of poverty, the donations he extracts allow him to dress richly and live quite merrily.

Tastefully attired in nice boots and an imported fur hat, the Merchant speaks constantly of his profits. The merchant is good at borrowing money, but clever enough to keep anyone from knowing that he is in debt. The narrator does not know his name. After the Merchant comes the Clerk, a thin and threadbare student of philosophy at Oxford, who devours books instead of food. The Man of Law, an influential lawyer, follows next. He is a wise character, capable of preparing flawless legal documents. The Man of Law is a very busy man, but he takes care to appear even busier than he actually is.

Analysis

The Canterbury Tales is more than an estates satire because the characters are fully individualized creations rather than simple good or bad examples of some ideal type. Many of them seem aware that they inhabit a socially defined role and seem to have made a conscious effort to redefine their prescribed role on their own terms. For instance, the Squire is training to occupy the same social role as his father, the Knight, but unlike his father he defines this role in terms of the ideals of courtly love rather than crusading. The Prioress is a nun, but she aspires to the manners and behavior of a lady of the court, and, like the Squire, incorporates the motifs of courtly love into her Christian vocation. Characters such as the Monk and the Friar, who more obviously corrupt or pervert their social roles, are able to offer a justification and a rationale for their behavior, demonstrating that they have carefully considered how to go about occupying their professions.

Within each portrait, the narrator praises the character being described in superlative terms, promoting him or her as an outstanding example of his or her type. At the same time, the narrator points out things about many of the characters that the reader would be likely to view as flawed or corrupt, to varying degrees. The narrator’s naïve stance introduces many different ironies into the General Prologue. Though it is not always clear exactly how ironic the narrator is being, the reader can perceive a difference between what each character should be and what he or she is.

The narrator is also a character, and an incredibly complex one at that. Examination of the narrator’s presentation of the pilgrims reveals some of his prejudices. The Monk’s portrait, in which the narrator inserts his own judgment of the Monk into the actual portrait, is the clearest example of this. But most of the time, the narrator’s opinions are more subtly present. What he does and doesn’t discuss, the order in which he presents or recalls details, and the extent to which he records objective characteristics of the pilgrims are all crucial to our own ironic understanding of the narrator.

The Knight, the Squire, and the Yeoman

The Knight has fought in crusades the world over, and comes as close as any of the characters to embodying the ideals of his vocation. But even in his case, the narrator suggests a slight separation between the individual and the role: the Knight doesn’t simply exemplify chivalry, truth, honor, freedom, and courtesy; he “loves” them. His virtues are due to his self-conscious pursuit of clearly conceived ideals. Moreover, the Knight’s comportment is significant. Not only is he a worthy warrior, he is prudent in the image of himself that he projects. His appearance is calculated to express humility rather than vainglory.

Whereas the narrator describes the Knight in terms of abstract ideals and battles, he describes the Knight’s son, the Squire, mostly in terms of his aesthetic attractiveness. The Squire prepares to occupy the same role as his father, but he envisions that role differently, supplementing his father’s devotion to military prowess and the Christian cause with the ideals of courtly love (see discussion of courtly love under “Themes, Motifs, and Symbols”). He displays all of the accomplishments and behaviors prescribed for the courtly lover: he grooms and dresses himself carefully, he plays and sings, he tries to win favor with his “lady,” and he doesn’t sleep at night because of his overwhelming love. It is important to recognize, however, that the Squire isn’t simply in love because he is young and handsome; he has picked up all of his behaviors and poses from his culture.

The description of the Knight’s servant, the Yeoman, is limited to an account of his physical appearance, leaving us with little upon which to base an inference about him as an individual. He is, however, quite well attired for someone of his station, possibly suggesting a self-conscious attempt to look the part of a forester.

The Prioress, the Monk, and the Friar

With the descriptions of the Prioress, the Monk, and the Friar, the level of irony with which each character is presented gradually increases. Like the Squire, the Prioress seems to have redefined her own role, imitating the behavior of a woman of the royal court and supplementing her religious garb with a courtly love motto: Love Conquers All. This does not necessarily imply that she is corrupt: Chaucer’s satire of her is subtle rather than scathing. More than a personal culpability, the Prioress’s devotion to courtly love demonstrates the universal appeal and influence of the courtly love tradition in Chaucer’s time. Throughout The Canterbury Tales, Chaucer seems to question the popularity of courtly love in his own culture, and to highlight the contradictions between courtly love and Christianity.

The narrator focuses on the Prioress’s table manners in minute detail, openly admiring her courtly manners. He seems mesmerized by her mouth, as he mentions her smiling, her singing, her French speaking, her eating, and her drinking. As if to apologize for dwelling so long on what he seems to see as her erotic manner, he moves to a consideration of her “conscience,” but his decision to illustrate her great compassion by focusing on the way she treats her pets and reacts to a mouse is probably tongue-in-cheek. The Prioress emerges as a very realistically portrayed human being, but she seems somewhat lacking as a religious figure.

The narrator’s admiring description of the Monk is more conspicuously satirical than that of the Prioress. The narrator zeroes in on the Monk with a vivid image: his bridle jingles as loud and clear as a chapel bell. This image is pointedly ironic, since the chapel is where the Monk should be but isn’t. To a greater degree than the Squire or the Prioress, the Monk has departed from his prescribed role as defined by the founders of his order. He lives like a lord rather than a cleric. Hunting is an extremely expensive form of leisure, the pursuit of the upper classes. The narrator takes pains to point out that the Monk is aware of the rules of his order but scorns them.

Like the Monk, the Friar does not perform his function as it was originally conceived. Saint Francis, the prototype for begging friars, ministered specifically to beggars and lepers, the very people the Friar disdains. Moreover, the Friar doesn’t just neglect his spiritual duties; he actually abuses them for his own profit. The description of his activities implies that he gives easy penance in order to get extra money, so that he can live well. Like the Monk, the Friar is ready with arguments justifying his reinterpretation of his role: beggars and lepers cannot help the Church, and giving money is a sure sign of penitence. The narrator strongly hints that the Friar is lecherous as well as greedy. The statement that he made many marriages at his own cost suggests that he found husbands for young women he had made pregnant. His white neck is a conventional sign of lecherousness.

The Merchant, the Clerk, and the Man of Law

The Merchant, the Clerk, and the Man of Law represent three professional types. Though the narrator valiantly keeps up the pretense of praising everybody, the Merchant evidently taxes his ability to do so. The Merchant is in debt, apparently a regular occurrence, and his supposed cleverness at hiding his indebtedness is undermined by the fact that even the naïve narrator knows about it. Though the narrator would like to praise him, the Merchant hasn’t even told the company his name.

Sandwiched between two characters who are clearly devoted to money, the threadbare Clerk appears strikingly oblivious to worldly concerns. However, the ultimate purpose of his study is unclear. The Man of Law contrasts sharply with the Clerk in that he has used his studies for monetary gain.

General Prologue: The Franklin through the Pardoner

Fragment 1, lines 331–714

Summary

The white-bearded Franklin is a wealthy gentleman farmer, possessed of lands but not of noble birth. His chief attribute is his preoccupation with food, which is so plenteous in his house that his house seemed to snow meat and drink (344–345). The narrator next describes the five Guildsmen, all artisans. They are dressed in the livery, or uniform, of their guild. The narrator compliments their shiny dress and mentions that each was fit to be a city official. With them is their skillful Cook, whom Chaucer would praise fully were it not for the ulcer on his shin. The hardy Shipman wears a dagger on a cord around his neck. When he is on his ship, he steals wine from the merchant he is transporting while he sleeps.

The taffeta-clad Physician bases his practice of medicine and surgery on a thorough knowledge of astronomy and the four humors. He has a good setup with his apothecaries, because they make each other money. He is well acquainted with ancient and modern medical authorities, but reads little Scripture. He is somewhat frugal, and the narrator jokes that the doctor’s favorite medicine is gold.

Next, the narrator describes the slightly deaf Wife of Bath. This keen seamstress is always first to the offering at Mass, and if someone goes ahead of her she gets upset. She wears head coverings to Mass that the narrator guesses must weigh ten pounds. She has had five husbands and has taken three pilgrimages to Jerusalem. She has also been to Rome, Cologne, and other exotic pilgrimage sites. Her teeth have gaps between them, and she sits comfortably astride her horse. The Wife is jolly and talkative, and she gives good love advice because she has had lots of experience.

A gentle and poor village Parson is described next. Pure of conscience and true to the teachings of Christ, the Parson enjoys preaching and instructing his parishioners, but he hates excommunicating those who cannot pay their tithes. He walks with his staff to visit all his parishioners, no matter how far away. He believes that a priest must be pure, because he serves as an example for his congregation, his flock. The Parson is dedicated to his parish and does not seek a better appointment. He is even kind to sinners, preferring to teach them by example rather than scorn. The parson is accompanied by his brother, a Plowman, who works hard, loves God and his neighbor, labors “for Christ’s sake” (537), and pays his tithes on time.

The red-haired Miller loves crude, bawdy jokes and drinking. He is immensely stout and strong, able to lift doors off their hinges or knock them down by running at them with his head. He has a wart on his nose with bright red hairs sticking out of it like bristles, black nostrils, and a mouth like a furnace. He wears a sword and buckler, and loves to joke around and tell dirty stories. He steals from his customers, and plays the bagpipes.

The Manciple stocks an Inn of Court (school of law) with provisions. Uneducated though he is, this manciple is smarter than most of the lawyers he serves. The spindly, angry Reeve has hair so short that he reminds the narrator of a priest. He manages his lord’s estate so well that he is able to hoard his own money and property in a miserly fashion. The Reeve is also a good carpenter, and he always rides behind everybody else.

The Summoner arraigns those accused of violating Church law. When drunk, he ostentatiously spouts the few Latin phrases he knows. His face is bright red from an unspecified disease. He uses his power corruptly for his own gain. He is extremely lecherous, and uses his position to dominate the young women in his jurisdiction. In exchange for a quart of wine, he would let another man sleep with his girlfriend for a year and then pardon the man completely. The Pardoner, who had just been in the court of Rome, rides with the Summoner. He sings with his companion, and has long, flowing, yellow hair. The narrator mentions that the Pardoner thinks he rides very fashionably, with nothing covering his head. He has brought back many souvenirs from his trip to Rome. The narrator compares the Pardoner’s high voice to that of a goat, and mentions that he thinks the Pardoner might have been a homosexual. The narrator mocks the Pardoner for his disrespectful manipulation of the poor for his own material gain. In charge of selling papal indulgences, he is despised by the Church and most churchgoers for counterfeiting pardons and pocketing the money. The Pardoner is a good preacher, storyteller, and singer, the narrator admits, although he argues it is only because he cheats people of their money in that way.

Analysis

Again, the narrator describes many of the characters as though he had actually witnessed them doing things he has only heard them talk about. Other portraits, such as that of the Miller, are clearly shaped by class stereotypes.

The Franklin, the Guildsmen, and the Cook

The Franklin and the five Guildsmen share with the Merchant and the Man of Law a devotion to material wealth, and the narrator praises them in terms of their possessions. The description of the Franklin’s table is a lavish poetic tribute to hospitality and luxury. The Haberdasher, Carpenter, Weaver, Dyer, and Tapestry-Weaver are not individualized, and they don’t tell their own tales. The narrator’s approval of their pride in material displays of wealth is clearly satirical. The Cook, with his disgusting physical defect, is himself a display of the Guildsmen’s material worth and prosperity.

The Shipman and the Physician

The descriptions of the Shipman and the Physician are both barbed with keenly satiric turns of phrase implying dishonesty and avarice. The Shipman’s theft of wine is slipped in among descriptions of his professional skills, and his brutality in battle is briefly noted in the midst of his other nautical achievements. The narrator gives an impressive catalog of the Physician’s learning, but then interjects the startling comment that he neglects the Bible, implying that his care for the body comes at the expense of the soul. Moreover, the narrator’s remarks about the Doctor’s love of gold suggest that he is out to make money rather than to help others.

The Wife of Bath

According to whether they infer Chaucer’s implied attitude toward this fearless and outspoken woman as admiring or satirical, readers have interpreted the Wife of Bath as an expression either of Chaucer’s proto-feminism or of his misogyny. Certainly, she embodies many of the traits that woman-hating writers of Chaucer’s time attacked: she is vain, domineering, and lustful. But, at the same time, Chaucer portrays the Wife of Bath in such realistic and humane detail that it is hard to see her simply as a satire of an awful woman. Minor facets of her description, such as the gap between her teeth and her deafness, are expanded upon in the long prologue to her tale.

The Parson and the Plowman

Coming after a catalog of very worldly characters, these two brothers stand out as rare examples of Christian ideals. The Plowman follows the Gospel, loving God and his neighbor, working for Christ’s sake, and faithfully paying tithes to the Church. Their “worth” is thus of a completely different kind from that assigned to the valorous Knight or to the skilled and wealthy characters. The Parson has a more complicated role than the Plowman, and a more sophisticated awareness of his importance.

The Miller, the Manciple, and the Reeve

The Miller, the Manciple, and the Reeve are all stewards, in the sense that other people entrust them with their property. All three of them abuse that trust. Stewardship plays an important symbolic role in The Canterbury Tales, just as it does in the Gospels. In his parables, Jesus used stewardship as a metaphor for Christian life, since God calls the individual to account for his or her actions on the Day of Judgment, just as a steward must show whether he has made a profitable use of his master’s property.

The Miller seems more demonic than Christian, with his violent and brutal habits, his mouth like a furnace, the angry red hairs sprouting from his wart, and his black nostrils. His “golden thumb” alludes to his practice of cheating his customers. The narrator ironically upholds the Manciple as a model of a good steward. The Manciple’s employers are all lawyers, trained to help others to live within their means, but the Manciple is even shrewder than they are. The Reeve is depicted as a very skilled thief—one who can fool his own auditors, and who knows all the tricks of managers, servants, herdsmen, and millers because he is dishonest himself. Worst of all, he enjoys his master’s thanks for lending his master the things he has stolen from him.

The Summoner and the Pardoner

The Summoner and Pardoner, who travel together, are the most corrupt and debased of all the pilgrims. They are not members of holy orders but rather lay officers of the Church. Neither believes in what he does for the Church; instead, they both pervert their functions for their own gain and the corruption of others. The Summoner is a lecher and a drunk, always looking for a bribe. His diseased face suggests a diseased soul. The Pardoner is a more complicated figure. He sings beautifully in church and has a talent for beguiling his somewhat horrified audience. Longhaired and beardless, the Pardoner’s sexuality is ambiguous. The narrator remarks that he thought the Pardoner to be a gelding or a mare, possibly suggesting that he is either a eunuch or a homosexual. His homosexuality is further suggested by his harmonizing with the Summoner’s “stif burdoun,” which means the bass line of a melody but also hints at the male genitalia (673). The Pardoner will further disrupt the agreed-upon structure of the journey (friendly tale-telling) by launching into his indulgence-selling routine, turning his tale into a sermon he frequently uses to con people into feeding his greed. The narrator’s disdain of the Pardoner may in part owe to his jealousy of the Pardoner’s skill at mesmerizing an audience for financial gain—after all, this is a poet’s goal as well.

General Prologue: Conclusion

Fragment 1, lines 715–858

Summary

After introducing all of the pilgrims, the narrator apologizes for any possible offense the reader may take from his tales, explaining that he feels that he must be faithful in reproducing the characters’ words, even if they are rude or disgusting. He cites Christ and Plato as support for his argument that it is best to speak plainly and tell the truth rather than to lie. He then returns to his story of the first night he spent with the group of pilgrims.

After serving the pilgrims a banquet and settling the bill with them, the Host of the tavern speaks to the group. He welcomes and compliments the company, telling them they are the merriest group of pilgrims to pass through his inn all year. He adds that he would like to contribute to their happiness, free of charge. He says that he is sure they will be telling stories as they travel, since it would be boring to travel in silence. Therefore, he proposes to invent some entertainment for them if they will unanimously agree to do as he says. He orders the group to vote, and the narrator comments that the group didn’t think it would be worthwhile to argue or deliberate over the Host’s proposition and agreed immediately.

The Host congratulates the group on its good decision. He lays out his plan: each of the pilgrims will tell two tales on the way to Canterbury and two more on the way back. Whomever the Host decides has told the most meaningful and comforting stories will receive a meal paid for by the rest of the pilgrims upon their return. The Host also declares that he will ride with the pilgrims and serve as their guide at his own cost. If anyone disputes his judgment, he says, that person must pay for the expenses of the pilgrimage.

The company agrees and makes the Host its governor, judge, and record keeper. They settle on a price for the supper prize and return to drinking wine. The next morning, the Host wakes everyone up and gathers the pilgrims together. After they have set off, he reminds the group of the agreement they made. He also reminds them that whoever disagrees with him must pay for everything spent along the way. He tells the group members to draw straws to decide who tells the first tale. The Knight wins and prepares to begin his tale.

Analysis

The Host shows himself to be a shrewd businessman. Once he has taken the pilgrims’ money for their dinners, he takes their minds away from what they have just spent by flattering them, complimenting them for their mirth. Equally quickly, he changes the focus of the pilgrimage. In the opening lines of the General Prologue, the narrator says that people go on pilgrimages to thank the martyr, who has helped them when they were in need (17–18). But Bailey (as the Host is later called) tells the group, “Ye goon to Caunterbury—God yow speede, / The blissful martir quite yow youre meede!” (769–770). He sees the pilgrimage as an economic transaction: the pilgrims travel to the martyr, and in return the martyr rewards them. The word “quite” means “repay,” and it will become a major motif throughout the tales, as each character is put in a sort of debt by the previous character’s tale, and must repay him or her with a new tale. Instead of traveling to reach a destination (the shrine of Saint Thomas Becket), the traveling becomes a contest, and the pilgrimage becomes about the journey itself rather than the destination. Bailey also stands to profit from the contest: the winner of the contest wins a free meal at his tavern, to be paid for by the rest of the contestants, all of whom will presumably eat with the winner and thus buy more meals from Bailey.

After creating the storytelling contest, Bailey quickly appoints himself its judge. Once the pilgrims have voted to participate in the contest, Bailey inserts himself as their ruler, and anyone who disagrees with him faces a strict financial penalty. Some have interpreted Bailey’s speedy takeover of the pilgrimage as an allegory for the beginnings of absolute monarchy. The narrator refers to the Host as the group’s “governour,” “juge,” and “reportour [record-keeper]”—all very legalistic terms (813–814).

Important Quotations Explained

1. Whan that Aprill with his shoures soote

The droghte of March hath perced to the roote,

And bathed every veyne in swich licour

Of which vertu engendred is the flour;

Whan Zephirus eek with his sweete breeth

Inspired hath in every holt and heeth

The tendre croppes, and the yonge sonne

Hath in the Ram his halve cours yronne,

And smale fowles maken melodye,

That slepen al the nyght with open ye

(So priketh hem nature in hir corages),

Thanne longen folk to goon on pilgrimages.

            (General Prologue, 1–12)

These are the opening lines with which the narrator begins the General Prologue of The Canterbury Tales. The imagery in this opening passage is of spring’s renewal and rebirth. April’s sweet showers have penetrated the dry earth of March, hydrating the roots, which in turn coax flowers out of the ground. The constellation Taurus is in the sky; Zephyr, the warm, gentle west wind, has breathed life into the fields; and the birds chirp merrily. The verbs used to describe Nature’s actions—piercing (2), engendering (4), inspiring (5), and pricking (11)—conjure up images of conception.

The natural world’s reawakening aligns with the narrator’s similarly “inspired” poetic sensibility. The classical (Latin and Ancient Greek) authors that Chaucer emulated and wanted to surpass would always begin their epic narrative poems by invoking a muse, or female goddess, to inspire them, quite literally to talk or breathe a story into them. Most of them begin “Sing in me, O muse,” about a particular subject. Chaucer too begins with a moment of inspiration, but in this case it is the natural inspiration of the earth readying itself for spring rather than a supernatural being filling the poet’s body with her voice.

After the long sleep of winter, people begin to stir, feeling the need to “goon on pilgrimages,” or to travel to a site where one worships a saint’s relics as a means of spiritual cleansing and renewal. Since winter ice and snow made traveling long distances almost impossible (this was an age not only before automobiles but also before adequately developed horse-drawn carriages), the need to get up, stretch one’s legs, and see the world outside the window must have been great. Pilgrimages combined spring vacations with religious purification.

The landscape in this passage also clearly situates the text in England. This is not a classical landscape like the Troy of Homer’s Iliad, nor is it an entirely fictionalized space like the cool groves and rocky cliffs of imaginary Arcadia from pastoral poetry and romances. Chaucer’s landscape is also accessible to all types of people, but especially those who inhabit the countryside, since Chaucer speaks of budding flowers, growing crops, and singing birds.

THE NUN’S PRIEST’S PROLOGUE, TALE, AND EPILOGUE

Fragment 7, lines 2768–3446

Summary: The Prologue of the Nun’s Priest

After the Monk has told his tale, the Knight pleads that no more tragedies be told. He asks that someone tell a tale that is the opposite of tragedy, one that narrates the extreme good fortune of someone previously brought low. The Host picks the Nun’s Priest, the priest traveling with the Prioress and her nun, and demands that he tell a tale that will gladden the hearts of the company members. The Nun’s Priest readily agrees, and begins his tale.

Summary: The Tale of the Nun’s Priest

A poor, elderly widow lives a simple life in a cottage with her two daughters. Her few possessions include three sows, three cows, a sheep, and some chickens. One chicken, her rooster, is named Chanticleer, which in French means “sings clearly.” True to his name, Chanticleer’s “cock-a-doodle-doo” makes him the master of all roosters. He crows the hour more accurately than any church clock. His crest is redder than fine coral, his beak is black as jet, his nails whiter than lilies, and his feathers shine like burnished gold. Understandably, such an attractive cock would have to be the Don Juan of the barnyard. Chanticleer has many hen-wives, but he loves most truly a hen named Pertelote. She is as lovely as Chanticleer is magnificent.

As Chanticleer, Pertelote, and all of Chanticleer’s ancillary hen-wives are roosting one night, Chanticleer has a terrible nightmare about an orange houndlike beast who threatens to kill him while he is in the yard. Fearless Pertelote berates him for letting a dream get the better of him. She believes the dream to be the result of some physical malady, and she promises him that she will find some purgative herbs. She urges him once more not to dread something as fleeting and illusory as a dream. In order to convince her that his dream was important, he tells the stories of men who dreamed of murder and then discovered it. His point in telling these stories is to prove to Pertelote that “Mordre will out” (3052)—murder will reveal itself—even and especially in dreams. Chanticleer cites textual examples of famous dream interpretations to further support his thesis that dreams are portentous. He then praises Pertelote’s beauty and grace, and the aroused hero and heroine make love in barnyard fashion: “He fethered Pertelote twenty tyme, / And trad hire eke as ofte, er it was pryme [he clasped Pertelote with his wings twenty times, and copulated with her as often, before it was 6 A.M.” (3177–3178).

One day in May, Chanticleer has just declared his perfect happiness when a wave of sadness passes over him. That very night, a hungry fox stalks Chanticleer and his wives, watching their every move. The next day, Chanticleer notices the fox while watching a butterfly, and the fox confronts him with dissimulating courtesy, telling the rooster not to be afraid. Chanticleer relishes the fox’s flattery of his singing. He beats his wings with pride, stands on his toes, stretches his neck, closes his eyes, and crows loudly. The fox reaches out and grabs Chanticleer by the throat, and then slinks away with him back toward the woods. No one is around to witness what has happened. Once Pertelote finds out what has happened, she burns her feathers with grief, and a great wail arises from the henhouse.

The widow and her daughters hear the screeching and spy the fox running away with the rooster. The dogs follow, and pretty soon the whole barnyard joins in the hullabaloo. Chanticleer very cleverly suggests that the fox turn and boast to his pursuers. The fox opens his mouth to do so, and Chanticleer flies out of the fox’s mouth and into a high tree. The fox tries to flatter the bird into coming down, but Chanticleer has learned his lesson. He tells the fox that flattery will work for him no more. The moral of the story, concludes the Nun’s Priest, is never to trust a flatterer.

Summary: The Epilogue to the Nun’s Priest’s Tale

The Host tells the Nun’s Priest that he would have been an excellent rooster—for if he has as much courage as he has strength, he would need hens. The Host points out the Nun’s Priest’s strong muscles, his great neck, and his large breast, and compares him to a sparrow-hawk. He merrily wishes the Nun’s Priest good luck.

Analysis

The Nun’s Priest’s Tale is a fable, a simple tale about animals that concludes with a moral lesson. Stylistically, however, the tale is much more complex than its simple plot would suggest. Into the fable framework, the Nun’s Priest brings parodies of epic poetry, medieval scholarship, and courtly romance. Most critics are divided about whether to interpret this story as a parody or as an allegory. If viewed as a parody, the story is an ironic and humorous retelling of the fable of the fox and the rooster in the guise of, alternately, a courtly romance and a Homeric epic. It is hilariously done, since into the squawkings and struttings of poultry life, Chaucer transposes scenes of a hero’s dreaming of death and courting his lady love, in a manner that imitates the overblown, descriptive style of romances. For example, the rooster’s plumage is described as shining like burnished gold. He also parodies epic poetry by utilizing apostrophes, or formal, imploring addresses: “O false mordrour, lurkynge in thy den!” (3226), and “O Chauntecleer, acursed be that morwe / That thou into the yerd flaugh fro the bemes!” (3230–3231). If we read the story as an allegory, Chanticleer’s story is a tale of how we are all easily swayed by the smooth, flattering tongue of the devil, represented by the fox. Other scholars have read the tale as the story of Adam and Eve’s (and consequently all humankind’s) fall from grace told through the veil of a fable.

