Caliban Upon Setebos Quotes

Question 1

Yon otter, sleek-wet, black, lithe as a leech;
Yon auk, one fire-eye in a ball of foam,
That floats and feeds; a certain badger brown
He hath watched hunt with that slant white-wedge eye
By moonlight; and the pie with the long tongue
That pricks deep into oak warts for a worm,

Answer 1

• simile undercuts the beauty of natural forms
  “That pricks deep into oak warts for a worm”
• aspiration of the alliterative /w/ phoneme amplifying his derision

Question 2

About their hole—He made all these and more,

Made all we see, and us, in spite: how else?

Answer 2

• horrified self-interruption

Question 3

Worthy, and yet mere playthings all the while,

Things He admires and mocks too,—that is it.

Answer 3

• masculine pronouns traditionally assigned to a higher power, typically the Christian God, are here inseparable from those assigned to nature

Question 4

I yet could make a live bird out of clay:

And he lay stupid-like,—why, I should laugh;
And if he, spying me, should fall to weep,
Beseech me to be good, repair his wrong,
Bid his poor leg smart less or grow again,—
Well, as the chance were, this might take or else
Not take my fancy: I might hear his cry,
And give the mankin three sound legs for one,
Or pluck the other off, leave him like an egg
And lessoned he was mine and merely clay.

would not I smash it with my foot? So He

Answer 4

• reverses Tennyson’s argument - instead argues that the emotional capacity of humans is directly reflective of the capacity of a god
• Tennyson instead sees the imperfect love on earth (love for Arthur is also grief when in reality it should be a celebration of him joining God in the afterlife) as the precursor to the divine love promised to Arthur in the afterlife

Question 5

If He caught me here,
O’erheard this speech, and asked “What chucklest at?”
‘Would, to appease Him, cut a finger off,
Or of my three kid yearlings burn the best,

Answer 5

• channels creativity into poetic rebellion
• explains his trickery through appeasement
• subverts the principles of Christian faith - recalls the myth of Abraham and Isaac which displays God’s foreknowledge of the boundaries of Abraham’s faith
• Caliban’s conception of trickery eg. hiding from Setebos “dances on dark nights” and believing his actions could mimic the ideology behind his God’s creation demonstrates his distance from Christianity and primitive concept of a higher power

Question 6

A tree’s head snaps—and there, there, there, there, there,

His thunder follows! Fool to gibe at Him!

Answer 6

• he might attempt to trick Setebos through appeasement

- BUT does not end the poem in triumph, however, actually this self-rebuke