In Praise of Limestone

Question 1

Rebecca Price Parkin on the tone

Answer 1

it can be summarised as having ‘intimacy, humility and tenderness’, informal and friendly tone

Question 2

Rebecca Price Parkin on reality as there’s a

Answer 2

‘relaxed but intimate and knowing contact with reality’

Question 3

Antony Hecht

Answer 3

‘presents to us a climate which corresponds to, certain moral qualities of human behaviour’

Question 4

there is no regular rhyme scheme which ____

Answer 4

mirrors the irregularity of the limestone landscape

Question 5

What is the shift in the poem?

Answer 5

midway it shifts from addressing humanity to directing it to a single person

Question 6

When was in Praise of Limestone written?

Answer 6

May 1948 after a visit to Italy

Question 7

James Persoon it’s about…

Answer 7

‘the beauty of mutable, imperfect human nature’

Question 8

What goes hand in hand together in this poem?

Answer 8

romance and the parody of romance

Question 9

what two landscapes does he combine

Answer 9

a landscape in northern England and the Italian landscape where he returned to in the post-war period

Question 10

Rebecca Price Parkin on humanity in the poem

Answer 10

‘the same plasticity that is the ground for man’s redemptive hopes makes it possible for a secular Caesar to turn him into a monstrous genocide machine’

Question 11

what does the granite wastes attach?

Answer 11

‘saints-to-be’

Question 12

what does the clays and graves attract?

Answer 12

‘Intendant Caesars’

Question 13

what does the oceanic whisper attract?

Answer 13

‘the really reckless’ - Nietszchean nihilists

Question 14

although at the beginning of the final stanza the poet doubts the authenticity of his vision of the Good Place…

Answer 14

he realises that although not intrinsically the ideal in itself, it can at least stand for an analogy of it.

Question 15

‘born lucky’

Answer 15

lucky is used by the later Auden with similarities to Grace

Question 16

form and structure

Answer 16

loose syllabic lines in three long stanzas

Question 17

it is a porous, rich, fertile and moderate landscape that Auden can only describe as an imaginary place through _____ ____

Answer 17

counterfactual statements

Question 18

‘steep stone gennels’

Answer 18

‘gennel’ is a step away from ‘channel’, meaning a ‘narrow passage between houses’ so that the human architecture blends with its limestone landscapes

Question 19

‘rival’ etymology

Answer 19

‘rival’ and ‘river’ are connected through latin ‘rivals’ (person living on the opposite bank of a stream. Auden’s band of rivals denies the modern sense of the word; there is camaraderie between them not antagonism, but the modern sense remains a vague threat

Question 20

Auden invokes the etymology of ‘rival’ to imply that language has been determined by nature,

Answer 20

and so the words used to describe people once described them as elements in nature

Question 21

‘or a thing like water / Or stone whose conduct can be predicted’

Answer 21

‘conduct’, like ‘rivals’ and ‘gennels’ has human and. non-human meaning in its etymology, suggested through the poem in its earlier use of the word ‘conduit’.

Question 22

Rebecca Price Parkin: ‘the door is open to the ______, the unpredictable - life as it is lived’

Answer 22

unplanned

Question 23

R.EMIG

Answer 23

‘through its multiple contradictions ‘In Praise of Limestone’ has already achieved its own utopia: the poem is its own poetic paradise, and one that need not fear a Fall, because it thrives on falls.’

Question 24

reminiscent of Wallace Stevens

Answer 24

‘Paradise is imperfection’

Question 25

Auden on this poem and limestone

Answer 25

‘that rock creates the only human landscape’

Question 26

Auden celebrates the soft, complex formations of ‘limestone’ representative of the compromising , ______ processes which allow the synchronous transition from physical (words) to mental (images) to take place

Answer 26

mediatory

Question 27

Auden evokes the _____ power of extreme place, which is magnified by focusing on it through the prism of negations

Answer 27

isolating

Question 28

the urgent, demanding imperatives of the clays and gravels functions too how how…

Answer 28

we ourselves are manipulated by the desires we believe we control

Question 29

the rhythm flitters to fro between iambs and dactyls….

Answer 29

much like the ‘band of rivals’ themselves, who ‘climb up and down’ ‘in twos and threes’

Question 30

homophones ‘thyme’ and ‘time’

Answer 30

recall that constant human limitation Auden depicts as fundamental to the human condition in ‘As I walked out one evening’