The Nun’s Priest’s Tale is the only one of all the tales to feature a specific reference to an actual late-fourteenth-century event. This reference occurs when the widow and her daughters begin to chase the fox, and the whole barnyard screeches and bellows, joining in the fray. The narrator notes that not even the crew of Jack Straw, the reputed leader of the English peasants’ rebellion in 1381, made half as much noise as did this barnyard cacophony: “Certes, he Jakke Straw and his meynee / Ne made nevere shoutes half so shrille / Whan that they wolden any Flemyng kille, /As thilke day was maad upon the fox” (3394–3397). This first and only contemporary reference in The Canterbury Tales dates at least the completion of the tale of Chanticleer to the 1380s, a time of great civil unrest and class turmoil.

Why were the 17th century metaphysical poets so called?

The metaphysical poets of the 17th century used  metaphors to make abstractions seem more concrete.  This group of poets included John Donne, Andrew Marvell, and John Wilmot, the naughty Earl of Rochester.  In 1921, T.S. Eliot wrote about the “movement” of metaphysical poets in his aptly titled essay, "The Metaphysical Poets."  He used John Donne has an example of the poetic devices that metaphysical poets used, writing that Donne would elaborate on “a figure of speech to the furthest stage to which ingenuity could take it.”

According to T. S. Eliot, Samuel Johnson, “employed the term metaphysical poets” and that Johnson considered the chains linking the poets to be “heterogeneous ideas that are yoked by violence together.”  These are the unexpected metaphors found in the metaphysical poets, and they are still striking to modern readers. 

John Donne's prowess with metaphors shines in “Meditation XVII” from “Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions.”  The church bells are tolling for a dead man, and John Donne says it is not necessary to ask for whom the bell tolls.  “All mankind is of one author and one volume,” says Donne, “when one man dies, one chapter is not torn out of the book, but translated into a better language...God's hand is in every translation.”  It is in this piece that Donne wrote, “no man is an island” and “any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind; therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.”

In “To His Coy Mistress,” Andrew Marvell assures his lady friend that if they had all the time in th world, “My vegetable love should grow/Vaster than empires, and more slow.”  However, “Time's winged chariot [is] hurrying near” and “The grave's a fine and private place/But none I think do there embrace.” Marvell uses decomposition as a metaphor, including worms and devouring birds, but elevates his poetry with contrasting images of the sun.  “Thus, though we can not make our sun/ Stand still, yet we will make him run.”

John Wilmot, also known as Lord Rochester, is considered to be a metaphysical poet, but his poetry is of a different style.  Instead of elevating human nature, Wilmot used his poetry to explore his weaknesses.  In "Return," Wilmot wrote, "Dear, from thine arms then let me fly, That my fantastic mind may prove/The torments it deserves to try."  Since he suffered several bouts of syphilitic symptoms, it is safe to assume his "fantastic mind" found the "torments" he was seeking. Not all of the metaphysical poets fit into the patterns of elongated metaphors. The metaphysical poets highlighted the human condition and reflected on spiritual questions in new ways.

JOHN DONNE: "THE FLEA"

John Donne lived from 1572-1631. In the world of poetry, his work was revolutionary. Online Literature.com states "Whatever the subject, Donne's poems reveal the same characteristics as the work of the metaphysical poets: dazzling wordplay, often explicitly sexual; paradox; subtle argumentation; surprising contrasts; intricate psychological analysis; and striking imagery selected from nontraditional areas such as law, physiology, scholastic philosophy, and mathematics."

Summary

The speaker tells his beloved to look at the flea before them and to note “how little” is that thing that she denies him. For the flea, he says, has sucked first his blood, then her blood, so that now, inside the flea, they are mingled; and that mingling cannot be called “sin, or shame, or loss of maidenhead.” The flea has joined them together in a way that, “alas, is more than we would do.”   

As his beloved moves to kill the flea, the speaker stays her hand, asking her to spare the three lives in the flea: his life, her life, and the flea’s own life. In the flea, he says, where their blood is mingled, they are almost married—no, more than married—and the flea is their marriage bed and marriage temple mixed into one. Though their parents grudge their romance and though she will not make love to him, they are nevertheless united and cloistered in the living walls of the flea. She is apt to kill him, he says, but he asks that she not kill herself by killing the flea that contains her blood; he says that to kill the flea would be sacrilege, “three sins in killing three.”    

“Cruel and sudden,” the speaker calls his lover, who has now killed the flea, “purpling” her fingernail with the “blood of innocence.” The speaker asks his lover what the flea’s sin was, other than having sucked from each of them a drop of blood. He says that his lover replies that neither of them is less noble for having killed the flea. It is true, he says, and it is this very fact that proves that her fears are false: If she were to sleep with him (“yield to me”), she would lose no more honor than she lost when she killed the flea.    

Form This poem alternates metrically between lines in iambic tetrameter and lines in iambic pentameter, a 4-5 stress pattern ending with two pentameter lines at the end of each stanza. Thus, the stress pattern in each of the nine-line stanzas is 454545455. The rhyme scheme in each stanza is similarly regular, in couplets, with the final line rhyming with the final couplet: AABBCCDDD.  

Commentary

This funny little poem again exhibits Donne’s metaphysical love-poem mode, his aptitude for turning even the least likely images into elaborate symbols of love and romance. This poem uses the image of a flea that has just bitten the speaker and his beloved to sketch an amusing conflict over whether the two will engage in premarital sex. The speaker wants to, the beloved does not, and so the speaker, highly clever but grasping at straws, uses the flea, in whose body his blood mingles with his beloved’s, to show how innocuous such mingling can be—he reasons that if mingling in the flea is so innocuous, sexual mingling would be equally innocuous, for they are really the same thing. By the second stanza, the speaker is trying to save the flea’s life, holding it up as “our marriage bed and marriage temple.” But when the beloved kills the flea despite the speaker’s protestations (and probably as a deliberate move to squash his argument, as well), he turns his argument on its head and claims that despite the high-minded and sacred ideals he has just been invoking, killing the flea did not really impugn his beloved’s honor—and despite the high-minded and sacred ideals she has invoked in refusing to sleep with him, doing so would not impugn her honor either.     

This poem is the cleverest of a long line of sixteenth-century love poems using the flea as an erotic image, a genre derived from an older poem of Ovid. Donne’s poise of hinting at the erotic without ever explicitly referring to sex, while at the same time leaving no doubt as to exactly what he means, is as much a source of the poem’s humor as the silly image of the flea is; the idea that being bitten by a flea would represent “sin, or shame, or loss of maidenhead” gets the point across with a neat conciseness and clarity that Donne’s later religious lyrics never attained.

JOHN DONNE: “THE CANONIZATION”

Summary

The speaker asks his addressee to be quiet, and let him love. If the addressee cannot hold his tongue, the speaker tells him to criticize him for other shortcomings (other than his tendency to love): his palsy, his gout, his “five grey hairs,” or his ruined fortune. He admonishes the addressee to look to his own mind and his own wealth and to think of his position and copy the other nobles (“Observe his Honour, or his Grace, / Or the King’s real, or his stamped face / Contemplate.”) The speaker does not care what the addressee says or does, as long as he lets him love.       

The speaker asks rhetorically, “Who’s injured by my love?” He says that his sighs have not drowned ships, his tears have not flooded land, his colds have not chilled spring, and the heat of his veins has not added to the list of those killed by the plague. Soldiers still find wars and lawyers still find litigious men, regardless of the emotions of the speaker and his lover.      

The speaker tells his addressee to “Call us what you will,” for it is love that makes them so. He says that the addressee can “Call her one, me another fly,” and that they are also like candles (“tapers”), which burn by feeding upon their own selves (“and at our own cost die”). In each other, the lovers find the eagle and the dove, and together (“we two being one”) they illuminate the riddle of the phoenix, for they “die and rise the same,” just as the phoenix does—though unlike the phoenix, it is love that slays and resurrects them.    

He says that they can die by love if they are not able to live by it, and if their legend is not fit “for tombs and hearse,” it will be fit for poetry, and “We’ll build in sonnets pretty rooms.” A well-wrought urn does as much justice to a dead man’s ashes as does a gigantic tomb; and by the same token, the poems about the speaker and his lover will cause them to be “canonized,” admitted to the sainthood of love. All those who hear their story will invoke the lovers, saying that countries, towns, and courts “beg from above / A pattern of your love!”    

Form The five stanzas of “The Canonization” are metered in iambic lines ranging from trimeter to pentameter; in each of the nine-line stanzas, the first, third, fourth, and seventh lines are in pentameter, the second, fifth, sixth, and eighth in tetrameter, and the ninth in trimeter. (The stress pattern in each stanza is 545544543.) The rhyme scheme in each stanza is ABBACCCDD.    

Commentary

This complicated poem, spoken ostensibly to someone who disapproves of the speaker’s love affair, is written in the voice of a world-wise, sardonic courtier who is nevertheless utterly caught up in his love. The poem simultaneously parodies old notions of love and coins elaborate new ones, eventually concluding that even if the love affair is impossible in the real world, it can become legendary through poetry, and the speaker and his lover will be like saints to later generations of lovers. (Hence the title: “The Canonization” refers to the process by which people are inducted into the canon of saints).    In the first stanza, the speaker obliquely details his relationship to the world of politics, wealth, and nobility; by assuming that these are the concerns of his addressee, he indicates his own background amid such concerns, and he also indicates the extent to which he has moved beyond that background. He hopes that the listener will leave him alone and pursue a career in the court, toadying to aristocrats, preoccupied with favor (the King’s real face) and money (the King’s stamped face, as on a coin). In the second stanza, he parodies contemporary Petrarchan notions of love and continues to mock his addressee, making the point that his sighs have not drowned ships and his tears have not caused floods. (Petrarchan love-poems were full of claims like “My tears are rain, and my sighs storms.”) He also mocks the operations of the everyday world, saying that his love will not keep soldiers from fighting wars or lawyers from finding court cases—as though war and legal wrangling were the sole concerns of world outside the confines of his love affair.       In the third stanza, the speaker begins spinning off metaphors that will help explain the intensity and uniqueness of his love. First, he says that he and his lover are like moths drawn to a candle (“her one, me another fly”), then that they are like the candle itself. They embody the elements of the eagle (strong and masculine) and the dove (peaceful and feminine) bound up in the image of the phoenix, dying and rising by love. In the fourth stanza, the speaker explores the possibility of canonization in verse, and in the final stanza, he explores his and his lover’s roles as the saints of love, to whom generations of future lovers will appeal for help. Throughout, the tone of the poem is balanced between a kind of arch, sophisticated sensibility (“half-acre tombs”) and passionate amorous abandon (“We die and rise the same, and prove / Mysterious by this love”).      

“The Canonization” is one of Donne’s most famous and most written-about poems. Its criticism at the hands of Cleanth Brooks and others has made it a central topic in the argument between formalist critics and historicist critics; the former argue that the poem is what it seems to be, an anti-political love poem, while the latter argue, based on events in Donne’s life at the time of the poem’s composition, that it is actually a kind of coded, ironic rumination on the “ruined fortune” and dashed political hopes of the first stanza. The choice of which argument to follow is largely a matter of personal temperament. But unless one seeks a purely biographical understanding of Donne, it is probably best to understand the poem as the sort of droll, passionate speech-act it is, a highly sophisticated defense of love against the corrupting values of politics and privilege.

JOHN DONNE : A VALEDICTION: FORBIDDING MOURNING

Summary The speaker explains that he is forced to spend time apart from his lover, but before he leaves, he tells her that their farewell should not be the occasion for mourning and sorrow. In the same way that virtuous men die mildly and without complaint, he says, so they should leave without “tear-floods” and “sigh-tempests,” for to publicly announce their feelings in such a way would profane their love. The speaker says that when the earth moves, it brings “harms and fears,” but when the spheres experience “trepidation,” though the impact is greater, it is also innocent. The love of “dull sublunary lovers” cannot survive separation, but it removes that which constitutes the love itself; but the love he shares with his beloved is so refined and “Inter-assured of the mind” that they need not worry about missing “eyes, lips, and hands.”

Though he must go, their souls are still one, and, therefore, they are not enduring a breach, they are experiencing an “expansion”; in the same way that gold can be stretched by beating it “to aery thinness,” the soul they share will simply stretch to take in all the space between them. If their souls are separate, he says, they are like the feet of a compass: His lover’s soul is the fixed foot in the center, and his is the foot that moves around it. The firmness of the center foot makes the circle that the outer foot draws perfect: “Thy firmness makes my circle just, / And makes me end, where I begun.”

Form The nine stanzas of this Valediction are quite simple compared to many of Donne’s poems, which utilize strange metrical patterns overlaid jarringly on regular rhyme schemes. Here, each four-line stanza is quite unadorned, with an ABAB rhyme scheme and an iambic tetrameter meter.

Commentary “A Valediction: forbidding Mourning” is one of Donne’s most famous and simplest poems and also probably his most direct statement of his ideal of spiritual love. For all his erotic carnality in poems, such as “The Flea,” Donne professed a devotion to a kind of spiritual love that transcended the merely physical. Here, anticipating a physical separation from his beloved, he invokes the nature of that spiritual love to ward off the “tear-floods” and “sigh-tempests” that might otherwise attend on their farewell. The poem is essentially a sequence of metaphors and comparisons, each describing a way of looking at their separation that will help them to avoid the mourning forbidden by the poem’s title.

First, the speaker says that their farewell should be as mild as the uncomplaining deaths of virtuous men, for to weep would be “profanation of our joys.” Next, the speaker compares harmful “Moving of th’ earth” to innocent “trepidation of the spheres,” equating the first with “dull sublunary lovers’ love” and the second with their love, “Inter-assured of the mind.” Like the rumbling earth, the dull sublunary (sublunary meaning literally beneath the moon and also subject to the moon) lovers are all physical, unable to experience separation without losing the sensation that comprises and sustains their love. But the spiritual lovers “Care less, eyes, lips, and hands to miss,” because, like the trepidation (vibration) of the spheres (the concentric globes that surrounded the earth in ancient astronomy), their love is not wholly physical. Also, like the trepidation of the spheres, their movement will not have the harmful consequences of an earthquake.

The speaker then declares that, since the lovers’ two souls are one, his departure will simply expand the area of their unified soul, rather than cause a rift between them. If, however, their souls are “two” instead of “one”, they are as the feet of a drafter’s compass, connected, with the center foot fixing the orbit of the outer foot and helping it to describe a perfect circle. The compass (the instrument used for drawing circles) is one of Donne’s most famous metaphors, and it is the perfect image to encapsulate the values of Donne’s spiritual love, which is balanced, symmetrical, intellectual, serious, and beautiful in its polished simplicity.

Like many of Donne’s love poems (including “The Sun Rising” and “The Canonization”), “A Valediction: forbidding Mourning” creates a dichotomy between the common love of the everyday world and the uncommon love of the speaker. Here, the speaker claims that to tell “the laity,” or the common people, of his love would be to profane its sacred nature, and he is clearly contemptuous of the dull sublunary love of other lovers. The effect of this dichotomy is to create a kind of emotional aristocracy that is similar in form to the political aristocracy with which Donne has had painfully bad luck throughout his life and which he commented upon in poems, such as “The Canonization”: This emotional aristocracy is similar in form to the political one but utterly opposed to it in spirit. Few in number are the emotional aristocrats who have access to the spiritual love of the spheres and the compass; throughout all of Donne’s writing, the membership of this elite never includes more than the speaker and his lover—or at the most, the speaker, his lover, and the reader of the poem, who is called upon to sympathize with Donne’s romantic plight.

EDMUND SPENSER : “AMORETTI”

“Amoretti” is an Elizabethan sonnet-cycle, a series of interconnected poems which conventionally trace a man's attempt to woo his beloved, the moment she capitulates to him and returns his love, and his sorrow at somehow losing her again. Spenser's sonnet-cycle divides readily into these three sections: his pursuit of the beloved extends from Sonnet 1 to Sonnet 57. Sonnets 58 through 77 mostly dwell upon the speaker's humility at having won his beloved's heart and his own impatience to consummate the relationship. Sonnets 78 through 89 focus primarily on the speaker's longing for his beloved, who is absent for some reason, while comforting himself with his poetry's ability to immortalize her. The poem ends with three sets of stanzas relating stories about Cupid, son of Venus, after whom the sonnet-cycle is named ("“Amoretti”" means "little Cupids.")   

The first and longest section relates the suitor's emotional turmoil at being so madly in love with a woman who will not accept his proposal of marriage. He moves from worshipful adoration of her beauty to vindictive anger at her rejection, depicting her at times as the Platonic ideal of virtue and at others as a cruel, sadistic tease. Throughout the first section, the speaker never questions his love for the woman, only whether he can survive loving someone so dangerous to his soul.     

Once the beloved agrees to marry him, the suitor shifts his tone to unmitigated admiration of the beloved. At times he is almost condescending, changing his previous images of the woman as hostile predator to himself as a hunter and she as his willing prey. He also finds himself amazed that so celestial a being as his beloved should lower herself to accept someon so mundane as himself. Nonetheless, he comforts himself by renewing his confidence in his art--poetry--and the power of his words to properly depict the beauty no other method can hope to portray.       

In the final sonnets, something has cause the beloved to leave the presence of the speaker. No specific reason is given, although one sonnet suggests that someone lied to the woman, possibly turning her anger toward the suitor. The poems of longing are not fearful, however, but simply mournful that the lover and beloved should be separated. There seems to be a hint that this separation, unendurable as it is for the speaker, is temporary.

Analysis of Sonnets 1 through 16

In typical Elizabethan fashion, Spenser begins his sonnet-cycle with self-referential comments regarding his role as poet. He first hopes that his poetry will be the means of winning his beloved's heart, then in the second sonnet admits that, should it fail, he may die. This extreme statement is conventional for a sonnet-cycle, emphasizing as it does the intense passion the speaker feels for the beloved, but it is also a reference to the poet's own success in his vocation: just as his poetry is intended to win the heart of his beloved, so too is it intended to make him a living (either by selling well to the public or by garnering the favor and patronage of the Queen). He may die emotionally if his words fail to convince the beloved to return his affections; he will die physically if he fails to support himself through his writing.        

The poet then turns his attention to the beloved by first noting the change in seasons brought on by the new year. As his world is moving from death (winter) to life (spring), so too he hopes his beloved's heart will turn from coldness toward him to warmth. The next sonnet delves into the beloved's inner qualities: in this case, her pride. By establishing early on that his beloved is given to "lofty looks," the speaker gains the reader's sympathy for further descriptions of the beloved as cold-hearted or cruel. Her pride also implies a superior social position to the speaker, something which was not completely true in real life, but which would certainly have been in the mind of Edmund Spenser, a man seeking favor from the Queen despite his family's lack of noble heritage.    From her pride, the speaker turns to his beloved's eyes, a favorite feature for description in ”Amoretti”. While Elizabeth Boyle's eyes may indeed have been striking, the choice of facial feature is not wholly dependent upon the beloved's real-life features. The eyes work as a two-way interface with the beloved--they give the speaker glimpses of her inner self, while at the same time allow her to "strike out" at him with disapproving glances. Also, the eyes would be a more safe feature to dwell upon than, for example, her lips (which he had not yet kissed, and which would imply a more carnal love) or other body parts with which--in the interests of chastity--the speaker should not be thinking on too extensively.     

 That the speaker chooses fire as a metaphor to describe his beloved is an interesting paradox  throughout ”Amoretti”. She is usually described as cold, but in a few stanzas it is her sun-like glory and heat that enflames the suitor. The frequency with which the speaker describes her in terms of heat and light will diminish as the sonnet-cycle progresses, presumably because the beloved's cold heart has doused the suitor's heated ardor.      

Sonnets 10 through 16 heavily feature a battle motif. The suitor and his beloved are described as being locked in a battle, with the beloved the eventual victor. Here the speaker reverses the real-world roles of actor and passive receiver; it is the beloved who is described as laying seige to the suitor's fortress, though in fact it is the suitor who barrages his beloved with these very sonnets in an effort to break down her own defenses against him. The beloved is described as a tyrant, a cruel victor, and a commander who refuses to make peace when the enemy asks for a truce. The beloved's constancy, often a trait admired by the suitor, is a barrier to their living together in harmony. The suitor, on the other hand, is already a captive to his beloved, and merely asks that she show him some mercy in her conquest.

Spenser combines the martial image with his previous meditation on the beloved's eyes in Sonnet 16, wherein he describes her gaze as firing arrows at any who had the misfortune to meet it. Ironically, the suitor has not been hit by one of these arrows, as they are darts of love and the beloved broke the one aimed at him before it could reach his heart. There is here a hint of jealousy, as the suitor sees other men receiving loving looks, but not himself.

Summary of Sonnets

Sonnet 33 Sonnet 33 is the first of the ”Amoretti” to mention Spenser’s other work-in-progress, The Faerie Queene. This reference, along with others throughout the sonnets, allow the reader to identify the speaker not just as a forlorn suitor, but as Spenser himself. Here Spenser regrets the “Great wrong” he does by spending his time and energy on the ““Amoretti””rather than The Faerie Queene; while he is moved to ply his suit with his beloved Elizabeth Boyle, he has already begun the longer work, which is dedicated to Queen Elizabeth. He complains that to finish both (or even to finish The Faerie Queene alone as it is intended) may be more than “sufficient worke for one mans simple head” (line 7). This complaint he turns into yet another argument in favor of his suit—how can he concentrate on the longer work “without another wit” (line 9)? Unless his beloved grants him “rest” (line 13) or he is given “another liuing brest” (line 14). He essentially claims that he cannot complete The Faerie Queene for Elizabeth until he has succeeded in wooing Elizabeth Boyle. Implied here is the notion that Elizabeth Boyle should consent to marry Spenser not only to return his love, but because it is her duty as a subject to the Queen of England.

Sonnet 34 The speaker compares himself to a ship lost at sea, looking for guidance from the stars. Unfortunately, “a storme hath dimd her trusty guyde” (line 3), making the stars invisible to the navigator. The second stanza identifies the storm-hidden stars as his beloved turning herself from the speaker, thus leaving him to “wander now, in darnesse and dismay” (line 7). He hopes the storm will pass and he will be able to see his guiding star (his beloved, showing favor to him yet again), but until then he plans to “wander darefull comfortlesse,/in secret sorrow and sad pensiuenesse” (lines 13-14).

Sonnet 35 The speaker again dwells upon his eye motif, but this time focuses on his own “hungry eyes” (line 1) that, though greedy for looking upon his beloved, are “so filled with the store/of that faire sight” (lines 9-10) they cannot hold anything else. He is voracious in his desire to gaze upon her beauty, to the point that all else barely exists, “all their showes but shadowes sauing she” (line 14). This sonnet is repeated verbatim, with a few spelling changes, as Sonnet 83.        Sonnet 36 Here the poet asks the object of his desire if it is really worth her time and trouble to torment him. He first wonders when his pain will cease—or if it ever will (lines 1-4). He asks if there is no way for him to “purchase peace” with his cruel beloved (line 5). Finally he addresses her directly, begging her to consider “how little glory” she gains by “slaying” him (lines 10-11), concluding with the warning that his death, “which some perhaps will mone” will result in her own condemnation “of many a one” (lines 13-14).

Analysis of Sonnets 17 through 43

Spenser allows bits of the previous battle motif to make their way into Sonnets 17 through 26, but of primary concern to the speaker here is his beloved's beauty, its causes, and its effects. He praises her in terms of a Platonic ideal, making her into an object of beauty indescribable by mortal man (save in his poetry). But her perfect beauty comes at a price to the suitor: just as her beauty is untouched by earthly weakness, so her constancy in denying his love remains more immutable than stone or steel. The very traits that make her so desirable also make her untouchable.    The poet spends several sonnets describing his beloved in pagan terms, from her origin at the hands of the Greek gods to her rightful place as an idol in a temple dedicated to her beauty. As with many Elizabethan poets, Spenser seeks to entrench himself firmly in the neo-classical tradition by harking back to Greek and Roman mythology and religious practices.    

Sonnets 27 through 32 include a strain of hope, sometimes even self-confidence, on the suitor's part. He admonishes his beloved for her pride, warning her in the next sonnet that history (or in this case, mythology) holds a warning for the woman who avoids returning a suitor's affections for too long. The myth of Daphne being turned into a laurel tree for rejecting Phoebus' overtures is yet another classical allusion, used here as an argument that the beloved not take too long in deciding in the suitor's favor. Of note is the suitor's shift in tone from one bereft of companionship and frustrated at his beloved's indifference to a man confident that, given time, the woman he loves will return his affections.    Here, too, the suitor reverses an earlier comparison of his beloved's beauty to fire; now he is the fire, and she is ice, but ice of a sort that defies natural law. While his passion burns itself to ashes, her coldness only gets more resilient and refuses to melt. While he considers this a miracle, the beloved's steadfast denial of his amorous overtures marks a shift back toward despair on the part of the suitor.   

