Amours Quotes

Question 1

‘Tis but to prove limitation, and measure a cord, that we travel (opening of Canto 1)

Answer 1

o

Question 2

‘The world that we live in/ Whithersoever we turn, still is the same narrow crib
(L1)

Answer 2

“narrow crib” - especially infantile

• “cord” - metaphoric umbilical cord
• paradoxically “proves limitation” because we interrogate our earthly and mortal bounds but indulge the boundlessness of imagination

Question 3

Rubbishy (italicised) seems the word that most exactly would suit it
(L1)

Answer 3

• maintains his judgemental distance as a tourist
• this tone pervades the first letter
• typography draws attention to haughty damnation
• italicised in the Patrick Scott edition
• others have capitalised it
• also perhaps draws attention to it as a word taken from Clough’s correspondence directly

Question 4

Rome disappoints me much,- St Peter’s perhaps in especial/ Only the Arch of Titus and view from the Lateran please me
(L1)

Answer 4

• due to Classical education, Claude finds the relics of Ancient Rome more attractive than the more recently impressive buildings etc.
• as a tourist he is looking for what is most familiar and he finds that the ancient relics are more familiar than the modern condition of Catholicism/ the modern buildings of Catholicism

Question 5

“I am feeling so spiteful,/ That I could travel to Athens, to Delphi, and Troy, and Mount Sinai,/ Though but to see with my eyes that these are vanity also”

(L1)

Answer 5

• disparity between his imagination and the senses
• if we question whether his sense can be trusted because they are so influenced by his imagination/ expectations then really do we have to question the validity of taking any travel recount as authentic - do we not need to travel ourselves in order to get closer to an authentic experience?
  (or do we have to sacrifice this idea of authenticity because all experience of travel will be affected by expectation etc.)

Question 6

Ye gods! what do I want with this rubbish of ages departed (L2)

Answer 6

• subverted invocation to the muses/ the gods
• reverses the direction of inspiration, more accusatory - better for them to exist in cultural memory or imagination than any physical reminder
• the archaism of the invocation, however, implies the awkward position that Claude finds himself in - he is simultaneously forced to accept temporal progress while striving towards the temporal past

Question 7

Would to Heaven the old Goths had made a cleaner sweep of it! (L2)

Answer 7

• recourse to the prevailing familiarity of his imagination
• give security
• wishes that the physical remnants of relics were destroyed in order that the enhanced version of his imagination could prevail
• but that also these relics did not have to be subjected to inevitable decay at the hands of time but could be preserved and immortalised in his imagination
• foreshadows the attitude of the futurists - want to overcome the oppressive weight of destruction - give way to modern progression

Question 8

‘Brickwork I found thee, and marble I left thee!’ their Emperor vaunted;/ ‘Marble I thought thee, and brickwork I found thee!’ the Tourist may answer (closes L2)

Answer 8

• spiteful chiasmus
• summarises the discrepancy between topography and expectation
• instability of language reflects the unavoidable instability of travel

Question 9

Come, let us go,—to a land wherein gods of the old time wandered,/ Where every breath even now changes to ether divine. (opening of Canto 1)

Answer 9

• imagined legacy of the ancient gods - “changes” as in every human voice turns into a flowing river of praise to the divinity of the gods
• in reality we find that they have been forgotten and superseded (especially in the replacement of the belief systems)
• however - the archaism of the syntactic formation mirrors his admission that the gods as a belief system are redundant

Question 10

All the incongruous things of past incompatible ages,/ Seem to be treasured up here to make fools of present and future (L1)

Answer 10

• described as its own “Monte Testaceo”

- has the destabilising consequence that this shows us what we are inevitably going to become

Question 11

metallic beliefs and regimental devotions (L5)

Answer 11

• sinful corruption of the modern Christian faith
• you might have to progress temporally but this is not necessarily progressive
• reference to iconography, financial orientation of the Catholic faith
• religion has become commodified because of its status as a tourist attraction
• discomforting ambiguity between the religious pilgrimage and the cultural pilgrimage
• “regimental” - criticism of the Tractarians - severity of religious observation - perfunctory

