Text 2 - The king, Urquhart

Question 1

Urqhart

Answer 1

Urqhart primary a novelist but started her career as a poet. this poem is part of a collection “some other garden”.

Question 2

who is in this text ?

Answer 2

The thematic thread is life at the court of Louis XIV. The King here is Louis 14 seen through the eye of one of his favourite Mme de Montespan. It’s about the collection, the play of desire, vanity, dominance and power and how all of this to inspire within the King’s Garden. KIng’s Garden = ref to Garden of Versailles.

Question 3

Poetry is here

Answer 3

Poetry is here a medium through which the writer develops a critical perspective on the question of power. We are in New France : a French colony. Urqhart decides to shift the look from British colonisation to French colonisation. Le notre = Architect of Garden.

Question 4

“revolutionary mob”

Answer 4

ref to French Revolution = political upheaval that can frighten the role of the monarch.

Question 5

“Terre Sauvage”

Answer 5

french term because it’s a french colony. SHe decides not to use the term wilderness but to use an approximative translation. This defamiliarizes this notion of wilderness for an English speaking reader. In canada everyone has an idea of what wilderness is so if you don’t use the term you’re less familiar with what might be at stake in the poem.

Question 6

Definition of the garden

Answer 6

A garden is : man-made (human intervention on the natural environnement), enclosed. Here it is directly linked to
(2 tradition to define landscape :
→Chinese
→ Arabic world & Europe )

Question 7

Etymology wilderness

Answer 7

Etymology of Wilderness : the space of the wild deer, by tacit understanding, the place of the wild deer was a territory beyond the authority of English common laws. The etymology of the term points to the wild animal & a place that is beyond the law = a lawless space.
⇒ King Louis 14th deciding to transform the Terre Sauvage into a garde = subjugating it, transforming the wilderness into a garden is about territorial control.

Question 8

Topos

Answer 8

First topos : entropic force of the nature
2nd topos : you cannot plant things. The soil does not allow plantation.
3rd topos : L14 thinks about the lake as sth meaningless. Nature without human intervention is deficient.

Question 9

Soil

Answer 9

word used in 17th and 19th for colony.

Question 10

colony

Answer 10

derived from colere = to cultivate.

Question 11

L22 : abrupt change

Answer 11

First half of the poem : the King is outside, looking at the forest and assessing it’s ethic values
2nd half : he is immersed, so he experiences disorientation.
→ This sense of disorientation doesn’t last long because he reaches “waterfalls” // Niagara Falls

Next stanza, again in a position of a spectator and he is happy because visibility of the spectacle

He is assessing the political efficiency of the spectacle.
Efficiency = the effect that it produces

He is looking out at a prospect, a panorama. This stanza suggests that visual mastery (the eye being able to embrace the scene) is related to territorial mastery. Prospect is related to surveying (Surveying // military connotation). Panoramic vision is an expression of power over space

In the end, the King wakes up screaming. He slips fall into the fountain, he is immersed once again. Immersion puts an end to the visual mastery he gained from contemplating the natural prospect
⇒ this undermines his pride and this is why he eliminates the word “glory” from his vocab.
⇒ In his dream he experienced what it means to lose mastery over a territory