The speaker begins Sonnet 33 by once again referring to his own poetry. In this case, it is the real-world Spenser's work on The Faerie Queene that is alluded to. He expresses some guilt over spending more of his time and energy wooing his beloved than he has spent continuing the epic he has dedicated to Queen Elizabeth. He argues that the epic he has in mind is beyond the power of one man--he needs "another wit" to help him--either another poet, a second self, or (more likely) a union with his beloved to return his focus to honoring the Queen. He may be, in essence, asking the Queen to advocate for him with his beloved, making her acceptance of his marraige proposal a matter of patriotism and loyalty to the crown.     

The suitor then falls into despair, spending several sonnets describing the torment he undergoes at the hands of the beloved. He wants to know why she torments him; and in hurting him, why she must take such pleasure in it. He paints the picture of sadistic beauty, but a beauty which he cannot resist. Moving to her hair, he sees her goldent tresses and the net which keeps them in place as a trap for him, entangling him hopelessly in love for her. He even goes so far as to accept her sadism, so long as she will be gentle in her scourging. It is as though he prefers her harsh treatment to her indifference, since if she is harming him on purpose, at least she is demonstrating some emotions toward him.

Analysis of Sonnets 44 through 57

This set of sonnets continues the ongoing struggle the speaker suffers in dealing with an unresponsive beloved. He reiterates previous motifs, such as the battle and the contrast of fire and ice. He also introduces another motif of analogies: predator and prey. The beloved is the hunting beast, ferocious and bloody, while the suitor is her prey, helpless and--in one case--submissive to her attack. He knows he will be devoured; he wants only to stay the pain in favor of a quick kill.         The speaker also voices desperation at his beloved's enduring indifference to his love. He goes so far as to seek solace in the fact that she continues to torment him with rejection: if she continues to speak to him, even negatively, it is perhaps because she cannot resist interaction with him. On this increasingly precarious ground the speaker stands, desperate to squeeze some hope out of his miserable plight.

Sonnet 66 The opinions of others once again enter into the poet’s consideration, this time in concern over those who believe the speaker’s fiancée has debased herself to marry such as he. He admires her as one who “could not on earth haue found one fit for mate” (line 6), but instead should have turned here eyes toward heaven to find an equal. He reassures her, however, that “now your light doth more it selfe dilate,/and in my darkness greater doth appeare” (lines 11-12); her humility and grace in pouring out her love upon the speaker only serves to demonstrate the magnanimity of her spirit.

Sonnet 67 Here the speaker turns his earlier images of predator and prey around, describing himself as “a huntsman after weary chace” having given “long pursuit and vaine assay” (lilines 1 and 5). His beloved, now a “gentle deare” (line 7) seeks to “quench her thirst at the next brooke” (line 8) and, catching sight of the hunter, surrenders herself to him “till I in hand her yet halfe trmbling tooke,’and with her owne goodwill hir fiyrmely tyde” (lines 12-13). He stands amazed at her willing surrender to him, “to see a beast so wyld,/so goodly wonne with her owne will beguyld” (lines 13-14). He rejoices that she has surrendered to him, but is mystified (and perhaps further pleased) that she has done it not under duress, but of her own free will.

Sonnet 68 Another holiday sonnet, this one commemorates the day that the “Most glorious Lord of lyfe…Didst make thy triumph ouer death and sin” (lines 1-2): Easter Sunday. He asks his “deare Lord” to “Grant that we for whom thou didest dye” may live “foreuer in felicity” (lines 5-8). Even this day set aside for commemorating the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead (signaling God’s triumph over sin and death) is commandeered by the poet to seek the blessing of a happy life for himself and his beloved. He then turns his words toward his beloved, urging her “let vs loue, deare loue, lyke as we ought,/loue is the lesson which the Lord vs taught” (lines 13-14).

Analysis of Sonnets 58 through 85

This set of sonnets continues to express and explore the ongoing struggle of the speaker in dealing with an unresponsive beloved. He reiterates previous motifs, such as the battle and the contrast of fire and ice. He also introduces another motif of analogies: predator and prey. The beloved is the hunting beast, ferocious and bloody, while the suitor is her prey, helpless and--in one case--submissive to her attack. He knows he will be devoured; he wants only to stay the pain in favor of a quick kill.   The speaker also voices desperation at his beloved's enduring indifference to his love. He goes so far as to seek solace in the fact that she continues to torment him with rejection: if she continues to speak to him, even negatively, it is perhaps because she cannot resist interaction with him. On this increasingly precarious ground the speaker stands, desperate to squeeze some hope out of his miserable plight.     Despite the threat of sorrow, this section of the sonnet cycle does take a turn for the better. The speaker has won the hand of this beloved and is eager to set a wedding-date. His former criticism of her cruelty and pride are all but gone--even her pride becomes a source of admiration rather than frustration for the speaker, to the point that he defends her seeming haughtiness as a misperception based in the envy of her critics. He also reverses two major motifs: the predator-prey motif and the battle motif.     The predator and prey image changes to the speaker-as-hunter and the beloved-as-exhausted-deer, finally accepting her inevitable capture. The battle motif sees the suitor in the role of victor, with the beloved a vanquished and submissive captive. Both give higher place to the suitor than previous sonnets, but also insist that he will be a merciful winner (unlike the beloved) and there will be lasting peace between the two of them.

Analysis of Sonnets 86 through 89

In keeping with the sonnet-cycle convention, Spenser here introduces an element of loss into the relationship between the lover and his beloved. Hinting that it is some terribly lie that has angered her and caused her to leave, the speaker spends the remaining sonnets mourning the absence of the beloved. It is significant that he sees her as absent rather than lost--the faint hope of the earliest sonnets has developed into a more firm belief that, though they are separated, the two will be together again in the future and their marriage finally come to pass.

Summary and Analysis of Final Stanzas

The final stanzas of ”“Amoretti””discuss Cupid's various antics as a way of examining the nature of love. Cupid is first mentioned as having urged the speaker, as a child, to reach into a beehive for the sweet honey within. The speaker did so, only to be stung by the bees while Cupid fled. Through this experience, the speaker is claiming to have learned that pleasure and pain go hand in hand, echoing the sentiments in the first section of “Amoretti”. Cupid's flight emphasizes the arbitrary nature of love and is developed further in these stanzas.   

The second section of stanzas absolves Cupid of some guilt. Here, Cupid is caught sleeping by Diane, goddess of the hunt. In an act of mischief, Diane switches one of Cupid's love-inducing arrows with one of her own deadly shafts. Cupid unknowingly pulls this arrow from his quiver when taking aim at the speaker, thus causing the speaker more pain than love.

Together, these first two sections emphasize the acute pain felt by an unrequited lover. Just as the suitor feels himself tormented by the lover in the earlier sonnets, here the speaker gives the cause of such pain--the abstract concept that love and harm are interconnected, or the arbitrary will of pernicious godlings.    

The third section of the final stanzas offers Cupid a chance to learn the results of his own actions. They focus almost entirely on an incident involving Cupid and Venus. As a child, Cupid is annoyed by a bee buzzing around him as he tries to rest.

His mother warns him to leave the bee alone, but Cupid instead impetuously grabs the bee in his hand. He is, of course, stung and releases the bee; his mother attempts to soothe him while teaching him a lesson: he has had no pity on many mortals whom his arrows have "stung," so perhaps he should show the same kindness to them that she is now showing to him. Cupid, however, misses the lesson entirely and goes on arbitrarily firing his arrows at mortals without thought for the consequences of unrequited love.

At the end of this section the speaker returns to himself as the target of Cupid's indifferent attentions, resigning himself to languish in unconsummated love until Cupid sees fit to end his suffering.

EDMUND SPENSER : “EPITHALAMION”

“Epithalamion” is an ode written by Edmund Spenser as a gift to his bride, Elizabeth Boyle, on their wedding day. The poem moves through the couples' wedding day, from the groom's impatient hours before dawn to the late hours of night after the husband and wife have consummated their marriage. Spenser is very methodical in his depiction of time as it passes, both in the accurate chronological sense and in the subjective sense of time as felt by those waiting in anticipation or fear.   As with most classically-inspired works, this ode begins with an invocation to the Muses to help the groom; however, in this case they are to help him awaken his bride, not create his poetic work. Then follows a growing procession of figures who attempt to bestir the bride from her bed. Once the sun has risen, the bride finally awakens and begins her procession to the bridal bower. She comes to the "temple" (the sanctuary of the church wherein she is to be formally married to the groom) and is wed, then a celebration ensues. Almost immediately, the groom wants everyone to leave and the day to shorten so that he may enjoy the bliss of his wedding night. Once the night arrives, however, the groom turns his thoughts toward the product of their union, praying to various gods that his new wife's womb might be fertile and give him multiple children.

Stanza 1 Summary The groom calls upon the muses to inspire him to properly sing the praises of his beloved bride. He claims he will sing to himself, "as Orpheus did for his own bride." As with most of the following stanzas, this stanza ends with the refrain "The woods shall to me answer and my Eccho ring."     

Analysis In the tradition of classical authors, the poet calls upon the muses to inspire him. Unlike many poets, who called upon a single muse, Spenser here calls upon all the muses, suggesting his subject requires the full range of mythic inspiration. The reference to Orpheus is an allusion to that hero's luring of his bride's spirit from the realm of the dead using his beautiful music; the groom, too, hopes to awaken his bride from her slumber, leading her into the light of their wedding day.  

Stanza 2 Summary Before the break of day, the groom urges the muses to head to his beloved's bower, there to awaken her. Hymen, god of marriage, is already awake, and so too should the bride arise. The groom urges the muses to remind his bride that this is her wedding day, an occasion that will return her great delight for all the "paynes and sorrowes past."   

Analysis Another classical figure, Hymen, is invoked here, and not for the last time. If the god of marriage is ready, and the groom is ready, then he expects his bride to make herself ready as well. The focus is on the sanctity of the wedding day--this occasion itself should urge the bride to come celebrate it as early as possible. Here it is the marriage ceremony, not the bride (or the groom) which determines what is urgent.    

Stanza 3 Summary The groom instructs the muses to summon all the nymphs they can to accompany them to the bridal chamber. On their way, they are to gather all the fragrant flowers they can and decorate the path leading from the "bridal bower," where the marriage ceremony is to take place, to the door of the bride's chambers. If they do so, she will tread nothing but flowers on her procession from her rooms to the site of the wedding. As they adorn her doorway with flowers, their song will awaken the bride.     

Analysis This celebration of Christian matrimony here becomes firmly entrenched in the classical mythology of the Greeks with the summoning of the nymphs. No more pagan image can be found than these nature-spirits strewing the ground with various flowers to make a path of beauty from the bride's bedchamber to the bridal bower. Although Spenser will later develop the Protestant marriage ideals, he has chosen to greet the wedding day morning with the spirits of ancient paganism instead.     

Stanza 4 Summary Addressing the various nymphs of other natural locales, the groom asks that they tend to their specialties to make the wedding day perfect. The nymphs who tend the ponds and lakes should make sure the water is clear and unmolested by lively fish, that they may see their own reflections in it and so best prepare themselves to be seen by the bride. The nymphs of the mountains and woods, who keep deer safe from ravening wolves, should exercise their skills in keeping these selfsame wolves away from the bride this wedding day. Both groups are to be present to help decorate the wedding site with their beauty.       

Analysis Here Spenser further develops the nymph-summoning of Stanza 3. That he focuses on the two groups' abilities to prevent disturbances hints that he foresaw a chance of some misfortune attending the wedding. Whether this is conventional "wedding day jitters" or a more politically-motivated concern over the problem of Irish uprisings is uncertain, but the wolves mentioned would come from the forests--the same place Irish resistance groups use to hide their movements and strike at the occupying English with impunity.

Stanza 5 Summary The groom now addresses his bride directly (even if she is not present) to urge her to awaken. Sunrise is long since gone and Phoebus, the sun-god, is showing "his glorious hed." The birds are already singing, and the groom insists their song is a call to joy directed at the bride.    

Analysis The mythical figures of Rosy Dawn, Tithones, and Phoebus are here invoked to continue the classical motif of the ode. Thus far, it is indistinguishable in content from a pagan wedding-song. That the groom must address his bride directly demonstrates both his impatience and the ineffectiveness of relying on the muses and nymphs to summon forth the bride.      

Stanza 6 Summary The bride has finally awakened, and her eyes likened to the sun wit their "goodly beams/More bright then Hesperus." The groom urges the "daughters of delight" to attend to the bride, but summons too the Hours of Day and Night, the Seasons, and the "three handmayds" of Venus to attend as well. He urges the latter to do for his bride what they do for Venus, sing to her as they help her dress for her wedding.     

Analysis There is a second sunrise here as the "darksome cloud" is removed from the bride's visage and her eyes are allowed to shine in all their glory. The "daughters of delight" are the nymphs, still urged to attend on the bride, but here Spenser introduces the personifications of time in the hours that make up Day, Night, and the seasons. He will return to this time motif later, but it is important to note that here he sees time itself participating as much in the marriage ceremony as do the nymphs and handmaids of Venus.        

Stanza 7 Summary The bride is ready with her attendant virgins, so now it is time for the groomsmen and the groom himself to prepare. The groom implores the sun to shine brightly, but not hotly lest it burn his bride's fair skin. He then prays to Phoebus, who is both sun-god and originator of the arts, to give this one day of the year to him while keeping the rest for himself. He offers to exchange his own poetry as an offering for this great favor.     

Analysis The theme of light as both a sign of joy and an image of creative prowess begins to be developed here, as the groom addresses Phoebus. Spenser refers again to his own poetry as a worthy offering to the god of poetry and the arts, which he believes has earned him the favor of having this one day belong to himself rather than to the sun-god.         

Stanza 8 Summary The mortal wedding guests and entertainment move into action. The minstrels play their music and sing, while women play their timbrels and dance. Young boys run throughout the streets crying the wedding song "Hymen io Hymen, Hymen" for all to hear. Those hearing the cries applaud the boys and join in with the song.     Analysis Spenser shifts to the real-world participants in the wedding ceremony, the entertainment and possible guests. He describes a typical (if lavish) Elizabethan wedding complete with elements harking back to classical times. The boys' song "Hymen io Hymen, Hymen" can be traced back to Greece, with its delivery by Gaius Valerius Catullus in the first century B.C.

Stanza 9 Summary The groom beholds his bride approaching and compares her to Phoebe (another name for Artemis, goddess of the moon) clad in white "that seemes a virgin best." He finds her white attire so appropriate that she seems more angel than woman. In modesty, she avoids the gaze of the myriad admirers and blushes at the songs of praise she is receiving.     

Analysis This unusual stanza has a "missing line"-- a break after the ninth line of the stanza (line 156). The structure probably plays into Spenser's greater organization of lines and meter, which echo the hours of the day with great mathematical precision. There is no aesthetic reason within the stanza for the break, as it takes place three lines before the verses describing the bride's own reaction to her admirers.      

The comparison to Phoebe, twin sister of Phoebus, is significant since the groom has essentially bargained to take Phoebus' place of prominence this day two stanzas ago. He sees the bride as a perfect, even divine, counterpart to himself this day, as Day and Night are inextricably linked in the passage of time.       

Stanza 10 Summary The groom asks the women who see his bride if they have ever seen anyone so beautiful in their town before. He then launches into a list of all her virtues, starting with her eyes and eventually describing her whole body. The bride's overwhelming beauty causes the maidens to forget their song to stare at her.       

Analysis Spenser engages the blason convention, in which a woman's physical features are picked out and described in metaphorical terms. Unlike his blasons in “Amoretti”, this listing has no overarching connection among the various metaphors. Her eyes and forehead are described in terms of valuable items (sapphires and ivory), her cheeks and lips compared to fruit (apples and cherries), her breast is compared to a bolw of cream, her nipples to the buds of lilies, her neck to an ivory tower, and her whole body compared to a beautiful palace.        

Stanza 11 Summary The groom moves from the external beauty of the bride to her internal beauty, which he claims to see better than anyone else. He praises her lively spirit, her sweet love, her chastity, her faith, her honor, and her modesty. He insists that could her observers see her inner beauty, they would be far more awestruck by it than they already are by her outward appearance.     Analysis Although not a blason like the last stanza, this set of verses is nonetheless a catalogue of the bride's inner virtues. Spenser moves for a moment away from the emphasis on outward beauty so prominent in this ode and in pagan marriage ceremonies, turning instead to his other classical influence: Platonism. He describes the ideal woman, unsullied by fleshly weakness or stray thoughts. Could the attendants see her true beauty--her absolute beauty--they would be astonished like those who saw "Medusaes mazeful hed" and were turned to stone.          

Stanza 12 Summary The groom calls for the doors to the temple to be opened that his bride may enter in and approach the altar in reverence. He offers his bride as an example for the observing maidens to follow, for she approaches this holy place with reverence and humility.      Analysis Spenser shifts the imagery from that of a pagan wedding ceremony, in which the bride would be escorted to the groom's house for the wedding, to a Protestant one taking place in a church (although he describes it with the pre-Christian term "temple"). The bride enters in as a "Saynt" in the sense that she is a good Protestant Christian, and she approaches this holy place with the appropriate humility. No mention of Hymen or Phoebus is made; instead the bride approaches "before th' almighties vew." The minstrels have now become "Choristers" singing "praises of the Lord" to the accompaniment of organs.         

Stanza 13 Summary The bride stands before the altar as the priest offers his blessing upon her and upon the marriage. She blushes, causing the angels to forget their duties and encircle here, while the groom wonders why she should blush to give him her hand in marriage.      

Analysis Now firmly entrenched in the Christian wedding ceremony, the poem dwells upon the bride's reaction to the priest's blessing, and the groom's reaction to his bride's response. Her blush sends him toward another song about her beauty, but he hesitates to commit wholly to that. A shadow of doubt crosses his mind, as he describes her downcast eyes as "sad" and wonders why making a pledge to marry him should make her blush.

Stanza 14 Summary The Christian part of the wedding ceremony is over, and the groom asks that the bride to be brought home again and the celebration to start. He calls for feasting and drinking, turning his attention from the "almighty" God of the church to the "God Bacchus," Hymen, and the Graces.    

Analysis Spenser slips easily (perhaps even hastily) away from teh Protestant wedding ceremony back to the pagan revelries. Forgotten is the bride's humility at the altar of the Christian God; instead he crowns Bacchus, god of wine and revelry, and Hymen was requesting the Graces to dance. Now he wants to celebrate his "triumph" with wine "poured out without restraint or stay" and libations to the aforementioned gods. He considers this day to be holy for himself, perhaps seeing it as an answer to his previous imprecation to Phoebus that this day belong to him alone.

Stanza 15 Summary The groom reiterates his affirmation that this day is holy and calls everyone to celebrate in response to the ringing bells. He exults that the sun is so bright and the day so beautiful, then changes his tone to regret as he realize his wedding is taking place on the summer solstice, the longest day of the year, and so his nighttime nuptial bliss will be delayed all the longer, yet last only briefly.    

Analysis By identifying the exact day of the wedding (the summer solstice, June 20), Spenser allows the reader to fit this poetic description of the ceremony into a real, historical context. As some critics have noted, a timeline of the day superimposed over the verse structure of the entire ode produces an accurate, line-by-line account of the various astronomical events (sunrise, the position of the stars, sunset).       

Stanza 16 Summary The groom continues his frustrated complaint that the day is too long, but grows hopeful as at long last the evening begins its arrival. Seeing the evening start in the East, he addresses is as "Fayre childe of beauty, glorious lampe of loue," urging it to come forward and hasten the time for the newlyweds to consummate their marriage.       

Analysis Again focused on time, the speaker here is able to draw hope from the approach of twilight. He is eager to be alone with his bride, and so invokes the evening star to lead the bride and groom to their bedchamber. 

Stanza 17 Summary The groom urges the singers and dancers to leave the wedding, but take the bride to her bed as they depart. He is eager to be alone with his bride, and compares the sight of her lying in bed to that of Maia, the mountain goddess with whom Zeus conceived Hermes.    

Analysis The comparison to Zeus and Maia is significant in that it foreshadows another desire of the groom, procreation. Besides being eager to make love to his new bride, the speaker is also hoping to conceive a child. According to legend and tradition, a child conceived on the summer solstice would grow into prosperity and wisdom, so the connection to the specific day of the wedding cannot be ignored.           

Stanza 18 Summary Night has come at last, and the groom asks Night to cover and protect them. He makes another comparison to mythology, this time Zeus' affair with Alcmene and his affair with Night herself.     

Analysis Here again Spenser uses a classical allusion to Zeus, mentioning not only the woman with whom Zeus had relations, but also their offspring. Alcmene was a daughter of Pleiades and, through Zeus, became the mother of Hercules. The focus has almost shifted away from the bride or the act of consummation to the potential child that may come of this union.          

Stanza 19 Summary The groom prays that no evil spirits or bad thoughts would reach the newlyweds this night. The entire stanza is a list of possible dangers he pleads to leave them alone.        Analysis At the moment the bride and groom are finally alone, the speaker shifts into an almost hysterical litany of fears and dreads. From false whispers and doubts, he declines into superstitious fear of witches, "hob Goblins," ghosts, and vultures, among others. Although some of these night-terrors have analogs in Greek mythology, many of them come from the folklore of the Irish countryside. Spenser reminds himself and his readers that, as a landed Englishman on Irish soil, there is danger yet present for him, even on his wedding night.        

Stanza 20 Summary The groom bids silence to prevail and sleep to come when it is the proper time. Until then, he encourages the "hundred little winged loues" to fly about the bed. These tiny Cupids are to enjoy themselves as much as possible until daybreak.       

Analysis The poet turns back to enjoying his beloved bride, invoking the "sonnes of Venus" to play throughout the night. While he recognizes that sleep can and must come eventually, he hopes to enjoy these "little loves" with his bride as much as possible.     

Stanza 21 Summary The groom notices Cinthia, the moon, peering through his window and prays to her for a favorable wedding night. He specifically asks that she make his bride's "chaste womb" fertile this night.   

Analysis Spenser continues his prayer for conception, this time addressing Cinthia, the moon. He asks her to remember her own love of the "Latmian shephard" Endymion--a union that eventually produced fifty daughters, the phases of the moon. He specifically calls a successful conception "our comfort," placing his emotional emphasis upon the fruit of the union above the act of union itself. The impatient lover of the earlier stanzas has become the would-be father looking for completion in a future generation.        

Stanza 22 Summary The groom adds more deities to his list of patron. He asks Juno, wife of Zeus and goddess of marriage, to make their union strong and sacred, then turns her attention toward making it fruitful. So, too, he asks Hebe and Hymen to do the same for them.     

Analysis While asking Juno to bless the marriage, the speaker cannot refrain from asking for progeny. So, too, he invokes Hebe (goddess of youth) and Hymen to make their wedding night one of fortunate conception as well as wedded bliss. While he does return to the hope or prayer that the marriage will remain pure, the speaker still places conception as the highest priority of the night.        

Stanza 23 Summary The groom utters and all-encompassing prayer to all the gods in the heavens, that they might bless this marriage. He asks them to give him "large posterity" that he may raise up generations of followers to ascend to the heavens in praise of the gods. He then encourages his bride to rest in hope of their becoming parents.       

Analysis Spenser brings this ode to a major climax, calling upon all the gods in the heavens to bear witness and shower their blessings upon the couple. He states in no uncertain terms that the blessing he would have is progeny--he wishes nothing other than to have a child from this union. In typical pagan bargaining convention, the speaker assures the gods that if they give him children, these future generations will venerate the gods and fill the earth with "Saints."    

Stanza 24 Summary The groom addresses his song with the charge to be a "goodly ornament" for his bride, whom he feels deserves many physical adornments as well. Time was too short to procure these outward decorations for his beloved, so the groom hopes his ode will be an "endlesse moniment" to her.   

Analysis Spenser follows Elizabeth convention in returning to a self-conscious meditation upon his ode itself. He asks that this ode, which he is forced to give her in place of the many ornaments which his bride should have had, will become an altogether greater adornment for her. He paradoxically asks that it be "for short time" and "endless" monument for her, drawing the reader's attention back to the contrast between earthly time, which eventually runs out, and eternity, which lasts forever in a state of perfection.

What is the effect of Spenser's repeated use of predator and prey imagery?  By comparing his relationship to his beloved with that of a predatory animal to its prey, he first casts his beloved in a negative light; she is a dangerous creature taking pleasure in hurting her prey to suit her own ravenous appetite. The prey image for the speaker places him in a passive position, reversing the real-world relationship between himself as suitor and his beloved as recipient of his amorous attentions. By casting himself as the prey, the speaker simultaneously takes on the innocence and helplessness of a prey animal, thus gaining the reader's sympathy, and jars the reader with an unexpected description of the woman's beauty as being both dangerous and harmful to those who behold it.

Why does the speaker compare his beloved to marble, rock, and other similar substances? The speaker is frustrated that his efforts seem to be having no effect on his beloved's attitude. He fears she is harder even than stone, but holds on the the faint hope that, as erosion eventually wears down the rocks, so too his own persistence will wear down her resistance. He also encourages himself with the belief that those things which are hardest won are most worthy of the effort, just as a sculptor toils for a long time in marble to create an image of permanent beauty.