Question 12

overcrusting with slime, perverting, defacing, debasing,
Michael Angelo’s Dome, that had hung the Pantheon in heaven, Raphael’s Joys and Graces, and thy clear stars, Galileo! (L5)

Answer 12

• condemnation exploding into plosive asyndeton
• all three figures - Angelo, Raphael, Galileo - all in some way been betrayed by religion
• the process of reappropriation of the Pantheon has been debased because there has been a religious shift from the point at which Michael Angelo created the Dome of St. Peter’s - was pure, now corrupt
• (Three Graces) - inspiration taken from a Roman statue in the Siena Cathedral - its value as a cultural artwork has been sullied due to the corrupt condition of the Catholic Church
• Galileo - (more explicit case) Catholicism debased his science through the Inquisition

Question 13

dreams to my eyes, I repeople thy niches/ Not with Martyrs, and Saints, and Confessors, and Virgins, and children but with the mightier forms of an older, austerer worship (L5)

Answer 13

• paradox whereby he is resisting religious modernisation while also witnessing the unrestrainable inevitability of the transcendence of the past
• due to the mode of travel writing and the expectation of some elements of truthfulness, this imaginary scene takes on a feeling of reality even when acknowledged as an idealistic fantasy
• ‘children’ - ie. the followers of these religious figures - relates to Claude as a ‘Great Man’ figure who exists under the pronoun ‘I’ and never as a follower of any single religion etc.
• privileges this ‘older, austerer’ worship with a translation into Latin

Question 14

It is a blessing, no doubt, to be rid, at least for a time, of/ All one’s friends and relations (L1)

Answer 14

• fits in with him being a Romantic traveller
• enjoys being alone with nature/ the landscape where he can find his morals aside from modern consumer culture etc.
• where really tourism is just an extension of consumer culture
• the epistolary form but with no reply reflects his isolation
• OR perhaps he conceals the replies from us in order to distance himself from being seen as a tourist

Question 15

(The Latest Decalogue)
Thou shalt not steal; an empty feat,
When ‘tis so lucrative to cheat:

Answer 15

• subversive parody of the 10 Commandments
• peels back the facade of each of the commandments and provides the background or the sub-text to each one
• similar to treatment of religion in Amours de Voyage - commandments are considered the pillars of faith in the same way that the buildings such as St. Peter’s Basilica is - peels back the facade in the same way - casts a critical eye on the reality of the faith

Question 16

(Easter Day)
Here, on our Easter Day
We rise, we come, and lo! we find Him not
(last stanza)

Answer 16

• similar priority of visible evidence over the abstraction of faith or imagination in Amours de Voyage

Question 17

(Easter Day)
THROUGH the great sinful streets of Naples as I past,
(opening line)

Answer 17

• same feeling of anguished betrayal of faith/ religious commitment
• no visible evidence for the presence of God

Question 18

(Easter Day)

Christ is not risen

Answer 18

• no visible evidence for the presence of God
• formally - shares the same sense of irony as Amours de Voyage
• ie. while asserting that there will be no resurrection of Christ - this refrain is constantly resurrected in repetition
• similarly - while he trying to break away from the co-existence of past and present in Amours de Voyage (wishing the Goths etc.) - the repetition of ‘Rome disappoints me much’ indicates that he cannot progress from his initial impressions of the place and thus is limited to circularity - shows how he is equally preoccupied with the past (in both the relics but also in the parallelism of his dissatisfaction)

Question 19

Rome is a wonderful place

L3

Answer 19

• tautological

Question 20

Here we all are at Rome, and delighted of course with St Peter’s
(L3)

Answer 20

• pronoun use “we” - shows their distance from the isolated academic of the Grand Tour - transition to the group tourism of families etc.
• explicit in the syndetic listing of “Courier, Papa and Mamma” etc. compared with the isolation of Claude
• does not privilege the sentence construction with the depth of a subordinate clause
• demonstrates the shallowness of her experience of travel
• observations of other families, gossipy tone
• uninventive adjectives

Question 21

Dear, I must really stop, for the carriage, they tell me, is waiting (L3)