What personal strengths does the speaker attribute to himself?     The speaker's primary positive self-identification is that of poet. Despite his waning self-confidence in light of his beloved's repeated rejections, he often returns to his faith that he is a skilled enough writer of verse to properly immortalize his beloved. Other arts cannot capture what his words can describe, and even his beloved's physical form will undergo decay--but the speaker's ability to record her virtues for posterity give him a special strength to offer his beloved and the world at large.

What is the effect of the battle and war motifs used in ”Amoretti”? By depicting his courtship of the beloved in terms of combat, the speaker evokes the violence and pain inherent in such conflicts. He usually places his beloved in the role of attacker and victor, and himself as the defencer and captive. Through these images, the suitor conveys the overpowering beauty of his beloved, as well as his own helplessness in the face of her majesty.

There is irony here as well, since the battle images refer to the beloved as the aggressor, while in reality the suitor is the one subjecting his beloved to a barrage of romantic overtures. By turning the reality on its head, the speaker manages to gain the reader's sympathy as well as depict how awe-inspiring his beloved truly is--he has no choice but to constantly appeal to her to accept his proposal, for her loveliness and strength of character make him helpless to resist.

What mixed attitude toward love does Spenser express in ”Amoretti”?   While he is overwhelmed by his love for the woman, he finds the power her merest glance has over him disturbing at times. He sees her charms as an active, agressive force drawing him to her, yet her rejection of his amorous overtures as a possible sign of perverse cruelty on her part. He gives no indication that he would rather not be in love with the woman, nor does he falter in his dedication solely to her, but he does often believe (if not hope) that his unrequited love will end in his own death.

How is the passage of time prominent in Epithalamion?     The ode begins before dawn and traces the passage of the bride and groom's wedding day through to their joyous union that night. The sun, moon, and other celestial bodies are addressed, alluded to, or invoked to signal the time of day; similarly, the detailed progression of the wedding ceremony from calling the bride forth through the groomsmen leading the groom to the bridal chamber detail the progression through the religious and civil ceremonies that mark the couples' progression from individuals to "one flesh." Time is also referred to as subjective, such as when the groom asks that the long-seeming daytime would speed by while the night hours would lengthen for the happy newlyweds.

How does Spenser mix pagan, Christian, and local lore in Epithalamion?   Pagan images dominate Epithalamion, from the initial invocation of the Muses to the final prayer to all the gods of the heavens. The wedding is couched almost entirely in classical Greek terms, with the pre-eminent divinity being Hymen, the ancient Greek god of marriage. Christian imagery enters in briefly, twice with the mention of "angels" and once--at the precise moment of the wedding ceremony proper--when the couple kneels at the altar of the "almighty Lord." A priest (presumably Christian) gives the blessing upon the couple, and it is after this stanza that the groom considers his bride to be his wife. The Irish countryside, along with lending itself to the setting of the ode, also provides several instances of local folklore to color the day: the wolves in the woods and the witches and hobgoblins haunting the night, for example.

How does the groom's goals seem to change over the course of Epithalamion?    At first, the groom wants his bride to awaken to enjoy this beautiful day set for their wedding. He dwells upon Phoebus, the sun-god, even going so far as to ask the god to sanctify this day to the groom himself (while keeping all the other days sacred to Phoebus). Soon it is clear, however, that the groom wants the day to pass so he may get to his wedding night and enjoy the conjugal bliss it will bring. Once night falls, however, and the groom has his bride upon their marriage bed, his focus shifts to making their union fruitful and her womb fertile.

How does the passage of time in Epithalamion parallel the stages of human life?     The ode begins before morning, with the speaker welcoming the day in childlike anticipation of a beautiful day better than any other. The speaker later becomes impatient with the day, longing for night to come and cover the couple as they love one another as man and wife. Once night has fallen, the speaker shifts to a longer view, imploring various gods to make this first union a fruitful one and the first of a long line of descendants. He has moved through the stages of life: childlike exuberance welcoming life simply to be lived, youthful ardor eager for martial bliss, and older wisdom seeking to secure its legacy in future generations.

What qualities make Epithalamion an ode? An ode is a serious poem addressing a subject of great importance to the speaker. In Epithalamion, Spenser discusses his wedding day as a sacred time, significant not just to himself and his bride, but also to the cosmos. The intertwining of the progression of morning to night, the invocation of classical deities, and the intimate yet public nature of the wedding lend the poem an air of importance even when revelry is called for by the groom. That the poem ends with the groom's desire for descendants who will ascend to heaven serves to give the wedding an almost apocalyptic significance, as it is part of the longer story of mankind's destiny and relationship with the powers of the universe.

ROBERT BROWNING: “CHILDE ROLAND TO THE DARK TOWER CAME”

Summary Published in the volume Men and Women, “Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came” takes its title and its inspiration from the song sung by Edgar in Shakespeare’s King Lear, when he pretends to be a madman. “Childe” is an archaic aristocratic title indicating a young man who has not yet been knighted. This particular young man is on a quest for the “Dark Tower”: what the tower’s significance is we do not know (perhaps it holds the Holy Grail). He wanders through a dark, marshy waste-land, filled with horrors and terrible noises. He thinks of home and old friends as he presses forward. Fighting discouragement and fear, he reaches the tower, where he sounds his horn, knowing as he does that his quest and his life have come to an end.

Form “Childe Roland” divides into six-line stanzas, mostly in irregularly stressed pentameter lines. The stanzas rhyme ABBAAB. Much of the language in this poem makes a rough, even unpoetic impression: it reflects the ugly scenery and hellish journey it discusses. Lines such as “In the dock’s harsh swarth leaves...” wind so contortedly that they nearly confound all attempts at reading them aloud. Both the rhyme scheme and the poem’s vocabulary suggest a deliberate archaicness, similar to some of Tennyson’s poems. However, unlike Tennyson’s poems, this poem recreates a medieval world that does not evoke pleasant fairy tales, but rather dark horrors.

Commentary Browning’s vision of the wasteland prefigures T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land and other works of high modernism. The barren plains symbolize the sterile, corrupted conditions of modern life. Although they are depopulated and remote, they serve as a stand-in for the city. Childe Roland hallucinates about dead comrades and imagines horrors that aren’t actually there: like the modern city, this place strains his psyche and provokes abnormal responses. Indeed, he has only arrived here by way of a malevolent guide: Roland’s first instinct is to think that the man is lying to him, but his lack of spiritual guidance and his general confusion lead him to accept the man’s directions.        

Childe Roland’s quest has no pertinence to the modern world, a fact evidenced by the fact that the young man has no one with whom to celebrate his success—in fact, no one will even know of it. In this way his journey speaks to the anonymity and isolation of the modern individual. The meaninglessness of Roland’s quest is reinforced by its origins: Childe Roland is not the creation of a genuine madman, but of a man (Edgar in Lear) who pretends to be mad to escape his half-brother’s murderous intentions. The inspiration for Browning’s poem thus springs from no sincere emotion, not even from genuine madness: it is a convenience and a folly, a sane man’s approximation of what madness might look like. The inspiration is an empty performance, just as the quest described here is an empty adventure.        

Much of the poem’s imagery references the storm scene in Lear from whence its inspiration comes. Shakespeare is, of course, the patriarch of all English literature, particularly poetry; but here Browning tries to work out his own relationship to the English literary tradition. He also tries to analyze the continued importance of canonical works in a much-changed modern world. (Via his reference to Shakespeare and to medieval themes, Browning places especial emphasis on these two eras of literature.) He suggests that while the Shakespearean and medieval modes still have aesthetic value, their cultural maintains a less certain relevance. That no one hears Roland’s horn or appreciates his deeds suggests cultural discontinuity: Roland has more in common with the heroes of the past than with his peers; he has nothing in common with Browning’s contemporaries except an overwhelming sense of futility. Indeed, the poem laments a meaninglessness so all-pervasive that even the idea of the wasteland cannot truly describe modern life or make a statement about that life; it is this sense of meaninglessness that dominates the poem.

ROBERT BROWNING: “FRA LIPPO LIPPI”

Summary “Fra Lippo Lippi,” another of Browning’s dramatic monologues, appeared in the1855 collection Men and Women. Fra (Brother) Lippo Lippi was an actual Florentine monk who lived in the fifteenth century. He was a painter of some renown, and Browning most probably gained familiarity with his works during the time he spent in Italy. “Fra Lippo Lippi” introduces us to the monk as he is being interrogated by some Medici watchmen, who have caught him out at night. Because Lippo’s patron is Cosimo de Medici, he has little to fear from the guards, but he has been out partying and is clearly in a mood to talk. He shares with the men the hardships of monastic life: he is forced to carry on his relationships with women in secret, and his superiors are always defeating his good spirits. But Lippo’s most important statements concern the basis of art: should art be realistic and true-to-life, or should it be idealistic and didactic? Should Lippo’s paintings of saints look like the Prior’s mistress and the men of the neighborhood, or should they evoke an otherworldly surreality? Which kind of art best serves religious purposes? Should art even serve religion at all? Lippo’s rambling speech touches on all of these issues.

Form “Fra Lippo Lippi” takes the form of blank verse—unrhymed lines, most of which fall roughly into iambic pentameter. As in much of his other poetry, Browning seeks to capture colloquial speech, and in many parts of the poem he succeeds admirably: Lippo includes outbursts, bits of songs, and other odds and ends in his rant. In his way Browning brilliantly captures the feel of a late-night, drunken encounter.

 Commentary The poem centers thematically around the discussion of art that takes place around line 180. Lippo has painted a group of figures that are the spitting image of people in the community: the Prior’s mistress, neighborhood men, etc. Everyone is amazed at his talent, and his great show of talent gains him his place at the monastery. However, his talent for depicting reality comes into conflict with the stated religious goals of the Church. The Church leadership believes that their parishioners will be distracted by the sight of people they know within the painting: as the Prior and his cohorts say, “ ‘Your business is not to catch men with show, / With homage to the perishable clay.../ Make them forget there’s such a thing as flesh. / Your business is to paint the souls of men.’ ” In part the Church authorities’ objections stem not from any real religious concern, but from a concern for their own reputation: Lippo has gotten a little too close to the truth with his depictions of actual persons as historical figures—the Prior’s “niece” (actually his mistress) has been portrayed as the seductive Salome. However, the conflict between Lippo and the Church elders also cuts to the very heart of questions about art: is the primary purpose of Lippo’s art—and any art—to instruct, or to delight? If it is to instruct, is it better to give men ordinary scenes to which they can relate, or to offer them celestial visions to which they can aspire? In his own art, Browning himself doesn’t seem to privilege either conclusion; his work demonstrates only a loose didacticism, and it relies more on carefully chosen realistic examples rather than either concrete portraits or abstractions. Both Fra Lippo’s earthly tableaux and the Prior’s preferred fantasias of “ ‘vapor done up like a new-born babe’ ” miss the mark. Lippo has no aspirations beyond simple mimesis, while the Prior has no respect for the importance of the quotidian. Thus the debate is essentially empty, since it does not take into account the power of art to move man in a way that is not intellectual but is rather aesthetic and emotional.       

Lippo’s statements about art are joined by his complaints about the monastic lifestyle. Lippo has not adopted this lifestyle by choice; rather, his parents’ early death left him an orphan with no choice but to join the monastery. Lippo is trapped between the ascetic ways of the monastery and the corrupt, fleshly life of his patrons the Medicis. Neither provides a wholly fulfilling existence. Like the kind of art he espouses, the Prior’s lifestyle does not take basic human needs into account. (Indeed, as we know, even the Prior finds his own precepts impossible to follow.) The anything-goes morality of the Medicis rings equally hollow, as it involves only a series of meaningless, hedonistic revels and shallow encounters. This Renaissance debate echoes the schism in Victorian society, where moralists and libertines opposed each other in fierce disagreement.

Browning seems to assert that neither side holds the key to a good life. Yet he concludes, as he does in other poems, that both positions, while flawed, can lead to high art: art has no absolute connection to morality.

ROBERT BROWNING: “PORPHYRIA’S LOVER”

Summary “Porphyria’s Lover,” which first appeared in 1836, is one of the earliest and most shocking of Browning’s dramatic monologues. The speaker lives in a cottage in the countryside. His lover, a blooming young woman named Porphyria, comes in out of a storm and proceeds to make a fire and bring cheer to the cottage. She embraces the speaker, offering him her bare shoulder. He tells us that he does not speak to her. Instead, he says, she begins to tell him how she has momentarily overcome societal strictures to be with him. He realizes that she “worship[s]” him at this instant. Realizing that she will eventually give in to society’s pressures, and wanting to preserve the moment, he wraps her hair around her neck and strangles her. He then toys with her corpse, opening the eyes and propping the body up against his side. He sits with her body this way the entire night, the speaker remarking that God has not yet moved to punish him.  

Form “Porphyria’s Lover,” while natural in its language, does not display the colloquialisms or dialectical markers of some of Browning’s later poems. Moreover, while the cadence of the poem mimics natural speech, it actually takes the form of highly patterned verse, rhyming ABABB. The intensity and asymmetry of the pattern suggests the madness concealed within the speaker’s reasoned self-presentation.         

This poem is a dramatic monologue—a fictional speech presented as the musings of a speaker who is separate from the poet. Like most of Browning’s other dramatic monologues, this one captures a moment after a main event or action. Porphyria already lies dead when the speaker begins. Just as the nameless speaker seeks to stop time by killing her, so too does this kind of poem seek to freeze the consciousness of an instant.   

Commentary “Porphyria’s Lover” opens with a scene taken straight from the Romantic poetry of the earlier nineteenth century. While a storm rages outdoors, giving a demonstration of nature at its most sublime, the speaker sits in a cozy cottage. This is the picture of rural simplicity—a cottage by a lake, a rosy-cheeked girl, a roaring fire. However, once Porphyria begins to take off her wet clothing, the poem leaps into the modern world. She bares her shoulder to her lover and begins to caress him; this is a level of overt sexuality that has not been seen in poetry since the Renaissance. We then learn that Porphyria is defying her family and friends to be with the speaker; the scene is now not just sexual, but transgressively so. Illicit sex out of wedlock presented a major concern for Victorian society; the famous Victorian “prudery” constituted only a backlash to what was in fact a popular obsession with the theme: the newspapers of the day reveled in stories about prostitutes and unwed mothers. Here, however, in “Porphyria’s Lover,” sex appears as something natural, acceptable, almost wholesome: Porphyria’s girlishness and affection take prominence over any hints of immorality.     

For the Victorians, modernity meant numbness: urban life, with its constant over-stimulation and newspapers full of scandalous and horrifying stories, immunized people to shock. Many believed that the onslaught of amorality and the constant assault on the senses could be counteracted only with an even greater shock. This is the principle Browning adheres to in “Porphyria’s Lover.” In light of contemporary scandals, the sexual transgression might seem insignificant; so Browning breaks through his reader’s probable complacency by having Porphyria’s lover murder her; and thus he provokes some moral or emotional reaction in his presumably numb audience. This is not to say that Browning is trying to shock us into condemning either Porphyria or the speaker for their sexuality; rather, he seeks to remind us of the disturbed condition of the modern psyche. In fact, “Porphyria’s Lover” was first published, along with another poem, under the title Madhouse Cells, suggesting that the conditions of the new “modern” world served to blur the line between “ordinary life”—for example, the domestic setting of this poem—and insanity—illustrated here by the speaker’s action.        

This poem, like much of Browning’s work, conflates sex, violence, and aesthetics. Like many Victorian writers, Browning was trying to explore the boundaries of sensuality in his work. How is it that society considers the beauty of the female body to be immoral while never questioning the morality of language’s sensuality—a sensuality often most manifest in poetry? Why does society see both sex and violence as transgressive? What is the relationship between the two? Which is “worse”? These are some of the questions that Browning’s poetry posits. And he typically does not offer any answers to them: Browning is no moralist, although he is no libertine either. As a fairly liberal man, he is confused by his society’s simultaneous embrace of both moral righteousness and a desire for sensation; “Porphyria’s Lover” explores this contradiction.

ROBERT BROWNING: “THE BISHOP ORDERS HIS TOMB AT SAINT PRAXED’S CHURCH”

Summary A fictional Renaissance bishop lies on his deathbed giving orders for the tomb that is to be built for him. He instructs his “nephews”—gperhaps a group of younger priests—on the materials and the design, motivated by a desire to outshine his predecessor Gandolf, whose final resting place he denounces as coarse and inferior. The poem hints that at least one of the “nephews” may be his son; in his ramblings he mentions a possible mistress, long since dead. The Bishop catalogues possible themes for his tomb, only to end with the realization that his instructions are probably futile: he will not live to ensure their realization, and his tomb will probably prove to be as much of a disappointment as Gandolf’s.    Although the poem’s narrator is a fictional creation, Saint Praxed’s Church refers to an actual place in Rome. It is dedicated to a martyred Roman virgin.

Form This poem, which appears in the 1845 volume Dramatic Romances and Lyrics,represents a stylistic departure for Browning. The Bishop speaks in iambic pentameter unrhymed lines—blank verse. Traditionally, blank verse was the favored form for dramatists, and many consider it the poetic form that best mimics natural speech in English. Gone are the subtle yet powerful rhyme schemes of “Soliloquy of the Spanish Cloister” or “My Last Duchess.” The Bishop, an earthly, businesslike man, does not try to aestheticize his speech. The new form owes not only to the speaker’s earthy personality, but also his situation: he is also dying, and momentary aesthetic considerations have given way to a fervent desire to create a more lasting aesthetic monument.

Commentary Poetry has always concerned itself with immortality and posterity. Shakespeare’s sonnets, for example, repeatedly discuss the possibility of immortalizing one’s beloved by writing a poem about him or her. Here, the Bishop shares the poet’s drive to ensure his own life after death by creating a work of art that will continue to capture the attention of those still living. He has been contemplating the issue for some time, as shown by his discussion of Gandolf’s usurpation of his chosen burial spot. His preparation has spanned years: he reveals that he has secreted away various treasures to be used in the monument’s construction, including a lump of lapis lazuli he has buried in a vineyard. The discussion as a whole reveals a fascinating attitude toward life and death: we come to see that the Bishop has spent so much of his time on earth preparing not for his salvation and afterlife, but for the construction of an earthly reminder of his existence. This suggests that the Bishop lacks religious conviction: if he were a true Christian, the thought of an eternal life in Heaven after his death would preclude his tomb-building efforts. Obviously, too, the Bishop does not expect to be remembered for his leadership or good deeds. And yet the monument he plans will be a work of magnificent art. Thus, as a whole, the poem reminds us that often the most beautiful art results from the most corrupt motives. Again, coming to this conclusion, Browning prefigures writers like Oscar Wilde, who made more explicit claims for the separation of art and morality.      

Despite the Bishop’s rough speech and dying gasps, this poem achieves great beauty. Part of this beauty lies in its attention to detail and the cataloguing of the various semiprecious stones that are to line the tomb. Natural history provided endless fascination for the Victorians, and the psyche of the period gave special prominence to the notion of collecting. Collecting offers a way to gather together objects of beauty without necessarily having to involve oneself in the act of creation. Instead, the collector can just gather bits of nature’s—or God’s—handiwork. Indeed, this notion of collecting provides an analog for Browning’s employment of dramatic monologues like this one: in their way, they resemble found objects, the speeches of characters he has just “stumbled across.” The poems are thus neither moral nor immoral; they just are. By taking such an attitude Browning may be trying to move beyond speculations on the moral dangers of modern, city-centered life, focusing more on anthropological than philosophical or religious aspects of existence.        

The poem ends with the Bishop’s vision of his corpse’s decay. The image hints at an underlying commonality of experience, a commonality more fundamental than any social power structures or aesthetic ambitions. While the notion of death as an equalizer may seem nihilistic, it can also prove liberating; for indeed, it relieves the Bishop, and implicitly Browning, of the burden of posterity.

Why is Browning so interested in the Renaissance?  

The Renaissance saw a major shift in theories of art. As “Fra Lippo Lippi” discusses, a new realism, based on observation and detail, was coming to be valued, while traditional, more abstract and more didactic forms of art were losing favor. This shifting in priorities is analogous to the shifting views on art and morality in Browning’s time. The Renaissance, like the Victorian era, was also a time of increasing secularism  and concentration of wealth and power (“My Last Duchess”. All of these aspects make the Renaissance and the Victorian era rather similar. By talking about the Renaissance, Browning can make his cultural criticism somewhat less biting. He also gains access to a wealth of sensuous detail and historical reference, which he can then use to add vibrancy to his verse. The historical connection, furthermore, lets him talk about his place in the literary tradition: if we still appreciate Renaissance art, hopefully future generations will still appreciate Browning’s poetry.

Think about how Browning uses language. What kinds of meter and other poetic forms does he use? Why is his language so often rough and “un-poetic”?       

Browning aspires to redefine the aesthetic. The rough language of his poems often matches the personalities of his speakers. Browning uses colloquialisms, inarticulate sounds (like “Grr”), and rough meter to portray inner conflict and to show characters living in the real world. In his earlier poems this kind of speech often accompanies patterned rhyme schemes; “My Last Duchess,” for example, uses rhymed couplets. The disjunction between form and content or form and language suggests some of the conflict being described in the poems, whether the conflict is between two moral contentions or is a conflict between aesthetics and ethics as systems. Browning’s rough meters and unpoetic language test a new range for the aesthetic.

Why is there so much violence against women in Browning’s poetry? What symbolic purpose might it serve?       

Women, particularly for the Victorians, symbolize the home—the repository of traditional values. Their violent death can stand in for the death of society. The women in Browning’s poetry in particular are often depicted as sexually open: this may show that society has transformed so radically that even the domestic, the traditional, has been altered and corrupted. This violence also suggests the struggle between aesthetics and morals in Victorian art: while women typically serve as symbols of values (the moral education offered by the mother, the purity of one who stays within the confines of the home and remains untainted by the outside world), they also represent traditional foci for the aesthetic (in the form of sensual physical beauty); the conflict between the two is potentially explosive. Controlling and even destroying women is a way to try to prevent such explosions, to preserve a society that has already changed beyond recognition.

SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE: “DEJECTION: AN ODE”

Summary The speaker recalls a poem that tells the tale of Sir Patrick Spence: In this poem, the moon takes on a certain strange appearance that presages the coming of a storm. The speaker declares that if the author of the poem possessed a sound understanding of weather, then a storm will break on this night as well, for the moon looks now as it did in the poem. The speaker wishes ardently for a storm to erupt, for the violence of the squall might cure his numb feeling. He says that he feels only a ‘dull pain,” “a grief without a pang”—a constant deadening of all his feelings. Speaking to a woman whom he addresses as “O Lady,” he admits that he has been gazing at the western sky all evening, able to see its beauty but unable fully to feel it. He says that staring at the green sky will never raise his spirits, for no “outward forms” can generate feelings: Emotions can only emerge from within.     

According to the speaker, “we receive but what we give”: the soul itself must provide the light by which we may hope to see nature’s true beauty—a beauty not given to the common crowd of human beings (“the poor loveless ever-anxious crowd”). Calling the Lady “pure of heart,” the speaker says that she already knows about the light and music of the soul, which is Joy. Joy, he says, marries us to nature, thereby giving us “a new Earth and new Heaven, / Undreamt of by the sensual and the proud.”       

The speaker insists that there was a time when he was full of hope, when every tribulation was simply the material with which “fancy made me dreams of happiness.” But now his afflictions press him to the earth; he does not mind the decline of his mirth, but he cannot bear the corresponding degeneration of his imagination, which is the source of his creativity and his understanding of the human condition, that which enables him to construct “from my own nature all the natural man.” Hoping to escape the “viper thoughts” that coil around his mind, the speaker turns his attention to the howling wind that has begun to blow. He thinks of the world as an instrument played by a musician, who spins out of the wind a “worse than wintry song.” This melody first calls to mind the rush of an army on the field; quieting, it then evokes a young girl, lost and alone.     

 It is midnight, but the speaker has “small thoughts” of sleep. However, he hopes that his friend the Lady will be visited by “gentle Sleep” and that she will wake with joyful thoughts and “light heart.” Calling the Lady the “friend devoutest of my choice,” the speaker wishes that she might “ever, evermore rejoice.”               

Form The long ode stanzas of “Dejection” are metered in iambic lines ranging in length from trimeter to pentameter. The rhymes alternate between bracketed rhymes (ABBA) and couplets (CC) with occasional exceptions.     

Commentary In this poem, Coleridge continues his sophisticated philosophical exploration of the relationship between man and nature, positing as he did in “The Nightingale” that human feelings and the forms of nature are essentially separate. Just as the speaker insisted in the earlier poem that the nightingale’s song should not be called melancholy simply because it sounded so to a melancholy poet, he insists here that the beauty of the sky before the storm does not have the power to fill him with joy, for the source of human feeling is within. Only when the individual has access to that source, so that joy shines from him like a light, is he able to see the beauty of nature and to respond to it. (As in “Frost in Midnight,” the city-raised Coleridge insists on a sharper demarcation between the mind and nature than the country-raised Wordsworth would ever have done.)           

Coleridge blames his desolate numbness for sapping his creative powers and leaving him without his habitual method of understanding human nature. Despite his insistence on the separation between the mind and the world, Coleridge nevertheless continues to find metaphors for his own feelings in nature: His dejection is reflected in the gloom of the night as it awaits the storm.      

“Dejection” was written in 1802 but was originally drafted in the form of a letter to Sara Hutchinson, the woman Coleridge loved. The much longer original version of the poem contained many of the same elements as “The Nightingale” and “Frost at Midnight,” including the same meditation on his children and their natural education. This version also referred explicitly to “Sara” (replaced in the later version by “Lady”) and “William” (a clear reference to Wordsworth). Coleridge’s strict revision process shortened and tightened the poem, depersonalizing it, but the earlier draft hints at just how important the poem’s themes were to Coleridge personally and indicates that the feelings expressed were the poet’s true beliefs about his own place in the world.

A side note: The story of Sir Patrick Spence, to which the poet alludes in the first stanza, is an ancient Scottish ballad about a sailor who drowns with a boatload of Scottish noblemen, sailing on orders from the king but against his own better judgment. It contains lines that refer to the moon as a predictor of storms, which Coleridge quotes as an epigraph for his ode: “Late, late yestreen I saw the new Moon / With the old Moon in her arms; / And I fear, I fear, my Master dear! / We shall have a deadly storm.”

SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE: “KUBLA KHAN”

Summary  The speaker describes the “stately pleasure-dome” built in Xanadu according to the decree of Kubla Khan, in the place where Alph, the sacred river, ran “through caverns measureless to man / Down to a sunless sea.” Walls and towers were raised around “twice five miles of fertile ground,” filled with beautiful gardens and forests. A “deep romantic chasm” slanted down a green hill, occasionally spewing forth a violent and powerful burst of water, so great that it flung boulders up with it “like rebounding hail.” The river ran five miles through the woods, finally sinking “in tumult to a lifeless ocean.” Amid that tumult, in the place “as holy and enchanted / As e’er beneath a waning moon was haunted / By woman wailing to her demon-lover,” Kubla heard “ancestral voices” bringing prophesies of war. The pleasure-dome’s shadow floated on the waves, where the mingled sounds of the fountain and the caves could be heard. “It was a miracle of rare device,” the speaker says, “A sunny pleasure-dome with caves of ice!”        

The speaker says that he once saw a “damsel with a dulcimer,” an Abyssinian maid who played her dulcimer and sang “of Mount Abora.” He says that if he could revive “her symphony and song” within him, he would rebuild the pleasure-dome out of music, and all who heard him would cry “Beware!” of “His flashing eyes, his floating hair!” The hearers would circle him thrice and close their eyes with “holy dread,” knowing that he had tasted honeydew, “and drunk the milk of Paradise.”      

Form The chant-like, musical incantations of “Kubla Khan” result from Coleridge’s masterful use of iambic tetrameter and alternating rhyme schemes. The first stanza is written in tetrameter with a rhyme scheme of ABAABCCDEDE, alternating between staggered rhymes and couplets. The second stanza expands into tetrameter and follows roughly the same rhyming pattern, also expanded— ABAABCCDDFFGGHIIHJJ. The third stanza tightens into tetrameter and rhymes ABABCC. The fourth stanza continues the tetrameter of the third and rhymes ABCCBDEDEFGFFFGHHG.                 

Commentary  Along with “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” “Kubla Khan” is one of Coleridge’s most famous and enduring poems. The story of its composition is also one of the most famous in the history of English poetry. As the poet explains in the short preface to this poem, he had fallen asleep after taking “an anodyne” prescribed “in consequence of a slight disposition” (this is a euphemism for opium, to which Coleridge was known to be addicted). Before falling asleep, he had been reading a story in which Kubla Khan commanded the building of a new palace; Coleridge claims that while he slept, he had a fantastic vision and composed simultaneously—while sleeping—some two or three hundred lines of poetry, “if that indeed can be called composition in which all the images rose up before him as things, with a parallel production of the correspondent expressions, without any sensation or conscious effort.”

Waking after about three hours, the poet seized a pen and began writing furiously; however, after copying down the first three stanzas of his dreamt poem—the first three stanzas of the current poem as we know it—he was interrupted by a “person on business from Porlock,” who detained him for an hour. After this interruption, he was unable to recall the rest of the vision or the poetry he had composed in his opium dream. It is thought that the final stanza of the poem, thematizing the idea of the lost vision through the figure of the “damsel with a dulcimer” and the milk of Paradise, was written post-interruption. The mysterious person from Porlock is one of the most notorious and enigmatic figures in Coleridge’s biography; no one knows who he was or why he disturbed the poet or what he wanted or, indeed, whether any of Coleridge’s story is actually true. But the person from Porlock has become a metaphor for the malicious interruptions the world throws in the way of inspiration and genius, and “Kubla Khan,” strange and ambiguous as it is, has become what is perhaps the definitive statement on the obstruction and thwarting of the visionary genius.

Regrettably, the story of the poem’s composition, while thematically rich in and of itself, often overshadows the poem proper, which is one of Coleridge’s most haunting and beautiful. The first three stanzas are products of pure imagination: The pleasure-dome of Kubla Khan is not a useful metaphor for anything in particular (though in the context of the poem’s history, it becomes a metaphor for the unbuilt monument of imagination); however, it is a fantastically prodigious descriptive act. The poem becomes especially evocative when, after the second stanza, the meter suddenly tightens; the resulting lines are terse and solid, almost beating out the sound of the war drums (“The shadow of the dome of pleasure / Floated midway on the waves...”).

The fourth stanza states the theme of the poem as a whole (though “Kubla Khan” is almost impossible to consider as a unified whole, as its parts are so sharply divided). The speaker says that he once had a vision of the damsel singing of Mount Abora; this vision becomes a metaphor for Coleridge’s vision of the 300-hundred-line masterpiece he never completed. The speaker insists that if he could only “revive” within him “her symphony and song,” he would recreate the pleasure-dome out of music and words, and take on the persona of the magician or visionary. His hearers would recognize the dangerous power of the vision, which would manifest itself in his “flashing eyes” and “floating hair.” But, awestruck, they would nonetheless dutifully take part in the ritual, recognizing that “he on honey-dew hath fed, / And drunk the milk of Paradise.”

Coleridge writes frequently about children, but, unlike other Romantic poets, he writes about his own children more often than he writes about himself as a child. With particular reference to “Frost at Midnight” and “The Nightingale,” how can Coleridge’s attitude toward children best be characterized? How does this attitude relate to his larger ideas of nature and the imagination?          

Like Wordsworth, Coleridge is wholly convinced of the beauty and desirability of the individual’s connection with nature. Unlike Wordsworth, however, Coleridge does not seem to believe that the child automatically enjoys this privileged connection. The child’s unity with the natural world is not innate; it is fragile and can be stunted or destroyed; for example, if a child grows up in the city, as Coleridge did, his idea of natural loveliness will be quite limited (in Coleridge’s case, it is limited to the night sky, as he describes in “Frost at Midnight”). Coleridge fervently hopes that his children will enjoy a childhood among the beauties of nature, which will nurture their imaginations (by giving to their spirits, it will make their spirits ask for more) and shape their souls.

Many of Coleridge’s poems—including “Frost at Midnight,” “The Nightingale,” and “Dejection: An Ode”—achieve their effect through the evocation of a dramatic scene in which the speaker himself is situated. How does Coleridge describe a scene simply by tracing his speaker’s thoughts? How does he imbue the scene with a sense of immediacy?     

Coleridge utilizes simple and efficient methods to sketch his scenes—in “Frost at Midnight,” for instance, he opens his poem with his speaker explicitly contemplating the scenery outside; he uses a similar technique in “The Nightingale.” In both poems, the natural objects that the speaker describes prompt his thoughts in other directions. Coleridge maintains his scenes’ sense of immediacy by having his speakers be interrupted or startled by something happening around them; this technique serves to wrench the reader back from the speaker’s abstract thoughts to the living, physical world of the poem. The startling or disruptive elements often take the form of sounds, such as the owl’s hooting in “Frost” and the nightingale’s singing in “Nightingale.”

T. S. ELIOT : “THE WASTE LAND”  :   Section I: “The Burial of the Dead”

Summary The first section of The Waste Land takes its title from a line in the Anglican burial service. It is made up of four vignettes, each seemingly from the perspective of a different speaker. The first is an autobiographical snippet from the childhood of an aristocratic woman, in which she recalls sledding and claims that she is German, not Russian (this would be important if the woman is meant to be a member of the recently defeated Austrian imperial family). The woman mixes a meditation on the seasons with remarks on the barren state of her current existence (“I read, much of the night, and go south in the winter”). The second section is a prophetic, apocalyptic invitation to journey into a desert waste, where the speaker will show the reader “something different from either / Your shadow at morning striding behind you / Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you; / [He] will show you fear in a handful of dust” (Evelyn Waugh took the title for one of his best-known novels from these lines). The almost threatening prophetic tone is mixed with childhood reminiscences about a “hyacinth girl” and a nihilistic epiphany the speaker has after an encounter with her. These recollections are filtered through quotations from Wagner’s operatic version ofTristan und Isolde, an Arthurian tale of adultery and loss. The third episode in this section describes an imaginative tarot reading, in which some of the cards Eliot includes in the reading are not part of an actual tarot deck. The final episode of the section is the most surreal. The speaker walks through a London populated by ghosts of the dead. He confronts a figure with whom he once fought in a battle that seems to conflate the clashes of World War I with the Punic Wars between Rome and Carthage (both futile and excessively destructive wars). The speaker asks the ghostly figure, Stetson, about the fate of a corpse planted in his garden. The episode concludes with a famous line from the preface to Baudelaire’s Fleurs du Mal (an important collection of Symbolist poetry), accusing the reader of sharing in the poet’s sins.       

Form Like “Prufrock,” this section ofThe Waste Land can be seen as a modified dramatic monologue. The four speakers in this section are frantic in their need to speak, to find an audience, but they find themselves surrounded by dead people and thwarted by outside circumstances, like wars. Because the sections are so short and the situations so confusing, the effect is not one of an overwhelming impression of a single character; instead, the reader is left with the feeling of being trapped in a crowd, unable to find a familiar face.     

Also like “Prufrock,” The Waste Land employs only partial rhyme schemes and short bursts of structure. These are meant to reference—but also rework— the literary past, achieving simultaneously a stabilizing and a defamiliarizing effect. The world of The Waste Land has some parallels to an earlier time, but it cannot be approached in the same way. The inclusion of fragments in languages other than English further complicates matters. The reader is not expected to be able to translate these immediately; rather, they are reminders of the cosmopolitan nature of twentieth-century Europe and of mankind’s fate after the Tower of Babel: We will never be able to perfectly comprehend one another.        

Commentary Not only is The Waste Land Eliot’s greatest work, but it may be—along with Joyce’s Ulysses—the greatest work of all modernist literature. Most of the poem was written in 1921, and it first appeared in print in 1922. As the poem’s dedication indicates, Eliot received a great deal of guidance from Ezra Pound, who encouraged him to cut large sections of the planned work and to break up the rhyme scheme. Recent scholarship suggests that Eliot’s wife, Vivien, also had a significant role in the poem’s final form.

A long work divided into five sections, The Waste Land takes on the degraded mess that Eliot considered modern culture to constitute, particularly after the first World War had ravaged Europe. A sign of the pessimism with which Eliot approaches his subject is the poem’s epigraph, taken from the Satyricon, in which the Sibyl (a woman with prophetic powers who ages but never dies) looks at the future and proclaims that she only wants to die. The Sibyl’s predicament mirrors what Eliot sees as his own: He lives in a culture that has decayed and withered but will not expire, and he is forced to live with reminders of its former glory. Thus, the underlying plot of The Waste Land,inasmuch as it can be said to have one, revolves around Eliot’s reading of two extraordinarily influential contemporary cultural/anthropological texts, Jessie Weston’s From Ritual to Romance and Sir James Frazier’s The Golden Bough. Both of these works focus on the persistence of ancient fertility rituals in modern thought and religion; of particular interest to both authors is the story of the Fisher King, who has been wounded in the genitals and whose lack of potency is the cause of his country becoming a desiccated “waste land.” Heal the Fisher King, the legend says, and the land will regain its fertility. According to Weston and Frazier, healing the Fisher King has been the subject of mythic tales from ancient Egypt to Arthurian England. Eliot picks up on the figure of the Fisher King legend’s wasteland as an appropriate description of the state of modern society. The important difference, of course, is that in Eliot’s world there is no way to heal the Fisher King; perhaps there is no Fisher King at all. The legend’s imperfect integration into a modern meditation highlights the lack of a unifying narrative (like religion or mythology) in the modern world.      

Eliot’s poem, like the anthropological texts that inspired it, draws on a vast range of sources. Eliot provided copious footnotes with the publication of The Waste Land in book form; these are an excellent source for tracking down the origins of a reference. Many of the references are from the Bible: at the time of the poem’s writing Eliot was just beginning to develop an interest in Christianity that would reach its apex in the Four Quartets. The overall range of allusions in The Waste Land, though, suggests no overarching paradigm but rather a grab bag of broken fragments that must somehow be pieced together to form a coherent whole. While Eliot employs a deliberately difficult style and seems often to find the most obscure reference possible, he means to do more than just frustrate his reader and display his own intelligence: He intends to provide a mimetic account of life in the confusing world of the twentieth century.       

The Waste Land opens with a reference to Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. In this case, though, April is not the happy month of pilgrimages and storytelling. It is instead the time when the land should be regenerating after a long winter. Regeneration, though, is painful, for it brings back reminders of a more fertile and happier past. In the modern world, winter, the time of forgetfulness and numbness, is indeed preferable. Marie’s childhood recollections are also painful: the simple world of cousins, sledding, and coffee in the park has been replaced by a complex set of emotional and political consequences resulting from the war. The topic of memory, particularly when it involves remembering the dead, is of critical importance in The Waste Land. Memory creates a confrontation of the past with the present, a juxtaposition that points out just how badly things have decayed. Marie reads for most of the night: ostracized by politics, she is unable to do much else. To read is also to remember a better past, which could produce a coherent literary culture.       

The second episode contains a troubled religious proposition. The speaker describes a true wasteland of “stony rubbish”; in it, he says, man can recognize only “[a] heap of broken images.” Yet the scene seems to offer salvation: shade and a vision of something new and different. The vision consists only of nothingness—a handful of dust—which is so profound as to be frightening; yet truth also resides here: No longer a religious phenomenon achieved through Christ, truth is represented by a mere void. The speaker remembers a female figure from his past, with whom he has apparently had some sort of romantic involvement. In contrast to the present setting in the desert, his memories are lush, full of water and blooming flowers. The vibrancy of the earlier scene, though, leads the speaker to a revelation of the nothingness he now offers to show the reader. Again memory serves to contrast the past with the present, but here it also serves to explode the idea of coherence in either place. In the episode from the past, the “nothingness” is more clearly a sexual failure, a moment of impotence. Despite the overall fecundity and joy of the moment, no reconciliation, and, therefore, no action, is possible. This in turn leads directly to the desert waste of the present. In the final line of the episode attention turns from the desert to the sea. Here, the sea is not a locus for the fear of nothingness, and neither is it the locus for a philosophical interpretation of nothingness; rather, it is the site of true, essential nothingness itself. The line comes from a section ofTristan und Isolde where Tristan waits for Isolde to come heal him. She is supposedly coming by ship but fails to arrive. The ocean is truly empty, devoid of the possibility of healing or revelation.

The third episode explores Eliot’s fascination with transformation. The tarot reader Madame Sosostris conducts the most outrageous form of “reading” possible, transforming a series of vague symbols into predictions, many of which will come true in succeeding sections of the poem. Eliot transforms the traditional tarot pack to serve his purposes.

The drowned sailor makes reference to the ultimate work of magic and transformation in English literature, Shakespeare’s The Tempest (“Those are pearls that were his eyes” is a quote from one of Ariel’s songs). Transformation in The Tempest, though, is the result of the highest art of humankind. Here, transformation is associated with fraud, vulgarity, and cheap mysticism. That Madame Sosostris will prove to be right in her predictions of death and transformation is a direct commentary on the failed religious mysticism and prophecy of the preceding desert section.           

The final episode of the first section allows Eliot finally to establish the true wasteland of the poem, the modern city. Eliot’s London references Baudelaire’s Paris (“Unreal City”), Dickens’s London (“the brown fog of a winter dawn”) and Dante’s hell (“the flowing crowd of the dead”). The city is desolate and depopulated, inhabited only by ghosts from the past. Stetson, the apparition the speaker recognizes, is a fallen war comrade. The speaker pesters him with a series of ghoulish questions about a corpse buried in his garden: again, with the garden, we return to the theme of regeneration and fertility. This encounter can be read as a quest for a meaning behind the tremendous slaughter of the first World War; however, it can also be read as an exercise in ultimate futility: as we see in Stetson’s failure to respond to the speaker’s inquiries, the dead offer few answers. The great respective weights of history, tradition, and the poet’s dead predecessors combine to create an oppressive burden.

T. S. Eliot : “The Waste Land”  :   Section II: “A Game of Chess”

Summary This section takes its title from two plays by the early 17th-century playwright Thomas Middleton, in one of which the moves in a game of chess denote stages in a seduction. This section focuses on two opposing scenes, one of high society and one of the lower classes. The first half of the section portrays a wealthy, highly groomed woman surrounded by exquisite furnishings. As she waits for a lover, her neurotic thoughts become frantic, meaningless cries. Her day culminates with plans for an excursion and a game of chess. The second part of this section shifts to a London barroom, where two women discuss a third woman. Between the bartender’s repeated calls of “HURRY UP PLEASE IT’S TIME” (the bar is closing for the night) one of the women recounts a conversation with their friend Lil, whose husband has just been discharged from the army. She has chided Lil over her failure to get herself some false teeth, telling her that her husband will seek out the company of other women if she doesn’t improve her appearance. Lil claims that the cause of her ravaged looks is the medication she took to induce an abortion; having nearly died giving birth to her fifth child, she had refused to have another, but her husband “won’t leave [her] alone.” The women leave the bar to a chorus of “good night(s)” reminiscent of Ophelia’s farewell speech in Hamlet.       

Form The first part of the section is largely in unrhymed iambic pentameter lines, or blank verse. As the section proceeds, the lines become increasingly irregular in length and meter, giving the feeling of disintegration, of things falling apart. As the woman of the first half begins to give voice to her paranoid thoughts, things do fall apart, at least formally: We read lines of dialogue, then a snippet from a nonsense song. The last four lines of the first half rhyme, although they are irregular in meter, suggesting at least a partial return to stability.        

The second half of the section is a dialogue interrupted by the barman’s refrain. Rather than following an organized structure of rhyme and meter, this section constitutes a loose series of phrases connected by “I said(s)” and “she said(s).” This is perhaps the most poetically experimental section of the entire poem. Eliot is writing in a lower-class vernacular here that resists poetic treatment. This section refutes the prevalent claim that iambic pentameter mirrors normal English speech patterns: Line length and stresses are consistently irregular. Yet the section sounds like poetry: the repeated use of “I said” and the grounding provided by the barman’s chorus allow the woman’s speech to flow elegantly, despite her rough phrasing and the coarse content of her story.      

Commentary The two women of this section of the poem represent the two sides of modern sexuality: while one side of this sexuality is a dry, barren interchange inseparable from neurosis and self-destruction, the other side of this sexuality is a rampant fecundity associated with a lack of culture and rapid aging. The first woman is associated by allusion with Cleopatra, Dido, and even Keats’s Lamia, by virtue of the lushness of language surrounding her (although Eliot would never have acknowledged Keats as an influence). She is a frustrated, overly emotional but not terribly intellectual figure, oddly sinister, surrounded by “strange synthetic perfumes” and smoking candles. She can be seen as a counterpart to the title character of Eliot’s earlier “Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” with whom she shares both a physical setting and a profound sense of isolation. Her association with Dido and Cleopatra, two women who committed suicide out of frustrated love, suggests her fundamental irrationality. Unlike the two queens of myth, however, this woman will never become a cultural touchstone. Her despair is pathetic, rather than moving, as she demands that her lover stay with her and tell her his thoughts. The lover, who seems to be associated with the narrator of this part of the poem, can think only of drowning (again, in a reference to The Tempest) and rats among dead men’s bones. The woman is explicitly compared to Philomela, a character out of Ovid’s Metamorphoses who is raped by her brother-in-law the king, who then cuts her tongue out to keep her quiet. She manages to tell her sister, who helps her avenge herself by murdering the king’s son and feeding him to the king. The sisters are then changed into birds, Philomela into a nightingale. This comparison suggests something essentially disappointing about the woman, that she is unable to communicate her interior self to the world. The woman and her surroundings, although aesthetically pleasing, are ultimately sterile and meaningless, as suggested by the nonsense song that she sings (which manages to debase even Shakespeare).       

The second scene in this section further diminishes the possibility that sex can bring regeneration—either cultural or personal. This section is remarkably free of the cultural allusions that dominate the rest of the poem; instead, it relies on vernacular speech to make its point. Notice that Eliot is using a British vernacular: By this point he had moved to England permanently and had become a confirmed Anglophile. Although Eliot is able to produce startlingly beautiful poetry from the rough speech of the women in the bar, he nevertheless presents their conversation as further reason for pessimism. Their friend Lil has done everything the right way—married, supported her soldier husband, borne children—yet she is being punished by her body. Interestingly, this section ends with a line echoing Ophelia’s suicide speech in Hamlet; this links Lil to the woman in the first section of the poem, who has also been compared to famous female suicides. The comparison between the two is not meant to suggest equality between them or to propose that the first woman’s exaggerated sense of high culture is in any way equivalent to the second woman’s lack of it; rather, Eliot means to suggest that neither woman’s form of sexuality is regenerative.

T. S. Eliot : “The Waste Land”  :   Section III: “The Fire Sermon”

Summary The title of this, the longest section of The Waste Land, is taken from a sermon given by Buddha in which he encourages his followers to give up earthly passion (symbolized by fire) and seek freedom from earthly things. A turn away from the earthly does indeed take place in this section, as a series of increasingly debased sexual encounters concludes with a river-song and a religious incantation. The section opens with a desolate riverside scene: Rats and garbage surround the speaker, who is fishing and “musing on the king my brother’s wreck.” The river-song begins in this section, with the refrain from Spenser’s Prothalamion: “Sweet Thames, run softly till I end my song.” A snippet from a vulgar soldier’s ballad follows, then a reference back to Philomela (see the previous section). The speaker is then propositioned by Mr. Eugenides, the one-eyed merchant of Madame Sosostris’s tarot pack. Eugenides invites the speaker to go with him to a hotel known as a meeting place for homosexual trysts.          

The speaker then proclaims himself to be Tiresias, a figure from classical mythology who has both male and female features (“Old man with wrinkled female breasts”) and is blind but can “see” into the future. Tiresias/the speaker observes a young typist, at home for tea, who awaits her lover, a dull and slightly arrogant clerk. The woman allows the clerk to have his way with her, and he leaves victorious. Tiresias, who has “foresuffered all,” watches the whole thing. After her lover’s departure, the typist thinks only that she’s glad the encounter is done and over.            

A brief interlude begins the river-song in earnest. First, a fisherman’s bar is described, then a beautiful church interior, then the Thames itself. These are among the few moments of tranquility in the poem, and they seem to represent some sort of simpler alternative. The Thames-daughters, borrowed from Spenser’s poem, chime in with a nonsense chorus (“Weialala leia / Wallala leialala”). The scene shifts again, to Queen Elizabeth I in an amorous encounter with the Earl of Leicester. The queen seems unmoved by her lover’s declarations, and she thinks only of her “people humble people who expect / Nothing.” The section then comes to an abrupt end with a few lines from St. Augustine’sConfessions and a vague reference to the Buddha’s Fire Sermon (“burning”).         

Form This section of The Waste Land is notable for its inclusion of popular poetic forms, particularly musical ones. The more plot-driven sections are in Eliot’s usual assortment of various line lengths, rhymed at random. “The Fire Sermon,” however, also includes bits of many musical pieces, including Spenser’s wedding song (which becomes the song of the Thames-daughters), a soldier’s ballad, a nightingale’s chirps, a song from Oliver Goldsmith’s The Vicar of Wakefield, and a mandolin tune (which has no words but is echoed in “a clatter and a chatter from within”). The use of such “low” forms cuts both ways here: In one sense, it provides a critical commentary on the episodes described, the cheap sexual encounters shaped by popular culture (the gramophone, the men’s hotel). But Eliot also uses these bits and pieces to create high art, and some of the fragments he uses (the lines from Spenser in particular) are themselves taken from more exalted forms. In the case of the Prothalamion, in fact, Eliot is placing himself within a tradition stretching back to ancient Greece (classically, “prothalamion” is a generic term for a poem-like song written for a wedding). Again this provides an ironic contrast to the debased goings-on but also provides another form of connection and commentary. Another such reference, generating both ironic distance and proximate parallels, is the inclusion of Elizabeth I: The liaison between Elizabeth and Leicester is traditionally romanticized, and, thus, the reference seems to clash with the otherwise sordid nature of this section. However, Eliot depicts Elizabeth—and Spenser, for that matter—as a mere fragment, stripped of noble connotations and made to represent just one more piece of cultural rubbish. Again, this is not meant to be a democratizing move but a nihilistic one: Romance is dead.         