Answer 21

• privileges the immediacy of the experience with the complexity of subordinate clauses
• demonstrates the limitations of having to communicate travel back to people at home
• the travel itself appears to become the burden
• when in reality it is the burden of having to communicate her experiences to someone else

Question 22

Luther, they say, was unwise; like a half-taught German, he could not/ See that old follies were passing most tranquilly out of remembrance
(L4)

“distend his Wittenberg lungs, and/ Bring back Theology once yet against in a flood upon Europe”

Answer 22

• echoes Clough’s own religious conflict - believes it is better for matters to be forgotten than to resist them
• considering the weight placed on memory in the poem - to be entirely forgotten is an almost unimaginable condemnation
• Rome as a city is used as a comparison for Freud’s analysis of the brain in which nothing is forgotten, only repressed
• rings of the ‘Great Man Theory’ in which an individual is able to shape history
• this gives greater credence to Claude’s ability to carry out the message he purports

Question 23

Jupiter, Juno, and Venus, Fine Arts, and Fine Letters… were quietly clearing away the Martyrs, and Virgins, and Saints
(L5)

Answer 23

• lifts the Roman gods out of their religious context as a redundant belief system and instead (through syndetic listing) connects the gods to progress and education
• Claude takes the more mature attitude that academic benefit should transcend religious belief (perhaps in line with Clough’s experience)

Question 24

Mary will finish; and Susan is writing, they say, to Sophia

L3

Answer 24

• tourist cannot escape from the expectations of those at home
• cannot travel in solitude - question of whether it detracts from their experience
• brings the obligations of home with her as a relentless representative

Question 25

But a man was killed, I am told, in a place where I saw

Something; a man was killed, I am told, and I saw something. (Cantos 2)

Answer 25

• forced into an authentically original response in confrontation of the novelty of his experience
• immediately emotive response, muddle of repetition and exclamatives
• paralipsis - syntactic difference from the lengthy description etc. of the guidebooks

Question 26

Murray, as usual,

Under my arm (Cantos 2)

Answer 26

• “Murray” accompanies him but takes a subordinate position under his arm (or he is still reliant on Murray as guidance?)
• (NB: this is Murray’s Handbooks for Travellers)

Question 27

emasculate pupils, gimcrack churches of Gesu

Answer 27

• ‘emasculate’ - references the practice of castrato - 1870: banned in the Papal States - elements of fakery
• peel back the appearance
• has the appearance but, in reality, is something else

Question 28

middle-class people these, bankers very likely

Answer 28

• expects to be surrounded by a network of upper-class people of certain society
• faces mass tourism - difference of France eg. post-revolution

Question 29

a necessity simple/ Meat and drink and life

I am glad to be liked

Answer 29

• then has to sacrifice his class snobbishness to these people because he desires companionship
• reflects the resurgence of the loneliness he experienced when at Rugby
• follows his disillusionment at the failure of the 1848 rebellion in France - the loneliness at this period of his life is what wells up into his poetry

Question 30

(The Prelude - Cambridge and the Alps)
(has just looked up for the first time on Mont Blanc)
“grieved/ To have a soulless image on the eye/ That had usurped upon a living thought/ That never more could be” /

Answer 30

• when the imagination becomes usurped by reality it is impossible to regain the initial expectation
• clear message that reality is more powerful than the imagination

Question 31

“Never predicted…never beheld a/ New Jerusalem coming down dressed like a bride out of heaven”

Answer 31

• immediacy of the shock of the revolution

Question 32

“I was returning home from St Peter’s; Murray, as usual/ Under my arm”

“gradually, thinking still of St Peter’s, I became conscious/ Of a sensation of movement opposing me”

Answer 32

• demonstrates how this experience is a significant break from previous tourist experience because he is thinking about St Peter’s but the striking situation begins to corrode the idealism and security of his tourist status

Question 33

“in the air? they descend; they are smiting/ Hewing, chopping - At what?”

Answer 33

• relives the experience for his recipient in a much more vivid form, can no longer make recourse to his platitudes that come to appear affected