Commentary The opening two stanzas of this section describe the ultimate “Waste Land” as Eliot sees it. The wasteland is cold, dry, and barren, covered in garbage. Unlike the desert, which at least burns with heat, this place is static, save for a few scurrying rats. Even the river, normally a symbol of renewal, has been reduced to a “dull canal.” The ugliness stands in implicit contrast to the “Sweet Thames” of Spenser’s time. The most significant image in these lines, though, is the rat. Like the crabs in Prufrock, rats are scavengers, taking what they can from the refuse of higher-order creatures. The rat could be said to provide a model for Eliot’s poetic process: Like the rat, Eliot takes what he can from earlier, grander generations and uses the bits and pieces to sustain (poetic) life. Somehow this is preferable to the more coherent but vulgar existence of the contemporary world, here represented by the sound of horns and motors in the distance, intimating a sexual liaison.

The actual sexual encounters that take place in this section of the poem are infinitely unfruitful. Eugenides proposes a homosexual tryst, which by its very nature thwarts fertility. The impossibility of regeneration by such means is symbolized by the currants in his pocket—the desiccated, deadened version of what were once plump, fertile fruits. The typist and her lover are equally barren in their way, even though reproduction is at least theoretically possible for the two. Living in so impoverished a manner that she does not even own a bed, the typist is certainly not interested in a family. Elizabeth and Leicester are perhaps the most interesting of the three couples, however. For political reasons, Elizabeth was required to represent herself as constantly available for marriage (to royalty from countries with whom England may have wanted an alliance); out of this need came the myth of the “Virgin Queen.” This can be read as the opposite of the Fisher King legend: To protect the vitality of the land, Elizabeth had to compromise her own sexuality; whereas in the Fisher King story, the renewal of the land comes with the renewal of the Fisher King’s sexual potency. Her tryst with Leicester, therefore, is a consummation that is simultaneously denied, an event that never happened. The twisted logic underlying Elizabeth’s public sexuality, or lack thereof, mirrors and distorts the Fisher King plot and further questions the possibility for renewal, especially through sexuality, in the modern world.         

 Tiresias, thus, becomes an important model for modern existence. Neither man nor woman, and blind yet able to see with ultimate clarity, he is an individual who does not hope or act. He has, like Prufrock, “seen it all,” but, unlike Prufrock, he sees no possibility for action. Whereas Prufrock is paralyzed by his neuroses, Tiresias is held motionless by ennui and pragmatism. He is not quite able to escape earthly things, though, for he is forced to sit and watch the sordid deeds of mortals; like the Sibyl in the poem’s epigraph, he would like to die but cannot. The brief interlude following the typist’s tryst may offer an alternative to escape, by describing a warm, everyday scene of work and companionship; however, the interlude is brief, and Eliot once again tosses us into a world of sex and strife. Tiresias disappears, to be replaced by St. Augustine at the end of the section. Eliot claims in his footnote to have deliberately conflated Augustine and the Buddha, as the representatives of Eastern and Western asceticism. Both seem, in the lines Eliot quotes, to be unable to transcend the world on their own: Augustine must call on God to “pluck [him] out,” while Buddha can only repeat the word “burning,” unable to break free of its monotonous fascination. The poem’s next section, which will relate the story of a death without resurrection, exposes the absurdity of these two figures’ faith in external higher powers. That this section ends with only the single word “burning,” isolated on the page, reveals the futility of all of man’s struggles.

T. S. Eliot : “The Waste Land”  :   Section IV: “Death by Water”

Summary The shortest section of the poem, “Death by Water” describes a man, Phlebas the Phoenician, who has died, apparently by drowning. In death he has forgotten his worldly cares as the creatures of the sea have picked his body apart. The narrator asks his reader to consider Phlebas and recall his or her own mortality.

T. S. Eliot : “The Waste Land”  :   Section V: “What the Thunder Said”

Summary The final section of The Waste Land is dramatic in both its imagery and its events. The first half of the section builds to an apocalyptic climax, as suffering people become “hooded hordes swarming” and the “unreal” cities of Jerusalem, Athens, Alexandria, Vienna, and London are destroyed, rebuilt, and destroyed again. A decaying chapel is described, which suggests the chapel in the legend of the Holy Grail. Atop the chapel, a cock crows, and the rains come, relieving the drought and bringing life back to the land. Curiously, no heroic figure has appeared to claim the Grail; the renewal has come seemingly at random, gratuitously.      

The scene then shifts to the Ganges, half a world away from Europe, where thunder rumbles. Eliot draws on the traditional interpretation of “what the thunder says,” as taken from the Upanishads (Hindu fables). According to these fables, the thunder “gives,” “sympathizes,” and “controls” through its “speech”; Eliot launches into a meditation on each of these aspects of the thunder’s power. The meditations seem to bring about some sort of reconciliation, as a Fisher King-type figure is shown sitting on the shore preparing to put his lands in order, a sign of his imminent death or at least abdication. The poem ends with a series of disparate fragments from a children’s song, from Dante, and from Elizabethan drama, leading up to a final chant of “Shantih shantih shantih”—the traditional ending to an Upanishad. Eliot, in his notes to the poem, translates this chant as “the peace which passeth understanding,” the expression of ultimate resignation.             

WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS : “ADAM’S CURSE”

Summary  Addressing his beloved, the speaker remembers sitting with her and “that beautiful mild woman, your close friend” at the end of summer, discussing poetry. He remarked then that a line of poetry may take hours to write, but if it does not seem the thought of a single moment, the poet’s work has been useless. The poet said that it would be better to “scrub a kitchen pavement, or break stones / Like an old pauper, in all kinds of weather,” for to write poetry is a task harder than these, yet less appreciated by the “bankers, schoolmasters, and clergymen” of the world.      

The “beautiful mild woman”—whose voice, the speaker notes, is so sweet and low it will cause many men heartache—replied that to be born a woman is to know that one must work at being beautiful, even though that kind of work is not discussed at school. The speaker answered by saying that since the fall of Adam, every fine thing has required “labouring.” He said that there have been lovers who spent time learning “precedents out of beautiful old books,” but now such study seems “an idle trade enough.” 

At the mention of love, the speaker recalls, the group grew quiet, watching “the last embers of daylight die.” In the blue-green sky the moon rose, looking worn as a shell “washed by time’s waters as they rose and fell / About the stars and broke in days and years.” The speaker says that he spoke only for the ears of his beloved, that she was beautiful, and that he strove to love her “in the old high way of love.” It had all seemed happy, he says, “and yet we’d grown / As weary-hearted as that hollow moon.”        

Form “Adam’s Curse” is written in heroic couplets, which is a name used to describe rhyming couplets in iambic pentameter. Some of the rhymes are full (years/ears) and some are only partial (clergymen/thereupon).    

Commentary “Adam’s Curse” is an extraordinary poem; though it was written early in Yeats’s career (appearing in his 1904 collection In the Seven Woods), and though its stylistic simplicity is somewhat atypical for Yeats, it easily ranks among his best and most moving work. Within an emotional recollection of an evening spent with his beloved and her friend, Yeats frames a philosophical argument: that because of the curse of labor that God placed upon Adam when He expelled him from the Garden of Eden, every worthwhile human achievement (particularly those aimed at achieving beauty, whether in poetry, physical appearance, or love) requires hard work. The simple, speech-like rhythms of the iambic pentameter fulfill the poet’s dictate that a poetic line should seem “but a moment’s thought,” and the bittersweet emotional tone appears wholly organic, a natural result of the recollection. The speaker loves the woman to whom the poem is addressed, and speaks “only for [her] ears”; but though the scene seems happy, their hearts are as weary as shells worn by the waters of time.      

Behind the natural, unsophisticated feel of the poem, of course, lies a great deal of hard work and structure—just as the poem’s speaker says must be true of poetry generally. (One of the most charming aspects of this poem is its mirroring of the aesthetic principles laid out by the speaker in the first stanza.) The discussion of work and beauty is divided into three progressive parts: the speaker’s claims about poetry, the friend’s claims about physical beauty, and the speaker’s claims about love. This last claim affords Yeats the chance both to hush the trio and to soften the mood of the poem, and the speaker looks outward to the rising moon, which becomes a metaphor for the effects of time on the human heart, a weariness presumably compounded by the labor of living “since Adam’s fall.

William Butler Yeats : SAILING TO BYZANTIUM

Summary The speaker, referring to the country that he has left, says that it is “no country for old men”: it is full of youth and life, with the young lying in one another’s arms, birds singing in the trees, and fish swimming in the waters. There, “all summer long” the world rings with the “sensual music” that makes the young neglect the old, whom the speaker describes as “Monuments of unageing intellect.”        

An old man, the speaker says, is a “paltry thing,” merely a tattered coat upon a stick, unless his soul can clap its hands and sing; and the only way for the soul to learn how to sing is to study “monuments of its own magnificence.” Therefore, the speaker has “sailed the seas and come / To the holy city of Byzantium.” The speaker addresses the sages “standing in God’s holy fire / As in the gold mosaic of a wall,” and asks them to be his soul’s “singing-masters.” He hopes they will consume his heart away, for his heart “knows not what it is”—it is “sick with desire / And fastened to a dying animal,” and the speaker wishes to be gathered “Into the artifice of eternity.”      The speaker says that once he has been taken out of the natural world, he will no longer take his “bodily form” from any “natural thing,” but rather will fashion himself as a singing bird made of hammered gold, such as Grecian goldsmiths make “To keep a drowsy Emperor awake,” or set upon a tree of gold “to sing / To lords and ladies of Byzantium / Or what is past, or passing, or to come.”         

Form The four eight-line stanzas of “Sailing to Byzantium” take a very old verse form: they are metered in iambic pentameter, and rhymed ABABABCC, two trios of alternating rhyme followed by a couplet.        

Commentary “Sailing to Byzantium” is one of Yeats’s most inspired works, and one of the greatest poems of the twentieth century. Written in 1926 and included in Yeats’s greatest single collection, 1928’s The Tower, “Sailing to Byzantium” is Yeats’s definitive statement about the agony of old age and the imaginative and spiritual work required to remain a vital individual even when the heart is “fastened to a dying animal” (the body). Yeats’s solution is to leave the country of the young and travel to Byzantium, where the sages in the city’s famous gold mosaics (completed mainly during the sixth and seventh centuries) could become the “singing-masters” of his soul. He hopes the sages will appear in fire and take him away from his body into an existence outside time, where, like a great work of art, he could exist in “the artifice of eternity.” In the astonishing final stanza of the poem, he declares that once he is out of his body he will never again appear in the form of a natural thing; rather, he will become a golden bird, sitting on a golden tree, singing of the past (“what is past”), the present (that which is “passing”), and the future (that which is “to come”).   

A fascination with the artificial as superior to the natural is one of Yeats’s most prevalent themes. In a much earlier poem, 1899’s “The Lover Tells of the Rose in His Heart,” the speaker expresses a longing to re-make the world “in a casket of gold” and thereby eliminate its ugliness and imperfection. Later, in 1914’s “The Dolls,” the speaker writes of a group of dolls on a shelf, disgusted by the sight of a human baby. In each case, the artificial (the golden casket, the beautiful doll, the golden bird) is seen as perfect and unchanging, while the natural (the world, the human baby, the speaker’s body) is prone to ugliness and decay. What is more, the speaker sees deep spiritual truth (rather than simply aesthetic escape) in his assumption of artificiality; he wishes his soul to learn to sing, and transforming into a golden bird is the way to make it capable of doing so.        

“Sailing to Byzantium” is an endlessly interpretable poem, and suggests endlessly fascinating comparisons with other important poems—poems of travel, poems of age, poems of nature, poems featuring birds as symbols. (One of the most interesting is surely Keats’s “Ode to a Nightingale,” to which this poem is in many ways a rebuttal: Keats writes of his nightingale, “Thou wast not born for death, immortal Bird! / No hungry generations tread thee down”; Yeats, in the first stanza of “Sailing to Byzantium,” refers to “birds in the trees” as “those dying generations.”) It is important to note that the poem is not autobiographical; Yeats did not travel to Byzantium (which was renamed Constantinople in the fourth century A.D., and later renamed Istanbul), but he did argue that, in the sixth century, it offered the ideal environment for the artist. The poem is about an imaginative journey, not an actual one.

Poetry analysis

The poem, “Sailing to Byzantium,” by William Butler Yeats can be read through many analytical lenses. In chapter five of his book, “Texts and Contexts,” Steven Lynn discusses two critical approaches to readings of the poem, presenting overviews of the Deconstructionist approach of Lawrence Lipking and the New Critical approach of Cleanth Brooks.

Lynn notes that, basing some of his insights, at least partially, on the Structuralist approach of Ferdinand de Saussure, Cleanth Brooks shows that the text offers set after set of binary contrasts. Brooks observes that Yeats favors the second element over the first in each contrast. Brooks lists, for example, nature versus artifice, “that” (referencing an undefined “reality”) versus the mythical Byzantium, aging versus timelessness, the sensual versus the intellectual, and being versus becoming. These contrasts create confusion which the readers must try to resolve through their analysis of the poem.

To Brooks’ list of contrasts, one might add “youth versus old age” and “death versus eternal life.”  Yeats introduces the concept of “youth versus old age” in stanza one where he talks about “The young/ in one another’s arms,” then contrasts this passage with “”Birds in the trees/ -Those dying generations - at their song.”  The old, “dying generations,” presented as birds, seem to be watching the young, even serenading them, despite the fact that the elderly will die soon.

Regarding the contrast, “death versus eternal life,” the fifth stanza of the poem discusses what will happen once the speaker is “out of nature.”  Since mankind is a part of nature, that phrase “out of nature” suggests ‘out of life’ or ‘dead’.  If one is no longer a part of life, one is either dead or in a higher spiritual plane (heaven, as it were).  In the fifth stanza, the speaker also says that his bodily form will not be that of a natural form.  Lipking takes that phrase to mean the shape of something found in nature, but it could also mean a living creature as opposed to something supernatural or otherworldly.  The stanza supports the otherworldly view in that although the speaker plans to take the form of a bird, it is not a natural or living bird with bones, blood, and feathers; it is a supernatural bird “of hammered gold and gold enameling,” which will entertain immortal bluebloods at an eternal court.  The speaker makes it clear that instead of dying, he chooses eternal, if artificial, life in Byzantium.

Brooks feels that the word “artifice,” the phrase “artifice of eternity,” and the concepts that suggest artifice unify the work.  For instance, in stanza one, the elderly are likened to living birds in living trees, but in stanza five, in Byzantium, the elderly have become golden birds in golden boughs, singing not “whatever is begotten, born, and dies” to young lovers in the throes of passion, but “of what is past, passing, or to come” to otherworldly lords and ladies.  Artifice in a fantastic paradise is seen as preferable to old age in real life.

Brooks points out the irony that the speaker must leave the living world, which is always changing and ‘becoming’ and assume a timeless, unchanging, supernatural existence before he can contemplate (sing of) the past, the present, and most importantly, the future of the living world.

Lipking’s Deconstructionist reading of “Sailing to Byzantium” finds no unity in the poem.  He feels that the lines and stanzas often either contradict each other or simply make no sense at all. 

Like Brooks, Lipking notes the patterns of opposites in Yeats’ poem, but he does not feel that the reader can find a way to resolve the confusion the contrasts create.  Although Lipking tries to find logic in Yeats’ contrasts, they only leave him with unanswerable questions.  Why would the speaker call for singing masters in stanza three when he stated that there was no singing school in stanza two?  In stanza five, the speaker says that “I shall never/Take my bodily form from any natural thing,” but he assumes the aspect of a bird, a natural creature.  Even the word ‘That’ at the beginning of the poem bothers Lipking because there is no real way to know what “That” references.

Lipking finds that, in some instances, the multitude of meanings a passage could have confuses rather than clarifies the poem’s message.  In stanza two, the lines “…and louder sing/For every tatter in its mortal dress” can have two different meanings, both equally valid; therefore, the true meaning of the passage is elusive.  In stanza three, the line “artifice of eternity” catches Lipking’s attention just as it did Brooks’.  Lipking feels that “artifice of eternity” could also have dual meanings, one suggesting permanence, the other illusion.  Since both concepts are, like the earlier passage in stanza two, equally valid, readers can have no idea of the lines’ true meaning.

The two critics show how a poem’s meaning and impact can change, depending on how readers approach it.  Lipking finds that the basic contrasts in the poem fall apart upon close scrutiny, revealing irreconcilable lacks of logic, whereas Brooks finds unity in the irony of the speaker having to leave his world before he can truly contemplate and appreciate its past, present, and future.  Both critics are persuasive, but Brooks’ reading seems a little stronger, especially once the passage about the real birds singing in the trees in stanza one is contrasted with the golden bird singing in the golden tree in stanza five.  That particular contrast ties the poem together and brings readers full circle.

Poetry analysis: Easter 1916, by William Butler Yeats

W.B. Yeats's poem "Easter 1916" is his way of mourning the people he knew and lost in the 1916 Easter Rising. It's a eulogy for their lives and for all that Ireland suffered during and after that rebellion, which took 490 lives, not including the fourteen (including the four men named in this poem) who were executed after that rebellion.

Yeats begins the poem describing the casual friendship he enjoyed with the people he will go on to eulogize. People he would meet for a drink at the "close of day" (line 1) in clubs that resided among "gray Eighteenth-century houses" (line 4) which refers to the Georgian architecture that defines Merrion Square where Yeats lived (and wasn't to impressed by, apparently) for twenty years. The houses themselves are mostly brick or painted white, but the neighborhood is dominated by the large gray Leinster House that holds the Irish parliament and casts a grayish tint over its side of Merrion Square at "close of day." Earlier I used the phrase "casual friendship" because the first stanza of this poem shows that Yeats wasn't all that close to these people. "I have passed with a nod of the head/Or polite meaningless words" (lines 5-6) Showing that the heroes he would "numberin this song" (line 35) were not his kindred spirits but acquaintances that he would occasionally exchange lame pleasantries with on the street or "Around the fire at the club." (line 12) After setting up this very calm un-dramatic beginning, Yeats abruptly shattered the poems tranquil set-up in lines 15&16 with "All changed, changed utterly/A terrible beauty is born."

Yeats repeats that last line in the second stanza and to concluded the poem in order to drive home the point that everything has "changed utterly" for him, for the martyrs of the Easter Rising, and for Ireland. As for "a terrible beauty is born" I read this as a commentary on the country itself. It's physical beauty is unparalleled but it is impossible to separate the Emerald Isle's beauty from its rather blood soaked history.

In the second stanza, he describes the lives of the acquaintances involved: Georgina Markiewicz, Padraig Pearse, Thomas MacDonagh, and John MacBride. But the three men (and James Connolly, the leader of the rebellion) aren't called by name until the last stanza, and the Countess Markiewicz never is. But she is the first to be described as a woman who's "days were spent in ignorant/her nights in argument." (lines 17-9) Yeats's description of her informs us she "rode to harriers" (line 24) when she was "young and beautiful." (line 23) We now have a vision of her as an upper-class (by the riding to hounds visual conjured in line 24) beauty who did charity work by day and debated Irish independence by night.

The next people honored are three who were executed after the rebellion was squelched (Georgina was given life in prison because she was a delicate' upper-class woman, then pardoned in 1917) the first of which was Pearse, an educated man who "kept a school/And rode our winged horse." (lines 24-5) The last refers to Pearse leading the group that captured the Dublin Post Office and reading the Proclamation of the Republic loud, to declare independence from Britain. He was the first to ride into battle, and the first to be executed. The second, MacDonagh, "his helper and friend" (line 26) who was cut down in the prime of his career according to Yeats's description "he might have won fame in the end/so daring and sweet his thought." (lines 28&30) The section dedicated to the third man proves my theory that these were not close personal friends of Yeats. "This other man I had dreamed/A drunken, vainglorious lout/He had done most bitter wrong/To some who are near my heart." (lines 31-4) This is Yeats's opinion of John MacBride (who had married and then abandoned the woman Yeats loved) but Yeats makes it clear that whatever his failings as a person, he must be "number[ed] in the song" (line 35) for his part in the war. There's also something vaguely ironic in lines 38 and 39. "He, too, has been changed in his turn,/Transformed utterly." These lines are threefold. One, they echo the terribly beauty' refrain; Two, they suggest that however much Yeats hated him, he didn't deserve death by firing squad; and three, the ironical part, was that his death and his part in this fight transformed him into a better person, someone Yeats could grudgingly respect.

In stanza three, Yeats comforts himself and his reader with the thought that all life is fleeting. A eulogy standard, that we aren't meant to last forever and death in inevitable and natural. Lines like "Minute by minute they change;/A shadow of cloud on the stream/Changes minutes by minute" (lines 48-50) show this with soothing nature imagery, also impossible not to include while talking about Ireland. He makes two references to a stone that never changes: in lines 43 and 56. First to establish that the stone was there in the beginning "to trouble the living stream" and it is there in the end "in the midst of all." This can be read two ways: One, as a direct reference to the land itself, meaning Ireland and the fact that it will always be there through all the wars and revolts and car bombings. Or, it could be a more vague there are some things that never change so don't despair' statement.

Having comforted us and himself with stanza 3, Yeats begins to question whether all the death has been in vain. In his words, "Was it needless death after all" (line 67) and "Too log a sacrifice/Can make a stone of the heart/O when may it suffice." (lines 57-9) In lines 60-5 he continues the comforting imagery, this time equating death with sleep. But from 65 to 66 that comfort breaks down and we are left with the reality of the destruction of Easter 1916 "What is it but nightfall?/No, no, not night but death." In line 68 he throws our faint hope of better times, hoping that all the death accomplished their goal. "For England may keep faith/For all that is done and said." Meaning that England will finally leave. He concluded the poem by stating the names of the three men he's described, here adding Connolly's, and telling us that we now "know their dream; enough/To know they dreamed and are dead." (lines 70-1) He finishes by repeating the refrain but this time preceding it with "Now in time to be,/Wherever green is worn" (lines 77-8) to state that Ireland will never be the same.

Poetry analysis : THE TRIUMPH OF LIFE, by P. B. Shelley

Shelley was an idealist described by his wife Mary Shelley as having a passion for reform. He wanted to reform the world and its evils of society. He believed that every man has free rights which have been curtailed by society. Shelley wrote poetry with a view of arousing people’s concern and consideration, the imagination and willpower that are the key to ward off society’s restrictions. Poetry cultivates the imagination, the faculty through which we achieve compassionate empathy with the root of humanity. Shelley believed that poetry ‘contains within itself the seeds […] of social renovation'.

‘The Triumph of Life’ is unfinished breaking in mid-sentence with the question: ‘Then, what is life?’

The Triumph of Life was the last major work by Percy Bysshe Shelley. To the end Shelley was questing for knowledge with the sceptical intelligence reflected in his work. ‘The Triumph of Life’ is a pessimistic poem based on the illusion of life. It has a definite parallel with Dante’s ‘Inferno’ which is a mixture of realism and grotesque. The text proclaims itself by Dante’s terza rima and circular rhyme suggesting the circles of hell.   

‘The Triumph of Life' is a bleak visionary poem, the narrator in Dante manner has an encounter with the figure of Rousseau who guides him through the vision of hell. Rousseau is not free from the hellish vision of which he provides commentary. He is as much a victim of the macabre dance of life as the mad revelling crowd of deluded souls who flock self-destructively into the wake of life’s chariot as it drives in triumph through and over them. Rousseau is depicted in the form of a tree stump, an ironical metaphor expressing the disillusionment and futility of life.

'The Triumph of Life' is an ironical poem, the ‘triumph’ is a cruel assertion of Life’s dominance over individual beings, life triumphs over spirituality, the mundane triumphs over the idealistic. Even Rousseau himself becomes disillusioned in the end, and regretted the results of the French Revolution. The light of the Enlightenment is dazzling and ultimate aim is to fade in the light itself. In Rousseau, Shelley sees himself, Rousseau’s point is that he was seduced by life itself which turned his mind to ‘sand’.

There were only two great men who survived the Triumph of Life: Christ and Socrates, whose lives were strong enough to keep them from being crushed by the chariot of the relentless process of change. Jesus and Socrates, according to Shelley were the victims of repressive and reactionary groups in their societies who could not tolerate the free enquiry initiated by them. Shelley although a confirmed atheist valued Jesus highly but insisted on seeing him a superior being not as a god.

Shelley held the belief that reform began in the minds of men, but as he grew older he became increasingly aware that such a gradual process might for all its honesty be futile. In ‘The Triumph of Life’ he expresses a reflection of the disillusionment and disenchantment of life. Shelley is almost rejecting the idealism which gave life to his poems.

http://www.helium.com/items/1689719-the-triumph-of-life-by-shelley

WILLIAM BLAKE : THE LAMB

Summary  The poem begins with the question, “Little Lamb, who made thee?” The speaker, a child, asks the lamb about its origins: how it came into being, how it acquired its particular manner of feeding, its “clothing” of wool, its “tender voice.” In the next stanza, the speaker attempts a riddling answer to his own question: the lamb was made by one who “calls himself a Lamb,” one who resembles in his gentleness both the child and the lamb. The poem ends with the child bestowing a blessing on the lamb.

Form “The Lamb” has two stanzas, each containing five rhymed couplets. Repetition in the first and last couplet of each stanza makes these lines into a refrain, and helps to give the poem its song-like quality. The flowing l’s and soft vowel sounds contribute to this effect, and also suggest the bleating of a lamb or the lisping character of a child’s chant.

Commentary The poem is a child’s song, in the form of a question and answer. The first stanza is rural and descriptive, while the second focuses on abstract spiritual matters and contains explanation and analogy. The child’s question is both naive and profound. The question (“who made thee?”) is a simple one, and yet the child is also tapping into the deep and timeless questions that all human beings have, about their own origins and the nature of creation. The poem’s apostrophic form contributes to the effect of naiveté, since the situation of a child talking to an animal is a believable one, and not simply a literary contrivance. Yet by answering his own question, the child converts it into a rhetorical one, thus counteracting the initial spontaneous sense of the poem. The answer is presented as a puzzle or riddle, and even though it is an easy one—child’s play—this also contributes to an underlying sense of ironic knowingness or artifice in the poem. The child’s answer, however, reveals his confidence in his simple Christian faith and his innocent acceptance of its teachings.

The lamb of course symbolizes Jesus. The traditional image of Jesus as a lamb underscores the Christian values of gentleness, meekness, and peace. The image of the child is also associated with Jesus: in the Gospel, Jesus displays a special solicitude for children, and the Bible’s depiction of Jesus in his childhood shows him as guileless and vulnerable. These are also the characteristics from which the child-speaker approaches the ideas of nature and of God. This poem, like many of the Songs of Innocence, accepts what Blake saw as the more positive aspects of conventional Christian belief. But it does not provide a completely adequate doctrine, because it fails to account for the presence of suffering and evil in the world. The pendant (or companion) poem to this one, found in the Songs of Experience, is “The Tyger”; taken together, the two poems give a perspective on religion that includes the good and clear as well as the terrible and inscrutable. These poems complement each other to produce a fuller account than either offers independently. They offer a good instance of how Blake himself stands somewhere outside the perspectives of innocence and experience he projects.

WILLIAM BLAKE : THE DIVINE IMAGE

Summary The personified figures of Mercy, Pity, Peace, and Love are listed as the four “virtues of delight.” The speaker states that all people pray to these in times of distress and thank them for blessings because they represent “God, our father dear.” They are also, however, the characteristics of Man: Mercy is found in the human heart, Pity in the human face; Peace is a garment that envelops humans, and Love exists in the human “form” or body. Therefore, all prayers to Mercy, Pity, Peace, and Love are directed not just to God but to “the human form divine,” which all people must love and respect regardless of their religion or culture.

Form The poem is comprised of five ballad stanzas—quatrains in which the lines have four and three beats, alternately, and rhyme ABCB. This stanza form, in English poetry, conveys a sense of candor and naturalness, and it is common in songs, hymns, and nursery rhymes. The lilting rhythm and the frequent repetition of words and phrases combine with a spiritual subject matter to create the poem’s simple, hymn-like quality.

Commentary This is one of Blake’s more rhetorical Songs. The speaker praises both God and man while asserting an identity between the two. “The Divine Image” thus differs from most of the other Songs of Innocence, which deal with the emotional power of conventional Christian faith, and the innocent belief in a supreme, benevolent, and protective God, rather than with the parallels between these transcendent realms and the realm of man.       The poem uses personification to dramatize Christ’s mediation between God and Man. Beginning with abstract qualities (the four virtues of Mercy, Pity, Peace, and Love), the poem makes these abstractions the object of human prayer and piety. The second stanza explains this somewhat strange notion by equating the virtues with God himself. But the idea is still slightly unorthodox, suggesting as it does that we pray to these abstract virtues because they are God, rather than praying to God because he has these sympathetic qualities. The poem seems to emphasize that Mercy, Pity, Peace, and Love are not God’s characteristics but his substance—they are precisely what we mean when we speak of God.

The speaker now claims that Mercy, Pity, Peace, Love are also equivalent to Man: it is in humans that these qualities find a kind of embodiment, and they become recognizable because their features (heart, face, body, clothes) are basically human. Thus when we think of God, we are modeling him after these ideal human qualities. And when people pray, regardless of who or where they are, or to what God they think they are praying, they actually worship “the human form divine”—what is ideal, or most godly, in human beings. Blake’s “Divine Image” is therefore a reversed one: the poem constructs God in the image of man rather (whereas, in the Bible, God creates man in his image). The implication that God is a mental creation reflects Blake’s belief that “all deities reside in the human breast.”

The poem does not explicitly mention Christ, but the four virtues that Blake assigns alternately to man and God are the ones conventionally associated with Jesus. Because Christ was both God and man, he becomes the vehicle for Blake’s mediation between the two. But the fact that he is given an abstract rather than a human figuration underscores the elaborate intellectualization involved in Christian doctrine. Blake himself favors a more direct identification between what is human and what is divine. Thus the companion poem in Songs of Experience, “The Human Abstract,” goes further toward exposing the elaborate institutions of religion as mental confabulations that obscure rather than honor the true identity of God and man.

William Blake : THE SICK ROSE

Summary The speaker, addressing a rose, informs it that it is sick. An “invisible” worm has stolen into its bed in a “howling storm” and under the cover of night. The “dark secret love” of this worm is destroying the rose’s life.

Form The two quatrains of this poem rhyme ABCB. The ominous rhythm of these short, two-beat lines contributes to the poem’s sense of foreboding or dread and complements the unflinching directness with which the speaker tells the rose she is dying.

Commentary While the rose exists as a beautiful natural object that has become infected by a worm, it also exists as a literary rose, the conventional symbol of love. The image of the worm resonates with the Biblical serpent and also suggests a phallus. Worms are quintessentially earthbound, and symbolize death and decay. The “bed” into which the worm creeps denotes both the natural flowerbed and also the lovers’ bed. The rose is sick, and the poem implies that love is sick as well. Yet the rose is unaware of its sickness. Of course, an actual rose could not know anything about its own condition, and so the emphasis falls on the allegorical suggestion that it is love that does not recognize its own ailing state. This results partly from the insidious secrecy with which the “worm” performs its work of corruption—not only is it invisible, it enters the bed at night. This secrecy indeed constitutes part of the infection itself. The “crimson joy” of the rose connotes both sexual pleasure and shame, thus joining the two concepts in a way that Blake thought was perverted and unhealthy. The rose’s joyful attitude toward love is tainted by the aura of shame and secrecy that our culture attaches to love.

WILLIAM BLAKE : LONDON

William Blake (1757-1827), poet, artist, visionary and leading figure of the Romantic Movement, has always cut an extraordinary persona in English literature. Known for his rebellious artistic temperament and lonely poetic voice, Blake's poetry is at first direct and simple, socially conscious, but consisting of incredible depth. Not only are his works highly valued by literary critics and readers alike, his warmth and feeling for human life really shines through beautifully within his poetry and expressive art.

This is certainly true of one of his masterpieces, the poem "London". Humanity is never far from the heart of Blake and the effects of the dehumanized industrialized processes on the human mind. This is one of the strong themes present in this poem. It is the narrator throughout the poem which is incredulous to the pain and suffering that is clearly visible on the streets. It must be remembered that London was a very different place back in the early part of the nineteenth century, and the suffering depicted within his work all too painfully real.

Throughout this impressionable poem the tone is steady and downcast as the narrator observes the misery inflicted upon the poor. Blake initially crafts an uncomfortable jarring effect, created with the idea of the repeated "charted" in contrast with the wandering through something that is structured and contained. This at once feels odd. It would seem that Blake (within this and other poems) would feel outrage at this imposing force upon human nature. You can't "wander" through streets that are lined with an imposed will upon the individual, you can only follow the preset direction. This could also be seen as symbolic of the course of life which the new industrial process would have on the lives on human beings forever after, one of simply following the road set out for you.

It is not much of a stretch to read into this idea of containment as an argument against the containment of the human spirit, especially considering some of other works by Blake. It appears to be a central theme that runs through much of Blake's poetry, and with it the strong desire to be free, to break away from the conformity that would envelop a dire population. Blake himself would struggle to live above the level of poverty and feel the pinch directly, which no doubt would breed the sympathy towards others in a same and worse condition as himself.

Within the poem "London", it is simple repetition which draws the eye to "marks" inflicted upon the faces of the people all around "every" corner which the narrator is led. There is a lot happening in this powerful passage, so much that a quick, cursory reading could easily miss. It demands a re-reading:

In every cry of every Man,

In every Infant's cry of fear,

In every voice, in every ban,

The mind-forg'd manacles I hear.

This is extremely emotive stuff. The technique is very simple as already expressed, repetition which helps to include the masses in the day-to-day suffering and pain of the poor upon the streets of London. The cry of the babies in pain is particularly effective, grown men feeling the pain of poverty is one thing, but to see and feel it happening to children is another. This is powerful stuff. The incredibly high infant mortality rate at this time in British history proves that this is not just poetic license, but a harsh fact of life. However it is the last line in this stanza which is most important.

The mind forged manacles is really what this stanza, and even the whole poem, is about. Mind forged manacles directly link to the idea of self-policing. The individual by the very nature of conformity brought about, largely, by the industrial processes of the time, mean that an individual's self will becomes so tied to the whole. Life has become something which has been structured by outside factors, by the need to conform to the rule of those in power. The self has become mind forged just like the charted streets.   Innocence in the poem is another important central theme. Not only is the emphasis to directed to the "infant's cry" and "infant's tear" but the reference to the chimney sweeper also hints at the darkness of child labour. The reality is that many children would die each year with injuries directly relating to the work they had to endure just to earn a pittance. This is the silent rage in this poem about the use of children in such labour and the related state use of the soldier who is left out on the street with nothing, a rejection of the state. The "palace" walls (and the blood which runs down them) is a particularly strong and moral counterpoint to the use of the poor as exploited property. With it the realization that somebody somewhere is benefiting from the suffering of others.

It is not only the men and children which are to suffer at the hands of this early capitalist exploitation, but women who are also forced to turn to prostitution. It is the curse which "blights" the marriage hearse at the end of the poem which is also a bleak reference to the pox, with the overt suggestion that the married couple will soon be infected by this black disease themselves.

The poem itself represents social injustice so prevalent at the time. To contemporary eyes the use of child exploitation and understanding some of the awful working conditions which many of theses people were forced to live and work in, seems outrageous. However, at the time it was simply a part of urban life, though a few such as Blake as represented here totally rejected the "normality" of it. Blake's reference to the innocents not only depicts the unfairness of the then system, it also in more positive light represents a symbolic hope for the future. Innocence becomes that of imagination over conformity and with it the hope of a new generation.

Blake in this poem is at once touching and socially conscious, but always precise and masterful in control of his verse. "London" becomes an incredibly powerful poem which fits into Blake's famous collection of Songs of Innocence and Experience perfectly. It is not hard to see why Blake is not only a leading figure of Romanticism, but also a leading poetic figure in the whole of literature and art, and one thing is for sure, many people have been influenced by him, but few people have surpassed him.

Summary The speaker wanders through the streets of London and comments on his observations. He sees despair in the faces of the people he meets and hears fear and repression in their voices. The woeful cry of the chimney-sweeper stands as a chastisement to the Church, and the blood of a soldier stains the outer walls of the monarch’s residence. The nighttime holds nothing more promising: the cursing of prostitutes corrupts the newborn infant and sullies the “Marriage hearse.”

Form The poem has four quatrains, with alternate lines rhyming. Repetition is the most striking formal feature of the poem, and it serves to emphasize the prevalence of the horrors the speaker describes.

Commentary The opening image of wandering, the focus on sound, and the images of stains in this poem’s first lines recall the Introduction to Songs of Innocence, but with a twist; we are now quite far from the piping, pastoral bard of the earlier poem: we are in the city. The poem’s title denotes a specific geographic space, not the archetypal locales in which many of the other Songs are set. Everything in this urban space—even the natural River Thames—submits to being “charter’d,” a term which combines mapping and legalism. Blake’s repetition of this word (which he then tops with two repetitions of “mark” in the next two lines) reinforces the sense of stricture the speaker feels upon entering the city. It is as if language itself, the poet’s medium, experiences a hemming-in, a restriction of resources. Blake’s repetition, thudding and oppressive, reflects the suffocating atmosphere of the city. But words also undergo transformation within this repetition: thus “mark,” between the third and fourth lines, changes from a verb to a pair of nouns—from an act of observation which leaves some room for imaginative elaboration, to an indelible imprint, branding the people’s bodies regardless of the speaker’s actions.

Ironically, the speaker’s “meeting” with these marks represents the experience closest to a human encounter that the poem will offer the speaker. All the speaker’s subjects—men, infants, chimney-sweeper, soldier, harlot—are known only through the traces they leave behind: the ubiquitous cries, the blood on the palace walls. Signs of human suffering abound, but a complete human form—the human form that Blake has used repeatedly in the Songs to personify and render natural phenomena—is lacking. In the third stanza the cry of the chimney-sweep and the sigh of the soldier metamorphose (almost mystically) into soot on church walls and blood on palace walls—but we never see the chimney-sweep or the soldier themselves. Likewise, institutions of power—the clergy, the government—are rendered by synecdoche, by mention of the places in which they reside. Indeed, it is crucial to Blake’s commentary that neither the city’s victims nor their oppressors ever appear in body: Blake does not simply blame a set of institutions or a system of enslavement for the city’s woes; rather, the victims help to make their own “mind-forg’d manacles,” more powerful than material chains could ever be.

The poem climaxes at the moment when the cycle of misery recommences, in the form of a new human being starting life: a baby is born into poverty, to a cursing, prostitute mother. Sexual and marital union—the place of possible regeneration and rebirth—are tainted by the blight of venereal disease. Thus Blake’s final image is the “Marriage hearse,” a vehicle in which love and desire combine with death and destruction.

William Blake : THE TYGER

Summary The poem begins with the speaker asking a fearsome tiger what kind of divine being could have created it: “What immortal hand or eye/ Could frame they fearful symmetry?” Each subsequent stanza contains further questions, all of which refine this first one. From what part of the cosmos could the tiger’s fiery eyes have come, and who would have dared to handle that fire? What sort of physical presence, and what kind of dark craftsmanship, would have been required to “twist the sinews” of the tiger’s heart? The speaker wonders how, once that horrible heart “began to beat,” its creator would have had the courage to continue the job. Comparing the creator to a blacksmith, he ponders about the anvil and the furnace that the project would have required and the smith who could have wielded them. And when the job was done, the speaker wonders, how would the creator have felt? “Did he smile his work to see?” Could this possibly be the same being who made the lamb?

Form The poem is comprised of six quatrains in rhymed couplets. The meter is regular and rhythmic, its hammering beat suggestive of the smithy that is the poem’s central image. The simplicity and neat proportions of the poems form perfectly suit its regular structure, in which a string of questions all contribute to the articulation of a single, central idea.

Commentary The opening question enacts what will be the single dramatic gesture of the poem, and each subsequent stanza elaborates on this conception. Blake is building on the conventional idea that nature, like a work of art, must in some way contain a reflection of its creator. The tiger is strikingly beautiful yet also horrific in its capacity for violence. What kind of a God, then, could or would design such a terrifying beast as the tiger? In more general terms, what does the undeniable existence of evil and violence in the world tell us about the nature of God, and what does it mean to live in a world where a being can at once contain both beauty and horror?

The tiger initially appears as a strikingly sensuous image. However, as the poem progresses, it takes on a symbolic character, and comes to embody the spiritual and moral problem the poem explores: perfectly beautiful and yet perfectly destructive, Blake’s tiger becomes the symbolic center for an investigation into the presence of evil in the world. Since the tiger’s remarkable nature exists both in physical and moral terms, the speaker’s questions about its origin must also encompass both physical and moral dimensions. The poem’s series of questions repeatedly ask what sort of physical creative capacity the “fearful symmetry” of the tiger bespeaks; assumedly only a very strong and powerful being could be capable of such a creation.

The smithy represents a traditional image of artistic creation; here Blake applies it to the divine creation of the natural world. The “forging” of the tiger suggests a very physical, laborious, and deliberate kind of making; it emphasizes the awesome physical presence of the tiger and precludes the idea that such a creation could have been in any way accidentally or haphazardly produced. It also continues from the first description of the tiger the imagery of fire with its simultaneous connotations of creation, purification, and destruction. The speaker stands in awe of the tiger as a sheer physical and aesthetic achievement, even as he recoils in horror from the moral implications of such a creation; for the poem addresses not only the question of who could make such a creature as the tiger, but who would perform this act. This is a question of creative responsibility and of will, and the poet carefully includes this moral question with the consideration of physical power. Note, in the third stanza, the parallelism of “shoulder” and “art,” as well as the fact that it is not just the body but also the “heart” of the tiger that is being forged. The repeated use of word the “dare” to replace the “could” of the first stanza introduces a dimension of aspiration and willfulness into the sheer might of the creative act.

The reference to the lamb in the penultimate stanza reminds the reader that a tiger and a lamb have been created by the same God, and raises questions about the implications of this. It also invites a contrast between the perspectives of “experience” and “innocence” represented here and in the poem “The Lamb.” “The Tyger” consists entirely of unanswered questions, and the poet leaves us to awe at the complexity of creation, the sheer magnitude of God’s power, and the inscrutability of divine will. The perspective of experience in this poem involves a sophisticated acknowledgment of what is unexplainable in the universe, presenting evil as the prime example of something that cannot be denied, but will not withstand facile explanation, either. The open awe of “The Tyger” contrasts with the easy confidence, in “The Lamb,” of a child’s innocent faith in a benevolent universe.

Poetry analysis: The Chimney Sweeper, by William Blake

In the Romantic era, literature became increasingly subjective, personal, emotional, and imaginative. Whereas Enlightenment writers focused on the similarities between people, Romantic era writers like William Blake, were becoming more interested in individuality and the differences between human beings. Blake's collection of poems Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience, written in 1794, particularly the first version of "The Chimney Sweeper," reflects these tendencies of the Romantic period.

Blake's "The Chimney Sweeper" takes on the point of view of a young boy who works in the city as a chimneysweeper. Throughout the lines of the poem, readers are given a glimpse at the boy's life. Blake describes the boy's unique perspective on his own situation. Despite the fact that the boy lives a horrible life, he believes the "story" that he will one day have a better life after death. This "story" is told frequently to oppress individuals who might demand better or equal treatment. Blake tells the story from the boy's point of view because taking this different perspective allows him to highlight the differences between individuals. Readers would likely have been members of the upper classes. With this poem, they could glance at what life is like in someone else's shoes.                          In the first version of "The Chimney Sweeper" we can also see Blake's injection of a sense of emotion. The little boy has lost his mother and was sold by his father. He is literally alone, and most likely feels alienated from the rest of society. Clearly, Blake feels that where you are in the city makes a lot of difference with respect to the kind of life and experiences that you have.

Although at the time child chimneysweepers were likely commonplace, this group of individuals was virtually invisible. Blake's focus on the individual's story brings what was previously invisible into the light. This idea of taking the ordinary and doing something with it that makes it extraordinary is common during the Romantic period.

Another characteristic of many Romantic era writers is the insertion of nature or natural images into their works. Although "the Chimney Sweeper" is presumably set in an industrialized city where residents would require a chimneysweeper, Blake inserts images of nature throughout the poem.

Blake peppers the poem with images that are typically associated with picturesque countryside landscapes such as a "lamb's back" (line 6), a "green plain" (line 15), and "a river" (line 16). In addition, Blake elicits images of the sky as the chimney sweeper describes the freed chimneysweepers from Tom's dream as shining "in the Sun" (line 16), rising "upon the clouds" and sporting "in the wind" (line 18).

Poetry explication: A comparison of William Blake's

Songs of innocence and Songs of experience

The antiquarian movement represented a renewed interest and value for the simpler life that existed prior to modernization and a belief that perhaps something of great value had been lost in the transition from "natural" to "industrialized". It was a time when people sought to rediscover the connection between humanity, nature, and faith. William Blake captures the essence of folk tradition in his collection of poetry, "Songs of Innocence and Experience", by demonstrating this connection, as well as the corruption that occurs when the connection is lost.

In "The Lamb", a child narrator identifies the value of the simple beast not only in relation to its physical attributes such as "clothing of delight" and its "tender voice", but by the fact that the creature is called by the same name as the Son of God. The narrator also identifies his own connection to the Lord in his realization that "He became a child" like the narrator himself. Blake is able to show that great wisdom is often found in the most innocent faith. Likewise, the wisdom found in innocent faith is expressed in "The Little Black Boy", where the speaker understands that the color of his skin makes him appear to be of lesser value than the white English child. Yet, he is still able to see beyond the physical issues that guide society and believe that, in the eyes of God, both their souls are of equal value and one day the white English child will also gain this wisdom and will love him.                However, such poems as "The Tyger" remind us that the negative forces in the world are very real and the innocent are often blind to them. Although experience often destroys part of what is innocent, it is necessary to realize it exists and that "he who made the Lamb" also made the Tyger.

"The Sick Rose" illustrates the fact that innocence, when blind to the negative, can be caught off guard by "the invisible worm" and easily corrupted and destroyed.

"The Songs of Experience" focus less on individual faith and connection to nature and the creator and more on the power of the Church itself and its control over society. "The Chimney Sweeper" here indicates the speaker's clear understanding, through experience, of his parents' hypocrisy in leaving him in a terrible situation while they are off praying and praising "God & his Priest & King", namely the Church, "who made up a heaven of our misery". The poetic collection demonstrates the value two different perspectives on the world.

Poetry analysis: THE BLESSED DAMOZEL, by Dante Gabriel Rossetti

"The Blessed Damozel" is a poem written in 1847 by Dante Gabriel Rossetti.  It was first published three years later, in 1850.  This poem is romantic and hopeful in nature.  It tells the story of a young woman who dies unexpectedly at a very young age.  Her family and the young man who loves her are in disbelief.

They miss her terribly almost immediately and have great difficulty imagining that life will go on without her. Although she has only been dead a few days at the most, it seems to them like it has been years.  It seems more like an eternity to the man she had promised herself to and left behind.  To him, she was perfect, no one could ever replace her, she was the only woman for him.

This poem portrays a connection between physical features of life on Earth and spiritual wonders of heaven.  The man who the young woman has left behind has a very difficult time coping with her death. He feels she is waiting for him somewhere and he feels destined to find her.

The young woman is on the edge of entering heaven but does not want to go without the man she loves.  She does not want to wait for him to join her.  The young man still feels close to her even though her body lies still and motionless.  At one particular moment, he is sure that her long flowing hair is surrounding him but discovers instead that it is merely autumn leaves falling freely from the trees.  Nevertheless, this gives him hope that he will one day be reunited with the woman he had once saw a future with.  Meanwhile, his love sees many couples being reunited in heaven and cannot wait for her turn to be able to once again be with the one she loves.

"The Blessed Damozel" gives off a sense of romance, sadness and hope in its twenty-four stanzas.  Although love is lost through death, there is great hope that it will be rekindled in the future, even if not on Earth. 

When the lovers meet again, their love will be eternal in heaven.  This poem helps readers to experience the idea that death is not always the end, but sometimes a beginning to something even greater and more powerful.

Poetry analysis: The Ballad of Reading Gaol, by Oscar Wilde

When one thinks of a ballad, particularly in music, one has brought to mind a simple tune, repeated often throughout the song, with each verse adding to a story being told. Often, there are fifteen, even twenty more verses. From an artistic, or musical, standpoint, it may not be great art. But an actual story is being told, in verse, and is therefore more word efficient than spoken or written prose. Oscar Wilde does the same in a long piece of poetry, called The Ballad of Reading Gaol (an older, English spelling of the word jail). However, in this piece an artistic approach is taken, even using repetition, to tell a story with more than one universal theme. The piece deals with murder, with prison and, oddly, with love. All quotes taken directly from the poem, which can be found here.

When one begins reading The Ballad of Reading Gaol, one may become daunted by the length of the piece. But the tale is spun very rhythmically. Yes, repetition is used, but artfully, and not as a cheat. The poem begins with the aftermath of a murder. A man has just killed the woman he loved in bed. While never stated whether he and the woman were married, it later becomes clear, that it doesn't matter. The reader is whisked through his trial, and then reads of his travails while in the Reading Gaol.

Following is the repetitious verse which is, in the end, the final theme of the poem:

Yet each man kills the thing he loves

By each let this be heard 

Some do it with a bitter look,

Some with a flattering word,

The coward does it with a kiss,

The brave man with a sword!

Most would view this theme, that every man kills the things he loves, as being a cynical view held by Wilde. And, perhaps, they'd be right. However, Wilde states this as a more general occurrence, and even states outright, that the killing may be slow, and over a lifetime, rather than what most of us would call murder. He's making a more universal statement - that we can't help but kill the ones we love, if for no other reason than just by loving them. Cynical, maybe. True, to be sure.

When one approaches The Ballad of Reading Gaol, as a reading of fine verse, one must not be afraid to take on the long piece (it's nearly 100 verses long). Instead, one should approach the epic with a sense of wonder, amazement, and, surprisingly yes, hope.

Poetry analysis: ARIEL, by Sylvia Plath

Sylvia Plath (1932 – 1963) was an American poet. She was also a novelist and short story writer.

If the hallmark of a good poem is to distil the story or the idea to the most minimal form, then her poem Ariel is a masterpiece. With such a stripping down of her prose, poem remains ambiguous. And hence there have been many interpretations made of this poem.

The poem, according to her husband and fellow poet Ted Hughes, is related to an experience she had while studying at Cambridge. Ariel was the name of her horse. On one occasion, she half fell from the saddle. Clinging on to the horse’s neck, she held on as the horse galloped back to the stables. It seems likely she was using the experience as a metaphor for her life and her attempts to stay on (or stay alive), and often holding on for dear life.

The first words of the poem: “Stasis in darkness.” This could well be a reference to her depression. That she is held in its darkness. She suffered from depression for most of her life and committed suicide when she was thirty years old.

Much of the poem could be about that horse ride, but when the reader gets to the eight stanza mood and pace changes; she is somewhere else. It is as if she were remembering the event with the horse and reflecting on her life. Then suddenly she is brought back to the present by a child’s cry. In the ninth stanza, the cry:

“Melts in the wall.

And I

Am the arrow,”

The child in question is most likely one of her children. She is at home and the sound of the cry melts into the wall and she is the arrow. This is a metaphor for how her attention is immediately drawn from her thoughts to the child’s cry.

The tenth stanza looks a reference to her suicide. The word suicide in a poem by someone who has taken their own life will always draw attention to itself. But it does seem that here she is joining back with the experience of the horse ride and staying on and equating it with staying alive. She says she is  

 “…at one with the drive

Into the red”    

The drive towards her own death, or possibility of death. The red indicating she is approaching the danger zone.  The final sentence is an interesting one:  “Eye, the cauldron of morning.”

The cauldron is the metaphor for the eye. A cauldron is a pot that is filled up with water and food. The water could be tears, but more likely she means that her eyes are filling up with the things she sees first thing in the morning. Another thing a cauldron does is reach its boiling point, so it is an interesting metaphor all round.

This line is almost a poem all by itself.

Poetry analysis : Lady Lazarus, by Sylvia Plath

Sylvia Plath's poem, Lady Lazarus, is a confessional poem about her battle with depression.  Plath suffered from bipolar disorder for most of her life and recounts in The Bell Jar her first unsuccessful suicide attempt.  What Plath is describing in this poem is the experience of being depressed and then recovering again.  The poem likens being revived from the dead state to living like a zombie since many depressed people are considered recovered when they are heavily medicated and no longer expressing troublesome emotions.  The speaker of the poem is being revived and her recovery is something that she feels is a spectacle.

She starts off the poem by saying, "I have done it again".  What she has done must have caused her to "die".  Whether death is actual physical death or the killing of some old feeling or habit or memory is not clear.  One possibility is that the revived woman in this poem is a symbol of some feeling or habit she had believed she had put to rest, but she had not.  An alternative explanation could be that the Plath is recalling her previous suicide attempt. 

The woman in the poem, whether a symbol or Plath herself, is being revived.  She is called Lady Lazarus, after Lazarus who Jesus commanded to come out of his tomb.  Lazarus too had all of his burial cloths on and his sister Martha and Mary were elated to peel them off and have their brother back.  However, the woman in this poem seems to resent being revived.  As they peel her burial cloths off, she refers to the people as "enemies".  Her revival seems to lack any spiritual significance.  It could be similar to being cryogenically frozen and being revived two hundred years later to a bunch of excited strangers who come simply for the wonder of it all.

The "peanut crunching crowd" gawks at the revived woman, who seems to prefer to stay dead.  Plath, who would eventually end her life, seems to be jaded or used to what is the end, whereas the crowd seems shallow and rather oblivious to the idea that death is what comes in the end.  As they stare at the woman, she puts on a show to amuse them in a condescending and contemptuous way.  For her the art of dying is something she does "exceptionally well".  She has made dying an "art", not because dying itself has any artistic merit, but because her revival seems to compel her to play out a drama she would prefer not to do.  This is why the poet says,

It's easy enough to do it and stay put. 
It's the theatrical 
Comeback in broad day 
To the same place, the same face, the same brute 
Amused shout: 
'A miracle!'

She fails to understand why being revived would be a miracle.  Miracles by definition defy physical laws, but for the better.  Lady Lazarus does not think of this as being good.

One reason is that she is too enveloped in her darkness to consider life to be superior no matter what anyone might claim.  She is not grateful for this revival which to her is motivated by a mixture of naive optimism and simple curiosity.  What the people and the doctor think is a humane deed, she sees as something that will cost them.  It reminds one of archeologists who dig up old pharaohs and die soon after for transgressing some fixed and mysterious boundary.  One who invades the grave of another will pay regardless of his seemingly good intentions:

There is a charge
For the eyeing my scars, there is a charge 
For the hearing of my heart-
It really goes. 
And there is a charge, a very large charge
For a word or a touch 
Or a bit of blood

The motive of the reviver or the one who disinters is irrelevant, if his actions prove displeasing to the dead.  The disinterred will expect an exact price at a later date.  On a personal level, Plath may be referring to others who view her "from afar" but not out of real concern.  Unlike a martyr who allows the common people to have pieces of his hands, hair, eyes, toes, or even his nose, Lady Lazarus is not so generous.  There is too much baggage and pain to give anything for free.

One's death is a very private affair and reflects the way one lives.  People die a little everyday.  Some wish to put to death old pains and feelings which if they cannot do makes dying harder when it is actually time to die.  Lady Lazarus has not died well.  The crowd looks on indifferently to her most intimate pains. 

She will rise again like a phoenix  and "eat men like air" because they do not have much meaning to her.

 Poetry analysis: AND DEATH SHALL HAVE NO DOMINION, by Dylan Thomas

The poem "And Death Shall Have No Dominion", by Dylan Thomas celebrates the undying and eternal strength of the human spirit. It is because of this strength that death does not claim ultimate victory over humanity. The dead are never truly lost to us but live on through the beauty of their memory and spirit. The struggle continues.

Three unrhymed verses make up the work. Beautiful universal imagery focuses on the sea, bones, and burial. Each verse starts and ends with the phrase "And death shall have no dominion." Even as Dylan brings us face to face with the physical reality of death, he disarms it. He gives death meaning by allowing us to see the beauty behind it, especially the beauty of human courage and dignity. Timeless values will live on in the stories of those gone before. It has been said that to live on in the memory of loved ones is to never die.

In the first verse, the poet shows that, in death all are one. Race and skin color have no more meaning when skin is no more. After death, the body is united with nature. "Dead men naked they shall be one/With the man in the wind and the west moon;" In death, men shall be naked, as they are from their mothers' wombs. In death, the innocence of Eden is restored. It is here that men become the stuff of legends. Here a man becomes part of a constellation, part of a grand design bigger than himself. Though his bones are naked, they may thus become clothed in eternal glory instead of mortal skin.

"When their bones are picked clean and the clean bones gone,/They shall have stars at elbows and foot;" Their foibles will be forgotten and their glories remembered. Their confusion forgotten, they will attain an eternal perspective of clarity. Those who have drowned in a universal sea of human sorrow shall be restored and taste joy again. Lovers will be reunited. "Though they go mad they shall be sane,/Though they sink through the sea they shall rise again;/Though lovers be lost love shall not; "

In the second verse, Dylan takes the reader to a graveyard on the sea floor. The dead here appear to be either sailors or other souls lost at sea. These dead died bravely, having suffered in their lives. The wheel of time has tested, tortured, and tried, but not broken them. "Strapped to a wheel, yet they shall not break; Faith in their hands shall snap in two, And the unicorn evils shall run them through; Split all ends up they shan't crack;" The unicorn is a very old and symbolic motif sometimes used to symbolize Christ or God. Has God or religion let these souls down? "Unicorn horns are said to be harder than diamonds and to be able to neutralize poisons. Unicorn tears can heal both physical wounds and sorrows of the heart." The refrain "And death shall have no dominion." symbolizes this triumph.

In the final verse, the poem wraps up on land, by the seashore. Dylan draws out the fact that the dead are no longer aware of the physical elements that once made up their home with the words "No more may gulls cry at their ears/Or waves break loud on the seashores" Yet new life may spring up in their place, an intrepid life like a flower that "lift its head to the blows of the rain;" Their innocence shall burst through like daisies. This innocence ultimately wins over even the sun, breaking it down. To break down the sun is to steal death's power. The phrase "Heads of the characters hammer through daisies;" implies that it is the character of those dead that hammers through the pain until innocence breaks through. The daisy flower, pure and childlike, pushes stubbornly through the hard earth of the grave to rise defiantly and bloom."  Break in the sun till the sun breaks down." The daisy blooms as dawn breaks, symbolizing the burst of innocence or day star as the night loses out. In the same way, death starts to lose its power as humanity regains purity and embraces hope, thus discarding pain and hate. To break in implies breaking in a horse until it serves the master, instead of the other way around. In this way, death can be made to serve man. "And death shall have no dominion."

Poetry analysis: POEM IN OCTOBER, by Dylan Thomas

Dylan thomas penned  `Poem in October` to honour his thirtieth birthday.

The poem is filled with feeling and colour and Thomas goes to great lengths to relay his inner thoughts and feelings.

Read the poem a few times and the pure beauty of his words shine through. The moment Thomas puts pen to paper he is busy weaving an emotive tale for his followers. 

His work is riddled with hidden meaning and it is our job to read and interpret as we think fit. This is my take on a `Poem in October`. 

Dylan Thomas awakes early on the morning of his Autumnal thirtieth birthday.

All around him are still asleep and it seems that Dylan may have mixed feelings about the forthcoming year.

Dylan lays in bed listening intently to the familiar sounds that he he feels are worthy of greater exploration.

 The birds are on the shore and he can hear the wind whistling through the trees in the nearby wood.   The waves are rolling in and the seagulls and rooks are calling to the tune of the small fishing boats bobbing on the swelling sea.

Dylan rises with a sense of determination, the rest of the village may well be asleep but he feels a need to go out and explore.

In verse two Dylan begins by recalling how his special day began, he awoke to the sound of water and the day begins as it means to go on.

Dylan finds himself walking through the countryside caught in the middle a heavy Autumn shower but at this point he appears to be finding contentment in his state if solitude.

As Dylan reaches the top of the hill the chill wind and the Autumn shower are left behind and he finds himself enjoying some October sunshine. The top of the hill is alive with the sound of birdsong.

Dylan stands on the breast of the hill to admire the view. Through the sea mist he can pick out the shape of the castle and the spire on the small church below though they look dreary in the misty light.

He laughs to himself as he recalls all of the tall tales that went on in Summer just past, when each and every gardener tried to outdo each other.

Dylan is drinking in the beauty as the weather decides to change yet again. Overhead the sky boasts a beautiful rainbow and as Dylan turns to face that rainbow he is suddenly transported back to the days of his childhood. Those precious days when he walked through sunny fields hand in hand with his Mother.           

 Today he walks through those fields as a man not a boy. Inside he still feels like a boy but he is a young man who is at that point mourning for his lost youth.

Yet again Dylan turns, he looks down the the town that is covered with Autumn leaves and wishes with all of his heart that he will be able to return to the top of that hill on his next birthday.

Thomas puts so much colour into `Poem in October`. The syllabic metre has been used artistically.                  As you read through the poem for the first time you realise that you must pay attention, if you read the poem as it stands then the beauty of the verse would be lost.

Thomas knows this and he wants you to linger over his beautiful poetry. If he has spent many hours composing it then he wants you to read it carefully and grasp what he is trying to tell you.

Thomas is an artist, his paintbox his words and his palette his paper. He paints the scene and you will make of it what you will.

`Poem in October` is filled with self expression, Thomas works his way through the poem depicting many different scenes and displaying varying emotions.

His birthday begins on a high and he remains upbeat until he recalls his childhood. Then and only then does he feel that dramatic sense of loss, his childhood is firmly in the past.

Literary analysis: The shifting of tone and mood in 'FERN HILL', by Dylan Thomas

PAST AND PRESENT MEET IN "FERN HILL" BY DYLAN THOMAS (AN IN-DEPTH ANALYSIS)

("Poetry is what makes me laugh or cry or yawn, what makes my toenails twinkle, what makes me want to do this or that or nothing." Dylan Thomas)

Dylan Thomas was a sick child, born in Swansea, Wales, in 1914. Fern Hill was a country house belonging to Thomas's aunt, where Dylan spent some of his childhood. In this poem, Thomas may be writing about himself, looking back on his lonely childhood and the troubled times to follow. On first read of Dylan Thomas's poem, "Fern Hill," the mood is light, like a lovely memory of childhood on a farm.

A deeper read of "Fern Hill" presents a tone of foreboding and aloneness. Thomas warns that something is coming, even though the child in the poem is given the gift of the oblivion of youth by the personification of Time ("Time let me hail and climb"). A poet as sophisticated and in love with language as Dylan Thomas would not blunder by using repetition without reason. We know the child is young and nave. He is green, and the simple times in Paradise beneath the apple tree are but a windfall, as in "Down the rivers of the windfall light." Impending loss of his youth also appears when he says, "I was green and carefree,"; "In the sun that is young once only,"; and, "Time let me play".        The religious references suggest the biblical Adam alone in the Garden, "honored . . . I was prince of the apple towns" and "I lordly had the trees and leaves."         We feel the ominous and omniscient presence in phrases such as, "once below a time." Like Adam alone in the garden with God, ("Golden is the mercy of his means"), with dominion over the animals, the poet tells us, "I was huntsman and herdsman, the calves/ Sang to my horn." Concurrently, we hear what is almost a death knell, "The sabbath rang slowly."

Then comes fear, "horses/ Flashing into the dark." The horse in the dark, a symbolic nightmare, warns of change. No longer a blissful child, he has become adult, as in, "And then to awake . . . like a wanderer white," a spirit or ghostly presence.

No longer a child or alone, "it was Adam and the maiden." Dylan Thomas married his wife Caitlin in London in the 1930's. Things begin well, but again, the tone changes. "The sky gathered again," refers to a sudden darkness. Despite the poet's seemingly happy tone, "Before the children green and golden," comes the inevitable, "Follow him out of grace."

In the end, there is the sadness of harsh reality, perhaps loss of a loved one or perhaps the poet's fall into alcoholism, "in the lamb white days, that time would take me." Like the white lamb taken to slaughter, the narrator is taken to the "swallow thronged loft, by the shadow of my hand.." He awakens to the farm seen as, "forever fled from the childless land." In the end, Fern Hill no longer holds him "green and golden," but he is held, "green and dying."

In a sad end, Dylan Thomas writes, "I sang in my chains like the sea." Dylan Thomas died in 1953 in St. Vincent's Hospital in New York City, probably as a result of a lifetime of alcoholism. The premonitions in "Fern Hill," in the end, came true.

References: "Dylan Thomas Home Page" by Aeronwy Thomas || The Top 500 Poems edited by William Harmon (Columbia University Press, 1992) || Creating Poetry by John Drury (Writer's Digest Books, 1991)

Poetry analysis: THE PRELUDE, by William Wordsworth

In ‘The Prelude’ Wordsworth recalls childhood experiences which reveal the benign influence of nature, Nature is man’s educator, a foster parent silently educating the child. It depicts the growth of a poet’s soul, the development of the heart and mind of a poet – ‘The Prelude’ is the prelude to a poetic career.     

 In this philosophical poem, Wordsworth describes his formative childhood by analysing the special relationship with his natural surroundings. As in ‘Tintern Abbey’ the poet is trying to enact the process or remembering while trying also to express philosophical and psychological ideas about the nature of experience and memory. He does this through his central premises of childhood – the ‘unremembered pleasures’ in ‘Tintern Abbey’, the beneficent effects of contact with nature and the growth of his poetic sensibility.

 The iambic pentameter which is slow, sedate, and calm is very appropriate for philosophical or descriptive writing. He uses it to describe things of seeming trivial importance – the trivial joys of infancy in a grand poem. This shift from the sublime of the epic metre and philosophical thinking to the trivial using the same epic metre is a dangerous risk to take. He tries to put a transcendental meaning to the trivial and he knows this, saying ‘too humble to be named in verse’. The truth of his own feelings makes him include subject topics which epic poets would put aside.     

 The poem in itself is a therapeutic exercise to ‘fix the wavering balance of my mind’, by rediscovering and re-enacting his life he hopes to trace the sources of his mental strength and weakness in order to be able to move forward. It grows out of dejection, despair and a loss of confidence and belief in values.

 The boat-stealing episode in Book I reflects a truth that Wordsworth feels: That it was his relationship with nature that led to his proper sense of morality and goodness. Nature draws the child to itself who in turn is mesmerised by her beauty – a transcendental vision. Nature becomes an educator showing him where he has done wrong by instilling fear: ‘Fostered alike by beauty and by fear’. Nature encourages him to do wrong (‘led by her’) in order to correct him and instils morality. From the natural bond of man with Nature, Wordsworth goes beyond the natural to the spiritual, the unseen presence.

Literary analysis : MAC FLEKNOE, by John Dryden

John Dryden was the greatest writer of the Restoration period as he was simultaneously a dramatist, a critic and a poet. Though he wrote a lot of good poems and novels his greatest works still remains the two satires: ""Mac Flecknoe" and "Absalom and Achitophel". They are both organized around a carefully chosen metaphor of parallel which carries with it an implicit set of standards or ideals whereby the victims of his satire are to be judge.

In "Mac Flecknoe", the organizing metaphors are those of classical poetry and empire. The poem's subject is Thomas Shadwell, a minor dramatist who had been employed, like Dryden, in the Cromwellian government service, and with whom Dryden had been engaged in literary disputes since the late 1600s. Shadwell and Dryden had, for nearly a decade before the composition of the poem, been airing in print their disagreements about a number of critical questions, such as the stature of Ben Jonson as a playwright and the relative merits of comedy based on displays of wit and repartee, as against the type of comic play which is devoted to the delineation of "humours" (extravagances of habit or personality which differentiate a particular character from his fellows). They had also exchanged views about the ultimate purpose of comedy, about the value of rhyme in dramatic verse, and about the nature of literary plagiarism.    In the course of these exchanges, Shadwell had rashly portrayed himself as the champion and dramatic heir of Ben Jonson.

In "Mac Flecknoe" Dryden responded to these boasts by imagining a grotesque coronation ceremony, in which Richard Flecknoe, a notoriously bad Irish poet and current monarch of "all the Realms of Non-sense", hands over the throne of his kingdom to Shadwell. Shadwell is solemnly enjoined by Flecknoe always to uphold the sacred traditions of Dullness which have been so lovingly cherished during his own reign.

The poem is written in the style which has come to be known as "mock-heroic". The object of this kind of poetry is not to ridicule the classical epic (in the manner of burlesque), but rather to bring out the paltriness of the figures and events being satirised by employing an epic style and register which is felt to be ludicrously inappropriate to its subject. Thus Shadwell progresses up the Thames to his coronation just as Virgil's Aeneas had sailed in stately dignity up the Tiber, Flecknoe entrusts power to Shadwell, just as Aeneas had entrusted the future of Rome to his son Ascanius. Shadwell's temples are crowned with poppies, just as the heads of the Roman emperors had been wreathed with laurels on their accession.

In this way Shadwell's Jonsonian, and thus classical aspirations (for Jonson had thought of himself as the dramatic heir of the Ancients) is exposed. Through his mock-heroic strategy Dryden brings home the difference between True Wit and its opposite, Dullness.

Modern admirers of "Mac Flecknoe" have praised the power of Dryden's allusions and running mock-heroic analogy to raise the poem above the level of a mere lampoon. They are the means, it is suggested, whereby Dryden rises above simple ridicule of a minor literary rival to make deeper points about the nature of literary civilisation and the threat which is posed to such civilisation by Dullness.

Dryden's wit is also playing subversively over matters which i his official "public" writing he so often treated with solemnity. Consequently, such weighty issues as monarchical succession, absolute rule and the divine rights of kings are given a slyly, double-edged treatment in this poem as well.

Flecknoe has achieved the "absolute rule" over his domain of Non-sense which Charles II was so frequently suspected of plotting to wield over his kingdom.

Poetry analysis: To His Coy Mistress, by Andrew Marvell

Andrew Marvell's famous lyric "To His Coy Mistress" is a metaphysical poem.  Metaphysical poems are brief, intense meditations employing wit, irony and elaborate "conceits" or comparisons. Underlying the formal structures of rhyme, meter, and stanza is the poem's logic-based argument. In "To His Coy Mistress" the explicit argument (the speaker's request that the coy lady yield to his passion) is a whimsical statement bristling with humorous hyperbole but leading to a deadly serious argument about the shortness of life and the quick passage of libidinal pleasure.

The theme expressed in it is carpe diem or seize the day. Marvell's poem is usually excluded from secondary level textbooks because of its explicit sexuality, despite its author being a Puritan and the son of a Calvinist Anglican preacher.

This seduction poem is presented in the unromantic form of a logical syllogism. The opening "if" segment lacks that subordinating conjunction that is more elegantly presupposed by the subjunctive mood of "Had we but world enough and time." The mediate inference is presented in the second verse paragraph beginning with "But," and the deduction in the concluding stanza commencing with "Now therefore." Such strict adherence to logical argument befits the author who was an important political figure in the Cromwell protectorate in England.

Current readers of Marvell's poem are often upset to learn that the adjective "coy" at the time of writing had none of its modern suggestions of playful teasing or coquetry. In Marvell's day the word was a synonym for reluctant, modest, even disdainful. [Shorter Oxford English Dictionary]  In  "the mother tongue: english and how it got that way" [page 73], Bill Bryson points out that "'coy' and 'quiet' both have the same grandparent in the Latin 'quietus'."The lady addressed in the poem remains silent -  reluctant to accede to the speaker's pleas because she wishes to maintain her "quaint Honour" or virginity. There is none of the dalliance or playing-hard-to-get that we usually assume with coyness.

Bryson also mentions how Marvell's term "quaint" was in Chaucer's The Wife of Bath's Prologue and Tale spelled "quainte" but also appears as "kent" and three other spelling variations. The variable spellings of today's unspeakable crudity "lie with  Chaucer or his copyists of both." [page 62].

In stanza one, the speaker/seducer makes concrete the abstractions of "Had we but world enough and time." Geographically, she might search for rubies on the shores of the Indian Ganges while he voices his unrequited desires by England's Humber River half way around the world from the object of his amorous desire. Temporally, he would sue for her affections beginning ten years before the Flood of Noah until the unanticipated "Conversion of the Jews." Read forever.

Moderns tend to read "My vegetable love" as a slow-growing carrot, turnip or the like. In the poet's day, "vegetable" would have signified the lowest of man's three souls. The uppermost was the rational, possessed only by humanity; then came the sensitive, shared by animals and involving motion and perception; then the vegetative, which, as with plant life, concerned itself with generation, augmentation, corruption, and decay. Were Marvell to hear vegetable love construed as a swelling cabbage or rutabaga, he would probably smile rather than protest.

Next comes an anti-Petrarchan segue. Petrarch and other writers of the courtly love tradition expounded in hyperbolic blazons  every physical feature of the love object: hair, brow, eyes, nose, teeth, voice, bosom, in descending order. Marvell's speaker says that he would happily follow in that tradition were it not for time and encroaching age, decrepitude, and accompanying sexual dysfunction. The lady is deserving of nothing less. We hear the unromantic terminology of investment and finance in

For, lady, you deserve this state, 
Nor would I love at lower rate.

Section two of the syllogism is enlivened by arresting imagery of sound and sight. "At my back I always hear/ Time's winged chariot hurrying near;/ And yonder all before us lie/ Deserts of vast eternity." The tone switches from earlier whimsicality to seriousness. There is nothing comical about

Thy Beauty shall no more be found 
Nor, in thy marble Vault, shall sound 
My echoing Song; then Worms shall try 
That long preserv'd Virginity; 
And your quaint Honour turn to dust, 
And into ashes all my Lust.

"Do it now. You're going to be dead a long time. Why bring a maidenhead to a coffin?" One need not comment on the phallicism of worms. It is interesting that churchman Marvell did not shun what today is considered at least an impropriety, but capitalized on the witty sexual double entendres.

This segment of the syllogism is memorably summarized by its ironic concluding couplet. It describes a location that offers seclusion, darkness, privacy, and security from observation or interruption by third parties. There is, however, one serious drawback.

The grave's a fine and private place, 
But none I think do there embrace.

Part three of the syllogism, stripped to its essentials, argues, "Now therefore, . . . let us sport us while we may."  The poet dresses that imperative with figurative language. Not just while we're young, but "While the youthful hew/ Sits on thy skin like morning dew." Let's have none of this "vegetable love"; let us rather couple fiercely like amorous hawks or eagles. Let us not be devoured by the slowly grinding molars of time and age, but do the devouring ourselves. Rather than the vast separation of the Ganges from the Humber, let us not merely unite but

. . .  roll all our strength, and all 
Our sweetness, up into one ball; 
And tear our pleasures with rough strife 
Thorough* the iron gates of life.     *through

More simply, let us love actively and passionately. Though we can't stop time's passage ("make our Sun/ Stand still"), we can make it fly by enjoying sexual fulfillment (we will make him run).

Although this analysis makes the poem sound like seduction motivated by sexual appetite, the copulatory activity is actually a symbol or metaphysical conceit for living life intensely and letting no opportunities slip by. Marvell, who never married, is not trying to emulate John Donne of the early "Jack the rake period." Presumably, this poet had no flesh and blood woman in mind for the coy mistress of the title. As stated earlier, the theme is carpe diem.

All humanity, not just one woman, are adjured not to let opportunities slip past nor allow time, age, and creeping decrepitude to do their work on bored minds and inactive bodies.